Winterlong (10 page)

I laughed. “You sound like Iris Bergenia!”

“I mean it—do something to cause me pain.”

Uneasily I shifted on the bed. “You never used to want that with me, cousin.”

“I don’t now, either, really. But I’m trying to show you something. Now go on—” She tossed back her mane of fiery hair and glared at me, then pointed to the knout draped over her wardrobe. “Use that if you like.”

I took the lash—a pretty whip of light braided doeskin that her Patron Flora Pyracantha gave her at Semhane one year—and raised it, smiling ruefully. When I struck Ketura she gasped: the blow was harsher than she had anticipated. I dropped the knout and rushed to comfort her.

“No!” She pushed me away and raised her clenched hand. “Watch—”

On her wrist the stony bracelet glowed very faintly, the lavender stripes deepening to violet against the luminous shell. One end of the gray loop was open, with a small rounded lip. As I stared it grew brighter still, until—
zzzkkk
shining black spine shot out from one of the dark whorls. At its tip a cobalt droplet gleamed like a gem’s tear. I breathed in sharply and moved to touch it.

“No: watch.” Ketura drew back, still holding her fist rigidly in front of her. As I stared the spine slowly retracted. I turned to her, marveling.

“What the hell is that?”

Ketura regarded me through narrowed eyes. Then she carefully slipped the bracelet from her wrist and handed it to me. “Now you should be very grateful to me for giving you this.”

“I don’t even know what it
is.”
I held it prudently in my palm, waited for her to snake it about my wrist. It grew warmer, as though adjusting to my body temperature. I touched the gray surface tentatively.

“It’s a sagittal: an engineered mollusk. Very poisonous, very rare. It was made during the Second Ascension.”

“That’s its shell?”

She nodded. “It lives inside, curled around like a—like a slug.”

“It’s poisonous?”

“Yes. If I’d struck you with it I’d have killed you.”

“Who gave it to you?” ‘

“A boy I met at the Botanical Gardens during the Masque of Poppies.”

I raised my eyebrows. “A Botanist gave you this?”

Ketura shook her head. “No. He wasn’t a Botanist. I don’t know what he was, really. He was beautiful, but he wasn’t a Paphian. Flora told me afterward that she had never seen him before; no one seems to have known who he was, or who invited him to the masque.

“I didn’t even entertain him; only talked with him in one of greenhouses for a little while. He gave me that—” She pointed at the sagittal, gray and cold about my wrist. “He said that it might serve me for a little while, and if I tired of it to give it to a friend.” She shook her head at the memory. “Not really the sort of gift we usually exchange, is it?”

I held up my arm and stared at it. “No, not really,” I admitted. “It’s ugly.”

Ketura nodded. “I know. I’m sorry; but it seemed like—well, it seemed like it might be useful for you, where you’re going.”

I looked at her coldly. “It’s a weapon.”

She nodded.

“How does it work?”

She leaned back against the wardrobe, flicking the hair from her eyes. “It feeds off the dead skin on your wrist. And it responds to changes in your body indicating fear or aggression. That’s when it sticks its spine out—”

“You knew all that?” I glanced at her admiringly.

She flushed. “No. The boy told me. He explained so that I’d know how and when to use it.”

I waited for her to continue, but instead she stood and paced back to her armoire. She rifled a drawer, finally chose a jet-black sheath trimmed with striped cat, and shrugged into it, smoothing the fur until it gleamed. I turned the sagittal this way and that, careful not to touch its anterior lip. After a few minutes Ketura said, “You could stay here and get rich, Raphael. There’s no reason for you to leave.”

I crossed my arms, keeping the sagittal away from my chest. “You left.”

“I wanted to study under the Botanists,” she said. “And I’m older than the rest of you. In a year they’ll have me in the kitchen, or carrying slops, or—” She shook her head, tight-lipped. “But you—why should you leave? Miramar wants you to stay,” she said bitterly.

“As the next suzein.”

“You should be flattered.” A bone pin sprang from her chignon. I retrieved it and handed it back to her. For a long moment she let her fingers rest against mine, and I felt her fingertips, callused from wielding the knout for her Patrons, the rough skin that never would have been allowed within another House. Then she took the pin and turned away. “I would never have left if Miramar had tried to stop me. But he didn’t. He thinks I’m already too old.”

I watched her chalk her face and drop two pearls of octine into each eye before she turned to me once more. “Raphael, you just don’t know—”

I stood and stalked to the window. “And you think you know it all now, just because you’re
so old.”

“That’s not it!” Beneath the Chinese lead her cheeks reddened. “It’s
dangerous
for us out there. Even among the Botanists—all they want from us now is hurt and humiliation. They hear news of the outlands, rumors of the next Ascension, and they hope they can somehow profit from it. They fear that the world has grown beyond their knowledge, but they know that we are still beautiful! So they hate us, and fear us. Beauty and youth and pleasure are no longer enough. They want pain and death; they no longer want to share the City with us. Haven’t you noticed it among your Patrons?”

I shook my head. “No.
My
Patrons expect something other than pain from me.”

She sighed. “I suppose so. Only the sweetest sugarplums for Raphael Miramar.” Her tone grew harsh, but the gaze she turned on me was soft. “I’m just afraid for you, Raphael; for all of us. What if we are betrayed by the Curators?”

I began to pull on my clothes. “That’s why I’m going to stay with Roland. To learn; and maybe someday come back here and share it with the rest of you.”

Ketura turned to regard her face in the mirror. One at a time she drummed three fingers against her lower lip, then bared her teeth in a snarl. “They don’t want us to learn—”

“Oh, shut up. I hear the same damned lies you do.” I grabbed my chasuble, glaring at my own reflection as I dressed. “Doctor Foster boring me to tears with his damned stories for boys and girls! All to frighten us from ever leaving here—” I tied my hair loosely and stormed past her without a word.

But at the door I hesitated, glancing at the gray band on my wrist. “Ketura …”

She shook her head, smiling as she turned from the mirror to meet me. “I’m sorry. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Roland Nopcsa really is different.” And she kissed me, then drew back and brushed three fingers against my lip.

“Be careful with that,” she warned, nodding at the sagittal and cupping her hand a scant inch from the dark curve of the shell’s edge. “It protects its host; but the venom is always fatal when it strikes.”

She paused, then said, “But you know—”

She stood in the doorway, pulling the domino from her sheath and draping its dark folds over her face.

“But what?” I urged.

“They’re almost beautiful when they die,” she said, and walked down the hall to meet her Patron.

“O
UR PREDECESSORS HERE BELIEVED
in a slow process of evolution.
We
know that new life forms emerge suddenly—we see it in the Narrow Forest, and through the work the Zoologists have done with the aardmen and other geneslaves.”

“Like that?” I pointed at the glossy model of an infant proteceratops nosing its way from an elongated leathery egg.

Roland took a long pull from his beer and nodded. “Exactly. Except that we can choose the form of our history, and presumably the proteceratops did not have that luxury.”

Above us the skeleton of
quetzalcoatlus northropi
hummed faintly, as a draft from the ventilation pipes stirred its hollow bones. I leaned forward to blow upon the blue-gray cube of pressed herbs burning in the little brass tray Fancy had given me as a going-away gift, watched the smoke coil about the arching claws and rakishly outthrust pelvis of the looming Deinocherius that guarded Roland’s bed. As Regent of the Natural Historians, Roland chose his own quarters in the Museum: the Hall of Archosaurs, where we retired each evening to talk and smoke and drink and make love. Miramar was right: my education was not foremost among Roland’s concerns.

But it was my oldest dream. To learn the true history of the old world, to memorize the alphabet embedded within the layers of calcareous rock, and so discern in the new damp mud and broken asphalt outside my window the whorls and patterns that would shape the future. And I believed that Roland knew these things, because he was descended from those who had been set here to guard the City’s knowledge after the First Ascension.

“What luxuries
did
the archosaurs have, Roland?” I asked, burrowing deeper into the heap of wool rugs covering the bed.

“Oh, the usual,” he replied. “Time. A variety of comestibles. Warm sunny days and cool yet pleasant nights: bring a sweater when visiting the Mesozoic.” A small potent explosion of laughter rocked the bed as he guffawed, throttling a bolster between his huge hands. “Oh, they had a wonderful life, the archosaurians. Huge and hungry and cruel, lumbering and gentle-eyed. Their footprints remain, and we little mice creep from the trees to drink from the impressions of their toes, and make our homes among their bones.”

He gulped the rest of his beer, leaned over the cask beside his bed, and refilled the bottle. “Ah, Raphael. Why would you leave your warm House upon the hill to live here? It’s so fucking
cold.”
Those heavy hands around my waist, now, pulling me close so that I could smell his sweat, sweetly sour from the Botanists’ bitter lager.

“I came to keep you warm,” I said obediently, nuzzling his chest. Roland was shorter than I, but massive: barrel-chested, thighs like tree stumps, hands so big and clumsy-looking it was a marvel to watch him assemble the delicate pinnules of shattered crinoids, until the fossilized sea lilies bloomed again within his brown palms.

“But orchids die in the cold,” he said mockingly. “Miramar would never forgive me if his prize blossom withered here.”

“No chance,” I replied. Roland laughed more loudly and pulled me closer.

“I feel a chill,” he said, forcing my head down, and for a while we turned to other matters.

In the night I woke. For six years Roland had been my Patron. I knew this vast chamber as well as I knew my room at the House Miramar. But in the weeks since coming here to live I had slept uneasily, waking often in the cool darkness to start at the sight of the vast silent behemoths that reared overhead. I stared at them now, wondering how their bones came to line these halls and clutter the vast storerooms of the Museum, whereas the remains of the men who had been here mere centuries before us were lost forever.

“You see how we choose which histories to recall?” Roland had remarked once, hefting a mannequin. “Please note that only Aides and Technicians sleep in the Hall of Man,” he added scornfully.

The Aide helping us move the exhibit glared when I laughed at Roland’s comment. She said,
“We
work our way up to the best Halls. We
earn
our beds.”

Blushing, I shut up. Even Roland was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Raphael earned his place in the House he came from, Franca.”

“It’s not the same,” she snapped. She was two or three years younger than I. Her hair had recently been shorn to’ indicate her promotion from Docent to Aide. She stared contemptuously at my long beribboned braid as we hauled the heavy steel desk back into storage. “They should know their rights here.”

“Raphael has been my student since he was a child. Allow the Regents their privileges and passions, Franca.” And he winked at her. I looked away quickly, my face burning from the complicitous smile they had shared for that instant.

But now beside me Roland lay dreaming. His heavy arm pinned me to the bed as he snored. I sighed and stared at the ceiling, where bats darted between the Deinocherius skeleton and the hollow-eyed trachodons. In the darkest corners of the gallery rats scuffled, nosing fruitlessly through the ancient bones stacked there. I watched the bats’ ceaseless waltz, until once more I fell restlessly asleep with their bloodless song echoing in my dreams.

E
ACH DAWN WE WOKE
to the screech of the Regent’s trumpet echoing through the Rotunda. Its clamor aroused Aides and Technicians and Regent alike from the galleries where they slept: the Aides and Technicians to begin their round of chores and maintenance, Roland to join his fellow Regents in their incessant discussion of useless research papers mined from the Museums’ Libraries. Although lately other things seemed to occupy their meetings. Roland returned to the Hall of Archosaurs later in the evening, and often was in no mood for me. I tried not to think of Miramar’s warning, of the rumors that even a Paphian catamite heard within the Museum of Natural History these last few weeks: that the Curators had taken a stand against the Ascendants. There had been a murder, or murders; would there now be retribution?

“I thought you were going to ban that damned horn,” I said, rolling away from Roland to cover my head with a bolster.

“Tradition is stronger even than Regents,” Roland replied. The trumpet bleated ‘fitfully for another moment. In the stillness that followed I heard the hum of voices and footsteps and doors creaking throughout the galleries, the muted click and burr of the Museum’s generator tumbling to life in the basement. Roland sighed. “But I love to hear them all wake: to think that once the City stirred so each day …”

I yawned and shook back my tangled hair. “Too early! No wonder they fell to the Ascendants without a fight.”

Roland shot me a disgruntled glance. “What are you going to do today?” he asked, tossing me a robe.

I dressed, wincing at the rough linen. My own clothes were reserved for masques and the rare occasion when I might meet with other Paphians. “The Devonian.” I tipped my head toward an adjoining gallery. “You’ll be in the Library?”