Under the roses I hid my heart.
He stopped and gave a dopey grin, then his eyes widened and he emitted a gasp as a voice whispered:
Why would it sleep not? Why should it start,
When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?
What made sleep flutter his wings and part?
Only the song of a secret bird.
“My hat! Who said that?”
Burton pointed up into the branches to their right. “There’s someone there. A child, I think.”
The voice, susurrating like leaves in a breeze, said, “Please. Don’t look at me. Walk on. The path is nearly ended. You are expected and welcome.”
“I can’t make him out in the—in the—” Swinburne said. He suddenly yawned, before finishing, “in the gloom.”
“Hey, lad!” Burton called. “Come out of there. We mean no harm.”
“How did you finish my verse?” Swinburne added, speaking very slowly. “I only just thought of it.”
“It is the song of the rose,” came the reply. “Follow the path.”
The king’s agent looked at his companion, shrugged, and continued on. They walked, aware that the small figure was scrambling from branch to branch and keeping pace with them. Burton tried to catch sight of the boy, but the leaves were so densely packed, and the red light so deep and shadow-filled, that he could discern little of him.
Rounding a bend, they stepped out into a clearing; a domed space completely enclosed by foliage from which hundreds of glowing fruits dangled in clusters, like fat grapes. In its middle, a bush humped up from the floor, and at its top a single flower blossomed, a red rose of phenomenal proportions, almost three feet in circumference, with fat bees and colourful butterflies and bright motes drifting lazily in the air around it.
The perfume was thick and cloying. Burton staggered and sank to his knees.
Leaves rustled as their escort moved around the edge of the glade.
“Are you the Beetle?” Burton murmured.
“Yes,” came the whispered reply.
“You manufacture Saltzmann’s Tincture?”
“It comes from the gourds.”
“Then this vegetation has been here for some considerable time?” Like Swinburne, Burton had to stop to yawn. “Long before the seeds fell?”
“It began to grow up through the planks of the floor a little more than five years ago. This Wednesday past, it produced the seeds and sent them out of the factory’s chimneys to summon you here.”
“To summon me?”
“To summon your companion. The poet is the key.”
“Hallo? Excuse me? What? What?” Swinburne drawled.
From the amid the crowded leaves, and with much creaking and squeaking, two slim branches extended, heavy gourds drooping from each.
“Moving?” Swinburne slurred. “Is the jungle moving?”
The gourds dropped and cracked at Burton’s and Swinburne’s feet. Thick honey-coloured liquid oozed from them.
“Drink, Mr. Swinburne,” the Beetle whispered. “You too, Sir Richard.”
Swinburne sat cross-legged on the carpet of roots, between Burton and the rose, with the gourd in front of him. Burton, with his unswollen eye blurring, tried to focus on his friend. For a brief moment, he saw him clearly. Swinburne’s green eyes were wide. His pupils were distended. He appeared to be in a trance. Pink butterflies were fluttering around him and settling on his shoulders. Burton thought he might be hallucinating. He looked up and felt sure that, in the small gaps between the vegetation above, he could glimpse a night sky milky with stars.
Impossible.
Swinburne closed his eyes, a slight smile on his face, raised the gourd, and drank from it.
Burton fought to make sense of what he was seeing. The poet resembled a dreaming Buddha, the red of his hair merging with the red of the rose behind him, until the poet and the blossom appeared to merge into one.
Though he didn’t will them to do so, Burton’s hands grasped the gourd and raised it to his mouth. He swallowed sweet viscous liquid.
A voice, like Swinburne’s but reverberating as if spoken into an echoing cavern, sounded in his mind:
Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame
Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,
Time, thy name.
“Algy, get out of my damned head!” Burton moaned.
From the vegetation, the Beetle urged, “Don’t resist it. The weight of ages is upon you.”
What the hell does that mean?
The voice continued:
Girt about with shadow, blind and lame,
Ghosts of things that smite and thoughts that sicken
Hunt and hound thee down to death and shame.
The unaccountable sense that he was not in an East London factory but deep in Central Africa swept through him. The Mountains of the Moon!
Eyes of hours whose paces halt or quicken
Read in blood-red lines of loss and blame,
Writ where cloud and darkness round it thicken,
Time, thy name.
Was the rose reciting the verse? A talking flower?
Nay, but rest is born of me for healing,
—So might haply time, with voice represt,
Speak: is grief the last gift of my dealing?
Nay, but rest.
Petals unfurling. Ages unfolding. Time, curling around itself, opening its secrets.
Petal layered upon petal. History layered upon history.
What am I seeing?
The Beetle’s voice: “The world’s narrative.”
All the world is wearied, east and west,
Tired with toil to watch the slow sun wheeling,
Twelve loud hours of life’s laborious quest.
Burton tried to distinguish between his vision and his imagination. He couldn’t. Jumbled sensations bubbled and swirled through him. A rose, a poet, a rhythm, an utterance that chanted through eternity, sprouting from within itself—the seed as the verbalisation, the shoot as the emerging verse, the blossom as signification, the pollination as cognisance, the fruit of understanding, again the seed.
Time is a form of expression? A language? A lyric? The words sung to a tune? A dance?
Pulsating colours. Stratified harmonies. Invasive fragrances.
Eyes forespent with vigil, faint and reeling,
Find at last my comfort, and are blest,
Not with rapturous light of life’s revealing—
Nay, but rest.
Slowly, the words metamorphosed. They became flavours. The flavours became colours. The colours became sensations. The sensations became numbers.
An equation.
It pulsed away from him, and the farther it withdrew, the more of itself it revealed, until he could see the entirety; a megalithic, looping, paradoxical mathematical structure of such esoteric intricacy that, for a moment, he viewed it with an utter lack of comprehension.
Then it slotted into place, and he understood it as Edward Oxford had understood it.
He opened his eyes, looked at the bedroom ceiling, and thought about the attempted assassination. Turning his head, he gazed at the woman who lay sleeping beside him—the woman who’d been his wife for the past two years.
She was pregnant.
I must understand my roots, he thought. Else the branches may bear bad fruit.
Later, in his laboratory, he shaved thin slivers from the side of the black diamond, hooked them up to a BioProc, marvelled at the output, and gradually realised what the data meant. His equation may have been labyrinthine in its complexity, but filtered through a BioProc, it also became practical.