The Wild Swans
Page 41
Tim walked away and disappeared into the crowd. Elias looked down at Sean’s panel again and at last let the tears fall freely down his ravaged cheeks.
It won’t be much longer now, Sean. I know you’ll be waiting for me. He sighed and stared out across the Quilt, feeling the crushing weight of his own grief and imagining it multiplied a thousandfold by all the panels he had seen this day. One panel for each person. Each panel a gift of love, made in agonizing pain. All the people who had lived and loved as he had, and who, like him, had simply run out of time.
All this pain. ...
His tears dried quickly in the ovenlike heat, making his face itch. Elias wiped at the salty tracks, and as he turned his head to look for Tim, a striking panel in the next block caught his eye. He went over to look at it more closely and caught his breath.
The background had been fashioned in bands of watered silk ribbon, arranged in subtly shifting gradations of colors. Quilted into the panel were snow-white swans, wings raised in exquisitely graceful flight, the outline of their feathers stitched in delicate, painstaking detail. “Ohhh...” Elias breathed.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” a voice beside him said quietly. “My sister made it.”
Elias looked up. A man and a woman stood to one side, looking down at the panel, too. The man might have been anywhere from seventeen to twenty-five, but the lines on his face, etched by pain and wasting, made it difficult to tell. He had a constrictive bandage over his elbow, immobilized by a white sling.
“It’s extraordinary,” Elias said. He blinked and looked more closely at the woman. Was she the sister? Tall, widemouthed, with long and wavy reddish blond hair stirring lightly in the hot breeze ... something seemed strangely familiar about her....
“They were our brothers,” the man said simply.
Elias looked down at the panel again, his eyes widening. How many brothers? One ... two ... three ... He glanced up again, and the significance of the man’s swollen joints suddenly became clear. The elbow must have been immobilized by a bleed. He’d seen others similarly marked in his AIDS support group.
“Hemophilia?”
The man nodded. “We were all born with it. I’m the only one left.” He looked down at the panel, his face still. “It’s female sex-linked, you know. There’s only a fifty percent chance of inheriting the gene, but we had bad luck, I suppose. Our mother always said she had cursed us.”
Elias swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry,” he said gently. His gaze turned curiously toward the woman again. Where had he seen her before? “It’s ... it’s a breathtaking memorial. You must have taken a long time to make it.”
She looked at him for a long moment without answering, her green eyes wide, brimming with grief so deep, so intense and aching that she seemed to shimmer with a strange serenity, far beyond the reach of tears.
I know, he realized in wonder. She’s the woman that Sean took me to meet, who he said could tell me the future.
She turned her face away from him and gazed into the distance over the Quilt.
“I’m sorry,” her brother said softly in an undertone. “Since our last brother died, well...” he adjusted his sling wearily, “she doesn’t talk much anymore.”
All this pain is for us.... Impulsively, Elias reached out to touch her arm. She looked down at his hand, and he jerked his fingers back self-consciously, for his hands were covered with oozing herpes sores.
But she surprised him. When she saw the sores, she didn’t recoil but instead gave a little gasp of sympathy. She brought his hands up and gently pressed them against her lips. Her tears fell upon his skin, and it seemed to Elias that where her tears fell, the pain in his hands ceased. He dreamed of her that night.
In his dream, she sat dressed in black on the bench in Central Park, watching the swans quietly swim in languid circles. It was November, and the sky overhead was a featureless gray. She turned her eyes from the swans to him, and he felt a tug of something, wordless and urgent, stretching over the infinite gulf between them, echoing through the centuries.
Sean’s voice came to him then, as if from a great distance: Ask her a question. He took a step toward her. “If I can’t save them, and I die for nothing, what did all the silence and suffering accomplish? What was it all for?”
Her lips parted, and for a moment he thought she was about to answer. But the swans stopped swimming in their slow circles, spread their wings, and extended their necks. She turned toward them again, rising from the bench and walking toward the water’s edge, her face alight. As if this were a signal, the swans wheeled and suddenly began swimming away, their feet churning the water into surging foam as their wings beat the air, splashing silver drops from the water’s surface, faster and faster.
“No,” he whispered sadly. “Come back.” But the swans became airborne, tucking up their feet, their necks stretched out full length.
He came to stand beside her to watch as the swans flew away, dwindling until they disappeared into the west.
Author’s Note
I start to write whenever something haunts me, and this book is no exception. Sometime in the autumn of 1993,I had a dream set in a deserted city park on a gray day. There, I saw a woman dressed in black sitting on a park bench, watching swans swim in the pond before her. She didn’t say anything to me. I knew, with that strange certainty sometimes felt in dreams, that she didn’t consider herself to be beautiful, although I thought she was. She had an untamed mane of hair and an angular face that made you look at it twice. But the most striking thing about her was the mute grief in her eyes. I knew she had something heartbreaking to tell me, if she would only speak. Yet I knew she never would.
At the time, I was trying to decide what my next book should be. I had already decided I wanted to try retelling a fairy tale. But which one? The swans in my dream, and the woman’s sadness and silence made me think of a favorite from my childhood, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans.”
My first thought was to set the story in Puritan New England. I began doing research, enough to convince me that the story could work if told that way. But I couldn’t seem to start writing because one thing still bothered me: that park bench. The woman in my dream obviously wasn’t living in the seventeenth century. Could I find a way to set the story in the contemporary world instead?
One day on my way to work, I saw a bus lumber by with an AIDS awareness billboard on its side that read: “Silence = Death.” And I thought, Huh. Strange connections began to form in my mind, and I started to study the early history of the AIDS epidemic. The more I read, the more parallels I saw with Eliza’s story.
But which approach should I use? I just couldn’t decide, and thrashed around in misery for a while until I explained my dilemma to fellow Minneapolis writer Pamela Dean. She didn’t bat an eye. “You’ll simply have to write both of them.”
And so I did.
Some people claim that fairy tales have nothing to tell us anymore, that stories full of heroes battling evil may be amusing but they’re mostly a waste of time for all but the very young. I don’t agree, because in the course of writing this book I’ve discovered that real heroes and heroines still exist in this world, racing against time while combatting betrayal and bigotry, just as Eliza did—and their actions have meant the difference between Me and death for millions.
Their story is not complete, for we haven’t yet found the way to break the curse. I would like to thank the many people who have encouraged me in the writing of this book. In no particular order they are Hans Christian Andersen and Loreena McKennitt, who provided a seed; Jenna Felice, who watered it and gave it permission to grow; and Pamela Dean, Pat Wrede, and David Cummer, who offered preliminary guidance.
Reading and commenting on the manuscript in various stages were Pat Wrede, Lois McMaster Bujold, Elise Matthesen, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Mark Tiedemann, Joel Rosenberg, Bruce Bethke, David Cummer, Denise Coon, Robert Diinger, Kij Johnson, Ashley Grayson and the staff of the Ashley Grayson Lite
rary Agency, Jaime Levine, Richard Willett, and, of course, my editor, Betsy Mitchell. For computer support: thanks to Bruce Schneier, who provided the first computer; and Zelle & Larson LLP, which provided the second—and in the nick of time, too. (Kij Johnson, however, has not now, nor has she ever, provided any technical computer support.)
In the course of doing my research, I drew upon the expertise of many. For books and insight about gay culture and community, I turned to Elise Matthesen, David Cummer, and Kurt Chandler; for information on home wine-making, Terry Garey; for fiber and fabric craft, Lynn Litterer; for photography and commercial photo developing, Mark Tiedemann; for medical information, Drs. Lisa Freitag and David Bucher; for information on Manhattan past, Chet Kerr and Heather Thomas; for information concerning New York law, Mary Cayley; for Irish and folk music, Sherry Ladig of the group Dunquin, and Barbara Jensen; for the big picture on folklore, Professor Ellen Stekert; for information about seventeenth-century English and colonial history and dialect, Karen Cooper, Tim Powers, and Lisa Lewis. Joel Rosenberg was absolutely thrilled to have me ask him about guns. Special thanks also to Pat Morgan, who provided historical information about the 1988 Central Park Names Project Quilt display; to Eugene McDougle of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, who graciously provided a videotape and a program from the early 1980s; to Pastor Dave Beety of Hope Lutheran Church; to Father Leo Tibesar of Spiritual Health Services of the Fairview-University Hospital; and to Father George Wertin and Tom Smith-Myott of St. Joan of Arc Church.
Thanks to my agent, Ashley Grayson; to Rob Diinger, who kept the home fires burning; to David Lenander, Webmaster extraordinaire; to Jon Lewis, who assured me that he really wants to read it; to Pat Brooks; and finally, thanks to Garth Danielson and the other loving and imaginative friends of Karen Trego.
If there are any I have missed naming here, please know I have thanked you with my heart, if not my head. All mistakes contained herein, of course, are solely the author’s own. Minneapolis, Minnesota August 30, 1998
PEG KERR lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two daughters. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and various other magazines and anthologies. Wild Swans was a finalist for the 2000 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and a winner of the 2000 Gaylactic Network Spectrum Award for Best Novel.
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1999 by Peg Ken-All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover design by Don Puckey
Cover illustration by John Jude Palencar
Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint from the following: “The Swan” Copyright
© 1950 by Ogden Nash. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
Aspect name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.
Warner Books, Inc.
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com
For information on Time Warner Trade Publishing’s online program, visit www.ipublish.com. An AOL Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in Trade Paperback by Warner Books. First Mass Market Printing: November 2001
10 987654321
Version History
V1.0—Spell checked and formatted
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
WARNER BOOKS EDITION