Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore (16 page)

The girl turned on her with a fiery look. "So what? Any of us can do that."

"You know where the crossing places are?"

"Hah." It was a whispered sneer. "Since I was^here. Since I could walk. I know them all, even the ones that haven't been used in a hundred years. All the kids do."

"Then why don't you—emigrate?"

The girl stared at her insolently. For a time Marianne thought she would not answer, but at last her expression softened and she put out a hand to touch Marianne's face. "You're all misty in the head, aren't you? Younger than I am, for all you seem older. They change, you know. A place might be a good gate for a while, then it would become a bad gate. You get through a bad gate, you might not be able to play your way out, you know? You have to work it out, play it out. That's what we're doing. Playing the gates. Patterning them. When the right pattern comes, then I'm next. I can tell you because I'm next, and I won't be here much longer." Seeing the incomprehension in Marianne's face, she continued. "There aren't any good gates for grown-ups. Only for kids. That's why I have to get out right away, before... you know. Don't tell!" For a moment the voice was that of someone Marianne knew, then the voice of an anguished child, then the dark-haired girl was swung back into the frenzy of the game. Marianne returned to her room, thinking she should wash her face before lunch. Bent over the basin she heard a shout go up from the children, but when she hastened to the window there was nothing to see.

The cloud-haired girl was gone, but she could have gone home for lunch. Marianne held that thought resolutely through the noon meal, through her afternoon nap, through the pre-dinner cocktail hour which the woman from Lubovosk insisted all the residents attend, and which she herself attended, today full of some obscure fury which Marianne made no effort to identify. After dinner the children were still hard at play, but the cloud-haired girl was not among them. Marianne went to her room to put a pack of tissues in her pocket with her comb and, after some thought, the little book of stories Macravail had given her. She had not read many of the stories nor understood those she had read. "Something," she whispered to herself. "Everyone should have something."

She went into the evening and to the river. Macravail was there. Beside him the grassy dog was digging wildly into a crevasse between two stones, whurffling as he did so. Marianne sat down beside Macravail and watched the dog until it gave up the search and lay down with a bursting sigh beside them.

"Tell me where all the crossings are," she said. "Tell me where they all are, Macravail." Then, as he did so, she wrote each one down on a page of the book, each on a different page.

When she had finished, the stars had come out. Taking a deep breath, she opened the book at random. The nearest lights were in the carnival ground, dim and distant. She made it out with difficulty. "The alley behind the bird market. Let's go there now, Macravail."

They went the long way 'round, skirting the fruit market and the street of the metal workers. They passed the back wall of the embassy, hearing over the wall the clatter of dishes and the unmistakable sound of laughter—the woman from Lubovosk's laughter. The alley behind the bird market was a narrow one, lit by a single gaslight. When they stood at the end of it, Marianne could see the door clearly, though she thought it had not been there when they entered the alley.

"Through there," said Macravail. She turned to see his face drawn up in an expression part pain, part hope, part despair.

"Through there."

"I have to go," she pleaded. "You do understand, Macravail? I can't stay. I can't go on forever like the little old woman, like the sons of the duchess. I have to have a difference, Macravail. Come with me."

"No," he said unaccountably. "You're safer alone. They may not even know you're gone for a while. But give me something—something to remember by...."

The only thing she had was the book. The words came out piteously, unforgiveably, before she thought. "Everyone ought to have something...."

"Ahhh.... She had not heard Macravail wail in that way before, so lost, so lonely. "Give me, and I'll give you." She felt the dog's leash thrust into her hands, felt the grassy beast pressing tight against her legs as the book was withdrawn from her hand. Then there was only the crossing to elsewhere, and the difference came without warning.

Makr Avehl lay on Marianne's bed, unmoving, eyes closed.

On the table beside him a brazier burned. From time to time, Ellat dropped a pinch of fragrant resin into it to make a pungent smoke. Between such times she moved about, making no unnecessary noise but not trying to be silent. Aghrehond had been stretched out on the living room floor until a few moments before. One moment he had been there, as quiet as Makr Avehl, the next moment he was gone. Ellat had found her eyes brim-ming with tears. Aghrehond was like a brother, like a bumptious, loving son. As Marianne had been
sent,
so had Aghrehond been
sent.
Except, of course, that he had volunteered to go.

She moved back and forth between the two rooms, being sure, tidying up. Makr Avehl would not be disturbed by her activities; she had begun to wonder if he could be aroused by anything at all. Outside the drawn curtains the evening bloomed violet with dusk, mild and springlike.

"Ellat?" She heard the indrawn breath.

"Here, Makr Avehl. Hold still. I've kept tea hot for you."

She slipped her arm beneath his head and brought the steaming cup to his lips as he sipped and sipped again, breathing deeply as from some great exertion.

"I found her."

"I knew you would, if anyone could. Was it as you thought, in some borderland world of Madame's?"

"Yes. A black world, of Black Madame. Oh, Ellat, but I will have vengeance on that one. Marianne is nothing to her, nothing at all, but she took her up like a boy picking an apple, only to throw it away after one bite. Bait. Using her to bait me. She hopes to throw me off balance. To make me commit foolishness, risk my people, risk the Cave. She plays a deep and dangerous game, that one."

"She tried our defenses once before. I do not think she is eager to try them soon again. She mocks at the Cave, but she could not break its protection."

"No. She prefers to bait me with my innocent kinswoman.

Well, she was ignorant of much, was Madame. Certainly she did not think I knew Marianne well enough to follow where she had sent Marianne, to follow and let her out of Madame's place into one of her own. Madame may learn soon that Marianne is gone from her limbo, but she will not know where.

We start even, then, neither of us knowing where she is." He laughed harshly before sipping again at the tea, swung his feet over the side of the bed and rose. "I must try to make a call to Alphenlicht."

"Everything will be packed by now. We can go tonight."

"I wish we could go. I need the Cave of Light, Ellat. I need the Cave and our people. But if I am ever to find Marianne, it has to be from here."

"Aghrehond?"

"I sent him after her. Poor thing. Everything is twisted where she is, names and people and places and times. All moves as in disguise, strangely warped. In this world of Madame's the pitiable emigre's have no memory of what they were, or only fragments. All has been wiped away. Nothing could wipe her character, of course, and the courage shines through like a little star. Still, she suffers under it."

"You say Aghrehond is with her. Where?"

He laughed, a short bark of vicious laughter, at her, at himself, at the world. "Lord of Light, Ellat, that's why I need the Cave. I don't know where she has gone. The only way out from the border worlds is into one's own world. She went into her own place, one of her own places—I don't know how many there may be. If she was a woman of some imagination, there might be thousands. Or perhaps only one. Whichever it may be, I must find her. /
must find her."

"What will you do?" She was hushed before his vehemence, a little awed by it, thinking she had not seen him like this before, not over a woman.

He sighed. "I will eat something, if you can find something here or bring something from that place on the boulevard. I'll take a shower. That place made me feel slimy. I'll call—who?

Who would be best? Nalavi? Cyram? Since I can't go to the Cave, they must do it for me. I'll call some of our people at the embassy and set them on Harvey's trail, and on Tahiti's. I want to know where they are in this world, if they are here at all. And then I'll try to think what to do next."

Outside Marianne's window the pink leaves of the oak un-curled like tiny baby hands, gesturing helplessly at the world beyond. The curtains remained closed. Downstairs, Mrs. Winesap turned in her half sleep, sat up suddenly to say to Mr.

Larkin, "Did you hear that? What was that?" To be answered only by a snore, a riffle of wind. Unsatisfied, she lay back down to sleep. There was the sound of a car driving away, then returning. Feet moved restlessly over their heads. Then silence, only silence. The house was still, still, as though waiting.

MARIANNE'S DESK WAS on an upper level of the library as were those of the assistant librarians, but not, as theirs were, upon the balcony itself. There a contentious writhing of brass made a lacoonish barrier between the desks and the gloomy gulf of air extending more than four stories from the intricate mosaics of the lobby floor to the green skylight far above. Marianne's space was sequestered in a trough of subaqueous shadow at the deep end of an aisle of shelves, the only natural light leaking grudgingly upon her from between splintered louvers of the curved window set some distance above her head. This eye-shaped orifice looked neither in nor out, but Marianne often glanced up at it in the fancy it had just blinked to let in some tantalizing glimmer from outside. To this wholly inadequate illumination she had added a lamp discovered in one of the vacant basement rooms, a composition of leaden lavender and grayed green in the form of an imaginative flower. Such light as it allowed to escape outward was livid and inauspicious, but that which fell on the desk top puddled a welcoming amber reminiscent of hearth fires or brick kilns, comforting and in-dustrious. By this liquid glow she found her way to and from her desk at night when all the balcony was dark, the aisles of books blacker tunnels yet, and the only movement except for her own the evanescent ghosts reflected through the wide glass doors from the windshields of passing cars.

After making an effort to leave the library every night for some little time, she had resolved not to try to leave for a while.

The attempts had become increasingly frustrating, and she felt it might be easier to give up the effort, at least temporarily.

She resolved to accept the necessity of washing out her underwear and collar in the staff washroom. She made a brief prayer of thanks that her appetite had never been large and was now easily placated by a few of the stale biscuits kept in the staff tea room. These biscuits never seemed to grow more or less stale, and their quantity remained constant in the slant-topped jar. When the jar was turned in a certain fashion, the tin lid caught light falling from street lamps through the high window to reflect it upon the dusty couch where she slept.

During the first several evenings, Marianne had turned on the lights in the basement room, flooding it with a harsh, uncompromising emptiness more threatening than the dark. The light brought persons to gather mothlike at the window where they crouched on the ground to peer down at her and whisper of books; the stealing of books, the destruction of books. When she turned off the lights, they went away, or so she thought, for the whispers ended and no shadows moved at the barred window. Thereafter, she used the lights only in the washroom, which had no windows, or upon her desk, so deeply hidden among the corridors of volumes that no ray could have betrayed her to watchers.

On each of the first several afternoons, rather late, Marianne had been sent on an errand of one kind or another: to take books to a room in the sub-basement; to find books in the fourth floor annex; to take papers to the special collection room on the mezzanine—all of them places difficult to find or return from. She had been at first surprised and later angered to find all the staff gone when she returned, the doors locked tight, the outside visible only through the vast, chill slabs of glass in the main entry. Each evening at this time it rained, glossing the pavements and translating the sounds of cars into sinister hisses which combined with the tangle of brass railings to make her think of feculent pits aswarm with serpents. It was better to go back to her desk, to that single warm light, to work there until weariness made it impossible to work any longer, than to stay in the chilly chasm of the lobby beside those transparent but impassable doors.

When both darkness and weariness overcame her, she felt her way down the wide marble flight, carefully centered in order not to touch the railings, around the comer to the small door—discouragingly labeled "Authorized Personnel Only"—

then down the pit-black funnel of the basement stairs to the washroom and light. From there it was only a step or two to the tea room where panties and collar could be laid wet upon the table, wrinkles smoothed; where a handful of biscuits could serve for supper, washed down by a mouthful of cold tea; where the tin-topped jar could be turned to beam its pale blot onto the place she would sleep; and to dream of dusty wings beating against glass. She always folded her trousers over the back of a chair, thankful for the plain, dark uniform which did not show dirt or wrinkles.