Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  "Sharlevian!"

  High above in darkness, the Fane’s acolytes still screamed.

  Fisting the blue-and-yellow satin dress, she tugged up the hem and stalked across the square. She strode through abandoned debris, guns and tankards, ribbons and trowels and flowers, kicking aside a broken marionette; running past where, head in hands, Tannakin Spatchet sat on the marble steps, to Sharlevian leaning back and kicking one heel against the foundation-stone carved with the Word of Seshat.

  "Mother . . ." The yellow-haired girl didn’t move out of Evelian’s embrace; if anything, tightened her arms around her mother’s waist. Evelian ruffled the girl’s hair, then buried her face in it.

  Footsteps clicked across the empty square, echoing back from distant buildings. A weighty tread.

  "Archemaster, what will happen now?" Tannakin Spatchet’s voice sounded flatly.

  She rubbed her cheek against her daughter’s warm hair and head, aware of the muscles tense in the child’s back. Hiding her own fear, she put the girl back to arm’s length and gave her a shake.

  "There’s my Shari, eh."

  "Aw, leave off."

  The girl tugged her silk overall sleeves up to show her wrists, bracelets jangling. She shrugged Evelian’s hands away.

  "I heard something today."

  Caught by his tone, Evelian looked at the Mayor and found Tannakin staring at Casaubon.

  "A prophecy, Lord Archemaster. This. In one hour, the circle of the living and the dying shall be broken. In one hour, the Wheel of Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees will fly apart into chaos: 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. Is this the hour?"

  Evelian saw the fat man’s blue eyes widen. "Where did you hear that!"

  "They say it has its origins in the Fane, messire."

  "Aw, yeah." Sharlevian sniffed, resting her hands back against the Word of Seshat carved into the abandoned foundation-stone. "That’s been going round. Been lots of stuff like that."

  The luminescent shadow of the foundation-stone seemed to hold a little warmth. Her hands behind her back, wrapped in the folds of her skirt, Evelian drew courage enough to look up at blazing darkness.

  "I never thought to see that come in my time. The Night Sun . . . Now will they leave us, the Thirty-Six? And wipe the world away and start a new one? Is the prophecy true?"

  She looked down. A step or two below, his back to the square, the big man stood at eye-to-eye level with her. Anger tautened his massive shoulders.

  "Are there other master builders here? Answer me, rot you! Who else would have the plans for the Temple? And workers, construction workers. I need them. I can’t act without them!"

  A cold wind blew. Tangled spars of light-shadow slanted from the scaffolding. Numbness bit at her feet and fingers. Evelian stared out at the glittering darkness of the Night Sun, eyes watering.

  "You see where we are? You see what’s happening to us?" She smiled, shook her head, one hand extending out to the deserted square. "Those that aren’t dead have run, messire. Now I’ve helped you search for Falke, I’m taking Sharlevian out of here. If it wasn’t for that—"

  She stabbed a finger at the distant siege-engine. Away from the stone of Seshat’s warmth, black light clustered, hiding the aurora of the labyrinth, the trapped daemons.

  "We shouldn’t have listened to you anyway. We should have run when we had the chance!"

  Tannakin Spatchet rose to his feet, pulling his greasy gray doublet straight. He gazed up at the fat man.

  "Archemaster, I may say that I admire your skills in protecting us from the acolytes. We thank you for that. Now I feel it might be wise if we attempted to take cover, all of us. Ultimately it may make no difference, but then again . . ."

  "Oh, Tan, for gods’ sakes!" Exasperated, Evelian rubbed the corners of her eyes as she walked down the steps, as if the darkness might be in her vision and not in the air. Shock numbed her, left her whole seconds of calm normality before the chill reasserted itself.

  "We used to hold a market . . ." She looked out towards the littered stone flags. Now faint metallic sparkles precipitated out of the air, falling to shine on porticoes and balconies. "In Nineteenth’s square, of course. Not here. Fourteenth is a Rat district . . . I don’t suppose that matters at all now."

  She fisted her hand and touched it gently to Casaubon’s arm, as she passed.

  "That’s what Falke wanted. But it’s too late to think about that now, isn’t it?"

  The Lord-Architect sat, both hands palm-down on the frost-cracked steps, his head tipped back and leaning against the foundation-stone. Folds of satin coat blotted up moisture from the stone, that darkened his blue silk breeches. One of his court shoes lacked a heel now, and both stockings slid down his tremendous calves to his ankles.

  "Falke could have given me the designs of the New Temple."

  He spoke so quietly that the silence almost drowned him.

  "Mistress Evelian, deep structures have a power on the universe, witness what power the labyrinth has to compel the Fane’s servants. The structure of building has that power, also; and I might have used it, if he had lived to tell me."

  The radiance of the Night Sun began to pulse: to tick, the time of some great heart or clock beating in it.

  "I told the lady White Crow." Tannakin Spatchet turned, hands fussing with his cuffs. The strands of hair combed across his balding head fell across his eyes now; and he jabbed an accusatory finger at the Lord-Architect. "When she made us talismans, I told her that young Falke was a fool, and engaged in plague magia and bone magia and the Thirty-Six know what else! You had a month to act in. Why didn’t you? Why wait until now? Until the Night Sun’s here, and it’s too late?"

  "Ask the pox-rotted Bitch who denied us a month to work in—!"

  The air vibrated to a striking that might have been inside the ear-canal or over the distant horizon in another District. Casaubon’s head came up. Copper hair fell over his forehead, straggling down to his eyes, and he gazed up through it. A liquidity swam in his eyes. The fine lines of his features, fat-blurred and buried, lost all good nature and humor.

  " ‘When that hour strikes, then act—’ "

  His rounded delicate lips quivered with some emotion: anger or misery.

  "Damn Her, the bitch! Treat an Archemaster like this!"

  He reared to his feet, as if he would actually shake his fist towards the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District. Some rigidity left his spine.

  "Damned Divine mother of all bitches. Give me thirty days to prepare and I might have done something, but no! No! What’s it to Her? Pick people up and put them down where it suits Her, no thought about what we can or can’t do; Valentine to the Fane, me to this farce—"

  Evelian, in a sharp voice that Sharlevian automatically winced at, snapped: "Lord Casaubon!"

  To her surprise the large man’s tantrum halted. He stared down at her, a faint pink colouring his cheeks.

  "Damned Decans think they can play god-games."

  "Is that where Crow vanished to? The Fane? With you? You fool! That woman was a friend of mine, as well as a lodger; if you were stupid enough to drag her into the Fane, of all places in earth and heaven, then—"

  "She’s there now, woman! Willingly. Searching out ways to avert your prophecy, Master Mayor."

  The Mayor reached to his throat, fingering a malachite talisman carved with symbols.

  Evelian reached behind and sat down on the steps without looking, the muscles of her legs turned liquid. Stone jolted her. She looked at her daughter, who shied pebbles idly across the construction site and paused to hook up one coil of her hair with a flashy pin.

  "Sharlevian . . ."

  The Lord-Architect stood as if he felt danger through the earth beneath his feet. His gaze traveled through the abandoned chaos of the construction site, staring towards the north-austerly horizo
n and the black pyramids of the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District.

  Evelian looked up at him.

  "What were you going to do? I think you had better try it, Messire Lord-Architect."

  He shook his head ponderously. "How? Given plans, given workers . . . I could have at least built out the ground-plan of Salomon’s Temple. There were people enough here, before the pestilence, for me to do it; but time ran out for us."

  Shuddering through bone and flesh and blood, Evelian felt the striking of an hour. She reached up a hand as her daughter picked a way back across the broken steps. The girl took it, staring at the fat man.

  "See you, Master Falke isn’t the only builder. I’m an Entered Apprentice."

  "Ah, love . . ."

  Sharlevian pulled free of her hand, reaching up to twist her fair hair into a worker’s knot, pinning it securely, ear-rings jingling. Plaster-dust stained the knees of her pink silk overalls. She smiled, sly; excluding everything that lay outside her expression of pleasure at her own intelligence.

  "Why don’t we build the Temple anyway?"

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon looked at her in silenced disbelief.

  "No," the girl said. "A model. There’s enough stuff here. It’s all pattern, like you said. Oh gods, the lectures I’ve had in Masons’ Hall about structures."

  She sighed self-consciously. Evelian, gathering her blue-and-yellow skirts and getting to her feet, said "Do you want a slap, missy?" and then laughed at incongruous reflexes. "Love, tell us."

  Abashed, the fair-haired girl mumbled: "Doesn’t matter what size it is, then, does it? Doesn’t have to be full size. Still got structure, hasn’t it?"

  Casaubon’s plump hands seized her by the shoulders. "A model!"

  Evelian walked past his padded torso, taking her daughter’s arm. A long exasperation faded. She gripped both of Sharlevian’s nail-bitten hands.

  "Shall we do this? Or shall we try to take shelter?"

  "Aw, Mother, c’mon. Might as well. Why not?"

  "Right. Tan and I will help. Let’s do it. Collect bricks–wood–nails–what you can. Move!"

  She strode up the steps. Behind her Casaubon protested, "There’s no plans! No blueprints. I don’t know what rituals he planned to use!"

  "We’ll build it how we’d want it to be. Who would it be for, after all?"

  The fat man reached into an inside pocket and extracted a rule, a plumb-line and a notepad; the last of which he began to figure on rapidly.

  Evelian climbed the steps to the site rapidly, and stopped with her hand on her stomach. Black sparkles fringed her vision. The smell of cold flared her nostrils; her breath fogged the air. She bent to seize the handles of an abandoned barrow.

  Enthusiasm or desperation beat in her head with her pulse. Conscious of the Mayor at her side, unearthing bricks, tiles, bags of plaster, and stone fragments, she abruptly straightened up and began to laugh.

  "Evelian." Tannakin Spatchet stopped, hands deep in a toolbox, peering up at her over his much-darned doublet-shoulder.

  It wheezed out of her, tears cold in the comers of her eyes. "Tan, didn’t you always want to be a hero? I did, when I was Shari’s age. This isn’t what I had in mind."

  He straightened his back and threw a handful of chisels and knives into the barrow. A wind from somewhere began to tug at his doublet and patched breeches, and blow strands of thinning hair across his eyes.

  "Evvie, I’ve never known you satisfied with anything."

  Her shoes lodged in the mud. She bent to free them, and to heave the barrow back towards the edge of the site.

  "Look."

  Tannakin lurched through the soft earth and grabbed the barrow’s other handle. As he pulled, he looked, and she saw him frown.

  All else darkening, now, as if storms approached; some faint light yet remained. The abandoned foundation-stone of the New Temple glowed with a flickering warmth like firelight. It beat against her skin as they plodded back, the barrow jolting over the rubble. In its light, the immensely fat man sat with legs sprawled wide apart, reading from his notepad, directing Sharlevian and sketching with chalk on the paving-stones in front of the carved Word of Seshat.

  "Let’s have an open courtyard, too!" Sharlevian sprawled on her stomach, elbows outspread, careless of her silk overall. She reached over and planted two bricks, and a third, to form a plain arch.

  "Main gates," she announced. "Build it in a rectangle or square, you can have a gate each side, people can walk in."

  The Lord-Architect reached across with the hand that enfolded his pencil and moved the bricks closer together, making the arch smaller. "No coaches."

  "Oh, sure. Just so people can walk and the kids can play out of the way."

  Evelian heaved the barrow to a halt and left the Mayor to sort around in its contents. She gathered her skirts and knelt down on the broken marble.

  "What are you doing?"

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon measured a lath with his rule, snapped it expertly to length, and fitted it along the chalk lines of the model Temple.

  "The proportions of great buildings should rightly be made the same as the proportions of the body, as Vitruvius writes."

  He knelt up, knees wide apart, silk straining to encase his huge thighs and calves. The top two buttons of his breeches had come undone, she saw, unequal to holding in his belly. His crumpled fleshy face wrinkled up with innocent concentration.

  "Symmetry’s the relations of the proportions of the part to the whole. As, the face–always the same distance from the bottom of the chin to the underside of the nose, as from nose to eyebrows, and eyebrows to hairline."

  He reached across, one fat finger tapping Sharlevian’s chin, nose and forehead. The fifteen-year-old giggled, vaguely flattered; and Evelian’s heart suddenly lurched for the normality of Masons’ Halls and building instruction.

  "Likewise, the length of the foot is one sixth the height of the whole body; the length of the forearm one fourth . . . And since man’s a microcosm, and thus like the larger macrocosm, so the proportions and symmetry of the Temple, matching the body, can mirror the proportions and order of the cosmos."

  "The cosmos isn’t as ordered as all that." Evelian smiled grimly. "Allow for it being flamboyant and disordered from time to time, Archemaster."

  "Well . . . yes."

  "I’d build the place with room for people." Sharlevian looked up, face smeared with chalk, totally unself conscious. "You go up to the avenues round the royal palace and boom!–it just hits you. You feel about this high. All those blocks, so massive–and you have to get up on the pavement or the coaches just knock you down. I’d build our Temple so people could sit around and just meet in the evenings, and there’d be places you could buy food, and the temple would look as though it wanted you to come in . . ."

  ‘I'd build a garden. In the center of the Temple. Laid out in pattern and proportion, but built of growing things . . .’ Heidelberg Castle and Gardens, engraved by Matthieu Merian from Hortus Palatinus, Salomon de Caus, pub. Johann Theodore De Bry, Frankfurt, 1620

  "I . . . ah"–Tannakin Spatchet emerged from the depths of the barrow–"I’d have the courtyard big enough to hold a regular market, and a place for the Market Court to meet, and somewhere to have a drink with colleagues when business is over . . ."

  "And what a time you’d have with university students!" Evelian laughed. The sound startled her. "Well, and why not? I’d like a place I could go to meet my old friends, a place that we’d helped build and was ours. No Lords! And I’d allow Temple coins, so that we could buy and sell in the Temple precinct, not barter. Even if that only happened there, it’d be a beginning. Say you–build your Temple and I’ll run the bank for you!"

  Her daughter giggled. Casaubon rubbed a cement-covered hand across his lapel, staining his coat.

  "I’d build a garden. In the center of the Temple. Laid out in pattern and proportion, but built of growing things: flowers, mosses, trees. A microcosm laid out in concentric circles, with
the plants of each Celestial Sign growing in their proper places. I built gardens in my city . . ."

  He raised his head, meeting Evelian’s eyes.

  "No Architect-Lords in that city now. Not any more. Oh, Parry’s good enough to me. She’s a senator in the Republic; she sees projects are put my way. But . . ."

  "It should have a dome!" Sharlevian rolled over and grabbed the edge of the stone of Seshat to pull herself to her feet. She scrambled, careless of a rip in her overalls, to exhume an old leather bucket from a rubbish-pile.

  "With the Celestial Signs," she added, scratching with a nail on the interior surface. "Or . . . Archemaster, will the Decans still be here on earth?"

  Her tone had increased in respect since she saw the Chymicall Labyrinth function. She now eyed the Lord- Architect with expectation. Evelian smiled slightly, and caught the fat man’s eye, and imperceptibly shook her head.

  "Mistress Sharlevian, who knows?" He placed the makeshift dome on the central circular walls.

  Tannakin Spatchet, peering down, said: "Steps up to the main building–the flower- and fruit-sellers use them."

  "And fountains, to drink."

  "And let people draw on the pavements . . ."

  Evelian shivered, ignored the coldness that bit at her fingers, and twisted wire in the proportions of golden mean and rule; watching it begin to take shape. Tiles propped up to form walls, bricks standing for outbuildings, the carefully measured wooden frame of the main building topped by its ridiculous bucket-dome–Casaubon and Sharlevian sprawling by it like children on a rug. Tannakin Spatchet unearthed a hose-nozzle, and ceremoniously set it in the tile-marked-out "courtyard" as a fountain.

  Evelian said: "I thought you were a fraud when you arrived. I see I was wrong. I never did believe Crow’s stories of her Invisible College–I see I was wrong in that, too."

  Casaubon’s fingers, surprisingly delicate in their movements, wired lath to lath in parts of a growing framework. The skeleton hinted at outflung quirky grandeur: classical proportions extended into pleasing irregularity–towers, balconies, buttresses; comfortable small rooms, colonnades, courtyards.