Blushing, I shut up. Even Roland was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Raphael earned his place in the House he came from, Franca.”
“It’s not the same,” she snapped. She was two or three years younger than I. Her hair had recently been shorn to’ indicate her promotion from Docent to Aide. She stared contemptuously at my long beribboned braid as we hauled the heavy steel desk back into storage. “They should know their rights here.”
“Raphael has been my student since he was a child. Allow the Regents their privileges and passions, Franca.” And he winked at her. I looked away quickly, my face burning from the complicitous smile they had shared for that instant.
But now beside me Roland lay dreaming. His heavy arm pinned me to the bed as he snored. I sighed and stared at the ceiling, where bats darted between the Deinocherius skeleton and the hollow-eyed trachodons. In the darkest corners of the gallery rats scuffled, nosing fruitlessly through the ancient bones stacked there. I watched the bats’ ceaseless waltz, until once more I fell restlessly asleep with their bloodless song echoing in my dreams.
5. The dark labyrinth of the ages
E ACH DAWN WE WOKE to the screech of the Regent’s trumpet echoing through the Rotunda. Its clamor aroused Aides and Technicians and Regent alike from the galleries where they slept: the Aides and Technicians to begin their round of chores and maintenance, Roland to join his fellow Regents in their incessant discussion of useless research papers mined from the Museums’ Libraries. Although lately other things seemed to occupy their meetings. Roland returned to the Hall of Archosaurs later in the evening, and often was in no mood for me. I tried not to think of Miramar’s warning, of the rumors that even a Paphian catamite heard within the Museum of Natural History these last few weeks: that the Curators had taken a stand against the Ascendants. There had been a murder, or murders; would there now be retribution?
“I thought you were going to ban that damned horn,” I said, rolling away from Roland to cover my head with a bolster.
“Tradition is stronger even than Regents,” Roland replied. The trumpet bleated ‘fitfully for another moment. In the stillness that followed I heard the hum of voices and footsteps and doors creaking throughout the galleries, the muted click and burr of the Museum’s generator tumbling to life in the basement. Roland sighed. “But I love to hear them all wake: to think that once the City stirred so each day …”
I yawned and shook back my tangled hair. “Too early! No wonder they fell to the Ascendants without a fight.”
Roland shot me a disgruntled glance. “What are you going to do today?” he asked, tossing me a robe.
I dressed, wincing at the rough linen. My own clothes were reserved for masques and the rare occasion when I might meet with other Paphians. “The Devonian.” I tipped my head toward an adjoining gallery. “You’ll be in the Library?”
Roland nodded. “The Regent of Aviators questioned my defense of quetzalcoaltus as the model for the Langley Aerodrome Number Three.”
“My idea,” I said hotly, but Roland cut me off.
“There’s nothing I can do, Raphael! I let you in the Library when I can—”
“Once since I’ve been here!”
“It’s not my decision—we have to abide by the rules the Board of Regents sets.”
I turned to the mirror I’d leaned beneath the allosaurus. It showed a leaner and angrier face than the mirrors at Miramar had ever thrown back at me. I tossed back my hair and glanced down to see my sagittal showing from beneath the cuff of my robe. Its shell glowed faint lilac; I pulled the sleeve to cover my wrist. Roland had noticed it before during an argument, when the gray carapace had begun to gleam warningly. I knew how foolish, and dangerous, it was for me to continue wearing it. But Ketura’s words stayed with me. It was the only weapon I had if we were betrayed.
Behind me stood Roland, his robe hanging open as he slapped a roll of papers against his palm. “Why are you fighting me, Raphael?”
I knelt in front of the mirror, sliding open a lacquered cosmetics box (Miramar’s parting gift) and drawing out my kohl wand. “Because I want to learn! Because I’m tired of being treated like a child—”
“There’s nothing I can do about that, Raphael.” He reached for my hand, tried to slide the kohl wand from between my fingers. “But maybe there is something you can do for me. …”
I pulled away from him. His surprise flared into rage as I stormed from the Hall.
“Raphael!” he shouted, but before he could follow me I had fled down one corridor, and then another, and another still; until I found myself walking through the immense jaws of an insular shark that served as entry into the Hall of the Deep.
My anger had faded somewhat by now. I almost regretted leaving Roland in a fury. Certainly the thought of confronting him later sobered me: he had a ferocious temper. But I calmed myself by wandering through the Hall, glancing at exotic seashells and sponges and reading aloud the ancient placards that decorated each case.
I had just turned the corner of a great display of dorados and slimefish when I nearly tripped over a stack of empty buckets. Glancing up, I saw that I had walked into an Aide’s work area—the same Aide Francesca I had met some time earlier in the Hall of Man.
“Good morning, Franca.” I bowed, sweeping the floor with my braid.
“Fran ces ca,” she hissed, her arms feathered with brushes and long-handled brooms. Small and lithe, with a boy’s flat chest and long legs, she reminded me of my little Fancy, moving too fast for her clumsy feet. But Fancy’s mild blue eyes never would slant and darken with fury as this girl’s did; and Fancy would die rather than crop her yellow hair.
“Excuse me: Francesca.”
“Don’t call me anything, whore.” A smudge of a mouth twisted in a face broad and flat as a plate. Years ago I’d given up looking for any shaft of beauty in the Curators’ faces. But, because I was homesick and lonely, I watched her hungrily as she turned her attention to cleaning a case full of blowfish. Graceless as a puppy; skin blotched and broken where she’d scrubbed it with the harsh soap they made of lye and tallow. Long narrow eyes the color of wax. Octine might brighten them, and kohl darken those invisible lashes. But nothing for her slab cheeks, except perhaps to daub hollows there with powder.
“Stop staring, whore.” She moved up a step on the ladder to reach a gaudy blue marlin. Like everything belonging to the Curators, the ladder was ancient. I swore that the only thing holding it together was Franca’s spite.
“Don’t talk to me,” she warned, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes. “Give me that brush.”
I handed her the brush and crouched to watch her. “Why do you cut your hair like that?”
“I thought you studied under Nopcsa for six years.”
I shrugged. “I studied Paleontology.”
Without looking at me she replied, “Because only whores wear their hair long.”
“Whores and sometimes lazars,” I corrected her. She shot me a surprised look, then quickly turned back to the marlin.
“Fit company.” But after a few minutes she asked, “Why do you wear those ribbons?”
. I pulled my braid forward, staring at it with mock perplexity. “These ribbons?” I said, stroking the colored tendrils plaited into my hair.
She nodded. For a moment she could have been a Paphian child at worship, earnest and still.
“This one”—fingering a bit of green and gold brocade—“for my House. And this one from my favorite Patron.” Thin worn strips of ugly red plaid, clumsily stitched together.
“Roland gave you that?” asked Franca. She rubbed her shorn scalp, then turned to blow dust from the marlin’s painted scales. I flicked my braid back petulantly. I wished she could have seen me at Illyria’s last masque, when it had taken me an hour to plait thirty-four ribbons into my hair, and the Magdalene disappeared beneath the flowers tossed by my admirers. I sighed and followed her as she moved her ladder to the next glass exhibit case.