Winterlong (40 page)

“All right. But
tell
me—”

We did. Or rather, Miss Scarlet did, embellishing my tale so that even I held my breath at certain points, and wondered had it really all been so dramatic—the horrifying tenure at
HEL
, followed by dangerous flight and pursuit and finally success with Toby Rhymer’s Players, not forgetting my bosom friendship with that acclaimed thespian Miss Scarlet Pan?

Jane listened dubiously.

“Well,” she said at last, when with paws joined Miss Scarlet had beseeched her to help and not betray me. “This is all a little hard to swallow, isn’t it?”

At Miss Scarlet’s offended expression she quickly added, “But
very
nicely told, Scarlet, very nice! But—well, suppose she
is
the one they’re searching for.”

She indicated me with a nod. I had for the moment become stock character in Miss Scarlet’s picaresque and not a participant in this discussion. “How am I to know that? And what is she going to do? If this Aviator is drawing the lazars and aardmen in to a search for you—”

She turned to me again. “Aidan Arent is too well known now in the City. Even if I don’t breathe a word—and I won’t—once a secret’s out it’s out, if you know what I mean. Someone else is bound to discover you, and then …” She circled her throat with her hand and made a choking sound.

We sat in silence for a few minutes. The sambar snorted, munching grass. Pale sunlight laced through the trees. A cricket sawed in the thickets, waking to the scant warmth. Miss Scarlet stared with sorrowful eyes into the forest, and I brooded on the Ascendant in the Cathedral who had vowed to find me, and cursed the labyrinth of chance and careless science that had brought me here.

Finally Jane said, “What exactly is it you
do,
Wendy?”

A cunning thought came to me: a means to escape. I looked up at her and asked, “Do you want me to show you?”

“Wendy!” Miss Scarlet said; but Jane had already nodded.

“Come here,” I said, drawing her to me. She lifted her face to mine. I pushed the hair back from her eyes, stared into them for a long moment. Still a little suspicious of me (rightly so, Jane!) but bold and unafraid. Then I kissed her. She pulled back, embarrassed, but I held her chin and brought her mouth to mine, my tongue probing between her lips until she sighed and closed her eyes. I waited until I felt her breathing quicken, then nipped softly at her lip, once and again, until blood mingled with the sweet salt in her mouth.

Bewilderment; a fiery burst of amazement and I behold her confused spectrum of desire and fear, liquid rolling eyes and a rich odor of the stable. Jane’s consciousness surprisingly powerful, a heated core burning through me so that I groan with pleasure, fall back as it flows over me, the warmth of sun and thick matted fur beneath her fingertips, undiminished awe as she watches a cinnabar fox being born, the damp scrawny mess of a hatching finch, a viper’s demon face breaking through a leathery shell with its egg tooth—

I recall myself, force my will upon the serpent’s triangular head until the black agate chips of its eyes slant, grow pale and green and glowing and its shining scales take on the contours of fluttering leaves. Before me the Boy shimmers into sight, face and body rippling as though seen through waves of heated air, His eyes alone steady and unwavering, green tunnels leading into darkness.

I pull back to consciousness, sit up drunkenly to peer at Jane’s face twisted into a look of blank yet intense concentration. Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked, trying to bring me into focus.

“That, how did you, what—” she stammered, swaying. Miss Scarlet clutched her arm as Jane reached for something not quite there, leaf falling through autumn light or whirring emerald-hinged beetle. Marveling, she brought her hand before her face, then suddenly doubled over as though struck.

“Aaah—” she groaned. She twisting to stare at me, choking on her words. “Take him!—make it
go!
—”

I stared at her coldly: she was but another of those bright figures moving through a gray landscape. Her pleas faded to a whisper of despair, the sigh of wind in leafless branches. Then I heard Miss Scarlet’s shrill voice, chattering and keening and it was
that
I could not bear, it was that which finally drew me back—

“Help her, Wendy! Please—”

I turned from her, bowed my head to meet Jane’s eyes. Dull now and exhausted, their light extinguished as she contemplated what
He
offered her, the wasted fields and stony ground that would give birth to no more birds, no more serpents or sambars or black-eyed vixens. Only livid sky to see and ashes to taste for eternity, only this and nothing more.

“Look at me,” I said. I squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that tears welled from them. I summoned Him, forced Him to turn that implacable gaze from Jane to me, His glittering emerald eyes staring without anger or surprise, their reserve broken all the same as they froze upon me.

“Leave her,”
I commanded.

He stared, cold and pitiless as a great cat disturbed at its repast. Then, slowly, He smiled, gnashing His small white teeth as He acceded me this small triumph; and faded into nothing.

The remainder of our trip to the Zoo was subdued. Jane crept back to consciousness, shaken as a child waking from a nightmare. Like a child she recovered quickly, although her eyes darted distrust as she walked beside me, and she held herself a little distant even from Miss Scarlet. Miss Scarlet was quiet upon her antlered mount, the sambar the only one of us unshaken, if silent as the rest.

My own thoughts were bleak ones. I felt a growing sense of shame at what I had done, and an odd bewilderment: because how was it that I was feeling shame? How was it that I felt anything and everything these days, until it seemed I was a roiling caldron of joys and terrors spilling over to scald those who loved me, those whom Justice had named as the only wall between myself and the dark?‘ Was that how I had pushed Him back, the Boy in the tree? Was it as Dr. Harrow had dreamed: that exposure to sensation, to real human emotion and not the refined chemistries of
HEL
, had rived new channels through the scars in my brain, so that I now began to feel what I had distilled from the hearts of others for all these years?

And could it be that feeling these things made one stronger, not weak and stupid as Anna and Gligor and myself had always thought? Strong enough that my own tongue might one day drown out the Small Voices, and my own eyes lock with the Boy’s and force Him back into the empty lands beyond sleep and dreaming?

But I did not know any of this; only guilt and sorrow and apprehension of the long night ahead. To ease the trek I went over my lines, and found myself repeating what Miss Scarlet had told me when we first met:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show …

Pondering these words, I came to the northwest part of the City, where I had never been before: where ancient gates rose from the trees and rubble to enclose the Zoological Gardens, and where if one stood upon the yellowing turf beneath the Regent’s Oak one might glimpse in the near distance the black cusp of the Engulfed Cathedral stabbing at the sky.

All was in an uproar when we arrived. A spotted cat, Rufus Lynx’s namesake, had escaped. It was to have been led by a very young Paphian girl (looking much relieved by the turn of events) to the center of the grass-grown amphitheater where our play would progress, and there presented with pretty ceremony to the Regent as the festivities began.

“Mmm! Jane Alopex! Mmm, they were looking for you in the Paradise Aviary, mmm mmm—”

A short heavyset man puffed up to greet us as we entered the Zoo barricades, waving back the two gatekeepers who hurried to his side.

“Rufus!” exclaimed Jane Alopex, dropping the sambar’s bridle and wiping her hands on her breeches.

“Yes yes, mmm, hallo, Rufus Lynx, mmm, Scarlet Pan, yes, h’lo, mmm, Aidan, yes yes yes—”

Nodding, he shook all our hands, not excluding the abashed Jane’s. The Regent was nearly bald, with a soft fine fringe of dark hair that might once have been red and stuck out in uneven peaks about his pink skull. This, along with his habit of humming to himself and his saffron tunic, gave him the manner of an agitated cockatiel. He wore muck-stained boots and bright trousers spattered with dirt and flecks of birdseed, and barely came up to my chin. He expressed vague pleasure at meeting Miss Scarlet once again, but scarcely seemed to see me at all. He was intent only upon recapturing the fugitive lynx.

“Now Jane, mmm, come along, it’s frightened the nesting hoopoes into the rafters and Fauna Avis seems to think you’re the only one can get them down again, mmm mmm.”

He took Jane’s arm and started to walk off with her, leaving the sambar to the care of the two gatekeepers. Jane patted it goodbye and waved at Miss Scarlet, then gazed at me coldly. But after a moment she grinned wryly. “I’ll find you and Scarlet later,” she said, and sauntered off.

This left me alone with Miss Scarlet. The early afternoon’s cool breeze licked at my neck and I shivered.

“Come, Wendy,” Miss Scarlet said in a low voice, slipping her small hand into mine. “I’ll show you where I grew up.”

We started along a neat little path of crushed tarmac, weeds and dead plants trimmed from its borders. In the near distance several odd buildings poked through the mesh of leafless trees and tall wild grasses. On the paths between these raced figures clad brightly as Jane Alopex, carrying buckets and trays and brooms in a rumpus of activity such as I had never seen elsewhere in the City.

We passed a red-roofed pagoda with a wrought-iron stork standing one-legged at each end of its peak. Two real storks stalked splenetically between these effigies, ugly and bald and with beady eyes as bloodshot as a Senator’s. When they met in the roof’s middle they paused, flapped their wings and clacked their bills together dolefully before continuing on their brooding perambulation.

“The Bird House,” explained Miss Scarlet. She waved at the storks, who glared down disapprovingly as we walked past.

Next was a stark glass and steel structure that gleamed coldly in the sun. Amorphous figures fluttered in some of its dark windows. In others tiny furred faces pressed close against the glass to stare out at us with wide mad eyes, baring their teeth and scrabbling at the glass as we went by. Miss Scarlet grew tight-lipped at the sight of them and quickened her pace, head bowed. After this a gentle slope rose before us, topped by a mock gothic cathedral with stone geckos and chameleons instead of gargoyles perched upon its eaves.

“You look uneasy,” said Miss Scarlet. She nodded as we passed a young boy pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones. “Which is understandable.”

I grimaced. I was not accustomed to having others know what I was thinking. Miss Scarlet laughed, her fingers tightening about mine. “When I first met you, Wendy, your face was blank as a block of wood. But now!”

She stopped and drew herself up, her dark agile face contorting as she mimicked my expressions: alarm, fear, wonder, pique, delight.

“I don’t look like
that,”
I said, offended.

“See for yourself.” From the satin reticule at her waist she withdrew a tiny mirror set in a sheath of aluminum. I grabbed it and tilted it before my face.

“I look exactly the same,” I pronounced. But as I squinted at my reflection I noted with surprise the new constellation of freckles arrayed across my cheeks. I pushed back a wisp of hair at my temple and rubbed the fleshy nodule hidden beneath. It felt smaller, less swollen. When I tipped the mirror to peer at it I saw that the scar tissue had indeed grown smoother. The node itself seemed to be shrinking. Turning to inspect its mate on the other temple I saw that it was no longer than my thumbnail. I let my hair fall back to cover the scars and returned the mirror to Miss Scarlet. She replaced it, then stroked her throat wistfully.

“I don’t suppose mine will ever disappear,” she said. She indicated a curving grass-grown pathway that crept over the hill. I followed as she clambered up, holding her skirts to keep them from dragging in the high yellow grass. “The Zoologists don’t have the sort of refined instruments that the Ascendants used with you. I’ll bring these scars to my grave.”

I winced as a long briar tendril whipped back into my face. “Mine weren’t supposed to heal.” I slapped the dust and clinging seed pods from my trousers, straightening as we stood at the top of the little rise. “And for all I know they’re not healing at all. I’ve had no medication for months now. Maybe this is terrible for me. Maybe I’m
dying.”

I pressed a finger to my temple, biting my lip as I realized I felt nothing: no customary ache as though I grazed against bruised flesh, no tremor of pain or longing triggered by the random firing of nerves. I was afraid then, to think that I might be losing my sole conduit for the only emotions I had ever known, those channeled into me at
HEL
through Emma Harrow.

“But maybe it is good for you, Wendy,” said Miss Scarlet. She pulled a burdock sticker from her skirt and popped it into her mouth. “Maybe the medication made you sick. Maybe now you can begin to get well.”

I shuddered at the thought of being so exposed to raw sensation. “No! I hear Voices. I see faces in the air. I had a seizure this morning and almost killed your friend Jane. I will never be well, Miss Scarlet.” I smiled bitterly. “I am as you see me: a Player only.”

Miss Scarlet nodded. She raised a finger as though to make a point but then stopped. “Well, perhaps. But I will show you something while we wait for Toby and the rest. Just don’t tell him that I missed my nap.”

I smiled and motioned for her to lead on.

Before us swept the curved gray buttresses of the faux gothic Reptile House. Lizards and serpents of chipped green enamel clung to its crumbling walls, half-hidden by a sheath of Virginia creeper gone crimson since the first frost. On the lintel above the main entrance stood a stegosaurus of red sandstone, its lumbering gait captured by some artisan centuries earlier. Crouching at its tail was a little carven mouse, winking slyly at onlookers below.