And now she began to see. There was a form appearing ahead of her, like the fruit of this blossoming darkness. It resembled nothing she could name, but it had the sinuousness of a serpent, or rather of many serpents, turned upon themselves over and over, a knot of sliding shapes in constant motion. It entered itself, this knot, and emerged remade.
it divided and sealed, opened like an eye and broke like water on a rock. Sometimes, in the midst of its cavortings, a spray of darkness would spurt between its surfaces. Oftentimes it would slough off a skin of shadows, which would instantly fly apart, the fragments rising like seeds from a field of dandelions, sowing themselves in the fertile gloom.
She was watching one such seeding when her gaze fell upon the figures sitting beneath this display. A man and a woman, face to face, hand to hand, their heads bowed as if in prayer. Seeing the two of them so close she thought of Abilene Welsh and Billy Baxter, though she did not entirely comprehend the reason. Surely those two had not frozen to death looking for a place to hold hands and bow heads, but to perform that labor she'd witnessed countless times among beasts. And yet, was the getting of children not the purpose of that labor? And did the form hovering above this couple not seem to come from their mingled essences, which rose from their lips like coiling smoke and intertwined between their brows?
"It's a baby," she said aloud.
Either the darkness was negligent, and failed to catch her words before they flew, or else the sound her tongue made was too slippery to @ seized. Whichever, she saw the words go from her lips like a turquoise and orange flame, the colors strident in such muted circumstances. they instantly flew towards the dark child, and were drawn into its workings, their brilliance streaking its every part.
The woman opened her eyes and raised her head with a look of pain upon her face, and her husband rose from his chair expelling a throatful of ether, then looked up at the creature he had fathered.
It was in turmoil now, its configurations changing even more rapidly, as if Maeve's colors had given it new fuel for its inventions. Too much, perhaps. In an ecstasy of change, its forms became even more erratic, feeding upon their own invention as they multiplied.
Maeve was in sudden terror. She retreated a couple of stumbling steps then turned and pelted away through the crowd. There was turmoil all around her, the darkness too traumatized to silence the voices of the throng, so that shouts of panic and alarm erupted on every side. She darted this way and that to keep anyone from catching hold of her, though it seemed few understood what had happened, much less recognized the culprit, and she reached the wall of the tent without a hand being laid upon her. As she stooped to duck under the fabric, she glanced back. The child was in decay, she saw, its forms ripened to bursting and rotting in the air. Its parents had separated, and lay in the arms of their respective families, stricken and sickened. Even as Maeve watched, the woman went into a fit so violent it was all her comforters could do to restrain her.
Clamping her hand over her mouth to subdue her sobs, Maeve dug under the tent wall and out into the snow. News of the calamity had already spread among those waiting outside and chaos had ensued. A fight had broken out towards the bottom of the slope, and someone was already sprawled on the ground with a spike in his heart. Elsewhere, people were running towards the tent, even as those within emerged, yelling at the tops of their voices.
Maeve sat down on the snow and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, which burned with all she'd seen, and with the tears that were about to come.
"Child."
She raised her head, and started to look around.
"What did you promise?"
She looked no further.
"It wasn't my fault," she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "I just said@'
"It was you?" the beast replied, cutting her short. "Oh Lord, oh Lord, what have I done?"
She felt the beast's hands on her body, and without warning she was spun around. She finally saw his features plainly-his long, patient face, his golden eyes, his fur, thickening to a mane in the middle of his skull, sleek as a beaver's pelt on his brow and cheek and chin. His teeth were chattering slightly.
"Are you cold?"
"No, damn you!"
She started to weep softly.
"All right, I'm cold," he said, "I'm cold."
"No you're not. You're afraid." The gold in his eyes flickered.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Maeve O'Connell."
"I should have killed you, Maeve O'Connell."
"I'm glad you didn't," she said. "Who are you?"
"Coker Ammiano. Soon to be infamous. If I'd killed you, you wouldn't have done this terrible thing."
"What was so terrible?"
"You spoke at the marriage. That was forbidden. Now there'll be war. The families'll blame each other. There'll be bloodshed, Then when they realize it wasn't them, they'll come looking for the culprit, and they'll kill us. You for what you did in there, me for bringing you here." Maeve pondered this chain of disaster for a moment. "they can't kill us if they can't find us," she said finally. She glanced back down the slope. Just as Coker had predicted, the fighting had indeed escalated. If it was not yet war it would be very soon. "Is there another way?" she said.
"One," he replied.
She scrabbled to her feet. "Take us there," she said.
Over the decades, Buddenbaum had assembled a comprehensive list of fictional works in which he appeared. to date he had knowledge of twenty-three characters he had directly inspired (that is to say a reader of the book in question, or a viewer of the play, if they knew him, instantly recognized the source), along with another ten or eleven characters that drew upon aspects of his nature for comic or tragic effect. It was testament to the many facets of his personality that he could step onto the stage as a judge in one piece and as a procurer in another and have both portraits judged accurate.
He took no offense at being exploited in this fashion, however scandalous the work or scurrilous the part. It was flattering to be a seed for so many creations, especially for one as certain to remain childless as he. And it amused him mightily that when these artists, in their cups, confessed to their homage, they invariably spoke of how much raw human truth they had discovered in him. He suspected otherwise.
Know it or not (and in his experience artists knew very little) they were inspired by the very opposite of what they claimed. He was not raw. He was not true. And one day, if he was cautious and wise, he would not even be human. He was a fake through and through, a man who had traveled the trails of America in a dozen different guises, and would wear another dozen before his business was done.
He did not blame them for their credulity. Every art but one was a game of delusions. But oh, the road to that Art was hard, and he was glad to have his list of alter egos to divert him as he made his way along it.
He even had some of the fruitier dialogue ascribed to him in these works by heart, and it pleased him to recite it aloud when there was nobody within earshot.
As now, for instance, trudging up the forested flank of this damnable mountain. A speech from a pseudo-historical tragedy called Serenissima:
"I have nothing but you, my sweet Serenissima. You are my sense, my sanity and my soul. Go from me now, and I am lost in the great dark between the stars, and cannot even perish there, for I must live until you still my heart. Still it now! I beg thee, still it now, and let my suffering cease."
He stopped in mid-declaration. There was another sound competing for his audience of trees, this far less musical. He held his breath, to hear it better. It was coming from the summit of the mountain, or thereabouts: sufficient voices to sluggest a cast of some substantial size was assembled there. No need to wonder what kind of drama was underway. The keening told all. It was a tragedy.
With his own voice now hushed, he started to climb again, the sounds more horrid the louder they became. It was only in fiction that pain made the dying poetic. In life, they sobbed and begged and ran with tears and snot. He had seen such spectacles countless times and did not relish seeing another. But he had no choice. The child might very well be up there somewhere-a child named for a goddess who brought dreams-and back in the balmy spring, in Missouri, his instincts had told him there was some significance in that naming. He'd lodged a little piece of his own dreams with the O'Connelis as a consequence, which with hindsight had probably been an error. How much of an error the next hour or so would tell.
Meanwhile, there was the mystery of the voices to vex him. was this the dying cries of pioneers, lost on the heights? He didn't think so. There were sounds amid the cacophony he had never heard from a human throat; nor indeed from any animal that lived in this corner of reality, which fact had made him sweat, despite the cold. A sweat of anticipation, that perhaps the impulsive gift he'd made to Harmon O'Connell had not after all been so unwise, and that the Irishman's daughter had led him, all unknowing, to the borders of his own promised land.
SEVEN
There was a crack in the sky; that was Maeve's first thought. A crack in the sky, and on the other side of it another sky, brighter than the night in which she stood. She had seen the heavens produce many marvels: lightning, whirlwinds, hail, and rainbows-but nothing like the waves Of Color, vaster than the vastest thunderhead, that rolled across that sky beyond the crack. A breeze came out to find her. It was warm and carried on its back a deep, rhythmical boom,
"That's the sea!" she Said, starting towards the crack. It was not wide, nor was it stable. It wavered in the air, as jittery as the flame of a lamp in a high wind. She didn't care about the how and why of it; she'd seen too much tonight to begin asking questions now. All she wanted to do was cross this threshold, not because she feared the consequences of what she'd done earlier, but because there was a sky and a sea she'd never seen before waiting on the other side.
"There'll be no way back," Coker warned her.
"Why not?"
"It took a great Blessedness to make this door, and when it closes again it won't be easily opened." He glanced back down towards the battlefield, and moaned at what he saw. "Lord, look at that. You go if you want to. I can't live with this." He raised his hand in front of his face and a single razor claw appeared from his middle finger, gleaming.
"What are you doing?"
He put the claw to his throat. "No!" she yelled, and grabbed his hand.
"All this dying, just because I said something I shouldn't. It's stupid."
"You don't understand the reasons," he said bitterly, though he made no further attempt to harm himself "And you do?" Maeve replied.
"Not exactly. I know there's some great argument between the families that's so bad they've been slaughtering one another for generations. This wedding was supposed to be a seal of peace between them. And the child was the proof of that."
"What's the argument?" she said. He shrugged. "Nobody knows, outside the fwnilies. And after this@' he looked at the corpse-strewn slope,
"there'll be fewer who know than ever."
"Well it's still stupid," she said again, "killing each other over an argument when there's so many things worth living for." She still had hold of his hand. As she spoke he retracted the claw. "I lost my Papa tonight," she said solemnly. "I don't want to lose you too."
"I've known Blessedm'ns less persuasive than you," Coker remarked softly. His voice was tinged with awe. "What kind of child are you?"
"Irish," Maeve replied. "Are we going then?"
She looked back towards the crack. The ground at its base was shifting, the stones and trampled snow softened in the heat of whatever power had opened this door, drawn through the threshold then pouring back again. She started towards it fearlessly but as she did so Coker laid his hand on her shoulder. "Do you understand what you're doing?" he said.
"Yes," she said, a little impatiently. She wanted to walk on that ebbing dirt. She wanted to know how it felt. But Coker hadn't done with his warnings.
"Quiddity's a dream-sea," he said, "and the countries there are swinge."
"So's America," she said.
"Stranger than America. They're born from what's in here." He tapped her temple with his finger.
"People dream countries?"
"More than countries. they dream animals and birds and cities and books and moons and stars."
"they all dream the same books and birdst' she said.
"the shapes are different," Coker replied somewhat hesitantly, "But@e souls of things are the same."
She looked at him in befuddlement. "Whatever you say," she replied.
.No, it's important you understand," he insisted. He paused for a moment, frowning as he dug for enlightenment. Then it came. "My father used to say: Every bird is one biri4 and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident. But Maeve simply shook her head, more confounded than ever. "Does this mean you're sonWhody's dream?" she said.
"No," Coker told her. "I'm the child of a trespasser!"
Here at least was something she grasped.
"Quiddity wasn't meant to be a place of flesh and blood," he went on.
"But people get through?"
"A few. Tricksters, poets, magicians. Some of them die. Some of them go crazy. And some of them fall in love with the things they find, and children come, who are part human and part not" He spread his arms and his wings. "Like me."
"I do," she said with a sly little smile. "I like you a lot."
But he was deadly serious. "I want you to know what you're doing when you step through that crack."
"I don't mind being a trespasser."
"You'll be living in a place where your people can only come in dreams, and then only @ times. The night they're born. The night they fall in love. And the night they die."