Winterlong (11 page)

Roland nodded. “The Regent of Aviators questioned my defense of
quetzalcoaltus
as the model for the Langley Aerodrome Number Three.”

“My
idea,” I said hotly, but Roland cut me off.

“There’s nothing I can do, Raphael! I let you in the Library when I can—”

“Once
since I’ve been here!”

“It’s not my decision—we have to abide by the rules the Board of Regents sets.”

I turned to the mirror I’d leaned beneath the allosaurus. It showed a leaner and angrier face than the mirrors at Miramar had ever thrown back at me. I tossed back my hair and glanced down to see my sagittal showing from beneath the cuff of my robe. Its shell glowed faint lilac; I pulled the sleeve to cover my wrist. Roland had noticed it before during an argument, when the gray carapace had begun to gleam warningly. I knew how foolish, and dangerous, it was for me to continue wearing it. But Ketura’s words stayed with me. It was the only weapon I had if we were betrayed.

Behind me stood Roland, his robe hanging open as he slapped a roll of papers against his palm. “Why are you fighting me, Raphael?”

I knelt in front of the mirror, sliding open a lacquered cosmetics box (Miramar’s parting gift) and drawing out my kohl wand. “Because I want to learn! Because I’m tired of being treated like a child—”

“There’s nothing I can do about that, Raphael.” He reached for my hand, tried to slide the kohl wand from between my fingers. “But maybe there is something you can do for me. …”

I pulled away from him. His surprise flared into rage as I stormed from the Hall.

“Raphael!” he shouted, but before he could follow me I had fled down one corridor, and then another, and another still; until I found myself walking through the immense jaws of an insular shark that served as entry into the Hall of the Deep.

My anger had faded somewhat by now. I almost regretted leaving Roland in a fury. Certainly the thought of confronting him later sobered me: he had a ferocious temper. But I calmed myself by wandering through the Hall, glancing at exotic seashells and sponges and reading aloud the ancient placards that decorated each case.

I had just turned the corner of a great display of dorados and slimefish when I nearly tripped over a stack of empty buckets. Glancing up, I saw that I had walked into an Aide’s work area—the same Aide Francesca I had met some time earlier in the Hall of Man.

“Good morning, Franca.” I bowed, sweeping the floor with my braid.

“Fran
ces
ca,” she hissed, her arms feathered with brushes and long-handled brooms. Small and lithe, with a boy’s flat chest and long legs, she reminded me of my little Fancy, moving too fast for her clumsy feet. But Fancy’s mild blue eyes never would slant and darken with fury as this girl’s did; and Fancy would die rather than crop her yellow hair.

“Excuse me: Francesca.”

“Don’t call me anything, whore.” A smudge of a mouth twisted in a face broad and flat as a plate. Years ago I’d given up looking for any shaft of beauty in the Curators’ faces. But, because I was homesick and lonely, I watched her hungrily as she turned her attention to cleaning a case full of blowfish. Graceless as a puppy; skin blotched and broken where she’d scrubbed it with the harsh soap they made of lye and tallow. Long narrow eyes the color of wax. Octine might brighten them, and kohl darken those invisible lashes. But nothing for her slab cheeks, except perhaps to daub hollows there with powder.

“Stop staring, whore.” She moved up a step on the ladder to reach a gaudy blue marlin. Like everything belonging to the Curators, the ladder was ancient. I swore that the only thing holding it together was Franca’s spite.

“Don’t talk to me,” she warned, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes. “Give me that brush.”

I handed her the brush and crouched to watch her. “Why do you cut your hair like that?”

“I thought you studied under Nopcsa for six years.”

I shrugged. “I studied Paleontology.”

Without looking at me she replied, “Because only whores wear their hair long.”

“Whores and sometimes lazars,” I corrected her. She shot me a surprised look, then quickly turned back to the marlin.

“Fit company.” But after a few minutes she asked, “Why do you wear those ribbons?”

. I pulled my braid forward, staring at it with mock perplexity. “These ribbons?” I said, stroking the colored tendrils plaited into my hair.

She nodded. For a moment she could have been a Paphian child at worship, earnest and still.

“This one”—fingering a bit of green and gold brocade—“for my House. And this one from my favorite Patron.” Thin worn strips of ugly red plaid, clumsily stitched together.

“Roland gave you that?” asked Franca. She rubbed her shorn scalp, then turned to blow dust from the marlin’s painted scales. I flicked my braid back petulantly. I wished she could have seen me at Illyria’s last masque, when it had taken me an hour to plait thirty-four ribbons into my hair, and the Magdalene disappeared beneath the flowers tossed by my admirers. I sighed and followed her as she moved her ladder to the next glass exhibit case.

After a few minutes she clambered down again, coughing as she shook a gray cloud from her duster. At the bottom step she sat and stared at me for a long moment.

“Have you seen them?” she said at last.

Puzzled, I shook my head.

“Lazars,” she said. Elbows planted on her knees, chin resting on her grimy hands, she looked like an ugly child waiting to hear one of Doctor Foster’s stories. I started to laugh, but caught myself.

“I saw a dead one, once,” I said slowly. Her eyes narrowed. “Two years ago. Roland was with me. It was after a rain of roses—”

Franca curled her lip. “Only whores call it that.”

I shrugged and turned, pretending to examine a shell. She clicked her tongue and explained, “I mean, you never call a thing by its real name. ‘Rain of roses,’” she added derisively. “Say its real name: a viral strike.”

“Well, this one was dead,” I said. “Look, do you want to hear this or not?”

Suddenly serious, she nodded. “Yes. Please.”

I moved closer to the ladder. “She was very pale and her hair was tangled—” I recalled the night: the wind soft and sweet with apple blossom and that faint cloying scent that stains the air for an hour or two afterward. There were six or seven of us—I remember the albino Whitlock was there, from High Brazil. Roland was accompanying us back to Miramar.

Whitlock saw her first. He yelled and ran back, tripping over his gown to tumble onto the broken bricks at my feet. I ran ahead with Roland. I was fearless because I knew he wore a gun, traded from the Ascendants, in a sheath at his side.

“She’s dead,” he said shortly, staring down the narrow ravine to where the body sprawled beside a rotting stump. “Come on—”

But I couldn’t leave. I stared, fascinated: because I found her beautiful.

“She looked like she was sleeping …” I said.

“I’ve seen dead people,” Franca said thoughtfully. “Before we burn them. They look asleep, sometimes.”

“Well, I’ve only seen one.”

“We have a lot of accidents. Someone gets poisoned in the tannery or a heavy box falls on them. Or someone gets old and just dies. Doesn’t that ever happen where you live?”

“No,” I said. “None of us ever gets very old.”

“But you saw one.” Faint admiration shaded her voice. “A lazar …”

I didn’t tell her how Roland sent the others running back to the House; then came after me, pinning me to the ground where I could see her the whole time, the shadows of her cheeks, the way her eyes glittered with phosphorescence, her hair rippling so slightly where bluebottle worms seethed within the knotted ringlets. Afterward I was so weak he had to help me stand. Because I was frightened, he thought. But it wasn’t that at all …

“Huh?—No,” I said, startled. I’d only half-heard Franca’s question. “I wasn’t scared.”

And I turned to stare at the ceiling hung with plasticine leviathans; because I no longer felt like talking.

R
OLAND NEVER MENTIONED OUR
argument that day. It was the beginning of Autime, and he was busy with the other Regents. Or so he said. I began to spend my days in the Hall of the Deep with Franca, who ignored me at first but gradually began to answer my questions, and sometimes even allowed me to assist her in her duties.

For a week we cleaned the models and mounted fish that hung from the Hall’s ceiling and aquamarine walls. “By the time we finish the last one, the others will be filthy again,” I complained. Overhead a pod of fiberglass whales hung by invisible wires. Aqua globes encasing electric lanterns cast dreamy waves of light upon walls and floor and the ribbed sweep of the whales’ bellies. It made me drowsy. Squatting atop a dilapidated ladder, I yawned often, batting lazily at the suspended hulls of bottlenoses and rorquals with a broom.

“You’ll fall,” Franca yelled up to me, wiping her forehead with her arm.

“Fall asleep, maybe,” I called back. “Come on up.”

She scrambled up, pausing halfway to steady herself against the wall. “You don’t like this gallery, do you?”

“Not really. There’re no people in it.”

She laughed, pushing a strand of lank blond hair from her forehead with a dirty fist. I smiled. I had grown accustomed to the Curators’ odd uneven features, to the stumbling way they all moved, their loud voices and even their smell: sweat and formaldehyde and the cedar shavings that kept moths from eating the pelts of stuffed lemurs and jerboas. In the rough map of Franca’s face I had come to discern hidden places that, if not precisely beautiful, still fascinated me. When struck by a slanting ray of morning light her yellow eyes would blaze suddenly, alarmingly, topaz. The same light might streak her cropped head with bands of gold, and I wondered: If only she would let it grow long, was there enough sun in the world to make it flash like my little Fancy’s wild mane? And once, after a day spent beneath a bright skylight, cleaning the convoluted whorls and ridges of a case full of murex seashells and dogwinkles, a faint spray of freckles rained across her cheeks. And somehow this delighted me.

“Well, people put them here,” she said. She spat on her hand and rubbed it clean against her tunic. “Besides, what’s the use of dead things?”

“Your precious birds are dead,” I retorted. “Everything in here is dead.”

“But they weren’t always dead.” She steadied herself with one hand on the ladder. With the other she pointed to the vaulted ceiling high above us, its ancient panes of leaded glass scarcely allowing a hint of sunlight inside. “Sometimes I see real birds up there—they get in, and nest in the ceiling. But the Curators always kill them,” she said sadly. “They say they damage the Collection.”

I stared at the ceiling, recalling the bats in Roland’s chamber. “If you went outside, you’d see lots.”

“I can’t go outside. Not ‘til I’m older.” She made a face. “Too
dangerous.”

“Well, someday you’ll see all the birds you want, Franca.” I leaned forward and took a strand of her short hair, wrapped it around my finger, then slowly let it fall back against her scalp. She twisted to regard me with those cool eyes.

“And someday you’ll see all your dead men, Raphael,” she replied, and burst out laughing. I laughed too as she clambered down. She stared up at me, hands on hips, her brooms and brushes stuck under one arm.

“I’m tired of this place,” she announced, tossing her tools onto the marble floor. “Let’s take a walk.”

I climbed down. The ancient ladder shuddered with relief when I finally stepped from the last rung onto the floor. “Outside?”

“Of course not. But—” She nibbled her fingernails thoughtfully. “We can visit the Egyptians,” she finally said. “They’re dead men: you’ll like them. Have you ever seen them?”

“Not really. Roland pointed out the wing once when I first came here.” I glanced down the long Hall to the shadowy archways that opened onto passages leading to other Collections. “Won’t someone come to check on us?”

Franca rolled her eyes. “Has anyone checked once since we started working together? Come on. Everyone does this.”

She tugged at my sleeve. As her fingers brushed against my wrist my heart quickened. “All right,” I said, and followed her down the hallway.

W
E ASCENDED TO THE
Hall of Dead Kings by a circuitous route: forsaking the cool blues and greens of the Hall of Fishes for the smoke-hued walls of the Hall of Man. The corridor leading from this gallery was long and narrow and dark, lit only by the faint light that pooled from each end of the tunnel. I walked quickly and pulled my worn tunic tight about my shoulders. I knew very little about the Hall of Dead Kings. Roland had been uncomfortable even talking about it.

“They built the pyramids and the great Obelisk by the Narrow Forest,” he said as we passed the Hall late one evening, returning from an Illyrian masque held in the West Wing. “We believe they built the Phantom Fighters for the First Ascension as well. The Aviation Regent disagrees.” And he had paused at the entry to the Egyptian Wing, staring broodingly at a crumbling tapestry of ivory-colored fiber.

Now I wondered how Franca had disappeared so quickly down the dim hallway, and hurried after her. I shivered a little at the thought of doing something I knew would anger Roland. Lately he had seemed more and more distant from me. More than once he’d snapped about my broken fingernails and callused hands—

“I can find as good as
that
in our own creche,” he’d said, pushing me away. “And can’t you get your slutty friends to send you some new clothes?”

I flushed at the memory and pounded the wall with my fist, swearing beneath my breath. Before me the light grew brighter. On the wall I recognized the same tapestry Roland had pointed out, angular figures with the heads of dogs and birds drawn on frayed and moldering cloth. I squinted, trying to make out Franca’s silhouette against the bright square of light that glowed a few yards ahead. Finally I reached the crumbling wooden entrance. I passed through this and beneath a second lintel formed of huge blocks of carven stone, and into a room ablaze with sunlight.