King of Morning, Queen of Day (30 page)

In the space of a few dozen paces Bridestone Wood became a Celtic bestiary unleashed. Every leaf and fern concealed watching, liquid eyes. In every hollow and dell one could see the gleam of gold and the rainbow sheen of beating faery wings. The woodland rang with the sound of faery bells no larger than appleseeds. Faces streaked and striped with outlandish tattoos fled at our approach; I caught brief glimpses of leather-clad elves and woodkernes crashing away from us through the underbrush. Farther removed among the trees were glints of shield and spear. From farther yet came the distant baying of warhounds and the thrashing of pursued deer. In one moment of clarity I saw a pair of giant elk horns upraised in the light of a far clearing.

Caldwell stumbled on, oblivious—or was the nature of his affliction that he was unable to see anything but the phagus manifestations?—but even he paused when all Bridestone Wood throbbed like a harp string to a colossal pulse of power and over the treetops passed an immense aerial vehicle in the shape of a dish studded with glowing portholes. It hung for a moment over the hillside, then was gone the next, as if it had flown away at unimaginable velocity. Shortly after I had a clear view of a large manshaped metal automaton striding purposefully through the undergrowth. He granted me a parting glance. His eyes were red electric light bulbs, his cranium a transparent dome beneath which luminous glass tubes flashed off and on. As we prepared to recross the stream for the ninth time we found it defended by a fellow dressed only in mottled green pants and a red scarf tied around his forehead. This overmuscled chap was armed with a rifle so powerful it was virtually a one-man arsenal. We hid among the bushes with the faeries and pixies while he sniffed the air and moved off downstream. Before we had gone twenty paces a volley of gunshots in rapid succession and the scream of some unknown large animal in death agony sent the birds flapping and cawing.

No catalogue of faeries ever contained creatures like these. My conclusion, unpalatable as it was, was that these phaguses were the manifestations of future mythologies—the elves, pixies, and Wild Hunt of generations yet unborn.

Close to the upper boundary of Bridestone Wood, an inexplicable and unseasonable mist started to infiltrate between the thinning trees. It was visible even to Caldwell. He pulled up abruptly, reached out before him.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “Nothing at all.”

Tiresias and Gonzaga conferred. The mist alarmed them in a way the ghostly manifestations of the wood had not. I shivered—the temperature was dropping by the second. I recalled the time in my study that Jessica had drawn out the latent heat energy in the atmosphere to create pseudophaguses. We resumed our march. Gonzaga led, staff held before him in both hands. I followed. Caldwell and Tiresias, similarly prepared, took up the rear. We looked to my mind rather like a procession of minor clerics in some obscure High Church ritual. Within a few dozen more paces the mist had thickened to virtual opacity. Only by the change of texture beneath my feet did I know that we had emerged from the woodland onto the sheep turf of the hillside. The cold was outrageous. I became aware that I was cringing from an unseen presence; within the mist I could hear a muted rushing. Gonzaga screamed an order; instantly both he and Tiresias snapped their staves into position above their heads, arms outstretched.

And in the same instant, the birds broke upon us. Thousand of birds, tens of thousands of birds, close packed into a single flock-being, tunnelling toward us unseen through the mist. They hurled themselves upon us, and broke around the power of Gonzaga’s pocket magic. Wings, claws, screaming beaks, glaring eyes, beat past me in an almost solid wall … and were gone. Caldwell’s voice could barely be heard over the cries of the birds: “What’s happening! What’s happening!”

Tiresias and Gonzaga lowered their staves. The march resumed.

Twice more the birds attacked; twice more they broke around our protective barrier woven from bottle caps, beads, and cigarette coupons. But for the speed of the old men’s reactions, I shuddered to contemplate our fate under those myriad slashing, pecking beaks.

As I was becoming convinced that we must walk forever through fog, I saw an area of darker greyness within grey fog. I knew in an instant what it had to be.

The Bridestone.

T
HE MIST SWIRLED IN
close around the Bridestone and swallowed her. The changeless grey of death: bird wings fluttered, darted at her. Feathers brushed her face, her fingers. She grasped at them, but she was falling, falling forward through the mist, an infinite plummet. Feathers and wings beat about her in the mist and she saw that what she had thought of as grey mist was the grainy texture of an infinite number of objects filling the infinite dimensions of a perfectly transparent medium.

Birds. She was falling through a space filled with hovering birds, wings outstretched, touching each other at wingtip, tail, and beak. As she approached the uppermost of them she saw that the birds were immense, each the size of a continent. Their backs and spread wings were feathered with forests and mountain ranges, oceans and plains: each bird was a land unto itself. She fell past land after land after land, possible worlds cast in the shapes of hovering birds—worlds of ice and worlds of fire, worlds of chivalry and worlds of cruelty, worlds of cities in the shapes of great towers, or pyramids, or mountains, where cities sailed upon the sea driven by a thousand sails, or cruised the skies, held aloft by balloons or rotating blades or millions upon millions of swans; cities in the shapes of clouds, or forests, or icebergs; cities in the shapes of leaves, or smoke, or dreams; cities that corresponded to psychological and emotional states; New Jerusalems, Infernal Dises. As she fell between the unfurled feathers of a world that was one endless city from which the smoke of a great burning went up and up, she saw far below her the gleam of gold in the greyness. It arced up toward her through the spaces between the touching wingtips. She fell between a dark, blasted birdland lit by the flare of eternal trench warfare and a pastoral Arcadia of chateaux, formal gardens, minor members of the Greek pantheon, and dairy maids on swings. The shining form drew parallel to her infinite plummet.

“See, Jessica, every dream and vision that lies within the mind of man.”

Mother and daughter, they grazed past a world composed entirely of chained naked bodies piled on top of each other, one million high, one billion wide, glowing with the heat of their own combustion, close enough to gag on the stench of searing, putrefying flesh. Jessica looked within the golden light and saw not the mythic figure that had revealed itself to her on the mountainside by the Bridestone, but a girl of fourteen or fifteen, bright, eager—a girl she could have imagined for her own younger sister. To their right was a world entirely of steel, all tubes and pipes and ducts and rectangular protrusions, and a billion lit windows. In place of a tail were two engine parts, blue-hot, each large enough to swallow a moon.

“Otherworld, Jessica. The Mygmus—the domain of infinite potential symbolism. My world, my domain; your heritage, Jessica.”

The fall continued. A land of plump, contented cumulus clouds grazed by paisley-pattern living blimps, each a mile long. A two-dimensional world of cartoon creatures, a Technicolor celebration of noise, mayhem, and mindless, impotent violence.

“Infinite worlds, Jessica. Faeryland. My faeryland was just the start, the access to all the others. See how they touch wingtip to wingtip, beak to tail? You can cross from one to another; eternity itself will not be long enough to explore all the worlds of the Mygmus. No limits here, Jessica; anything, anyone, you want, you can have.”

A moon-blue landscape of bare, rounded hills was littered with dismembered statuary. A stone head half a mile across followed their descent with its eyes. Its lips moved, silent syllables.

“Everything that has ever been, everything that ever will be. We are outside time, Jessica, in eternity, where everything exists forever at once. All this I promise you; all this I will share with you.”

They fell on through the unending greyness. From the ramparts of a cloud-piercing tower, a sentry blew an alarum on a great golden horn as he spied the falling women beyond the edge of his world. Pennants emblazoned with eagles and swords snapped in the wind from beyond.

“Mother and daughter, together forever. What could be more natural, more perfect than that?”

But Jessica had seen the deeper darkness embedded in the grain of the Mygmus; four patches of shadow that seemed to enlarge by absorbing the bird flecks into themselves. They grew with astounding speed—black stars in the greyness; rough star shapes, like crude sketches of people.

People.

They were people.

Four people.

The infinite grey space dissolved into mist. The close-touching bird lands broke apart and fell away from each other in a storm of wings. She felt the Bridestone cold and slick against her back. Four figures approached through the mist. Without waiting for the command from his queen, the Damian phagus tore his javelins from the earth and ran to meet them. He crouched low, readied a javelin. Jessica recognised her father’s tall, vacant silhouette against the mist, and that of Dr. Hannibal Rooke. She shouted a warning but the javelin was aflight, an unseen song in the mist

Gonzaga moved with dazzling speed. Hands swung, spear cracked against staff and went singing away, end for end, through the mist.

The Damian thing rose from its battle stance and withdrew circumspectly. The four entered the small amphitheatre around the Bridestone. Hannibal Rooke’s expression was one of disbelief unwillingly suspended. Jessica’s father turned his head from side to side, searching, unable to find.

“Jessica?”

All her rage, all her betrayal, all her hurt, all her hatred: her heart tore in two.

“Dad. Daddy.”

The Damian thing had its sword from its scabbard and at her throat in a whisper. In the same breath the two old tramps, who seemed so uncommonly
familiar
to Jessica, had the long staves they carried hefted and ready. The Damian thing drew back a fraction. Was that fear Jessica saw, like a dull glitter, in the corner of his eyes? Wrapped in her cowl of light, indistinct, indefinite, caught in a state of dissolution and redefinition between old woman, goddess, and child, the Adversary was disdainful.

“These held me in check these years? I’d expected better of a daughter of mine.”

“I don’t know what’s going on here!” Jessica had wanted to scream to exorcise herself but the nightmare endured, frozen in tableau against a backdrop of everchanging changelessness. “What are you talking about? What’s happening to me?”

Tiresias and Gonzaga approached. The Damian thing growled gutturals from the Indo-Aryan dawn, but stepped back with a glitter of sword and eye. The sun hung like a drop of red red blood in the mist. The two old men laid down their staffs, knelt arthritically. Tiresias’s rheumy gaze looked up to meet Jessica’s.

“Truly, you do not recognize us.”

Gonzaga moaned in his throat. His hands, like little creatures, busied themselves on the turf. Nothing to find. Nothing to be done.

“But you do remember!” The voice was Hannibal Rooke’s. “You do remember. The fire, Jessica! The fire. Remember the fire.”

“I. Remember. The … fire … I remember the fire!” She screamed at him as she had screamed at the Mother thing, as she had screamed at the flames a lifetime before. “I remember … everything!” She looked into Tiresias’s face—skin like mildewed leather, teeth stained yellow by tea, swathes of sweaty white bristles. Tears filled the old man’s eyes.

“Madam, you called on us to protect you, and we came, and for thirteen years now we have been faithful to our calling. It was never our intent to fail you; never our desire that you should be brought to this sorry pass; forgive us the things we have left undone that we ought to have done.”

“All they could ever hope to do was contain me for a little while,” the Mother thing said. “As her power was awakened, so theirs began to ebb because, don’t you see, all you vain and foolish creatures, when she created them, she gave all her power to them. They grow weaker and weaker, and she still does not properly understand her power. I stand with all the glory of the Mygmus behind me and who would deny me now?”

The birds, the red drop of sun, the wind, the breath in the lungs, hung motionless, a moment frozen in time.

And a voice spoke. An almost voice; syllables trapped in a throat. Gonzaga’s face was the concentration-contorted mask of a dumb man trying to speak.

“I … do …”

He rose to his feet unsteadily, took his staff in both hands, and thrust the whittled end into the turf. Thunder growled around the heights of Ben Bulben. A sudden wind whipped across the hillside, clutched at clothing, rattled the Damian thing’s brasses and bronzes, jingled bottle caps and B. B. badges, and was gone.

The Emily thing’s scorn was devastating. Her laughter flayed like a whip.

“You dare me, who can summon whole legions of faery warriors at a whim, more angels than there are in heaven, stars in the sky?”

“Tiresias rose painfully. He lifted his staff, swung the tip to almost touch Gonzaga’s. A bar of solid blue arc light burned between them. Fat drops, blue as brandy on a Christmas log, fell sputtering to the turf. The lightning froze the Emily thing’s face in the mask of a petulant thirteen-year-old. Gonzaga once again wrestled with words.

“She … can … too.”

“Your powers are balanced.” The fusion light lent Tiresias’s face a hawkishness, a lean evangelical zeal. “She can match you, army for army, host for host, legion for legion, creation for creation, dream for dream, whim for whim.”

The Emily thing looked about to stamp its foot. Tiresias continued, “Your powers equal each other in every way but one—they are differently distributed. Yours is contained within you except for that small part that maintains your faery lover phagus. Hers is more fully subsumed into us; as you so rightly deduced, our web of gyruses only began to unravel when the good Dr. Rooke unwittingly awakened her nascent abilities. The only thing that prevents her from assuming the full mantle of her might and majesty is us. In our absence, that power will revert to its mistress and she will be free to decide as she wills.” He swept his staff up in an arc, away from Gonzaga’s. The faery light was extinguished; eyes blinked away yellow afterimages, Tiresias plunged the sharpened tip of his staff into the soil beside his partner’s.