Rats and Gargoyles (54 page)

"Likewise, the length of the foot is one sixth the
height of the whole body; the length of the forearm one fourth . . . And since
man’s a microcosm, and thus like the larger macrocosm, so the proportions and
symmetry of the Temple, matching the body, can mirror the proportions and order
of the cosmos."

"The cosmos isn’t as ordered as all
that."
Evelian smiled grimly. "Allow for it being flamboyant and disordered from time
to time, Archemaster."

"Well . . . yes."

"I’d build the place with room for people."
Sharlevian looked up, face smeared with chalk, totally unself conscious. "You go
up to the avenues round the royal palace and
boom
!–it just hits you. You
feel about
this
high. All those blocks, so massive–and you have to get up
on the pavement or the coaches just knock you down. I’d build our Temple so
people could sit around and just meet in the evenings, and there’d be places you
could buy food, and the temple would look as though it wanted you to come in . .
."

‘I'd build a garden. In the center of the Temple. Laid
out in pattern and proportion
,
but built of growing things . . .’
Heidelberg Castle and Gardens, engraved by Matthieu Merian from
Hortus
Palatinus,
Salomon de Caus, pub. Johann Theodore De Bry, Frankfurt, 1620

"I . . . ah"–Tannakin Spatchet emerged from the depths of the barrow–"I’d have the courtyard big
enough to hold a regular market, and a place for the Market Court to meet, and
somewhere to have a drink with colleagues when business is over . . ."

"And what a time you’d have with university
students!" Evelian laughed. The sound startled her. "Well, and why not? I’d like
a place I could go to meet my old friends, a place that we’d helped build and
was ours. No Lords!
And
I’d allow Temple coins, so that we could buy and
sell in the Temple precinct, not barter. Even if that only happened there, it’d
be a beginning. Say you–build your Temple and I’ll run the bank for you!"

Her daughter giggled. Casaubon rubbed a
cement-covered hand across his lapel, staining his coat.

"I’d build a garden. In the center of the Temple.
Laid out in pattern and proportion, but built of growing things: flowers,
mosses, trees. A microcosm laid out in concentric circles, with the plants of
each Celestial Sign growing in their proper places. I built gardens in my city
. . ."

He raised his head, meeting Evelian’s eyes.

"No Architect-Lords in that city now. Not any more.
Oh, Parry’s good enough to me. She’s a senator in the Republic; she sees
projects are put my way. But . . ."

"It should have a dome!" Sharlevian rolled over and
grabbed the edge of the stone of Seshat to pull herself to her feet. She
scrambled, careless of a rip in her overalls, to exhume an old leather bucket
from a rubbish-pile.

"With the Celestial Signs," she added, scratching
with a nail on the interior surface. "Or . . . Archemaster, will the Decans
still be here on earth?"

Her tone had increased in respect since she saw the
Chymicall Labyrinth function. She now eyed the Lord- Architect with expectation.
Evelian smiled slightly, and caught the fat man’s eye, and imperceptibly shook
her head.

"Mistress Sharlevian, who knows?" He placed the
makeshift dome on the central circular walls.

Tannakin Spatchet, peering down, said: "Steps up to
the main building–the flower- and fruit-sellers use them."

"And fountains, to drink."

"And let people draw on the pavements . . ."

Evelian shivered, ignored the coldness that bit at
her fingers, and twisted wire in the proportions of golden mean and rule;
watching it begin to take shape. Tiles propped up to form walls, bricks standing
for outbuildings, the carefully measured wooden frame of the main building
topped by its ridiculous bucket-dome–Casaubon and Sharlevian sprawling by it
like children on a rug. Tannakin Spatchet unearthed a hose-nozzle, and
ceremoniously set it in the tile-marked-out "courtyard" as a fountain.

Evelian said: "I thought you were a fraud when you
arrived. I see I was wrong. I never did believe Crow’s stories of her Invisible
College–I see I was wrong in that, too."

Casaubon’s fingers, surprisingly delicate in their
movements, wired lath to lath in parts of a growing framework. The skeleton
hinted at outflung quirky grandeur: classical proportions extended into pleasing
irregularity–towers, balconies, buttresses; comfortable small rooms, colonnades,
courtyards.

"Not a fraud." He placed another part of the
framework on the chalked stone. It rocked. "Just out of my depth, Mistress
Evelian."

Sharlevian, mixing mud in her hands, began to
plaster the courtyard’s outer walls smooth. Ignoring a broken fingernail, she
sketched
trompe l’aeil
designs, so that her mother (closing an eye,
squinting, forgetting scale) could see how the designs would lead one to
perceive longer galleries and an apotheosis of images on the ceiling.

"I was hoping that at least
one
of the four
of us knew what we’re about."

The Lord-Architect’s gaze lifted first to her and
then to the enclosing black light. His breath misted the air. He said nothing.

Four sets of hands built the model, in the warm
shadow of the foundation-stone. The wooden-lath frame and hessian-and-plaster
walls took on solidity. Rickety, makeshift, it none the less began to body out a
shape.

The air shook again like a tolling bell.

Higher above the city that is called the heart of
the world, birds soar.

The air is chill now, and thin. Below them the city
curves with the curvature of the world. Eagles, wild hawks, cormorants and
finches; bright parakeets and humming-birds: all frail feathers beat against the
troposphere. Beaks snap. Butterfly-bodies crunch.

And still, higher and further, the bright blobs of
moths and butterflies fly upwards. Drawn up by the black fires that sear the
sky, hot and bitter as a plague-sore. Souls drawn up by the Night Sun that scars
the sky as black tattered flesh scars the plague-dead.

Air thins in the frail bones of birds, but still
they strive for height, striking at the bright insects, devouring.

A black-and-white death’s-head moth bobs in the
air, feeling on dusty fragile wings the cold of the Night Sun. The chill that
will crisp the
psyche
into nothingness.

The death’s-head moth flies up towards that
oblivion, away from the beating wings of a dusty brown sparrow.

The black fire that does not give life but takes
it: that can create only the death of a soul.

The white crow flew through the hollow body of the
dying god.

A stone rib-cage soared above her. All hollow,
hollow and white, that had been ebony: the Decan of Noon and Midnight.

The crow soared up, her wing-tips bending to the
pressure of the air. Ice glinted on the pale stone ribs curving up to rise above
her head.

"Hhrrraaa-kk!"

She flew through the void of it, vast as
cathedrals: a gutted empty carcass. If stone can rot, this stone flesh rotted.
It curved like a vast wall at her right side. Ribs, muscles, tendons clearly
delineated.

On each lump of tendon and muscle, and lodged in
the splintered crevices of bone, white wax candles burned. The yellow flames
leaped in the draught of her wings. She felt their heat. Fire palely reflected
in the stone flesh, warming no thaw in the frost.

Receding ranks of candles burned on each hillock
and lump of petrified gut. The sweet smell of beeswax dizzied her. So far away
that only avian sight detects it, the great ribs curved down again.

She beat frantic wings to soar up. The great spine
of the Decan of Noon and Midnight jutted infinitely far above her head,
vertebrae an avenue of spiked pillars hanging down into void. Light blazed back
from the blade of a shoulder, vast as a salt-plain. Stone guts hung from stone
ribs in profuse lace drapery.

Dust brushed her wing. She side-slipped in the cold
air. A great slew of stone flesh avalanched down, raising dust and chill.
Decaying, the rib-cage opened to the air beyond, a mist of gold and rose-color
that her bird’s vision could not penetrate. From candle-starred heights another
chunk of stone fell, alabaster-white, turning slowly in the air. She glided,
caught in fascination; it roiled the air, falling past, tumbling her end over
end; shattered in thunderous fragments below.

Weary, she skimmed the air, gliding down to flick
her shadow (pale as ice) across the rounded joint of a limb, domed as great
buildings are; rose again, straining, avian heartbeat ticking fast as a watch.
The hollow between clavicle and jaw opened up ahead, flesh rotted away into
stone-dust.

She beat her wings, straining to reach the gap. The
great jaw-bones shed scales, marble slabs that might have stood for walls in the
Temple of Salomon. An ache bit into what would have been her shoulders and the
muscles of her breast. Cramp twinged. She wheeled and spun down–down–down; the
floor of the body so great a distance below that she feared her strength would
fail, and she fall despite her shape.

A color: scarlet.

Far below, a man climbed slowly and painfully over
the uneven surface between rib and stone rib, his bare feet slipping on the icy
marble among the candles. One splash of color: he wore, still, its arms knotted
around his waist, Candia’s buff-and-scarlet doublet.

Naked, his ribs showed bony as the Decan’s.

"Dies irae!"

White silence shattered at her caw. She spread
crow’s wings, gliding down the pale air. Double images from
her wide-set eyes merged as she focused on the man below.

"I take it to be that hour." Theodoret raised his
head. Gray eyes brimmed with mutable brilliance, following the curve of her
flight. He shook the hair back from his eyes, smiling. "Well, child? Young
Candia believed help to be found in the Invisible College. You should have come
before."

"I did. The Decan. The Eleventh Decan. She moved
me."

"To this crucial hour . . ."

The white crow spread pinions to cup air, stalled,
and gripped a splintered rib between her claws. She hopped from one jutting
splinter of bone to the next. Warmth of candle-fire singed her breast-feathers,
the stone under her claws icy.

"Oh, the world–is
always
saved. Always. In
some form. Or another. What matters–" She forced breath from minute lungs in a
toneless parody of speech. "What matters–is what happens–to people. Individuals.
They’re not. Always saved."

She tilted her head to look from one eye and gain a
clear image.

Theodoret smiled, genuine amusement on his lined
face. "You’re a very cynical crow, lady."

She spluttered a caw that began in indignation and
ended in something unrecognizable.

"But it
is
time." Theodoret tugged the
knotted sleeves tighter about his waist. He picked up a fallen bone spar or
splinter from the floor, bracing his steps across the uneven flesh.

The white crow flapped into the air, landed
scrabbling on the smooth side of a rib, and skidded down into the hollow between
in a flurry of feathers. The Bishop of the Trees laughed. He trod onwards, bare
feet unsteady on the icy stone.

"Craa-aak!"

She recovered herself, flapping up, curving in long
glides back and forth across his path as he clambered over neck-bones, knee-deep
in decaying stone-dust.

In the void ahead of her, a paler light shone down
from empty eye-sockets vast as rose-windows, into the interior of the skull. The
great head of The Spagyrus lay tilted, fangs wide as pillars crossing his
half-open jaw. Wax stalactited the ledges of jaw and palate, and the curving
roots of broken teeth: white candles burning with a pure flame. She flew wearily
in the cold air, soaring up.

An old woman and a young man sat on the floor of
the jaw.

Between them they scattered small cubes. The white
crow skimmed the air above their heads, catching double visions of dice as she
passed. Heurodis’s smoky-blue gaze never wavered as she drew the dice towards
herself and cast. The bearded blond man sprawled back on one hip, a finger
tapping at his mouth; and as she passed he reached out and scooped up four of
the six dice and tossed them down.

A feather falling–or is it rising?–against a blue
sky:
Flight.
Meshing cogs and gearwheels:
Craft.
In a field of
corn and poppies, two lovers embrace:
The Sun.
And– escaping its weighted
cast towards the androgyne that dances masked,
The World
–the flower-eyed
skull of
Death.

An intensity of light burned about the bone-cubes,
images bright with color in that white desert. She felt through the tips of
spread pinions how air and probability strained there; the edge of the field
catching her, and she wheeled, gliding back towards the Bishop of the Trees.