The Homecoming

by Danielle L. Parker

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

“Home is people,” she said, thinking of Tilla and Ashton, and the sad, graying couple she had parted from among the roses. “Places are never home to me, however beautiful they are.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “I am a solitary man, for the most part. I live in my mind.”

He had a smooth metallic colored car, with the smell of leather and something else, almost a sea smell, inside. It was, perhaps, the scent of him, clean and a little remote. “What is it you do?” she said in curiosity, for the car spoke of money, and as he drove, something silvery flashed on his wrist, a solid platinum chronograph.

“I design drugs,” he said. “I am a genius at what I do.” There was a change in his profile as he spoke, a flash of something chill and bitter. “This is a mining colony. The mining companies pay me my hire. It is enough silver, almost, for the sin of what I do.”

“But you dream,” Rowan said. To touch those emotions now was to burn one’s hand upon ice smoking with frost. She did not dare. “Ashton said he painted your dream.”

“It was a dream I had then,” he said. “Dreams do change, and sometimes they die. What do you create, Rowan?”

“Nothing like what Ashton does,” she said. “I like to paint people best, I think. Gentle things.”

The hardness eased out of his profile, just a little. “Ah,” he said. “I thought you were a gentle person. You paint mothers and children, I think, and old people with good memories to dream on. Is that it?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I don’t sell much. There’s more money in the angry or strange. Ashton doesn’t paint what he does for those reasons, of course. It is because he sees it, and because he sees beauty, even in death.”

He said nothing for a moment. They were turning up a road that wound through trees, or what Rowan thought might be trees: tall spears with frost-white trembling pendulums, with darkness gathering beneath. There were patches of snow, something Rowan had never seen before, here and there glimmering upon the dark rock. “Perhaps you will be a serendipitous guest,” he said at last. “I have forgotten gentleness.”

They were turning into a driveway. The trail wound ahead through the frosted trees, until they came, quite suddenly, upon a house. It was low, and seemed almost to be growing from and following the ground. Like the car it was metallic and sleek, and its silvered skin flushed in the last rays of the evening with colored iridescences, purple fading into blue and into at last a rose pink. “It’s beautiful,” Rowan breathed.

He had stopped the car, and for a moment he gazed before him with remote appraisal. “I had forgotten that too,” he said at last. “Yolan Muse designed it for me. He is the best architect on Minotaur, some say. It suited my dreams at the time. Perhaps I have lost them.” The sun sank behind the horizon as he spoke, and the glorious iridescence faded into no more than a cold silver-gray shape, framed by icy trees and snow.

The canvas coat was worse than useless. Rowan shook in the chill of the evening. But he was opening a door, and if what she saw inside was like the house, clean and elegant and sparse, still, there was warmth.

“We’ll have dinner,” he said. “I rarely have a house-guest, so it will be a pleasure to cook for two. And you can tell me what Ashton is doing lately. I’ve long admired his work, but it seems that I do little for pleasure now...and then I’ll show you to the guest studio.” He took her coat away from her. “Come. You can help.”

Little of the food was familiar to Rowan. “Minotaur has underground seas,” he said. “They are cold and fruitful.” He showed her what seemed to be a round fruit, its heart like the seed of a peach in color, and its outside stubbled with black warts. “In the sea, all creatures consume each other. If you put your finger into the mouth of this animal, when it was alive, you would have nothing left but your fingernail, soon. Man, of course, is the greatest predator of all. So we shall enjoy this urchin.”

It was a quiet meal, with the sound of music in the background, something intermittent and delicate, like chiming bells played by an idle hand. “Ashton is doing well,” she told him. “He’s had a show at the Academy this last year. He still lives in that small room and rarely gets out, but somehow he sees more from there than I, or many, could with the world at our feet.” She paused, while she drank of the wine he had served, which was clear and fresh. “I’d like to see what he painted for you. If...if you don’t mind.”

The shadow fell upon his face again. “Then you shall,” he said. “After supper.”

It was in his bedroom. In the large sparsely furnished room was a silvery bed, as round and severe as the room, and along the curved walls ran Ashton’s painting. Dredd picked up a small hand lamp and they walked, slowly, along the length of it.

“There is a legend in the mines of Minotaur,” he said. “The miners believe in a Queen who holds court there, who receives the souls of those who die in her realm. Perhaps it is like the old sailors’ tales of Davy Jones and his locker. See for yourself.”

There in a cavern with it seemed no ending floated a shadowy court, knights in shining black like carapaced insects, and above them on a stony throne, a Queen of Air and Darkness, with her crown glowing with points of purple darker than night. Among her court were faded miners, their helmets hazed with darkness, each riven with the means of their death: some crushed, and some drowned, some with drugged and tormented eyes, yet each feasting upon the ethereal repast.

“There are many ways to die in the mines,” said Dredd, gazing broodingly upon the faces that seemed almost to turn and speak to him. “There is water, which is always dangerous in a fresh working; last year fifteen drowned when they broke through to an underground river that had not been properly mapped. Sometimes the supports collapse. And there are those who die by my art.” He touched a staring eye with a finger, his expression distant. “By means of the drugs I design men work there with the need for less air and less light and less food; yet there are some, a few, who cannot accept the potions without paying a price. All pay the price in the end. These too are in her court.”

Rowan shivered. Dredd turned the lamp on the last panel.

“My fate, if there is justice,” he said, and raised the lamp a little higher.

There was a King sitting beside the gossamer Queen, but where she was fraying smoke and trailing wisps of darkness, he was bleached frost. His eyes were the silver of metal, and his face as remote as that of the man beside her. The scepter in his hand was glass, and had almost the shape of a long thin beaker.

“That is you,” Rowan whispered, and drew away a little, for it seemed the man beside her radiated something of that cold, for just an instant.

“Yes,” he said. “Sleep, if you would believe, has been the most difficult need to overcome. Men must dream or go mad. Yet if a man takes the drug that I have in my trial laboratory now, he may sleep and in moments, not a night, dream enough to work day after day and night after night. I have conquered all that makes a man wish to live.”

There was nothing Rowan could say in the face of such a horror. She opened the door and fled outside, and stood shivering in the dining room again. The chiming sound of the music was as bitter as his voice.

“You are tired,” he said, following her and putting the lamp down on the table. “Come. I will show you to your room.”

There was a little comfort to know that Ashton, whose gentle but formidable spirit seemed to linger in the room, had slept in the very bed she laid in. But Rowan could not rest. Through the half-closed door she could see the thin edge of light from the laboratory they had passed, and as the night wore on, small sounds from it, as of a man working, opening drawers, moving objects. The chiming music had ceased.

Then near morning there was at last silence. Rowan rose in the faint lightening of the air and looked out the window. There was a fresh fall of scant snow, dusting the drive and the silvery shape of the house. Frost lay on its metallic skin. She pulled on Tilla’s sweater and the khaki coat over her trousers, then pinned the glass rose in her braid, for comfort, and went outside.

He was not to be seen. Thank you, she wrote. Don’t worry. I’ll hitch a ride back to the port.

It was night again before she could call, standing in a crowded kiosk in the familiar roar of voices with the hot stench-laden air of her brown world in her lungs.

“Tilla,” she said. “Tilla, this is Rowan. I’m... I’m coming home.”

The author would like to thank her friend Pasi Parnanen for his collaboration and suggestions on this story.