Shane, seeing Cal emerge.
‘The window won’t budge. I’ll have to try from down here.’
He caught a deprecating look from Bazo. ‘You’ll never reach the bugger from here,’ the man said, scratching the expanse of beer-gut that gleamed between T-shirt and belt.
‘I’ll try from the wall,’ said Cal.
‘Watch yerself –’ Gideon said.
‘Thanks.’
‘– you could break yer back –’
Using pits in the crumbling mortar for footholds, Cal hauled himself up on to the eight-foot wall that divided this yard from its neighbour.
The sun was hot on his neck and the top of his head, and something of the giddiness he’d experienced climbing the stairs returned. He straddled the wall as though it were a horse, until he got used to the height. Though the perch was the width of a brick, and offered ample enough walking space. heights and he had never been happy companions.
‘Looks like it’s been a nice piece of handiwork,’ said Gideon, in the yard below. Cal glanced down to see that the West Indian was now on his haunches beside the carpet, which he’d rolled out far enough to expose an elaborately woven border.
Bazo wandered over to where Gideon crouched, and scrutinized the property. He was balding, Cal could see, his hair scrupulously pasted down with oil to conceal the spot.
‘Pity it’s not in better nick,’ said Shane.
‘Hold yer horses,’ said Bazo. ‘Let’s have a better look.’
Cal returned his attention to the problem of standing upright. At least the carpet would divert his audience for a few moments; long enough, he prayed, for him to get to his feet. There was no breath of wind here to alleviate the fury of the sun; he could feel sweat trickle down his torso and glue his underwear to his buttocks. Gingerly, he started to stand, bringing one leg up into a kneeling position – both hands clinging to the brick like grim death.
From below, there were murmurs of approval as more of the carpet was exposed to light.
‘Look at the work in that,’ said Gideon.
‘Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?’ said Bazo, his voice lowered.
‘I don’t know ’til you tell me,’ came Gideon’s reply.
‘What say we take it down to Gilchrist’s. We might get a price for this.’
‘The Chief’ll know it’s gone,’ Shane protested.
‘Keep it down,’ said Bazo, quietly reminding his companions of Cal’s presence. In fact Cal was far too concerned with his inept tight-rope act to bother himself with their petty theft. He had finally got the soles of both feet up on to the top of the wall, and was about to try standing up.
In the yard, the conversation went on.
‘Take the far end, Shane, let’s have a look at the whole thing …’
‘D’you think it’s Persian?’
‘Haven’t a fuckin’ clue.’
Very slowly, Cal stood upright, his arms extended at ninety degrees from his body. Feeling as stable as he was ever going to feel, he chanced a quick look up at the window sill. The bird was still there.
From below he heard the sound of the carpet being unrolled further, the men’s grunts punctuated with words of admiration.
Ignoring their presence as best he could, he took his first faltering step along the wall.
‘Hey there …’ he murmured to the escapee ‘… remember me?’
33 took no notice. Cal advanced a second trembling step, and a third, his confidence growing. He was getting the trick of this balancing business now.
‘Come on down,’ he coaxed, a prosaic Romeo.
The bird finally seemed to recognize his owner’s voice, and cocked his head in Cal’s direction.
‘Here, boy …’ Cal said, tentatively raising his hand towards the window as he risked another step.
At that instant either his foot slipped or the brick gave way beneath his heel. He heard himself loose a yell of alarm, which panicked the birds lining the sill. They were up and off, their wing-beats ironic applause, as he flailed on the wall. His panicked gaze went first to his feet, then to the yard below.
No, not the yard; that had disappeared. It was the carpet he saw. It had been entirely unrolled, and it filled the yard from wall to wall.
What happened next occupied mere seconds, but either his mind was lightning fast, or the moments played truant, for it seemed he had all the time he needed –
Time to appreciate the startling intricacy of the design laid out beneath him; an awesome proliferation of exquisitely executed detail. Age had bled brightness from the colours of the weave, mellowing vermilion to rose, and cobalt to a chalky blue, and here and there the carpet had become thread-bare, but from where Cal teetered the effect was still overwhelming.
Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, all subtly different from their neighbours. The effect was not over-busy; every detail was clear to Cal’s feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if banded together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border; others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there.
In the field itself ribbons of colour described arabesques across a background of sultry browns and greens, forms that were pure abstraction – bright jottings from some wild man’s diary – jostling with stylized flora and fauna. But this complexity paled beside the centre piece of the carpet: a huge medallion, its colours as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could read each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.
He saw all of this in one prodigious glance. In his second the vision laid before him began to change.
From the corner of his eye he registered that the rest of the world – the yard, and the men who’d occupied it, the houses, the wall he’d been toppling from – all were winking out of existence. Suddenly he was hanging in the air, the carpet vaster by the moment beneath him, its glorious configurations filling his head.
The design was shifting, he saw. The knots were restless, trembling to slip themselves, and the colours seemed to be merging into each other, new forms springing from this marriage of dyes.
Implausible as it seemed, the carpet was coming to life.
A landscape – or rather a confusion of landscapes thrown together in fabulous disarray – was emerging from the warp and the weft. Was that not a mountain he could see below him, pressing its head up through a cloud of colour?; and was that not a river?; and could he not hear its roar as it fell in white water torrents into a shadowed gorge?
There
