5. Wes
Wes
He comes down every night now, and every night I learn him a little more.
It’s been a week. I’ve stopped pretending the misericords need me in the crossing after dark; I’ve stopped pretending anything.
The diocese gets its daylight hours, the survey gets written, the photographs get taken.
And when the light goes and the last of the grey leaves the high windows, I light the candles I’ve started buying by the box, and I wait, and there’s the great soft drag of wings unfolding up in the gallery, and Castor comes down out of the dark and folds himself into my ring of light.
We talk. God, we talk. Three hundred years of things he’s never said and twenty-nine of things I’ve never told anyone, and it turns out the two of us fit, his dryness against my dryness, his patience against my noise.
He tells me about the things he’s killed coming over the rooftops, flat and unboastful, a man describing a job.
I tell him about the collector who wouldn’t look at me, the manor where they had me eat in the kitchen, the long clean record of my own forgettability.
He listens the way the cathedral listens, except the cathedral never said, low and certain, “They were fools,” and meant it about me.
He tells me what the city was like when they raised the cathedral, and what the masons sang, and how the bell was cast, and how he learned to read by watching over the shoulders of men copying psalters by candlelight in the scriptorium that’s a storeroom now.
He tells me about a kingfisher that nested in the churchyard wall a hundred and forty years ago, the one bright thing in a bad decade, and how it came back four springs and then didn’t, and how he grieved a bird he was never allowed to touch because there was nothing else small enough to love.
I have to put my hand on his great clawed one when he says that.
He goes still under it, the way he does, the held way, and the note in his chest drops, and I think: that’s the saddest sentence anyone’s ever said to me, and he said it the way you’d report the weather.
Three hundred years of teaching himself not to want, and the proof of it is a kingfisher he mourned in secret because a bird was the only thing the world let him have.
“You’re allowed to love things,” I tell him. “Out loud. Big things. Not just birds.”
“I’m learning,” he says, and turns his hand over under mine so it cups my whole hand in its heat, and that’s the moment, I think, looking back, that’s the moment I stopped having any sense at all about what I was getting into.
Tonight the talk runs out.
It runs out because I’ve been looking at his hands.
I do that, I look at hands, at the structure of things, it’s the job.
His are enormous, grey, clawed, the knuckles I cleaned the soot from now flexing in the candlelight, and I’ve been watching the way the heat shimmers off the backs of them, and I’ve stopped hearing my own sentence halfway through.
“…sorry,” I say. “I lost the thread.”
“You were looking at my hands,” he says.
He’s learned to read me. Three hundred years of nothing to do but watch and now all that attention is turned on me, total, ferocious, and it should be frightening and instead it’s the most wanted I’ve ever felt in my life.
“You do that. You look at me the way you look at the stone.”
“It’s a compliment,” I say. “It’s how I look at things I think are beautiful.”
The sound starts up in his chest. Low. I’ve learned it means he doesn’t have words.
“Castor.” I put my swab down. My heart’s going. “Can I touch your hand. Properly. Not your face. Your hand.”
He goes still in the particular way he has, the held way, the way that means he’s making himself safe for me. He turns his hand over in the candlelight, palm up, claws curled back and away, and lays it on the flags between us, open.
“It’s heavy,” he warns. “And the claws. I’ll keep them…”
“I trust you,” I say, and I watch it land on him, those three words, the way a man looks when he’s handed something he didn’t think he’d ever be allowed to hold.
I put my hand in his.
His palm is hot, sun-warm, that’s the only way to say it, the banked dry heat of stone that’s held a July afternoon, except it’s January and there’s been no sun and the heat is all his own.
The skin is finer than I expected, a close grain, warm and smooth over the great architecture of bone beneath, and when I press my fingers between his he closes them, slow, so slow, claws lifting clear so not one of them touches me, and the size of it undoes me, my whole hand swallowed in his, and the sound in his chest drops a full octave and I feel it come up through his palm into mine.
“There it is,” I say, unsteady. “That’s the one I felt the first night.”
“You make me make it,” he says, and it’s almost an accusation, almost a wonder.
“I’ve held this body three hundred years and I never knew it could…
” He stops. His thumb moves, careful, exploratory, the pad of it the size of my whole knuckle, and strokes once across the back of my hand, and we both go still, because I think it’s the first time in three centuries he’s touched anything on purpose to feel it rather than to hold the wall.
He does it again. Slower. He turns my hand over in his and traces the lines of my palm with the very tip of one claw, feather-light, learning the map of me, and I watch a kind of astonishment move across his great grey face, that a thing can be touched gently, that touch can be a question instead of a command.
The candlelight slides over the close grain of his skin where it’s warm and the harder ridge of his knuckles where the soot used to live, the soot I cleaned, and I think about how the first thing I ever did to him was clean three hundred years of neglect off a face nobody bothered to look at, and how that was already a kind of touching, already a kind of asking.
“You’ve got good hands,” I tell him. “Whoever carved you knew hands. I noticed it the first night. Most masons fudge the hands.”
“He was the only one who ever looked at me long enough to get them right,” Castor says, low. “The man who made me. He’s been dust four hundred years. You’re the second.”
“Second to look long enough.”
“Second to look at all,” he says, and closes his hand around mine, slow, claws lifting clear, and the size of it swallows me whole.
“Castor,” I say. “Have you ever, has anyone ever touched you to make you feel good?”
The candle ticks. His wings shift high over his shoulders, a leathery whisper.
“No,” he says.
“Do you want them to?”
I watch the want move through him, I can see it now, I’ve learned his body the way I learn stone, the tension that runs up the long muscle of his arm, the way the heat rolls off him stronger, the way the sound rises.
“I don’t know how to want that,” he says, low, raw.
“I don’t know what it is. I only know that when you put your hand in mine I’d give back a year of the dawn to feel it again. ”
“Don’t,” I say sharply, because the cost is a thing I haven’t let myself look at and I won’t let him spend it carelessly. “Don’t trade the dawn. Just, let me. Let me show you. You don’t have to know how. I’ll go slow.”
He looks at me a long time. Total focus. The whole weight of three hundred years of attention turned on one small lonely man kneeling on a cold floor.
“Show me,” he says.
So I rise up onto my knees in front of him, and I take his great clawed hand in both of mine, and I lift it to my mouth, and I press my lips to the hot centre of his palm, and the sound that breaks out of him isn’t subsonic anymore, it’s a groan, a real one, torn up out of three centuries, loud in the empty cathedral, and his wings snap half-open behind him before he wrestles them down, and the candle nearly goes out, and I look up the length of his huge held trembling body and I think: I am going to teach this creature what his own skin is for, and it’s going to take all night, and I have never wanted anything so much.