Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy Read online

  Chapter 7. Lovers

   

  Cambridge, England, Earth, October, 2024

   

  No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the landscape-garden offered the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities.

  Edgar Allan Poe—The Domain of Arnheim

   

  It was a one-bedroom Victorian garden flat in Chesterton, which they were paying for from a year’s extension of Jack’s doctorate grant, extra supervisions, and a few odd research jobs that Jadis was doing for Professor MacLennane (who’d taken a proprietorial interest in both of them) on the pretext of her studying for a Masters while Jack finished his thesis—a prospect that seemed almost in his grasp, but forever just beyond his reach.

  The flat was dark and grubby, but sound and tolerably dry; the central heating worked at least some of the time; and a pot of paint on a summer Sunday afternoon always works wonders, even were one not to be distracted by trying to paint each other instead of the kitchen ceiling. In any case, Jack—who was otherwise never more content than when sleeping rough under a hedge—said he’d be pleased to have a base where he could think and work in peace and quiet, and where they could at least be together without prying landladies or college domestics.

  It also had a delightful postage-stamp of a garden: hardly forty feet by twenty, but surrounded entirely by a high wall, and, being north-east facing, made an evening sun-trap of the high, back wall. At the bottom of the garden was a knee-high raised bed that ran its entire width, restrained by a wall of reclaimed bricks, and in which some unidentifiable species of ornamental acacia grew over an unkempt understory of broom, rosemary and lavender. You could crawl right inside, under the bushes, and make a hideout on a carpet of herbs and the crusts of dead leaves, where nobody could find you. It baked in the Sun during the day, unleashing a torrent of fragrance, and even after dark, the old brick wall behind would radiate the accumulated heat well into the early hours—warmth that the bushes would then trap, creating a Mediterranean microclimate.

  In the evenings of that first, hot summer, Jadis and Jack would burrow into the bushes—they called it the Nest—and might not emerge until morning—their own private Eden. Jack remembered one chilly dawn awaking in the Nest to find them both slick with dew. A spider had spun draglines across Jadis’ pale face, trapping drops of moisture that made a spangled net for the twining, leaf-adorned strands of her hair. Each of her long, dark lashes was crowned with a tiny pearl, just as if she were a sleeping fairy queen. For all that he was aching, wet and blue with cold, Jack remembered it as a moment when his heart sang.

  And as for supervisions, ever since his best student had become his partner he’d seen very few sparks of talent, or even (it has to be said) of much intelligence. The one exception was a dashing and almost unbearably cocky first-year called Avi Malkeinu, who was Israeli and knew all about Mount Carmel, famous for its honeycomb of caves rich in Neanderthal and modern human remains. Avi had poked around them, boy and man, civilian and soldier, and had some outrageous ideas about the extent and depth of human and Neanderthal occupation in his country—outrageous to all except Jack, who learned as least as much from Avi as Avi did from him.

  Avi’s openness, candor and easygoing nature made something that happened to Jack one day in late September, when Cambridge baked in the last, fiery gasps of Summer, all the more disturbing. He was visited in his office by two rather shifty-looking characters, claiming to represent some student organization or another, who advised him that he shouldn’t be teaching Avi Malkeinu. He’d served in the Israeli Defense Forces, they said, and was, no doubt, an Agent of Zionist Oppression. In response, Jack did something that he almost never did. He got angry. Alarmingly, consumingly angry, so that he shed the shy, quiet academic that he tended to be while in Cambridge, and became the wiry and piratical ranger that he was in the field. He listened quietly to what his visitors had to say, and then, still without meeting their gaze, invited them, just as quietly, to go fuck themselves. When they began to remonstrate, he rose from his chair like a thunderhead over the plains.

  “Listen, I thought I told you to fuck off,” he said, as calmly as his sternly suppressed violence would allow, “and if I see either of you little shits again—or if you harass my friends—I’ll fucking rip your fucking bastard heads off and fucking stick them on fucking poles. Understand? Now piss off.”

  The two took flight and never came back. For ten minutes Jack remained his chair, his heart racing, his body shaking. He didn’t think he’d had it in him. He’d normally do anything to avoid conflict, and immediately began to worry that there might be repercussions. But what began to dominate his mind, half an hour later, as he walked home through the searing streets, clouds bubbling above him as if to mirror his mood, was that he’d heard spiteful rubbish like that before, from people in his own department, especially the social anthropologists: and those archeologists who read the past not as it was, but through the lenses of current political preoccupation—and yet had the gall to call themselves ‘scientists’.

  Neo-archeologists, processual archeologists, feminist archeologists, Marxist archeologists, post-fucking-processual archeologists, for God’s sake, not to mention those idiots, quite often obscenely obese women from Berkeley or Pasadena, who climbed to the top of tels, stripped off and jiggled their leviathantine tits about for the benefit of some right-on Mother Goddess—as if (and this was the part he found really offensive) as if this charade had anything whatsoever to do with what prehistoric people actually believed or did.

  And there were people in his department who actually took that bilge seriously—the same people who’d cheerfully scorn a kitsch Hawai’ian hotel luau as having as much connection with authentic Polynesian culture as Mickey Mouse had with Mus musculus, simply because it was a product of capitalist colonialism. No, he thought. Prehistory is forged on the ground, not by political posturing, and it was people like Avi Malkeinu—open-minded people, people only interested in telling it as he saw it—who had the best chance of making progress without prejudice. And they were damning him not for his science but because of his origins and national obligations. What dismal, hypocritical crap. No wonder, Jack thought, that he’d spent so much time in the field, away from such pseudery.

  But as he got closer to home, and began to calm down, he realized that he was close to being a pseud himself. Processual-and-whatever archeology had, at least, been forged in the field as much as his own landscape-based approach, as ways and means to get to grips with patterns seen in data, patterns caused by the interaction of man and nature. But as yet he still had no way of interpreting the patterns he saw. He had to find something soon. He had to. To vindicate people like Avi Malkeinu. To vindicate Jadis’ faith in him. To vindicate himself.

  Still, there might be something, just one little thing, a tiny gleam of hope. They’d been on their holiday, driving straight down through France, camping under hedges and in fields or just sleeping in the car. When they got almost in sight of the Pyrenees—in fact, not long after they’d crossed the Loire—Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. It was the landscape. It sang to him in a way that the vales and scarps of England never did. But the more he thought about it, the more frustrated he became—there was something important in the French landscape, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was. He resolved to go back, chase it down, and soon.

  Jadis, too, had had a rotten day, running errands for Professor MacLennane that meant scurrying to and from the University Library for books that didn’t exist, when she was quite sure that they did; or if they did exist, were on shelves on the other side of the building; for papers which she wasn’t allowed to see, even though she’d phoned ahead and received cast-iron assurances that they would be made available. It didn’t help that the library was as hot as an oven, and that she was getting a headache. Making it worse was a general niggle about Jack. It was
about time, she thought, that Jack made some headway with his doctorate, because only then did she feel that she could get serious about her own. The plan was that when Jack was within hailing distance of his Ph.D., he could apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, and when he’d secured that, she’d become his research student. But until Jack had written up, they were stuck in a holding pattern.

  She did wonder—had wondered—whether she mightn’t strike out on her own. She had the first-class degree, so she’d have the pick of doctorate places. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t had offers from elsewhere.

  Two things held her back. The first was Professor MacLennane, who advised her to wait. Something will turn up, he said. He was chasing a big and juicy grant, he said. Any day now, he said. She’d kick herself if she jumped ship now, he warned.

  Second, and perhaps most importantly, she found herself reluctant to leave Jack to stew on his own. Quite plainly, he needed her. More to the point, she needed him. She loved him, more than anything. Oh, yes, she’d tried to be rational about such things. After all (she told herself) love was just a few hormones whizzing around in the sorry bag of chemicals from which human beings are made. However, the fact remained, that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t clearly remember any previous existence for herself, alone, before she’d met Jack. She remembered coalescing, somehow, in Jack’s office, light as thistledown. Memories of an earlier life were fragmentary, enigmatic, as if the effect of her first meeting Jack was to purge them, leaving almost no trace. She could only retrieve a few scattered shreds—the peaty scent of scotch whisky; a fantastic, futuristic city at night under an endless star-spattered sky; the taste of a fish grilled in palm leaves on a tropical beach. Family holidays, maybe? Further introspection was no use. It was Jack who made her existence concrete, even meaningful, and even more that—it was Jack that made her conscious of her own, raw physicality. If Jack weren’t around, she felt that she’d simply float away, as fragile and translucent as a soap bubble, and vanish into nothingness.

  She arrived home moments after Jack. As she kicked off her sandals she saw his hiking boots and socks cast off in the hall, still warm; his bag on the kitchen table, papers pouring from it like the innards of a partially eviscerated dogfish. She found him where she knew he would be, in the Nest.

  “Wine?” he offered, barefoot, holding out a full glass of off-license Merlot as she sat down next to him on the wall of the raised bed, beneath the lavender and rosemary, fragrant from the day’s heat.

  “Nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” she replied, taking a generous swig. “Correction,” she noted, looking up, her eyes sharp, her lips stained with red, a rivulet running down her chin. “I’m sure you said something even nicer to me this morning.”

  “I did?” Whatever clouds had gathered over him were beginning to dissipate. Responding, she warmed to him and came closer, sitting on the ledge between his legs, leaning back against his chest, completely enfolded by his arms.

  “Yes, you silly man. You said”—she began to laugh—“you said that tonight we really must have a brainstorm.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “I’d rather pour you some more wine,” which he did. Then he put down the bottle and stroked her unfastening hair.

  “…and, you said that after the brainstorm, that I really needed what you called ‘a thorough seeing-to.’”

  “I said that? Sounds most uncouth. Not like me at all. Are you sure that was me?” He ran his fingers down her throat, unbuttoned her blouse, and let his hands steal lightly over her skin. She shivered.

  “Yes, of course it was you,” she laughed. She felt as warm as the wine as she reached her arms above her and pulled his face down to hers.

  “Nope. Can’t have been me,” he said. “Now, if it were me, I’d have said you needed a good seeing-to before the brainstorm. Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain.”

  “Well, as it is you, and that’s your view, Professor,” she said, “why don’t we…?”

  But before they could say or do anything else, the clouds broke with a deafening crash, and within seconds they were as drenched as if God had emptied his bathwater on their garden.

  They sat in the warm rain on the edge of the raised flowerbed, her head under his chin. He ruffled her damp hair while continuing to unbutton her, while she luxuriated in his minute attention. They both undressed and let the warm rain course over their bodies. She rose, turned as if she were a dancing sprite in the dawn of the world, rain splashing and glancing and making sparks in all directions as it ricocheted from her glistening body, her hair swinging in lazy streamers. She straddled him, feeling him deep and smooth within her, as with one hand he traced the rivulets arcing down the valley of her spine.

  As they moved, they kissed again, their lips meeting and parting, meeting and parting, through the rain curtain, in a butterfly dance. After a minute or two he rose and, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, picked her up, turned, and, sliding out of her, placed her inside the Nest on a deep carpet of leaves still dry and warm, the foliage above protecting it from the worst of the downpour. She lay almost buried in leaves, limbs spread, eyes burning in a soft glow. But before he could scramble into the Nest and take her again, she laughed skittishly and flipped over on to her knees and elbows, thrusting her leaf-strewn backside at him like a cat on heat, waving it from side to side like a flag. He moved in towards her, feeling the irresistible softness of the backs of her thighs against his groin, her swollen, pitted warmth between. He stroked the curves of her hips, brushing the leaves away; traced the dips of her lower back, and sliding into her as deeply and as fully as he could—and with such sudden ferocity that he lifted her knees, for an instant, clear of the ground.

  Waves of electric shock coursed through her. She needed him now, in the eternal now, with a savage, inhuman craving. She had decided that what she wanted most of all, right now, was to be fucked: mechanically, forcefully, to have done, and bring this never-ending business with Jack’s thesis to a head. She could tell from the way that Jack was throwing himself into her with such violence that something had irked him, too—perhaps even stung him into a kind of remorse that demanded action, some kind of closure. But even after all that, she was beginning to experience the first waves of a slow burn which, if he kept up this relentless, kinetic bombardment, would lead to her own longed-for release. She forgot about the thesis, about the inaction, about her own academic holding pattern, and when at length he came, in a thunderous spasm, she felt as if he had filled every crevice of her body and being. With his last, fitful gasps she found herself panting for breath, shaking from head to toe, her soul dissolved, her body a husk like these dead leaves, collapsing, and as she did so, she felt him draw out of her, a sensation both unbearably joyous and excruciatingly painful, all mixed together.

  They lay in each others’ arms, soaking, exhausted and covered by wet leaves, filled with a buzz and a flood of rapture, awed by their own animality. He wrapped her in his arms, and, as the storm passed overhead, she felt herself doze slightly. It was dusk when she woke. “Come on,” he said, “Time for that brainstorm.”

  She could hardly meet his eyes as they made the few steps to the kitchen door and went inside. He made a big bowl of pasta (they were now very hungry indeed) while she showered. The well-behaved and domesticated shower jets were a balm after the screaming wildness of the rain, warming and absolving her, and sending the last of the leaves and dirt down the drain.

  After a supper during which they had hardly spoken they sat on either side of the kitchen table with Jack’s papers, in an atmosphere of brittle nervousness. Their clothes, trashed, were shoved into the corner, waiting for a trip to the launderette. Jack had put on a long, white bathrobe embossed with the legend ‘Property of the Fairbanks Marriott,’ over faded grey tracksuit bottoms. Jadis, her hair scraped back severely and tied in a long plait, wore nothing but her horrible, shapeless once-purple jersey, now so stretched and vast that
it came down below her knees, its sleeves so long that she’d had to roll them in great puffs wedged above her elbows. But for all this informality their conversation was as stilted and as starchy as a job interview going badly, when both parties find nothing to say to fill the yawning pauses.

  As they discussed how to organize Jack’s data, Jack longed to come round to her side of the table. Jadis, for her part, wanted his arms, his touch, and most of all that he should wrap her up like a baby, like a Christmas parcel and—well—to make everything all right. But each was too scared to move. There was something about the moment—this moment—on which they both felt the world and the cosmos would turn. A single distraction, however small, and the moment would be lost, irretrievably.

  So they bounced ideas to one another like the sexless talking heads that scientists are supposed to be: Jack, with his icily blue eyes explaining his intuitions, Jadis with her coal-black gaze dissecting them with cold logic, shuffling them, probing them, parrying, throwing them back. Their language was framed in the cool tones of null hypotheses, falsifiability, significance levels, distribution-free nonparametric tests; of circularity, particularity and applicability.

  It seemed to Jadis that the tables had been turned. She had become the teacher, he the pupil. Jack felt the same, and with that, the relief of responsibility shared, of not having to do everything as he’d always done, on his own.

  But what neither quite realized was that their dispassionate discourse was turning into a lovers’ exchange. As they came to see a shared picture of what Jack’s course of action should be, their spoken utterances grew shorter, as they started to complete each other’s sentences. Cold eyes were animated, hands waved. Jadis, still talking, rose to put the kettle on; Jack, to finish the drying up. They stood next to each other, at the sink, in their baggy clothes, arguing with force—but no animosity—over the details of what was beginning, almost, to look like a strategy.

  A part of Jack that had detached from the argument looked face on at Jadis in pure wonderment. But Jadis was distracted, in full flow—about metadata, integration and probability distributions—that he daren’t stop her and just tell her that he loved her. He didn’t want to spoil it: even to touch her, to brush past her by accident, might break the flow of her argument. Even under that horrible sack she loved to wear around the house (and which he’d sworn she was wearing when they’d first met, although she always denied it), he could tell she was as taut as a string. She had to work it out of her system, for both of them.

  But then, it happened. Tea over, drying-up done, piles of notes made, they both rose at once in the tiny kitchen and—zap!—Jack’s right wrist made a glancing contact with one dangling, purple sleeve, and—zing!—She was in his arms again, face buried once more in his chest.

  “Do you think you can take it from here?” she asked, looking up at him, red-nosed and eyelids full of water, racked with sobs, as if she’d had some intellectual orgasm. It had all been building up inside her for weeks—months—this way through the woods, until the tension had become insupportable.

  Later, when she’d calmed down, and Jack had tucked her up in bed, folding himself in behind her with one arm sleepily fingering loose strands of her hair, the other folded across her belly, she thought that perhaps that the expression of pure unabashed, unselfconscious sex was all that she’d needed to break the deadlock.

  When Jack’s thesis was complete, after another two months of sixteen-hour days; after more argument, more computer simulations, another trip to France (this time Jack, on his own), more anxiety, more sleepless nights, more wine, more laughter, more elation, more despair, more testing, more arguments, more checking and double-checking, and papers in unruly drifts all over the flat, Jadis discovered something else.

  She was pregnant.