Winter’s breath smoked in the cold air.
“But daylight will be breaking soon, Father. And I want to go home.”
For a long moment Winter did not answer. David thought he would turn and put little Lark down and they would walk back up the hill to the Southside and make hot chicory and drink it together and wait for the sun to rise. But Winter shook his head. “I do not forget my responsibilities.” He began to walk forward with Lark held over the edge of the Bridge railing. “I made a deal with the North Side once. I go to make another. Perhaps the magic will not demand her sacrifice. Don’t try to stop me. That would only make her death a certainty.”
“Mister?” Lark cried. Standing there on the cold dark Bridge, David found himself wondering, sadly, why he had never married. It seemed like a very important question. “Mister?”
Would he speak? No. No answer. But he had not forgotten the promise he made to Raining. He had not forgotten Wire, that extraordinary young woman who said, “We are the only parents she has left.”
The question was, Where would the bullet drive Winter’s body? Standing where David was, two paces behind Winter and a little to the right, could he shoot his commander in the left shoulder and hope the impact would spin the body around fast enough to keep Lark from falling over the bridge?
John Walker stepped forward.
What about a bullet to the leg? Would it buckle Winter’s body and drop Lark below the level of the railing?
Winter shifted Lark again, holding her out in empty space. She whimpered.
John Walker stepped back.
David scrambled from the road onto the sidewalk and ran forward. He couldn’t decide what to do, so he shot Winter through the brain and lunged for the girl. He missed her and she fell screaming as Winter’s arm dropped beneath her.
She grabbed his dead body, little arms clutched around his bloody neck as he buckled, and David had another chance and this time he caught her. He tried to pull her back from the railing but she was screaming and wouldn’t let go of Winter’s body until David took her arms and held her and held her while she screamed.
John Walker knelt beside Winter’s body, weeping. David looked up and met his eyes. “I promised,” he said.
He went back to the car and used its radio to call for help. He explained that Winter was dead and that he had a little girl with him who might need assistance. Before he finished, an operator cut in to say that Emily was on her way and wanted everything left for an investigation. He was to wait and touch nothing.
He buckled Lark up in the front seat and turned on the heater. When she was safe and warm he got out of the car. Winter’s body lay where it had fallen. Gouts of blood had already frozen into a crusty brown stain on the snow. John Walker was gone. The only trace of him that remained was a set of boot prints on the snowy sidewalk heading up the Bridge to the Southside.
David got back in the car. He cracked a window so he and Lark wouldn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning. The girl cried until she fell asleep. Together they sat in the warm car for hours. From time to time David spoke on the radio. Delays developed while people tried to decide whether to let Emily come down to the scene of Winter’s murder. No one told David what was happening in Chinatown and he didn’t care.
At last Emily arrived. David was taken into custody. The sky was just beginning to pale in the east. It was almost morning.
Chapter
Twenty-nine
Claire had never seen Emily so upset. The news of Winter’s death unravelled her.
Emily had never been a worse politician than she was for the next couple of hours; silent and withdrawn with the enlisted men she needed to command, and, more damaging still, snappish and high-handed with the few Southsiders of her stature. She had even provoked Mike Beranek, who was, in Claire’s jaundiced opinion, as level-headed a man as the army was capable of promoting. Claire had found herself in the highly unusual situation of having to shut Emily up and do her talking for her.
Things got so bad that at one point Claire feared there was a real chance of Emily’s landing in prison. This was not the way she put it to Emily. Instead, she said it looked as if Emily would not be allowed to participate in the investigation into Winter’s death. There was even talk, she said reluctantly, that Emily would not be allowed to pay her respects to his body before he was entombed.
A sneaky tactic and it worked. With a great effort of will Emily pulled herself together and began to coax, argue, wheedle, and bully the assorted dignitaries of Southside with something approaching her usual skill.
It went surprisingly well. The shock of Winter’s death was very great on the Southside. Claire suspected that in their hearts, her fellow citizens were desperate for Emily to take charge; their obstreperous behavior reflected their outrage that she hadn’t stepped in and done so masterfully from the start. As soon as Emily showed she had her touch back, everyone was glad to accede to her wishes. She was, after all, Winter’s political heir and next of kin. Claire was able to relax and observe the rest of the negotiations with what she imagined must be the feelings of a proud mother with no interest in hockey watching her son dominate his league’s All-Star game.
On the Bridge it was different. No politics there. No maneuvering. Just the fact of Winter’s body lying cold and stiff on the icy sidewalk. Emily prayed over it, and wept. When her tears were done she crossed herself and stood. “Claire?”
“Yes.”
“I have to go across the Bridge. I have to…harrow the North Side, you know. I have to make peace with those children. I have to end Grandfather’s deal.”
“Do I hear something about Making a New Covenant?”
Emily laughed unsteadily. “That too. Claire? I’m frightened.”
“Sensible.”
“Will you come with me?”
Claire looked around. David Oliver had driven Lark up to the top of the hill. He was probably being questioned already; no doubt by one of his own men. “I didn’t have anything else planned,” she said.
Pale morning light came as they began their crossing.
The river was almost free, now. The pack ice had broken up; scattered floes drifted singly down the river’s broad brown back. Old snow still lingered in the dim river valley and spread out across the wrinkled plains. The great red-black bones of the High Level Bridge lay on that mute white expanse like the skeleton of some huge iron beast. At the north end of the Bridge, where it began its climb up the far bank of the river, Emily crouched before a little mound in the roadway. Brushing away the snow, she found a pile of children’s bones, tiny arms and feet and fingers, and twelve small skulls. The bones were cold to the touch. To Claire’s surprise Emily did not close her eyes and pray, but only knelt before those dead children, unblinking. And she made there certain promises.
Then she stood and together they climbed up the hill to the abandoned city.
It was colder on the North Side, and still. The road forked after leaving the Bridge. Emily chose the right-hand way that skirted the edge of the old Legislature buildings. The pond before it was frozen, its fountain still. A few cars sat empty in the snow-covered parking lot. Then they went on, past the Legislature and up the hill, Emily puffing as they passed the YWCA and the Edmonton Journal building on the corner of Jasper Avenue. All the roads were empty and all the windows were dark. Everything human had been stripped from that place, every thought or purpose; every building and car and sign and street lamp was reduced to landscape only. Every work of man held only the same irreducible meaning as the barren trees, and the snowy fields, and the prairie sky.
“Look!” Emily said, pointing upwards.
“What? I don’t see anything.”
“It’s a pigeon.”
“What? Oh—there it is,” Claire said. One pale grey bird peered down at them from a window ledge just under the eaves of the Edmonton Journal building. It cocked its head to one side, fluffed, and then rushed into the sky in a batter of grey wings.
“Ha!??
? Emily said. She was grinning.
Claire grinned back. “Nice to see something, anyway. Hey—look over there. On the streetlight. No, right on top.”
“Magpie? No, a crow. Two crows. Let’s go that way.” Emily waved across the street to where the crows were. Claire went first, stumbling when she stepped off a curb whose edge was still hidden by the snow. “Look at our footprints!” Emily said. “Like being the first kid in the schoolyard after a blizzard.”
“Big playground,” Claire said. She felt herself smiling.
Three cedar waxwings watched them from the top of a huge white marquee with the words FAMOUS PLAYERS spelled out in letters a foot high. The marquee stuck out above a pair of large glass doors rimed with frost. Emily waved to their reflections in the glass; they very civilly waved back.
There were more crows on the electric trolley lines now—three, five, seven of them. Another waxwing perched in the naked branches of a scrawny tree planted to beautify the sidewalk untold decades earlier. A brace of singularly greedy-looking magpies patrolled the park in Sir Winston Churchill Square. And on the steps of the public library, Emily and Claire surprised a whole flock of pigeons. The birds scattered around them, booming and whirring.
The empty city was alive with birds, birds in every tree, birds on statues and parking meters; birds perched on the gables of old buildings or issuing suddenly from underground parking lots. Crows and magpies and sparrows, finches and pigeons and little hedge wrens. Emily even spied a first spring robin, red breast puffed out bravely against the white of winter.
“Could they all be birds?” Emily asked.
“Could what be birds?”
“The dead. The ghosts. They live half in our world and half in another. Grandfather said that.”
“Oh,” said Claire. “We should have asked John Walker.”
The day grew warmer. Claire began to sweat in her parka. The dry snow underfoot lost its squeak, then grew mushy and clotting. Water stains spread down the sides of empty office buildings. Still the birds came, scores of them, flocks of them. Everywhere Emily went, the birds followed her. The sparrows a-quiver, the pigeons disapproving and easily offended, a source of endless amusement for the jeering magpies, and the crows, who croaked out their own cynical commentary on the whole business. By the time Emily headed back for the Bridge, a storm cloud of birds wheeled and hovered over her. From time to time she would raise her hand and whirl it, and the whole vast twittering cloud of birds would spin like autumn leaves stirred by the wind.
It was almost noon when they returned to the park at the head of the Bridge. Here the birds hung back, uncertain, settling on trees and park benches and bicycle racks. But Emily shook her head, and raised her arm again, and cried out, no stirring words but a schoolgirl’s yell, and jogged to the sidewalk leading down the hill and began to run, quicker and quicker, and Claire loped alongside, and the birds began to follow, streaming out behind them like a banner. Faster and faster, slithering on the slippery sidewalk, Emily bounding down the slope, each stride huger than the last, and then they were running onto the very Bridge itself, and the sky was dark with wings.
Emily faltered, laughing, as her wind gave out. The cloud of birds swept by, crows beating steadily below the Bridge and magpies with them, little brown birds and dun-colored birds, spotted and stippled and speckled birds of hedge and limb, darting through the girders, and overhead the great rushing roaring of ten thousand beating wings. And then the birds were past them, driven like leaves on the wind. Over the valley they soared, and into the trees on the south side of the river. Some beat strongly up the hill, swirling among the university buildings or darting into the tangled hedgerows of bare honeysuckle and rhododendron, or lifting up, higher and higher, to circle around the great dome of St. Paul’s.
Then drifting, landing, perching, hopping, stopping, walking, watching, the birds came down, settling after so many long cold years among the streets and houses of the Southside, for once and forever.
Emily knelt again at the cairn of small bones and crossed herself and bowed her head.
A ring of birds gathered around her: a finch, a duck, a meadowlark; swallow, waxwing, snowy owl, chickadee, wren. A squawking crow. A white marsh-hawk, that men would call a harrier, fierce as the winter sun. Last to come was the woodpecker, winging not from the north, but from the west, coming up along the river. A faint sea-scent clung about his wings.
Emily touched the skeletons, their tiny skulls and finger bones. “We should bury these.” She stripped off her foil parka and made a rough sling of it and put the bones inside. Then she started walking back across the Bridge, for home.
One by one, the last birds lifted into the air and flew ahead, arrowing for the Southside. Swallow, meadowlark, finch, and the others, hopped, squawked, and flapped away singing.
The Harrier landed on the bridge railing next to Claire. With fierce pale eyes they beheld one another. Then the white hawk leapt up, beating higher and higher, until she let her wings open and soared toward the wooded southern bank. She screamed, and split the day open with her fierce exultation.
Some time later Claire realized Emily was looking at her. She turned away from the girl abruptly.
“Well?” Emily said. “It’s time to go home.”
Chapter
Thirty
That night was the worst of Wire’s life.
She had given Lark up to be slaughtered.
David Oliver had come into the room and told her in his grave tired gentle lying way that he needed to take Lark with him for a moment, the bastard…Oh shit, oh gods. Had said he would only be a minute, and stupid worthless cunt she had trusted him, trusted a Southside spy. And let Raining’s daughter go to die.
She cried loudly, hysterically, trying to lose herself in the violence of her own grief. But she never managed to forget why she was crying, so she stopped.
Oh Lark. Black hair bouncing, small limbs tireless in play. Small mouth open in sleep.
Oh Rain, what have I done to you?
Because he was a man, dammit. Because he was a man and he admired her and he had wanted to kiss her once, she felt it, and so she had liked him. And trusted him. She had sold her best friend’s life for a few tired smiles from a stranger. Unbelievable.
If she could have traded places with Lark, she would have done it like a shot. She would have gone to her death weeping tears of joy. And it didn’t matter a damn. Because the terrible mistake was made and it couldn’t be taken back, not by a million good intentions, not by the most anguished remorse. Lark would die and Wire would live, because the universe is deaf and dumb and does not hear what we say and has no answers for us, but rolls on crushing and implacable, and our dreams and desires are less than ghosts to it. Less than smoke on the wind.
It never occurred to Wire to kill herself. She only imagined living in anguish, always.
The god came to her just before dawn, clothed in the body of a woodpecker—a red wingbeat and a faint smell of bark and stream water.
“You!” she whispered. He stood before her, smiling. Beautiful beyond hope. “I know you. You were watching me the day I went to get Raining.”
He held out his hand and she knew she must stand and approach him.
Even smiling, his beauty was terrible. Unendurable. She fell to her knees and looked away, unable to bear his brightness. He took her hand. His touch was morning sun kindling the treetops; cold creek water over stone; deer in the forest. His smile was not serene but merry. He looked at her with rascal’s eyes that promised everything, and kissed her hand, and like a miracle she was forgiven.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I don’t deserve it.”
He laughed, annihilating all deserving. As if her guilt, too, was only smoke on the wind. And the touch of his lips on her hand was sweet, was sweet.
Early that morning a rumor of Winter’s passing flew through the corridors of Government House, and was soon confirmed. Winter was dead and General Beranek was in charge until furt
her notice. Someone back on the Southside, David Oliver perhaps, thought of Wire at last and sent word to her that Lark was safe. Wire was to be released and escorted to her apartment.
A few hours later she was home.
At the entrance to her building she said goodbye to the well-muscled escort the Southsiders had provided and climbed the stairs to her apartment, all seven flights. She came to her door still puffing and turned the knob. Her right hand was stiff and painful where the god had kissed it. She drew a breath and stepped inside. The hand bothered her again as she unlaced her chunky boots. Her apartment hummed and chortled, happy to have her back. A burner came on under the kettle. Pleasant music began to play.
Wire stripped off her socks and walked barefoot across the hardwood floors. She was grimy and weary from her days of captivity and she meant to take a bath, but first she walked over to her balcony door, slid it open and stepped outside. It had finally stopped raining; the grey cloud was beginning to break up. Here and there the midmorning sun slipped through, dancing on the water of English Bay.
No woodpecker regarded her from the branches of the cherry tree.
She never saw the god again, and her right hand, where he had kissed it, remained crippled with arthritis for the rest of her days. But on that morning, the feeling of joy and relief and grace, more profound for being undeserved, still abided deeply within her; and his rogue’s kiss had been sweet, and the world was good.
Wire sat on her bed and pulled off her clothes, lifting Raining’s locket off last of all. She held it up, and laughed at her fat future self there—thanks a lot, Rain. She kissed the locket and tossed it in the general direction of her charm box. Then she headed for the shower, wondering what she was going to eat for breakfast.
Chapter
Thirty-one
When David Oliver woke he recognized his surroundings immediately. He was in the solitary confinement cell in the McKernan stockade.