Plenilune (47 page)

Struggling against the pain and panic, she groped forward. There was a fire in her body as though someone were taking each rib and sharpening it on a grinding stone. Finally her fingers closed over fabric; they brushed against skin. The fox was there, somewhere, beyond the red-spangled black that throttled her vision.

“Rupert?” She heard a voice from far away and far up. Steps like shod hooves rattled against her ears. “Rupert?
Dammerung!
“

“I’m—hale enough. Look—look to the lady. I’m afraid he crushed her rather badly. Careful, you thumbs-all!”

Margaret choked on a scream as someone tried to put arms around her. Someone was cursing, soft and low and beautifully; someone was whispering in her ear, “Best go to sleep now. It will be better that way.”

The blurred outline of a man’s face appeared above her in the fluttering, feathered light of a lantern. Odd thing, that: he always seemed to manage a halo of light, always in that careless, unaffected manner. He always had that shining about him. Odd, that…

A long, fine hand pressed over her forehead. “Go to sleep.”

As though driven in by lunar tides, washing swift and gentle through her brain, a deep and painless sleep overcame her.

17 | The Hollow Quiet

On the other side of the sleep Margaret expected pain. She surfaced—it was like surfacing from the bottom of a lake—with her limbs braced against the hot impact, and she was surprised some moments later to find that no pain came. A long shudder ran through her, and to her disgust she realized through the lightness in her head that she was shivering from fear. With an effort she pried her eyes open, squinting against the stab of white light, and tried to see where she was and to remember, between the stabbing light and sick taste of fear, what had happened.

She was in a Lookinglass bed. Not her own bed in the high, narrow garret overlooking the south-west grounds, but a lower room, lit by the morning sun, spacious and well furnished. Everything was light and delicate. To her eyes, still gummed with sleep, there was the impression of being in a birch wood with the wind carrying the light rushing and roaring overhead. And there was a wind, and light, for they were blowing in through some opening, fluttering the white hangings about her bed until they sparked with silver.

After getting her bearings Margaret noticed, among the light and racing, a great winged shadow on the floor and, looking up with rather less interest than usual at the body that cast it, got her first clear view, since that night of flurrying horror, of the fox.

He was standing in the open balcony doorway where the cold wind and frozen light were coming in, moth-wing grey with the light at his shoulders and velvet bee-black in the small of his back where the shadow was deepest. He was clad in a black tunic with fantastically long sleeves and trousers which fit tightly but were too long, the cuffs rumpled and bunched about the tops of his bare feet.

No doubt he felt her gaze, for presently he turned on one bare heel, very smoothly and like a dancer, and caught her eyes with his—the hypnotic sort, she thought with another panicked flutter where her heart was: so pale blue they were nearly silver. For a moment his face was only eyes, those witching-blue, hypnotic eyes, and then, suddenly, he smiled—a gash of a smile across the lower part of his face, that was like a spate of rain and a spate of sun at once, a mirthless sort of humour. About his eyes, when she looked back at them, there were thin, deep wing-lines that were like grief and laughter both at once, so that she could not decide if the light look of mockery was in earnest or only from long habit.

For some time they looked at each other, he smiling in his faintly mocking way which was the same with a fox’s face or a man’s, and she with rather less interest than usual, but at last he, with a little upward tilt of his head, broke the silence saying,

“There are many and various dull things one says to a patient newly awake. Perhaps you have heard them all by now. So I will say rather that I think I owe you the truth, which I withheld from you before.”

“You mean that you—” her tongue was oddly heavy and not quite its right size in her mouth “—are Dammerung, and that Dammerung never did die in a hunting accident?”

His brows fluttered rampant, but otherwise he seemed unmoved. “No, it was not Dammerung who died in a hunting accident…” Then his light gaze became heavy on her, searching the way Rhea used to search down into her inside self. “Did you know that I am Dammerung when you went to get the Blind Dragon’s spell to set me free, or was it mere womanish whim?”

She attempted a mirthless, brittle smile. “It was mere womanish whim. I knew you because—because when you turned there was the likeness of Rupert in your face.”

“And there the likeness ends?” His tone and rhetoric seemed unoffended, and almost absentminded. He came a little stiffly to the side of the bed and sat in a walnut-wood chair, his legs with a bare foot on the end of each tucked up under the seat. Leaning forward, he put a hand on Margaret’s temple and felt a moment for heat, and for pulse at her throat. His hand was as long and fine and sure as she remembered the fox’s paws being, but even that did not seem of much interest to her.

“How do you feel?”

She thought about that carefully, for she found she had to think about it carefully or it slipped in the wake of a sense of panic out of her mind altogether. “I do not seem to feel much of anything,” she admitted at length.

“Indeed?” He put his hand once more to her forehead. “That is well, then. You will not eat just yet, for I think you are not hungry and hunger will come soon enough later. Though heaven knows you are thin enough—” his tone became condescending “—you should not fast long before you waste away.”

“Truly?” She looked at him witheringly. “I mistook you for your shadow when I first saw you, you are so thin.”

His smile, a gash at the right side of his face, had no laughter in it. “
I
am going away now to eat, as to that, so that Skander does not worry more about me than he already has. What a hen that bulk can be! And you will go back to sleep presently as all good patients do—or so I am told.”

She did feel sleepy and not at all clear in the head on several scores, and she had an odd, muffled sense of detachment. She watched Dammerung rise and put away the chair, looking very like Hamlet but with his hair dark and trimmed—he must have had it cut since coming to Lookinglass, for she had some vague impression of it having been longer before.

But that was on the other side of the long sleep and she could not remember that time very well…

Dammerung paused in the act of turning away. A frown pulled at his brows, a shadow dropped for a moment over his eyes. “We have sent down to Melchior our physic to come up from Cheshunt so that he may look over you. He should be here before sundown.”

She stared at him bluntly. Melchior? The physic? She had a confused recollection of a watery-eyed old man shaking with age, a man so old his years had mazed him. “Why does he come?” she asked, appalled to find that she had to speak carefully to keep her voice from breaking.

Dammerung smiled, but again the laughter was not in it, though companionship was. “He comes because I bid him come, and there are yet men who come when I whistle for them. Do you bide quietly now and we will all come up again to see you this evening and fuss and make much of you. Sleep, now.”

His last words had no mockery in them, but a low sort of desperation, and with a nod of deference that seemed more of habit than conscious courtesy he withdrew, shutting the door behind him without another look back.

The room was strangely more empty than his going should have made it. The blowing light seemed hollow, the white and paleness of the colours unfriendly, and there was nothing to stand between Margaret and the loathsome panic in her middle. She lay rigidly under the blankets, staring up at the ceiling where the light was making dancing spear-head patterns on the stucco. She was glad, in a small, deep part of her that could still feel a sense of gladness, that Dammerung had gone: she did not want him to see her trembling as she was trembling with a formless horror of the numbness and disinterestedness which swaddled her. She could move her toes and she could move her fingers. She was not paralyzed. Yet there was something definitely wrong and it made her afraid, horribly afraid, and she was glad Dammerung had not stayed to see it.

That day was the worst Margaret could remember. It had been morning when she had awoken—she could tell by the weight and colour of the light, and, without thinking of it, by how the wind smelled just a certain way. Dammerung said she would sleep presently, as all good patients were wont to sleep, but for a long time she lay awake, crawling through the minutes, pulling herself each moment from the brink of utter panic. Self-loathing helped a little, for she loathed herself badly during those long hours, and some sense of Providence helped a little more, but the times when she managed to doze helped the most. The blurred sense of dreaming, which was never far off, mingled with the light and birchleaf-shaped patterns on the ceiling: when she dozed and really dreamed, she seemed adrift on a green north sea with the roar of the sea in her ears and the cream of foam the coolness of the wind on her skin. It might have been a pleasant sort of dreaming, and at times it almost was, but whenever she surfaced near waking, the wolf-crouched figure of fear loomed just on the periphery of her mind like something in the dark water below her, or behind her, always circling her and waiting until she should be too tired to struggle…

At length Margaret became aware of the foam against her arms being cold—more like ice than foam now, and the green sea had turned dark. With an effort she pushed upward to waking once more, past the numbness, past the fear, past the thing-in-the-dark which waited for her and, blinking, found that the light had turned to deep amber-colour and the corners of the room were thick with shadows. The balcony doors were still open, and though the grounds below were drenched in the shadow cast by the bulk of the building, the sky upward and beyond was a pale flaming hue, yellow like wine and as thin, with curdled pink clouds scuttling across its face. It was evening at last. It took a full minute for it to occur to her, and with that thought, oddly enough, went the terror. A sense of quiet resignation took its place.

Some time afterward she heard a growing noise of feet in a corridor outside her door. She did not know whether to look asleep or remain alert, but she did not have time to choose for the knob clicked and the door swung open, letting in Skander and Dammerung, and then the blue-jay man with the little shaky figure of the physic. Margaret was dimly aware of Aikaterine being there as well, but the room seemed overfull to her now, and it was hard to focus.

With extreme and unruffled care the blue-jay man guided the ancient physic to the bedside and then, being sure the man would not lose his balance, withdrew a respectable distance into the background where the shadows had thickened. Looking up through the scant light at the physic’s face, Margaret saw he had not changed. He still trembled, his bird-thin bones all seeming to rattle together under the sheer weight of his years, and his pale, watery eyes were still trained upward as if he expected any moment to see the sky rent back by Heaven’s coming. There was a moment, as he stretched out one claw of a hand for Margaret’s forehead, when the singsong whine of terror began crawling up her throat again—somehow she kept it in—and when the palm touched her skin it was not as bad as she had expected. The skin of the physic’s hand was light, like a dried autumn leaf, yet there was a sense of being spoken to through it, soothingly, comfortingly, all the while searchingly, which stopped up Margaret’s whine with surprise. Strangely enough, the hand did not shake once it had touched her. With both hands he felt her, and seemed to talk to her, and soothed her in a way which afterward she could never quite describe.

Finally Melchior let out a rattling sigh and withdrew his hands. “Some lamplight, I think,” he said to the ceiling. “She would like some light. Children are afraid of the dark.”

In the darkness of the background Skander gestured, and with a soft flutter of blue stained indigo by the shadows, the blue-jay man went away to fetch a light.

Melchior nodded shudderingly at the ceiling. “When we have a light for her I will take a look and see what damage has been done.”

Almost Margaret touched her tongue to her dry lips, but she caught herself. Between the white hangings of the bed—which were grey now in their troughs and pink where the sky-light touched them—and the darkness beyond she saw Dammerung’s face looking down to her own, and thought with a sense of puzzlement that there was something drawn and pinched about his mouth.

Skander’s man returned with the light and soon a candelabra was lit, shedding a fan of warm yellow light through the room. The balcony doors were shut, cutting off the cold air and, with a nod from Melchior, Aikaterine turned back the coverlet.

“Should we go?” asked Skander. His voice was big and bold-sounding in the hollow silence of the room.

The physic put up both hands, shaking them vigorously. “Nay, I do not need ye to take off her sleeping gown for me to see. I can see well enough. Now, lass, little babe,” he turned to Margaret, and for the first time she saw that his eyes, looking directly at her, were the soft colour of chicory-bloom. “This may hurt ye a trifle.”

Before she could brace, Dammerung cut in quietly, levelly. “It will not hurt her, Master Doctor. I have seen to that.”

They all looked to him, starkly cut in golden light and black shadow, his face like the face of new-chiselled stone, but no one spoke another word. The trembling, blue-veined hands that spoke without words fumbled and grew sure against Margaret’s torso, and the numbness, rather than withdrawing like a sea-anemone when it is touched, grew only deeper. She began to have a curious feeling of floating, or being dispossessed of her body, and she thought that if she was not careful she might begin to laugh. She kept her eyes on Dammerung’s face, though he did not look back at her, and somehow the stark grimness of his countenance helped.