Little, Big Part 40

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 un- familiar, 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 a 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 a"

"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 wanteda"the one piece which of all pieces he should not any longer care to seeka"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 a"

"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 pa.s.s by. There'll be more. Just let *em pa.s.s by. Don't tell them I told you so."

"Their work," Auberon said. "Why?"

"Oh, well," Grandfather Trout said guardedly. "Why; well, why a"

"Okay," Auberon said. "Okay, see? See what I mean?" An innocent victim, tears sprang to his eyes. "Well, h.e.l.l with them anyway," he said. "Figments. I don't care. It'll pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed. "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 pa.s.ses. You thinka"Love. It's such a whole, such a permanent thing. So big, soa"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 hera"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 about 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 mytha ."

"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 pa.s.s." 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 ecstatica"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 sanctuma"where I worked with the gla.s.ses and mirrors and so on, you knowa"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 outcla.s.sed those gentlemen, by just as much, perhaps, was she outcla.s.sed 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 a"

"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 a"

"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 then considerably weakened, and much poorera"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 gla.s.s to the window light. "The same joys. The same sorrows a 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 gla.s.s, the struggle between them could be observed, a show laid on for the rich and mighty who lived in high places. Ever after a 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.

Ever After "Oho," George Mouse said when at last he opened the door of Old Law Farm to find Auberon on the stoop. Auberon had been long pounding and calling (somewhere in his wanderings he had lost all his keys) and now faced George ashamed, the prodigal cousin.

"Hi," he said.

"Hey," George said. "Long time no hear from."

"Yeh."

"You had me worried, man. What the h.e.l.l was that about, running off? h.e.l.l of a thing."

"Looking for Sylvie."

"Oh, yeah, hey, you left her brother in the Folding Bedroom. A sweet guy, really. So you find her?"

"No."

"Oh."

They stood facing each other. Auberon, still bemused by his own sudden reappearance in these streets, could not think of a way to ask George to take him back, though it seemed that it was for that that he stood before him. George only smiled and nodded, his black eyes alert to something not present: stoned again, Auberon supposed. Though May was just unfolding in Edgewood, the City's single week of spring had come and pa.s.sed, and summer was full there already, putting forth its richest odors, like a lover in heat. Auberon had forgotten.

"So," George said.

"So," Auberon said.

"Back in Bigtown, huh?" George said. "Were you thinking a"

"Can I come back?" Auberon said. "I'm sorry."

"Hey, no. Swell. Lot's to do just now. The Folding Bedroom's empty a How long were you thinking? a"

"Oh, I don't know," Auberon said. "From now on, I guess. Ever after."

He was a flung ball, that's all, he saw that clearly now; flung outward from Edgewood at first, leaping high, bounding to the City, then ricocheting madly within that maze, the walls and objects he struck the determiners of his way, until (not by his choice) he had been flung back Edgewoodwards again to carom there, angles of incidence equaling angles of reflection; and then back again to these streets, to this Farm. And even the most tensile of b.a.l.l.s must have a stop, must bounce more lowly, then more lowly, and at last roll only, parting the gra.s.s; then, resisted even by the gra.s.s, must slow, and with a little rocking motion come to rest.

Three Lilacs George seemed then to realize that they stood there in an open door, and, darting his head out for a quick look down the fearful street to see who might be approaching, drew Auberon within and locked the door behind them, as he had once before on a winter night in another world.

"You got some mail and stuff," he said as he led Auberon down the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen; and then said something more, about goats and tomatoes, but Auberon heard nothing more because of a sudden roaring of blood in his ears and a fearful thought about a gift, which filled up his head; a roaring and a thought which continued to fill up his head while George aimlessly searched amid the treasures of the kitchen for the letters, stopping to put questions and make remarks. Only when he saw that Auberon neither heard nor answered did he apply himself and come up with two long envelopes, which had been put in a toast-rack along with some ancient dunning letters and souvenir menus.

A glance told Auberon that neither was from Sylvie. His fingers trembled, though pointlessly now, as he opened them. Petty, Smilodon Ruth were pleased to inform him that Doctor Drinkwater's will had at last been settled. They included an accounting which showed that, less advances and costs, his share of the settlement was $34.17. If he would come in and sign some papers he would receive this amount in full. The other envelope, a heavy wove paper with an expensive-looking logo, yielded up a letter from the producers of "A World Elsewhere." They had gone very carefully over his scripts. The story ideas were terrific and vivid but the dialogue was somewhat unconvincing. Still, if he cared to work over these scripts or try another, they thought a place could be found for him soon among the show's junior writers; they hoped to hear from him, or were anyway hoping last year. Auberon laughed. At least he'd have, perhaps, a job; perhaps he would continue Doc's endless chronicle of the Green Meadow and the Wild Wood, though not in the way Doc would have.

"Good news?" George said, making coffee.

"You know," Auberon said, "There's some very strange things going on in the world lately. Very strange."

"Tell me about it," George said, meaning the opposite.

Auberon realized that coming out of his long drunk he was just now noticing things that everyone else had already learned to live with. As though he were suddenly to turn to his fellow man and announce that, hey, the sky is blue, or point out that the aged trees along the street were in leaf. "Were there always big trees along this street?" he asked George.

"That ain't the worst of it," George said. "The roots are breaking up my bas.e.m.e.nts. And just try to get through to the Parks Department. Hopeless." He put coffee before Auberon. "Milk? Sugar?"

"Black."

"Curiouser and curiouser," George said, stirring his coffee with a tiny souvenir coffee-spoon though he had put nothing in it. "Sometimes I think I'll blow this burg. Go back into fireworks. There's going to be big bucks in fireworks now, I bet, with all the celebrations."

"Hm?"

"Eigenblick and all that. Parades, shows. He's very into that stuff. And fireworks."