Everville

PART ONE was is AND WILL BE

It was hope undid them. Hope, and the city that Providence had made them suffer enough for their dreams. They'd lost so much already along the-children, healers, leaders, all taken-surely, they reasoned, God would preserve them from further loss, and reward their griefs and hardships with deliverance into a place of plenty.

When the first signs of the blizzard had appeared clouds that had dwarfed the thunderheads of Wyoming rising behind the peaks ahead, slivers of ice in the wind-they had said to each other. This is the final test. If we turn back now, intimidated by cloud and ice, then all those we buried along the way will have died for nothing; their suffering and ours will have been for nothing. We must go on. Now more than ever we must have faith in the dream of the West. After all, they told each other, it's only the first week of October. Maybe we'll see a flurry or two as we climb, but by the time the winter sets in we'll be over the mountains and down the other side, in the midst of sweet meadows. On then; on, for the sake of the dream.

Now it was too late to turn back. Even if the snows that had descended in the last week had not sealed the pass behind the pioneers, the horses were too malnourished and too weakened by the climb to haul the wagons back through the mountains. The travelers had no choice but to go forward, ugh they had long since lost any sense of their whereabouts and were journeying blind in a whiteness as utter as y black midnight.

Sometimes the wind would shred the clouds for a moment, but there was no sign of sky or sun. Only another pitiless peak rising between them and the promised land, snow driven from its summit in a slow plume, then drooping, and descending upon the slopes where they would have to venture if they were to survive.

Hope was small now; and smaller by the day. Of the eighty-three optimistic souls who had departed Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1848 (this sum swelled by six births along the way), thirty-one remained alive. During the first three months of the journey, through Kansas, into Nebraska, then across 487 miles of Wyoming, there had been only six fatalities. Three lost in a drowning accident; two wandered off and believed killed by Indians; one hanged by her own hand from a tree. But with the heat of summer, sicknesses abounded, and the trials of the journey began to take their toll. The very young and the very old had perished first, sickened by bad water or bad meat. Men and women who had been in the prime of their lives five or six months before, hardy, brave, and ripe, became withered and wretched as the food stocks dwindled, and the land, which they had been told would supply them with all manner of game and fruit, failed to provide the promised bounty. Men would leave the wagon train for days at a time in search of food, only to return hollow eyed and empty-handed. It was therefore in an already much weakened state that the travelers faced the cold, and its effect had proved calamitous. Forty-seven individuals had perished in the space of three weeks, dispatched by frost, snow, exhaustion, starvation, and hopelessness.

It had fallen to Herman Deale, who was the closest the survivors had to a physician since the death of Doc Hodder, to keep an account of these deaths. When they reached Oregon, the glad land in the West, he had told the survivors they would together pray for the departed, and pay due respects to each and every soul whose passing he had set down in his journal. Until that happy time, the living were not to concern themselves overmuch with the dead. they had gone into the warmth and comfort of God's Bosom and would not blame those who buried them for the shallowness of their graves, or the brevity of the prayers said over them.

"We will speak of them lovingly," Deale had declared, "when we have a little breath to spare."

The day after making this promise to the deceased, he had joined their number, his body giving out as they ploughed through a snow field. His corpse remained unburied, at least by human hand. The snow was coming down so thickly that by the time his few provisions had been divided up among the remaining travelers, his body had disappeared from sight.

That night, Evan Babcock and his wife, Alice, both perished in their sleep, and Mary Willcocks, who had outlived all five of her children, and seen her husband wither and die from grief, succumbed with a sob that was still ringing off the mountain-face after the tired heart that had issued it was stilled.

Daylight came, but it brought no solace. The snowfall was as heavy as ever. Nor was there now a single crack in the clouds to show the pioneers what lay ahead. they went with heads bowed, too weary to speak, much less sing, as they had sung in the blithe months of May and June, raising hosannas to the heavens for the glory of this adventure.

A few of them prayed in silence, asking God for the strength to survive. And some, perhaps, made promises in their prayers, that if they were granted that strength, and came through this white wilderness to a green place, their gratitude would be unbounded, and they would testify to the end of their lives that for all the sorrows of this life, no man should turn from God, for God was hope, and Everlasting.

At the beginning of the journey west there had been a total of thirty-two children in the caravan. Now there was only one. Her name was Maeve O'Connell; a plain twelve-year-old whose thin body belied a fortitude which would have astonished those who'd shaken their heads in the spring and told her widowed father she would never survive the journey. She was stick and bones, they'd said, weak in the legs, weak in belly. Weak in the head too, most likely, they whispered and their hands, just like her father Harmon, who while parties had been assembling in Missouri, had talked most elaborately of his ambitions for the West. Oregon might well be Eden, he'd said, but it was not the forests and the mountains that would distinguish it as a place of human triumph: It was the glorious, shining city that he intended to build there.

Idiotic talk, it was privately opined, especially from an Irishman who'd seen only Dublin and the backstreets of Liverpool and Boston. What could he know of towers and palaces?

Once the journey was underway, those who scorned Hannon among themselves became a good deal less discreet, and he soon learned to keep talk of his ambitions as a founder of cities between himself and his daughter. His fellow travelers had more modest hopes for the land that lay ahead. A stand of timber from which to build a cabin; good earth; sweet water. they were suspicious of anyone with a grander vision.

Not that the modesty of their requirements had subsequently spared them from death. Many of the men and women who'd been most voluble in their contempt for Harmon were dead now, buried far from good earth or sweet water, while the crazy man and his stick and bones daughter lived on. Sometimes, even in these last desperate days, Maeve and Hannon would whisper as they walked together beside their skeletal nag. And if the wind shifted for a moment it would carry their words away to the ears of those nearby. Exhausted though they were, father and daughter were still talking of the city they would build when this travail was over and done; a wonder that would live long after every cabin in Oregon had rotted, and the memories of those who'd built them gone to dust.

they even had a name for this time-defying metropolis.

It would be called Everville.

Ah, Everville!

How many nights had Maeve listened to her father talk of the place, his eyes on the crackling fire, but his gaze on another sight entirely: the streets, the squares, and the noble houses of that miracle to be.

"Sometimes it's like you've already been there," Maeve had remarked to him one evening in late May.

"Oh but I have, my sweet girl," he had said, staring across the open land towards the last of the sun. He was a shabby, pinched man, even in those months of plenty, but the breadth of his vision made up for the narrowness of his brow and lips. She loved him without qualification, as her mother had before her, and never more than when he spoke of Everville.

"When have you seen it, then?" she challenged him.

"Oh, in dreams," he replied. He lowered his voice to a whisper. "Do you remember Owen Buddenbaum?" "Oh yes.

How could anybody forget the extraordinary Mr. Buddenbaum, who had befriended them for a little time in Independence? A ginger beard, going to gray; waxed mustache that pointed to his zenith; the most luxurious fur coat Maeve had ever seen; and such music in his voice that the most opaque things he said (which was the bulk of his conversation as far as Maeve was concerned) sounded like celestial wisdom.

"He was wonderful," she said.

"You know why he sought us out? Because he heard me calling your name, and he knew what it meant."

"You said it meant joy."

"So it does," Harmon replied, leaning a little closer to his daughter,

"but it's also the name of an Irish spirit, who came to men in their dreams."

She'd never heard this before. Her eyes grew huge. "Is that true?"

"I could never tell you a lie," he replied, "not even in fun. Yes, child, it's true. And hearing me call for you, he took me by the arm and said: Dreams are doorways, Mr. O'Connell. Those were the very first words he said to me."

"What then?"

"Then he said: If we but have the courage to step over the threshold......

"Go on."

"Well, the rest's for another day."

"Papa!" Maeve protested.

"You be proud, child. If not for you, we'd never have met Mr. Buddenbaum, and I believe our fortune changed the moment we did."

He had refused to be further drawn on the subject, but had instead turned the conversation to the matter of what trees might be planted on Everville's Main Street. Maeve knew better than to press him, but she thought much about dreams thereafter. She would wake sometimes in the middle of the night with the ragged scraps of a dream floating around her head, and lie watching the stars, thinking: was I at the door then? And was there something wonderful on the other side, that I've already forgotten ?

She became determined to keep these fragments from escaping her, and with a little practice she learned to snatch hold of them upon waking and describe them aloud to herself. Words held them, she found, however rudimentary. A few syllables were all that was needed to keep a dream from slipping away.

She kept the skill to herself (she didn't even mention it to her father), and it was a pleasant distraction for the long, dusty days of summer to sit in the wagon and sew pieces of remembered dreams together so that they made stories stranger than any to be found in her books.

As for the mellifluous Mr. Buddenbaum, his name was not mentioned again for some considerable time. When it was finally mentioned, however, it was in circumstances so strange Maeve would not forget them until the day she died.

they had been entering Idaho, and by the calculations of Dr. Hodder (who assembled the company every third evening and told them of their progress), there was a good prospect that they would be over the Blue Mountains and in sight of the fertile valleys of Oregon before the autumn had properly nipped the air. Though supplies were low, spirits were high, and in the exuberance of the moment, Maeve's father had said something about Everville: A chance remark that might have passed unnoticed but that one of the travelers, a shrewish man by the name of Goodhue, was the worse for whiskey, and in need of some bone of contention. He had it here, and seized upon it with appetite.

"This damned town of yours will never be built," he said to Harmon.

"None of us want it." He spoke loudly, and a number of the men-sensing a fight and eager to be diverted-sauntered over to watch the dispute.

"Never mind him, Papa," Maeve had murmured to her father, reaching to take his hand. But she knew by his knitted brows and clenched jaw this was not a challenge he was about to turn his back on.

"Why do you say that?" he asked Goodhue.

"Because it's stupid," the drunkard replied. "And you're a fool." His words were slurred, but there was no doubting the depth of his contempt. "We didn't come out here to live in your little cage."

"It won't be a cage," Hannon replied. "It will be a new Alexandria, a new Byzantium."

"Never heard of either of 'em," came a third voice.

The speaker was a bull of a man called Pottruck. Even in the shelter of her father's shoulder, Maeve trembled at the sight of him. Goodhue was a loudmouth, little more. But Pottruck was a thug who had once beaten his wife so badly she had sickened and almost died.

"they were great cities," Harmon said, still preserving his equilibrium,

"where men lived in peace and prosperity."

"Where'd you learn all this shit?" Pottruck spat. "I see you readin' a lot of books. Where'd you keep 'em?" He strode towards the O'Connells' wagon. "Going' to bring 'em out or shall I bring 'em out fer ya?"

"Just keep out of our belongings!" Harmon said, stepping into the bull's path.

Without breaking his stride, Pottruck swiped at Harmon, knocking him to the ground. Then, with Goodhue on his heels, he hoisted himself up onto the tail of the wagon, and pulled back the canvas.

"Keep out of there!" Harmon said, getting to his feet and stumbling towards the wagon.

As he came within a couple of strides, Goodhue wheeled around, knife in hand. He gave Hannon a whiskey-rotted smile. "Uh-uh," he said. "Papa.

.. " Maeve said, tears in her voice, please don't."

Harmon glanced back at his daughter. "I'm all right," he said. He advanced no further, but simply stood and watched le Goodhue clambered up into the wagon and joined ttruck in turning over the interior.

The din of their search had further swelled the crowd, but none of the spectators stepped forward in support of Harmon and his daughter. Few liked Pottruck any more than they liked the O'Connells, but they knew which could do them the greater harm.

There was a grunt of satisfaction from inside the wagon now, and Pottruck emerged with a dark teak chest, finely polished, which he unceremoniously threw down onto the ground. Leaping down ahead of his cohort, Goodhue set to opening the chest with his knife. It defied him, and in his frustration he started to stab at the lid.

"Don't destroy it," Harmon sighed. "I'll open it for YOU."

He took a key from around his neck and knelt to unlock the box. Pottruck was down from the wagon now, and, pushing Harmon aside, kicked open the lid.

Maeve had seen what lay in that box many times, it wasn't much to the uneducated-just a few rolls of paper tied with leather thongs-but to her, and to her father, these were treasures. The city of Everville lay waiting to be born upon those sheets of parchment: its crossroads and its squares, its parks and boulevards and municipal buildings.

"What did I say?" Pottruck spat. "You said books," Goodhue replied.

"I said shit, is what I said," Pottruck said, rummaging through the rolls of paper and tossing them hither and thither as he searched for something he recognized as valuable.

Maeve caught her father's eye. He was trembling from head to foot, his face ashen. His anger, it seemed, had been overtaken by fatalism, for which she was glad. Papers could be replaced. He could not.

Pottruck had given up on his digging now, and by the bored expression on his face, he was ready to go back to his wife-beating. He might have done so too had Goodhue not caught sight of something lying at the bottom of the box.

"What's this?" he said, stooping and reaching into its depths. A grin spread over his unshaven face. "This doesn't look like shit to me."

He brought his discovery out to meet the light, sliding it out of the parcel of paper in which it had been slid and holding it up for the assembly to see. Here was something even Maeve had not set eyes on before, and she squinted at it in puzzlement. It looked like a cross of some kind, but not, she could see, one that any Christian would wear.

She approached her father's side and whispered, "What is it, Papa?"

"It was a gift... " he replied...... from Mr. Buddenbaum."

One of the women, Marsha Winthrop, who was one of the few who had ever shown anything approaching kindness to Maeve, now stepped from the knot of spectators to take a closer look at Goodhue's find. She was a large woman with a sharp tongue, and when she spoke, the throng ceased muttering a moment.

"Looks like a piece of jewelry to me," she said, turning to Harmon. "was it your wife's?"

Maeve would often wonder in times to come what had possessed her father at that moment; whether it was stubbornness or perversity that kept him from telling a painless lie. Whichever it was, he refused the ease of deception. "No," he said. "It did not belong to my wife."

"What is it then?" Goodhue wanted to know.

The answer came not from Harmon's lips but from the crowd.

"One of the Devil's signs," said a strident voice.

Heads turned, and smiles disappeared as Enoch Whitney emerged from the back of the crowd. He was not a man of the cloth, but he was by his own description the most Godfearing among them; a soul commanded by the Lord to watch over his fellows and remind them constantly of how the Enemy moved and worked his works in their midst. It was a painful task, and he seldom let an opportunity slip by to remind his charges how much he suffered for their impurities. But the responsibility lay with him to castigate in public forum any who strayed from the commandments in deed, word, or intention-the lecher, of course, the adulterer, the cheat. And tonight, the worshipper of godless things. He strode in front of the erring father and daughter now, bristling with denunciations. He was a tall, narrow man, with eyes too busy about their duty ever to settle on anything for more than a moment.

"You have always carried yourself like a guilty man, O'Connell," he said, his gaze going from the accused, to Maeve, to the object in Goodhue's fingers. "But I could never get to the root of your guilt. Now I see it." He extended, his hand. Goodhue dropped the cross into it, and retreated. "I'm guilty of nothing," Hannon said.

"This is nothing?" Whitney said, his volume rising. He had a powerful voice, which he never tired of exercising.

"This is nothing?"

"I said I was guilty of-"

"Tell me, O'Connell, what service did you do the Devil, that he rewarded you with this unholy thing?" There were gasps among the assembly. to speak of the Evil One so openly was rare; they kept such talk to whispers, for fear that it drew the attention of its subject. Whitney had no such anxieties. He spoke of the Devil with something close to appetite.

:'I did no service," Harmon replied.

"Then it was a gift."

"Yes." More gasps. "But not from the Devil."

"This is Satan's work!" Whitney bellowed.

"It is not!" Harmon yelled back at him. "I have no dealings with the Devil. It's you who talk about Hell all the time, Whitney! It's you who sees the Devil in every corner! I don't believe the Devil cares much about us. I think he's off somewhere fancy@'

"The Devil's everywhere!" Whitney replied. "Waiting for us to make a mistake and fall." This was not directed at Harmon, but at the assembly, which had thinned somewhat since Whitney's appearance.

"There's no place, even to the wildernesses of the world, where his eyes are not upon us."

"You speak of the Devil the way true Christians speak of God Almighty," Harmon observed. "I wonder sometimes where your allegiances lie!"

The response threw Whitney into a frenzy. "How dare you question my righteousness," he foamed, "when I have proof, proof here in my hand, of your unholy dealings!" He turned to address the crowd. "We must not suffer this man in our midst!" he said. "He'll bring disaster upon us, as a service to his internal masters!" He proffered the medallion, passing before his congregation. "What more proof do you need than this? It carries a parody of our Lord upon the cross!" He turned back upon Harmon, stabbing his finger at the accused. "I ask you again: What service did you do for this?"

"And I'll tell you, one last time, that until you stop finding the Devil's hand in our lives, you will be his greatest ally." He spoke softly now, as to a frightened child. "Your ignorance is the Devil's bliss, Whitney. Every time you scorn what confounds you, he smiles. Every time you sow the fear of him where there was none, he laughs. It's you he loves, Whitney, not me. It's you he thanks in his evening prayers." The tables had- been turned so simply and so eloquently that for a moment Whitney did not fully comprehend his defeat. He stared at his opponent with a frown upon his face, while Harmon turned and addressed the crowd. "If you don't wish me and my daughter to travel with you any further," he said, "if you believe the slanders you've heard, then say so now, and we'll go another way. But be certain, all of you be certain, there is nothing in my heart or head but that the Lord God put it there...."

There were tears in his voice as he came to the end of his speech, and Maeve slipped her hand into his to comfort him. Side by side they stood in front of the company, awaiting judgment. There was a short silence. It was broken not by Whitney but by Marsha Winthrop.

"I don't see no good reason to make you go your own way," she said. "We all started this journey together. Seems to me we should end it that way."

The plain good sense of this came as a relief to the crowd after all that talk of God and the Devil. There were murmurs of approval here and there, and several people began to depart. The drama was over. they had work to do: wheels to fix, stew to stir. But the righteous Whitney was not about to lose his congregation without one last warning.

"This is a dangerous man!" he growled. He threw the medallion to the din, and ground his heel upon it. "He'll drag us down into Hell with him."

"He ain't going' to drag us anyplace, Enoch," Marsha said. "Now ya just go cool off, huh?"

Whitney cast a sour glance in Harmon's direction. "I'll be watchin'

you," he said.

"I'm comforted," Harmon replied, which won a little laugh from Marsha. As if the sound of laughter appalled him, Whitney hurried away, pushing through the crowd, muttering as he went.

"You'd better be careful," Marsha said to Hannon as she too departed.

"You've got a tongue could do you harm one of these days."

"You did us a great kindness tonight," he replied. "Thank you."

"Did it for the child," Marsha replied. "Don't want her thinkin' the whole world's crazy."

Then she went away, leaving Hannon to gather up the scattered papers and return them to the chest. With her father's back turned, Maeve went in search of the medallion, picking it up and examining it closely. All of the descriptions she'd heard in the last few minutes seemed to her plausible. It was a pretty thing, no doubt of that. Shining like silver, but with flecks of color-scarlet and sky blue-in its luster. Any lady, wife or no, would be happy to wear it. But it was clearly more than a piece of decoration. There was a figure in the middle of it, outspread like Jesus on the cross, except that this savior was quite naked, and had something of both man and woman in its attributes. It was surely not a representation of the Devil. There was nothing fearsome in its aspect: no cloven hooves, no horns. Shapes flowed from its hands and head, and down between its legs, some of which she recognized (a monkey; lightning; two eyes, one above, one below), some of which were beyond her. But none were vile or unholy.

"Best not to look at it too long," she heard her father say.

"Why not?" she asked, staring still. "Will it bewitch me?"

"I don't know what it'll do, to tell the truth," her father said.

,,Did Mr. Buddenbaum not tell you?"

Her father reached over her shoulder and gently pried the medallion from her fingers.

"Oh he told me, sure enough," Hannon said, returning to the box and placing the medallion inside, "only I didn't altogether understand him." With the contents now gathered up, he closed the lid and started to lug the box back to the wagon. "And I think maybe we should not speak that man's name aloud again."

"Why not?" Maeve said, determined to vex some answers out of her father. "is he a bad man?"

Harmon set the box down on the tail of the wagon. "I don't know what kind of man he is," he replied, his voice low. "Truth is, I don't rightly know that he's a man at all. Maybe... " he sighed.

"What, Papa?"

"Maybe I dreamt him."

"But I saw him too."

"Then maybe we both dreamt him. Maybe that's all Everville is or will be. Just a dream we had, the two of us."

Her father had told Maeve he wouldn't lie to her, and she believed him, even now. But what kind of dream produced objects and real as the medallion she'd just held in her fingers?

"I don't understand," she said.

"We'll talk about this another time," Harmon said, passing his hand over his furrowed brow. "Let's have no more of it for now."

"Just tell me when," Maeve said.

"We'll know when the time's right," Hannon said, pushing the box back through the canvas and out of sight. "That's the way of these things."

"These things, these things: what exactly were these things? For the next several weeks, as the wagon train wound its way through Idaho, following a trail forged by half a decade's westering, Maeve had puzzled over the mystery of all she'd seen and heard that day. In truth the puzzlement was a distraction-like the sewing together of dream-scraps-a distraction from the monotony of the trail. The weather through late June and July was mostly sweltering, and nobody had much energy for games. Adults had it easy, Maeve thought. they had maps to consult and feuds to fume over. And they had that business between men and women that her twelve-year-old mind did not entirely grasp, but that she yearned to comprehend. It was plain, from her observations, that young men would do much for a girl who knew how to charm them. they would follow her around like dogs, eager to supply any comfort; make fools of themselves if necessary. She understood these rituals imperfectly, but she was a good student, and this-unlike the enigmatic Mr. Buddenbaum-was a mystery she knew she would eventually solve.

As for her father, he was much subdued after the clash with Whitney, mixing with the rest of the travelers less than he had, and when he did so exchanging only the blandest of pleasantries. In the safety and secrecy of the wagon, how ever, he continued to pore over the plans for the building of Everville, scrutinizing them with greater intensity than ever. Only once did she attempt to coax him from his study. He told her sternly to let him be. It was his intention, he said, to have Everville by heart, so that if Pottruck or Goodhue or their like attempted and succeeded in destroying the plans, he could raise the shining city from memory.

"Be patient, sweet," he told her, then, his sternness mellowing. "Just a few more weeks and we'll be over the mountains. Then we'll find a valley and begin."

In this, as in all else, she trusted him, and left him to pore over the plans. What was a few weeks? She would content herself in the meanwhile with the triple mystery of dreams, things unsaid, and the business between men and women.

In a tiny time they would be in Oregon. Nothing was more certain.

But the heat went out of the world even before August was over, and by the end of the third week, with the Blue Mountains not yet visible even to the keenest eye, and food so severely rationed that some were too weak to walk, the word had spread around the campfires that according to friendly natives, storms of unseasonal severity were already descending from the heights. Sheldon Sturgis, who had led the train thus far with a loose hand (some said that was his style; others that he was simply weak and prone to drink), now began to hasten along those who were slowing progress. But with a growing number of frail and sickened pioneers, mistakes and accidents proliferated, adding to the delays that were an inevitable part of such journeys: wheels lost, animals injured, trails blocked.

Death became a fellow traveler sometime in early September, that was Maeve's belief She did not see him at first, but she was certain of his presence. He was in the land around them, killing living things with his touch or his breath. Trees that should have been fruitful in this season had already given up their leaves and were going naked. Animals large and small could be seen dead or dying beside the trail. Only carcass-flies were getting fat this September; but then Death was a friend to flies, wasn't he?

At night, waiting for sleep to come, she could hear people praying in the wagons nearby, begging God to keep Death at bay. It did no good. He came anyway. to Marsha Winthrop's baby son, William, who had been born in Missouri just two weeks before the trek began. to Jack Pottruck's father, a beast of a man like his son, who suddenly weakened and perished in the middle of the night (not quietly, like the Winthrop child, but with terrible cries and imprecations). to the sisters Brenda and Meriel Schonberg, spinsters both, whose passing was only discovered when the train stopped at dusk and their wagon went unhalted, the women being dead at the reins.

Maeve could not help wonder why Death had chosen these particular souls. She could understand why he had taken her mother: She had been very beautiful and gracious and loving. He had wanted to make the world the poorer by removing her, and himself the richer. But what did he want with a baby and an old man and two withered sisters?

She didn't bother her father with such questions; he was fretful and beset enough. Though their wagon showed no sign of failing, and their horse was as healthy as any in the train, it was clear from the look in his sunken eyes that he too knew Death was an unwelcome outrider these days. She began to watch for the horseman more clearly, hoping to reassure her father by identifying the enemy; to say, I know the color of his horse and of his hat, and if he comes near us I'll know him and frighten him off with a prayer or a song. More than once she thought she caught sight of him, weaving between the wagons up ahead, dark in the dust. But she was never certain of any sighting, so she kept her silence rather than give her father an unverified report.

And the days passed, and the cold deepened, and when finally the Blue Mountains came into view, their slopes were white down below the tree line, and the clouds behind them black and bruised by their burden of ice.

And Abilene Welsh and Billy Baxter, whose antics in the summer had been the subject of much gossip (and clucking from Martha Winthrop), were found frozen in each other's arms one morning, touched by death as they enjoyed each other's company away from the warmth of the fires. Even as they were being buried, and Doc Hodder was speaking of how they would be eternally united in the Kingdom of the Lord, and those sins they might have committed in the name of love forgiven, Maeve looked up at the gray heavens and saw the first flakes of snow spiraling down. And that was the beginning of the end.

She gave up looking for Death the Outrider after that. If he had ever accompanied the wagons on horseback, as she'd suspected, he had now put off that shape. He had become simpler. He was ice.

It killed many of the travelers quickly, and those it did not kill it tormented with intimations of the state ahead. It slowed the brain and the blood; it made the fingers fumble and the feet numb; it stiffened the sinews; it lined the lungs with a dusting of frost.

Sometimes, even now, with so many people dead and the rest dying, Maeve would hear her father say: "It wasn't supposed to be this way," as though some promise had been made to him that was presently being broken. She did not doubt the identity of the promise-maker. Mr. Buddenbaum. It was he who had filled her father's heart with ambition, who had given him gifts and told him to go West and build. It was he who had first whispered the word Everville. Perhaps, she began to think, Whitney had been right. Perhaps the Devil had come to tempt her father in the form of Mr. Buddenbaum, and filled his trusting heart with dreams for the pleasure of watching that heart broken. The problem vexed her night and day-never more so than when her father, in the midst of the storm-leaned over to her and said: "We must be strong, sweet. We mustn't die, or Everville dies with us!"

Hunger and exhaustion had her teetering on delirium now-sometimes she would imagine herself on the ship coming from Liverpool, clinging to the icy deck with her fingertips; sometimes she was back in Ireland, eating grass and roots to keep her belly from aching@ut in times of lucidity she wondered if perhaps this was some kind of test; Buddenbaum's way of seeing whether the man to whom he' given the dream of Everville was strong enough to survive. The notion seemed so plausible she could not keep it to herself.

"Papa?" she said, grabbing hold of his coat.

Her father looked round at her, his face barely visible beneath his hood. She could only see one of his eyes, but it looked at her as lovingly as ever.

"What, child?" he said.

"I think maybe-maybe it was meant to be this way."

"What are you saying?"

"Maybe Mr. Buddenbaum's watching us, to see if we deserve to build his city. Maybe just when we think we can't go on any longer he'll appear, and tell us it was a test, and show us the way to the valley."

"This isn't a test, child. It's just what happens in the world. Dreams die. The cold comes out of nowhere and kills them." He put his arm around his daughter, and hugged her to him, though there was precious little strength left in him.

"I'm not afraid, Papa," she said.

"Are you not?"

"No I'm not. We've come a long way together."

"That we have."

"Remember how it was back at home? How we thought we'd die of starvation? But we didn't. Then on the ship. Waves washing people overboard to right and left of us, and we thought we'd drown for certain. But the waves passed us by. Didn't they?"

His cracked, white lips managed a tiny smile. "Yes, child, they did."

"Mr. Buddenbaum knew what we'd come through," Maeve said. "He knew there were angels watching over us. And Mama to@'

She felt her father shudder at her side. "I dreamed of her last night-" he said.

"was she beautiful?"

"Always. We were floating, side by side, in this calm, calm sea. And I swear, if I'd not known you were here, child, waiting for me-2'

He didn't finish the thought. A sound like a single blast of a trumpet came out of the blind whiteness ahead; a note of triumph that instantly raised a chorus of shouts from the wagons in front and behind.

"Did ya hear that?"

"There's somebody up here with us!"

Another blast now, and another, and another, each rising from the echo of the last till the whole white world was filled with brazen harmonies. The Sturgis' wagon, which was ahead of the O'Connells', had come to a halt, and Sheldon was calling back down the line, summoning a party of men to his side.

"Stratton! Whitney! O'Connell! Get your guns!"

"Guns?" said Maeve. "Papa, why does he want guns?"

"Just climb up into the wagon, child," Harmon said,

"and stay there till I come back." The din of trumpets had died away for a moment, but now it came again, more magnificent than ever. As she climbed up onto the wagon, Maeve's skinny frame ran with little tremors at the sound, as though the music was shaking her muscles and marrow. She started to weep, seeing her father disappear, rifle in hand. Not because she feared for him but because she wanted to go out into the snow herself and see what manner of trumpet made the sound that moved in her so strangely, and what manner of man played upon it. Perhaps they were not men at all, her spinning head decided. Perhaps the angels she'd been gabbing about minutes before had come to earth, and these blasts were their proclamations.

She started out into the snow, suddenly and uncontrollably certain that this was true. Their heavenly guardians had come to save them, and Mama too, more than likely. If she looked hard she would see them soon, gold and blue and purple. She stood up on the seat, clinging to the canvas, to get a better view, scanning the blank snow in every direction. Her study was rewarded. Just as the trumpets began their third hallelujah, the snow parted for a few moments. She saw the mountains rising to left and right like the teeth of a trap, and ahead of her a single titanic peak, its lower slopes forested. The perimeter of the trees lay no more than a hundred yards from the wagon, and the music she heard was coming from that direction, she was certain of -it. Of her father, and of the men accompanying him, there was no sign, but they had surely disappeared among the trees. It would be quite safe to follow them, and wonderful to be there at her father's side when he was reunited with Mama. Wouldn't that be a blissful time, kissing her mother in a circle of angels, while Whitney and all the men who had scorned her father looked on agog?

The opening in the veil of snow was closing again, but before it did so she jumped down from the wagon and started off in the direction of the trees. Within moments, snow had obliterated the wagons behind her, just as it had covered the forest ahead, and she was following her nose through a blank world, stumbling with every other step. The drifts lay perilously deep in places, and she several times dropped into drifts so deep she was almost buried alive. But just as her frozen limbs threatened to give up on her, the trumpets came again, and the music put life back into her sinews and filled her head with bliss. There was a piece of paradise up ahead. Angels and Mama and her loving father, with whom she would build a city that would be the wonder of the world.

She would not die, of that she was certain. Not today, not for many years to come. She had great work to do, and the angels would not see her perish in the snow, knowing how far she had traveled to perform that labor. And now she saw the trees, pines higher than any house, like a wall of sentinels in front of her. Calling for her father she ran towards them, careless of the cold and the bruises and her spinning head. The trumpets were close, and there were bursts of color in the corner of her eye, as though some of the angelic throng, who had not yet picked their instruments, were clustered about her, the tips of their beating wings all that she was allowed to glimpse.

borne by invisible hands, she was ushered beneath the canopy of trees and there, where the snow could not come, and the ground was soft with pine needles, she sank down onto her knees and drew a dozen heaving breaths while the sound of trumpets touched her in every part.

It was not music that finally picked her up, nor the hands of the invisible throng. It was a shout, which rose above the trumpet echoes, and filled her with alarm.

"Damn you, O'Connell!" She knew the voice. It was Whitney. "God in Heaven! What have you done?" he yelled.

She got to her feet and started towards his din. Her eyes were not yet accustomed to the gloom after the brightness of the blizzard, and the further from the edge of the forest she ventured, the darker it became, but the rage in Whitney's voice spurred her on, careless of what lay in her path. The trumpets had fallen silent. Perhaps the angels had heard his rants, she thought, and would not float their harmonies on tainted air, or perhaps they were simply watching to see what human rage was like.

"You knew!" Whitney was yelling. "You brought us into Hell!" Maeve could see him now, moving between the trees, calling after his quarry into the shadows.

"O'Connell? O'Connell! You'll burn in a lake of fire for this. Burn and burn and-"

He stopped; swung round, his eyes finding Maeve with terrible speed. Before she could retreat, he yelled: "I see you! Come out, you little bitch!"

Maeve had no choice. He had her in the sights of his rifle. And now, as she approached him between the trees, she saw that he was not alone. Sheldon Sturgis and Pottruck were just a few yards from him. Sturgis was crouched against a tree, terrified of something in the branches above him, where his rifle was pointed. Pottruck was watching Whitney's antics with a bemused expression on his oafish face.

"O'Connell?" Whitney yelled. "I got your little girl here." He adjusted his aim, squinting for accuracy. "I got her right between the eyes if I pull the trigger. An' I'm going to do it. Hear me, O'Connell?"

"Don't shoot," Sturgis said. "You'll bring it back."

"It'll come anyway," Whitney said. "O'Connell sent it to fetch our souls."

"Oh Jesus Christ in Heaven-" Sturgis sobbed. "Stand right there," Whitney said to Maeve. "And you call to your Daddy and you tell him to keep his demon away from us or I'll kill you."

"He hasn't-hasn't got any demons," Maeve said. She didn't want Whitney to know that she was afraid, but she couldn't help herself. Tears came anyway.

"You just tell him," Whitney said, "you just call." He pushed the rifle in Maeve's direction, so that it was a foot from her face. "If you don't I'll kill you. You're the Devil's child's what you are. Ain't no crime killing muck like you. Go on. Call him."

"Papa?"

"Louder!"

"Papa?"

There was no reply from the shadows. "He doesn't hear me.

"I hear you, child," said her father. She looked towards his voice and there he was, coming towards her out of the murk.

"Drop your rifle!" Pottruck yelled to him. Even as he did, the trumpets began again, louder than ever. The music clutched at Maeve's heart with such force she started to gasp for breath.

"What's wrong?" she heard her father say, and glanced back in his direction to see him start towards her.

"Stay where you are!" Whitney yelled, but her father kept running. There was no second warning. Whitney simply fired, not once but twice. One bullet struck him in the shoulder, the other in the stomach. He stumbled on towards her, but before he could take two strides, his legs gave out beneath him, and he fell down.

"Papa!" she yelled, and would have gone to him, but then the trumpets began another volley, and as their music rose up in her, bursts of white light blotted out the world, and she dropped to the ground in a swoon.

"I hear it coming-"

"Shut up, Sturgis."

"It is! It's coming again. Whitney! What do we do?"

Sturgis's shrill shouts pricked Maeve awake. She opened her eyes to see her father lying where he had fallen. He was still moving, she saw, his hands clutching rhythmically at his belly, his legs twitching.

"Whitney!" Sturgis was screaming. "It's coming back."

She could not see him from where she lay, but she could hear the thrashing of the branches, as though the wind had suddenly risen.

Whitney was praying.

"Our Lord, who art in Heaven-,, Maeve moved her head a little, in the hope of glimpsing the trio without drawing attention to herself. Whitney was on his knees, Sturgis was cowering against the tree, and Pottruck was staring up into the canopy waving wildly: "Come on, you fucking shit! Come on!"

Certain she was forgotten, Maeve got to her feet cautiously, reaching out to grab hold of the nearest tree trunk for support. She looked back to her father, who had raised his head a couple of inches off the ground and was staring at Pottruck as he fired up into the thrashing branches.

Sturgis yelled, "Christ, no!," Whitney started to rise from his kneel, and in that same moment, a form that Maeve's bewildered eyes could not quite distinguish from the branches-it had their sweep and their darkness swooped upon Pottruck.

Whatever it was, it was no angel. There were no feathers here. There was no gold or scarlet or blue. The beast was naked, of that she was reasonably certain, and its flesh gleamed. That was all she had time to grasp before it picked Pottruck up and carried him off, up into the canopy.

He screamed and screamed, and Maeve, though she hated the man with a passion, wished he might be saved from his torment, if only to stop his din. She covered her ears but his cries found their way between her fingers, mounting in volume as a terrible rain fell from the branches. First came the rifle, then blood, pattering down. Then one of Pottruck's arms, followed by a piece of flesh she could not distinguish; and another. And still he screamed, though the patter of the blood had become a downpour, and the snaking part of his innards dropped from the tree in a glistening loop.

Suddenly, Sturgis was rising from his hiding place, and began to fire into the tree. Perhaps he put Pottruck from his misery, perhaps the beast simply took out the man's throat. Whichever, the terrible sound ceased, and a moment later Pottruck's body, so mangled it looked barely human, fell from the branches and lay steaming on the ground.

The canopy stilled. Sturgis backed away into the shadows, stifling his sobs. Maeve froze, praying that Whitney would go with him. But he did not. Instead he started towards her father.

"See what you did, calling the Evil One?" he said.

"I-didn't-call anybody," Han-non gasped.

"You tell it to go back to the pit, O'Connell. You tell it!"

Maeve looked back in Sturgis's direction. The man had fled. But her gaze fell on Pottruck's rifle, which lay beneath the dripping branches a yard from his corpse.

"You repent," Whitney was saying to Harmon. "You send that devil back where it came from, or I'm going to blow off your hands, then your pecker, till you're begging to repent."

With Sturgis gone and Whitney's back turned, Maeve didn't need much caution. Eyes cast up towards the branches, where she was certain the beasts still squatted, she started towards the rifle. She could see no sign of the creature-the mesh of branches was too thick-but she could feel its gaze on her.

"Please... " she whispered to it, the syllables too soft to attract Whitney's attention, "don't hurt... me."

The squatter made no move. Not a twig shook; not a needle fell.

She glanced down at the ground. Pottruck's body lay sprawled in front of her, a nonsense now. She'd seen corpses before. Dead in Irish ditches, dead in Liverpool gutters, dead along the trail to the promised land. This one was bloodier than most, but it didn't move her. She stepped over it and stooped to pick up the rifle.

As she did so she heard the thing above her expel a sighing breath. She froze, heart thumping, waiting for the claws to come and pluck her up. But no. Just another sigh, almost sorrowful. She knew it wasn't wise to linger here a moment longer than she needed, but she couldn't keep her curiosity in check. She rose with the rifle, and looked back up into the knot of branches. As she did so a drop of blood hit her cheek, and a second fell between her parted lips. It was not Pottruck's blood, she knew that the moment it hit her tongue. The drop was not salty, but sweet, like honey, and though she knew it was coming from the beast

(Pottruck's aim had not been so wild after all, it seemed), her hunger overcame any niceties. She opened her mouth a little wider, hoping another drop would come her way, and she was not disappointed. A little shower of drops struck her upturned face, some of them finding her mouth. Her throat ran with spittle, and she could not help but sigh with pleasure at the taste.

The creature in the tree moved now, and she briefly glimpsed its form. Its wings were open wide, as though it was ready to swoop upon her; its head-if she read the shadows right@ocked a little. And still the blood came, the drops no longer missing her mouth but falling directly upon her tongue. This was no accident, she knew. The beast was feeding her; squeezing its wounded flesh above her face like a honey-soaked sponge.

It was a moan from her father that stiffed her from the strange reverie that had overtaken her. She looked away from her nourisher, and back through the trees. Whitney was crouching beside Harmon's body, his rifle at her father's head.

She started towards them, lighter and fleeter than she'd been in weeks. Her belly no longer ached. Her head no longerspun.

Whitney did not see her until she was six or seven yards away, Pottruck's bloodied rifle pointing directly at him. She had never used a weapon like this before, but at such a distance, it would be difficult to discharge it without doing some harm. Plainly the tormentor made the same calculation, because his face grew fretful at the sight of her.

"You should be careful with that, child," he said.

"You leave Papa alone." "I wasn't touching him."

"Liar."

"I wasn't. I swear."

"Maeve, my sweet-" Harmon murmured, raising his head with no little difficulty, "go back to the wagon. Please. There's something-something terrible here."

"No, there isn't," Maeve replied, the blood of the beast still sweet on her tongue. "It's not going to hurt us." She looked back at Whitney.

"We've got to get my Papa fixed up, before he dies. You put down your rifle." Whitney did so, and Maeve approached, keeping her own weapon pointed in his direction while she looked upon her father. He was a pitiful sight, his jacket and shirt dark with blood from collar to belt.

"Help him up," she told Whitney. "Which way is it back to the wagons?"

"You go, child," Harmon said softly. "I got no life left in me."

"That's not true. We'll get you to the wagons and Mrs. Winthrop can bandage you up-"

"No," Harmon said. "It's too late."

Maeve came to her father's side, and looked directly down into his eyes.

"You've got to get well," she said, "or what'll happen to Everville?"

"it was a fine dream I dreamed," he murmured, raising his trembling hand towards her. She took it. "But you're finer, child," he said. "You're the finest dream I ever had. And it's not so hard to die, knowing you're in the world."

Then his eyes flickered closed.

"Papa?" she said. "Papa?"

"He's gone to Hell-" Whitney murmured.

She looked up at him. He was smiling. The tears she'd held back now came in a bitter flood of sorrow, and of rage-and she went down on her knees beside her father, pressing her face against his cold cheek.

"Listen to me@' she said to him. Did she feel a tremor in his body, as though he were still holding on to a tiny piece of life, listening to his child's voice in the darkness?

"I'm going to build it, Papa," she whispered. "I am. I promise. It won't be just a dream-"

As she finished speaking she felt a feather breath against her cheek, and she knew he had heard her. And having heard, had let go.

The joy of that knowledge was short-lived.

"You're not going to build anything," Whitney said.

She looked up at him. He had reclaimed his weapon, and was pointing it at her heart.

"Stand up," he said. As she did so he knocked Pottruck's rifle from her hand. "Your tears don't impress me none," he went on. "You're going'

the way of your Daddy."

She raised her arms in front of her as though her palms might deflect his bullets. "Please@' she murmured, stumbling backwards.

"Stand still," he yelled, and as he yelled he fired, the bullet striking the ground inches from her feet. "You're coming with me, in case that devil your Daddy raised comes calling again."

He had no sooner spoken that there was a disturbance in the branches a few yards behind him.

"Oh Lord in Heaven-" Whitney breathed, and rushed at Maeve, spinning her around and pulling her back against his body. She sobbed for him not to hurt her, but he grabbed a fistful of her hair and hauled her on to her tiptoes. Then he started to back away from the spot where the canopy was shaking, with Maeve obliged to match him step for step. they had taken maybe six paces when the shaking stopped. The wounded beast was not prepared to risk another bullet, it seemed. Whitney's panicked breaths became a little more regular. "It's going to be all right," he said. "I got the Lord watching over me."

He'd no sooner spoken than the beast erupted, moving through the trees overhead with such speed and violence that entire boughs came crashing down. Maeve took her chance. She reached up and stabbed her nails into Whitney's hand, twisting her body as she did so. Her greasy hair slipped from his fist, and before he could catch hold of her again she was away, seeking the shelter of the nearest tree.

She'd taken three strides, no more, when what she took to be two branches dropped in front of her. As she raised her arms to cover her face, she realized her error. The limbs grabbed hold of her, their fingers long enough to meet around her waist. Her breath went out of her in a, rush, and she was hauled off the ground and up into the shelter of trees.

Whitney fired, and fired again, but her wounded savior was as quick in his retreat as he'd been to snatch her away. "Hold on," he told her, his hands hot against her, and even before she'd even found proper purchase went off through the canopy, his wings slicing the branches like twin scydies as they labored to carry the beast and his burden skyward.

She had forgotten the trumpets. But now, as her savior bore her up through the trees, the music came again, more splendid than ever.

"The Lady comes," the creature said, alarm in his voice, and without warning began to descend again with such speed she almost lost her hold on him and was spilled from his arms.

"What lady?" she asked him, studying the shadows that hid his face from her.

"Better you not know," he said. The ground was in sight now. "Don't look at me," he warned her as they cleared the lower branches, "or I'll have to put out your eyes."

"You wouldn't do that."

"Oh wouldn't I?" he replied, his hand coming up over her face so swiftly she didn't have time to catch her breath before mouth, nose, and eyes were sealed. She drew what little The air was trapped between her face and his palm. It smelled like his blood had tasted: sweet and appetizing. Opening her mouth, she pressed her tongue against his skin.

"I think you'd eat me alive if you could," he said. By his tone, it was plain the thought amused him.

She felt solid earth beneath her feet, and again he spoke, his mouth so close to her ear his beard or his mustache tickled her lobe.

"You're right, child. I can't blind you. But I beg you, when I take my hand from your face, close your eyes and keep them closed, and I will go from you whistling. When you can no longer hear me, open your eyes. But for your heart's sake@n and only then. Do you understand?"

She nodded, and he took his hand from her face. Her eyes were closed and stayed that way while he spoke again. "Go back to your family," he told her.

"My Papa's dead."

"Your Mama, then?"

"She's dead too. And Whitney'll kill me as soon as he sees me. He thinks I'm the Devil's child. He thinks you're a demon that my father conjured up."

The creature laughed at this out loud.

"You're not from Hell, are you?" she asked. "No, I'm not."

"Are you an angel then?"

"No, not that either."

"What then?"

"I told you: Better you not know." The trumpets were sounding again. ceremony's about to begin. I have to go. I wish I could do more for you, child, but I cannot" He laid his fingers tightly upon her eyelids.

"Eyes closed until I'm gone."

"Yes

"You promise me?"

"I promise." His fingers were removed, and he began to whistle some pretty little tune, breaking it only to say: "Say nothing of this, to anyone," then picking up the melody again to mask his departure.

A promise made with fingers crossed was no promise at all; Maeve had known this from the age of five. Uncrossing her fingers now, she waited until the sound of whistling retreated just a little, then opened her eyes. Their flight had apparently taken them some considerable way up the mountain, because the ground around the rock on which he'd set her was steeply sloped. Far fewer ums grew here; and there was consequently far more light. She could see the sky overhead snow had stopped, the parting clouds tinged a delicate pink by the setting sun-and when she cast her eyes up the Mountainside in pursuit of the whistler she found him readily enough. At this distance, she could make out almost no detail of his appearance, but she was determined not to be denied it long. Climbing down off the boulder, she started after him.

It was hard going. The dirt and rotted needles slid away beneath her feet and hands as she climbed, and several times she had to scrabble for a root or a stone to keep herself from sliding back down the slope. The distance between herself and the beast grew steadily wider, and just as she began to fear losing sight of him altogether the same roseate light that had tinged the clouds overhead came between the trees, and with it a balmy air the like of which she'd not felt on her face in a month or more. The trees were more widely spread than ever, and between them she could see something of the slope beyond. It rose in a snowy sweep up to the top of the mountain, where the clouds had cleared completely, so that the peak stood against a sky pricked with the first of the stars. Their glimmer, however, could not compete with the lights shed on the snow field below, the source of which Maeve did not discover until she was a few yards from the edge of the trees.

Several forms of misty light hovered over the slope, shedding their gentle luminescence on a scene of such beauty she stood among the trees rooted with wonder. Though her rescuer had denied he was an angel, surely heaven was here. From what other place could the creatures that inhabited this place have come? Though few of them had wings, all were in some way miraculous. A dozen or more that better resembled birds than men-beaked and shiny-eyed-stood communing beneath one of the spheres of light. Another clan, this at first glance dressed in scarlet silks, descended the slope with much ostentation, only to suddenly draw their brilliance into their bodies and hang in the air like skinned snakes.

Yet another group had torsos like fans that opened lavishly, exposing vast, pulsing hearts. Not every member of this assembly was so strange. Some were near enough men and women but for a color that passed through their skin, or a tail they trailed behind. Others were so tenuous that they were nearly phantoms, their passage leaving no mark upon the snow, while others still-these surely the cousins of her savior-seemed almost too solid in this place of spirit, brooding in the shadows of their wings, reluctant, it seemed, to even keep company with their fellows.

As to the creature that had unwittingly led her here, he was limping his way through the congregation towards a place at the top of the slope where a tent the color of the darkening sky had been pitched. She was of course instantly curious as to what wonder it contained. Did she dare leave the cover of the trees and follow him to find out? Why not? she reasoned. She had nothing to lose. Even if she were able to find her way back down the mountain to the wagons, Whitney would be there, with his rifle and his righteousness. Better to go where the creature and her curiosity led.

And now, another astonishment. Though she took her way out from the trees and up through the hundred or so gathered here, none made a move to question her or block her way. A few heads were turned in her direction, it was true, a few whispers exchanged of which she was surely the subject. But that was all. Among such strangenesses, her size and sickliness were apparently taken to be a glamor of their own.

As she climbed the thought occurred to her that perhaps this was a dream: that she had swooned on her father's chest, and would wake soon with his body cold beneath her. There were simple proofs against such doubts, however. First she pinched her arm, then she poked her tongue in the bad tooth at the back of her mouth. Both hurt, more than a little. She wasn't dreaming. Had she maybe lost her mind then, and was inventing these wonders the way travelers in the desert invented wells and fruit trees? No, that made no sense either. If these were comforts she'd created, where were her mother and her father; where were the tables laden with cake and milk?

Extraordinary as all these visions were, they were real. The lights, the families, the shimmering tent; all as real as Whitney and the wagons and the dead in their graves.

Thinking of what she'd left behind, she paused for a moment and looked back down the mountain. Night was drawing on swiftly, and the forest had receded into a misty darkness. She could see no sign of the wagons, nor were there any fires burning below. Either the snow had buried them all, or-more likely@ey had moved on towards the mountain while the blizzard's fury subsided, assuming she was lost.

So she was. Orphaned and wandering among strangers, countless miles from the place where she was born, she was as lost as any soul could be. But she felt no sadness at that thought (a prick, perhaps, knowing her father lay in the dark below, but no more). Instead she felt a kind of joy. She was of a tribe of one here; and if she was ever asked what manner of magic she carried to this sacred place, she would sit these miraculous folk down and tell them about Everville, street by street, square by square, and they would be astonished. Nor would she be lost, when she'd told her tale, because Everville was her true home, and she was as safe in its heart as it was in hers.

It wasn't difficult for Whitney to convince those waiting back at the wagons that they should give up the O'Connell girl as lost and move on. Darkness was falling and Sturgis had already returned from the forest with babbled tales of a terror that had brutally dispatched Pottruck. It was still here, Whitney warned, and though its conjurer was dead, the creature's appetite for blood and souls would only become stronger as the night deepened. Besides, the storm had abated a little. This was God's way of thanking them for their part in O'Connell's dispatch; they should not scorn it.

Nobody-not even Marsha Winthrop-put up any argument against their departure. Whitney had graphically described the girl's abduction. It was unlikely she had survived.

Even though the snowfall had given way to mist, and the moon when it rose was round and bright, progress was exhausting, and after an hour of travel-with the fringes of forest a safe distance behind them-they made camp for the remainder of the night.

Whitney sang hymns as he lit the fire, raising his unmelodious voice to the glory of God, praising Him for leading them from Hell's dominion.

"The Lord has us in his hands," Whitney told the company between verses.

"Our journey is almost done."

At his suggestion, Everett Immendorf's widow, Ninnie, was charged to make a stew, its ingredients culled from the last of everyone's supply of vittles.

"It will be the last supper we will take along this dark road," Whitney said, "for tomorrow God will bring us into our promised land."

The stew was little more than gruel, but it warmed them as they sat huddled about the fire. Drinking it, they dared talk quietly of deliverance. And it was in the midst of this talk they had proof that Whitney had been right. As the flames began to die down, there came a sound from beyond the throw of the light: that of someone politely clearing their throat.

Sturgis-who had not stopped trembling since his return-was first to his feet, his gun drawn.

"No need of that," came a floating voice. "I'm here as a friend." Whitney rose to his feet. "Then show yourself, friend," he said.

The stranger did as he was invited, and sauntered into view. He was shorter than any man around the fire, but he carried himself with the easy gait of one who was seldom, if ever, crossed. The high collar of his fur coat was turned up, and he smiled out from its luxury as though the faces before him were those of well-fed friends, and he was coming to join them at a feast. Apart from the snow on his boots, there was no sign that he had exerted himself to reach this spot. Every detail was in place and bespoke a man of cultivation: waxed mustache, clipped beard, calf-skin gloves, silver-tipped cane.

There was not one among the group around the fire unmoved by his presence. Sheldon Sturgis felt a deep shame for his cowardice, certain that this man had never shit his pants in his life. Alvin Goodbue's stomach rebelled at, the powerful perfume the man wore, and he summarily ffimw up his portion of gruel. Its cook, Ninnie Immendorf, didn't even notice. She was too busy feeling thankful for her widowhood.

"Where'd you come from?" Marsha wanted to know.

"Up the pass," the stranger replied.

"Where's your wagon?" The man was amused by this. "I came on foot," he said. "It's no more than a mile or two down into the valley."

There were murmurs of joy and disbelief around the fire. "We're saved!" Cynthia Fisher sobbed. "Oh Lord in Heaven, we're saved!"

"You were right" Goodhue said to Whitney, "we were in God's hands tonight."

Whitney caught the twitch of a smile on the stranger's face. "This is indeed welcome news," he said. "May we know who you are?"

"No secret there," the man replied. "My name's Owen Buddenbaum. I came to meet with some friends of mine, but I don't see them among your company. I hope no harm has befallen them."

"We've lost a lot of good people," Sturgis said. "Who're you looking for?"

"Harmon O'Connell and his daughter," Buddenbaum replied. "Were they not with you?"

The smiles around the fire died. There were several seconds of uneasy silence, then Goodhue simply said: "They're dead."

Buddenbaum teased the glove off his left hand as he spoke, his voice betraying nothing. "Is that so?" he said.

"Yes it's so," Sturgis replied. "O'Connell-got lost on the mountain."

"And the child?"

"She went after him. It's like he says, they're both dead." Buddenbaum's bare hand went up to his mouth, and he nibbled on the nail of his thumb. There was at least one ring on every finger. On the middle digit, three. "I'm surprised-" he said.

:'At what?" Whitney replied.

'At God-fearing men and women leaving an innocent child to freeze to death," Buddenbaum replied. He shrugged. "Well, we do what we must do." He pulled his glove back on. "I'll take my leave of you."

"Wait," said Ninnie, "won't you have something to eat? We ain't got much, but-"

"Thank you, no."

"I got a little coffee tucked away," Sheldon said. "We could brew a cup."

:'You're very kind," Buddenbaum said. 'So stay," said Sheldon.

"Another time perhaps," Buddenbaurn replied. He scanned the group as he spoke. "I'm sure our paths will cross in the future," he said. "We go our many ways but the roads lead back and back, don't they? And of course we follow them. We have no choice."

"You could ride back down with us," Sheldon said.

"I'm not going back," came the reply. "I'm going up the mountain."

"You're out of you're mind," Marsha said with her customary plainness.

"You'll freeze up there."

"I have my coat and gloves," Buddenbaum replied, "And if a little child can survive the cold, I surely can."

"How many times-?" Goodhue began, but Whitney, who had taken a seat on the far side of the fire from Buddenbaum, and was studying the man through the smoke, hushed him.

"If he wants to go, let him," he said.

"Quite so," Buddenbaum replied. "Well-goodnight."

As he turned from the fire, however, Ninnie blurted out: "Trumpets."

Buddenbaurn looked back. "I beg your pardon?"

"We heard trumpets, up on the mountain@' She looked to her fellow travelers for support, but none offered a word. "At least, I did," she went on hesitantly, "I heard-"

"Trumpets."

"Yes.

"Strange. "Yes." She had lost all confidence in her story now. "Of course, it could have been... I don't know@' "Thunder," said Whitney.

"Thunder that sounds like trumpets? Well, there's a thing. I'll listen out for it." He directed a little smile at Ninnie. "I'm much obliged," he said, with such courtesy she thought she'd swoon. Then, without a further word, he turned his back upon the assembly and strode out of the firelight, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

All those gathered around the fire that night would survive the rest of the journey, and all in their fashion prosper. It was a brave time in the West, and in the years to come they would build and profit and procreate heroically, putting behind them the harm they'd suffered getting there. they would not speak of the dead, despite the promises they'd made. they would not seek out the bones of those ill-buried and see them laid to rest with better care. they would not mourn. they would not regret.

But they would remember. And of the incidents they'd conjure in the privacy of their parlors, this night, and the man who'd come visiting, would prove the most enduring.

Every time Sheldon Sturgis brewed a pot of coffee, he would think of Buddenbaum, and recall his shame. Every time Ninnie Immendorf had a suitor come knocking (and several did, for wives were hard to come by in those years, and Ninnie could cook a mean stew) she would go to the door praying it would not be Franklin or Charlie or Burk but Buddenbaum. Buddenbaum.

And every time the Reverend Whitney mounted his pulpit, and spoke to his parishioners about the workings of the Devil in the world, he would bring the man with the cane to mind, and his voice would fill with feeling and the congregation would shudder in their pews. It was as though the preacher had seen the Evil One face to face, people would say as they filed out, for he spoke not of a monster with the horns of a goat, but of a man fallen on hard times, stripped of his horses and his retinue, and wandering the world in search of children that had strayed from the fold.

Six By the time Maeve reached the top of the slope she had lost sight of her savior, and as there were no lights around the tent, it was hard to make out much about those who lingered in its vicinity. Part of her hoped not to encounter him, given that she'd cheated on her promise and followed him into the midst of this ceremony, but another part, the part nourished by his honey-blood, was willing to risk his are if she could know him better. Surely he wouldn't hurt her, she told herself, however angry he was. What was done was done. She'd seen the secrets.

All except for what lay inside the tent, of course, and she would soon put that to rights. There was a door a few yards from where she stood, but it was sealed, so she headed around to the side of the tent, where there was nobody to see, and pulled the fabric up out of the snow so that she could shimmy underneath.

Inside there was a silence so deep she almost feared to draw breath, and a darkness so profound it seemed to press against her face, like the hands of a blind man reading her flesh. She let it do so, fearing that she'd be removed if she rejected it, and after a few moments of scrutiny its touch became lighter, almost playful, and she felt the darkness coaxing her up from the ground and away from the wall. She was obliged to trust to it, but that was no great hardship. There was no peril here, of that she was certain, and as if in reward for her faith the darkness began to flower before her, bloom upon bloom opening as she approached. The darkness grew no lighter, but as she walked her eyes understood its subtleties better; saw forms and figures that she'd been blind to before. She was one of hundreds here, she realized, members of the families she'd seen in the snow outside, lucky or worthy enough to come into this sacred place. There were tears of bliss on some of their faces; smiles and reverence on others. A few even looked her way as she was led through the throng, but most were watching some sight the black blossoms had not yet shown her. Eager to know what wonder this was, she focused her attentions upon the mysterious air.

And now she began to see. There was a form appearing ahead of her, like the fruit of this blossoming darkness. It resembled nothing she could name, but it had the sinuousness of a serpent, or rather of many serpents, turned upon themselves over and over, a knot of sliding shapes in constant motion. It entered itself, this knot, and emerged remade.

it divided and sealed, opened like an eye and broke like water on a rock. Sometimes, in the midst of its cavortings, a spray of darkness would spurt between its surfaces. Oftentimes it would slough off a skin of shadows, which would instantly fly apart, the fragments rising like seeds from a field of dandelions, sowing themselves in the fertile gloom.

She was watching one such seeding when her gaze fell upon the figures sitting beneath this display. A man and a woman, face to face, hand to hand, their heads bowed as if in prayer. Seeing the two of them so close she thought of Abilene Welsh and Billy Baxter, though she did not entirely comprehend the reason. Surely those two had not frozen to death looking for a place to hold hands and bow heads, but to perform that labor she'd witnessed countless times among beasts. And yet, was the getting of children not the purpose of that labor? And did the form hovering above this couple not seem to come from their mingled essences, which rose from their lips like coiling smoke and intertwined between their brows?

"It's a baby," she said aloud.

Either the darkness was negligent, and failed to catch her words before they flew, or else the sound her tongue made was too slippery to @ seized. Whichever, she saw the words go from her lips like a turquoise and orange flame, the colors strident in such muted circumstances. they instantly flew towards the dark child, and were drawn into its workings, their brilliance streaking its every part.

The woman opened her eyes and raised her head with a look of pain upon her face, and her husband rose from his chair expelling a throatful of ether, then looked up at the creature he had fathered.

It was in turmoil now, its configurations changing even more rapidly, as if Maeve's colors had given it new fuel for its inventions. Too much, perhaps. In an ecstasy of change, its forms became even more erratic, feeding upon their own invention as they multiplied.

Maeve was in sudden terror. She retreated a couple of stumbling steps then turned and pelted away through the crowd. There was turmoil all around her, the darkness too traumatized to silence the voices of the throng, so that shouts of panic and alarm erupted on every side. She darted this way and that to keep anyone from catching hold of her, though it seemed few understood what had happened, much less recognized the culprit, and she reached the wall of the tent without a hand being laid upon her. As she stooped to duck under the fabric, she glanced back. The child was in decay, she saw, its forms ripened to bursting and rotting in the air. Its parents had separated, and lay in the arms of their respective families, stricken and sickened. Even as Maeve watched, the woman went into a fit so violent it was all her comforters could do to restrain her.

Clamping her hand over her mouth to subdue her sobs, Maeve dug under the tent wall and out into the snow. News of the calamity had already spread among those waiting outside and chaos had ensued. A fight had broken out towards the bottom of the slope, and someone was already sprawled on the ground with a spike in his heart. Elsewhere, people were running towards the tent, even as those within emerged, yelling at the tops of their voices.

Maeve sat down on the snow and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, which burned with all she'd seen, and with the tears that were about to come.

"Child."

She raised her head, and started to look around.

"What did you promise?"

She looked no further.

"It wasn't my fault," she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "I just said@'

"It was you?" the beast replied, cutting her short. "Oh Lord, oh Lord, what have I done?"

She felt the beast's hands on her body, and without warning she was spun around. She finally saw his features plainly-his long, patient face, his golden eyes, his fur, thickening to a mane in the middle of his skull, sleek as a beaver's pelt on his brow and cheek and chin. His teeth were chattering slightly.

"Are you cold?"

"No, damn you!"

She started to weep softly.

"All right, I'm cold," he said, "I'm cold."

"No you're not. You're afraid." The gold in his eyes flickered.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Maeve O'Connell."

"I should have killed you, Maeve O'Connell."

"I'm glad you didn't," she said. "Who are you?"

"Coker Ammiano. Soon to be infamous. If I'd killed you, you wouldn't have done this terrible thing."

"What was so terrible?"

"You spoke at the marriage. That was forbidden. Now there'll be war. The families'll blame each other. There'll be bloodshed, Then when they realize it wasn't them, they'll come looking for the culprit, and they'll kill us. You for what you did in there, me for bringing you here." Maeve pondered this chain of disaster for a moment. "they can't kill us if they can't find us," she said finally. She glanced back down the slope. Just as Coker had predicted, the fighting had indeed escalated. If it was not yet war it would be very soon. "Is there another way?" she said.

"One," he replied.

She scrabbled to her feet. "Take us there," she said.

Over the decades, Buddenbaum had assembled a comprehensive list of fictional works in which he appeared. to date he had knowledge of twenty-three characters he had directly inspired (that is to say a reader of the book in question, or a viewer of the play, if they knew him, instantly recognized the source), along with another ten or eleven characters that drew upon aspects of his nature for comic or tragic effect. It was testament to the many facets of his personality that he could step onto the stage as a judge in one piece and as a procurer in another and have both portraits judged accurate.

He took no offense at being exploited in this fashion, however scandalous the work or scurrilous the part. It was flattering to be a seed for so many creations, especially for one as certain to remain childless as he. And it amused him mightily that when these artists, in their cups, confessed to their homage, they invariably spoke of how much raw human truth they had discovered in him. He suspected otherwise.

Know it or not (and in his experience artists knew very little) they were inspired by the very opposite of what they claimed. He was not raw. He was not true. And one day, if he was cautious and wise, he would not even be human. He was a fake through and through, a man who had traveled the trails of America in a dozen different guises, and would wear another dozen before his business was done.

He did not blame them for their credulity. Every art but one was a game of delusions. But oh, the road to that Art was hard, and he was glad to have his list of alter egos to divert him as he made his way along it.

He even had some of the fruitier dialogue ascribed to him in these works by heart, and it pleased him to recite it aloud when there was nobody within earshot.

As now, for instance, trudging up the forested flank of this damnable mountain. A speech from a pseudo-historical tragedy called Serenissima:

"I have nothing but you, my sweet Serenissima. You are my sense, my sanity and my soul. Go from me now, and I am lost in the great dark between the stars, and cannot even perish there, for I must live until you still my heart. Still it now! I beg thee, still it now, and let my suffering cease."

He stopped in mid-declaration. There was another sound competing for his audience of trees, this far less musical. He held his breath, to hear it better. It was coming from the summit of the mountain, or thereabouts: sufficient voices to sluggest a cast of some substantial size was assembled there. No need to wonder what kind of drama was underway. The keening told all. It was a tragedy.

With his own voice now hushed, he started to climb again, the sounds more horrid the louder they became. It was only in fiction that pain made the dying poetic. In life, they sobbed and begged and ran with tears and snot. He had seen such spectacles countless times and did not relish seeing another. But he had no choice. The child might very well be up there somewhere-a child named for a goddess who brought dreams-and back in the balmy spring, in Missouri, his instincts had told him there was some significance in that naming. He'd lodged a little piece of his own dreams with the O'Connelis as a consequence, which with hindsight had probably been an error. How much of an error the next hour or so would tell.

Meanwhile, there was the mystery of the voices to vex him. was this the dying cries of pioneers, lost on the heights? He didn't think so. There were sounds amid the cacophony he had never heard from a human throat; nor indeed from any animal that lived in this corner of reality, which fact had made him sweat, despite the cold. A sweat of anticipation, that perhaps the impulsive gift he'd made to Harmon O'Connell had not after all been so unwise, and that the Irishman's daughter had led him, all unknowing, to the borders of his own promised land.

There was a crack in the sky; that was Maeve's first thought. A crack in the sky, and on the other side of it another sky, brighter than the night in which she stood. She had seen the heavens produce many marvels: lightning, whirlwinds, hail, and rainbows-but nothing like the waves Of Color, vaster than the vastest thunderhead, that rolled across that sky beyond the crack. A breeze came out to find her. It was warm and carried on its back a deep, rhythmical boom,

"That's the sea!" she Said, starting towards the crack. It was not wide, nor was it stable. It wavered in the air, as jittery as the flame of a lamp in a high wind. She didn't care about the how and why of it; she'd seen too much tonight to begin asking questions now. All she wanted to do was cross this threshold, not because she feared the consequences of what she'd done earlier, but because there was a sky and a sea she'd never seen before waiting on the other side.

"There'll be no way back," Coker warned her.

"Why not?"

"It took a great Blessedness to make this door, and when it closes again it won't be easily opened." He glanced back down towards the battlefield, and moaned at what he saw. "Lord, look at that. You go if you want to. I can't live with this." He raised his hand in front of his face and a single razor claw appeared from his middle finger, gleaming.

"What are you doing?"

He put the claw to his throat. "No!" she yelled, and grabbed his hand.

"All this dying, just because I said something I shouldn't. It's stupid."

"You don't understand the reasons," he said bitterly, though he made no further attempt to harm himself "And you do?" Maeve replied.

"Not exactly. I know there's some great argument between the families that's so bad they've been slaughtering one another for generations. This wedding was supposed to be a seal of peace between them. And the child was the proof of that."

"What's the argument?" she said. He shrugged. "Nobody knows, outside the fwnilies. And after this@' he looked at the corpse-strewn slope,

"there'll be fewer who know than ever."

"Well it's still stupid," she said again, "killing each other over an argument when there's so many things worth living for." She still had hold of his hand. As she spoke he retracted the claw. "I lost my Papa tonight," she said solemnly. "I don't want to lose you too."

"I've known Blessedm'ns less persuasive than you," Coker remarked softly. His voice was tinged with awe. "What kind of child are you?"

"Irish," Maeve replied. "Are we going then?"

She looked back towards the crack. The ground at its base was shifting, the stones and trampled snow softened in the heat of whatever power had opened this door, drawn through the threshold then pouring back again. She started towards it fearlessly but as she did so Coker laid his hand on her shoulder. "Do you understand what you're doing?" he said.

"Yes," she said, a little impatiently. She wanted to walk on that ebbing dirt. She wanted to know how it felt. But Coker hadn't done with his warnings.

"Quiddity's a dream-sea," he said, "and the countries there are swinge."

"So's America," she said.

"Stranger than America. They're born from what's in here." He tapped her temple with his finger.

"People dream countries?"

"More than countries. they dream animals and birds and cities and books and moons and stars."

"they all dream the same books and birdst' she said.

"the shapes are different," Coker replied somewhat hesitantly, "But@e souls of things are the same."

She looked at him in befuddlement. "Whatever you say," she replied.

.No, it's important you understand," he insisted. He paused for a moment, frowning as he dug for enlightenment. Then it came. "My father used to say: Every bird is one biri4 and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident. But Maeve simply shook her head, more confounded than ever. "Does this mean you're sonWhody's dream?" she said.

"No," Coker told her. "I'm the child of a trespasser!"

Here at least was something she grasped.

"Quiddity wasn't meant to be a place of flesh and blood," he went on.

"But people get through?"

"A few. Tricksters, poets, magicians. Some of them die. Some of them go crazy. And some of them fall in love with the things they find, and children come, who are part human and part not" He spread his arms and his wings. "Like me."

"I do," she said with a sly little smile. "I like you a lot."

But he was deadly serious. "I want you to know what you're doing when you step through that crack."

"I don't mind being a trespasser."

"You'll be living in a place where your people can only come in dreams, and then only @ times. The night they're born. The night they fall in love. And the night they die."

She thought of her Papa then, who'd spoken of floating in a calm sea with her Mama beside him. Had that sea been Quiddity?

"I want to go," she said, more eager than ever.

"As long as you understand," he said.

"I do," she told him. "Now, can we go?"

He nodded, and she was away in a heartbeat, stepping lightly over the shifting ground.

If Buddenbaum had learned anything in his years of wandering, it was that things mundane and things miraculous were not, as had it, irrevocably divided. Quite the reverse. Though continent was everywhere being measured and possessed unmagical minds, its sacred places overrun, and their guardians driven to drink and despair, the land was too deeply seeded with the strange to ever be made safe for the pioneer.

The proof was spread before him on the mountain slope. Creatures from the far side of sleep, breathing the same air as the brave souls who'd come to conquer this land; dying with the same stars overhead.

Walking among the corpses, he felt the itch to hike back down the trail and fetch a few of the pioneers back, to show to them that they were not the only travelers here, and that no law nor God nor well-laid pavement would keep beasts like these from coming again. He might have done so too, but for the girl. She was here somewhere, his instinct told him, and alive. Whatever mischief had brought this massacre al>out, she had survived it. But where?

Up the slope he climbed, pausing now and again when a particular bizarrely caught his eye. He had been a student of the occult for too long to doubt the origin of these species. they came from the Metacosm, the world of Quiddity. He had never been able to find his way into that place himself, but he had collected over the last many decades several unique works on its geography and zoology, most of which he knew by heart. He had even sought out and interrogated men and women-most of them in Europe, and most magicians-who claimed to have found their way over the divide between this world, the Helter Incendo, and into that other. Some of them had proved to be living in a state of self-delusion, but there had been three who had convinced him beyond reasonable doubt that they had indeed ventured onto the shores of the dream-sea. One had even voyaged across it, and had lived among the islands of the Ephemeris a life of sybaritic excess, before his mistress had conspired to strip him of his powers and return him to the Cosm.

None of these travelers had profited from their journeys however; they had returned wounded and melancholy. The sweet simplicities of God and goodness no longer made sense to them, and human intercourse gave them no comfort. Life was meaningless, they had all then concluded, whether in this world or that.

Buddenbaum had listened carefully, learned what he could, then left them to their wretchedness. If ever he swam with spirits, he told himself, or walked upon a shore where drewns took living form, he would not whine about the absence of God. He would lead those spirits and shape those dreams, and gain in power and comprehension until time and place folded up before him.

He was perhaps closer to realizing that ambition than he'd thought. A door had opened to let these creatures through; and if it was still ajar, then he would take his chances and step through it, unprepared though he was.

He went down on his hands beside some pitifully wounded creature and whispered softly to her.

"Can you hear me?"

Her speckled eyes flickered in his direction. "Yes," she said.

"How did you get here?"

'TM ships---" she replied.

,After the ships. How did you get into the COSM?"

'@ Blessedm'n opened a way for us."

"And where is this waYT'

"Who are yout'

"Just tell me@'

,Are you with the childt' she said.

Something about the way she asked this question cautioned Buddenbaum.

"No," he said, "I'm not with the child. In fact@' he studied aw woman's face as he spoke, looking for clues, "in fact l,in here... to kill the child."

The woman grimaced through the pain. "Yes," she said. "Yes, yes, do that. Slaughter the little bitch and give her heart to the Blessedm'n-"

"I have to find the bitch flat," Buddenbaum said c@y.,the way. That's where she,ii be." The dying woman turned her head and stared UP the Slope- "DO you see the tentt'

"Yes."

"Beyond it, to the right, there are rocks, yes? Black rocks."

"I see them."

"On the other side."

"Thank you." Buddenbaum started to rise.

"The Blessedm'n,' the woman said, as he did so. "Tell him to say a prayer for me."

"I will," Buddenbaum replied. "What's your name?"

The woman opened her mouth to reply, but death was too quick for her. Unnamed, she died. Buddenbaum paused to close her eyes-the stare of the dead had always distressed him-then he headed on up the slope towards the rocks, and the way that lay concealed between.

As she stepped over the threshold, Maeve took one last look back at the world she had been born into. If Coker was right, she would not see it again. Another hour and it would be day. The weaker stars had already flickered out, and the bright ones were dimming. There was a faint light in the east, and by it she could see a man between the rocks, climbing with the gait of one who could barely keep from breaking into a dash. Though he was still some distance away, she recognized him by his coat and cane.

"Mr. Buddenbaum," she murmured.

"You know him?"

"Yes. Of course." She took a step back the way she'd come, but Coker caught hold of her arm.

"He's attracted some attention," he said.

It was true. Two of the survivors of the bloodshed were following-one a dozen paces behind Buddenbaum, the seeond twice that-and by the state of their robes and blades it was plain they'd claimed more than their share of lives. In his haste, Buddenbaum was unaware of them, though they were closing on him fast. Alarmed, Maeve pulled away from Coker and stepped back over the threshold. The unstable ground, excited by her agitation, splashed up against her shins.

Coker called out to her again, but she ignored him and started down between the rocks, shouting to Buddenbaum as she went. He saw her now, and a smile crossed his face.

"Child!" Coker was behind her, yelling. "Quickly! Quicidy!"

She glanced over her shoulder at the flame of the crack. It was wavering wildly, as though it might extinguish itself at any moment. Coker was standing as close to the crack as he could get without crossing over, beckoning to her. But she couldn't go; not without hearing from Buddenbaum some words of explanation. Her father had suffered and perished because of a dream this man Buddenbaum had sown in his heart. She wanted to know why. Wanted to know what the shining city of Everville had meant to Buddenbaum, that he had gone to such trouble to inspire its creation.

There was only half a dozen yards between them now.

"Maeve-" he began. "Behind you!" she yelled, and he glanced back to see the assassins racing up between the rocks. With but a moment before the first of them was upon him, he took the offensive and struck out with his cane, bringing it down on the man's blade and dashing it from his hand. The blow splintered his cane, but he didn't cast it away. As his attacker bent to snatch up the fallen sword, Buddenbaum drove the broken cane into his face. He reeled backwards, shrieking, and before the other assailant could push past his companion and catch his now weaponless quarry, Buddenbaum was off again towards the crack.

"Stand aside, child!" he yelled to Maeve, who was frozen now, unable to advance or retreat. "Aside!" he said as he came upon her. Coker let out an angered yell, and she looked up to see him stepping back through the crack, whether to aid her or to block Buddenbaum she didn't know.

For a moment, picturing the look of hunger on Buddenbaum's face as he'd shoved her aside, she feared for Coker's safety. Buddenbaum knew what the door opened onto, that was plain, and equally plainly he'd not be denied whatever wonders lay there. He struck Coker four or five times, the blows powerful enough to crack Coker's nose and open his brow. Coker roared in fury, and seized hold of Buddenbaum by the throat, pitching him back the way he'd come.

Maeve had started to get to her feet, but as she did so a tremor ran through the ground, and she raised her head in time to see the crack convulse from one end to the other. Shaken by the violence in its midst, the flame was flickering out. "Coker!" she yelled, fearful he'd be trapped in the closing door.

He looked her way, his face all sorrow, and then retreated a step or two until he was safe from the threshold. The sliver of Quiddity visible through the crack was narrower by the moment, but her thoughts weren't of the voyages she'd never take there. they were of Coker, whom she'd known only half a night, but who'd been in that little time her savior and her tutor and her friend. He shied through the closing door like a beaten dog, so forlorn she couldn't bear to look at him.

Eyes stinging, she averted her gaze and Buddenbaum rose into her sight, his face spattered with Coker's blood.

"Never!" he was yelling, "Never! Never!" and raising his fists he stumbled back towards the narrowing crack as if to beat it open again.

In his passion he had forgotten the second assassin. He had clambered over his sprawled companion, and now, as Buddenbaum stepped onto the contested ground between slope and shore, the assassin lunged and drove his weapon into the enemy's back.

The wounding stopped Buddenbaum in his tracks. He let out a sob, more of frustration than of pain it seemed, and reached behind him, grabbing at the weapon and hauling it out of his flesh. As he did so he swung round, moving with such speed that his wounder had no time to avoid his own blade. It opened his belly from flank to flank in a single slice and without a sound the man fell forward, his guts precedin; him to the ground.

Maeve didn't watch his final moments. Her gaze went back to the crack, unable to keep from looking Coker's way one final time, and to her astonishment she saw him stepping forward and reaching through the gap, jamming his arms in the door before it could seal itself. Then he pressed forward and began to elbow the crack open a little way, pushing first his head, then his thickly muscled neck, then a shoulder, through the fissure.

It caused him no little pain, but the sensation seemed only to fuel his frenzy. Thrashing as he went, he dragged his body through the opening, inch by agonizing inch, until his wings met the crack. Though they were folded behind him as tight to his body as they'd go, they were too bulky to be pulled through. He let out a pitiful cry, and turned his eyes in Maeve's direction.

She started towards him, but he waved her away. "Just... be... ready-" he gasped.

Then, drawing a single, tremendous breath, he pressed every sinew into service and began to push again.

There was a terrible tearing sound, and blood began to flow from his back, running down over his shoulders. Maeve shuddered in horror, but she could not look away. His eyes were locked with hers, as though she was his only anchor in his suffering. He rocked back and forth, the muscle that joined wings to torso torn wide open, his body shuddering as he visited this terrible violence upon it.

The horror seemed to go on an age-the thrashing, rocking, and tearing-but his tenacity was repaid. With one final twisting motion he separated his body from its means of flight, pressed his mutilated form through the crack and fell, his honey blood flowing copiously, on the other side.

Maeve knew now what he'd meant by just be ready. He needed her help to stem the flow from his wounds before he bled to death. She went to the body of Buddenbaum's attacker and tore at his robes. they were thick and copious, precisely to her purpose. Returning to Coker, who was lying face-down where he'd fallen, she pressed the fabric gently, but firmly, against his wounds, which ran from his shoulder blades to waist, telling him softly as she did so that this was the bravest thing she'd ever seen. She would make him well, she said, and watch over him for as long as he wished her to do so.

He sobbed against the snow-the crack closed above him-and in the midst of his tears he answered her.

"Always," he said.

Buddenbaum had been wounded before, though only once as badly as this. The stabbing would not kill him-his patrons had rendered his constitution inhumanly strong in return for his services-but it would take a little time to heal, and this mountain was no place to do it. He lingered in the vicinity of the two rocks long enough to see the door close, then he stumbled away from the slope, leaving the O'Connell child and her miserable consort to bleed and weep together at the top. Discovefing how innocent little Maeve had come to cause such mayhem he would leave for another day. Not all the witnesses to the night's events were dead; he'd seen a handful fleeing the field when he'd arrived. In due course, he'd trace them and quiz them till he better understood how his fate and that of Maeve O'Connell were connected.

One thing he knew for certain: connected they were.

The instinct that had made him prick his ears that April day, hearing the name of a goddess called in a place of dust and dirt and unwashed flesh, had been good. The miraculous and the mundane lived side by side in this newfound land, and, in the person of Maeve O'Connell, were indivisible.

Coker and Maeve lay in the shelter of the two rocks for several hours, resting bones, flesh, and spirits traumatized by all that the previous night had brought. Sometimes she would make little compresses of fabric soaked in melted snow, and systematically clean his wounds, while he lay with his head upon her lap, moaning softly. Sometimes they would simply doze together, sobbing sometimes in their sleep.

There was no snow that morning. The wind was strong, and brought convoys of puffy white clouds up from the south west, shredding them against the peaks. Between them, sun, too frail to warm them much but reassuring nevertheless.

The supplies of carrion lying on the slope had not gone unnoticed. An hour or two after sunrise the first birds began to circle and descend, looking for morsels on the battlefield.

Their numbers steadily increased, and Maeve, fearful that she or Coker would have an eye pecked out while they slept, insisted they move a few yards into the cleft between the rocks, where the birds would be less likely to come.

Then, sometime towards noon, she woke with her heart hammering to the sound of growls. She got up and peered over the rock. A pack of wolves had nosed the dead on the wind, and were now either tearing at the bodies, or fighting over the tenderest scraps.

Their presence was not the only grim news. The clouds were getting heavier, threatening further snow. "We have to go," she told Coker.

He looked up at her through a haze of pain. "Go where?" he said.

"Back down the mountain," she told him, "before we freeze or starve. We don't have that much daylight left."

"What's the noise?"

"Wolves."

"Many of them?"

"Maybe fifteen. they won't come after us while they've got so much food just lying there." She went down on her haunches beside him. "I know you're hurting and I wish I could make it better. But if we can get back to the wagon I know there's clean bandages and-"

:'Yes-" he muttered, "and what then?" 'I told you: We go on down the mountain."

"And what happens after that?" he said, his voice pitifully weak. "Even if we could find the rest of your people, they'd kill us soon as look at us. they think you're a child of the Devil, and I'm-1 don't know what I am any more."

"We don't need them," she said. "We'll find our own place to live. Somewhere we can build."

"Build?"

"Not right now, but when you're well. Maybe we'll have to live in a hole for a while, steal food, do whatever we have to do, but we're not going to die."

"You're very certain."

"Yes," she said quietly. "We're going to build a shining city. You and me."

He looked at her almost pityingly. "What are you talking about?" he said.

,,I'll tell you as we go," she said to him, pulling on his arm to raise him up.

She was right about the wolves: they had more than enough food to keep them occupied. Only one of the pack, a scarred, runty animal missing an ear, came sniffing after them. Maeve had armed herself with a short sword plucked from one of the corpses, and rushed at the animal with a blood-curdling shout. It fled, its tail between its legs, and did not venture near them again.

The first flakes of snow began to fall just as they reached the forest, but once beneath the canopy of branches it was no concern to them. Getting lost, however, was. Though the gradient of the ground plainly pointed the way down, the forest covered most of the lower slope, and without Coker's preternatural sense of direction, Maeve would have most assuredly lost her way between the trees, and never have emerged again.

they spoke very little as they went, but Coker-who despite his wounds showed amazing fortitude-did broach one subject: that of Buddenbaum. was he a Blessedm'n, Coker asked? "I don't know what a Blessedm'n is."

"One who works with the spirit@'

"Like a priest?"

"And does miracles."

"Priests don't do miracles."

"What do they do then?"

"they say prayers. they break bread. they tell people what to do and what not to do."

"But no miracles?"

"No miracles."

Coker thought about that for a time. "Then I mean something different," he said.

"Are Blessedm'n good or bad?"

"Neither. They're explorers, is what they are."

That sounded like Buddenbaum, she said.

"Well whatever he is," Coker went on, "he has more power in him than most. That wound should have killed him on the spot."

She pictured Buddenbaum as he spoke, pulling the blade out of his own back.

"It was extraordinary," Coker replied. Though she had not said a word she knew without question he was speaking of the same sight.

"How did you do that?" she said.

He looked at her guiltily. "I'm sorry," he said, "that was impolite. It's just that it was so clear."

"You saw what I saw?" He nodded. "What else have you seen?"

"Not much," he said.

"What?" she insisted.

"When you talked about building," he said. "I saw a city."

She named it for him. "That's Everville. My Papa was oing to build it-" She paused a moment, then said: "What id it look like?"

"It was shining," he replied simply.

"Good," she said.

It was dark by the time they reached the wagon, but the snow that had blanketed the heights was failing only fitfully below. While Coker made a bed for himself, Maeve rooted around for what crumbs and scraps of food remained, and they ate together. Then they slept again, while the wind buffeted the wagon; fitful sleep, filled with dreams, the strangest of which Maeve woke from with such a start Coker stirred beside her.

"What is it?" he asked her.

She sat up. "I was back in Liverpool," she said. "And there were wolves in the streets, walking upright in fancy clothes."

"You heard them howling in your sleep," Coker said. The wind was still carrying the howls down the mountainside. "That's all." He raised his hand to her face and stroked it gently.

"I wasn't afraid," she said. "I was happy." She rose and lit the lamp.

"I was walking in the streets," she went on, turning the blankets aside as she spoke, "and the wolves were bowing to me when I went by." She had uncovered the teak chest, and now threw open the lid.

"What are you looking for?"

She didn't answer, but delved through the papers in the chest until she found a piece of folded paper. She closed the chest and unfolded the paper on top of it. Though the light from the lamp was paltry, the object wrapped in the paper gleamed as it was uncovered.

"What is it?" Coker wanted to know.

"Papa never told me properly," she said. "But it was-" she faltered, and lifted the paper up towards the light so she could study it better. There were eight words upon it, in perfect copper-plate.

Bury this at the crossroads, where Everville begins.

"Now we know," she said.

The snow continued to fall the following day, but lightly. they made two small bundles of supplies, wrapped up as warmly as they could, and began the last portion of their journey. The tracks left by the rest of the wagons were still visible, and they followed them for half a mile or so, their route steadily taking them further from the mountain.

"We've followed them far enough," Maeve announced after a time.

"We've got no choice," Coker replied.

"Yes we do," she said, leading him to the side of the trail, where a tree-lined slope fell away steeply into a misty gorge. "they couldn't go that way 'cause of the wagons, but we can.

"I can hear rushing down there," Coker said. "A river!" Maeve said with a grin. "It's a river!"

Without further debate they started down. It wasn't easy. Though the snow turned to a light dusting and then disappeared entirely as they descended, the rocks were slick with vivid green moss, which also grew in abundance on the trees, whether dead or alive. Twice they came to places where the slope became too steep to be negotiated, and they were obliged to retrace their steps to find an easier way, but for all their exhaustion they didn't stop to rest. they had the sound-and now the glittering sight-of the river to tempt them on; and everywhere, signs of life: ferns and berry bushes and birdsong.

At last, as they reached level ground, and began to beat a trail to the river, a breeze came up out of nowhere, and the mist that had kept them from seeing any great distance was rolled away.

they said nothing to one another, but stood a few yards from the white waters and looked in astonishment at the scene beyond. The dark evergreens now gave way to trees in all their autumnal glory, orange and red and brown, their branches busy with birds, the thicket beneath quickened by creatures pelting away at the scent of these interlopers. There would be food aplenty here: fruit and honey and fish and fowl.

And beyond the trees, where the river took its glittering there was green land. A place to begin.

On the mountain that would come to be known as Harmon's Heights, the elements were beginning the slow process of erasing the dead and their artifacts. they stripped from the bodies what little flesh the wolves and carrion birds had left. they pounded the bones till they splintered, then pounded the splinters to dust. they shredded the tents and the fine robes; they rusted the blades and the buckles. they removed from the sight of any who might chance upon the battlefield in decades to come, all but the minutest signs of what had happened there.

But there was one sign the elements could not remove; a sign that would have certainly disappeared had there not been a last living soul upon the Mountainside to preserve it.

His names were numerous, for he was the son of a great family, but to all who had loved him-and there had been many-be was called by the name of a legendary ancestor: Noah.

He had come to the mountain with such hopes in his heart he had several times wished aloud for the words to express them better. Now he half-believed he'd called disaster down, wishing for words. After all, hadn't it been words spoken by a child that had undone the ceremony and brought the truce to such a bloody end?

He had fled the signs of that battle half-insane, fled into the forest where he had sat and sobbed for the wife he'd seen perish in front of him, her heart too tender to survive the trauma of having her spirit-child unknitted. He, on the other hand, was beyond such frailties, coming as he did from a line of incorruptibles. His mind was part of a greater scheme, and though nothing would have pleased him more than to cease thinking, cease living, he could not violate his family's laws against self-slaughter. Nor would his body perish for want of sustenance. He could fatten himself on moonlight if he so chose.

So at last, when he'd wept himself out, he returned to the sight of the tragedy. The beasts had already done their disfiguring work, for which he was grateful. He could not distinguish one corpse from another; they were all simply meat for this devouring world.

He climbed the slope and slipped between the rocks, up to the place where the door that had led on to the shores of Quiddity had burned. It was gone, of course; sealed up. Nor could he expect it to be opened again any time soon-if at all-given that most all of the people who had known about the ceremony were on this side of the divide, and dead. Blessedm'n Filigree, who had opened the crack in the first place, was a notable exception (was he a conspirator in this, perhaps?), but given that his opening of the door was a crime punishable by servitude and confinement, he was likely to have fled to the Ephemeris since the tragedy and found a place to lie low until the investigations were over. But as Noah stood on the spot where the threshold between Cosm and Metacosm had been laid, he saw something flickenng close to the ground. He went down on his haunches and peered at it more closely. The door, it seemed, had not entirely closed. A narrow gap, perhaps four or five inches long, remained in place. He touched it, and it wavered, as though it might at any moment flicker out. Then, moving very cautiously, he went down on his belly and put his eye close to the gap.

He could see the beach, and the sea, but there were no ships. Apparently their captains had sensed disaster and sailed away to some harbor where they could count their profits and swear their crews to silence.

All was lost.

He got to his feet, and stared up at the snow-laden sky. What now? Should he leave the mountain, and make his way in the world of Sapas Humana? What purpose was there in that? It was a place of fictions and delusions. Better to stay here, where at least he could smell the air of Quiddity, and watch the light shifting on the shore. He would find some way to protect the flame, so that it wasn't extinguished. And then he would wait, and pray that somebody ventured along the beach one day, and saw the crack, and came to it. He'd tell them the whole sorry story; persuade them to find a Blessedm'n who'd come and open the way afresh. Then he'd return to his world. That was the theory, at least. There was a tiny chance that it could ever be more than that, he The shore had been chosen for its remoteness; he could expect many bewhcombers there. But patience was easy if it was all you had; and it was. He would wait, and while he waited, name the smm in this new heaven after the dead, so he would have someone to confide in as time went bN/

As things went, there was more to see below than above, for after a little while people began visiting the vallev that lay in the shadow of the peak. Noah knew their lives were trivial things, but he studied them nevertheless, his gaze so sharp he could pick out the color of a woman's eyes from his lookout on the mountain. There were many women in the valley in those early days, all of them robust and well-made, a few even beautiful. And seeing that this stretch of earth was as good a place a.,; any other to settle, their admirers built houses, and courted, and mwficd and raised families. And in time there grew and prospered in the valley a proud little city called Everville.