The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (7 page)

He was in the room. The doctors were ignoring him. By the faint breath of movement before his face, the sudden sweet smell like the breath of a
spring wind, he knew that the unicorn was nearby, invisible, watching him with wide eyes. Sadly, Raven sank to his knees.

II

“I am not a good man with words. And the woman I love, she should have poetry and songs, the most beautiful of words, to speak of her. Words without equal.

“I do not know how to say how deep I have love for her. Her eyes are bright, she smiles like the springtime. And how she laughs! I think angels must laugh like that. Most people laugh at what is ridiculous and mean, laughing what they see as silly, stupid things. You know? But her laughter is laughter made in joy. Like those soda cans filled with bubbles, and you shake them, and it all come bubbling out. . .

“Once I was lost at sea in a lifeboat. The freighter I served on, the
Pavopodopolus,
out of Athens, went down when an engine explosion broke the hullplate loose below deck. It was many hot days in that lifeboat, and we did not know if the radioman had told our position to anyone in time. When we ran low on water, we cast lots to see who would drink that day and who would go thirsty.

“One man went mad because he drank sea water, and he tried to break our water bottles. We clubbed him and put him over the side. It was the worst thing I had ever done. I thought I should die before I could do such a thing.”

Raven shuddered, grimacing. He remembered his wife had just said something to Koschei about how she would behave on a lifeboat. Raven told himself Wendy had never been in a lifeboat, that she did not know the cruelty of the world. But he frowned because he knew that she did know but had the type of soul that never let that cruelty touch her . . .

Raven closed his eyes and continued to speak. “When we were rescued, and we came to safe harbor, I knelt down and kissed the firm ground. It was
so steady, so safe. I had come out of the empty and dead waste of the sea, to what was like home again. I was rescued beyond all hope. And that, that is what my wife is to me. That and more.”

With his eyes shut, he could feel a warmth, a motion in the air before him. He felt the pressure of wise and ancient eyes, watching him, a supernatural being like a living beam of light. He wondered if he reached out his hand if he would touch her delicate and deerlike muzzle. Raven’s body was trembling.

“I must tell you, spirit, how we met. There were no friends in New York. I worked as a longshoreman. But I was not in the union, not legal to be allowed to work. The only thing it was legal for me to do in America was starve. So when I was cheated, or when they did not pay my wage, I could not go to anyone to complain. I was strong and quick. I could make men afraid of me. But every man’s hand was against me. Without my wife, the world would be that way again for me. Filled with hate.

“After the Amnesty Act let me have a green card, I went to find a dream I had. The city was so ugly to me; I wanted to be surrounded by trees. It was like the thirst of a thirsty man. My eye was hungry for beautiful things. Without my wife, I would hunger and thirst like that again, and never be satisfied. Not ever. For there would be no beauty for me in all the world.

“I took the test to be hired as a park ranger, in the National Forestry Service Police Force. They are a federal body.

“They gave me a uniform and a gun, and a splendid place to live, way deep in the green. My duties were as nothing. I had to count the trees the loggers took and count the deer the hunters shot, and fill out stack after stack of colored paper forms. Stacks of paper up to your chin, I had to fill out. In triplicate.

“That is where I met her, you know. I thought she was a
Rusalka,
at first, a swan-maiden or a spirit-woman. Because she was running naked through the woods. She was so young! So full of life! The young, they want so much to be alive . . .”

Raven opened his eyes and looked at the half-naked young man draped across the table across the room from him.

He squinted, face troubled, uncertain. Eyes open, he continued to speak:

“Once and twice I saw her like this. I fill out a form on it, in triplicate. Headquarters say, arrest this woman; she is streaking; she is trespassing. So I hunt her through the forest, where her light footstep has bent the grass, turned over a leaf. I have a keen eye; great patience. I do not like to lose what I am hunting. I did not want to lose her . . .

“So I hunt her; I catch her. But she is not shy even when she is naked like a bird. She stands with her hands on her hips and tosses her head and makes fun of me and will not come along. She dares me to put the handcuffs on her; even after she is chained up, she makes me wrestle with her. So I am carrying her over my shoulder, and she is trying to kick me. And she is laughing, and she pretends I am a romance-book villain come to ravish her in chains, that she must do as I bid, or she will be taken away. You know, I do not think she was pretending so much. And the paperwork for arrests, all that writing. In triplicate! After the second day she was staying in my cabin, I am thinking, such a bad idea to arrest her after all, you know? Such a bad idea! Maybe I marry her instead.

“Her father, I have never met, very rich, very powerful lawyer in Washington, D.C. She says he does not like her to wed me. And we must elope, and she must lie about her age to get married because she is young. But she is so good. She can make the deer come and eat out of her hand, because of her goodness. They know she would not hurt any thing alive. She would not help kill any thing . . .”

Raven stood up, frowning terribly. “Because she is so good, she has no drop of pity. She has a sense of justice like a sharp knife. My wife would never forgive anyone who had done wrong. She would never allow anyone who had done such an evil as this to come near to her again.”

Raven turned. “Koschei! I cannot do what you have asked. . .” Koschei had to bow his head to step into the room, and his robes billowed through
the open door like smoke. Entering, his body seemed to swell and fill the Emergency room, his eyes burning like malignant stars. “It is too late, son of Prometheus. Your second thoughts come too tardily. Behold.”

And he pointed to the sword still in Raven’s grasp. The knots were stirring and swaying of their own accord, unwinding, untwirling, a slow and weightless dance of rope. The cords unknotted themselves, rippling free. The knots spread and fell open.

Koschei’s hands were thin and gray, and his finger nails were yellow, longer than his fingers. With a slow sweep of his black sleeves, with a crackling rustle of his vambraces and paudrons, the deathless creature raised his arm, palm out, fingers spread.

“Hand me now my weapon, mortal man.”

Cold dread was in Raven. He knew what he did next could not be undone.

III

Raven, son of Raven, was abnormally aware of the Emergency room in which he stood, as if each tiny detail were viewed through a small, clear lens. It was a bright, modern, well-lit place, surrounded by doctors and nurses, men of learning and science whom Raven respected. Filling the doorway was a dark, ancient, evil spirit, a creature of whom Raven knew nothing; of whom, he feared, men, for all their wisdom, would never know more than nothing. The spirit, Koschei the Deathless, held out his hand for the sword Raven carried.

“Yield to me my weapon,” Koschei’s voice, surrounded with echoes, rang out, “that I may take the life from this boy here and give it to your wife.”

Raven’s thoughts were an aching pressure in his brain. He saw his hand rise up and proffer the sword to Koschei, extending it hilt first.

“Hands! What are you doing?” he thought to himself. “Why are you
giving this terrible creature this sword? Do you want to be the hands of a murderer? Do you want to have blood on you?”

Koschei drifted forward, his narrow face floating near the ceiling, cold and without expression; the two dots of light in the shadows of his eye sockets shone brightly.

“It is not too late,” thought Raven. “Take back the sword before Koschei touches it! I will be innocent of wrong. I will not be a murderer. Wendy would be so proud of me . . .

“And then Wendy will be gone. Gone, and my life goes with her.

“Where is goodness? Shouldn’t goodness come to stop me? Some people say God in his high heaven is the source of goodness. But heaven is so far away. God should strike me dead with lightning before my hand gives this sword to Koschei! But God will not stop my hand. Some people say the source of goodness is the heart, that mercy and kindness prevent us from murdering each other. If my heart were to stop pumping blood this instant, my hand would turn all pale and fall off. Others say goodness is in the brain, and philosophers show how it is not ‘in our long-term best interest,’ (such a fine-sounding phrase!) not in our ‘enlightened self-interest,’ to murder. If my brain were to explode this second, the nerves in my hand would go limp, and I would avoid this guilt.

“But there is no goodness to stop me. Not in my conscience, not in my feelings, not in my thoughts. My conscience is no more than a stinging fly; it irks me, it stings me, but it cannot turn my hand aside.

“Now I curse my soul, my heart, my brain. For they were all too weak to make me good when the test came.”

And he handed the sword to Koschei.

IV

The frozen, numb sensation that had been in Raven’s hand, now, the moment he let go of the sword, seemed to travel up his arm and gather in his
chest, a heavy lump of ice. It felt solid, as if it would never leave his heart again.

Koschei bent over the boy on the table and cut his chest open with the sword. Into the slit he put his armored hand.

“Koschei, wait!” shouted Raven.

Koschei did not turn, but remained bent over his task. “What need you now from me, mortal fool? Thanks and gratitude?”

“I should have attacked you with that sword!”

“I am a necromancer. I know in what part of himself each man keeps his life hidden. Mine was hidden in my heart; therefore I have removed my heart. While it is true I take no joy in life, no love, no pleasure, and I must take the joy of others to stir my blood, it is also true that I cannot be harmed by this weapon. I am without a heart, and Pity cannot touch me.”

Koschei lifted his hand out from the boy’s chest, and, in his palm, there was a pearl of crystal, holding a floating flutter of bright and joyful fire in its center, like the leaves of a tree in autumn, or the wings of a red-gold butterfly, beating.

“Wait! Stop!” Raven shouted. He stepped forward uncertainly, but his head was only as tall as Koschei’s elbow, he could not bring himself to try to grab that bone-covered, thin body. The same revulsion which makes a man unwilling to touch a corpse stopped him.

Koschei brushed him aside and floated toward the door, his bony armor rustling and creaking, his huge black robes billowing like sails.

Without turning his helmeted, crowned head, Koschei spoke softly: “Why do you repent your deed, mortal man? The eldest and first of all your kind let his love for his wife expel him from the garden of paradise; and his eldest son committed the same crime as you. Your first ancestor was a fine and stalwart man, much braver, wiser and better than you, yet even the father of your race was not immune to pity for his wife. I will say to you what I first told him. It is true your wife will hold you in low contempt. But at least she will be at hand to hate you. Comfort yourself with that.”

And Koschei was gone.

5

Beyond the Gates
of
Greater Slumber

I

She was sound asleep, drugged, undreaming. And so she did not see nor dream of the thin shadow which stooped over her, did not feel the chill radiating from the dry bones of his armor, did not know with what pain and what reluctance he let go of the little crystal orb of beating flame, did not sense the little orb, warm as spring sunlight, drifting down, fragrant and soft, to touch her parted lips. But she smiled when the bubble popped, and warm spirits breathed into her smile, settling, bringing a rosy blush to her cheek. Her eyes moved beneath lids delicate as petals, for she had begun to dream.

With a hiss of malice and longing and envy and despair for that living light now gone (for he had so wanted to keep it for himself, despite that he could never use it, nor feel its warmth) the thin shadow of the necromancer
now moved aside from her, stepped through the door, and, drawing mist about him, stood motionless.

Hands lax, face dead, without even the strength to gnaw on himself for spite, the necromancer waited and waited, hating the cold in his bones.

II

Wendy, lying in the hospital bed, was suddenly overcome with a sensation of great pleasure and well-being. The pains that had been in her body for these many weeks now, throbbed, ebbed, and departed.

She raised her arms and slid back her sleeves and looked at the flesh of her arms in the moonlight; they were clear and without bruises. Even the tiny scar on her arm for the intravenous needle had vanished.

The dull, cottony drowsiness in which the tranquilizers and painkillers had wrapped her had vanished; leaving only a clean, clear kind of restfulness.

Wendy looked out the window up at the moon, at the stars flying in the deep darkness of heaven above silvery clouds. “Whoever is up there watching me,” she said, “I’d like to thank you a lot, and I’d like to say I never lost faith in you. I always knew miracles happen, no matter what everyone says. I’ve seen them before. People are so silly when it comes to miracles. The ones that happen every day: sunrises, childbirth, love; people don’t think they’re miracles just because they happen every day. The ones that don’t happen every day: healings, flying; people don’t believe in them because they’ve never seen them just because they don’t happen every day.”