Wizard of the Pigeons Page 26

  Pigeons are not nocturnal. At night they are plump puffs of feathers perched in high sheltered places, sleeping more soundly than fat cats on sunny window ledges. They do not see well at night. They seem weaponless, lacking the taloned feet and hooked beaks of the raptors. But a homer pigeon can accurately crack the knuckles of an intruding hand venturing into her nest with a sharp stroke of her wing. The pointed pink or black beak that pricks out bits of popcorn from cracks in cobblestones occasionally jabs even the soft palm of one who offers largesse.

  And the battering wings and jabbing beaks of a thousand hungry pigeons in competition for food are not to be ignored. By anything.

  They had heard, had received the call of Wizard summoning them to be fed. So they came, hungry always, blundering through the darkness. They dove to his feast, squabbling and crowding one another as they fought for the writhing threads and juicy gobs of grayness. Plucking and gulping, they dismantled it. Mir roared its agony through Wizard’s bones. Its pain exploded inside him in the place where it had sheltered, burning like phosphorous in his guts. The night turned black and red before his eyes. To his ears came only the cooing and fluttering of pigeons, pecking one another in their eagerness as they snatched up wet, gray chunks. The agonized roar inside him became a shriek that rose up in pitch, passing through the scales of his hearing until it reached a shrillness that his ears could no longer perceive. Wizard sat rocking in the darkness, his hands over his tortured eardrums, wondering if it had stopped, or if it would scream on endlessly inside him, too high to be consciously perceived.

  The wondering was his own. When he recognized that, he opened his clenched eyes to the grayness of city night. A simple grayness, unthreatening. Just the gray light of streetlamps, blessedly empty of any cognizance. He wished he could sit and bask in it and rest. Not yet. It was not quite finished. He heaved himself up, wiping blood from his face onto the sleeve of his robe. Cassie he saw leaning against the wall of the alley, beside the Great Winds dumpster. She looked drained, but he sensed that she strained still to hold Mir at bay.

  He reached her side and touched her arm gently. “No need,” he whispered hoarsely. “That part is done.”

  Her legs gave way beneath her and she sank to the cold pavement. He crouched beside her on nerveless legs that trembled with weariness. Together they watched the pigeons clean it up. It seemed to take forever, but Wizard did not mind.

  Cassie was leaning against him, warming him, and her soft hair beneath his chin smelled of the garden. They sat silently, watching the busy beaks of the pigeons. He knew they both thought of that summer day when he had left the cavalcade to find her. Threads of gold and silver, woven together so seldom, and always so briefly. He pulled her closer, thinking of the befores they shared.

  When at last the pigeons were sated, no bones or teeth remained at the core of the thing. The plump birds sat about on the paving stones, blinking sleepy round eyes, full to capacity at last. In the center of the alley, untouched by beaks, rested a small gray document box.

  “This part’s for me,” Wizard sighed. He dragged himself to his feet, reluctantly pushing Cassie back when she would have joined him. He stepped softly up to the box and stood over it. When he nudged it with his toe, he heard a ghastly scuttling inside it. “Still,” he marveled. He lifted his foot and brought it down sharply, concentrating on smashing the paving stones that lay beneath the box. The shock of the blow jolted up through his spine. He felt the lock and lid give way, to crush down upon whatever was in there. The heel of his sock grew warm and heavy with his own blood.

  But when he nudged the box again, all was silent within.

  “What was in there?” Cassie wondered.

  “You don’t want to know,” he assured her.

  He picked it up with dirty newspapers from the dumpster and dropped it into a smoke-blackened footlocker lying underneath the fire escape. He touched the lid and it fell, to shut with a thud over the thing. He knelt before it to fasten the catches shut.

  “Give me a hand?” he asked Cassie.

  There were handles on either end of the fire-blackened footlocker. The load within was heavier than it had any right to be. The shape of the footlocker was awkward and their disparate heights made it no easier. They walked side by side down the night sidewalks, each gripping a handle and dodging parking meters. Cassie did not need to be told they were heading for the public dock.

  They spoke very little at all. Once Cassie said, “They were all sleeping in high places, or I could have reached them sooner. They would have come right away, if you had thought of calling them yourself. I used your voice, but they were still wary of believing me.”

  And once he observed, “This has been the longest night of my life,” to which she replied, “The dawn is wise enough to wait some struggles out.”

  The sea splashed and heaved beneath the public docks.

  Wizard stared down at the lacy tops of the waves. “Is it deep enough here?” Cassie worried.

  “I don’t think it will stop at the bottom,” he assured, her.

  Together they swung it, once, twice, three times and away.

  There was no splash, no rising of bubbles. It was gone. The sea wind made streamers of their doming.

  Beside him, Cassie fussed with the silver tassels of the cloak.

  They came undone in her fingers and she slipped from its shelter. Bruises were shadows on her white skin, revealed by her own torn clothes. Wizard winced. She draped the cloak over his arm, but when he tried to put it again about her shoulders, she stepped away from him. “I’ve borrowed your strength long enough. Take it again, and give back to me what is mine.”

  Puzzled, be slung the cloak around his shoulders. The warmth of her body clung to it still, and be had to smile sadly as he met her eyes. Then he felt the slow peeling away of something, like a tight garment being drawn off his body. For an instant he felt naked and chilled, and then his own power rose to protect him again.

  “I’ve been using your magic tonight,” he said, finally grasping it. She nodded, looking down at the rough wood of the dock.

  “I put it upon you when I held you, knowing it was forbidden, but too fond of you to let you go unsheltered. If I had known the strength of the grayness, I would not have had the courage to do so. But I did not. I thought I was wise. I set my own trap for it, never guessing how easily it could overpower me once I had lent my strength to you. I did not guess the hold it had on you.” She paused suddenly, shaking her head violently. “You had hidden your torment too well. You were right, you know. It was within you as well as without, just as real in both places. And when I saw it upon you, saw you transformed in it…I thought I would go mad with horror. I fled. Even now, when I think of now easily it hunted me down using you… But it is done. You are free now.”

  She was giving him the pieces faster than he could fit them together. “It was your power I used, then, when I faced it down?”

  She shook her head, not looking at him. “You used mine upon the knife; did not you guess that ferocity was woman’s magic? The soaring rush you felt afterward; that was seduction of the grayness. I saw you swept away from me. But when you cloaked me in your protection and sent me away, I took my magic with me as well. I needed it, to find and rouse your pigeons, and call them to you. Then, when I returned… I know you felt me join you.”

  The spice scent. He nodded slowly, beginning to understand as Cassie fitted the pieces together for him. But Cassie never explained anything. Something was terribly wrong. He reached and turned her face up to his. Moonlight and streetlights touched her tears.

  “Why are you crying?” Her tears hurt him as nothing else had.

  “Because I am hurt!” She cried out. She pulled gently free of him, wrapping herself tightly in her arms. She stood so alone. “Why do you think the rules are given us, if not to keep us from hurting ourselves? But the decision was mine. I took it upon myself, to give you what you would not ask for. My magic. To call for you the allies you had p
repared so well for this battle. I unbalanced my magic. But I could have done nothing else. Could I have watched you destroyed? Knowing that for all the times and tomorrows that might ever come, never again would our paths cross? Shall I be sorry for what I did? But it hurts. Yes. All the old scars have come unhealed. I had forgotten it could hurt this bad. All the old pains are new again.”

  He nodded stiffly, knowing what she meant. The pains that came out of the past and haunted, hurting past toleration. A pain that made you explode at a touch. He could not reach after her as she walked to the edge of the dock. The full moon was over the sea, sending a wrinkling silver path across the waves to diem. Cassie gave him one anguished look and then stepped down onto that path. He hurried to the edge of the dock and stood looking after her. She walked steadily away, her small feet leaving no impression on the ocean’s salty face.

  Her silhouette grew small against the moon.

  “I’ll see you later!” he cried after her.

  She never answered.

  “SEEN CASSIE?” asked Rasputin.

  Wizard shook his head slowly. It had become a ritual greeting among them. Always one asked, and one denied silently.

  Nothing more than this was ever said about her. Wizard had all the memories now, and he clung to them. He had given up trying not to hope.

  “So what you want me for, I-Don’t-Know Wizard?”

  It was June again, and Rasputin shone in the pleasant weather. Enamelled red hoops glittered in his earlobes, and his bare chest was decked in successions of bright red seed necklaces. They rattled when he danced, and even when he was still, they clicked softly against one another, maintaining the secret rhythm of his endless dance. A light wind rustled the leaves of the trees in Occidental Square.

  “See her?” Wizard nodded at a bench across the way from them. He flung another handful of popcorn from the withered bag on the seat beside him. Pigeons fluttered and scrabbled around their feet. Rasputin nudged them away from his bare toes and scowled.

  “See who?”

  “On the left end of the bench. Move your eyes just a little, to catch her at an angle. See her now?”

  “I don’t see nothing but an empty bench. You getting snaky on us. Wizard?”

  Wizard made an impatient motion of his head and caught up one of his pigeons. He whispered to it for an instant and then flung it aloft. It fluttered frantically, made altitude, then wheeled and came sliding down to light on the empty bench.

  “A chameleon!” Rasputin gasped.

  Her startlement had betrayed her. When she moved, she was visible. But as soon as she was still again, she began to blend back into her surroundings. Subtle ripplings of color crossed her. In a moment, she was invisible again.

  “I’ll be damned!” Rasputin whistled low. “Looks like maybe you found one. You talked to her yet?”

  Wizard shook his head. “I’ve been watching her for about a week. She’s completely unaware of what she is doing. I thought I’d get your opinion before I approached her.”

  Rasputin shrugged. “Ain’t my department. You go talk to her, take her around a little. Run her past Euripides and see if she Knows him. The usual stuff. If she pans out, bring her by me. I’ll give her the rules.”

  Two wizards leaned back on their park bench. The blue robes of one fluttered against his bare feet. The other’s fingers twitched in his endless dance. No one gave them a second glance. It was a fine June day in the Emerald City.

  The End