Northlight (11 page)

Another time...
But there would never be another time.

Everywhere he turned, Esmelda was there. Looking down at him from the University walls. Lurking in the minds of the masters. Not merely Esmelda the University Senator, but Esmelda of Laurea, Esmelda who had saved the city. He'd been a fool to think an academic career, or anything else, would give him a life of his own.

Only a few days ago, the suite Terricel shared with the other History candidates had been as familiar as his own bedroom. Now, as he drifted to his desk, he stared at the partition walls as if he'd never seen them before. As usual, the rooms hummed with activity — study groups, junior students being tutored, somebody calling for coffee or asking everyone to be just a
little
quieter, please,
some
people were trying to work.

He sat down in his chair and stared at the clutter on his desk, the piles of references and outlines. The mess looked only vaguely familiar and yet, although he'd never noticed it before, reminiscent of Esmelda's ubiquitous piles. The sheet of notes he'd made on the mathematics of inter-dimensional space was incomprehensible, the handwriting a stranger's.

Nearby, a handful of students raised their voices, carried away in debate.

“You've got it all wrong! Solstice means changing of the ‘seasons,'“ said one student, a dark-eyed girl. “It's clearly an allegorical construct to explain the passages in a human lifetime.”

“The ancients weren't that sophisticated,” said one of the boys. “Sol was their god, who was born each year at the Solstice and then sacrificed at Midwinter. Otherwise there's no difference between the two festivals. And certainly no esoteric significance. It's all just an excuse to get drunk and party in the streets.”

Terricel remembered having almost exactly the same conversation with his own friends. He could predict the argument phrase for phrase, point and counterpoint. Any moment now one of them would start talking about reverence for the natural harmony and the preservation of the environment.

“You don't have to posit the existence of a god to recognize the importance of preserving your ecological balances,” the second boy said, right on cue. It was practically a direct quote from the junior-level bioethics course.

The conversation veered into the traditional rituals and how they ought to be eliminated, since their purposes had clearly been long since fulfilled. Terricel had heard enough.

Slowly, as if his body were no longer his to command, he began taking down the pictures from the partition walls. His favorite was a sketch done by Gaylinn sen'Raimuth, the art student with whom he'd been lovers earlier that year. It was a seascape in colored charcoal. He felt a distant tug, as if someone else named Terricel sen'Laurea had once yearned to see that wild, windswept shore. The drawing was too good to throw away, so he rolled it up and tied it with a bit of string he found in the top drawer.

He placed it on the desk top and began making neat piles of the books — some to keep, some to return to the library. Everything else he tossed into the recycle basket.

Gaylinn's studio in the Arts Complex of the University was empty. The student in the adjacent studio, a mousy-haired woman who looked as if she hadn't had a decent meal in a month, murmured that she never knew where Gaylinn was, she wasn't any friend of
hers.
If Terricel just walked in, it wasn't any business of
hers.

The room smelled of paint, solvent, and dayflowers. Terricel sat down on the stool in front of the oversized drafting table. He remembered how, when he first started work on his proposal topic, they'd spread out the Starhall maps and planned where to dig in the basements. Gaylinn had teased him about being a mole at heart, and then they'd laughed and made love on the big sofa. The lumps of red and orange glass she'd used to pin down the maps now served as paperweights for pencil and charcoal sketches and portrait studies. She'd done a series of one of her friends from Raimuth, a woman engineering student who'd left the University suddenly last term. Gaylinn had been quite upset about it at the time.

In the corner by the window stood a covered easel. It bore a large stretched canvas, much bigger than those Gaylinn usually used. He walked over to it and lifted the muslin drape.

It was a study in oils, almost finished, the head and torso of a young man, nude, lying on his back with his face turned away from the viewer. The perspective, superbly rendered, accentuated the lines of the jaw and cheekbones, the sensuous curve of the collarbone, the arch of the thin, slat-ribbed chest sloping down to the velvet abdomen. The model's unkempt black hair fanned out over the rumpled sheets. Sunlight filtered in from a point above his head, deepening to blues and grays.

Terricel stepped back a pace to get a better look. The skin tones were so lifelike that he almost expected to see a pulse beating in the exposed neck. But lower down, in the shadows, the flesh by degrees turned pale, as smooth and perfect as marble. At the transition point, right over the heart, there was just the hint of green, as if a plant nearby had cast a reflection from its shiny leaves.

It was a master-work, even he could see that. No student could have charged the canvas with such vitality and such pathos. She had only to submit it to her committee and she'd receive her degree.

Terricel jerked the muslin cover over the canvas. He paced back to the stool, sat down, and covered his face with his hands.

She must have lain awake, watching him after they'd made love, memorizing each line of his body. The way his hair flopped away from the cowlick in back, the contour of his shoulders, the faint shadows between the muscles of his belly. He had slept on, unaware, even as the figure on the canvas did.

Terricel covered his eyes with his hands. He seemed to have grown a second skin beneath his own, like a layer of rotten bile. If only he could run, scream, sweat it out of his pores. If only he were a norther or one of those eastern nomads and had a god — any god — to cry out to.

The door latch clicked open and Terricel heard the rustle of full skirts and smelled the faint, sweet aroma of dayflowers. He opened his eyes. His vision swam as his retinas readjusted to the room's brightness.

Gaylinn, her dark brown curls tied back with an orange scarf, set down a basket of fruit on the sofa. “Terr? What are you doing here?”

She laid one hand on his shoulder. Her fingers felt warm and soft. Once she would have taken him into her arms and held him, her body as round and strong as her artist's hands.

He jerked away from her touch. “I brought your seascape back.”

“You took it down...” Her eyes searched his.
Why? What's happened?

“I gave my proposal today.”
In case you'd forgotten.

“And it didn't go well?”

“Not go well? Not go — What a joke!” He began to pace. A strange, hot energy boiled up in him, making him careless of his words. “My committee — those acidic bastards — they're so scared of Esme, all they could think of was what would happen if I dug up the Starhall, not whether I found anything or not. They don't give a contaminated damn for the truth. They're nothing but a pack of bootlickers.”

He whirled around to face her, gesturing wildly. “The worst part is they didn't even have the guts to fail me. Just gave me a no-show to save their forking asses with my mother. And for about half a second I was actually
grateful
to have a second chance — I must have been an idiot to think I could have an academic career! I might as well follow in Esme's footsteps and have done with it.”

Gaylinn nodded, chewing her lower lip. “I'm sorry you had a hard time. But do you think you're the only one to fool yourself? The only one to make stupid choices? People have all sorts of dumbshit reasons — trying to please their parents, or wanting to kick their teeth in, or some half-assed compromise like yours.”

“That's easy for
you
to say,” Terricel grumbled, sounding very like the Pateros Brigade girl.

“Oh!” She waved one hand as if brushing away a cloud of pollen-flies. “This was pure batshit luck. I started out in my father's print shop back home in Raimuth, all set to take over the business with my big brother. But he started me doing illustrations and saw how fired up I got. He even took my side when Father said no to University art training.”

Terricel thought, If Avi hadn't left, if she'd stayed, would she have fought for me, too?

“The first painting I do as a master will be for him,” Gaylinn said. “Maybe a portrait of his kids.”

Portrait
. Terricel's eyes went to the easel in the corner. “That's good,” he said. “It's very good. A master's piece.”

Gaylinn walked over, lifted the muslin cover and studied the canvas underneath, tilting her head and chewing on the inside of one cheek. “I haven't been able to work on it all week. That's why I covered the thing — it's an emotional piece, you see, and I couldn't face... Now, coming back to it... Yes, it
is
good.”

It's me, isn't it? Why did you paint me like that — what did you see in me?

“I think it's good enough — ” his voice came as if in a dream, detached from the anguish the painting evoked in him, “ — to get your degree.”

“That's not how it works in Art.” She shook her head and lowered the muslin. “You do a solo show, a whole collection. I've got a gallery date for after Solstice, and that means working my ass off until then. This'll be in it.” She picked up the seascape and unrolled it. “Maybe this, too. I'd forgotten how much I liked it.”

“But you
are
almost finished — ”

“Why, are you jealous?”

“What, me?” He forced a laugh. “And you'll go home then.” Back to Raimuth as she always said she would, to be close to her large, affectionate family. She'd paint, maybe teach, marry and have a houseful of laughing children.

“Yes,” she said seriously. “I'd thought of staying here — the department's offered me a position — but now...now I can't. I can't stay in a place where things like this happen.”

“It could just as well have been Raimuth.”

“But it wasn't, was it?” she retorted, tight-lipped. “It was
here
and I'll never be able to walk across the plaza without
remembering...
”

She went on in a softer tone, “Anything's better than standing around arguing might-have-beens. Why don't we get out of here, maybe get roaring drunk for old times' sake? Someplace low and toxic, what do you say?”

“Low and toxic.” He grinned at her. “Downright acidic. That's the best idea I've heard all day.”

THE ELK PISS SALOON.

The sign was a slab of nameless wood, carved and painted with the figure of a quadruped with wildly improbable antlers. Time and weather had stripped away the color and most of the contours, leaving only a tracery of the original picture. The letters had been repainted, and only after staring at them for a moment did Terricel realize the original name was The Elk Pass Saloon.

The saloon occupied the ground floor corner of what was once a dockside warehouse. Above it, behind the shingled walls with their peeling green paint, lay the storage lofts and workshops of a furniture repair business.

Terricel pushed past the swinging doors and into the big, ill-lit room. A curved bar extended like a wooden tongue into the center, and to either side, tables dotted the sawdust-covered floor. Shadowy doorways punctuated the far wall, bracketing a battery-lit tank where brightly-colored river jellyfish hovered and pulsated in the turbid water. At this hour, well past dinner but early yet, the place was still half empty. The barkeep, bald and jug-eared, looked up from wiping glasses and narrowed his eyes suspiciously when he saw Terricel.

Gaylinn walked up to the bar and slapped one palm on its pitted surface. “You old fart, what are you staring at? Are you working tonight, or volunteering for a blow-dart target?”

“Are you drinking tonight,” he said out of one side of his mouth, “or just standing there, calling honest working folk names?”

“Only those that deserve it,” she shot back.

They chose a table to the side and sat in cane-backed chairs that had undergone more than one reincarnation in the repair shop upstairs and were about due for another. The barkeep brought them pint mugs of frothy ale and plates of something steaming and unrecognizable.

The food turned out to be badly prepared trout and potatoes, but it was hot and Terricel was surprisingly hungry. He found it was possible to disguise the off-flavors with generous amounts of ale.

Gaylinn sipped her ale and pushed her food around her plate with her fork. “Don't say you never imagined me in a place like this. It's where I go when I'm homesick.”

“This — ?” Terricel gestured toward the bar. The room was beginning to fill up with tradesmen, a scattering of ramblers off-shift at the docks, men and women with hard faces and drab-colored clothing. The smells of sawdust and the jellyfish tank mingled with the sourness of sweating, dubiously clean bodies. “You get homesick for
this?
”

“It's a lot closer to home — my real home — than the University is.”

A chunk of greasy fish remained on his plate, but Terricel's throat closed up and he couldn't eat any more. He threw his fork down with a clatter and shoved his plate away. His nerves itched. Gaylinn kept reminding him of the distance between them. He thought of how their closeness had ended, one misunderstanding after another. So different from the sunny afternoon when a fresh-faced art student had sauntered up and smiled at him. “Everyone says how stuck-up you are,” she'd said, “you being Esmelda's son and all that. You never say hello, as if you think you're too good for everyone else. But I bet they're wrong. I bet I'd like you if I got to know you.”