Rats and Gargoyles (63 page)

"Nephew–oh,
Lucas.
" Zar-bettu-zekigal
chuckled. "Oh,
he’ll
be all right. He’s a good kid. Ask him from me
what’s he going to be when he grows up."

Andaluz roared with laughter, pushed a way for them
between men and Rats to Luka’s side. The older Katayan knelt, bending to drink from the canal’s clean cold
water. The Lady Luka stared out across the great canal at the heavily laden
vessel.

She held up a hand, gripping her bamboo cane. She
nodded, once, the motion folding the soft skin at her throat. Andaluz stepped to
her side. Her head moved on bird-delicate shoulders; she looked up at him.

"They’re here." She spoke barely above a whisper.

Andaluz strained to hear over the crowd’s babble:
voices and sudden laughter, a dropped bottle, a Ratling’s squeak. He frowned,
hearing only a gull’s cry and the creak of rose-laden masts.

"I don’t—"

The gull cried again: sharp, desolate, joyful.
Andaluz stared at Luka. He lifted one hand, touching the feathers wound into her
single braid.

Shadows of bird’s wings fell across her, across her
silver hair and orange-and-purple robes; across his blunt-fingered hand.

"Oh, lady." Sudden tears constricted his throat.

The woman lifted both arms. Rings glittered in the
sunlight. Her orange scarves swirled. Tiny bells on her leather belt jingled,
soft as hawks’ jesses. Bright-eyed, she laughed; raised her voice and called out
an answering gull’s shriek.

Dots flocked in the high haze.

Silence spread out into the crowd, Luka’s voice
soaring over theirs. Andaluz stood quite still, arms hanging at his sides, mouth
slightly open; openly relaxed into his own amazement.

They fell down from the sky–soaring in great
squadrons, clouds, flocks: hawks and eagles, gulls, thrushes, humming-birds;
owls and cormorants and wild geese; chaffinches and peregrine falcons and
sparrows . . . All the air full of wings, whirring, full of dusty feathers and
bird-calls and droppings; thousands of birds circling in a great wheel that had,
in its eye, the silver-braided bird-woman.

Andaluz softly said: "Oh, my dear lady . . ."

Luka’s raised hands shot forward. The cane reached
up towards the black vessel riding the canal. A great herring-gull caught the
hot still air under its wings, curved in flight to skim across the water and
land on the rail of the Boat.

A thrush flicked to land on a coil of rope.

Luka reached her hands out across the water. Hard
concentration furrowed her face. Bird after bird flew down, soaring towards the
high invisible deck.

Andaluz stared at figures crowding the rails,
figures with no shadows. He felt his own heart beat in his throat.

"So many dead . . ."

The Boat settled into the water. Flocks of gulls
and starlings circled the flower-draped sails. They dipped, curving flights to
cross the deck.

He moved as close to her as he dared, eyes still
fixed on the Boat. Ripples ran across the canal from its hull, dazzling in the
summer heat. He took a great breath of humid air. "Is that what I think?"

The small woman gazed up, plump face beaming. She
fumbled her cane; pulled the orange-and-purple robes looser at her neck, and
rubbed sweat from her forehead with the heel of her hand. She rocked back and
forth on her sandaled heels.

"Yes, my birds carry them back to the Boat, and,
yes, the Boat will carry them through the Day and back to birth again . . ."

Andaluz stared up. A hawk clung to the Boat’s
nearer rail. It raised half-open wings, head down, hacking a harsh call. It
choked.

The bright body and wings of a butterfly unfolded
from the bird’s beak, hacked into the air by its strangulated call. Andaluz
laughed. Drunkenly, the bright
psyche
flew up to cling to the bottom of a
rose-woven sail.

Elish-hakku-zekigal chanted, her voice croaking
quiet as a whisper. The Boat moved out, no faster than walking pace, flanked by
crowds on either side of the canal now; gliding on towards the lagoon.

A vast crowd of bright moths and butterflies clung
to the Boat, almost hiding the black wood with gold, scarlet, green, purple,
azure. Bird after bird swooped down to the deck, then soared up to fly off
across the city . . .

Figures at the rail glided past Andaluz. A black
woman in a faded green gown, who stretched her fists up to the sun and laughed,
silently, as if she couldn’t have too much of the light. A man pushing between
two brown Rats to lean on the rail, milk-white hair blowing in the summer wind;
gazing down at the crowd with wide pit- black pupils. A slender black Rat in a
scarlet priest’s jacket, who touched a white rose to her furred cheek and held
her other hand close by the rail, admiring how no shadow marked the wood . . .

More, more: too many to see and note.

"I—" Andaluz abruptly turned to Luka. The woman
rubbed at her wet eyes with plump fingers, smiling up at him. His own eyes ran
water. He folded his arm in hers, patting her hand, and lifted it to his lips
and kissed it.

She smiled with a brilliance that outshone the sky.

Elish-hakku-zekigal touched his arm and pointed.
Her chant croaked on, breathless, unfaltering. Freckles stood out on
Zar-bettu-zekigal’s pale skin. The Candovard Ambassador stared upwards,
following her gaze.

Six yards above, at the black rail, a shadowless
woman leaned her chin on her arms and frowned as if memory troubled her.
Slanting black brows dipped over reddish- brown eyes webbed around with faint
lines. Broken butterfly-wings tangled in her short greasy hair.

"Lady!" Zar-bettu-zekigal’s hand jerked up,
stopped, fell to her side. "Lady Hyena!"

Warm wind brushed the woman’s face, smoothing away
the frown. A ragged Sun-banner sashed her red shirt; and she fisted the cloth in
one hand and rubbed it against her cheek, her glance sliding away from the
Katayan girl.

Andaluz rested his arm across her shoulders.
"She’ll come back, Mistress Zari. If not to you, then to others."

Zar-bettu-zekigal broke from his embrace. "Oh,
what! I know
that
—"

Her greatcoat swirled about her pale calves. Loping
strides took her ahead, paralleling the woman at the rail. Her hands fisted at
her sides, black against dazzling light and water, as she came to the carved
steps where the canal opened out into the lagoon.

A frown dented the woman’s slanting brows.

Suddenly the woman grabbed at her hip, as if she
expected to find a sword there. She thrust her way down the rail, limping,
pushing her way between men and Rats; walking level with Zar-bettu-zekigal.

No shadow marked the deck.

A sweet smile broke over her face, relaxed and
content. She stopped, standing still; and–as no other on the Boat–lifted her
hand in farewell. Andaluz glanced down. Zar-bettu-zekigal’s eyes glowed.

"Did you see that! She said goodbye. To
me
!"

The Boat moved out into the lagoon, prow turning
towards the open sea. A humid wind shifted the masses of roses, and the
rose-leaves sprouting from rail and bow and spar. Limpid water rushed against
the curving tarred planks of the hull.

Andaluz shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat
slicked the grizzled hairs on his skin. The Lady Luka gripped Elish’s arm for
support and lowered herself to sit on a step, easing her sweat-pink feet into
the cool water. He stepped down beside her, resting one hand on her rumpled
robes.

"Andaluz, look!"

The harbor water flows, a net of diamonds; and in
lucid depths adamant limbs now stir: Chnoumen, Chachnoumen, Opener of Hundreds
and Thousands of Years, implicit in the lines of sun on water.

"Things can’t be the same after this . . ."

A tread behind warns him, that and the sudden
silence of the crowd.

Towering over the marble-and-gold palaces, Her
ancient terracotta smile secret and triumphant, the Decan of the Eleventh Hour
walks amongst Rats and humans that scurry like ants about Her feet. Bees hum
among the roses that chain her, sweet and white in the afternoon sun.

Andaluz tastes salt and sand in his mouth.

"I wish I knew my son were here and safe." Luka
raised her head, surveying all; bird-bright glance softening with dreamy
reminiscence. "He was always so delicate as a child, my Baltazar. His chest, you
know. He never did take
care
of himself."

Andaluz bit the inside of his cheek firmly. "Ah . .
. yes. Mistress Zari’s described Lord Casaubon to me so well that I feel I
already know him."

The younger Katayan woman gurgled. She caught a
light-standard and pulled herself up on to its marble base, gazing over the
heads of the crowd, searching.

Luka patted her silver braid, twisting a feather
more tightly in it. "I know he’s never been too proud to ask his mother for
help; that’s why I came at once. I’d never
say
that to Baltazar, of
course. He’d be dreadfully embarrassed. Did he look well when you last saw him?"

" ‘Well’?" Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned and pointed.
"See for yourself, Lady. Ei!
Lord-Architect!"

"Baltazar!"

Luka elbowed her way between people, Andaluz at her
heels. Andaluz glimpsed copper hair as a head turned.

An immensely tall and fat man walked beside the
Decan of the Eleventh Hour, stately and beaming. His shirt hung out of his
breeches, unbuttoned, stained black with machine-oil. The two top buttons of his
breeches had gone missing, and both stockings were unrolled to his ankles. He
moved massively, the crowd parting in front of him.

Luka hallooed: "My little baby
boy
!"

The Lord-Architect Casaubon stopped, sat heavily
and abruptly down on the top step of the quay, put his padded elbows on his vast
knees, and sank his face into his hands.

". . . Mother."

Slowly the Boat moves into distance, hazed in the
afternoon heat; gliding down the path of sun-dazzles on the water.

Still from the sky they pour down to follow it, the
birds that fly from thin-aired heights; and, high above, white stone wings curve
on air: Erou, the Ninth Decan, Lord of the Triumph of Time, soaring in the
changing brilliance of the sky.

"We will never be the same again."

Into the silence of gathered tens of thousands, a
clear voice sounds: the Decan of the Eleventh Hour, Lady of the Ten Degrees of
High Summer, whose gaze now scatters miracles over the god-haunted heart of the
world.

"Death is not final
—
"

From the Fifth Point of the Compass they come, walking out from the ruins of the Fane into the world.
In the great Districts that stretch across a continent, bells ring in abbey
towers, ships’ masts burst into flower, women and children and Rats and men
clasp hands and dance, in chains and pairs, through streets, and through the
midnight-marble ruins.

Stone-bodied, immense, beast-headed: god-daemons
stalk streets and parks and avenues, squares and palaces.

"–only change is final; and now it changes again!"

After millennia of construction, thrown down now
and laid waste, the Thirty-Six Decans walk out of the Fane’s ruins and into the
world.

White heat-haze lies over the full-leafed summer
trees, shadowing their green canopies blue.

Where she lies, in tall cow-parsley between field
and formal gardens, damp grass and shadow imprint her body. Borrowed shirt and
breeches shade her from sunburn.

Up on the hill-slope, past garden fountain-jets ten
meters tall and impromptu open-air feasting, the rotunda of the New Temple
curves across the sky. Warm brick, pennants and flags, tiny dots of faces where
people walk in wonder along its outer balconies . . .

Time enough to go back to crowds and questions in a
few minutes. The woman lies in the grass, hearing birds sing; now gazing down
past where the Arch of Days lies invisible under the foot of the hill, past the
new canal, to distant hills hollowed with blue shadow.

A large figure approaches, down in the valley,
walking along the canal path. Frock-coated: copper hair glinting a clear
quarter-mile.

The White Crow rolled over on her back, staring up
through the dust of meadowsweet, reaching up with scarred hands to play with the
swarming black-dot haze of bees. And abruptly shifted, sprang to her feet, and
began to run back up the hill towards the Temple.

A distant clock chimes.

Blazing white light reflected from pale gravel and
a pale sky. Zar-bettu-zekigal sprawled on the fountain’s marble rim, knees and
black dress spread apart, nostrils flaring to smell the day’s heat.

"I know the answers to every question now."

"Every question?" Lucas pulled at the neck of his
shirt. He lifted a wine-bottle to his mouth and drank. The young Katayan woman
sat sideways on the fountain’s rim, one foot up on the marble, her black dress
falling down between her knees and over her tail.

"I’m a Kings’ Memory: I know." She snorted. "Which
is more than
they
do."

Sheaves of paper lay scattered on the gravel about
her feet. Blackletter, with illustrative gray-and-black photographic images, and
narrow columns of print. The fountain’s odorous spray speckled them with water.

"Vanringham got
this
out fast enough!
Listen." She hauled a sheet of paper out from under her other heel.
The
Moderate Intelligencer’s
still-damp ink marked her fingers.

" ‘Visiting student Prince Lucas of our far-flung
colony of Candover played a curious part in events. It is creditably reported
that he authorized the students of the University of Crime to go on a spree of
looting, they only being discouraged at the last by the disclosure of his
background in the mechanic trade
—
’ "

"What!" Lucas, choking on a swallow of wine, sat up
and grabbed the paper. "I’ll sue!"