"Your daughter's very pretty," Meg said, smiling at her.
"Her name is Sasha, I ..." She smiled. All of the anxiety she had been feeling had gone, she realized. "You aren't angry with me, are you? I mean . . . about Ben."
"Angry?" She laughed. "God, no. It'll be nice to have some decent company around. Now . . . turn your head slightly toward the light, so I can see what I'm doing."
SHE OPENED THE DOOR quietly and stepped inside. There was a long casement window to her right. Beneath it a broad wooden table crowded with all manner of things—a part-sculpted clay head, an oddly shaped piano keyboard, some sketches, pots of paints, brushes, scalpels, and rags, and, in a chaotically disordered pile, a stack of old folders labeled in Ben's precise hand. Ben himself had his back to her, working on a canvas. For a moment she stared out of the window, still surprised by how beautiful the valley was, how strange it felt to be outside the City. It was all so different, so frighteningly, confusingly different. No wonder Ben had seemed strange when she'd first met him; no wonder he'd seemed out of place back there in the levels. She looked back at him, then took two silent steps, moving to the left so that she could see the canvas better. It was a huge thing and took up most of the wall on that side of the room.
It was a picture of the valley—of the Domain—but changed, horribly transformed. In the top half of the canvas all seemed normal. Sunlight bathed the valley, creating a sense of great repose. Birds nested in the branches of the ash trees, and a swan glided on the golden, sunlit water. She could see the cottage to the right of the canvas, the tree—the same young oak she could glimpse from the window—just beneath it on the slope. Yet there, beneath it all, was a second world, so different from the first as to make its normality appear sinister, a mask to what was really real.
There, in the center of the picture, the earth had cracked and the water fell through a thin crust of darkness into what seemed like a vast flame-lit cavern. And as it fell, the water changed. Its vivid blue became a deep yellow. Its smooth liquid flow suddenly, violently fragmented—as if its very atomic properties had changed—tiny splinters of bright yellow glass scattering in a shower of exploding crystal onto the rocks below. The effect was startling.
She took a step toward it, feeling a ripple of fear run down her spine. It was the dance of death. To the far left of the cavern a tall, emaciated figure led the dance, its skin as pale as glass, its bare arms lithely muscled, the long legs stretched taut like a runner's. Its body was facing to the left—to the west and the darkness beyond—but its horselike, shaven head was turned unnaturally on its long neck, staring back dispassionately at the naked host that followed, hand in hand, down the path through the trees.
In its long, thin hands Death held a flute, the reed placed to its lipless mouth. From the tapered mouth of the flute spilled a flock of tiny blackbirds, the cruel rounded eyes like tiny beads of milky white as they fell onto the host below, pecking at eye and limb.
In the very center of the cavern, beneath the great gash in the earth, the settling crystal had formed a sluggish flow—like the flow of glittering lava. She recognized the allusion. These were the Yellow Springs, beneath which, the Han claimed, the dead had their domain, ti yu, the "earth prison."
So bleak it was. So hopeless those forlorn and forward-staring figures. A scene of utter torment, and no release—no sign of simple human compassion.
She shivered, watching him lean toward the canvas to make the tiniest of changes to one of the figures.
"It's called The Feast of the Dead,' " he said quietly.
"It's extraordinary," she said. Yes, and horribk, and frightening and . . . and beautiful, all at the same time. "Was it a dream?"
"Yes," he said. "But not one of mine. I saw this once. Or a version of it. Do you remember? I told you about it."
She shrugged. If he had, she didn't recall it.
"The Oven Man," he said, as if that were the key that would unlock the memory. "He painted this with ash."
It meant nothing to her.
"Well, he'll be busy tonight, neh?" He turned, then frowned at her. "Where's the child?"
"Meg's looking after her."
"Ah . . ."
She watched him, surprised by how calm he was, how untouched by events. "It's ending," she said. "The world is ending, Ben."
His eyes were cool, unmoved by her words. "You don't think I know? We Shepherds have been awaiting this for centuries!" He turned slightly, looking back at the canvas, then laughed quietly. "When things break down, we artists forge new links. We make sense of it all. That's our purpose."
He turned back, staring at her, the full intensity of his gaze bearing down on her, then, beckoning her closer, he offered her the brush. "Come . . . add your own figure to the dance."
SAMPSA CREPT SLOWLY down the hallway. Kneeling beside the open doorway, he looked into the room.
His grandfather lay there, propped up on the cushions, completely still, his hairless, skull-like head turned toward the window and the sea.
One quarter of his genetic makeup had come from the old man. One quarter of all he was. Slowly, like a fox creeping through the grass toward a chicken pen, he crawled into the room, making his way to the foot of the bed.
He could hear the old man's breathing, smell that strange, musty smell that seemed to cling to him. Carefully he raised his head, looking over the carved wooden foot of the huge bed.
The old man's head looked like something that had been carved in jest. Those features which, in the portrait in the hall, created a sense of rocklike strength, now seemed merely ludicrous, the chin too wide, the nose too long for the collapsed bone-structure of the face.
The skin itself seemed stretched over the bone, like animal hides over a nomad's tent, its surface blotched and yellowed, blighted here and there by tufts of coarse ice-gray hair.
Slowly he moved around, creeping toward where his grandfather's hand lay on top of the sheet, its gleaming gold extending to the leather pad at the shoulder. Sampsa stared at it a moment. It was easy to imagine that the old man's body was slowly being turned from flesh to gold; that he would come back in the evening and the whole of the old man's chest and head would be made of the same bright, gleaming metal.
"Sampsa?"
Tolonen's head turned the slightest amount, those watery gray eyes still fixed upon the distant sea.
"Yes, Grandpa?"
"Ah . . ." The old man's mouth formed the suggestion of a smile. For a time he was silent, then he gave a little cough. The fingers of his hand flexed, like a machine coming to life. "Come closer, boy."
He stood, stepping to his grandfather's side, careful not to block his view. From this close the smell of the old man was much stronger. It was like the smell of old cupboards, of drawers that had been kept locked for years, their contents slowly rotting in the darkness.
"What do you see, Grandpa?"
"See?" The voice was like the wind whispering through the treetops. The old man made a sound that might have been either laughter or discomfort; he couldn't tell which. "I see old friends. Li Shai Tung. Klaus Ebert. Young Vittorio Nocenzi. They're out there, waiting for me."
Sampsa turned and looked, but there was nothing; only an old man's imaginings. Turning back, he reached down and laid his hand against the old man's palm. The metal was soft and warm—not metal at all, he realized, but something that resembled it.
Looking back at the old man's face he saw Tolonen was watching him.
"Something's happening," the old man said, his voice a sigh. "I can feel it." Something of the old strength flickered briefly in those eyes, then vanished, like a fish slipping back into the depths. "What is it, boy? What's happening?"
It's the old world, Grandpa, he wanted to say. It's dying. Just as you are dying. And the new is being bom. That's what you feel. The death pangs of the old and the birth pangs of the new.