Angels and Exiles

by Angels

  Then he was gone, and Dagr opened the door into the chapel. The room was bathed in the glow of the wall panels, the pews casting multiple soft shadows. Bunches of fir twigs were tied to the pillars that rose toward the ceiling. No one was there, apart from the priest himself.

  Pater Kolgrim was on his knees, praying. Again and again he bent at the waist to kiss the base of the tree on which the Lord hung, muttering litanies. Dagr stepped forward, hesitant. The priest seemed to ignore Dagr, until he abruptly stopped his prayers and turned at the waist, still kneeling, to regard him. His expression was bleak, his eyes haunted.

  “Have you come to reproach me?” he asked.

  Bewildered, Dagr answered: “Excuse me, Pater. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “No, of course you didn’t. Then why have you come?”

  Dagr stammered, unable to find the words to explain his situation. “I wanted to . . . to know something,” he said.

  Pater Kolgrim rose to his feet and started to take off his stole, then put it slowly back on. “You have a question? Then ask it.”

  Dagr struggled with an opening. “What does it mean . . . when you see a woman . . . like in dreams?”

  Pater Kolgrim uttered a short bark of laughter. “Lust. Merely lust. Normal for a boy your age. You must pray for the Lord to keep your thoughts pure, and—”

  “No. A woman with wings. She had wings.”

  The priest’s mouth twisted as if in disgust.

  “It means you lie,” he said. “No one sees angels in their dreams. The Lord doesn’t send his messengers to mankind anymore.”

  “But she spoke to me. She said—”

  “Enough!” the priest shouted. “I don’t want to hear your stories, boy!” One hand clutched at the end of his stole, twisting it into a rope. “Get out! I was not responsible, do you hear? I told them it was wicked, but no one ever listens to me, do they? They want to be wedded, and they want a feast, and if no meat is fresh enough . . .”

  Dagr remained motionless, struggling to accept the truth that was dawning on him. The priest, his voice barely recovered, shouted at him once more to leave.

  “You have no right to blame me,” he croaked. “It was for your sake he was taken. He was below the lawful age for adjudgement, but you, you’re the son of the hetman. Your meat they didn’t dare take.”

  Pater Kolgrim fell back onto his knees before the tree and muttered hoarse entreaties. Above him, the Lord with his arms outstretched gazed down with a blank eye at the sufferings of the world.

  Dagr took a step back. He felt his heart thudding in his belly, not his chest, and liquid cold running down his entrails. He recalled the wedding banquet; the aroma of roasted meat filled his nostrils, but this time his mouth was filled with ashes. He smelled then the burning scent that accompanied the dark woman dancing in the gap within the heart of the candle flame, surrounded by the prismatic glories of light born from the mask’s visor.

  His hand went up to the cut at his temple where the loose wire from the mask had scratched his flesh like a thorn. Resolve bloomed. He took two long strides, knelt to the side of Pater Kolgrim, and twisted the key loose from its metal loop at the priest’s belt. The man did not react, lost in his misery. When Dagr left the chapel, he could still hear the priest moaning for forgiveness. There was a faint roaring in his ears, but the convulsions of vomiting he expected did not materialize. Something within him was held in abeyance, waiting for revelation.

  The padlock yielded to the key; Dagr let it fall to the floor, pushed the door and entered the chamber. From the entrance he could see the glow from the living masks at the end of the room. Still, he summoned light by brushing his fingers against a pad as Pater Kolgrim had done before; lamps awoke on the ceiling.

  Dagr made his way to the far end of the room. He knew which mask he had worn before; yet he first reached for one of the lit ones, Patrekr’s mask, applied it to his face. It was very light, surprisingly flexible, like thin tanned skin. The world looked exactly the same through the faceplate, the glow of the lamps unaltered, save for the oval of green radiance framing his sight.

  He laid Patrekr’s mask back in its place. His hands went to the other mask, the mask of an unnamed and forgotten ancestor. A mask that had itself died and was therefore much greater than a live mask, in the same way that the dead were vastly more potent than the living. Once again, as he put it on, the loose wire scratched his temple, at an angle to the previous cut; Dagr felt it slicing the flesh, breaking the narrow scab with a sound more imagined than real, and continuing on its way. The finger he brought to his head he withdrew dotted with blood and put in his mouth.

  Wearing this mask, his face was his own; it was his sight that was changed. Overlaid upon it was the sight of the unnamed ancestor. Through the visor the room altered, the shelves faded, and shadows pulsed as if something ungainly struggled to come into being in the corners. Dagr walked back to the door; he lifted his hand to the pad—stark in his sight, that square upon the wall, so real—and dismissed the lights. In the darkness, the slit of the opening he had left in the doorway was fringed with glories of pure colour.

  He might stride through the corridors of the Hold now; but would he see anything more through the mask than he had before? Would it show him a way to safety? A magic path through the snow and ice of the outside to a refuge? Never. Dagr realized he was asking himself the wrong questions. Safety could no longer be his concern; nor did he need atonement, for he had committed no sin. What he must find was revenge. To answer the capture of stones with a larger one; to strike back, in Griss’s memory. His eyes burned but would not shed any tears.

  So he left the room of masks and went as directly as he might to the concourse of the vast metal doors and the narrow door with a wooden handle, which he and Griss had so often haunted. He was seen soon enough, by one of the Hold’s thralls; and soon again his path crossed that of people who recognized him. No one barred his way, but more than one left running. Dagr paid them no heed.

  Close to the great outer doors of the Hold he reached the narrow door he sought and passed inside, into heat rivaling summer’s finest bounty.

  Seen through the visor, the room shimmers and sparks. Glories of green and blue tremble around the brightest lights, and motes of deeper colour swim quickly across one wall. Dagr moves toward the machine in the centre of the room; its half-melted shape pulls at his heart like the saddest story imaginable. His hands fall upon the warm metal, feel along the surfaces, like a surgeon palpating a patient’s abdomen, seeking for internal traumas.

  Footsteps sound outside; the door is slammed open. Ormolf enters the room; and is struck immobile, his face undone, bloodless. Dagr is not cringing, nor running away. He should be; this is what his mind almost tells him he is in fact doing. But no, he has stood up and is taking a step closer to Ormolf.

  “You’re dead,” whispers Hradulf’s second-born, eyes wide. “I killed you. You weren’t breathing, your heart didn’t beat. I left you for Sartog. I saw you dead . . . !”

  “Oh yes,” Dagr says, his mouth moving without any awareness on his part of what he is about to say. “You left me for Sartog, and Sartog came. He ate me, he ate all of me, the flesh and the soul and the bones. Then he sent me back for you, Ormolf; we have unfinished business.”

  Dagr moves swiftly; his arms feel small and weak, his entire body too short. But Ormolf does not fight back, and Dagr’s fist easily finds his throat, deals a solid blow to the larynx, stunning Ormolf. One savage kick to the knees and the young man falls. Now, much too late, he shakes off some of his terror and struggles, breath hissing in his bruised throat. Dagr’s hand comes up to Ormolf’s face; his thumb digs deep and gouges out the right eye. The youth’s hands fly to his face as he tries to scream. Dagr rests a knee on his opponent’s chest, seizes his head, one hand on the chin and one at the crown, and applies torque until at last the neck snaps with a muffled pop. Ormolf’s body goes slack;
his ruined face falls to the side, hiding his mutilation.

  Dagr rises to his feet with a grunt, returns to the side of the machine. His hand caresses the fascia, pauses at the stumps, waves in the air to feel the parts that should be there but aren’t, returns to the battered surface where lines and circles of yellow crusts mark long-gone controls. He almost weeps at the thought. “Machine, machine,” he whispers, knowing the sonic inputs are still functioning, “will you play a game?”

  “Please select a game,” replies the machine’s voice. Dagr knows it a stolen voice, the voice of a woman he once held in his arms and kissed. His manhood swells in his trousers.

  “Oh, let’s play a good one,” he says, the words strangers on his lips. “Let us open the gate.”

  The machine whispers something, in the voice of the long-dead woman. It complains of missing knowledge, of damage and corruption. Dagr soothes its peevishness, tells it what it wants to hear, and when the machine grows too agitated and warns of active dangers, he knows the words that compel it to obey. Like an old man, his mind worn smooth with the passage of years, forcing his limbs into motion even as his joints protest, processes are initiated deep below them, in the bowels of the Hold. Dagr feels the stone tremble, a soundless quivering that runs up through the soles of his feet into the pit of his belly.

  He speaks further, coaxing the machine through the phases. The barriers yield to his will; he remembers or imagines a young girl parting her thighs, and his penis forcing its way into her. One hand slips beneath his clothing to grab his rigid member. Hot as his palm is from contact with the machine, still it feels cool to his blood-stiffened penis. Things become easier now, the machine compliant, like the girl’s cunny yielding, no longer dry but lubricious. A clenching arises within him and he spills his seed along his leg, a blood-hot rope of semen soaking his trousers. More urgent words from him—he wants to intone the girl’s name at the same time, but it still hovers in dream-land, either unrecalled or not yet invented—and the last defences are breached. Locks fall open, yawning pits are uncovered, mechanisms align. A screech of metal rends the air as the heavy doors in the concourse burst the seal of rust and dirt binding them shut. The rock is slammed by a single sharp hit, a colossal steel hammer falling down upon an anvil. Outside, the blaze of the eternal lights waxes intolerably bright before blowing out.

  And a woman stands before him, her skin dead black, her eyes gleaming obsidian, her body enveloped in fuliginous wings. She raises a hand; on its ink-dark palm he can read a webwork of lines darker still, their tracery clean and smooth, every branch and tributary distinct, like a diagram of a human hand rather than the thing itself. Her presence brings the fragrance of hammered hydrogen and the song of shattered space.

  “I see you, pilot,” the ancestor says. “The gate is open.”

  The angel grows larger, and he can see stars reflected in her eyes, and the strands of her coal-dark hair rising from her scalp. Her upraised hand reaches for him, and the ancestor lifts his mirroring one.

  It is the other hand that Dagr lifts to the mask, and with fingers still sticky from his seed he grasps the rim of the mask and tears it off his face.

  The ancestor leaves him, like a hand pulled out from a glove, and he half falls, supporting himself with one trembling arm. The angel is still floating before him, black in the core of a greater blackness. Her hand closes slowly into a fist, which she brings to her heart. There is nothing but her in the world, no machine, no room, no Hold, and yet Dagr steps away from her, still not upright, his feet scrabbling for purchase on a non-existent floor. Her wings open—huge, impossibly vast wings, wings that could shelter the Hold itself, wings that could cup the sun’s light and cast a shadow over the entire world. And she falls away, shrinking into infinity; for a second, Dagr feels that in fact she is unmoving and it is he who is falling, faster and faster, down a pit with no bottom.

  She is gone. Before him is the machine, the half-melted blob of metal with its meaningless markings and missing parts; at its feet the mask of the unnamed ancestor, its faceplate dotted with both red and white.

  The room is trembling. Outside, in the concourse, a godlike voice thunders, raging incoherently about mirrors, nearly drowned out by unearthly wails, like the hosts of the damned howling for the blood of the living.

  Dagr steps around Ormolf’s corpse and steps outside. All along the length of the concourse, a galaxy of lights glows poisonous green, tracing the course of the cables. The huge doors have opened, and what has always lain behind is throwing off a furnace glare onto the opposite wall.

  Turning his gaze away, Dagr flees along the concourse, toward the main doors. The floor thrums under his feet from the reverberations of a deep-buried screeching. Somewhere in the frigid darkness of the outer Hold, the eyed shaft must now be spinning like a child’s top.

  A blast of snow greets him as he nears the doors: they have opened to the fullest, and the raging winds of the outside are blowing into the Hold. The sky is aflame with a pale orange glory, a blasphemy of sunlight in the midst of the Fimbulwinter. Behind Dagr a dislodged column falls onto the floor and shatters, sending out a hail of rock shards.

  Dagr staggers out of the Hold. In the sky above, a ring of suns is shining, a necklace of flaming balls, warmer than a score of summers. He falls to his knees in the snow, his bare, torn hands sinking in to the wrists. The glory of the suns intensifies until the centre of the ring shines like white gold. Dagr cannot tear his eyes away, though the light burns them. From behind him, shrieks rise from the Hold, together with the sound of walls crumbling and hoarse exhalations that might be titanic laughter.

  The central glow fades abruptly, and the suns flee from the ring, sliding outwards for an instant and then disappearing abruptly. The terrible night of the Fimbulwinter returns. Dagr’s sight is clouded by green-purple bruises, and for a moment he cannot see anything. Then he glimpses the stars, pinpoints of cold light nailing the darkness to the vault of heaven. One by one, they are going out, as if swallowed, occulted by something unimaginably vast.

  THE SONG OF THE MERMAID

  I didn’t wear gloves when I went to get married today. My mother wanted gloves, white cotton formal gloves, or failing that black leather, like the gloves I wear aboard aerostats. But I wanted to be bare-handed; wanted the scar to show, the long purple slash over the back of my left hand. I had on my parade uniform, with the Claw pinned to it, and polished boots, and a morion, and a dulled sword at my side. I felt like a character in a puppet show.

  The church was full of people. There were a few comrades from the College, and even old Professor Cruikshank. The priest had forced him to remove his prostheses at the door and he only had a single arm and three fingers to wave with. The rest were from the respective families. Forty or more on my side, all in their best clothes, all still smelling of fish; on the bride’s side, there were maybe sixty, and I didn’t have to imagine the dirt beneath their fingernails: I could see it.

  I’d been waiting at the far end of my aisle for a good ten minutes when Senemyane finally made her appearance. Her dress was so awful I felt like laughing or crying. A hand-me-down from two generations back, something that must have served every cow in her family, regardless of her size. She’d had to pin it in a hundred places to make it fit on her slight frame; she’d have looked better in a potato sack. We began to walk toward the altar and each other. She was taking mincing steps, as if her feet hurt her from wearing something other than mud-crusted clogs.

  I had to hold back to match her pace, to make sure we arrived at the same moment. Seeing her from closer up, I was surprised; last time I’d seen her, she’d been an ugly girl, and flat as a plank to boot. She’d grown up, filled out, and her face was now almost pretty. She reminded me a bit of a whore I’d favoured back in Lanthym; she had the same red hair, but I had to admit Senemyane’s features were more pleasant.

  The priest joined our hands and turned us around to face the congrega
tion. My mother and my uncle were in the front row. She’d been blubbering for hours and was still going on strong; some probably thought she was mourning the fact that my father couldn’t be here to see his only son get married, but I at least knew she was dying of shame, that I was marrying below my station in life.

  My father’s brother Bernard stood next to her and kept his hand on her shoulder; he looked both uncomfortable and proud. I’d seen nearly the same expression on his face years and years ago, the day the mermaids came ashore, once the slaughter was done.

  I was ten that autumn. I was still small for my age and I’d been denied the boats for another year or two. I’d never worked yet, except for small chores, so I had nothing worthwhile to do with my time. I was becoming too much bother for my mother, who had my four sisters to take care of, and I was sent to my Uncle Bernard’s house for three weeks so she could be rid of me for a while. Uncle Bernard lived out on the headland we called the Witch’s Spit. Most men there didn’t own boats; they worked on the Handmaiden, a big ship owned by foreigners that went far offshore, after large prey: jackfin, red-squale, even lorchas. Uncle Bernard had injured his foot badly and the Handmaiden’s captain had refused to let him aboard until he was fully recovered.

  He took me in without complaint; he wasn’t a friendly man, but not unpleasant either. His foot by now had mostly healed, but he still couldn’t walk much. I was supposed to help him with his chores, but apart from fetching the rum bottle from the cupboard I was left fairly idle. With nothing better to do with his time, he taught me the rudiments of the craft: how to use a filleting knife, how to bait a trawl hook, that sort of thing. In the evenings, he went on and on about the Handmaiden’s expeditions, until I was both bored stiff and frustrated that I couldn’t have gone myself.

  By the end of my stay he’d started to take brief strolls. He liked to go out at sunset; he enjoyed, and taught me to appreciate, the colours of the sky and water, the way they changed as the sun sank below the horizon. One evening, we went out some distance from his house, to a desolate stretch of the coast. The sun had vanished, leaving only a red-orange smear on the horizon. It was cool and I wrapped my thin coat tight about me. Uncle Bernard walked with a crutch to ease the weight on his foot; the round point of the crutch dug little pits in the sand. Suddenly he grabbed at my arm.