The Peacock Cloak

my way was in the end inevitable, because once it is chosen, all other ways become obsolete. To have obeyed Fabbro would simply have been to postpone what was sooner or later going to happen, if not led by me, then by one of the others, or even by some leader rising up from the Esperine people themselves.”
    He thought briefly again of the children in front of the ruined house, but then he turned another corner, and there was his destination ahead of him. It was a little island of domesticity amidst the benign wilderness of the valley, a small cottage with a garden and an orchard and a front gate, standing beside a lake.
    “He is outside,” said the Peacock Cloak, whose hundred eyes could see through many different kinds of obstacle. “He is down beside the water.”

    Tawus came to the cottage gate. It was very quiet. He could hear the bees going back and forth from the wild thyme flowers, the splash of a duck alighting on the lake, the clopping of a wooden wind chime in an almond tree.
    He raised his hand to the latch, then lowered it again.
    “What’s the matter with me? Why hesitate?”
    Clop clop went the wind chimes.
    “It is always better to act,” whispered the cloak through his skin, “that’s what you asked me to remind you.”
    Tawus nodded. It was always better to act than to waste time agonising. It was by acting that he had built a civilisation, summoned great cities into being, driven through the technological changes that had taken this world from sleepy rural Arcadia to an age of interplanetary empires. It was by acting that he had prevailed over his six siblings, even when all six were ranged against him, for each one of them had been encumbered by Fabbro with gifts or traits of character more specialised than his own pure strength of will: mercy, imagination, doubt, ambivalence, detachment, humility.
    True, he had caused much destruction and misery but, after all, to act at all it was necessary to be willing to destroy. If he ever had a moment of doubt, he simply reminded himself that you couldn’t take a single step without running the risk of crushing some small creeping thing, too small to be seen, going about its blameless life. You couldn’t even breathe without the possibility of sucking in some tiny innocent from the air.
    “The city of X is refusing to accept our authority,” his generals would say.
    “Then raze it to the ground as we warned we would,” he would answer without a moment’s hesitation. And the hundred eyes would dart this way and that, like a scouting party sent out ahead of the battalions that were his own thoughts, looking for opportunities in the new situation that he had created, scoping out his next move and the move after that.
    There had been times when his generals had stood there open-mouthed, astounded by his ruthlessness. But they did not question him. They knew it was the strength of his will that made him great, made him something more than they were.
    “But now,” he said to himself bitterly, “I seem to be having difficulty making up my mind about a garden gate.”
    “Just act,” said the cloak, rippling against his skin in a way that was almost like laughter.
    Tawus smiled. He would act on his own account and not on instructions from his clothes, but all the same he lifted his hand to the latch and this time opened it. He was moving forward again. And the eyes on his cloak shone in readiness.
    Inside the gate the path branched three ways: right to the cottage, with the peaks of the valley’s western ridge behind it, straight ahead to the little orchard and vegetable garden, left and eastward down to the small lake from which flowed the stream that he’d been following. On the far side of the lake was the ridge of peaks that formed the valley’s eastern edge. Some sheep were grazing on their slopes.
    Clop clop went the wind chimes, and a bee zipped by his ear like a tiny racing car on a track.
    Tawus looked down towards the lake.
    “ There you are,” he murmured, spotting the small figure at the water’s edge that the peacock eyes had already located, sitting on a log on a little beach, looking through binoculars at the various ducks and water birds out on the lake.
    “You know I’m here,” Tawus muttered angrily. “You know quite well I’m here.”
    “Indeed he does,” the cloak confirmed. “The tension in his shoulders is unmistakeable.”
    “He just wants to make me the one that speaks first,” Tawus said.
    So he did not