“Posies for the mayor, poppies for the king,” his sister Julita would sing, cavorting, gripping his finger. “Violets for the merchant-man with his golden ring.” She waved to the soldiers above, and very rarely, they waved back. Then she would squeal with delight. She loved the tower, had no sense that generals rather than kings ruled Romania today, or of the difference between them.
Julita down there below. Grown up now, almost a woman. Invisible in the fog. He gulps down a sudden virulent melancholy. To be at his mother’s table, sipping coffee sweet as molasses, watching his father chew a pipe. To dance with his sister again.
But even as he watches, the moon leaps free of a cloud, emerges round and huge, fixing the land below like a squint animal eye. Everything is abruptly visible: each street of his town, every branch in the thatched roofs. The listing Posnr mansion squats on the next ridge, over a slum of groggy stables. But the windows do not shine. Nothing shines, everything merely appears in the submarine light, shipwrecks at forty fathoms.
The fleet of aircraft hangs in the south sky, dwindling.
A noise: his skin crawls. The mad baying of the dogs, seeking a harmony quite impossible to so grotesque a team—but distinctly hungry. Has Faraz forgotten them?
Anton turns away from the view. Now then.
Exactly in the room’s center stands the signal lamp, exquisite and huge. Its concave mirror is larger than a half-barrel; its mantel of spun asbestos like a fetal star. Anton raps the fuel tank: half full. Now he twists opens the valve and pumps vigorously, bringing the fuel to pressure. Then he touches his torch to the mantle.
The flash quite blinds him; flames singe the hair up and down his arm. He smiles, finds a socket for his torch, and steps directly in front of the mirror.
Heat!
It bathes his face, his chest, his limbs. His wet hair streams. He shields his eyes with a raised arm. Only now does he realizes how thoroughly cold he has become.
I’ll never move again.
But the heat bites at the scratch on his wrist. Annoyed, he turns his back, stares at the small, irregular wound. He cannot remember where the damn thing came from.
No one responds to his lamp signal. Hardly surprising. Anton has begun to suspect an immense drill, and his part in it a test of readiness. Well, he would damn well pass. But what would they do to Lupescu?
He rolls the lamp about, inspects the world at leisure, standing so close to the flame that his chest burns through his shirt, loving it. The tide has risen over the cleft in the sea rocks, but it is still there, leviathan-like beneath the waves, troubling their charge. And from this height he sees the whole garden and its stone residents, beyond Wagner’s gate: twisted Paganini, and scarecrow Prokofiev spindled between a pair of unhealthy lilacs. Farther back, yellow eyes glisten from a row of cages, mouths hang open. The dogs are watching him, like prisoners waiting to riot, tense with idiot hate.
They howl. Let them howl. Hot, hot to the edge of pain, Anton smiles over his country, his palace, his lovely Black Sea—and then he sees the girl, and shrieks aloud.
She is standing on an iceberg, making swiftly toward the palace over the waves: a young girl, with ice crystals in her hair like white jewels, and her colorless eyes brighter than these. She is regal and coldly smiling, her arms are bare and slender. He lunges for binoculars: she wears a robe of frozen teardrops, frozen baby’s breath, frozen eighth notes. He thinks, Something is going to happen to me.
When she draws near the cliff, the clouds roll solemnly back, and one leaps rippling down to become a white stairway from her feet to the window of the tower. She starts to glide up to him, effortless, and her voice precedes her in a velvet singsong. He has never heard a thing so beautiful.
Anton touches his lamp. Its heat is distant.
She is almost to him, a girl in full flower—but her skin is the blue-white of the iceberg. Her hand is on the window. He has not unlatched it.
She pauses, and then a new, kinder smile plays on her lips. They shape two words:
Don’t wait.
Her breath paints ice crystals on the glass.
Still, he does not move. He is scared out of his mind. But the beautiful girl only watches him with greater compassion. She knows everything about him. She is for him. She is the Empress of Antarctica’s daughter.
When she breathes out, the patch of ice widens, hiding her face. But then her finger taps, and ice and glass shatter together in a cough of wind. Her blue hand reaches in and touches the latch. Halfheartedly, he moves to stop her. She flicks his arm away; it is done.
Inside the chamber her smile is more than kind. He has expected her all his life. She drops her glistening robe, reaches beneath his shirt with both spreading hands, and for a moment he feels an unbearable sweet flame as her sapphirine body presses his own.
Then he thrashes. He is sprawled over the chair, head thrown back. The window is closed, the lamp has gone out, he is bathed in a sweat turning rapidly cold. He sits up—and the world spins black. Sand and grime bite his cheek. He is suddenly on the floor.
Fumes, from the lamp! Retching, he pulls himself to his feet, throws open the window, gasps and gasps and gasps.
He has nearly been asphyxiated! And the girl?