Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  The soles of her bare feet burned with the hot earth. She stepped from that to brick paving, reaching the center of the marked patterns. The Lord-Architect came to stand beside her. The yellow sun drenched the enclosed garden. A smell of hot earth and hot brick reached her nostrils.

  A statue loomed in the center of the courtyard, bees swarming over its crossed front paws. Brown unmortared bricks rose up into leonine shoulders, flanks, haunches, and a tail curved over one slightly stretched hind leg. Around the shoulders and head, drapework delineated in curved brickwork surrounded an almond-eyed face. The swell of breasts showed above the crossed front paws.

  The White Crow shifted, eyes aching from staring up into the sun. The sphinx towered some sixteen or eighteen feet above her; shaped brickwork smoothly curving, sun-bleached, and crumbling here and there where bees nested in crevices. She sat down, cross-legged, ignoring Casaubon’s expostulation; energy sucked by the heat.

  Drowned dizzy, she wiped her red face and reached down to scratch her bare legs under the knee-breeches. The fingers of her left hand pricked with pain. She glanced down to see angry red pin-pricks where she had touched the bristles of the black roses.

  Casaubon’s voice, half-drowned in the silence of sun and bees, said: "Time."

  She heard no clock. The hour sounded as invisibly as ripples under water, pulsing through her.

  The sphinx’s curved brickwork eyelids slid up.

  Pupil-less ocher eyes gazed down, twelve feet above the earth. She saw herself and the Lord-Architect reflected there, in shining sand. Some frontier irrevocably crossed in her mind, the White Crow succumbed to a casual bravado that might pass for, or might become, courage. She removed her hat. She laughed.

  Long lips curved up, and the great front paws moved, dust haunting the hot air.

  "You are too early."

  The Lord-Architect knelt beside the White Crow. She stared at the back of his neck, the yellow-stained linen and heat-flushed skin.

  "What do you mean, ‘too early’!" Casaubon protested indignantly. "I might have been too late!"

  The White Crow gripped the crown of her speckled black-and-white hat and fanned herself with the brim. Still sitting, she called up: "Lady of the Eleventh Hour, who is Lord of the Ten Degrees of High Summer!"

  The sphinx’s eyes shifted to the red-haired woman.

  "I’m the Master-Physician White Crow," the White Crow said, "and this is Baltazar Casaubon, Lord- Architect, Knight of the Golden Rose, Scholar-Soldier of the Invisible College . . ."

  "Yes." The ancient eyes filled with amusement. "I know. I summoned him."

  A stillness touched the White Crow; only her eyes shifting up to the man who knelt beside her. What she had forgotten of his wit and strength (not merely a very fat man, but a very large man also fat) came back to her with the rush of five years’ forgetting.

  Brick paving jolted as Casaubon sat down heavily. Peeling off the heavy satin frock-coat, and unbuttoning his embroidered waistcoat, he wiped his already-wet shirt-sleeves across his face, and gazed up at the Decan.

  A heat-shimmer clung to the shaped bricks. The folds of the head-dress fell across leonine shoulders, framing a face more than human. Articulated, impossible, the great body shifted to one elbow, hind leg stretching.

  The White Crow ignored Casaubon’s attempts to speak now that his immediate indignation had run dry. She gazed up at the god-daemon, not able to keep her mouth from stretching in a smile of pure joy. She put her hat back on the masses of tangled red hair, tilted it to shade her eyes. Her fingers flexed. They tingled for the act of an art so long unpracticed.

  The Decan’s full-lipped mouth smiled. Her robed head bent, and her shining sand eyes fixed on the White Crow.

  "Child of earth."

  "Lady." The White Crow laughed. Sweat trickled down between her sharp shoulder-blades. The Decan’s sun unknotted tensions in her body, smoothed them into a trance of heat.

  "You sent for an architect and a physician of the Invisible College." Casaubon, doggedly rolling up his shirtsleeves, addressed his remarks to the sphinx-paw resting on the earth beside him. The paw lay large as a cart on the earth. Brick claws flexed.

  "Divine One," he added, as an afterthought.

  Heady, as if she were ten years younger and still the woman who would speak her mind although god and daemon waited on it, she poked her finger into Casaubon’s damp shoulder.

  "Oh, now, you, hold it–right there. A Decan sent for the College’s assistance? And you didn’t tell me that?"

  Sunned in the warmth of amusement radiant from the brick courtyard, the Lord-Architect said: "Now, Valentine. You wouldn’t be here if I had. I know you."

  "Yes." The White Crow uncrossed her legs, rubbing at cramp in one calf. "Yes . . ."

  She rested her elbow along his shoulder. His shirt showed sopping patches under the arms and down the middle of his vast back. Sweat and metheglin reeked on the air.

  "This is not the appointed hour."

  The White Crow made a grab for the Lord-Architect as he rose majestically to his feet.

  "You’re lucky I’m here at all!" he rumbled, ham-hands planted on hips. "I bring you the best pox-rotted physician there is (who doesn’t want to come), and the best living expert in architectonics (and I didn’t want to come either, if your Divine Presence doesn’t know that), and I get us both here, now, through magia run wild, and what thanks do I get for it!"

  He stopped, swept up his satin coat, rescued the hipflask from one pocket, and stomped to the edge of the brickwork to stare out over the knotted gravel patterns of the courtyard and coax a drop or two more of metheglin from the flask.

  The hot brick paving quivered. The other paw of the sphinx fell lightly, so that, from where she sat between them now, the White Crow could have reached out a hand to touch both.

  "The best living–but I can raise the best of the dead. You passed a world of dangers–but we could unseam the world from pole to pole, in a heartbeat."

  The White Crow laughed.

  She was aware that Casaubon turned, that the freckles on his heated face stood out in a sudden pallor. All else vanished in the sandstorm and dust-devil gaze of the god- daemon, as the Decan lowered her head and focused her close gaze on the White Crow.

  Nails digging into her palms, the White Crow said: "Lady, and begging your Divine Presence’s pardon, I know the Decans could unsoul the sky, untie the bonds that fasten the earth, untune the dance of the heavens; for all that is is held within the Degrees of the Thirty- Six."

  The brick lids blinked.

  "And I also know," the White Crow ended, "how difficult it is to get thirty-six of anybody to agree to anything, and act as one."

  Furnace heat scoured the courtyard. Softer than the hum of black bees and the rustle of the roses, the White Crow heard the rare laughter of a Decan. She climbed to her feet. The muscles at the backs of her legs trembled.

  "She is a Master-Physician, to know the conflict and contention among the Stars so well. You have performed adequately, child of earth, in bringing her here. Welcome. "

  " ‘Bringing’?" the White Crow queried.

  " ‘Adequately’?" the Lord-Architect bridled.

  She could feel him clinging to his refuge of obtuse pride and alcohol, as she clung to wit or a studied carelessness: some scant refuge against the presence of the god-daemon informing mortal matter. Casaubon’s plump knuckles brushed her chin, moved up to lift the tumbled mass of hair, silver-white at the temples. The power of ten degrees of the sky infused the courtyard: permitting no evasions, nothing less than truth.

  "I made you keep me here. I made you listen to me. I made you come with me. Valentine."

  "Oh, I knew how you were doing it," she said, "but I let you, just the same . . . I did the hard bit when I hid here and researched the heart of the world for five years, alone."

  The White Crow pushed the brim of her hat up. She grinned, sun-dazed. "And I’ll do the rest that’s hard when we leave here, and
if we’re alive at the end of it I will still thank you for finding me. But as for now—"

  "–for now," the Lord-Architect Casaubon picked up, turning to look into the Decan’s slanting desert-eyes. "I would be cautious, Divine One, with what I said before mortal kings. You, who read hearts and minds, know mine."

  The great paw moved slightly closer. The White Crow felt a radiance from it through her arm, ribs, thigh, and the left side of her body. She took a breath. Half air and half the soul of heat, it burned in her lungs.

  "I wrote with woman’s blood on the moon, because I saw the Great Circle four times broken."

  "It will be broken again."

  The god-daemon’s breath touched her face, and the White Crow smelt bone-dust.

  "You are too early. For all things, there is a certain hour to act: that hour and no other. "

  The White Crow swayed. Black bees filled the air, mica-wings glittering. They flew exactly the sun-hot courtyard’s patterns, holding the air above the gravel labyrinth. She reached out to knot the linen of Casaubon’s shirt in one hand. Ghost-lines of darkness began to pattern the sky.

  "Shall pestilence in the heart of the world be healed? I have seen infinite generations board the Boat to be carried through the Night and back to birth. This is nothing in the eyes of the Thirty-Six Powers. "

  "Pestilence?" The White Crow frowned: calculating, bewildered.

  The shining salt-pan gaze of the god-daemon fell on the White Crow. A black geometry starred the sky. The White Crow rubbed her sweat-blurred eyes.

  The Decan’s robed head tilted to look down upon Casaubon, where the Lord-Architect stood between her paws.

  "Shall we permit Salomon’s House to be raised in the heart of the world, that it become the New Jerusalem? These things pass. The Temple has fallen once, and will fall again. This is nothing in the eyes of the Thirty-Six Powers."

  "Ah. I don’t know about that . . . Divine One." Casaubon wriggled his index finger in his ear, took it out, looked at the wax under the nail and, as he wiped it down his embroidered waistcoat, said: "I ruled a city once. All of it built by line, by rule, by square; by order of hierarchy and just proportion of harmony. They tore it down. It’s a republic now. The Lords-Architect are gone."

  The White Crow watched time-worn brick move as living flesh; the pocked and crumbling leonine body tense.

  "We are who we are, and not to be vanquished by the reshaping of stone-masonry! That is nothing. But–The Spagyrus, the Lord of Noon and Midnight–shall He break the Dance?"

  The White Crow slid her hand up to rest on Casaubon’s forearm. Fine copper-haired flesh, sweet and sleepy: human. She reached up and removed her hat. The heat of the sky above the Thirty-Sixth temple struck at her neck and the crown of her head.

  "It was broken." Casaubon’s arm slid around the White Crow’s shoulders.

  "A black miracle." She rubbed her mouth with her hand and tasted salt. Her dry voice creaked. "A Philosopher’s Stone that gives eternal Death, death of the soul."

  "Such things unloose the sky and earth; untie the forces that hold world to sun, and flesh to bone."

  The White Crow’s skin smelt to her now of sweat and sweet age, of middle years and high summer, of dreams enacted and powers taken up into unused hands. She brushed hair away from her eyes. The heat of it burned her fingers.

  Casaubon’s mouth at her ear, warm with alcohol, breathed: "The face . . . Does she have the face of your mother?"

  "How did you know that!"

  "Because she has the face of my mother, too."

  "All things happen in a certain hour. An hour to act, an hour to fail or succeed."

  The courtyard hummed with the flight of bees, ceaselessly rising and falling. The scent of black roses hung in the heat-soaked air. The sphinx blocked all light, Her robed head raised against a yellow sky pocked with the black geometries of constellations: the hieroglyphs of reality.

  "Do what you will, children of earth. In one hour, there will be a magia of pestilence. In one hour, the founding stone will be laid of the House of Salomon. In this one same hour, do what you will."

  The White Crow shivered, standing in the shadow of the god-daemon. Lips curved, the baking-hot brick crumbling dust onto the air. Lids slid widely open upon eyes as pitiless, amused and deadly as earth’s wastelands.

  "The hour of that day is not yet. You are come before your time.

  "In that one hour, the Lord of Noon and Midnight will once more break the great circle of the living and the dying: I prophesy. And in that one hour the Wheel of Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees will fly apart into chaos: I prophesy. Stone from stone, flesh from bone, earth from sun, star from star. There shall not be one mote of matter left clinging to another, nor light enough to kindle a spark, nor soul left living in the universe.

  "In that one hour."

  Movement caught her eye: the White Crow wrenched free of Casaubon’s arm, her hand going up to her sword. She froze, fingers outstretched to grip. Above, in the yellow heat-soaked sky, black lines etched animal-headed god-daemons with stars for eyes.

  "I give you both the day that holds that hour."

  The sky shuddered.

  A sense of turning sickened her. She slitted her lids to block out the sky, and the sun that moved: shifting thirty Degrees across its arc from the Sign of the Lord of Morning to the Sign of the Lady of High Summer. Cramps twisted her womb, and she bent over, grinding a fist into the pit of her belly, the pain of the moon waxing and waning in a heartbeat.

  "At the precise moment that the Great Circle is once again broken–then act!"

  The great paws of the god-daemon closed together.

  The White Crow flung out both arms, pushing against the sun-hot brick that writhed beneath her palms. She staggered, slipped to one knee, sneezed violently as cold air forced its way into her lungs; and scrambled to her feet.

  A wall of tiny ocher bricks blocked her vision. Her dusty hands rested flat against them. She pushed away, her eyes following the brickwork up . . . to where it hooped above her head in an arch.

  The first entrance-arch cast a dawn shadow into the street. No coach waited outside. The White Crow stood alone, shivering in air that felt cold only by contrast with the soul of heat. Her womb ached with the loss of time passed.

  "Shit-damn!"

  Her voice echoed.

  The White Crow swung around, taking in the dew drying on the cobbles, the dawn-mist turning the blue sky milky. "Evelian! My rooms! Who’s been feeding my animals while I’ve been gone?"

  A citizen, out early, skittered past one corner of the Fane, and the White Crow yelled: "The day, messire?"

  Without turning or stopping, the man called: "Day of the Feast of Misrule."

  "That long?"

  She swung back, stabbing a dusty index-finger at the Lord-Architect, to realize that she stood alone and faced a blank gateless brick wall.

  "–Casaubon?"

  Chapter Five

  Light spreads out across the heart of the world.

  Down in Eighth District North quarter the barter-stalls open early, candy-striped awnings pearled with dawn’s dew. Men and women argue the value of rice, portraits and chairs against pomanders, shoes and viola da gambas. The barter-markets will close in an hour: it is the Feast of Misrule.

  In Thirty-First District morning is advanced. Children dig the heavy clay earth of allotments, unearthing shards of pottery with a peacock-bright glaze, where sun sparkles from the edges of broken telescopic lenses. Parents call the children in; it is the Feast of Misrule.

  At the royal palace light slants into wide gravel-floored courtyards, glares back white from walls. Echoing: the clatter of guard-change, the rattle of hoofs. Even this early, heat soaks the thick-walled chambers where Rats await a special morning audience.

  And down where Fourteenth District meets the harbor the sailless masts of ships catch the first yellow fire of the sun. Tugs anchored; wherries moored; light stains the lapping water where ships lie idle,
even the transients part of the preparations.

  Ashen, the dawn touches the Fane. Light curdles, chitters; sifting to fall upon the ragged wings of daemons: acolytes rustle and roost. Storm-bright eyes flick open.

  Light spreads out across the heart of the world, the dawn of the day of the Feast of Misrule.

  Reverend Mistress Heurodis said: "I cannot stay so long as I thought. It would hardly do for me to be seen with you."

  Archdeacon Regnault sat on the gutter step, sandal in one dark hand, fingering the ball of her aching right foot. She raised her head when Reverend Mistress Heurodis spoke, and laughed mirthlessly.

  "I’m told by the novices that Reverend Master Candia took equally great care not to be seen with Bishop Theodoret of the Trees." She pitched her voice to carry over the constant ringing of a charnel-house bell. "They were together, I know that. I know nothing else. And that was thirty days ago!"

  She stood, clutching one sandal in her hand.

  "My time to search grows less. I’m needed back at the hospital now. We’ve never needed to heal so many sick with pestilence as this High Summer."

  Beckoning Heurodis with a nod of her head, she limped across the wide, tree-lined avenue towards the illegal cafes of the human Eighth District South quarter, just opening or shutting with the dawn.

  "If your Church didn’t insist on healing those the god-daemons fate for death and rebirth"–Heurodis seized the trailing edge of her blue cotton dress, and picked a neat way between fallen leaves, cracked roadstones, and fresh dung–"you wouldn’t now stand between poverty and ignominy."

  Two- and three-story sandstone buildings took a warm light from the sun, the cafes’ shield-shaped signs glowing blue, crimson and gold. The smell of fresh water rose from newly washed pavements. Where the soapy liquid trickled into the gutters, it accentuated the dung-odors of the avenue.

  The Archdeacon paused on the far pavement, waiting for the old woman to catch up. She squinted up at the milky sky, sighed, anticipating heat and the distances to be walked across the heart of the world when one’s Church is too poor to afford carriages.