Celebrant (20 page)

Racing through the empty streets of the city, high in the mountains.
Down on the slope below she sees the inhabited sections and the lights that idly drift along its streets.
Meanwhile, four feet or so off the ground, she can see this outline or membrane shooting by, down glowing archways on the dark tile.
Black birds all look alike but what kind is that, with the long donkey ears?
She’s never seen one like that before (she thinks).
Why isn’t that all right?
She
has
seen one like that?
As it runs and as it catches the light that form is taking on color and mass, turning into a little blonde girl streaking through the streets.
Intense irrepressible thrill to feel her heart slam, her lungs slam, the pistons in her arms and legs pumping, and her eyelids slamming and what else? quick
—
the thoughts and sensations scatter and chirp and slam so light in her brain like birds
—
fanfares in her skin, distinctnesses warble out of her nerves, spectral caterwauls shaped like dragonfly wings balloon up her nervous system and then shrink away to nothing in no time
—
the flat cool nerves plaited into her hands and feet
—
mouth always trying shapes, sloppy tag-along searching for its shape
—
dancing and jumping, trying everything in the little courtyard in the early morning in her freshly stolen tardoleo until every movement was precisely controlled.

Burn stops abruptly with her baton under her arm.
Warm snow whirls around her, coming from the natural robot where it sits sighing to itself, a sound like a drinking glass rolling across a rug.
She turns unsteadily walking in a straight line, drenched in perspiration, feeling rather than seeing the doorway fleetingly circumferencing her, then she crosses the porch and darts across the street to the safety of the maze.
After a while she catches herself just barely wondering how it is that the light is still so blue, and even distinct her wan shadow
—
twilight all this time?
Or was it no time?
With a shock she realizes the night is passing off, not coming over, and the sickly azure sheen intensifying over everything precedes the dawn of the next day.

This building is still in use, no good for sleeping in during the day
—
try the next.
She steps into the street without looking first, and there’s Ester a dozen feet away coming out of an alley.

Ester sees her at once.

Brun-Brun! (she shouts, and her face lights savagely)

That’s Kunty’s nickname for Burn.

Burn dashes into the next building and up the stairs, feet scraping after her, catching her baton in the banister rail she nearly pitches herself backward
—
extricates the baton and Ester is scrabbling at the base of the steps.

The path to the roof is blocked by a heap of furniture
—
Burn flees down a long hallway putting rooms and folded walls between herself and fresh and cruel Ester.

Burn picks her way through the litter on the floor and through doorways with light, precisely selected motions even though her legs are hot and numb and she is giddy with fatigue.
Finally a wall brings her up short
—
Ester is cursing in the next room, flinging rubbish out of her way and stops just on the other side of the door.
Burn braces herself, raising her heavy baton with ebbing strength and

You’d better run,

Ester is saying and

leaps into the room, toward Burn and

into flutter and murmur scattering as she comes without dispersing.

—
Ester stops.

Pigeon girls are gathered around Burn;
their hair ruffles out and they hum softly down in their throats.
Burn stands there, ready.
Ester swipes claws at a girl near to her, to show she means business.
There’s a burst of sound and a ripple of motion in answer, but the knot around Burn only tightens.
They aren’t running.

Ester feels their unblinking eyes play over her skin like so many thin streaks of cold water.
A billow of fear suddenly rolls down on her.
She takes a step back, then pivots and goes on all fours and

pigeon girls are following her
—

she can’t glimpse them over her shoulder in the dark rooms, and can barely hear the light flap of their feet, their gentle panting, the faint hum of their anger.

Phryne:

Phryne is one of the last scions of an aristocratic Macedonian family, who had for many years enjoyed the high distinction of being General Stulphthakis’ mistress.
He was the soul of discretion;
his power and influence rested on his unquestioned reputation for keeping secrets and, more importantly, for the quick acuity with which he could discriminate between genuine secrets and false ones.
A false secret is kept in the dark for no good purpose.
His wife was cast iron
—
die cast
—
but her glacial majesty and great wealth made her a good match for him.
She may have had her diversions as well, but she seemed too addicted to currency manipulation and usury to give much thought to any such liberal joys as love and her erotics all involved specie.

The General picked Phryne out at a cotillion and she was his possession within the month
—
and that was only because he was habitually cautious and did nothing, literally nothing, precipitously.
He was tolerably handsome, but above all it was his lordliness that fascinated her.
Officially she became his unofficial pastime, although he was careful never to flaunt.
She always knew when he was setting her forward like a chess piece, to arouse so many quanta of jealousy, or to throw a rascally light on himself when he felt that would make him seem more approachable, particularly with respect to the other kinds of affairs not openly discussed.
Being used like this, she understood abstractly, was somehow unwholesome, but in her heart she liked being his conspiracy, and she loved being a demigod.
It was as if a beam of secret glory were trained on her every moment.

Mrs. General Stulphthakis’ cancer took her life quickly, or so it seemed.
Actually she’d had it diagnosed years before, untreatable, and had soldiered on with it in silence nearly until the end.
She refused any drastic measures, never complained, never let anyone see how much pain she was in, and turned her face to the wall, but not before she’d disbursed the vast wealth she’d hidden from her husband to various of her own relatives.

Phryne had been waiting for him in the private home they’d always used, very conveniently just a few dozen yards up the street from the small, discreetly extremely luxurious hotel he preferred, and had happened to step out onto the balcony
...
drenched in clear, snowy light
...
wearing the sheer, white dress of thin silk that so flattered her, that clung so lovingly to her form
...
in time to see him emerge from beneath the canopy of the hotel entrance and speedily usher her young cousin Veronika into his mercedes.
Like a lightning bolt the truth broke in on her and she screamed.
They were already driving away.

Foreshortened men looked up.

Over the epoch that followed that revelation, she oscillated, with throbs that would gather slowly and build implacably, by such measured steps that she was aware of each one, to a crescendo of confused and unbearable suffering.
Her anguish would incandesce, like a chemical reaction, at unpredictable moments, turning into bleaching, murderous hate, then lapse again into something more like grief.

Staring out the window toward the sea
—
it was a resort town
—
the thoughts slithering around the inside of her skull like friable old condoms blowing in the wind.
They all seem to orbit the same mute center, the obscure shock.
Now she thinks she had a presentiment of it, one of the last times they were here, and came down through the long, steep tunnel through the pale orange-tan rock to the concrete pier.
The General’s haunted old mercedes was a black, glistening cavern of a car, and his driver seemed to belong to it.
The driver might have been killed by it and his ghost condemned to drive it forever.
She remembers the way she started once, seeing him returning to the car from the public bathroom in a park.
It was that surprising to see him out of the car.
The day of her presentiment, at the beach, it chanced that she happened to be struck by his way of being silent, which, up until then, she had assumed he had adopted as the way best calculated to keep him in the General’s service.
She tended to understand everyone in terms of calculation, and, in the General’s milieu, this was a sensible and useful tendency.
But now, it was as if the haze that usually obscured something, like a mountain in the distance, had blown away, for reasons as inscrutable as changes in the weather, and she saw that he was a
silenced
man.
Standing in a gale of sunlight on the pier, as the General sauntered down its length to meet his so-and-so, she happened to glance back and saw the driver behind the wheel, his features washed out to grey transparency by the reflections in the intervening windshield, and his sad face.
He had been reduced to this, nothing but a driver, hurtling through space, ferrying people to and fro, and was nothing more than the sad frictionlessness of perfect operation.
To her, he took on portentousness at once, like a harbinger of sorrow, and now it was here.

Some time later she had gone to find the General.
She knew where he was, and with whom, the woman he would now marry instead of her, and she brought along a slender knife which she felt would explain herself to him with the succinctness he liked so much.
His bodyguards stopped her in the parking lot.
With a composure that was much more alarming than rage she called on them to let her pass, and it was only when they made it clear they were every bit as duty-bound to defend the General against women as men that she exploded in a withering onslaught of insults and challenges, loading them with curses she lashed at them like boiling surf until they grew pale, pressed together their lips, lowered their eyes.
They did not, however, move, and, after glowering haughtily at them a moment more, she turned and stepped slowly away, trembling with exhaustion.

No more will I feel the morning light (she said to herself)

The elevated language she used wasn’t wrong or right.
Plain words weren’t proud enough.
She desperately needed pride then, so she expressed herself in the grandest language.
It was right for what she needed but it still felt put on, and that seemed to reflect falseness on her pride, making it into a mask.

She began her travels the following night, which was all the restraint her injury would permit, without a word to anyone.
She went to a land of staircases.
Time was transformed into an inner maze that turned her around and around in place so that she was always wandering.
Light and heat left her with each step.
Again and again she noted to herself, (I’m growing cold), but without quite hearing herself.
That voice was becoming more and more muffled, like the voice from a grave.
She slept during the day, climbed stairs at night, and before her eyes everything was becoming black and cold and gleaming like the polished side of a black mercedes, in which nothing except cold was reflected.