Little, Big

He said nothing. It was.

“The Presidency,” Hawksquill said, “is no longer an office. It’s a room. A nice one, but only a room. You must refuse it. Politely. And any other blandishments they may offer. I’ll explain your next moves later…”

He turned on her. “How is it you know these things?” he said. “How do you know me?”

Hawksquill returned his gunlike look with one of her own, and said, in her best wizard’s manner, “There is much that I know.”

The intercom buzzed. Eigenblick went to it, looked thoughtfully at the array of bottons on it, finger to his lips, and then punched one. Nothing happened. He pushed another, and a voice made of static spoke: “Everything is ready, sir.”

“Ja,” Eigenblick said. “Moment.” He released the button, realized he hadn’t been heard, pressed another, and repeated himself. He turned to Hawksquill. “However it is you’ve found out these things,” he said, “you have obviously not found out all. You see,” he went on, a broad smile on his face and his eyes cast upward with the look of one confident of his election, “I’m in the cards. Nothing that can happen to me can deflect a destiny set elsewhere long ago. Protected. All this was meant to be.”

“Your Majesty,” Hawksquill said, “perhaps I haven’t made myself clear…”

“Will you stop calling me that!” he said, furious.

“Sorry. Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I know very well that you are in the cards—a deck of very pretty ones, with trumps at least obstensibly designed to foretell and encourage the return of your old Empire; designed and drawn, I would guess, some time in the reign of Rudolf II, and printed in Prague. They have been put to other uses since. Without your being, so to speak, any the less in them.”

“Where are they?” he said, suddenly coming toward her, avaricious hands like claws held out. “Give them to me. I must have them.”

“If I may go on,” Hawksquill said.

“They’re my property,” Eigenblick said.

“Your Empire’s,” she said. “Once.” She stared him into silence, and said: “If I may go on: I know you’re in the cards. I know what powers put you there, and—a little—to what end. I know your destiny. What you must believe, if you are to accomplish it, is that I am in it.”

“You.”

“Come to warn you, and to aid you. I have powers. Great enough to have discovered all this, to have found you out, needle in the haystack of Time. You have need of me. Now. And in time to come.”

He considered her. She saw doubt, hope, relief, fear, resolution come and go in his big face. “Why,” he said, “was I never told about you?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “because they didn’t know about me.”

“Nothing is hidden from them.”

“Much is. You would do well to learn that.”

He chewed his cheek for a moment, but the battle was over. “What’s in it for you?” he said. The intercom buzzed again.

“We’ll discuss my reward later,” she said. “Just now, before you answer that, you’d better decide what you will tell your visitors.”

“Will you be with me?” he said, suddenly needful.

“They mustn’t see me,” Hawksquill said. “But I’ll be with you.” A cheap trick, a cat’s bone; and yet (she thought, as Eigenblick punched at the intercom) just the thing to convince the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, if he remembered his youth at all, that indeed she did have the powers she claimed. With his back to her, she disappeared; when he turned to face her, or the place where she had been, she said, “Shall we go meet the Club?”

Crossroads

The day was gray, a certain pale and moist gray, when Auberon descended from the bus at the crossroads. He had had words with the driver about being let off at this particular place; had had difficulty at first in describing it, then in convincing the driver that he actually passed such a spot. The driver shook his head slowly in negative as Auberon described, his eyes not meeting Auberon’s, and said “Nope, nope,” softly, as though lost in thought; a transparent lie, Auberon knew, the man simply didn’t want to make the slightest variation in his routine. Coldly polite, Auberon described the place again, then sat in the first place behind the driver, his eyes peeled; and tapped the driver when the place approached. Got out, triumphant, a sentence forming on his tongue about the hundreds of times the man must have passed this place, if that was the level of observation to be found in the men the public was urged to leave the driving to, etc.; but the door hissed shut and the long gray bus ground its gears like teeth and lurched away.

The fingerboard he stood by pointed as always down the road toward Edgewood; more haggard, leaning at a more senescent angle, the name more time-erased than he remembered or than it had been when he had last seen it, but the same. He started down the looping road, brown as milk-chocolate after the rain, stepping along cautiously and surprised by the loudness of his footfalls. He hadn’t understood how much he had been deprived of during his months in the City. The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn’t have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made up out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth. He was able to survive outside all this well enough—air was air, after all, here or in the City—but, once plunged down within it again, he might have felt returned to a native element, might have uncurled within it, soul expanding like a butterfly sprung from its confining coccoon. In fact he did stretch his arms out, breathe deeply, and quote a few lines of verse. But his soul was a cold stone.

As he went along, he felt himself to be accompanied by someone: someone young, someone not in a lank brown overcoat, someone not hung over, someone who tugged at his sleeve, reminding him that here he’d used to pull his bike over the wall to return by secret ways to the Summer House and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, there he’d fallen out of a tree, there bent down with Doc to hear the mutter of closeted woodchucks. It had all happened once, to someone, to this insistent someone. Not to him… The gray stone pillars topped with gray oranges rose up where and when they always would. He reached up to one to touch the pitted surface, clammy and slick with spring. Down at the end of the drive his sisters awaited him on the porch.

Now for God’s sake. His homecoming was to be no more secret than his leaving—and as he thought this, he realized for the first time that he had intended it to be secret, had supposed himself able to slip back into the house without anyone’s noticing he had been gone for some eighteen months. Foolish! And yet the last thing he wanted was a fuss made over him. Too late, anyway, for as he stood by the gate-posts uncertainly, Lucy had spied him and leapt up waving. She pulled Lily after her to run and greet him; Tacey more regally kept to the peacock chair, dressed in a long skirt and one of his old tweed jackets.

“Hi, hi,” he said, casual but suddenly aware of the figure he must cut, unshaven and bloodshot, with his shopping bag and the City dirt beneath his nails and in his hair. So clean and vernal Lucy and Lily seemed, so glad, that he was torn between drawing back from them and kneeling before them to beg their forgiveness; and though they embraced him and took his bag from him, talking both at once, he knew they read him.

“You’ll never guess who came here,” Lucy said.

“An old woman,” Auberon said, glad that once in his life he could be sure he guessed right, “with a gray bun. How’s Mom? How’s Dad?”

“But who she is you’ll never guess,” Lily said.

“Did she tell you I was coming? I never said it to her.”

“No. But we knew. But guess.”

“She is,” Lucy said, “a cousin. In a way. Sophie found out. It was years ago…”

“In England,” Lily said. “Do you know the Auberon you’re named after? Well, he was Violet Bramble Drinkwater’s son…”

“But not John Drinkwater’s! A love child…”