The Peacock Cloak

They had even made a pact with each other that they would always work together and always take decisions as a group.
    “ That didn’t last long,” Tawus now wryly observed, and then he remembered, with a momentary excruciating pang, the fate of Cassandra, his proud and stubborn sister.
    But they’d believed in their agreement at the time and, having made it, all Seven had stridden out, laughing and talking all at once, under a warm sun not unlike this one, and on a path not unlike the one he was walking now, dressed so splendidly in his Peacock Cloak. He had no such cloak back then. They had been naked gods. They had begun to wrap themselves up only as they moved apart from one another: Cassandra in her Mirror Mantle, Jabreel in his Armour of Light, Balthazar in his Coat of Dreams… But the Peacock Cloak had been finest of all.
    “I hear music,” the cloak now whispered to him.
    Tawus stopped and listened. He could only hear the stream, the grasshoppers and the bees. He shrugged.
    “Hospitable of him, to lay on music to greet us.”
    “Just a peasant flute. A flute and goat bells.”
    “Probably shepherds up in the hills somewhere,” said Tawus, resuming his stride.
    He remembered how the seven of them came to their first human village, a village whose hundred inhabitants imagined that they had always lived there, tending their cattle and their sheep, and had no inkling that, only a few hours before, they and their memories had been brought into being all at once by their creator Fabbro within the circuits of Constructive Thought, along with a thousand similar groups scattered over the planets of Esperine: the final touch, the final detail, in the world builder’s ivory ball.
    “The surprise on their faces!” Tawus murmured to himself, and smiled. “To see these seven tall naked figures striding down through their pastures.”
    “You are tense,” observed his cloak. “You are distracting yourself with thoughts of things elsewhere and long ago.”
    “So I am,” agreed Tawus, in the same silent code. “I am not keen to think about my destination.”
    He looked down at the object he carried in his hand, smooth and white and intricate, like a polished shell. It was a gun of sorts, a weapon of his own devising. It did not fire mere bullets. It destroyed its targets by unravelling, within a chosen area, the laws that defined Esperine itself, and so reducing form to pure chaos.
    “Give me a pocket to put this in,” Tawus said.
    At once the cloak made an opening to receive the gun, sealing itself up again when Tawus had withdrawn his hand.
    “The cloak can aim and shoot for me, if need be,” Tawus muttered to himself.
    And the cloak’s eyes winked, green and gold and black.

    The valley turned a corner. There was an outcrop of harder rock. As he came round it, Tawus heard the music that his cloak, with its finely tuned senses, had detected some way back: a fluted melody, inexpertly played, and an arrhythmic jangling of crudely made bells.
    Up ahead of him three young children were minding a flock of sheep and goats, sheltering by a little patch of trees at a spot where a tributary brook cascaded into the main stream. A girl of nine or ten was playing panpipes. In front of her on a large stone, as if it were the two-seat auditorium of a miniature theatre, two smaller children sat side by side: a boy of five or so and a little girl of three, cradling a lamb that lay across both their laps. The jangling bells hung from the necks of the grazing beasts.
    Seeing Tawus, the girl laid down her pipes and the two smaller children hastily set their lamb on the ground, stood up, and moved quickly to stand on either side of their sister with their hands in hers. All three stared at Tawus with wide unsmiling eyes. As he drew near, they ran forward and kissed his hand, first the older girl, then the boy, and finally the little three year old whose baby lips left a cool patch of moistness on his skin.
    “Your face is familiar to them,” the cloak silently observed. “They think they know you from before.”
    “As we might predict,” said Tawus. “But you they have never seen.”
    The children were astounded by a fabric on which the patterns were in constant motion, and by the animated peacock eyes. The smallest child reached out a grubby finger to touch the magical cloth.
    “No, Thomas!” her sister scolded, slapping the child’s hand away. “Leave the gentleman’s coat alone.”
    “No harm,” Tawus