Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  "We have no use for these servants now. What they did, We will do Ourselves."

  Spitting temper, Candia pushed the hair back that flopped into his eyes. "Call that taking responsibility!"

  "I perceive that I have erred. See how I will pay." Grave humor echoes; like the Bishop’s, young beyond its years, and fully cognizant of dubious moral standpoints. "Let them have speech and souls. I create them so. I create them free of Us!"

  "Speech and souls—"

  Candia grabbed the Bishop’s arm, pulling himself to his feet. The old man’s lips opened, anticipating, awed.

  "Praise the Lord Decan!" a gargoyle-figure shrilled, hanging head-down from a high gutter.

  "Praise be buggered!" A raucous cry. Bristle-tail lashing, a daemon uncurled black wings and flew up to hover over the roof. His eyes gleamed amber. "He’s thrown us to our enemies, that’s all He’s done! They’ll take revenge for what He made us do!"

  Beaked muzzles rose, opening, and harsh voices cawed in competition with one another.

  "We’re different now; Rats and men won’t hate us—"

  "Won’t they!"

  "I have a right to be here; it’s our city, too!"

  "No home, here; no place for us—"

  "All ours! Sky and roofscape, all ours."

  "But I want more than that—"

  "The Lord Decan will tell us what to do!"

  "Not me, he won’t tell!"

  Wings rattled in the heat, circling; shadows falling to dazzle Candia as he gazed upwards. Apprehensive of the copper taste of blood, he waited for that ancient warning of their presence. Nothing came. Black ribbed wings, moth-eaten brown furred bodies, spiked long tails–mortal gargoyle-daemons swarmed above the university quadrangle.

  Theodoret’s elbow dug his ribs. Through the archway, black specks began to rise in confusion across the whole district. Dumbfounded, Candia scratched at his blond stubble.

  "The Rat-Lords aren’t going to like this. His Majesty really isn’t going to like this."

  "Choice. Knowledge and choice. I think I am revenged. Let these have all our problems! Let them deal with us, and his Majesty–and the Thirty-Six in the world, and—" The Bishop suddenly guffawed. "My friend, no one’s going to like it!"

  An elderly gargoyle-daemon on a gutter linked clawed thumbs across her flaking breast. Her ribbed wings, drawn down, furled about her shoulders, gleaming tar-black and smelling of old buried stone. One finger moved to scratch under a drooping dug. She stared down at Candia and Theodoret with a light in her eye.

  "Who asked you to like it?"

  Andaluz rolled down one black woolen stocking, folded it neatly on the canal steps beside its twin, and lowered his lean feet into the water.

  Early-afternoon sun shimmered, light webbing his pale skin. He flexed his toes in the cold water.

  "I assure you, Lady Luka, this canal is real enough. Although to my knowledge it’s never been here before—"

  He broke off, spreading his hands to acknowledge the city of wonders; shook his head, smiling.

  "One says that of so much. What’s one canal!"

  The plump silver-braided woman walked in a swirl of bright robes to where he sat. She shaded her eyes with her hands. "In a city of wonders . . . !"

  Andaluz slid his heavy doublet off his arms and shoulders, letting it fall carelessly on the steps. He unfastened a button-toggle of his shirt. Sweat dampened the cloth between his narrow shoulder-blades; heat drove sixty years’ chill from his bones. He lifted one foot from the canal and hooked his arm around his knee.

  "Luka?"

  She gazed at the sky: at the heat-hazed, soft gray-blue, empty of all birds. Past her profile, the new wide waterway here opened out into the harbor. Heat and summer’s brightest light glared back from the marble palaces that lined the great canal. Andaluz left wet splashes on the marble as he drew his feet from the water and stood up.

  "Lady, what is it?"

  Marble-and-gold steps and walkways paralleled the canal, running down to where the light flashed from the sea-harbor. Hot on the air came the smell of the sea. Miles of city fronting the harbor shone now in the sun, bright with apple and cherry and blackthorn flower.

  She turned to face inland. "Listen!"

  The buzz of the approaching crowd grew louder. The Candovard Ambassador stood barefoot, in shirt and breeches, scratching at his grizzled hair. He reached down towards his discarded doublet. The movement arrested itself midway: he straightened, resting his hand on the woman’s arm.

  "Luka, dear lady, tell me—"

  "There!"

  A sudden black spar reared over the heads of the crowd. Appearing between the frontages of palaces, where the canal curved back into the city, the prow of a black ship glided into sight.

  The smell of tar came to him in the hot sun, sparkling on the planks. Great black masts towered, white sails belling from them. A sweet rich scent set Andaluz to rubbing his eyes; he frowned, focusing.

  Sails hung in tangles against the sky, great curtains and draperies of roses depending from the rigging. The flower-sailed ship glided deep and steady in the water, no hand at the wheel. Figures lined the rails. Ripples lapped the marble steps at Andaluz’s feet.

  "It’s the Boat! Dear lady—" He turned to her, eyes bright with a sudden comprehension.

  One of her slender fingers pointed. "And it’s young Elish!"

  Crowds of people walked the canal paths. Noisy, hand- in-hand or arms about each other’s shoulders, sweating in the heat and calling to their neighbors on the far canal bank, the people of the city crowded out into the sun.

  Between a stocky brown Rat and an elderly Fellowcraft, the Katayan walked. Her pale face raised, she moved her mouth; he could hear nothing of what she chanted. The power and joy of it beat against his skin, as hot as the sun’s light.

  "Madame Elish!"

  He pushed his way forward between people and embraced the thin woman. She shifted her gaze from the Boat, the wall of the hull towering beside them as it glided slowly towards the sea.

  "Ambassador!" She caught his hand and swung him to walk on with her to where Luka stood waiting. "You must know, messire, I lied to you. I’m no envoy."

  "My dear girl, I don’t care whether you are or not; you’re infinitely welcome."

  The great vessel began to slow. The Katayan woman, licking her lips and drawing in breath, chanted a few soft syllables. She ran forward to grip Luka’s hands, laughing down at the middle-aged woman. Andaluz caught his bare foot on a stone, staggered against someone in the crowd. A tall bearded man smiled and handed him a wine-flask.

  Andaluz began to shake his head, stopped, took the wine and drank. "My thanks to you, messire."

  "Welcome. Welcome!"

  "Oh, see you—" A hand gripped his bare elbow. "Messire Ambassador! Isn’t it wonderful?"

  Andaluz ran his finger down the younger Katayan’s palely freckled jaw-line. He smiled. "Mistress Zari. My nephew, if he yet lives, wishes you found. Do you know this?"

  "Nephew–oh, Lucas." Zar-bettu-zekigal chuckled. "Oh, he’ll be all right. He’s a good kid. Ask him from me what’s he going to be when he grows up."

  Andaluz roared with laughter, pushed a way for them between men and Rats to Luka’s side. The older Katayan knelt, bending to drink from the canal’s clean cold water. The Lady Luka stared out across the great canal at the heavily laden vessel.

  She held up a hand, gripping her bamboo cane. She nodded, once, the motion folding the soft skin at her throat. Andaluz stepped to her side. Her head moved on bird-delicate shoulders; she looked up at him.

  "They’re here." She spoke barely above a whisper.

  Andaluz strained to hear over the crowd’s babble: voices and sudden laughter, a dropped bottle, a Ratling’s squeak. He frowned, hearing only a gull’s cry and the creak of rose-laden masts.

  "I don’t—"

  The gull cried again: sharp, desolate, joyful. Andaluz stared at Luka. He lifted one hand, touching the feathers wo
und into her single braid.

  Shadows of bird’s wings fell across her, across her silver hair and orange-and-purple robes; across his blunt-fingered hand.

  "Oh, lady." Sudden tears constricted his throat.

  The woman lifted both arms. Rings glittered in the sunlight. Her orange scarves swirled. Tiny bells on her leather belt jingled, soft as hawks’ jesses. Bright-eyed, she laughed; raised her voice and called out an answering gull’s shriek.

  Dots flocked in the high haze.

  Silence spread out into the crowd, Luka’s voice soaring over theirs. Andaluz stood quite still, arms hanging at his sides, mouth slightly open; openly relaxed into his own amazement.

  They fell down from the sky–soaring in great squadrons, clouds, flocks: hawks and eagles, gulls, thrushes, humming-birds; owls and cormorants and wild geese; chaffinches and peregrine falcons and sparrows . . . All the air full of wings, whirring, full of dusty feathers and bird-calls and droppings; thousands of birds circling in a great wheel that had, in its eye, the silver-braided bird-woman.

  Andaluz softly said: "Oh, my dear lady . . ."

  Luka’s raised hands shot forward. The cane reached up towards the black vessel riding the canal. A great herring-gull caught the hot still air under its wings, curved in flight to skim across the water and land on the rail of the Boat.

  A thrush flicked to land on a coil of rope.

  Luka reached her hands out across the water. Hard concentration furrowed her face. Bird after bird flew down, soaring towards the high invisible deck.

  Andaluz stared at figures crowding the rails, figures with no shadows. He felt his own heart beat in his throat.

  "So many dead . . ."

  The Boat settled into the water. Flocks of gulls and starlings circled the flower-draped sails. They dipped, curving flights to cross the deck.

  He moved as close to her as he dared, eyes still fixed on the Boat. Ripples ran across the canal from its hull, dazzling in the summer heat. He took a great breath of humid air. "Is that what I think?"

  The small woman gazed up, plump face beaming. She fumbled her cane; pulled the orange-and-purple robes looser at her neck, and rubbed sweat from her forehead with the heel of her hand. She rocked back and forth on her sandaled heels.

  "Yes, my birds carry them back to the Boat, and, yes, the Boat will carry them through the Day and back to birth again . . ."

  Andaluz stared up. A hawk clung to the Boat’s nearer rail. It raised half-open wings, head down, hacking a harsh call. It choked.

  The bright body and wings of a butterfly unfolded from the bird’s beak, hacked into the air by its strangulated call. Andaluz laughed. Drunkenly, the bright psyche flew up to cling to the bottom of a rose-woven sail.

  Elish-hakku-zekigal chanted, her voice croaking quiet as a whisper. The Boat moved out, no faster than walking pace, flanked by crowds on either side of the canal now; gliding on towards the lagoon.

  A vast crowd of bright moths and butterflies clung to the Boat, almost hiding the black wood with gold, scarlet, green, purple, azure. Bird after bird swooped down to the deck, then soared up to fly off across the city . . .

  Figures at the rail glided past Andaluz. A black woman in a faded green gown, who stretched her fists up to the sun and laughed, silently, as if she couldn’t have too much of the light. A man pushing between two brown Rats to lean on the rail, milk-white hair blowing in the summer wind; gazing down at the crowd with wide pit- black pupils. A slender black Rat in a scarlet priest’s jacket, who touched a white rose to her furred cheek and held her other hand close by the rail, admiring how no shadow marked the wood . . .

  More, more: too many to see and note.

  "I—" Andaluz abruptly turned to Luka. The woman rubbed at her wet eyes with plump fingers, smiling up at him. His own eyes ran water. He folded his arm in hers, patting her hand, and lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

  She smiled with a brilliance that outshone the sky.

  Elish-hakku-zekigal touched his arm and pointed. Her chant croaked on, breathless, unfaltering. Freckles stood out on Zar-bettu-zekigal’s pale skin. The Candovard Ambassador stared upwards, following her gaze.

  Six yards above, at the black rail, a shadowless woman leaned her chin on her arms and frowned as if memory troubled her. Slanting black brows dipped over reddish- brown eyes webbed around with faint lines. Broken butterfly-wings tangled in her short greasy hair.

  "Lady!" Zar-bettu-zekigal’s hand jerked up, stopped, fell to her side. "Lady Hyena!"

  Warm wind brushed the woman’s face, smoothing away the frown. A ragged Sun-banner sashed her red shirt; and she fisted the cloth in one hand and rubbed it against her cheek, her glance sliding away from the Katayan girl.

  Andaluz rested his arm across her shoulders. "She’ll come back, Mistress Zari. If not to you, then to others."

  Zar-bettu-zekigal broke from his embrace. "Oh, what! I know that—"

  Her greatcoat swirled about her pale calves. Loping strides took her ahead, paralleling the woman at the rail. Her hands fisted at her sides, black against dazzling light and water, as she came to the carved steps where the canal opened out into the lagoon.

  A frown dented the woman’s slanting brows.

  Suddenly the woman grabbed at her hip, as if she expected to find a sword there. She thrust her way down the rail, limping, pushing her way between men and Rats; walking level with Zar-bettu-zekigal.

  No shadow marked the deck.

  A sweet smile broke over her face, relaxed and content. She stopped, standing still; and–as no other on the Boat–lifted her hand in farewell. Andaluz glanced down. Zar-bettu-zekigal’s eyes glowed.

  "Did you see that! She said goodbye. To me!"

  The Boat moved out into the lagoon, prow turning towards the open sea. A humid wind shifted the masses of roses, and the rose-leaves sprouting from rail and bow and spar. Limpid water rushed against the curving tarred planks of the hull.

  Andaluz shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat slicked the grizzled hairs on his skin. The Lady Luka gripped Elish’s arm for support and lowered herself to sit on a step, easing her sweat-pink feet into the cool water. He stepped down beside her, resting one hand on her rumpled robes.

  "Andaluz, look!"

  The harbor water flows, a net of diamonds; and in lucid depths adamant limbs now stir: Chnoumen, Chachnoumen, Opener of Hundreds and Thousands of Years, implicit in the lines of sun on water.

  "Things can’t be the same after this . . ."

  A tread behind warns him, that and the sudden silence of the crowd.

  Towering over the marble-and-gold palaces, Her ancient terracotta smile secret and triumphant, the Decan of the Eleventh Hour walks amongst Rats and humans that scurry like ants about Her feet. Bees hum among the roses that chain her, sweet and white in the afternoon sun.

  Andaluz tastes salt and sand in his mouth.

  "I wish I knew my son were here and safe." Luka raised her head, surveying all; bird-bright glance softening with dreamy reminiscence. "He was always so delicate as a child, my Baltazar. His chest, you know. He never did take care of himself."

  Andaluz bit the inside of his cheek firmly. "Ah . . . yes. Mistress Zari’s described Lord Casaubon to me so well that I feel I already know him."

  The younger Katayan woman gurgled. She caught a light-standard and pulled herself up on to its marble base, gazing over the heads of the crowd, searching.

  Luka patted her silver braid, twisting a feather more tightly in it. "I know he’s never been too proud to ask his mother for help; that’s why I came at once. I’d never say that to Baltazar, of course. He’d be dreadfully embarrassed. Did he look well when you last saw him?"

  " ‘Well’?" Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned and pointed. "See for yourself, Lady. Ei! Lord-Architect!"

  "Baltazar!"

  Luka elbowed her way between people, Andaluz at her heels. Andaluz glimpsed copper hair as a head turned.

  An immensely tall and fat man walked beside the Decan of th
e Eleventh Hour, stately and beaming. His shirt hung out of his breeches, unbuttoned, stained black with machine-oil. The two top buttons of his breeches had gone missing, and both stockings were unrolled to his ankles. He moved massively, the crowd parting in front of him.

  Luka hallooed: "My little baby boy!"

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon stopped, sat heavily and abruptly down on the top step of the quay, put his padded elbows on his vast knees, and sank his face into his hands.

  ". . . Mother."

  Slowly the Boat moves into distance, hazed in the afternoon heat; gliding down the path of sun-dazzles on the water.

  Still from the sky they pour down to follow it, the birds that fly from thin-aired heights; and, high above, white stone wings curve on air: Erou, the Ninth Decan, Lord of the Triumph of Time, soaring in the changing brilliance of the sky.

  "We will never be the same again."

  Into the silence of gathered tens of thousands, a clear voice sounds: the Decan of the Eleventh Hour, Lady of the Ten Degrees of High Summer, whose gaze now scatters miracles over the god-haunted heart of the world.

  "Death is not final—"

  From the Fifth Point of the Compass they come, walking out from the ruins of the Fane into the world. In the great Districts that stretch across a continent, bells ring in abbey towers, ships’ masts burst into flower, women and children and Rats and men clasp hands and dance, in chains and pairs, through streets, and through the midnight-marble ruins.

  Stone-bodied, immense, beast-headed: god-daemons stalk streets and parks and avenues, squares and palaces.

  "–only change is final; and now it changes again!"

  After millennia of construction, thrown down now and laid waste, the Thirty-Six Decans walk out of the Fane’s ruins and into the world.

  Chapter Nine

  White heat-haze lies over the full-leafed summer trees, shadowing their green canopies blue.

  Where she lies, in tall cow-parsley between field and formal gardens, damp grass and shadow imprint her body. Borrowed shirt and breeches shade her from sunburn.