Black Light (29 page)

“Who?”

“That one, there—”

But already the man-woman was gone, lost within the moving circle. I pulled away from Ralph, no longer caring if it was cold, no longer caring if I was a million miles or a million light-years from Kamensic. “I saw him,” I repeated angrily. “At the Nursery when I was twelve. There was a painting there—a cave painting, it was hanging in one of the rooms. Kissy Hardwick saw it, too—she sat and talked to me for a while. It was right before she died…”

My voice trailed off. I thought of the girl in the torn blue dress, her patchwork bag spilling open on the floor between us to scatter its glittering array, pills and peacock feathers, tarot cards and earrings and a knife carved of bone…

“She had a knife,” I said. My eyes widened but I no longer saw Ralph, only that archaic blade, its handle burned russet and scored with minuscule lines. “She said she was his godchild, too, and that we were all real—she said that we were all real…”

“You are,” whispered Ralph. “Watch—”

In my mind’s eye a small dirty hand still grasped the bone knife, turning it so that light touched the tiny incisions, momentarily causing them to glow. Then it was as though someone tossed dust into my face. My eyes teared as I drew back and raised a hand before me.

But there was no dust clouding the air; only a small spare figure standing alone beneath a birch tree. The circle dance had retreated, so that they were small black columns ranged against the purple sky. So had the little group of reindeer herders. They were perhaps fifty feet away, no longer tending their animals but aligned side by side, watching the redhaired girl. Beside her stood the white reindeer, head upraised.

And it remained thus, absolutely still. Were it not for the way its skin shuddered beneath the skeins of midges upon its flanks, I would have thought it a statue carved of stone or snow. Beside the reindeer lay the bulky, fur-wrapped bundle that had been carried by its mate, and above it stood the girl, gazing at the birch with her hands cupped in front of her. In the eerily charged light I could see her clearly—the too-vivid stain of cinnabar and ochre upon her hair, a network of reddish lines striating her cheeks. Her eyes were wide open, the pupils lost within silvery irises, and that, too, gave me a flash of the figure in the cave painting with its maddening stare.

“Why does she look like that?” I whispered.

“Poppies,” said Ralph.
“Papaver somniferum
…”

He bent and let his fingers play with a dried stalk, one of thousands nodding in the night wind; then straightened, stripping dead leaves and an oval seed-capsule from its tip. He held it out to me, a small brown globe with a ridged crown about its top. I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “I—I don’t want it—”

Ralph ignored me, taking my hand and prising it open so that he could place the seed-head in my palm. “Don’t worry,” he said, his smile edged with disdain. He closed his hand around mine, squeezing it shut so the seed-capsule splintered and cut into my palm. “It’s outgrown its usefulness, except for the seeds. You have to pick them after they bloom, before the capsules are fully ripe. And to get any kind of high you have to eat a
lot
of them”— he inclined his head toward the girl beneath the tree. —“like she has.”

As though she had heard us, the girl started, blinking; then turned away. She walked slowly, stumbling and catching herself in a stoned parody of the circle dance. When she reached the bundle on the ground she hesitated, then knelt beside it and began to fumble with its leather bonds.

It took her several minutes, unraveling thongs and layers of hide and tossing them aside. Despite my fear I found myself inching forward to see.

“Oyum kami,”
she said, and leaned to embrace what lay before her.

It was the body of a man, naked, his dark hair falling loose from beneath a conical leather hat. His face was gaunt, the high cheekbones scarified with straight lines; his eyes had been sewn shut. But even from that distance, even across all those thousands of years, I knew him.

“Axel,” I breathed.

“Kami bö,”
whispered the girl. She took the ravaged face in her hands and kissed it, lingeringly, moving from brow to mouth to chest. Then she pressed her open palms upon his breast, threw her head back and began to wail. It was a horrible sound, made more dreadful when the others of her tribe joined in. I clapped my hands over my ears in a futile attempt to drown it out, while beside me Ralph watched raptly. The lament went on and on, the girl’s voice rising to a scream and abruptly falling silent. The rest, too, fell still, though there remained an ululating echo that took a minute to die away. I looked around, and saw the distant circle of stationary dancers silhouetted against the twilight.

“She is preparing him for sky burial,” said Ralph in a sleepwalker’s voice. “He is her father. Her father and her lover, and their god.”

“How—how can he be a god? He’s dead and I—I can see who he is.”

“He is dead because she killed him.”

“But
why
?”

“Because it is what must be done. Because he is the god who travels between worlds. Between animals and men, between this world and the world of the dead. He is a god, and goes willingly; but we must help him on his way. That is the compact men and women made with the gods, long ago. That is what the Benandanti forget, or refuse to remember—that death is a journey, too. It’s all like this—”

He made a circular motion in the air, the same words and the same gesture Axel Kern had used in the chapel at Bolerium. I shook my head, too tired to argue or question him.

Ralph did not to notice. “The Benandanti see all other ways as chaos, and that is what they fear more than anything,” he said. “
Mysteries.
They seek to explain away all that they can’t control. When all else fails, they destroy what they do not comprehend. They made themselves the foes of the great mystery religions and their adherents, and for millennia have stood guard against the rebirth of those forces which they believe will undo all their own great works. And
this
—”

He swept his arm out in front of him. Light streamed from it like sparks from a smoldering log. “
This
is where—and when—the Good Walkers were born.”

A few yards away the redhaired girl lifted her head, staring at the sky as though she saw her own image reflected there. In the distance the waiting circle was still. Between the two, silent girl and assembled dancers, only the scattered members of the reindeer tribe seemed alive, the air before them touched with vapor where they breathed. We might have been there for a quarter-hour or a thousand years, frozen figures on a great chronometer, when suddenly something else moved upon the horizon: a black cloud that broke apart and reassembled as it drew toward us, dispersing the motionless dancers as though they were rotting fenceposts.

At the same time, the girl bent forward—slowly, with, no sense of urgency—and began to gather the corpse in her arms. It seemed weightless, or else she was far stronger than I. She hefted the body and started toward the birch tree. Her expression was so far beyond grief or normal human sorrow that it was masklike, almost peaceful. It was the face of the virgin holding her son, or Demeter carrying the grain to be winnowed. I could not imagine this girl laughing or weeping or even sitting in repose; could imagine nothing but this solemn bearing away, repeated for all eternity. When she reached the foot of the birch tree she paused, head bowed.

That was when I realized what the moving figures on the horizon were. They were horsemen, riding steeds hardly bigger than the reindeer but far more fleet. The air rang with the sound of their hooves, the jingling of harness and their voices, high and clear and jubilant, as though they had just awakened to a morning golden with sun and all of life a promise.

And perhaps it
was
morning, because now I had to shade my eyes to see them. The uncanny twilight that had bathed the steppes was breaking up. Tatters of gold shone between indigo clouds. Stars flickered in them like fish in a net, then disappeared. The sudden flood of light made even far-off objects seem distinct, crisp as though cut from paper. I could make out tufts of hair bristling along the horses’ necks, the serpentine patterns embroidered upon harnesses and the same patterns repeated in tattoos upon the bared breasts of the horsemen. There were women, too, their hair in pigtails like the men, their expressions no less fierce and joyous.

But what was strangest about them, and most unsettling, was that each horse wore a kind of headdress, tasseled and heavily embroidered in bold colors—blue, red, black, green. The headgear covered their skulls so that only their eyes were visible through small holes, and rose in two leather pillars between their ears. Gorgeous branching pillars, tasseled and hung with ornaments of gold, and unmistakably meant to signify antlers.

“See how it begins?” said Ralph in a low voice. “They are like cuckoos, leaving their young to nest in the homes of others, until eventually of course all the others are driven out, driven to extinction by them.”

“But who are they?”

“They are the Benandanti, although it will be centuries before they give themselves that name. Right now they are little removed in time and belief from their origins, which are as you see them—”

He nodded toward the girl. “And this, too, the Benandanti can neither accept nor forgive—that they issued from the same stock as those mysteries which they most despise; that their gods and monuments are formed of the same blood and stone as ours. That if you go back far enough and long enough, you will see only two faces staring at you from the darkness: the hunter and the mother. The Benandanti deny one and have debased the other; but they will not be denied forever. Gods do not die any more than we do. They sleep, and are awakened, and sleep again. They weave the same patterns endlessly, and all through time we are only bright bits of color picked out across their work.”

And then I saw not just the taiga unfolding beneath the sunrise, but an entire world, a glowing diorama with colored globes whirling overhead and small bright forms moving on the earth, like miniature puppets or gaming pieces. There were the reindeer people, frozen beside their horned steeds, and there the invaders upon their caparisoned horses, a carpet of dust beneath their hooves. The reindeer tribe did not move, not until the horsemen were upon them; and then they toppled like chesspieces scattered by a child, the undergrowth beneath them and red.

As though it were a time-lapsed film, the scene changed, to men and women standing quietly between cattle with huge curved horns; and yet it was not different at all. The men raised knives and slaughtered one of the bulls; a woman wept, and another coupled with a man in the dirt. And then again there was a circle of girls and boys, holding hands and executing an intricate dance, leaping from one foot to the next while in the center a man was bound to a tree with looping strands of ivy. The dance broke up but the man remained, a girl holding a cup to his lips while he drank, red running from the corners of his mouth and staining his breast. Flames rose about him, and once again the horsemen came, though they were different this time, their mounts heavier and the riders armored. And yet again there was a young girl, redhaired, naked, embracing a woman while others stood in a protective circle about them. The woman became a man, but the redhaired girl did not change. The man stood motionless while she tore his robes from him and drew him to her until the two of them collapsed to the earth. There was a burst of crimson and gold; the man disappeared. The girl remained, consumed by fire.

And then I saw before me the same scenes that had been enacted upon Muscanth Mountain. A boy lying upon the ground, bound with ivy; a stag crashing down as hunters rushed to draw blood from its breast.

Only this time I did not run away. Like all those other figures suspended between earth and sky I was caught in the pattern. I turned to Ralph Casson, and he nodded.

“Yes,” he said, as though I had finally guessed the answer to a riddle he’d posed hours ago. “It’s all real, Lit. As real as anything gets, actually.”

“But—but I don’t
know
anything!” I cried. “How can I be a part of any of it, your Malandanti or the rest, when I just heard about them tonight?”

“Doesn’t matter. When has ignorance ever excused anyone? Gods need to be born, and they need avatars to assist them. That’s you.”

I kicked at him angrily, succeeded only in sending up a spray of twigs and moss. “Avatar? What the fuck’s an avatar? And if it’s so goddam important why don’t
you
do it? Why aren’t
you
it?”

For an instant I thought he’d strike back. His eyes narrowed, his mouth grew tight, but almost immediately his expression softened.

“Oh, Lit…I wish I were. More than anything—more than I have ever wanted anything on this earth, love or money or children, I’ve wished to be one of them.
Any
one of them—Benandanti or Malandanti, I never cared which!—but one doesn’t choose these things. One can only be born to it, or chosen.”

“Then what
can
you do?” Fear stoked my rage as easily as alcohol did. I began to feel buzzed, and stared challengingly at Ralph’s disconsolate face. “Why the fuck do they even bother with you?”

A tremor ran along one side of his mouth. “Oh, but they
don’t
bother with me, Lit,” he said, almost in a whisper. “That’s the whole problem. That’s what the problem has been for, oh, about twenty-two years now, ever since I went to college and made the mistake of trying to join a club that didn’t want me for a member. Have you ever had that happen to you, Lit? Has it?”

“N-no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so…”

“Of course not,” he murmured. “Of course not, how could you? Growing up there in Brigadoon—you’re
one
of them. Even if you’re not with Balthazar and his fucking Conclave, you’re still one of the Chosen Ones. How could you know anything about what it’s like,
not
to be chosen? To have this whole magical world open up to you for a little while, and then suddenly to have it all end—to have all the doors slam shut in your face? How could you know anything about that?”