The Peacock Cloak

and forget all about it until the next time. But those children wouldn’t forget, would they? Not while they still lived. That day would stain and darken their entire lives, like the smoke stained and darkened their pretty blue sky. What could be worse, when you think about it, than filling up a small mind with such horrors? That, in a way, is also creating a world. It is creating a small but perfect hell.”
    He snatched up yet another stone, but, with a swift graceful movement, Fabbro had jumped up and grasped Tawus’ wrist to stop him throwing it.
    “Enough, Tawus, enough. The rebellion is over. The divisions you brought about have all been healed. The killed and the killers. The tortured and the torturers. The enslaved and the enslavers. All are reconciled. All have finally come back.”
    “Everyone but me.”
    Tawus let the stone fall to the ground. His creator released his hand, sat down again on the log and once again patted the space beside him.
    Tawus looked at Fabbro, and at the log, and back at Fabbro again. And, finally, he sat down.
    The two of them were completely in shadow now, had become shadows themselves. The smooth surface of the lake still glowed with soft pinks and blues, but the birds on its surface had become shadows too, warm living shadows, softly murmuring to one another in their various watery tongues, suspended between the glowing lake and the glowing sky. And more shadow was spreading up the hillside opposite, engulfing the sheep one after another, taking them from golden prominence to peaceful obscurity. Soon only the peaks still dipped into the stream of sunlight that was pouring horizontally far above the heads of the two men.
    “Everyone but you,” Fabbro mildly agreed, reaching down for his binoculars once more so he could look at some unusual duck or other that he’d noticed out on the water.
    Tawus glanced across at his Peacock Cloak, dangling from its tree. That tawdry thing, he suddenly thought. Why did I choose to hide myself in that? The cloak was shimmering and glittering, giving off its own light in the shadow, and its eyes were still brightly shining, as if it was attempting to be a rival to those last brilliant rays of sunlight, or to outglow the softly glowing lake. It was all that was left of Tawus’ empire, his will, his power.
    He turned to Fabbro.
    “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he began. “I don’t in any way regret what…”
    Then he broke off. He passed his still trembling hand over his face.
    “I’m sorry, Fabbro,” he said in a completely different voice. “I’ve messed it all up haven’t I? I’ve been a fool. I’ve spoiled everything.”
    Fabbro lowered his binoculars and patted Tawus on the hand.
    “Well maybe you have. I’m not sure. But you’re quite right, you know, that I did just create a shell, and it was your rebellion that made it a world. Deep down I always knew that rebellion was necessary. I must have done, mustn’t I, since whatever you did came from somewhere inside me? Rebellion was necessary. I’d just hoped that in Esperine it would somehow take a different path.”
    Only the highest tips of the peaks were still shining gold. They were like bright orange light bulbs. And then, one by one, they went out.

About the Author

    Chris Beckett was born in Oxford, England, in 1955. His first published story, “A Matter of Survival”, appeared in the British science fiction magazine Interzone in 1990, and he’s since been publishing short stories regularly in magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as three novels: The Holy Machine (first published in the US by Wildside in 2004 and since published in a new edition by Corvus in 2010), Marcher , published in 2009 by Cosmos, and, most recently, Dark Eden , published by Corvus in 2012, to widespread critical acclaim.
    This is his second short story collection. His previous collection, The Turing Test , published by Elastic Press, was the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award in 2009 from a short list that included a Booker prize-winner, a Whitebread prize-winner and a Booker-shortlisted author.
    Having originally studied psychology at Bristol University, Chris Beckett trained as a social worker and has worked in that field for most of his adult life. He is now a part-time lecturer in social work at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
    He lives in Cambridge with his wife Maggie and sundry animals, and is visited there from time to time by his