Shroud of Shadow (26 page)

He passed a hand over his face, rose, and went to the window. The days were lengthening, and the sky was still touched with sunset; but, outside, the squalid clatter of the streets had died without a whimper. Furze. Impoverished Furze.

“I just wish that I'd started a little sooner,” he said. “Old Fugger gave his retired employees free housing—well, practically free—and here I am still hammering out deals in gold and silver. I should have started sooner. Maybe . . . maybe things would have been different.” Rambling now, staring out as though at a ship on the horizon, one that bore something precious, one that was passing him by. “But I didn't, and I drove her away, and now I've got . . .” He turned around. “What have I got, Natil? Money. Three sons I'd disown if I had any sense. Two grandsons who aren't worth picking up horse turds with. And a wife who . . . well, I suppose she's somewhere.”

He went back to the bed, sat down. His knobby knees poked out from the hem of his nightshirt. “What have I got?” He shook his head. “Not much. And it's too late to do anything about it.”

Natil was silent. Her harp was silent, too.

“Play something, Natil. I want to go to sleep.” Jacob crawled under the covers. “I've heard that some of those Irishmen can work magic with their harps. Can you work magic, Natil?”

She evaded the painful question. “I play the harp, master.”

Jacob persisted. “Can you turn me into a better man? Can you make me happy? Can you make people like me for something besides my money?” He laughed bitterly, waved away her answer. “Play something. Please.” He grinned at her. “Ever hear a
please
from an Aldernacht before? Please, then. And work some magic if you can.”

Natil played, and after he had dropped off to sleep—snoring loudly, even smiling a little—she rose to leave. But Jacob's request made her harp heavy in her hand, and she paused at the door. “I have been trying, aster,” she whispered. “But it does not work any more.”

Hadden stared through the dust-frosted windshield of the van, waiting for a stoplight to change. It was hot, and there was little traffic, but the town was small and took its time with such things as stoplights. Hadden was not worried about the time, though, nor was Wheat. Time was meaningless: they both knew instinctively that there was plenty of time now, time for everything.

I have the feeling that this isn't going to end
, Wheat had said, and the certainty had remained with them.
It'll be this way forever.

Forever. Waiting at this stoplight in a town that was, like all towns, ripe with the odors of humans who knew themselves only as what they were, hot with sun-baked asphalt and concrete, polluted with auto exhaust and diesel fumes and pieces of paper and bent beer cans, they were both thinking of forever. Wheat was staring as though she were seeing such things as cars, people, and storefronts for the first time—as she would always see them—but Hadden's eyes were elsewhere.

“Look at that guy,” he said softly. His voice was pitched economically: loud enough to carry over the engine and the air conditioner, but no more.

Wheat looked. An old man was stumbling along the street, carrying what looked like clothing in two plastic shopping bags. His face was seamed and dirty, his hair matted with the dust of the field in which he had slept, his shoes held together with lengths of rope and duct tape gleaned from some dumpster. He moved with the air of a man who was wandering with no goal save another field, another dumpster, another night spent alone by himself or alone in the crowded bunkroom of a mission: Salvation Army, Fellowship of Christ, Saint Vincent de Paul, it mattered little which.

The stoplight held at red. Hadden and Wheat watched. Out there, stumbling down the long length of the sidewalk, were all the mortality and frailty and broken dreams that they had, somehow, left behind . . . or of which, perhaps, by some unlooked-for grace, they had been absolved. The world was a wonderful place . . . and yet . . .

. . . and yet there were these: the broken, the homeless, the preterit. Whether here before them or half a world away, there were men trudging on a journey that had no end, children with the fat, hollow belly of malnutrition, mothers rooting through garbage fro something with which to feed their families, soldiers standing out there just . . . just shooting at one another.

It struck them, then: the thing from which they had been kept because they had been too busy with the wonder. There was Hadden, and there was Wheat . . . and then there was the world. All of it. And it could no longer be the world
out there
, because for them the world had, over a week ago, ceased being
out there
, their rapidly widening hearts reaching out, enfolding everything, turning it all, abruptly, into
in here
.

There was no escaping it. Ensnared by their hearts, by their change, by their absolution, Hadden and Wheat stared, and then were suddenly weeping with all the blunt, shocky realization of children confronted with an axe murder.

The light changed. They drove out of town, pulled over by a patch of scrub oak, and held one another, shaking from pity, from fright, from the knowledge that, yes, it would be this way
forever
.

Wheat was the first to pry her face out of her hands. Her fingers shook, but she reached into the back and pulled a bottle of fruit juice out of the styrofoam cooler. She opened it, drank.

“I wasn't ready for that,” she said.

“I don't think anyone who really sees it ever is.”

“You think there are others besides us?”

“Dear God, Wheat, I don't even know what
us
is.”

The air was so dry that the melt and ice that had beaded the juice bottle a minute before were already gone. Wheat was pale, and she took a long pull before she held it out and told Hadden to finish it up.

“Silly me,” she whispered, “I thought it was going to be pink clouds and bunny rabbits for the rest of my life.”

Hadden found himself looking at the road. It stretched off into the distance, linking with other roads, highways, freeways, city streets, turnpikes. Flowing. Flowing on forever. Wheat's words did not make sense. “The rest of your life, Wheat?” he said. “What does that mean?”

Wheat clenched her eyes, shook her head. “I don't know what it means.”

“What did it mean a few minutes ago?”

She was plainly frightened. “I'm . . . I'm stupid, all right?”

He set down the empty bottle, turned to her. “You are not stupid,” he said, realizing as he uttered the words that a softness that was almost womanly had slipped into his speech. “You spoke the truth. You thought we were immortal, didn't you?”

The truth. Whatever they were, whatever they had become, they had to speak the truth. “Yes . . . I did . . .”

“You still think so.” It was not a question.

“I do.”

“So do I.” Hadden sighed. “We're going to see that again, and again, and again. We're going to see it for a long time, I guess.” The thought of immortality, of wonder and pain bound so inextricably together for so long overcame him, and he passed his hands over his beardless face. “We can give money away until we're broke, and it won't make a shred of difference. We can volunteer, we can give time, energy, and strength until we have nothing left . . . and it won't help.”

“Don't say that.”

“It's true.”

“Yes,” said Wheat. “It's true. But . . . we've . . .” She trembled with the effort of her thoughts. Immortality. “. . . we've got to do something. We can feel, and so we can . . . we can do something. Even if it's not much. Even if it's just a smile, or a word. Even if it makes just a little bit of difference, the fact will remain that somebody did
something
.” And the sun struck her in the face as she turned to him, kindling the starlight in her eyes until it blazed like a nebula. “Maybe that's why we can feel this way. Maybe that's why we're here. Maybe that's why we've changed.”

And Natil, dreaming five hundred years in the past, was crying out that she was right, that such as Hadden and Wheat were entrusted with the Great Work, with helping and healing and comforting the world and those in it until the stars burnt themselves black and the heavens whispered into final silence.

Hadden was looking at his hands. Changed. Changed utterly. And more changes, he was sure, to come. He and Wheat had wept like children, and, indeed, they were children. But they would grow.

“But . . . but what gets us through all of it?” he said softly. The delicacy of his voice was coming through strongly. Gentle. Just loud enough to carry. “We can't go on like this forever. What gets us through?”

Wheat shook her head.

But Natil, in her dreams, was screaming. “The Lady, the Lady gets you through. She hold you when you fall. She speaks with you face to face. There is no doubt, no separation, no uncertainty. You and She are One.
Ai, ea sareni, Marithae Dia! Cirya ephana ilei i—!
”

But she had screamed herself awake, and the morning was streaming in through her window. Belroi. Like Hadden and Wheat, Jacob and his people were going home.

***

There are all kinds of wandering, but there is only one return. The gypsies, maybe, knew about that, for their routes looped far, but, like the seasons that determined them, never really returned to any place in particular. They were fractal patterns, these, paths that paralleled the road of a decade ago with young hands holding the reins where old hands had once held them, path that never repeated themselves, but rather precessed with elusive similarity, as though there were a Lorenz attractor sitting out there somewhere, always calling, always dictating a return that was really no return at all, only an illusion of belonging, only a dream of order.

Reinne, the consumptive, might have been tracing something of the sort along the streets of Ypris, for though her steps took her on apparently random courses, they were nonetheless influenced and determined by an attractor, a center point that turned her endless looping and circling and retracing into an enfoldment of purpose, put a pattern to it: a wavering butterfly, or a seahorse tail that curled around, pointed towards, the house of Jacob Aldernacht.

Once, she actually had the audacity to violate the equations of nonperiodicity that held her to her interweaving course, on a warm afternoon, she braved the glare of the gate guards and insisted that she be allowed up to the door of the house. The guards did not notice the color of her eyes or of her hair. No, what struck them was her demeanor, her certainty that, yes, there was a reason she should be allowed up to the front door, there was an urgent reason. And so, bewildered, they let her go.

The servant who answ3ered her knock was properly horrified to find himself confronted with a ragged crone who lisped out the name of the master of the house, punctuating her words with a consumptive hack that left a thread of blood at one corner of her mouth.

“Jacob,” she said. “Is Jacob here?”

“Mister Aldernacht,” he said with severity, “has returned from a business trip. Although that is none of your business. Be off.”

“Is he well? Tell me. I want to know.”

“Get out!”

“What about Francis?”

“Get out!” Steeling himself, the servant grabbed her by the arm and hustled her down the walk, through the gate, and out into the street. “Get out!”

Reinne fell down when he let go of her, and, lying on the cobbles in the warm sun, she hacked up another wad of bloody sputum from her disintegrating lungs. “Are they well?” she wheezed through the slime and froth. “Do they have money?”

But the servant had returned to the house. There was no one to hear her questions.

The guards were disciplined. Orders of Mister Josef.

***

Omelda was only a servant, and a lowly one at that: incarcerated in the kitchen when Edvard and Norman were not abusing her, she did not even hear that Natil was expected home until Jacob and his party had ridden in through the gate and dismounted in the courtyard. But though a little more than a week ago Omelda had been eager for the harper's return, now she stayed where she was: in the kitchen, on her knees.

This sudden lassitude surprised her little, for, given the circumstances under which she now labored, she was unconcerned about whether or not she found a cure for her inner plainchant. A cure certainly would not change the behavior of Edvard and Norman. In truth, though, Omelda was not entirely sure that she did not now welcome the internal music, since it provided a kind of buffer to the abuse, an opiate that made the hours of forced copulation and sexual torture almost bearable.

And so when Natil, clad in Aldernacht livery, hurried into the kitchen, Omelda greeted her listlessly. It really did not matter any more. Rapes had studded her existence since she had left Shrinerock Abbey, but persistent, ritualized abuse had finally broken her.

“Omelda? Beloved?”

Nor would Omelda mention anything of Edvard and Norman even to Natil. This was a family that hunted down escaped servants with an army of mercenaries, that was willing to besiege a town over a matter of legal indentureship. What would they do in response to a clearcut case of treason? Or, rather, what would they not do? “Oh, hello, Natil.” She stood up from her scrubbing stiffly. These days, she did everything stiffly. “Welcome home.”

There was a touch of shame in the harper's eyes. “I am sorry that I had to leave.”

“Oh . . . that's all right. Don't worry about it.”

“I returned as soon as I could.”

“Yes . . . of course . . .”

Natil watched her for a moment, brow furrowed. “You are angry.”

“No . . . not at all . . .”

But Natil did not look convinced. “We have work to do, beloved. We have lost time.”

Omelda shrugged. “I'm . . . not worried . . .” She shrugged again. “They keep me . . .” The thought of telling Natil about Edvard and Norman occurred to her again, but she let it die. Telling would do no good. Telling would make everything worse. Her body was dung: let it remain dung. “. . . busy.”