The Peacock Cloak

large and long-fingered as Tawus’ were.
    “No,” he said, “I agree. It must be so. Otherwise there would only ever be one thing.”
    “You made your choice,” Tawus said. “You should have stuck to it and stayed outside.”
    “Hence the armies, hence the striding like a colossus at their head, hence the plan to seek me out and destroy me?”
    Fabbro looked up at Tawus with an expression that was half a frown and half a smile.
    “Yes,” Tawus said. “Hence all those things.”
    Fabbro nodded.
    “But where are the armies now?” he asked. “Where is the striding colossus? Where is this “we” you speak about? An awful lot of the energy has dissipated, has it not? The nearer you got to me, the faster it all fell away. They’ve all come back to me, you know, your armies, your brothers, your sisters. They have all come to me and asked to become part of me once again.”
    Some of the eyes on the cloak glanced inquiringly upwards at Tawus’ face, others remained fixed on Fabbro, who had lifted his binoculars and was once again looking at bird life out on the lake.
    “Fire the gun and you will be Fabbro,” the Peacock Cloak told its master. “ You will be the one to whom the armies and the Five have all returned. Your apparent isolation, your apparent diminishment, is simply an artefact of there being two of you here, two rival versions of the original Fabbro. But you are the one I shield and not him. You are the one with the weapon.”
    Fabbro laid down his field glasses and turned towards the man who still stood stiffly apart from him.
    “Come Tawus,” he coaxed gently, patting the surface of the log beside him. “Come and sit down. I won’t bite, I promise. It’s almost the end, after all. Surely we’re both too old, and it’s too late in the day, for us to be playing this game?”
    Tawus picked up another stone and flung it out into the lake. The ripples spread over the smooth surface. Quack quack went the ducks near to where it fell, and one of them fluttered its wings and half-flew a few yards further off, scrabbling at the surface with its feet.
    “The armies are irrelevant,” Tawus said. “The Five are irrelevant. You know that. For these purposes they are simply fields of force twisting and turning between you and me. The important thing is not that they have come back to you. No. The important thing is that I have not.”
    Fabbro watched his face and did not speak
    “I gave their lives purpose,” Tawus went on, beginning to pace restlessly up and down. “I gave them progress. I gave them freedom. I gave them cities and nations. I gave them hope. I gave them something to believe in and somewhere to go. You just made a shell. You made a clockwork toy. It was me, through my rebellion, that turned it into a world. Why else did they all follow me?”
    He looked around for another stone, found a particularly big one, and lobbed it out even further across the lake. It sent a whole flock of ducks squawking into the air.
    “Please sit down, Tawus. I would really like you to sit with me.”
    Tawus did not respond. Fabbro shrugged and looked away.
    “Why exactly do you think they followed you?” he asked after a short time.
    “Because I was in your image but I wasn’t you,” Tawus answered at once. “I was like you, but at the same time I was one of them. Because I stood up for this world as a world in its own right, belonging to those who lived in it, and not simply as a plaything of yours.”
    Fabbro nodded.
    “Which was what I wanted you to do,” he said.
    The day was moving into evening. The eastern ridge of peaks across the water glowed gold from the sun that was setting opposite them in the west.
    “After the sun sets,” Fabbro calmly said, “the world will end. Everyone has come back to me. It’s time that you and I brought things to a close.”
    Tawus was caught off guard. So little time. It seemed he had miscalculated somewhat, not having the benefit of the Olympian view that Fabbro had enjoyed until recently, looking in from outside of Constructive Thought. He had not appreciated that the end was quite as close as that.
    But he was not going to show his surprise.
    “I suppose you are going to lecture me,” he said, “about the suffering I caused with my wars.”
    As he spoke he was gathering up stones from the beach, hastily, almost urgently, as if they had some vital purpose.
    “I suppose you’re going to go on about all the children whose parents I took from