Silence above them. Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed. Inside his mind he could actually place the figure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured.
“I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story. It is no place for children. Believe me,” he said again.
“I do,” Kate said, with feeling. “Believe me!”
Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard. He was surprised how much of that was in him these days. “Right,” he said. “Run along, kids. Well, what am I supposed to do with this…feeling I have in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there. This is completely messed up. What am I supposed to do with it?”
After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently. “You are hardly the first person to have an awareness of such things. You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do…” That hint of amusement again. “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd. What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives. We are not…this story is not important for you.”
Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared. That, too, was strange. In the lingering resonance of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”
“No,” said the voice above them, flatly dismissive. “As you just put it: run along. That will be best, whatever it does to your vanity. I am not as patient as I might once have been.”
“Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked.
“What?” cried Kate again.
In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, above and to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down. The man on the roof somersaulted off the slanting tiles to land in the garden in front of them. His face was vivid with rage, bone white. He looked exactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought.
“How did you know that?” the man snarled. “What did he tell you?”
He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed. He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest; could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack of hair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth. His grey-blue eyes were also hard. The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by the throat. Someone. Ned knew who that would be.
But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.
Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, bored and edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother. Only that last was still true. An hour ago the world had been a different place.
“Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said. “I don’t know how I know these things. I asked you that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”
“Ned,” said Kate. Her voice creaked like it needed oiling. “This sculpture was made eight hundred years ago.”
“I know,” he said.
The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”
They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned. The leather jacket was slate grey, his shirt underneath was black. “You have surprised me again. It doesn’t often happen.”
“I believe that,” Ned said.
“This is still not for you. You have no idea of what…you have no role. I made a mistake, back there. If you won’t go, I will have to leave you. There is too much anger in me. I do not feel very responsible.”
Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little. “You will not let us…do anything?”
A movement of the wide mouth. “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you would realize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful.
“Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class.
The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them. He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, but lit by the April sun in a garden.
“Why now?” Ned asked. “Why here?”
They could hear the traffic from outside again. Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right in the middle of it.
The man was silent for what seemed a long time. Ned had a sense that he was actually near to answering, but then he shook his head. He walked across the middle of the cloister and stepped between two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to the street and world.
“Wait!”
It was Kate this time.
The man paused again, his back still to them. It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned. He wouldn’t have stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had.
“Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone.
He did turn, after all, at that.
He looked at Kate across the bright space between. He was too far away for them to make out his expression.
“Not yet,” he said.
Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him.
They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in so many ways, from the world.
Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps. He felt as if he needed to run for miles, up and down hills until the sweat poured out of him.
From here he could see the rose again between the two pillars, behind the carving. People said she was the Queen of Sheba. It was posted that way on the wall. How did he know they were wrong? It was ridiculous.
Directly in front of him the corner pillar was much larger than those beside it—all four of the corners were. This one, he realized, without much surprise, had another bull carved at the top. It was done in a style different from David and Goliath, and nothing at all like the woman.
Two bulls now, one in the baptistry, fifteen hundred years ago, and this one carved—if he understood properly—hundreds of years after that. He stared at it, almost angrily.
“What do goddamn bulls have to do with anything?” he demanded.
Kate cleared her throat. “New Testament. Symbol of St. Luke.”
Ned stared at the creature at the top of the pillar in front of him.
“I doubt it,” he said finally. “Not this one. Not the old one inside, either.”
“What are you saying now?”
He looked over, saw the strain on her face, and guessed he probably looked a lot the same. Maybe they were kids. Someone had pointed a knife towards them. And that was almost the least of it.
He looked at the sculpted woman where Kate stood and felt that same hard tug at his heart again. Pale-coloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away. Barely anything to be seen, as if she were a rendering of memory itself. Or of what time did to men and women, however much they’d been loved.
And where had that idea come from? He thought of his mother. He shook his head.
“I don’t know what I’m saying. Let’s get out of here.”
“Need a drink, Detective?”
He managed a smile. “Coke will do fine.”
KATE KNEW WHERE she was going. She led him under the clock tower and past the city hall to a café a few minutes from the cathedral.
Ned sat with his Coke, watched her sip an espresso without sugar (impressed him, he had to admit), and learned that she’d been here since early March, on an exchange between her school in New York City and one here in Aix. Her family had hosted a French girl last term, and Kate was with the girl’s family until school ended at the beginning of summer.
Her last name was Wenger. She planned to do languages in university, or history, or both. She wanted to teach, or maybe study law. Or both. She took jazz dance classes (he’d guessed something like that). She ran three miles every second or third day in Manhattan, which was not what Ned did, but was pretty good. She liked Aix a whole lot, but not Marie-Chantal, the girl she was staying with. Seemed Marie-Chantal was a secret smoker in the bedroom they shared, and a party girl, and used Kate to cover for her when she was at her boyfriend’s late or skipping class to meet him.