by Mary Gentle
"Not a fraud." He placed another part of the framework on the chalked stone. It rocked. "Just out of my depth, Mistress Evelian."
Sharlevian, mixing mud in her hands, began to plaster the courtyard’s outer walls smooth. Ignoring a broken fingernail, she sketched trompe l’aeil designs, so that her mother (closing an eye, squinting, forgetting scale) could see how the designs would lead one to perceive longer galleries and an apotheosis of images on the ceiling.
"I was hoping that at least one of the four of us knew what we’re about."
The Lord-Architect’s gaze lifted first to her and then to the enclosing black light. His breath misted the air. He said nothing.
Four sets of hands built the model, in the warm shadow of the foundation-stone. The wooden-lath frame and hessian-and-plaster walls took on solidity. Rickety, makeshift, it none the less began to body out a shape.
The air shook again like a tolling bell.
Higher above the city that is called the heart of the world, birds soar.
The air is chill now, and thin. Below them the city curves with the curvature of the world. Eagles, wild hawks, cormorants and finches; bright parakeets and humming-birds: all frail feathers beat against the troposphere. Beaks snap. Butterfly-bodies crunch.
And still, higher and further, the bright blobs of moths and butterflies fly upwards. Drawn up by the black fires that sear the sky, hot and bitter as a plague-sore. Souls drawn up by the Night Sun that scars the sky as black tattered flesh scars the plague-dead.
Air thins in the frail bones of birds, but still they strive for height, striking at the bright insects, devouring.
A black-and-white death’s-head moth bobs in the air, feeling on dusty fragile wings the cold of the Night Sun. The chill that will crisp the psyche into nothingness.
The death’s-head moth flies up towards that oblivion, away from the beating wings of a dusty brown sparrow.
The black fire that does not give life but takes it: that can create only the death of a soul.
The white crow flew through the hollow body of the dying god.
A stone rib-cage soared above her. All hollow, hollow and white, that had been ebony: the Decan of Noon and Midnight.
The crow soared up, her wing-tips bending to the pressure of the air. Ice glinted on the pale stone ribs curving up to rise above her head.
"Hhrrraaa-kk!"
She flew through the void of it, vast as cathedrals: a gutted empty carcass. If stone can rot, this stone flesh rotted. It curved like a vast wall at her right side. Ribs, muscles, tendons clearly delineated.
On each lump of tendon and muscle, and lodged in the splintered crevices of bone, white wax candles burned. The yellow flames leaped in the draught of her wings. She felt their heat. Fire palely reflected in the stone flesh, warming no thaw in the frost.
Receding ranks of candles burned on each hillock and lump of petrified gut. The sweet smell of beeswax dizzied her. So far away that only avian sight detects it, the great ribs curved down again.
She beat frantic wings to soar up. The great spine of the Decan of Noon and Midnight jutted infinitely far above her head, vertebrae an avenue of spiked pillars hanging down into void. Light blazed back from the blade of a shoulder, vast as a salt-plain. Stone guts hung from stone ribs in profuse lace drapery.
Dust brushed her wing. She side-slipped in the cold air. A great slew of stone flesh avalanched down, raising dust and chill. Decaying, the rib-cage opened to the air beyond, a mist of gold and rose-color that her bird’s vision could not penetrate. From candle-starred heights another chunk of stone fell, alabaster-white, turning slowly in the air. She glided, caught in fascination; it roiled the air, falling past, tumbling her end over end; shattered in thunderous fragments below.
Weary, she skimmed the air, gliding down to flick her shadow (pale as ice) across the rounded joint of a limb, domed as great buildings are; rose again, straining, avian heartbeat ticking fast as a watch. The hollow between clavicle and jaw opened up ahead, flesh rotted away into stone-dust.
She beat her wings, straining to reach the gap. The great jaw-bones shed scales, marble slabs that might have stood for walls in the Temple of Salomon. An ache bit into what would have been her shoulders and the muscles of her breast. Cramp twinged. She wheeled and spun down–down–down; the floor of the body so great a distance below that she feared her strength would fail, and she fall despite her shape.
A color: scarlet.
Far below, a man climbed slowly and painfully over the uneven surface between rib and stone rib, his bare feet slipping on the icy marble among the candles. One splash of color: he wore, still, its arms knotted around his waist, Candia’s buff-and-scarlet doublet.
Naked, his ribs showed bony as the Decan’s.
"Dies irae!"
White silence shattered at her caw. She spread crow’s wings, gliding down the pale air. Double images from her wide-set eyes merged as she focused on the man below.
"I take it to be that hour." Theodoret raised his head. Gray eyes brimmed with mutable brilliance, following the curve of her flight. He shook the hair back from his eyes, smiling. "Well, child? Young Candia believed help to be found in the Invisible College. You should have come before."
"I did. The Decan. The Eleventh Decan. She moved me."
"To this crucial hour . . ."
The white crow spread pinions to cup air, stalled, and gripped a splintered rib between her claws. She hopped from one jutting splinter of bone to the next. Warmth of candle-fire singed her breast-feathers, the stone under her claws icy.
"Oh, the world–is always saved. Always. In some form. Or another. What matters–" She forced breath from minute lungs in a toneless parody of speech. "What matters–is what happens–to people. Individuals. They’re not. Always saved."
She tilted her head to look from one eye and gain a clear image.
Theodoret smiled, genuine amusement on his lined face. "You’re a very cynical crow, lady."
She spluttered a caw that began in indignation and ended in something unrecognizable.
"But it is time." Theodoret tugged the knotted sleeves tighter about his waist. He picked up a fallen bone spar or splinter from the floor, bracing his steps across the uneven flesh.
The white crow flapped into the air, landed scrabbling on the smooth side of a rib, and skidded down into the hollow between in a flurry of feathers. The Bishop of the Trees laughed. He trod onwards, bare feet unsteady on the icy stone.
"Craa-aak!"
She recovered herself, flapping up, curving in long glides back and forth across his path as he clambered over neck-bones, knee-deep in decaying stone-dust.
In the void ahead of her, a paler light shone down from empty eye-sockets vast as rose-windows, into the interior of the skull. The great head of The Spagyrus lay tilted, fangs wide as pillars crossing his half-open jaw. Wax stalactited the ledges of jaw and palate, and the curving roots of broken teeth: white candles burning with a pure flame. She flew wearily in the cold air, soaring up.
An old woman and a young man sat on the floor of the jaw.
Between them they scattered small cubes. The white crow skimmed the air above their heads, catching double visions of dice as she passed. Heurodis’s smoky-blue gaze never wavered as she drew the dice towards herself and cast. The bearded blond man sprawled back on one hip, a finger tapping at his mouth; and as she passed he reached out and scooped up four of the six dice and tossed them down.
A feather falling–or is it rising?–against a blue sky: Flight. Meshing cogs and gearwheels: Craft. In a field of corn and poppies, two lovers embrace: The Sun. And– escaping its weighted cast towards the androgyne that dances masked, The World–the flower-eyed skull of Death.
An intensity of light burned about the bone-cubes, images bright with color in that white desert. She felt through the tips of spread pinions how air and probability strained there; the edge of the field catching her, and she wheeled, gliding back towards the Bishop of the Trees.
"Not cards, now. Dice."
She strained to fly a few yards further, stalled, and slid to nestle in a hollow part of the great jaw’s hinge.
Theodoret paused, lifting his head.
"Can birds smell?" he asked softly. "This is the way it would smell before snow, I remember when I was a child . . ."
"The world is not always saved."
Tendoned, articulated, the machinery of the jaw rose complicated above her tiny niche. Stone chilled: she fluffed out breast-feathers. Her heart hammered. Candles dazzled. She cocked her head to one side, gazing out across the alabaster spaces. Candia and Heurodis at this distance two spots of color, no more.
The vast curves of the god’s skull rose, ledged with candles. Infinitely far above she glimpsed rose-light as another suture crumbled away into dust.
The whisper echoed again along the walls in fossilized flesh, vibrating in her hollow bones: "Are you not gone from here?"
Theodoret lifted his head. The crow, perched at eye- level, looked across at him. The candle-light shone on his silver-gray hair, finger-combed clean and curling to frame his lined face. His eyes shone, his lips parted slightly. The flesh of his shoulders and bony throat shone yellow against the Decan’s alabaster ruin.
"No, nor likely to, my lord."
He smoothed the doublet under his narrow buttocks and seated himself, with some effort, on the knotted marble.
"I have succeeded."
The white crow opened her beak and cawed softly, the manipulation of the bird’s larynx coming too easily.
"Divine One, think. Think. What you do. What you are. This sickness is–not necessary."
"I know. It is my choice. "
Theodoret’s gaze searched for some source of the disembodied whisper. Movement rustled. The crow shifted her stabbing beak, jerking her head around and her other eye to focus.
Whiteness moved.
A feeler vibrated on the air. Carapaces rustled. Carved as if from milk and ivory, moving blindly across the palate and teeth and jaw, white cockroaches crawled. Now that they moved, she saw them: marble scarabs clinging to splintered fangs, burrowing through deep and glittering alabaster dust. Intricately carved stone blowflies, and ants, swarming across the ridged floor of the vast skull-pan.
They approached the bare legs of Theodoret, where he sat calmly. She flicked into flight, curved down to skim the floor, and then reared up. Lack of her own human size had deceived her. Insects crawled, large as dogs or small ponies.
Stone feelers and legs rustled. Candle-flames glimmered on carapaces bright with frost. The rustling modulated, taking on a chorus-voice: "I am the Thirty-Six. You cannot compel me. You cannot move me by pleading. Will you complain that I have done this, who am a god?"
Her wings rose and fell, beating wearily. She fanned her tailfeathers, gliding on a long curve to take her back to where Theodoret sat.
"Divine One, you forget—"
"I do not forget. 1 know all that you know. 1 made the world and you. "
The whiteness of stone blinded her. Aware to each side of her vision of pinions bending, forcing down cold air, beating hollow-boned, she cawed: "I could tell you– hrraaa-ak! But I forget. I forget. I become. What I seem."
Air roiled. From below and all around, the rustling of stone insects formed a voice: "Will you require me to play by my rules? I am not so constrained. You desire your own shape, you bargain for it. But I perceive you, bone and blood and soul, down to the particles that dance below sense’s awareness: I know what you know–and it is nothing."
The crow cried out.
Stone fractures, falling to splinters among the columns of limbs: far off, far off. Like thunder the echo resounds.
"I am above your choices and desires. "
She skimmed the old man’s shoulder, curving in flight, dazzled by the light of candles on frosted marble.
"For no reason, but my whim. "
Pain slammed through her.
Every vein threaded with glowing wires, every bone weighed solid and fracturable; she whirled, flinching from the smooth marble that slammed into her body. Her head jerked up and back, neck cracking.
Gravity slammed her down. Her ribs burst wide, skin stretching, losing the goosepimple-lodging of quills. Claws uncurled, bones of feet stretching, stabbing. A sheer weight of body threw her down, wings spread out: spreading still although she couldn’t move, knocked breathless, skin pushing out from beneath white feathers, skin and shaped bone—
Heaviness weighed her pelvis, her back. Fire coursed through her, cramp released from a cellular level; tears burst from her eyes, and she jerked her arms, moving them from the shoulders, to bury her face across her callused hands.
The woman lay face down on ridged marble.
"I do not need reasons."
Loose feathers surrounded her hands.
She knelt back on her heels, staring at the white pinions and down that scattered the stone. Frost chilled her. She reached out hands palm-forward to the heat of candles on the ledge above her, and stared at short nails and skin. Not young: sallow skin with a minuscule incised diamond-pattern, healing from a cut here, marked (she turned the palms to her) with the calluses of pen and sword.
"Thank . . . you . . ." She spoke blindly, to the air. "Thank you!"
A hot tear chilled down her cheek. She wiped it with the heel of her hand, wrapped her arms around her naked body and staggered to her feet. Her foot curled, clawing for purchase. She slipped, automatically throwing her arms out to the sides, not forward to break her fall; and other hands gripped her and pulled her to kneel by the stone on which he sat.
"Rest."
"I don’t have time—"
She raised her head and focused her single gaze on the old man. The Bishop of the Trees smiled. Her voice in her ears sounded like song. A smile moved her mouth.
"–but I don’t suppose this matters now. Except to me." She shivered, arms tight across her body. "Except to me!"
Theodoret reached down, took one of her hands and unfolded it, and placed her fingertips against her temple.
Unfamiliar softness brushed her fingers. She leaned forward, staring into the smooth reflecting surface of the nearest marble, the skin about her eyes creasing as she squinted. Dark-red hair fell about her face and shoulders, curling finely, streaked with white.
In the hollow of each temple, just where the white hair began to grow out, a patch no larger than her thumbprint grew. White down, the feathers soft as fur.
"He doesn’t need reasons."
Before she could become fascinated, staring at her face in the shine of marble, she leaned her hands against the stone and pushed herself to her feet. Unsteady, she gazed down at Theodoret.
"I’m sorry, my lord. Scholar-Soldiers . . . I don’t have magia now for this; all magia derives from the Thirty-Six powers of the universe, and they so weakened now—"
A grin stretched her face. Drunk on speech, she stretched up her arms: body stretching, shoulders, breasts, stomach, legs. Feeling the cold of ice upon her skin and the fretful warmth of candles, and she shook her hair back and laughed.
"–Wonderful!"
The Bishop of the Trees burst into laughter, rich and resonant. A wistfulness chilled the air. The rustling bodies of insects swarmed over the nearer stone.
With a crack that split air and sound together, the cathedral-skull split from tooth to eye. Intolerably bright, the rose-light glared in.
Stone poured down. Shards of marble rumbled down the slope of the inner mouth, bounding as boulders do in avalanches, resistless. The White Crow tilted her head and stared up at the falling rock, shafting through the air towards her. Breath made a hard knot in her gut.
"My lord Bishop, you are laughing at me, I think. "
She put both hands up to her head, fingers brushing the down at her temples. One knuckle nudged a gold bee-pin. All muscles tensed to take wing–pain threaded her human shape. She rose on the balls of her feet to run. Stone ripped down out of t
he air.
Unconsciously her hand tightened around the gold bee, loosened at a sensation of fur and whirring wings. She touched her fist to her mouth, breathing a name; threw out her hand. As the bee flew she stared up into hollow whiteness. Into mortal and divine substance fast decaying.
Taking his hand away from placing a piece of plaster, his fingers shook. Cold bit into his skin, blotching it white and blue. Casaubon stood awkwardly and tucked his fat hands up into his coat-armpits, squinting at the sky.
"Is it finished?"
Evelian grabbed his arm. Her hands didn’t close about the width of his wrist. She jerked furiously at his satin sleeve.
"Is this finished? What’s happening? What can we do?"
He took his arm away without noticing her grip. He felt in his left-hand pocket, then his right, one inside pocket and then the other; and finally from a pocket in the tail of the frock-coat unearthed a large brown handkerchief. He blew his nose.
"It . . ."
The white still-wet plaster model shone. Low buildings surrounded a courtyard, some entrances reached by cellar-steps, some by risers; all within a long wire-framed colonnade. Arches opened into the yard, too small to permit coaches, wide enough for walking. Steps and seats littered the yard at irregular geometric intervals.
Over it, the dome of the Temple rose, swelling up from the body of the complex: a dome to stand stunningly white and gold against summer skies, to be surrounded by doves, to be surrounded also by gardens– sketched in with chalk and a few uprooted weeds from the building site–growing with the brightness of roses. Open arches led from temple to gardens, from gardens to temple . . .
A model rocking on chalk-marked broken paving. Wired laths. Hessian. Plaster.
All precisely measured: to proportion, in symmetry, to scale.
"Given what it is, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done."
Casaubon reached up and scrubbed a hand through his copper-gold hair, leaving it in greasy spikes.
