Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

Others but stewards of their excellence.”

I listened spellbound, hearing in her rich tones the echo of some distant battle, the clash and clamor of a great day dawning to which I would soon wake. Then I shook my head, as though dispersing a dream from my bed in the Home Room.

“How do you know such things?”

A smile twitched across her wrinkled face as she tapped a finger to her lips. “Science has awakened her brother Magic from his long sleep. The goddess is alive, Magic is afoot. And you and I will follow in their train.” She turned from me to take Toby’s hand.

It may have been that Miss Scarlet and I spoke for longer than I imagined. Certainly I have since seen hours fly past when she was onstage, and her audiences stir themselves afterward as though resentful that they had been cheated by a performance of mere moments. I was surprised to see that already Lalage and the Players had returned. The little server squeaked behind its mistress, its hold filled with bottles and globes and a small glass cylinder filled with absinthium of a poisonous green. Behind them Fabian juggled tamarillos and plums, dropping them much to the amusement of the pretty round-faced Player who carried a bowl of fieldcress and nasturtium blossoms. Last of all came the mustachioed girl, balancing on her broad shoulder a platter of salted pigeons.

Fabian tossed a plum to Toby. With a flourish Toby presented it to Miss Scarlet. Lalage bowed to us, her head held proudly despite the crooked crown of leaves that had displaced the neat braids upon her brow.

“You bring me good luck, cousins!” she called out to Justice and myself. Justice grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth. Toby blew a kiss to Miss Scarlet.

Gitana set the platter on the table, adjusted her spectacles, and wiped her hands upon her thighs.

“Dinner is served,” she announced, and flopped onto the grass.

Curiosity was a good sauce for this second meal. Toby and Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel (I learned her name when Toby bellowed it, demanding more wine from the carafe she hugged between her knees) tucked in with much loud praise for Lalage’s food. Lalage settled upon Justice’s lap to feed him greengages and burgundy streams from the carafe, spilling most of it. Miss Scarlet ate quietly at my side, amassing a small arsenal of plum stones before her.

“An Ascendant among cooks!” Toby tossed another pigeon to Gitana. “Lalage, why don’t you join our troupe? Then we could eat like Governors every day!”

“And I could live like an animal, and sleep in a drafty theater, and wonder if my throat would be slit in the night.” Lalage stumbled to her feet. Mehitabel promptly took her place and began twirling Justice’s hair about her greasy fingers.

I averted my eyes. Toby leaned across the table to me, covering both my hands with his huge one (his nails clean and well shaped, I noticed with some surprise, and stained with crimson dye).

“ You would have no such objections to our life, Sieur Aidan,” he suggested, and turned my hands palm-upward. “These hands would welcome hardening—” He brushed my fingertips. “Haven’t you ever wanted to see our City by night, when the old moon cuts broad milky avenues through the Narrow Forest, and aardmen swim across the Tiger to hunt swans and lazars?”

“No,” I said, and turned to watch Justice.

The new moon had risen. Lalage had gone to pace among the trees, lighting a series of metal torches that sputtered fitfully before leaping into golden light. After a few minutes the conversation was punctuated by the hiss and sizzle of moths’ Icarian flights.

“Ah, but there’s better than that!” said Fabian. A handful of candicaine pipettes lay scattered like jackstraws on the table before him. He broke one, inhaled deeply. “There are birds with the breasts of women, and trees that will sing you to sleep—”

“And then suck you dry as a dead leaf,” called Lalage.

Fabian ignored her. “And you should see how the Paphian women treat you! Men, too, I suppose,” he added and passed me a candicaine pipette.

I felt a small hand plucking at my sleeve and turned to see Miss Scarlet.

“Would you like to see our show?” she asked softly. She climbed onto the table so that her long skirts spilled around her. Before I could reply, Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel had lunged through the shadows to where their huge, satchel lay by the gate. Toby stood and bowed to Lalage’, then took Miss Scarlet by the hand and assisted her down.

“You will excuse us while we prepare the entertainment,” he said. As he passed Justice I saw the two of them exchange knowing glances, and Toby winked broadly.

“Well!” said Lalage. She smoothed her hair and looked sideways at Justice, who grinned like a cat. “I suppose I’d better clear some of this.”

“Let me help you,” said Justice, carelessly gathering an armful of chipped plates and the pigeons’ carcasses, but being very careful not to upset a single wineglass or carafe. He paused in front of me to stack more plates, then dipped his head to brush my cheek. He turned away, scattering Miss Scarlet’s pyramid of plum stones. I watched them disappear inside.

By the outer gate Toby’s Players giggled and fought for costumes and scripts. I was alone for the first time since Justice had freed me. After several minutes I reached into my pocket and withdrew Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. I turned it over in my hands, then slipped it onto my shorn head, hoping that when she returned Miss Scarlet would notice it. I felt my heart stirred by all this cheerful ruckus. Closing my eyes, I sought within the knots of memory one that would tighten this thread of feeling.

And found it upon a small raised stage, some fifty years earlier, a stage lit by hissing gas lamps and smelling of cheap cosmetics and powder, where a boy and girl in matching broadcloth tunics and carrying matching blue books carefully followed marks chalked upon the scuffed floor reciting.

“ ’… I never had a brother;

Nor can there be that deity in my nature

Of here and everywhere. I had a sister

Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured …’”

This a memory of Emma’s slipped somehow within my own, a stray cell sailing through me until it bumped another. Then another scene flashed through memory’s aperture. Emma’s bed, Aidan and Emma and mumbling Molly knocking heads together above the stained counterpane. A rush of displaced thought, like a wind careening through a broken window; and this image too spun off its string to join the others jumbled inside me.

I shivered in anticipation, for an instant thought I lay upon my bed in the Home Room. But a hand drawn to my forehead touched only Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. The flare of memory cooled, coalesced into a firefly dropping through the air, a glowing green scarab. I opened my hand. It lit there, wings blurring as they clicked back into their sturdy casing. I recalled the huge bees hovering in the afternoon air, the trees that had devoured Tast’annin’s bodyguard. Fireflies and bees the size of hummingbirds. A talking chimpanzee. Even the Players seemed somewhat inflated, as if they all deigned to imagine one another wiser, lovelier, bolder, and braver than they really were; and by so dreaming had awakened to find it come true.

But now the firefly shakes its wings and buzzes from my hand. In the doorway Justice and Lalage embrace before rejoining me at table, Justice preening slightly, his long hair tangled and his lip bleeding again. Fabian moves several of the metal torches so that their light falls upon the dark grass before us, then with a bow and a flourish announces: