Winterlong (30 page)

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Awful.” I flinched as she brushed the hair from my forehead. She nodded, poured me a glass of water, and waited until I drank it before saying anything more.

“You could have killed that child. You could have killed yourself,” she said at last. I shut my eyes and started to turn from her. “No!—listen to me, Wendy!”

I opened one eye, then shrugged. With a groan I pulled myself up to stare back at her angry face. “I’m listening,” I said.

“Perhaps you do not care about putting yourself in danger; but you have no right to endanger our lives as well. That child was hysterical.
Justice
was hysterical. He thought he’d killed you. He had to lie to the suzein about what happened, else Miramar might have taken action against us all because you harmed the child.

“That was ill-conceived, Wendy. You heard Miramar: Ascendants have crossed the river. They might be looking for you. A strange, cold young man resembling a Paphian favorite, driving a Paphian child to the edge of madness—this may sound too much like a runaway empath who caused the suicide of the Ascendants’ most renowned researcher.”

“They think I’m dead,” I protested weakly.

The chimpanzee trembled with indignation. “Being dead doesn’t excuse it! You could have killed her—”

“I don’t care,” I said, exhausted. I pressed my palms against my eyes. “Please let me sleep—”

“Dammit, Wendy!”

In her excitement she had climbed onto the seat of the little rocker. It swayed precariously as she swung her arms to punctuate her sentences, bits of the decayed fabric of her dressing gown pocking the air with flecks of oriental green and black, “You have to care!” she exclaimed, one long arm plucking at my bedcovers. “You must care, about everything; else how will you become a Great Artist? How will you become Truly Human?”

I groaned. “I don’t want to become
anything
right now. Right now I’d like to sleep, or maybe eat. Where is Justice?”

She blinked painfully, as if she had been slapped. “Not care?” she repeated, as if she had not heard me. “Not care?”

I rolled my eyes and turned onto my side. I could hear her breathing deeply (“from the diaphragm,” she would say) as she sought to calm herself. I pretended to be asleep, although I knew this would not fool Miss Scarlet, who declared she could smell sleep, and daydreams when one should be preparing for one’s entrance.

But perhaps she decided it would be better to wait for this imperfect vessel to knit itself back together before attempting to fill it again. The bedstand shook as she brushed against it, retrieving her book. Then I heard the soft rustle of a page being turned. She cleared her throat.

“‘Great acting, of course, is a thing of the spirit; in its best estate a conveyance of certain abstract spiritual qualities, with the person of the actor as medium. It is with this medium our science deals, with its slow, patient perfection as an instrument. The eternal and immeasurable accident of the theater which you call genius, that is a matter of The Soul’”

The muted kiss of her volume’s brittle pages as they met each other once again. “Goodbye, Wendy,” said Miss Scarlet. The door clicked shut behind her.

The house was dark that evening. Fabian visited me briefly. He told me that while we had been performing for Miramar and his guests, the House High Brazil had been beset by lazars. Many were dead or taken prisoner, Paphians and Curators alike, and there was talk of gruesome things, children beheaded by other children in the darkness, the living corpse the Saint-Alabans named the Gaping One seen frolicking with a jackal familiar at the ball; captives led to be human offerings to Him at the Engulfed Cathedral. The City was in mourning.

After he left I lay long abed, half-expecting to be visited again by Miss Scarlet, or Justice, or even Toby himself. At the very least by Citana or Mehitabel. But no one came. A distant clock clanged somewhere within the theater. Still I waited; still no one came. It seemed I was being ignored, or left to recover in solitude. Finally I decided to go out.

I met no one in the halls, though from far off I could hear the swish and clatter and shouted expletives that accompanied fencing practice in the gymnasium. A reassuring sound, whispering that normal life was going on somewhere despite the massacre, despite my madness. I went through the Grand Hall, passing quickly down the center of the ancient carpet with its worn arabesques. As I hurried I passed rotting cabinets holding portfolios so ancient that the very meanings of the words they contained had changed over the intervening centuries. It was with some relief that I reached the massive oaken doors that led outside.

Shadows stretched across the wide sward in front of the theater, to wither and die before reaching the boundaries of the Library facing it. A score of skittish sheep belonging to the Librarians grazed upon the theater lawn. Occasionally Toby called them into service as decorative additions to certain pastoral plays in our repertory. For the most part they just wandered aimlessly across the grass. I nodded at the young Librarian perched across the way upon the ruins of a marble pillar. A re-engineered swivelgun rested in his lap as protection against lazars or aardmen. I exchanged a melancholy greeting with him and headed for the Deeping Avenue.

Already the sun had dipped behind the Library’s copper dome. As I crossed the common I heard the rush of hawks settling for the night, and the moans of owls as they made a few half-hearted forays into the twilight. An undeniable glamor hung over this place, the Library grounds a disordered but still lovely tangle of rosebushes and cherry trees given just enough attention to keep them from utter abandon, while magnolias and white oaks lofted high above them. From here I looked down the long sweep of the Deeping Avenue to where the Narrow Forest overtook it. I could just make out the blackened finger of the Obelisk rising from the trees. Behind it the sun glinted upon the distant river. In places I saw where the Deeping Avenue was still kept clear. There were little orchards of apple and cherry trees, and pasture compounds where the Curators grazed sheep. White blocks like salt spilled upon a smooth green table were wooden beehives splitting beneath their load of honey. I saw the tulip poplar allee leading to where the Regents’ few and splendid horses lived in the circular Horn Building, and the red turrets of the High Regent’s Castle, still proud and tall despite its broken towers and shattered windows.

But for the most part the view down Library Hill was of trees massed between the ruins of once-elegant marble buildings, and the crumbling bulk of vast gray edifices that had never been lovely. Only in decay had they finally achieved a sort of truce with sky and rain beneath their heavy kudzu beards.

I sighed, and stopped to climb a ragged pine tree whose branches spoked out to form a comfortable vantage point. It was October, what the Paphians called Autime, but the air still smelled sweet and warm. Only the browning leaves of the oaks seemed like fall, that and a faintly chill northern breeze that stirred the evergreen boughs.

I braced myself against the pine’s bole and stood, the breeze ruffling my hair. Its touch made me think of cold granite, stony earth; a pale face half-hidden by new green leaves. But I shook this melancholy from me and turned to face due west, to the river, and felt the last bit of sun slide down my cheeks.

Since I had entered it nearly two months ago it never failed to stir me, to see it thus. The City of Trees, the Senators’ abandoned capital, the forgotten City by the River. To go out upon the stage gave me great joy; but it was joy shot through with despair and feverish longing, as I felt myself buffeted by the waves of desire that my audiences tossed back upon me. I felt no triumph in my performances, as did Toby; took no ordinary pleasure as did Gitana and Fabian and the rest, with the surety of an evening spent in lovemaking afterward. And I could not be like Miss Scarlet and treat the theater as a temple, or a laboratory. She found acting a form of alchemy, a crucible in which to purify the raw lusts and loves and everyday fevers of humankind and then, having cooled them in the detachment of rehearsal, fortify herself onstage with this elixir of human memory.

No. The joy of the theater was for me the joy of longing, of yearning for that humanity which I could simulate but would never truly possess or understand. I did not yet understand that it is longing and loss, as much as anything else, that makes one truly human.

But to look like this upon the City of Trees
was
to understand something of men and women, of how they had lived once long ago, when the avenues were roads that stretched white and smooth and as yet unmarred by trees, and the Obelisk stood whole, and Senators ruled from atop Library Hill. It made me feel empty, somehow, and alone. But emptiness and solitude eased my heart like nothing else, they were so rare to me.

And so for a few minutes I felt as though the City belonged only to myself. That it was my secret, somehow, and my creation. As the Small Voices were mine; as were the memories of Emma and Aidan and the poet Morgan Yates and the courtesan Fancy Miramar. Small voices; random neural firings; stolen memories. But they were mine now, as I imagined this City was mine, to savor and horde and protect against the One who would steal them from me, the One who sought to drive me to despair and death as He had those others. I shook my head, then raised my fist to the dusky sky and laughed.

“You will not have me!” I cried aloud. But only the wind called back.

I thought then of an ancient poem Miss Scarlet recited sometimes when we traveled across the City to perform. She would gaze upon the ruins of Library Hill, its glory now dust and rubble beneath the greenery, and say, “The Ascendants may have abandoned the City, but the gods have not, and we have not. We hold her still, Wendy, people like you and me. We wait for the day when the Magdalene will wake again, and walk here as the lazars say the Gaping One does now. While we can still believe in Her and hope, the City is ours. They will never wrest Her from us again, not with inferno or rain or fear. ‘We are not to despair; we are not to despair.’”

Then she would recite, and afterward we would both be silent. Because it was the very ordinariness of this vision that we loved—

The dream of small lives no longer led. Of a light left burning upon a well-swept porch, and small machines clattering along the dusty avenues. The smells of scorched coffee and cheap wine hanging above a sordid little cafe. The thrum of trains moving beneath ancient avenues now enthralled by starving children and the relentless usurping trees.

I leaned back against the pine trunk. As the first star blinked in the pure and empty sky I recited softly.

“‘ … Even now, in this night

Among the ruins of the Post-Vergilian City

Where our past is a chaos of graves and the barbed-wire stretches ahead

Into our future till it is lost to sight,

Our grief is not Greek:

As we bury our dead

We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear,

That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity

Neither ourselves nor our city;

Whoever the searchlights catch, whatever the loudspeakers blare,

We are not to despair.’”

L
AZARS WOKE ME FROM
a black and dreamless sleep in the Hagioscopic Embrasure.

“It is him,” said a child’s voice. So vast was the void that had swallowed me I could not for some moments discern their figures moving about the room, although my eyes were open and gray dawn slanted from slits in the varicolored ceiling.

“Yes,” another voice lisped. “He killed Peter in the river last night. I saw him.”

“We must take him,” the first voice said, but doubtfully.

“Yes,” the other agreed, and fell into thoughtful silence.

They did not kill me, though I lay for many minutes waiting to feel their small knives in my throat, their teeth. I heard them stirring about the room, kicking at oddments that rolled across the floor, and imagined what broken toys they played with: Whitlock’s cosmetics, candicaine pipettes, a flask of absinthium emptied of its green liquor. I groped at my side for Whitlock’s body, felt nothing there. I whispered Anku’s name: nothing.

The voices sounded very young. Finally I could stand it no more. I sat up, blinking.

At the edge of the obfuscating oriels several figures squatted. One swept the floor with a cosmetic brush, drawing something in the powders and ointments spilled there. The others watched her with no great interest. Their voices were soft, curiously inert, as though nothing remained in the world to amuse or frighten them.

Surely not this empty chamber. Nopcsa’s corpse was gone, and Whitlock’s. Of Anku I saw nothing.

“Where is my familiar?” I asked.

Every head turned to stare. Then they raced to my side, giggling and shoving at one another. They gathered in a circle around me, grinning: all of them filthy, with stained hands and hair clotted with blood and dirt. They smelled of rotting meat.