A shiver ran through Case. ‘What will happen to me?’
‘Once our kind was closer to humanity, but we are immortal and in all the long years began to diverge. We learned how to do without blood, and to live unnoticed among humanity. We became the guardians of humanity, but as we continue to live, so we continue to diverge, and humanity becomes ever more alien to us. Once a century, a human is consumed so that we may understand humanity well enough to care what becomes of it. That human is the stranger who, once consumed, is known, and through that one, all humanity.’
‘I am the stranger?’ he asked, but he knew. Here was the answer to his long searching and all of his journeys. He had been a witness all his life, and here at last was his audience. An ecstasy of terror and exaltation welled up in him.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘They are waiting.’ She took his hand and led him across the stony yard towards the church, where he could see people sitting facing the altar.
‘A church?’ he murmured, thinking of all the stories he had researched of vampires being repelled by crosses and holy water.
‘Where else do immortals belong but in a house built for an immortal who was killed by humans,’ said the woman, ‘an immortal whose blood is symbolically drunk again and again?’
His mouth was dry as she brought him into the church and to the front, where a man stood, facing the altar. He had the same quality of stillness as the woman, before he turned to face them.
‘I am Gabriel,’ said the man, and his eyes were the same pale, dazzling blue as the woman’s.
‘Are you an angel?’ asked Case.
‘I am as an angel,’ answered Gabriel. ‘And now, you must choose.’
‘Choose?’ asked Case. His lips felt stiff and cold.
‘What we would have of you is a gift and it is yours alone to give. But this is a dark gifting, for it will end the life of the giver. I think you have guessed that. And so now, you must decide if you can give.’
‘There were others?’ Case said, after what seemed a long time.
The figure nodded. ‘There were, and in each case, they gave their gift freely.’
‘If I decide I don’t want to die . . .’
‘You will leave this place unharmed,’ said Gabriel. ‘You will never see any of us again. You will not be hunted. Think on it, but you must decide before dawn, and that is near.’
Case blinked rapidly, and felt a strange desire to weep. He turned to a looming marble statue of a saint at whose feet lay a sheaf of flowers. The scent was heavy and sickening. Case realised that he was terribly frightened, but he also felt that he had been waiting his whole life for this moment, even if he had not known it consciously. And if he turned from it, what was he to do with what remained of his life? Would he go mad looking for pale eyes to make him feel real?
‘Have you made your decision?’ asked Gabriel gently.
Case looked at him, realising there was no choice. Not really. That must have been what the others like him had understood. His life for the future of humankind. It was an exchange any fool could understand. And wasn’t this the moment towards which he had been travelling, all unknowing, all these long years? Wasn’t this the consummation he had been seeking in all those script endings he had tried to write?
He did not need to tell the immortal his decision. He saw comprehension in those clear, blue eyes. He did not know what he expected, but Gabriel nodded and the rows of seated, cloaked people rose with a soft collective movement and gooseflesh broke out on his neck as the woman in white stepped forward and laid back his collar to bare his neck.
He saw through the open door of the church that the sun was beginning to rise. A fiery crimson light lanced across the sea and in through the door to strike knives of light from every shining surface. Gabriel moved forward, bathed in red, darkness fluttering at his back in great shadowy wings. He laid his long, cold hands on Case’s shoulders. His eyes were a blaze of pale light, and Case closed his own eyes. Then he felt the lips of the immortal against his throat. For a moment, he thought that there would be only this kiss, and death, but not all of the old dark stories were false, for he felt the sharp teeth as they punctured his skin and the pain was so intense that he had to clench his teeth to prevent himself crying out. Then the immortal began to draw his life from him, and there was a terrible dragging anguish as if his heart were being torn out. The light of the dawn grew so that he could see the redness through his eyelids. The hands released him, and other hands clasped him, and again he felt the teeth in his throat. All of them, he thought. They will feed on me, and he screamed and felt himself falling away from the sound into the hot burning heart of the volcano.
His last living dream was of the moonlit gumtrees, their sharp scent piercing the alien air.
The end, he thought.
‘Wake,’ said a voice.
He opened his eyes. He was outside and it was morning. The woman in white was bending over him, and for the first time, he saw that she was little more than a girl with light, bright eyes.
His throat felt sore but when he lifted his hand to the place where they had bitten him, he could feel that his skin was smooth and unbroken.
‘Our kind heals swiftly,’ she said.
‘Our kind?’ he asked.
‘You gave your life to bestow the gift of your knowledge. But you were bitten thrice. Once is for the death of a mortal, twice is for the release of the spirit, and thrice is for the birth of an immortal.’ A tear fell down her cheek and onto his and he touched it wonderingly. She said, ‘I weep for the human who gave his life for his people. But I rejoice, too, for you are the first new immortal in a century, as I was the first in the last. That is why I was sent.’
He stared at her, and saw the diamond blue of his own eyes reflected in hers. He said, ‘I thought that was the end.’
‘It was the end of endings,’ she said, and she held out her hand to him, and he took it, immortal to immortal.
THE WOLF PRINCE
for Heather
My son howls.
Hearing it, I start to my feet, the weight of the tapes try I have been working on pulling it from my fingers.
Cloud-Marie gargles thickly in dismay and begins to gather the fabric up from the floor. It is densely embroidered and difficult to handle. When she has managed to heave it onto the rack, she turns her big pale face to me and I wonder if she heard what I heard. One of her eyes regards me with great intensity while the other turns slowly away. I have always seen the drift of that wayward eye as an omen, and more than one decision has been dictated by its movement.
I think of the colour of the sky when I woke this morning: bruise-coloured with tinges of unhealthy yellow; an autumn sky. It used to be my favourite season. I loved the way the thick light soaked any wall in a slow buttery radiance, the rustling susurrus of dried brown leaves sliding along the pavement. Now it seems to me a season of fading sorrow.
It was the very end of autumn when first I came to that city which is the gateway to this place. I had a practical reason for my journey, but my true reason was something less rational, less definable and all but hidden from myself. Simply put, the city had seemed to suggest something that stirred my deepest longings. I do not doubt many people who visit it are drawn by the wonder of an impossible idea translated into a real and miraculously beautiful city.
Yet few who travel to that city, which is fantasy made real, discover that it is the gateway to this labyrinthine land of islands and canals it merely mirrors imprecisely. Despite their longings, the majority will keep to the tourist trails, for the city is a maze designed not to trap victims but to keep them from its secret heart. Most tourists will buy maps and rely upon them to discover what the city has to offer. Seeming to document every tortuous alley as they do, the very complexity of the maps is a glamour designed to ensure that those following them will never wander far from well-travelled paths. Those sensitive or wise enough to suspect the truth and lay aside their maps may still baulk at crossing unknown
bridges or following strange paths. Some instinct of caution will remind them of all the stories in which those who choose to leave proper paths come to enigmatic and unsettling ends.
That city keeps its secret well, for this is its entire purpose, the reason for its existence.
Suddenly I want the comfort of my own chamber. I sign to Cloud-Marie that I have finished with the tapestry and, leaving her to return the room to order, I rise and go into the hall. Touching a wall, I find it damp. It is always damp in this realm. In autumn the air is wet because the fallen leaves exude a fermenting steam that intoxicates all who breathe it. In spring, rain falls and falls in grey and slanting curtains that render the grass soggy enough to take a handprint. The air grows so wet that one feels breathing to be little more than a slow drowning. Even in summer, when building surfaces blaze white-hot and the cobbles burn through the soles of your shoes, it is damp, for the heat sucks a haze of water from the canals into the air. It forms a brackish sticky vapour that slicks all flesh and renders all cloth limp. Winter is worse, though. Icy mists rise up as slow and nacreous wraiths, seeping from the cracked black earth to hang almost immobile in the frozen air, breathing a chill, deadly film over the stone walls.
Last winter I caught pneumonia. I remember little of the illness except the way the light cut into my eyes, igniting a headache so astoundingly painful that it made me feel as if my head would explode. You can always tell a mortal who has dwelt here too many seasons, for they breathe as if the sea has entered into their lungs.
I remember the chilly delicacy of the air as it settled on me the first time I came here, how my skin rose into gooseflesh. Now it prickles at the memory. Or maybe a goose walks on my grave, for I suppose there must be a grave, somewhere in the future, waiting to receive me.
Disliking the tenor of my thoughts, I stop at a window on the side of the palace that overlooks the city and the canal rather than its sprawling grounds. I run my eyes over the ruddy carapace formed by the roofs below. Only a myriad of dark lanes and the glimmering threads of smaller canals show through it, except where the carapace splits wide open to allow the Grand Canal to pass between this palace and the one on the opposite bank. Between them, the gleaming silver surface of the water is ruffled with white and a cold wind slaps at me.
I feel Cloud-Marie’s warmth as she comes to stand beside me. She grunts softly but I lift a finger to quell her, for underneath the ebb and flow of my thoughts, I am still listening.
Did I imagine the howl? Such an imagining would require hope to give it force. The knowledge that I might still be capable of hope forces me to hope and, like a man made to walk on long-withered limbs, I stumble a few astonished steps, then fall. Because even if he howled, what salvation can there be for him?
‘It’s not possible,’ I say, speaking aloud without meaning to.
The dry croak of my voice startles me and, continuing along the passage, I discover that I cannot remember when last I spoke. I have not been out in many weeks. No one comes to visit, of course; they would as soon enter Dracula’s castle. I can guess that thorny rumours and barbed stories have grown around this palace and its inhabitants in a great wild thicket. If I were younger, they would make me a trapped princess and dream a prince to rescue me, but I am a queen and the prince is a king.
My husband did not change at all after he became a king. Of course, his kind can be any age once they have reached maturity, simply by willing it. Naturally enough he chose to be a young man in his prime most often, except occasionally as a whim when he fancied that wisdom is more compelling when it issues from withered greybeards.
Perhaps he takes that form now, or maybe he has grown weary of the demands of manhood and has made himself into a boy. I do not know, for he has gone a-questing these long years, and even before that, he left me and took to residing in the Queen’s Palace, often called the Summer Palace because it is always summer there.
When first he announced that he would go and live there, he used the weather as an excuse, telling me he preferred summer to the eternal autumn shrouding the King’s Palace. Ironically, it is the queen whose moods dictate the weather above the King’s Palace, but she can control it only so far as she can control her moods. Yet though my moods wrought stormy squalls and chilly rain, I do not believe he left me because of the weather.
The Queen’s Palace is prettier than the King’s Palace, and stands on the opposite bank of the great canal from it, being a rambling building of pale pink stone with a multitude of balconies and airy flying buttresses. A small, elaborately designed park surrounds it, full of complex and, to me, disturbingly lifelike topiary. Vast flowerbeds are laid out around the leafy beasts in geometric designs of abstract flowers that play sly tricks on your eyes. I have sometimes heard The Queen’s Palace referred to as the Palace of Tears, for this is where queens must go when their sons take wives.
She is not dead, of course, his mother, my mother-in-law. She dwells even now in the Queen’s Palace with all of the other mothers-in-law, though not her great-great-grandmother-in-law, who was human like me, and mortal. What a torture she must have found it to grow old and die among these evergreen faerie queens. But they were kind to her after their own fashion, for my husband told me once that they made themselves age with her, until she died.
So, my husband went to dwell with his mother and all those grandmothers, and for a time he played the prodigal son for them. In those days, the Summer Palace scintillated with unexpected life and self-importance and no one would have dreamed of calling it the Palace of Tears, for its halls rang with music and merriment. The queens adored my husband for the brightness he brought with him, and no doubt he dallied with some of them. Faerie folk are sensuous and there is no such thing as incest for them. They are monogamous only when they are in love. Love, for them, cannot be what it is for mortals, since love for us is mortal and therefore intensified with a bittersweet despair. Immortal love is something entirely different after the first heat; it is a slow relishing, a cool playfulness, an endless game of chess. Desire, too, is different for my husband’s kind, for there is no real urgency to have anything, no sense that time is running out. It was only when my husband went to live in the Queen’s Palace that I came to truly understand the nature of the difference between human and faerie desire.
My husband would summon me to the Summer Palace to attend sumptuous balls. He would not deliver the invitation himself, but send his courtiers got up as faerie godmothers or as cats in boots to deliver his invitations. His messengers would produce astonishing gowns, golden coaches and glass slippers and various spells or tests. One way or another I would be got to the ball. Once I arrived, my husband would claim me lavishly and there would be music and food and wine and dancing. For a little while I was amused if somewhat puzzled by these games, but I was no immortal who could play back and forwards in time eternally. I was a mother, and motherhood more than anything had shown me that time was not a playground but a stern and inexorable master. I became impatient with the games, yet still I went when he sent for me because I was a woman ripe in her life, and for me, that ripeness was not eternal.
My mortal desire transformed the virginal vestments the king had sent me to wear into provocative wisps of silk that barely contained me; they did not prettify or tame. Impatient desire was like a tiger within me, and sometimes my husband would gasp at the sight of me, as he had not done at that pale younger self. Then he would take me into his arms, whirl me into the dance and cover me with kisses as light and cold and insubstantial as snowflakes. But I was no longer a coy girl-woman needing his guidance and faerie tales to help me find the treasure-trove of my own passion. I would pull him with me away from the faerie lanterns and music and into the nearest dark room where we would couple, clasped together as tightly as the two hands of a single man. But the hands belonged to a drowning man, and despite passion, we would go on drowning.
I wonder now if the savagery of my ripe desire revealed in those encounters alarmed my faerie hus
band. My full woman’s passion was not the sweet, confused yearning of a princess, nor was it the ethereal and airy passion of the immortals who know that they have all the time in the world for pleasure. There were peaks and chasms in my desires yet untouched and I felt an urgency that only mortals can feel in striving for them, knowing they will die. I know my husband desired me, fascinated by the combination of hunger and desperation that is mortal loving, yet when he held me, I think there were times when he looked into my face and beheld a corpse.
Coming into my chamber, I cross to the fire and lower myself with a sigh into the deep, comfortable bucket chair that sits before it. For a time, I let myself be hypnotised by the play of the flames on the hearth, but the howl I heard seems to be echoing in my mind.
Cloud-Marie, seeing me shiver despite the fire, drapes a warm shawl solicitously over my legs. Then she begins to unbraid the dark golden syrup of my tresses and it comes to me as a chill foreseeing that, when I am old, she will do the same thing – lay the soft rug over my skinny shanks before unwinding my coarse grey braids.
She begins to brush my hair rhythmically, and I relax into the pull and tug of her ministrations. I watch her in the mirror, seeing how her whole simple wit is focused on grooming my hair. I consider speaking to her but words make her uneasy, and they are unnecessary anyway because she is gifted with a doglike ability to sniff out my moods. Even the signing is something that she understands and yet never uses. There is no need. She responds happily and devotedly to orders that ask nothing of her but simple obedience. They make her feel safe and she is centred by them.
I have drifted half to sleep when suddenly I sit bolt upright, for it has come to me that the last person I spoke to was my son. A chill runs through me to think it could be so, for the boy ceased to speak over two years ago. Can it really be so long? It seems to me that I have had conversations recently but I cannot recall the details of them. Perhaps they are only memories of speaking long ago.
Metro Winds Page 18
