Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  "You . . ."

  "Me." Theodoret rasped.

  He pressed back against the smooth bole of a grown beech tree behind him. Sunlight and shadow spotted his bony chest, dappled his legs and thighs. He pressed his hands and spine against the bark.

  The waves of generation sank back.

  Unsteady, the White Crow staggered towards him.

  A tendril of ivy crept around the bole of the tree, looping the old man’s wrist. His skin darkened, silvered. Before she could draw breath his skin cracked and fissured, merging so swiftly into the lumps and curves of the beech-trunk that she had no time to turn away her gaze.

  The tree grew.

  He grew with it, embedded into the wood. His long mobile features darkened to green, to silver- brown; his hair flowed out across the bark, rooting down into it.

  He opened his mouth and called a word of healing.

  She fell down, the leaves and fragments of bark imprinting her flesh.

  The call echoed into the heart of the wood.

  His jaw strained open, strained further open, and she thought it must surely crack; his head tipped back and growing into the heartwood of the beech.

  Two sprouting pale-green leaves poked from the corners of his mouth.

  Swift, swift as thought they grew; jutting out like tusks and coiling back, growing into the trunk of the beech.

  "Theo! My lord Bishop!"

  She pulled herself to her feet, craning her neck to see the tree. Already the trunk was too vast for her to perceive all of it, and its leaves and branches shadowed the world. The coolness of forests shivered across her skin.

  "I have found him. "

  A cool heartbreaking wind blew around her, out of the heart of the wood. Awe dried her throat. Sweat slicked the skin of her elbows, behind her ears, her thighs: blood and cells burning, warm with a knowledge of solidity. She shook her hair back and craned her neck to look up through shedding petals.

  The sense of an old story rose in her, unbelieved, unconquerable; and she gazed up into the heights of branches and green leaves.

  "Now . . ."

  Her spine shuddered, prickled the hairs at the back of her neck. She touched her fingers to her mouth. Vibrating at cell- and DNA-level, voices sang in her flesh: thirty-five of them. Voices of the Decans of Hell and Heaven.

  Something tickled her hand. She lifted it. Blood- heat, imperceptible, red liquid trickled from her palm and dripped to the earth. Blood smeared the sweating flesh of her knee, her ankle. The black bee-stings of the Decan’s maze throbbed, her left hand raw and swollen.

  "Act—"

  "Act now—"

  "Channel us—"

  " We will inform you—"

  "Breathe in you—"

  "Speak in you—"

  "Open our Selves to you—"

  A sand-bright voice, clearer than all others, thrummed in her human flesh: "We made you in Our image and with Our power. You are all star-daemons. My child, my lover, my bride of the sun and widow of the moon, call down the universe now. Heal!"

  Sprawling naked, without sword or book, her suntanned flesh scratched with the thorns of impossible roses, the White Crow reached out. With her left hand she drew hieroglyphs, skeining down the bright air to twist in magia patterns. Watching how the light shifted, as leaves shift in a high wind; feeling for the moment and sensing it—

  At some level above or below perception, binding took place.

  A sapling birch brushed her arm, white bark peeling like paper. Transparent green leaves sprinkled the branches. Heat burned into her back.

  The dappled light of beech shade fell cool across her skin.

  She reached up, holding her hand in the sign of protection. The feedback of power between microcosm and macrocosm, Scholar-Soldier and the elementals, filled her with an electric energy; drawing power down the chains of the world from the Thirty-Six houses of the heavens.

  She sprang up, barefooted, stamped a foot down into new grass. Beeches surrounded her, growing up to the invisible sky. Their great boles towered like pillars, soaring up a hundred feet to where they arched together, new green leaves rustling, and a bird sang.

  Divine and demonic: demonic and divine.

  Tall slender branches rose as pillars to the sky, meeting overhead in arches of new foliage. Birds sang in the branches, caterpillars and woodlice crawled among the roots.

  A mass of broken marble lay embedded in the earth. Walking closer, she gazed up at it. Solid, some fifteen or twenty feet high; cracked and fissured and gold, still, with the light of extinguished candles. The last of the ruined mortal matter that had hosted a god-daemon. The White Crow walked close enough to touch, to feel the cold radiating from it.

  She drew rapidly, smearing blood from her hand in complex astrological and cabbalistic signs on the broken surface of the marble. A frown indented the dark-red eyebrows, and she rested her free hand against the stone as support, leaning her forehead on that arm. The scrawled signs covered a half, two-thirds of the rock. The symbols grew cramped, smaller as the surface became more crowded; and the White Crow frowned in concentration, muttering the remembered first prayers of training.

  "O thou who are the four elements of our nature, and the hundred elements of nature itself; Powers; star- daemons; rulers of the Thirty-Six Houses of the Sky and Earth . . ."

  "Draw down power. As above, so below. You are Our creation and We created you kin to Us. Draw power down the linkages of the world and heal!"

  The stone split under her fingers.

  Cracking like a shell: sliding, splitting; stone fragments falling to splinter on the floor of the wood. She stumbled back. Her hand dropped, lifted again to draw with bloodstains on the air. Rubble fell away, echoing like gunshots, from the massive shape disclosed.

  In a shaft of sunlight, great wings unfurled.

  Ribbed wings opened, glowing first pearl and then pale rose and then gold. The wind from their beating knocked her from her feet. Earth hit her. She grunted, breath jolted from her body. Grass and twigs imprinted her bare stomach. She raised herself up and rested on her forearms.

  A great muzzle dipped, vast dark-gold eyes opening. Scales glinted on monstrous cheek-bones. Tiny naked ears flicked alertly. Tendrils floated upon the air, anchored across the head and around the eyes. Tusks jutted up alongside the pit-nostrils, crusted with deposits of adamant crystal. The overhanging upper lip wrinkled.

  She hardly breathed. "Lord of Noon and Midnight."

  The leonine body unfolded, rising from marble fragments to stand forty feet high: spotted yellow as a leopard, brown-gold as a hyena. Great wings sheathed. Lids slid up to narrow the eyes watching her. The full closed lips curved.

  "I had forgotten how it is, to become so young . . . I had forgotten how it is to forget . . ."

  Miracle beat in her blood, staggered her feet, so that she stumbled to her feet, head fizzing as with wine. She held out one hand empty of sword, the other empty of scroll; grinning up into the newborn face so hard that it hurt her jaws.

  The overhanging muzzle dipped. She flinched. Closed lips touched her. She smelt fire, comet-dust, the green breath of trees.

  "Where’s Theo? Divine One . . ."

  The massive head lifted. Ivy coiled, ringing the tusks with white and green. Insects crept in the folds of the upper lip; woodlice and wild bees and lizards. She stared up into eyes liquid with golden blackness; smelt from the delicate-lipped mouth a scent of cut grass. A shiver walked up her spine, exploded between her shoulder- blades.

  "Forget, change, become a miracle."

  The voice sounded like the rustle of leaves, like the echo of sound in great spaces of stone.

  "I had forgotten what it is to change! Each spring is the world’s first; each winter the ending of an aeon; each summer the high and changeless meridian of pleasure. Now is the millennium. Now I see!"

  The great long-muzzled head lifted. Wide nostrils and mouth encompassed a speckled darkness, the yellow darkness of sun in shadowed cavi
ties of wood. The god- daemon shifted, haunches sinking, wings curving up to frame the high shoulders. It sat immovably in the cathedral of trees.

  She shook.

  The tension of green hung in the air; paused, poised, hesitated; hung in balance.

  The Decan, The Spagyrus, Lord of Noon and Midnight, reached out one clawed limb and touched the bark of the great beech tree. White flesh and bone tumbled into shape: the old man sprawled in the grass. The White Crow held out her right hand, and the Bishop of the Trees seized it and pulled himself to his feet.

  "We . . . did it." He laughed, dazed, face creasing.

  The White Crow gazed up through shifting beech leaves, the brightness of the green tingling in her blood and vision.

  "Yeah. We did it and here’s the end of it . . ."

  The voice of the Twelfth Decan rang through the aisles of the trees, deep and new. His sandstone-and-gold pelt rippled.

  "End? No. I perceive . . . We perceive . . . that We have erred. No, this is not the end. You have scarcely been admitted across the threshold of miracle. It is the beginning, now."

  The ancient voice burned with energy and new fire. In the Scholar-Soldier’s head it echoed with the voices of the Thirty-Six who make up the circle of the sky.

  "Now We see that We should not for so many aeons have concealed Ourselves in stone. Now We throw down the Fane. And now . . . We will walk amongst you. "

  The White Crow craned her neck, staring upwards.

  All the flat gold of the sky softened, turning to great towering masses of brilliance that paled: here to rose, there to pink and gold . . .

  The sky shredded; stretching and pulling apart. The depths beyond glowed blue.

  Clouds parted, the sun’s beams turning them gold and pink. Parted, pulled aside, no trace of the flat gold sky now; only a heat and a brightness that dazzled her.

  A white-yellow disc brought water to her eyes.

  She stared up into the infinity of a blue summer sky.

  "Captain-General, something’s happening!"

  Desaguliers straightened, leaning his musket and rest back against his haunch. He stared up at the top of the barricade where the Cadet crouched. "Did no one ever train you to make an exact report? What is ‘happening’?"

  The young Cadet–a slim black Rat, hardly more than a Ratling–clung with tail and one gloved hand to the shattered joists of the palace wall. Powder-burns scarred his livery and smooth-furred snout.

  "I don’t know!"

  Desaguliers, hearing battle-fatigue in the young Rat’s voice, leaned his musket against the barricade’s bricks, joists and jewel-studded furniture; drew his pistol, and loped along to scramble up the slope.

  A stray shot spanged off a corner of the demolished wall. Desaguliers ducked, glancing back. Nothing new– the main palace hall broken open to the sky, slashed with the light-shadows of the Night Sun, and barricaded from the courtyard where human refugees hid behind rubble and risked shots with captured weapons.

  Darkness clung to masonry, illuminated only by powder-flashes. The blue light that mazed the streets sank into dimness. Desaguliers rubbed his sore eyes. The wings of acolytes overlapped the sky, flying down to cling to broken walls, precariously leaning roofs.

  "They’re . . . not attacking."

  Desaguliers, hand poised to give the signal to fire, hesitated. "Not yet, I think."

  Ribbed wings folded, obsidian claws clutching coign and balcony and gutter, bristle-tails coiling: by tens and dozens the acolytes settled on the besieged palace.

  He turned his lean snout, staring down from the barricade into the body of the hall. Shattered glass and treadmills, torn drapes, the inlaid floor splintered with soldiers’ running feet; here and there the black smears of extinguished fires. Blue-jacketed Cadets lined the barricades, steadying muskets on rests or cleaning swords black with daemon blood.

  Clustered in the center, under the last remaining arch of that clover-leaf roof, away from attack and falling walls, eight Rats clung together. One brown Rat nursed a bloody arm, resting back in the arms of two black Rats. A silver Rat trod down a scarlet robe under one hind claw, clutching at a bony black Rat. They clung. The fattest black Rat lay on broken marquetry flooring, curled around the clump of intergrown tails that he clutched to his furred stomach.

  "They’re not attacking, messire."

  Desaguliers narrowed his eyes, stroking his scarred cheek. "They’re going to come right over us next time they try, that’s obvious. Messire Jannac, is your blade dull yet?"

  "Er, no, messire."

  "We’re going to move down into the nearest train- tunnels while this lull lasts."

  "But his Majesty?"

  "We’re going to cut his Majesty free; it’s the only way we’ll move them."

  "Messire!"

  He turned his head, swearing at the Rat daring to protest; stopped dead, staring at the Cadet. A pale light glinted on his black fur, shone from the young Rat’s broken nails and sword-hilt. Desaguliers raised his head.

  The light-shadows blurred and vanished. Above, the world lightened to yellow, to gold, to brilliance.

  He raised his eyes, staring up to where the Night Sun had blotted the sky, and looked directly into the white- hot disc of the noon sun.

  Desaguliers scrambled up on to the highest point of the barricade, careless of fire; eyes running tears in the brilliance of daylight, the summer sun’s heat like fire on his pelt.

  He grabbed a metal rod projecting from the rubble, blotted his eyes with the fur of his arm, and stared out across the city. Across the courtyard, where men and women walked out wondering into sunlight; across the city roofs black with clustering acolytes, to the great darkness in the north-aust.

  Walls and buttresses tumbled, falling slow into clear air.

  Desaguliers beckoned wildly, aware of Jannac climbing to his side. "Do you see, messire? Do you see that?"

  "The Fane!"

  Black walls splintered, shifting, falling. Arched roofs crashed down into naves. Desaguliers felt through clawed feet the rumble of the impact; sound twitched at his ragged ears. Dust billowed up from the Fane-in-the- Seventh-District, spires crumpling, falling like rows of dominoes. The breath of a smell came to him in the summer air: dank stone, opened crypts, and something that choked his throat with unshed tears.

  "The Fane . . ."

  He sheathed his sword, loping up to cling to the edge of the broken wall and lean outwards. Shadow skirred across him. He jerked his snout up. The daemon-acolytes beat their wings, spiked tails clutching the palace masonry, beaked jaws open and screeching.

  Dust and haze thundered up in the north-aust sky.

  Captain-General Desaguliers shaded his eyes with a call used shaking hand. Gripping brick with his other hand, he leaned out and squinted to the aust-west. Far distant, down in Eleventh District, the midnight silhouettes of black masonry collapsed . . .

  "It is . . . it is destroyed."

  About to call down in triumph to the Cadets, Desaguliers choked on wonder.

  He had swiveled round to climb down, and now faced the Fane again. Color danced: scarlet, green, blue, white and purple.

  From out of the Fane’s black rubble and ruin, from tilted pillars and crumbling buttresses, from ogive windows and broken spires, plants began to flower. Roses, hawthorn, forget-me-nots, apple blossom; orchids and cowslips, blackberries and alyssum; out of season and out of time, growing, spilling out of the ruins like a lava-tide . . .

  Below him, the Cadets rested muskets and sheathed swords, climbing the barricades to walk among bewildered men and women in temporary truce. The Rat-King milled in confusion. Desaguliers stepped, slipped, slid a yard down a tilted limestone slab, grazing his haunch; grabbed the torn stone edge and stared, wordless, at the Fane.

  Among the ruins of millennially old stone, miraculous flowers opened petals to the summer sky, spilling down into the city streets.

  The wings of acolytes rustled agitatedly on the roof above. Desaguliers looke
d up to see each beaked muzzle pointing at the Fane’s ruins in dumb expectancy.

  Gray heat burned her bare shoulders.

  She threw her head back, muscles unknotting from tension; feeling her rose-tangled hair hot under the sun. A granular gray summer’s heat burned in her, fogging her vision; pricking her skin with ultraviolet, loosing all strains.

  She stared up into a blue sky.

  Open, blue: the sun an unbearable white hole into heat and light. One glance upwards blinded her, tears pouring down her cheeks; she saw, smeared, to each horizon: north, south, aust, west and east, the city that is called the heart of the world.

  At every horizon, the Fane is tumbled into ruin: obelisks jutting like broken teeth, buttresses fracturing into stone lace, roofs falling, walls split, open to the summer air.

  "We have chosen Our new way. We have hidden Ourselves for too long. Now We choose to walk amongst you. "

  All Fanes are one Fane.

  Her feet are conscious of hardness, that she walks now on brick paving, and she stares up–in a courtyard where pottery brick walls collapse–at the stone-warm image of a sphinx.

  Black bees swarmed frantically, the air full of buzzing black dots. The White Crow walked forward, hands gently brushing bees aside, their furred feet tickling as they crawled across her bare shoulders. She lifts her head.

  "The Wheel turns. The Dance begins again."

  "You’ll . . . build again?"

  Terracotta full lips smile, anciently and with warmth. The Decan of High Summer, the Lady of the Eleventh Hour: a sphinx-shape that towers high above the woman; heat radiating back from sun-warmed brick flanks and head-dress and heavy-lidded eyes.

  "We have confined Ourselves to the Fane too long," the Decan’s voice repeats, attendant with echoes, until it seems that all the Thirty-Six are speaking in a confusion of voices. "My Master-Physician, all that the Divine does is right, because it is We who do it. Come."

  The White Crow’s feet stung with the reverberation of a brick paw falling to the ground. She swayed, staring up. Moss-crusted flanks stretch, great shoulders arch; the vast body of the god-daemon rises from the earth. Impossible, articulated, the incarnate stone flesh moves; shining in the noon sun with the brilliance of deserts.