Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

The bone clattered to the floor. His finger stabbed the air in front of my face, then flicked a strand of wheat-colored hair from his lip. He continued, “There would be a certain symmetry; like in that masque the blond children showed me. ‘Baal and Anat’: I quite liked that one.”

His voice wandered off. He stretched his hand to pinch Oleander’s shoulder, kneading the loose skin as though he were testing a bolt of fine silk.

“She might be,” I said. “Only she was raised among the Ascendants, who do not believe. And that masque is nonsense, a ghost story taught the Saint-Alabans by the Historians. I do not believe in the Magdalene or the Gaping One.”

Which was no longer strictly true, since I had seen with my own eyes a spectral Boy walking in the Narrow Forest, whom Dr. Silverthorn might have called an Angel, but who I believed to be the Hanged Boy. And his jackal familiar sat not an arm’s length from me. But I could not understand why an Ascendant would be interested in these things. It was almost beyond comprehension to think that he might believe in them.

Tast’annin looked at me with those vulpine eyes. They glowed dull orange, as though banked embers burned somewhere behind his shattered face.

“I was not a religious man,” he said, his voice fallen to a whisper. From behind him billowed a sigh, the flop of a heavy leg upon the stone floor. The aardman Trey had turned over in his sleep. “I saw too many things, things you would not believe, my lovely child …”

He motioned for me to draw nearer. I dragged myself across the floor, sweating as I came within the murky radius of firelight. I started to pull off my woolen cloak, decided not to. That would leave me only in a thin shift, and that would make it easier for the Aviator to grope at me with his large bony hands. Like many eunuchs his physical loss had honed his hatred to a fine dangerous point; he struck me whenever the temper took hold of him.

Not now, though. He merely tousled my unbound hair, then traced the edges of the hempen rope I wore about my neck at his command.

“No, darling boy: I ceased to believe after I saw entire cities erupt in liquid flame, and heard the sound a million people make when they die all at once. A sort of scream, so loud that my ears bled; and for many days afterward I heard a dull whining, as though flies whirred and banged inside my skull.

“I heard it so many times I went deaf in one ear—”

A draft of icy air shot up from one of the grates in the stone floor. The Aviator tapped his ear with a long ivory fingernail, then waved to disperse the smoke roiling around him.

“But the Governors repaired that. When I underwent rehabilitation, when I retired from active duty; when they decided to send me here to this accursed City.”

He drifted into silence, running his front teeth over his lip again and again as though to strip the skin from it. I stared down at my hands folded in my lap. The sagittal glowed very faintly in here, the palest lilac; as though it drew strength from the stench of evil that hung about the Chapel. When the Aviator had been silent for several minutes Oleander lifted his head. His sunken eyes shone. As I took in his hollow cheeks, the unnatural brightness of his eyes, I realized that he really was starving. His cotton trousers had grown too loose to hang about his emaciated hips. He had discarded them for a pair of particolored breeches, a High Brazilian child’s harlequin costume: gaudy gold and green, torn and bloodied at the knees (she too had been ringing the changes when she died), but fitting Oleander’s demeanor, his somewhat melancholy gaiety.

“But you flew in the air!” he said. “You lived in the NASNA station!”

The idea delighted him beyond all measure. I had grown weary weeks before of the Aviator’s exploits. Oleander, it seemed, never would.

Tast’annin let his lip slide slowly between his teeth until it curled back into its accustomed nerveless grin.

“Yes, I flew in the air,” he said. He turned to look at Oleander, so slowly it seemed he was some huge automaton formed of metal and bone.

“I was one of the last. I was a NASNA Aviator, a remarkable soldier of the firmament; one of those who would save the world and bring about a final glorious Ascension, though not the one your people dream of, Oleander, nor yours, my dear Raphael …”

He laughed mirthlessly. One hand groped through a pile of bright rubbish arranged by one of the smoking braziers. It withdrew a book, an archaic volume tied with string so that its pages would not come loose. I craned my neck to read the title faded across its mottled cover: An Inquiry into Some Ethical Points of Celestial Navigation. He glanced at it, frowned, and tossed it onto the heap of glowing embers. He raked his hand through the rubbish once again, until he drew forth another volume. Its cover was gone and many pages seemed missing, but it appeared to meet his satisfaction. He flipped through the matted pages, peeling them apart with great care, until he found the one he wanted. He began to read. The echo of his words hung in the heavy air, hollow and faintly threatening.

It was a terrible story, and it seemed to go on for hours. I moved closer to Oleander. He listened without looking up, and his stitches grew looser and more uneven, until when he jerked on the thread it broke, and the bone needle flew into the fire. Then he gave up all pretense of working. He huddled beside me, his hands slipping beneath my cloak to clasp mine as the Aviator’s voice broke over us in inescapable waves, and the snores of the aardman droned on behind us, and in the shadows Anku stared unblinking as though he waited and watched for something to take shape and rise from the darkness of the Resurrection Chapel.

“’ The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…’”

As Tast’annin read this his tone grew dreamy, almost gentle. He lifted his head from the page.

“That is what we lost,” he said. “The primacy of an idea, an idea worth dying for, something greater than ourselves and deserving of sacrifice …

“But you did not forget, Raphael, and your people did not forget, did they? And these others—”

He pointed at Trey snoring lustily. “The geneslaves have always looked for someone to bow down to: it is in their mongrel nature as dogs, and as failed men too I suppose, to find someone worth naming master.

“I think that is why I was not a religious man: I never found anyone or anything I could bow down to. Pasty weak men and women kneeling before insipid gods, gods with all the blood washed from their wounds, gods who died without a fight—else they’d still be getting their share of glory and blood and sacrifice, eh, Raphael?”

I had lost the sense of what he was saying. The words of his dreadful story still had me in a sort of trance, so that when the Aviator’s cold fingers grabbed the rope around my neck I cried out, and Oleander nearly jumped into my lap.

I thought Tast’annin would kill me then, for no reason but that I had shown fear of him. But after a moment he dropped the cord and leaned back.

“The boy has no idea what I am speaking of,” he whispered. In the dying firelight he looked even more like some ancient effigy, some terrible thing wakened from a long and restive sleep. But it was not the obvious symbols of his derangement that frightened me, the bones and braids and broken knives, or even the rope he made me wear. No, it was the more subtle emblems of the outer world that filled me with a growing unease: that triangle of shining cloth adorning his breast, a type of luminous cloth I had never seen; the little icons emblazoned on his Aviator’s jacket, stars and moons and shapes like arrows or the prows of boats. The ring upon one gnarled finger, a circle of heavy gold set with a large blue stone and surrounded by letters spelling out NASNA . I could not imagine that his people would have weak gods. I could’ not imagine that they would have gods at all, and I told him so.