Winterlong (24 page)

What?

Relief? Indecision? Fear?

All of these; and a twisted desire for Roland, who now stood staring down at the masque. His hands rested against some invisible barrier at the room’s edge, and he mumbled to himself while Anku lay watchfully a few feet away. And I felt desire for the sweet and faithless Whitlock beside me, giggling as he recounted his own exploits at recent castigations, punctuating each anecdote with quick childish kisses and toying with the cosmetic cylinders and ribbons and gleaming candicaine straws strewn on the floor about him.

“… and, Raphael, tonight Iontha High Brazil said she heard congreves launched across the river, and Gamaliel and Swan Illyria saw lazars gathering near the Tiger!” He paused, and plucked a cherry from a silver serving platter.

“Lazars,” I repeated. I took a deep breath. “I saw lazars—”

“You, cousin!”

“Yes—by the Tiger.” I continued to stare at Roland. I wondered whether he was too drunk to identify me later if I simply left now; or if I should confront him with my dismissal.

“But you were alone! How did you escape?” Whitlock grabbed my hand.

“Oh—” I stammered, quickly but gently moving my hand from his grasp. When I glanced down I saw the sagittal gleaming very faintly. I slipped that hand into the folds of my tunic, with the other pointed toward the far end of the room where Anku lay. “The jackal—”

“But lazars—!”

I turned and laid a finger to his lips.

“Whitlock,” I said. “When did Roland first engage you?”

“Nopcsa? Months and months ago. Right after you went to the Museum.” He gazed up at me, cabochon eyes glinting with surprise. Then he clapped both hands to his small mouth and glanced from myself to Roland and back again.

“Raphael! I’m so sorry—I had no idea—you didn’t know!” There was the faintest note of glee in his apology.

“No, I did
not,
” I said. Suddenly all of my anger and hurt and spite flooded me again. I glared at my former Patron, naked save for a loose undershift of white cambric now stained with wine, peering at Whitlock and myself. “I am not accustomed to such treatment.”

“Ah, Raphael.” A twinge of malice quivered in Whitlock’s smile. He tipped his head toward Roland, then reached for an atomizing tube. There was a soft hiss staining the air with sandalwood. “You are too proud, you know …
All
of us are accustomed to ‘such treatment’—only Raphael Miramar ever thought he was above it. To dare live among the Curators! Didn’t you know he would hate you for it?”

I winced. I recalled Ketura’s warning, Franca’s callous wonder that I had ever imagined the Curators would accept me as anything but a common whore.

“I wanted to learn from him—” I began, when Roland suddenly, called out.

“Whitlock! They’re gathering the suzeins for the judging—” His expression clouded as he saw me standing above Whitlock. “Miramar,” he said.

He no longer sounded drunk. He strode across the room to his paramour. “Who let him in?”

Whitlock flinched, then tossed back his white hair pettishly. “Raphael and I were paired a—”

“Who let him in, you pasty slut?” Nopcsa kicked at the pile of blankets.

Whitlock stumbled to his feet, wrapping a sheet around his thin shoulders. “Best go, Raphael,” he said, and stooped to gather his costume. “I don’t know who let him in, Roland. Perhaps the scholiast was tampered with.”

“Who let you in?” demanded Roland. “How did you know we were here? How did you
get
here?”

“I crossed the Narrow Forest,” I replied. “I’ve brought you a gift, Roland. Anku!”

Like smoke seeping up through the floorboards the jackal materialized at my side. Whitlock eyed him nervously, tugging on his robe as he shifted from one foot to the other. I could feel Anku quivering as he stared at the Curator.

“An albino jackal,” Roland said, stroking his chin and eyeing Anku. Suddenly he began to laugh. “Miramar, I always thought you were too clever for a whore!” He stooped and snapped his fingers at the jackal. Anku’s ears flattened against his skull but he did not move.

“A peace offering,” I suggested.

“An albino?” said Whitlock, somewhat plaintively. I shrugged. My head had begun pounding again. About my wrist I felt a steady pulse of heat come and go, come and go, in rhythm with the rush of blood through my veins.

“As pretty a consort as ever you’ve had, Roland,” I said. I hoped my excitement and fear would not betray me. But I felt a little ashamed as well, and dared an apologetic glance at Whitlock. He was regarding me curiously. I saw his glance slide from my face to my arm and then fix upon my wrist. I gripped the glowing bracelet with my other hand. At my feet a wan pool of violet reflected from the sagittal. And to my horror the gaze Whitlock cast back upon me mirrored my own. His blinking eyes darted between fear and wonder as he looked from the sagittal to my face and back again, shaking his head in disbelief.

He knows what it is!

For an instant I held his gaze, thinking
Do not betray me!
as I stood there calmly, and even Anku’s breath stilled as he waited with me.

Then—

“Well, Roland,” Whitlock announced with that same lazy note of petulance, as though he were only half-awake and none too pleased about it. With calculated slowness he bent to pick up a crown of azure and yellow macaw quills.
“I
must go to the judging—”

“Take me,” I said to Roland. I turned to confront him, almost near enough now for us to embrace. “Leave him and be my escort.”

Because suddenly, more than anything—more than vengeance, more than surcease from pain and exhaustion, more even than I longed for his love and desire for me to return—I simply wanted everything to be as it had been. I wanted to enter the Great Hall with Roland and lower my eyes as he guffawed at the sight we made together, as he had done at so many masques and balls. I wanted to have Gower Miramar as my lover and confidante and suzein once more, and Fancy my beloved cousin beside me, and Ketura with her explosive laugh and temper to match …

“I won’t leave again, I promise,” I pleaded. My hand had fallen upon Anku’s head. My fingers kneaded his fur as I raised my eyes to Roland’s. “Just let me go with you now.”

He stared at me for a long time. Like a moth that alights upon one fair blossom and then forsakes it for another, desire for me lingered upon Roland’s dark face; and then was gone forever.

“You’re too clever for yourself, Raphael,” he said at last. Disdainfully he kicked at Anku, missing the jackal but sending a small tide of silks washing across the floor. “Some whore’s trick to curry favor with your people! A white dog—”

Anku growled and slipped to the other side of the room.

Roland glanced at Whitlock lining his eyes with kohl and smiled. “I have a prettier pet than that already, Miramar. Hurry up, Whitlock.” And without another glance at me he turned and began to pull on his tunic and Regent’s sash of red and black.

I watched him, stunned that he had rejected me—really rejected me!—so easily, without so much as an argument over my hair or torn clothes, without even acknowledging that I had braved the perils of the Narrow Forest to come here, and risked humiliation by my own people in order to break into this garish seraglio and offer myself to him.

“Roland …” I began.

He paused at the far wall and tugged at one of a dozen multicolored ropes of braided velvet that looped from the ceiling. A clear sweet chime. Then a tiny door opened in the wall. A brazen face blinked verdigrised eyelids. Its speaking mechanism ground resolutely, as though it had been unused for many months.

“Speak cousin,”
it finally pronounced in the same chilly tones the scholiasts affected.

“Bid the elders come and remove an uninvited guest from the Exiguous Hagioscopic Chamber. Inform Lemuel High Brazil that the catamite Raphael Miramar has committed a crime of interjacence.”

“As you wish,”
the brass head replied. The tiny door snapped shut.

“Roland!” Whitlock gasped. The kohl wand snapped shut in a flurry of black powder. “That’s
banishment
—you
can’t!—
”

Roland snarled and slashed at the air with his hand. “Do you want to go with him?” He turned, grabbing blindly at the dangling ropes. Chimes pealed and tinkled. From a dozen alcoves soft voices rang from brazen throats. “Summon Lemuel High Brazil!”

“No!” Whitlock cried, cowering on the floor. A tremor of pity for him cut through my own fear and indecision. Before I could say anything he shrieked, pointing.

“Raphael!”

I turned, too late to avoid Roland’s arm swinging to smash against my throat. I fell to my knees, gagging as I tried to catch my breath. But Roland grabbed my shoulders and yanked me back up, his crimson face swimming before mine.

“Whores and lazars! You all feed off us—” His hands gripped me so that I cried aloud, and he laughed. “Not so strong and well fed as you were, eh, Miramar? You won’t last long once you’re banished.”

And he tore at my tunic, pushed me to the floor, and with one hand tight about my throat twisted to turn me onto my stomach as I struggled. Roland cursed and smacked me with the side of his hand. My head reeled. For a moment I lay once more beneath the apple tree in the Narrow Forest, the figure grunting above me not Roland but the Hanged Boy, hands like a rope tightening about my throat, pain ripping through me and a voice braying such triumph and utter desolation that I screamed …

“Raphael!”

This
is what awaits you this and nothing more and it does not end no not now no not ever no come to me come to me
—

“Raphael,
please!”

And there above me crouched neither Roland nor the Gaping One but Whitlock, Anku panting at his side. From Roland’s neck a broken ampule protruded.

“—
dead,
Raphael, I killed him, sweet Magdalene, oh save me he’s dead!”

I tried to speak but my bruised throat could not form the question. The clamor in my ears softened, the roaring broke into discrete notes that I gradually realized were words, the voices of scholiasts pronouncing the same message over and over again:

“We summon the suzein of the House High Brazil.”

“Raphael Miramar has committed a crime of interjacence.”

“We summon the suzein of the House High Brazil
…”

The muted cadence of the masque below faltered and then stilled. With a clang the brazen voices of the scholiasts announced my name one last time and fell silent.

“Whitlock,” I began.

“Shh!”

His fear bled into taut concentration. I raised myself to lean upon one elbow, reaching for Anku. Behind the jackal I glimpsed Roland’s bulk, a maroon coverlet tossed across him so that only his hand could be seen. Within that ominous silence this alone seemed right: that Roland should lie there dead, and that I should sit a few feet away and be glad of it. I felt my shoulders heave beneath the weight of some kind of vicious glee and turned to Whitlock as if he might explain to me this sudden violent humor.

But he was not looking at me. Nor did he stare at the man he had killed protecting me. Head cocked to one side, he gazed at the ceiling, pale ruby eyes blinking as though he strove to read our names there among the velvet ropes and spiderwebs. And now Anku mirrored Whitlock’s posture, sitting on his haunches and. staring upward, ears pricked.

“What—” I demanded, hearing nothing at first; ‘then bit off the end of my sentence. From far within the labyrinth of High Brazil a bell began to toll.

“That is the tocsin,” said Whitlock very slowly, as though somehow it might not really
be
the tocsin until he had pronounced the word.

I nodded, dazed. By some extraordinary effort I got to my feet. “The tocsin,” I said.

Whitlock turned to face me. “High Brazil is beset by lazars,” he said, and stumbled to the windows overlooking the Great Hall.

Now I could hear it clearly: three long repeated notes, deep and dreadful, a sound I had grown up fearing from Doctor Foster’s tales. The tocsin sounded once a year to announce the Masque of Winterlong and so allow us all to hear its hollow song, and afterward begin our games of go-bang and snapdragon.

But this was not Winterlong. This was the Butterfly Ball, and the warning tocsin sounded now when we should be hearing the laughter of the judges pronouncing the masque’s cacique.

“That’s impossible,” I protested. But in my head rang other words: /
have gone mad; I am dreaming.
Whitlock fumbled with a curtain at the wall’s edge until his fingers found a switch. A soft click. The obfuscating oriels shimmered. The chamber grew dim.

“Look,” my friend whispered. “It has begun …”

I stepped around Roland’s corpse to join Whitlock. As we stared down I saw upon the entrance balcony a grinning line of emaciated children, one beside the other, hands linked as though for some harrowing antic. They had torn the ropes of flowers from the balustrades and hung them about their necks in imitation of the Paphians. Some of them wore the remnants of actual costumes. I recognized Aspasia Persia’s beaded cobwebs now adorning the matted curls of a boy with fiery eyes and livid face.

“They must have taken her outside,” said Whitlock. “We will be eaten alive.” He pointed at the
ORPHEUS
, its glass pipes now silent. The masquers ringed tightly the calliope’s gleaming bulk, as if it might shelter them from the murderous children.

Upon the parapets more and more lazars gathered, and at the top of each stairway, and within the embrasures, their skeletal arms and legs outstretched like mayflies impaled upon the varicolored glass. But they moved in utter silence, as though waiting for a signal to begin their play.

Suddenly I heard a piercing cry. From the crowd huddled about the
ORPHEUS
darted a willowy harlequin, his costume billowing behind him as he ran toward the main steps.

None of the lazars pursued him. He cleared the top step. It seemed he might escape, go free to summon aid, when a bowstring twanged. The figure halted, jerked back and forth like a teetotum. Then he toppled and rolled down the steps, a scarlet streamer unraveling behind him upon each white stair.