At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  If any of them breathed, their breath was as cold as the outer air.

  Behind Wael was Isse, Sele’s beautiful half-sister. Her head was raised and her white face—was it only the dusk that dusted her skin with blue?—looked ahead, eyes dark as shadows. She might have been seeing another place entirely, walking through another landscape, as if this statue of a woman in a summer dress had been stolen from a garden and put down all out of its place and time. Where did she walk to so intently? What landscape did she see with those lightless eyes?

  And Baer was behind her, Berd’s other cousin. He had been her childhood enemy, a plague on her friendship with Sele, and somehow because of it her most intimate friend, the one who knew her too well. His name jumped in Berd’s throat. He stood too close to the wall for Berd to sidle by. She had to cross in front of him to the other wall and he had to see her, though his head, like Wael’s, was lowered. He might have been walking alone, brooding a little, perhaps following Isse’s footsteps or looking for something he had lost. Berd stopped in front of him, trembling, caught between his cold and Isse’s as if she stood between two impossible fires.

  “Baer?” She hugged herself, maybe because that was as close as she dared come to sharing her warmth with him. “Oh, Baer.”

  But grief did not lessen her fear. It only made her fear—made them—more terrible. She had come too close. Baer could reach out, he only had to reach out . . . She fled, her sleeve scraping the wall, her boots battering the stairs. Down, down, moving too fast to be stopped by the terror of what else, what worse, the dark lobby might hold. Berd’s breath gasped out, white even in the darkest spot by the door. It was very dark, and the dark was full of reaching hands. The door had no handle. It had swung closed. She was trapped. No. No. But all she could whisper, propitiation or farewell, was her cousin’s name. “Baer . . . ” please don’t forget you loved me. “Baer . . . ” please don’t do me harm. Until in an access of terror she somehow wrenched open the door and sobbed out, feeling the cold of them at her back, “I’m sorry!” But even then she could not get away.

  There was no street, no building across the way. There was no way, only a vast field of blue . . . blue . . . Berd might have been stricken blind for that long moment it took her mind to make sense of what her eyes saw. It was ice, the great ocean of ice that encircled the pole, as great an ocean as any in the world. Ice bluer than any water, as blue as the depthless sky. If death were a color it might be this blue, oh! exquisite and full of dread. Berd hung there, hands braced on the doorframe, as though to keep her from being forced off the step. She forgot the cold ones upstairs; remembered them with a new jolt of fear; forgot them again as the bears came into view. The great white bears, denizens of the frozen sea, exiles on land when the spring drove the ice away. Exiles no more. They walked, slow and patient and seeming sad with their long heads nodding above the surface of the snow; and it seemed to Berd, standing in her impossible doorway—if she turned would she find the house gone and nothing left but this lintel, this doorstep, and these two jambs beneath her hands?—it seemed to her, watching the slow bears walk from horizon to blue horizon, that other figures walked with them, as white-furred as the bears, but two-legged and slight. She peered. She leaned out, her arms stretched behind her as she kept tight hold of her wooden anchors, not knowing anymore if it was fear that ached within her.

  And then she felt on her shoulder the touch of a hand.

  She fell back against the left-hand doorjamb, hung there, her feet clumsy as they found their new position. It was Baer, with Wael and Isse and others—yes, others!—crowding behind him in the lobby. The house was not empty and never had been, no more than a tomb is empty after the mourners have gone.

  “Baer . . . ”

  Did he see her? He stood as if he would never move again, his hand outstretched as though to hail the bears, stop them, call them to come. He did not move, but in the moment that Berd stared at him, her heart failing and breath gone, the others had come closer. Or were they moved, like chess pieces by a player’s hand? They were only there, close, close, so close the cold of them ate into Berd’s flesh, threatening her bones with ice. Her throat clenched. A breath would have frozen her lungs. A tear would have frozen her eyes. At least the bears were warm inside their fur. She fell outside, onto the ice—

  —onto the stoop, the first stair, her feet carrying her in an upright fall to the street. Yes: street, stairs, house. The door was swinging closed on the dark lobby, and there was nothing to see but the tall, shabby driftwood house and the brass doorknob rolling slowly, slowly to the edge of the stair. It did not fall. Shuddering with cold, Berd scoured her mittens across her ice-streaked face and fled, feeling the weight of the coming dark closing in behind her.

  Dear Berd,

  I am lonely here. Recent years have robbed me of too many friends. Do I seem older to you? I feel old sometimes, watching so many slip away from me, some through travel, some through death, some through simple, inevitable change. I feel that I have not changed, myself, yet that does not make me feel young. Older, if anything, as if I have stopped growing and have nothing left to me but to begin to die. I’m sorry. I am not morbid, only sad. But your coming is a great consolation to me. At last! Someone dear to me—someone dearer to me than anyone in the world—is coming towards me instead of leaving me behind. You are my cure for sorrow. Come soon . . .

  Berd was too cold, she could not bear the prospect of canvassing the rest of Sele’s old haunts. Old haunts! Her being rebelled. She ran until the air was like knives in her lungs, walked until the sweat threatened to freeze against her skin. She looked back as she turned corner after corner—no one, no one—but the fear and the grief never left her. Oh, Baer! Oh, Wael, and beautiful Isse! It was worse than being dead. Was it? Was it worse than being left behind? But Berd had not earned the grief of abandonment, no matter how close she was to stopping in the street and sobbing, bird-like, open-mouthed. She had no right. She was the one who was leaving.

  At least, she was if she could find Sele. If she could only find him this once. This one last time.

  She had known early on that it was love, on her part at least, but had been frequently bewildered as to what kind of love it was. Friendship, yes, but there was that lightness of heart at the first sight of him, the deep physical contentment in his rare embrace. She had envied his lovers, but had not been jealous of them. Had never minded sharing him with others, but had always been hurt when he vanished and would not be found. Love. She knew his lovers were often jealous of her. And Baer had often been jealous of Sele.

  That had been love as well, Berd supposed. It was not indifference that made Berd look up in the midst of their scheming to see Baer watching her from across the room; but perhaps that was Baer’s love, not hers. Baer’s jealousy, that was not hers, and that frightened her, and bored her, and nagged at her until she felt sometimes he could pull her away from Sele, and from the warm candlelit conspiracy the five of them made, with a single skeptical glance. He had done it in their childhood, voicing the doubting realism that spoiled the game of make-believe. “You can’t ride an ice bear,” he had said—not even crushingly, but as flat and off-hand as a government form. “It would eat you,” he said, and one of Berd and Isse’s favorite games died bloody and broken-backed, leaving Baer to wonder in scowling misery why they never invited him to play.

  Yet there he was, curled, it seemed deliberately, in Sele’s most uncomfortable chair, watching, watching, as Sele, bright and quick by the fire, said, “Stories never die. You can’t forget a story, not a real story, a living story. People forget, they die, but stories are always reborn. They’re real. They’re more real than we are.”

  “You can’t live in a story,” Baer said, and it seemed he was talking to Berd rather than Sele.

  Berd said, “You can if you make the story real.”

  “That’s right,” Baer said, but as though he disagreed. “The story is ours. It only becomes real when we make it happen, and
there has to be a way, a practical way—”

  “We live in the story,” Sele said. “Don’t you see? This is a story. The story is.”

  “This is real life!” Baer mimed exasperation, but his voice was strained. “This story of yours is a story, you’re just making it up. It’s pure invention!”

  “So is life,” Sele said patiently. “That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  Which was true; was, in fact, something Berd and Sele had argued into truth together, the two of them, alone. But Berd was dragged aside as she always was by Baer’s resentful skepticism—resentful because of how badly he wanted to be convinced—but Berd could never find the words to include them in their private, perfect world, the world that would be perfect without him—and so somehow she could not perfectly immerse herself and was left on the margins, angry and unwilling in her sympathy for Baer. How many times had Berd lost Sele’s attention, how many times had she lost her place in their schemes, because Baer was too afraid to commit himself and too afraid to abstain alone? Poor Baer! Unwilling, grudging, angry, but there it was: poor Baer.

  And there he was, poor Baer, inside a cold, strange story, leaving Berd, for once, alone on the outside with Sele. With Sele. If only she were. Oh Sele, where are you now?

  It seemed that the whole city, what was left of it, had moved into the outskirts where the aerodrome sprawled near the snow-blanked hills. There had been a few weeks last summer when the harbor was clear of ice and a great convoy of ships had docked all at once, creating a black cloud of smoke and a frantic holiday as supplies were unloaded and passengers loaded into the holds where the grain had been—loaded, it must be said, after the furs and ores that paid for their passage. Since then there had been nothing but the great silver airships drifting in on the southern wind, and now, as the cold only deepened with the passage of equinoctial spring, they would come no more. Until, it was said, the present emergency has passed. Why are some lies even told? Everyone knew this was the end of the city, the end of the north, perhaps the beginning of the end of the world. The last airships were sailing soon, too few to evacuate the city, too beautiful not to be given a gorgeous goodbye. So the city swelled against the landlocked shore of the aeroport like the Arctic’s last living tide.

  The first Berd knew of it—it had been an endless walk through the empty streets, the blue dusk hardly seeming to change, as if the whole city were locked in ice—was the glint and firefly glimmer of yellow light at the end of the wide suburban street. She had complained, they all had, about the brilliance of modern times, the constant blaze of gaslight that was challenged, these last few years, not by darkness but by the soulless glare of electricity. But now, tonight, Berd might have been an explorer lost for long months, drawing an empty sled and an empty belly into civilization with the very last of her strength. How beautiful it was, this yellow light. Alive with movement and color, it was an anodyne to grief, an antidote to blue. Her legs aching with her haste, Berd fled toward, yearning, rather than away, guilty and afraid. And then the light, and the noise, and the quicksilver movement of the crowd pulled her under.

  It was a rare kind of carnival. More than a farewell, it was a hunt, every citizen a quarry that had turned on its hunter, Death, determined to take Him down with the hot blood bursting across its tongue. Strange how living and dying could be so hard to tell apart in the end. Berd entered into it at first like a swimmer resting on the swells. Her relief at the lights that made the blue sky black, and at the warm-blooded people all around her steaming in the cold, made her buoyant, as light as an airship with a near approximation of joy. This was escape, oh yes it was. The big houses on their acre gardens spilled out into the open, as if the carpets and chandeliers of the rich had spawned tents and booths and roofless rooms. Lamps burned everywhere, and so did bonfires in which the shapes of furniture and books could still be discerned as they were consumed. The smells wafting in great clouds of steam from food carts and al fresco bistros made the sweet fluid burst into Berd’s mouth, just as the music beating from all sides made her feet move to an easier rhythm than fear. They were alive here; she took warmth from them all. But what storerooms were emptied for this feast? Whose hands would survive playing an instrument in this cold?

  The aerodrome’s lights blazed up into the sky. Entranced, enchanted, Berd drifted through the crowds, stumbling over the broken walls that had once divided one mansion from the next. (The native-born foreigners had made gardens, as if tundra could be forced to become a lawn. No more. No more.) That glow was always before her, but never within reach. She stumbled again, and when she had stopped to be sure of her balance, she felt the weight of her exhaustion dragging her down.

  “Don’t stop.” A hand grasped her arm above the elbow. “It’s best to keep moving here.”

  Here? She looked to see what the voice meant before she looked to see to whom the voice belonged. “Here” was the empty stretch between the suburb and the aerodrome, still empty even now. Or perhaps even emptier, for there were men and dogs patrolling, and great lamps magnified by the lenses that had once equipped the lighthouses guarding the ice-locked coast. This was the glow of freedom. Berd stared, even as the hand drew her back into the celebrating, grieving, furious, abandoned, raucous crowd. She looked around at last, when the perimeter was out of view.

  “Randolph!” she said, astonished at being able to put a name to the face. She was afraid—for one stopped breath she was helpless with fear—but he was alive and steaming with warmth, his pale eyes bright and his long nose scarlet with drink and cold. The combination was deadly, but Berd could believe he would not care.

  “Little Berd,” he said, and tucked her close against his side. With all their layers of clothing between them it was hardly presumptuous, though she did not know him well. He was, however, a crony of Sele’s.

  “You look like you’ve been through the wars,” he said. “You need a drink and a bite of food.”

  And he needed a companion in his fin de siècle farewell, she supposed.

  “The city’s so empty,” she said, and shuddered. “I’m looking for Sele. Randolph, do you know where he might be?”

  “Not there,” he said with a nod toward the aerodrome lights. “Not our Sele.”

  “No,” Berd said, her eyes downcast. “But he’ll be nearby. Won’t he? Do you know?”

  “Oh, he’s around.” Randolph laughed. “Looking for Sele! If only you knew how many women have come to me, wondering where he was! But maybe it’s better you don’t know, eh, little Berd?”

  “I know,” said little Berd. “I’ve known him longer that you.”

  “That’s true!” Randolph said with huge surprise. He was drunker than she had realized. “You were pups together, weren’t you, not so long ago. Funny to think . . . . Funny to think, no more children, and the docks all empty where they used to play.”

  A maudlin drunk. Berd laughed, to think of the difference between what she had fled from and what had rescued her. All the differences. Yet Randolph had been born here, just the same as Wael and Isse and Baer.

  “Do you know where I can find him, Randolph?”

  “Sele?” He pondered, his narrow face drunken-sad. “Old Sele . . . ”

  “Only I need to find him tonight, Randolph. He has something for me, something I need. So if you can tell me . . . or you can help me look . . . ”

  “I know he’s around. I know!” This with the tone of a great idea. “I know! We’ll ask the Painter. Good ol’ Painter! He knows where everyone is. Anyone who owes him money! And Sele’s on that list, when was he ever not? We’ll go find Painter, he’ll set us right. Painter’ll set us right.”

  So she followed the drunk who seemed to be getting drunker on the deepening darkness and the sharpening cold. The sky was indigo now, alight with stars above the field of lamps and fires and human lives. Fear receded. Anxiety came back all the sharper. Her last search, and she had only this one night, this one night, even if it had barely begun. And the thought came t
o her with a shock as physical as Baer’s touch: it was spring: the nights were short, regardless of the cold.

  She searched faces as they passed through fields of light. Strange how happy they were. Music everywhere, bottles warming near the fires, a burst of fireworks like a fiery garden above the tents and shacks and mansions abandoned to the poor. Carnival time.

  Berd had never known this neighborhood, it was too far afield even for the wandering Sele and her sometimes-faithful self. All she knew of it was this night, with the gardens invaded and the tents thrown open and spilling light and music and steam onto the trampled weeds and frozen mud of the new alleyways. They made small stages, their lamplit interiors as vivid as scenes from a play. Act IV, scene i: the Carouse. They were all of a piece, the Flirtation, the Argument, the Philosophical Debate. And yet, every face was peculiarly distinct; no one could be mistaken for another. Berd ached for them, these strangers camped at the end of the world. For that moment she was one of them, belonged to them and with them—belonged to everything that was not the cold ones left behind in the empty city beside the frozen sea. Or so she felt, before she saw Isse’s face, round and cold and beautiful as the moon.

  No. Berd’s breath fled, but . . . no. There was only the firelit crowd outside, the lamplit crowd within the tent Randolph led her to, oblivious to her sudden stillness, the drag she made at the end of his arm. No cold Isse, no Wael or Baer. No. But the warmth of the tent was stifling, and the noise of music and voices and the clatter of bottle against glass shivered the bones of her skull.

  The Painter held court, one of a hundred festival kings, in a tent that sagged like a circus elephant that has gone too long without food. He had been an artist once, and had earned the irony of his sobriquet by turning critic and making a fortune writing for twenty journals under six different names. He had traveled widely, of course, there wasn’t enough art in the north to keep a man with half his appetites, but Berd didn’t find it strange that he stayed when all his readers escaped on the last ships that fled before the ice. He had been a prince here, and some princes did prefer to die than become paupers in exile. Randolph was hard-pressed to force himself close enough to bellow in King Painter’s ear, and before he made it—he was delayed more than once by an offered glass—Berd had freed her arm and drifted back to the wide-open door.