Winterlong w-1, page 11
part #1 of Winterlong Series
“No,” said Justice, as though he had read my thoughts. He reached to take my hand. “We’re safe, I think. Anyone at HEL will assume we were caught by the rain. No one will look for us, at least not tonight. They’re afraid of the rebels; they’ll be trying to trace the source of the attack.”
“But what of us? Won’t the lazars find us out here?”
He made a face. “We’ll have to chance it. But I think we’re safe for now, at least this side of the river.”
He hugged me. “We’re free, Wendy. By morning we can leave. I know a place we can go for a few days—”
“But,” I stammered, “what will we do?”
I could imagine his mouth pursed in the darkness, thinking. “We’ll go to the City,” he said at last. “I have people there; they may help us.” But he sounded doubtful.
“But what about me: they’ll know who I am.” I pulled closer to the wall, disliking this enforced proximity. I felt stronger since he had given me my medication, and wished morning would come. I wished he would leave.
“No one knows who you are, Wendy,” Justice said softly. “Outside of HEL no one has heard of you or the others.”
“Won’t they look for you?”
“They terminated me two days ago, but it’s been so disorganized that the release code wasn’t changed yet. One of the servers let me in. They won’t bother with me. I’m only an Aide.” He hesitated, then added, “And I’m not an Ascendant.”
I flopped back against the tomb wall. “What about me?” I had never been outside of HEL , except for chaperoned visits to the riverwalk and giddy forays to the ziggurat with Anna and a few of the other empties.
“Can you do anything?”
“I can assist in emotive engram therapy.”
“Well.” He did not sound impressed. “My— people —are in the City. They may be able to help. Or there’s others might be interested in you.” He regarded me critically. No one would recognize you like this.”
“No one knows me outside of HEL ,” I said. The thought evoked an echo of Dr. Harrow’s sorrow and loneliness, and I shivered. He drew me closer.
“You can use another name. Travel in disguise. It might be exciting.” He rubbed the nape of my neck, brushing the short hairs the wrong way. “We’ll say you’re a Curator.”
“My name is Wendy Wanders.”
“Take another; take a boy’s name.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “Tell them to call me Aidan.” And I stretched out upon the dank marble floor beside him and fell slowly into sleep.
I slept fitfully. Although undisturbed by the rush of wind in the leaves or the faint footfalls of passing animals, I could not grow accustomed to the unfamiliar weight of Justice beside me, the flickering shades of his dreams intruding upon my own. Several times I started awake in terror, seeing a pair of glowing green eyes fading into the confines the tomb’s walls. And Dr. Harrow’s voice echoed over and over in my mind, calling my name and her brother Aidan’s until finally she faded into silence.
Once, near dawn, I woke to feel Justice’s hands sliding beneath my shirt.
“Get away,” I said, although there was nowhere for him go. As I tried to edge from him I could smell his arousal, he pressed me against the wall, his jacket falling about us like a tent. I tried to bite his shoulder, but he shoved me back so that my cheek grazed the marble. Then holding my face in his hands he kissed me, murmuring my name as he ran his hands across my skull. I bit his tongue. With a choked cry he yanked away from me, but not before a little blood trickled into my mouth: enough that his desire exploded in my brain and I shut my eyes, trembling.
Cursing, he touched the tip of his tongue, drew away finger spotted with blood. In the near-darkness he might have been a stone angel fallen from atop one of the vaults. He turned back to me, his eyes clouded with anger.
“You ungrateful—”
A drop of blood welled onto his lip and I tilted my head to kiss him. My tongue flicked across the tiny cut and tasted what blood remained, the bright flash of his anger melting into disappointment and confusion. He fumbled to put his arms about me, but I crouched against the back of the tomb. Without a word he lay down again, his back to me. I sensed his wakefulness long afterward.
At first light he crept from our hiding place. A few minutes later he returned to wake me.
“Get up,” he said. He braided his hair, tying the end with a black silk ribbon. “Even if they think we’re dead we can’t stay here.”
“But the virus?”
“It doesn’t live more than an hour in the open air. But we can’t trust Leslie or the others not to come looking for your corpse.”
“Will the lazars hunt us?” I stretched, wondering what we would be able to eat.
Justice stood, hands slouched in the deep pockets of his jacket as he watched me tuck in my shirt. “This is probably the best time to avoid them. After the rain of roses they’re—sated.”
“I have never seen one,” I admitted, and smiled. “I’m thirsty.”
Justice stared at me as though waiting for me to say something else; to apologize, perhaps. I adjusted the cuff of my shirt, wishing I’d brought other clothes. After a moment he shook his head.
“Well, come on, then,” he said. We left the tomb.
Sunrise misted the eastern edge of the woods, where through the deep green leaves I glimpsed the chromati haze of the Glass Fountain and the purer emerald of HEL lawns.
Justice said, “You can go back if you want. Go ahead: see what happens.”
“I don’t want to go back.” I turned from this last sight of my home to follow him. “You didn’t have to free me. I’ll go on alone now if you want.”
“Hah.” He snorted, but paused to hold a wiry sumac hip while I passed beneath it. “No point letting you get killed out here after all that trouble.” As I passed, his voice rose slightly. “Why’d you bite me last night?”
“’I don’t like to fuck.”
“’Then why did you kiss me?”
“I tapped you.”
His eyes darkened as he stepped beside me, kicking at mushrooms and damp leaves. “What?”
I squinted to find a path among the ancient trees. “I can read blood.”
He stared at me for a long moment. I met his gaze, finally shrugged and turned to make my way through the tangled forest.
We walked in silence until the sun hung high overhead, Justice seemed to find his way by the sun, and by following the river. Occasionally we glimpsed it through the trees, a litter of blue and gold.
A heavy jasmine-scented steam began to rise from the earth. This came from carpets of white flowers that covered the ground like moss, their blossoms no bigger than my fingernail. As I stooped to watch them the tiny blooms opened and closed like little gaping mouths. When I touched one it snapped at my finger.
“Look, Justice! It’s hungry—”
He shook his head and pulled me to my feet. “No, Wendy.”
“Are they poisonous?”
“Sometimes. Things change, after the rain of roses.”
I followed him. When he wasn’t looking I would kick at the mats of white flowers and watch them seethe as we passed.
We skirted the rotted foundations of small wooden buildings, the collapsed tangle of steel walls and cavernous bunkers and commercial ziggurats that during the Third Ascension had been built upon the earlier ruins. On the decaying ziggurat steps I saw copperheads drowsing in coiled knots and other, larger snakes, blue-black and with scales so long and fine they looked like feathers. The fallen steel archways were pied with lizards, golden-eyed and blue-tongued, waiting patiently for crickets to waken and warm themselves on the metal. I was hungry. In the trees ahead Justice waited for me to catch up. I waved to him to go on ahead, waited for him to turn away so that I could capture a lizard as it dozed. It was lovely, raised rounded scales like tiny rust-and-azure studs. I wished I could save its skin; but I killed it quickly by biting its neck. I sucked the little blood there was from its body cavity and made quick mouthful of the meat in belly and tail. A flicker of the animal’s hunger and heat sparked in my brain: the warmth of insects and then the quick slash of my own teeth through its spine. That was all it gave me. I was sorry about the pretty scales.
I skipped ahead to join Justice and we continued in silence for a time.
“You’ve never been this far outside before, have you?” he said at last.
“We had no need to leave HEL .”
For what? Dr. Harrow had warned me that the world outside was a decadent place, and dangerous. Certainly the ruined City of Trees was no place for a creature dependent upon a carefully administered regime of chemicals and stolen dreams. But Justice only motioned for me to follow him to the edge of the forest. We left the cool shelter of the trees behind.
“Where are we?” I asked, stepping among shattered blocks of granite.
“Near the Key Bridge.”
A path of white stones curled from the edge of the broken road and stretched through the trees. Justice hesitated, squatting on a ledge of tarmac.
“Are we lost?”
He shook his head. “No. But it will be dark soon. That’s the City, there.”
He pointed to the far shore of the river. Through a green scrim I glimpsed broken roofs and towers vying with tree tops for the afternoon sun.
“Tired?”
“No.” Instead I felt edgy, wide awake. At HEL we would have been dressing for dinner, or stealing things for a secret meeting in our quarters. And a certain uneasiness shaded all my thoughts now: fear of those brilliant eyes and the longing they kindled within me; fear of the loneliness that crept over me whenever I recalled Dr. Harrow’s white form lying still on the floor of the Home Room …
“Good. We’ll cross there—” He pointed, and I peered through the thicket. For the first time I saw the bridge spanning the murky river, its ancient fretwork rusted to a filigree of red and black, virginia creeper scalloping the tower struts in waves of green that shimmered in the warm breeze.
We followed the path of white stones. It skimmed the broken ribs of what had once been a road, hedged by tall bronzed oaks and a winding network of ditches now filled with stagnant water. Occasionally the rusted shell of an automobile or velocipede poked from the greenery or lay submerged in the brackish pools like gaunt pike. Once we heard something thrash in the ditch. Justice pulled me after him into the brush, and from there we glimpsed a pale slender appendage like an arm or tentacle gently plying the surface of the black water behind us. Justice watched impassively until it withdrew and the ripples subsided in the scummy pool.
In a few more minutes we reached the bridge. Justice shook his head as though testing the air. Then he turned to me, laughing in relief.
“This is it. We made it.”
And as I followed Justice I suddenly felt Him again inside me, stirring against the shell of nerve and bone that contained Him. I knew that the dark flash that tore through me was not my jubilation, not Dr. Harrow’s or Aidan’s but His, the Other now with me and within me.
He saw the City too, and the sight filled Him with a raging joy: joy and blood-hunger and a thirst for worship.
But for myself, crossing that river, the sluggish guardian of my childhood—what stirred me at first sight of the fallen City of Trees unfurled before me like a ruined flag, all the more valiant for its tattered heraldry?
The tales Dr., Harrow had told us of the City painted a grimy metropolis, justly forsaken: a cheap bauble not worth preserving. Its people died horrible deaths in the Long Night of the First Ascension—starvation, radiation sickness, plague. Its rulers had already fled west. There they perished in the wilderness or else joined the fledgling alliance that a century later would bring about the Second Ascension. Since then the City was held by the researchers (and camp followers) who had been sent to recover some of the knowledge of the Civil Servants, and then, in the chaos following the first mutagenic warfare, forgotten. They owned the City now: mad watchdogs of useless knowledge and their whores, feasting upon the ruins like fat ticks. And in the streets lived cannibal children and the geneslaves who preyed upon the living.
But always Dr. Harrow gave us a gray city not worth dreaming of, bound by a dead river.
Yet now the river itself seemed to have awakened at the sound of our footsteps, the heavy waters uncoiling to flash silver and blue beneath the bridge. Instead of the mud-colored fish that nudged at our riverwalk in search of crusts I saw huge golden carp, circling slowly to the surface to peer up at us with wise round eyes. And sea-birds whose cries streaked the still afternoon with harsh echoes of white shores, and ospreys and eagles hunting the noble carp, and otters like arrows striking the bright water. I froze.
“What is it?” Justice called, turning to look back at me. I shook my head and steadied myself with one hand upon the rusted ironwork. Too much! I wanted to scream; and instinctively crouched and turned to strike my forehead against a piling. Even there the world loomed: a string of tiny scarlet mites threading through the flaking green paint, a tendril of kudzu like a child’s beckoning finger. I started to scream.
“Wendy! Stop—” Justice ran and knelt beside me. He grabbed my wrists and pulled me from the railing so that my head thrashed against empty air. “Stop it!”
I tried to beat myself against his chest and mute the clamor in my head, the sight of all those things moving and brilliant in the world. He hugged me tight, until it passed; until once more I could focus on the shattered concrete I knelt upon, the raveled hem of his ‘jacket, my knuckles laced with blood.
“Are you all right?” His face was white. “What is it?”
I breathed deeply, the way Dr. Harrow had taught me to breathe after a seizure; then shut my eyes and concentrated, trying to draw up a memory to stanch the horrible welling of sensation and light. But there was nothing there, nothing like this river, these birds, this golden haze rising to veil the heavy green of the eastern shore. Only a faint comforting memory of dead trees and hills, like a small cold nugget lodged inside me; and so I focused on that, until the dead calm soothed me and I could speak again.
“Too much,” I whispered, shielding my eyes from the sun. Justice draped his jacket about me and helped me to my feet.
“Can you walk?”
I nodded, pulling the folds of cloth about my face. “Too sudden,” I said.
“You’ve never been outside,” he said, as if truly realizing it for the first time.
“No. I told you.” I shook my head. “It will go away—just too sudden, too much light, all those—” I flapped my hand at the flickering shapes I could still just barely make out from the corner of my eyes, the gulls disporting along the bridge’s ramparts.
“I’m sorry. I—I couldn’t chance stealing more of your medication. Can you …”
But already I felt stronger—as I always did after capturing a new sensation, if the first violent impressions did not completely overwhelm me. I took a deep breath, then lifted my head.
“I’m better now,” I said. I stretched my arms and flexed my hands, feeling my blood quicken. I faced Justice. Far behind him I could just make out the shattered ramparts that had been my home. I turned to see the unknown City at bridge’s end, just a few feet away. And suddenly I laughed, so loudly that a skein of gulls shrieked and banked away from us. Then I ran the last steps to the far shore.
So we entered the City of Trees. In the growing dusk it looked more strange, the low ruined lines of buildings and verdant trees painted with a brooding light. The air still smelled of summer, wild grapes and honeysuckle and the river’s stagnant breath. We picked our way across the rubble of what had once been a road. Now oaks and gingkos thrust through the concrete to tower overhead. Beneath our feet ivy and thick runners of some thorny plant covered the shattered road.
We climbed a gently sloping hill scented with honeysuckle and the rich odors of other, strangely colored flowers. As we left it behind us the river’s soft rush fell into silence. Justice seemed more watchful now. Often he stopped to regard the remains of some ancient structure—a metal monument in the shape of a man, a pox of briar roses covering its face; a great machine of some smooth rivetless material still humming and vibrating despite the myriad skinks sunning themselves on its black surface—and he would click his tongue in dismay or curse beneath his breath.
“It changes so fast,” he said once. He stared in chagrin at the hollow body of an autobus collapsed in a ditch like some drowned beast, then glanced toward the horizon before us.
I was starting to feel dizzy and ill from hunger and thirst. Worse, the acetelthylene was wearing off. I could feel the effects of being without my medication for so many days: a hollow feeling inside my head and the Voices that, if I listened to them, would call my name repeatedly in soft yet urgent tones. These were the flickering embers of consciousness of all those patients I had tapped at HEL , flaring bits of memory and desire that would not die but were kept imprisoned within my mind by constant medication. But now they were starting to creep out again, as they did in dreams, or if my dosage was changed, or when I had been subjected to the ruthless probes of Dr. Leslie’s janissary medics. I stumbled as I walked, and swatted fiercely at my ears as if that might silence them.
Justice watched me with concern. “Are you all right? What is it?”
I cupped my hands over my ears. “The Small Voices.” That had been the name Anna and I gave to them as children; before Anna’s favorite Small Voice manifested itself as Andrew, her secondary personality.
Justice stared, baffled. I shrugged and continued to follow him through the underbrush. I was so exhausted that the Small Voices’ babble soon grew no more worrisome than the chirping of birds or crickets. After a few more minutes the flutter and squeaking of real birds roosting for the night drowned them out.
We passed a clearing ringed with white trees like birches. The air smelled of warm earth and goldenrod, but also of something foul, fetid water perhaps, trapped in a rotting stump. The sky glowed deepening blue and green. I sighed, feeling the breeze cool against my shorn skull, watched the long slender branches of the birch trees float upon the wind as though reaching for me. I had started toward one of them, thinking I might lie there to rest a moment, when Justice grabbed me and pulled me back.
