At my feet lay Raphael. He was bathed in golden brilliance. I heard a wailing as of some creature falling from the air and looked up. I saw the stars, one by one, coming into sight once more, and the sky folding itself back like the dark underside of a leaf turning to the rain.
I drew my breath and turned to my friends there beside me, Justice and Scarlet Pan. Justice looked at me and smiled. He took my face in his hands and kissed it, and said, “Now you know, Wendy. Now you are truly awake and you can see, it’s not all horror and confusion; even death.”
I kissed his mouth. “Now I know”
He stooped to lift Miss Scarlet and kissed her as well; and then holding her he turned to me and said goodbye.
“But it’s only started,” I cried.
He nodded. His eyes were not sad, but still they held something in them of pity.
“I know,” he said; “but I have to go on, you see. Because I’ve done what I had to do. And besides, I’ve already left.”
He set Miss Scarlet gently back upon the ground and pointed to where my brother lay, his face so pale and his eyes twitching beneath their lids in troubled sleep.
“There is your brother to be made whole,” he said. His arms swept out to encompass the dark pit about us, barren glassy Saint-Alaban’s Hill and the sky pale and still, the lazars still struggling to flee. “A City to be made whole, a world perhaps …”
He took me once more and kissed me, and I wept. But this time there was no bitterness, nothing of vengeance or horror but only sadness to see him go.
“You still have your good Angel there,” he said, smiling as he pointed to Miss Scarlet. “Even though you have grown a conscience of your own.”
He touched me on the forehead and quoted, laughing softly: “‘If you learn to be brave, honest, and unselfish, then you will become a real girl.’”
He bowed to us both, drawing three fingers to his mouth in the Paphian’s beck, then dropped one and then the other until only his index finger remained upon his lips.
“Remember, Wendy: It is all one,” he whispered. “Death and growth and desire and fear. It is all one.” He was gone.
I stood, dazed, and stared at the sky. Above me reared the launcher. As I watched it shuddered, then recoiled as with a tremendous shriek the missile shot from it, speared the clouds and burst into flames of white and red. The launcher shuddered again, then was still. After a moment debris rained down like hail, but I was heedless of it striking me.
The explosion in the heavens faded to black smoke, streamers of gray and white. In the distance the horizon glowed pale pink. The Cathedral’s dark spires pointed heavenward where the last stars gleamed faintly: all but one that flared brightly and then faded to a prick of white like the others upon that black map. Beside me stood Miss Scarlet: not a woman but the same small wizened figure as before, staring at her gnarled hands in disbelief.
“Wendy?” She turned to me pleading. Her eyes fell upon Raphael, the small forms scattered about the pit, and she was quiet. After a moment she said, “It doesn’t matter, really, does it? We’re alive, at least—”
“Yes,” I said. I reached to take her small hand. “But it did happen; something did happen.”
For a moment we stared at each other, and I wept to remember Justice Saint-Alaban.
Then a shout rang through the air. We turned, and saw against the wall something slumped beside a small body covered with a rainbow cloak. The Aviator lay there, dead, his ruined face staring at the dawn. Above him stood Jane Alopex, disbelief turning to joy as she waved her pistol, then with a whoop threw it so that it bounced over the rim of the pit. I smiled despite my sorrow, and looked down.
He lay there still, the broken boy; but his face was not so tormented as it had been. It seemed even that he might dream of gentle things, for his eyes no longer twitched beneath their lids, and the soft full curve of his mouth now turned slightly upward. I stood a moment, then looked to the east where the sky now was yellow. I waited until the first brilliant blade of sunlight sliced across the Cathedral’s tallest tower. I stooped and brushed the tangled hair from my brother’s brow, and kissed him upon the forehead.
“Wake, Raphael,” I whispered. His eyes twitched and opened to stare at me, a gray flash of alarm that faded as quickly as the stars.
“Wh—” he started, but I touched his mouth with my finger.
“We are waking now,” I said, and stood.
Behind me Jane started to say something, fell silent. I felt Miss Scarlet’s hand slip into mine.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “Or doesn’t it matter now?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Well, yes; I suppose it probably does.”
I brushed the hair from my eyes. I took Miss Scarlet into my arms and with Jane behind me climbed the ladder until we stood above the pit, gazing down from Saint-. Alaban’s Hill.
The sun had risen above the horizon, and I could see the entire City of Trees laid out before me, trees and ruined buildings and four fair Houses upon a hill. Far far beyond these I made out the faint sparkling cusp of the river.
“Well,” I said, tightening my grip upon Miss Scarlet’s hand. I looked at her and then at Jane. “I guess we’d better go.”
They nodded. Together we walked down Saint-Alaban’s Hill.
Equindi uscimmo a riveder le stele.
—And thence we came forth, to see again the stars.
Author’s Afterword
My concern in Winterlong is the relationship between consciousness and reality, and in particular the way in which an artistic medium may be used to explore the interstices between the objective, waking world and those other, more richly textured and deeply shadowed realms that most of us visit only fleetingly. Winterlong explores these regions through the peculiar sensibility of Wendy Wanders. In Aestival Tide, an independent companion novel, I take a different route: we move outward from the disfigured City to the broader stage of a transmogrified oceanscape, conducted (or kidnapped) by a narrative consciousness that is even more out-of-the-ordinary than Wendy’s.
Wendy, Miss Scarlet, Jane Alopex all appear in Aestival Tide. But the primary narrative is that of Jenny-the-fox, neophyte in an arcane cult whose members live in the ruins of an ancient weather-tracking station in the coastal town of Occis. Jenny is caught up in the ongoing intrigue between the Ascendant hegemony and the Balkhash Commonwealth. She is also increasingly obsessed with what she believes is her crucial role in bringing about the necessary destruction of Occis itself. Aestival Tide, the annual celebration of the summer solstice, brings hundreds of carnival-goers to the former ocean resort—among them Wendy and Scarlet and Jane. There’s a kidnapping, a geneslave insurrection involving the reluctant Miss Scarlet, messianic obsessions and the looming threat of a killer hurricane that has been predicted for over three hundred years. As in Winterlong, I’m using subtexts drawn from Near Eastern mythologies, along with the more familiar elements of the Demeter/Persephone myth, the story of the Magdalene, and even the Biblical tale of Lot’s wife. And I hope that the different narrative structure, alternating between third-person and yet another first-person narrator (a la Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet) will give even more depth and texture to my continuing exploration of the coming of the Magdalene.
A Biography of Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957) is the award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy titles such as Winterlong , Waking the Moon , Black Light , and Glimmering , as well as the thrillers Generation Loss and Available Dark . She is commonly regarded as one of the most poetic writers working in speculative fiction and horror today.