The Wind From a Burning Woman: Six Stories of Science Fiction (9 page)

Have you ever kissed a man before?

Yes.

Who?

My brother. She laughed.

And? His voice was sharper, he might kill her brother, he intimated.

A friend named Jules.

Where is he?

Oh, he vanished on a wood-gathering expedition.

Oh. And he kissed her again. Im a historian, not a voyeur; so I discreetly hide the flowering of their passion. If Corvus had had any sense, he would have reveled in his conquest and never returned. But he was snared and continued to see her despite the risk. This was loyalty, love, faithfulness, and it was rare.

It fascinated me.

I have just been taking in sun, a nice day, and looking out over the buttresses. The Cathedral is like a low bellied lizard, and the buttresses are its legs. There are little houses at the base of each buttress, where rains pouters with dragon faces used to lean out over the trees (or city or whatever was once down below). Now people live there. It wasnt always that way-the sun was once forbidden. From childhood, Corvus and Constantia were denied its light, and so even in their youthful prime they were pale and dirty with the smoke of candles and tallow lamps. The most sun anyone received in those days was obtained on woolgathering expeditions.

After spying on one of the clandestine meetings of the young lovers, I mused in a dark corner for an hour, then went to see the copper giant Apostle Thomas. He was the only human form to live so high in the Cathedral. He carried a ruler on which was engraved his real name-he had been modeled after the Cathedrals restorer in times past, the architect Violletle-Duc. He knew the Cathedral better than anyone else, and I admired him greatly. Most of the monsters left him alone-out of fear, if nothing else. He was huge, black as night, but flaked with pale green, his face creased in eternal thought. He was sitting in his usual wooden compartment near the base of the spire, not twenty feet from where I write now, thinking about times the rest of us never knew: of joy and past love, some say; of the burden that rested on him now that the Cathedral was the center of this chaotic world, others say.

It was the Giant who selected me from the ugly hordes when he saw me with a Psalter. He encouraged me in my efforts to read. Your eyes are bright, he told me. You move as if your brain were quick, and you keep yourself dry and clean. You arent hollow like the rains pouters. You have substance. For all our sakes, put it to use and learn the ways of the Cathedral.

And so I did.

He looked up as I came in. I sat on a box near his feet and said, A daughter of flesh is seeing a son of stone and flesh.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. So it shall be, in time.

Is it not a sin?

It is something so monstrous it is past sin and become necessity, he said. It will happen more as time passes.

Theyre in love, I think, or will be.

He nodded. I-and one other=were the only ones to abstain from fornication on the night of Mortdieu, he said. I am-except for the other-alone fit to judge.

I waited for him to judge, but he sighed and patted me on the shoulder. And I never judge, do I, ugly friend?

Never, I said.

So leave me alone to be sad. He winked. And more power to them.

The Bishop of the Cathedral was an old, old man. It was said he hadnt been Bishop before Mortdieu but had been a wanderer who came in during the chaos, before the forest had replaced the city. He had set himself up as titular head of this section of Gods former domain by saying it had been willed to him.

He was short, stout, with huge, hairy arms like the clamps of a vise. He once killed a spouter with a single squeeze of his fist, and spouters are tough things, since they have no guts like you (I suppose) and I. The hair surrounding his bald pate was white, thick, and unruly, and his eyebrows leaned over his nose with marvelous flexibility. He rutted like a pig, ate hugely, and shat liquidly (I know all). A man for this time, if ever there was one.

It was his decree that all those not of pure flesh be banned and that those not of human form be killed on sight.

When I returned from the Giants chamber, I saw that the lower nave was in an uproar. They had seen someone clambering about in the scaffold, and troops had been sent to shoot him down. Of course it was Corvus. I was a quicker climber than he and knew the beams better; so when he found himself trapped in an apparent cul-de-sac, it was I who gestured from the shadows and pointed to a hole large enough for him to escape through. He took it without a breath of thanks, but etiquette has never been important to me. I entered the stone wall through a nook a spare hands width across and wormed my way to the bottom to see what else was happening. Excitement was rare.

A rumor was passing that the figure had been seen with a young girl, but the crowds didnt know who the girl was. The men and women who mingled in the smoky light, between the rows of open-roofed hovels, were chattering gaily. Castrations and executions were among the few moments of joy for us then; I relished them, too, but I had a stake in the potential victims now, and I was worried.

My worry and my interest got the better of me. I slid through an unrepaired gap and fell to one side of the alley between the outer wall and the hovels. A group of dirty adolescents spotted me. There he is! they screeched.

The Bishops masked troops can travel freely on all levels. I was almost cornered by them, and when I tried one escape route, they waited at a crucial spot in the stairs-which I had to cross to complete the next leg-and I was forced back. I prided myself on knowing the Cathedral from top to bottom, but as I scrambled madly, I came upon a tunnel I had never noticed before. It led deep into a broad stone foundation wall. I was safe for the moment but afraid that they might find my caches of food and then poison my casks of rainwater. Still, there was nothing I could do until they had gone; so I decided to spend the anxious hours by exploring the tunnel.

The Cathedral is a constant surprise. I realize now I didnt know half of what it offered. There are always new ways to get from here to there (some, I suspect, are actually created while no one is looking) and, sometimes, even new theres to be discovered. While troops snuffled about the hole above, near the stairs-where only a child of two or three could have passed-I followed a flight of crude steps deep into the stone. Water and slime made the footing and handing difficult. For a moment I was in a darkness deeper than any I had experienced before-a gloom more profound than mere lack of light could explain. Then below me I saw a faint yellow gleam. More cautious, I slowed and progressed silently. Behind a rusting, scabrous metal gate, I set foot into the lighted room. There was the smell of crumbling stone, a tang of mineral water, slime-and the stench of a dead spouter. The beast lay on the floor of -the narrow chamber, several months j gone but still fragrant. I have mentioned that spouters are very hard to kill, and this one had been murdered. Three candles stood freshly placed in nooks around the chamber, flickering in a faint draft from above. Despite my fears, I walked across the stone floor, took a candle, and peered into the next section of tunnel.

It sloped down for several dozen feet, ending .1 at another metal gate. It was here that I detected an odor I have never come across before-the scent of the purest of stones, as of rare jade or virgin marble. Such a feeling of lightheadedness passed over me that I almost x laughed, but I was too wary for that. I pushed aside the gate and was greeted by a rush of the coldest, sweetest air, like a draft from the tomb: of a saint whose body does not corrupt but, rather, pushes corruption away and expels it a miraculously into the nether pits. My beak dropped open. The candlelight fell across the darkness onto a figure I at first thought to be an infant. But I quickly disagreed with myself. The figure was several ages at once. As I blinked, it became a man of about. thirty, well formed, with a high forehead and elegant hands, pale as ice. His eyes stared at the wall behind me. I bowed down on scaled knee and touched my forehead as best I could to the cold stone, shivering to my vestigial wingtips. Forgive me, Joy of Mans Desiring, I said. Forgive me. I had stumbled upon the hiding place of the stone Christ.

You are forgiven, He said wearily. You had to come sooner or later. Better now than later when . . . His voice trailed away, and He shook His head. He was very thin, wrapped in a gray robe that still bore the scars of centuries of weathering. Why did you come?

To escape the Bishops troops, I said. He nodded.

Yes. The Bishop. How long have I been here?

Since before I was born, Lord. Sixty or seventy years. He was thin, almost ephemeral, this figure I had imagined as a husky carpenter. I lowered my voice and besought, What may I do for you, Lord?

Go away, He said.

I could not live with such a secret, I said. You are salvation. You can overthrow the Bishop and bring all the levels together.

I am not a general or a soldier. Please go away and tell no-

I felt a breath behind me, then the whisper of a weapon. I leaped aside, and my hackles rose as a stone sword came down and shattered on the floor beside me. The Christ figure raised His hand. In shock, I stared at a beast much like myself. It stared back, face black with rage, stayed by the power of His hand. I should have been more careful-something had to have killed the spouter and kept the candles fresh.

But, Lord, the great beast rumbled, he will tell all.

No, the Christ said. Hell tell nobody. He looked half at me, half through me, and said, Go, go.

Up the tunnels, into the orange dark of the Cathedral, crying, I crawled and slithered. I could not even go to the Giant. I had been silenced as effectively as if my throat had been cut.

The next morning I watched from a shadowy corner of the scaffold as a crowd gathered around a lone man in a dirty sackcloth robe, I had seen him before; his name was Psalo, and he was left alone as an example of the Bishops largess. It was a token gesture; most of the people regarded him as barely half-sane.

Yet this time I listened and, in my confusion, found his words striking responsive chords in me. He was exhorting the Bishop and his forces to allow light into the Cathedral again, by dropping the canvas tarps that covered the windows. He had talked about this before, and the Bishop had responded with his usual statement-that with the light would come more chaos, for the human mind was now a pesthole of delusions. Any stimulus would drive away whatever security the inhabitants of the Cathedral had.

At this time it gave me no pleasure to watch the love of Constantia and Corvus grow. They were becoming more careless. Their talk was bolder:

We shall soon announce a marriage, Corvus said.

They will never allow it. Theyll cut you.

Im nimble. Theyll never catch me. The church needs leaders, brave revolutionaries. If no one breaks with tradition, everyone will suffer.

I fear for your life-and mine. My father would push me from the flock like a diseased lamb.

Your father is no shepherd.

He is my father, Constantia said, eyes wide, mouth drawn tight.

I sat with beak in paws, eyes half-lidded, able to mimic each statement before it was uttered. Undying love . . . hope for a bleak future . . . shite and onions! I had read it all before, a cache of romance novels in the trash of a dead nun. As soon as I made the connection and realized the timeless banality-and the futility-of what I was seeing, and when I compared their prattle with the infinite sadness of the stone Christ, I went from innocent to cynic. The transition dizzied me, leaving little backwaters of noble emotion, but the future seemed clear. Corvus would be caught and executed; if it hadnt been for me, he would already have been gelded, if not killed. Constantia would weep, poison herself; the singers would sing of it (those selfsame warble-throats who cheered the death of her lover); perhaps I would write of it (I was planning this chronicle even then), and afterward, perhaps, I would follow them both-having succumbed to the sin of boredom.

With nightfall, things become less certain. It was easy to stare at a dark wall and let dreams become manifest. At one time, Ive deduced from books, dreams couldnt take shape beyond sleep or brief fantasy. All too often Ive had to fight things generated in my dreams, flowing from the walls, suddenly independent and hungry. People often die in the night. It was-is-a hard world we live in.

That night, falling to sleep with visions of the stone Christ in my head, I dreamed of holy men, angels, and saints. I came awake abruptly, by training, and one had stayed behind. The others I saw, vaguely, flitting outside the round window, where they whispered and made plans for flying off to heaven. The wraith who remained was a dark shape in one corner. His breathing was harsh. I am Peter, he said, also called Simon. J am the Rock of the Church, and popes are told that they are heir to my task.

Im rock, too. I said. At least in part.

So be it. You are heir to my task. Go forth and be pope. Do not fear or even reverence the stone Christ, for a Christ is only as good as He does, and if He does nothing, there is no salvation in Him.

The shadow reached out to pat my head, and I saw his eyes grow wide as he made out my form. He muttered some formula for banishing devils and oozed out the window to join his fellows.

I imagined that if such a thing were actually brought before the council, it would be decided that the benison of a dream person is not binding. I did not care. This was better advice than any Id had since the Giant told me to read and learn.

But to be pope, one must have a hierarchy of servants to carry out ones orders. The biggest of rocks does not move by itself. So, swelled with power, I decided to appear in the upper nave and announce myself to the people.

It took a great deal of courage to appear in daylight, without cloak, and to walk across the scaffolds surface, on the second level, through crowds of vendors setting up the market for the day. Some reacted with typical bigotry and sought to kick or deride me. My beak discouraged them. I clambered to the top of a prominent stall and stood in a murky lamps circle, clearing my throat to announce myself. Under a hail of rotten pomegranates and limp vegetables, I told the throng who I was, and I told them about my vision. Jeweled with beads of offal, I jumped down in a few minutes and fled to a tunnel entrance too small for most men. Some of the boys followed me, and one lost a finger, trying to slice me with a bit of colored glass.