redRobe

Chapter Nine Cold Like Water/Sharp Like Glass

‘This is Joan?’ The small fat man who stood at the top of the stone steps leading up to the monastery sounded doubtful and Father Sylvester tried to look at the shivering child with fresh eyes. He couldn’t. Too few memories were backed up in what was left of his brain for him to see anything clearly.

Father Sylvester nodded abruptly. ‘This is the girl.’ He pushed Mai forward, then gripped her shoulder when she stumbled. ‘And her name is Joan.’ When Mai opened her mouth to protest the fingers became vicelike, digging hard into a nerve in her neck.

‘Release her.’ The words that interrupted him were firm: not cross or bullying, just spoken by a woman who was used to being obeyed, and obeyed immediately. She spoke Spanish.

Father Sylvester released his grip.

‘Good.’

The woman came slowly down the steps towards them, tall and black-haired and somewhere in her late twenties. If she was shocked at Mai’s filthy clothes she didn’t let it show, though her smile faded when she looked at Mai’s face and found dark pupils dilated with drugs, fear or fever. Damaged goods weren’t what Kate Mercarderes needed.

Sweat had stained under the arms of Mai’s canvas jacket and the now-tattered crepe bandages on her legs were obviously soiled. But it was the bruises darker than lipstick around her mouth that sparked fury in the woman’s eyes.

‘What happened?’

‘He sewed my mouth shut,’ said Mai sensing an ally, ‘with a needle.’

The tall woman looked at Father Sylvester and though his face hardened he couldn’t quite meet her gaze. ‘It was necessary,’ he said. ‘You know it was necessary.’

‘And her wrists?’ Katherine Mercarderes said abruptly. ‘Was that necessary too?’

‘He thought I might escape,’ said Mai. She held her wrists out to the woman. ‘Please, my fingers hurt...' She swallowed a sob. ‘Everything hurts.’

‘Life does,’ said Kate, then caught herself and forced a smile. ‘Still, Louis can find you new clothes, a bath, some food…’ She nodded to the small fat man still stood at the top of the steps who beetled back inside the house, head down.

A bath? Father Sylvester wanted to howl but restrained himself. Surely Kate realised… There wasn’t time to pamper the brat. Kate had to realise that. Besides, all they needed was the brat’s body and they didn’t need that for long…

‘Patience,’ Kate ordered.

‘I don’t have time for patience,’ said Father Sylvester. ‘I’m dying.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ Kate said. ‘You think I’d forgive you this if you weren’t?’ She nodded at Mai, who stood swaying with exhaustion. And then Kate caught herself again and touched the priest gently on the shoulder. Seeing someone she’d known since childhood. Someone she’d loved as a child and trusted as much as she’d trusted the Pope. But also someone she was planning to betray.

‘You have the relic?’

The what… Father Sylvester looked briefly puzzled and then nodded, pointing to the bead-and-feather talisman round the girl’s neck.

Kate raised her eyebrows but she didn’t say anything further and she made no attempt to touch the precious soulcatcher. No matter how much she wanted to, Kate didn’t dare.

‘Release her hands.’

The priest muttered something in Latin and the cuffs dropped to the ground like lifeless plastic snakes. They were two-use only, the kind issued to airlines, not supposed to he used for anything longer than a ten hour flight.

Red weals ran around Mai’s wrists, oozing clear liquid. In any other situation, Kate would have fired up a medical Drexie box or relied on mediSoft to brief proprietary assemblers. As neither of these existed in Cocheforet she’d have to make do with what she’d brought with her, which was a bit all-purpose.

‘Salve, I suppose,’ Kate said thoughtfully. What she meant was that in a tiny vacuum-sealed pot she kept a colony of BayerRochelle spiders that could stitch shut the thread holes at a molecular level, clearing away dead white blood cells and repairing torn flesh. But she made it sound like she was offering Mai some ancient herbal extract mixed with pig fat.

‘Come with me,’ she put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and steered her towards the steps.

‘Wait...'

The woman stopped but she didn’t turn round and she didn’t let go of the girl’s shivering shoulders. ‘She’s having a bath and then she’s getting some rest. Look at her! You think we can work with her in this state?’ Together, Kate and Mai began to climb the steps.

Done, was it? She had to know it wasn’t… Whatever she told him.

The water was cold as glacial melt, the splash of a high waterfall echoing off the rock face that surrounded the deep mountain pool. Above Father Sylvester the sky was dark and starless. A black arc of nothing that stretched across the heavens like void. No people could have looked up at that night sky and imagined it held eternal mementoes of ancient heroes. No angels hung silent and unseen overhead listening to the celestial music of the spheres.

It was an absence made absolute. No place could be more fitting for him to die. Father Sylvester had spotted the foam-flecked foss, the thin fall of water, on his ride up to Escondido and though he couldn’t see where it fell to earth, he’d guessed rightly that there’d be a mountain pool. Cold and private, like the few thoughts left in his mind.

The girl was his legacy to Kate and she could make of the foul-mouthed child what she would. Whether it was success or failure no longer worried him. He wouldn’t be alive to see either.

And the child wasn’t much, but she was all they had.

Father Sylvester had hoped to be present to see Mai give up the dreams he’d put into the child’s head, but if Kate wanted to move at her own speed then she had that authority. Though her speed was too slow for an old man with only hours to live. So he’d come here to die, lead by Clone who understood the need for these things.

Clone wasn’t a friend of Father Sylvester’s, but he was no longer an enemy. The mute and tongueless ox of a man had long since made his peace with Father Sylvester just as he had reached resolution with Joan, may God overlook her undoubted sins.

Using his glassblade, Father Sylvester shaved off his beard and cut away his hair and greying ponytail as grief demanded. Ashes he’d already had enough of to last a lifetime. He wore no jewellery. And his steel cross of five nails crudely brazed together was where he’d left it, on the pillow of his bed for Kate to find.

The gutting out of the Vatican bank accounts had been Joan’s secret and his doing. He set up the discreet shell companies and blind trusts, switched money from account to account, using everything from Bajan datahavens to free-trade orbitals.

Between them they’d dug out the foundation of gold on which the Papacy had always stood and quietly spent it as the money always should have been spent. On food for the poor, on medicine, but mostly in airlifting the destitute and starving out of warzones and into transit camps where they could be shipped to Samsara. And while there were still ‘fugees in need, Joan had kept spending money to ship them and Tsongkhapa had kept receiving their numbers until the money was gone. And by then WorldBank and the IMF were already closing in.

Father Sylvester sighed.

Kate had been grateful when he asked permission to retire to his room. Her anger at his treatment of the Japanese girl palpable in the abruptness of her nod.

Dying wasn’t as easy as Father Sylvester had imagined, but then it had begun earlier and lasted longer than he had made allowance for. And now his patience, like his faith, was exhausted. It was time to close the book. For the recording angel to weigh up his life and make judgement.

Father Sylvester carefully took off his trousers and folded them, leaving them on top of a rock that was slick with white spray from the high foss. He didn’t believe in waste. That was one of the reasons he’d kept himself alive so long. His shirt came off next and Father Sylvester folded that neatly too. He was tempted to leave his Calvins on but he’d come naked into the world and bloody-mindedness said that was the way he should go out.

Drowning had been his first idea. A pocket full of stones and a slow walk into the freezing pool at the foot of the waterfall, the cold binding tight his chest before his lungs had even filled with water. But Father Sylvester’s greatest fear wasn’t death, it was changing his mind. The idea that the stones might not be heavy enough or survival an instinct too strong filled him with doubt. And he despised doubt, not as an intellectual position, that he accepted entirely, but as a weakener of action.

It would have to be by the blade.

Father Sylvester climbed out of his Calvins and stood naked in the darkness. His body was old, not bloated or fat but weak with old injuries only half repaired and swollen around the upper gut where an ulcer ate at his stomach lining. He wouldn’t miss that. Actually, the priest’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile, there wasn’t much he would miss.

Unfolding his trousers to get the blade, Father Sylvester refolded them quickly and stepped away from his pile of clothing. He’d prevaricated enough. What he needed now was a stone as ballast to keep him from slipping or floating as he walked out into the water. Finding one the correct size was difficult but he managed it, holding the glass blade in his right hand and the stone in his left.

The meltwater numbed his ankles as Effectively as a baseball bat and Father Sylvester winced as he knelt and the water reached his genitals, which constricted like three snails with the contact. But he kept on shuffling his way further into the pool, feeling for the rocky bottom as the water closed ever higher round him until only his shoulders were above the darkened surface.

Now came the real test.

The stone went between his knees where he knelt. He’d been planning to hold it in one hand while using his other to drive the blade. But his hands were weak these days and besides his fingers shook so much he was afraid that if he dropped the blade it would be gone forever. So between his knees was where the rock had to go.

Taking the razor-edged glass blade in his right hand, Father Sylvester closed left hand over right and without pausing, rammed the knife point hard into his abdomen, low down on his left hand side. Muscle tore but the water was so cold and his body so numb that Father Sylvester felt almost nothing. But then he expected that, he’d been stabbed in the gut before.

Now came the hard bit. Clenching his teeth, Father Sylvester gripped the blade’s handle and yanked viciously, pain exploding as he cut open his own stomach wall in one sickening pull of the knife. Guts bulged through the sudden slit in his abdominal lining to reveal a tangled sausage-like mess within. And cold water rushed into his body as if someone had just packed his insides in ice.

‘Jesus.’

Father Sylvester cut harder, slicing more muscle and gut and watched in shock as lengths of his ileum and jejunum tumbled out through the rapidly gaping slit and slowly sank, spilling their ruptured contents like floating fish shit where they’d been hacked open by the knife.

Grabbing at his own small intestines, the man severed a slimy white handful and reached inside himself to pull out another length, sawing at the muscle until that too came away in his hands. And then he pushed his fingers back inside his body for more.

He was undoubtedly insane and undoubtedly dying, but that didn’t make killing himself hurt any the less. In the end it was slitting his wrists that finished Father Sylvester. But he didn’t remember doing it, though he felt the blood sluggishly leave his veins. All he remembered, and the only thought he took with him to the edge of death, was that his stomach was frozen.

‘Your name is Joan. You are my sister.’

Mai looked doubtfully at the woman sat on a wooden chair beside her big cast-iron bath. She wanted to say No, I’m Mai. To insist that she’d never been anyone other than Mai, that she’d never had a sister, or mother or father come to that, not that she could remember. But the woman was being kind to her. Very kind. Which wasn’t something Mai knew how to deal with.

Not that she trusted the woman or anything. She didn’t. It was just that Mai was being buried under an accumulation of small kindnesses. And besides she was warm for the first time in days and her face had stopped hurting.

Powder had been brushed on her lips to take away the swelling, unseen assemblers unweaving insoluble fibrin threads as scabs dissolved, her wrists had been dressed and antiseptic skin sprayed onto the raw flesh of her thighs, analgesic deadening the rawness as proteins knitted together a new dermal layer. The woman had made Mai cover her sex while she sprayed on the new skin, and even with the edge of a sheet covering Mai’s groin Kate had been jumpy, almost irritable.

The crossness hadn’t lasted though. After the painkillers and skin came something Louis called thukpa, food, hot noodle soup that Kate spooned into Mai’s mouth herself. It was salt and sweet, not a taste the girl recognised, but she finished the bowl anyway. And would have had more if only Kate had let her.

After that, Mai was taken through to a bathroom on the ground floor next to the vast kitchens. So hot water could be carried through, Mai supposed, and she was almost right. Hot water came gurgling down a sluice from the kitchen and kept splashing into the bath until it was almost full.

The feather thing that weird priest made her wear round her neck rested on a chair by itself, well away from the water, but Mai’s jacket was gone: removed as soon as she took it off, along with the crepe bandages, and carried out of the room at arm’s-length by Kate who returned seconds later with a small pile of folded clothes.

‘Nightdresses,’ Kate said. ‘We’ll find one that fits.’

The girl sat up to look, soap bubbles sliding in a sloppy avalanche from her shoulders and tiny breasts.

‘Do you want to get out?’ Kate asked, her face suddenly stiff.

‘No,’ Mai shook her head.

‘Then get back under the water,’ said Kate, ‘it’s better for you.’

Mai shrugged and sank back in her bath, burying herself beneath the scented bubbles. She’d tried silence and sulking, but neither made a difference. The strange woman still just sat there, occasionally smiling at Mai but mostly looking worried when she didn’t know the girl was watching her.

‘My name is Katherine Mercarderes,’ the woman said finally. There was the briefest hesitation, as if she expected Mai to say something and when the moment passed she smiled sadly, ‘but you can call me Kate. You’ve always called me Kate…’

Always? Mai shrugged and sank even lower, until slowly cooling water rose to her chin and only her face showed above the surface. She liked the bath, with its four cast-iron legs and she liked the big room. Though the house seemed more like a derelict palace than the empty monastery Kate said it was. Plaster peeled from the dusty pink walls and the ceiling overhead seemed to be held up by narrow wooden beams, at least they looked like real wood from where she lay.

She liked the house too. There were no swathes of watered silk to line the walls, no naked marble nymphs, no heavy chandeliers or gold leaf highlights to the ornate ceiling rose, because there was no ceiling rose, no architectural decoration at all. The walls just ended at the top and then the ceiling began… And best of all, at least for Mai, there were no huge mirrors to reflect her back at herself. Mai liked the house, liked it a lot.

‘You live here?’

‘We all live here… Joan.’

Kate said the name like she was tasting it. And from the expression on the woman’s face, she found the taste strange.

‘Joan is your sister?’ That was what the woman had said, wasn’t it?

‘Sweet, lovely, innocent, stupid Joan.’

The tall woman was crying, Mai realised. Not loudly but softly, almost as if she hadn’t quite realised it herself.

‘Hey, you okay?’

‘Of course I’m…’ Kate stopped and bent to pick a white towel from the grey slate floor and when she straightened up again her face was calm.

‘It’s time to get out.’ Kate held up the towel and blushed as Mai scrambled up to stand there, suds sliding down her soft stomach and legs. Then Kate suddenly stepped forward to wrap the Japanese girl in the towel, steadying Mai as she stepped out of her bath onto the tiles.

‘Time you slept.’ Strong arms, surprisingly strong arms, gripped Mai in a quick hug and then Kate was fussing with the clothes she’d carried in earlier, holding up simple cotton nightdresses one after the other, eyeing them for size.

‘This one, I think.’ She held it out, stopped and laughed when she saw the naked girl wasn’t yet dry. A laugh was so brief it sounded like a sob. ‘Joan never could dry herself properly either.’ Kate took the towel and tossed it over Mai’s head, rubbing hard to dry the girl’s hair before patting dry her shoulders and back.

‘The rest you can do yourself,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute to show you your room.’

Mai watched her go, wondering. About Kate and about the others. But mostly about sticking around for a day or two. She’d liked the way the hot bath water flowed over her body like waves. She’d never had a bath before, only used a sonic cubicle or rubbed on skin crawlers to get rid of sweat and dead skin. The bath was nice and so far the woman was nice, in a fussy sort of way. Even the huge house wasn’t bad, though it had almost no furniture and was so dirty it looked like only animals had lived in it for years.

All the same, nice bath and house or not, Mai knew she couldn’t stay there long term. They were all too freaky. Besides when was she ever going to get a better opportunity to set up on her own?

Commission, food and bed space at Madame Sotto’s had taken ninety-five percent of her earnings and now that Madame Sotto was burnt toast, Mai planned to do without an agent. And there was bound to be room for a hard-working ex-kinderwhore, in wherever the hell it was she was…