Winterlong (18 page)

Gitana set the platter on the table, adjusted her spectacles, and wiped her hands upon her thighs.

“Dinner is served,” she announced, and flopped onto the grass.

Curiosity was a good sauce for this second meal. Toby and Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel (I learned her name when Toby bellowed it, demanding more wine from the carafe she hugged between her knees) tucked in with much loud praise for Lalage’s food. Lalage settled upon Justice’s lap to feed him greengages and burgundy streams from the carafe, spilling most of it. Miss Scarlet ate quietly at my side, amassing a small arsenal of plum stones before her.

“An Ascendant among cooks!” Toby tossed another pigeon to Gitana. “Lalage, why don’t you join our troupe? Then we could eat like Governors every day!”

“And I could live like an animal, and sleep in a drafty theater, and wonder if my throat would be slit in the night.” Lalage stumbled to her feet. Mehitabel promptly took her place and began twirling Justice’s hair about her greasy fingers.

I averted my eyes. Toby leaned across the table to me, covering both my hands with his huge one (his nails clean and well shaped, I noticed with some surprise, and stained with crimson dye).

“You
would have no such objections to our life, Sieur Aidan,” he suggested, and turned my hands palm-upward. “These hands would welcome hardening—” He brushed my fingertips. “Haven’t you ever wanted to see our City by night, when the old moon cuts broad milky avenues through the Narrow Forest, and aardmen swim across the Tiger to hunt swans and lazars?”

“No,” I said, and turned to watch Justice.

The new moon had risen. Lalage had gone to pace among the trees, lighting a series of metal torches that sputtered fitfully before leaping into golden light. After a few minutes the conversation was punctuated by the hiss and sizzle of moths’ Icarian flights.

“Ah, but there’s better than that!” said Fabian. A handful of candicaine pipettes lay scattered like jackstraws on the table before him. He broke one, inhaled deeply. “There are birds with the breasts of women, and trees that will sing you to sleep—”

“And then suck you dry as a dead leaf,” called Lalage.

Fabian ignored her. “And you should see how the Paphian women treat you! Men, too, I suppose,” he added and passed me a candicaine pipette.

I felt a small hand plucking at my sleeve and turned to see Miss Scarlet.

“Would you like to see our show?” she asked softly. She climbed onto the table so that her long skirts spilled around her. Before I could reply, Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel had lunged through the shadows to where their huge, satchel lay by the gate. Toby stood and bowed to Lalage’, then took Miss Scarlet by the hand and assisted her down.

“You will excuse us while we prepare the entertainment,” he said. As he passed Justice I saw the two of them exchange knowing glances, and Toby winked broadly.

“Well!” said Lalage. She smoothed her hair and looked sideways at Justice, who grinned like a cat. “I suppose I’d better clear some of this.”

“Let me help you,” said Justice, carelessly gathering an armful of chipped plates and the pigeons’ carcasses, but being very careful not to upset a single wineglass or carafe. He paused in front of me to stack more plates, then dipped his head to brush my cheek. He turned away, scattering Miss Scarlet’s pyramid of plum stones. I watched them disappear inside.

By the outer gate Toby’s Players giggled and fought for costumes and scripts. I was alone for the first time since Justice had freed me. After several minutes I reached into my pocket and withdrew Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. I turned it over in my hands, then slipped it onto my shorn head, hoping that when she returned Miss Scarlet would notice it. I felt my heart stirred by all this cheerful ruckus. Closing my eyes, I sought within the knots of memory one that would tighten this thread of feeling.

And found it upon a small raised stage, some fifty years earlier, a stage lit by hissing gas lamps and smelling of cheap cosmetics and powder, where a boy and girl in matching broadcloth tunics and carrying matching blue books carefully followed marks chalked upon the scuffed floor reciting.

“
’…I never had a brother;

Nor can there be that deity in my nature

Of here and everywhere. I had a sister

Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured …’”

This a memory of Emma’s slipped somehow within my own, a stray cell sailing through me until it bumped another. Then another scene flashed through memory’s aperture. Emma’s bed, Aidan and Emma and mumbling Molly knocking heads together above the stained counterpane. A rush of displaced thought, like a wind careening through a broken window; and this image too spun off its string to join the others jumbled inside me.

I shivered in anticipation, for an instant thought I lay upon my bed in the Home Room. But a hand drawn to my forehead touched only Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. The flare of memory cooled, coalesced into a firefly dropping through the air, a glowing green scarab. I opened my hand. It lit there, wings blurring as they clicked back into their sturdy casing. I recalled the huge bees hovering in the afternoon air, the trees that had devoured Tast’annin’s bodyguard. Fireflies and bees the size of hummingbirds. A talking chimpanzee. Even the Players seemed somewhat inflated, as if they all deigned to imagine one another wiser, lovelier, bolder, and braver than they really were; and by so dreaming had awakened to find it come true.

But now the firefly shakes its wings and buzzes from my hand. In the doorway Justice and Lalage embrace before rejoining me at table, Justice preening slightly, his long hair tangled and his lip bleeding again. Fabian moves several of the metal torches so that their light falls upon the dark grass before us, then with a bow and a flourish announces:

“‘The Romantic History of Algernon Moncrieff and Gwendolen Fairfax,’ as performed by Toby Rhymer, His Troupe, Featuring Miss Scarlet Pan as Lady Bracknell.”

And I am a virgin witness as the Players begin their show.

W
ESTERING LIGHT MADE A
burnished cathedral of the trees when I finally paused in my flight through the forest. In my madness I had fled the Museum, wearing once more the brocaded tunic and ribands that marked me of the House Miramar: these and my sagittal the only arms I bore against the night. And night it would be soon; and I had lost my way.

Rumors that the Ascendants planned vengeance for a murder had alarmed the Regents enough to place sentries at each Museum. But the Technician posted by the North Gate scarcely glanced at me, so intent was she upon a volume of archaic holograms depicting the life cycles of extinct primates. In my Paphian garb I must have looked as though I was to attend the ball at High Brazil that evening. I had passed several high-ranking Curators in the Rotunda, all dressed in sober robes as they made their way to the North Gate to meet the palanquins from High Brazil that would bear them to the masque. I could have followed them, commandeered a palanquin for myself; but that would have meant answering questions, dealing, with elders from High Brazil who would not have my name among those they were to receive. And I did not want to see Roland, not yet. So I left through the South Gate. The sentry raised her head. Seeing only myself, she returned to her reading, I strode purposefully down the steps, through the broke columns facing the Narrow Forest, and to the edge of the forest itself. Here I hesitated. In the late afternoon light it was easy enough to orient myself to the northwest, where our Houses stood. In the distance the Obelisk pierced the trees’ canopy, a somber point among all that glittering greenery. If I steered to its right I would eventually come to the Tiger Creek, or perhaps even a road leading to the Hill Magdalena Ardent. I imagined that I saw the river itself sparkling through the shifting leaves. Before my nerve could break I hurried beneath the trees.

Here the late summer’s heat filtered through the leaves to drip in an almost palpable golden broth. Too late I wondered if perhaps I should have worn my Aide’s shift-stained and ugly, but woven of lighter cloth. But pride and my determination to confront Roland at the Masque and regain standing among my people had made me choose my own clothes—which quickly grew damp and weighted from the heat. My heavy braid burned against my neck. I winced and shrugged it from shoulder to shoulder, until it snagged on a bramble hedge. I tugged it loose and tucked it into my collar. Almost immediately I snared my sleeve upon the same briars. I pulled the thorns free, careful not to tear my brocade; another step and I was trapped on more. Neither were my boots fit for this sort of travel. The marshy ground soaked the felt soles until with each step I thought I sank to my ankles in muck. But I scrambled on trying to keep a spur of grief and indignation at my heel.

The late hour held little chance of my meeting anyone else, although there was much traffic among the Museums that bordered this part of the forest. For a short distance well-trodden paths wound between great oaks and with apples already burdened with fruit: west to the Historian south to the Weavers and Aviators and Botanists who trafficked with the Ascendants. To the northwest stretched a broken stone road leading to the Zoological Garden, perhaps an hour’s walk from here.

I followed this path. I hoped it would bring me to the Tiger Creek, which I could then follow to where it poured into the Rocreek not far from High Brazil. Myrtle and kudzu choked the path; slender apple and cherry saplings sprang from the ferns, heralding new wild orchards. With only a few hours of daylight remaining I walked determinedly, fending off tree limbs and straggling vines as I tried to keep the Obelisk in sight.

I went slowly, swiping at trailing vines and strands of spiderweb heavy with pollen and the striped husks of butterflies. Other trails intersected mine. These seemed to lead nowhere, and were probably known only to the lazars who traveled them on their midnight raids and forays. Certainly only lazars or the great hunting beasts—wolves and wild dogs, cat-a-mountains and eyra and the dog-faced lardmen who figured so prominently in Doctor Foster’s most gruesome stories—could slip down those strangled green tunnels.

The ground beneath my foot suddenly shuddered. A strangled shriek made me yelp and jump back, terrified. In the center of the path squatted a couvado toad, fat and round and misshapen as a rotted pumpkin. As I stared it grinned fatuously at me. Then its huge mouth gaped open and, with a gurgling belch, it turned itself inside out, exposing its pulsing heart and vivid entrails.

I covered my mouth with both hands and quickly turned away. Blindly I chose another path that seemed to veer toward the setting sun. I staggered down this, stumbling madly through honeysuckle thickets and rank orchards.

T
HE FARTHER IN I
went, the less clearly marked was the trail. Eventually I found myself in a tiny clearing where a dozen breaks in the underbrush might have been paths leading deeper into the forest. I chose one because pale blue veronica carpeted the earth there. As my feel crushed the soft blue mat of flowers their blossoms wept sweet tears. I hesitated, breathing their fragrance and recalling the name Doctor Foster had taught us for these tiny blooms: lose-all-care. They had a haunting scent, redolent of spring rain and the promise of twilight. But when I started to move again I found that I had forgotten which way I wanted to go. I turned, and sighted a patch of narcissus nodding in the bole of a dead tree. I shook my head trying to recall which path was mine. Surely I wanted to follow the sun? This way, then, where the light poured through a gap in the trees …

But a moment later I knelt among the white narcissus …

I did not wonder how they came to bloom there in early Autime, which were harbingers of spring; nor how the faintest of breezes seemed to make them whisper and sigh like frightened children, so that I crooned comforting words to them. I only knew they were the most lovely flowers I had ever seen, and I did not want to leave them.

And I might have remained there until full dark brought my doom, had not a fire ant climbed and stung my wrist. Its bite seared through my entire hand. I gasped, killing the ant with an ungrateful swat. Then rubbing my eyes I stumbled back to my feet.

Ruddy light now filtered through the leaves. I had long since lost sight of the Obelisk, and hours might have passed since I first entered the woods. My flesh crawled as I recalled Doctor Foster’s tales of the evil flowers spawned by the rains of roses: of Philantha Persia’s abduction by lazars when she went to hear daffodils laughing by the river; of Botanists lured to their deaths in the Rocreek by sighing lyacinths with the eyes of women; of almond-scented lilies whose fragrance alone brought madness and death. Such stories I had always dismissed; yet here I was now, bewitched by a patch of narcissus! I moved to brush the leaves from my hair, and as I did so saw that a slender green shoot had wrapped itself around my sagittal as I lay dreaming. I cried out and yanked the vine from my wrist, heedless of the cries of the flowers I trampled, I turned and ran.