Little, Big Part 32

Then there came, bowling outward in all directions from its starting place, the thing Auberon in the City had felt or heard: a thing that turned the world for a moment to shot silk, or changed in a wink the changeable taffeta of its stuff. A bomb, Auberon had thought it to be; Russell Eigenblick knew it wasn't a bomb but a bombardment.

Like a sharp restorative it shot throught his veins. His weariness vanished, He heard the end of the encomium which introduced him, and he sprang from his chair, eyes alight, mouth grim. He let flutter away, dramatically, the handful of notes for this Lecture as he mounted the dais; the vast audience, seeing this, gasped and cheered. Eigenblick gripped the edges of the lectern with both hands, leaned forward, and bellowed into the microphones that gaped before him to receive his words: "You must change your lives!"

A wave of astonishment, the wave of his own amplified voice was.h.i.+ng the crowd, lifted them up, struck the back wall, and returned to break over him. "You must. Change. Your lives!" The wave curled back on them, a tsunami. Eigenblick gloried, sweeping the crowd and seeming to look deeply into every eye, into every heart: they knew it, too. Words crowded into his brain, formed sentences, platoons, regiments against whom resistance was hopeless. He unleashed them.

"The preparations are finished, the votes are in, the die is cast, the chips are down! Everything you most dreaded has already occurred. Your ancientest enemies have the whip hand now. To whom will you turn? Your fortress is all c.h.i.n.ks, your armor is paper, your old laughter is a reproach in your throat. Nothinga"nothing is as you supposed it to be. You have been deeply fooled. You have been staring into a mirror and supposing it to be the old road's long continuation, but the road has run out, dead end, no through traffic. You must change your lives!"

He drew upright. Such winds were blowing in Time that he had difficulty hearing himself speak. In those winds rode the armed heroes, mounted at last, sylphs in battle-dress, hosts in the middle of the air. Eigenblick, as he harangued the open-mouthed ma.s.s before him, lashed them, threshed them, felt himself bursting restraints and coming forth whole at last. As though in a moment he had grown too large for an old worn carapace, with delicious itchy relief he felt it split and crack. He paused, until he knew it had all been shed. The crowd held its breath. Eigenblick's new voice coming forth, loud, low, insinuating, made them s.h.i.+ver as one: "Well. You didn't know. Oh, no. How were yoouu to know? You never thought. You for got. You hadn't heard." He leaned forward, looking out over them like a terrible parent, speaking rapidly, as though he spoke a curse: "Well, there will be no forgiveness this time. This time is once too often. Surely you see that, surely you knew it all along. You might, in your secretest heart, if you ever allowed yourself to suspect that this would happen, and you did suspect it, you did, you might have hoped that once again, once again there would be mercy, however undeserved; another chance, however badly bungled every other chance had been; that at the very last you would be ignored, you, only you would be missed out, overlooked, not counted, lost blameless in the cracks of the catastrophe that *must engulf all else. No! Not this time!"

"No! No!" They cried out to him, afraid; he was moved, deep love for their helplessness, deep pity for their state filled him and made him powerful and strong.

"No," he said softly, cooing to them, rocking them in the arms of his bottomless wrath and pity, "no, no; Arthur sleeps in Avalon; you have no champion, no white hope; nothing is left to you but surrender, don't you see that, you do, don't you? Surrender; that's your only chance; show your rusted sword, useless as a toy; show yourselves, helpless, innocent of any of the causes or conclusions of this, aged, confused, weak as babes. And still. And still. Helpless and pitiable as you are"a"he held out commiserating arms to them with great slowness, he could hold them all and comfort thema" "eager to please as you are, full of love, asking only with softest tears in your big babe's eyes for mercy, pity peace; still, still." The arms descended, the big hands again gripped the lectern as though it were a weapon, a huge fire burst within Russell Eigenblick's bosom, horrid grat.i.tude engulfed him that he could lean down upon these microphones at last and say this: "Still it will not draw their pity, none of it, for they have none; or stay their awful weapons, for they have already been loosed; or change anything at all: for this is war." Lower he bent his' head, closer his satyr's lips came to the aghast microphones, and his whisper boomed: "Ladies and gentlemen, THIS IS WAR."

Unexpected Seam Ariel Hawksquill, in the City, had felt it too: a change, like a flash of menopause, but not happening to herself but to the world at large. A Change, then; not a change but a Change, a Change glimpsed bowling along the course of s.p.a.ce and time, or the world stumbling over a thick and unexpected seam in the seamless fabric.

"Did you feel that?" she said.

"Feel what, my dear?" said Fred Savage, still chuckling over the ferocious headlines of yesterday's paper.

"Forget it," Hawksquill said softly, thoughtful. "Well. About cards, now. Anything at all about cards? Think hard."

"The ace of spades reversed," Fred Savage said. "Queen of spades in your bedroom window, fierce as any b.i.t.c.h. Jack of diamonds, on the road again. King of hearts, that's me, baby," and he began to sing-hum through his ivory teeth, his b.u.t.tocks moving slightly but snappily on the long, b.u.t.tock-polished bench of the waiting room.

Hawksquill had come to the great Terminus to question this old oracle of hers, knowing that most evenings after work he could be found here, confiding strange truths to strangers; pointing out with an index finger brown, gnarled, and dirt-clogged as a root, certain items in yesterday's paper which the train-takers around him might have missed, or discoursing on how a woman who wears a fur takes on the propensities of the animala"Hawksquill thought of timid suburban girls wearing rabbit-furs dyed to look like lynx, and laughed. Sometimes she brought a sandwich to share with him, if he were eating. Usually she went away wiser than she had come.

"Cards," she said. "Cards and Russell Eigenblick."

"That fella," he said. He was lost awhile in thought. He shook out his paper as though shaking a troublesome notion from it. But it wouldn't go.

"What is it?" she said.

"Now d.a.m.n if there wasn't a change just now," he said, looking upward. "Sumpm a What was it, did you say?"

"I didn't say."

"You said a name."

"Russell Eigenblick. In the cards."

"In the cards," he said. He folded his paper carefully. "That's enough," he said. "That'll do."

"Tell me," she said, "what you think."

But she had pressed him too hard, always a danger, ask the great virtuosi for one more encore and they will turn petulant and surly. Fred rosea"as far as he ever rose, remaining bent like a quizzical lettera"and felt for something nonexistent in his pockets. "Gotta go see m'uncle," he said. "You wouldn't have a buck for the bus? Some kinda buck or change?"

From East to West She walked back through the vast arching hall of the Terminus no wiser this time than when she had come, and more troubled. The hundreds who hurried there, eddying around the shrinelike clock in the center and was.h.i.+ng up in waves against the ticket booths, seemed distracted, hard-pressed, uncertain of their fates: but whether more so than on any other day she wasn't sure. She looked up: grown faint with age and long watching, the Zodiac painted in gold marched biaswise across the night-blue dome, p.r.i.c.ked out with tiny lights, many of them extinguished. Her steps slowed, her mouth fell open; she turned, staring, unable to believe what she saw.

The Zodiac ran the proper way across the dome from east to west.

Impossible. It had always been one of her favorite jokes about this mad City that its grand center was watched over by a Zodiac that was backwards, the mistake of a star-ignorant muralist, or some sly pun on his star-crossed City. She had wondered what reversals might happen ifa"with proper preparationa"one were to walk backwards through the Terminus beneath this backwards cosmos, but propriety had always kept her from trying it.

But look now. Here was the rain in his right place, and the hindquarterless bull, the twins and the crab, King Lion and the virgin and the double-panned scales. The poised scorpion next, with red Antares in his sting; the centaur with his bow, the fish-tailed goat, the man with the water-jug. And the two fishes bow-tied at the tails. The crowds flowed around her where she stood gawking, flowed without pause as they did around any fixed object in their path. Her looking upward was infectious, as in the h.o.a.ry trick; others looked upward too, searching briefly, but, unable to see the impossible thing she saw, hurried on.

The ram, the bull, the twins a She struggled to retain her memory that they had been otherwise, had not always had this order, for they looked as old and immutable as the stars they pictured. She grew afraid. A Change: and what other changes would she find, out on the streets; what others lay in the to-come, yet to be manifested? What anyway was Russell Eigenblick doing to the world; and why on earth was she sure that it was Russell Eigenblick who was Somehow at fault? A sweet baritone bell struck, and echoed around her as she stared, not loud but clear, calm as though possessed of the secret: the Terminus clock, ringing the small time of the hour.

Sylvie? The same hour was being rung in the pyramidal steeple of a building which Alexander Mouse had built downtown, the only steeple in the City that rang the hours for the public enlightenment. One of the four notes of its four-note tune was silenced, and the others fell irregularly into the channel of streets below, blown away by wind or m.u.f.fled by traffic, so it was no help usually, but Auberon (unbarring and unbolting a door into Old Law Farm) didn't care what time it was anyway. He gave a glance around himself to see that he wasn't followed by thieves. (He'd already been robbed once, by two kids who, since he'd had no money, had taken the bottle of gin he was carrying, and then took and flung his hat to the ground and stepped on it with long sneakered feet as they went away.) He slipped in, and bolted and barred the door behind him.

Down the hall, through a brick-toothed rent George had made in the wall to give access to the next building, up that hall, up the stairs, gripping the banister iced thickly with generations of paint. Out a hall window onto a fire escape, a wave to the happy farmers at work with shoots and trowels down below, and back into another building, another hall, absurdly narrow and close, familiar in its gloom and joyful, for it led home. He glimpsed himself in the pretty mirror Sylvie had hung on the wall at the end of the hall, with a tiny table below it and a bowl of dried flowers, bien nice. The doork.n.o.b didn't open the door. "Sylvie?" Not home. Not back from work, or out farming; or just out, the reborn sun caused the blue island lagoon in her blood to rise. He hunted out his three keys and peered at them in the dark, growing impatient. Ovoid-ended for the top lock, keystone-ended for the middle, oh h.e.l.l! He dropped one, and had to get down on hands and knees, furious, and feel for it amid the irremediable antique filth of all City nooks and crannies. Here it was: huge, round-ended one for the police lock, which kept the police out, ha ha.

"Sylvie?"

The Folding Bedroom seemed oddly large, and, though sunlight poured in through all its little windows, Somehow not cheerful. What was it? The place seemed swept, but not tidy; cleaned, but not clean. There was a lot of stuff missing, he gradually realized; a lot of stuff. Had they been robbed? He went gingerly into the kitchen. Sylvie's collection of unguents and such that cl.u.s.tered above the sink was gone. Her shampoos and hairbrushes, gone. It was all gone. All but his own old Gillette.

In the bedroom likewise. Her totems and pretty things, gone. Her china senorita, with a dead-white face and black spitcurls, whose top half separated from her flaring skirt which was really a jewel box, gone. Her hats hung on the back of the door, gone. Her crazy envelope of important papers and a.s.sorted snapshots, gone.

He tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.

Nothing at all.

He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.

"Gone," he said.

The fields, the caves, the dens of Memory cannot be counted; their fullness cannot be counted nor the kinds of things counted that fill them a I force my way in amongst them, even as far as my power reaches, and nowhere find an end.

a"Augustine, Confessio Upon a deep midnight, the Maid of Stone knocked with a heavy fist on the tiny door of the Cosmo-Opticon on the top floor of Ariel Hawksquill's townhouse.

"The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to see you."

"Yes. Have them wait in the parlor."

The moon behind the mirrored moon of the Cosmo-Opticon, and the dull glow of the City lights, were all that illuminated the heavens of gla.s.s; the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read. Odd, she thought, how (reversing the natural order) the Cosmo-Opticon was intelligible, ablaze, in the day, and obscure at night, when the real heaven's panoply is fulla . She rose and came out, the iron Earth with its enameled rivers and mountains clanging beneath her feet.

The Hero Awakened A year had pa.s.sed since she had looked up to see that the Zodiac painted on the night-blue ceiling of the Terminus had changed its old wrong order of march and went the way the world went. In that year, her investigations into the nature and origins of Russell Eigenblick had grown only more intense, though the Club had fallen oddly silent; no longer lately did they send her cryptic telegrams urging her on, and though Fred Savage showed up as usual at her door with the installments of her fee, these weren't accompanied by the usual encouragements or reproaches. Had they lost interest?

If they had, she thought she could awaken it this night.

She had broken the case, in fact, some months before; the answer came, not from her occult researches, but from such mundane or sublunary places as her old encyclopaedia (tenth Britannica), the sixth volume of Gregorovius on Medieval Rome, and (a great folio in double columns, with a hasp to lock it up) the Prophecies of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. It was certainty that had taken all her arts, and that had to be bought at the cost of much labor, and much time. There was no doubt, now, though. She knew, that is, Who. She did not know How, or Why; she knew no more than she had known who the children of the children of Time were, whose champion Russell Eigenblick might be; she didn't know where those cards were which he was in, or in what sense he was in them. But she knew Who: and she had summoned the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to hear that news.

They had disposed themselves around the chairs and sofa of her dimly-lit and crowded drawing-room or study on the ground floor.

"Gentlemen," she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, "more than two years ago you gave me the a.s.signment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then youa"yes, even youa"may be incapable of acting on it."

There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.

"We all know," she went on, "the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people's greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam et Futurus. Arthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself.

"All these tales, moving as they are, are not true. No trials of his people awakened Arthur; Cuchulain is able to sleep through the mutual slaughter of his, protracted over centuries; the Second Coming, continually announced, has been delayed past the virtual end of the Church that so much counted on it. No: whatever the next World-Age brings (and that age lies anyway well in the to-come) it will not bring back a hero whose name we know. But a" She paused, a.s.sailed by a sudden doubt. Said aloud, the absurdity of it seemed greater. She even flushed, ashamed, as she went on: "But it happens that one of these stories is true. It's not one we would ever have thought to be true, even if it were one we remember and tell, and for the most part it isn't; it and its hero are much forgotten. But we know it to be true because the necessary conclusion of it has occurred: the hero has awakened. Russell Eigenblick is he."

This shot fell less heavily among her hearers than she had expected it to. She felt them withdraw from her; she saw, or perceived, their necks stiffen, their chins draw down doubtfully into expensive haberdashery. There was nothing for it but to go on.

"You may wonder," she said, "as I did, what people Russell Eigenblick has returned to aid, We as a people are too young to have cultivated stories like those told of Arthur, and perhaps too self-satisfied to have felt the need of any. Certainly none are told of the so-called fathers of our country; the idea that one of those gentlemen is not dead but asleep, say, in the Ozarks or the Rockies is funny but not anywhere held. Only the despised ghost-dancing Red Man has a history and a memory long enough to supply such a hero; and the Indians have shown as little interest in Russell Eigenblick as in our Presidents, and he as little in them. What people then?

"The answer is: no people. No people: but an Empire. An Empire which could, and once did, comprise any people or peoples regardless, and had a life, a crown, borders and capitals of the greatest mutability. You will remember Voltaire's dig: that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Yet in some sense it existed until (as we have thought) its last Emperor, Francis II, resigned the t.i.tle in 1806. Well: my contention is, gentlemen, that the Holy Roman Empire did not pa.s.s away then either. It continued to exist. It continued, like an amoeba, to s.h.i.+ft, crawl, expand, contract; and that while Russell Eigenblick slept his long sleep (exactly eight hundred years by my reckoning)a"while, in effect, we all slepta"it has crept and slid, s.h.i.+fting and drifting like the continents, until it is now located here, where we sit. How exactly its borders should be drawn I have no idea, though I suspect they may be identical with this country's. In any case we are well within it. This city may even be its Capital: though probably only its Chief City."

She had ceased looking at them.

"And Russell Eigenblick?" she asked of no one. "He was once its Emperor. Not its first, who was of course Charlemagne (about whom the same sleep-wake story was for a while told) nor its last, nor even its greatest. Vigorous, yes; talented; uneven in temperament; no administrator; steady, but generally unsuccessful, in war. It was he who, by the way, added the *holy' to his Empire's name. About 1190 he chose, with the Empire generally at peace and the Pope for the moment off his back, to go on crusade. The Infidel only briefly felt his scourge; he won a battle or two, and then, crossing a stream in Armenia, he fell from his horse, and was too weighted down by his armor to get out. He drowned. So says Gregorovius, among other authorities.

"The Germans, though, after many later reverses, came to disbelieve this. He hadn't died. He was only asleep, perhaps beneath the Kyffhauser in the Hartz Mountains (the place is still pointed out to tourists) or perhaps in Domdaniel in the sea, or wherever, but he would return, one day; return to the aid of his beloved Germans, and lead German arms to victory and a German empire to glory. The hideous history of Germany in the last century may be the working-out of this vain dream. But in fact that Emperor, despite his birth and his name, was no German. He was Emperor of all the world, or at least all Christendom. He was heir to French Charlemagne and Roman Caesar. And now he has s.h.i.+fted like his ancient borders, and has changed no allegiances in doing so, only his name. Gentlemen, Russell Eigenblick is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, yes, die alte Barbarossa, reawakened to rule over this strange latter age of his Empire."

This last sentence she had spoken, her voice rising, against a growing swell of murmurs, protests, and standings-up among her hearers.

"Absurd!" said one.

"Preposterous!" said another, like a spit.

"Do you mean to say, Hawksquill," said a third, more reasonably, "that Russell Eigenblick supposes himself to be this resurrected Emperor, and that a"

"I have no idea who he supposes himself to be," Hawksquill said. "I'm only telling you who he in fact is."

"Then answer me this," said the member, raising his hand to silence the hubbub Hawksquill's insistence raised. "Why is it just now that he returns? I mean didn't you say that these heroes return at the time of their people's greatest need, and so on?"

"Traditionally they are said to, yes."

"Then why now? If this futile Empire has lain doggo for so long a"

Hawksquill looked down. "I said it would be hard for me to make a recommendation. I'm afraid that there are essential pieces of this puzzle still withheld from me."

"Such as."

"For one," she said, "the cards he speaks of. I can't now go into my reasons, but I must see them, and manipulate thema ." There was an impatient uncrossing and recrossing of legs. Someone asked why. "I supposed," she said, "you would need to know his strength. His chances. What times he considers propitious. The point is, gentlemen, that if you intend to suppress him, you had better know whether Time is on your side, or on his; and whether you are not futilely ranging yourselves against the inevitable."

"And you can't tell us."

"I'm afraid I can't. Yet."

"It doesn't matter," said the senior member present, rising. "I'm afraid, Hawksquill, that, your investigations in this case being so prolonged, we've had to come to a decision ourselves. We came tonight chiefly to discharge you of any further obligation."

"Hm," said Hawksquill.

The senior member chuckled indulgently. "And it doesn't really seem to me," he said, "that your present revelations do much to alter the case. As I remember my history, the Holy Roman Empire had not a lot to do with the life of the peoples who supposedly comprised it. Am I right? The real rulers liked having the Imperial power in their hands or under their control, but in any case did what they liked."

"That was often so."

"Well then. The course we decided on was the right one. If Russell Eigenblick turns out to be in some sense this Emperor, or convinces enough people of it (I notice, by the way, he continually puts off announcing just who he is, big mystery), then he might be more useful than the reverse."

"May I ask," Hawksquill said, motioning forward the Maid of Stone who stood mumchance in the doorway with a tray of gla.s.ses and a tall decanter, "what course of action you decided on?"

The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club settled back in their seats, smiling. "Co-optation," said a membera"one of those who had most vigorously protested Hawksquill's conclusions. "The power of certain charlatans," he went on, "isn't to be despised. We learned that in last summer's marches and riots. The Church of All Streets fracas. Et cetera. Of course such power is usually short-lived. It's not real power. All wind, really: A storm soon pa.s.sed. They know it, tooa ."

"But," said another member, "when such a one is introduced to real powera"promised a share in ita"his opinions indulgeda"his vanity flattered a"

"Then he can be enlisted. He can be used, frankly."

"You see," said the senior member, waving away the drink-tray offered him, "in the large scheme, Russell Eigenblick has no real powers, no strong adherents. A few clowns in colored s.h.i.+rts, a few devoted men. His oratory moves; but who remembers next day? If he stirred up great hatreds, or mobilized old bitternessesa"but he doesn't. It's all vagueness. So: we'll offer him real allies. He has none. He'll accept. There are lures we have. He'll be ours. And d.a.m.n useful he might prove, too."

"Hm," Hawksquill said again. Schooled as she had been in the purest of studies, on the highest of planes, she had never found deception and evasion easy. That Russell Eigenblick had no allies was, anyway, true. That he was a cat's-paw for forces more powerful, less namable, more insidious than the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club could imagine, she ought by rights to inform them: though she herself could not yet name those forces. But she had been released from the case. They wouldn't anywaya"she could see it in their smug facesa"probably listen to her. Still she blushed, fiercely, at what she withheld from them, and said, "I think I'll have a drop of this. Will no one join me?"

"The fee," said a member, watching her closely as she poured for him, "need not be returned, of course."

She nodded at him. "When exactly do you put your plan into execution?"

"This day next week," said the senior member, "we have a meeting with him in his hotel." He rose, looking around him, ready to go. Those members who had accepted drinks swallowed them hastily. "I'm sorry," the senior member said, "that after all your labors we've gone our own way."

"It's no doubt just as well," Hawksquill said, not rising.