Art Pact 10


There were seven-hundred and fifty-eight steps to the top of the tower, which Alexander discovered by counting them - once on the way up, then again on the way down. At the bottom was the herbarium, the tropical heat of the glass-house and rank upon rank of leaves. At the top, the rarified air of the observatory, the whistling cold wind that snapped at Alexander's nose and ears and tried to burrow into his clothes.

He expected to be able to look down from the balcony to see the greenhouse far below, but the tower seemed to be permanently embedded in a cloud, just the top thirty or forty meters emerging from the dense white fluff to look out over a landscape of jagged islands in a white sea. There were telescopes - three of them, two set high on stalks so that he could not reach them, one set on a low tripod that he thought must have been for Sombra when she was little. He could crouch down and use that one with some effort, pressing the right lens of his glasses up against the rubber eyepiece and squinting. There was a single bright star in the centre of the field - or was it a planet? Alexander could not tell, and wished that he had paid more attention during the field trips at school.

He was sent up and down the town twice a day. Once in mid-morning, once in the evening so that by the time he got back to the first floor it was just about time for tea. In the morning his job was delivery - Sombra would prepare a cage containing one crow and one white dove, which the magician would enchant so as to prevent them from fighting. He, long-legged and spindly, would loom over the shadow girl like a monstrous heron, poking his nose into each aspect of her work although saying nothing except for the magic words of the pacifying spell. When Sombra had done that, she would chop up and combine a number of herb-leaves (freshly picked from the garden in a different combination each day), and twist them into a packet. Alexander took the packet and the two birds in their cage, climbed the laborious climb to the top of the tower and then, before collapsing into an exhausted heap, would pour the herbs over the birds and release them from their cage.

In the evening his duty was collection and observation. On his first day in the tower he had had to carry Sombra all the way up. The magician had lifted the shadow-girl onto Alexander's back, where she had clamped her arms gently but firmly around the base of his neck. Then the magician showed Alexander how to tuck the thighs of Sombra's ruined legs beneath his arms. She weighed next to nothing, but out of her heated wheelchair was relentlessly cold, so that she sucked the warmth out of Alexander's back. For the first hundred steps he shivered himself, but the effort of the climb caused him to heat up so much that by the time they reached the top he found that his back and neck were the only places that were not dripping with sweat, kept pleasantly cool by the shadow-girl's icy touch.

"I can't put you down," he told her. "I don't think I'll be able to get you onto my back again without his help."

"It's ok," she said. Her voice sounded raspy and itchy in the cold thin air. "Just listen. Probably nothing will happen today, it doesn't look right for it."

She turned him by tugging on his shoulders, steering him around the observatory's balcony like a stubborn horse. Between the two tall telescopes she pointed him outwards, looking towards the highest and loneliest of the mountaintops emerging from the clouds.

"That's where they climb to," she said.

"Who?"

"The flower people," she said, after a little pause. "I don't know."

"Do they live on the mountain?"

"I don't know. But sometimes they throw things up, into the wind. You'll know them when you see them. Any that come nearby, catch them."

"And bring them down to him?"

He felt the girl shudder against his back.

"God no! Let them go, don't even bring them inside the tower! But study them before you release them. Memorise them, everything about them. He'll ask you something. Like: how many legs did it have? Or: was it orangey-red, or reddy-orange? Or: Whose eyes did you think about when you looked at it?"

"How am I supposed to remember all that?"

"I don't know," she said. "But you will."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Art Pact 176 - In Memory

Art Pact 115

Art Pact 123