by John Crowley
No; Auberon was thinking of Sylvie, and of what his mother had instructed him to do tomorrow in the woods above the lake island, the outlandish thing; and how she had pressed her finger to her lips, and then to his, enjoining silence on him when his father came into the room. He raised his forefinger and stroked the new hair that had recently and unaccountably joined his two eyebrows into one.
“In a way, you know,” Smoky said, “I’m sorry you made it back.”
“Hm?”
“No, of course I don’t mean I’m sorry, only … Well, I had a plan; if you didn’t write or show up soon, I was going to set out to find you.”
“You were?”
“Yup.” He laughed. “Oh it would have been quite an expedition. I was already thinking of what to pack, and all.”
“You should have,” Auberon said, grinning with relief that he had in fact not.
“It might have been fun. Seeing the City again.” He was lost a moment in old visions. “Well. I probably would have got lost myself.”
“Yes.” He smiled at his father. “Probably. But thanks, Dad.” “Well,” Smoky said. “Well. Gosh, look at the time.”
Embracing Himself
He followed his father up the wide front staircase.
The stairs creaked where and when they always had. The nighttime house was as familiar to him as the day-house, as full of details he had forgotten he knew.
They parted at a turning of the corridor.
“Well, sleep well,” Smoky said, and they stood together in the pool of light from the candle Smoky held. Perhaps if Auberon hadn’t been encumbered with his squalid bags and Smoky with the candle, they would have embraced; perhaps not. “You can find your room?”
“Sure.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
He took the fifteen and a half steps—bumping his flank against the absurd commode he always forgot was there—and put out his hand, and it touched his faceted glass knob. He lit no light once inside, though he knew that a candle and matches were there on the night-table, knew how to find them, knew the scarred underside of the table where he could strike the match. The odor (his own, cold, faint, but familiar, with an admixture of child’s smell, Lily’s twins who had camped there) spoke in a constant old murmur to him of past things. He stood unmoving for a moment, seeing by smell the armchair where much of his childhood’s happiness had been had, the armchair just large enough and unsprung enough for him to curl in with a book or a pad of paper, and the calm lamp beside it, and the table where cookies and milk or tea and toast could glow warmly in the lamplight; and the wardrobe from out whose door, when left ajar, ghosts and hostile figures used to steal to frighten him (what had become of those figures, once so familiar? Dead, dead of loneliness, with no one to spook); and the narrow bed and its fat quilt and its two pillows. From an early age he’d insisted on having two pillows, though he’d only rested his head on one. He liked the rich luxury of them: inviting. All there. The weight of the odors was heavy on his soul, like chains, like old burdens reassumed.
He undressed in the dark and crawled into the cold bed. It was like embracing himself. Since the adolescent spurt of growing that had brought him to Daily Alice’s height, his feet, when he was in this bed, curled down over the end, and had made two depressions there in the mattress. His feet found them now. The lumps were where they had always been. There was in fact only one pillow, and it smelled vaguely pissy. Cat? Child? He wouldn’t sleep, he thought; he couldn’t decide whether he wished he had been bold enough to gulp more of Smoky’s brandy or glad that this agony was his now, a lot to make up for, starting tonight. He had, anyway, plenty to occupy his wide-awake thoughts. He rolled over carefully into Position Two of his unvarying bedtime choreography, and lay that way long awake in the suffocating familiar darkness.
CHAPTER FOUR
You talk like a Rosicrucian, who
will love nothing but a sylph, who does
not believe in the existence of a
sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole
universe for not containing a sylph.
—Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
No, I understand now,” Auberon said, calm in the woods—it was so simple, really. “I didn’t, for a long time, but I do now. You just can’t hold people, you can’t own them. I mean it’s only natural, a natural process really. Meet. Love. Part. Life goes on. There was never any reason to expect her to stay always the same—I mean ‘in love,’ you know.” There were those doubt-quotes of Smoky’s, heavily indicated. “I don’t hold a grudge. I can’t.”
“You do,” Grandfather Trout said. “And you don’t understand.”
Nothing for Something
He had gone out at dawn, awakened by that abrasive thing like thirst or need that always awoke him at dawn since he’d become a drunkard. Unable to recapture sleep, unwilling to stare at the room, his room, which in the untender dawn looked alien and unfamiliar, he’d dressed. Put on his overcoat and hat against the misty chill. And climbed up through the woods, past the lake island where the white gazebo stood up to its knees in mist, up to where a falls fell melodiously into a deep dark pool. There, he’d done as his mother had instructed him, though believing none of it or trying to believe none of it. But, believe it or not, he was after all a Barnable, Drinkwater on his mother’s side; his great-grandfather didn’t refuse his summons. He couldn’t have if he’d wanted to.
“Well, though, but I’d like to explain to her,” Auberon said. “Tell her … Tell her, anyhow. That I don’t mind. That she has my respect for making the decision she did. So I thought if you knew where she was, even approximately where …”
“I don’t,” said Grandfather Trout.
Auberon sat back from the pool’s edge. What was he doing here? If the one piece of information he had wanted—the one piece which of all pieces he should not any longer care to seek—was to be still withheld from him? How could he anyway have asked for it? “What I don’t understand,” he said at last, “is why I have to go on making such a big deal out of it. I mean there are lots of fish in the sea. She’s gone, I can’t find her; so why do I cling to it? Why do I keep making her up? These ghosts, these phantoms …”
“Oh, well,” said the fish. “Not your fault. Those phantoms. Those are their work.”
“Their work?”
“Don’t want you to know it,” said Grandfather Trout, “but yes, their work; just to keep you sharp set; lures; no worry there.”
“No worry?”
“Just let ‘em pass by. There’ll be more. Just let ‘em pass by. Don’t tell them I told you so.”
“Their work,” Auberon said. “Why?”
“Oh, well, Grandfather Trout said guardedly. “Why; well, why …”
“Okay,” Auberon said. “Okay, see? See what I mean?” An innocent victim, tears sprang to his eyes. “Well, hell with them anyway,” he said. “Figments. I don’t care. It’ll pass. Phantoms or no phantoms. Let ‘em do their worst. It won’t last forever.” That was saddest of all; sad but true. A trembling sigh covered him and passed. “It’s only natural,” he said. “It won’t last forever. It can’t.”
“It can,” Grandfather Trout said. “It will.”
“No,” Auberon said. “No, you think it will sometimes. But it passes. You think—Love. It’s such a whole, such a permanent thing. So big, so—separate from you. With a weight of its own. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“But that’s not so. It’s just a figment too. I don’t have to do its bidding. It just withers away on its own. When its over after all you don’t even remember what it was like.” That’s what he had learned in his little park: that it was possible, reasonable even, to discard his broken heart like a broken cup; who needed it? “Love: It’s all personal. I mean my love doesn’t have anything to do with her— not the real her. It’s just something I feel. I think it connects me to her. But it doesn’t. That’s a myth, a myth I make up; a myth abo
ut her and me. Love is a myth.”
“Love is a myth,” Grandfather Trout said. “Like summer.”
“What?”
“In winter,” Grandfather Trout said, “summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”
Auberon raised his eyes to the crook-fingered trees that rose above the sounding pool. Leaves were uncurling from ten thousand tips. What he was being told, he saw, was that he had accomplished nothing in the little park by Art of Memory, nothing at all; that he was as burdened as ever, unrelievably. That couldn’t be so. Could he really love her forever, live in the house of her forever, inescapably?
“In summer,” he said, “winter is a myth….”
“Yes,” said the trout.
“A report, a rumor, not to be believed.”
“Yes.”
He had loved her and she had left him, without reason, without farewell. If he loved her always, if there was no death of love, then she would always leave him, always without reason, always without farewell. Between those eternal stones bright and dark he would be ground small forever. It couldn’t be so.
“Forever,” he said. “No.”
“Forever,” said his great-grandfather. “Yes.”
It was so. He knew, eyes blind with tears and heart black with terror, that he had exorcised nothing, not one moment, not one glance, no, he had by his Art only refined and burnished every moment of Sylvie that he had been given, not one of them was returnable now forever. Summer had come, and all serene autumns and all winters peaceful as any grave were myth and no help.
“No fault of your own,” Grandfather Trout said.
“I must say,” Auberon said, wiping tears and snot from his face with the sleeve of his coat, “you’re not a lot of comfort.”
The trout answered nothing. He hadn’t expected thanks.
“You don’t know where she is. Or why I should be done by this way. Or what I should do. And then you tell me it won’t pass.” He sniffed. “No fault of my own. Big help that is.”
There was a long silence. The fish’s wavering white form regarded him and his grief unblinking. “Well,” he said at last. “There is a gift in it for you.”
“Gift. What gift.”
“Well, I don’t know. Exactly. But I’m sure there’s a gift. You don’t get nothing for something.”
“Oh.” Auberon could sense the fish’s effort to be kind. “Well. Thanks. Whatever it is.”
“Nothing to do with me,” Grandfather Trout said. Auberon stared into the water’s silky folded surface. If he had a net. Grandfather Trout sank slightly and said, “Well, listen.” But after that he said nothing more; and by slow degrees sank out of sight.
Auberon rose. The morning mist had burned away, the sun was hot, and the birds were ecstatic—it was all that they had hoped it would be. He made his way down the stream through all this gladness, and out along the path to the pasture. The house, beyond whispering trees, was pastel in the morning, and seemed to be just opening its eyes. A dark smudge in the spring, he stumbled through the pasture, wet to his knees with dew. It can last forever: it will. There would be a bus he could catch at evening, a bus that by a roundabout path met another bus that went south along the gray highways, through thickening suburbs, to the broad bridge or to the tiled tunnel, and then out onto the horrid streets that led by old geometries smoked and full of wretchedness to Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom in the City where Sylvie was or was not. He stopped walking. He felt himself to be a dry stick, that dry stick that the Pope in the story gave to the sinful knight who had loved Venus, and who would not be redeemed until it blossomed. And there was no blossoming in him.
Grandfather Trout, within whose pool spring was also unfolding, fringing his private holes with tender weed and bringing bugs to term, wondered if there really would be a gift for the boy. Probably not. They didn’t give out such things when they didn’t have to. But the boy had been so sad. What harm in telling him? Give him heart. Grandfather Trout’s was not an affectionate soul, not now, not after all these years; but this was after all spring, and the boy was after all flesh of his flesh, or so they said. He hoped anyway that if there was a gift in it, it wouldn’t be one that would cause the boy any great suffering.
Quite Long-Sighted
“Of course I’d always known about them,” Ariel Hawksquill said to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. “In the practical, or experimental, stage of my studies, they were always a nuisance. Elementals. The experiments seemed to draw them, like a bowl of peaches drawing a cloud of fruit flies from nowhere, or a walk in the woods drawing chickadees. There were times I couldn’t go up and down the stairs to my sanctum—where I worked with the glasses and mirrors and so on, you know—without a crowd of them at my heels and head. Annoying. You couldn’t ever be sure they weren’t affecting your results.”
She sipped at the sherry the Emperor had ordered for her. He was pacing the parlor of his suite, not paying close attention. The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club had departed in some confusion, not sure whether any conclusion had been come to, and feeling vaguely fleeced. “What,” Barbarossa said, “do we do now? That’s the question. I think the time is ripe to strike. The sword’s unsheathed. The Revelation should come soon.”
“Hm.” The difficulty was that she had never thought of them as having wills. Like angels, they were forces only, emanations, condensations of occult energy, natural objects really and no more wilful than stones or sunlight. That they had shapes which seemed to be able to contain wills, had voices and faces with changeful expressions and flitted about with apparent purpose, she had ascribed to that quiddity of human perception that sees faces in the blotches of plaster walls, hostility or friendliness in landscapes, creatures in clouds. Once see a Force, and you will see it with a face, and a character; no help for it. But the Architecture of Country Houses saw the matter very differently: it seemed to state that if there were creatures who were merely expressions of natural forces, the will-less emanations of shaping wills, the medium of spirits who knew what they were doing, then those creatures were men and not fairies. Hawksquill was unwilling to go so far, but she was forced to think that yes, they did have wills as well as powers, and desires as well as duties, and weren’t blind, no, quite long-sighted in fact; and where did that leave her?
She really didn’t feature being a mere link in a chain woven by other powers, and having nothing to say in the matter, as her upstate cousins apparently thought of themselves. For sure she had no intention of being a subaltern in their army, which is how she supposed they thought of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whatever he thought of the matter. No: with no side was she ready to throw in her lot that completely. The mage is by definition he who manipulates and rules those forces at whose direction the common run blindly live.
She was on thin ice, in fact. The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club could never have been an opponent worthy of her powers. And by as much as she outclassed those gentlemen, by just as much, perhaps, was she outclassed by those who operated Russell Eigenblick. Well: it was anyway to be a contest worthy of her, at last; at last she and what she knew, now when her powers were at their height and her senses sharpest, would be tested as far as they could be tested; and if found wanting, there would at least be no dishonor in the losing.
“Well? Well?” said the Emperor, sitting down heavily. “No Revelation,” she said, and rose. “Not now, if ever.” He started, and his eyebrows shot up. “My mind is changed,” Hawksquill said. “It might be just the thing to be a President for a while.” “But you said …”
“As far as I know,” Hawksquill said, “that office’s powers are legally intact; only disused. Once installed, you could turn them on the Club. They’d be surprised. Throw them …”
“Into prison. Have them done secretly to death.”
“No; but perhaps into the toils of the Legal System at least; from which, if recent history is any guide, they will not emerge for a long time, and t
hen considerably weakened, and much poorer—nickeled and dimed to death, as we used to say.”
He grinned at her from his chair, a long, wolfish, conspirator’s grin which almost made her laugh. He crossed his large blunt fingers over his stomach and nodded, pleased. Hawksquill turned to the window, thinking Why him? Why him of all people? And thought: if the mice in a household were suddenly given some vote or say in its management, whom would they elect housekeeper?
“And I suppose,” she said, “in many ways, being President of this country, just now, wouldn’t be altogether different from being Emperor of your old Empire.” She smiled at him over her shoulder, and he looked up at her from under his red brows to see if he were being mocked. “The same splendors, I mean,” Hawksquill said mildly, raising her glass to the window light. “The same joys. The same sorrows … How long, in any case, did you expect to reign now?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. He yawned hugely, complacently. “From now on, I suppose. Ever after.”
“That’s what I thought,” Hawksquill said. “In that case, there’s no need to be hasty, is there?”
From the east, across the ocean, evening was gathering; a complex, lurid sunset was spilled in the west as from a broken vessel. From this window’s height, out of its orgulous expanse of glass, the struggle between them could be observed, a show laid on for the rich and mighty who lived in high places. Ever after … It seemed to Hawksquill, watching the battle, that the whole world was just at that moment lapsing into a long dream, or perhaps awaking from one; it was impossible to tell which. But when she turned from the window to remark on this, she saw that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was asleep in his chair, snoring softly, his faint breath blowing out the hairs of his red moustache and his face as peaceful as any sleeping child’s: as if, Hawksquill thought, he had never really awakened at all.