Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (23 page)

“
Now
,” says My Lady Charlotina in her tinkling shard voice, “We simply cannot keep the
child
all to ourselves, can we?” And she takes his hand, takes his busy attention, and drags him away for her wild and calculated introductions.

Afterwards, after the praise of those Jherek has met before, too many times past counting, and faces new to him: Miss Una Persson and the chronographer Brannart Morphail (who has not yet affected his prestigious hump and clubfoot), the Everlasting Concubine and O’Kala Incarnadine, the Duke of Queens in his sticky robe of peacock candies, half a hundred others, at least, and all bearing lavish compliments and more lavish gifts.

He still sits on the throbbing dais of living slate, cross-legged in the uncomfortable récamier, bramble weave and fish-hide, where My Lady Charlotina put him. The crowd is drifting away, breaking up like a sky full of muttering clouds. Lord Jagged leans close, Jagged, who has given him nothing and so must have saved it for the very last.

“Come with me, pretty Jherek,” and Jherek is glad to be free at last of the prickly récamier, steps gingerly over and through the bundles and carbuncles and twittering things in denim baskets. Follows Lord Jagged past the buffet of quivering, tentacled period treats and delicacies. Jherek’s stomach rumbles, and he pauses, taking a pastry with restless millipede legs.

“Hurry yourself along,” Jagged says, eager urge. “I’m afraid I’m growing terribly impatient for you to see my gift.” 

Jherek crunches through one end of the pastry and is surprised to find the gooey filling tastes pleasantly of rosemary and hyacinth, with vaguest bitter hint of wormwood.

“The Iron Orchid tells me that you’ve acquired a special, ah,
fascination
with 19th Century Dawn Age relics and culture.”

Jherek mumbles affirmation through the last bite of his pastry, which is dead now and losing some of its flavor.

“My Lady Charlotina insisted that I set it back here, out of sight of the guests, lest it spoil her illusions.”

They step through a final trefoil arch, brush aside gossamer and spider silk, and the shadows and murk, the rich swaths of gloom placed thoughtfully just so, are gone, and Jherek stands in warm sunlight, light filtered green-white through clear glass and foliage. He blinks, squinting as his pupils make their slow adjustments. 

A very long and vaulted dome, cast iron and glass, so high and fragile that Jherek cannot imagine why it does not collapse under its own weight; set about the walls are galleries and arcades framed with marble and fibafome pillars. And laid straight down the center, a careful, riotous garden of trees and exotic shrubs, fig palms, and date ferns that stretch far up to the ceiling, graceful, drooping branches that exactly echo the curve of the dome. A crystal lagoon sparkling along one edge and the garden is alive, teems with lumbering beasts and things that flutter through the humid air, wriggle in the turquoise waters. 

“Oh, Jagged,” he says and runs across flagstones to stand at the shining bronze rail that separates them from the garden. “Oh, it
is
marvelous, indeed! It is the best present ever! What exactly is it?”

“A Palaeozoic Museum,” Lord Jagged says and stands behind Jherek, his slender, alabaster hands on the boy’s shoulders. “I understand that they were quite the rage during the reign of Nixon Kennedy II, menageries of primordial flora and fauna.”

Jherek claps his small palms together – loud smack of childflesh against childflesh – frightening a flock of rooks and tiny rhamphorhynchi. The blackbirds and winged saurians rise squawking, midnight feathers and stiletto-beaked cloud, circling the dome, darting through the trees, drawing fresh gales of laughter from Jherek.

“I found some paintings and holograms in the rotted cities,” says Lord Jagged. “An archive devoted to the history of the Dead Sciences, I believe.”

There’s a sudden roar, then, and a howl of pain. Jherek looks and sees the clumsy, rhino-nosed iguanodon, the instant before it hauls its scaly, quadrapedal bulk into a maroon grove of cedars. The giant ground sloth that pursues the dinosaur across the impeccable meadow roars again, drags itself forward with sickle claws, disappears after its prey.

“Of course, I’ll have it transported back to your own house after the party,” and Jagged sits down on a wrought cardboard bench, a perfect replica down to the faintly glowing neon detail.

“May I stay here?” Jherek asks. “I mean, surely I don’t have to go back to the soirée instead.”

“Of course,” he says. “I can hardly blame you for tiring of all that tedious melancholy.” He stands, then, goes to Jherek and bends to kiss the boy, their lips and tongues brushing, tasting one another. Lord Jagged runs his fingers through Jherek’s white ponytail.

“No one could ever doubt the Iron Orchid is your mother, sweet Jherek.”

And then Jagged pulls his charcoal cape tighter about his shoulders and steps back through the entrance of the Palaeozoic Museum, back into the must and pallor of My Lady Charlotina’s Four Year Empire. 

And Jherek is alone. 

The walkway of flagstones and glazed ceramic tiles, Jherek has discovered, completely encircles the garden, gentle ellipse and no short stroll, all the way around. The air inside the Palaeozoic Museum is sultry and sticky hot, if he walks in the sun, and when he steps back into the shadows, cool as the halls of My Lady Charlotina’s caverns. It smells of growing things, and quarried stone, and the spoor of creatures extinct a hundred million years before Piltdown Man built his first primitive cities at Babylon and Muncie.

From the amber sandy shores of the lagoon, shallows awash with the spiral shells of Pre-Cambrian and Ordovician mollusks, pink clouds of trilobites and bronze-plated Devonian fishes, the garden rises, up through forgotten geological ages, to a grassy knoll where mastodons and a small herd of unicorns graze. The dark and tangled plots of jungle in between echo with deliciously frightful cries of life and death, sounds that prick Jherek’s bare arms and back with goose bumps.

And Lord Jagged has decorated the walls of the Museum as well, the tidy cabinet of a proper 19
^th
-Century geologist: quaintly ancient cases of oak and styroglass filled with the petrified bones of leviathans, the fossilized tracks of behemoths. Entire varnished skeletons of quartz and silica reassembled for his pleasure.

More than halfway round, Jherek comes upon a little bridge, an iron arch spanning a brook that exits the wall through the mouth of a stone porpoise and runs a short distance through a concrete sluice before joining the lagoon. He sits, winded, legs aching, but still as pleased as when he first laid eyes on Jagged’s gift. 

“You are my most fabulous friend,” he says, as a brightly plumaged archaeopteryx lights on the bronze rail, meaning, of course, Lord Jagged and not the ur-bird. “Except for dear Mother.”

Smallest splash then, and he peers down past his dangling legs, beneath the bridge and there’s the girl, the only child he’s ever seen besides his own reflection. She’s ankle-deep in the gurgling brook, fending off a curious mesosaur with the toe of one soggy boot. Jherek recognizes her at once as one of My Lady Charlotina’s Four Year fabrications. Her waxy complexion and skin like shriveled apple peel, grey eyes and raven, bone-threaded dreadlocks.

“Hello,” he says, and she only takes her eyes off the little reptile long enough to aim a distressed half-smile his way. “Whatever are you
doing
under there?”

The mesosaur, sensing her distraction, its opportunity, leaps from the water like a salmon, snags needle-teeth into one stockinged leg and the girl slaps it loose.

“Help me,
please
,” she begs. “I think they intend to eat me alive.” 

“I should think they’re entirely too small for that,” he says, but Jherek lies flat on his stomach, sun-warmed metal beneath him, a chilling breeze rising off the water, and holds out one hand to the girl, helping her scramble up and onto the bridge.

She stands before him, dripping, water pooling around her clunky black boots. Her entire costume is the same unremarkable shade of black, dull and lifeless matte that seems completely indifferent to the noonday brightness of the Museum: a black dress of some drab and unfamiliar fabric down past her knees, ragged black lace draping her wrists, a stiff black frock coat with big black buttons and a stiffer black fraise around her throat. A rather moth-gnawed black tricorne perched crookedly on her head.

“Doesn’t it get awfully tiresome,” he asks her, “always being dressed so somber?”

“It is respectful,” she says, haughty and sharp chin up. 

“Respectful of whom?” he asks, still lying on the bridge, but rolled over on his side so that he can see her better.

“Of the Presently and Future
Dead
, you blasphemous dullard.” She makes some odd gesture with her hands. 

There is a long tear in one of her black and purple candy-striped stockings and a small bloody place where the mesosaur broke skin, the hint of crimson and spreading stain of darker fabric. Jherek has never before seen anyone
bleed
.

“Do you think,” he asks her, “that if I went wading I might be bitten as well? It looks very interesting, to bleed.”

The girl cocks one black eyebrow and gives him a look that’s one part bewildered exasperation, one part dawning curiosity.

“Does it actually
hurt
?” Jherek Carnelian asks the girl hopefully.

“
Yes
,” she says. “Of
course
it hurts. What are you, some sort of bloody fool?”

“I don’t think so,” he says, “never having actually bled myself.”

“You’re a queer one, right enough,” and she stoops to unlace her wet boots. “The whole lot of you folk are stranger than wormfunk, if you’d have bothered asking me.”

Jherek sits up and watches, alert, as she drains her shoes, chases the tiniest of crustaceans from the left, and hangs them both to dry by black laces; the boots dangle from the bronze rail like twin parasites.

Jherek shrugs, deciding he might be better off if he saves bleeding for another time, better off changing the subject.

“Do you like it?” he asks her, indicating the garden and the Museum’s fossil-crowded walls. “Is it not the most charming gift ever?” 

“What is it?” she asks.

“A Palaeozoic Museum, of course,” Jherek answers. “My special gift from sweet Lord Jagged.”

“It’s very bright,” she says uncertainly, shading her eyes and squinting up at the high dome, the white sun blazing in through the glass and metal and twining ivy. “So much light is very disrespectful. I think I will be punished if Anubis or Ligeia find out I’ve been here.”

“Who?”

“My Elders,” she says, still watching the sky. “Master Copticians of Count Perfidy’s Court. I’m only in the second year of my apprenticeship. This sort of thing could keep me out of the Guild altogether.”

“Then why’d you leave the party?” Jherek asks. He has no clear idea what the girl’s talking about, but isn’t interested enough to ask too many questions, wishing she’d be happy to enjoy the muggy antediluvian afternoon, the gentle bleat of the hadrosauri resting in the shade of the fig palms.

“I didn’t
mean
to come in here,” she says, “I was only trying to find the Grand Mortis…”

Jherek yawns, realizes he’s grown quite sleepy in the heat, and the girl stops in mid-sentence. 

“You’re very rude,” she says.

“I didn’t mean to be, honestly,” Jherek replies, beginning to wonder what he might say or do that will not somehow offend the girl.

“Well,” she says, sitting down next to him, carefully smoothing her skirt and the long tails of her frock coat. “I expect it’s not your fault. I can’t imagine that you’ve been raised any better. Your folk are all so horribly disrespectful. Absolute heathens, the lot of you.”

“Heathens?” Jherek recognizes the word, but has always thought it some archaic botanical term.

“Yes,” she says, a new note of passion in her voice. “
Heathens
. Why, the very thought of so much sunlight, and then simply
refusing
to die. And what’s worse, coming back if any of you should ever happen to be killed!”

“Heathens, then, are people who don’t die?”

The girl sighs loudly, frightening away the archaeopteryx.

“If you were
not
a heathen, you’d never have asked such a silly and ignorant question. Heathens do not respect the Dead, but revel instead in the transient pleasures of life, disregarding the Holy Rites of Mortification. And along that road lies corporeal dissolution and eternal decay.

“Death is as sacred as Life, which it preserves, which is why we must preserve Death. That is why the words and holy deeds of the Guild Elders, the Copticians and Embalmers, the Tanners and Shroudsmiths, even the lowliest shiners of common bone, must be heeded.”

And she repeats the odd hand motion she made earlier. 

“Oh,” Jherek says, resigning himself to the truth, that he must indeed be a heathen, that everyone he loves must also be heathens. “I see. Do you have a name?”

“Sexton,” she says, staring gloomily between her boots as the hadrosauri. “Sexton Dakhmas.”

“And I am Jherek Carnelian, birth son of the Iron Orchid.”

“A heathen name,” Sexton Dakhmas sighs, “Poor lost Jherek. But I shall not blame you.”

“You are kind.”

“I am merciful,” she replies.

“Are you part of My Lady Charlotina’s menagerie, Sexton Dakhmas?” Jherek asks, having decided the girl is not an automaton, not a simple reproduction of a Four Year Empire child.

“My Lord Perfidy’s entire court was stolen from their crypts before I was born, abandoned here.” And she pauses, correcting herself. “No, abandoned
now
, I suppose. Nonetheless, we have struggled bravely to observe the Rites and preserve the sacrosanct remains of our Dead.”

Jherek nods his head, has heard stories of temporal abductions, has heard the Iron Orchid say to Jagged that more than one menagerie has been greatly enriched with beings rescued from time slavers.