Little, Big (62 page)

Early train-takers and men come to open tawdry shops passed him later, still there, long unconscious, on his knees in the corner like a bad boy, face wedged into the door into nowhere. With the ancient courtesy or indifference of the City, no one disturbed him, though some shook their heads sadly or in disgust at him as they passed: an object-lesson.

Tears were on his cheeks too in the little park where he sat, having salvaged this, the last of Sylvie, the living end. When he had at last awakened in the Terminus still in that position, he didn't know how or why he had come to be there; but he remembered now. The Art of Memory had given it all back to him, all, to do with what he could.

What you didn't know; what you didn't know arising, spontaneously, surprisingly, out of the proper arrangement of what you did: or rather what you knew all along but didn't know you knew. Every day here he had come closer to it; every night, lying awake at the Lost Sheep Mission, amid the hawkings and nightmares of his fellows, as he walked these paths in memory, he approached what he didn't know: the simple single lost fact. Well, he had it now. Now he saw the puzzle complete.

He was cursed: that's all.

Long ago, and he knew when though not why, a curse had been laid on him, a charm, a disfigurement that made him for good a searcher, and his searches at the same time futile. For reasons of their own (who could say what, malevolence only, possibly, probably, or for a recalcitrance in him they wanted to punish, a recalcitrance they had however not punished out of him, he would never give in) they had cursed him: they had attached his feet on backwards, without his noticing it, and then sent him out that way to search.

That had been (he knew it now) in the dark of the woods, when Lilac had gone away, and he had called after her as though his heart would break. From that moment he had been a searcher, and his searching feet pointed Somehow in the wrong direction.

He'd sought Lilac in the dark of the woods, but of course he'd lost her; he was eight years old and only growing older, though against his will; what could he expect?

He'd become a secret agent to plumb the secrets withheld from him, and for as long as he sought them, for just so long were they withheld from him.

He'd sought Sylvie, but the pathways he found, seeming always to lead to her heart, led always away. Reach toward the girl in the mirror, who looks out at you smiling, and your hand meets itself at the cold frontier of the glass.

Well: all done now. The search begun so long ago ended here. The little park his great-great-grandfather made he had remade into an emblem as complete, as fully-charged, as any trump in Great-aunt Cloud's deck or any cluttered hall in Ariel Hawksquill's memory mansions. Like those old paintings where a face is made up of a cornucopia of fruit, every wrinkle, eyelash, and throat-fold made of fruits and grains and victuals realistic enough to pluck up and eat, this park was Sylvie's face, her heart, her body. He had dismissed from his soul all the fancies, laid here all the ghosts, deposited the demons of his drunkenness and the madness he'd been born with. Somewhere, Sylvie lived, chasing her Destiny, gone for reasons of her own; he hoped she was happy. He had lifted the curse from himself, by main strength and the Art of Memory, and was free to go.

He sat.

Some sort of tree (his grandfather would have known what kind, but he didn't) was just in that week casting off its leaflike blooms or seeds, small silver-green circles that descended all over the park like a million dollars in dimes. Fortunes of them were rolled toward him by wastrel breezes, piled against his unmoving feet, filled his hat-brim and his lap, as though he were only another fixture of the park to be littered, like the bench he sat on and the pavilion he looked at.

When he did rise, heavily and feeling Somehow still inhabited, it was only to move around from Winter, which he was done with, back to Spring, where he had begun; where he now was. A year's circuit. Winter was old Father Time with sickle and hourglass, his ragged domino and beard blown by chappy winds, and a disgusted expression on his face. A lean, slavering dog or wolf was at his phthisical feet. Green coins fell across them, catching in the relief; green coins fell whispering from Auberon as he rose. He knew what Spring, just around the corner, would be; he'd been there before. There seemed suddenly little point in doing anything any more but making this circuit. Everything he needed was here.

Brother North-wind's Secret. Ten steps was all it took. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? He'd always thought that was put wrong. Shouldn't it be, If Winter comes can Spring be far
ahead
? Ahead: as you advance through the seasons, first winter comes, and then spring is not far ahead. "Right?" he said aloud to no one. Ahead, behind. It was probably he who had it wrong, who saw it from some peculiar useless personal point of view no one else shared, no one. If winter comes . . . He turned the corner of the pavilion. Can spring be far ahead, behind . . . Someone was just then turning the other corner, from Spring into Summer.

"Lilac," he said.

She glanced back at him, half gone around the corner; glanced back at him with a look he knew so well yet had for so long not seen that it made him feel faint. It was a look which said,
Oh I was just going away somewhere, but you caught me
, and yet it didn't mean that, was just pretty coquetry mixed with some shyness, he'd always known that. The park around him grew unreal, as though in the act of silently blowing away. Lilac turned toward him, her clasped hands swinging before her, her bare feet taking small steps. She had (of course) grown no older; she wore (of course) her blue dress. "Hi," she said, and brushed her hair away from her face with a quick motion.

"Lilac," he said.

She cleared her throat (long time since she'd spoken) and said, "Auberon. Don't you think it's time for you to go home?"

"Home," he said.

She took a step toward him, or he one toward her; he held out his hands to her, or she hers toward him. "Lilac," he said. "How do you come to be here?"

"Here?"

"Where did you go," he said, "that time you went?"

"Go?"

"Please," he said. "Please."

"I've been here all the time," she said, smiling. "Silly. It's you who've been in motion."

A curse; only a curse. No fault of your own.

"All right," he said, "all right," and took Lilac's hands, and lifted her up, or tried to, but that wouldn't work; so he linked his hands like a stirrup, and bent down, and she put her small hare foot into his hands, and her hands on his shoulders, and so he hoisted her up.

"Kind of crowded in here," she said as she made her way within. "Who are all these people?"

"Doesn't matter, doesn't matter," he said.

"Now," she said, settled in, her voice already faint, more his than hers, as it had always been, after all, after all; "nowwhere do we go?

He drew out the key the old woman had given him. It was necessary to unlock the wrought-iron gate in order to leave, just as it was in order to enter. "Home, I guess," Auberon said. Little girls playing jacks and plucking dandelions along the path looked up to watch him talk to himself. "I guess, home."

Despising, for your sake, the City, thus

I turn my back: there is a world elsewhere.

—Coriolanus

Hawksquill's powerful Vulpes translated her back to the City in a near-record time, and yet (so her watch told her) perhaps still not under the wire. Though she was now in possession of all the missing parts of the problem of Russell Eigenblick, the learning of those parts had taken longer than she had expected.

All along the road north she had planned how she might present herself to the heirs of Violet Drinkwater in such a way—as antiquarian, collector, cultist—that the cards would be shown her. But if she had not herself been predicted in them (Sophie knew her at once, or recognized her very quickly) they would certainly not have been yielded up to her at all. That she proved to he as well a tenuous cousin of Violet Bramble's descendants had helped too, a coincidence that surprised and delighted that strange family as much as it interested Hawksquill. And even so days went by as she and Sophie pored over the cards. More days she spent with the last edition of
The Architecture of Country Houses
, whose peculiar contents none of them seemed to be very familiar with; and though, as she studied and pored, the whole story—or as much of it as had so far happened—gradually came clear under her cockatoo scrutiny, still all the while the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club advanced toward the fateful meeting with Russell Eigenblick, and still Hawksquill's loyalties remained unplaced, and her path obscure.

It was obscure no more. The children of the children of Time: who would have thought? A Fool, and a Cousin; a Journey, and a Host. The Least Trumps! She smiled grimly, circling around the mammoth Empire Hotel in which Eigenblick had installed himself, and decided on a charm, a thing she rarely resorted to.

She inserted the Vulpes into the cavernous parking garage beneath the hotel. Armed guards and attendants patrolled the doors and elevators. She found herself in a line of vehicles being checked and examined. She stilled the car's growl, and took a Morocco-leather envelope from the glove-box. From this she extracted a small white fragment of bone. It was a bone taken from a pure black cat which had been boiled alive in the tenement kitchen of La Negra, an
espiritista
for whom Hawksquill had once had occasion to do a great favor. It might have been a toebone, or part of the maxillary process; certainly La Negra didn't know; she'd hit on it only after a whole day's experimenting before a mirror, separating the bones carefully from the stinking carcass and putting each in turn into her mouth, searching for the one that would make her image in the mirror disappear. It was this one. Hawksquill found the processes of witchcraft vulgar and the cruelty of this one especially repellent; she wasn't herself convinced that there was one bone among the thousand-odd bones in a pure black cat that could make one invisible, but La Negra had assured her that the bone would work whether she believed it or didn't; and she was glad to have the gift just now. She looked around her; the attendants had not yet noticed her car; she left the keys in the lock, thoughtfully; put the little bone into her mouth with a grimace of disgust, and disappeared.

Extracting herself unnoticed from the car took some doing, but the attendants and guards paid no attention to the elevator doors opening and closing on no one (who could predict the vagaries of empty elevators?) and Hawksquill walked out into the lobby, going carefully in the company of the visible so as not to brush against them. The usual unsmiling raincoated men stood at intervals along the walls or sat in lobby armchairs behind dummy newspapers, fooling no one, being fooled by no one but she. At an unseen signal, they began to change their stations just then, like pieces on a board. A large party was coming through the swift-bladed revolving doors, preceded by underlings. Not a moment too soon, Hawksquill thought, for this was the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club proceeding into the lobby. They didn't gaze around themselves inquiringly as ordinary men might on entering such a place, but, spreading out slightly as though more fully to take possession here, they kept their eyes ahead, seeing the future and not the transitory forms of the present. Under each arm was the glove-soft case, on each head the potent homburg long ridiculous on any but men like these.

They sorted themselves into two elevators, those with the highest standing holding the doors for the others, as ancient male ritual dictates; Hawksquill slipped into the less crowded one.

"The thirteenth?"

"The thirteenth."

Someone punched the button for the thirteenth floor with a forceful forefinger. Another consulted a plain wristwatch. They ascended smoothly. They had nothing to say to one another; their plans were made, and the walls, they well knew, had ears. Hawksquill remained pressed against the door, facing their blank faces. The doors opened, and neatly she sidled out; just in time too, for there were hands thrust forward to take the hands of the club members.

"The Lecturer will be right with you."

"If you could wait in this room."

"Can we order anything up for you. The Lecturer has ordered coffee."

They were shepherded leftward by alert suited men. One or two young men, in colored blouses, hands clasped behind them in an uneaseful at-ease, stood by every door. At least, Hawksquill thought, he's wary. From another elevator a red-coated waiter came out carrying a large tray which bore a single tiny cup of coffee. He went rightwards, and Hawksquill followed him. He was admitted through double doors and past guards, and so was Hawksquill at his heels; he came up to an unmarked door, knocked, opened it, and went in. Hawksquill put an invisible foot in the door as he closed it behind him, and then slipped in.

It was an impersonally-furnished sitting-room with wide windows looking out over the spiky city. The waiter, muttering to himself, passed Hawksquill and exited. Hawksquill took the fragment of bone from her mouth and was carefully putting it away when a farther door opened and Russell Eigenblick came out, yawning, in a blackish, bedragoned silk dressing-gown. He wore on his nose a pair of tiny half-glasses which Hawksquill hadn't seen before.

He started when he saw her, having expected an empty room.

"You," he said.

Without much grace (she couldn't remember ever having done quite this before), Hawksquill lowered herself onto one knee, bowed profoundly, and said, "I am your Majesty's humble servant."

"Get up," Eigenblick said. "Who let you in here?"

"A black cat," Hawksquill said, rising. "It doesn't matter. We haven't much time."

"I don't talk to journalists."

"I'm sorry," Hawksquill said. "That was an imposition. I'm not a journalist."