6/12/2003
Avalon, Cape May County, NJ, USA
Geoffrey Ashbrook
By night he walked the roofs of the compound. It was a vast cluster of mansions that loped over one the horsy waters of the river Tolls to the south and foamed over the slight valley north until it reached the mountains, where it climbed the first two peaks before giving off to sentinel monasteries. From the roofs the labyrinth of streets were visible as what they are from above, and the networks of clotheslines and message cables became part of a second ground floor.
He had been there two months, and had watched everything intently for that time, and he solidly felt that he had no idea of what was going on. The guards waved as he went by. The bells on the shop doors jangled like clock bells. The men with their thick bound books hugged tight to the breast in the rain scuttled along as though their ankles were not allowed to travel apart as much as they would like. The endless ant processions of basket carts and wooden carts and saddle bags filled with cloth, sand, wire, and metal persisted through all hours. By day the streets were teaming tributaries of flows that defied whatever governs waters. Up and down hill, both ways at once, crossing streams, vast channels of frantic movement yet in no predominant direction and with no collisions. What would happen to the air, he would always wonder, if like this the pieces always happened to miss eachother?
He slept twice a day, at irregular times, so that he could watch everything that happened day and night. He watched the filers from behind through their vast windows. He watched the great machines and furnaces. He watched the people traveling back to their homes in the neighboring villages each evening. He watched the first few lights turn on behind windowed rooms before the sun came up, and he watched the last ones flicker out. He watched the players of strange instruments traveling from inn to inn, setting up and packing up.
He watched his new father-in-law. He watched him meeting with people, that’s what he seemed to do all day. People who came on the backs of birds, people who came hidden in small baskets, people who called out to him and waded through the workers in plain sight, people who appeared only in the faces of mirrors and in polished sheets of crystal. And he watched his mother -in-law, who poured over maps of the world day in and day out. She knew who owned every inch of land around the planet, and which inches were owned by no one. And she kept maps of many other planets as well.
Then one night, as he was rounding a corner near the East Tower, he found one of the family guard standing there. “Sir Grin,” the guard said with a slight bow. “Your father is expecting you. Do you know where to find him?”
“No,” said Grin.
The guard smiled, “He is in the East Observatory.”
“Thank you Bryn, I shan’t keep him waiting.”
The guard, who --for reasons that Grin did not entirely understand-- appeared always to have a very stooped posture, turned, flickered, and was gone. Grin looked out over the pallet of rooftops to see her springing into the air from off a message cable, only to disappear between buildings a hundred yards away.
Grin made his way quickly to the roof of the observatory, with its great dome always ahum with the instruments inside. He scrambled up the side, popped open a hatch, slid down a ladder, swung over to a ledge, followed the ledge to the office, dropped down in the doorway, and knocked once.
He heard steps from inside, a key fumbled in the lock, and the door swung wide open. Inside stood his great father-in-law, smiling and obese, with his wide prospecting eyes. He reached out and scooped the boy into the room with a giant hand, both patting him on the back and propelling him inside. “Ah, Grin,” he said with a jolly rumble. “You came so quickly.” He tipped the door shut with a finger but did not lock it. “How is...your time? Are you comfortable? How is my Daughter?”
“I don’t know,” Grin said plainly, “I haven’t seen her in more than two weeks.”
His stepfather seemed to have become stuck, his mouth was half formed around a word, but he wasn’t even breathing. Finally his lips pursed together and he let out a low sighing ‘hmmm.’ “I hope you are not troubled by anything that those...that any of the monks at the monastery, may have told you.”
“Oh it’s nothing like that. It’s just that your whole compound is so interesting. I find it hard to take my eyes off it. There’s so much going on. I mean, I’ve been watching everything for weeks and I’m not even sure what happens here. Will I...ever be allowed to know why you chose me?”
Less, whose eyes had been ever narrowing with suspicion until this question, finally closed them. “Yes, of course,” he said, almost to himself. “This must all be very new to you. And strange to you? To go from seeing only men and boys to being married, to go from a simple life in the big hills to the very thick of my compound, yes, a sharp mind must take things to adjust. And you are no fool. And you? Why you?
“For years before my daughter was even born I had men coming from across the solar system to pledge their unborn sons to marriage. Not a week goes by, even now that all know she has been married, that I don’t receive bags filled with letters, proposals, invitations, from even kings, though I know not why they are so keen. And the care and cost of each note equals the price of raising a building. Just, they say, ‘come and see our grounds,’ as they are sure that would be enough to bend my mind. But...they say that children are never separate from their parents’ minds, even the subconscious mind --especially the subconscious mind.
“Children are born into the wishes that we do not know we have, which perhaps saves us from the folly of our ambitions...yes? I have known countless counts, dukes and barons, who have children who are worse than worthless. They care not for business, they ravage the maids, they pelt their parent’s guests with insults, even mud, and it is plain that though the parents look on with horror these children are expressing the most sincere feelings of their parents. If you want to know how a nobleman really thinks of you, look at how his children treat you. No,” he said shaking his hands, ”this is no absolute rule, I have seen otherwise many times. But it is true too often to be overlooked. And I myself, am of many minds.”
There was a pause as Less looked down on Grin, and Grin met his gaze with the same searching scrutiny that he parsed the compound with all day. But Less was all but impenetrable.
“So you think that I’m not like you, is that it?” asked Grin.
“I am not aiming for difference, young Grin, I do not hate myself or envy you so much. I aim only for chance. I know as little of you as I know of my own depths. This twisted compound must not fall to any who has fought for it. No, it lands on you like a curse. Uninvited, unaware of itself. It will grow around you, and into you. It cannot be controlled, but it needs people all the same.”
“So, do you want me to-“
“I do not want to tell you what to do.”
“But you do have wishes, I can see it in your eyes--sort of.”
“I do not trust...that my words do not come from this place...and I do not trust it. So I will not speak. I can not...see...anymore, do you understand what I say?”
“You can’t see?”
“The whole I can not see. Where it is going, what ails it. When it must be stopped, or turned. It is like a great ship, a giant monster of the sea. Is it wonderful, terrible, I do not know. Should it be nurtured or killed and forever banished, I do not know. How it takes and drains people, I do not understand. Our minds are like platters of food to it. And we live on it, and it feeds us too.”
“And you are giving this all to me?”
“It is done. You have my blessing, which I can only hope is not more than half a curse. I would apologize, but it does not seem appropriate somehow. Now tell me, what are you seeing when you watch this place? You say you do not understand what you see, but you want to keep looking?”
“Well, there’s a kind of life here. It’s alive, I can see that, but I can’t...but there’s so much that I don’t know ab-“
“There is no such thing as seeing everything, young Grin. Seeing more isn’t always what you think. More is not what you think it is. If you chase after what you are not seeing, you will turn your head from what you do see. Know what you see. It is the same as with any discontent, it does not honor what we have.”
“I want to see what you see, but...how could you be blind? You have to see something. You don’t act blind.”
“Maybe. But now I must go, the compound calls me to where it has better ears than here. And you have roofs to walk, and a young wife. Fair well, Grin,” he said, taking up the boy’s hand in his own, careful not to squeeze too hard. There was something final in his voice.
Grin stood, walked to the door, turned & bowed, exited, closed the door quietly, and made a mad dash for the wall next to a boiler. He stepped onto one of the hot water pipes --his shoe hissing for the moment it touched-- and he kicked off and grabbed onto the second floor railing, swung himself on top, leapt off the railing onto a thin window ledge on the wall, and jumped out into the night.
Once outside he began to walk slowly, watching the procession of the stars above and of the paper lanterns below. And in his internal map, a vast landscape of question marks, he filled in one more stylized question mark over the bed of his new father.
He walked out towards a bend in the river where the night-fisherman fished from the branches of the trees that hung out over the flow. Every few minutes there was a glimmer of silver as a slippery body was pulled from the water. And then it flapped in the air as it rose into the trees. Sometimes there was a subsequent splash, sometimes a very large one.
Grin walked out over the tiles and ducked under a large ventilation pipe. A gathering of birds scattered from the roof when he turned the corner, and there over the edge was the dull red glow and the rhythmic tinging of the blacksmiths yard. They were often busy all night, though he could rarely guess at what they were making. Tonight it looked like they were making small rings and long arching poles. He watched them scuttle around for a few minutes and then headed south again.
After a few narrow alleys and half a dozen clotheslines he’d made his way to the southwest restaurant district, where he climbed to the top of an old hexagonal lighthouse that now housed a cafe & teahouse. Up on the roof he found a few chairs and small tables, one of them occupied. “Hello, Patina,” he said, panting slightly. “Nice night, isn’t it?”
“You’re late,” she said.
“You bet I am,” he said, excitedly. “I was just talking with your dad.”
“You what? Is something wrong?”
“Oh no. He just wanted to...uh...I dunno actually. Just uh, talk, I guess.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he mentioned that he felt this whole compound’s cursed, and how he feels like its taken him over, and made him blind, and that uh, that was what compelled him to give it all away to a completely stranger like me. Are you finished with that soup?”
“Is that all he said?”
“Uh, oh, he did seem a bit worried that I hadn’t seen your sister in a while. Actually I should probably go and talk to her now, you think?”
“Why’d you tell him?” she asked concernedly.
“Why not? He’s fine with it. He just wanted to make sure I’m not afraid of girls, you know, ‘Those kooky monks,’” he said, jiggling his fingers in the air above his head. “What kind of soup is it tonight?”
“A shellfish broth, with potatoes, bean paste cubes, onions, and...fig.”
“And fig?”
“It’s good, try some.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is.”
“Can I nab a bit of that bread,”
“Uh huh,”
“Thanks.” And then after a bit of spoon clanging and chewing he said, his mouth still half full, “Thish is good.”
“So what’re you gunna talk to Lysine about?” asked Patina.
“Oh, you know, stuff,” he said, looking all around. “Actually I’ve no idea. I hope I haven’t forgotten what she looks like. Oow, just kidding.” He rubbed his shoulder. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“You know how many people wish they were married to her?”
“That’s what your father was saying. An I think about that all day, when I look around this place. It’s rife with dreams like that down there. And here I am, don’t even know what I have. Don’t even...well, I can’t appreciate it, can I?”
“Well go on, you great lump. Go and tell her I said hey. Oh, and give her this. It’s something I nabbed I mean I...paid for, down at the market.” She said as she carefully rubbed something off the nail of her left index finger. “Go on,”
“Thanks, I’ll catch you up later,” he said. And he stood up, pushed his chair in, tucked the parcel into the inner pocket of his robe, nodded, and dashed and dove off the roof and down into an array of message cables.
Landing on an over-cross he trampolined over a few narrow domiciles belonging to new members of the Carpenter’s Guild and landed on the smooth slope of a mail depot. From there he worked his way north.
Once he had crossed over to the court-residential district he could just leap all the gaps between buildings, and he made quick time of it. Soon he was on his own roof. It felt strange, and good. So often he had no idea who he was walking around above, and it felt good to know that in the event that he fell through the ceiling that he’d be welcome to stay.
He jumped down onto the porch, fitted his key into the sliding door --which appeared to be wooden framed with hundreds of wrist width square glass panels, but which he knew housed iron bars beneath the wood--, turned the key, and pulled. But the door didn’t budge. So he tried pushing and the door swung silently in. He went in and closed the door behind him. He was in ‘the living room...probably,’ he thought, trying to recall the layout of his small home. He wandered around reacquainting himself. The kitchen, the...hallway...lots of doors that could be closets, bathrooms, entrances, stairways, oh boy. He began to wonder if he was in the right place as he admired a large painting, which he’d never seen before, above of the fireplace. He had a fireplace? He’d always wanted one of those. They had had big ones back at the monetary, but not in the cells where they slept.
At the end of a long hall he saw a door which he was pretty sure he remembered, as it had a large ding in it where he’d fallen over trying to pull his pants on in the morning and knocked over a bookcase that fell splintering into it. Fortunately Lysine had been more amused than distraught at the ruined bookcase.
He put his hand around the knob, and pushed on the door, but the knob wouldn’t turn. He looked down at the lock and at the keys on his key chain, but he knew where all his keys went and this wasn’t one of them.
He put his ear to the door, and heard nothing. He looked at the bottom of the door, and there was no light coming underneath. He turned around and looked down the empty hall for a few minutes, yawned, and began to walk away from the door. After a few wrong turns he made his way to the porch, exited, and locked the door behind him. He climbed back onto the roof and began to slowly plot out in his mind where everything in the house was below him.
He traced out where the hall should have branched and run, to the dinged door, to the bedroom. He was pretty sure that the bedroom had two or three windows on two walls --being at a corner of the building. He draped himself over the roof and looked down and in from the overhang and saw a bunch of windows. He began to slide off the roof, so he reached his fingers around the corner and let himself fall heels-over-head and just hung.
He let go with one of his hands and turned to face the building again, and noted that one of the windows was unlatched and open a crack. He hand-walked down the roof to get closer to it. He reached out his foot and swung back and forth until he could tap the window, and then with each inward swing he toed the window open a bit more. When it was open about a foot, he swung in hard and let his feet pass in the open window, and he bent his legs down at the knees so that when the rest of his body fell outside the window he could hang by his legs. His back slapped against the wall harder than he had anticipated and it almost knocked the wind out of him. He looked down the five stories to the ground, took a deep breath, curled his torso up, grabbed onto the sides of the windowsill with his hands, pulled his feet out, and then stuffed his head into the window and let himself slide in and onto the floor in a heap.
He heard something move in the room and he looked up to see someone sit up in the bed on the side closest the door. “Whusat?” said a girl’s voice, sounding half asleep.
Grin got up and went over to the side of the bed and said, “It’s just me. The uh, door was locked so, uh, I crawled in the window. Were you sleeping ok until now?”
Lysine blinked and looked over at the door, and turned back to him. “You could have knocked.”
“Well, I, I didn’t want to wake you up,”
“You were going come in and not wake me up?”
“Uh, no...but,”
“What time is it?” she said, rubbing one of her eyes.
“It’s about four, now.”
“Four? Why didn’t you just come by in the morning?”
“I...I didn’t think of that. I was, I just had to see you.”
“You did?”
“Uh, look. I was talk’n to your dad, and uh, to Patina-“
“Tonight? Did something happen?” she sat up straighter and swung one of her legs out from under the covers.
“Uh, no no. No, there’s nothing wrong. No, uh, accidents or anything.”
“An accident?”
“Ugh, no uh. Oh jeeze.” He flopped down face forward onto the bed.
“You are so odd.”
Grin said something but because his face was pressed into the duvet it came out only as an intermittent humming.
“What?”
He rolled over and covered most of his face with his hands, “I’m in love with your sister.”
“You’re what? I think I’m dreaming.”
“No, look,” he said, sitting up quickly taking her hand gingerly. “She doesn’t know about this.”
“She doesn’t know what? That you’re telling me? Are you planning to elope or something?”
“What? No, she doesn’t know I like her, or that I’m in love with her. Oh, and she got these for you down at the market.” He pulled the parcel out of his robe and pressed it into her hand and closed her fingers around it, and looked her seriously in eyes.
“Why, what is this?” she asked, looking down at the parcel.
“Oh, I don’t know, let’s have a look?”
“You don’t know what it is?”
“Should I?”
Lysine rolled her eyes and unwrapped it and found a mound of slightly squished chocolate truffles.
“Ooo truffles, that was a good idea,” said Grin excitedly. “Sorry I squooshed them.”
“Why are you telling me all this? Why is she giving me truffles, and why was my dad talking you? What is going on, Grin?”
Grin knit his brows and stared at the wall with his mouth shaped like an ‘O,’ and then met her gaze again and said, “I don’t know,” and he smiled.
Lysine buried her face in her hands and then dropped them back to her lap. “Why haven’t you been here in so long, Grin? ...Did...did I do something?”
Grin looked at her and cocked his head. “Your fine,” he said reassuringly.
“What do you mean I’m fine!” she shouted, “I’m not fine, I’m pissed off. Your driving me nuts, Grin! It’s been almost three weeks since you disappeared!”
“I didn’t disa-“
“Shut it! Two months ago I found out that I was going to be getting married, that someone else had just decided the rest of my life for me. Fine. I didn’t even get to take a look at you until after the wedding because my stupid dress was so big and that vale was like a curtain. So then we actually get to talk, and you seem ok. A little light-headed but not abusive or pushy or anything. And so I think, ok, maybe it’s going to be ok, maybe we’ll learn to love eachother, maybe he’ll grow up to be handsome, maybe I’ll be proud to ride beside him in coaches through the country side, maybe he’ll take us and our family on trips to other worlds, maybe he’ll grow up! And then the next day you leave, and show up way after dinner time TWO DAYS LATER with a bag full of dead fish!”
“They were fresh fish, I’d just caught them,”
“You’re not supposed to catch fish in the middle of the night...don’t you understand?” She searched his eyes for some light of recognition.
“What are you saying?” he said quietly.
“I’m saying...I’m saying I’ve only seen you four times since we’ve been married! I’m saying you just show up in the middle of the night with fish, or breaking into your own bedroom window. I’m saying, that I don’t know anything about you. Where are you from? What kind of family do you have? I’m saying, what I am supposed to do...when you tell me that you’ve fallen in love with my sister, but that she doesn’t know about it! What am I supposed to say to that, huh? ‘Congratulations?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ What? You’re freaking me out. You’re wrecking my life. It’s not supposed to go like this. I’m Less’s daughter. I could have married princes from any world around the sun. But no, I married you. Are you a prince? Maybe you are, but YOU HAVEN’T SAID ANYTHING YET!” She was trembling with anger. Her small hands were balled into tight white-knuckled fists.
“Wow,” said Grin, grinning. “I never saw you do this before.”
“How can you be smiling!” she shouted, grabbing a pillow from behind her and clubbing him in the side of the head. And she kept hitting him with it over and over as she spoke, despite his unsuccessful attempts to catch it in the air. “What are you doing to me!” She hollered, punctuating her sentences with blows from the pillow. “Your making, my life, into some, kind, of joke!”
Unable to catch her pillow, Grin grabbed up one of the other pillows and began batting at her with it. After a few minutes of unadulterated mutual pillow pummeling he caught her pillow in mid swing, so that they were both gripping the same battered case and fully able to see eachother --frazzled visages that they were.
“Ok,” he said, now grinning more than ever, “I’ll give you some answers.”
Lysine still looked all riled up, but he could tell that she was grinning now too, even though she was trying not to.
“I am not a prince, or from any other world. I’m from a monastery. I never had any family that I can remember. The monastery I’m from is deep in the mountains to the north of here. And I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t even know what it means that we were married. They didn’t have marriages at the monastery, I figured it was just some kind of social formalism, like being adopted into a family, or like a bond of friendship, like when kids cuts their fingers and rub the blood together. But...it seems like there’s a lot more I need to know about it.
“When I was talking with your dad tonight, he was sitting in the East Observatory, and he called for me to meet him there, he talked to me about why he’d picked me out of the countless others. He didn’t say exactly, in any simple way. But I think he knows that this compound is alive somehow, and he’s afraid of it, and of what would happen if someone greedy got in charge of it. He’s even afraid of himself now.
“He said he wanted a chance. Like rolling dice I think. Like everything he does on purpose is poisoned by the curse of this place. And he apologized for putting it all on me...sort of. And he loves you, he really does. And he was worried that we’re not getting along. And he was afraid that I was afraid of you because of the things Monks tell the acolytes about girls, or at least I’m guessing that’s what it was. Has he ever talked to you about all that?
“But, what about Patina?”
“Oh forget her,”
“But you said you’re in love with her.”
“Maybe I am, but we’re still married. Now...I don’t know what that means exactly, but to me it means that we’re friends, above all else. And nothing, not even love should get in the way of that. I made some kind of promise to keep some sort of flame burning. I don’t now what...they were talking about, but...”
“But what?”
Grin noticed that he she was looking at him kinda funny now, and he also started to notice that he was very tired from pillowing and from not sleeping.
“But, I think the flame of this place is blown out somehow.”
Lysine turned and looked out the window, at the stars outside and at the reflection of the gaslights across the way --dancing on the surface of the creek all splayed against the wall aside the window.
“And I think I’ve been asked to relight it. Will you help me?”
“What?”
“Will you help me relight this place?”
She looked at him searchingly.
“Yeah,”
“You promise swear?”
“Uh huh.”
Grin sighed and closed his eyes, and tipped and slumped down face forward onto the bed beside her, laying over the one of her legs that was still under the covers. He said something else but his face was in the duvet again. She let her hand drift silently over the surface of the bed, and, very tentatively, she ran her fingers through his curly coppery hair and closed her eyes and listened to the birds outside the still open window.