Little, Big (50 page)

Where she found herself just now was at the top of a stair.

Whether she mounted or descended these stairs she wouldn't afterwards be able to determine; but they were long. At the end of them was a chamber. The broad studded door stood flung open. A great stone, by its track in the dust, had not long ago been rolled away from barring shut the door. Dimly within she could see a long feast-table, spilled cups and scattered chairs iced with ancient dust; from the chamber came an odor as of a messy bedroom just opened. But there was no one within.

She made to pass the broken door to investigate, but noticed then seated on the stone a figure in white, small, pretty, head bound in a golden fillet, paring its nails with a small knife. Not knowing what language to speak to this person, Hawksquill raised her brows and pointed within.

"He is not here," the person said. "He is risen."

Hawksquill considered a question or two, but understood before she asked that this personage would not answer them, that he (or she) was an embodiment only of that one remark: He is not here, he is risen. She turned away (the stair and the door and the message and the messenger fading from her attention like a shape momentarily perceived in changeful clouds) and set off further, bethinking herself where she might go for answers to many new questions, or questions to fit the many new answers she was quickly garnering.

"The difference," Hawksquill had long ago written in one of the tall marbled folios filled with her left-handed script which stood or lay on the long lamplit study table far behind her now, "the difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space.

"To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at. When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in space; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante's sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Heraclitus could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form—the qualities of Space. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory."

Knowing this to be so, it could not matter to Hawksquill that on her travels her gray-bunned head and nerveless limbs did not probably change place, remained (she supposed) in the plush chair in the middle of the Cosmo-Opticon at the top of her house which stood in a hexagram of lower City streets. The winged horse she had summoned to bear her away was not a winged horse but that Great Square of stars pictured above her, and "away" was not where she was borne; but the greatest skill (perhaps the only skill) of the true mage is to apprehend these distinctions without making them, and to translate time into space without an error. It's all, said the old alchemists quite truthfully, so simple.

"Away!" said the voice of her Memory when the hand of her Memory was on the reins again and her seat was sure, and away they went, vast wings beating through Time. They traversed oceans of it while Hawksquill thought; and then her steed plunged, at her command, unhesitatingly, without a blink, which took the breath of her Memory away, into either the southern sky below the world or into the limpid-dark austral waters, in any case making for there where all past ages lie, Ogygia the Fair.

Her Steed's silver-shod feet touched that shore, and his great head sank; his strong wings, billowing like draperies, now emptied of the air of time, sank too with a whisper and trailed along the eternal grass, which he cropped for strength. Hawksquill dismounted, patted her steed's enormous neck, whispered that she would return, and started off, following the footprints, each longer than herself, pressed on these shores at the end of the Golden Age and petrified long since. The air was windless, yet the gigantic forest under whose eaves she entered soughed with a breath of its own, or perhaps with His breath, expelled and drawn with the long regularity of immemorial sleep.

She came no closer than the entrance of the vale he filled. "Father," she said, and her voice startled the silence; aged eagles with heavy wings rose up and settled sleepily again. "Father," she said again, and the vale stirred. The great gray boulders were his knees, the long gray ivy his hair, the precipice-gripping rnassy roots his fingers; the eye he opened to her was milky-gray, a dim-glowing stone, the Saturn of her Cosmo-Opticon. He yawned: the inhalation turned the leaves of trees like storm-wind and stirred her hair, and when he exhaled his breath was the cold black breath of a bottomless cave.

"Daughter," he said, in a voice like earth's.

"I'm sorry to disturb your sleep, Father," she said, "but I have a question only you can answer."

"Ask it then."

"Does a new world now begin? I see no reason why it should, and yet it seems it does."

Everyone knows that when his sons overthrew their ancient Father, and cast him here, the endless Age of Gold ended, and Time was invented with all its labors. Less well known is how the young, unruly Gods, frightened or ashamed at what they had done, gave the ruling of this new entity into the hands of their Father. He was asleep in Ogygia then and didn't care, so ever since it has been here in this isle, where the five rivers have their common wellspring, that all the used years accumulate like fallen leaves; and when the Ancientest One, troubled by a dream of overthrow or change, shifts his massy limbs and smacks his lips, scratching at the rock-ribbed muscles of his hams, a new age issues, the measures alter which he gives to the dance of the universe, the sun is born in a new sign.

Thus the airy scheming Gods contrived to put the blame for the calamity on their old Father. In time, Kronos, king of the happy Timeless Age, became old busybody Chronos with his sickle and hourglass, father of chronicles and chronometers. Only his true sons and daughters know better—and some adopted ones, Ariel Hawksquill among them.

"Does a new age now begin?" she asked again. "It's beforehand if it does."

"A New Age," said Father Time in a voice that could create one. "No. Not for years and years." He brushed away a few of these that had gathered in withered piles on his shoulders.

"Then," Hawksquill said, "who is Russell Eigenblick, if he isn't King of a new age?"

"Russell Eigenblick?"

"The man with the red beard. The Lecturer. The Geography."

He lay back again, his rocky couch groaning beneath him. "No King of a new age," he said. "An upstart. An invader."

"Invader?"

"He is their champion. That's why they waked him." His milky-gray eye was drifting closed. "Asleep for a thousand years, lucky man. And now awakened for the conflict."

"Conflict? Champion?"

"Daughter," he said. "Don't you know there's a war on?"

War . . . There had been, all along, one word she had sought for, one word under which all the disorderly facts, all the oddities she had gathered up concerning Russell Eigenblick and the random disturbances he seemed to cause in the world might be subsumed. She had that word now: it blew through her consciousness like a wind, uprooting structures and harrying birds, tearing leaves from trees and laundry from lines, but at least, at last, blowing from one direction only. War: universal, millennial, unconditional War. For God's sake, she thought, he'd said as much himself in every recent Lecture; she'd always thought it was merely a metaphor. Merely! "I didn't know, Father," she said, "until this moment."

"Nothing to do with me," said the Ancientest One, his words muffled in a yawn. "They applied to me once for his sleep, and I granted it. A thousand years ago, give or take a century . . . They are after all children of my children, related by marriage. . . . I do them a favor once and again. No harm in that. Little enough to do here anyway."

"Who are they, Father?"

"Mm." His enormous vacant eye was shut.

"Who are they whose champion he is?"

But the vast head was bent backward on its bouldered pillow, the vast throat swallowed a snore. The hoary-headed eagles who had risen shrieking when he woke settled again on their crags. The windless forest soughed. Hawksquill, reluctantly, turned her steps toward the shore again. Her steed (sleepy himself, even he) raised his head at her approach. Well! No help for it. Thought must conquer this, Thought could! "No rest for the weary," she said, and leapt smartly onto his broad back. "On! And quickly! Don't you know there's a war on?"

She thought as they ascended, or descended: who slept for a thousand years? What children of the children of Time would make war on men, to what end, with what hope of success?

And who (by the way) was that golden-haired child she had glimpsed curled up asleep in the lap of Father Time?

The child turned, dreaming; dreaming of what had come of all she had seen on her last day awake, dreaming it all and altering it in her dreaming even as, elsewhere, it came to pass; plucking apart her bright and dark dream-tapestry and knitting it up again with the same threads in a way she liked better. She dreamt of her mother awaking and saying "What?", of one of her fathers on a path at Edgewood; she dreamt of Auberon, in love somewhere with a dream-Lilac of his own invention; she dreamt of armies made of cloud, led by a red-bearded man who startled her nearly awake. She dreamt, turning, lips parted, heart beating slowly, that at the end of her tour she came riding down from the air, came coursing with vertiginous speed along an iron-gray and oily river.

The ghastly red round sun was sinking vaporously amid the elaborate smokes and scorings of jets that had made the false armies in the west. Lilac could only hold her tongue: the brutal esplanades, the stained blocks of buildings, the clamor brought to her ears, silenced her. The stork turned inward; Mrs. Underhill's stick seemed uncertain in the rectangular valleys; they went east, then south. A thousand people seen from above are not as one or two: a heaving queasy sea of hair and hats, the odd bright muffler blown back. Hell-holes in the street shot up steam; crowds were swallowed up in clouds of it, and (so it seemed to Lilac) didn't emerge, but there were countless others to replace them.

"Remember these markers, child," Mrs. Underhill shouted back at Lilac over the keening sirens and the turmoil. "That burned church. Those railings, like arrows. That fine house. You'll pass this way again, alone." A caped figure just then detached itself from the crowd and made to enter the fine house, which didn't seem fine to Lilac. The stork, at Mrs. Underhill's direction, topped the house, cupped her wings to stop, and with a grunt of relief put her red feet down amid the weather-obscured detritus of the rooftop. The three of them looked down into the middle of the block just as the caped figure came out the back door.

"Now mark him, dear," Mrs. Underhill said. "Who do you suppose he is?"

With arms akimbo beneath the cloak, and a wide hat on his head, he was a dark lump to Lilac. Then he took off the hat, and shook out long black hair. He turned clockwise in a circle, nodding, and looked around at the rooftops, a white grin on his dark face. "Another cousin," Lilac said.

"Well, yes, and who else?"

He put his finger thoughtfully to his lips, and scuffed the dirt of the untidy garden. "I give up," Lilac said.

"Why, your other father!"

"Oh."

"The one who engendered you. Who'll need your help, as much as the other."

"Oh."

"Planning improvements," Mrs. Underhill said with satisfaction, "just now."

George paced out his garden. He went and chinned himself on the board fence which separated his yard from the next building's, and looked over like Kilroy into the even less well-kept garden there. He said aloud, "God
damn!
All
right!
" He let himself down, and rubbed his hands together.

Lilac laughed as the stork stepped to the roof's ledge to take off. Like the stork's white wings opening, George's black cape flew outward and then closed more tightly around him as he laughed too. This, Lilac decided, delighted by something about him which she couldn't name, was the father which, of the two of them, she would have chosen to have: and with the instant certainty of a solitary child about who is and who is not on its side, she chose him now.

"There's no choosing, though," said Mrs. Underhill as they ascended. "Only Duty."

"A present for him!" she cried to Mrs. Underhill. "A present!"

Mrs. Underhill said nothing—the child had been indulged quite enough—but as they coursed down the shabby street, in their wake there sprang up from the sidewalk at even intervals a row of skinny and winter-naked saplings, one by one. This street is ours, anyway, thought Mrs. Underhill, or as good as; and what's a farm without a row of guardian trees along the road that passes it?

"Now for the door!" she said, and the cold city tumbled beneath them as they fled uptown. "It's long past your bedtime— there!" She pointed ahead to an aged building that must once have been tall, overweening even, but no more. It had been built of white stone, white no longer, carved into a myriad of faces, caryatids, birds and beasts, all coal-miners now and weeping filthily. The central part of it was set back from the street; wings on either side framed a dark dank courtyard into which taxis and people disappeared. The wings were linked, high up at the top, by an archlike course of masonry, an arch for a giant to pass under: and they three did pass under it, the stork ceasing to beat its wings, coasting, wing-tipping slightly to arrow accurately into the darkness of the courtyard. Mrs. Underhill cried "'Ware heads! Duck, duck!" and Lilac, feeling a
whoosh
of stale air rush up at her from the interior, ducked. She closed her eyes. She heard Mrs. Underhill say, "Nearly done now, old girl, nearly done; you know the door," and the darkness behind her lids grew brighter, and the noise of the City vanished, and they were elsewhere again.