The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Makr Avehl acknowledged this information with a pleasant nod, stood back to let Ellat precede him into the hallway and halfway up the stairs. Then he saw Marianne’s jacket, obviously trodden upon where it lay half on the upper step, then the clipboard of papers with her signature scrawled and running off one edge. The door to her apartment was open. On the window seat the purple crocuses wilted in the close heat, and a fly buzzed in frustration against the closed window.

  He stepped back into the hall to pick up the clipboard, knowing as he did so what had happened. It could all be read in the signs; the track of the beast could be seen. The world began to turn red inside his eyes, and he realized he was holding his breath. Released air burst from his lungs, and he sat down abruptly. ‘She’s gone. Oh, damn me for a fool, Ellat. Damn me for an arrogant, irresponsible fool. We’re too late. She’s gone.’

  Ellat was already going down the stairs, out into the tiny front yard. ‘You must be Mrs Winesap? I thought so. Marianne has told me all about you. She’s so grateful for your help with the lawn. I wonder, did you happen to notice anyone coming or going this morning? I had sent a package, and I wondered…’

  Sympathetic, warm expression saying what a nice woman she was to have sent a package. ‘I saw him leaving. Went out of here like a cat with his tail on fire. Must have left his delivery truck around the corner, because he went off down the block in the time it took me to say “Good morning.” I hate it when people are so bad-tempered they don’t even respond to a simple time of day. I said, “Good morning,” loud and cheerful, and I didn’t even get a grunt from him.’

  ‘That would have been about what time?’

  ‘Oh, let me see. What did I come outside for? I’d had breakfast, and Larken was doing the dishes, and I’d written a letter to my sister – that was it – and I’d come out to put it in the mailbox for the postman. So it wasn’t time for “Donahue” yet, or I’d have been watching him. About 8.30, I’d say, give a little take a little.’ She laughed heartily. ‘I always say don’t be too sure, and nobody can call you a liar.’

  He was holding onto the banister when Ellat came back up the stairs. ‘I heard,’ he said. ‘Then Marianne wasn’t taken.’ He turned back into the room. On the window seat the Delvaux print of the young women setting lights in the street was broken in two, splintered ends of frame protruding like broken bones. He went through to the bedroom. Nothing. Orderly. She had made the bed. The bathroom was a little messy, towel dropped rather than folded. ‘She was here when the doorbell rang,’ he said to Ellat, turning to make a helpless gesture to Aghrehond who had just come up the stairs. ‘Doorbell rang, she went to the door. The person there said something about signing for a package, and Marianne said “of course” or “sure” or something of the kind – without thinking. She didn’t even have time to be afraid.’ Oh, God, he thought, why did she pull away from me with that revulsion? I should have been here. I should have been the one to answer that door, confront that monster.

  ‘If it is that Lubovosk woman, she flips her finger at you,’ said Aghrehond. ‘She sneers like a boy in the street, nyaa, nyaa, nyaa. She makes an insult, a provocation. Why?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Ellat, ‘because she has had the wits to see that Makr Avehl cares for the girl. Bait. Bait in a trap.’

  With horror, Makr Avehl thought of the white bird and the black, demon fish; thought of the naked girl carrying her little light into the darkness while trying to pretend that she was dreaming. He came to himself staring at his own face in the mirror, haggard and terrified.

  ‘Why is the picture broken?’

  ‘I gave it to her,’ he replied woodenly. ‘To replace a very unpleasant one her brother had given her. If Harvey saw it – if Madame saw it, they would know in an instant that someone was intervening in Marianne’s affairs.’

  ‘But she wasn’t taken,’ said Ellat. ‘Whoever it was didn’t take her.’

  ‘Sent,’ Makr Avehl growled. ‘Not taken, sent.’ So, wherever she was now, among the false worlds, somewhere in the endless borderlands where no maps existed and the shortest distance between any two points was never a straight line, she was at least together, body and soul. He had seen bodies sundered from their souls. He had experienced souls sundered in that way, too. Better not, far better not. If he had had to choose between two horrors, it would have been this, at least. That she was in one place. One. Somewhere.

  ‘I must go into Madame’s limbo after her, into whatever borderland place she has been sent.’

  ‘Makr Avehl! Think of the danger!’ Ellat laid a hand upon his arm. ‘Think!’

  ‘I am thinking,’ he muttered. ‘You, too. Think of her. Somewhere alone. Lost. Frightened. Perhaps without memory. Certainly without friends. In a dream world, a lost world, a world in which dark is light and evil is good, perhaps. You think, Ellat. What else can we do?’

  ‘From here?’

  ‘Yes. From here. Water those flowers, will you? She wouldn’t have left them like that. Open the window. She would have done that.’ Oh, God Zurvan, he prayed, let me undo the harm I have done. I was the one not to tell her what pit of evil I sensed in that Box of hers. I was the one who begged her to come to Wanderly, not valuing her own instincts which bade her stay far from her so-called kin. I was the one who considered the threat not urgent, not imminent. God.

  Where would one like Madame send one like Marianne? What kind of world would she construct, of her own soul, of her own being? Where would one like Marianne be sent? Into what place? Into which of the myriad borderlands? How constrained, how held? He lay down upon Marianne’s bed, quietly, quietly, letting what he knew of Tabiti possess him until it became more real than himself. Where? Where? Where?

  Ellat came to the door of the room, apparently unsurprised to see him lying there. ‘Can you tell me what you are going to do?’

  He reached out a hand to her, clasping her own, begging her trust and indulgence. She released him, sighing.

  How could he describe to her the almost instinctive tasting of ambience, the intuitive sorting through of words and ideas and pictures? Marianne had been sent, and that sending had had to be, by its very nature, within the structure of Marianne’s relationship to Madame, within the ambience of their milieu. He had only to feel his way into that vicinage, into what was already there; he had only to seek that faintly diplomatic tinge, the flavor of embassies and foreign places, the sourness of artifice, the stink of deception, the thin, beery scent of solitude and cold rooms, the presence of children – no! The presence of the childlike. The shadow of malevolence hovering. Within that, something being built, constructed, changed, for Marianne’s own persona would demand that. Courage. There would be courage. Stubbornness. A kind of relentless perseverance in survival.

  Withal, there would be power, Madame’s power, Madame’s control, hidden, perhaps, or disguised, but there nonetheless. Madame’s colors, ebony and blood. Marianne’s colors, mauve and plum and misty blue found rarely if at all. Would there be anything there of Harvey? Unlikely. Though he might think of himself as an important part of this challenge, in reality he was no more to Madame than was Marianne herself, a part of the bait.

  He lay there, breathing his way into the precincts of illusion, finding the border of dream as he would have found the spoor of a deer in the forest of Alphenlicht, slowly, with infinite caution, summoning it, moving breath by breath so as not to shatter the silence or betray his presence, disguising his own form, changing to blend into the place he would find himself, that otherwhere, that hinterland where he would find her, find her, find her…

  Ellat, watching, saw him sink into trance, fade before her eyes into an effigy, lifeless as stone, betrayed only by the shallow, infrequent breaths which misted the mirror she held before his lips. A grunt from the doorway made her turn. Aghrehond stood there, eyes wide, mouth open, panting as though he had run for miles. ‘I will go with him,’ he said.

  ‘Hondi. He did not ask—’

  ‘Ellat, he does not
ask. I will go with him. He may need someone. He may need someone to stay in there when he comes back, for he cannot stay. That is what she wants, that Lubovoskan. She wants him lost in the false worlds, but he is too wise for that. I will go. Shush now.’ And he went back into the living room to lie down there, hands folded on his chest, sinking at once into a sleep both as profound and as disturbing as that which held Makr Avehl.

  Deep into the night the light glowed in the upper window as Ellat’s figure passed and passed again and the search went on.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Marianne, like the others in the pensione, made daily visits to the embassy. It was only a short walk, through the carnival ground and the phantom zoo, along the city wall to the Gates of Darius – not cleaned yet, though the scaffolding had been rigged against the ruddy stones for several seasons, and teams of dwarves were brought in from time to time to swarm up the ladders and peck away at the archway – then onto the Avenue of Lanterns. She thought that they must keep changing the avenue. When she had first visited the embassy, she remembered the avenue as quite broad and straight, the lanterns honest constructions of amber glass and bronze. Now the way curved to make room for the new tiled pool they were building, and the lights had been replaced with scattered braziers which left much of the roadway in darkness, the footing treacherous among chips of marble, chisels, mallets, and discarded cola cans the masons had left. Of course, reaching the embassy in the morning light was only a matter of watching one’s step, but the return always seemed to occur after darkness had fallen, which made the return trip difficult though not, Marianne reminded herself constantly, impossible. Marianne went to the embassy at least every other day, religiously, in the constant hope that some message would have arrived concerning her, or some quota would have been changed to allow her an exit visa. Everyone at the pensione, of course, existed in the same hope.

  The woman who could have come from Lubovosk had pointed out, with laughter, what a vain hope that was. ‘Those of us from Lubovosk already have our visas,’ she had said, fixing Marianne with her cold, imperious eye in which that taint of mad laughter always hung like a pale moon over a cemetery. ‘Those of us who know the rules know the way. Those of us in favor with the ambassador. You, on the other hand, are unlikely to receive permission to leave. You are obviously a native, a borderlander.’ The way she said it was a venomous revelation to Marianne, a metempiric bombshell which seemed to make the matter certain forever. Of course they would not help her at the embassy. Of course the quota would not include her. Of course they would be moved to neither pity nor mercy. Not for a borderlander, a creature of quiet-gray, still-dun ghostness.

  She had thought to apologize to the woman who could have come from Lubovosk, but the words caught in her throat, so she had put her glass of Madeira on the harpsichord (worrying later that it might have left a ring) and let herself out of the crowded apartment. Behind her the surf of conversation ebbed and flowed, falling into silence as she climbed the echoing stairs to her own room. It had been a mistake to go to the reception. Probably they had meant to invite someone else, and the invitation had been put under her door by mistake.

  Her room was cold, the dirty casements opened wide to a view of the nearer roofs and the farther towers. Sun lay upon the streets, rare as laughter, enough to start a ridiculous upwelling of hope, like a seeping spring under ashes. She snatched up her coat to drag it over her arms as she ran down the clattering stairs of the pensione, past the landing where they had found the old man dead, his pockets stuffed with appeals to the ambassador, past the room where the woman who could have come from Lubovosk and her guests still talked, into the frigid entrance hall with its lofty ceiling and frosty mirrors, and out into the bright, dusty streets where the children from everywhere gathered to play. She wondered, as she had before, why they gathered in this street rather than some other. They broke before her like drops of mercury, only to flow together behind her and go on with their games, a fevered intensity of play. She could feel their impatience, their hot ardor, sizzling in the dust.

  She wondered which of them, if any of them, had been born here in the borderland? Surely none. No one remembered being born here. There were no natives to this place, despite what the woman who could have come from Lubovosk had said. They had come, all of them, as Marianne had come, interlopers, strangers, unacclimatized to this place or this time. Marianne knew there must have been somewhere else. ‘Cibola,’ she chanted to herself. ‘Rhees. New York. Camelot. Broceliande. Persepolis. Alphenlicht.’ All of these were places beyond the border. ‘I could have come from there,’ she whispered rebelliously. ‘I could. I know I could.’

  Hands thrust deep into her pockets, she started down toward the river wharves, toward a place full of light and the complaint of gulls. If the sun were an omen, if hope were not dead, if there were still reason to go on – well, then Macravail might be there. Perhaps they would go to the phantom zoo, feed dream shreds to the tame ghosts. Perhaps he would give her another present from the flea market, perhaps a book with stories about other places. Perhaps he would not. One never knew with Macravail.

  She found him sitting, as he often did, upon a bollard, perched like some ungainly bird, thin to the point of ropiness, every corner of him busy with bones. She gentle-voiced him, knowing his horror of shrillness, and he turned in one flowing motion to stare at her from huge, lightless eyes which seemed to see only shadows where she saw light and light where she saw shadows. ‘Marianne,’ his voice caressed her. ‘Will you share my sun?’

  The question she answered was not the one he had just asked. Squatting beside him on the wharf, she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll go to the embassy anymore.’ He had suggested to her again and again that it was a waste of time, gently, persistently. ‘I keep thinking of the old man.’

  ‘What old man was that?’

  ‘The old man who died in the place I live. He’d been going to the embassy forever. He never got out. The woman from Lubovosk says I’ll never get out.’

  ‘But she urges you to go to the embassy.’

  ‘Yes.’ Marianne was unable to consider the fundamental dilemma this implied. It was true. The woman who could have come from Lubovosk urged everyone to go to the embassy. Always. The thought led her into a gray, fuzzy area which itched at the edges and hurt in the middle. She could not think of it, even though she knew Macravail would be disappointed. She changed the subject. ‘Did you take your dog to the witch wife?’

  ‘It did no good at all.’ Macravail’s voice was grave and sorrowful, the edges of his mouth under the white moustache turned down. ‘I thought at first it had helped. For a time he seemed better, and we even walked to Leather Street and bought a new leash, but last night while we slept all his hair fell out. He is bald now, like a wineskin.’ He pointed to the shadows where a bloated shape murfled to itself, shiny and hard as a soccer ball.

  Marianne sighed. They had spent half their substance for several seasons – surely it had been several seasons – on Macravail’s dog, yet the poor beast seemed no better. She could not bear to see Macravail grieve over him. ‘Why don’t we plant on him?’ she suggested desperately. ‘Mixed grasses. We’ll tie the seeds on with gauze and water him night and morning.’

  So that is what they did that day while the sun dribbled into the streets in shiny puddles and processions wound about on the city walls and heralds rode toward the gates making brassy sounds of challenge. When they had planted Macravail’s dog – more complicated than she had thought it would be, for the gauze tended to slip – they went to the phantom zoo, but it was too late to feed the ghosts and they ended up eating the dream shreds themselves.

  When he left her at the door, he reminded her of the morning’s resolution. ‘You promised not to consent to go to the embassy anymore.’ She asked him why he cared, knowing he could not, or would not, tell her. He did not, merely sniffed remotely and chewed on the corners of his moustache while the dog snuffled wearily at the end of the gilded leash. ‘I ho
pe your dog will grow grass, Macravail,’ she wished him at last. He had forbidden her to say goodbye to him, which made leave-taking somewhat tenuous. She was never quite sure when he would go or if he would go at all. When she laid her hand upon the door latch, however, he went away, leaving her to climb the four long flights to the cold room and the sagging bed. Evidently the reception was long over, for no sounds came from the woman’s apartment. Sometimes Marianne did not see her for days, many long days, and she felt somehow that the woman had somewhere else to go from time to time, unlike the rest of them.

  The next morning, however, it was the woman from Lubovosk who woke her, tapping on the door, calling, ‘Marianne, get up, get dressed. They’re doing something new at the embassy today.’ Marianne almost refused to answer, almost kept her word to Macravail, but then decided that any hope was better than none. She agreed to go with them after breakfast, remembering from some misty past a voice telling her she was contrary – or was it to be contrary? – asserting her independence by refusing to hurry from the dining room even though the others were shifting impatiently in the hall. The red-faced woman was there, and the two sons of the duchess. The little old woman who swept the hallways was with them as well, her eyes frightened and soft beneath the swath of veiling on her hat. Marianne had never seen her in anything but apron and dusty skirt, a tattered shawl around her shoulders, but today she wore mittens and carried a parasol above the silly hat.

  ‘It’s a pretty parasol,’ offered Marianne, sorry now to have kept the old thing waiting.

  ‘Everyone ought to have something,’ the old woman said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  The five of them moved off under the sardonic gaze of the woman who could have come from Lubovosk. Marianne expected to hear her laugh behind them at any moment, almost as though she remembered the laughter. When she looked back from the edge of the carnival ground, however, the woman was gone. In the zoo the phantoms moved restlessly in their cages, but only Marianne glanced at the spectral arms thrust through the bars, begging for food. The twin sons of the duchess strode along side by side, their arms around one another’s waists to hide the fact they were joined at the lower body. When they arrived at the embassy, a fussy clerk sent them all to various rooms and told them to wait. Marianne sat in the empty office, listening to the hopelessly frustrated buzzing of a fly against the gray glass, dirty from a hundred rains and a hundred dust storms, admitting light only through the accidental fact that the filth was not perfectly evenly distributed. Outside lay the famed gardens of the ambassador, but Marianne could not see them. A very long time went by before one of the consular staff entered the room, a bundle of forms under one arm, to sit at the desk and begin the questions. The woman from Lubovosk had been right. The procedure was different, and yet Marianne had a feeling of horrid familiarity, as though in some other place or time she had experienced it all before.