His eyes weren’t dead: they sparkled, displaying his glee at seeing us. I read into that radiance perhaps far more than I should have: that he wanted me to draw close, to hold me as much as I wished to hold him, yet he feared his weakness would leave me wanting more than he could give.
Grindfarg had completely ignored the little drama taking place around him. He’d swept behind Pavro and his supportive mother, hurriedly clambering back into the dark carriage interior.
Without a word of command to the team of horses, the carriage rumbled into motion across the gravel, a swift trot almost instantly becoming a careering gallop as soon as they had cleared the curve of the circular section of drive.
‘But he’d looked so well in the photographic portraits!’ Katerina had complained sulkily as Pavro was unsteadily helped up the curling stairs to his room by Doñas Delmestra.
‘It was the initial elation, overcoming his weariness,’ Doñasta Delmestra said, doubtlessly repeating Grindfarg’s own explanation.
Since that night, neither Katerina nor I had seen anything more of Pavro.
But he was improving remarkably swiftly, Doñasta Delmestra proudly informed us almost hourly.
At last, he’d managed to speak, if a little croakily, a touch too painfully for him.
He’d said he wanted to prove to everyone as soon as possible that he was ready to see us.
That, thankfully, what he was suffering from wasn’t exactly contagious, was it?
Doñasta Delmestra had been shocked by that. But Parvo had just grinned at her horrified expression: and that was a sure sign to all of us that we didn’t have much longer to wait before we’d all be able to visit him without worrying about wearing him out too much.
*
When the maid informed me that both Doñas and Doñasta Delmestra wished to see me in the study, I wasn’t quite sure if I was more worried or perplexed: it sounded serious, and yet I couldn’t think of any reason for the Delmestras to insist on such a formal meeting.
As I entered the study, their stern and rigid demeanour made me instantly all the more anxious and confused: what could have happened?
‘Pavro? It isn’t Pavro, is it?’ I asked fearfully.
Thankfully, the grim expressions fell from their faces to be immediately replaced by ones of wide-eyed surprise (Doñasta Delmestra explaining later that they were shocked I could think they would inform me of any setback in his health in such a callously officious manner).
‘No, no: of course not, my dear!’ Doñas Delmestra quickly assured me. ‘Yet there is something of major importance that does concern you!’
With a graceful wave of a hand, he indicated the official letters and documents laid out across the nearby table. I recognised the style of these forms: they carried similar emblems to those I had received regarding notice of my intended, whose face I would be sharing after the transference.
As I was a ward of the Delmestras’ it was perfectly natural for them to open any correspondence I received; indeed, it was expected of them, as they were now my legal guardians, whereas I had few rights until the time of my transference.
‘It’s your intended, Andraetra,’ Doñasta Delmestra said grimly. ‘She’s absconded: no one knows where she has gone.’
‘Courundia,’ I said, vaguely recalling the girl’s name.
Why had she fled? She would be the one receiving beauty, not ugliness?
If anyone should be fleeing, it should be me.
‘Not to worry, my dear,’ Doñas Delmestra said. ‘They are already preparing your second choice, so there is no real possibility that your transference need be delayed in anyway.’
My second choice?
As if I had any option.
I’d had no say in the choosing of Courundia.
The choice had been God’s, and God’s alone.
An intended had to quite naturally share many similarities with those they would be partnered with. A similarity of the bone structure lying beneath the face, a similarity in the proportion between chin, cheek, and the hollows of the eyes: though, of course, the removed skin would allow for a certain amount of manipulation, of stretching.
There were other, more minor similarities that were also sought, I’d been reliably informed, to ensure a successful operation. If these weren’t adhered to, the newly attached face would wither, die; rot.
I knew this for sure because I had seen it happen. This, indeed, was the punishment meted out to anyone foolish enough to try and avoid their transference by fleeing.
When the absconder was caught – and oh yes, they were always caught – a form of transference went ahead anyway, but one involving the face of an animal, the resultant creature (what else could you call them?) being a terrifying hybrid.
These poor souls would be put on display within a town’s square, entirely naked and chained to a post, as if they were indeed nothing but the very lowliest of beasts. Here they were left to fend for themselves, with nothing to shelter them from or cover themselves against the extremes of weather, living off any scraps dropped by passers-by, or the rotten food hurled at them by gleefully cruel crowds.
Many people would replace the food with stones.
If the beast was lucky, such a stone might strike him or her on her temple, allowing them to at last move on to a better world. (Though the creed assures us these beasts have no place reserved for them in the hereafter, I find it hard to believe our creator could be so cruel.)
‘You’ll soon be receiving the illustrations made of your second choice,’ Doñas Delmestra reassured me, a beaming smile lighting up both sides of his face. ‘Giving you plenty of time to prepare for and adapt to the new way you will look!’
*
Chapter 9
Parvo is sitting up in bed, his upper body covered with a loose night shirt.
He smiles as I enter, moves as if about to get out of bed; I rush towards him, stopping him, telling him not to be so stupid, that he still needs rest.
As we draw close together, so close together after being so long apart, as we touch each other, our flesh touching after so long apart, our faces draw even closer, our lips closer still; and they touch too, no longer parted.
*
The warmth of his flesh is as it has always being; there was none of the coldness that I feared there might be.
I find it hard to believe that he has been raised from amongst the dead.
He suffers only a slight weakness, his muscles only slightly wasted through inaction. His skin, too, is blanched, as he’s benefited from little sun.
In every other way, however, this is the Pavro I’ve always known.
Questioning how I am, how I’ve been, allowing me hardly any time to ask after him, as if our positions are reversed and I’m the one whom everyone has been worrying about.
‘Why wouldn’t you let me know you’d been ill?’ I finally manage to blurt out, still a little hurt and angry that he’d withheld all this from me.
‘Ill?’ he says, as if surprised. ‘It was hardly an illness, Ant,’ he adds with a bewildered chuckle, calling me by the pet name I’d been awarded since moving in with the Delmestras. ‘I didn’t want to get shot!’
‘Shot? What do you mean, “shot”?’
I’m so startled by this that I pull back urgently from him.
‘Ahh; no one’s told you, have they?’ he mutters shamefully, his face creasing with a dawning realisation.
‘Told me what? No, they didn’t tell me you’d been shot! They said you’d been ill, that you were on the mainland receiving treatment!’
Once again he shakes his head ashamedly, yet says, ‘Yes, yes; I suppose it does make sense–’
‘How’s it make sense?’ I snap. ‘Katerina told me you were ill, and that’s why you’d died! Now you’re saying you’d really been shot! Who shot you? Who tried to kill you?’
‘Soldiers, of course!’ he says, with a tone of assurance implying it should be obvious.
As he spoke, he pulled his
night shirt aside a little, revealing the healed wound just above his heart.
Instinctively, I reached out to touch the scarred flesh, my fingers, my whole arm abruptly tingling with the strange thrill of touching his bared chest.
He grasped my hand, held it tighter still over his heart.
‘I thought they might tell you the truth – but it would have been too dangerous! For them, for you!’
As he says this, the implication of his words, of the wound, dawns on me
‘The revolution? You’ve been fighting with the revolutionary forces?’
I’m staggered by his stupidity, his lack of consideration for his family’s wellbeing. If anyone is caught fighting or even simply supporting the revolutionaries, the entire family is arrested and imprisoned, no matter how powerful or well-connected they might be.
And that, of course, is why I’d been lied to about Pavro’s disappearance from the Delmestra household without any word of goodbye, or letter of explanation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says now, firmly grasping my hand all the harder to prevent me from angrily pulling away from him. ‘I didn’t mean to get caught up in it all! It was a friend – he was in trouble, so I helped him escape…’
‘And then you couldn’t get back?’
He nodded, head down, hiding his embarrassment.
I lightly caressed the slight indent in his flesh where the musket ball had entered.
‘They…removed the lead, yes?’
The lead ball, if left within the wound, could still poison him.
He nods again, but this time without embarrassment.
‘More than that,’ he admits. ‘Somehow, they also completely repaired the wound: last time I saw it, before I passed out, it was still a massive gash. I’d overheard the surgeons in what served as our hospital out there: they said it was inoperable, that I should be removed to…the area where people were sent to die.’
‘They? The ones who repaired you, I mean: you mean the photographer, this Grindfarg?’
I get another nod from him.
‘Holandros, he’d been out in the field, taking images of the dead out there. When he saw me, still barely alive, he said he recognised me as a Delmestra: said that, for the right fee, he could give me back my life…’
‘And you agreed?’
‘What else was I supposed to do? I left with him, in his carriage.’
‘How did they do it? Is it connected with these photographs he takes? The use of chemicals, the…stealing of souls?’
I say this last part hesitantly, expecting him to laugh a little, mocking my childishness for even contemplating something so obviously foolish.
He doesn’t laugh. He frowns, his face serious.
‘I’ve no idea how they do it,’ he admits. ‘But if they didn’t: believe me, Ant, I’d now be lying in my grave!’
*
Chapter 10
It felt odd, knowing that everyone had lied to me.
Yes, of course, I understood their reasons: no one wants to risk the authorities finding out that a family member is fighting for the revolutionaries.
Whole plantations have been raised to the ground, the earth salted, making the soil unusable for the rest of time.
Everyone can be killed, if the crime is regarded as serious enough.
The maids.
The servants.
The overseers.
Ironically, only the slaves are spared death.
They can hardly be held responsible for the foolishness of their masters, after all.
Besides, they are too valuable to be wasted in such a ridiculously irresponsible manner.
They’re sold on.
The vengeful mass slaughter that had followed their own abortive revolution had only resulted in the remainder increasing in value. (The island’s own rebellion against the mainland rulers, of course, is celebrated with resplendent statues of our heroes, many standing alongside monuments to those who threw off the yoke of the empire.)
Of course, new slaves are being continually brought onto the island, but most soon succumb to our climate, to the insects that spare no one from their venomous or merely highly infectious bites. Those slaves who have been born here are therefore the most treasured, having become relatively well acclimatised to their surroundings.
They know, too, which insects to avoid, which appear threatening but which are effectively harmless (they just appear horrendous, it not being unknown for a visitor from the mainland to die of shock or heart failure when an otherwise gorgeously iridescent creature the size of a spindly-legged kitten lands on their arm).
The present rebellion doesn’t seek to free these slaves. Our economy would collapse without them. It seeks, it claims, to free us. And that, of course, can only be achieved by placing its leaders in power, replacing the theocracy that rules us.
One thing they promise their supporters is the outlawing of the transference.
Is Pavro against it?
Does he dread the destruction of his beauty as much as I do?
*
When I’d first moved in to live with the Delmestras after the deaths of my own parents, Katerina hadn’t taken kindly to me at all.
She’d regarded me, she would admit with embarrassed laughter much later, as an interloper, someone who might steal her own fair share of the obviously limited love of her parents.
I was so much prettier than her after all, she had ashamedly added.
Then one night, as I lay drowsy and half asleep in my bed, she came to my room, wondering if I knew a way of gently opening her prized and delicate little timepiece.
There was no need to force it, I showed her, making it open for me with only the merest of tender touches. In return, she introduced me to her secret garden, with its velvety-petalled blooms, its glistening pool of honeyed waters, its sweetly delicious spring, rippling as if with the utmost pleasure within its softly contoured hollow.
After that, we would share our secret longings with each other in whispers, for tongues can travel anywhere.
My longing, of course, eventually turned to Pavro. And when I admitted this to Katerina, far from being upset, she pronounced herself happy and delighted.
For wasn’t he her twin?
And so wasn’t this perfectly right, the ideal solution?
As Pavro lay drowsy and half asleep in his bed, I came to his room.
*
Chapter 11
‘What was it like?’ I ask as we contentedly lie within each other’s arms. ‘Dying I mean: what was it like?’
He shakes his head a little, as if trying to clear it of any faulty, fogging memories.
‘I can’t quite remember,’ he says, unable to hide the disappointment within his voice. ‘Do we recall what it’s like as we go to sleep?’
‘No bright lights, darkness, rolling hills?’
He shakes his head again, this time as his answer to my query.
‘Maybe I wasn’t dead long enough,’ he suggests not a little sadly, as if realising he’d missed out on or been denied the chance to see what lay beyond for all of us. ‘And, before you ask your next question, when I realised I was alive, it was just as if I’d woken up: nothing more, nothing less.’
‘Nothing more, nothing less, than coming back to life,’ I correct him with a delicate kiss to his badly shaven cheek.
He shrugs, grins.
‘Why me, though?’
He says it as if he’s been pondering this very question for quite a while now. Pondering it and failed to come up with an adequate answer.
‘Didn’t you say,’ I point out, in case he’s forgotten, ‘that it’s an expensive process?’
He frowns as if considering this, as if it’s something he’s already considered a number of times and dismissed as being irrelevant.
‘There was one week when we were defending an old ruin, some ancient missionary building. We were fighting off attack after attack, the soldiers being relentlessly sent against us. We thought we’d have
to fall to their attacks eventually: particularly on the last day, when waves of them just kept on rolling towards us, despite our cutting them down line by line. The ground was littered with bodies of both the dead and badly wounded who, when night thankfully came, we could hear moaning for help, for water. No one was giving quarter you see, not even to allow the removal of the dead and wounded, as there was no trust between us: we each thought the other would use any lull to at least send spies across, or lay traps. Yet when it was completely dark – it was the first perfectly moonless night – the moans of the dying became piercing screams, terrifying shrieks that made us all shiver with fright. And in the morning, the ground was completely cleared; as if the dead had got up and simply walked away.’
I rise up on my elbows, gaze directly into his eyes.
‘So? So the soldiers used the cover of darkness to remove their dead!’
Once more, he shakes his head, combining it with a grimace of anxiety.
‘The next morning, a group of their officers approached us under a white flag: demanding to know what we’d done with their wounded!’
*
Chapter 12
‘I’m taking you to meet your new intended,’ Doñas Delmestra declared proudly when I politely queried his request that I join him on a journey into town immediately after breakfast.
‘But…such a thing isn’t allowed!’ I said, scandalised by the notion, let alone the actual act.
No one was ever supposed to meet their intended, not even after the transference. Of course, accidental meetings couldn’t be completely prevented, yet these were incredibly rare, the Gorgesque and Grotesgeous being wholly different strata of society and therefore tending to gather in entirely separate areas.
(I’d heard that such meetings were invariably a disappointment for the Gorgesque, who complained that the Grotesgeous were surprisingly inadequate when it came to wearing the beauty bestowed upon them: they wore their new faces not with pride and sufferance, but with shame and anger, such that even the most gorgeous of features palled and sagged.)