I crossed my arms, keeping the sagittal away from my chest. “You left.”
“I wanted to study under the Botanists,” she said. “And I’m older than the rest of you. In a year they’ll have me in the kitchen, or carrying slops, or—” She shook her head, tight-lipped. “But you—why should you leave? Miramar wants you to stay,” she said bitterly.
“As the next suzein.”
“You should be flattered.” A bone pin sprang from her chignon. I retrieved it and handed it back to her. For a long moment she let her fingers rest against mine, and I felt her fingertips, callused from wielding the knout for her Patrons, the rough skin that never would have been allowed within another House. Then she took the pin and turned away. “I would never have left if Miramar had tried to stop me. But he didn’t. He thinks I’m already too old.”
I watched her chalk her face and drop two pearls of octine into each eye before she turned to me once more. “Raphael, you just don’t know—”
I stood and stalked to the window. “And you think you know it all now, just because you’re so old.”
“That’s not it!” Beneath the Chinese lead her cheeks reddened. “It’s dangerous for us out there. Even among the Botanists—all they want from us now is hurt and humiliation. They hear news of the outlands, rumors of the next Ascension, and they hope they can somehow profit from it. They fear that the world has grown beyond their knowledge, but they know that we are still beautiful! So they hate us, and fear us. Beauty and youth and pleasure are no longer enough. They want pain and death; they no longer want to share the City with us. Haven’t you noticed it among your Patrons?”
I shook my head. “No. My Patrons expect something other than pain from me.”
She sighed. “I suppose so. Only the sweetest sugarplums for Raphael Miramar.” Her tone grew harsh, but the gaze she turned on me was soft. “I’m just afraid for you, Raphael; for all of us. What if we are betrayed by the Curators?”
I began to pull on my clothes. “That’s why I’m going to stay with Roland. To learn; and maybe someday come back here and share it with the rest of you.”
Ketura turned to regard her face in the mirror. One at a time she drummed three fingers against her lower lip, then bared her teeth in a snarl. “They don’t want us to learn—”
“Oh, shut up. I hear the same damned lies you do.” I grabbed my chasuble, glaring at my own reflection as I dressed. “Doctor Foster boring me to tears with his damned stories for boys and girls! All to frighten us from ever leaving here—” I tied my hair loosely and stormed past her without a word.
But at the door I hesitated, glancing at the gray band on my wrist. “Ketura …”
She shook her head, smiling as she turned from the mirror to meet me. “I’m sorry. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Roland Nopcsa really is different.” And she kissed me, then drew back and brushed three fingers against my lip.
“Be careful with that,” she warned, nodding at the sagittal and cupping her hand a scant inch from the dark curve of the shell’s edge. “It protects its host; but the venom is always fatal when it strikes.”
She paused, then said, “But you know—”
She stood in the doorway, pulling the domino from her sheath and draping its dark folds over her face.
“But what?” I urged.
“They’re almost beautiful when they die,” she said, and walked down the hall to meet her Patron.
4. A break in the historical record
“O UR PREDECESSORS HERE BELIEVED in a slow process of evolution. We know that new life forms emerge suddenly—we see it in the Narrow Forest, and through the work the Zoologists have done with the aardmen and other geneslaves.”
“Like that?” I pointed at the glossy model of an infant proteceratops nosing its way from an elongated leathery egg.
Roland took a long pull from his beer and nodded. “Exactly. Except that we can choose the form of our history, and presumably the proteceratops did not have that luxury.”
Above us the skeleton of quetzalcoatlus northropi hummed faintly, as a draft from the ventilation pipes stirred its hollow bones. I leaned forward to blow upon the blue-gray cube of pressed herbs burning in the little brass tray Fancy had given me as a going-away gift, watched the smoke coil about the arching claws and rakishly outthrust pelvis of the looming Deinocherius that guarded Roland’s bed. As Regent of the Natural Historians, Roland chose his own quarters in the Museum: the Hall of Archosaurs, where we retired each evening to talk and smoke and drink and make love. Miramar was right: my education was not foremost among Roland’s concerns.
But it was my oldest dream. To learn the true history of the old world, to memorize the alphabet embedded within the layers of calcareous rock, and so discern in the new damp mud and broken asphalt outside my window the whorls and patterns that would shape the future. And I believed that Roland knew these things, because he was descended from those who had been set here to guard the City’s knowledge after the First Ascension.
“What luxuries did the archosaurs have, Roland?” I asked, burrowing deeper into the heap of wool rugs covering the bed.
“Oh, the usual,” he replied. “Time. A variety of comestibles. Warm sunny days and cool yet pleasant nights: bring a sweater when visiting the Mesozoic.” A small potent explosion of laughter rocked the bed as he guffawed, throttling a bolster between his huge hands. “Oh, they had a wonderful life, the archosaurians. Huge and hungry and cruel, lumbering and gentle-eyed. Their footprints remain, and we little mice creep from the trees to drink from the impressions of their toes, and make our homes among their bones.”
He gulped the rest of his beer, leaned over the cask beside his bed, and refilled the bottle. “Ah, Raphael. Why would you leave your warm House upon the hill to live here? It’s so fucking cold.” Those heavy hands around my waist, now, pulling me close so that I could smell his sweat, sweetly sour from the Botanists’ bitter lager.
“I came to keep you warm,” I said obediently, nuzzling his chest. Roland was shorter than I, but massive: barrel-chested, thighs like tree stumps, hands so big and clumsy-looking it was a marvel to watch him assemble the delicate pinnules of shattered crinoids, until the fossilized sea lilies bloomed again within his brown palms.
“But orchids die in the cold,” he said mockingly. “Miramar would never forgive me if his prize blossom withered here.”
“No chance,” I replied. Roland laughed more loudly and pulled me closer.
“I feel a chill,” he said, forcing my head down, and for a while we turned to other matters.
In the night I woke. For six years Roland had been my Patron. I knew this vast chamber as well as I knew my room at the House Miramar. But in the weeks since coming here to live I had slept uneasily, waking often in the cool darkness to start at the sight of the vast silent behemoths that reared overhead. I stared at them now, wondering how their bones came to line these halls and clutter the vast storerooms of the Museum, whereas the remains of the men who had been here mere centuries before us were lost forever.
“You see how we choose which histories to recall?” Roland had remarked once, hefting a mannequin. “Please note that only Aides and Technicians sleep in the Hall of Man,” he added scornfully.
The Aide helping us move the exhibit glared when I laughed at Roland’s comment. She said, “We work our way up to the best Halls. We earn our beds.”