by Angels
Andersen’s legs gave way. He slid, tried in vain to check his fall by grasping at the table, collapsed on the floor. His body was imprisoned in a mantle of frost. He heard a series of splashes, then the siren’s breathless voice came to him.
“You’re too far away. I can’t reach you. Those who chew too much of the red seaweed die sometimes, because they forget to breathe. Breathe, Andersen. Do you hear me? I can’t help you do it.”
Andersen did not answer.
“I didn’t lie when I said Carl would be back soon. I will ask him to take you to one of your places of healing.”
“I was supposed to . . . kill you,” said Andersen. “I sought you for so long. . . . An agent of the Organization . . .” His thoughts spun in circles. He was so terribly cold.
Someone was helping him to walk. Andersen barely managed to keep his legs under him. His sight was blurred. The cold penetrated to the marrow of his bones. He heard a gate creak. His head tilted by itself onto his left shoulder. His left arm was resting across someone’s shoulders. Andersen recognized the acne-scarred cheeks of the young man from the pavilion.
A horse’s steps approaching, the sound from a carriage’s wheels. “The Hospice of the Brothers of Saint Gerard,” said the young man to the driver. He pushed Andersen inside with surprising strength and agility.
The carriage rode along a narrow, poorly paved street. Andersen had no memory of the past few minutes. He was shuddering, and his eyes were teary. His left hand groped in vain inside the pockets of his overcoat, seeking the adjustors.
“The Brothers will take care of you. You’ll feel better soon. Try to hold on, we’re almost there.”
“Why?” Andersen managed to ask.
The young man shrugged, his mouth twisted in embarrassment. “My brother took calliopine too. It made him believe he was Christ, come back to expiate the sins of the world. One night they threw him into gaol while he was in withdrawal and come morning he was dead. I’m doing it for him.”
Andersen buried his head between his knees. He retched again and again, but nothing came up to his lips. He tried to remember his training in the Organization, the last words of his supervisor, the name of his supervisor, the name of the woman he had been sent here to kill; he could not. The bright canvas that had been his memory was shredding, crumbling away, and he was beginning to perceive the drab and desperately sad thing that had hidden behind it.
The needle withdrew from his arm. A drop of blood welled; Father Vercors tore a small piece from a cotton wad, pressed it against the wound, and made him bend his elbow.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Yes, Father. Thank you.”
“You are making very good progress. What would you say if, next time, I decreased the dosage by another fourth?”
Andersen hesitated. “I don’t feel ready yet, Father. But soon, yes.”
“I know I can trust you, my son. When you are ready to decrease the dosage, you will tell me.”
Father Vercors took him back to his room, then left him. After a long while, Andersen removed the piece of cotton. A red dot remained at the crook of his elbow, a tiny blood clot. He put his shirt back on, buttoned the wrists: already his hands had stopped shaking. He put on his vest and went out of the hospice.
At long last, the rain had stopped. The clouds had torn apart, like Father Vercors had torn the cotton wad. The sun poured a painful brilliance through the breaches. Andersen was hot when the sun shone on him, and even when it was briefly masked by the clouds, the cold could not get to him.
He crossed the port district and came to the belvedere that overlooked the water. He sat on one of the benches painted emerald green and looked out to sea. The dredge ships were still there. One of the ships’ windlasses began to spin; the grapnel rose up from the sea floor, holding a granite slab. The metal that had been poured into the graven letters had not tarnished; it glittered for a moment in the sun, then the slab was laid onto the deck and immediately covered up with canvas.
Andersen’s sight was blurred by tears. Somewhere far to the south, in the ocean into which this sea opened, swam hybrids and monsters. This world was not the world he had wished for. He still remembered, vaguely, his dreams of another world: clean; orderly; a world where the forces of reason prevailed; where his life had some worth. That world, it was as if he had lost it through an obscure transgression he could never atone for. He knew it was the drug talking in him, but he wanted, oh, how he still wanted to believe in it.
A revelation came to him then, that the whole of the universe held meaning; the messages engraved onto the slabs torn from the muck of the sea floor, but also the muck itself, and the twenty fathoms of water atop it, and the flight of gulls, and the pattern of clouds in the sky, and even the movement of light through the ether. And he knew also that never, never in all his life, would it be given to him to understand the message that all things eternally spoke.
He remained there, shivering in the wind, eyes wet, until evening, until Father Vercors came for him and took him back to the hospice.
BLACK ANGEL
On the last morning before the Fimbulwinter, it was customary for the dwellers of the Hold to gather at one of the rare windows and take in the sun’s final rays of reddened light. Hunters and warriors stood at the large bays above the main door; the Hold’s women and children tended to cluster at a smaller window on the ground floor. The hetman and his family, together with the priest and any favoured holdsmen, would sit and be served tea before a wide low opening on the topmost floor, their breath making clouds of condensation as they sipped the boiling brew.
One window never had more than a few watchers at it: a narrow slit in one of the side towers, its glass scoured by a million tiny lines until it had become nearly opaque. It was such a poor viewpoint that it was ignored, save by boys of a certain age and make, who hovered at the brink of manhood but could not be certain of achieving it. This year there were two, Dagr and Griss, who crouched before the window, peering through a small patch that was almost clear. The sky and the land glowed with the sun’s glory, but the disk itself had not yet appeared. The hummocks of snow cast no shadows as yet, and the outside looked like a painting of a place, inviting with its pale pink-orange curves, like Dagr’s sleep-time imaginings of a woman’s naked flesh.
He knew that should he step outside, he would instantly discover the lie: under the sky whose darker half still shone with stars, the wind would cut through his coat like a knife and freeze his flesh brittle. Even touching the cold glass numbed his fingers after a minute.
Griss looked at Dagr and spoke in an awed whisper. “Is it true you’re going to wear a mask at the feast?”
“Yeah. Hradulf said every one of his sons and nephews, even me.”
“Who will you be?”
“Pater Kolgrim didn’t say.”
“I’ve seen Patrekr and Avarr-Ram, but never anyone else. You’ve seen more.”
It was almost an accusation; Dagr shrugged. “You were too young when Eileifr died. That time there were Galinn and Jongeir, besides Patrekr.”
“But this time there’ll be more. Seven of you, that’s such a lot! Who do you think he’ll pick? Maybe he’ll take a mask from the real olden times; wouldn’t that be hot!”
“Watch for the sun, Griss, you’ll miss it.”
The younger boy turned his attention back to the landscape beyond the window, but he wouldn’t stop talking about the upcoming wedding feast. He had been pestering Dagr with questions ever since Osfrid’s marriage had been announced; his whole life seemed to revolve around it. You’re too old for this, Dagr wanted to shout. You can’t be a baby forever. And if you keep running through it in your mind you’ll wring out all the pleasure beforehand. When it does come, you’ll be disappointed and angry.
But he never said anything; Griss would only be hurt. The boy still slept with his mother in the crèche, lacking as he did a recognized fat
her.
“There,” said Dagr. The sun’s disk had heaved itself above the horizon by the width of two threads. He focused his gaze on that bright rim, his fingertips hurting as he pressed his hand against the window.
“I heard all the ancestors are in the room of masks,” Griss went on, unstoppable. “Even Sartog himself! If you had to wear his mask, he might come for revenge in your sleep . . . !” The boy shivered in an ecstasy of delicious terror.
“Shut up,” said Dagr, but Griss wouldn’t abandon his train of thought.
“It’s true, Dagr, if his mask is in there and your father wants you to—”
“Enough, I said!” Dagr grasped Griss’s thin shoulder and squeezed; his grip was strong enough to cause pain, even through the wool of the housecoat. The boy whimpered and fell silent.
“It’s not funny, Griss. You shouldn’t make jokes like that. Sartog’s a story we tell children to keep them in line. You can’t keep believing in him at your age. You hear me, Griss? You’ve got to grow up. One day all too soon you’ll be adjudged, and you’ll have to be ready for that.”
The boy’s eyes had filled with tears; Dagr felt that he had shattered a fragile game never meant in seriousness, and knew guilt. But he did this for the good of the boy.
The light was fading; he glanced back through the window, saw the sun’s rim slipping back beneath the horizon. “Look at it, Griss,” he urged, “don’t miss the last rays.” Sniffling, the younger boy obeyed.
A moment later only the sun’s glory was left in the sky, and that was slowly fading as well. The long night of the Fimbulwinter had begun.
“Listen, I’m sorry I got angry,” said Dagr. “You talk too much, that’s all. Let’s go play stones, all right?”
The peace offering was accepted and Griss, his chagrin instantly forgotten, led the way.
Twelve years now Hradulf had been hetman, chosen by acclamation after the death of Hrothmarr, who had only fathered one son, and he had long since turned to sleeping bones, dead in his youth of a fever. Hradulf by contrast had three legitimate sons, plus one bastard. He loved them all; Dagr enough to recognize him and spare him thralldom; the others far more, and above all Osfrid, his eldest, to whom he could refuse nothing. He had not refused him Lyuvina, though she was his cousin. Nor had he refused him marriage at an unpropitious time of the year. Osfrid’s wishes and whims were not to be barred: the young man moved in a rarefied sphere, above mere men. Laws and customs could not really apply to him.
It must be conceded Osfrid was an impressive man, his features flawless, strong and tall. Seeing him, you wanted to follow where he led, ached for a smile or a word of approval from the firm mouth with its perfect teeth. But Dagr had spent his childhood feeling like this toward nearly everyone else, and so his awe at his eldest half-brother was less than that of other people.
The four flights of steps down from the tower window were uncannily high, as if built for the legs of giants. Once on ground level, the two boys followed a broad concourse toward the heart of the Hold. At one point, a row of rime-coated metal doors of vast size appeared in the left-hand wall. Flakes of paint still adhered to the metal in random splotches. The last door, short and narrow, had been fitted with a wooden handle. Dagr grasped it and tugged the door half open. They both scurried in and pulled the door shut behind them.
It was a small room they found themselves in, and so warm that they had to remove their house coats, even though no fire burned. The light here came from panels set in the ceiling: a smooth, buttery illumination rather than the chill blue-white crackle of the Hold’s ordinary eternal lamps. The heat came not from the panels, but from the machine in the centre of the room, a strange thing like one of those half-melted ice banks you sometimes found in the summer, sheltered in a dark hollow of rock. Whenever Dagr looked at it, he had a strong sense that it was incomplete: protrusions shot out from its edges only to end abruptly, like stumps of limbs. Surely once these must have led to functional extremities of some sort, hands if not feet.
Griss seated himself on the floor before the machine, and Dagr joined him, feeling the machine’s warmth enveloping him. No one but them ever came into this room. It wasn’t that they were the only ones that knew of it; rather, they were the only ones stupid enough to want to spend any time there, or so Björnkarl the hunter had once said to Dagr. Which was another way of saying that the dwellers of the Hold were afraid of the machine, that they mistrusted its sluggish spirit and the dim magics it still wielded. For Dagr and Griss it held no terrors; in truth it seemed the most inoffensive mechanism you could imagine, once you got over your surprise at its unusual abilities. It could talk and show images, which was a prodigious thing; but it was very stupid and couldn’t carry a conversation. Ask it a question and it would usually mumble something about missing information.
Its great virtue was that it knew how to play games, some of which were completely new to the boys.
“Machine, machine,” said Griss, stroking one hand across a flat surface while he lightly grasped a protrusion with the other, “will you play a game?”
From the depths of the half-melted machine a scratchy voice arose. It always spoke with a strange accent, the vowels too open, the consonants weak: the speech of an idiot child trying its best to be understood. “Please select a game,” it said.
“Will you play stones?” Dagr asked. Sometimes the machine was capricious and would refuse to play anything; the boys believed from experience that it was more cooperative when Dagr made the request.
After a moment the machine replied with the traditional formula, as if it were referring to a musket: “Loaded. Go.” Between the two boys, a space in the air began to glow; lines of yellow light drew a grid. It fluttered at its edges and sometimes changed shape if you moved your head to look at it from another angle. Griss made the first move, touching his fingertip to one of the intersections: a black pebble appeared there, glossy and round like a summer bean. Dagr replied, choosing an intersection close by. They didn’t understand the rules of the game very well, why sometimes the machine forbade them from capturing the other player’s stones, and why it kept wanting to end the game when there was still plenty of empty space left to play in. But Griss loved the game; probably, Dagr suspected, because he never got tired of the bright shapes blooming in the air. No doubt Griss would want to become a recorder or somesuch occupation that involved the head and very little of the arms. Dagr hoped he himself could become a hunter; as a bastard of the hetman, he could hope for nothing more. Any lower rung on the ladder and his life would remain in danger forever, but as one of those who brought food to the hold, he could hope to remain safe—as long as he did and said nothing against Hradulf or Osfrid.
Dagr was two years older than Griss, and his skill at stones was greater, even though he hardly tried to win. Griss was a sore loser, and his anxiety would grow throughout the game as he began to fall behind in points. Dagr couldn’t play to lose, as Griss would realize it immediately and throw a tantrum; but he couldn’t play to win too much, since that would end in a storm of tears. So he balanced his strategy carefully, making the occasional deliberate blunder whereby Griss could snatch a handful of Dagr’s stones off the board, crowing in triumph. It kept the outcome in suspense, and at least if Griss lost it wouldn’t be by much; and probably this was another reason why the younger boy loved stones, where it mattered by how much you lost, in contrast to most other games where only winning mattered. But then, Dagr had begun to understand, those games were much more like real life; there too it didn’t matter how you won and by how much, as long as you did win.
Griss was falling behind in points, despite Dagr’s best efforts. The younger boy made blunders and noticed immediately afterwards, so that Dagr was compelled to exploit the mistake. In this way he had pulled far ahead, and Griss could already taste defeat. The boy had begun to fidget, looking all around the room instead of studying the board. Dagr was desperately examining his
position, hoping to find a move that would make him vulnerable.
And then the image of the board flickered and warped like a shaken tablecloth; and a black face looked out at him, with blind black eyes and a mouth full of stars.
Griss had been looking away; by the time he brought his gaze back to the board, it had resumed its former appearance, the rows of white stones and black no more than shimmering in the air.
“What? Why d’you yell?”
Dagr started to answer, and found he could not. He felt that it would have been a lie to say he had seen a face that looked at him; such a lie that it could not be uttered. “The board . . . jumped,” he forced out, each word a pain. “I was startled.” As he said it he started to believe it himself.
“Yeah, the machine’s tired,” said Griss, oblivious. “The game’s not much fun when the board does that. I keep making mistakes ’cause I can’t see it right.”
“Yeah,” Dagr said. “Yeah, that’s right. This isn’t much fun that way. I’d rather go down and watch them prepare for the ceremony.” And to his immense relief Griss seized on the excuse and abandoned the game. Dagr told the machine they were done, and the image vanished. He brushed his hand across the metal—so warm, like a skin filled with water warmed at the coals, like the flesh of someone burning with fever—and said goodbye to the machine, a ritual he and Griss had stumbled into and could not now forego.
They put their coats back on before opening the door into the concourse. Even before the door moved, Dagr felt a chill seep into his bones; it was like the sense of terrible wrongness that had come to him the day he learned his mother had gone the way of all flesh.
For a fact, preparations for Osfrid’s wedding preoccupied not just Griss but many of the dwellers of the Hold. This was a good thing in that it distracted attention from the long months of darkness ahead, but the endless demands for perfection had begun to wear patiences thin. Dagr had overheard rumours that the Hold’s hunters had been requested to bring in fresh meat and they had flatly refused to take even one step outside the Hold’s doors. If Osfrid wanted to seek out dormant deepbears in their burrows by starlight, he was welcome to it, but everyone else would be quite content with salted flesh.
