“No,” he said. “Not as I am now. Not half-dead.”
Half-dead? Even now he was more alive than most she knew. “Then when?”
“Come spring. When I live again.”
So easy for him to say. He would be the one for whom those months meant nothing. What a long, terrible, cold winter hers would be.
“I’ve one more thing needs doing,” he said. “You won’t like it. I’d rather you not watch.”
She wouldn’t be dissuaded. He could do no worse than she’d seen already.
Solemn, Jack left the church a moment. When he returned she understood his concern, and despite her resolve, she still had to avert her eyes. Mangled by glass and steel, yes, it was, but the head was recognizably Alain’s.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’d be a fool not to,” Jack said. “But he did lose it by accident, nothing more. I’ll not be a fool, then, and waste it.”
The head was bled clean by now, and he set it aside while grappling with the altar. He struggled, strained, and with a deep grinding of stone it shifted, tilting up and to the side. If doubts still lingered, this did them in. No one man could lift this hollowed limestone block.
Beneath the altar was concealed a round cavity, a shallow well. When he dropped the head inside, she winced at the rattling of its moist heft against dried old ivory domes and mandibles. Jack heaved the altar back, the shadow of its base sliding slowly across Alain’s upturned face like the fall of his final night.
Jack nodded out over the menagerie of spirits. “To give them dreams,” he said. “To strengthen them against the winter, ‘til I see them again.”
In the narthex, as the doors swung wide into the moonlit dark beyond, she wanted to cling to him, possess him, to know more and listen to everything he could tell her about … well, where she had come from wouldn’t be a bad start.
“Why you?” she asked instead. “Why did you get the job of staying up to watch so much of it die around you?”
While it seemed a hideously lonely vigil, if he regarded it that way, you’d never know it. Could he even feel such a thing as loneliness?
“Who better?” he said. “Who else tracks time the way it was meant to be measured?”
Just past the doors, he stared up at the pattern of leaf and hair and face carved above them centuries before, by bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.
“Not a very good likeness, really. I’m much better looking.” He laughed with her, and in that moment she knew that, no, even a god was not beyond loneliness. Else why had he told her any of this, and who else could he have told?
“Called me Jack-o’-the-Green, too, they did. And I think, deep in his heart, Crenshaw knows exactly who I am … and that’s what scares him so.”
He drew his pitiful coat about him, looking to the sky, to the vast ocean of stars. Above them, Orion, the Hunter. It was his season. She could always find Orion.
“Best go, luv,” he said. “Not nearly as much forest as there was once. And I have to go deep, where I’ll not be disturbed.”
She imagined him in sacred hibernation, fetally curled or regally prone, beneath a blanket of brittle leaves, hair and beard dusted white with frost, snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes. Waiting for warmth.
He drew a huge breath, held it, let it out in a noisy gust and broad grin. “I’ve a splendid sense of smell, Kate. And I smell a great wildness coming. Maybe not next spring. Nor the spring past that. But it’s coming. The land always takes back its own.”
He left her soon after, a bulking shape made smaller, darker, with every stride toward the treeline. She lost sight of him even before he entered. Heard the crack and crunch of his passage, then even that was gone.
She returned inside the church, intending to lock up, and got as far as turning out the lights before she knew its floor was all the bed she would need tonight.
And swaddled by spirits, she did not sleep alone that night, dreaming of longer days and the fall of empires, while warmed by the breath of goats.
As Above, So Below
“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid
my angels will take flight as well.”
— Ranier Maria Rilke
In the beginning was the word; in the end, not even that. But words are small things anyway, trivial and puny and weakened by limitations. They are, like flesh and bone, inadequate to hold the full measure of what they struggle to contain. Like blood and lymph, they run when the skins that confine them are pricked.
In a world where word could become flesh, this was not the flaw, Austin knew.
It was the folly.
*
