33 took no notice. Cal advanced a second trembling step, and a third, his confidence growing. He was getting the trick of this balancing business now.
‘Come on down,’ he coaxed, a prosaic Romeo.
The bird finally seemed to recognize his owner’s voice, and cocked his head in Cal’s direction.
‘Here, boy …’ Cal said, tentatively raising his hand towards the window as he risked another step.
At that instant either his foot slipped or the brick gave way beneath his heel. He heard himself loose a yell of alarm, which panicked the birds lining the sill. They were up and off, their wing-beats ironic applause, as he flailed on the wall. His panicked gaze went first to his feet, then to the yard below.
No, not the yard; that had disappeared. It was the carpet he saw. It had been entirely unrolled, and it filled the yard from wall to wall.
What happened next occupied mere seconds, but either his mind was lightning fast, or the moments played truant, for it seemed he had all the time he needed –
Time to appreciate the startling intricacy of the design laid out beneath him; an awesome proliferation of exquisitely executed detail. Age had bled brightness from the colours of the weave, mellowing vermilion to rose, and cobalt to a chalky blue, and here and there the carpet had become thread-bare, but from where Cal teetered the effect was still overwhelming.
Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, all subtly different from their neighbours. The effect was not over-busy; every detail was clear to Cal’s feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if banded together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border; others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there.
In the field itself ribbons of colour described arabesques across a background of sultry browns and greens, forms that were pure abstraction – bright jottings from some wild man’s diary – jostling with stylized flora and fauna. But this complexity paled beside the centre piece of the carpet: a huge medallion, its colours as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could read each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.
He saw all of this in one prodigious glance. In his second the vision laid before him began to change.
From the corner of his eye he registered that the rest of the world – the yard, and the men who’d occupied it, the houses, the wall he’d been toppling from – all were winking out of existence. Suddenly he was hanging in the air, the carpet vaster by the moment beneath him, its glorious configurations filling his head.
The design was shifting, he saw. The knots were restless, trembling to slip themselves, and the colours seemed to be merging into each other, new forms springing from this marriage of dyes.
Implausible as it seemed, the carpet was coming to life.
A landscape – or rather a confusion of landscapes thrown together in fabulous disarray – was emerging from the warp and the weft. Was that not a mountain he could see below him, pressing its head up through a cloud of colour?; and was that not a river?; and could he not hear its roar as it fell in white water torrents into a shadowed gorge?
There was a world below him.
And he was suddenly a bird, a wingless bird hovering for a breathless instant on a balmy, sweet-scented wind, sole witness to the miracle sleeping below.
There was more to claim his eye with every thump of his heart.
A lake, with myriad islands dotting its placid waters like breaching whales. A dappled quilt of fields, their grasses and grains swept by the same tides of air that kept him aloft. Velvet woodland creeping up the sleek flank of a hill, on whose pinnacle a watchtower perched, sun and cloud-shadow drifting across its white walls.
There were other signs of habitation too, though nothing of the people themselves. A cluster of dwellings hugging a river bend; several houses beetling along the edge of a cliff, tempting gravity. And a town too, laid out in a city-planner’s nightmare, half its streets hopelessly serpentine, the other half cul-de-sacs.
The same casual indifference to organization was evident everywhere, he saw. Zones temperate and intemperate, fruitful and barren were thrown together in defiance of all laws geological or climatic, as if by a God whose taste was for contradiction.
How fine it would be to walk there, he thought, with so much variety pressed into so little space, not knowing whether turning the next corner would bring ice or fire. Such complexity was beyond the wit of a cartographer. To be there, in that world, would be to live a perpetual adventure.
And at the centre of this burgeoning province, perhaps the most awesome sight of all. A mass of slate-coloured cloud, the innards of which were in perpetual, spiralling motion. The sight reminded him of the birds wheeling above the house in Rue Street – an echo of this greater wheel.
At the thought of them, and the place he’d left behind, he heard their voices – and in that moment the wind that had swept up from the world below, keeping him aloft, faltered.
He felt the horror in his stomach first, and then his bowels: he was going to fall.
The tumult of the birds grew louder, crowing their delight at his descent. He, the usurper of their element; he, who had snatched a glimpse of a miracle, would now be dashed to death upon it.
He started to yell, but the speed of his fall stole the cry from his tongue. The air roared in his ears and tore at his hair. He tried to spread his arms to slow his descent but the attempt instead threw him head over heels, and over again, until he no longer knew earth from sky. There was some mercy in this, he dimly thought. At least he’d be blind to death’s proximity. Just tumbling and tumbling until –
– the world went out.
He fell through a darkness unrelieved by stars, the birds still loud in his ears, and hit the ground, hard.
It hurt, and went on hurting, which struck him as odd. Oblivion, he’d always assumed, would be a painless condition. And soundless too. But there were voices.
‘Say something …’ one of them demanded, ‘… if it’s only goodbye.’
There was laughter now.
He opened his eyes a hair’s breadth. The sun was blindingly bright, until Gideon’s bulk eclipsed it.
‘Have you broken anything?’ the man wanted to know.
Cal opened his eyes a fraction wider.
‘Say something, man.’
He raised his head a few inches, and looked about him. He was lying in the yard, on the carpet.
‘What happened?’
‘You fell off the wall,’ said Shane.
‘Must have missed your footing,’ Gideon suggested.
‘Fell,’ Cal said, pulling himself up into a sitting position. He felt nauseous.
‘Don’t think you’ve done much damage,’ said Gideon. ‘A few scrapes, that’s all.’
Cal looked down at himself, verifying the man’s remark. He’d taken skin off his right arm from wrist to elbow, and there was tenderness down his body where he’d hit the ground, but there were no sharp pains. The only real harm was to his dignity, and that was seldom fatal.
He got to his feet, wincing, eyes to the ground. The weave was playing dumb. There was no tell-tale tremor in the rows of knots, no sign that hidden heights and depths were about to make themselves known. Nor was there any sign from the others that they’d seen anything miraculous. To all intents and purposes the carpet beneath his feet was simply that: a carpet.
He hobbled towards the yard gate, offering