by Mary Gentle
Cranes and gantries jutted, the tops of the tallest lost in falling snow. Snow pasted each stone, each rope, each beam; stark white against the yellow sky. Humility Talbot picked his way across a tarpaulin-shrouded stretch of earth, narrowly avoiding a ditch. His square-toed black shoes skidded. White damp-stains began to rime the worn leather uppers.
"This way, master architect."
The Lord-Architect Casaubon clutched the handle of his black umbrella with gloved hands. Fat white flakes plopped against the taut cloth, sliding wetly down to merge with the snow covering the building site. He hunched his chins down into his buttoned-up frock-coat. "You’re damned close to the river."
"We have the foundations sunk well enough," Humility Talbot protested. "The whole plan is aligned according to the sacred geometries of the site."
Ponderously, the Lord-Architect folded his umbrella, shook it, handed it to Talbot to hold, and ducked under a low scaffolding platform. He pushed six inches of piled snow from the stone of the walls. It fell heavily and wetly into the dug pits of the piers and pylons. He tapped the stone.
"Master architect?"
"You’re building the eye of the sun, rot it, not some village hall!"
The Lord-Architect Casaubon took one foot from an ice- starred mud slick; rubbed the upper of one of his shoes against his calf, smearing the black silk stockings; and cast another glance upwards. A lowering grey-yellow covered the vast site: stones, half-built walls, piles of uncut masonry, scaffolding, and gantries. Flakes of snow drifted down, black against the sky, white against the earth. A cold, damp wind cut through clothing.
"Where was your last trouble?"
"This way, sir."
Humility bowed his cropped head. A snatch of wind threatened to remove his wide-brimmed hat, and he crammed it down more firmly. Two braziers burned to the north, half a street down towards the river, and men clustered around them, occasionally sparing a look and a curse. He led the fat man across laid-down planks, threading a way between barrows, casks, and temporary shelters; between two towering stone walls that would in time become a perpendicular door arch.
Unroofed, a vast circular building lay open to the winter sky.
No snow lay here. Rising walls, pillars, entrance-arches, pavements: all clear. Biscuit-coloured stone took the snow’s light, transmuting it to warmth, glowing back with the heat of long summers.
"Rot you, at least you have something right."
The Lord-Architect squatted down with slow and immense effort until he balanced on huge haunches. Without looking up, he snapped fat fingers at Humility Talbot. The Protectorate architect handed down the furled umbrella. Casaubon poked cautiously at the warm stone with the ferrule.
The gentle curve of the walls stretched away to either side, the nearest section already lined with fluted pillars. Paving ringed the interior: a warm yellow-brown stone, inset at every heptagonal junction with a star of gold or bronze.
Between the Lord-Architect’s feet, an inset oval of silver gleamed in the paving.
Just a little further in, two more curved to pattern each other; then five, seven, seventeen, and more. Glass, backed with steel and silver; thick and curved and polished to mirror-brightness, stretching out in the same pattern all around the circular building: stone pavement becoming mirror.
Three yards further in to the centre of the roofless building, the patches merged to become a plain of mirror. It gleamed, catching all light into itself, light of dull clouds, hidden sun, falling ice-flakes; glowing with a burnished silver on the verge of becoming gold.
The Lord-Architect leaned forward, pressing the umbrella ferrule into the fretwork of pale stone. The steel, smooth as mercury, reflected his black brocade sleeve.
"We laid this first, to build around it. Geomancy left us no other choice," Humility Talbot murmured. "The smaller buildings around are planned to Golden Rectangles; this to a circle, and the whole thing in just line and proportion." The Lord-Architect planted the umbrella firmly and pushed himself upright. The umbrella’s narwhal-bone ribs bent. "The dome?"
"There we had problems before . . . this . . . began. Sir, you know how it is with master masons. They have their craft, and for building square, none better, but when it comes to the structural dynamics of a dome—the weightbearing calculations, the necessity to lay curved stone, the placing of the ribs—they must and will learn to obey orders without my explaining every reason for it!"
"Any of ’em still working here with you?"
"Yes, sir, some."
"Damn ’em for fools, then!"
Without waiting for guidance, the Lord-Architect began to pace around the pavement, staying back from the mirrored interior. Once he paused, squinting up to where the future dome would have masonry-gaps to allow in the light of the sun: dawn and dusk’s warm illuminations, noon’s blaze.
"We prepared the ground! When there were accidents, we blessed the stones!" Humility Talbot waved his arms. "The Protector herself came here with chrism to anoint the support armature of the dome! It made no difference, sir, the walls still crack and fall when we build higher than this, and workmen are still found dead—crushed under stones, or fallen from secure scaffolding, or—and there's this."
Sound muffled: quiet enough now to hear the faint hiss of flakes melting as they fall to land on the eye of the sun. Quiet enough to hear the echoes of Humility Talbot’s shouting, and his harsh breath.
The Lord-Architect placed fingertips against the inner surface of the wall. He stripped both black silk gloves off and rested his palms against the stone. A frown creased his broad forehead.
"I—eeshour!" The fat man blinked at the unexpected sneeze, stepped back, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I find this place remarkably cold, Master Talbot."
"I know. And I know that it should not be so: not the eye of the sun." Almost humbly, Talbot touched the large man’s arm. "You will not say what the godless say in this town: that only the monarch could build this temple, and not we of the Protectorate?"
The Lord-Architect Casaubon stared intently at the blank wall. He frowned, the tip of his tongue protruding between his delicate lips.
"Master architect?—Ecch!"
Humility Talbot’s nostrils flared whitely. He stepped back, muffling an oath.
In the almost-heat of the temple’s interior, a smell grew to prominence. Coppery, cold; a taste of metal in the back of the throat. Given a wind from the river, the stench of the Smithfield shambles might be drifting up. The snow fell in soft verticals, denying the possibility, intensifying the stink of blood.
"How can I build a dome?" Talbot’s voice sounded thick with unshed tears. Plaintive, he wailed. "The stones themselves are become an abomination!"
Thick redness bulged from between the impossibly tight masonry joins, liquefied, and ran down the sand-coloured walls in streaks. Blood poured, running from between the stones, dripping, spouting; until the great curving wall ran red from top to bottom, for the space of perhaps twenty yards either side of where they stood.
"As to th—assshuu!"
The Lord-Architect blew his nose between his fingers, wiped his hand down his coat, and looked at the spreading pool of blood as it crept across the paving towards his heeled shoes.
A yard short of the first inset mirrors, it ceased, rapidly coagulating to a brown scum.
"As to that," the Lord-Architect Casaubon concluded, "you have me, Master Talbot, whom you did not have before."
Humility Talbot shivered. He tucked his hands into his sleeves, thin arms shuddering at the touch of cold flesh. "That’s all very well, sir, but what do you propose to do? I cannot return to the Protector with no reason for the temple’s defilement!"
The fat man squinted bareheaded at the sky, from here fringed with the half-built walls of the eye of the sun. His gaze took the direct line that sunlight would take, when striking in through the dome’s empty centre to the mirror-floor.
"Cheer up, man!" His ham-sized hand landed on Humility Talbot’s s
houlder. The impact staggered the smaller man. Guileless blue eyes gazed down. "I need the hour of noon, and a sky clear enough to see the sun; then I’ll do a heliomantic diagnosis for you. Here, on this very site! Tomorrow. Why not? Then we’ll see. Tell your General Olivia to come."
He beamed in satisfaction.
Humility Talbot opened his mouth, and thought better of it.
"All things are made known in their proper time," he concluded weakly.
"Of course! Good man." The Lord-Architect nodded in a congratulatory manner. "Nothing to be done until tomorrow noon. I’m—eeshuu!—I’m returning to Roseveare House. Send a carriage for me there. Pray to the Universal Architect for an end to this pox-rotten snow!"
Sometime in the early hours of the next morning the Lord- Architect Casaubon wakes, turning in the creaking bed with infinite caution, so as not to wake the woman beside him. The midnight feed was long, Jadis fractious.
He rises, treading delicately towards bassinet and bottle for the next feed. Fire’s embers do not take the chill from the room. He bends ponderously over to poke the child in its belly with a fat, ink-marked finger.
"Coo," he offers. "Coo?"
Wrinkled red flesh moves. A tiny and baleful pair of blue eyes opens. The Lord-Architect’s three-month-old daughter, in total silence, gives him a look of withering contempt. He bundles the child in his voluminous silk robe and feeds her.
"Ookums," Casaubon tries, scooping the baby up against his vast shoulder, mildly reassured as she throws up a dribble of milk onto his lapel. "Babba . . ."
The ginger-haired child closes her eyes in what appears to be long-suffering, patient resignation.
From the bed the White Crow mutters, asleep.
Casaubon, listening, hears amid her unintelligible speech the words Guillaime and Desire.
Chapter Six
The morning smelled of chill, of the brazier-fires of chestnut sellers further down Whitehall. The sedan chair thumped down into the snow outside the entrance to the Banqueting Hall. The White Crow caught up the hem of her dress with one hand, tossing a half-groat to the lead carrier with the other.
"I won’t be long. Wait for me." She nodded across the street. "Be in The New-Founde Land Arms."
Wind blew keen from a blue sky. Smoke rose from all the palace’s cluttered chimneys. Sound carried across snow from the furthest yard. Tottering in heeled ankle boots and cursing yards of brocade skirt, she bundled her cloak about her and pushed her way through the crowds on the steps.
"Public audience!" a red-faced Protectorate sergeant snarled. "Get to the back of the queue!"
The White Crow shook unfamiliar unbound hair back from her face. Men and women in rags crowded the lobby and the stairs leading up from it, forcing the main door open, their breath white on the air. She looked in wonder at scabbed faces, ulcerous hands and legs, cataracted eyes.
"God save her. The Queen and her Hangman!" A man sat, crutches under his arm, withered legs sprawling.
A mess of trodden slush made the tiled floor treacherous. She stared from the doorway, over their heads, and caught the eye of the courtier in peach satin who descended the stairs, scented kerchief held to his nose. His yellow periwig something disarranged, his rouge smeared; and with a woman clinging to his arm, her dove silk dress slipping to uncover a breast, recovered with giggles.
"Waldegrave . . . ?" She shrugged and called. "Sir Denzil Waldegrave!"
The middle-aged man snapped his fingers. Two younger courtiers cleared a path between the queues of halt and sick. The White Crow opened her mouth to say Master-Physician, shut it again, and clacked across the tiles, skirt and cloak still held up out of the slush.
"Roseveare." The man’s round face beamed, under his golden wig. He did not introduce his companion. "Madam, the Roseveare family face is unmistakable! You must be Mistress Valentine."
"You used to visit my father. I remember you and—your brother, was it?—at Roseveare, when I was very small. Sir Denzil, I need to see her Majesty, Carola."
He tapped his amber cane thoughtfully on the wet tiles, frowning in concentration. A susurrous of voices came from the stairs and the Banqueting Hall above.
"Today?"
"Now." She shook back folds of the satin cloak and brocade dress; the ice-blue and silver shining in the dim lobby. "Are you a good subject of the Queen, Sir Denzil?"
"Madam!"
"And easy to provoke, too." She smiled. "Well, I am more circumspect, but equally as good a subject, and I need to see Carola today. How difficult will that be?"
Denzil Waldegrave’s gaze travelled across the lobby. "Most of these will find themselves turned away. She tires. Come up with me now, Mistress Valentine."
He turned a satin-and-sashed back, walking languidly up the turns of the stairs, his arm around the whore’s waist; below the shabby panelled walls and the pale patches where oil-paintings might once have hung. The curls of his yellow wig bobbed to his waist.
In sudden curiosity, the White Crow called, "Do you know a captain called Pollexfen Calmady?"
"That pirate?" Waldegrave shuddered. "The man is nothing but a footpad. A mercenary! Were any of the family left, they would disown him; howbeit, he had the fortune to be left sole heir, before he gambled the estate away. I hope you’re not well-acquainted with him, madam?"
Without waiting for an answer, the round-faced man gestured the whore away, turned his head, and put his finger to his lips.
"These Protectorate guards, madam, are more for Queen Carola’s protection than her imprisonment, you must understand. There are so many malcontents since civil revolt became amnesty."
Four black armoured musketmen lined the entrance to the Banqueting Hall. The White Crow caught the gaze of their hard-faced sergeant. She smoothed her brocade stomacher and busied herself arranging the lace at her dcolletage.
"—another Royalist bitch—"
Denzil Waldegrave’s complexion reddened. The White Crow smiled and rested her arm on his peach-satin sleeve. As if it were easy, she maneuvered past the queueing sick and into the Hall.
Snow-light gleamed in from the long rows of windows onto the parquet flooring, bringing colour from the velvet and brocade hangings. She stared down the vast hall. Ushers with tall staves pushed the ragged men and women into line. Somewhere a baby cried. She caught the gaze of a boy with a bulbous growth at the side of his mouth, then the crowd hid him.
"Carola still touches for the Kings’ Evil." She marvelled.
"It behooves her, madam, to go cap in hand to the mob and perform whatever they ask."
Surprised equally at shrewdness and bitterness, she glanced at Waldegrave.
"They do love her, madam. As they never did and never will love the soldier-whore Olivia. Come."
Light from the great square-paned windows dazzled. She stumbled, treading on the hem of her brocade gown; her hands that plucked at it hot now, and moist. Above, in gem-colours obscured by the smoke of torch-lit banquets, the Reubens ceiling glowed. She lowered her head from images of planetary numina in all glory to the purple canopy of the throne, from which focal point alone they would appear in perfect perspective, and to the woman who lolled back in it, swarthy face grinning.
"Valentine? Mistress, you’ve long been absent from our court. We should be greatly angered with you."
The White Crow curtsied unsteadily. The large woman in green silk and silver lace leaned forward under the throne’s jewel-embroidered canopy. One of the courtiers in the lobby now stood at Carola’s side, smugly informative. The White Crow wobbled upright, kicking a yard of skirt out of the way with her heel, and approached as the Queen indicated. "Your Majesty."
An old woman on her knees before the throne turned her head, showing an ulcerated mouth. Green-and-yellow pus made one cheek puffy. Rheumy eyes glared at the White Crow.
The swarthy Queen raised her voice.
"We will end what we have begun here, madam Valentine, before we speak with you. Nothing else becomes our majesty but t
o care for our people."
"Even so, your Majesty." Urbane, the White Crow bowed her head and retreated a step to stand beside Sir Denzil Waldegrave. He nodded fractionally in approval.
Footsteps and voices echoed down the oblong hall. Light fell on ragged cotton shirts and leather breeches, on thin and famine-worn faces.
The White Crow let her gaze travel around—rouged and beauty-marked men in red and gold silk watching an impromptu theatre performance at one window; an old woman in jade silks, a boy no older than Bevil dancing attendance on her; groups at tables gambling with cards and dice. Their groomed wigs askew, two men with rouged cheeks handled a young woman with the clean face of a whore. Ragged children ran through the crowded court, selling winter’s delicacies: fried hedgepig, roast rook.
"Now, old grandmother." Queen Carola reached out, sallow fingers touching the old woman’s face. Spots of dried blood marked her bitten-down nails. The stench of unwashed linen drifted from the old woman, and a whiff of rot touched the chill air.
Carola wiped her hand hard across the old woman’s mouth, smearing yellow pus. The kneeling woman swayed. Carola muttered, inaudible. She pushed her hand back. "There."
The old woman slowly dabbed the smeared pus away with her sleeve. Under it, her skin showed, wrinkled and spotted brown with age. Her searching fingers touched the ulcers that had edged her lips—dry, healing scars.
"Oh, lady, bless you!"
Carola sprawled back, nodding. "Well, madam grandmother. It is well."
"—all blessings on you—!"
"Help her, sir." One languid hand gestured to a courtier, who took hold of the old woman’s arm, helping her away. The Queen wiped her stained fingers on her rich silk breeches.
"We have need of refreshment. Our people will not grudge an hour?"
Raucous public reassurance echoed in the Banqueting Hall. Carola stood and picked up her long cane, snapping her fingers. Four or five spaniels in ruby-studded collars sprang up and tumbled about her feet as she walked towards the antechamber door.