Polystom (Gollancz Sf S.) Read online

  Nestor was at his side now. ‘The tide turned only quarter of an hour ago, sir, if that,’ he said breathlessly. ‘If she went in the water it won’t be far from here.’

  But even as men arrived with the weighted net, and others came dragging a boat over the sand, Polystom felt the urgency go out of his body. He turned, waving Nestor on, and started walking back along the pier. There was an utter certainty in him, as deep as his bones, that his wife was dead, and sodden in the water behind him. The awfulness of it settled over the surface of his thoughts like snow; but deeper down was a curious feeling of vacancy.

  He reached the grass, when he was overtaken by shouting. Men were running down from the west. ‘The woods! The woods!’

  Stom’s heart leapt up again. ‘Is it her?’ he called, breaking into a jog. ‘The woods?’

  ‘Sir!’ called his servants. ‘Sir!’

  Nestor, despite being twice his master’s age, was at his side in moments. They ran together up the sloping grass, past the orchard to their left and towards the gesticulating men at the borders of the forest.

  ‘Did you deal with the fishers?—’ Stom gasped.

  ‘Yes sir!’ bolted Nestor.

  ‘—with the fishermen?—’

  ‘Yes sir!’

  ‘Was she heading in their direction again?’ Stom asked. ‘Is she going that way?’

  They ran for two minutes, three, before a growl behind them announced one of Stom’s automobiles, creeping over the grass on its narrow wheels, driven by a jerky-faced undermechanic. Stom spun about and pulled the door open, heaved the driver out, clambered in. The engine grumbled, and caught, and he drove up the slope and between the wide gatepillars of the trees, leaving a wake of two lines behind him, tyre marks deeply scored into the turf.

  He drove as far as he could, Nestor running in front of him and the hallooing of other servants audible through the open window, until the trees were too narrow to pass between. Then he tumbled out of the car and sprinted the last hundred yards to a knot of people. Pushing them aside, he saw, with déjà vu, the crumpled heap of clothes on the forest floor, a flimsy silk gown, a pair of house slippers, and the turbaned mass of bandages.

  ‘How is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Breathing,’ said somebody.

  Stom gripped her tiny shoulder, and pulled her body over. Her eyes were open; her expression looked, indeed, rather comical, mouth pursed and eye-shaped. She met his eyes.

  ‘Did you trip over a tree root?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in a voice small but not diminished. And then, miraculously, a smile flicked over her mouth. It only lasted a moment, but it completely changed the mood of the moment.

  Stom sat down on the pine needles beside his wife. ‘Where did you think you were going?’ he asked, not unkindly. The entire encounter, its emotional swellings and anticlimaxes, had now taken on the flavour of a ridiculous comedy.

  She was staring straight up, now, at the canopy of fir branches. ‘Away,’ she said.

  ‘Away – through the forest? In house slippers?’ He chuckled. ‘How ridiculous you are.’

  ‘Away,’ she said.

  ‘You,’ said Stom, gesturing messily at one of the servants standing nearby. ‘Pick her up and take her to the car.’

  The boy stooped, and stood again with Beeswing in his arms. She seemed dreamily removed from events happening around her. ‘No,’ she said softly, without struggling. ‘Let me go.’ Stom sat until his breath was back, and then got to his feet, walking the hundred yards back to his car. The afternoon sun was intermittent through the tops of the trees, making scribbling patterns of light on the forest floor.

  At the car Beeswing was sitting on the running-board, her hands on her knees. ‘In the car,’ said Stom, coming over to her. ‘I can’t drive you back on the running-board.’

  ‘My head feels funny,’ she said.

  ‘The doctor told you bed-rest,’ said Stom, helping her to her feet and opening the door behind her. ‘He didn’t say flee through the woods. No wonder your head feels funny.’ He was impressed again, as he helped her to a standing position, by the sheer lightness of her, as if her bones were hollow as a bird’s, as if her flesh were not filled with blood in the hot-water bottle fashion of Stom’s own body but was instead suffused with ichor, with air itself. And there was even a little elation in himself. The quicksilver shifts in mood, in the air around his wife, bubbled a hopefulness up in his own mind. Perhaps this ridiculous little adventure was going to mark the turning-point in their mutual relationship. They could learn to laugh together at the absurdity of her escape attempts, and by laughing they would bond. He wanted to be alone with his wife in this fragile moment of bonding. ‘You men,’ he called to his servants. ‘Back to the house with you.’

  The servants, half unwillingly, left, stepping between the trees. They too had been wound up tight by the trauma of Beeswing’s vanishing. They shared, in their reduced way, his sense of anticlimax. ‘In the car, my love,’ said Stom, a smile on his lips, turning to face her.

  She wasn’t there; and he turned his face again, smile-less, to see the back of her bouncing away deeper into the wood. He started after her, immediately, caught between laughing at this child’s game of chase-and-kiss-me, and scowling at her continued intransigence. It was possible to take a game too far. And underneath was the suspicion, hardened by his earlier anger into grimness, that Beeswing was playing a different game to him. Chase-and-kiss-me meant I expect to be caught, I relish being caught. Beeswing’s running was the reflex action of the instinctual runaway. She continued betraying him, abandoning him.

  Stom’s longer legs covered the ground between him and his wife swiftly, and as he reached out to apprehend her he decided that he would root out this insurrectionary streak in her make-up once and for all. He would lock her up, and keep her locked up until her spirit broke a little – or if not broke exactly, then at least softened to the point where it could bear the imprint of reality. Tie her to a bed, perhaps, so she couldn’t hurt herself. He could not play this game for ever. Marriage was a more serious business than this. And thinking so, he reached forward and grabbed with both hands at Beeswing’s moving hips, one hand on each side, gripping and pulling her down. His greater weight and momentum carried him over her and forced her down on the ground.

  He stumbled, his foot caught against her legs and he almost fell; but he recovered himself, staggered on several steps and brought himself up against a treetrunk. She was lying face down again, as she had done before. ‘To me!’ he called, angry now, wanting his servants to come quickly, to pick her up and make sure she was deposited inside the car. ‘Over here!’ He turned his wife’s body over with his foot, looking down at her with a certain disdain, as if to say I’m not amused by this childishness, you know. The irritant was that, even in something as tender as the bond of joint amusement, she did not understand where the boundaries lay. Had she got straight back in the car, the fragile mood of happiness might have been maintained on the drive back to the house. Then this first point of connection could have been firmed up. But this second running off had spoiled that. And playing dead, as she was now doing, only made matters worse. The games were over. No point in lying there white-eyed and pretending motionlessness.

  He bent over her, to look more closely at her fogged eyes. She had rolled them back in their sockets. Her mouth hung slack. The first of his servants had reached him before he realised that she wasn’t breathing, and that her pulse – never a strong thrum – was entirely absent.

  The doctor, that evening, could offer little precision of diagnosis. A blood vessel had exploded in her head, he said. This was probably a weak area from her former injury, some vein torn by her banging her head against the door that had only partially healed, and had been knocked loose again. He couldn’t say whether it had been Polystom’s tackle that had done this, or whether she had done it herself simply with the action of running, ‘this latter,’ he said, ‘as distinct a possibility as th
e former. With this sort of injury, bed-rest is absolutely required, you see. Sudden movement can easily be fatal. It’s also possible,’ he said, ‘that she hit her head in the forest going down, and caused a wholly new injury. I could open her head with the knife,’ he explained, smiling at Stom’s wince, ‘and wouldn’t be able with certainty to determine which of these scenarios was the proximate cause of death.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Polystom.

  Nestor, his cheek still red, although the ruddiness had not darkened into a bruise, saw the doctor out. Stom stood in the ante-room into which Beeswing’s body had been brought. The bandages had been removed to reveal two smile-shaped cuts, half-healed and rusty with dried blood, just above her hairline. Otherwise, there was nothing about the body to indicate that it had died prematurely. He touched the forehead, expecting instinctively to feel warmth and instead found it dry and cold, an unusual combination. The sweatless fever-free chill of polished stone.

  Nestor, tentatively, looked round the door. ‘Sir?’ he asked.

  But Stom felt cool himself, infected by her coldness. He was conscious of the absence of the violent emotions he had felt at the deaths of his father and co-father. He felt no desire to cry; and no capability of tears even had he wanted them. ‘Her manner,’ he said, ‘in the woods, when we found her. She was fey, then. Do you think the aneurysm had already happened, and her head was filling with blood as we spoke to her?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘That would mean,’ he went on, ‘that she was dead when we found her. Dead but still playful. I’d like a bottle of wheat whisky, Nestor. There should be half a dozen bottles from the case Aunt Elena gave me for my birthday. Bring a bottle to my snug.’

  The chill unreality of this death continued through the next few days, as Stom organised a funeral. Few came; although Aunt Elena and Uncle Cleonicles both appeared – which was surprising, given that neither of them had come to his co-father’s funeral the year before. Beeswing’s guardian came, but neither of her parents appeared. Polystom wrote up the record of her life the day before the ceremony. It had taken him nearly a week to write up records for his father and co-father, but he managed hers in a day. There seemed so little to say about Beeswing: the bare facts of her life, fleshed out with a few observations on her character from her husband. It was as though she would leave as light an imprint upon the biographical record as her delicate body had left upon the material word. ‘There was something elfin about her,’ Polystom told the few assembled. ‘My feelings were touched,’ he said, having decided against using the phrase I fell in love, ‘my feelings were touched by her lightness, her delicate but fiery spirit, by her faery beauty. She was a creature of the air, a spirit of the air, like the sprite Aethra from the opera Tettixes. She has left this material world now, and I’m certain she finds a purer existence amongst the clouds.’

  He could see Aunt Elena nodding, gently; but there were no tears.

  Afterwards there was a brief funeral meal, and then the guests went their various ways. Only Cleonicles loitered. ‘Are you bearing up, my boy?’ he said. ‘This is a bad business, I know, but are you bearing up?’

  ‘Could I prevail upon you, Uncle,’ he said, with the brittle precision of the bereaved, ‘to stay tonight?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said the old man. ‘As long as you like.’

  That evening, over drinks on the patio (for the night was a warm one) they talked for many hours. Or, rather, Polystom talked, talked on, dry-eyed but urgent, and Cleonicles listened. The talk was, to begin with, of Beeswing, but of course it elided easily into talk of Polystom himself. She had never understood him; she had ignored the gift he had given her. It was an appropriate way to die, really, he said. There had been something wrong in her head all along. Why should it be that healthy individuals are drawn, as some undoubtedly are, to the marks of sickness in others? Where is the sexuality in pathology? Health should be drawn to health, surely. But there was a sort of sickness in me, too, he said. He had craved a soulmate, a partner, and this craving was a sort of weakness. A weakness. And the talk wound down into drowsy wine-fuelled pleasantries. And after this into silence, a comfortable silence between the two men.

  After a while, Cleonicles said: ‘You don’t blame yourself, dear boy?’

  And this was a thought that had literally not occurred to Polystom. ‘Blame myself?’ he repeated. ‘For what?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Cleonicles. ‘Quite.’ And he looked into the fire, as if his science-refined spirit could foresee the future, the innumerable visits that his nephew would go on to make to his house, the innumerable tears he would shed, the pitiable talk of missing her and bitterness of life that Cleonicles would have to listen to over the coming year. It may have been that he did not suspect such a future. Or perhaps he had some inkling of the way his nephew’s spirit would run.

  ‘There’s no reason why you can’t marry again,’ he said, offering the remark with a forceful voice, knowing it to be one of the uncomfortable sorts of truth that a recently bereaved husband doesn’t like to hear, howsoever truthful it may be. ‘Not just yet, of course, but in time. And marry somebody more settled, perhaps.’

  Polystom stared gloomily into the fire. ‘I know you’re right, Uncle.’

  ‘May I take the record of her life with me?’ Cleonicles said. ‘When I go back to the moon, I mean?’

  Stom looked up, startled at this request. ‘If you like, Uncle,’ he said. ‘But why on earth would you want it?’

  ‘I have my reasons,’ he replied. ‘Scientific reasons, perhaps.’

  ‘Does – she – come within the remit of science, then?’

  ‘We all do,’ said Cleonicles. ‘All of us. An eccentric, as she was, is more useful to – certain scientific investigative procedures than a run-of-the-mill type. My boy,’ and he leant forward. ‘You mustn’t be ashamed.’ Polystom started to protest, feebly, but Cleonicles quieted him with his heavy hand. ‘No, you mustn’t be ashamed to have fallen in love with such a creature. It’s one of those passing things, and had you not followed it through you would have regretted it. Regret nothing! Never apologise, never explain. And always remember that love comes in a variety of species. There are healthier forms of it waiting for you!’

  They chatted on, for an hour or so, before the older man drifted into a sleep in his chair, and Polystom looked thoughtfully upon the heap of glowing ash that filled the fireplace.

  It was not until a week had passed that Nestor told him that one of the servants had almost died the same day as Beeswing, death hovering twice over the house. ‘She didn’t die, though, sir.’

  Polystom stared at the fire. Nestor was giving his weekly report. ‘Did this happen this week?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The fire crackled into the silence between them. ‘Well?’ prompted Polystom. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you wanted all the depressing details, sir. The point is that she’s better now, with the loss of one hand, and she’s recovering her health.’

  ‘Tell me the depressing details,’ said Polystom, his voice freighted with a curiously self-satisfied gloominess.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ said Nestor, a little flustered. He was wearing all black, in honour of his master’s mourning. The new black velvet of his coat crinkled and flexed as he shuffled uneasily in his seat, grins and smirks appearing and disappearing in the cloth as if it were making wicked faces at its master. ‘It was only a lower servant girl, a garden worker. She pushed her hand through some glass in the glasshouse. We don’t know why. But she’s fine now, recovering.’

  This tale was not morbid enough to satisfy Polystom’s soul; he waved his butler on with his report.

  [eighth leaf]

  [this leaf is very fragmented at start and close, and its order is uncertain. It is impossible, from internal evidence, to know whether the event it relates comes from before or after Polystom’s marriage to Beeswing, or how the original author intended it to relate to
the other events in the narrative. It is placed here at the end of the sequence only tentatively.]

  [. . . looking into]

  [. . . (masculine word ending)]

  [. . .]

  [. . . and f(rom?) above]

  [. . . variegated]

  . . . that [there were?] bears in his woods. Some estate-owners had their aboriginal bear-populations culled, ‘clearing their woods’ as the phrase went. Polystom had read about the Steward of the main Estate on Rhum having all his bears killed, stuffed, to be animated stiffly with rods and cogs and little electrical motors, before placing them back in between the trees. Such artifice was not for Polystom. He hired hunters (on leave from the army, and glad of the pay) to shoot two hundred of the beasts in his own woodland, but impressed upon them that they must kill no more. He liked the idea of a score or so bears roaming his lands. He went so far as to ship a whole herd of cows to pasture south of the Middenstead to save the valuable creatures from ursine depredation. [There were?] enough boars, rabbits and fish living wild in the forest and streams to keep a limited population of bears fed.

  And once, magically, dangerously, Polystom had come face to face with one of his bears. It happened towards the end of a Winter Year, just as it was turning to a Spring Year. He had been wandering further than usual; the sun was slipping away. It was late in the afternoon, dusk permeating the gloom of the forest with sepia, and the fragrance of pine-needles and resin sharp in the cold air. Polystom had been walking for many hours. He had heard the moans of bearsong several times through the day, but had ignored them – they sounded distant, and his mind had been elsewhere. He had wandered on. The moon was low in the sky, its green-silver circle of light bitten into by the silhouettes of trees, and more trees, and then the up-line of a mountain. Soon the sunlight drained away entirely and green moonlight on dark-green trees gave the woods a spectral, unreal aspect. Sighing with the beauty of it, the melancholy loveliness of his lands, Polystom stopped where he was. He slipped his backpack from his shoulders and rummaged through it to bring out his torch. It would be time to go soon; not to walk home – that was too far – but to cut down through the trees to the nearest inlet or cove of the Middenstead, and then along the coast until he found one of his boat huts. Inside would be a kettle, a larder of dried food, bottles of pineberry wine – and a telephone, from which he could call his main estate and have a servant come collect him in a boat. He switched his torch on, not wanting to stumble and twist an ankle as he picked his way through the shadow at his feet. The light, a bright and syrupy yellow, sprang all about him, enamelling the tree trunks in their own sharp shadows, turning indistinctness into the upright painted flats of layered stage scenery.