Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  In the quiet, Jackson Mead reflected upon what he was about to do, and doubted that he would succeed. He had never succeeded before, when the elements were simpler, the air was purer, and the horizon trembled with the immediate presence of the cloud wall. But now hardly anyone knew the cloud wall for what it was even when it swept through the city and scoured their souls white. And though the machines were ready, Jackson Mead doubted that conditions had properly coalesced. He doubted the coming of the high shimmering gold that would commend an instance of perfect, balanced justice, for he doubted that anyone remembered or cared for justice either natural or divine. They had all defined it according to their own lights, which meant that it always had to be quick and uncomplicated.

  It had taken ages for him to realize that he had to make a bridge of light without a discernible end. Before that, he had built wonders of lovely proportion and airy grace, silvery catenaries that sang in the breeze high above windblown straits all over the world, connecting one heather-covered cliff to another, or marrying the two sides of a choked and impoverished city. It had been right and good to fashion those vast curves which were in themselves an ideal synthesis of rising and falling, aspiration and despair, rebellion and submission, pride and humility. In imitation of universal waves, they were the strongest things ever constructed, and probably the most religious of structures except perhaps for the church steeples, that pointed up into the far distance.

  Now he had the thick and precisely aligned bundles of light, perfectly parallel, perfectly pure, to aim in a curve so gradual that by all known means of measurement it would appear to be absolutely straight. It was to take root in the Battery and pierce the air with its smooth particolored girderwork, straight as an arrow, at forty-five degrees.

  Jackson Mead walked over to a twelve-foot-high tinted window, and kicked it out. “I want to see this in its true colors,” he said as the glass shattered and the pieces flew outward to glide and tumble on the wind.

  The breeze pushed against their faces and swept back their hair, and they had to lean into it as they surveyed what was before them. The sky was crowded with plumes of steam and smoke. High and white, slowly turning, slowly rising, their tops already in the sun, they looked like a range of golden mountains that were far away not on the horizon, but on high. Jackson Mead tilted his head and squinted at this sight, and then turned to Mootfowl. “There are the plumes of smoke and ash. We can’t wait any longer.”

  In an arresting gesture of hand and eye, he signaled for the bridge to be thrown.

  In the launch, they thought that they had been struck by lightning. The blinding spectral flash and its ensuing concussion pushed them down into the bilge. The only one who was not thrown was Abby.

  Just east of the park, staring down a seemingly endless avenue and trying to summon his courage, the white horse had his breath knocked out of him by the sudden burst of light and crack of thunder that rolled over the city and brought even the ruins to attention.

  From the Battery rose a beautiful angled beam of light in every color. Each section was as tall as a man, a yard wide, and how long no one could tell. The warmer colors—the reds, greens, violets, and grays—were the core, and the more ethereal and metallic colors the sheath. Solid beams mitered the air, rose through the plumes, and disappeared beyond sight. The blue, white, silver, and gold beams that comprised the sheath were transparent, blinding, and jewel-like, and a halation that appeared substantial enough to walk upon followed and echoed the main structure in a diffuse, spangling, silvery road.

  As the minutes passed, Jackson Mead watched. “How much time?” he asked, second by second, for he knew that even at the speed of light, or faster (because of the curve), it would be neither seconds nor minutes, but hours before they would know if the bridge had taken. They would know if the long arch had found a resting place when a back wave would return through it and shake the earth. And if it failed, it would simply go out, as if someone had blown out a candle.

  They were not the only ones in the city who were transfixed by what they had made. No one anywhere moved, for fear of breaking the spell. Especially for those who were not aware of the test that was yet to come, it seemed as if it were working. The plumes kept rising. The sun was now so close to the eastern horizon that, to watch it, one would think that all Europe was burning. And the bridge appeared to be on its way.

  But Mootfowl, the expert mechanic, suddenly stepped forward, for he had seen amidst the light what no one else, not even Jackson Mead, was capable of seeing. Cecil Mature turned away from the bridge for the first time, and looked at Mootfowl. And then Jackson Mead saw what it was that Mootfowl had discovered.

  The interior had begun to vibrate, a sure sign that it would not take. Hardly perceptible at first, it was soon oscillating in a regular rhythm. The whole bridge began to shake. Then it buckled, and, as suddenly as it had been thrown, it disappeared, leaving only a fine and confusing afterimage to those who now found themselves in the morning light, aching in memory of its beauty.

  NOW THE sun was up. It appeared to sit on a blackened line of rooftops in Brooklyn and drip gold into the streets. As it rose higher, it poured molten metal down the hills and into the harbor, making a thousand dark alleys into a thousand golden sluices.

  In the ruins of the Maritime Cathedral, Peter Lake watched the light run in from behind columns and buttresses, steadily driving away shadows and reflecting off whatever glass was left in the windows that still had a shape. He imagined that when the cathedral had been surrounded by fire it must have been blacker than ink, and that red light had danced in scalloped patterns on the high ceilings. And perhaps a bright flare, a gas line igniting, or the sudden kindling of a wooden house had sent straight rays glinting through the whale’s white eye, or made the sails appear to billow in the delicate glass ships. Now, charred beams lay across the floor, and as the sunlight streamed in, Peter Lake could see that in a very short time weeds would begin to grow over the stone.

  Not exactly sure of what to expect, Peter Lake was startled by a noise that sounded like a gloved fist hitting metal. He shielded his eyes and looked toward the door, where, backlighted, someone was staggering about, his hands clutching his head. “That has to be you, Pearly,” Peter Lake shouted, even though he couldn’t see clearly because of the sun in his eyes. “Only Pearly Soames would knock his head coming through a door that’s forty feet wide.” Moving to the center of the cathedral, Peter Lake felt his blood running hard. He had not intended to be full of fight, but, as if from nowhere, the fight had returned.

  After smashing his head quite hard against a pipe that had fallen diagonally across the doorway, Pearly was hopping about in pain.

  “Or maybe it’s not Pearly Soames,” Peter Lake taunted. “The way it’s hopping around, it looks like some bastard jackrabbit that stepped on a nail.” Pearly stopped still, his anger greater than the pain.

  “Now, Pearly Soames, he’s a dumb evil bastard too. He falls downstairs twice a day, and he mistakenly shoots his own men. He mixes up words because his tongue is a snake fighting for its independence. And he has dreadful, disgusting fits, after which he comes to and finds that his hands are full of blood because his long filthy nails have raked his flanks and attacked his face. But the bastard—and I mean, literally, bastard—hasn’t yet been known to hop like a jackrabbit. So, who is it, now? Is it Pearly, or is it a rabbit?”

  “It’s Pearly, and you know it,” replied a deep scratchy voice in barely controllable anger. Pearly Soames walked slowly up the center aisle between two forests of pews that had been crushed by falling masonry.

  He was tremendous. Peter Lake had not remembered that Pearly had been so big, but now he seemed to be ten feet tall. There again were the eyes that made Rasputin’s seem as soft as a lamb’s. Even Peter Lake, in whom there had resided nearly every kind of power, was impressed by the mobility of Pearly’s eyes. They were shallow, self-consuming whirlpools that terrorized not because of what they threatened, but because of t
heir emptiness. They took note of the wound in Peter Lake’s side.

  “I see that little Gwathmi did stick you,” Pearly said, warming to the possibility that, as Peter Lake had rustled through time, his invulnerability had been scraped off. “His brother Sylvane told me about it, hoping for a reward. I didn’t believe him, so I killed him.”

  “Let’s see,” Peter Lake interrupted, mockingly. “With which one of your ivory-handled doodads did you kill him? Was it with pimp’s knuckles? An ebony beaver tail?”

  “With my hands. Sylvane was very small, smaller even than Gwathmi. I reached out and grabbed his neck in my right fist,” Pearly said, clenching his teeth together as he imitated what he had done, “and squeezed until it snapped. He went for his weapons, but he didn’t have time. He should have known.”

  “You can’t do that to me, can you?” Peter Lake asked, staring without fear into Pearly’s eyes. “You never could touch me, remember?”

  “Oh no, not you,” Pearly answered. “No, not you. A woman protects you, Peter Lake, a girl. I’ve tried, haven’t I, but you do have a shield. Or, you had a shield. She must be getting tired of the job, since she let Gwathmi through. Nothing lasts forever, Peter Lake, nothing, not even her love for you.”

  “Love passes from soul to soul, Pearly. It does last forever. But you wouldn’t know about that.”

  “I might, in fact. You’d be surprised at what I’ve come to know. I grant you that it passes from soul to soul, but you must grant me that it is a finite commodity, and that, as it is traded, it leaves some souls unprotected and abandoned.”

  “I don’t think so,” Peter Lake offered. “I think that nothing is lost in the giving.”

  “That’s a bloody myth,” Pearly screamed, “and violates all laws! The world is held in perfect balance. When you give, you lose. When you take, you gain. There’s nothing more to it.”

  “No,” said Peter Lake. “The laws that you think are absolute have on occasion been abridged. Anyway, they are vastly complicated, and what is apparent is not always what is true.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Pearly asked.

  Peter Lake hesitated before he answered. “No,” he said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Of course you’re not, because your protection is gone,” Pearly insisted. “You’re abandoned now, Peter Lake. I knew that if I hung on long enough, I would find you when you’d be worn down.”

  “My protection may have disappeared,” Peter Lake asserted. “But you’ve still got me to fight.” Then he did something that no one had ever dared to do. He raised himself up, and he spat in Pearly’s eyes.

  Pearly’s short sword was out instantly and on its way down, but Peter Lake jumped to the side. Only then did Peter Lake see that Short Tails were perched on the walls, hidden in the broken pews, and standing in packed ranks near the altar.

  As Pearly bellowed, and swung his sword from left to right, Peter Lake threw himself back and landed perfectly on the base of a broken column. “What makes you think that I can’t dispatch you just like that?” he said, slamming his fist through the empty air. “What makes you think that I can’t take all the little men who are standing here and hurl them to Canarsie faster than the speed of sound?” Sparkling with anger, Peter Lake had momentarily forgotten what he was intending to do.

  Pearly rushed him with the sword, trying to cut through his ankles. This time, instead of dodging, Peter Lake lifted his left foot and trapped the sword against the stone. Try as he might, Pearly couldn’t move it.

  “Why are you so sure that things have changed?” Peter Lake asked, his foot firmly against the sword.

  Pearly smiled.

  “Why?” Peter Lake asked again.

  “Because we butchered the horse.”

  “You couldn’t have,” Peter Lake said, his eyes beginning to swim.

  “Ah, we did, not even ten minutes ago.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Pearly said. “You can see for yourself.” He turned to the men drawn up behind him. There was a stir in their ranks, and a passage opened in them, through which came a dozen men, all of whom were soaked with blood and carrying the limbs, quarters, and head of a horse. They looked like the men in the meat markets who hoist whole lambs or sides of beef onto their shoulders. But the hide was still on the pieces that they carried, and though it was covered with blood, it was white.

  Thus, Peter Lake was broken. He stepped off the column, and let the sword clatter onto the ground, where Pearly picked it up.

  “Here, you see,” Pearly said, indicating the pile of horse flesh, “is your invulnerability. Here are the results of your beliefs. Here is what your sentiments have brought, and here is the end that you must endure.”

  Peter Lake dropped to his knees.

  Pearly raised the sword in both hands, and rested the tip between Peter Lake’s collarbone and the base of his neck.

  “Do you know what will happen now?” Pearly asked.

  Peter Lake remained silent.

  “You’ll rot on the floor until the dogs stream back into the city. They’ll fight over what’s left of you and the horse, and take the pieces to their dens under the piers—that is, if the rats don’t come first. And as for Beverly Penn, you saw her for the last time at the beginning of the century, and will never see her again. You have come to the common and inevitable end, though you struggled hard to get to it. In a moment, you will be forever mute and forgotten. There will be no one to remember you. Nothing. It was all in vain.”

  Peter Lake looked up into the morning sky and saw the great plumes. Perfectly shaped, pure white, many miles high, they stood immobile in the cold blue air.

  “Just clouds of steam and ash,” Pearly insisted. “It happens sometimes, after a fire.”

  “In my understanding,” Peter Lake said, “they were to have been more than that. . . .” But suddenly he became still, and his eyes vainly sought what he could hardly hear.

  As Pearly, too, strained to listen, the tip of the sword left Peter Lake’s shoulder, and hung in the air. From the north came a sound like rolling thunder that grew louder and louder as it approached. It was steady and electrifying. Then it swept by them—hoofbeats drumming the ground. The whole island was shaking.

  Peter Lake turned to Pearly once again. “I thought we had seen all the horses on the island ford to Kingsbridge,” he said. “But it seems,” he continued, nodding at the carcass piled near him, “that at least one unfortunate animal didn’t cross the river.

  “That’s the white horse,” Peter Lake declared, his outstretched right arm pointing toward the thunder. “And the way he’s running, he’s going to make it.”

  Pearly hadn’t changed his stance. Peter Lake took the tip of the sword and replaced it above his collarbone. “And so am I, Pearly, so am I, although in a way that will never be clear to you. You see, it works. The balances are exact. The world is a perfect place, so perfect that even if there is nothing afterward, all this will have been enough. Now I see, now I’m sure of what I must do. And it must be done quickly.”

  He moved the sword until it began to cut into him. Then he looked up, far past Pearly. “Only love . . .” he said. “Drive hard.”

  The sword was driven into him until its hilt came to rest on his shoulder and he was dead.

  FROM THE sound and speed of his galloping, the milk horse had appeared to those who saw or heard him, and to Peter Lake, to have been taken up by thunder. But to him it was a smooth and easy transit in which earth and air faded into a silken dream, enabling him to fly. As he gathered speed, the ground and sky blurred into lines of viscous color, and he soon began to leave the ground in buoyant leaps that left only the sound of wind whistling past his ears and the edges of his hooves. Then he would touch the ground again, and recall what it had been like to be enmeshed in the machinery of the world and to know firsthand its frictions, complications, and love. But he found that in his weightless acceleration a smooth and perfect silen
ce pulled him on—the sure sign of pastures where the wildflowers were stars, and where enormous horses lived in a perpetual stillness, and yet never ceased to move.

  Though whenever he touched the ground his love for those who were still full in the world held him back, the clear ether pulled him from his long dream, and he rose high into the air. He saw the white wall closing in over the bays and inlets. As he flew into the clouds, he saw that they were as he remembered them. And once more, Athansor, the white horse, many times beaten, passed far beyond the cloud wall—never to fall back again.

  IN THE courtyard where Christiana had kept the white horse, the salver lay in shadow, but light hit the wall just above it, and, as the sun rose, the clear and perfect line between sunshine and shadow descended. At first, the salver was illuminated only along a thin upper strip that burned like a hot wire. And then, as the light dropped in a golden curtain, the tray caught fire. Almost as strong as the sun itself, it lit the dark side of the garden with rich light that emanated from the untarnished metal in blinding colors. As the inscription took the fire of the sun, the courtyard began to fill with gold light.

  THE SUN’S launch motored across the cold currents that now made the harbor green, gold, and white, and its engines sang in a deep and perplexing sound as the boat pushed gently through the unbroken swells. The passengers turned to the south, where a vertical white wall had transformed the harbor into an infinite sea. Even as the wall kneaded and tumbled, buckling out and pulling in, it rose straight up, beyond the limits of vision. Hardesty said that it had swelled with the ruined city’s smoke and dust, and that such a thing could be very beautiful if it were caught in the morning sun.

  The only one not looking at the cloud wall or speculating on things to come was Martin, who, almost as a matter of faith, had not taken his eyes from Abby.