Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

Jane listened dubiously.

“Well,” she said at last, when with paws joined Miss Scarlet had beseeched her to help and not betray me. “This is all a little hard to swallow, isn’t it?”

At Miss Scarlet’s offended expression she quickly added, “But very nicely told, Scarlet, very nice! But—well, suppose she is the one they’re searching for.”

She indicated me with a nod. I had for the moment become stock character in Miss Scarlet’s picaresque and not a participant in this discussion. “How am I to know that? And what is she going to do? If this Aviator is drawing the lazars and aardmen in to a search for you—”

She turned to me again. “Aidan Arent is too well known now in the City. Even if I don’t breathe a word—and I won’t—once a secret’s out it’s out, if you know what I mean. Someone else is bound to discover you, and then …” She circled her throat with her hand and made a choking sound.

We sat in silence for a few minutes. The sambar snorted, munching grass. Pale sunlight laced through the trees. A cricket sawed in the thickets, waking to the scant warmth. Miss Scarlet stared with sorrowful eyes into the forest, and I brooded on the Ascendant in the Cathedral who had vowed to find me, and cursed the labyrinth of chance and careless science that had brought me here.

Finally Jane said, “What exactly is it you do, Wendy?”

A cunning thought came to me: a means to escape. I looked up at her and asked, “Do you want me to show you?”

“Wendy!” Miss Scarlet said; but Jane had already nodded.

“Come here,” I said, drawing her to me. She lifted her face to mine. I pushed the hair back from her eyes, stared into them for a long moment. Still a little suspicious of me (rightly so, Jane!) but bold and unafraid. Then I kissed her. She pulled back, embarrassed, but I held her chin and brought her mouth to mine, my tongue probing between her lips until she sighed and closed her eyes. I waited until I felt her breathing quicken, then nipped softly at her lip, once and again, until blood mingled with the sweet salt in her mouth.

Bewilderment; a fiery burst of amazement and I behold her confused spectrum of desire and fear, liquid rolling eyes and a rich odor of the stable. Jane’s consciousness surprisingly powerful, a heated core burning through me so that I groan with pleasure, fall back as it flows over me, the warmth of sun and thick matted fur beneath her fingertips, undiminished awe as she watches a cinnabar fox being born, the damp scrawny mess of a hatching finch, a viper’s demon face breaking through a leathery shell with its egg tooth—

I recall myself, force my will upon the serpent’s triangular head until the black agate chips of its eyes slant, grow pale and green and glowing and its shining scales take on the contours of fluttering leaves. Before me the Boy shimmers into sight, face and body rippling as though seen through waves of heated air, His eyes alone steady and unwavering, green tunnels leading into darkness.

I pull back to consciousness, sit up drunkenly to peer at Jane’s face twisted into a look of blank yet intense concentration. Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked, trying to bring me into focus.

“That, how did you, what—” she stammered, swaying. Miss Scarlet clutched her arm as Jane reached for something not quite there, leaf falling through autumn light or whirring emerald-hinged beetle. Marveling, she brought her hand before her face, then suddenly doubled over as though struck.

“Aaah—” she groaned. She twisting to stare at me, choking on her words. “Take him!—make it go! —”

I stared at her coldly: she was but another of those bright figures moving through a gray landscape. Her pleas faded to a whisper of despair, the sigh of wind in leafless branches. Then I heard Miss Scarlet’s shrill voice, chattering and keening and it was that I could not bear, it was that which finally drew me back—

“Help her, Wendy! Please—”

I turned from her, bowed my head to meet Jane’s eyes. Dull now and exhausted, their light extinguished as she contemplated what He offered her, the wasted fields and stony ground that would give birth to no more birds, no more serpents or sambars or black-eyed vixens. Only livid sky to see and ashes to taste for eternity, only this and nothing more.

“Look at me,” I said. I squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that tears welled from them. I summoned Him, forced Him to turn that implacable gaze from Jane to me, His glittering emerald eyes staring without anger or surprise, their reserve broken all the same as they froze upon me.

“ Leave her,” I commanded.

He stared, cold and pitiless as a great cat disturbed at its repast. Then, slowly, He smiled, gnashing His small white teeth as He acceded me this small triumph; and faded into nothing.

The remainder of our trip to the Zoo was subdued. Jane crept back to consciousness, shaken as a child waking from a nightmare. Like a child she recovered quickly, although her eyes darted distrust as she walked beside me, and she held herself a little distant even from Miss Scarlet. Miss Scarlet was quiet upon her antlered mount, the sambar the only one of us unshaken, if silent as the rest.

My own thoughts were bleak ones. I felt a growing sense of shame at what I had done, and an odd bewilderment: because how was it that I was feeling shame? How was it that I felt anything and everything these days, until it seemed I was a roiling caldron of joys and terrors spilling over to scald those who loved me, those whom Justice had named as the only wall between myself and the dark?‘ Was that how I had pushed Him back, the Boy in the tree? Was it as Dr. Harrow had dreamed: that exposure to sensation, to real human emotion and not the refined chemistries of HEL , had rived new channels through the scars in my brain, so that I now began to feel what I had distilled from the hearts of others for all these years?

And could it be that feeling these things made one stronger, not weak and stupid as Anna and Gligor and myself had always thought? Strong enough that my own tongue might one day drown out the Small Voices, and my own eyes lock with the Boy’s and force Him back into the empty lands beyond sleep and dreaming?

But I did not know any of this; only guilt and sorrow and apprehension of the long night ahead. To ease the trek I went over my lines, and found myself repeating what Miss Scarlet had told me when we first met:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show …

Pondering these words, I came to the northwest part of the City, where I had never been before: where ancient gates rose from the trees and rubble to enclose the Zoological Gardens, and where if one stood upon the yellowing turf beneath the Regent’s Oak one might glimpse in the near distance the black cusp of the Engulfed Cathedral stabbing at the sky.

All was in an uproar when we arrived. A spotted cat, Rufus Lynx’s namesake, had escaped. It was to have been led by a very young Paphian girl (looking much relieved by the turn of events) to the center of the grass-grown amphitheater where our play would progress, and there presented with pretty ceremony to the Regent as the festivities began.

“Mmm! Jane Alopex! Mmm, they were looking for you in the Paradise Aviary, mmm mmm—”

A short heavyset man puffed up to greet us as we entered the Zoo barricades, waving back the two gatekeepers who hurried to his side.

“Rufus!” exclaimed Jane Alopex, dropping the sambar’s bridle and wiping her hands on her breeches.

“Yes yes, mmm, hallo, Rufus Lynx, mmm, Scarlet Pan, yes, h’lo, mmm, Aidan, yes yes yes—”

Nodding, he shook all our hands, not excluding the abashed Jane’s. The Regent was nearly bald, with a soft fine fringe of dark hair that might once have been red and stuck out in uneven peaks about his pink skull. This, along with his habit of humming to himself and his saffron tunic, gave him the manner of an agitated cockatiel. He wore muck-stained boots and bright trousers spattered with dirt and flecks of birdseed, and barely came up to my chin. He expressed vague pleasure at meeting Miss Scarlet once again, but scarcely seemed to see me at all. He was intent only upon recapturing the fugitive lynx.