The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (19 page)

To ensure the stability of propriety and to reaffirm the principle that younger brothers can never win victories over older ones, Andrew disdainfully
announced he had learned night-magic from father, secrets Lemuel was too young to be entrusted with, which would allow Andrew to go much higher still, should he condescend to use them.

By taunts, Lemuel drew out Andrew’s secret, and, before they had descended, Andrew had taught him the song to summon the dream-colt.

That night, after saying his prayers, Lemuel carefully whispered the song he’d been taught, softly, so as not to wake his brother in the next bed.

Eager, wide-eyed, he lay in darkness, staring at the North Star through his open window. And he flinched with hope each time he heard a night wind scrape a tree branch against the house, for he was certain, with a little boy’s certainty, that this was the sound of hoofbeats on the roof.

Between midnight and dawn, between waking and sleeping, moonlight gathered like frost on the open panes, and, in the light, a fawnlike head reached in through the window and stared at Lemuel with wide, dark, liquid eyes. Her coat gleamed like nighttime snow, yet it was wonderfully warm to the touch when Lemuel reached up shyly to pet her nose. He realized, since his window was on the second story, that she must be standing in midair.

She spoke in a woodwind voice: “So young? So young to have called me down from high Celebradon. In that star-surrounded citadel I stand, forever unsleeping, and watch and guard my master, forever asleep, counting years until the trumpet call shall startle him awake, and he will take up his arms and armor and leap upon my back and cry,
‘Away! For Acheron is rising from the sea! The final battle calls and all the Earth is at hazard!’
“ She threw back her head and gave a wild and spirited whinny.

Lemuel was openmouthed.

Now the dream-colt dipped her head and said in a solemn voice: “I may leave my vigil only when the guardians of Everness, in dire need, call out to me. In dire need I go, and not for pleasure, or for pride, or for play. Now you have shamed me, little boy, for I am absent from my post without good cause. What if the Last Horn Call should sound while I am thus away? Shall my master walk afoot to Rangnarok?”

“I hope I didn’t do anything wrong . . .” said Lemuel.

“Patience and Faithfulness; this your people swore, your people as well as mine swore it, bound with mighty oaths to the Neverending City. Where is patience that you dare to call me here before my time? Where is faithfulness? Once a mighty order were the guardians of Everness, many families, not just one, and a kingdom to call for its support. But now, how often does the Wall stand empty, unwatched? Your family knows the ancient words to call down powers from Celebradon, the Tower in the Autumn Stars, but to what use? Your people have forgotten us, or if they recall, do not practice the old forms, or do not believe. There is no faithfulness any more in Everness, I fear.”

By this, Lemuel knew his brother had not ever called down a dream- colt, and he wondered, with sudden disorientation, almost fear, if his father ever had. Wasn’t there anyone who still believed?

“I’m sorry. Really, I am. Wait! Don’t go! Look here; I brought you a present. See? It’s an apple. I snuck it out of the kitchen in my nightshirt.”

She was silent a moment, nostrils twitching. “Most of those who pray for rain do not bring out umbrellas,” she said softly to herself, her voice warm and low. Aloud she said, “And what is that bundle under your pillow?”

“My long coat.”

“It is a summery night.”

“But I thought, you know,” he said, suddenly shy, “it might get cold if we went up high.”

The creature spoke in a voice of great beauty: “For your impatience there should be shame; therefore you must never boast to your brother nor tell your father I have been here. But for your faith, there should be reward. Mount up upon my back! And I will fly you to any land you can name, around the world and back here before the dawn. And yes, I can outpace the dawn, for I am more swift footed than the sun. Draw on your jacket.”

His bare feet were cold on the windowsill as he climbed outside.

Astride the dream-colt, belly tight with joy and trembling, Lemuel
leaned forward to hug her tightly about the neck, pressing his cheek into the warm scented mass of her mane.

“I wasn’t impatient,” he whispered. “It’s just you came too soon to let me show you I could wait. I would have waited. For you. I would have waited forever. Honest.”

10

Imprisoned
in
Acheron

I

Wendy pulled her head up sharply. She had been lying with her head on the books on the desk, she did not know for how long, and the lantern had gone out. Something had made her lift her head. A noise?

Then she heard it again. There was a crash of sea wave against the cliffs outside, a ragged, drawn-out boom. And, beneath that, a swifter, sharper crash, a louder boom. Both noises were coming at the same time, and it was hard to distinguish them.

Curious, Wendy climbed out the window. She saw the statue of Boreas and, behind him, the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Bears, shining in the light of a thumbnail moon.

She shimmied up an elm tree to the sea wall. Wendy crept forward, startled
by the sudden wind that tugged at her skirts and sent her hair flying like a black banner. High above were bright stars.

This was a section of the wall she had not seen before, large and in good repair, with a wide, crenellated battlement set with embrasures and machicolations for defense, with tall stone towers at either end.

Putting her hands on the stones to either side, Wendy peered between the merlons of the wall. Below she saw the sea, a wilderness of surging waves and foam. Rushing hilltops of black water, fringed with froth of white and green, thundered against the sea cliff.

Below the water was a school of luminescent fish, horrid creatures of bulbous, staring eyes, and teeth like clusters of white knives. With them were jellyfish, shining with an eerie pallor, and glowing giant squids with wise eyes, whose coats were lambent with many colors.

Beneath and between this swarm of fish, and in the glow shed by those cold bodies, two giants held a tree trunk as a ram. At the ebb, they drew back their mighty arms. When the sea waves crashed against the cliff below the wall, they sent the ram’s head lunging in a cloud of spray up at an angle to strike into the stones of the wall, crashing as the waves crashed.

Sporting among their feet was a herd of seals, swimming and diving with gay abandon. Some of the seals floated with their heads above the water and were singing or barking hymns to praise the darkness.

On the seafloor still further below, a cavalcade of drowned knights stood in ranks, spears held at identical angles. Each of their horses was suffering from some different and disfiguring disease, swollen with sores; and the knights were surrounded by floating clouds of blood.

In the air above the sea, surrounded by dark clouds, stood a figure with long and wild hair, dressed in kilt and long coat of coal-black and steel-gray, and his coattails streamed in the wind like the wings of a bat. In his hands was a bagpipe, and from the pipe came streamers of rushing cloud.

Behind him stood a second figure, dressed in Greek armor, armed with a tall spear and a shield as round and burnished as the moon. When this figure
clashed his spear against his shield, there came a roll and rumble of thunder through the length and breadth of heaven.

Even in the few moments Wendy watched, storm clouds began to gather, like a flotilla of vast black ships. Here and there among the clouds came ships indeed, sailing without lanterns, rank on rank of billowing sails like clipper ships. And from these ships came calls and song, woven amidst the thunder.

Behind them all, on the horizon, wading the ocean the way a child might wade a shallow pond, came vast, dark figures, with sea waves billowing around their upper legs and waists. It was too far to distinguish any details except that the hooded figure in the center carried a lamp in which were trapped many beautiful small lights, flickering like butterflies of flame.

The battering ram crashed into the stones of the wall, surrounded by flying spray.

The winds were shrieking as if in pain.

Wendy turned and fled, her footsteps uncertain in the sudden wind.

II

Once and twice she fell to her hands and knees as the wall trembled beneath titanic blows. The blocks beneath her groaned; there was a trickle of dust in the air, pulled from cracking masonry by rising storm winds.

She fell or flew down a long flight of stairs to the courtyard. In the deep pool, circled by luminous constellations, images of the sky were shattered by concentric circles that appeared each time the ground jumped. The trees in the garden creaked and tossed huge their green heads back and forth in the winds.

Behind her, a huge block fell with the noise of an earthquake. There was a thunderclap and calls of barking seals, as well as screams of joy from down below, and a triumphant shrill of trumpets.

The doors nearest her were locked. But she suddenly found herself on the sill of a high window, without remembering whether she had jumped or climbed or floated up to it with a single step.

The window was unlocked. In she went.

Inside, the corridor was dark and silent.

III

In the moment it took for Wendy’s eyes to adjust to the gloom, she leaned with her back to the window jamb, palms on the wall to either side of her, breathing softly.

“Have I remembered how to fly?” she asked. “After all this time? Maybe I just climbed up and only think I remembered how to fly. On the other hand, maybe I just flew and only think I climbed up.” Then she said, “Maybe this house is magic after all. Why can’t I hear the noises anymore?”

It was true. The earthshaking battering, the scream of the wind, were not to be heard. Wendy looked around her and began walking down the strange corridor, lightly brushing her fingers against the wall hangings and door jambs she passed.

Each door had a number of white crows carven into its lintels, as if a murder of crows had decided to roost along the upper doorways. Some doors had more, and others had fewer crows. The tapestries showed scenes that could only be glimpsed in the gloom, and then only if they were opposite a window lit with the light from the gibbous moon: a little girl playing in a garden, two little boys running, a funeral, a quartet of women toasting with raised cups, a juggler spinning coins in the air.

Wendy tried to find her way back to the grandfather’s bedroom where her husband was. A while later, having tried several doors and wandered down several other corridors, all decorated oddly, Wendy found herself in a countinghouse, where the dim moonlight showed framed dollar bills above
chests of coins. There was a small door hidden behind a closet leading to a short curved set of stairs, which led her back up to the corridor decorated with ravens, just opposite a tapestry of a dragon curled around a heap of treasure, its scorpionlike tail touching its smoldering nostrils. The door jamb next to it held six ravens.

“Ah! I understand now,”Wendy said to herself. “This is a memory mansion. It’s all mnemonics. These things are all put here to be kept in memory, just like the book said the Lady of the Lake would keep them in. No wonder they’re not allowed to move them at all. This corridor is a nursery rhyme. Let’s see . . .

One crow brings a girl,

Two bring a boy,

Three bring sorrow,

Four bring joy,

Five bring silver,

Six bring gold,

Seven bring a secret,

Never to be told. . . .

Wendy paused, looking back and forth at the tapestries. She found the one next to the door jamb holding three ravens at the end of the corridor, which showed a funeral. Through this door, down a short, curved passage, she found the central circular corridor. She came out next to the statue of the helmeted figure who held a pomegranate.

“I thought so!” she said. “There are four wings of the house. Earth, water, air, fire. South, east, north, west. Each with its own Greek god. Hades, the god of funerals, stands for earth, I guess. Is Apollo supposed to be fire?”

When she had been here before, with a lantern, the statues had been visible in the distance. Now they were not. The moonlight was coming in at strange angles through little windows set high in the walls, illuminating
the frescoes on the ceiling, which showed patterns of birds in flight.

Wendy looked up. “I’ve got the hang of this now!” Above Hades’ statue, a flock of crows was shown, with only a few birds otherwise, a falcon, an eagle, a seagull. Wendy followed the line of seagulls till she came upon a flock of them. When she drew her eyes down, there was the statue of Poseidon blowing on a conch.

Through a small window above the sea-god, she saw a full moon; which she thought was strange, for she clearly remembered seeing the moon as three-quarters when she had been in the south wing, in the crow corridor, and she thought she recalled it had been a crescent when she looked out the library windows.

She passed by the statue. The corridor beyond, for some reason, seemed confused and full of shadows, and Wendy could not find the large doors to the end. Then she noticed the ships that appeared in the decorations, in paintings or as little models mounted on pedestals. A dingy had one sail; a sloop had two; a yawl had three; a schooner had four.

She found a picture of a Yankee Clipper between two pictures, one of the
Dawn Treader,
the other of the
Nagfar.
Turning, she saw the large doors, flanked by tridents, beneath the image of an open eye.

There was a crack of white, harsh light beneath the door. Something was strange about the light, and it made Wendy dizzy to look too closely at it. She knocked.