V

ANIN

He knew that after what happened last time there would be a big performance. The world needed to be righted, precedent asserted, the future written. He arranged his face to blankness so the Vaik might project what they needed there, hiding his horror deep within himself.

Four Vaik entered his quarters after lunch on the half. They were high-spirited and fey, laughing among themselves as they removed his masjythra and escorted him, naked, down the zigzagging ramp and onto the path to the northeastern sector.

Jonathon tilted his head to the sun, enjoying the feeling of warmth on his skin. The gardens had recovered well from the sestyatesh. Buds were springing up in the mild weather, and everything wore an expectant, hopeful aspect. The light caught in the fine gold hair of the Vaik as they led him into a part of The Fortress where he had never been before. He squinted, and it seemed he was orbited by four glowing suns.

This had to be a residential district because, as they made their procession, women and girls appeared at windows and threw petals towards them. Jonathon did not understand the words they spoke, but there was no missing the ribald nature of the raillery. His Vaik escort laughed, springing into the air to catch the flowers and dropping them atop his head. The women wore loose, white gowns that flowed like water as they slipped along the path.

They stopped at a blue building festooned with red window boxes. The Vaik led him in, their touch warm and soft. They were excited, chirruping like birds. They came to a three-walled room that opened onto a lawn. The room was tiled in whites and blues and bathed in light. Incense burned from delicate glass jars but still the scent of the garden—fresh-washed and cut—permeated the room. Jonathon breathed it in and felt slightly light-headed.

One of the Vaik led the way towards a perfect blue slab of water, a narrow rectangle slicing through the room. She stepped nimbly down the marble stairs, still robed. “Come here, Jonathon Bridge.”

He followed her into the water. She took a sponge and wiped his hair, his face, his neck. She worked methodically and gently, cleansing him in slow, concentric circles. The water was warm and rose-scented. Her wet gown clung to her breasts and hips, her brown nipples perfectly visible through the white material. Jonathon’s penis stirred. Smiling, the Vaik reached for it and gave it a wash. “Lucky Ulait,” she said, and winked at him.

Jonathon kept his face determinedly blank, but he was imposing the image of this nubile, rose-scented Vaik on his retina. He would carry whatever he could into the bedchamber with Ulait, determined not to fail her.

“Close your eyes,” whispered the Vaik. She sponged his hair, and the rivulets ran warm along his cheeks.

There was a slight splash and, when he opened his eyes, Mandalay was sitting on the side of the bath, her bare legs swinging in the water. Next to her was a tray bearing an intricately carved silver jug and half a dozen small red glasses.

“Hello,” he said.

“Verrglet?” she asked.

“Yes, please.”

She poured the fizzy green juice into the glasses and handed them around. The other Vaik came and sat on the rim of the bath, too.

Jonathon took his glass from her hand. “Thank you.”

She had an air of mischief about her he had never sensed before. It made her impossibly beautiful. He had an urge to reach for her and pull her into the water with him. But he stayed where he was, sipping his verrglet.

“I’m wondering about the beard,” said Mandalay. “Should he keep it, do you think? Or should we shave it off?”

The Vaik in the pool with Jonathon reached out and bunched the wiry, salt-and-pepper beard that framed his face. The men had been given shaving equipment in the bathhouse, and Jonathon had used it during the summer when the salt gnats gave him such grief. But in the colder months he’d let it grow.

“I like a man with a beard,” said the Vaik, and she leant in and kissed him on the mouth. She tasted of ginger and the berry, tingly aftertaste of verrglet. “But,” she drew back, his face in her hands, and considered him, “there’s the scratch factor. Best it goes, I think.”

She spoke matter-of-factly, in the prosaic way of the Vaik when dealing with sex, but Jonathon’s stomach iced over. He turned away as if to cough, then downed the rest of his verrglet. This would happen. He could do this. He scrunched his eyes tight and opened them rapidly a few times. Then settled his features and turned back around, serene.

Mandalay nodded. “Bring me the razor. Come, Jonathon Bridge, Let’s see what you look like under that foliage.”

The Vaik led him out of the bath. He hung back a little to watch the undulating bottom swathed in white cloth ahead of him. Mandalay wrapped a large, soft towel around him then motioned for him to take a seat. He took the chair she offered, faced towards the lawn. The birds chirped in the soft blue sky and something scurried in the undergrowth nearby. He wanted to be out there with the sun on his back, pruning the leaves and watering the flowers. Or just flopped on the cool green grass, unmoving, letting the sun dry him and enjoying the play of light within his lashes.

Mandalay prepared the lather and set a long blade to warm in a bowl of water. She towelled his beard off and applied the lather with a small brush. The smell of pine and spruce filled his nostrils. Mandalay worked quickly and without hesitation, planing the blade along his cheeks and chin. He was acutely aware of her proximity, could feel her breath warm on his skin, the tickle of her red hair along his temples. Her tongue protruded a little as she concentrated, working around the cleft in his chin. She wiped the blade clean on a towel and stood back to check her handiwork. He didn’t relax until she’d put down the blade.

“You look—different.”

Jonathon ran his hand along his face, feeling the unfamiliar smoothness.

“Here.” She handed him a jar and helped him to apply the moisturiser.

“I will miss these smells,” he said, inhaling the scent. “The shaenet smells. Mistaelnet balm. Norsling. I don’t remember what the outside world smells like. If it smells at all.”

“More verrglet, I think,” said Mandalay.

“Only one for you, Jonathon Bridge,” said the Vaik who had bathed him, crooking her little finger. The others laughed.

They all sat around the edge of the azure pool, their feet in the water, drinking. He sipped the bubbling tea, enjoying the warmth of it coursing through his chest and along his limbs, while letting his mind wander freely, though the blankness of his naked face never wavered.

He wondered about the Vaik who had brought him here from his quarters. Despite the wildly random chromosomes that produced them, they barely wavered from the essential prototype: fine hay-coloured hair; high, wide foreheads; dark skin; and heavy lids over almond-shaped brown eyes. Mandalay, who looked so different—did she truly feel one of them, even after more than twenty years at The Fortress? She had an authority here, that much was obvious, but the physical fact of her difference was undeniable. He remembered the first Vaik who had come to his bed and left her blood on him. The Vaik don’t trust bridges, she’d said. Things naturally separated should not be conjoined.

But the paradox of Vaik civilisation was that without the supplicants and national servicemen it would all end. Whatever boys were produced by the union of the Vaik and the men did not live here. Was it possible that the Vaik had evolved to a point where they produced girl-children only? Or did they do . . . something else? The vision of Mandalay holding the hot, sharp blade rose before him.

Did they?

He became aware that Mandalay was studying him. Was she committing him to memory? He chided himself for the thought: he was one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, to flow through her hands. He remembered what Daidd had told him, that nothing was spontaneous. The Vaik choreographed every encounter. But how many men, he considered darkly, did Mandalay permit to sleep with her daughters?

He met her gaze. She was flushed, perhaps from the verrglet, and holding a hand protectively over her belly. “Come. A toast.” She stood and held her glass aloft. “In the beginning there was nothing, and the Vaik were not afraid.”

As Mandalay spoke, the revelry of the group subsided and the women bowed their heads. Jonathon bowed his also.

“They fashioned themselves from the state of nothingness and devised four pillars so that they might take shape and form.”

“Work. History. Sex. Justice,” the women incanted as one.

“A moving body is a creative body. It produces the food on our plates, the walls that protect us and the art that delights us.

“We created and re-create ourselves by standing apart. We honour they who won us our solitude, but we are not petrified.

“Pleasure consists in the freedom to, and the freedom from, and every Vaik will herself determine in what measure these things are best.

“We are instruments of the sovereignty of all women, and do not shrink from the sacrifice this entails.

“Work. History. Sex. Justice.

“We are Vaik,” they all said as one.

“Come,” Mandalay said abruptly, “it’s time.”

The Vaik wrapped him in a silken robe—“for Ulait to unwrap”—and led him to the bedchamber.

He lay in bed watching the light creep through the window and into his room. The sea whispered below the perimeter wall and the seabirds began their chorus. He threw the bedcovers back and let the fresh air magnetise his body. He splashed water on his face and leant out the window. He filled his lungs with the salt sea air then turned back to the room that had been his for the past three hundred and sixty-five days. He wouldn’t sleep here tonight, and soon, very soon, all traces of him would be erased. Daidd and Mandalay would carry him for a while, then gently let him go. Ulait might remember him. He hoped so.

Instinctively his body tensed for the chime of the bell, then he began his last walk down the zigzagged path, along the verandah and to the dining hall. Daidd hailed him from their usual table near the alfresco area where the Vaik were assembling. He sat next to Daidd, who reached for his hand and closed his fist over it. “Soon you will have coffee.”

“Coffee,” Jonathon repeated. Then he laughed. “Man, I was in bad shape those first few days.” The blue masjythra ladled fruit and porridge into his bowl. He sipped the astringent tea he’d grown used to. “I won’t miss this,” he said, nodding to the tea. “It’s an abomination. Tastes like grass.”

“You don’t know yet what you’ll miss. It might surprise you.”

“Yes, thank you, Master.” He felt uncomfortable. Overfull. As if he might burst into hysterics or start a fight because there was too much to contain within himself. He wanted to be both in and out. With Adalia and his daughter outside, out there. But also in the shaenet tethering the vines to stakes and pressing mistaelnet. The twilight between them both was unbearable.

“I’ll miss you,” said Daidd.

Jonathon swallowed a sob. He concentrated on chewing his food until the impulse passed. “If you leave, Daidd, you can stay with me and Adalia. For as long as you like. Mandalay knows where to find me.”

Daidd nodded. “Thank you, my friend. But I can’t leave. You know that.”

“Things change. All things change. I just want you to know you have options.”

“What will you do now?”

“Change nappies. Learn to make bread. Take my daughter to the park. Talk to my wife. Beyond that, Daidd, it will be one day at a time.”

“You won’t go back to your old job.”

“No.” It was one of the few things about which Jonathon was certain. That time was past. “I do have an idea.”

Daidd raised an eyebrow, curious.

“The Vaik must need intermediaries with the city. Someone to do their banking, ensure supply lines in the event of a storm. Recruit supplicants.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“I meant what I said, Daidd. You can come to us if you leave.”

“I can’t leave. I can’t leave her.”

After breakfast, Jonathon followed Daidd to the foot of the stairs where the assignment assembled for the day’s task. A few of the men shook his hand and wished him well.

Daidd hugged him tightly. “It has been a privilege knowing you, Jonathon Bridge. I think you may be Mandalay’s masterpiece.”

“Thanks. I think. Remember, my offer stands.”

Jonathon turned and walked to his room. He swung between an almost unbearable anticipation and paralysing dread. In a matter of hours he would pass through The Veya Gate. He would see Adalia. He would hold his child. The idea of his child had changed him, the way a strong wind will bend a tree. That he would look into his baby’s eyes, hear her sounds, feel her soft, warm body against him . . . That this would be a reality.

His sensitivity was heightened with each passing minute. Every follicle was upright in the breeze. The nerve endings in his tough, callused feet started working again. The grains of sand on the polished boards of his room felt like golf balls. The sea beneath his window was especially salty. He opened his mouth to feel the sodium crystals stick to his tonsils.

When it seemed he might snap under the strain, fear flooded in. It made his knees buckle and he had to sit on the bed, drawing air into his lungs.

He knew that he and Adalia were different people after this past year. Would they be different in complementary ways, with new channels opening up between them that they could explore at leisure? Or would the way back to each other be closed?

It was a risk they had taken with their eyes open.

“May I come in?”

“Of course.”

Mandalay sat next to him on the bed, smiling. “I’ve come to escort you, if you are ready.”

Jonathon nodded. They were silent as they took the zigzag ramp through the residential quarters and followed the path towards The Veya Gate. He’d been drugged when he first passed through it, and felt he may as well have been so now. Everything seemed hyperreal: the green shimmer of Mandalay’s gown, the pink buds waking from their winter hibernation, the bleached white of the clouds lazing overhead.

He paused as they came to The Gate. It was a curved, pearlescent structure, dazzling in the weak sunlight. It seemed to wear a halo.

“I can ask questions on the other side of this,” said Jonathon.

Mandalay laughed. “One. I’ll permit you one.”

He inched forward, ruminating on what he would ask. He longed to know how much of what had passed between him and Mandalay was real, though he understood that each of them would have different conceptions of what constituted “real.” But for the physical changes in his body he might have believed he’d dreamt the whole thing, psychically guided by the Vaik while he lay drugged and inert on a camper bed for twelve months.

He wanted to know about The Woman: whether she had ever been a real person and was now an idea, a Vaik bogeyman wheeled out to ensure compliance.

Had the Vaik known he would say no to Ulait that first time and, if so, why hadn’t they prepared her for that eventuality?

When he had pushed the isvestyii off the wall, was that what Mandalay had intended all along? If he hadn’t done it, would the Vaik have leapt from boltholes in the ground and done it themselves?

He was now moving so slowly he was barely moving at all. Mandalay passed through The Gate ahead of him. It was the way that she held her hand on her rounding belly as she waited for him that decided Jonathon. Really, there was no other question to ask.

He took one last look at the fuzzy, gleaming structure that connected his past and his future selves, and walked through. On the other side, he took Mandalay’s arm, drawing her close.

“I know you’re pregnant,” he said. “I don’t ask if the child is mine. I want to know, if it’s a boy, what will happen to him?”

“This is your question?”

“Yes.”

“The boys live in a sequestered part of The Fortress—though, as you may have guessed, the Vaik don’t conceive boys at the same rate as they do girls. Perhaps every tenth child is a boy.”

“That doesn’t seem possible. Biologically.”

“What do you know about the treaty between our peoples? About the biological guarantees?”

“I read about that before I came here. When the war ended there was an agreement that men would be provided to the Vaik.”

“Before the war there were rules about the men the Vaik were sent. Only men who’d conceived children and were sound mentally and physically. They also had to be able to prove their maternal line. Those rules were supposed to continue under the biological guarantees. Instead, your people sent us your lunatics, your prisoners. Inbred, deformed, violent, deranged. That was our stock.”

Jonathon remembered when he’d read about the treaty, the powerful sense he’d had of a key piece of information withheld. Now he understood. “They tried to breed you out,” he said. “A form of biological warfare.”

“But here we are, centuries later. Barely altered.”

Being Vaik is a state of mind, she had told him once. He could almost believe they had willed their DNA into an immutable state; men contributing nothing but the enlivenment of the egg. In such circumstances, birthing few boys seemed entirely possible.

“I never saw a Vaik boy the whole time I was here. Never heard a boy’s voice. They don’t live here.”

“They do, but we keep them confined. They are not free to move around the grounds like their sisters. They can leave if they wish. Most choose to stay.”

His child with Mandalay—if he was a boy—might come to him. Come to his world.

“If he leaves, will you—”

But Mandalay cut him off. “One question only.”

Jonathon wasn’t sure that he believed her, about the boys. He remembered the day of The Great Hall when he’d upturned the tiny bones in the soil. He was almost certain they hadn’t been bird bones.

Whatever the truth was, Mandalay would give him no comfort. Fatherhood was something she could not conceive of. He had to trust her, for his own sanity. One day, years from now, he might be walking down a city street and a young man would brush past him and Jonathon would know that this was his boy. It was the sort of thing that Adalia would believe possible, even likely.

“Goodbye, Jonathon Bridge.”

“Goodbye, Mandalay.”

How did you take leave of such a person, under such circumstances? Jonathon briefly considered kissing her, or shaking her hand. But none of that would suffice. Now they had passed through The Veya Gate, there was no language between them. She turned, and was gone. He felt a strain at his heart, as of a cord at maximum tension, then a snap and relief.

“This way, please, Mr. Bridge.”

The electii had appeared as Mandalay left. This was not the one who had inducted him. As the two of them wound their way through the rabbit’s warren of corridors and anterooms, Jonathon wondered what had happened to the first electii he had met. Was that electii still here, welcoming supplicants like him? Or had a decision been taken at The Great Hall that the electii was now Vaik?

Finally, he and the electii came to a bare, square room with a wicker basket in the corner.

“In the basket you will find your clothes and personal effects. Place your masjythra in the basket when you’re done. I will be waiting outside the door for you. Take all the time you need.”

But Jonathon had no wish to linger. His child—his child!—was waiting for him. He pulled the masjythra over his head and unpacked his clothes from the basket. The fabric was strange in his hands, dull and lifeless, after the gown he’d grown used to. His fingers were clumsy at the buttons of his shirt and the cotton felt scratchy. His underwear felt tight and restrictive. Unnecessary. He took the jocks off and balled them up into his jacket pocket. His pants were far too big; he had to cinch them at the waist with his belt. At the very bottom of the basket was his wedding ring, also too loose for his leanness. He placed it on his index finger. He dropped the masjythra in the basket and called out to the electii that he was ready.

The electii opened the door and stood aside to let Jonathon pass. “Follow the corridor until it diverges. On the right is a staircase, on the left another corridor. Take the left. This will lead you to the grassed enclosure and then the iron gate. Goodbye. And good luck.”

“Thank you.”

Almost jogging now, Jonathon followed the corridor until it stopped at a wall painted with trees bent double in the wind. He turned left, his heart pounding, and ran for the rectangle of sunlight where the door opened to the small, grassed enclosure. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Birds pecked at the grass, undisturbed by the wheeze of the iron gate.

He walked through the gate to the outside. Then there they were on the steps leading down to the car park. His wife’s hair had grown, and she hadn’t started dyeing it again. It fell in a two-toned wave to her shoulders. Her cheeks were as ruddy as he remembered, her smile as infectious. The baby she held was curious about her unfamiliar surroundings, looking about—wide-eyed—from a head determined to support itself.

“I brought you coffee,” said Adalia, nodding to a plastic cup by her feet.

“Adalia,” he said. “I don’t think I can stand up.” But he was already down, his legs buckling. He landed, hard, on his bony bottom. Adalia laughed, and he closed his eyes to drink in that rich, cheeky cackle that had lured him, siren-like, on the night they’d met.

“Sit on the step,” she said.

He shifted along on his bottom to the step, dangling his legs over the side. Adalia lowered herself to be next to him and handed their baby to him. He placed her in the crook of one arm and circled her with the other. He gazed at the baby, at her molten grey eyes exploring his, silently. She felt in his arms just the way she had felt in his dreams. As if he hadn’t known what his arms were for, until now. Adalia reached across for the coffee, placing it on the far side of him, then leant into him. She rested her head on his shoulder so he could smell the minty fragrance of her shampoo.

They remained like that, all three, for some time.