Winterlong (15 page)

“Tired?”

“No.” Instead I felt edgy, wide awake. At
HEL
we would have been dressing for dinner, or stealing things for a secret meeting in our quarters. And a certain uneasiness shaded all my thoughts now: fear of those brilliant eyes and the longing they kindled within me; fear of the loneliness that crept over me whenever I recalled Dr. Harrow’s white form lying still on the floor of the Home Room …

“Good. We’ll cross there—” He pointed, and I peered through the thicket. For the first time I saw the bridge spanning the murky river, its ancient fretwork rusted to a filigree of red and black, virginia creeper scalloping the tower struts in waves of green that shimmered in the warm breeze.

We followed the path of white stones. It skimmed the broken ribs of what had once been a road, hedged by tall bronzed oaks and a winding network of ditches now filled with stagnant water. Occasionally the rusted shell of an automobile or velocipede poked from the greenery or lay submerged in the brackish pools like gaunt pike. Once we heard something thrash in the ditch. Justice pulled me after him into the brush, and from there we glimpsed a pale slender appendage like an arm or tentacle gently plying the surface of the black water behind us. Justice watched impassively until it withdrew and the ripples subsided in the scummy pool.

In a few more minutes we reached the bridge. Justice shook his head as though testing the air. Then he turned to me, laughing in relief.

“This is it. We made it.”

And as I followed Justice I suddenly felt
Him
again inside me, stirring against the shell of nerve and bone that contained
Him.
I knew that the dark flash that tore through me was not my jubilation, not Dr. Harrow’s or Aidan’s but
His,
the Other now with me and within me.

He saw the City too, and the sight filled Him with a raging joy: joy and blood-hunger and a thirst for worship.

But for myself, crossing that river, the sluggish guardian of my childhood—what stirred me at first sight of the fallen City of Trees unfurled before me like a ruined flag, all the more valiant for its tattered heraldry?

The tales Dr., Harrow had told us of the City painted a grimy metropolis, justly forsaken: a cheap bauble not worth preserving. Its people died horrible deaths in the Long Night of the First Ascension—starvation, radiation sickness, plague. Its rulers had already fled west. There they perished in the wilderness or else joined the fledgling alliance that a century later would bring about the Second Ascension. Since then the City was held by the researchers (and camp followers) who had been sent to recover some of the knowledge of the Civil Servants, and then, in the chaos following the first mutagenic warfare, forgotten. They owned the City now: mad watchdogs of useless knowledge and their whores, feasting upon the ruins like fat ticks. And in the streets lived cannibal children and the geneslaves who preyed upon the living.

But always Dr. Harrow gave us a gray city not worth dreaming of, bound by a dead river.

Yet now the river itself seemed to have awakened at the sound of our footsteps, the heavy waters uncoiling to flash silver and blue beneath the bridge. Instead of the mud-colored fish that nudged at our riverwalk in search of crusts I saw huge golden carp, circling slowly to the surface to peer up at us with wise round eyes. And sea-birds whose cries streaked the still afternoon with harsh echoes of white shores, and ospreys and eagles hunting the noble carp, and otters like arrows striking the bright water. I froze.

“What is it?” Justice called, turning to look back at me. I shook my head and steadied myself with one hand upon the rusted ironwork.
Too much!
I wanted to scream; and instinctively crouched and turned to strike my forehead against a piling. Even there the world loomed: a string of tiny scarlet mites threading through the flaking green paint, a tendril of kudzu like a child’s beckoning finger. I started to scream.

“Wendy! Stop—” Justice ran and knelt beside me. He grabbed my wrists and pulled me from the railing so that my head thrashed against empty air.
“Stop it!”

I tried to beat myself against his chest and mute the clamor in my head, the sight of all those things moving and brilliant in the world. He hugged me tight, until it passed; until once more I could focus on the shattered concrete I knelt upon, the raveled hem of his ‘jacket, my knuckles laced with blood.

“Are you all right?” His face was white. “What
is
it?”

I breathed deeply, the way Dr. Harrow had taught me to breathe after a seizure; then shut my eyes and concentrated, trying to draw up a memory to stanch the horrible welling of sensation and light. But there was nothing there, nothing like this river, these birds, this golden haze rising to veil the heavy green of the eastern shore. Only a faint comforting memory of dead trees and hills, like a small cold nugget lodged inside me; and so I focused on that, until the dead calm soothed me and I could speak again.

“Too much,” I whispered, shielding my eyes from the sun. Justice draped his jacket about me and helped me to my feet.

“Can you walk?”

I nodded, pulling the folds of cloth about my face. “Too sudden,” I said.

“You’ve never been outside,” he said, as if truly realizing it for the first time.

“No. I told you.” I shook my head. “It will go away—just too sudden, too much light, all those—” I flapped my hand at the flickering shapes I could still just barely make out from the corner of my eyes, the gulls disporting along the bridge’s ramparts.

“I’m sorry. I—I couldn’t chance stealing more of your medication. Can you …”

But already I felt stronger—as I always did after capturing a new sensation, if the first violent impressions did not completely overwhelm me. I took a deep breath, then lifted my head.

“I’m better now,” I said. I stretched my arms and flexed my hands, feeling my blood quicken. I faced Justice. Far behind him I could just make out the shattered ramparts that had been my home. I turned to see the unknown City at bridge’s end, just a few feet away. And suddenly I laughed, so loudly that a skein of gulls shrieked and banked away from us. Then I ran the last steps to the far shore.

So we entered the City of Trees. In the growing dusk it looked more strange, the low ruined lines of buildings and verdant trees painted with a brooding light. The air still smelled of summer, wild grapes and honeysuckle and the river’s stagnant breath. We picked our way across the rubble of what had once been a road. Now oaks and gingkos thrust through the concrete to tower overhead. Beneath our feet ivy and thick runners of some thorny plant covered the shattered road.

We climbed a gently sloping hill scented with honeysuckle and the rich odors of other, strangely colored flowers. As we left it behind us the river’s soft rush fell into silence. Justice seemed more watchful now. Often he stopped to regard the remains of some ancient structure—a metal monument in the shape of a man, a pox of briar roses covering its face; a great machine of some smooth rivetless material still humming and vibrating despite the myriad skinks sunning themselves on its black surface—and he would click his tongue in dismay or curse beneath his breath.

“It changes so fast,” he said once. He stared in chagrin at the hollow body of an autobus collapsed in a ditch like some drowned beast, then glanced toward the horizon before us.

I was starting to feel dizzy and ill from hunger and thirst. Worse, the acetelthylene was wearing off. I could feel the effects of being without my medication for so many days: a hollow feeling inside my head and the Voices that, if I listened to them, would call my name repeatedly in soft yet urgent tones. These were the flickering embers of consciousness of all those patients I had tapped at
HEL
, flaring bits of memory and desire that would not die but were kept imprisoned within my mind by constant medication. But now they were starting to creep out again, as they did in dreams, or if my dosage was changed, or when I had been subjected to the ruthless probes of Dr. Leslie’s janissary medics. I stumbled as I walked, and swatted fiercely at my ears as if that might silence them.

Justice watched me with concern. “Are you all right? What is it?”

I cupped my hands over my ears. “The Small Voices.” That had been the name Anna and I gave to them as children; before Anna’s favorite Small Voice manifested itself as Andrew, her secondary personality.

Justice stared, baffled. I shrugged and continued to follow him through the underbrush. I was so exhausted that the Small Voices’ babble soon grew no more worrisome than the chirping of birds or crickets. After a few more minutes the flutter and squeaking of real birds roosting for the night drowned them out.

We passed a clearing ringed with white trees like birches. The air smelled of warm earth and goldenrod, but also of something foul, fetid water perhaps, trapped in a rotting stump. The sky glowed deepening blue and green. I sighed, feeling the breeze cool against my shorn skull, watched the long slender branches of the birch trees float upon the wind as though reaching for me. I had started toward one of them, thinking I might lie there to rest a moment, when Justice grabbed me and pulled me back.

“No, Wendy!”

I fell against him, and started to push him away angrily when he forced my head around. “Look—”

Against the boles of two trees a pair of figures reclined, as I had imagined myself resting beneath the lacy birches. Their heads had all but disappeared within the loose folds of their janissary’s uniforms. Willowy branches had wrapped themselves around them, snaking through flaps of yellow cloth to fasten upon their arms and chest and eyes. One had thrown his arm across his face, as though to shield it from the sun. Crumpled flesh hung from his wrist. Worms had bored small, perfectly round holes through his cheeks. The rest of his face seemed to have slipped from his skull like a mask of thin cloth.

The other gazed rigidly at us. As I stared back her mouth moved wordlessly. A black-winged beetle crawled from it, crept down her chin and onto the peaked collar of her uniform jacket. The net of branches rippled about her, their smooth white outer bark pulsing ever so slightly as they fed.

Justice turned away, tried to pull me after him; but I continued to stare. The scene wavered. Sunlight faded to gray twilight, white ribs and fleshless fingers emerging from black water, another tree whose limbs cracked beneath a body’s weight. He falls, turns bald white eyes to stare at me as I scream and look away—

“Shh, Wendy.” Justice drew me from the clearing, pushing back vines loud with bees and sparrows until we found a safer spot. “Here, sit …”

I found a large stone and settled there, breathing deeply until I felt calm again.

“Betulamia,” he explained. He sat a few feet from me, propping his feet on another rock and leaning so that his chin rested on his knees. “But we were safe; they had already fed.”

I tore leaves from an oak sapling at my feet. “It wasn’t that, really. It—They reminded me of something else.”

We rested for a few more minutes. Justice peered through the undergrowth, first north, then west, trying to get his bearings. When we started off again I asked, “Where are we going?”

“There’s a woman of my House who lives nearby; if she hasn’t left, or been driven out, or …”

The woods fell back. Before us opened a wide grassy avenue, speared by small saplings and the green mounds of overgrown autovehicles. To one side it sloped down to the river. A hill continued upward to our left, and there loomed a gold-domed building, its stained marble pillars choked with wisteria and ivy. Sunset ignited the dome so that I blinked to stare at it; but. from a narrow barred window at ground level a fainter light gleamed.

“She’s there!” Justice said. I let him drag me, stumbling over a moss-grown curb to where a tiny patio building had been trimmed of underbrush. I squinted to read broken letters on the dome overhead:

RI S NATION     ANK

On the door itself hung a small hand-lettered wooden placard, the words spelled out in faded but carefully drawn cursives:

LAST NATIONAL BANK

Lalage Saint-Alaban, Prop.

Love Philtres

Tea Readings

Psychotropic Drugs

“What is
this?”
I began; but Justice had already raced up the steps leading to a set of huge metal doors. A great steel ring hung there. Justice banged this once, twice. As the third clang echoed down the empty avenue a tiny slit opened in the door. An alarmingly bright blue eye peered out.

“Lalage!” he yelled. “It’s Justice—”

The blue eye disappeared. A harsh grating signaled bolts being drawn. One of the doors creaked inward.

“Justice!” In the shadows I glimpsed a small figure that drew up sharply at the sight of me. Justice stepped past me into the room. I hesitated.

“It’s all right, Wen—
Aidan,”
he called back. “It’s only Lalage.”

“Justice,” the woman rebuked. She peered at me suspiciously.

“A friend, Lalage. A
Patron.”

“Oh, all right,” she sighed, and pulled the door back another inch.

It opened onto a great chamber. The only light filtered from windows high overhead, touching the room with glints of green and gold. Tables made of dismembered automobiles were scattered across the floor, chairs over-turned or leaning against them haphazardly. Small shapes fluttered around them. There was a strong animal smell.

“Thank you, Lalage. I wasn’t certain you’d still be here …” His voice faded as he stepped farther into the cavernous room.

The woman laughed, turning a series of bolts and locks within the door. “Where else would I go? Too old for the duties of pleasure now. And you can’t really picture me in the kitchen at Saint-Alaban, can you, Justice?”

They laughed. Lalage crossed the room to embrace Justice, leaving me to wander among the tables of a forsaken hospice. The fluttering shapes were birds, guinea hens and peahens and doves. Peacocks dragged soiled trains through the muck. In the shadows a number of small barred chambers protected shattered glass monitors and more empty chairs.