Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  There was no one else present when she entered save the awful sentience of death. She could not call to Skander or even sob for her own sake: the sentient dark choked off all sound. She moved across the room, through the fractured light and bars of shadow, to the dark-stained bedside table on which stood the full mug of horehound and tansy and the cut-crystal carafe of water that was glowing as with a light of its own. The next crescendo of animal-noise seemed to blossom in the splintered light as if, by way of anchoring itself, it had fixed itself in the watery shine.

  Skander lay alone among the pillows and the light and shadows and the shadow of death. His skin was pale, his hair blackened with sweat; his breathing was painfully audible and irregular, and something white glistened on his lips. Margaret steeled her stomach and reached for the carafe. She let the stream of water run into the narrow neck of the freckled, fluted horn, watching the way the light played in the dance of water, then put the crystal away while the light jinked hard back and forth against Skander’s cheek.

  “Skander?” She touched his shoulder gingerly. “Skander, can you wake?”

  His breathing sharpened and two fingers fluttered, that was all—but that was enough. Margaret climbed up on the edge of the high four-poster and got one hand behind Skander’s head. He was heavy and cold and damp, and the air smelled strongly of almonds and death, but she forced herself to put the horn to his soiled lips. Water dribbled over his lips and through his teeth. She watched his throat but it did not move.

  “Come on,” she begged him, and hitched hard at her skirts to lean forward so she could get her fingers into the soft of his jaw. “Blast you, Skander Rime—swallow it!” She got some water to leak in through his teeth, but when nothing more happened she flung down the horn in a spray of silver water and pushed hard at his throat with both thumbs. She pushed harder than she thought was good for him, but at last, with a panicked, involuntary intake of breath Skander gasped, gagged, swallowed—she felt the thick muscles convulse under her palms—and began coughing violently. She thought she had killed him but he continued to cough and heave heartily for several minutes, turning red in the face, before he finally dropped off into hard breathing.

  His eyelids fluttered and dragged themselves open. They looked like fractured amber, vague in the light, and roved against a confusion of pain for a moment before they seemed to fix on Margaret’s face. His lips moved. No sound came out.

  “If you can hear me,” she told him, “better be hushed. You’ve had a close shave—and given us a nasty shock.”

  His face twisted; his brows gathered as if in an attempt to drag his battered thoughts together. Finally he whispered, “I’m—quite thir—”

  “Thirsty? Do you want some water?”

  A lively disapprobation flashed in his eyes. Chastened, Margaret climbed off the bed and went to the cupboard by the fire—which had eaten up its kindling and since gone out—and pulled out the little spare bottle of brandy that was kept for guests. But when she gave him a tumbler-full, he was almost too flogged to drink it and his consciousness kept slipping under her grasp. With a patience worn thin by panic, she continued to slide the brandy down his throat piecemeal until he had swallowed it all, and then she watched him drift away into a sombre sleep. She listened to his breathing and found it even. His hands, which had been curled and contracted in agony, had loosened and lay flat on the coverlet: the heavy signet ring glinted with a tiny sleeping spasm, but otherwise they were still.

  With a despairing sigh Margaret left him to build up the fire again. The clanging of the logs on the fender did not wake him. She moved mechanically, numbed by the hours that had thrashed her without mercy. It still seemed surreal, too fast and too horrible to have really happened. The house had dropped into a lull of windy quiet; the howling had stopped. No doors banged, no steps tread on the hall floors. Skander’s breathing was too even and low for her to hear over the crackle of the fire.

  After awhile—she did not know how long a while—she came back out of her blindly wandering thoughts to find herself standing by the fire with the poker in her hand, staring at Skander’s dexter hand. I think he should be safe now, she thought with a sudden flinching of restlessness. I should go down—I should go down to see him.

  Deliberately she put the poker away and went round to bend back over Skander’s face, searching it carefully one last time. She saw no discomfort in him, but what she saw discomforted her. She saw the regal, uncompromising lines of the de la Mare line, the aquiline nose, the proud, aristocratic mouth and brows.

  It has been a long time since the men of my world looked like this. So casually handsome, so easily born to rule. But then, we have grown more peaceful too, I think. I wonder if that is better.

  Satisfied that he would sleep and that he was in no danger of remission, she stole out of the room and locked the door behind her, putting the key in her own pocket. She was startled, upon turning around, to find the light still pattered through the windows and open doorways into the hall, that the atrium was still blooming with the sepia evening light. Had not hours passed, she wondered, and the world shifted drastically under her feet? Feeling oddly as if she had wandered into someone else’s dream, she brushed her hand across her eyes and continued on.

  She met Rhea, of all people, coming out of the library. The maid halted in the doorway and flung up her head, a sharpened, secret hope of anger showing for a moment in her eyes. Margaret stopped and met the gaze, hung a moment on it, and suddenly she understood. She understood in a whole but formless sort of way—the greeting kiss, the black, upturned eyes, the mulled wine…She did not think, nor did she feel anything until she was staggering forward, her fist smarting from the blow, and Rhea’s face twisted into a mask of fury and surprise with a broken, bloodied left eyelid.

  “You little witch!” Margaret cried, and struck again. Rhea was small and quick, but Margaret was beside herself. “Nay, you will not run like a coward! I am sick of your face—here, let me make it better pleasing!”

  She hit like a man, and Rhea hit back, fighting like a cat in a bag, but Margaret had the odd clarity of fury burning away the clinging dross on her vision. She beat the maid down into the library and finished her with one last parting blow to the face, dropping her with an abbreviated thump onto a low coffee table. Only then did she hear the ringing of blood in her own ears and feel the sweat prickling on her skin. Rhea looked up at her through her fingers and one good eye, her teeth on edge, the breath whistling through her nose.

  “Don’t you say a word,” Margaret warned her, “for I am about to be finished, and if you rouse me again I’ll rub your mockery in your face for good. Old Hobden is a good hand with shovels. You would hardly make a lump in the earth.”

  Rhea said nothing; through her busted lip, Margaret was not sure she could. But as she went back to the library door, rage singing high and sweetly in her brain, she stopped once and turned back. The maid seemed to be waiting, staring up through fingers and dishevelled hair. There was murder in the eye.

  “You have always mocked me,” said Margaret. “You had better never mock me again.”

  Rhea touched her tongue to her bloodied lip, as if she meant to say something, but she hesitated and the moment was lost. Without a backward glance Margaret left her, though the feeling of daggers in her back followed her all down the hall and into the atrium downstairs until, having got lost in her own anxiety and anger, she found herself in the rear entryway and had to double back for the kitchen hall.

  There was a flustered noise of talking coming from the kitchen but there was no one in the hall or the peristyle that she could see. Silently she slipped down the cellar stair, back through the ebbing tide of green-feeling electric pulse, against the feeling of someone who was not there watching her closely, until she found herself walking down the short stair into the wine-cellar and found the fox waiting for her.

  For a long while the two of them were silent. The room had seemed big before, receding into the setter-brown s
hadows of the underground; but the fox’s sharp-etched, wolfish body, drenched with the darkest India-ink colour, seemed to dwarf even her fathomless numbness as it loomed over her, resting on its lean haunches, cupped ears like shields pricked and bent as if to catch the sounds of her thoughts. One after the other things to say blew like dry leaves through her mind, but she could decide on no one to pick up and her tongue, for the moment, was tied.

  She noted that he had a single bloom of white in the centre of his chest.

  “Is this the first time,” he asked in his new baritone, “you have broken your knuckles open on someone?”

  She put up her hand and found blood streaming down the contours of her veins. It had not hurt until she saw it: a blue-fire pain began at once and she winced. “Yes. It felt curiously good at the time, though,” she added.

  The fox smiled. “Were that I a woman! I would have done that to her long ago. Alas, I—well, I’m not.” There was a brief silence, then, more quietly: “Why did you not kill her?”

  She found she had been asking herself that since she had dropped Rhea on the coffee table and pulled back, not giving her a blow to the nose that would have splintered in her brain-pan.

  “He did not die,” she said simply.

  And the fox, far from protesting, smiled more widely and rose off his haunches to his enormous equine height. “Now you taste how awful justice is in the mouths of them that speak it. How is our blithesome Lord of Capys?”

  Margaret managed a small smile in return. “Something less blithesome now, but I have locked the door on him and he sleeps.”

  “And you did not mind the horn?”

  Fixing upon the lamp she saw again the wild wind-break of goldfinches and the startled, upward lunge of a dainty white woodland animal whose disinterest in her had been, in retrospect, perhaps the most grievous insult she could remember receiving in her life. “No, I did not mind it. I had seen a live one at Lookinglass.”

  The fox sat back down. “Oh, really? You did not tell me that.”

  “Nor did you tell me,” her tone sharpened, “that you grow like Chinese bamboo and turn as black as Livy.”

  He, too, looked into the lamp as if to hide his own thoughts among the melting yellow light. She watched his black, jewel-cut muzzle, flushed into a copper hue, eyes glazed with an icy film of light, and listened to the sound of his breathing until he found his thoughts again.

  One lip curled self-deprecatingly, revealing a terrible line of enormous sharp white teeth. “The first time we met and you went away again, back into the upper graves of Rupert’s company, and I did not come with you, you hated me. I felt that you did.”

  It would have been lying to deny it. he could not lie to him.

  His eyes flung down their glassy overlay as he looked back at her. “I am sorry—but I could not come. It is not a lock on doors and a lack of thumbs that keeps me down here. Rupert has his little Fool tied up by greater powers than that. I cannot mount those stairs any more than you can scale the glaciers of Fang.”

  “You mean his star-work. His little squares and circles and funny mathematics.” Rage burned in the back of her throat. “He can lock you down here but he could not even save his own cousin?”

  Sympathy pricked at the fox’s brows. “You put that to him? What a smart that must have made. I am surprised it is Rhea’s eye that is black and not yours.”

  She frowned, her lip remembering the break which it had only recently healed. The fox, seeming to realize what he had said, turned away.

  “I grow smaller and weaker in the shadowing of the moon,” he said presently, quietly, his voice muffled by the fur on his shoulder. “But when it waxes I grow stronger, and I fight against my bonds, and Rupert prays to his infernal god that I do not break them.”

  In a small voice, into the hollow quiet, Margaret murmured, “I am sorry I hated you.”

  He flashed her a smile, quick and kingfisherly, and rather irreverent of her remorse. “I think you have not hated me for a while now. I have held that close and warmed my heart with it on cold, empty nights.”

  He was the only person whom she would let mock her, whose mockery she could take with equanimity, because his mockery held no biting edge of hatred. She sat down on the wine-crate and pulled her feet off the cold dirt floor.

  “I will go grey,” she said in a pitiful, half-laughing voice. The laughter was unsteady and threatened to get the better of her.

  “Maybe we had better open one of those bottles after all,” said the fox sympathetically.

  “Maybe we better had.” Margaret brushed the back of her hand over her eyes. “I got a glass of brandy for Skander, but didn’t think to pour any for myself. That was an oversight.” Again they were quiet, rather shy of each other, Margaret thought. She still felt chills just looking at him and he, seeming aware of that, had curled up on the floor in an attempt to make himself look smaller. The blue blaze and green-flaking fire had gone out of him. Had she been daft, she would have thought he was no more than a huge black dog.

  But she was not daft.

  “What was it that you did?” she asked at last.

  He had been looking elsewhere—the shadow of his head turned and loomed on the wall as he moved to meet her uncertain gaze. “Have you ever heard of the Danse Macabre?” he countered.

  The chill, as if in mimicry, skittered on her flesh. “Yes. It is a gruesome piece of artistry.”

  “Oh, is it art now…? I got in its way as it was going upstairs and messed up its footwork, that is all.”

  She frowned. “You make so light of it.”

  “To laugh,” he replied, “is the blithest weapon of those who live in the dark.”

  She picked a shard of masonry off the floor and began to roll its roughness between her thumb and forefinger. “He came down because he was lonely. Poor thing, up there in Lookinglass all by himself. So he comes down here, to the last place in Plenilune he would really want to go, to just sit and talk with me—and this happens.”

  “Do you fancy him?”

  “Fancy has nothing to do with it,” she replied, her voice sharpening. “He is a good sort of man, and good sort of men don’t do well in this house. It quenches them…”

  The hollow quiet stretched and grew until it became almost painful; then the fox broke it of a sudden, rushing to his feet and turning away with a heavy intake of breath. The light and shadow licked around his enormous body as he paced away and, turning at the end of his prison, came pacing back. Margaret watched him sadly, recognizing, though she was sure he did not, the gesture of a caged animal.

  “You are lucky down here,” she said impulsively.

  He swung round and stared at her; his wall-eyes wavered with an eerie blue light.

  “You are lucky down here,” she repeated. “There is no sun and there is no air, but at least there is no Rupert and there is no Rhea and there is no—there is no—” Her voice cracked.

  The fox said grimly, “The dead in Sheol are silent of the praise of the Lord.”

  “I want to go to the back of the wind.” She put her head in her hand. Her forehead throbbed, and against her pressed eyelids she saw the scenes of Skander in his death-throes, struggling even to the last to maintain his dignity. “I want a lee to hide in. I do not know how much of this madness I can take.” She looked into his face, which had turned soft under her words. “Your shoulders can spark green fire and hold off death, but whose shoulders can bear up the huge cross I see being put up for Plenilune?”

  “But I think that you know the answer to that.”

  “I know. I know. But he is otherwise silent while we all cry out for the sake of Plenilune. You have said yourself that no one is equal to contending with Rupert. Must we be our own heroes?”

  The fox was silent for awhile, as if listening to the sound of God’s own silence and weighing it. But whatever he thought of it, if he had any hope or any despair, his face did not belie it.

  “Who knows, Margaret? But I have often observed
that it is out of people like you that heroes are made.”

  She stood up. “Then God help the heroes,” she replied definitely. After a pause she added, “I wish God would hear me in this place. It would be a joke on Rupert worthy of even you, fox.”

  He smiled a little.

  “I should go back up to Skander now. I locked the door to keep anyone out and I am the only one with a key.”

  The fox got up and walked with her to the foot of the stairs. Standing so close to him, Margaret could feel the dark ripple of power shimmering around him. His huge shadow plunged the wine-cellar into a deeper gloom and, for just a moment, it seemed to her to be the dark mantle of death trailing after him, trailing after him and touching her…

  He was speaking to her. “Try to mind yourself. Every time you come down here some new awful thing has happened. I can only do so much,” he added apologetically.

  Why did she feel as if this were their last meeting? All at once she wanted to reach across and touch him, though everything in her recoiled at the thought, just to prove to herself that the nightmarish feeling was a fraud. “Don’t be so serious. If you are serious I cannot bear life. You must laugh, or I have no hope at all.”

  He smiled, but the smile was mirthless. “Better go now.” He looked up and away as if to hide his inscrutable face. “Skander will be waiting—how we all wait for your step at the door…! I may be smaller when next you can come.”

  “Yes. I thought of that.”

  He looked at her. “You do not mind?”

  She did mind, because it unnerved her, but for the same reason she kept coming down to the cellar, for the same reason she wanted to reach across and grab him as the only security in her life, she did not mind too much. She left him in the big black splendour of death’s shadow, blue eyes shining like two gashes of heaven, and she did not mind too much.

  Skander was still asleep when she looked in on him. He had shifted, flung an arm over his head, and turned a little to one side. Margaret smiled kindly on the natural pose, wishing, like some magician, she could conjure up Aikaterine, who would best know Skander’s habits, likes, and dislikes. She fetched her books, Songmartin’s and the little atlas Julianna had given her, and sat down in a chair drawn close to Skander’s head. It occurred to her as she settled that she ought to have fetched her dress but she felt too emotionally flogged to entertain for more than one flinching instant the idea of bending back over that accursed gown. In the mystical half-light and shadows of Skander’s room, the stitching of that gown seemed like the methodical movement of time toward Rupert’s installation as Overlord. She could not bear to bring it closer.