Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

He stared at me for a long time. Like a moth that alights upon one fair blossom and then forsakes it for another, desire for me lingered upon Roland’s dark face; and then was gone forever.

“You’re too clever for yourself, Raphael,” he said at last. Disdainfully he kicked at Anku, missing the jackal but sending a small tide of silks washing across the floor. “Some whore’s trick to curry favor with your people! A white dog—”

Anku growled and slipped to the other side of the room.

Roland glanced at Whitlock lining his eyes with kohl and smiled. “I have a prettier pet than that already, Miramar. Hurry up, Whitlock.” And without another glance at me he turned and began to pull on his tunic and Regent’s sash of red and black.

I watched him, stunned that he had rejected me—really rejected me!—so easily, without so much as an argument over my hair or torn clothes, without even acknowledging that I had braved the perils of the Narrow Forest to come here, and risked humiliation by my own people in order to break into this garish seraglio and offer myself to him.

“Roland …” I began.

He paused at the far wall and tugged at one of a dozen multicolored ropes of braided velvet that looped from the ceiling. A clear sweet chime. Then a tiny door opened in the wall. A brazen face blinked verdigrised eyelids. Its speaking mechanism ground resolutely, as though it had been unused for many months.

“ Speak cousin,” it finally pronounced in the same chilly tones the scholiasts affected.

“Bid the elders come and remove an uninvited guest from the Exiguous Hagioscopic Chamber. Inform Lemuel High Brazil that the catamite Raphael Miramar has committed a crime of interjacence.”

“ As you wish,” the brass head replied. The tiny door snapped shut.

“Roland!” Whitlock gasped. The kohl wand snapped shut in a flurry of black powder. “That’s banishment —you can’t!— ”

Roland snarled and slashed at the air with his hand. “Do you want to go with him?” He turned, grabbing blindly at the dangling ropes. Chimes pealed and tinkled. From a dozen alcoves soft voices rang from brazen throats. “Summon Lemuel High Brazil!”

“No!” Whitlock cried, cowering on the floor. A tremor of pity for him cut through my own fear and indecision. Before I could say anything he shrieked, pointing.

“Raphael!”

I turned, too late to avoid Roland’s arm swinging to smash against my throat. I fell to my knees, gagging as I tried to catch my breath. But Roland grabbed my shoulders and yanked me back up, his crimson face swimming before mine.

“Whores and lazars! You all feed off us—” His hands gripped me so that I cried aloud, and he laughed. “Not so strong and well fed as you were, eh, Miramar? You won’t last long once you’re banished.”

And he tore at my tunic, pushed me to the floor, and with one hand tight about my throat twisted to turn me onto my stomach as I struggled. Roland cursed and smacked me with the side of his hand. My head reeled. For a moment I lay once more beneath the apple tree in the Narrow Forest, the figure grunting above me not Roland but the Hanged Boy, hands like a rope tightening about my throat, pain ripping through me and a voice braying such triumph and utter desolation that I screamed …

“Raphael!”

This is what awaits you this and nothing more and it does not end no not now no not ever no come to me come to me —

“Raphael, please!”

And there above me crouched neither Roland nor the Gaping One but Whitlock, Anku panting at his side. From Roland’s neck a broken ampule protruded.

“— dead, Raphael, I killed him, sweet Magdalene, oh save me he’s dead!”

I tried to speak but my bruised throat could not form the question. The clamor in my ears softened, the roaring broke into discrete notes that I gradually realized were words, the voices of scholiasts pronouncing the same message over and over again:

“ We summon the suzein of the House High Brazil.”

“ Raphael Miramar has committed a crime of interjacence.”

“ We summon the suzein of the House High Brazil …”

The muted cadence of the masque below faltered and then stilled. With a clang the brazen voices of the scholiasts announced my name one last time and fell silent.

“Whitlock,” I began.

“Shh!”

His fear bled into taut concentration. I raised myself to lean upon one elbow, reaching for Anku. Behind the jackal I glimpsed Roland’s bulk, a maroon coverlet tossed across him so that only his hand could be seen. Within that ominous silence this alone seemed right: that Roland should lie there dead, and that I should sit a few feet away and be glad of it. I felt my shoulders heave beneath the weight of some kind of vicious glee and turned to Whitlock as if he might explain to me this sudden violent humor.

But he was not looking at me. Nor did he stare at the man he had killed protecting me. Head cocked to one side, he gazed at the ceiling, pale ruby eyes blinking as though he strove to read our names there among the velvet ropes and spiderwebs. And now Anku mirrored Whitlock’s posture, sitting on his haunches and. staring upward, ears pricked.

“What—” I demanded, hearing nothing at first; ‘then bit off the end of my sentence. From far within the labyrinth of High Brazil a bell began to toll.

“That is the tocsin,” said Whitlock very slowly, as though somehow it might not really be the tocsin until he had pronounced the word.

I nodded, dazed. By some extraordinary effort I got to my feet. “The tocsin,” I said.

Whitlock turned to face me. “High Brazil is beset by lazars,” he said, and stumbled to the windows overlooking the Great Hall.

Now I could hear it clearly: three long repeated notes, deep and dreadful, a sound I had grown up fearing from Doctor Foster’s tales. The tocsin sounded once a year to announce the Masque of Winterlong and so allow us all to hear its hollow song, and afterward begin our games of go-bang and snapdragon.

But this was not Winterlong. This was the Butterfly Ball, and the warning tocsin sounded now when we should be hearing the laughter of the judges pronouncing the masque’s cacique.

“That’s impossible,” I protested. But in my head rang other words: / have gone mad; I am dreaming. Whitlock fumbled with a curtain at the wall’s edge until his fingers found a switch. A soft click. The obfuscating oriels shimmered. The chamber grew dim.

“Look,” my friend whispered. “It has begun …”

I stepped around Roland’s corpse to join Whitlock. As we stared down I saw upon the entrance balcony a grinning line of emaciated children, one beside the other, hands linked as though for some harrowing antic. They had torn the ropes of flowers from the balustrades and hung them about their necks in imitation of the Paphians. Some of them wore the remnants of actual costumes. I recognized Aspasia Persia’s beaded cobwebs now adorning the matted curls of a boy with fiery eyes and livid face.

“They must have taken her outside,” said Whitlock. “We will be eaten alive.” He pointed at the ORPHEUS , its glass pipes now silent. The masquers ringed tightly the calliope’s gleaming bulk, as if it might shelter them from the murderous children.

Upon the parapets more and more lazars gathered, and at the top of each stairway, and within the embrasures, their skeletal arms and legs outstretched like mayflies impaled upon the varicolored glass. But they moved in utter silence, as though waiting for a signal to begin their play.

Suddenly I heard a piercing cry. From the crowd huddled about the ORPHEUS darted a willowy harlequin, his costume billowing behind him as he ran toward the main steps.