The Peacock Cloak

them,” he said.
    He threw a stone. Splash. Quack.
    “And the rapes that all sides perpetrated,” he said, throwing a stone again, “and the tortures,” throwing yet another stone, “and the massacres.”
    He had run out of stones. He turned angrily towards Fabbro.
    “I suppose you want to castigate me for turning skilled farmers and hunters and fishermen into passive workers in dreary city streets, spending their days manufacturing things they didn’t understand, and their evenings staring at images on screens manufactured for them by someone else.”
    He turned away, shaking his head, looking around vaguely for more stones.
    “I used to think about you looking in from outside,” he said. “When we had wars, when we were industrialising and getting people off the land, all of those difficult times. I used to imagine you judging me, clucking your tongue, shaking your head. But you try and bring progress to a world without any adverse consequences for anyone. You just try it.”
    “Come on Tawus,” Fabbro begged him. “Sit with me. You know you’re not really going to destroy me. You know you can’t really reverse the course that this world, like any world, must take. It isn’t only your armies that have fallen away from you, Tawus, it is your own steely will. It has no purpose any more.”
    But the cloak offered another point of view.
    “Destroy Fabbro and you will become him,” it silently whispered. “Then you can put back the clock itself.”
    Tawus knew it was true. Without Fabbro to stop him, he could indeed postpone the end, not forever, but for several more generations. And he could rule Esperine during that time as he had never ruled before, with no Fabbro outside, no one to look in and judge him. The cloak was right. He would become Fabbro, he would become Fabbro and Tawus both at once. It was possible, and what was more, it had been his reason for coming here in the first place.
    He glanced down at Fabbro. He looked quickly away again across the lake. Ten whole seconds passed.
    Then Tawus reached slowly for the clasp of the Peacock Cloak. He hesitated. He lowered his hand. He reached for the clasp again. His fingers were trembling because of the contradictory signals they were receiving from his brain, but finally he unfastened the cloak, removing it slowly and deliberately at first, and then suddenly flinging it away from him, as if he feared it might grab hold and refuse to let him go. It snagged on a branch of a small oak tree and hung there, one corner touching the stony ground. Still its clever eyes darted about, green and gold and black. It was watching Tawus, watching Fabbro. As ever, it was observing everything, analysing everything, evaluating options and possibilities. But yet, as is surely proper in a garment hanging from a tree, it had no direction of its own, it had no separate purpose.
    Across the lake, the eastern hills shone. There were sheep up there grazing, bathed in golden light that picked them out against the mountainside. But the hills on the western side were also making their presence felt, for their shadows were reaching out like long fingers over the two small figures by the lake, one standing, one seated on the log, neither one speaking. Without his cloak, in a simple white shirt and white breeches, Tawus looked even more like Fabbro. A stranger could not have told them apart.
    A flock of geese came flying in from a day of grazing lower down the valley. They honked peaceably to one another as they splashed down on the softly luminous water.
    “When I was walking up here,” Tawus said at last, “I met three children, and they reminded me of some other children I saw once, or glimpsed anyway, when I was riding past in a tank. It was in the middle of a war and I didn’t pay much heed to them at the time. I was too busy listening to reports and giving orders. But for some reason they stuck in my mind.”
    He picked up a stone, tossed it half-heartedly out into the lake.
    “Their ruined home lay behind them,” he went on, “and in the ruins, most probably, lay the burnt corpses of their parents. Not that their parents would have been combatants or anything. It was just that their country, their sleepy land of Meadow Lee, had temporarily become the square on the chessboard that the great game was focussed on, the place where the force fields happened to intersect. Pretty soon the focal point would be somewhere else and the armies would move on from Meadow Lee