Little, Big (55 page)

"What is it?" she said.

"Now damn if there
wasn't
a change just now," he said, looking upward. "Sumpm . . . What was it, did you say?"

"I didn't say."

"You said a name."

"Russell Eigenblick. In the cards."

"In the cards," he said. He folded his paper carefully. "That's enough," he said. "That'll do."

"Tell me," she said, "what you think."

But she had pressed him too hard, always a danger, ask the great virtuosi for one more encore and they will turn petulant and surly. Fred rose—as far as he ever rose, remaining bent like a quizzical letter—and felt for something nonexistent in his pockets. "Gotta go see m'uncle," he said. "You wouldn't have a buck for the bus? Some kinda buck or change?"

She walked back through the vast arching hall of the Terminus no wiser this time than when she had come, and more troubled. The hundreds who hurried there, eddying around the shrinelike clock in the center and washing up in waves against the ticket booths, seemed distracted, hard-pressed, uncertain of their fates: but whether more so than on any other day she wasn't sure. She looked up: grown faint with age and long watching, the Zodiac painted in gold marched biaswise across the night-blue dome, pricked out with tiny lights, many of them extinguished. Her steps slowed, her mouth fell open; she turned, staring, unable to believe what she saw.

The Zodiac ran the proper way across the dome from east to west.

Impossible. It had always been one of her favorite jokes about this mad City that its grand center was watched over by a Zodiac that was backwards, the mistake of a star-ignorant muralist, or some sly pun on his star-crossed City. She had wondered what reversals might happen if—with proper preparation—one were to walk backwards through the Terminus beneath this backwards cosmos, but propriety had always kept her from trying it.

But look now. Here was the rain in his right place, and the hindquarterless bull, the twins and the crab, King Lion and the virgin and the double-panned scales. The poised scorpion next, with red Antares in his sting; the centaur with his bow, the fish-tailed goat, the man with the water-jug. And the two fishes bow-tied at the tails. The crowds flowed around her where she stood gawking, flowed without pause as they did around any fixed object in their path. Her looking upward was infectious, as in the hoary trick; others looked upward too, searching briefly, but, unable to see the impossible thing she saw, hurried on.

The ram, the bull, the twins . . . She struggled to retain her memory that they had been otherwise, had not always had this order, for they looked as old and immutable as the stars they pictured. She grew afraid. A Change: and what other changes would she find, out on the streets; what others lay in the to-come, yet to be manifested? What anyway was Russell Eigenblick doing to the world; and why on earth was she sure that it was Russell Eigenblick who was Somehow at fault? A sweet baritone bell struck, and echoed around her as she stared, not loud but clear, calm as though possessed of the secret: the Terminus clock, ringing the small time of the hour.

The same hour was being rung in the pyramidal steeple of a building which Alexander Mouse had built downtown, the only steeple in the City that rang the hours for the public enlightenment. One of the four notes of its four-note tune was silenced, and the others fell irregularly into the channel of streets below, blown away by wind or muffled by traffic, so it was no help usually, but Auberon (unbarring and unbolting a door into Old Law Farm) didn't care what time it was anyway. He gave a glance around himself to see that he wasn't followed by thieves. (He'd already been robbed once, by two kids who, since he'd had no money, had taken the bottle of gin he was carrying, and then took and flung his hat to the ground and stepped on it with long sneakered feet as they went away.) He slipped in, and bolted and barred the door behind him.

Down the hall, through a brick-toothed rent George had made in the wall to give access to the next building, up that hall, up the stairs, gripping the banister iced thickly with generations of paint. Out a hall window onto a fire escape, a wave to the happy farmers at work with shoots and trowels down below, and back into another building, another hall, absurdly narrow and close, familiar in its gloom and joyful, for it led home. He glimpsed himself in the pretty mirror Sylvie had hung on the wall at the end of the hall, with a tiny table below it and a bowl of dried flowers,
bien
nice. The doorknob didn't open the door. "Sylvie?" Not home. Not back from work, or out farming; or just out, the reborn sun caused the blue island lagoon in her blood to rise. He hunted out his three keys and peered at them in the dark, growing impatient. Ovoid-ended for the top lock, keystone-ended for the middle, oh hell! He dropped one, and had to get down on hands and knees, furious, and feel for it amid the irremediable antique filth of all City nooks and crannies. Here it was: huge, round-ended one for the police lock, which kept the police out, ha ha.

"Sylvie?"

The Folding Bedroom seemed oddly large, and, though sunlight poured in through all its little windows, Somehow not cheerful. What was it? The place seemed swept, but not tidy; cleaned, but not clean. There was a lot of stuff missing, he gradually realized; a lot of stuff. Had they been robbed? He went gingerly into the kitchen. Sylvie's collection of unguents and such that clustered above the sink was gone. Her shampoos and hairbrushes, gone. It was all gone. All but his own old Gillette.

In the bedroom likewise. Her totems and pretty things, gone. Her china señorita, with a dead-white face and black spitcurls, whose top half separated from her flaring skirt which was really a jewel box, gone. Her hats hung on the back of the door, gone. Her crazy envelope of important papers and assorted snapshots, gone.

He tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.

Nothing at all.

He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.

"Gone," he said.

The fields, the caves, the dens of

Memory cannot be counted; their

fullness cannot be counted nor the

kinds of things counted that fill

them . . . I force my way in amongst

them, even as far as my power

reaches, and nowhere find an end.

—Augustine
, Confessio

Upon a deep midnight, the Maid of Stone knocked with a heavy fist on the tiny door of the Cosmo-Opticon on the top floor of Ariel Hawksquill's townhouse.

"The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to see you."

"Yes. Have them wait in the parlor."

The moon behind the mirrored moon of the Cosmo-Opticon, and the dull glow of the City lights, were all that illuminated the heavens of glass; the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read. Odd, she thought, how (reversing the natural order) the Cosmo-Opticon was intelligible, ablaze, in the day, and obscure at night, when the real heaven's panoply is full. . . . She rose and came out, the iron Earth with its enameled rivers and mountains clanging beneath her feet.

A year had passed since she had looked up to see that the Zodiac painted on the night-blue ceiling of the Terminus had changed its old wrong order of march and went the way the world went. In that year, her investigations into the nature and origins of Russell Eigenblick had grown only more intense, though the Club had fallen oddly silent; no longer lately did they send her cryptic telegrams urging her on, and though Fred Savage showed up as usual at her door with the installments of her fee, these weren't accompanied by the usual encouragements or reproaches. Had they lost interest?

If they had, she thought she could awaken it this night.

She had broken the case, in fact, some months before; the answer came, not from her occult researches, but from such mundane or sublunary places as her old encyclopaedia (tenth Britannica), the sixth volume of Gregorovius on Medieval Rome, and (a great folio in double columns, with a hasp to lock it up) the Prophecies of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. It was certainty that had taken all her arts, and that had to be bought at the cost of much labor, and much time. There was no doubt, now, though. She knew, that is, Who. She did not know How, or Why; she knew no more than she had known who the children of the children of Time were, whose champion Russell Eigenblick might be; she didn't know where those cards were which he was in, or in what sense he was in them. But she knew Who: and she had summoned the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to hear that news.

They had disposed themselves around the chairs and sofa of her dimly-lit and crowded drawing-room or study on the ground floor.

"Gentlemen," she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, "more than two years ago you gave me the assignment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then you—yes, even you—may be incapable of acting on it."

There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.

"We all know," she went on, "the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people's greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age.
Rex Quondam et Futurus
. Arthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself.

"All these tales, moving as they are, are not true. No trials of his people awakened Arthur; Cuchulain is able to sleep through the mutual slaughter of his, protracted over centuries; the Second Coming, continually announced, has been delayed past the virtual end of the Church that so much counted on it. No: whatever the next World-Age brings (and that age lies anyway well in the to-come) it will not bring back a hero whose name we know. But . . ." She paused, assailed by a sudden doubt. Said aloud, the absurdity of it seemed greater. She even flushed, ashamed, as she went on: "But it happens that one of these stories
is
true. It's not one we would ever have thought to be true, even if it were one we remember and tell, and for the most part it isn't; it and its hero are much forgotten. But we know it to be true because the necessary conclusion of it has occurred: the hero has awakened. Russell Eigenblick is he."

This shot fell less heavily among her hearers than she had expected it to. She felt them withdraw from her; she saw, or perceived, their necks stiffen, their chins draw down doubtfully into expensive haberdashery. There was nothing for it but to go on.

"You may wonder," she said, "as I did, what people Russell Eigenblick has returned to aid, We as a people are too young to have cultivated stories like those told of Arthur, and perhaps too self-satisfied to have felt the need of any. Certainly none are told of the so-called fathers of our country; the idea that one of those gentlemen is not dead but asleep, say, in the Ozarks or the Rockies is funny but not anywhere held. Only the despised ghost-dancing Red Man has a history and a memory long enough to supply such a hero; and the Indians have shown as little interest in Russell Eigenblick as in our Presidents, and he as little in them. What people then?

"The answer is: no people. No people: but an Empire. An Empire which could, and once did, comprise any people or peoples regardless, and had a life, a crown, borders and capitals of the greatest mutability. You will remember Voltaire's dig: that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Yet in some sense it existed until (as we have thought) its last Emperor, Francis II, resigned the title in 1806. Well: my contention is, gentlemen, that the Holy Roman Empire did not pass away then either. It continued to exist. It continued, like an amoeba, to shift, crawl, expand, contract; and that while Russell Eigenblick slept his long sleep (exactly eight hundred years by my reckoning)—while, in effect, we all slept—it has crept and slid, shifting and drifting like the continents, until it is now located here, where we sit. How exactly its borders should be drawn I have no idea, though I suspect they may be identical with this country's. In any case we are well within it. This city may even be its Capital: though probably only its Chief City."

She had ceased looking at them.

"And Russell Eigenblick?" she asked of no one. "He was once its Emperor. Not its first, who was of course Charlemagne (about whom the same sleep-wake story was for a while told) nor its last, nor even its greatest. Vigorous, yes; talented; uneven in temperament; no administrator; steady, but generally unsuccessful, in war. It was he who, by the way, added the 'holy' to his Empire's name. About 1190 he chose, with the Empire generally at peace and the Pope for the moment off his back, to go on crusade. The Infidel only briefly felt his scourge; he won a battle or two, and then, crossing a stream in Armenia, he fell from his horse, and was too weighted down by his armor to get out. He drowned. So says Gregorovius, among other authorities.

"The Germans, though, after many later reverses, came to disbelieve this. He hadn't died. He was only asleep, perhaps beneath the Kyffhauser in the Hartz Mountains (the place is still pointed out to tourists) or perhaps in Domdaniel in the sea, or wherever, but he would return, one day; return to the aid of his beloved Germans, and lead German arms to victory and a German empire to glory. The hideous history of Germany in the last century may be the working-out of this vain dream. But in fact that Emperor, despite his birth and his name, was no German. He was Emperor of all the world, or at least all Christendom. He was heir to French Charlemagne and Roman Caesar. And now he has shifted like his ancient borders, and has changed no allegiances in doing so, only his name. Gentlemen, Russell Eigenblick is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, yes,
die alte Barbarossa
, reawakened to rule over this strange latter age of his Empire."