The police had been bribed to evacuate the area south of Chambers Street. Pearly assured them that he was after only one man, and that no property would be damaged. He marshaled his armies of deformed waddlers and bristling mad dogs, like a real general—riding here and there, jumping his dappled gray over lines of his own men, and testing the deployments. He spoke to the Brooklyn side by telephone. It was ready. “Is Manhattan ready?” they asked. Pearly answered in the affirmative. Sixteen hundred soldiers in Manhattan were fully armed and properly positioned. Though the cloud wall was unsettled, and had moved up the bay, it often did so in late September as the seasons changed, and Pearly was willing to bet that when the sun came up and stabilized the day, the cloud wall would recede. The sun did come up, and illuminated a massive army of squat criminal beings, who could not resist talking loudly to each other, because they hoped for blood. They had real weapons, and they liked to use them.
Pearly waited for Peter Lake to emerge from the cellar where the innkeeper had sworn that he was hiding. Sparks flew from him as if from a big gray cat in a dry winter storm. He could hardly stay still, his head nodded up and down as if it were keeping time, and his razor eyes fixed on the open ramp of the basement stable.
PETER LAKE awoke with a start. “Christ!” he said, and fell back against the straw. It was already half-light, and when he was either very happy or very unhappy he could never fall asleep again after awakening. He sat up, and saw Athansor, who looked as if he wanted to race. Peter Lake had seen other horses with the same urgent need to run, but it had always been at Belmont just before post time, when a syringe full of atropine was working its dangerous wonders. Athansor looked as if he could outrun ten of that kind of horse, one after another.
Peter Lake himself felt astoundingly strong and energetic. He was wide-awake, and he wanted only to ride Athansor. “I’ll take him up to the country,” he said out loud. “We’ll run like hell across the whole goddamned state.” He got to his feet and walked toward what he hoped would be the bucket of hot water that he had asked for, delivered early. It was only the water from the previous evening. When he looked down at it to see if it was steaming, he saw that his palms and fingers were badly cut, as if he had held on to a chain of sharp diamonds that was pulled through his hands.
He hadn’t time to reflect, and guessed that he would do well to hurry, for Athansor’s energy was now so intense that the walls of the stable vibrated like a station shed into which six locomotives had come in train.
Then Peter Lake heard the sound of the sixteen hundred men, now in their places, ready, and no longer required to mute their unusual voices. “What the hell is that?” Peter Lake asked himself, and then dashed up the ramp to face a phalanx of about eight hundred of them arranged in a crescent across an empty square, not more than fifty yards away. Pearly was mounted on his gray, smiling as confidently as a knife-thrower. Peter Lake smiled in recognition. “You’ve done well, Pearly,” he shouted across the gap. “But it’s not over yet.”
“No, Peter Lake,” Pearly shouted back. “It’s not over yet.”
“What do you think you’ll accomplish,” Peter Lake asked after seeing Pearly’s army, “with these idiots and buffoons?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but went back inside and leapt upon Athansor, who shot away with tremendous force. Peter Lake intended simply to jump the ranks and be off. How could Pearly have been so stupid? Athansor emerged from the stable like an express train. The chubby little trolls had to catch their breath.
But he quickly wheeled to a stop. Peter Lake felt his blood beating. There would be no jumping, for this strange and pathetic army had raised a forest of sharp pikes thirty and forty feet long. They were too close for Athansor to clear their blades: he could not simply rise straight up in the air.
With the way blocked except for a small opening on the left, Peter Lake spurred Athansor and made for the breach. Closing behind him, Pearly’s army came alive with a shout. It had been carefully planned. As soon as Peter Lake was clear, a hundred little men appeared in the opening of a side street and blocked the way with pikes. Nets had been hung from booms and spars mounted on buildings, and a dozen vicious dogs were unleashed to harry Athansor. He trampled them easily, or sailed over them, but they slowed him down. Not a single shot had been fired. Pearly’s soldiers were too busy funneling Peter Lake onto the bridge ramp. Peter Lake could see what they were trying to do, but he had no escape. The closer he got to the bridge, the more nets there were, the more pikes, the louder the cries of his pursuers.
Finally, with nowhere else to go, and a hundred sharp pike heads jabbing at him, Athansor sidled reluctantly onto the ramp. His mouth frothed. He showed his teeth. He looked for an opportunity either to fight or to soar over his enemies, and found none. They had hung heavy nets along the suspension cables all the way out to the towers. He had no choice but to try for Brooklyn.
As Peter Lake expected, the Brooklyn side, too, was all netted up, its cables choked with heavy hawsers and trawler nets. The walkway was filled with pikemen marching toward him. Athansor could have cleared the pikes, but the cathedral-like arches were blocked with weighted nets that reached down to within a few feet of the pike-heads.
Peter Lake galloped east and west, trying to find a way out. He knew that many horses in many battles had been wheeled around and spurred in just the way he was directing Athansor, made to imitate pacing tigers, while their riders were breathless with fear. They had nowhere to go, so they went back and forth. The city shone in a bed of autumn blue to the north and west. Brooklyn was still asleep. The river had black wind lines penned across its face. And to the south was the open harbor, across which stretched the cloud wall, furious and close, buckling in the middle of the bay, sucking at the water and creating a line of breakers that rolled from its base.
High above the river, hundreds of feet above the water, all they could do was rush to and fro as the enemy closed. The only way out that Peter Lake could see was in the conjunction of the two forces. During the fighting, he might be able to get to the rear and escape. He had no weapons. Athansor breathed hard.
Both lines stopped. Pearly was too smart to create the confusion for which Peter Lake hoped. They halted in place, fixed their pikes close to the nets, and stood their ground. Only then did groups of fighters pass through the two main bodies. There were about a hundred. They had shorter pikes, swords, and pistols. Pearly knew that a mob could not be a tight enough seal, so he set them still and had the best men step forward to kill Peter Lake and his horse.
“We have no choice,” Peter Lake said to Athansor. “This time, we fight.”
The first group closed. They were timid, as well they should have been. Athansor reared and pushed the pikes aside. He charged into the soldiers and knocked them over. He bit and trampled them. But he was in a forest of pikes, and they cut him on the flanks and chest. When a second group saw his blood, they joined the fight and fired their pistols. A swordsman lunged for Peter Lake and slashed him across the back. Peter Lake felt no pain. He took the sword. Now he had a weapon, and he flailed angrily and hard.
Athansor reared and placed his hooves deep into the chests of the attackers. The sound was of underbrush breaking. As sword struck sword it became clear to Peter Lake that he was going to die. They fired into Athansor’s face, and their bullets smashed into his bones and tattered his ears like flags above a fortress. Lead pierced his muscles, and lodged in his gut. Peter Lake, too, was cut and bleeding everywhere. He felt cold. Then Pearly commanded his fighters to fall back. Peter Lake was left with the dead scattered all around him. He and Athansor were shaking from their wounds. They moved about meaninglessly. Then Peter Lake saw that Pearly had a second and yet a third wave ready to do battle. This could not be borne.
He looked at the river below. It was very far, too far. But it was a lovely blue, and a much better way to die, if he had to, than upon the bloodstained boards of the Great Bridge. There was nothing to lose. They would jump.
The wi
nd whistled through nets and cable. Peter Lake gave one last glance to the city, and turned south to the marshes. As the second wave started to close, Athansor began the tiger pacing, but this time it was north-south, across the narrow walkway of the bridge. They thought he was crazed. Trying for the kill, they fired their pistols. But he ignored them. When he was ready, he leaned back on his haunches. Pearly’s men stopped, for they had never seen such a sight. Athansor arched on visible waves of power. He compressed himself into something almost round. Then, with a roar, he unfolded in a long white silken movement, and flew into the air, parting a thick steel cable that had been in his way, and clearing the nets with ease.
Momentarily suspended over the bay, Peter Lake expected to fall, and would have been satisfied with what he expected. But there was no fall. Athansor rose, and sped outward, stretching his wounded forelegs before him as the air whistled past. The horse and rider were headed for the white wall. Peter Lake looked back and saw that the city was small and silent, and seemed no larger than a beetle. As they broke into the cloud wall the world became a storm of rushing white mist that screamed and shrieked like a choir of shrill and tormented voices.
They flew for hours; it got harder and harder to breathe and more and more difficult for Peter Lake to hold on. As Athansor’s speed increased, the clouds rushing by whited out in a blur. Peter Lake thought of the city. A shelter from the absolute and the lordly, it now seemed like such a loving place, even though it had been so hard. Bright images came before his eyes now that he was snow-blind, and he ached for the color, the softness, and the sheen of the city that was an island in time.
Finally Athansor tore through the roof of the clouds. They found themselves in a black and airless ether. What Peter Lake saw was what Beverly had described, and he was awed beyond his capacity for awe. He couldn’t breathe, and he knew that if he stayed on the horse he would die. So he touched Athansor gently, and threw himself off to fall back upon the field of clouds. That was the last he saw of the high clear world, for his fall became clouded and tumbling and timeless. There were lakes in the clouds that simply gave upon the sea, and there were deeper, longer columns that curved through whitened air. He fell, and he fell, and he had no will. His arms and legs flailed. His neck was like the soft neck of a baby.
Peter Lake tumbled through the world of white. And then, entirely forgotten, he vanished deep into its infinite fury.
II
FOUR GATES TO THE CITY
Four Gates to the City
EVERY CITY has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues—wild and free—that stopped at the city walls.
In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery.
To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever.
Lake of the Coheeries
THE UPPER Hudson was as different from New York and its expansive baylands as China was different from Italy, and it would have taken a Marco Polo to introduce one to the other. If the Hudson were likened to a serpent, then the city was the head, in which were found the senses, expressions, brain, and fangs. The upper river was milder, stronger, the muscular neck and smoothly elongated body. There was no rattle to this snake. Albany sometimes tried to rattle, but failed to emit an audible sound.
First of all, the Hudson landscape was a landscape of love. To reach it by sea, one had to have a series of glorious weddings, crossing the sparkling bands that were the high bridges. Then one sailed into tranquil, capacious, womanly bays, the banks of which were spread as wide and trusting as any pair of long legs that ever were. Then began an infinity of pleasant convolutions. There were whole valleys on tributaries, each with many thousand well-tended gardens. Towns along the banks were entirely subsumed in their devotion to one great view, or in the memory of one portion of one century in which they enjoyed a seemingly endless spell of clear weather. There were old opera houses, great estates, hidden root cellars and spring enclosures, gray churches built by the Dutch, wharves that stretched a mile into the river and were hung on some days with dozens of sturgeon each of four hundred pounds or more and bursting with roe. The skating was unparalleled, except perhaps in Holland, for the early Dutch had built several hundred miles of canals through wilderness, swamp, field, and village, upon which a skater could glide all alone under the moonlight for a long winter’s night, and hardly know that he had been out ten minutes. Often boys or girls would come home in the blare of early morning, after a night of racing the moon, having fallen deeply in love.
On the Hudson, infatuation was a great and complicated phenomenon. It was sometimes ridiculous and endearing: that is, to see adolescents caught painfully in the pleasant traps into which they eagerly jump. They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves. “I love you,” they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate. The valley seemed to have run on love. But, luckily, commerce and farming were richly endowed, and the seasons were intense and fruitful (ice and maple sugar in the winter; shellfish and flowers in the spring; vegetables, grain, and berries in summer; everything at fall harvest; and lumber, minerals, whale products, beef, mutton, wool, and manufactures all year-round), for if they were not, there would have been chaos.
On the Hudson, there was always the opportunity to be educated deeply in the heart. The beauty of the landscape did the rest, along with the magic of the moon, the river’s hot and reedy bays, the glittering silver ice, days of summer or days of snow submerged in an ocean of clear blue air, fields never-ending, the wind from Canada, and the great city to the south.
THE WATER of the Lake of the Coheeries was as lush and blue as the water of a round and opalescent glacial pool. Its plentiful fish were full of silvery fight (rising above the lake like flashing swords), and they fled from place to place in a spectral bath of intense and unvarying fidelity. It could be angry and brutal in storms, and drinking from it was an awakening and a blessing. And sometime not too deep in winter, each year, the Lake of the Coheeries would surprise everyone by freezing over during the night. In the second week of December at the latest, the inhabitants of Lake of the Coheeries Town sat by their fires after dinner and stared into the darkness around their rafters as Canadian winds rode in hordes and attacked their settlement from the north. These winds had been born and raised in the arctic, and had learned their manners on the way down, in Montreal—or so it was said, since the people of Lake of the Coheeries hadn’t much respect for the manners or mores of Montreal. The winds ripped off tiles, broke branches, and to
ppled unwired chimneys. When they came up, everyone knew that winter had begun, and that a long time would pass before the spring made the lake light yellow with melting streams that fled from newly breathing fields.
But one winter the winds were harder and colder than they had ever been. The night they started had seen birds smashed against cliffs and trees, children crying, and candles flickering. Mrs. Gamely, her daughter Virginia, and Virginia’s infant, Martin, stayed in their tiny house and imagined pure hell on the lake. They could hear huge waves breaking against the soft wiglike tufts where the fields met the water. In the middle of the lake, said Mrs. Gamely, the water was being blown into giant foamy castles, and all the great monsters from the deep, including the Donamoula, were being ploughed up and turned over like roots in a new field. “Listen,” she said. “You can hear them shrieking as they tumble about. Poor creatures! Even though they are a cross between seaborne spiders, writhing serpents, and the sharpest knives; even though their eyes are big and open and have no eyelashes, and they stare at you like cockeyed beggars; and even though their teeth are a forest of bony razors, still, it’s a shame to hear them crying like that.”
Virginia fastened onto the darkness, listening for the shrieks of sea creatures being tossed like a salad in the middle of the lake. All she heard was the wind. Mrs. Gamely rolled her tiny eyes and held up one finger. “Shh,” she said, and listened. “There! Hear them?”
“No!” answered Virginia. “I hear only the wind.”
“But don’t you hear the creatures, too, Virginia?”