The clouds had rolled away during her time underground, and the day was now filled with hazy summer light. The air was heavy and humid, but Rosie thought she had still never drawn a sweeter breath in her entire life. She turned her face, wet with sweat and tears, gratefully up to the faded blue denim she could see between the unravelling clouds. Somewhere in the distance thunder continued to rumble balefully, like a beaten bully making empty threats.
That made her think of Erinyes, running in the darkness below, still looking for the woman who had invaded its domain and stolen its prize. Cherchez la femme, Rosie thought with a trace of a smile. You can cherchez all you want, big fella; this femme — not to mention her petite fille — is gone.
10
Rosie walked slowly away from the stairs. At the head of the path leading back into the grove of dead trees, she sat down with the baby in her lap. All she wanted was to regain her breath, but the hazy sun was warm on her back, and when she raised her head again, some small change in the lie of her shadow made her think she might have dozed a little.
As she got to her feet, wincing at the pain that shot through the muscles of her right thigh, she heard the harsh, squabbling cry of many birds — they sounded like a big family having a rancorous argument at Sunday dinner. The child in her arms made a soft snorting sound as Rosie shifted her to a more comfortable position, blew a little spit-bubble between her pursed lips, then fell silent again. Rosie was both amused by and deeply envious of her placid, sleeping confidence.
She started down the path, then stopped and looked back at the single living tree with its shiny green leaves, its bounty of deadly reddish-purple fruit, and the Classical Fables subway entrance standing nearby. She looked at these things for a long moment, filling her eyes and mind with them.
They’re real, she thought. How can things I see so clearly be anything but real? And I dozed off, I know I did. How can you go to sleep in a dream? How can you go to sleep when you’re sleeping already?
Forget it, Practical-Sensible said. That’s the best thing, at least for the time being.
Yes, probably it was.
Rosie started off again, and when she reached the fallen tree blocking the path, she was amused and rather exasperated to see that her arduous detour around the snarl of roots could have been avoided: there was an easy path around the top of the tree.
At least there is now, she thought as she went around it. Are you sure there was before, Rosie?
The rocky babble of the black stream rose in her ears, and when she reached it, she saw that the level had already begun to drop and the stepping-stones no longer looked so perilously small; now they looked almost the size of floor-tiles, and the scent of the water had lost its ominously attractive quality. Now it just smelled like very hard water, the kind that would leave an orange ring around the tub and toilet-bowl.
The squabble of the birds — You did, No I didn’t, Yes you did — started up again, and she observed twenty or thirty of the largest birds she had ever seen in her life lined up along the peak of the temple’s roof. They were much too big to be crows, and after a moment she decided they were this world’s version of buzzards or vultures. But where had they come from? And why were they here?
Without realizing she was doing it until the infant squirmed and protested in her sleep, Rosie hugged the baby tighter to her breast as she gazed at the birds. They all took off at the same instant, their wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline. It was as if they had seen her
looking at them and didn’t like it. Most of them flew off to roost in the dead trees behind her, but several remained in the hazy sky overhead, circling like bad omens in a western movie.
Where did they come from? What do they want?
More questions to which Rosie had no answers. She pushed them away and crossed the stream on the stones. As she approached the temple, she saw a neglected but faintly visible path leading around its stone flank. Rosie took it without a single moment of interior debate, although she was naked and both sides of the path were lined with thorn-bushes. She walked carefully, turning sideways to keep her hip from being scratched, holding (Caroline)
the baby up and out of thorns’ way. Rosie took one or two swipes in spite of her care, but only one — across her badly used right thigh — was deep enough to draw blood.
As she came around the corner of the temple and glanced up at the front, it seemed to her that the building had changed somehow, and that the change was so fundamental that she wasn’t quite able to grasp it. She forgot the idea for a moment in her relief at seeing ‘Wendy’
still standing beside the fallen pillar, but after she’d taken half a dozen steps toward the woman in the red dress, Rosie stopped and looked back, opening her eyes to the building, opening her mind to it.
This time she saw the change at once, and a little grunt of surprise escaped her. The Temple of the Bull now looked stiff and unreal . . . two-dimensional. It made Rosie think of a line of poetry she’d read back in high school, something about a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The odd, unsettling sense that the temple was out of perspective (or inhabiting some strange, non-Euclidean universe where all the laws of geometry were different) had departed, and the building’s aura of menace had departed with it. Now its lines looked straight in all the places where one expected such a building to look straight; there were no sudden turns or jags in the architecture to trouble the eye. The building looked, in fact, like a painting rendered by an artist whose mediocre talent and run-of-the-mill romanticism have combined to create a piece of bad art — the sort of picture which always seems to end up gathering dust in a basement corner or on an attic shelf, along with old issues of the National Geographic and stacks of jigsaw puzzles with a piece or two missing.
Or in the seldom-browsed third aisle of a pawnshop, perhaps.
‘Woman! You, woman!’
She swung back toward ‘Wendy’ and saw her beckoning impatiently.
‘Hurry up n get that baby over here! This ain’t no tourist ‘traction!’
Rosie ignored her. She had risked her life for this child, and she didn’t intend to be hurried.
She folded back the blanket and looked at a body which was as naked and female as her own.
That was where the resemblance ended, however. There were no scars on the child, no marks that looked like the fading teeth of old traps. There was not, as far as Rosie could see, so much as a single mole on that small and lovely body. She traced a finger slowly up the baby’s entire length, from ball of ankle to ball of hip to ball of shoulder. Perfect.
Yes, perfect. And now that you have risked your life for her, Rosie, now that you’ve saved her from the dark and the bull and God knows what else that might have been down there, do you intend to turn her over to these two women? Both have some sort of disease working on them, and the one up on the hill has a mental problem, as well. A serious mental problem. Do you intend to give this kid to them?
‘She be all right,’ the brown-skinned woman said. Rosie wheeled in the direction of the voice. ‘Wendy Yarrow’ was now standing at her shoulder, and looking at Rosie with perfect understanding.
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding as if Rosie had spoken her doubts aloud. ‘I know what you’re thinkin and I tell you it’s all right. She mad, no doubt in the world ’bout that, but her madness don’t extend to the child. She knows that although she bore it, this child ain’t hers to keep, no
more than it’s yours to keep.’
Rosie glanced toward the hill, where she could just see the woman in the chiton, standing by the pony and waiting for the outcome.
‘What’s her name?’ she asked. ‘The baby’s mother? Is it — ‘
‘Ne’mine,’ the brown woman in the red dress replied, cutting in quickly, as if to keep Rosie from speaking some word better left unsaid. ‘Her name don’t matter. Her state o’ mind does.
She a mighty impatient lady these days, along with all her other woes. We best be goin up with no more jabber.’