Wonders of the Invisible World (4 page)

I got up, went into my office, and called Durham.

“I could have stopped it,” I said tersely. He was silent, not because he didn’t know what I was talking about, but because he did. “I was an angel from God. I could have changed the message.”

“You wouldn’t have come back,” he said simply. It was true. I would have been abandoned there, powerless, a beardless youth with breasts in a long robe raving about the future, who would have become just one more witch for the children to condemn. He added, “You’re a researcher. Researchers don’t get emotional about history. There’s nothing left of that time but some old bones in a museum from where they dug them up to build a station complex. A gravestone with an angel on it, a little face with staring eyes, and a pair of cupid wings. What’s to mope about? I put a bonus in your account. Go spend it somewhere.”

“How much?”

He was silent again, his eyes narrowed slightly. “Not enough for you to go back. Go get drunk, Nici. This is not you.”

“I’m haunted,” I whispered, I thought too softly for him to hear. He shook his head, not impatiently.

“The worst was over by then, anyway. Heroics are forbidden to researchers. You know that. The angel Mather dreamed up only told him what he wanted to hear. Tell him anything else and he’d call you a demon and refuse to listen. You know all this. Why are you taking this personally? You didn’t take being a goddess in that Hindu temple personally. Thank God,” he added with an obnoxious chuckle. I grunted at him morosely and got rid of his face.

I found a vegetable bar in the kitchen, and wandered back into the living room. The space-thieves were sneaking around a zoo on the planet Hublatt. They were all imaging animals onscreen while their characters studied the specimens. “We’re looking for a Yewsalope,” Brock said intently. “Its eyeballs are poisonous, but if you cook them just right they look like boiled eggs to whoever you’re trying to poison.”

The animals were garish in their barred cells: purple, orange, cinnamon, polka-dotted, striped. There were walking narwhales, a rhinoceros horn with feet and eyes, something like an octopus made out of elephant trunks, an amorphous green blob that constantly changed shape.

“How will you know a Yewsalope when you see it?” I asked, fascinated with their color combinations, their imagery. Brock shrugged slightly.

“We’ll know.”

A new animal appeared in an empty cage: a tall, two-legged creature with long golden hair and wings made of feathers or light. It held on to the bars with its hands, looking sadly out. I blinked.

“You have an angel in your zoo.”

I heard Brock’s breath. Indra frowned. “It could fly out. Why doesn’t it fly? Whose is it? Anyway, this zoo is only for animals. This looks like some species of human. It’s illegal,” she said, fastidiously for a thief, “on Hublatt.”

“It’s an angel,” Brock said.

“What’s an angel? Is it yours?”

Brock shook his head. They all shook their heads, eyes onscreen, wanting to move on. But the image lingered: a beautiful, melancholy figure, half human, half light, trapped and powerless behind its bars.

“Why doesn’t it just fly?” Indra breathed. “It could just fly. Brock—”

“It’s not mine,” Brock insisted. And then he looked at me, his eyes wide, so calm and blue that it took me a moment to transfer my attention from their color to what they were asking.

I stared at the angel, and felt the bars under my hands. I swallowed, seeing what it saw: the long, dark night of history that it was powerless to change, to illumine, because it was powerless to speak except to lie.

“Matrix?” Brock whispered. I closed my eyes.

“Don’t call me that.”

When I opened my eyes, the angel had disappeared.

O
ut of the
W
oods

The scholar came to live in the old cottage in the woods one spring.

Leta didn’t know he was there until Dylan told her of the man’s request. Dylan, who worked with wood, cut and sold it, mended it, built with it, whittled it into toothpicks when he had nothing better to do, found the scholar under a bush, digging up henbane. From which, Dylan concluded, the young man was possibly dotty, possibly magical, but, from the look of him, basically harmless.

“He wants a housekeeper,” he told Leta. “Someone to look after him during the day. Cook, wash, sew, dust, straighten. Buy his food, talk to peddlers, that sort of thing. You’d go there in the mornings, come back after his supper.”

Leta rolled her eyes at her brawny, comely husband over the washtub as she pummeled dirt out of his shirts. She was a tall, wiry young woman with her yellow hair in a braid. Not as pretty or as bright as some, but strong and steady as a good horse, was how her mother had put it when Dylan came courting her.

“Then who’s to do it around here?” she asked mildly, being of placid disposition.

Dylan shrugged, wood chips from a stick of kindling curling under his knife edge, for he had no more pressing work. “It’ll get done,” he said. He sent a couple more feathery chips floating to his feet, then added, “Earn a little money for us. Buy some finery for yourself. Ribbon for your cap. Shoe buckle.”

She glanced down at her scuffed, work-worn clogs. Shoes, she thought with sudden longing. And so the next day she went to the river’s edge and then took the path downriver to the scholar’s cottage.

She’d known the ancient woman who had died there the year before. The cottage needed care; flowers and moss sprouted from its thatch; the old garden was a tangle of vegetables, herbs and weeds. The cottage stood in a little clearing surrounded by great oak and ash, near the river and not far from the road that ran from one end of the wood to the other. The scholar met her at the door as though he expected her.

He was a slight, bony young man with pale thinning hair and gray eyes that seemed to look at her, through her and beyond her, all at the same time. He reminded Leta of something newly hatched, awkward, its down still damp and all askew. He smiled vaguely, opened the door wider, inviting her in even before she explained herself, as though he already knew.

“Dylan sent me,” she said, then gazed with astonishment at the pillars and piles of books, scrolls, papers everywhere, even in the rafters. The cauldron hanging over the cold grate was filthy. She could see a half-eaten loaf on a shelf in the open cupboard; a mouse was busily dealing with the other half. There were cobwebs everywhere, and unwashed cups, odd implements she could not name tossed on the colorful, wrinkled puddles of clothes on the floor. As she stood gaping, an old, wizened sausage tumbled out of the rafters, fell at her feet.

She jumped. The scholar picked up the sausage. “I was wondering what to have for breakfast.” He put it into his pocket. “You’d be Leta, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can call me Ansley. My great-grandmother left me this cottage when she died. Did you know her?”

“Oh, yes. Everyone did.”

“I’ve been away in the city, studying. I decided to bring my studies here, where I can think without distractions. I want to be a great mage.”

“Oh?”

“It is an arduous endeavor, which is why I’ll have no time for—” He gestured.

She nodded. “I suppose when you’ve become a mage, all you’ll have to do is snap your fingers or something.”

His brows rose; clearly, he had never considered the use of magic for housework. “Or something,” he agreed doubtfully. “You can see for yourself what I need you for.”

“Oh, yes.”

He indicated the vast, beautifully carved table in a corner under a circular window from which the sunny river could be seen. Or could have been seen, but for the teetering pile of books blocking the view. Ansley must have brought the table with him. She wondered how he had gotten the massive thing through the door. Magic, maybe; it must be good for something.

“You can clear up any clutter in the place but that,” he told her. “That must never be disturbed.”

“What about the moldy rind of cheese on top of the books?”

He drew breath, held it. “No,” he said finally, decisively. “Nothing on the table must be touched. I expect to be there most of the time anyway, learning spells and translating the ancient secrets in manuscripts. When,” he asked a trifle anxiously, “can you start?”

She considered the various needs of her own husband and house, then yielded to his pleading eyes. “Now,” she said. “I suppose you want some food in the place.”

He nodded eagerly, reaching for his purse. “All I ask,” he told her, shaking coins into her hand, “is not to be bothered. I’ll pay whatever you ask for that. My father did well with the tavern he owned; I did even better when I sold it after he died. Just come and go and do whatever needs to be done. Can you manage that?”

“Of course,” she said stolidly, pocketing the coins for a trip to the market in the village at the edge of the woods. “I do it all the time.”

She spent long days at the cottage, for the scholar paid scant attention to time and often kept his nose in his books past sunset despite the wonderful smells coming out of his pots. Dylan grumbled, but the scholar paid very well, and didn’t mind Leta taking leave in the late afternoons to fix Dylan’s supper and tend for an hour to her own house before she went back to work. She cooked, scrubbed, weeded and washed, got a cat for the mice and fed it too, swept and mended, and even wiped the grime off the windows, though the scholar never bothered looking out. Dylan worked hard, as well, building cupboards and bedsteads for the villagers, chopping trees into cartloads of wood to sell in the market for winter. Some days, she heard his ax from dawn to dusk. On market days, when he lingered in the village tavern, she rarely saw his face until one or the other of them crawled wearily into bed late at night.

“We never talk anymore,” she murmured once, surprisedly, to the dark when the warm, sweaty, grunting shape that was Dylan pushed under the bedclothes beside her. “We just work and sleep, work and sleep.”

He mumbled something that sounded like “What else is there?” Then he rolled away from her and began to snore.

One day when Ansley had gone down to the river to hunt for the details of some spell, Leta made a few furtive passes with her broom at the dust under his worktable. Her eye fell upon a spiral of gold on a page in an open book. She stopped sweeping, studied it. A golden letter, it looked like, surrounded by swirls of gold in a frame of crimson. All that richness, she marveled, for a letter. All that beauty. How could a simple letter, this undistinguished one that also began her name, be so cherished, given such loving attention?

“One little letter,” she whispered, and her thoughts strayed to earlier times, when Dylan gave her wildflowers and sweets from the market. She sighed. They were always so tired now, and she was growing thinner from so much work. They had more money, it was true. But she had no time to spend it, even on shoes, and Dylan never thought of bringing her home a ribbon or a bit of lace when he went to the village. And here was this letter, doing nothing more than being the first in a line of them, adorned in red and gold for no other reason than that it was itself—

She touched her eyes, laughed ruefully at herself, thinking, I’m jealous of a letter.

Someone knocked at the door.

She opened it, expecting Dylan, or a neighbor, or a tinker—anyone except the man who stood there.

She felt herself gaping, but could not stop. She could only think crazily of the letter again: how this man too must have come from some place where people as well as words carried such beauty about them. The young man wore a tunic of shimmering links of pure silver over black leather trousers and a pair of fine, supple boots. His cloak was deep blue-black, the color of his eyes. His crisp dark curls shone like blackbirds’ wings. He was young, but something, perhaps the long, jeweled sword he wore, made both Dylan and Ansley seem much younger. His lean, grave face hinted of a world beyond the wood that not even the scholar had seen.

“I beg your pardon,” he said gently, “for troubling you.” Leta closed her mouth. “I’m looking for a certain palace of which I’ve heard rumors all my life. It is surrounded by a deadly ring of thorns, and many men have lost their lives attempting to break through that ensorceled circle to rescue the sleeping princess within. Have you heard of it?”