The Fugitive Season continued...


"Well, that was nice, wasn't it?" Oskar paused on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant to light a cigarette.  "I think you could probably sleep with Bern. Are you sure you didn't at University?"

Tavin shrugged. "How would I know?"

"True. Though you could have upset Elsta a little bit more. I know you, Tavin, and I don't think you were even trying."

"I don't give a damn about your neurotic women," he snapped. "Why should it bother her so much? What I do is my own business."

"She's just- You never heard about her brother, did you?"

"You can't imagine how desperate I am for you to rectify that."

"Tavin-" A cab stopped at the curb, and a party of well dressed men emerged, a veritable haze of studied jocularity preceding them. Oskar took his arm and lead him around the side of the building. "He went mad and murdered his fiancée. He's going to spend the rest of his life in the Chapelaine Sanitarium. Elsta blames Mitra."

"Well?"

"Well?" Tavin had rarely seen Oskar look really furious; once, when he was denied admittance to the Medical College on the grounds of having an unverified parentage, and another time when their first landlady had them evicted by the police. "Maybe she has a point. Maybe you should - god, why do you have such contempt for life? Is it really so awful, are you really too good for it? Do you know who else is in Chapelaine?"

"No. Who?"

Oskar seemed on the verge of speaking, but froze, his lips parted, teeth set on the first sound of a name. His anger broke, and for a moment he looked almost puzzled, and then a kind of cavalier despair came over his face.

"No one. I'm sorry, dear, never mind me." He straightened Tavin's collar. "I didn't realize you don't have a tie. I'm surprised they even let you in."

"Oskar. Can we go now?"

"Yes." He dropped his cigarette, left it to sputter in the rainwater and grime puddled in the alley. "I'll show you the way."

They took a cab to the Neves crossing; at this end, the grand gentrification project of the last generation held out, though signs of encroaching despoilment were apparent. Between the neat, Empire Revival facades were empty windows and doors, streaks of rust where scrappers had stolen the ornamental railings and grillwork. The wide street was quiet, though as they walked down it toward the Geffsten, Tavin became aware of surreptitious movement in the alleys, of presences that seemed to track them between the deep pools of shadows.

The shabby, aging facades began to give way to outright ruin and more obvious signs of life. Here, they were watched quite boldly, not with open hostility or calculation as Oskar, in his expensive clothes, would ordinarily incite here, but with a studied opaqueness. Tavin watched them, too, searching for the starved face of the boy, or a lily like the one he wore now, displayed like a medallion.

Oskar paused under one of the few working streetlamps and searched through his pockets for his cigarettes. He was frowning, but with an exaggerated, almost theatrical cast to the expression that Tavin knew meant he was making an effort to appear at ease. He lit two cigarettes, gave one to Tavin, plucked the lily from his collar and touched the lighter's long, pale flame to it. Tavin tried to grab it from him, but Oskar flung it down and held him back. The whole flower was engulfed before it hit the curb, where it sent up a sweet, sickly smoke.

"What the hell did you do that for?" The white throat of the flower ran with flame, blackened, and split open.

"Don't worry, he has more," Oskar said. "Now they know we're here."

The flower was still burning when two figures stepped into the pale lamplight, the girl and boy from the bar that Tavin had followed to the Vermilion.  Their hands were clasped and they leaned toward each other, the paper rose in the girl's tangled hair grazing the boy's cheek. They started silently at Tavin, as rapt and avaricious as stray cats.

"Well, darling." Oskar put his hand on Tavin's shoulder. "Have fun. These two charming young people know the way." Then, to the girl, "You don't need me. I never said I was coming."

"Oskar-"

"I'm sorry, no late parties for me tonight. That bother with the arsonist put me dreadfully behind at work." He paused, half turned away, and gave Tavin a brilliant smile that did not quite conceal his reluctance. "Everything will be fine."

"Come on." The girl slipped her hand through Tavin's elbow; her nails were frayed and uneven, patched with splinters of old lacquer. She wore a pair of tattered, dirty net gloves and her hands were so cold Tavin felt the chill of her touch through his sleeve. He looked back, but Oskar was gone already, down the long, dark throat of Neves. The boy took his other arm and hooked his fingers in Tavin's coat pocket, his boney knuckles, hatched with scars, pressed to Tavin's side.

They lead him through alleys and ruined courtyards, down narrow streets that cut like gullies between uneven escarpments of collapsing buildings. Past rows of abandoned and reclaimed townhouses, where the roofs had decayed into fantastical crenellations. Through a broad field, dotted saplings and tussocks of fine grass and wood anemones, where they tripped over the foundations of warehouses and storefronts. Past the bleak, elaborately caparisoned mass of the Zaragoza Sanitarium. Down narrow streets where primitive, desperate wars raged in the hollow buildings. Finally, to a street in Menkrik, to a heavy door curtained in old graffiti between an unlicensed chemist's and a lepidopterist's.

The boy struggled with the door for a long moment, and ushered them inside with a brusque gesture. He propped it open with his foot and, by the elusive light of a distant streetlamp, lit a small lantern kept near the door. He let the door slam shut; the reverberations shook the cramped entryway, knocked chips of plaster and debris loose. The girl started for the stairs, but the boy grabbed her, his hands immense and wicked on her flimsy arms, and shoved her back against the door.

"Don't you try that again," he growled. "We both found him." She cowered sullenly, obedient, but the lamp showed the boy's febrile pallor and how he trembled as from exhaustion or exertion. She looked, in comparison, the image of health and strength, but whatever threat he implied subdued her. Satisfied, the boy turned his lamp to illuminate the passage before them, and ungently nudged Tavin forward.

Ahead was a long, low stairwell, the walls and curved ceiling covered with rough drawings and words, giving the effect of an organic fresco rather than the vulgar, territorial graffiti that ornamented the Geffsten. On either side of the first step were two figures that made Tavin flinch back. He wasn't sure what he thought he saw at first, whether they were men or animals or young trees pulling the building apart from the inside, but he was certain that they were real, living presences crowding against them. He stepped back into the boy, who swore and almost dropped the lamp, and Tavin saw they were the painted figures of tree-lords. The taut, spare lines of their bodies, the wide lynx eyes, and the tangled shadow of their horns had been sketched with a kind of atavistic passion, so that the indifference and malevolence of their gaze seemed the result of some inner consciousness and not an affect of the artist.

"Move it." The boy pushed him again, but carefully, and his voice was softer, almost respectful.

The long, sharply sloped stairwell, frescoed with incomprehensible slogans and pictures ranging from the bizarre to the obscene, looked like the penitential passages beneath certain early cathedrals, that through a half forgotten instinct mimicked those pitch black, treacherous caves beneath the buttresses and vaults of the alpine forest. The boy's lamp was unsteady and Tavin felt his way up the steep steps more on faith than sight.

Four doors opened off the cramped landing at the top of the stairs. Two figures occupied most of the landing; wrapped in a huge, patched blanket, heads nodding toward each other, hair tangled into a single fair mass, bare legs trailing limply over the edge of the top step. Beyond the doors, other lamps burned, and people sprawled, singly or in groups, on ancient, elegant furniture and sprung mattress, crates and buckled heaps of debris where holes had been broken in the walls. It smelled of rotting plants, the wind blowing off the river, cigarettes and hash, the apple and linden blossoms that fell through the open windows like rain, the musky scent of small animals, and the holy incense of lilies.

Tavin stepped over the tangle of legs and filthy blanket and paused in one of the doorways. The walls were marbled with peeling, mildew damascened wallpaper and stained plaster, marked with letters and images as crude and suggestive as ancient, painted vases. Hazy, green horizons and a familiar, nearly abstract pattern of branches and blurred stars. A huge, tarnished silver mirror reflected distorted shadows and the peacock glare of an exquisite Nanci lamp. Burst boxes full of books and old clothes were stacked haphazardly on the floor. On a decrepit settee, the transparent canary brocade leaking stuffing, a very tall man with a platinum Empress Teodora coiffure slept against the shoulder of the man Tavin had seen in the audience at the Vermilion. He wore the same dirty, expensive clothes and he stared at Tavin with a look of mingled horror and rapture.

For a moment, Tavin regretted being there. It was the look on that man's face, the anticipation and dread of epiphany that Tavin had only recently recalled; if he had lost the ability to see things for other than what they appeared to be once he could lose it again. In that fear of loss and exile to the ordinary world was doubt; whatever Tavin thought he had seen that night, whatever revelation he believed he had witnessed, would be dispelled by this meeting. It would have been a trick of stage makeup and suggestive lighting. Mitra would be only commonly cunning and possessed of no more mystery than Arnor Senne, and Tavin would be lost again. He had been taught as a child not to test faith and he began, at last, to understand. He started to turn away, but a movement in the silvered mirror caught his eye, and he knew it was too late.

Across the room was a door to what once had been a bedroom. It was empty now, and the narrow panes of glass in the window had rotted out of their frame. The floor was carpeted with particles of glass that sparkled like the sooty snow that fell in the city. The girl leaned against the wall near the door and stared sullenly ahead, even when Tavin's shoes crunched softly across the pulverized glass. Her companion, the boy, was speaking to a man in sumptuously old, frayed clothes, a little younger than Tavin but older than the boy. The boy beckoned, a triumphant grin illuminating the wasted lines of his face, and Tavin stepped closer.

Tavin knew him, even without the wig of serpentine hair, face slashed with painted shadows and failing footlights; it was Mitra. Half of his black hair was caught in a silver mantilla comb like the lacy, intricate exoskeleton of some fantastic sea creature, his head  framed by half a pale halo. Lush, full-blown camellias were pinned along his collar, red and white petals clustered thickly against the bluish shadows of his throat. His fine hands were as jeweled as icons and in his fingers he twirled a long silver pin.  He was either so strange looking that he was beautiful, or so beautiful as to appear strange, and whether this was an effect of his features or some inner quality made visible in his expression was impossible to tell. And this was, perhaps, his simplest fascination, this sense of tension, the consummation of the unnatural and the sublime.

"I know you," Mitra said. "There's something I want to tell you."

It was no different. It was the Prince, pronouncing terrible things beneath the blue desert of a hard, hot sky. It was the lily lying on the boards. It was even those black mountains, but now the whole world was changed, he had passed through the final, secret green door. He was, at last, where he had always wanted to be.

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The Fugitive Season is an excerpt from a longer piece of work.