Clive Barker - Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

One hundred and fifty-seven days after beginning his journey across the Reconciled Dominions, Gentle once again set foot on the soil of England. Though it wasn't yet the middle of June, spring had arrived prematurely, and the season on its heels was at its height. Flowers not due to blossom for another month were already blowsy and heavy-headed with seeds; bird and insect life abounded, as species that normally appeared months apart flourished simultaneously. This summer's dawns were announced not with choruses but with full-throated choirs; by midday the skies from 'coast to coast were cloudy with feeding millions, the wheels slowing through the afternoon, until by dusk the din had become a music (sated and survivors alike giving thanks for the day) so rich it lulled even the crazy into remedial sleep. If a Reconciliation could indeed be planned and achieved in the little time before midsummer, then it would be burgeoning country that the rest of the Imajica would greet: an England of bountiful harvests, spread beneath a melodious heaven.

It was full of music now, as Gentle wandered from the Retreat out across the dappled grass to the perimeter of the copse. The parkland was familiar to him, though its lovingly tended arbors were jungles now, and its lawns were veldt.

"This is Joshua's place, isn't it?" he said to Jude. "Which way's the house?"

She pointed across a wilderness of gilded grass. The roof of the mansion was barely visible above the surf of fronds and butterflies.

"The very first time I saw you was in that house," he told her, "I remember... Joshua called you down the stairs. He had a pet name you despised. Peachblossom, was it? Something like that. As soon as I set eyes on you—"

"It wasn't me," Jude said, halting this romantic reverie. "It was Quaisoir."

"Whatever she was then, you are now."

"I doubt that. It was a long time ago, Gentle. The house is in ruins, and there's only one Godolphin left. History isn't going to repeat itself. I don't want it to. I don't want to be anybody's object."

He acknowledged the warning in these words with an almost formal statement of intent.

"Whatever I did that caused you or anybody else harm," he said, "I want to make good. Whether I did it because I was in love, or because I was a Maestro and I thought I was above common decency... . I'm here to heal the hurt. I want Reconciliation, Jude. Between us. Between the Dominions. Between the living and the dead if I can do it."

"That's a hell of an ambition,"

"The way I see it, I've been given a second chance. Most people don't get that."

His plain sincerity mellowed her. "Do you want to wander to the house, for old time's sake?" she asked him.

"Not unless you do."

"No, thanks. I had my little fit of deja vu when I convinced Charlie to bring me here."

Gentle had of course told her about his encounter with Estabrook in the Dearthers' tents and about the man's subsequent demise. She'd been unmoved.

"He was a difficult old bugger, you know," she now remarked. "I must have known in my gut he was a Godolphin, or I'd never have put up with his damn fool games."

"I think he was changed by the end," Gentle said. "Maybe you'd have liked him a little more."

"You've changed too," she said, as they started to wander towards the gate. "People are going to be asking a lot of questions, Gentle. Like: Where have you been and what have you been doing?"

"Why does anybody even have to know I'm back?" he said. "I never meant that much to any of them, except Taylor, and he's gone."

"Clem, too,"

"Maybe."

"It's your choice," she said. "But when you've got so many enemies, you may need some of your friends."

"I'd prefer to stay invisible," he told her. "That way nobody sees me, enemies or friends."

As the bounding wall came in sight the skies changed with almost eerie haste, the few fluffy clouds that minutes before had been drifting in the blue now congregating into a lowering bank that first shed a light drizzle and a minute later was bursting like a dam. The downpour had its advantages, however, sluicing from their clothes, hair, and skin all trace of Yzordderrexian dust. By the time they'd clambered through the mesh of timbers and convolvulus around the gate and trudged along the muddied road to the village— there to take shelter in the post office—they could have passed for two tourists (one with a somewhat bizarre taste in hiking clothes) who'd strayed too far from the beaten track and needed help to find their way home.

Though neither of them had any valid currency in their pockets, Jude was quick to persuade one of two lads who stopped in the post office to drive them back into London, promising a healthy fee at the other end if he did so. The storm worsened as they traveled, but Gentle rolled down the window in the back and stared at the passing panorama of an England he hadn't seen for half a year, content to let the rain soak him all over again.

Jude was meanwhile left to endure a monologue from their driver. He had a mutinous palate; which rendered every third word virtually unintelligible, but the gist of his chatter was plain enough. It was the opinion of every weather watcher he knew, he said, and these were folk who lived by the land and had ways of predicting floods and droughts no fancy-talking meteorologist ever had, that the country was in for a disastrous summer.

"We'll either be cooked or drowned," he said, prophesying months of monsoons and heatwaves.

She'd heard talk like this before,, of course; the weather was an English obsession. But having come from the ruins of Yzordderrex, with the burning eye of the comet overhead and the air stinking of death, the youth's casually apocalyptic chatter disturbed her. It was as if he was willing some cataclysm to overtake his little world, not comprehending for a moment what that implied.

When he grew bored with predicting ruination, he started to ask her questions about where she and her friend had been coming from or going to when the storm had caught them. She saw no reason not to tell him they'd been at the estate, so she did so. Her reply earned her what studied disinterest had failed to achieve for three quarters of an hour: his silence. He gave her a baleful look in the mirror and then turned on the radio, proving, if nothing else, that the shadow of the Godolphin family was sufficient to hush even a doomsayer. They traveled to the outskirts of London without further exchange, the youth only breaking the silence when he needed directions.

"Do you want to be dropped at the studio?" she asked Gentle.

He was slow to answer, but when he did it was to reply that, yes, that's where he wanted to go. Jude furnished instructions to the driver and then turned her gaze back towards Gentle. He was still staring out the window, rain speckling his brow and cheeks like sweat, drops hanging off his nose, chin, and eyelashes. The smallest of smiles curled the corners of his mouth. Catching him unawares like this, she almost regretted her dismissal of his overtures at the estate. This face, for all that the mind behind it had done, was the face that had appeared to her while she slept in Quaisoir's bed: the dream lover whose imagined caresses had brought from her cries so loud her sister had heard them two rooms away. Certainly, they could never again be the lovers who'd courted in the great house two centuries before. But their shared history marked them in ways they had yet to discover, and perhaps when those discoveries were all made they'd find a way to put into flesh the deeds she dreamed in Quaisoir's bed.

The rainstorm had preceded them to the city, unleashed its torrent, and moved off, so that by the time they reached the outskirts there was sufficient blue sky overhead to promise a warm, if glistening, evening. The traffic was still clogged, however, and the last three miles of the journey took almost as long as the previous thirty. By the time they reached Gentle's studio their driver, used to the quiet roads around the estate, was out of sympathy with the whole endeavor and had several times broken his silence to curse the traffic and warn his passengers that he was going to require very considerable recompense for his troubles.