Chapter 90: You don’t have to Wait anymore
The garden of shadows was even more mysterious at night. Moonlight reached where the sun never touched. The marble wall became sinister and pale, the bas-relief shadow was black like an absence.
Neville had a torch. The fire light bowed to the moonlight. Star shaped ivy leaves, unmoving glass blades; the garden seemed to hold its breath while the shadows and the flowers slowly danced to no wind. Every petal was a veil hiding a future and a past, glued together by purple flowersas frail as silk.
The marble wolf was before and after every petal. The marble tree and its shadow, like lighthouses in the sea of eternity, showed the way to here and now.
‘The three wolves of Sátiron,’ whispered Frederico. ‘The black wolf of shadows, the golden wolf of hopes, and the grey wolf, master of minds. One of the Old Woman’s books spoke of them.’
A book of marble in a garden of shadows. What pages rested behind that cover? What stories of magic, Mystery, death? And the grey wolf, with his eyes, warned: books like this, once open, never again shall close.
‘It is too late,’ said Frederico. ‘I have lost the cover.’
At the same time, to face marble was to take the first step toward the corridor in his nightmare, begin the crossing to this side here, where night after night he would dream of a dog’s bloody whipering and Faust’s absence. Neville stepped forward, stretching the black twig tied to Frederico’s arm. At least, with Neville pulling him like that, Frederico could advante without abandoning his darkness.
Neville felt, without touching, the marble texture, the fur of the wilde grey wolf, the harsh shadow lying on the floor, the smooth golden leaves. And the breath of History combing the wolf’s hair, dancing with the leaves, moving in the shadow.
Neville moved on.
‘I have avoided the story for too long.’
But each step was like a hot blade piercing his stomach. To act now that Robert was gone? Too late. Too late!
Not to Franária, Pierre had said. Too late for us, perhaps, but not to Franária.
Vivianne wondered if she was the only one felling terrified. She noticed Gregoire, his feet glued to the ground. She took him by the elbow and followed the prince and archer to the other side of the marble.
I took a fright when Vivianne took my arm. It hadn’t crossed my mind to follow those two to the other side of the marble. However, there she was, hanging on my elbow. I took a step forth. Na observer might think I was pulling her, but the truth was: she was pushing me.
Forth, to the wall of moonlight and mystery. Waxy light, liwuid rock; footprints on marble fog. Fog that became sand on the other side, stretching away in a sea of grass. A different grass from the black one in the garden behind us. Above our heads, tiny pieces of night and moon, sieaved onto us by the canopies of sleeping trees, like a mosaic of black and light.
— Gregoire’s Memories
Neville heard the others following him to the other side of the marble wall, onto a lawn as large as the apple orchard. In the middle of that clearing stood a lonely tower. Neville’s torch still burnt, but the flame had become cool and white.
Cool and black were the eyes of the girl standing between them and the tower. Black, almost liquid, was her long hair. The girl was perhaps tem years old, but in her eyes shone the light of another moon, ancestral to the one that silvered the sky tonight.
The girl made na elegant gesture with her arm, inviting them in.
‘Tea?’ she asked.
And the torch still burnt white.
The thick, wodden door was strenghened with iron and looked unwelcoming, but the tower inside was very comfortable. The small entry hall had been adapted into a small house. The girl, who introduced herself as Yukari Nakamura, asked them to remove their shoes at the door and Vivianne was surprised to feel wood under her feet. Franish towers from before the empire had stone or dirt floors. But the interior of that tower was Satironese rather than Franish. Vivianne noticed how smooth the wood was under her feet. That type of parquet that felt like a carpet was very Satironese.
The decoration, the furniture, everything looked Satironese. Vivianne was usually against adaptations, but she admitted that a Franish tower this ole could never be comfortable.
Yukari began to take herbs and tea tools from the cupboard. Vivianne had seen a tea ceremony in Rimbaud’s Caravan, but never with such perfect movements, as gentle as the green scent of tea that filled the little house.
The three men sat down, hypnotized by Nakramura’s hands. She was a little girl, but they all knew that only the real Nakamura could live at the other side of the wolves.
‘Why do you live so close to the door?’ Vivianne asked. ‘Traditionally, you live on the top floor of a tower.’
‘For protection,’ said Yukari.
‘Isn’t it safer at the top?’
‘If the enemy takes the door, they win the tower. I protect the door, not the other way around.’
Neville wasn’t paying attention to the conversation about doors, towers and architectures. Together with the green scent of herbs, he felt something smooth like the water from that creek he had drank from in the presence of that other mystery, Nuille. It was magic, but here in the tower was a distant, shapeless, lukewarm kind of magic.
Frederico took the cup with trembling hands. Behind the sweet scent of bitter tea, over the silk hair of the girl Yukari, Frederico saw a shelf with books. One of them had a blue cover, the colour of dawn.
Frederico didn’t even notice that he stood up. When he realized, his grey fingers were sighing against the ancient book. His nails recognized the letters, even though he’d never learned how to read them.
‘Where did you get this book?’ he asked.
‘In Sátiron.’
‘I didn’t know there were any copies.
‘That’s the original,’ said Yukari. ‘There is only one copy.’
Frederico leaned his forehead against the shelf.
‘Not anymore. It was burnt.’
‘I know,’ said Yukari. ‘I finished the new copy just yesterday. You may see it if you like.’ She stood up and opened a door beside the bookshelf. A dusty eagle scream escaped through the opening as they all stepped into the other side.
Vivianne’s feet landed on smooth stone. The walls were hidden behind shelves filled with paper from floor to ceiling. Rough, thick paper; paper so thin it was almost like na insect’s wing; large, long, rolled in scrolls, folded, some recent, some crumbling, yellow, blue, trodded on, covering walls and columns, giving the impression that the tower was built of paper.
A soft hiss tickled Vivianne’s foot, ran up a leg, then climbed her spine until it reached the tips of her hair. She jumped back, hitting Neville. Where her foot har been there was a green marble snake, framed by a rip of black marble. All over the floor there were animals. Unicorns and stags, wolves and griffins. Vivianne looked along the paper corridor. It was interrupted at regular intervals by stabs of moonlight that thinned out into the unending distance. That wasn’t Franish or Gorgathian architecture. That wasn’t architecture.
And all those marble animals — Vivianne had the feeling they didn’t like being steped upon. By Neville’s protective posture at her side, he had the same feeling as her.
Neville was wholy made of skin. His eyes, nose, ears — everything was skin. The world, a storm of textures, like dust taking over the atmosphere by the fall of a meteor. Spiderwebs thickened the air, emprisoning the tower, the air, History. Neville had seen those webs before. He felt, long before he saw, the man coming down the corridor. Old and writhed like a plum left out in the winter sun, white chaos framing the worn-out wrinkles. He struggled to move against the webs that he himself created. Tore them with jointy hands, stumbled on them, doubled over under their weight.
The old man stopped in front of them, cast a foggy gaze at Gregoire. Neville had forgotten Gregoire was there. The old man’s eyes sputtered a yellow spark, which cut through the web-fog, like light dropping in through a curtain’s quick gap, but Gregoire was not the storm that could lift the curtains from buryed yellow eyes, so they moved on and rested on Neville.
‘Fregósbor!’ said disse Neville.
He grabbed the old mage’s arm. The wrinkles on the ancient skin spread over Neville’s black hand like spiderwebs, trapping his body and his continuity. He was stuck in a moment that fleeted away and left him behind. He couldn’t follow time anymore, he couldn’t exist. He tried to free himself, run after existence. The more he tried, the more the webs glued to him.
But Neville had met Nuille. The power of that memory still tingled all over his skin. He tore the webs from his chest with such violence that he lost balance and nearly fell off his time, his life.
A touch to his hand. No more than a touch from Yukari Nakamura. The solid softness of ancient young fingers gave him back his body.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘What is that?’ asked Vivianne. She stepped away from the ghostly webs clinging to the old man’s chaotic beard.
‘Reality trying to fiz a breach,’ said Yukari.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Fregósbor should have died a long time ago. He didn’t. Reality can’t accept his existence; he is a breach, a grain od sand in reality’s mucus.
Neville spoke into Fregósbor’s ear.
‘Your wait is over. The story is here. It is called Pierre.’
The dusty webs receded like a wave licking the beach, and the little yellow eyes almost reached the surface, but a new wave of webs crashed over them and drowned once more the yellow soul under eras that Fregósbor should not have seen.
Frederico didn’t notice the mage Fregósbor. Darkness blanketed him against magical nuances, spiderwebs from ancient times, everything. Yukari had taken him to the new blue book on a desk. The cover had the same letters as the ancient book on her shelf. Frederico asked with his eyes, then picked the book up and opened it. He recognized the pages, turned uncountable times, never read. In those Satironese words he saw the Old Woman, and she was angry.
Move your lazy ass and make something useful of yourself.
Frederico’s arm burnt where Neville’s black tree anchored him to here and now.