The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  No crying! No crying. Save it for the painting, every bitter tear.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Raining stood staring at the canvas she had been working on all day. She had slept one hour in the last forty-three. Her hands were shaking and her skin felt thin and dry like paper and easy to rip. She knew she must be tired, but she could not feel it. She took a step back and examined her work. It was Nick and Lark and they were standing in a snowy country, standing together at the top of the Bridge on the Southside, and it was Raining who was not in the picture, Raining who was not there. Raining who had abandoned them.

  Her mother, Bell, came downstairs, belting her dressing gown. “Rain? Go to bed, sweetheart. You won’t be able to think until you sleep.”

  Raining laughed without looking away from her canvas. “I guess they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “You can’t help Nick or Lark by making yourself sick.”

  “I can’t help them any way at all, Mom. I made very sure of that.”

  “You did what you could do.”

  “Yes, it always feels that way.” Raining picked up a morsel of white paint and cut it roughly into some dark blue with her palette knife, careful not to blend the colors too much, then picked up the paint on her little 00 brush and touched a few more highlights into Lark’s black-shining hair. “Everything I do feels right at the time…and somehow, I always end up here in the Forest. Alone.”

  Bell sighed and touched her daughter’s cheek with her birch-white hand. She looked at the painting. “That’s very good.”

  “Wu Tao Tzu once astonished the T’ang court by creating a marvelous celestial landscape for the Imperial Palace, and then walking into the painting. That would be good magic, wouldn’t it? I could paint Lark, maybe, and pull her out. Drag Nick back from the North Side.”

  “Can I make you some tea?”

  “I was always afraid to paint like this,” Raining said. “Yes please. Blackberry.”

  The cookstove was down to a dull orange ember. Bell widened the flue and dug another piece of dried poplar out of the woodbox. Opening the stove door she blew gently on the coals until the fire turned yellow. She stuffed in the new faggot. The fire clasped it with thin yellow arms and licked black lines onto its pale flesh. Bell went to get the kettle.

  Raining stood back from the painting. She had taken extraordinary trouble over Nick’s hands, his thick oil-stained fingers. In all his enormous silence it was always his touch she understood, his hands speaking even when his voice was silent. Silent, silent, silent under the snow.

  Bell came to stand beside her. “This is the best thing you’ve ever done.”

  Raining touched up a shadow under one of Nick’s eyes.

  “Yeah. And you know what I have now?” she said. “Paint…Nothing but goddamn paint.”

  She took her palette knife and stabbed into the canvas. It wouldn’t go all the way through. She swore and slashed up and down the painting, smearing the paint around, picking up big gobs of blue and green from her palette and splattering them like mud across the surface. Then she fell into the big armchair and doubled up with her face in her hands and wept, huge shocking sobs, her eyes blind with tears, her heart dissolved in utter desolation.

  When the tears finally stopped, her mother and the fire still remained. Raining watched the fire for a long time.

  Finally she rose. Into a basket she put a suit of her father’s good warm clothes, a box of wooden matches, and a pair of wool gloves. From the kitchen her mother brought her some bread and dried fish and mushrooms. From her studio Raining gathered a set of paintings, miniatures she had made while still on the Southside: one of Lark on her first birthday, and one of them all together as a family. Then, reluctantly, one of herself, a little self-portrait she had made, back when she and Nick were very much in love. It hurt to look at it. Then she took a matte knife from her studio and cut a long tress of her hair and put that in the basket too. Then she took a handful of kindling from the woodbox beside the stove. Last she took the painting she had made that day, with the spatters of blue and green paint she had flung on it like tears, and the rips where she had punctured it unmended.

  She crept to the hallway closet, eased out a wool coat and pulled on a pair of canvas shoes. Her mother brought her a flashlight from the oddments drawer in the kitchen and kissed her on the cheek and held her for a long moment. When she let go, Raining eased the porch door open and stood on the threshold. Then she stepped out, and the door closed behind her with a click. She thumbed on the flashlight and made for the nearest path with her basket of sacrifices. She was half hoping Wire would be waiting for her at the edge of the wood, but she wasn’t.

  It was deep in the night. Far above the treetops the sky had cleared, and a cold wind had sprung up from the north. The towering Douglas firs swayed and rocked, shaking the day’s rain down in gusts. The cold drops fell on Raining. She did not put up her hood but let them fall.

  A long time she walked and always climbing, heading for a high and secret place she knew. At last, breathing hard with her basket at her side, she came into a clearing on the top of a great hill. The wind blew hard and cold. Stars shone above her between rags of flying cloud.

  There was a circle of stones in the center of the clearing and there she built her fire, with paper on the bottom held by rocks against the wind, and twigs on top, and kindling, and above that a few dry sticks. The wind played tricks on her ears. Downslope, an animal seemed always to be scrambling up through the brush. Branches squeaked and moaned. Far away she could hear the distant buzz of Southsider helicopters patrolling the edge of the Forest, reluctant to venture inside. Raining smiled mirthlessly. As well they should be.

  She set a match to the paper and nursed her fire, sitting with her back to the north wind so it would not rush among her little flames and blow them away. The fire flared, flickered, struggled, caught. She tended and fed it. When it was strong enough, she sat back, feeling the damp earth cold and wet beneath her haunches.

  The wind was strong. It pulled the flames into giddy tornadoes that swirled and vanished over the pale wood. The fire’s movements were jerky, sudden, desperate. It curled steadily around some logs, blue flames bending like stalks of grain before a smooth wind. Elsewhere it burst into incendiary blooms. She wished she could paint in those hungry colors.

  She put in the things she had brought for Nick, the clothes and the food and the pictures of their family, and the fire consumed them all, and she put in the tress of her own black hair and the fire bore it away. Last she put on the painting she had made that day and it blazed up, smoking and stinking of oil. The canvas went black and rotten with fire and then the flames devoured it.

  When the fire had taken everything she had to give, it shrank, falling in on itself, sinking down. The wind seemed colder now, stealing the flames’ warmth away, but when she tried to sit downwind the smoke choked her and burned her eyes. She settled for stretching one leg downwind so the heat could pour over it.

  The fire gave off many sparks. These the wind pulled into thin, glowing streamers. One by one or in groups of four or five they threw themselves out of the embers and rushed into the night. Most were instantly extinguished. Some lasted six or seven meters before dying. A very few curled over the slope of the hill and hurtled out of sight, still burning. She watched them go. The stars above her burned and burned, and the wind rushed under them.

  Slowly Raining stretched her hands out above the fire. Heat welled up in her palms and the firelight filled them with trembling shadows, so they were strange to her. She was grateful for the warmth that filled her hands. Sparks whirled and jumped around her fingers. At first she was cautious, bracing herself for quick needles of pain when they touched her, but they never did. Whether the wind flowing around her fingers carried the sparks away, or for some other reason, she was not burned. Slowly her shoulders relaxed. She no longer heard the sound of animals in the brush. The fire was everything, its flames and embers.

 
Long, long into the night she hunched over it, dipping her hands into its light as if into holy water. Watching as the sparks whirled and flew, light breaking around her hands like water streaming around a rock. Ten thousand fragile threads of flame, slipping between her fingers and rushing into the enormous dark.

  From out of the night a voice said, “I have come.”

  Raining jerked her head up and stared, her eyes blind from staring at the fire. Flames still seemed to dart and flicker before her. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I saw your fire,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice, a god’s voice, not harsh but weary. To hear it was to feel the silence of long journeys. Raining thought she had never heard a voice that sounded so alone.

  Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness a little, and she could make out the dim shape of a man across the fire from her. He was seated downwind; the smoke from the fire blew around him like clouds, revealing and obscuring his pale face. He did not seem bothered by it, but leaned forward as if to warm himself. His two hands broke into the field of firelight. They were pale hands, thick-fingered and worn with hard work. Somehow they reminded her of Nick’s. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “The Southsiders call me John Walker.”

  “John Walker!” Raining said, but she did not disbelieve. “But—Why have you come here?”

  “I saw your fire,” he said again. A corner of canvas writhed and twisted on the edge of the fire, sending up a line of oily smoke. “You called for Nick. He could not come, so I came in his place.”

  “You know Nick?”

  John Walker held up his hand. “Wait! Someone is coming.” Branches squeaked and twigs snapped, heading upslope out of harmony with the wind.

  A moment later a last branch shook and two more people stumbled into the clearing. Raining could make out nothing in the darkness, but John Walker seemed to know them. He stood. “I have been waiting for you,” he said.

  Chapter

  Twenty-two

  Emily had been lost in the Forest for what seemed like a very long time. It was late, it was dark, and though mercifully the rain had stopped, she was fairly certain that if someone had offered her a stiff shot of rye she would have taken it and to hell with religion. “‘So dear, what have you given up for Lent?’” she muttered. “Sleeping and eating, to start. I’m drinking nothing but muddy rainwater. I have also decided to magnify the Lord by going without conventional toilet supplies. Or toilets.”

  She hadn’t started talking to herself until nightfall. Until then, the Forest had been bearable. Cold and wet and gloomy, yes. Horribly cramped, God yes. Her eyes had literally ached with the desire to look across an expanse: snow, water, plains, anything. But in the Forest every view was choked off, smothered by brambles, tree trunks, limbs, dips in the path. It had stopped raining some time in the late afternoon, but if there were stars above the tangled branches, Emily could not see them. A wind had come up, making the pines wave and bend like stalks of prairie grain. It was much louder than she would have expected, gust after gust of wind crashing and foaming through the treetops. Branches cracking and splintering, dead limbs breaking off and smashing to the ground.

  Even above the noise of the wind she could hear the helicopters. Back and forth, farther and nearer, sweeping overhead with methodical efficiency. She had been involved in a lot of search-and-rescue operations looking for stray troops or lost children. She knew the drill. Except this time, she guessed, they were looking for her.

  She had been so focused on getting Li Mei to smuggle her out of the Southside before Winter could cut her angel free that she had eaten little at the banquet last night. All day long she had been regretting the cabbage rolls and perogies she had left uneaten. Served her right for not attending to basics. She spent a miserable hour in the late morning remembering the exact smells of steaming borscht and hot raspberry cobbler.

  Here her Lenten training did her some good. Five times a year she observed total fasts, no food at all from sunset to sunset, so at least she was familiar with the pattern of her body’s complaints and seductions. In a way, this fast was easier than most; usually she had to use tight discipline to keep her desires in check. But this time there was no food to eat, no temptation at all, and she could indulge herself in food fantasies that were positively explicit.

  She was also extremely lucky to still be wearing her foil parka. Even though the temperature here in Vancouver was laughably mild compared to what she was used to at home, Emily kept her hood on and drawn tightly around her face, and she tried to keep moving. She was afraid that if she stopped and gave in to sleep, she might slip into hypothermic shock. Even lost in the Arctic she could at least have built an igloo and let the snow insulate her sleeping space, but here in this damned wet wood everything conspired to leach heat away from her. Never too much at a time, it was too mild for that, but a small, steady drain. Bleeding warmth as if from a small cut that would not close.

  The infrared scopes her Grandfather’s trackers would be using were the other reason the parka was a godsend. Besides being an excellent insulator, the foil was also highly reflective; standing on the prairie without it, she would have glowed like a bonfire in an IR scope. A tracker’s familiar might well be trained to pick out the heat signature of a soldier wearing foil gear, so she kept her face turned down and her hands jammed into her pockets to make her IR profile as scant as possible. She wondered what her signature looked like. A fox? A badger? Hopefully this wood was crawling with such small heat traces.

  Saint Barbara and Saint Simeon, it was chilly. She couldn’t keep walking forever. Sooner or later exhaustion and hunger would catch up with her.

  At first, fear had kept her going. Early in the morning she had actually heard sounds of pursuit behind her. Terrified, she had labored to put on speed, running through an agonizing stitch in her side. Then she tripped over a root hidden in a puddle of water and fell so hard her head rang. Covered in mud, she clawed wildly for purchase and lurched back into a run before the fog had fully cleared from her eyes.

  She had dropped into a stumbling jog soon after, her lungs beating like dying moths in her chest and her mouth feeling as if it were stuffed with wet wool. Then down to a walk. Then down to the ground. She lay there for some minutes, heart pounding so hard it hurt her chest and made her body shake, trying to listen through her own ragged, whooping gasps for sounds behind her. She was determined to stagger off the path and into the bush to hide if they were still coming. They weren’t.

  Long minutes had passed. From time to time she heard distant shouts. Twice she caught the sound of railgun fire, very far away. Once, much later in the afternoon, a soldier had cursed and stumbled through the bush shockingly close to her. She had crept behind a tree and crouched there, frozen, until long after he was gone.

  She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t been caught. Any good tracker should have been able to follow her, even in the rain. And any group of infantrymen should have been able to run her down without breathing hard. Whether she would have been able to suborn them and turn them to her own uses was another question. That was the sort of thing her familiar, and her angel, and her life, had made her good at. She was Winter’s heir, the second-most powerful person in Southside. She owned their loyalties, now and in the years to come.

  —Used to own them, her familiar said. You abdicated, remember?

  Emily nearly cried then. Not quite, but nearly.

  As the day wore on, exhaustion made it hard to sustain a good, useful fear. The midafternoon was particularly unpleasant; a long, aimless journey on shaking limbs weak from hunger and a fevered mind dizzy from lack of sleep. She had actually walked into a tree, which was painful and a little funny. The second time she did it, it just hurt.

  By dusk her body had found its second wind. Burning up muscle tissue now. Hooray. When dark fell, her fear came back. A good dose of fear, Emily discovered, could clear her head wonderfully.

  She wondered if it mattered which trail she pick
ed to walk along. Would this one more than another lead her to Raining’s house in the wood, and some hope of sanctuary, or at least to the edge of the trees, or the sea? Or was she destined to wander in this Forest until it chose to let her go? Or maybe she was going to wander under the light-strangling trees until she died. There was no divine plan, and Emily’s only hopes for salvation lay in her own rapidly fading powers. That’s what Claire would say.

  She walked unsteadily into the darkness. It had stopped raining hours ago, but cold water still dripped from the cedars. There were a lot of noises in a dark forest at night, she discovered. She was surprised by how much she hated not knowing what made each one.

  She wondered how long the flashlight Li Mei had given her would last.

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,

  Ninety-nine bottles of beer!

  If one of those bottles should happen to fall…

  Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall!”

  “Fifty-four soup bowls of borscht on the floor,

  Fifty-four soup bowls of borscht!

  If I were to eat just a little bit more,

  Fifty-three soup-bowls of borscht on the floor!”

  “Eight roasting squirrels on a homemade spit,

  Eight roasting squirrels on a spit!

  I’d have no problems devouring it,

  Seven roasting squirrels on a homemade spit!”

  There was a very depressing moment when she reached zero. She was getting very hoarse, and she thought she might as well lie down here as any other place. She had done her best and tried her hardest, but she didn’t know what to do anymore; she was tired and cold and filthy and shaking with hunger and if her best wasn’t good enough, then to hell with it. As her soldiers said. She looked for a long time at the gaping mouth of a split-trunked cedar, where she could probably just squeeze in. If she was lucky, it wouldn’t get much colder than the