8. Castor
Castor
The day is long in a new and terrible way, because now I have something to lose.
For three centuries the stone hours were nothing, a blank, a held breath, a waiting.
Now they are torture, because I spend them counting.
The cost I’ve taken on. The dawn that came two minutes sooner this morning than it should have, the stone catching at my wings while I was still folding, a grip that did not used to be there.
I have been careless. I have been spending the future of myself on the present of him and I would do it again, I will do it again, but Wes has gone away to do the sum I told him not to, and I am stone, and I cannot stop him.
He is below me right now. I can see him with my stone-sight, the strange flat all-over awareness the daylight gives me.
He is not working. He is at his trestle with the cathedral’s records spread out, the cartulary, the old foundation deeds, the bound surveys, all the paper the diocese keeps in the muniment room and never reads.
He has been at it since dawn. He is looking for me.
Not the carving of me, the making of me.
He wants to know how I was bound, because if you know how a thing was bound you might know how to loose it, or change it, or pay it differently.
He has changed the shape of my days without knowing it.
The stone hours used to be a blank I endured; now they’re a held breath, and I spend them listening for the click of the rectory door, the scrape of his boots on the flags, the small private sounds of a man making a home out of a ruin.
He’s hung a cord of work-lamps along the scaffold.
He’s brought a kettle. He talks to me in the daylight now, knowing I can’t answer, and the cruelty of being awake and mute and unable to reach him is a new cruelty, three hundred years in and I’m still finding fresh ones, but it is also, God help me, the best part of my day, the sound of him moving below me, alive, mine, fighting magistrates for the life of a thing on a gutter.
I want to tell him to stop. There is no loosing it. I have had three hundred years to want a way out and there isn’t one. The guardian holds the wall until the wall doesn’t need holding, and the wall will need holding until St. Wracken’s falls, and St. Wracken’s is built to stand a thousand years.
Except.
Except St. Wracken’s is going to be sold.
He told the carving of me, in those first eleven nights, when he thought I was stone, the diocese, the developer, the flats and the wine bar and the glass floor.
Deconsecrated. Sold off. And I did not think, then, what that meant, because I had stopped thinking about the future at all.
I think about it now, all the long stone day, with a cold that has nothing to do with the January air.
What anchors me is the cathedral. Not the building, the thing the building is.
A house of the holy, a thing set apart, a wall worth guarding.
That is what the binding is tied to. That is what I hold and what holds me.
When they deconsecrated it, ten years ago, I felt the binding loosen, go thin and grey, like a rope half-cut.
I have been holding a wall that the world has already stopped calling sacred.
If they sell it, if they gut it, if they make it flats and a wine bar and a feature of the bell tower, The wall I’m bound to will stop being a wall worth a guardian.
And a guardian whose wall is unmade does not go free.
I have never seen it happen but I know it in my stone bones the way I know the dawn.
The binding does not simply release. It was made to end one way: with the guardian still on the post, holding, until the holding is done.
Take the wall out from under him before that and the binding has nowhere to anchor and nothing to hold and it does the only thing left to it.
It comes home. It comes all the way home, into the stone, and it does not give me back.
I turn it over all the long stone day, the way I turn over everything now that there’s something to lose.
When they raised these walls, the masons meant them to outlast every man who’d ever pray in them, and they did, the wall has outlasted the faith that built it.
The diocese stopped meaning the words a decade ago, and I felt the binding thin then, go grey and slack, a rope half-cut.
A half-cut rope still holds, and I have been holding by it, hand over hand, for ten years without quite letting myself know it.
What the developer’s paperwork does is part the last strand.
Not by malice. By indifference. They will turn the house of the holy into a place to buy wine, and they will never know there was a guardian in it, never know what their signatures unmade.
That is the part that sits coldest of all, that I could die of being forgotten by people who never knew I was here to be forgotten.
The sale is the dawn that doesn’t end.
I have known this, dimly, the way you know a far-off thing.
I know it sharply now, because now I have a reason to want to be flesh past one more dusk, and the reason is sitting below me with three hundred years of paper spread out, doing the sum, and I cannot warn him, and I cannot help him, and the grey light crawls across the floor I cannot reach.
Dusk comes the way water comes through a crack, slow, then all at once.
The feeling rushes into me, the thaw, the hurt of it, the wings softening, the back, the haunches, the chest and the sound, and I am flesh, and I drop off the gallery before the warmth has even finished filling my wings, and I catch the air a man’s height down and sweep the nave and land in the candlelight where Wes is already on his feet, white-faced, the cartulary open in his hands, and I know from his face that he’s found it. He’s done the sum. He knows.
“You found out,” I say.
“The sale completes in twelve days.” His voice is flat and careful, the voice of a man holding himself together with both hands.
“The developer’s lawyers have already filed.
The diocese signed last month. They didn’t tell me because I’m just the surveyor, I’m just the hired hand, they don’t…
” He stops. Swallows. “Castor. I read the foundation deed. I read the binding clause. It’s in the old Latin, in the margin, the part the diocese thinks is a decoration.
Custos ad murum donec murus sanctus. The guardian to the wall until the wall is holy. ”
“Until it isn’t,” I say.
“Until it isn’t.” His hands are shaking on the old vellum.
“If they unmake the church, the wall stops being holy, and the binding…” He can’t say it.
He looks up at me, and his eyes are wet, and the working attention is gone, burned away, and what’s underneath is bare.
“It kills you. Selling this building kills you. And I’ve got twelve days. ”
I cross to him. I take the cartulary out of his shaking hands and set it down gently on the trestle, and I gather him in, claws spread wide, wings coming round, and I hold him against the heat of me while he breaks, and the thing I feel, the unforgivable, enormous thing I feel even now, is glad.
Glad that he cares this much. Glad to be worth this grief.
Three hundred years and the first one to hold me with kindness is the one who’ll have to watch me turn to stone, and I am glad, and I am ashamed of the gladness, and I hold him tighter, careful, careful, while the candle burns and the rain comes on the lead and the dawn, far off, counts down to the last one I’ll ever come back from.
“Twelve days,” I say into his hair. “Then we’d better not waste the nights.”