‘I…’
‘You have!’
‘Yes,’ admitted Odolo, unaccountably embarrassed. ‘But the wishes never came true. I knew they wouldn’t. The thing is a — well, let’s just say it’s an old thing. Very old. The people here, they, it’s because it’s unique that they’ve got it locked up, I mean had it locked up. A toy. A bauble. That’s all it is, at least to them. A jewel among jewels.’ ‘You speak lightly of things most valued!’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Odolo. ‘What’s all that — that gold, jewellery, junk? What does it do? It sits there, that’s all. That’s all it can do. That’s why you people never get anywhere, you’re infatuated with accumulation, things, substance. What you don’t understand is that it’s process, that’s everything. Energy! The interplay of energy!’
He was staring not at Chegory but through him. Looking at something. A vision, perhaps. A vision distant in time and space.
‘I don’t know that I understand what you’re saying,’ said Chegory, ‘but I do know when I’m being insulted.’
‘Sorry,’ said Odolo. Then shuddered. As if a ghost had walked over his grave.
‘What is it?’ said Chegory. ‘Flashback?’
‘What’s that?’ said Odolo.
‘If you have taken zen,’ said Chegory, ‘then you’ll get these flashbacks, like me in the dark, you know. Sudden visions, that’s what they are.’
‘Oh,’ said Odolo, ‘I don’t think I’ve taken zen. I don’t — I don’t know what to think.’
But speculating about such unknowns took them most of the rest of the morning. Their conversation got steadily deeper and deeper as they made their way through (to give here their combined consumption rather than a breakdown by individual) seven cups of cinnamon coffee, four cups of tea, three plates of popadoms, two bowls of goat’s meat soup, a bowl of shrimps and then (it was not yet noon, but they were ready for lunch) two bowls of cassava and a couple of plates of fricasseed seagull with more coffee to go with it.
They had just finished the last of their seagull and the last of their coffee when the noon bells rang out to announce the end of istarlat and the start of salahanthara.
‘Well,’ said Odolo, pushing back his chair and rising from his table, ‘let’s be off, then.’
‘To where?’ said Chegory in surprise.
‘To the pink palace, of course. The Petitions Session starts shortly.’
‘I’m not going there!’
‘Of course you are. Where else can you go? You’ve no friends left to turn to. You could run away, flee into Zolabrik, take up with Jal Japone again. But you’ve told me already you don’t want to do that. So there’s only one thing left to do. Petition the Empress.’
‘But I’d get arrested if I-’
‘You can’t get arrested if you’re-’
‘Oh, if you’re a petitioner, fine, usually, but there’s a State of Emergency, there’s-’
‘Relax, relax,’ said Odolo. ‘I’m known to one and all at the palace as an imperial favourite. You won’t get into trouble, not when you’re with me. You’ll do good for yourself and good for me as well. You’ll get a pardon from the Empress, I swear to it. Better, when you tell of the pirates with the wishstone then the soldiers can start searching in earnest.’
‘Well,’ said Chegory, ‘maybe, maybe…’
‘Definitely!’ said Odolo.
Then the conjuror hustled young Chegory out of Gan-166 thorgruk and into the noonday heat through which they went, at a pace appropriate to the heat, up Skindik Way and then up Lak Street towards the pink palace standing in all its glory atop Pokra Ridge.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘If this doesn’t work,’ said Chegory, as they sweated up Lak Street, ‘then I’m finished.’
‘Relax,’ said Odolo. ‘Whatever her faults, Justina’s merciful, I’ll give her that. You’ll get your pardon.’
‘Sure. Or get my head hacked off on the spot. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’
‘Then do you want to start walking for Zolabrik?’ ‘That’s my other option, isn’t it?’
‘There’s a third.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Chegory. ‘Tell me about it!’
‘You work on Jod, don’t you? So you know the island’s ruler. So why not seek help from him?’
‘There’s no point going there,’ said Chegory. ‘Ivan Pokrov’s in jail, I’ve told you that.’
‘But that’s not who I was thinking of,’ said Odolo. ‘Who, then?’
‘The Hermit Crab, of course!’
Chegory shuddered.
‘You,’ he said, ‘have got to be crazy. Have you ever seen that brute?’
‘No, but-’
‘It’s, let’s see, it’s intimidating, that’s the word. When you know what it’s done it’s not just intimidating it’s bloody terrifying. I have to give the thing meat and stuff. Oh shit! And I haven’t! It’s missed lunch, that’s, that’s, gods, maybe it’s turning people inside out right now.’
Chegory wheeled. A marvellous view! But he wasted no time admiring it for his eyes were all for Jod. It still existed. That was something! The marble buildings of the Analytical Institute were still there, and so was the harbour bridge. But how much longer would it be before the Hermit Crab poured out the vials of wrath and inverted the island entire, or shattered it into just so many chips of scatter-stone?
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Odolo. ‘Someone else will feed your happy little friend. Or is it sacred? A sacred ritual, and you its priest?’
‘Priest?’ said Chegory, startled. ‘Me? No, it’s not that, it’s not sacred, but it’s a — a — it’s a trust, that’s what it is, thousands of people, all Injiltaprajura, but it’s me they trusted, so it’s, yes it is sacred, it is, a sacred trust, and I blew it, the Crab’s starving right now, it’s-’
‘But someone else will-’
‘They won’t! They’re all slaves, that’s what, no more sense than a coconut, or they’re mad algorithmists, just cogs and wheels and binary logic, that’s all they think of, not, not keeping two legs two arms stopping from getting turned inside out that kind of, of important stuff. I should-’
‘You should come inside,’ said Odolo, trying in an avuncular way to calm his intense young companion. ‘If you’re consecrated to the cause of victualling our crustacean-in-residence then you’d best look after yourself.’ By such talk the imperial favourite persuaded young Chegory to climb the steps and pass within the portals of the pink palace.
‘Business?’ said a guard, one of seven on duty within the foyer.
‘Petitions,’ said Odolo, and nodded pleasantly, and led Chegory onwards.
One of the guards had a black eye and a heavily bruised cheek, suggesting he might have been one of the unfortunates who had been overwhelmed during the rioting in the treasury in the night just gone. Chegory expected the man to leap forward and arrest him, but no such thing happened.
‘Up here,’ said Odolo. ‘Up the stairs.’
Up the stairs they went to the Grand Hall where the petitions session had already started. For a moment, the world wavered, and Chegory imagined he saw a fanged monster coming to quench its thirst upon his flesh. For that moment, reality tottered. Even as it did so, he knew what he was enduring: a flashback consequent upon his nighttime indulgence in zen.
Then the outlines of the world hardened again into the everyday, the quotidian, the expected and the expectable. The Grand Hall with unlit chandeliers hanging from its high ceiling. An unruly press of petitioners being held back by guards with scimitars naked. The Empress Justina high-seated upon a throne of ebony. Her white ape, Vazzy, even now being dragged away after perpetrating some (temporarily) unpardonable misdeed. Expressionless slaves standing to either side of the throne, their muscles working huge feathered fans to cool the ruler of
