Winter's Tale Part 40

As he connected the leads to a blasting box, Peter Lake said, "I hate to blow vaults with nitro, but speed is of the essence here, and these tea biscuits just ask for it. The bolts are going to be propelled into the back of the vault like armor-piercing sh.e.l.ls. I hope they don't hit the plate." He turned to Cecil."Do you remember Mootfowl's nitro prayer?" Cecil nodded."Then say it, and I'll push the plunger."

Cecil mumbled something about a ball of fire, Peter Lake put his palm on the plunger, clutched his side yet again, and shoved the rod into the piston.

The bank shook as if there were an earthquake. Above them, a giant chandelier was suddenly lit, and its several tons of surprised and protesting crystals were swinging back and forth.

"That's it. It even turned on the lights. Batteries, all banks have battery circuits, just for people like us. Let's go." They ran down into the sepulcher, which was now brightly lit."Turn the wheels, Peter Lake commanded."I can't. My side hurts too much." turned the wheels to remove the remnants of the bolts from the strikes. Then they pulled at the enormous door, which was perfectly balanced on its fire-hydrant hinges, and the vault was open.

"What's the number of the box?" Cecil wanted to know.

"Fourteen ninety-eight, " Peter Lake answered. He was in considerable pain, because he had not been able to resist helping Cecil pull open the door.

The box was at waist level, on the right side of the chamber. Peter Lake approached it, sank to his knees, and began to work the combination. He watched himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror on one wall of the vault, looked in his own eyes, and glanced at Cecil's rotund form alongside, bobbing up and down with antic.i.p.ation. He saw a pool of blood forming on the marble tiles beneath him. Despite the pain, he seemed to be getting more and more alert, and moreand more powerful.

"Finished, " he said, moving the bolt lever. The little door swung open, and Cecil pulled out the box. They clipped off the small padlock, lifted the lid, and spread apart the folds of cloth that wrappedthe salver.

Peter Lake held it up before them.

This was not a still thing. Like a good painting, it moved. And like light, it moved. In the forever lively interaction of the pure and untarnished metals from which it had been fas.h.i.+oned, it glowed in a thousand colors, glinting in whites, blues, silvers, and gold. It seemed to be on fire, and it lighted their faces.

"It's alive, " Peter Lake said."No one's ever going to melt it down. No one ever could."

CHELSEA had become a dark and quiet island surrounded by lines of nervous militiamen armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. Because Cecil was short and squat, he superficially resembled a Short Tail, though he did not have either the stubby curled nose or the paddle chin. The militiamen, mainly farmboys from upstate, were not too sure of what a Short Tail looked like close-up, and they weren't partial to the leather bags full of burglar's tools, either. But the salver dazzled them, and they let Peter Lake and Cecil pa.s.s through theirlines.

Though the fires had liberated enormous amounts of energy,and numerous inversions had trapped warm air close to the ground (making some areas as hot as summer and most of the city comfortably springlike), it was still winter, and cold breezes much like cold streams in an otherwise tepid river wound through the mild inversions like smooth serpents of icea"refreezing pools of melt water slicking down the sidewalks, and contracting whole neighborhoods of air in strange ebullient booms. Chelsea was warm. The trees were in leaf. The bushes had thickened up, and stood in stable plumes pressed against iron fences or congregated in the square. Flowers repossessed flower boxes, as self-a.s.sured as cats who sleep outside on a summer night.

"A florist must have been here, " Cecil offered, his mouth slightly open as he tried to take in more air than usual, so that he might smell the flowers.

"A florist indeed, " Peter Lake answered."These are some of the plumes. Some will be a mile high, others no bigger than a leaf."

They turned into a narrow pa.s.sage that led to a garden courtyard. An iron gate secured with a bicycle lock barred their way. It could not have been opened with its key as fast as it was picked by the chief mechanic of The Sun. At the end of the pa.s.sageway was an enclosed garden that ran from east to west for two blocks. The residents of the buildings looking over it had torn down the fences that separated their plots, to make the narrow close a private park.

Peter Lake realized that he would best reclaim Athansor alone. He stopped, and turned to his friend, who knew that yet another very short time was now over. Cecil was not about to press himself on Peter Lake the way he had done at the beginning of the century, begging to be his squash cook, promising to make money with tattoo jobs on the side, sticking to him wherever he went even though it was hard to keep up.

Often when someone dies those left behind think to themselves, if only I could have one more day: I would use it so wella"an hour, perhaps even a minute. Cecil Mature had been given his time with Peter Lake, and it was now over. Tears would have tumbled down his cheeks had not Jackson Mead and Mootfowl taught him not to cry."It's not good for the digestive system, " Mootfowl had said, as severe as the Connecticut undertaker he had once been.

"It's all changed now, " Peter Lake said."For us, it's come to an end. But, you'll see, when you sleep it'll well up so strongly that youwon't know which is the dream. And when, finally, there is nothing left of you, you'll be overpowered by the strength of another time that willa"mark my wordsa"reclaim you. It will snap you up and pull you under like a trout taking a buga"all suddenness, all surprise, something silver rising from the depths. And then you may find that it starts all over again, because it has never ended." "I understand that. It doesn't make it any easier." "Now you've got to turn your back on me and go."

"I can't."

"Yes you can. You'll have to do it sometime, so you might aswell do it now."

Cecil thought that it would be impossible to turn from Peter Lake. But Peter Lake was smiling, and perhaps because of the promise that he sensed in the smile, Cecil was able to turn and leave.

Now Peter Lake was alone in the garden. He moved slowly among the trees until, halfway through, he found himself on a slight rise, from which he could see the other end. Standing there in perfect calm, looking straight at him, was his white horse.

The minute he saw the white horse, all the powers that had brought him to that very moment left him forever, and he became just a man with a wound in his side. The horse, too, seemed no longer like the great balloon-limbed statue that he had been. He seemed to be smaller, perhaps not as good a fighter, and there was something about him which suggested... a milk horse. He followed Peter Lake with his eyes, and bent his neck way over to one side when Peter Lake went around a clump of bushes. When Peter Lake emerged, Athansor's ears were pointing back, his face was strained forward, and his right legs were touching the ground only tentatively, which was the way he used to lean sometimes when he was drawing milk wagons in summer, and would stop under a curbside horse-shower of the Horses' Aid Society. Peter Lake looked into Athansor's eyes. Though the horse seemed more diminutive now, and his wounds and scars were anything but beautiful to see, and though he would not have seemed out of place harnessed in the traces of a wagon, he still had his round and perfect eyes. After leaving the salver against the new branches that had stubbornly sprung from the foreshortened stump of a tree, Peter Lake made a quick mount, and they started for the tunnel at the other end of the close. Green leaves rushed by them as if it were spring or summer, and when Peter Lake looked up, he knew that dawn was not too far away."Come on, " he said, as he guided the white horse through the dark foliage."Hurry now. You're going home."

THOUGH the fires had died down, they had burned nearly everything, and the beams of gutted buildings glowed with heat. Apart from these dark red bars that made the city a luminescent blueprint of what it once had been, very little was left intact. The protected islands stood amid fields of destruction that once again reflected natural features of the underlying terrain, and open distance had returned to Manhattan after many hundreds of years. Smoke and steam drifted upward from the rivers, in white, gray, and silver. The streets were deserted. The city had been conquered and destroyed, and it looked much smaller.

Just before dawn, Peter Lake cantered Athansor up and down the long avenues. Athansor's strides, matchless in their grace, carried them from one end of the island to the other, and back, as if they were using a razor strop or looming a sheet of cloth. They sailed to and fro so smoothly that it was as if they were gliding on ice, and as they pa.s.sed by, time was compressed in the ruins, enabling them to see the city as it was and as it would be, all at once. No richer tapestry had ever been devised, for here all time was at issue. They were able to see it not because they were gifted and high, but, rather, because they had been humbled, and because the world had been pushed back as quiescent images had rebelled and surged forward in disorder and victory. Though the city lay in ruins, nothing about it seemed dead, and it continued as if its spirit had never needed the material frame that now was gone.

They saw a black thunderstorm race in on a summer day and scatter children through the park, their hair blowing in the sudden wind, hoops rolling free, the forked ribbons of the little girls' gondoliers' hats luffing as violently as the wings of a bird trapped insidea house. They saw an airplane rising alone at night, its powerful white light coming for them in the empty air as if G.o.d had sent an angel. They saw s.h.i.+ps and barges rush from north to south and south to north as if supplying far-flung endangered regiments, cutting the clear blue band of the Hudson with silver wakes that flashed like swords. They saw wrestlers straining on the mat, their struggling limbs unknowingly symmetrical, parodies of bridges, beams, and rock formations. They saw a poor child kissing a doll. They saw a pile driver six stories high hypnotizing a lunchtime crowd in the garment district with the otherwordly strikes of metal upon metal and the crazy exhalations of steam that lifted its heavy weight over and over, again and againa"very much like the garment workers themselves, who sewed and st.i.tched through the hours and days of their lives. They saw a family walking by a pond, and they knew from the houses and the wooden walls that the ducks in the pond had never heard any language but Dutch. They saw courageous little boats rus.h.i.+ng through h.e.l.l Gate, waltzing in a white current between walls of rock. They saw a young actress who, bathed in rose light, was playing her part, and mastering her fear. They saw the steel-gray bridges, in the suns.h.i.+ne and in snowstorms, standing about the city like giant bedsteads.

These things unfurled before them like flags rolling out on the wind, and seemed to be an important part of the truth if only because they presented again and again the same curves, the same colors, the same flowing symmetries, the same feelings, operations, and acts, all of which, over time, spoke and sang in one language and one song of one central beauty.

Peter Lake rode past dance halls and symphonies ten deep in the same s.p.a.ce, and discovered that their sounds combined in a single perfect tone. Part of the overlay of flawless images seemed to be that Athansor was leading a phalanx of fifty horses, or morea"mares and stallions, colts and fillies, grays, chestnuts, blacks, and spotted ponies, red Shetlands, Percherons with manes above their hooves like African dancers, Arabians, war-horses, thoroughbreds, and dray horses. But when Peter Lake looked carefully, he saw that they were real. More than just images, they were flesh and blood, and they had gathered to Athansor as he shuttled along the streets. Pulled fromtheir hiding places in rubble-filled lots, they had banded together and now all were cantering with the same smooth stride, the milk horse in the lead.

As it grew light enough to make out individual forms in the distance, Peter Lake saw astonished Short Tails, their mouths hanging open as he thundered by at the head of the procession. This suited his purpose well enough. They would soon discover the pattern he was making, and get the news to Pearly, who would probably also hear that Athansor had now turned himself into fifty synchronized horses.

On their last pa.s.s over the north of the island, they sent the fifty horses into the river, and watched them ford to Kingsbridge and escape along the river's edge. Now Manhattan was cleared of its horses but for one. Because they saw that the sun was about to rise, Peter Lake and Athansor galloped this time, and they stopped somewhere south of the park. There were hardly any landmarks left, and it was hard for them to know exactly where they were.

The rider dismounted. One cannot properly embrace a horsea" they're too big. So Peter Lake was content to look in Athansor's eyes."I suppose, " he said, "that you know where you're going." The horse sneezed."Do you think they'll let you in up there with a cold?" Peter Lake asked."In those pastures, they probably don't worry about that sort of thing. But who knows, maybe they've got a quarantine. Maybe that's what kept me out.

"Now it's time for you to do what you've been able to do and haven't done, on my account, for G.o.d knows how long. Go ahead. I won't be with you. You have to do it by yourself."

The horse didn't move until Peter Lake clicked his tongue and waved his hand.

Then Athansor whinnied, and began to walk. The very fact of his motion took hold of him, and he started to gallop, faster and faster, until the ground rumbled beneath him and he was far away from Peter Lake, who was deeply saddened. He would never see the white horse again, but he was confident that the horse would find his right and proper place, where he had started, home.

ATHANSOR vaulted from the ground as if to rise. Though he came down after sailing only ten or fifteen feet, he was little discouraged. He tried once more, in much the same spirit of a man who, awakened from a dream of flying, goes back to sleep confident that he will fly again. He found a long rubble-free avenue, and began to run. At first, he cantered, holding himself back. Then he started to gallop. The air whistled past his bent-back ears. His hooves seemed to touch the ground as lightly and infrequently as the hand that seems effortlessly to power the potter's wheel. Now, certainly, with the speed he possessed, he had only to draw up his front legs, tighten his neck, and turn his face to the skya"the way he had always donea"and he would soar into the air in a strong ascending curve. He threw himself forward and up, and courageously refused to expect anything butflight.

And then, despite his courage, he came cras.h.i.+ng down on the pavement, lost his balance, rolled several times in uncontrolled somersaults, and smashed into a line of garbage cans that had formed a barrier on either side of which was absolutely nothing. The tremendous clatter shocked him, but not half as much as his simple earth-boundenness.

After the shock and humiliation of skidding along the street and bowling over the garbage cans, he retreated to the park. Alone in an empty field, he bent way down and pushed his head between his forelegs until he was rolled up in a compact package that resembled an equestrian statue done by a cubist, or, as Craig Binky wouldhave said, a cuban.

The purpose of this was inspection. From various stables and from the street, he had many times witnessed the churchly and una.s.sailable process wherein an auto mechanic elevated a car in the presence of its silent and intimidated owner, and examined its entrails from underneath. So, he did it himself. He was no mechanic, however, nor a veterinarian, an anatomist, or (more to the point) an aeronautical engineer. Everything seemed perfectly finea"his hooves were glistening, black, and hard; his muscles were taut; the tendons underneath his hide were as strong as steel cables; and his belly wasfirm and streamlined.

Encouraged because nothing seemed to be amiss, he decided totry again. He would gain speed in a mad rush up the walkway to the Belvedere, and then sail out over the lake and past the high rubble on Fifth Avenue, to make a breathtaking orbital curve to the south.

Going up the trails was as easy as if there were no grade. Even the steps and curves of the walkway were no hindrance. When he flew outward in the turns, he checked his inertia with four hooves against the vegetation on the side of the path, bounding ahead as if he were rus.h.i.+ng down a mountain. Reaching the top, he dashed across a surface of flat rock and pushed himself into the air with the power of his briefly coiled and compressed rear quarters. Up he went, enthralled. Remembering what it was to fly, he experienced the lovely weightless updraft that the angels feel. And then he began to fall.

This was by no means the controlled glide that he had habitually used to descend, a fall in which every moment of apprehension had brought a cease-fire with gravity, until he and it signed a treaty on the ground. Not at all: it was a flailing, tumbling, sinking rout. He turned in the air, his nostrils flared, his eyes opened wide, and he fell into the lake a hundred feet below the Belvedere, sending up plumes of foaming white water that looked for a moment like wings sprouting from his sides, though, fortunately for him, he was unaware of that irony.

Despite the way in which he had taken to the water, he swam beautifully, and climbed up on the bank as n.o.bly as ever a horse emerged from river or lake. Perhaps because he was dripping wet, he seemed crazed or panicky. But he was not to be deterred, and he started for one of the long and straight avenues, where he hoped to gallop for however many miles it might take before he flew.

THOUGH at first they could not see its color in the strange light that came between the darkness and the dawn, after the fires had died and the moon had poked between tremendous Himalayan clouds of vapor and ash, the surface of the harbor was as green and smooth as emerald. Asbury guided the launch through the repentant waters, steering between upturned chunks of ice that looked in the blinking moonlight less like icebergs than the harmless polar bears in paintings, that are forever immobile and only three or four inches high.

On the Isle of the Dead, the gravedigger had disappeared. He had fled when he heard the launch, leaving his hat and his shovels. Hardesty threw aside the hat, took one of the shovels, and began to dig. He wouldn't let Asbury help him, and he wished that before his shovel struck wood he would die and awaken in another world. He lifted shovelfuls of the soft earth, and the others watched.

It did not take long to get the little coffin above ground."Now what, " he asked, afraid and unwilling to open it.

"Take her out. It hasn't been long, and the ground is cold, " Virginia said. Hardesty clenched his teeth, and thrust the shovel under the lid of the coffin. He pried it up, took it in his hands, and threw it violently to the side. Abby lay within, much the same as she had been when they had last seen her. From a distance, someone might have thought that she was asleep.

Hardesty bent to pull her close to him, listening for life. But she was completely still. He carried her as he had so often done when bringing her home in the evening, when she had fallen asleep in hisarms.

Asbury held the launch against the dock while Hardesty steppeddown, took Abby from his shoulder, and laid her on the hatch cover. Virginia and Mrs. Gamely lifted Martin in and climbed aboard, and Christiana pushed off, nimbly jumping onto the stern.

The rumbling of the old engine beneath the hatch cover cleared Abby's hair from her face. Only Martin noticed, for he alone dared look at her, since he alone truly believed that she would awaken. He knelt beside her, waiting for her eyes to open. Mrs. Gamely nervously fingered the poultice that she carried in her bag, but she knew it was for curing the sick, not for bringing back the dead. The rest of them looked everywhere but at Abby, though Virginia kept her right hand on the little girl's shoulder. They set off across the harbor, among the melting cakes of ice, with a gentle wave from their bows,and hardly a wake.

It was beginning to get bright.

INDEED it was. The sun was just about to come up on the first day of the third millennium, to view the destruction of the city and seewith what pleasure, determination, and nerve its inhabitants would face this, the newest of their days. As always before the dawn, there was a certain sense of urgency.

The messages and messengers that had been coming to Jackson Mead in a steadily swelling flood in the previous hours suddenly broke off. No one arrived to break the silence, and even Cecil Mature sat quietly in his place, gazing sadly through the large windows that gave out on the green harbor. Tranquil now for the first time in too long a time to recount, Mootfowl was perched on a sort of dunce chair behind and to the side of Jackson Mead. He had prayed silently for at least an hour, though for what, exactly, no one knew.

In the quiet, Jackson Mead reflected upon what he was about to do, and doubted that he would succeed. He had never succeeded before, when the elements were simpler, the air was purer, and the horizon trembled with the immediate presence of the cloud wall. But now hardly anyone knew the cloud wall for what it was even when it swept through the city and scoured their souls white. And though the machines were ready, Jackson Mead doubted that conditions had properly coalesced. He doubted the coming of the high s.h.i.+mmering gold that would commend an instance of perfect, balanced justice, for he doubted that anyone remembered or cared for justice either natural or divine. They had all defined it according to their own lights, which meant that it always had to be quick and uncomplicated.

It had taken ages for him to realize that he had to make a bridge of light without a discernible end. Before that, he had built wonders of lovely proportion and airy grace, silvery catenaries that sang in the breeze high above windblown straits all over the world, connecting one heather-covered cliff to another, or marrying the two sides of a choked and impoverished city. It had been right and good to fas.h.i.+on those vast curves which were in themselves an ideal synthesis of rising and falling, aspiration and despair, rebellion and submission, pride and humility. In imitation of universal waves, they were the strongest things ever constructed, and probably the most religious of structures except perhaps for the church steeples, that pointed up into the far distance.

Now he had the thick and precisely aligned bundles of light,perfectly parallel, perfectly pure, to aim in a curve so gradual that by all known means of measurement it would appear to be absolutely straight. It was to take root in the Battery and pierce the air with its smooth particolored girderwork, straight as an arrow, at forty-five degrees.

Jackson Mead walked over to a twelve-foot-high tinted window, and kicked it out."I want to see this in its true colors, " he said as the gla.s.s shattered and the pieces flew outward to glide and tumbleon the wind.

The breeze pushed against their faces and swept back their hair, and they had to lean into it as they surveyed what was before them. The sky was crowded with plumes of steam and smoke. High and white, slowly turning, slowly rising, their tops already in the sun, they looked like a range of golden mountains that were far away not on the horizon, but on high. Jackson Mead tilted his head and squinted at this sight, and then turned to Mootfowl."There are the plumes of smoke and ash. We can't wait any longer."

In an arresting gesture of hand and eye, he signaled for thebridge to be thrown.

In the launch, they thought that they had been struck by lightning. The blinding spectral flash and its ensuing concussion pushed them down into the bilge. The only one who was not thrown wasAbby.

Just east of the park, staring down a seemingly endless avenue and trying to summon his courage, the white horse had his breath knocked out of him by the sudden burst of light and crack of thunder that rolled over the city and brought even the ruins to attention.

From the Battery rose a beautiful angled beam of light in every color. Each section was as tall as a man, a yard wide, and how long no one could tell. The warmer colorsa"the reds, greens, violets, and graysa"were the core, and the more ethereal and metallic colors the sheath. Solid beams mitered the air, rose through the plumes, and disappeared beyond sight. The blue, white, silver, and gold beams that comprised the sheath were transparent, blinding, and jewel-like, and a halation that appeared substantial enough to walk upon followed and echoed the main structure in a diffuse, spangling, silvery road.

As the minutes pa.s.sed, Jackson Mead watched."How much time?" he asked, second by second, for he knew that even at the speed of light, or faster (because of the curve), it would be neither seconds nor minutes, but hours before they would know if the bridge had taken. They would know if the long arch had found a resting place when a back wave would return through it and shake the earth And if it failed, it would simply go out, as if someone had blown out a candle.

They were not the only ones in the city who were transfixed by what they had made. No one anywhere moved, for fear of breaking the spell. Especially for those who were not aware of the test that was yet to come, it seemed as if it were working. The plumes kept rising. The sun was now so close to the eastern horizon that, to watch it, one would think that all Europe was burning. And the bridge appeared to be on its way.

But Mootfowl, the expert mechanic, suddenly stepped forward, for he had seen amidst the light what no one else, not even Jackson Mead, was capable of seeing. Cecil Mature turned away from the bridge for the first time, and looked at Mootfowl. And then Jackson Mead saw what it was that Mootfowl had discovered.

The interior had begun to vibrate, a sure sign that it would not take. Hardly perceptible at first, it was soon oscillating in a regular rhythm. The whole bridge began to shake. Then it buckled, and, as suddenly as it had been thrown, it disappeared, leaving only a fine and confusing afterimage to those who now found themselves in the morning light, aching in memory of its beauty.

NOW the sun was up. It appeared to sit on a blackened line of rooftops in Brooklyn and drip gold into the streets. As it rose higher, it poured molten metal down the hills and into the harbor, making a thousand dark alleys into a thousand golden sluices.

In the ruins of the Maritime Cathedral, Peter Lake watched the light run in from behind columns and b.u.t.tresses, steadily driving away shadows and reflecting off whatever gla.s.s was left in the windows that still had a shape. He imagined that when the cathedral had been surrounded by fire it must have been blacker than ink, andthat red light had danced in scalloped patterns on the high ceilings. And perhaps a bright flare, a gas line igniting, or the sudden kindling of a wooden house had sent straight rays glinting through the whale's white eye, or made the sails appear to billow in the delicate gla.s.s s.h.i.+ps. Now, charred beams lay across the floor, and as the sunlight streamed in, Peter Lake could see that in a very short time weeds would begin to grow over the stone.

Not exactly sure of what to expect, Peter Lake was startled by a noise that sounded like a gloved fist hitting metal. He s.h.i.+elded his eyes and looked toward the door, where, backlighted, someone was staggering about, his hands clutching his head."That has to be you, Pearly, " Peter Lake shouted, even though he couldn't see clearly because of the sun in his eyes."Only Pearly Soames would knock his head coming through a door that's forty feet wide." Moving to the center of the cathedral, Peter Lake felt his blood running hard. He had not intended to be full of fight, but, as if from nowhere, thefight had returned.

After smas.h.i.+ng his head quite hard against a pipe that had fallen diagonally across the doorway, Pearly was hopping about in pain.

"Or maybe it's not Pearly Soames, " Peter Lake taunted."The way it's hopping around, it looks like some b.a.s.t.a.r.d jackrabbit that stepped on a nail." Pearly stopped still, his anger greater than thepain.

"Now, Pearly Soames, he's a dumb evil b.a.s.t.a.r.d too. He falls downstairs twice a day, and he mistakenly shoots his own men. He mixes up words because his tongue is a snake fighting for its independence. And he has dreadful, disgusting fits, after which he comes to and finds that his hands are full of blood because his long filthy nails have raked his flanks and attacked his face. But the b.a.s.t.a.r.da" and I mean, literally, b.a.s.t.a.r.da"hasn't yet been known to hop like a jackrabbit. So, who is it, now? Is it Pearly, or is it a rabbit?"

"It's Pearly, and you know it, " replied a deep scratchy voice in barely controllable anger. Pearly Soames walked slowly up the center aisle between two forests of pews that had been crushed by fallingmasonry.

He was tremendous. Peter Lake had not remembered that Pearly had been so big, but now he seemed to be ten feet tall. There againwere the eyes that made Rasputin's seem as soft as a lamb's. Even Peter Lake, in whom there had resided nearly every kind of power was impressed by the mobility of Pearly's eyes. They were shallow self-consuming whirlpools that terrorized not because of what they threatened, but because of their emptiness. They took note of the wound in Peter Lake's side.

"I see that little Gwathmi did stick you, " Pearly said, warming to the possibility that, as Peter Lake had rustled through time, his invulnerability had been sc.r.a.ped off."His brother Sylvane told me about it, hoping for a reward. I didn't believe him, so I killed him."

"Let's see, " Peter Lake interrupted, mockingly."With which one of your ivory-handled doodads did you kill him? Was it with pimp's knuckles? An ebony beaver tail?"

"With my hands. Sylvane was very small, smaller even than Gwathmi. I reached out and grabbed his neck in my right fist, " Pearly said, clenching his teeth together as he imitated what he had done, "and squeezed until it snapped. He went for his weapons, but he didn't have time. He should have known."

"You can't do that to me, can you?" Peter Lake asked, staring without fear into Pearly's eyes."You never could touch me, remember?"

"Oh no, not you" Pearly answered."No, not you. A woman protects you, Peter Lake, a girl. I've tried, haven't I, but you do have a s.h.i.+eld. Or, you had a s.h.i.+eld. She must be getting tired of the job, since she let Gwathmi through. Nothing lasts forever, Peter Lake, nothing, not even her love for you."

"Love pa.s.ses from soul to soul, Pearly. It does last forever. But you wouldn't know about that."

"I might, in fact. You'd be surprised at what I've come to know. I grant you that it pa.s.ses from soul to soul, but you must grant me that it is a finite commodity, and that, as it is traded, it leaves some souls unprotected and abandoned."

"I don't think so, " Peter Lake offered."I think that nothing is lost in the giving."

"That's a b.l.o.o.d.y myth, " Pearly screamed, "and violates all laws. The world is held in perfect balance. When you give, you lose. When you take, you gain. There's nothing more to it."

"No, " said Peter Lake."The laws that you think are absolute have on occasion been abridged. Anyway, they are vastly complicated, and what is apparent is not always what is true." "Are you sure of that?" Pearly asked.

Peter Lake hesitated before he answered."No, " he said, "I'm not sure."

"Of course you're not, because your protection is gone, " Pearly insisted."You're abandoned now, Peter Lake. I knew that if I hung on long enough, I would find you when you'd be worn down."

"My protection may have disappeared, " Peter Lake a.s.serted."But you've still got me to fight." Then he did something that no one had ever dared to do. He raised himself up, and he spat in Pearly's eyes.

Pearly's short sword was out instantly and on its way down, but Peter Lake jumped to the side. Only then did Peter Lake see that Short Tails were perched on the walls, hidden in the broken pews, and standing in packed ranks near the altar.

As Pearly bellowed, and swung his sword from left to right, Peter Lake threw himself back and landed perfectly on the base of a broken column."What makes you think that I can't dispatch you just like that?' he said, slamming his fist through the empty air."What makes you think that I can't take all the little men who are standing here and hurl them to Canarsie faster than the speed of sound?" Sparkling with anger, Peter Lake had momentarily forgotten what he was intending to do.

Pearly rushed him with the sword, trying to cut through his ankles. This time, instead of dodging, Peter Lake lifted his left foot and trapped the sword against the stone. Try as he might, Pearly couldn't move it.

"Why are you so sure that things have changed?" Peter Lake asked, his foot firmly against the sword.

Pearly smiled.

"Why?" Peter Lake asked again.

"Because we butchered the horse."