2. Castor
Castor
The mortal has put his hand on me, and for the first time in a very long time I want the sun to go down.
I should explain about the sun, except there is no one to explain it to and never has been.
At dawn I become what they made me: stone.
Not asleep, that would be a mercy. Aware.
I am aware all day, set into the cathedral’s skin like a tooth in a jaw, watching the light crawl across the floor I cannot reach, hearing the pigeons, hearing the rain, hearing, lately, this one man talk to me as if I am company.
At dusk the stone gives me back. It hurts the way the thaw hurts a frozen hand, feeling rushing into a thing that had forgotten it could feel.
My wings come first, the membrane warming and softening between the spurs until I can fold and flex them.
Then the long muscles of my back, my haunches, the claws on my hands going from carved curves to something that can close.
Last of all my chest, where the binding sits, where the low sound lives that I have never let anyone hear because there has never been anyone to hear it.
He heard it.
He put two fingers on my face, not to carve me, not to pray to me, not to check the survey of me so they could decide what I was worth.
He touched me to learn the temperature of me.
And when the sound came up out of my chest he didn’t run.
He said why are you warm, like it mattered, like I was a thing that could be warm on purpose.
I have guarded St. Wracken’s for three hundred years.
In all that time I have been carved, scrubbed, prayed at, leaned on, rained on, lit by candles and once, horribly, by a coloured electric lamp the dean’s nephew aimed up at me for a festival.
I have been called a saint by people who didn’t look at me and a gargoyle by people who did.
I have killed three things that came over the Veilwood roofs to get at the people sleeping below, and not one of those people ever knew I’d done it, and not one of them ever will.
That is the bargain. The guardian is not seen. The guardian holds the wall.
I remember each of the three. A shade that poured itself over the lead roof on a moonless night forty years ago, the year the Veil thinned, when the world filled up with things that hadn’t walked it in an age and half the old quarter slept through the changing of everything.
I took it apart over the churchyard with my claws and my weight and the long fall, and in the morning I was stone again with a child’s window two streets away still lit and safe, and the child grew up and grew old and never knew.
A thing like a knot of hands that came up the bell-rope two winters later.
A pale crawling hunger that tried the rectory door, this same door I crouch outside now, when a young curate slept behind it, and I broke it on the churchyard wall and washed the wall clean with the next day’s rain.
None of them thanked me. None of them could.
That is not a complaint; it was never meant to be a thing that earned thanks.
You do not thank a wall for standing. You only notice it when it falls.
I made my peace with being a wall a very long time ago, and the peace held, the way I held, for three centuries.
And then a man with cold hands and a tin of beeswax climbed my scaffold and called me the best-looking thing in the postcode, and the peace I’d made cracked straight down the middle like bad stone in a frost.
I had stopped wanting to be seen. You stop wanting water in a desert; the body gives up on it to keep you sane. I had given up on it so thoroughly that when the want came back tonight it came like a wound reopening, hot and humiliating and alive.
His name is Wes. He told the carving of me his name on the third night, the way you’d tell a dog, not expecting it to keep it. I have kept it. Wes. I have turned it over in the long stone hours until it’s worn smooth.
Now it is night, and I am flesh, and I am crouched at the lip of the gallery with my claws hooked into the ledge he cleaned for me, and below me the nave is dark and empty and the door of the rectory is shut, and I could go to it.
That is the thing he doesn’t know. I can leave the gallery. At night I can move, across the vault, down a pier, out along the roof on the cold lead he was talking about. I can go anywhere inside the bounds of the churchyard wall.
But there is a cost, and the cost is the whole of the bargain.
Every hour I spend off my post, away from the wall I am sworn to hold, the binding takes back.
It takes it out of the dawn. The further I go, the longer I stay, the harder the stone comes for me at sunrise, sooner, heavier, more final.
A guardian who abandons his wall does not get three hundred years.
He gets a morning where the stone comes early and does not, one day, give him back.
For three centuries that has been an easy sum. Stay on the wall. Hold. There has been nothing below worth the dawn.
I unhook one claw from the ledge.
I tell myself I only want to be nearer the place where he sleeps.
That I will go as far as the crossing and no further, stand in the dark under the lantern tower where the carving of me cannot see but the flesh of me can, and listen to him breathe, and go back before the cost adds up to anything that shows.
I open my wings. The membrane shudders down their whole span, warm now, mine now, and the air of the empty nave moves under them.
It has been a long time since I flew inside.
I had forgotten the cathedral is built to a body like mine, the vault rises to meet a thing with wings, the way a cup is built to meet a mouth.
I drop off the gallery.
I fall a man’s height before I catch the air, and the catch is the best feeling I have had in a hundred years, the membrane filling, the pull through my shoulders, the whole heavy weight of me turning from a falling thing into a flying one.
I sweep the length of the dark nave a hand’s breadth under the bosses he’s been cleaning, and the candle he forgot to take, still burning on the scaffold, leans hard in my wake and gutters and holds.
I land at the crossing without a sound. Three hundred years of practice; I can put this body down like a shadow lying flat.
The rectory door is old oak with a gap under it, and light comes through the gap, not candlelight. The small cold glow of one of their devices. He is awake.
I should go back. The cost is already counting; I can feel it as a thin ache behind my breastbone, the dawn leaning in a little closer than it did.
Instead I cross the worn flags on silent clawed feet and I put my horned head down close to the door, close to the gap, close to the breathing on the other side of two inches of oak, and I listen to Wes not-sleeping, and I let the low sound build in my chest until I know it must come through the wood to him, until I am as good as touching him through the door, and I think: one more night of this and I will knock.
One more, and I will let him see what answered.