Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson

Author:Rupert Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2005-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Lying in bed with blankets drawn up to my chin, I was looking at a ceiling, delicately vaulted, white as chalk. The smoothness of the surface made it hard for me to focus, so I turned my head to the right. Set deep into the wall was a single window, its tiny panes framing a sky of blended grey and gold. There would be a garden out there, I thought, a place where one could read or dream. I turned my head the other way. The man from the beach was sitting on a chair beside the bed. He was clean-shaven, with high cheekbones, and his shorn black hair showed traces of silver. He was still wearing his blue robes, but his mitre was resting on his lap.

‘How do you feel?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. Weak.’ Actually I felt like a child who had been sick for a long time – or perhaps I was being distantly reminded of my boyhood, the lost years, an illness I had concealed from myself. ‘Are you a bishop?’

The man smiled faintly, lowering his eyes. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

There was a stillness about him, as if he had retreated from the outer edges of his body into a place that was private, inaccessible.

‘When we found you on the beach,’ he said, ‘you needed medical attention. We brought you back here, dressed your injuries –’

‘I was injured?’

‘You must have hit your head. You don’t remember? You were suffering from exhaustion too.’

‘Were there any other survivors?’

‘Not that we know of.’

The man reached behind him for a glass. I should drink, he said; it would help me to sleep. I lifted my head off the pillow, and he held the glass to my lips. I had swallowed half the medicine when a panic began to unfold inside me, heat flooding across my skin.

‘Is this the Blue Quarter?’ I said, looking up into his face.

He nodded.

I sank back with a sigh. Sleep took me.

A bell hauled me to the surface once again. This time a woman was sitting beside the bed. Something about her complexion, some papery quality it had, made me think she must have suffered. She wore her brown hair cut short, like a boy. A book lay open on her lap, the words arranged in blocks. Poetry, I thought. Or hymns.

‘Were you one of the people on the beach?’ I asked.

She looked up at me and smiled. ‘Yes, I was there. We were all there.’ She closed her book. ‘You probably don’t realise this,’ she said, ‘but you have performed a kind of miracle by coming here. You’ve saved the whole community.’

Ever since the vernal equinox, she told me, they had been waiting for a sign, something that would confirm the fact that they were living in the right way, that they had chosen the correct path. All summer they had watched the skies, but they had seen nothing out of the ordinary – no comet, no shower of meteors, no eclipse. In

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