I dreamed fitfully: of Franca, her pale face framed by falcon’s eyes; of Roland panting above me, his hands enchained with light. Once I started awake to see that dozens of white moths had settled upon my chest and face. Their wings opened and shut as they fed upon the nectar that dripped from the night-coils, their tongues unfurling in black threads. I brushed them off, but they only wafted a few inches above me before lighting onto my legs again. With a sigh I fell back to the ground.
Then I must have dreamed; but a dream such as I never had before, a dream that seemed to show me the dreams of all things that had been, and died; and then all the dreams of dreams; and last of all those of Death himself dreaming of all that was to be—
Of archosaurs rising from their adamant beds to pluck planets from the void; of rivers boiling, and humming trees, and beasts that wept like men; of metal ships that ravished the sun into a thousand stars, and a flaming cathedral rising from the blackened earth; of myriad entombed figures released from their stony beds, and a demonic girl whose eyes burned in a face that mirrored my own; of dying children whose voices rang out like sweet bells, and a cadaver who spoke sagely with Death.
Of all of these; and untold others—myself and Roland and Miramar, and Fancy and Francesca and Doctor Foster, too—all of us, linked in a ronde set to the sound of hollow pipes booming as we swept across the sky.
And then I woke: to a kiss cold as Franca’s, so that I tried to will the feathery crush of bracken beneath me into an unyielding marble floor. But the ferns crackled as I groaned and stirred; and the eyes that met mine were not hers.
“Wake, Raphael,” a voice said.
I breathed in sharply, shaking the last drunken moths from me. Night had fallen. In the deep blue sky that showed through breaks in the trees I glimpsed a silver spar of moon and many stars. I stumbled to my feet, bracing myself against the apple tree as I tried to remember where I was and what dream had brought me there.
“We are waking now,” someone whispered. I rubbed the nectar from my eyes, blinking as I tried to see who spoke to me from the shadows. A flash of terror warned me of lazars; but a lazar would not know my name.
And a lazar would not be so beautiful.
“Who are you?” I stammered.
He dropped from a tree a few paces from me. A glimmer of light hung about him, as though the frail moonlight sought him here gladly. He smiled: a boy a little younger than myself; the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
“Raphael,” he replied. His voice was honeyed, not yet broken, but mocking as no child’s voice should be. That, more than his unearthly beauty, frightened me. “You know me.”
For an instant my thoughts careened through all those I had loved, vainly seeking his among pillowed faces in Saint-Alaban, Persia, High Brazil, my own House. But no Paphian would crop his golden curls thus about that white forehead; no Paphian ever had skin so fine that the moonlight seemed to melt into it to glow from within eyes the color of moon lilies.
“No,” I said. “I do not know you. I would never have forgotten you.”
“Already you have forgotten me,” he said. Suddenly it seemed that his face altered. For an instant Franca’s features passed over his own: splotches of leaves and mold upon his face the quick reflection of bruises that had blurred her cheeks and breast. I gasped and stepped toward her.
But it was not Franca. Her features rippled and were gone. Instead I found myself reaching for a bloated corpse propped against the apple tree, its hollow eyes wormed with foxfire, its shattered jaw hanging limply upon a neck ulcerated by the rotted remains of a hempen rope. I cried out: and then he stood there once more, still and white and lovely in the fitful moonlight.
“I do know you,” I whispered. I shivered uncontrollably. “The Hanged Boy …”
He nodded. “That is a name,” he said after a long moment. “You may call me by another.” Smiling, he crossed his arms upon his pale hairless chest.
“Lord …” I began.
“No,” he murmured. I could almost imagine that the unblinking green eyes regarded me with pity. He stepped toward me. I was shaking now and crouched on all fours like a dog, my hands kneading the earth frantically as I tried to steady myself.
“Please go.” I shut my eyes. “Please, please go …”
“No, Raphael,” he repeated. “We are waking now …”
He reached for me with a hand that gleamed with a hard pure light, a hand white and cold as bone. His touch evoked the frigid impression of the kiss that had awakened me. And then I knew that I had not really awakened earlier; that in my seventeen years I had never been awake. Only now; because only he could wake me. I felt as though those fingers bored into my skull, probing the soft center of my brain where sleeping thoughts trembled for release. I would have cried aloud, but that cold clenched my jaws shut, gripped my neck in an unyielding vise, froze my eyes so that I stared up at him and trembled at the sight.
Because such beauty as his shrieked for worship. Those luminous green eyes, his face and body radiantly white, that exquisite form … I was stirred by desire such as I had never known, save when I had seen the lazar’s corpse so long ago, and Franca’s that afternoon. And that terrified me more than all else: because I knew that such beauty could not be evil, any more than mine could be; that such beauty would seek and find worship surely as a flower seeks sunlight and rain.
But even as his beauty roused me I saw the livid horror seething within his eyes, the corruption and utter madness of extinction that he expelled as unconsciously as I breathed air. And as I had seen within Franca’s broken face a strange and compelling beauty, I knew that from now on I would glimpse within whatever was lovely the foul thing it would become.
And then I did scream, and begged him to take back that knowledge and vision, the awful counterpoint to my soaring dream.
“No,” he whispered. His cold mouth pressed against mine. “You must learn: it is all one, Raphael. It is all one …”
At these words I fainted. When I woke he was gone.
3. The birth of yesterday
I thrashed to wakefulness, tangling my fingers in the grass. The moon had scarcely moved across the sky. From the night-coils’ tongues still dripped a slow sweet rain. For a moment I thought it might have been a nightmare brought on by those poisonous blossoms, or the ghastly white moths they fed.
Then I saw the jackal.
It crouched a few paces from me, beneath that same tree whence he had dropped a short while ago. Like a wild dog, slender, with a long muzzle and pointed ears; but with hair the color of frost, milky white except where a darker stripe crossed its back from tail to head. Escaped from the Zoologists, maybe—they bred them for hunting—although I had never seen a white jackal before.
Perhaps I had grown brash in the face of all the terrors of this accursed place. Because I was not afraid of it.
“Go on!” I yelled, shying a stone at its muzzle. The jackal darted to one side. I would have thrown myself upon it and strangled it, I was that maddened. I grabbed the overhanging limb of a tree and glared. It did not run away. It sank back upon its haunches again, head cocked to one side, regarding me with an alarmingly prescient gaze. I snatched up another stone but it slipped into the shadows to reappear in a moment—so close that I dropped my weapon and tripped in my haste to get away from it.
As I fell, something snaked about my ankle, something soft yet unyielding. I tried to scramble to my feet and collapsed, my elbows sinking into the loamy earth. When I glanced back I saw that a vine thick as my wrist had crept from the tree and encircled my ankle. It was pulling me backward, as if a hidden green winch cranked me toward the tree. Other vines disentangled themselves and looped to the earth, their pale trumpets opening and closing as if scenting something besides their own sickly fragrance. As the vines humped toward me I saw that the small and ineffectual green thorns protecting each bloom had turned bright red, as an anole’s throat blossoms when it sights a foe. They whistled softly as the vines flailed through the air. I rolled onto my back, striking at one as it whipped past my face. Like a serpent it drew back, the wind hissing through the hollow thorns. Other vines lashed about my legs. The trumpet-shaped flowers swelled and disgorged a heavy fluid onto my legs, thick as honey and with a cloying scent. Where it seeped through the fabric of my trousers I felt my legs grow numb.