Of course he will, but only by fastening shutters against this crazy wind: a tedious job. “No choice about it, though. That’s all right.”
He picks his way across the great hall. Pelts conspire to trip him: red fox, ferret, wolverine, a huge black bear with claws and head intact, agate eyes watchful. The Magar has a passion for animals quite absent in his warden. He returns from Black Sea excursions with chained lynx, birds of prey astonished under leather hoods, grizzled elk heads limed for mounting.
And every kind of dog! Even now, just audible over the wind, he hears their furious noise. Like a mercenary barracks, the kennel stands removed (but sufficiently visible) from the main gate of the palace, a nightmare space of snarls and excrement and flung bones. That howler, now: is that the Airedale, who leaps so fast the eye cannot follow? Or the Rhodesian devil, heaped with muscle to the point of deformity and raised on a diet of black flesh and beatings, until even a passing dark shirt opens the faucets of its bloodlust?
Anton is glad to think of the salt marsh and swollen Danube between him and the Magar’s eye.
He shuffles past the kitchen, its dangling Posnr hams, forbidden French chocolates. The splay-footed master staircase. The snicker of lowered visors on suits of mail at attention since the fifteenth century, the maid’s thorny broom propped insolent against one iron shoulder. And last, and most precious: the door of the library. His library, he always thinks. A portal to a kinder universe.
Soon, he tells the door. Wait for me.
His thoughts race: these storm-shutters, now. I’ve never bothered with them before. It’s never been so cold. Will my hands make music, or just go numb?
Very much preoccupied with this last thought, he flips past the sighing curtain, and all at once stands gulping in the bitter strength of the gale.
The palace wall cleaves straight down upon a cliff. Below is the Black Sea—roaring, angrier than he has ever seen it, a rabid infinity of foam. The land is broken and cruel, rock and slime and more rock and more slime, and directly before him a livid gash: a fissure astoundingly deep and wide. Over and into this wound in the rocks the surf is pouring, exploding skyward, rushing back with a monstrous slurp to cascade again.
No less than a typhoon. But that crack, that canyon in the breakers—why can he not remember it? Surely it is named and known?
You are addled, Anton. If you’re not careful you’ll forget your name.
The rain has not arrived, but he sees it coming, a gray net dragged by thunderheads. There is the moon, too: also grossly huge. Never in his life has it loomed so large, not even at harvest, bloodshot on the world’s rim. And gripping the cornice, Anton begins to consider the moon’s intentions.
Do they not say that it commands the tides, after all? Of whose making this unnatural surf, if not the moon’s? Could it be seeking, in some private malevolence, to tug the sea’s wide lip over the land, over the palace itself, as an impatient nurse tugs bedclothes over a child’s head?
He has read of corals and anemones, and teeth of sharks, fused in the Carpathian foothills, millions of years old. Where had the shore stood then? How many meters of soundless sea assured the Black that this land, here, was forever hers? How long had she suffered no other’s touch on this deep-sea shelf, none but the moon’s, gently exciting her, lifting her waters, smoothing the glide of her round-eyed children? When had men come, hooking those children through the gills?
Can they hate—the moon, and natural things?
The cold light ambles on the surf; the wet wind claws with nails of salt.
Then Anton laughs, his intensity at once merely comic. He grins at the storm, the moon, the white-toothed waves. They are beautiful.
“You are beautiful! Tell me: how will my sonata go tonight, eh? A sign for the suffering artist? No? Nothing?”
Throwing the bolt on the last shutter of the great hall, he feels instantly warmer. The gale drops to a whisper: these walls so thick that melon-sized shot from Russian cannon lie still undiscovered in the stone, they say. He returns to the hearth, where his torch rubs orange fins together, glad to see him. Its warmth runs up his arm and across his chest. But once out of the wall socket, the flame still cowers, writhes, and he knows the wind has not conceded him the palace.
Too many windows, he thinks angrily. Too many rooms from which the day’s faint heat has bled already. Night fell—an hour ago?
Three hours?
It doesn’t matter. He will secure the upper galleries and then shut himself in the library. His library! Beloved nucleus, smelling of tallow and camphor, stalagmite heaps of candles on the maple desk. He must hurry and get there, before he loses everything. Before fatigue and chill rob him of his gift, those galloping harmonies, the wild something in his blood.