"When Monday gets back," he said, "I"d like you to go to the estate and bring back the stones in the Retreat. I"m going to perform the Reconciliation upstairs, where I"ve got my memories to help me."
"Why are you sending Clem?" Jude said, not rising or even turning. "I know the way; he doesn"t. I know what the stones look like; he doesn"t."
"I think you"d be better off here," Gentle replied.
Now she turned. "What for?" she said. "I"m no use to anyone. Unless you simply want to keep an eye on me."
"Not at all."
"Then let me go," she said. "I"ll take Monday to help me. Clem and Tay can stay here. They"re your angels, aren"t they?"
"If that"s the way you"d prefer it," he said, "I don"t mind."
"I"ll come back, don"t worry," she said derisively, raising her beer bottle. "If it"s only to toast the miracle."
A little while after this conversation, with the blue tide of dusk rising in the street and lifting the day to the rooftops, Gentle left off his debates with Pie and went to sit with Celestine. Her room was more meditative than the one he"d left, where the memories of Pie had become so easy to conjure it was sometimes hard to believe the mystif wasn"t there in the flesh. Clem had lit candles beside the mattress upon which Celestine was sleeping, and their light showed Gentle a woman so deeply asleep that no dreams troubled her. Though she was far from emaciated, her features were stark, as though her flesh was halfway to becoming bone. He studied her for a time, wondering if his own face would one day possess such severity; then he returned to the wall at the bottom of the bed and sat on his haunches there, listening to the slow cadence of her breath.
His mind was reeling with all that he"d learned, or recollected, in the room above. Like so much of the magic he"d become acquainted with, the working of the Reconciliation was not a great ceremonial. Whereas most of the dominant religions of the Fifth wallowed in ritual in order to blind their flocks to the paucity of their understanding-the liturgies and requiems, charts and sacraments all created to amplify those tiny grains of comprehension the holy men actually possessed-such theatrics were redundant when the ministers had truth in their grasp, and with the help of memory he might yet become one such minister.
The principle of the Reconciliation was not very difficult to grasp, he"d discovered. Every two hundred years, it seemed, the In Ovo produced a kind of blossom: a five-petaled lotus which floated for a brief time in those lethal waters, immune to either their poison or their inhabitants. This sanctuary was called by a variety of names but most simply, and most often, the Ana. In it, the Maestros would gather, carrying there a.n.a.logues of the Dominions they each represented. Once the pieces were a.s.sembled, the process had its own momentum. The a.n.a.logues would fuse and, empowered by the Ana, burgeon, driving the In Ovo back and opening the way between the Reconciled Dominions and the Fifth.
"The flow of things is towards success," the mystif had said, speaking from a better time. "It"s the natural instinct of every broken thing to make itself whole. And the Imajica is broken until it"s Reconciled."
"Then why have there been so many failures?" Gentle had asked.
"There haven"t been that many," Pie had replied. "And they were always destroyed by outside forces. Christos was brought down by politics. Pineo was destroyed by the Vatican. Always people from the outside, destroying the Maestro"s best intentions. We don"t have such enemies."
Ironic words, with hindsight. Gentle could not afford such complacency again, not with Sartori still alive and the chilling image of Pie"s last frantic appearance at the Erasure still in his head.
It was no use dwelling on it. He put the sight away as best he could, settling his gaze on Celestine instead. It was difficult to think of her as his mother. Maybe, among the innumerable memories he"d garnered in this house, there was some faint recollection of being a babe in these arms, of putting his toothless mouth to these b.r.e.a.s.t.s and being nourished there. But if it was there, it escaped him. Perhaps there were simply too many years, and lives, and women, between now and that cradling. He could find it in him to be grateful for the life she"d given him, but it was hard to feel much more than that.
After a time the vigil began to depress him. She was too like a corpse, lying there, and he too much a dutiful but loveless mourner. He got up to go, but before he quit the room he halted at her bedside and stooped to touch her cheek. He"d not laid his flesh to hers in twenty-three or-four decades, and perhaps, after this, he wouldn"t do so again. She wasn"t chilly, as he"d expected her to be, but warm, and he kept his hand upon her longer than he"d intended.
Somewhere in the depths of her slumber she felt his touch and seemed to rise into a dream of him. Her austerity softened, and her pale lips said, "Child?"
He wasn"t sure whether to answer, but in the moment of hesitation she spoke again, the same question. This time he replied.
"Yes, Mama?" he said.
"Will you remember what I told you?"
What now? he wondered. "I"m... not certain," he told her. "I"ll try."
"Shall I tell you again? I want you to remember, child."
"Yes, Mama," he said. "That would be good. Tell me again."
She smiled an infinitesimal smile and began to repeat a story she"d apparently told many times.
"There was a woman once, called Nisi Nirvana..."
She"d no sooner started, however, than the dream she was having lost its claim on her, and she began to slip back into a deeper place, her voice losing power as she went.
"Don"t stop, Mama," Gentle prompted. "I want to hear. There was a woman..."
"... yes..."
"... called Nisi Nirvana."
"... yes. And she went to a city full of iniquities, where no ghost was holy and no flesh was whole. And something there did a great hurt to her..."
Her voice was getting stronger again, but the smile, even that tiniest hint, had gone.
"What hurt was this, Mama?"
"You needn"t know the hurt, child. You"ll learn about it one day, and on that day you"ll wish you could forget it. Just understand that it"s a hurt only men can do to women."
"And who did this hurt to her?" Gentle asked.
"I told you, child, a man."
"But what what man?" man?"
"His name doesn"t matter. What matters is that she escaped him, and came back into her own city, and knew she must make a good thing from this bad that had been done to her. And do you know what that good thing was?"
"No, Mama."
"It was a little baby. A perfect little baby. And she loved it so much it grew big after a time, and she knew it would be leaving her, so she said, "I have a story to tell you before you go." And do you know what the story was? I want you to remember, child."
"Tell me."
"There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana. And she went into a city of iniquities-"
"That"s the same story, Mama."
"-where no ghost was holy-"
"You haven"t finished the first story. You"ve just begun again."
"-and no flesh was whole. And something there-"
"Stop, Mama," Gentle said. "Stop."
"... did a great hurt to her..."
Distressed by this loop, Gentle took his hand from his mother"s cheek. She didn"t halt her recitation, however; at least not at first. The story went on exactly as it had before: the escape from the city; the good thing made from the bad; the baby, the perfect little baby. But with the hand no longer on her cheek Celestine was sinking back into unthinking slumber, her voice steadily growing more indistinct. Gentle got up and backed away to the door, as the whispered wheel came full circle again.
"... so she said: I have a story to tell you before you go."
Gentle reached behind him and opened the door, his eyes fixed on his mother as the words slurred.
"And do you know what the story was?" she said. "I want... you... to... remember... child."
He went on watching her as he slipped out into the hallway. The last sounds he heard would have been nonsense to any ear other than this, but he"d heard this story often enough now to know that she was beginning again as she"d dropped into dreamlessness.
"There was a woman once..."
On that, he closed the door. For some inexplicable reason, he was shaking, and had to stand at the threshold for several seconds before he could control the tremor. When he turned, he found Clem at the bottom of the stairs, sorting through a selection of candles.
"Is she still asleep?" he asked as Gentle approached.
"Yes, Has she talked to you at all, Clem?"
"Very little. Why?"
"I"ve just been listening to her tell a story in her sleep. Something about a woman called Nisi Nirvana. Do you know what that means?"
"Nisi Nirvana. Unless Heaven. Is that somebody"s name?"
"Apparently. And it must mean a lot to her, for some reason. That"s the name she sent Jude with to fetch me."
"And what"s the story?"
"d.a.m.n strange," Gentle said.
"Maybe you liked it better when you were a kid."
"Maybe..."
"If I hear her talking again, do you want me to call you down?"
"I don"t think so," Gentle said. "I"ve got it by heart already."
He started up the stairs.
"You"re going to need some candles up there," Clem said. "And matches to light "em with."
"So I am," Gentle said, turning back.
Clem handed over half a dozen candles, thick, stubby, and white. Gentle handed one of them back.
"Five"s the magic number," he said.
"I left some food at the top of the stairs," Clem said as Gentle started to climb again. "It"s not exactly haute cuisine haute cuisine, but it"s sustenance. And if you don"t claim it now it"ll be gone as soon as the boy gets back."
Gentle called his thanks back down the flight, picked up the bread, strawberries, and bottle of beer waiting at the top, then returned to the Meditation Room, closing the door behind him. Perhaps because he was still preoccupied with what he"d heard from his mother"s lips, the memories of Pie were not waiting at the threshold. The room was empty, a cell of the present. It wasn"t until Gentle had set the candles on the mantelpiece, and was lighting one of them, that he heard the mystif speaking softly behind him.
"Now I"ve distressed you," it said.
Gentle turned into the room and found the mystif at the window, where it so often loitered, with a look of deep concern on its face.
"I shouldn"t have asked," Pie went on. "It"s just idle curiosity. I heard Abelove asking the boy Lucius a day or two ago, and it made me wonder."
"What did Lucius say?"
"He said he remembered being suckled. That was the first thing he could recall: the teat at his mouth."
Only now did Gentle grasp the subject under debate here. Once again his memory had found some fragment of conversation between himself and the mystif pertinent to his present concerns. They"d talked of childhood memories in this very room, and the Maestro had been plunged into the same distress which he felt now; and for the same reason.
"But to remember a story," Pie was saying. "Particularly one you didn"t like-"
"It wasn"t that I didn"t like it," the Maestro said. "At least, it didn"t frighten me, the way a ghost story might have done. It was worse than that..."
"We don"t have to talk about this," Pie said, and for a moment Gentle thought the conversation was going to fizzle out there. He wasn"t altogether certain he"d have minded if it had. But it seemed to have been one of the unwritten rules of this house that no inquiry was ever fled from, however discomfiting.
"No, I want to explain if I can," the Maestro said. "Though what a child fears is sometimes hard to fathom."
"Unless we can listen with a child"s heart," Pie said.
"That"s harder still."
"We can try, can"t we? Tell me the story."
"Well, it always began the same way. My mother would say: I want you to remember, child I want you to remember, child, and I"d know right away what was going to follow. There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana, and she went into a city full of iniquities... There was a woman called Nisi Nirvana, and she went into a city full of iniquities..."
Now Gentle heard the story again, this time from his own lips, told to the mystif. The woman; the city; the crime; the child; and then, with a sickening inevitability, the story beginning again with the woman and the city and the crime.
"Rape isn"t a very pretty subject for a nursery tale," Pie observed.
"She never used that word."
"But that"s what the crime is, isn"t it?"
"Yes," he said softly, though he was uncomfortable with the admission. This was his mother"s secret, his mother"s pain. But yes, of course, Nisi Nirvana was Celestine, and the city of terrors was the First Dominion. She"d told her child her own story, encoded in a grim little fable. But more bizarrely than that, she"d folded the listener into the tale, and even the telling of the tale itself, creating a circle impossible to break because all of its const.i.tuent elements were trapped inside. Was it that sense of entrapment that had so distressed him as a child? Pie had another theory, however, and was voicing it from across the years.
"No wonder you were so afraid," the mystif said, "not knowing what the crime was, but knowing it was terrible. I"m sure she meant no harm by it. But your imagination must have run riot."
Gentle didn"t reply; or, rather, couldn"t. For the first time in these conversations with Pie he knew more than history did, and the discontinuity fractured the gla.s.s in which he"d been seeing the past. He felt a bitter sense of loss, adding to the distress he"d carried into this room. It was as though the tale of Nisi Nirvana marked the divide between the self who"d occupied these rooms two hundred years before, ignorant of his divinity, and the man he was now, who knew that the story of Nisi Nirvana was his mother"s story, and the crime she"d told him about was the act that had brought him into being. There could be no more dallying in the past after this. He"d learned what he needed to know about the Reconciliation, and he couldn"t justify further loitering. It was time to leave the comfort of memory, and Pie with it.
He picked up the bottle of beer and struck off the cap. It probably wasn"t wise to be drinking alcohol at this juncture, but he wanted to toast the past before it faded from view entirely. There must have been a time, he thought, when he and Pie had raised a gla.s.s to the millennium. Could he conjure such a moment now and join his intention with the past one last time? He raised the bottle to his lips and, as he drank, heard Pie laughing across the room. He looked in the mystif"s direction, and there, fading already, he caught a glimpse of his lover, not with a gla.s.s in hand but a carafe, toasting the future. He lifted the beer bottle to touch the carafe, but the mystif was fading too fast. Before past and present could share the toast, the vision was gone. It was time to begin.
Downstairs, Monday was back, talking excitedly. Setting the bottle down on the mantelpiece, Gentle went out onto the landing to find out what all the furor was about. The boy was at the door, in the middle of describing the state of the city to Clem and Jude. He"d never seen a stranger Sat.u.r.day night, he said. The streets were practically empty. The only thing that was moving was the traffic lights.
"At least we"ll have an easy trip," Jude said.
"Are we going somewhere?"
She told him, and he was well pleased.