Free Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahoney Page A

chatelaine-witch of the old free house. The ghost of the stroppy little messenger-bird haunts him about her bike, and there are more Appeared, always more Appeared. Were there people left in the real world anymore?
    He had, by this time, already forgotten Kay. He was full of lost love and hopeless lust.
    At that precise moment, he was thinking: ‘I need a prostitute. A simple, common prostitute, selling herself on a street corner. Not a witch, just a whore; not a carnival, just a brothel; not the Mystery, just an uncomplicated shag. The Gestapo Twins always ambush me on the way in. They’re making fun of me. Frankly, they don’t get it up for me.’
    He was sitting at his usual table at the Café Andelsprutz. He always left a spare chair in the hope that someone would join him. He was not at all surprised to find the man sitting opposite him, the same man he has in his room now, black-coated, black-hatted, otherwise vague as a poem written on water.
    ‘Captain Emilio Esteban?’ he asked.
    ‘This is me.’
    The newcomer laughed, and the silence of the city strangled the noise. ‘Who is it that runs in the woods?’
    Esteban scrambled from his chair, dropped to his knees and choked on the answer: ‘The fawn and the poet and the warrior of the old country.’
    The next ritual question, insistent: ‘And what is the secret of Candida?’
    ‘This is the young land over the sea in the West.’
    ‘And who were the architects of the city?’
    ‘They removed themselves from all the histories, and we call them dragons.’
    ‘And who is it that sits upon the dragon throne? Whom does it serve?’
    ‘You, sir,’ Esteban said, his eyes fixed on a face he knew would slip away with the morning dew.
    Doctor Arkadin popped his tongue. Disappointment. ‘You’re an idiot.’
    Esteban felt dislocated, as though he hadn’t left his flat and was in fact kneeling by Kay’s sleeping body with his face pressed close into her heat. (But this is still some weeks in the future, and the realisation almost shakes him out of his dream, and Kay out of hers.)
    ‘Little wonder you’re all such dismal poets.’
    ‘I thought you wrote the officers’ oaths.’ An afterthought: ‘Sir.’
    ‘I went up to Cambridge in a sunless year and came down full of oaths and pledges. I’m only mortal. I was made by my mistakes. Captain, will ye follow me please?’
    ‘Where to, sir? And why?’
    ‘Does it occur to you that the officer corps of Candida lacks the discipline or the sense of duty you’d expect from a formal army?’
    He shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’
    ‘Do you think this should be corrected?’
    ‘Now that you mention it –’
    ‘Ah, please follow me, Captain, because I asked politely. A great fear is upon me, a fear for the future of this city and what might be done to it.’ He turned to move away – and this was his one distinctive feature, the limp he’d acquired after driving a gangrenous nail through his foot on the boat from Ireland – but stopped and turned and raised a warning finger. ‘If you must address me, then call me doctor .’
    ‘And you can call me idiot , doctor.’
    Then they were in the vaults, the great warren of tunnels and archives and shelters beneath the city that had been excavated for fear that the continental wars of the new century – now the past – would reach into the mountains. Esteban had been here before, of course, at least at the junctions where they intersected the lower storeys of the academy, but he still found them oppressive and claustrophobic. (Kay felt the knot tighten beside her breast, pain like cancer.) The only sounds were the lonely drip of distant water and the soft Dublinese from the doctor’s mouth. Their feet made no sound on the stone floor, not even the doctor’s drag-limp – he walked without a cane and refused Esteban’s offers of help. The vaults were whispering galleries.
    ‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like to ride a dragon?’
    ‘I can’t say that I believe in