LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate. “Please don’t kill us.”

      It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was actually speaking words like don’t kill us, and meaning them.

      His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.

      The voice from the roof was grave. “I said I wouldn’t.”

      “You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said.

      “I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”

      Ned would remember that. He’d remember almost everything, in fact. He said, “You know that your face is down in the corridor, back there?”

      “You went down? That was brave.” A pause. “Yes, of course it is.”

      Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise. Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way.

      “I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke.

      “Someone might have liked it to be.”

      Ned dealt with that, or tried to. And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way as before. “Who…who was the model for her, then?” he asked. He was looking at the woman on the column. He found it hard not to look at her.

      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

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