The Face in the Frost (14 page)

“Care for a bean?” said Prospero.

“You be quiet. Just be quiet. Look, there’s more to this garden. Come on.”

They walked farther in, stepping over rows of parsnips and cauliflowers. Vines, finally, and on them, knobbly green-streaked yellow squashes. When Roger picked one up, he noticed that it was rotten black underneath: yellow strings of pulp and seeds hung from the caved-in belly of the plant. One after another he turned them up, and they were all like that. He was about to give up when he saw a little streak of orange under an intricately knotted pile of vines. This squash was solid; he thubbed his staff against its goose-pimpled sides.

“This will do nicely. All right, stand back.”

“Higgeldy-piggeldy

John Cantacuzene

Swaddled in Byzantine

Pearl-seeded robes

“Put out the eyes of his

Iconophanical

Prelate, for piercing his

Priestly earlobes.”

The squash flew into a saffron-powder rage, and when the dust settled, there was a square black Amish-style box carriage. It smelled faintly of kerosene, the leather-strap springs were cracked, but it looked serviceable. On the doors and ceiling, for some reason, were dusky paintings of river landscapes, and the black horsehair-filled upholstery had silver ashtrays set into its tufted armrests. Two bull’s-eye oil lamps burned on the front.

“There!” said Roger. “Let’s get those horses.”

The two wizards went north. For days, they rode across flat tableland where nothing but long yellowed grass and dusty goldenrod grew. In the distance, you might see a tree or one of those tall watchtowers that the Northerners built. Those towers were not like anything seen in the south. Round, narrow, and with pointed stone roofs, they looked like huge candles; usually they had three floors, connected by ladders, that could be pulled up through holes in case of attack. You could not hold out for long in them if you were besieged, but a fire could be lit on the upper story and the smoke could be seen for miles. Once Prospero and Roger found one of these towers planted next to the road on which they were traveling. It was night and there were soldiers outside, sitting around a peat fire. They were not laughing, drinking, or telling stories. Instead, they sat grimly hunched over, poking the fire with their spears and wearing their acorn helmets. Long narrow nosepieces, fire-shadowed, made their faces look evil. They must have heard the carriage rattling along miles away, but none of them looked up as it rolled past, spitting gravel. They were waiting for something else.

The few scattered towns of the North were usually hidden under the lee of a low hill; or you might find houses scattered through the trees of a little grove, or grouped at the foot of a landscaped and terraced hill of farmed fields. On top, there was always a castle without battlements, a long oval wall of odd-shaped heaped stones, pierced by cruciform loopholes. The carriage passed several of these dumpy forts, but never came close to any of them; Prospero, using his brassbound telescope, could see that the fields were untended, and that the drawbridges were up.

In the roadside towns, the wizards picked up stories and rumors. One man told how frost formed on the windows at night, though it was only the middle of September. There were no scrolls or intricate fern leaves, no branching overlaid star clusters; instead, people saw seasick wavy lines, disturbing maps that melted into each other and always seemed on the verge of some recognizable but fearful shape. At dawn, the frost melted, always in the same way. At first, two black eyeholes formed, and then a long steam-lipped mouth that spread and ate up the wandering white picture. In some towns, people talked of clouds that formed long opening mouths. One man in the town of Edgebrake sat up all night, staring at a little smiling cookie jar made in the shape of a fat monk; it stood on a high cupboard shelf, smiling darkly amid shadows. The man would not tell anyone what was wrong, or what he thought was wrong. Doors opened at night inside some houses, and still shadows that could not be cast by firelight fell across beds and floors. People who lived near forests and groves dreamed that the trees were calling to their children; in the daytime, pools of shadow that floated trembling around the trees seemed darker than they should have been, and when the children showed an unusually strong desire to play in the woods, panicked parents locked them indoors. Voices rose from empty wells, and men locked their doors at dusk.

One night, after weeks of travel, Prospero and Roger were sitting around a fire they had made near a peat bog. Orion burned cold and tilted overhead in a sky that seemed emptier than it should have been. The chill was close around them, and even in their woolen high-collared cloaks, they felt that they were sitting in a wet cellar. There was none of the bracing windy cold of the empty northern fields—just clinging, bad-smelling damp. Prospero was reading his large handwritten book, and Roger, whose legs had gone numb, got up to walk around. He walked past the carriage and stopped suddenly. There was a man standing by the horses. He was wearing a coarse-spun cloak and a furry hat pulled down over his ears, and he was touching the horses with the tips of his fingers. Not petting them, just touching them to see if they were real. Roger stood there and watched him, his hand resting on the steamed-up nickel surface of one carriage lamp. When the man looked up and saw the bearded face gruesomely footlighted, he jumped back with a sucked-in yelp, as if he had slummed his hand down on a nail.

“Yes,” said Roger. “I’m real, too. We won’t hurt you.” He was trying to look kind, but he felt more like laughing. Prospero got up and walked over to join them, his book slung under his arm.

“Then,
please
, sir,” said the man, “and you too, sir, will you see me home? I live five miles down the road and I’m afraid.”

“Of what? Bandits?” Prospero asked the question, knowing that “bandits” would not be the answer.

“Come with me and I’ll show you. You are men of magic. I am not so foolish that I can’t see that. There are no carriages like this on our roads. Come with me.”

All three men got into the dusty black carriage; Roger sat in the middle, holding the reins, and when they were sure they had all their gear, he clucked to the horses and the wheels swished through the tall wet weeds. The road they turned onto was a well-kept branch of the Great Way, a major highway broad enough for two wide wagons to pass; this stretch of it was bordered by a low wall of brown square-cut sandstone. The running lamplight flickered on a stone cross, one of the milestones marking the distance from the Feasting Hill to the Brown River. Rigid stone saints, their faces washed empty by rain, clung to the wheel that bound the arms of the cross together. The farmer leaned out the window and pointed at the marker.

“It’s not far now. Yes, there it is!”

They stopped at the edge of a walled graveyard. In the bright moonlight, a slate-roofed chapel stood under the dripping yellow leaves of a huge half-dead willow. Prospero and Roger got out and followed the farmer over a rickety wooden stile. Inside the yard were narrow roof-shaped tombs—replicas of the coffin lids that rotted below—flat, thick, ground-level slabs, and church window–pointed uprights. Years of weathering had peeled irregular paper-thin layers from the slabs, so that the remaining letters lay in puddles and islands of flint. The farmer, kneeling, pointed to a long stone that was cracked into six or seven jagged pieces.

“Look at these. Tell me what this means, if you can.”

The broken words, some filled with dark blobs of moss, said “empty,” “dark,” “hollow,” “doomed.” All the gravestones were alike. The words repeated were the same—nothing else was left.

Roger gently grasped the man’s shaking arm.

“Come. We’ll take you home.”

As they left the churchyard, Prospero turned to look at the little chapel. The willow’s limp strings were moving over the broken shingles in an ugly caressing way. There were letters on the slates:

IT IS NOT LONG TIL—

He saw that “TIL” had had two Ls—the second had slid halfway down the roof.

A few miles down the road the carriage stopped at the farmer’s cottage, a whitewashed oblong topped by two lumpy haystack gables. In the two upper windows, scowling jack-o’-lanterns burned—Southerners had started the custom, and it had spread among folk who thought amulets and hex signs were not enough to keep away night creatures. The Dutch door of the cottage was open at the top, and the strong-looking woman who leaned over the sill was silhouetted in orange firelight. She held, not a broom, but a short pike pole. The farmer called to her.

“It’s all right, Maria, these are friends.” He turned to Prospero and Roger, who were ready to drive on.

“Why don’t you stay here for the night? It’s well past midnight, and we have a big empty bed upstairs. Our sons grew up a long time ago.”

Prospero looked at Roger. “Why not? Taking turns sleeping in that bouncing hatbox has left me a wreck. And you, too, though you won’t admit it. It’s two days to the foothills of the mountains, but we’ll run off the road before we get there.”

“I suppose. Very well. But we’ve got to be up by six. First, though, we’d better hide the carriage in that barn over there. We don’t want to call something down on these people’s heads in return for their hospitality.”

“What do you mean?” It was the farmer speaking.

Prospero and Roger looked startled. They had been alone on the road so long that they were used to discussing their private affairs aloud, Roger got down out of the carriage and drew the farmer aside.

“Nothing will happen, I assure you, if we get that carriage out of sight before nightfall. I can’t explain this thing, but if you want us to go on and not stay, we will.”

“I won’t hear of such a thing!” said the farmer. “I’ve sheltered fugitives from the kings and God knows who else. Besides, you’re wizards, aren’t you?”

Roger laughed and shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe. Thank you for your hospitality. Not many people are willing to take in creatures like us these days. We’ll cover up the carriage later, but first I have to have a talk with my friend. Alone. We’ll join you in a minute.”

The farmer went into the house, and Roger went back to the carriage where Prospero was sitting.

“Listen,” he said, whispering, “I think it’s all right for us to stay here the night. But I keep expecting things to pounce on us when we stop. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that we haven’t been attacked or followed?”

“Yes, but remember how much that poor monk had to concentrate to get anything out of the book. Melichus may have given up on us. From what I can see, his work is progressing. Of course, he may be waiting for us to get to the cottage. He may—oh, let’s not think about it till we have to. At any rate, I’m hungry. Let’s go in and eat.”

He got out of the carriage and followed Roger into the house. As they walked up the path, Roger pointed up to the buck-toothed pumpkin faces.

“If we had had one of those, we’d be traveling in a state coach.”

Prospero managed a little smile. He was still thinking about the lettering in the churchyard. And he knew Roger was forcing cheerfulness.

Later, inside, the two travelers from the south sat at a smooth pine table, talking to the farmer and his wife over the ruins of a large veal-and-ham pie. It was Prospero’s private and crankily repeated opinion that veal-and-ham pie was next in tastelessness to raw potatoes, but he had forgotten that opinion this evening with the help of a sharp brown sauce made from quinces. Roger usually warned Prospero about the effect of condiments on his stomach, but tonight he kept quiet, because his friend was beginning to come out of a dangerous depression that had been on him since the bridge-wrecking incident. Part of the reason for Prospero’s sudden cheerfulness was the unlikely interior of the house. The farmer, it seems, was a woodcarver, and he had filled the shelves of this long low room with scenes from local mythology. Fat saints shoved pigs through fences, elderly ladies pelted ogres with rocks, drunken kings dropped chairs out of windows onto wandering minstrels. But the best thing of all in the room was the clock over the mantel, a Nuremberg circus of cows with clacking jaws, stumbling ducks, frantically dancing angels, and waltzing bishops. In the center window over the dial was a little man who kept missing the bell with his hammer as the bell bobbed up and hit him on the head. All this, at least, is what the farmer said the clock was supposed to do. It wasn’t running, and when Roger asked why, the farmer’s wife pointed at the dark window. Prospero sat there with a strange look on his face. He got up and walked the length of the room to the fireplace, and he stood there for several minutes, toying with the jointed wooden dolls. Then, grasping the mantel, he leaned up on tiptoe and put his lips to the keyhole in the side of the clock. He whispered so softly that no one in the room heard him.

“Melichus is a fool.”

Picking up the wooden crank, Prospero wound up the clock and set the pendulum swinging. The cows flapped their jaws inanely, the ducks stumbled uncertainly over the wooden platform, bishops waved their crosiers and clicked their heels, and—Prospero shoved the hands to twelve—the bewildered wooden man swung twelve times at the painted bell and missed, while the bell caught him twelve times on his shiny brass nose.