Complete Short Fiction, page 38
I felt exhilarated. I breathed not air but light. The ground rocked under my feet as if I walked on the surface of Lake Michigan. I ran off through the darkness.
The chapel corner was deserted, the moon peeking over the ramshackle plastic building that housed the MHD generators. Two huge concrete Cherubim with snarling faces and clawed feet supported the chapel. I pulled myself into the shadows by their heads.
The cold wall behind me sucked my heat. I shifted weight from foot to foot but didn’t dare move much more to stay warm. Footsteps crunched on the gravel walk. I almost turned and ran then. Heart pounding, I stepped forward into the moonlight.
Laurena turned. “Ah, Brother Vikram.” She stood before me in a long dress, not a school uniform at all, but a real gown flaring out over her hips and tumbling down to the ground. Her hands were clasped like a suppliant’s, her hair loose around her shoulders. For a moment I thought she was there to make mock of me, but she was clearly as nervous as I was.
“I’m glad you came,” I said.
“I almost didn’t,” she said. “Aya didn’t want me to. She didn’t say that, but it wasn’t so hard to figure out what she thought.”
I didn’t ask her if that was why she came. Instead, I took her arm. She pulled her arm back against my hand in acknowledgement of its presence. I felt joy.
“So what do you think rescuing me on that stupid pier entitles you to?”
I ignored her tone and paid attention to the pressure of her upper arm. “Just a few words. The ones you wouldn’t give me before.”
She snorted but said nothing else. We walked along the low wall that tried vainly to stop the encroachments of dune sand and finally stood on the slope overlooking the villages that clung to the edge of Crystal Lake, the dune-trapped body of water behind St. Theda’s. Her family lived down there somewhere, save for her tedious brother Michael, who had moved up to the monastery, where he worked providing his town with electric power. Though surely it had already healed, she limped on her injured ankle.
“I was in Chicago once,” I said, naming the most romantic place I could think of. It helped that I actually had seen it.
She took my arm in her turn but did not look at me. Was she seeking, somewhere among the twinkling lights around the lake, the single light of her family’s house? Escape. Laurena Tarchik wanted escape. I was going to give it to her. “The Drowned City. I wish I came from a drowned city. I wish Lake Michigan would pour across the dunes and fill Crystal Lake to overflowing.” She was imagining water pouring in through the windows of her house, drowning her mother as she fixed dinner. I didn’t need to read her mind to know that.
“The water the towers rise from is usually still. It’s shallow and you can still see the fire hydrants and street signs under it. There’s enough glass left in the buildings that the reflected light of sunset makes the place look inhabited.” We hadn’t actually landed there. Uncle Cosmas had just swung the boat in close on our way to Milwaukee. But I didn’t feel the need to burden Laurena with that kind of detail.
“I have places to go,” I said. “Boston. Paris. Constantinople. Who knows? Moscow herself.” I whispered the names of those torn and rebuilt cities, capitals of the Orthodox Empire, for their aphrodisiac qualities.
She sighed. “Anywhere, Vikram. Anywhere but here.”
I put my arms around her waist and kissed her. She kissed me back, deeply but matter-of-factly, not melting in my arms. I ran one hand down to where her buttocks swelled out and felt her breasts against my chest.
She ground her hips against me, then pushed me away with suddenly strong arms. “I have to get home.” She said the word with disdain. “They’ll miss me.”
“When will I see you again?”
“Use Aya to send me another note.” She smiled. “I rather liked that.” She turned and, without a backward look, walked into the darkness towards her house.
I headed back toward the Infirmary, fingers and toes tingling. The moon was now shining full silver, coating the bare trees.
My return path took me past the spot at the base of the knoll where the boys had attacked Aya. There were no traces of the scuffle in the sand. The scene, with its dull-faced blackbooted farm boys and its tormented cripple in their center, had receded in my mind to a medieval painting, a side panel to the Crucifixion . . . or a scene in the life of a saint.
I stood and looked up at the knoll. With a tightening of my scalp, I saw the silhouette of a figure sitting thoughtfully at its top. In the moonlight that ominous twisted shape showed me something of what the boys had feared, for I recognized Aya Ngomo.
“Good evening, Aya.” She had heard me clambering up the hill, and was not at all surprised to see me. That should have told me something.
“Hello, Vikram.” She looked past my shoulder at the stars. “Have you ever wanted to float away into the sky? Just to drift between the stars?”
I thought about holding my breath and slowly rising through the clouds. But it didn’t even occur to me to tell her about it; this was something so private I had never articulated it.
“There are too many places to travel on this earth,” I said instead. “I’ve only seen a few of them myself.”
“Oh? We’re stuck here in the dunes of Michigan. What lies outside?” Her tone was faintly mocking, not at all what a crippled girl’s should have been. All these young ladies were too wise. “What wonders have you seen, Vikram?”
Her tone was interrogative in a way I didn’t like. I didn’t feel like admitting that Milwaukee was my big trip, and somehow the story I had told Laurena about Chicago seemed inadequate to Aya’s attention.
“Boston,” I said. I’d read enough about the capital of Russian New England to fake a visit there. And I’d always intended to go.
“Really?” The romantic name excited her. “Then you can tell me about the new Cathedral they’re building there. What does the bell tower look like?”
Bell tower? What a question! “Russian Second Empire,” I said. It seemed reasonable. I knew the Boston Public Library was built in that style, just across Copley Square from the Cathedral.
She frowned. “I thought they were using the remains of an old skyscraper to hang the bells—that’s what’s so interesting about it. I must have misunderstood. . . .” Her eyes were on me. I don’t think Aya really saw the truth someone was concealing, though it often seemed that way. Instead, the way she looked at you reminded you that you yourself knew the truth, even if she didn’t, and made you ashamed for not speaking it.
“Why are you sitting out here, Aya?”
“I was waiting for you.” Aya told the truth herself, though not always all of it. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that she had understood my rendezvous with Laurena and had positioned herself to catch me on my return from it. “I wanted to show you something.”
Despite the sudden weariness that I felt, the sense that the world was too complicated and difficult to deal with, I sat down next to her on the cold ground. “What is it, Aya?”
“My mother died when I was born. My father not long after, both, I think, from the same disease that makes me what I am.” She didn’t give me time to speak some standard commiseration but rushed on. “But before he died, he told me a story. At least I remember it as being him. Perhaps it was just a dream. The sort of vision that comes to someone with a distorted nervous system.”
Remember this, Thomas. Aya Ngomo never had a vision that she did not attribute to some physical cause. Of course, the Lord performs his miracles through the universe He Himself has created, and thus can use a congenitally defective nervous system to convey His visions, if that suits His purposes best.
“He told me that each person had a jewel—the thing that defines us, that makes us ourselves. Something had stolen mine from me.” She ran a hand down her twisted side. “That’s why I’m like this. I am incomplete.”
“A jewel. What sort of jewel?” I pictured a bauble rolled into a dusty corner and forgotten after the closing of some massy treasure chest filled to the brim with unset emeralds and pearl earrings.
“I won’t know that until I find it.”
“Then how will you look for it?”
“I—” She gazed back up at the sky. “However I can.”
“Well, good luck with it then.”
She was correct and I realized it, of course, as by now we all have. It may be that I was the first to see the truth of it. St. Aya Ngomo. Was it merely by accident that I had seen her torment by the farm boys as a stage on the way to sainthood?
“Doesn’t it amaze you that the Orthodox Empire travels through space?” Her question didn’t seem like a changing of the subject, but perhaps I was merely caught up in the physical vision of her metaphorical bauble. Jewels glinted at me from the sky.
I was spending a year of my young life at a Byzantine monastery while spacecraft rose from the Dakota plains not a thousand kilometers away. “I suppose it is odd.”
“Odd? It makes no sense at all. But then, why should anyone travel through space? It’s so much trouble. You haven’t traveled through space, have you, Vikram?” A smile tugged at her lips.
“No,” I said curtly.
“I’m sure you will. As might I. I’ve been reading about it. I suspect that we are not the first race to travel through the solar system.”
“What have you been reading?”
“Oh, this and that. Stuff from the First Space Age, before the wars. There are indications that we are not the first, that others went among the planets long before we were even thought of. The Ancient Ones, some people call them. No one knows who they were.”
“Did they take your jewel?”
“Perhaps they did. If so, will you help me look for it?”
And, not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I said, “Sure, Aya. But I’m sleepy now, and going to bed. Good night.”
One day the Patriarch of Milwaukee, Simon Kramer, visited his monastery. The entire community dragged itself down to the monastery’s dock, some distance down shore from the ruined house and pier where I first met Laurena and Aya Ngomo. The Patriarch’s hydrofoil scudded across the lake like a sparkling water bug. Crumpled and shattered blue ice stretched out from the beach. It had been some labor breaking a passage through for a boat landing. The water beyond was gray and sullen, unhappy at remaining liquid while other water rested frozen.
Though I have since been to Constantinople and Moscow, I still remember the glory that emerged from the hydrofoil. The Patriarch and his entourage were dressed in scarlet and yellow robes embroidered with gold, vivid against the white and dried brown of the sleeping shore. Their crowns gleamed with jewels. Acolytes carried icons of the Virgin, the last—an unhappy, balding man—hauling a much-too-heavy gold reliquary containing the remains of St. Natalie of Choisy-le-Roi, martyred in 2094 by direct order of Governor-General Moreau as the Holy Apostolic Army of Russia advanced toward Paris. The sad man tripped over a beached and frozen carp, and looked even sadder.
The Patriarch held his audiences in the Library, a much-patched building that had once been a tourist restaurant. Among others he called to him his ward, Aya Ngomo. When Aya came to the Library she found me cleaning the bronze high reliefs that decorated its front. Brother Michael had detected a faint shadow of oxidation on the neck of one of the Roman soldiers uninterestedly witnessing the martyrdom of St. Lawrence in the third panel. I scrubbed behind the soldiers’ ears like a diligent mother, cursing Michael’s name.
“Vikram,” Aya said. “I’m afraid of him. He’s huge. He’s covered with jewels and has a loud voice. He’s like an idol.”
I looked down at her from my stepladder. She was not wise and mocking, demonstrating some subtle superiority over me. For the first time I saw her as a unhappy young woman, bent and twisted by an indifferent fate, unsure of what was going to happen next. Her clothes were neat and pressed for the interview.
“He’s just a man, Aya.” I didn’t have to face him. “He wants to ask you a few dumb questions about your studies and send you on your way.”
“Of course. Still. . . .” She looked at me appealingly with her large eyes, then smiled. She was trying act coquettish and it was grotesque.
“Go ahead.” I spoke in dismay. “Don’t keep him waiting.”
I returned to my memories of the night before. It had been a struggle as formalized as a Court dance but Laurena had finally allowed me to touch her breasts. I had run my hands gently across her skin, taking her nipples between thumb and forefinger—
“Novice Vikram Osten?” It was the balding sad man with the reliquary. He frowned up at me from the doorway, his droopy moustache like graffiti scrawled inexpertly across his face. His name was Donald Tergenius and he was head of the Patriarch’s civil secretariat. “Meditating on the fate of St. Lawrence?”
I noticed that I was leaning my hand on the body of the saint as he was roasted on the griddle in front of the Emperor Decius. “Yes.” I removed my hand and straightened. “He is the patron saint of libraries.”
“Just so. The Patriarch wishes to speak to you.”
“Yes, yes.” I jumped down from my stepladder and babbled. The man intimidated me. “I have been studying the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and—”
He regarded me gloomily. In later years I would learn that Tergenius invariably expressed anger as melancholy. “Save that stuff for someone who’s interested in it—whoever that might be. The Patriarch has more important things to think about. As do I.” He drew back into the doorway.
Patriarch Simon Kramer’s face was almost invisible beneath his beard. He sat behind a desk, members of his secretariat shoving papers under his gaze as he spoke. “I have good report of you,” he rumbled. Tergenius stood solemnly by his shoulder.
“I’m glad.” I tried to imagine who it could have been. The Archimandrite of St. Thecla had never deigned to notice me, and as for my lifemonk, Michael. . . .
“I have already learned to rely on the perceptions of my ward, Aya Ngomo. Continue your studies and you will be a success.” With this formula he shuffled me off, tongue-tied, onto the grim Tergenius, who escorted me back out.
We lingered in the doorway, he looking intently at me. “In several months I am leaving the Patriarch’s service. I am becoming a provincial administrator in Utah.” Despite my earlier blithe talk of Constantinople and Moscow, I felt him to be talking about the furthest ends of the Earth, a miserable exile. “There is room for advancement, there on the edge of our Empire, particularly for those uncomfortable under the just rule of the Church.”
“I’m sure there is. But my family has risen high here in Michigan.”
“That they have. And you intend to climb on their shoulders. A fair ambition, if predictable. Still, if events do not turn out as intended. . . .” A brief smile appeared on his face like a ritual gesture. Without another word he turned and walked away, leaving me wondering at the reasons behind his implied offer. He saw something in me, and advancement was impossible without a patron. But Utah. . . .
The sun was setting over the lake, its red light diffused through a layer of icy mist. I was searching for Aya but realized that I wouldn’t have far to look: I could see her bent figure down on the shore, black against the vivid blue of the snow. She twisted and shuffled, as if trying to dance.
“Aya, you’re cold.” She turned to look at me. “You should get back to the dormitory.”
My shoes were full of snow from my descent down the dunes. I could feel the cold wind off the lake tightening my cheeks. Aya’s once-neat clothes hung askew, as if she’d been running through the woods and rolling in the snow. Her face was flushed and her eyes were fever-bright. She didn’t seem to notice the cold. She was a woman in the grips of something far beyond her.
“I have made my decision, Vikram. Are you ready to go with me?”
“What? What did the Patriarch say to you?”
“Oh.” She made a face, a ladylike moue of disapproval, bizarre under the circumstances. “Some standard formulas. You know how these people talk.”
“So why—”
“I realized that he wanted to help me, but had no idea of how to do it. The burden is on me, if I’m to find what I’m looking for. And I will find it, my jewel. I will!”
“I’m sure.” I was cold and unhappy. Her husky voice seemed unsuitable to such absurdly melodramatic statements.
“And you’ll help me, won’t you, Vikram?” She took my arm, the first time she had ever touched me.
“What are you talking about?”
Her eyes shone as she looked at me. “I have seen what I have to do.”
She loved me. I suddenly understood. It made perfect sense. I was handsome, rich, clever. She was a poor crippled girl, completely alone, ward of a distant ecclesiastic. Her dismal fate drove her to love me through sheer self-defense, the way a drowning man loves air. So I didn’t take it as a judgment on my own worth. But I understood it.
“Doesn’t it occur to you that I too have jewels to seek?” I kept my voice hard.
She looked at me solemnly. “What are they, Vikram?”
I again pictured her jewel rolled into a dusty corner while the treasure chest gleamed. I had spoken to Tergenius and the Patriarch, men of power. And there were men of power far beyond them, the rulers of this world.
“The jewels of the Earth. I will climb to the heights, above the Patriarch, above the Governor of Ontario. You are not the only one with dreams.”
She caught her breath. For an instant I thought she was going to cry. “Oh, you poor man.” She put her thin arms around me. “What a choice to make!”
