Little, Big Part 51

And in a mode like fiction, like make-believe, existed the land to which her cousins said she was invited toa"no, told she must!a"journey. Yes, journey; for if it was a land, the only way to get there was to travel.

All that was clear enough, but no help.

For Chinese heavens and make-believe lands had this in common, that however you reached them, it was your choice so to travel; in fact endless preparations were almost always required for such journeys, and a will or at least a dream of iron. And what had that to do with a mode which, against this world's will, or without anyway asking its leave at all, invaded it piecemeal, siezing an architect's fancy, a pentacle of five towns, a block of slum buildings, a Terminus ceilinga"the Capital itself? Which fell on the citizens of this common mode and bore them away, or at least absorbed them w.i.l.l.y-nilly in the advancing tide of its own being? The Holy Roman Empire, she had called it; she had been mistaken. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was only flotsam borne on this wave that moved the waters of Time, his sleep had been broken into as graves are broken into by the waters of a flood and the dead borne out, he was headed elsewhere.

Unless she, who had no intention of ending up in some place ruled by who knew what masters, masters who might well take her revolt against them very badly, could turn him. Turn him, as a secret agent is turned by the side he is spying on. For this she had stolen the cards. With them she might rule him, or at least make him see reason.

There was one great flaw in that scheme, however.

What a pickle, what a pickle. She glanced up at the purse over on the luggage rack. She felt that her s.h.i.+ft against this storm was as hopeless as any, as any sad hopeless s.h.i.+ft of those caught in the path of something, something uncaring and oncoming, and far huger than they had imagined. Eigenblick had said it in every speech, and he had been right, and she blind. To welcome it was as futile as to defy it, it would have you anyway if it wanted you, Hawksquill was very sorry she had been smug but still she must escape. Must.

Footsteps: she sorted their progress down the corridor toward her bedroom from the regular clatter of the train wheels' turning.

No time to hide the cards, nowhere better anyway than in plain sight. This was all coming too rapidly to a head, she was after all only an old lady and no good at this, no good at all.

Do not, she counseled herself, do not look toward the alligator purse.

The door was flung open. Holding the jamb in his two hands to steady himself against the train's motion, Russell Eigenblick stood before her. His somber tie was pulled awry, and sweat glistened on his forehead. He glared at Hawksquill.

"I can smell them," he said.

There, there was the flaw in her scheme. She had glimpsed it first in the Oval Office on a certain snowy night. Now she was certain. The Emperor was mad: as mad as any hatter.

"Smell what, sir?" she asked mildly.

"I can smell them," he said again.

"You're up very early," she said. "Too early for a gla.s.s of this?" She showed him the brandy bottle.

"Where are they?" he said, stumbling into the tiny chamber. "You have them, now, here somewhere."

Do not look toward the alligator purse. "Them?"

"The cards," he said. "You b.i.t.c.h."

"There's a matter I must speak to you about," she said, getting up. "I'm sorry I was delayed boarding last night until late, but a"

He was lunging around the room, eyes s.h.i.+fting rapidly, nostrils flaring. "Where," he said. "Where."

"Sir," she said, drawing up but feeling hopelessness swim up in her, "sir you must listen."

"The cards."

"You're acting on the wrong side." She blurted it out, unable to frame it cleverly, feeling horribly drawn to stare at the purse which he had not seen on the luggage rack. He was tapping the walls for hiding places. "You must listen. Those who made promises to you. They have no intention of keeping them. Even if they could. But I a"

"You!" he said, turning to her. "You!" He laughed hugely. "That's rich!"

"I want to help you."

He paused in his search. He looked at her, depths of sad reproach in his brown eyes. "Help," he said. "You. Help. Me."

It had been an unfortunate choice of words. He knewa" she could see it in his facea"that helping him had never been what Hawksquill had intended, nor was it her intention now. Mad he might be, but he wasn't stupid. The betrayal in his face made her look away. It was apparent that nothing she could say would move him. All he wanted from her now was what was useless to him without her, though even that she couldn't think how to explain.

She found herself staring at them, in their purse on the luggage rack. She could almost see them looking back at her.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed her look away, but the Tyrant had seen her. He made to shove her aside, reaching up.

"Stop!" she said, flinging into the word powers she had once vowed never to use except at deepest need, and for good ends only. The Emperor stopped. He was still in mid-grasp; his bull's strength struggled against Hawksquill's command, but he couldn't move. Hawksquill grabbed the alligator purse and fled from the room.

In the corridor, she nearly collided with the stooped and slow-moving porter. "Ready to sleep, now, miz?" he inquired gently.

"You sleep," she said, and pushed past him. He slid down the wall, mouth open, eyes closed, asleep. Hawksquill, already crossing into the next car, heard Eigenblick roar out in rage and dismay. She shoved aside a heavy curtain that barred her way, and found herself in a sleeper, where at Eigenblick's cry men had awakened and were now pulling aside the curtains on upper and lower berths and looking out, sleepy, alert, pale. They saw Hawksquill. She backed out through the curtain and into the car she had come from.

There, in a niche in the wall, she saw that cord which she had often studied in her train-going, the cord that when pulled in fun or malice set the puller up for a stiff fine. She had never really believed that these slim ropes could actually stop a train, but, hearing steps and clamor in the far car, she pulled it now, and stepped quickly to the door, and grasped its handle.

Within seconds the train came to a thras.h.i.+ng, cras.h.i.+ng, jolting stop. Hawksquill, astonished at herself, wrenched open the door.

Rain struck her. They were in the middle of nowhere, amid rainy, dark woods where last hillocks of snow melted. It was fiercely cold. Hawksquill leapt to the ground with a fainting heart and a cry. She struggled up the embankment, hampered by her skirt, hurrying herself lest the impossibility of her doing this at all catch up with her.

Dawn was gray, almost in its paleness more opaque than night. At the top of the embankment, within the woods, panting, she looked back at the dark length of the stopped train. Lights were coming on inside. From the door she had left, a man jumped down, signalling behind him to another. Hawksquill, stumbling in snowobscured undergrowth, ran deeper in. She heard calls behind her. The hunt was up.

She turned behind a great tree and rested her back against it, sobbing painful cold breaths, listening. Twigs crackled, the woods were being beaten for her. A glance around showed her a dim figure, far off to the left, with something blunt, pointed and black in a gloved hand.

Done secretly to death. No one the wiser.

With trembling hands she opened the alligator purse. She clawed out from amid the loose cards a small morocco-leather envelope; Her breath condensing before her made it difficult to see, and her fingers shook uncontrollably. She pulled open the envelope and fumbled within it for the sliver of bone that it contained, one bone chosen from among the thousand-odd bones of a pure black cat. Where was the wretched thing. She felt it. She pinched it between two fingers. A crackle of brush that seemed close by startled her, she threw up her head, the tiny charm slipped from her fingers. She almost caught it as it fell catching along the stuff of her skirt, but her eager hand grasping for it brushed it away. It fell amid snow and black leaves. Hawksquill, crying a hopeless no, stepped unwittingly on the place where it had fallen.

The calling of those who followed her was soft, confident, coming closer. Hawksquill fled from her shelter, glimpsing as she did so the shade of another of Eigenblick's soldiers, or the same one, anyway armed; and he saw her too.

She had never given much thought to what in fact might happen to her mortal body, its soul securely hidden, if fatal things were done to it; if projectiles were pa.s.sed violently through it, if its blood were spilled. She couldn't die, she was certain of that. But what, exactly? What? She turned, and saw him aim. A shot was fired, she turned to run again, unable to tell if she had been struck or only shocked by the noise.

Struck. She could distinguish the warm wetness of her blood from the cold wetness of the rain. Where was the pain? She ran on, plunging hopelessly out-of-kilter, one leg seemed not to be working. She fell against tall trees, hearing her pursuers guiding each other with brief words. They were quite near.

There were escapes from this, there were other exits she could find, she was sure of it. But just at the moment she could remember none of them.

Could not remember! All her arts were being taken from her. Well, that was just; for she had dishonored them, had lied, had stolen, had sought power with them in her height of pride; she had used powers she had forsworn, for ends of her own. It was quite just. She turned, at bay; she saw on all sides the dark shapes of her pursuers. They wanted to get quite close, no doubt, so as not to make a great fuss. One or two shots. But what would become of her? The pain she had thought not to feel was just now surging up her body, and was ghastly. Pointless to run any more; black mists were pa.s.sing before her eyes. Yet she turned again to run.

There was a path.

There was a path, quite clear in the twilight. And therea"well, she could go there, couldn't she? To that little house in the clearing. A shot jolted her horribly, but as though a shaft of sunlight struck it, the house became clearer: a funny sort of house, indeed the oddest little house that she had ever seen. What house did it remind her of? Gingerbreaded and many-colored, with chimney-pots like comic hats, and cheerful firelight showing in the deep small windows, and a round green door. A welcoming, a friendly green door; a door that just then opened; a door from which a broadly grinning face looked out to welcome her.

Fifty-two Pickup They shot her, in fact, several times, being superst.i.tious themselves; and certainly she looked as dead as any dead person they had ever seen, the same doll-like, heedless appearance to the limbs, the same vacated face. She didn't move. No cloud of breath condensed above her lips. Satisfied at last, one s.n.a.t.c.hed up the alligator purse, and they returned to the train.

Weeping, shouting hoa.r.s.e gouts of laughter, with the old cards (mixed backs and faces) pressed in a messy clutch against his bosom, at last, at last, Russell Eigenblick, the President, pulled at the cord which would start the train again. Blinded with fear and joy, he plunged through the cars of the train, almost knocked over when the train with a jolt started up again; the train plunged through his country, swept with rain, breathing clouds of steam. Between Sandusky and South Bend the rain turned unwillingly to snow and sleet and deepened to blizzard; the baffled engineer could see nothing. He cried out when there loomed up before him with great suddenness the mouth of a lightless tunnel, for he knew there could be no tunnel in this landscape, nor had ever been, but before he could take action (what action?) the train had roared into limitless darkness louder and darker even than Barbarossa's triumph.

When it arrived, quite empty of pa.s.sengers, at the following station (an Indian-named town where no train had stopped for years) the porter whom Ariel Hawksquill had shouldered aside in her haste awoke.

Now what on earth?

He arose, and, slow with forty years' service, walked the train, as astonished at himself for having slept, and at the train for having stopped unscheduled, as at the absence of his pa.s.sengers.

Midway through the silent cars, he met the white-faced engineer, and they consulted, but said little. There was no one else aboard; there had been no conductor; it was a special train, everyone aboard had known where they were going. So the porter said to the engineer. "They knew," he said, "where they were going."

The engineer returned to his cab, to use the radio, though he hadn't yet decided what to say. The porter continued through the cars, feeling ghostly. In the bar car he found, amid empty gla.s.ses and crushed cigarettes, a deck of cards, old-fas.h.i.+oned cards, flung about as though in rage.

"Somebody playin' fifty-two pickup," he said.

He gathered them upa"the figures on them, knights and kings and queens such as he had not seen before, seemed to plead with him from their scattered places to do so. The last onea"a joker maybe, a character with a beard, falling from a horse into a streama"he found caught in the window's edge, face outward, as though in the act of escaping. When he had a.s.sembled them all, and squared them up, he stood unmoving in the car with them in his hands, filled with a deep sense of the world, the whole world, and his place in it, somewhere near the center; and of the value which later ages would put on his standing here alone, at this moment, on this empty train, at this deserted station.

For the Tyrant, Russell Eigenblick, would not be forgotten. A long bad time lay ahead for his people, a bitter time when those who had contended against him would turn, in his absence, to contend with each other; and the fragile Republic would be broken and reshaped in several different ways. In that long contention, a new generation would forget the trials and hards.h.i.+ps their parents had suffered under the Beast; they would look back with growing nostalgia, with deep pain of loss, to those years just beyond the horizon of living memory, to those years when, it would seem to them, the sun always shone. His work, they would say, had gone unfinished, his Revelation unmade; he had gone away, and left his people unransomed.

But not died. No; gone off, disappeared, one night between dawn and day slipped away: but not died. Whether in the Smokies or the Rockies, deep in a crater lake or far beneath the ruined Capital itself, he lay only asleep, with his executive a.s.sistants around him, his red beard growing longer; waiting for the day (foretold by a hundred signs) when his people's great need should at last awake him again.

Are you, or are you not? Have you the taste of your existence, or do you not? Are you within the country or on the border? Are you mortal or immortal?

a"Parliament of the Birds *I want a clean cup,' the Hatter interrupted. *Everyone move one place.'

a"Alice in Wonderland That the Dog predicted by Sophie which greeted Daily Alice at the door should turn out to be Spark didn't surprise Alice much, but that the old man whom she found to guide her on the far side of the river should be her cousin George Mouse was unexpected.

"I don't think of you as old, George," she said. "Not old."

"Hey," George said, "older than you, and you're no spring chicken, you know, kid."

"How did you get here?" she asked.

"How did I get where?" he replied.

Her Blessing They walked together through dark woods, talking of many things. They walked a long way; spring came on more fully; the woods deepened. Alice was glad of his company, although she had not been sure she needed a guide; the woods were unknown to her, and scary; George carried a thick stick, and knew the path. "Dense," she said; and as she said it she remembered her wedding journey: she remembered Smoky asking, about a stand of trees over by Rudy Flood's, whether those were the woods Edgewood was on the edge of. She remembered the night they had spent in the cave of moss. She remembered walking through the woods on the way to Amy and Chris's house. "Dense," he had said; "Protected," she'd answered. As each of these memories and many others awoke in her, unfolding as vivid as life, Alice seemed to remember them for the last time, asthough they faded and dropped as soon as they blossomed; or rather that each memory she called up ceased, as soon as she called it up, to be a memory, and became instead, Somehow, a prediction: something that had not been but which Alice, with a deep sense of happy possibility, could imagine one day being.

"Well," George said. "This is about as far as I go."

They had approached the edge of the wood. Beyond, sunny glades went on like pools, sunlight falling in square shafts upon them through tall trees; and beyond that, a white, sunlit world, obscure to their eyes accustomed to the dimness.

"Goodbye, then," Alice said. "You'll come to the banquet?"

"Oh, sure," George said. "How could I help it?"

They stood a moment in silence, and then George, a little embarra.s.sed for he'd never done this before, asked her blessing; and she gave it gladly, on his flocks and on his produce, and on his old head; she bent and kissed him where he knelt, and went on.

So Big The glades like pools, one after another, continued a long way. This part, Alice thought, was the best so far: these violets and these new moist ferns, those graylichened stones, these bars of benevolent sun. "So big," she said. "So big." A thousand creatures paused in their spring occupations to watch her pa.s.s; the hum of newborn insects was like a constant breath. "Dad would have liked this place," she thought, and even as she thought it she knew how it was that he had come (or would come) to understand the voices of creatures, for she understood them herself, she needed only to listen.

Mute rabbits and noisy jays, gross belching frogs and chipmunks who made smart remarksa"but what was that in the further glade, standing on one leg, lifting alternately one wing and then the other? A stork, wasn't it?

"Don't I know you?" Alice asked when she had entered there. The stork leapt away, startled and looking guilty and confused.

"Well, I'm not sure," the stork said. It looked at Alice first with one eye, and then with both eyes down its long red beak, which gave it a look at once worried and censorious, as though it peered over the tops of pince-nez spectacles. "I'm not sure at all. I'm not sure of much at all, to tell you the truth."

"I think I do," Alice said. "Didn't you once raise a family at Edgewood, on the roof?"

"I may have," the stork said. It made to preen its feathers with its beak, and did it very clumsily, as though surprised to find it had feathers at all. "This," Alice heard it say to itself, "is going to be just an enormous trial, I can see that."

Alice helped her loose a primary that had got folded the wrong way, and the stork, after some uncomfortable fluffing, said, "I wondera"I wonder if you would mind my walking a ways with you?"

"Of course you may," Alice said. "If you're sure you wouldn't rather fly."

"Fly?" said the stork, alarmed. "Fly?"

"Well," Alice said, "I'm not really sure where I'm going at all. I sort of just got here."

"No matter," the stork said. "I just got here myself, in a manner of speaking."

They walked on together, the stork as storks do taking long, careful steps as though afraid to find something unpleasant underfoot.

"How," Alice asked, since the stork said nothing more, "did you just get here?"

"Well," the stork said.

"I'll tell you my story," Alice said, "if you'll tell me yours." For the stork seemed to want to speak, but to be unable to bring itself to do it.

"It depends," the stork said at last, "on whose story it is you want to hear. Oh, very well. No more equivocation.

"Once," it said, after a further pause, "I was a real stork. Or rather, a real stork was all I was, or she was. I'm telling this very badly, but at all events I was also, or we were also, a young woman: a very proud and very ambitious young woman, who had just learned, in another country, some very difficult tricks from masters far older and wiser than herself. There was no need, no need at all, for her to practice one of these tricks on an unwitting bird, but she was young and somewhat thoughtless, and the opportunity presented itself.

"She performed her trick or manipulation very well, and was thrilled at her new powers, though how the stork bore ita"well, I'm afraid she, I, never gave much thought to that, or rather I, the stork, I thought about nothing else.