The old man was now moving towards them, his step steady, his gaze the same. But Chloe intervened.
‘Now don’t,’ she said.
He frowned, his mouth tight. But he came no closer.
‘We have to be away,’ she told him. ‘You know we must.’
He nodded. Were there tears in his eyes? Cal thought so.
‘I’ll be back soon enough,’ she told him. I’ll just take him to the border. All right?’
Again, a single nod.
Cal raised his hand in a tentative wave.
‘Well,’ he said, more mystified than ever. ‘It’s … it’s been … an honour.’
A faint smile creased the man’s face.
‘He knows,’ said Chloe. ‘Believe me.’
She took Cal to the door. The lightning blazed through the room; the thunder made the air shake.
At the threshold Cal gave his host one last look, and to his astonishment – indeed to his delight – the man’s smile became a grin that had a subtle mischief about it.
‘Take care,’ Cal said.
Grinning even as the tears ran down his cheeks, the man waved him away and turned back towards the window.
2
The rickshaw was waiting on the far side of the bridge. Chloe bundled Cal into his seat, throwing the tasselled cushions out to lighten the load.
‘Be swift,’ she said to Floris. No sooner had she spoken than they were off.
It was a hair-raising journey. A great urgency had seized everything and everybody, as the Fugue prepared to lose its substance to pattern again. Overhead, the night sky was a maze of birds; the fields were rife with animals. There was everywhere a great readying, as if for some momentous dive.
‘Do you dream?’ Cal asked Chloe as they travelled. The question had come out of the blue, but was suddenly of great importance to him.
‘Dream?’ said Chloe.
‘When you’re in the Weave?’
‘Perhaps –’ she said. She seemed preoccupied. ‘– but I never remember my dreams. I sleep too deeply …’ She faltered, then looked away from Cal before saying, ‘… like death.’
‘You’ll wake again soon,’ he said, understanding the melancholy that had come upon her. ‘It’ll only be a few days.’
He tried to sound confident, but doubted that he was succeeding. He knew all too little of what the night had brought. Was Shadwell still alive; and the sisters? And if so
‘I’m going to help you,’ he said. ‘That I
‘Oh yes,’ she said with great gravity. ‘That you are. But Cal –’ She looked at him, her hand taking his, and he felt a bond between them, an intimacy even, which seemed out of all proportion to the meagre time they’d known each other. ‘Cal. Future history is full of tricks.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Things can be so easily erased,’ she said. ‘And
‘Am I missing something?’ he said.
‘Just don’t assume everything’s guaranteed.’
‘I don’t,’ he told her.
‘Good. Good.’ She seemed a little cheered by this. ‘You’re a fine man, Calhoun. But you’ll forget.’
‘Forget what?’
‘All this. The Fugue.’
He laughed. ‘Never,’ he said.
‘Oh but you will. Indeed maybe you have to. Have to, or your heart would break.’
He thought of Lemuel again, and his parting words.
If there were any further words to be said on the subject, they went unvoiced, for at this point Floris brought the rickshaw to an abrupt halt.
‘What’s the problem?’ Chloe wanted to know.
The rickshaw driver pointed dead ahead. No more than a hundred yards from where the rickshaw stood the landscape and all it contained was losing itself to the Weave, solid matter becoming clouds of colour, from which the threads of the carpet would be drawn.
‘So soon,’ said Chloe. ‘Get out. Calhoun. We can take you no further.’
The line of the Weave was approaching like a forest fire, eating up everything in its path. It was an awesome scene. Though he knew perfectly well what procedures were under way here – and knew them to be benevolent – the sight was almost chilling. A world was dissolving before his very eyes.
‘You’re on your own from here,’ said Chloe. ‘About turn, Floris! And
The rickshaw was turned.
‘What happens to me?’ said Cal.
‘You’re a Cuckoo,’ Chloe shouted back at him, as Floris hauled the rickshaw away. ‘You can simply walk out the other side!’
She shouted something else, which he failed to catch.
He hoped to God it wasn’t a prayer.
XII
A VANISHING BREED
1
espite Chloe’s words, the spectacle ahead offered little comfort. The devouring line was approaching at considerable speed, and it left nothing unchanged. His gut feeling was to flee before it, but he knew that would be a vain man?uvre. This same transfiguring tide would be eating in from all compass points: sooner or later there would be nowhere left to run.
Instead of standing still and letting it come to fetch him, he elected to walk towards it, and brave its touch.
The air began to itch around him as he took his first hesitant steps. The ground squirmed and shook beneath his feet. A few more yards and the region he was walking through actually began to shift. Loose pebbles were snatched into the flux; leaves plucked from bush and tree.
‘This is going to hurt,’ he thought.
The frontier was no more than ten yards from him now, and he could see with astonishing clarity the processes at work: the raptures of the Loom dividing the matter of the Fugue into strands, then drawing these up into the air and knotting them – those knots in their turn filling the air like countless insects, until the final rapture called them into the carpet.
He could afford to wonder at this sight for seconds only before he and it met each other, strands leaping up around him like rainbow fountains. There was no time for farewells: the Fugue simply vanished from sight, leaving him immersed in the working of the Loom. The rising threads gave him the sensation of falling, as though the knots were destined for heaven, and he a damned soul. But it wasn’t heaven above him: it was
But Chloe’s prayer, if that it had been, afforded him protection. The Loom rejected his Cuckoo-stuff and
