A boat on the island implied a sailor, one who had come and not yet departed.
I looked around as if I might in that instant see the source of this anomaly, and of course saw nothing but the overhanging trees swaying in the cold sea wind, the prick of crimson promising an oncoming sunset. It was the kind of evening for warm hats and fingerless gloves wrapped around a cup of something sweet; the kind of night to curl up indoors while the wind howled outside the window, to be buried deeper than necessary beneath thick blankets, a littler fuller than was strictly required on a belly-stuffing meal.
I feared neither a stranger nor the dark.
Indeed, the feeling that this boat stirred in me was an old one, almost comforting in its calm.
I feltcurious.
For the first time in such a long time, the familiar sense of it, the familiar stirring, a kind of fascination, a childlike wonder at a thing unknown. War had smothered it; the prospect of deathheld no interest. But this was a mystery, and at the mystery I felt the awakening of something lost, familiar, unkind.
Thank you, I whispered to the boat, to the coming dark, to the stirring of my soul.
Thank you.
I wandered along paths grown narrow by neglect, and now that I was looking, I saw little signs of disturbance, summer thorns snapped by the passage of an animal larger than the snuffling burrow-diggers and fungi-sniffers of my realm. By the time I reached the vegetable patches that hemmed in my cottage, the sun was nearly set and the dark prickled with endless beauty, infinite possibility, fascinating in its depth.
Thank you, I whispered.Thank you.
Some efforts had been made to tidy up a few broken vines in my garden. The labours were poor, crude, quickly abandoned. Gourd had bred with gourd to create monster beasts of speckled yellow and bloody purple, new species flourishing while I had been away. The fallen leaves had been brushed off the roof of the cottage where they otherwise might have covered the solar cells; a single light shone in the window, the battery by the door showing a 77 per cent charge.
I listened to the sea and the wind, the settling calls of the evening birds as they bickered and grew quiet against the dark.
Then I walked up to the door and knocked.
Silence from within.
After the silence, movement. A pushing-back of a chair. A moving of feet. Then silence again. Someone has risen; someone has walked towards the door. Someone has hesitated on the verge of answering. Someone is making up their mind.
I think I am perhaps curious enough that doors will not stop me.
I think, if I wish to, that I can pass straight through this wall, stick my head in, call out: anyone home?
But if I do that, who knows what will happen next. Who knows how much blood will be spilled, whose heart will be ripped out,whose brain I will end up holding in the palm of my hand as the curiosity overwhelms me, tips me fromwho is theretowhat is there and why and how and…
And all the other questions the endless, wondering dark keeps asking of this universe, never quite understanding the answers that are given.
So instead I wait, then knock again.
After a moment, I hear a latch lifted, and the door swings back.
The man who stands on the other side, half lit in the glow of the single shining lamp, is too tall for my cottage. He would have been unusually tall for the average population of the archipelago even before his genetic enhancements made him something of a giant, my eyes level with the upper half of his chest. I have to crane to see the top of his head, which he has shaved and allowed to regrow, not glorious and golden, but limp and white, the long plait of his office gone. He has had cosmetic surgery to soften the edges the scars – that artful tapestry– that were his pride and his identity, and I can only assume that the new green of his eyes is a permanent dye hiding enhancements.
He appears to be unarmed, but that is rather meaningless where he is concerned.
He seems a little surprised to see me, and then he does not.
“Hello,” Theodosius says, in the language of the Shine. “I wondered if you’d show up.”
Chapter 64
He makes a cup of tea.
He uses my cups but his tea, acquired from a new shop in Poulinio that I have not yet visited, whose owner prides herself on her exemplary palate and taste.
I sit and watch him pour the water, steep the leaves.
He is unfamiliar with the process. He has had people to do this for him for so long – too long. He is perhaps one of the few people who is as old as I, but for the first time since I have known him, his age is beginning to show. His hands shake as he pours the water; he gives a little huff as he settles down into his chair – my chair – by the heater.
