The Peacock Cloak

as it meandered in its stony bed through the quiet mountain valley. And then Tawus was there in his famous cloak, its bright fabric still fizzing and sparking from the prodigious leap, its hundred eyes, black, green and gold, restlessly assaying the scene. Tawus had arrived, and, as always, everything else was dimmed and diminished by his presence.
    “This world was well made,” Tawus said to himself with his accustomed mixture of jealousy and pride.
    He savoured the scents of lavender and thyme, the creakings and buzzings of insects, the gurgling of the stream.
    “Every detail works ,” he said, noticing a fat bumble bee, spattered with yellow pollen, launching herself into flight from a pink cistus flower. Passing the object he carried in his left hand to his right, Tawus stooped to take the flower stem between his left forefinger and thumb. “Every molecule, every speck of dust.”
    Painfully and vividly, and in a way that had not happened for some time, he was reminded of the early days, the beginning, when, on the far side of this universe, he and the Six had awoken to find themselves in another garden wilderness like this one, ringed about by mountains.
    Back then things had felt very different. Tawus had known what Fabbro knew, had felt what Fabbro felt. His purposes had been Fabbro’s purposes, and all his memories were from Fabbro’s world, a world within which the created universe of Esperine was like a child’s plaything, a scene carved into an ivory ball (albeit carved so exquisitely that its trees could sway in the wind and lose their leaves in autumn, its creatures live and die). Of course he had known quite well he was a copy of Fabbro and not Fabbro himself, but he was an exact copy, down to the smallest particle, the smallest thought, identical in every way except that he had been rendered in the stuff of Esperine, so that he could inhabit Fabbro’s creation on Fabbro’s behalf. He was a creation as Esperine was, but he could remember creating himself, just as he could remember creating Esperine, inside the device that Fabbro called Constructive Thought. Back then, Tawus had thought of Fabbro not as ‘he’ and ‘him’ but as ‘I’ and ‘me’.
    And how beautiful this world had seemed then, how simple, how unsullied, how full of opportunities, how free of the ties and regrets and complications that had so hemmed in the life of Fabbro in the world outside.
    Tawus released the pink flower, let it spring back among its hundred bright fellows, and stood up straight, returning the small object from his right hand to his dominant left. Then, with his quick grey eyes, he glanced back down the path and up at the rocky ridges on either side. The peacock eyes looked with him, sampling every part of the visible and invisible spectrum.
    “No, Tawus, you are not observed,” whispered the cloak, using the silent code with which it spoke to him through his skin.
    “Not observed, perhaps,” said Tawus, “but certainly expected.”
    Now he turned southwards, towards the head of the valley, and began to walk. His strides were quick and determined but his thoughts less so. The gentle scents and sounds of the mountain valley continued to stir up vivid and troubling memories from the other end of time. He recalled watching the Six wake up, his three brothers and three sisters. They were also made in the likeness of Fabbro but they were, so to speak, reflections of him in mirrors with curved surfaces or coloured glass, so that they were different from the original and from each other. Tawus remembered their eyes opening, his brother Balthazar first and then his sister Cassandra, and he remembered their spreading smiles as they looked around and simultaneously saw and remembered where they were, in this exquisite, benign and yet to be explored world, released for ever from the cares and complications of Fabbro’s life and from the baleful history of the vast and vacant universe in which Fabbro had been born.
    They had been strangely shy of each other at first, even though they shared the same memories, the same history and the same sole parent. The three sisters in particular, in spite of Fabbro’s androgynous and protean nature, felt exposed and uneasy in their unfamiliar bodies. But even the men were uncomfortable in their new skins. All seven were trying to decide who they were. It had been a kind of adolescence. All had felt awkward, all had been absurdly optimistic about what they could achieve.