Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

When finally I did wake it was late morning. Sunlight bloomed upon the peeling wallpaper of my tiny room. I turned to see Miss Scarlet sitting primly upon a child’s rocking chair she had dragged from the prop room, her lips moving as she read silently from Mrs. Fiske’s Memoirs.

“Miss Scarlet,” I whispered. When I touched my forehead I felt a bump there as big as Miss Scarlet’s fist, and recalled Justice’s face as he struck me in the Miramars’ chamber. I tried to raise myself, and knocked against a half-full pitcher of water on the nightstand. Miss Scarlet caught this before it could fall. She put it back upright, carefully reserved the place in her book with a tattered strand of velvet ribbing. With a sigh she set the volume upon the nightstand.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Awful.” I flinched as she brushed the hair from my forehead. She nodded, poured me a glass of water, and waited until I drank it before saying anything more.

“You could have killed that child. You could have killed yourself,” she said at last. I shut my eyes and started to turn from her. “No!—listen to me, Wendy!”

I opened one eye, then shrugged. With a groan I pulled myself up to stare back at her angry face. “I’m listening,” I said.

“Perhaps you do not care about putting yourself in danger; but you have no right to endanger our lives as well. That child was hysterical. Justice was hysterical. He thought he’d killed you. He had to lie to the suzein about what happened, else Miramar might have taken action against us all because you harmed the child.

“That was ill-conceived, Wendy. You heard Miramar: Ascendants have crossed the river. They might be looking for you. A strange, cold young man resembling a Paphian favorite, driving a Paphian child to the edge of madness—this may sound too much like a runaway empath who caused the suicide of the Ascendants’ most renowned researcher.”

“They think I’m dead,” I protested weakly.

The chimpanzee trembled with indignation. “Being dead doesn’t excuse it! You could have killed her—”

“I don’t care,” I said, exhausted. I pressed my palms against my eyes. “Please let me sleep—”

“Dammit, Wendy!”

In her excitement she had climbed onto the seat of the little rocker. It swayed precariously as she swung her arms to punctuate her sentences, bits of the decayed fabric of her dressing gown pocking the air with flecks of oriental green and black, “You have to care!” she exclaimed, one long arm plucking at my bedcovers. “You must care, about everything; else how will you become a Great Artist? How will you become Truly Human?”

I groaned. “I don’t want to become anything right now. Right now I’d like to sleep, or maybe eat. Where is Justice?”

She blinked painfully, as if she had been slapped. “Not care?” she repeated, as if she had not heard me. “Not care?”

I rolled my eyes and turned onto my side. I could hear her breathing deeply (“from the diaphragm,” she would say) as she sought to calm herself. I pretended to be asleep, although I knew this would not fool Miss Scarlet, who declared she could smell sleep, and daydreams when one should be preparing for one’s entrance.

But perhaps she decided it would be better to wait for this imperfect vessel to knit itself back together before attempting to fill it again. The bedstand shook as she brushed against it, retrieving her book. Then I heard the soft rustle of a page being turned. She cleared her throat.

“‘ Great acting, of course, is a thing of the spirit; in its best estate a conveyance of certain abstract spiritual qualities, with the person of the actor as medium. It is with this medium our science deals, with its slow, patient perfection as an instrument. The eternal and immeasurable accident of the theater which you call genius, that is a matter of The Soul’”

The muted kiss of her volume’s brittle pages as they met each other once again. “Goodbye, Wendy,” said Miss Scarlet. The door clicked shut behind her.

The house was dark that evening. Fabian visited me briefly. He told me that while we had been performing for Miramar and his guests, the House High Brazil had been beset by lazars. Many were dead or taken prisoner, Paphians and Curators alike, and there was talk of gruesome things, children beheaded by other children in the darkness, the living corpse the Saint-Alabans named the Gaping One seen frolicking with a jackal familiar at the ball; captives led to be human offerings to Him at the Engulfed Cathedral. The City was in mourning.

After he left I lay long abed, half-expecting to be visited again by Miss Scarlet, or Justice, or even Toby himself. At the very least by Citana or Mehitabel. But no one came. A distant clock clanged somewhere within the theater. Still I waited; still no one came. It seemed I was being ignored, or left to recover in solitude. Finally I decided to go out.

I met no one in the halls, though from far off I could hear the swish and clatter and shouted expletives that accompanied fencing practice in the gymnasium. A reassuring sound, whispering that normal life was going on somewhere despite the massacre, despite my madness. I went through the Grand Hall, passing quickly down the center of the ancient carpet with its worn arabesques. As I hurried I passed rotting cabinets holding portfolios so ancient that the very meanings of the words they contained had changed over the intervening centuries. It was with some relief that I reached the massive oaken doors that led outside.

Shadows stretched across the wide sward in front of the theater, to wither and die before reaching the boundaries of the Library facing it. A score of skittish sheep belonging to the Librarians grazed upon the theater lawn. Occasionally Toby called them into service as decorative additions to certain pastoral plays in our repertory. For the most part they just wandered aimlessly across the grass. I nodded at the young Librarian perched across the way upon the ruins of a marble pillar. A re-engineered swivelgun rested in his lap as protection against lazars or aardmen. I exchanged a melancholy greeting with him and headed for the Deeping Avenue.

Already the sun had dipped behind the Library’s copper dome. As I crossed the common I heard the rush of hawks settling for the night, and the moans of owls as they made a few half-hearted forays into the twilight. An undeniable glamor hung over this place, the Library grounds a disordered but still lovely tangle of rosebushes and cherry trees given just enough attention to keep them from utter abandon, while magnolias and white oaks lofted high above them. From here I looked down the long sweep of the Deeping Avenue to where the Narrow Forest overtook it. I could just make out the blackened finger of the Obelisk rising from the trees. Behind it the sun glinted upon the distant river. In places I saw where the Deeping Avenue was still kept clear. There were little orchards of apple and cherry trees, and pasture compounds where the Curators grazed sheep. White blocks like salt spilled upon a smooth green table were wooden beehives splitting beneath their load of honey. I saw the tulip poplar allee leading to where the Regents’ few and splendid horses lived in the circular Horn Building, and the red turrets of the High Regent’s Castle, still proud and tall despite its broken towers and shattered windows.

But for the most part the view down Library Hill was of trees massed between the ruins of once-elegant marble buildings, and the crumbling bulk of vast gray edifices that had never been lovely. Only in decay had they finally achieved a sort of truce with sky and rain beneath their heavy kudzu beards.

I sighed, and stopped to climb a ragged pine tree whose branches spoked out to form a comfortable vantage point. It was October, what the Paphians called Autime, but the air still smelled sweet and warm. Only the browning leaves of the oaks seemed like fall, that and a faintly chill northern breeze that stirred the evergreen boughs.