They knew what you were then?' said Suzanna.

'No.' said Apolline. She'd thrown a pile of clothes off one of the chairs and was straddling it. 'No, all they knew was rumour and hearsay. Called us all kinds of names. Shades and faeries. All manner of shite. Only a few got really close, though. And that was only because we let them.'

'Besides, there weren't that many of us.' said Lilia. 'We've never been very fertile. Never had much of a taste for copulation.'

'Speak for yourself.' said Apolline, and winked at Cal.

The point is, we were mostly ignored, and - like Apolline said - when we did make contact it was for our own reasons. Perhaps one of your Kind had some skill we could profit by.

Horse-breeders, wine-merchants ... but the fact is as the centuries went by you became a lethal breed.'

True.' said Jerichau.

'What little contact we had with you dwindled to almost nothing. We left you to your bloodbaths, and your envy -'

'Why do you keep harking on envy?' said Cal.

'It's what your Kind's notorious for.' said Freddy. 'Always after what isn't yours, just for the having.'

'You're a perfect bloody species, are you?' said Cal. He'd tired of the endless remarks about Cuckoos.

'If we were perfect.' said Jerichau, 'we'd be invisible, wouldn't we?' The response fazed Cal utterly. 'No. We're flesh and blood like you.' he went on, 'so of course we're imperfect. But we don't make such a song and dance about it. You people ... you have to feel there's some tragedy in your condition, or you think you're only half alive.'

'So why trust my grandmother to look after the carpet?' said Suzanna. 'She was a Cuckoo, wasn't she?'

'Don't use that word.' said Cal. 'She was human.'

'She was of mixed blood.' Apolline corrected him. 'Seerkind on her mother's side and Cuckoo on her father's. I talked with her on two or three occasions. We had something in common you see. Both had mixed marriages. Her first husband was Seerkind, and my husbands were all Cuckoos.

'But she was only one of several Custodians. The only woman; the only one with any human blood too, if I remember rightly.

'We had to have at least one Custodian who knew the Kingdom, who would seem perfectly unremarkable. That way we hoped we'd be ignored, and finally forgotten.'

'All this ... just to hide from Humankind?' said Suzanna.

'Oh no.' said Freddy. 'We might have continued to live as we had, on the margins of the Kingdom ... but things changed.'

'I can't remember the year it began -' said Apolline.

'1896,' said Lilia. 'It was 1896, the year of the first fatalities.'

'What happened?' said Cal.

To this day nobody's certain. But something appeared out

of the blue, some creature with only one ambition. To wipe us out.'

'What sort of creature?'

Lilia shrugged. 'Nobody ever saw its face and survived.'

'Human?' said Cal.

'No. It wasn't blind, the way the Cuckoos are blind. It could sniff us out. Even our most vivid raptures couldn't deceive it for long. And when it had passed by it would be as if those it had looked on had never existed.'

'We were trapped.' said Jerichau. 'On one side. Humankind, growing more ambitious for territory by the day, 'til we had scarcely a place left to hide; and on the other, the Scourge, as we called it, whose sole intention seemed to be genocide. We knew it could only be a matter of time before we were extinct.'

'Which would have been a pity.' said Freddy, drily.

'It wasn't all gloom and doom.' said Apolline. 'Seems odd to say it but I had a fine time those last years. Desperation, you know; it's the best aphrodisiac.' she grinned. 'And we found one or two places where we were safe awhile, where the Scourge never sniffed us out.'

'I don't remember being happy.' said Lilia. 'I just remember the nightmares.'

'What about the hill?' said Apolline, 'what was it called? The hill where we stayed, the last summer. I remember that as if it was yesterday .. .'

'Rayment's Hill.'

That's right. Rayment's Hill. I was happy there.'

'But how long would it have lasted?' said Jerichau. 'Sooner or later, the Scourge would have found us.'

'Perhaps.' said Apolline.

'We had no choice.' said Lilia. 'We needed a hiding place. Somewhere the Scourge would never look for us. Where we could sleep awhile, until we'd been forgotten.'

The carpet.' said Cal.

'Yes.' said Lilia. That was the refuge the Council chose.'

'After endless debate.' said Freddy. 'During which time hundreds more died. That final year, when the Loom was at work, there were fresh massacres every week. Terrible stories. Terrible.'

'We were vulnerable of course,' said Lilia. 'Because there were refugees coming from all over... some of them bringing fragments of their territories ... things that had survived the onslaught ... all converging on this country in the hope of finding a place in the carpet for their properties.'

'Like what?'

'Houses. Pieces of land. Usually they'd get a good Babu in, who could put the field or the house or whatever it was, into a screed. That way it could be carried, you see -'

'No, I don't see,' said Cal. 'Explain.'

'It's your Family,' said Lilia to Jerichau. 'You explain.'

'We Babus can make hieroglyphs,' Jerichau said, 'and carry them in our heads. A great technician, like my master, Quekett ... he could make a screed that could carry a small city, I swear he could, and speak it out again perfect down to the last tile.' Describing this, his long face brightened. Then a memory brought his joy down. 'My master was in the Low Countries when the Scourge found him,' he said. 'Gone.' He clicked his fingers. 'Like that.'

'Why'd you all gather in England?' Suzanna wanted to know.

'It was the safest country in the world. And the Cuckoos of course, were busy with Empire. We could get lost in the crowd, while the Fugue was woven into the carpet.'

'What is the Fugue?' said Cal.

'It's everything we could save from destruction. Pieces of the Kingdom that the Cuckoos had never truly seen, and so wouldn't miss when they were gone. A forest, a lake or two, a bend of one river, the delta of another. Some houses, which we'd occupied; some city squares, even a street or two. We put them together, in a township of sorts.'