Of What We Leave Behind

She was found by the butler, lying at the bottom of the grand stair, shoes in her hand, neck broken. She'd been dead for several hours.

~ * ~

The village was quaint, in a battered sort of way. It was clean, in a confused sort of way. It had its pride, though no one remembered what that pride was in. The castle loomed above. In winter its crooked shadow clawed out across the frozen lake.

~ * ~

Everybody loved her; the whole village trudged through the snow to their wedding. Some said she was crazy, some said she was fey, some said she was more than a little mad; at issue was not so much her character as the old wizard's. But when he placed the garland round her neck, they both, quite visibly, shone. And when he kissed her, they drifted absently into the air. And the church suddenly, inexplicably, smelled of apples.
In that moment the weight of the castle on the crag above halved, and for a season and a year the village was a calmer, happier place.

~ * ~

When they came and told him, he ran straight to her side. He tore open her bodice, ripped the brooch from his cloak, said seven words over it, and drove its tine into her chest above the heart. The attendants were shocked: for many days, at least, their master would be as mortal as they.
        Nothing happened, of course; she was already too long dead, and the proper preparations had not been made for her to stay with her body. But at least the situation would now not worsen. He helped carry her to his workroom.
        The next several hours were spent examining her, coaxing her, jolting her and, in moments of greater distraction, kissing her, trying to find some tiny spark of life within; but there was none. He constructed a crystal coffin, kissed her one last time, and placed her inside: he would keep her body on, he thought, some obscure impulse that it might be useful later. Then he sat down to think.
        He had a fair knowledge of necromancy - what educated wizard didn't? - but the thought of it chilled him through. It was her soul, not merely her body, that he needed by him. Still, there had to be a way to bring her back to him. Probably her body wouldn't figure in the solution, but - somehow it made him feel better, lying across the room from him, in a state of perfect preservation.
        There had to be a way.
        It wasn't for another three days that his mind truly began to unravel.

~ * ~

Throughout their courtship he had steadily unaged. By the first night of their marriage he was for practical purposes a thirty year old - a more than respectable differential, given their relative rank and the fact that he could wait at that age for her, if she desired.
        She was, he reflected, the most precious thing he had ever held.
        He felt so very happy he thought he might die - a most unusual notion for one immune to normal death.
        Their honeymoon took twelve weeks and spanned two continents.

~ * ~

He was sitting in his workroom, at his desk, staring at the flame in the lamp. He had been staring at the flame for a long time. The book before him was open to a page headed Recovering what is Lost; but it was a simple spell, constructed from first principles as an example, good only for the student or perhaps to one who has mislaid a favourite pipe.
He didn't want to kill himself, but it was hard to understand why the pain in his heart hadn't killed him by itself.
He stared at the flame.

~ * ~

Her rooms were a wonder to her. Not quite as she had planned them in her mind, but so spacious, so real, so bright; so different from anything she had imagined could exist within the bleak old castle....
        With a sense of private delight she turned the key in the lock: and was alone. Stately she danced across the polished floor to her writing desk, where she arranged the paper as if she had been, while composing poetry, suddenly interrupted, startled by some unexpected intruder into concealing her half-finished lines. She crumpled a single sheet deliciously in her hands and tossed it delicately, artfully aside, for verisimilitude's sake.
        Pleased with her fancy now she paced slowly back across the room to the chair where her old doll sat staring solemnly into the past. She picked it up and walked with it, very quietly, into her yet un-slept-in bedroom. They sat them both at the dressing table; she picked up her brush, and, gazing the while into her mirror, touched the end of her nose softly with the bristles. The doll watched her, watched her watching herself.
        She shivered at some unidentifiable absence of thought.

~ * ~

After some infinite age spent sitting in his workroom with his lamp, his books, and her coffin, staring at the pages in an emptiness that was filled with everything, an energy came upon him. He rose from his place, crushed his tendency to sway on stiff and bloodless feet with an unconscious spell, grabbed his cloak and travelling staff, and departed in the way that wizards know.

His outward search took him then far across the world. He sought out colleagues in hidden places, he visited old friends in strange lands. Wherever he went he asked after ways to bring back the beloved dead, but whomever he spoke with shook their head and sadly turned away. Many had pity for him and gave him the use of rare books and subtle indexical workments that they possessed or gave home to. A few who had known him well talked among themselves as to what they might do to help him recover his self, since this too seemed departed. But himself he would hear nothing but what he took to be the next step in his search for the key to what had been his but now was locked away.

~ * ~

Walking in the garden they had painted together, stretching from the windswept path above the cliff, through cunning rockery, formal garden, coyly dishevelled orchard, to the staunch old forest behind: they had held hands on stone pathways between the gay beds of late spring flowers, exchanged sedate kisses behind geometrically clipped hedges, whispered to each other of fluttering nothings beneath the sound of a small contrived brook.
Pausing to pick up his staff and jaunty new hat where he had cast them on the grass, he followed her around the corner; but she was gone.

With her back to the tree she stood, out of breath, keeping silence, listening. His feet crunched past on the path, seeking her. Her heart pounded with love for him; the tree was rough under her hands. Quietly she turned around and kissed it. It was strange to think this tree was perhaps younger than her handsome husband.

Later on he found her again, sitting in the orchard, surrounded by cuttings of many plants. He didn't know of the game she had been playing, caressing herself with the variously textured petals and leaves and stems. She straightened her clothing as she stood to meet him.
When he pulled her to him, she gasped. He thought this from startlement at a physicality unaccustomed in an open space, truly hoped the surprise pleasant. Her secret was a small bunch of flowers she had concealed within her clothing when first she heard him approach, that she had been planning to convey back to her rooms. After a moment of shocked silence her sensual curiosity got the best of her and she pressed her chest firmly against him, letting the thorns pierce her as they would. Relieved by her appreciative response, he held her for a long time.

~ * ~

Ultimately the need to move departed and he returned to his castle above the village on the lake. It was autumn now and the garden looked complicated where it should have looked simple, simple where it should have confounded the eye. As for the castle, it was empty. Nothing inside was out of place; a fortiori, nothing moved. In his workroom only the lamp flickered slightly at his arrival, shifting the shadows on her body in a way that emphasised the stillness of death. He returned to his desk, sat down, and looked to see what book he had abandoned, half-read, so many months before.
It was a textbook, the introductory work on infomancy that he had first studied at college. It was open to a sample development through first order LaMar transforms of the ontic transresolution of an object, from memories or physical impressions; the example was unimaginatively named _Recovering what is Lost_. Idly he pulled out a scrap of paper and started pushing symbols around....

The classical first-order methods of transresolution always look like they are going to have problems with cospecial formands, but of course they're for the most part only ideally regressive, so it comes out in the wash. But the greater trees - and people - are idic, and the singularity manifests. Well, alright, why can't we find a cancellator? ... But any cancellator has the form of the concretion of a demifascicle, which is co-inimical with the mundane world and you're lucky if it just goes boom.

... Of course, emotically the regress hardly amounts to anything problematic. So. Suppose we tried to construct a uniformly reflective emotic domain - a bit odd, but there's no reason it shouldn't exist. You'd lose a few distinctions between modes of nonmanifestation, which might make refinement of the working harder, but the regressive hinge would just be the cruxal of a complex (or any topical aggregation? Hm.) of finite directed yearnings. That should be manageable, and there's no difficulty at all with the intensionalisation because the emotic indexation is quite direct.

A somewhat roundabout way to get a resolution, of course, but it should serve to reconstruct a personality - and its concomitant corporeal vestment - from the emotional impressions left in the environment. Hm. Eureka?

He didn't stop to consider whether the abstract paper method was practical; he set to work.

~ * ~

Pencil between lips she sat folded in the morning sunlight, on a sill on the stair winding up the eastern tower. She stared intently into space, seeking there the words that would capture the precise sense of her present being for the diary held braced against her knees. A cloud struck glancing shadow from the sun and she had it. Bringing pencil back to paper, she laid out the next sentence in a hand of her own creation.
        Five breaths later came a clattering from above and the bustling of a maid fearsomely armed with duster and broom. The silver thread of her thought stretched and threatened to part. Finally the maid backed fully into view and turned to attend to the window. She started at the frowning presence on the sill.
        "Pardon, my lady. I didn't know you were here."
        The thread broke. "Of course I'm here!"

"Should I, um, would you like to move, or, or should I come back? Later. Only, the window, I..."
The diary snapped shut. "You _stupid_ woman! Do you know what you've done? You distracted me and now - now it's _gone_! Do you understand? I'll never capture that thought again. Get out of here, get out, before I throw something, before I scream...."

~ * ~

He went to her rooms with a large velvet bag and reverently collected the things to which he thought she might have been especially attached: her doll, a summer dress, some items from a drawer full of smooth stones and old disintegrating flowers, her hair-brush, a necklace, her diary, a strange piece of glass from the table near her bed....

Back in the workroom he draped a heavy cloth over the transparent coffin. Next he prepared the platform that was carved into the central staff of the castle, and brought to it the items he had collected. When all was in perfect order, he began the working.

~ * ~

She awoke from a strange dream, but the place in which she found herself was stranger. She was lying on her back in a dark room full of pinkish fog. Heaped around her were her possessions: a hundred objects, fragments, each one impossibly dear. A profound vibrancy suffused her, entering her body wherever her naked skin touched the wooden ledge on which she lay.... There was a draft from somewhere, and she was faintly cold. Her dress was here. Would it like to clothe her? She held it against her face, and it came to her that it would. It was then that she noticed the man watching her through the slowly clearing mist.

He had watched this creature coalesce, ontogeny all but recapitulating psychogeny: mouth before womb, breasts before back, shoulders before shins, till finally it was her before him again: not the empty husk beneath the drapery at the side of the room, but a living, breathing woman. He stood motionless beside the platform as she began to find herself.
Before even she opened her eyes she spread her limbs, trying to establish contact with as many of the objects about her as she could, as if for assurance of her corporality. Finally her eyelids flickered up, and in a moment she sat, burying her face in the white cotton dress that had lain at her right hand. At last she shook it out by the shoulders - and saw him. Her eyes opened wide and her mouth reshaped into a sigil of worried surprise. Why is this man staring at me with such open hunger on his face? he could all but hear her think.

After a startled moment she climbed carefully backwards down from the shelf and, using the dress as a makeshift bag, hurriedly gathered her belongings and backed across the room to a corner.

~ * ~

The party was to be perfect in every detail. It was her birthday, and nothing would go wrong. Her mood was sparkling, unbreakable, giddy, intense. She was directing the rearrangement of the hangings in the ballroom - some maid had earlier tried her best, but the poor thing had only half a grasp of tradition and none of style, the effect had been depressingly like the decoration they had had for the new year's eve.
With three women perched precariously on chairs, she was concentrating on trying to get things properly horizontal when a servant blundered through the door with a bowl of some ghastly red fluid in his arms. He brushed the fabric where it hung down the side of the door.
"You idiot, you fool! You could have spilled that, I'm sure you've stained the cloth, Maria! Did he splash your dress? Put that down, get out, get out, get - !"

He reached the bottom of the stairs. Now they were married she had insisted that their joint celebration of her birthday be a vast public affair. Well, nothing wrong with bringing some life into the castle, though she was alone enough for him. He hurried down the passage to the ballroom. Someone was shouting.

"Get - !" He appeared at the doorway as she spoke. She pressed her hand to her mouth, and when a moment later it came away, it was like the dawn. She flew across the room to his arms. It was her birthday. Nothing could go wrong....

~ * ~

She stood staring out the window, stroking her lower lip with a piece of amber, her other arm folded across her stomach. He came to her and took her elbow in his hand. A minute more she stood there, then turned to face him, face slack, eyes blank. This time she did not run but turned away and stared across the room. He felt he was not there.

Later on he heard voices in her bedroom. Hope overcoming propriety he let himself in and came upon her combing out her doll's hair, talking to it, telling it how special it was, prized above all other things.
He spoke to her then, but she did not hear.

~ * ~

He was close to despair. In three months she hadn't spoken but to her doll and her brush. It was ever harder to doubt that she was damaged, that something had gone awry in the working. This strange creature who had in her world room only for things was not his bride.
And therein lay his error, perhaps: in calling her back through possessions alone, had he - somehow - limited her to interaction with the inanimate?

There was a sense, though, in which the spell had worked. While it was hard to know if the personality this new creature possessed really reflected some private self of his wife, still it looked like her, moved like her, seared him with a stencil of his onetime joy at her existence, fashioned now of fire and ash.
Finally he determined that he must try again. Evidently he must have people among the keys, those who had worked for her in the castle and those who had known her in the town. He feared to tell them what he hoped to accomplish; but no matter his strange behaviour since his wife's untimely death, when he bade them, the people came.

This time the whole workroom was shrouded, concealing the stranger implements of his trade and vocation from the eyes of the gawking laity who filled the space around the table. Remembering her nakedness at the time of the failed attempt he made the villagers and servants turn their backs as he went about the working.

~ * ~

Dusk found her once more behind the slightly better inn; the smell of rotting garbage in this alleyway each time now brought her an anticipatory thrill of its own. When she tapped the kitchen door the kindly innkeeper's wife bustled her in with a world-wise wink, shooed her upstairs with a cheap bottle wine.
When she opened the door to the room, her lover was... not in a proper state of dress. She fell upon him gaily, and then he upon her, and then - it was some time before they got around to opening the wine, and the manner of its drinking was at times a trifle unrestrained.
Much later again found her lying beside him and thinking that, in all prudence, it might be time to start walking back up the hill. But then, what place in this place prudence?

~ * ~

As soon as she was fully and conventionally material she sat alertly up, surrounded by the backs of poor and grubby peasants. She snatched the shift from the wizard's outstretched hand and clothed herself as best she could.
        "These people," she began. Several of them jumped, most turned round, one of the villagers started screaming hysterically. The servants, though, had half known what to expect. "What are they doing here, all standing around gawking as at some carnival show? Have you all no work to do?"
        Hastily he shooed the crowd from the room, instructing the servants to disperse the villagers to their homes, curious or no. Fortunately they seemed, for the most part, far more than willing to leave. When they were finally alone he turned to her in relief. Her eyes were like green-smouldering coals.
        "- And you! What are you doing standing there like some idiot? I don't know how you fooled me into marrying you, anyway! I could have married a noble, a duke, a prince, if you hadn't tricked me with your sorcery! I wish -"
        He ran from the room, tears burning at his eyes. A moment later he heard a door slam and footsteps banging down the stairs toward her bed.

~ * ~

Another time they talked of the wizard:
        "Of course I love him. But he's an old man. He's lusty enough, but he thinks like an old man. He thinks I'm precious, fragile, breakable."
        "You're not breakable?"
        She gave him a strange look and half a smile. "Would you like to try?"

~ * ~

Eventually, in despair, he sent these two strange women away.

Having now promised himself he would make no more attempts to reconstruct his lost bride, the notion of finding out quite how she had come to her fatal fall obsessed him. She had been walking without shoes, tripped on the hem of her dress, and gone headlong down the stairs; that was clear. But where had she been going, all silent, in the middle of the night? Why?
He tried questioning the villagers; but it seemed that the more he asked the less they knew. Perhaps it had been the shock of seeing her, seeming to see her, alive again, that had turned them against him. Perhaps some superstition, or some mistaken belief about how it had been worked.
He tried, at great cost now two years and more had passed, various methods to reconstruct the events leading up to the tragedy, but to no avail: after sleeping poorly, she had got up from her bed, dressed, walked to the stairs and fallen; as simply as that.

He was beside himself; there seemed nothing more to be learned. He had trouble caring to eat; he had done no work of substance since her death; physical repair of the castle was being done by workmen hired by the housekeeper, as he had long since stopped finding time to attend to it among the long lonely hours of the day.

Finally, one morning, came a note from the wife of an innkeeper in the town. For a consideration; no reprisals to be taken on anyone; no guarantees; but information. The solution to his mystery at last.

His haste was such that he did not return for his coat, though the rain turned to sleet as he started down the road.

~ * ~

Once more everything was prepared. Her lover was just standing there, arms flopping slack, looking confused and extremely nervous; presumably he could imagine nothing to his benefit arising from his presence.
In view of her unnatural reaction to the possessions with which he had first tried to call her back, hastily he sent him from the room the moment she started to condense. The poor youth just looked relieved.

Finally she was fully solid and her small movements lost their shimmer and became those of a normal physical body. She spread her limbs, stretched, rolled her neck around; and, quite slowly, opened her eyes. She looked up; as saw him standing above her head, a great lazy smile spread up her face.... She sat.
        She was smiling at him!
        His head swam as he handed her her dress. She rose from the platform, took the dress from his hand, and, still smiling, dropped it at his feet. She stepped onto it. Then throwing her arms up around his neck, she pulled his face down to hers, thrust her tongue into his mouth, tugging at his hair....
        He stood rigid with surprise.
        She took half a step back and cocked her head on one side. Her smile faded for a moment, reappeared; she knelt before him on the dress, her favourite dress, reached for the fastenings of his trousers, her mouth falling slowly open....
        He fled.

~ * ~

It had taken the old priest a long time, far too long a time, to overcome his sense of foreboding and climb up the long, stepped road to knock on the castle door. He had married them and he had tried to pay a call when first she had died, but the servants had turned him away, saying the wizard had made his own arrangements for a funeral and was now away on business. It was hard to approve, but impossible to argue. Later, when talk of the strange happenings in the castle had spread around the town, he had been too nervous. No, he had been afraid. Then, at last, he recognised this fear as the central part of the very thing he had to fight.

Sitting in the library with a brandy in his hand, talking calmly before the roaring fire, he realised that his worries, while not utterly groundless, were mistaken. There was evil here as everywhere, but the evil was a sad compulsion rooted in the love of a good man for his departed wife, made strange by skill and knowledge, impatience and murky vision. The man before him was still the man who he had known when their apparent ages were reversed, still the man he had once thought of as his learned old friend.
After the second drink he persuaded the wizard to lay out the whole story from the start. He had thought to hear it as a confession; instead it became for him a tragedy, or in some sad, quiet way, a comedy.

For some time the priest had been staring silently at his empty glass. Finally, he looked up. On his face was a gentle, sad smile.

"I think perhaps that what you love is what she took with her; but your magic recalls only what she left behind."