The same type of container was still used and reused over all the world they knew, for everything from fire splints to spare needles; or even for pills.
“May God have mercy on her,” he said soberly, signing the air over the remains. “I do not know if this could be strictly construed as suicide. Perhaps. . but I hope not.”
Ritva sniffled a little. “And she brought her cat. That’s sad, that’s really sad.”
Artos shook his head silently. They were looking out over the graves of four or five millions who’d died quickly if they were lucky, and more often in slow bewildered fear and agony and dread; the whole ruined city was a tomb, like a thousand others. Yet while the deaths of six billion were a story too hard for a mind to grasp, the death of one and her cat could move folk even a generation later.
We humans are made so, he thought. We’re creatures of the pack, and our packmates or those we can imagine as such are more real to our hearts than any number of nameless strangers.
Then he came to the edge and leaned against the rope; the windows had slanted outward here, so you could look directly down as well.
“Oh, my,” he said after a while. “Oh, my. By flower-faced Blodeuwedd’s all-seeing owl!”
It was different from a glider or balloon, yet oddly as if he were hovering suspended by a sheer act of will half a mile above the earth. The next surprise was how fair the view was. Water stretched south and east and west, white-ruffled blue beating in light surf on the curving shore, empty of sails but dense with birds nesting on green offshore islands. They rose in skeins like twisting trails of smoke as he watched, and other flights went honking through the air not far away-black-white-gray Canada geese for the most part. The ruins of the skyscrapers formed a huge cross, but soon they gave way to a mantle of green that must have started as tree-lined streets and gardens and now was a burgeoning forest with only occasional snags of brick peeking through; more birds flew raucous through the branches, and he could imagine deer and boar beneath, and rabbit and fox and badger and raccoon. From that wood of oak and maple, fir and spruce and locust, occasional apartment towers reared like monoliths, often more than half overgrown in a shaggy coat of climbing ivy.
Here there was none of the sense of brooding menace that filled the heart down among the buildings, the closed-in sense of hostile eyes always watching, and the awareness of the great dying beneath that. Here you could see how root and branch and leaf and burrowing beast were slowly reclaiming the land, and it gave you a detachment where the lifetimes of men waxed and vanished like morning light on the leaves. The air that blew in through the shattered glass smelled of the silty-wet lake and was otherwise clean.
“Does the Middle Earth of men look thus, from the halls of the Gods in Asgard?” Asgerd said quietly. “Does the All-father’s eye see so, the gaze that roams the Nine Worlds from his high seat?”
She turned to Edain: “I came up here because I was ashamed not to, Edain. Thank you for bringing my heart to it. I’d not want to have missed it.”
His arm went around her waist. “It’s a sight, and no mistake, eh? Something to tell the grandkids.”
They stood looking outward. Ritva and Mary went the circuit of the round observation deck, pointing things out and exclaiming, the liquid trills of excited Sindarin marking their passage. Ingolf stood with his arms crossed.
“So damn many,” he said in a brooding tone. “Madison, Chicago, Cincinnati, Albany, Boston. . I’ve seen dozens of ’em and there’s always more.”
Father Ignatius meditated for a while, and then pulled a pad out of one of his robe’s capacious pockets and began to sketch. Virginia merely blinked, then blinked again; Artos suspected she was trying to fit what she saw into a mind shaped by twenty years of Powder River ranch life, and succeeding only slowly.
“Well, I always thought the old folks mighty foolish when they talked about things before the Change,” she said. “Maybe I was. . sorta wrong about that. If they could do this …”
Fred nodded slowly. “I think I understand Dad a bit better now. They had this, and they lost it. It was all taken away. No wonder he was wild to get it back-get some of it back at least, the big country even if he couldn’t get the stuff like this.”
“But they left this!” Asgerd said. “For us to see, and sing of in our sagas.”
There was another moment of quietness. “And yet they died,” Edain said. “And they’re gone, almost as if they never were.”
Artos shook his head. “They left us. We’re not the ancients, but we’re their children. Children of their seed, children of their dreams.”
The dark young man from Idaho spoke:
“Rudi. . Artos. . do you think we can ever do something as, as magnificent as this? Or are we always going to be living in their shadows, tearing down their wonders and using them to build sheep-pens or hammer into spearheads?”
Artos put his hand to the hilt of the Sword, feeling the blur of possibility like currents beneath the surface of the world.
“No,” he said. “We won’t do anything like this. We’ll do different things. Things just as grand! And maybe when we’ve proved we can, we’ll get the power to do such as this back as well. Someday, when we’re ready.”
Mathilda took his free hand. He squeezed hers gratefully, and she said:
“I’m glad we saw this. But I’m glad it’s only once. We can’t let this sort of thing, umm, intimidate us. We Changelings have a world to make-our own world.”
There was a murmur of assent, as they looked around at the bones of glory.
“And that’s what’s important,” Artos said. “Important to us and our children and theirs after them. It’s been an hour. Best we be going.”
The nine of them collected their gear. Ignatius paused for a second, ripped out a page from his sketching pad, wrote his name on it and then folded the whole into a winged dart like a hang glider. Then he gave a dexterous flick of the wrist and sent it out the window; the wind took it and snapped it upward. The white fleck shrank into a dot that spun away.
The soldier-monk grinned; when he did you remembered he was still barely thirty, and saw the smallholder’s boy who’d walked barefoot down the little dusty lanes below Mt. Angel.
“I used to do that when I was a scholarship student in the abbey’s junior secondary school,” he said, chuckling ruefully. “Before I decided I had a vocation. Mt. Angel’s walls are high enough on its hilltop, though not as high as this. Sister Agatha would crack me over the knuckles with her rosary for wasting paper, and my confessor would set me penances for wasting the labor of those who made it-and made it for a tool of learning, not a boy’s game. But I had trouble truly repenting.”
His smile grew reminiscent. “One landed five miles away-and I got another switching from my father when he had to pay the man who brought it to us. It was worth it.”
“And with that, let’s take our leave of this wonder,” Artos said.
When they were all in the stairwell he carefully shut the steel door once more and wedged it against wind and storm with a bit of metal that he drove in with a blow of his heel. It made the door boom like a drum, echoing down the confines of the concrete passage.
“Why?” Ingolf said. “Won’t keep the water out forever.”
“Very little is forever,” Artos replied. “It’ll keep it out for a while, and that may mean the tower stands for another year. Which is not such a little thing, eh?”