Shroud of Shadow (19 page)

Hadden had looked in the mirror in the bathroom and had found someone else looking back. Yes, the man resembled George, but he was not George: he was Hadden. His beard had abruptly vanished, his cheekbones had altered, and his build had begun turning from stocky to slender.

And Wheat's clumsiness had fallen from her like a heavy cloak dropped to the floor. She moved with grace and surety, her face was vaguely but distinctly different, and her hands, when she talked, gestured swiftly and economically, like birds performing an aerial dance.

The morning was well advanced when they finally pulled themselves away from the outside world, reheated the coffee, and sat down to think. They had no idea what had happened to them, no idea where it might take them, no idea what they were supposed to do about it.

Wheat held up a hand that shimmered softly, even in the daylight. “I'm almost afraid to go outside. Do you think other people are going to see this?”

Hadden shook his head. “No.” He was surprised at his certainty. “Only we can see it. If this . . . whatever . . . happens to someone else, then they'll see it, too, but . . .”

He fell silent, staring at his own too-slender hand, worrying. In the course of a night drive through the mountains, an earnest conversation in a diner, and a day made holy by friendship and sex, he had been able to accept sudden and unexpected transformation, new thoughts and speech and sensations, and, in fact, his own casual acceptance of such things. Now, though, with the coming of another morning, doubts were beginning to surface.

Wheat noticed his silence, his furrowed brow. “Talk, Hadden. But what?”

“I mean . . .” He flexed his shimmering fingers, almost startled that he could claim this hand as his own. “This is happening fast, and I don't know what it is. I'm getting worried. Shouldn't we see a doctor or something?”

Wheat regarded him silently, then shook her head. He was surprised: she seemed so calm. A new mind, a new body—and intimations of more newness yet to come—and yet she accepted it all, embraced it as she had embraced him when, in her bed, he had entered her and they had become lovers.

“I'll tell you something, Hadden,” she said. “Men don't know this, or if they know, they don't pay any attention to it. But I think you'll understand now.”

He looked at her.

She shrugged. “You're not . . . really a man anymore.”

His look turned to a stare, and then the cold set in. She was right. He knew that she was right.

“It's something that women know,” Wheat was saying. “About doctors. Women don't know in their minds, of course. They know it in their bellies and in their breasts. I'm just now putting it into so many words.” She smiled, shook her head at such sudden and fast-coming realizations. “This is so strange: I feel like I'm just waking up.”

And then it struck Hadden that she had referred to women as though she no longer numbered herself among them.

“Doctors are there to make you normal,” she said. “If they can't make you normal, then they give you something to make other people think you're normal.” She laughed again, softly, sadly. “It doesn't matter what you think.”

No longer a man. He was still struggling with the knowledge.

“But I don't want to be normal,” Wheat continued as though casually throwing off a burden. “I don't even care whether people think I'm normal. This . . .” She rose, stretched. She was slim, possibly slimmer than she had been the day before, but she looked capable, strong. “. . . this is too good. I feel too good about it.”

Hadden did not know what he felt. Despite the wide-eyed and childlike wonder that had found him, that had turned this morning to sunshine and diamonds, there was a gripping in his belly. He was not a man. What did that mean?
What was he?

“What . . . what should we do then?” he managed.

“Us?” said Wheat. “I think we should leave this place.”

This place.
Again the language of estrangement.

“I've got five hundred dollars saved up. It's in my moving account. It was going to take me back to Montana someday. What have you got?”

“About a grand.” It was from the engagement ring. He had returned it to the store an hour after he had bought it. The jeweler had not even had time to take his cash to the bank.

Was that . . . was that why Tina had walked out on him? Because he was not a man? Had she intuited what Wheat was just now seeing?

Wheat was looking at him, her cornflower blue eyes gleaming with alight that had nothing to do with the spill of morning from the windows; and he suddenly realized why she had spoken of women with a sense of distance: she was no more really a woman than he was a man.

She was something else now.

But she was smiling, unconcerned about the change, pulling it, in fact closer to herself as, with clumsy fingers, a baby might drag a favorite blanket to its mouth. “A grand?” she said. “What on earth are you doing running around with that kind of money in your wallet?”

Shamed by his loss, he hung his head, shrugged. “Where do you want to go?”

“I don't know. I don't care.” She went to another window, pulled open the curtains, jerked the blinds up. Street, buildings, sunlight: they all rushed in, and the light limned her in a radiance that mingled with the aura of silver that lapped about her. “This is all so new, and it's so wonderful, but I want more. I want out of this town. I want the desert. I want trees. I want mountains.” She turned back to him, eyes wide, bright. “I can taste them, Hadden. I want them like I want food. Don't you?”

He was still struggling. The mention of the money and the reason he had it had taken him back to another morning that, though only forty-eight hours departed—dear God, had it only been two days?—seemed so foreign and stale, seemed such a thing of the past he could not but marvel that it still had the power to sting.

But it did indeed sting. It stung deeply. It put the bitter poison straight into his heart. Tina had left, and now Wheat had said that he was not a man. And, worse, he knew it to be true.

“Then . . . what am I?” he said.

And Wheat finally understood. Going to him, she sat down on the worn fabric of the sofa and put her arms about his neck. No, she was no longer a woman, but she had been one once, as he had been a man, and the gesture was therefore appropriate and comforting. “You're Hadden,” she said.

“But what does that mean? Hadden isn't a man. What is he?” He was gesturing wildly, the changes that had come upon him now overtaking him in a wave of shame. What the hell was he doing here? What was this? Skin that glowed with lambent fire? Alterations of face, body, gesture, language?

Wheat grabbed his hands. “Listen . . .”

“What the—”

She stared into his face, and there was a flicker of starlight in her eyes. He knew it was starlight. He was frightened that he knew. But his knowledge and fright conspired together and silenced him.

“Women know this, too,” Wheat began. “We—”

“But you're not a woman!”

“That's right.” She shook him, her grip unnervingly strong for such a slender being. “Listen to me, Hadden. Please listen, and try to understand. Try to feel it in yourself. You can do it now. I know you can. When you're a woman, you're always changing into something else. You start out as a girl. You have your first period, and suddenly you're a woman. Then maybe you have a child, and then you're a mother. Your breasts get full, and then you don't belong just to yourself anymore, but to that little mouth that's looking to you for food. Then you reach menopause, and you're something else again.”

He was staring at her, no longer struggling, for, yes, he understood. He understood it, he felt it, he knew it.

Wheat let go of his hands, sat back. “I'm something else now. And so are you. It's time that we both knew that.”

“But . . . what is it that we are?” said Hadden, and the altered inflections and vocabulary of his speech struck him again. And, yes, he was even thinking differently, for he comprehended and felt the import of Wheat's words.. There was an openness within him, a sense of free passage that had abruptly cleared. Women felt it, and he felt it, too. But he was not a woman. Nor was he a man. He was . . .

Something else . . .

He could not fight it. He had to go with it, to apply to his own body the lessons of necessity and inevitability that women knew by instinct.

“What are we?” he said again.

Wheat looked out the window at the blue sky. A smile spread over her face like a sunrise. “I don't know exactly,” she said. “But I think we'll find out. I don't think that it will be kept from us.” She tipped her head to the side, and her starlit gaze found Hadden. “Come on,” she said. “Let's load up your van.”

“With what?”

“With my stuff,” she said. “It's time for me to go home. It's time for
us
to go home. Wherever that is.”

***

With the coming of morning, Furze struggled up out of sleep like a drunkard shaking off the effects of a night's excess: glad to be free of its vertiginous nightmares, it was nonetheless uneasy about the upcoming day. Muddy streets steamed with the stagnant warmth of shit, vomit, urine, and, occasionally, blood; the sky was the color of buttermilk; the House of God stood blackly, like a finger lifted to the sky: inauspicious omens all.

But though Furze awoke to face another day of struggle, Inquisition, and penury, the town was now faintly laced with a sense of wild hope, for Jacob Aldernacht had agreed, in person, to discuss terms. To be sure, the terms would be his own, but Furze was in the position of a thoroughly ruined woman who was willing to sell soul and body both in order to put a mouthful of meat into her child.

In his combination shop and house, Paul Drego rose, kissed his wife, and ate breakfast, hoping that the moribund cathedral framed by his window was not a completely fitting emblem for his city. Elsewhere, James, smiling his silly grin still, made love to his sweetheart, and afterwards fed her the last of the delicate pastries he had scrounged out of his most recent miserly commission from David a'Freux, putting bit after bit into her little red mouth despite her (admittedly feeble) protests. Simon the Jew said his prayers. The convicted heretics who had escaped Fredrick's fate by earnestly abjuring what they neither understood nor particularly believed appeared at mass, their crosses of yellow felt prominent on the fronts and backs of their jackets . . . as would be the case for the rest of their lives. Siegfried of Madgeburg prostrated himself before the cross of his Savior, waiting, hoping for a vision of the divine, a vision that remained elusive. Albrecht privately debated, for the hundredth time, the question of the Inquisition.

Natil, though, was looking for her shawm player. “Renaud, have you seen Harold?”

Renaud, like most drummers, kept his fingers and hands in constant, rhythmic motion. This morning, he was sitting with his nakers in the middle of the room shared by the male musicians, tapping out an intricate rhythm, his eyes closed.

“Renaud?”

“Haven't—”
Bonk!
“—seen—”
Bonk, bonk!
“—him.”
Bonkita-bonk!

She looked to the other man in the room. “Reimbold?”

Reimbold played the cornetto, and was as hot as Renaud was cool. “That son of a bitch! He threw up in my bed last night, pissed on my horn, and then fell into a stupor!”

Natil was patient. She was in charge of the musicians, and though she was rather disturbed by the constant supervision they required, she had promised the Aldernachts that she would supervise them, and Elves—no matter how human they had become—kept their word. “But where is he now?”

“I don't know and I don't care!”

Natil sighed, withdrew, closed the door.

Now, Harold, shawm player and would-be womanizer, was very much in keeping (at one, in fact) with the spirit of Furze this morning, for in the same tavern in which Paul Drego and James had talked, drunk, and been overheard, he was attempting to simultaneously collect his wits and fight off a raging headache.

Hair of the dog. He was drinking beer and eating cold herring and hot bread: not quite what had gotten him into this condition, but close enough; and he had learned from years of experience that the way to beat a stomach revolted by the mere thought of food was to take it firmly in hand, give it a shake and a severe talking to, and stuff some kind of breakfast into it . . . accompanied by some kind of alcohol.

He felt absolutely no resentment toward Natil for the beating she had given him. The harper was a spirited woman, obviously accustomed to the rough intentions of rougher men, and he should have remembered that. If anything was going to induce her to spread her legs, it was charm. Charm and sweet talk and gifts. Harold knew charm and sweet talk, and gifts could be bought. But, in order to further his plans, he had to rid himself of the effects of what he now fuzzily estimated was most of a barrel of wine.

He resolved to keep track of his drinking. Next time. He would keep track next time. One had to pace oneself, after all. Next time.

He was calling for more beer as Natil, dressed in the costume of an Aldernacht servant, her harp in her hand, descended the stairs of the house that Jacob had bought—Jacob never rented anything—in Furze. From the servants' floor just beneath the roof she made her way down one flight, her steps silent, her skirts rustling. Manarel, Jacob's road steward, was standing, thick as a tree trunk, before his master's closed door. “Morning, Mistress Natil.”

“Good morning, Master Manarel. Have you seen Harold?”

“Not since last night. Me and two of the boys carried him upstairs and pitched him in with his fellows. What happened after that, I don't know.” He fixed her with a dark eye. “Has he been bothering you?”

Natil laughed, felt a pang. So human. “Not at all. I simply feel that I really ought to keep track of him.”

“Well,” he nodded, “Harold's one who warrants it.”

Jacob's voice from within the room: “Is that my harper?”

Manarel cracked the door open. “It is, Mister Jacob.”

“Send her in,” said Jacob. “I want some music with my breakfast.”