“It is a better sort of wrestling than other kinds you might see, for it better suits our purpose.” Dammerung cast about under the bare cherry-verge a moment before returning with a thick branch roughly the length of his arm. His cousin watched him warily. “In brief: our business, that is, the business of war, is more like to our kind of wrestling than two bulls pitting their shoulders together and groaning into the earth.” As though the branch were a sword he spun it, and spun with it, his bare, agile feet skimming the short turf. It was a strange series of movements and yet Margaret had to admit that they were beautiful, and if the branch were a real sword the blue-jay man would have been dead.
Skander brought up his arm and blocked a blow from the stick. Margaret thought it was a casual block, but he followed it up with two quick jabs at Dammerung’s head—one of which Dammerung avoided with a neat dodge, one of which he dodged right in to. She heard the crack of contact and stifled another gasp. Dammerung spun with the blow, his back to Skander, and leapt, turning over backward until his legs locked around his cousin’s neck.
“Damn!” cried Skander, and the two went down again while the blue-jay man, too close to the scuffle, side-stepped to avoid being pulled in by his master’s right hook.
Dammerung rolled off Skander’s back, staggering, his head tilted and his hand pressed under his nose. “Oh, that can’t be good,” he said as blood spurted between his fingers.
“Did I not tell you to learn to duck!” Margaret cried. But she could see Dammerung was enjoying himself—possibly all the more for the sudden blood-letting. His fire was up, the wind rushing round him like a roaring mantle of his own wild aura. “The storm is up!” he cried, shaking himself like a dog and flinging blood left and right, “and all is on the hazard!”
The two went at it anew, giving and taking and avoiding blows with a precision and power which surprised Margaret. And she was suddenly intensely sorry that she was a woman and not a man. It was not until they finished, by common consent or by some rule she was not privy to, and had stepped away, saluting each other with broken laugh and bloodied nose, that she realized she had risen and had watched the whole thing on her feet. As Dammerung came striding wearily back up to her, she felt a crying ache in her body and had to put her hand on the tabletop and lean her weight upon it.
“What do you think?” he asked her mockingly. “Do I fit this body well again?”
She dug into her pocket and pulled out her handkerchief, handing it to him. “You are all manner of full of yourself, Dammerung. You outfit any body.”
“There, you have conquered me.” Then, more seriously, “Are you hurting?”
She shook her head. “I am tired. I think I pushed myself too far today. No, don’t—”
He reached out to her and she was afraid that he would try to take the pain for her. She was sure she could manage, and he was hot and breath-spent and his face was bloodied.
“Nay, do not get your fur awrong.” He took her elbow. “We will go to the sitting room and be wealthy and lackadaisical now that I have pummelled my cousin and you have fretted on my account.”
Skander buttoned his braces and slid them back over his shoulders. “I will put you to quarter-staves this evening. Margaret should like that.”
“What are we for,” said Dammerung with a sly and martyrly look, “but to make sport for the ladies.”
“Tabby, with me.” Skander turned away. “I’ll see you two inside. Don’t bleed on my couches.”
Margaret and Dammerung went back inside; she was not sure which led and supported the other. Dammerung was still stiff and recovering his breath, but he seemed otherwise in good spirits. He put her down on a couch in the sitting room and collapsed beside her, his head leaned back, her handkerchief pressed to his nose. “I wonder if Aikaterine could be prevailed upon,” he yawned after a moment of quiet, “to bring us something to drink.”
“Something warm would be nice,” Margaret agreed sleepily. She rubbed at her eye and was surprised by how cold her knuckle was on her wind-blasted cheeks.
But neither of them made a move to call the girl in. The couch’s embrace, half pillows and half sheepskin, was luxuriously sweet. A golden clock with a corona of bright, blurred light was ticking on the mantelpiece and, with each hard tick, shook itself and its little spangles of light across the upswept face of the white marble chimney. Dammerung, his head thrown back on the wooden curve of the sofa, handkerchief clamped over his nose, seemed to be almost asleep. It was not until that moment that she saw how tired he was, languid and in shadow, scarred like the thing in the black marble cave which had set him free, still gathering the strength which had been scattered as with a blow upon the water. She wondered what he would look like when he was quite himself again.
He took the handkerchief away and gingerly ran a finger under his nose: it came away dry. With a sigh he crumpled it up and stuffed it into his trouser pocket and rose, aimlessly, and wandered toward the tall, thin, four-legged instrument set up under the windows. After a moment’s inquisitive pause, running his hand along the side of it and patting its arched neck, velvety-smooth like a stallion, he propped up the lid, turned up the cover, and sat down at the keyboard.
It was no good sitting alone. Margaret had taken up a pillow and had been holding it warmly in her lap; with a sigh of her own she put it away and got shakily to her feet to join him. He looked up over the sheet-music he was shuffling through and scooted to the end of the bench to leave her room.
“Can you play?” he asked, holding out a paper for her to see.
The notes were done up oddly—in circles, yes, but circles that were more suggestive of curlicues and Chinese script than of the musical written language she was accustomed to. She stared at it a moment before the sense began to bleed through the unfamiliar style.
“I can play better than my sisters,” she admitted, “but then, I applied myself better.”
“You strike me as the sort who would.” He set the sheet up on the piano. “Handle the accompaniment: it is less difficult. Has Skander tuned this…?”
He crooked his long fingers and set them on the keys. A sweet cord trembled up from the long range of strings in the body of the instrument, but it played weakly, as if its voice were coming from a long way off. Dammerung grimaced but continued. With an inexplicable flutter of panic Margaret hurried to join in.
The sly beast! As she played, catching the rhythm of the notes as she went, she knew he was deliberately getting her mind off her own tiredness. In a way, she realized as she left off to turn his page for him, she saw he had not done putting himself back into shape. He had pitted his body against his cousin’s stalwart shoulder. As his fingers moved deftly along the ivory keys she watched his attention fix on the whirl of notes and tiny, indicative dots, fix upon the woven fabric of sound emanating from the bed of strings. He had made Skander pluck his biggest, heaviest string to bring it back into tune: like his fingers on the keys, his mind was playing delicately on his finer nerves, matching them against the tuning fork of so intricate a task as playing a piano. It was but a small thing, a simple thing, but the strength was in the details.
She started when he began to sing.
I wandered the corridors of Time—
Those gilt-decked ancient halls of yore
(far off loomed the future’s door);
Gazed on marvel here, and there still more,
When a wall rose up on the watch’s spine:
A sudden obelisk rising square,
Like Babel, but taller, and still more fair,
Bricked with diamonds, sealed with gore.
What is this horror, what this sight—
Which seems to pierce the very night—
Fades pomp of kings to moth-wing grey,
Turns empires into a blank Pompeii;
From light is born and births more light?
I stared and could not say.
He leaned forward a moment and squinted at the page, fingers fudging beautifully on a complicated series of interconnected spirals, circles, and dots.
Pompeii I had passed, and Rome too;
This column topped them and still grew.
Its mortar was blood, its seams were stone—
I thought at times I heard it groan,
As flesh-and-blood is known to do,
As if its bricks were bone.
A mason came around the bend,
All covered with diamond-grit and sand:
Ill-omened guide, but the chance I grasped,
And said, “Hark! what is this mast
With stone sails set—for what land!—
Which all pillars has out-classed?”
“Da da-da da dum da da-da dum…I don’t remember the rest.”
Margaret finished the accompaniment and put her hands in her lap. “Why, what was it?”
He smiled sheepishly into the page. “Only a little song I was making once when I was on holiday here. By the twelve houses, that was years ago! I must have been only a little lad then, and reading some very fine epic literature, too, by the sound of it. I am mortified that I dug it back out at all. An’ sure it is no Shiggaion. My memory of it was better than this.”
She took the page from him. “The music was very pretty. You play well for someone who is several years out of practice. The poetry leaves things desired, though I feel—”
She stopped, suddenly, a blush of confusion rushing up her cheeks. A hundred painful memories flooded her mind and she wondered if she dared say the one word which fit in the keyhole, that unlocked the door behind which she strove to hide her unpleasant life.
But Dammerung was probing. “You feel what?”
Her thumb brushed the coarse, heavy paper. “I feel Rupert would not like it.”
Dammerung laughed, harshly, soundlessly. He took the paper back. “No? No, he wouldn’t. I wrote it about the kingdom of heaven. He would not be so fond of that.” With a casual gesture he let it go. The paper slipped on the air, circled, notes spinning, and came to rest on the polished hardwoods in a broken patch of sunshine. Sliding his hands into the back of his trousers to be sure the long tail of his linen shirt had not pulled loose, he said, “What can you do? Do you know anything by heart?”
“Hmm!” Margaret moved to command the centre of the instrument. Dammerung swivelled, straddling the bench, to give her room. “Life has taught me harsher things by heart, but I might be able to remember something.” She sat a moment in thought, passing completely over the last few months at Marenové House, past the Leeds railway station, past her mother and the nagging, to single, quiet moments she had stolen in order to make something beautiful out of the tedious task of learning an instrument. Those had been moments of respite for her and their memory touched a tender place, a place which smarted if she pressed too hard—as Spencer, she realized, must smart if Dammerung thought too closely on him. Time did not heal such wounds.
Lest he should somehow catch her thoughts, Margaret chose a song at random and began to play. She found she was rusty and that it did make a difference to be playing in the sitting room of Capys Lookinglass, in Plenilune, where they wrote their notes down in curious script. The European way of music, superimposed in her mind over the piano under her hands, confused her and muddled her notes until she was able to find her balance. She played a few bars of an old Welsh hymn and Dammerung, listening to the way of it, seemed greatly to enjoy it.
“It is different,” he said when she had finished, “and yet very like us. So they see our way in music there on Earth as well as our way in literature? That makes for good hearing.”
As it was a hymn, Margaret chose not to mention that, where she came from, the Welsh were not much thought of—but she was startled by a sudden bang of the keys as Dammerung got up, palms on the ivories, a look of surprise and worry on his face.
“Skander!”
His cousin stood in the doorway—he winced at the jangle of discordant notes as if they had struck him in the face—and his face, which had been battered but pleasant last Margaret had seen it, was drawn and white with horror. He had a piece of unfolded letter-paper clutched in one hand. He was looking blankly, horrified, at Dammerung, and did not seem able to hear him.
“Skander! What the deuce is it? You look as though you have seen my ghost!”
The joke, half-heartedly made, failed to touch Skander. He looked down at the paper, staring through it, then crossed as if in a trance to put it in Dammerung’s waiting hand. Dammerung did not look at it at first. He followed Skander with his eyes as the other went to the window and stood staring out blindly at the garden. Skander put his chin in his hand, covering his lips; his hand was trembling.
With an effort Margaret got up and leaned into Dammerung’s shoulder to look at the letter, but Dammerung shied away and read it to himself. She watched his eyes flicker over the lines, then widen and pale; his lips moved a little, but so little that Margaret could not read them. Then, “Shuh!” he gasped, disbelieving. “What—” Sitting back down hard on the bench he handed the letter to Margaret, staring, as Skander stared, blankly, unseeingly.
She turned the letter into the light and began scanning it, expecting a death. But it was worse than that. The beautiful script, etched in atrament and gold, breathing with formality, was an invitation—an invitation to the wedding of Woodbird Swan-neck and some man called Sparling. It struck Margaret like a physical blow. The paper slid; her fingers did not respond. Blankly she watched it drift between two long fingernails painted rose-gold and flutter softly to the floor, a pale, skin-coloured leaf against the dark-stained carpet.
“The cow!” hissed Dammerung.
Skander snapped round. “Dammerung!”
“Not her. Black Malkin.” Dammerung got up and stepped away from the piano as if to start pacing, but caught himself at the last moment and stood still, thinking so hard Margaret could see the green sparks snapping in his eyes.