Palimpsest

YOUNG-EYED CHERUBINS

TWO

THE UNHAPPY ROOK

Sei is so young, and November kisses her like she will never get a chance again. The torii gates stretch up into the night like one gate echoed over and over, a stutter of gates, and the fox statues grin down from their pedestals. When Sei begins to run ahead into the shadows, November can see them, she is sure she can see them, she would swear it, the foxes, one by one, turn their stone heads and bow to them, their little ears flattened against their granite skulls.

She takes Ludovico's hand and begins to run, too, up and up and up, and the spiders all around, if she could but hear them, call her name like a rosary, and—

And Casimira sweeps her up with a laugh like a war trumpet, and sets her down again in a vast red room full of brown notebooks and printing presses and bees crawling the walls. November opens the books, one of them, two, but they are blank.

“Didn't you notice the street names, my darling girl?” Casimira beams. “Enough nouns make a verb, and we have made a verb, and it is us.”

The house tugs at Novembers hand and presses it to his little lips. Hesitantly, with held breath, he extends his pink tongue and licks it gently.

November looks for Ludovico, but he is not there. Her bees fly from her fingertips, into the city, seeking him in her name. She smiles in the arms of Casimira, arms tight and strong and undeniable, arms like victory. They will find him.

In years to come the bees of Palimpsest will be utterly changed, and to be stung by one will be to be honored beyond dreams of grace. On their wings will be printed in infinitesimally delicate script an encyclopedia of Palimpsest, written in a high room in a house that practices its smiles, a high room the house kept hidden for all of them, a lair but not a cave. In the encyclopedia are endless lists of the city's wonders, and in those lists are stories upon stories, and to be stung is to know all of them, and weep for the knowing of.

THREE

THE THREE OF TENEMENTS

The dark descends so fast it steals Oleg's breath, and when they begin to run ahead he is afraid to be left behind, he cannot be left behind, and through the wafting incense of the shrine below he wills his skinny, weakened legs to carry him, to carry him toward them, after them, into the shadows, into the blue, into the mouths of all those foxes, who seem to have his own face, smiling back at him, and seem to be saying:

She is waiting for you. She is waiting, Olezhka. His chest burns as though his heart has been pierced by a spear of flame, and—

And Lyudmila is sitting naked on a broad, dry bed piled with quilts of blue and silver stars. His sister, her arms open, her eyes shining. She speaks to him in Russian and he understands her, falls into her, kisses her laughing, and she laughs with him. When he is inside her he will see snow falling through torchlight on the edge of the Volkhov, which never took any child's breath, which never was anything but a band of silver light in the dark.

In days to come the locks of Palimpsest will fall in love. They will refuse the keys made for them and insist that their owners follow the Albumen until they find an enormous river barge with a canopy of bronze silk, where a thin young man and his wife with hair the color of bread beat keys from the most extraordinary substances, from baleen and dried river mud, sodalite and beryl and bird bones, king s crowns and prison bars, hazel branches and willow wands and corset stays and gold and silver and glass. No lock will settle for less than its most and dearest beloved.

FOUR

THE ARCHIPELAGO

Don't leave me, Ludovico thinks when November starts to run after Sei. But of course, of course she would not. She is his Isidore, and she will lead him into the world. She grabs his hands and they run like children, as though there is a wonderful game ahead and the whole day to come for its playing. November laughs and he thinks the sound of it might shatter him, so high and so sweet, inviolable. In just another moment she will be able to speak to him, in just another moment she will turn to him and he will understand every syllable in the etymology of her, and—

And he wakes on a wooden dais, a huge circle of oak raised slightly above the street. He stares around him, the empty air of an early morning, before anyone is awake, except bakers and postmen. An old woman stands in her doorway, her right leg a huge, twisted bear-limb, holding a tray of steaming, frosted cake. Tears fill up her eyes and roll down her fat cheeks. She drops the cake. Her mouth hangs open.

Klavdia goes inside and snatches another from the window. She comes running to him, finally, finally, after all this time. Casimira promised her, and here he is.

He swallows her cake, drinks her tea.

The war is over.

As Ludovico eats and the old woman fusses over him, her fur bristling against his leg, Ludo turns his eyes north, down the long avenues, to a house with high green spires. It is fitting, he supposes, that I arrived here, in the old place. Out of all of them, I am the traditionalist.

A bee alights softly on his knee. The old bear-woman grins at him. She gives him a little curtsey. A second bee drifts in, and a third.

November, he thinks. He lets the bees coax him onto the street as the first traffic of the morning comes screeching, careening in, and walks up the lane, toward his beloved, his ibex, who leapt from such a far height, and landed on her horns.

THE SUBURBS OF PALIMPSEST SPREAD OUT from the edges of the city proper like ladies’ fans. First the houses, uniformly red, in even lines like veins, branching off into lanes and courts and cul-de-sacs. There are parks full of grass that smells like oranges and little creeks filled with floating roses, blue and black. Children scratch pictures of antelope-footed girls and sparrow-winged boys on the pavement, hop from one to the other. Their laughter spills from their mouths and turns to autumnal leaves, drifting lazily onto wide lawns. The sun glowers red in the east, leaving scarlet shadows on all their cheeks.

There are parks, of course, between the houses. Suburbs create children out of ether, and they require the space. Carousels of bone and fur mirror the exact musculature of horses and giraffes and three-toed sloths, so that the children will naturally be inclined to ride such creatures when they are grown and such a thing becomes a necessity. There, just there-a little girl with violet ribbons like reins in her hair is telling her brother that mother will be away tonight, and they may sneak into the city to dance with women with the heads of white foxes. Wicked child!

Eventually the houses fade into fields: amaranth, spinach, blueberries. Shaggy cows graze; bell-hung goats bleat. Palimpsest is ever hungry. In the morning, milk will splash white as a river into a hundred pails and more, butter will come creamy and yellow, and bread will rise as thick as a heart. There are orchards, peaches and plums, cherries and apples like garnets. There are ponds full of fish, their eyes black and depthless. The farms go on further than the houses, out and out and out.

But these too fade as they extend like arms outstretched, fade into the empty land not yet col