Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [13]
“Thanks.” He stood.
They were no longer looking at him. On the screen, an albino girlchild was standing alone in the middle of a raging argument. She was an island of serene calm, her eyes vacant and autistic. “That’s Eden, she’s the boy’s sister. Hasn’t spoken since it happened,” Lank remarked.
“What happened?”
“She saw a unicorn,” the giant said.
* * *
From the air the village had looked like a very simple antique printed circuit, of the sort Galileo might have used to build his first radio telescope, if he wasn’t confusing two different eras, a comb of crooked lines leading inward from the water, too small for there to be any need of cross-streets. The houses were small and shabby, but warm light spilled from the windows, and voices murmured within. An occasional dog stridently warned him away from boat or yard. Other than an innkeeper who nodded lazily from the door of the watermen’s hotel, he met no one by the riverfront. He turned onto the marsh road, the river cold and silver at his back. He went past a walled-in ground where skeletons hung from the trees, the bones bleached and painted and wired together so that they clacked gently in an almost unnoticeable breeze.
Beyond the boneyard the ground rose gently. He passed several large dark houses, still unscavenged, newly abandoned by their wealthy owners. Probably gone to the Piedmont to participate in the economic boom. Last on the road, just before the land wearily eased itself down into marsh, was his destination.
The house was blistered and barnacled, and it was meager light indeed that escaped the thickly curtained windows into the wider world. But under its mottling of chrysalids the wood planking was gracefully carved and fitted. He stood before the massive entranceway and touched the doorplate. Within, a voice gonged, “Callers, mistresses.” Then, to him, the door said, “Please wait.”
A moment later the door opened on a pale, thin face. On seeing him, it opened in startlement, revealing an instant’s fear before tightening again into wariness. The woman lifted her chin defiantly, so that her eyes seemed simultaneously to flinch away from him. “I thought you were the appraiser.”
The bureaucrat smiled. “Mother Gregorian?”
“Oh, her.” She turned away. “I suppose you’d best come inside.” He followed her down the gullet of a hallway flocked with a floral print gone dead brown into the crowded belly of a sitting room. She seated him in a dark lionfooted chair. It was a massy thing, shag-maned atop and fringed beneath, with padded armrests. He’d hate to have to move it.
A woman hurried into the room. “Is that the appraiser? Have him look at the crystal, I—” She stopped.
Tock. A metronome wedged between dusty specimen bells reached the end of its swing and began the long, slow return, ponderously counting out the slow seconds of mortality. Trophy beasts peered down at him from the tin ceiling with eyes of green and gray and orange glass. Now that he noticed, the room was full of faces. Heavy-lidded, openmouthed and disapproving, they were carved into the legs, sides, and bases of the escritoires, tables, sideboards, and china cabinets that jostled one another, competing for space. Even the blond mahogany pieces had been extravagantly carved. He wondered where the shavings were now; they would not have been discarded. It was an enormously valuable room, and would have been twice as comfortable with half as much furniture. Tock. The metronome reasserted itself, and still the women studied him, as if they would never speak again.
“Honestly, Ambrym, must I wait forever for you to introduce your friend?”
“He’s not mine, he’s Mother’s.”
“All the more reason to show a little common courtesy.” She thrust forward a hand, and he stood so they could shake. “I’m Linogre Gregorian,” she said. “Esme! Where are you?”
A third woman, dressed in mousy brown, appeared, drying her hands with a cloth towel. “If that’s the appraiser, be sure he knows that