Joe and Gala, Chapter Three

Every movement was pain, and the feeblest exertion of the muscles incurred wracking spasms that begged release from the cruel hold of consciousness, as Joe and Gala hauled themselves excruciatingly out of twin puckering orifices that marked the end of the line. They had fetched up in the bilges, where lubricant was deposited as a slack sludgy residue once everything of worth had been leeched from it. Ankle-deep in this, ragged and bloodstained and their hair matted solid with caked-up filth, the two combatants turned to one another for the last time.

By now neither could so much as keep his or her shoulders and knees fixed upright. Nevertheless, Joe’s hand was making efforts to pierce the dark, even here at the bottom of the world. These however amounted to little more than tallow-candle smudges that died the moment they ignited.

Gala saw. In terms of their battle there was no longer anything for her to fear from him, nor he from her. Both knew it was over. The only thing left to fear was what was looming into this place of blackness now that they could fight no more.

“Why won’t you stop?” Gala asked, in a voice of utter exhaustion and disbelieving despair. “I’ve tried everything to make you stop.”

Joe did not move.

“I knew we’d have to fight,” she went on, shaking her head slowly. “And I knew it would never go back to how it had been – that what I’ve done would make us enemies. You’re Four Heroes, and it works like that. But…”

She looked at him.

“The Four Heroes are also meant to notice when things don’t add up,” cried Gala, and she sounded on the verge of tears, not so much from sadness as from exasperation. “Yes, you fight at first. But then eventually you see what doesn’t fit, and so you sit down with the enemy and you talk, then together you figure out what’s really happening…”

She choked, and with a kind of uncomprehending indignation hurled at him:

“That’s what The Four Heroes are supposed to do! It’s what you always used to do! It’s what I expected you to do here! But you won’t!”

Still Joe’s gaunt shape hulked in the shadows, motionless save for breathing.

“Why won’t you?” Gala went on tearfully. “Why won’t you stop? The Joe I used to read about would have stopped. He was – ”

It had gone on too long for her to talk any other way.

“He was kind,” she declared, weeping. “And wise, and…and good. All he cared about was the truth, and doing what was right. He wasn’t like you.”

Joe, at long last, spoke into the gloom.

“I do see.”

His voice was dull and halting, reduced to the scantest resemblance of itself by far more than physical fatigue. He went on:

“Though your memories as Draxu revealed them to me were genuine, the third and final one…it did not correspond with what I know to be fact. I saw it, Gala. I have known it all throughout our confrontation.”

“Then why…?” were the only words Gala could muster, mouthing them noiselessly for by now she was beyond speech.

Joe was coming forward, and Gala observed as he approached through the murk that he was crying silently just as she was. Tears were streaming down his grimy face.

“Because I must hate you, Gala,” he explained. There was nothing left about him but the bare vulnerability of one for whom all else had been stripped away, exposing in the open wound what was perhaps the only real honesty that could ever exist. “I must hate you, for I hate myself, and by no other means can I understand that which has changed and corrupted me…”

Joe pulled in a raw shuddering breath. He had drawn very close to Gala by now.

“It is wrong,” he continued, as if in desperation Gala should understand him. “It is serving my own pleasure alone. It is craving a happiness that can only be stolen from another. It is what I vowed I would never seek…never again, not since…”

The tears were flowing.

“But I cannot resist it,” he sobbed out hopelessly. “I could not make Neetra part of it. I love her. All I could do was try to spare her the knowledge of what I was becoming. But then I was reminded of my destiny, and shown I was not free to make even that choice. For there is no escape, not from this…”

Gala was listening. For some reason, and more and more as she gathered the direction in which Joe was headed, she was aware just how maddeningly hot and prickling was the sting from her right leg where he had torched it. She found she had started to ardently wish that the sword-scar she had inflicted on his chest might be paining him just as much.

“But you,” Joe finished amid the floods. One of his hands had thudded lifelessly to rest beside her throat, and his head was as low as his neck would allow, such that his face was nearly touching her bosom. “Since then…no, since ever I saw you…I knew what you might be to me. I tried to deny it, knowing I must remain faithful to Neetra…but all the while it tortured me without respite that you might be the one to satisfy this unconscionable need, in which I was doomed to be forever divided from she I loved. Just as long as I had reason to hate you. Evil is the one thing I can understand. Only with another who was evil could I indulge the evil in me.”

Gala said nothing. She was allowing what she had heard to take its time, to find the place sunken deep in the pit of her belly it was to occupy. What the news entailed for Gala was fast unclouding before her, in all its plain and awful clarity.

Foremost in her mind was the question of when it had begun. Probably on that very day she had sat on deck and watched shafts of sunlight fall upon the troubled ocean like a rare soothing kiss, her mother in her wooden chair beside her, and her ginger kitten on her lap. Perhaps that had been Gala’s first inkling there might be more to the world than sadness and struggle. And perhaps that was what Joe had truly meant to her from the moment she learned of him, and why his towering figure came to fascinate her more and more as she delved further into the Prophecy’s pages. There were resemblances between her role and his, but secretly to the young Gala it had been the differences that were more exciting. Something about her far-future soulmate and his way of doing things, this Four Heroes cause that privileged peace and cooperation and justice over mere strength and the determination to survive…in this, Gala had once discovered a glimmer of what she remembered from her mother’s smiling eyes that sunny afternoon, the dream of a world ruled by gentler laws and warmer hearts than she had ever known.

But in truth, she had never left the plague-ship. Gala saw it now, even as her illustrious hero, her shining symbol of golden prospects, slumped before her a puny bedraggled boy and sniffed and snivelled onto her breast. Here was her star-crossed love surpassing time and space that would bring order to the very galaxies. All Joe had ever been able to do was hate her. In his heart, then and now and forevermore, was someone better than she. That girl from their precious gentle and kind world, which Gala now knew that for all the signs and wonders and longings of her younger days, had not been intended for her. She would only ever be the child from the leper-colony, crying powerless at her mother’s coffin, an unhappy little wretch for whom you could feel nothing more than pity.

Gala’s lips closed in a hard line. Her dark eyes were cold.

“Fine,” she said to Joe. “If that’s how it is for us. On those terms alone. You hating me, and me hating you.”

Their rough hands were about each other the next moment, and in the throes of some primal inhuman force that admitted of neither tenderness nor restraint Joe and Gala splashed into the slop, clutching and ripping at clothing, as night closed in around them.

What could happen, when the first of The Four Heroes and the first of the Next Four came together thus in hate?

Out in the void beyond the wayward fungus-ship, an occultation of a sun by a local planet was beginning. As that sluggish disc-shaped craft drifted into the path of totality it was claimed by darkness, a slow plane of unrelenting black scrolling from the saucer’s curving rim and widening and widening along the flat round surface until it took the diameter, swallowing indiscriminately each fungal nub and hump and bulge. Once the meridian was passed, the surrounding stars began to drown likewise in the eclipse. At a stellar distance on the zenith of the monolithic black trapezoid, the sun was shedding the last of its light in a radiant narrowing crescent. Then the consummation was complete, the aura extinguished as if forever, and ship and stars alike were gone into an everlasting shadow.

And in a place some twenty years remote, the entity named Harbin knew of this. For among the strange and terrible powers that seethed beneath his faceless twilight shroud and glowed in the embers of his eyes was a capacity to cast his awareness roaming back, through the restless channels and swirling eddies of time. Even in his hour of triumph, as he sat on the throne he had made of Planet Earth beneath a reeling black hole sky, Harbin was able to navigate his way to the very instant the blood-dimmed shade he would throw across the ages first fell. This he did, and was content. All was as it should be. Somewhere in the ebb and flow, out amid the eternal mystery, deep in that unfathomable tide whose fluctuations drove life and fate on their determined course the whole universe over, he was slouching towards Nottingham to be born.

END OF CHAPTER THREE