6. The palace (I)

At the approach of dusk the road entered a long plantation of aspens. The air was noticeably cooler now, and a bit of wind was rustling the leaves. On their left, burnished by the declining sun, a broad muddy stream was churning past, as if urging them to quicken their pace. They crossed over a little stone bridge, beneath which a narrow channel separated itself from the stream, heading off to the right and out of the grove, into what appeared, in the distance, to be ripening fields of wheat. He saw no sign of anyone working the fields or heading homewards after a day's labor; but a kingfisher, perched on a low outlying branch at streamside, regarded them — rather balefully he thought — as they came over the bridge.

Lucinda plodded on, a stride ahead of him. For the first time she looked weary; her head had sunk down to the level of her shoulders, and she took no interest in the terrain along the road. Though it was, he reflected, rather late in the game to begin asking where they were going, he was emboldened to inquire where they would spend the night.

“We're almost there,” was all she would let on.

In fact it was not long before he detected the outline of an immense form looming ahead of them in the last twilight. A few moments later they emerged out of the grove into a clearing, and stood at one corner of a vast structure, intricately but harmoniously wrought from stone and glass, whose full extent he could not at that hour determine. Surrounded by a wide, empty plaza, palisades of thick marble columns supported a high balcony that encircled the building, sheltering an open portico beneath. Above the balcony, great walls of stone, interrupted by tall and slender windows, rose another hundred feet or more into the air, until they came to an end at the lowest reach of the gently curving copper roof whose summit he could not see. At the corner, immediately before them, a series of wide steps, made from a lighter marble than the building walls, rose to an arched entranceway that was weakly lit by the orange glow of a pair of bell-shaped lamps on either side.

The cat rested quietly at his side as he stood open-mouthed for several minutes, looking down first one long wall and then the other, craning his neck to gaze up at the heights. Here and there, in a regular pattern, pale light seemed to be shining through some of the windows, though it provided scant illumination to the plaza beyond. Other than the whispering of the aspen leaves and the faint murmur of the encircling stream, there was no sound.

When the time came he did not need Lucinda's prompting to begin the ascent of the steps. She let him go first, but remained closely at his heels. Though his weariness from their two days' journey had largely dissipated as he stood in the cool of the plaza, he found the brief climb surprisingly strenuous. When he reached the top he turned and looked down at the dimly lit grove and the blackness beyond. She waited by his side until he was ready to go in. As he stepped through the doorway — there was no door — he glanced at the great glass lamps, and was perplexed to find that he could see no obvious source to explain their faint but steady glow.

Once inside, he peered in semi-darkness down a long, deserted gallery, intermittently lit by the receding halos of a series of smaller lamps, set in niches built into the walls, whose light was insufficient to permit him to see as far as the gallery's end. The arched ceiling, twenty feet above, was decorated in an intricate, apparently abstract pattern, the details of which he could not clearly make out. The slight chill he had felt on the plaza fell away, as the air inside the gallery was noticeably warmer than outside, and in fact seemed to be flowing in a slow current through the doorway behind them. The murmurs from the grove were entirely hushed, and except for his footfalls (the cat's made no sound in any case) there was utter silence.

They began to walk slowly. Lucinda, for the moment, allowing him to set their pace. After thirty steps or so, as they passed along the rows of windows on their left, a second corridor opened to their right, perpendicular to their own and indistinguishable from it in form; a further fifty paces brought another. The length of the building remained impossible to gauge, as darkness continued to obscure the distant depths of the gallery, but the astonishing regularity and harmony with which it was constructed were already evident. For all its incalculable size, there was nothing oppressive or ponderous about the architecture that enveloped them; every chamber, every window, was proportionate to the whole, but intimate and sufficient in its own space. Even the absolute blackness of night visible through the windowpanes seemed to form part of the composition.

“What is this place?” he asked the cheetah, at last.

“It is the palace of the King of Night, and we are his guests.”

She offered no more, and he decided it was enough of an answer for the moment. They continued for some time, without further conversation, until a slight increase in the surrounding illumination drew his attention to the approach of yet another passageway leading to their right. The intersecting gallery was wider and higher than the one they were walking along, and as he peered down it he saw that it almost immediately opened out into a large chamber of white marble. At a nod from the cat, he turned in this direction.

The chamber was deserted and utterly bare of any adornment or furnishing. The vaulted ceiling, luminous and austere above them, displayed no element of the elaborate motif that had, until that point, looked down on them during their passage through the palace. His footsteps muffled by the dome, Oren strode to the center.

In each of the four corners of the room a dozen steps curved to a landing, from which another stairway spiraled above into spaces unseen. Choosing the exit to the left, nearest to the point where they had come in, they climbed the steps, turned, then climbed again. The light in the stairwell was dim, as the only illumination came from a single small lamp at each level. As they rose from summit to summit, Oren and even Lucinda began to labor under the effort, and it seemed to him that the unaccustomed confinement within the narrow space was not much to her liking. He judged that they had ascended three stories, and perhaps a fourth, when they at last emerged into another vaulted room, distinguishable from the one below only by the downward direction of its outlets. They found the windowed gallery along the outside wall, shook off their fatigue as best they could, and resumed their original heading. The disappointment of having to traverse yet another apparently endless and empty corridor was just beginning to slow his steps, and to dull his senses, when he noticed a faint moving light coming towards them through the darkness ahead.

May 23, 2007

Copyright © 2007 Chris Kearin. All rights reserved.