Tziga was silent.
“Tziga? Why did Erasmus ask you how you got the film? I thought the cameraman was his agent.”
Tziga looked vague and baffled, and Chorley was once again overcome by nervous tenderness toward his damaged brother-in-law. “Never mind,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.” They came off the bridge onto the west embankment. The air was still but nevertheless carried the smell of damp, burned timber.
When they arrived home, they were met by a one-girl whirlwind. Rose was wrapped in a thick shawl. She said the house was cold. She said there were fires laid already, kindling and coal under a summer’s worth of dust. “Could someone else please put a match to them? I’m allergic to matches. Temporarily, I hope.” She followed her father into the parlor, and, as he knelt to light the fire, she stood behind him, ranting. “I’m sick of salad and eggs and bread,” she said. “Now that Uncle Tziga’s no longer a big secret, could we please get back our cook and maids?”
“Cook left last year. She retired to nurse her sick sister. Remember?” Chorley said.
“Why would I remember? I wasn’t here. I was boarding at school, and eating boiled bacon and boiled broccoli and boiled bloody potatoes.”
“We can summon the maid back any time. She’s only on leave. Paid leave.”
“This family is hopeless!” Rose raved. “Renting rooms they don’t use. Paying maids to take holidays. Throwing money at problems!”
Chorley got up and stared at his daughter with wide eyes. “What on earth has gotten into you?”
“The Doran house is packed with servants. Mamie and her mother can sit around being ornamental. What would we have done if gentlemen had come calling for me? Fed them dried fruit and boiled eggs with their black tea?”
“Sorry,” said Chorley. “I’ll place an advertisement for a cook on Monday. After Monday everything will be different. We’ll sit down and talk about the future. You and I. We’ll make some plans.”
“Fine,” said Rose. She came to stand beside her father and leaned against him, not to be friendly but to edge him aside so that she stood directly in front of the fire’s warmth. She said, “So it’s to be Monday, then?”
“That’s when the Commission reconvenes. Would you like to go with us—me and Laura and Tziga, and the Grand Patriarch and his people?”
“No. I don’t want Mamie to hear I was in on the kill. She’ll probably never speak to me again anyway, no matter what I do.”
Chorley put an arm around his daughter. “Are you warmer now, dear?”
“Yes.”
“I’d better go see what Tziga is up to. Partway through your tirade he headed for the kitchen.”
“Oh no!” Rose rushed off to rescue the food from her uncle’s absentminded efforts.
Chorley was in bed by eleven, but it took him a long time to go to sleep. He would be drifting off but would wake up with his heart pounding, startled by the memory of his daughter’s plunge from the roof of the People’s Palace, or by panic at all the little things he’d left undone. He hadn’t talked to Rose about what she wanted to do this year. And what was Laura going through now? Just how involved with that Mason boy had she allowed herself to be? Was Tziga any better? Would Grace be safe walking Inland alone?
Taken together, all these little worries and serious frights kept rousing Chorley till around three in the morning, when he fell asleep in the midst of a memory of the Depot film—the pajama-clad figures in flickering black-and-white—an agitated picture of serene sleepwalkers.
The man was with his family. They were trailing up from the beach after an early-morning swim. The blond sandstone of his house caught the light of the lifting sun. In the high tide, the forest seemed to come right down to the water, so that the headland spilled over its reduced shoreline like a gem bulging with light above a gold setting. In the scoop of the bay, two sails were visible, and one far-off smudge of smoke from a steamer’s funnel. The man gazed at the horizon and had a sense of the world beyond his peaceful property, going on, industrious, and in good order.
As he strolled and looked around him, the man was filled with satisfaction at everything he saw. He realized that this was one of those moments when it seemed the world itself stopped him and clasped his hand and gave him its congratulations.
He stopped walking. He took a cigar from the pocket of his robe. He trimmed the cigar to his satisfaction, then lit it and blew out smoke of a creamy texture and bluish tinge, the taste of which reminded him of other pleasures he’d had—meals eaten, deals struck, rivals beaten. He planted his legs and stood in his orchard, his bearded chin tilted up, blowing smoke into the branches above him.
Wasps had burrowed in the hanging shells of the last apricots of the season. The smoke dislodged them, and the man watched, delighted, as the insects kept on seeking the lost sweetness through the smoke, dogged and stupid.
“It was all worth it,” thought the man. “All the risks I took, all the sacrifices I made.” Before him, yesterday, today, tomorrow, was the proof of the good he’d done himself—his beautiful house and happy family.
He could see his mother on the terrace, with her silver tea service and old-worldly shawl. She was ninety years of age and still straight-backed and sound of mind. With her was his second wife. She’d seen him. She was coming down the terrace steps. In a moment she’d join him, and he’d put his hand in the small of her slender back.
His son and daughter passed him in friendly conversation. He watched them with gratification. He’d been wrong ever to worry about them since, true to their mother’s habitual saying, they were the cream that had risen to the top of society. His son looked every inch the prosperous businessman he was—a major stockholder in the nation’s largest utilities company.
The man detected that advice was being offered, brother to sister, and that it was a happy exchange. His daughter had mellowed, had grown up generous and grateful and good. He had been foolish to worry about her too—though he could always say to himself now that worrying about her was part of doing well by her.
One of his granddaughters stopped beside him. “Look, Grandfather!” she said, and did a cartwheel.
“Very good,” said the man, then, “Watch out for the wasps.”
She did. She was careful. She called out the same advice to her younger sister. There were no mishaps. He could hear them, their laughter broken up by grunts of effort as they practiced all the way to the house.
The eels the boys had caught yesterday would be smoked and boned and ready for breakfast. The man had a good appetite. He ground out his cigar on the trunk of the apricot tree.
The girls had gone indoors, and the Inlet became for a moment a silent arena in which the future—his future—breathed like an expectant audience. Yes, it had all been worth it, the brinkmanship, the qualms of conscience. He had taken things on himself, had made hard decisions for others, and had been rewarded by this peace—and by being right. He was the architect of the prosperity of his nation. It had all turned out for the best. And he knew that he was, in the balance of time, a better man than most.
The orchard grew warmer, and the wasps took themselves off to their bush nests.
His grandsons came last, walking gingerly barefoot by him. They were strong boys, sun-browned, carrying their canoe paddles.
For another moment the man was by himself in the warm morning. He was utterly content. Whatever wrongs he’d committed were only, in the end, part of this loveliness, this life he’d made, this nation he’d shaped, this whole beautiful day ahead of him.
3
N THAT SAME SATURDAY, GRACE DROVE LAURA TO DOORHANDLE, their bones shaken by the bad early auTUMN ROADS. BEFORE EITHER OF THEM WENT IN, THEY ASKED FOR A CLAIM FORM AT THE CHIEF RANGER’S OFFICE AND FILLED IT OUT. LAURA STAKED HER CLAIM ON THE GATE. THEY MADE A NOTE OF WHERE THEY WERE GOING IN THE INTENTIONS BOOK, THEN WALKED IN.
They went together to Foreigner’s West, and Grace sat beside Laura as she slept. Then Grace kept Laura company again t
o the coach stop at Doorhandle before heading back In herself on a three-day round trip to the site of Drought’s End.
Laura was in the waiting room by the stagecoach stop when she heard the announcement that, because of a cracked wheel rim, the departure of the Sunday coach would be delayed an hour. She looked at her watch and then went out. She wasn’t hungry, so she wandered up and down the short boardwalks, browsing shop windows. She was doing this when she saw from a distance one of the Misses Lilley coming her way and decided that she couldn’t face any Lilleys.
Laura ducked into an alley between the draper’s and butcher’s and came out on the slope down to the banks of the Rifleman. There was a bridle path by the river. Laura walked along it, away from the border, until only Doorhandle’s church steeple was visible over the riverside trees.
Most of the flowers had gone to seed, but the Queen Anne’s lace had lasted and stood waist high. There were big dragonflies zooming back and forth across the path, and, whenever one passed close, Laura would warily stop to see what it was going to do. They had always liked to fly into Rose’s hair, and Laura was worried that, since Rose and her hair weren’t present, the insects might find her attractive instead. But the dragonflies swerved around her as if she were protected by an invisible barrier.
It was very quiet on the path. The native birds had, for the most part, gone back into the forest—everything they liked to eat was gone. With the bullying parson birds gone, the thrushes were back and singing. Laura stopped to listen to one, its song a flow of joy so sure it was almost matter-of-fact.
The breeze dropped altogether, and the sun seemed to kiss the tops of Laura’s ears.
Then there came a vibration—footfalls on the path behind her. Laura remembered that she wasn’t supposed to be alone. That there were reasons other than her bereavement that her family was sticking so close to her. She turned—and threw up her hands. She was dazzled. The low sun shone, magnified, through a volume of glass. The sun melted as the glass moved.
Laura closed her eyes and cried out.
Someone spoke, said her name in a deep, melodious voice—a voice she didn’t know.
Laura opened her eyes again and looked to where the voice had come from. The patch of magnified, blinding sunlight had gone. The thing between her and the sun had moved. She could get a better look at it now. What she saw was a humanshaped volume of glass. She could see trees and grass and the river through the body, distorted, twisted like the petals of color at the heart of a glass marble.
Laura backed into the cloud layer of Queen Anne’s lace and didn’t stop till she met the trunk of a tree.
He approached her slowly, the glass Nown, and as he came she saw a smear of dirty bread dough in his abdomen, all that remained of her little bread-and-dust man. She saw the solid lump of dark matter in his chest, a rust-stained rock from the railbed. She saw that he wasn’t completely, limpidly transparent but had, in his human-shaped volume, here and there, bubbles hanging like frog spawn in pond water. She saw that the different thicknesses of his different parts made shadows within him, and that these weren’t shadow-colored but bronze and indigo and blue-black. The shadows and distorted world melted in him as he came toward her —moved, a glass statue that was flexible, as if still molten.
As he came close, Laura saw that the soles of his feet were frosted by the wear of walking. Up close his hand was white too or, because he put his hand up to touch her face, the white may only have been her breath misting the glass of his palm.
Nown stooped. He brought his head down to hers so that their foreheads were pressed together. Laura didn’t say anything. She only rubbed her face against his. Her cheeks were wet with tears and squawked against his smooth glass skin.
He put an arm around her to support her. She could scarcely stand and couldn’t speak. His skin was warm from the sun but unyielding. Her hand against his jaw felt a fake sinew, like a seam of some harder mineral in a sea-worn stone. His jaw moved but stayed as hard as any stone. He said, “Rose?”
Laura cried harder.
“I called,” he said. “And I was lucky, she was near. It didn’t take me too long to find her in the fire. But the staircase was eaten away by then, and I did more harm than good. I’m sorry. I promise in the future to do more, to do— I know not what—to save whoever you love.”
Laura clung to him. She had the feeling that something blocked had burst open and she was being swept toward the future she had thought she’d lost. She choked out “Rose saved herself” and felt him relax—as much as anything unyielding could be said to relax.
“Sit down,” Nown said, and lowered her to the ground. He knelt before her. His body became the yellow-green of grass and flower stalks, his head milky with flowers—filled, and surrounded, and crowned with flowers. Laura touched his face again. It was a little unclear where he began and ended. He was there, and not there. And it was more difficult than ever to read any expression on his face.
After a long time, when the light was turning gold and midges had gathered under the tree, Laura was calm enough to tell Nown what had happened. She told him about Sandy. “Men must have been lying in wait for him,” she said. “The Gate had turned him into an even more formidable Soporif than his uncle George. His uncle thinks he was knocked out in a struggle and took everyone down with him. The men who attacked him were carrying lamps. None of them would have been conscious when the fire started.”
Nown sat still and seemed to be thinking. Laura watched him and considered how she’d felt betrayed by him. How she’d given him up in her heart and wrapped herself in Sandy, Sandy’s warm flesh, her sense that Sandy was a real life, a true future. She considered that some of her willingness to fall into all that—love, and promising her life—was made up of fury at Nown. She had felt spiteful and righteous.Now she didn’t know what she felt. Her feelings were so strange, beyond relief, or reprieve, or gratitude.
She took a deep breath. “The site of The Gate is on the border, inside a big O that someone has inscribed on the ground. For years rangers have supposed that the O stands for ‘ouest’—the French word for west. They think that because there’s also a big N on the ground in the north. N for ‘nord.’ But when I saw the O, and Sandy told me about the N, I knew what it really was. What the Place really is. Why didn’t you tell me that it’s a Nown?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“That isn’t an answer. Once I’d freed you, why didn’t you tell me? You must have understood that it was something I needed to know.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
“I didn’t know what would happen.”
Laura reached out, put her knuckles against his rock-hard shoulder, and gave him a hard shove. He didn’t stir.
“I couldn’t foresee the consequences for you and me if I told you.”
“Couldn’t you just act in good faith?”
“My freedom isn’t like yours, Laura. I think that whenever I have to choose what to do, I have to know what will happen. My free will has laws, it seems. Because I cannot lose my soul, my free will must have laws.”
This somehow all made sense to Laura. It made her feel terribly tired, but better. She’d been wrong to resent him—she was always wrong when she expected him to act like a human. She sighed—she had just realized that she’d missed the coach. She asked Nown, “Why didn’t you come to find me in Founderston?”
“It was only yesterday that I was able to dig myself out. They had finally moved enough of the debris to make the ash loose around me.”
“I thought you’d been destroyed.”
“I fell into a pit of coal. It was burning. There were hours when I thought I might not be able to go on. To go on distinguishing myself from the burning coal. We were the same temperature, and I became confused about where the coal ended and I began. Then I felt myself melting, and as I melted I reduced and found myself, my limits. I drew some air into me so I wouldn’t shrink too much. I didn’t want to be small. And,
as I took that breath, I remembered that Laura had made me, and that I’d promised to watch Laura, and never to hurt her. I kept myself together and cooled. And then I had to wait.”
Laura looked at him. The sun was bristling through him now, broken by the shadows of the trees across the river. “All right,” she thought, “this is my life.” What she said was, “Father needs me. I have The Gate for him. Can you get me to Founderston before midnight?”
“Yes.”
She studied him. He wouldn’t be too visible in the dark, but by daylight he was conspicuous. He could no longer pretend to be a stone. She was sure that, although he could move, he could no longer stretch or flatten, or make a comfortable sling of his arms to carry her in. Then she had an idea. She knew where she could find clothes he could wear. She had a moment of confusion about her plan—it was practical, but it made her a little queasy. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
Laura left him. She hurried back to the village and to Mrs. Lilley’s boardinghouse.
She asked her landlady about the trunk she was storing.George Mason had asked Grace to tell Mrs. Lilley that he would drop by in a day or two to collect his nephew’s belongings. Laura said to the landlady that George Mason had told her she could have one or two of Sandy’s things. Conveniently, tears filled her eyes as she spoke.
Mrs. Lilley patted Laura’s shoulder, took her to the trunk room, and gave her the key to Sandy’s trunk.
Half an hour later, Nown was clothed in trousers, a knitted hat, and Sandy’s long dreamhunter’s duster coat. Laura saw that her sandman hadn’t totally managed to combat the shrinkage of his change from river sand to glass, despite the frog spawn skeins of bubbles he’d drawn into his body. He was nearer to Sandy’s size now—a little over six feet and as slender as a young man. He’d kept all his proportions, but there was less of him.