Winterlong (8 page)

I bowed my head, affecting modesty, and said, “I’ll tell Miramar you promised the tincture would be delivered
soon.”

Her smile froze. With a shrug she turned and fled.

“Puh,” I said aloud. “That old bitch.” I walked to the bed and retrieved my rings and the aluminum bracelet Roland had given me last year when I had been chosen cacique at the Masque of Winterlong. It was a lovely bangle, taken from the Hall of Civil Servants in the Museum where Roland lived and where soon, soon!
I
would live as well. For several minutes I stood before the mirror, combing my long hair and braiding it again. This time I bound it with a long indigo riband, pulled the braid taut to display the titanium ear-cuffs that had been another token of Roland’s favor, ancient ornaments he had found among the ruins beneath the Obelisk. I dropped the braid, gingerly touched my cheek, wincing at how rough it felt. Most Patrons preferred the youngest children. Those of us old enough to shave were encouraged to do so each morning and evening. But Roland had confided that Iris Bergenia would prefer me unshaven, and so tonight I had forgone my toilet. Despite this the face that glowed between the shadows in the mirror’s flecked surface was no less beautiful than the painted effigies in the Hall of Dead Kings. Raphael Miramar, most sacred of the Magdalene’s Children, beloved of Paphians and of the Curator Roland Nopcsa.

Tonight I would tell Miramar I was leaving.

I smiled into the mirror, once more made the Paphian’s beck to myself. I was turning to leave when a shape shot across the room, giggling.

“Fancy!” I cried, laughing as I whirled to catch her. Candlelight struck the spurs of her shoulders, collarbone, knees; made a golden cerement of her thin white tunic. She squealed as I grabbed her and we both tumbled onto the thick carpet. For a moment I pinned her, felt those sharp thin ribs that I could have crushed like the husk of a tamarind. Then she wriggled from my arms and slid beneath the bed.

“Miramar is waiting!” she said, blowing a dust feather into my face. “Let me out.” She peered from the bed-shadows: enormous eyes in a triangular face; golden hair just long enough to be pulled into two tight braids that left her ears pitifully exposed to the autumn drafts that chilled our House.

I settled back onto my heels. “Come on out, then.”

“You’ll catch me.”

“I’ll come under there and catch you if you don’t.”

“You can’t, you’re too big—” She laughed, grasping one of the bed’s heavy carven feet and snaking behind it.

“Huh,” I said, prying her fingers loose.

With a shriek she darted from beneath the bed. I caught her before she could flee back into the Clandestine Adytum and hugged her to me, kissing her cheek and inhaling her soft scent, still milky and sweet with childhood. “How long were you there, you little snake?”

She shrugged, flushed with excitement, and straightened her shift. “Not long. An hour—”

“An hour!” I pretended to pull her braids, when from downstairs resounded the harsh strains of the sistrum heralding last worship, and Doctor Foster’s voice intoning the opening verse of “The Magdalena.”

“Come
on,”
she said, and we ran downstairs.

Only Miramar and Doctor Foster lay prostrate in the fane when we arrived. All of the older children and pathics had gone to a Conciliatory Masque at Saint-Alaban. Since this was Third Day, when Doctor Foster attended to Miramar’s castigations, I knew that if I remained I would have the chance to tell Miramar of my decision to join Roland at the Museum. I waited while Fancy stood on tiptoe to reach the font which held civet and attar of roses, tried not to grin at how earnestly she anointed herself before turning to let me pass. My own anointment was cursory, and I was punished for my sloppiness in spilling unguent down the front of my chasuble. Miramar ignored Fancy and myself as he chanted the long verses of “The Duties of Pleasure.” Doctor Foster sniffed and rolled his eyes as I took my place beside him, trying not to choke on the cloying scent of roses that mingled with the more bitter reek of hemp burning on the altar.

After only a few minutes I heard Fancy’s slow breathing: already sound asleep. How could Miramar and Doctor Foster stay awake through worship, night after night, despite long hours of attendance upon the Magdalene’s affairs and the samovars of sedative tea they consumed between Visits from Curators and other Paphians? I yawned and focused as I always did upon the ancient figure of the Magdalene. Swathed in smoke from the blackened brazier, the pale contours of Her face had been smoothed to an eyeless plane by the impressions of thousands of small hands over the centuries. To stay awake I counted the stars painted upon Her blue robe and wondered how many years it had been since She was made. Hundreds, perhaps. Miramar and Doctor Foster maintained that ours was the oldest of all the Magdalenes upon the Hill Magdalena Ardent. It was brought there from the ruined Shrine in the northeast part of the City, in the first years of the Second Ascension. That was before the ‘rains of roses made a wasteland of the northeast, before the aardmen and hydrapithecenes and other geneslaves drove the Curators and the first Paphians from their homes, to dwell in the Museums and Embassies as we did now. The House Saint-Alaban claimed that its Magdalene was older than ours. It had come from the Cathedral that still stood to the northwest upon Saint-Alaban’s Hill. But the Cathedral was an evil place. The very earth there was poisonous, contaminated by the rains of roses. Only lazars lived in the ruins now, though Doctor Foster said that many janissaries once stood guard over an ancient hoarde of weapons placed near Saint-Alaban’s Hill before the First Ascension.

“Only a Saint-Alaban would want to lay claim to an image from the Engulfed Cathedral,” Miramar would say disdainfully whenever the issue was brought up. “If they are so proud of their ancestry, why don’t they return there to live?” This would anger whatever Saint-Alabans were present, but the rest of us would laugh.

Perched upon a small ridge overlooking the River Gorge, our House commanded a view of two others—Saint-Alaban and Persia. To the south sloped the Hill Magdalena Ardent, shadowing the ornate fastnesses of Illyria and crowned by High Brazil’s minarets and glowing lights. Many nights as a child I had huddled with my bedcousins in the upstairs nursery, staring out the beveled windows to watch Miramar and the older children traipse across the Bison Bridge to attend masques in those gaslit halls, or begin the longer pilgrimage to the outskirts of the Narrow Forest where the Curators dwelled. By the time I was old enough to accompany our Patrons outside, I had learned that (alas!) the House Miramar was not as wealthy as the House High Brazil (that entertained the Botanists almost exclusively, in exchange for opium and atropa belladonna); that our own Doctor Foster had been sold to the House Miramar by the hydrapithecenes who had devoured his parents, for a vial of tincture of opium and a bolt of water proof silk (to which we attributed his predilection for laudanum and costly fabrics); that the occasional Ascendant visiting our Patrons must be entertained without question; that from the Curators we might demand orchids and textiles and cosmetics in return for our rarefied lust, but never ask for learning.

Still, no Curator or Illyrian could have lavished us with as much affection and as many attempts at luxury as did Miramar. The original gold and indigo mosaic tiles glittered on our nursery walls, although there were many gaps in the intricate geometries patterned there. Our clothes were designed and woven by Curators at the Museum of Technologies, or obtained by them from Ascendant traders. In seraglios lit by dozens of electrified candles we entertained our Patrons, and slept in beds that had been imported from the Balkhash countries centuries ago. My room had a balcony overlooking the river, and my own tiny radiophone patched into the House generator. Late at night, after my last Patron had left, I would lie long awake listening to the pulsing strains of waltzes broadcast from the Museum of Technologies as I pored over the brittle pages of the volumes Roland Nopcsa had given me last Winterlong. Books with titles like
The Ancient Life-History of the Earth
and
The Modern Changes of the Earth: Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology,
and
A Short History of a Great Group of Extinct Reptiles.
And one cold and windless winter’s eve I picked up an Ascendant radio signal broadcasting from somewhere in the United Provinces. For hours I listened to a faint sweet voice telling an old, old story of a man redeemed by ghosts, until the signal, ghostlike itself, faded into the dawn.

But there was no radiophone to entertain me now: only the featureless Magdalene with Her plaster hands joined, holding the beads upon which She counted the Decades. Five sets of beads; five Houses. In a whispered monotone Doctor Foster responded to Miramar’s Invocation of the Sacred Jade, the secret names of Desire. Fancy’s breathing had grown softer still, the smoky air warm and ripe with dreams.

I must have dozed myself. It seemed that the figure of the Magdalene had gathered Her robes tightly about Her thighs. As I watched She writhed as though in pain,’ a sight made more horrible because of Her eyeless face. Her gown rippled and swelled until it tore apart. Then I saw that at Her feet crouched a boy with fair curling hair and grass-green eyes, beautiful as any Paphian mite. He might have been the twin of those other images of the Magdalene, a boy as lovely as She herself, but his lips curled in a cat’s cruel smile, and his green eyes winked malice. In his hands he held the torn hem of the Magdalene’s gown, and I saw that She bled from wounds in Her hands and feet. The shining stars upon Her robe turned to tears of blood.

Then I saw that the boy was wounded too. About his neck hung a bit of cord, or perhaps a vine. It had left a red scar around his neck. But he did not seem to be suffering. Instead he smiled to see the Magdalene in pain, although She reached to him with Her white hands, to offer succor or perhaps forgiveness. I knew then it was that boy who had injured her. In a rage I sprang to hit him.

My head banged against the edge of the altar. I fell back grunting. Above me the faces of Miramar and Doctor Foster and Fancy folded together in concern.

“J
UST STAY STILL AND
drink your valerian,” ordered Doctor Foster. “Here, Benedick: give this to Raphael.”

“Thanks, cousin,” I said, taking the steaming mug Small Benedick held out to me. I waited until he skipped back to Doctor Foster before grimacing and drinking the awful stuff.

To my mortification, they had brought me to Doctor Foster’s infirmary. Actually the anteroom of his chambers, dignified by the term
infirmary
only by virtue of a warped wooden shelf sagging beneath a row of very old glass bottles. Inside of them one glimpsed homunculi swimming in the cloudy spirits, or the clenched fronds of bizarre plants, the preserved limb of a carnivorous betulamia. I had fortunately never seen these used in any treatment, indeed had never known him to treat us with anything except tincture of opium or chamomile tea (for pain or overstimulation), or sops of wine or an infusion of valerian (for everything else).

“I’m all right,” I said. I glared at Small Thomas and Benedick and the other very young children sniggering at me from the other side of the room. They sat at Doctor Foster’s feet. My forehead felt bruised where I had knocked it against the altar, and there was that familiar dull throbbing that often followed worship, from inhaling hempen smoke. Doctor Foster nodded, stroking the coiled yellow hair of Fancy in his lap.

“Yes, well, drink it anyway and try to rest. I gather you weren’t going to the Conciliatory Masque, so there’s no need to rush out of here.” He smiled, tossing back his hair (graying at the temples and starting to grow a little thin on top, despite frequent applications of lilac water and honey). He shifted so that more of the children could lean against his legs, and cleared his throat. Doctor Foster liked to talk and liked to have an audience. Too old to be engaged by Patrons, he was still too clever to meet the usual fate that elders meet, little more than slaves to their younger cousins. Instead he had parleyed his gift for storytelling, along with his (mostly imaginary) healing abilities into a position at the House Miramar that was, if not precisely honored, still eyed affectionately by Miramar and the rest of us. We older pathics had lost our appetite for his tales—
stories for boys and stories for girls,
he called them—preferring the real intrigues of our constant round of masques and the intricate couplings that accompanied them. Still it was soothing to lie upon the swaybacked couch beneath a catskin comforter, breathing the sweet fumes that rose from his narghile as he related old tales of the City of Trees and the tragic love stories that were the Paphians’ favorite entertainment.

“… and so the aardmen took him, and Lilith Saint-Alaban gave herself to them in exchange for his life; but the aardmen killed him anyway, and her too; and their son Small Hilliard died in a rain of roses.” Doctor Foster sighed. I started, realizing I must have drifted off again.

Not that it mattered. All his stories ended the same way: tragically, with beautiful Paphian boys and girls kidnapped by geneslaves or devoured by lazars or enslaved by Ascendants and Curators. It made life seem a somewhat more comforting prospect in comparison; except that as we got older we learned that most of the tales were true.

“Now a story for
boys,
” demanded Small Thomas, pinching Fancy as he shook his curls at Doctor Foster.

Doctor Foster drew from his narghile and stared at the mosaic ceiling, as though he read there some strange history. “What story?” he said at last.

“My story!” said Small Thomas.

“Raphael’s story!” said Fancy, kicking him and hugging Doctor Foster. “Please, Doctor Foster!”

I pulled the comforter to my chin and tucked my long braid around my neck. Doctor Foster exhaled a plume of smoke and began.

“I remember the day Raphael came here. Sixteen years ago; the same day that Trahern High Brazil performed his inspired Akolasian gambade for the Curators, and as a result of their overly enthusiastic ravishments died; but it was an extraordinary thing to see all the same.” He sighed at the memory.