Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahoney Read Free Book Online Page B

passed, which surprised her. Most of the other servants were from outside the city, not Appeared but locals from the nomadic mountain tribes, and they held together in their own knots. They were mostly women. Kay had no quarrels with them but made no friends.
    At least once a week, she was sent up the long, winding stair to the roof to ring the house-bell, which spoke with the sacred authority of any monastery chant. In the rare altitude, her head ballooned, and too readily she imagined herself teetering on the brink. She imagined Candida spreading out in impossible directions from the base of the house to cover the whole world. Wild purple flowers grew on the inhospitable outcrop round the bell, and she decided to pick one each time, wearing it for the rest of the day as a symbol of good luck, of not falling, of clinging on.
    There was one other friend besides Azure. On her first afternoon cleaning the library, blind Father Christmas ambushed her, taking dustpan and brush from her hands. He was nowhere near as tall as her. He was squat. Unlike most people his height, he didn’t trouble to look her in the eye – why should he? – but directed his deep, jovial voice just below her throat.
    ‘A library cleans itself, except in extremis. Dust is a line of defence.’ He laughed heartily and strode deeper through the maze of shelves with the confidence of a sighted man. Kay kept a close eye on his heavy brown hands, hoping to see them go to the carvings and notches that distinguished each shelf, but they remained swaying at his side. If that was his system, he’d mastered it long ago. He had her pick out what seemed to be a circular table from a junk room and set it up in a corner of the library. It was in fact a War in Heaven board on a stand, and he spent the afternoon teaching her how to play.
    ‘Am I going to get into trouble for this?’ she asked.
    ‘Hell, no. Don’t you worry about me either. I have tenure.’
    She hung up her tabard and sat in her black skin-suit under the blind man’s gaze, trying and failing to master the intricate game. Luis’ thick fingers probed each sculpted piece carefully, to memorise them before placing them on the board. After that, she began to hope for more daily assignments to the library, but her supervisor showed no sign of yielding either way.
    There was free-time, which she came to loathe as much as the work-time. Leaving the old free house should have been a relief, but Candida felt at least as oppressive under its cheerfully blank skies. The streets felt like the open-air extensions of the house, and the noise and pressure of the crowd reminded her of the more intense but subtler intermingling of bodies she’d left behind. It made her self-conscious, the possibility that she might be seen by someone who knew her business and her home. She explored, a little, but the city was a warren. She considered compiling a rough map – she felt the same mild urge to do the same for the house – but dismissed the thought as Adolescent and Impossible. Mostly she ventured outside to buy food and fresh clothes. The paper money she earned started as healthy green but withered visibly as the days went by, turning yellow, then brown and slowly flaking away in her pockets.
    ‘You’re an Appeared,’ she remarked. She was slumped with her legs apart. Luis’ blindness gave her licence to relax, at least visibly. He had her cornered, if such a thing were possible on a curved game-board. He laughed.
    ‘I came here like you. Voluntarily.’
    ‘I was misinformed.’
    ‘So was I. So was Doctor Arkadin. He came out here looking for the mountain made of gold and didn’t find it.’
    ‘It was greed, then? El Dorado, greed and stupidity. The usual reasons?’
    Luis shook his head. Thunder. Despite his full beard, his scalp was thinning, grizzled and grey. ‘The mountain is a metaphor. Who knows what his real motives were? He says he wanted to bring European culture to us savage Americans. He had