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.Now it was Jacob who shook his head.“What about sisters?”“None,” he said.“Or if I did, I don’t remember them, which is possible.”“Having brothers and sisters and not remembering?”“Having a childhood.Having parents.Being born.”“I don’t remember being born,” Will said.“Oh you do,” Jacob said.“Deep, deep inside,” he tapped his breastbone, “—there’s memory in there somewhere, if you knew how to find it.”“Maybe it’s in you too,” Will said.“I’ve looked,” Jacob said.“Looked as deep as I dare.Sometimes I think I get a taste of it.A moment of epiphany, then it’s gone.”“What’s an epiphany?” Will asked.Jacob smiled, happy to be a teacher.“A little piece of bliss,” he said.“A moment when for no reason you seem to understand everything or know that it’s there for the understanding.”“I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those.”“You wouldn’t necessarily remember if you had.They’re hard to hold on to.When you do, it’s sometimes worse than forgetting them completely.”“Why?”“Because they taunt you.They remind you there’s something worth listening for, watching for.”“So tell me one,” Will said.“Tell me an epiphany.” Jacob grinned.“There’s an order.”“I didn’t mean—”“Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it if you did,” Jacob said.“I did,” Will said, beginning to see a pattern in what Jacob asked of him.“I want you to tell me an epiphany.” Jacob poked the fire one last time, and then leaned back against the wall.“Remember how I said I’d endured colder winters than this?”Will nodded.“There was one worse than any other.The winter of seventeen thirty-nine.Mrs.McGee and I were in Russia—”“Seventeen thirty-nine?”“No questions,” Jacob said.“Or you’ll have nothing more.It was the bitterest cold I’ve ever known.Birds froze in flight and fell out of the air like stones.People perished in their millions and lay in stacks unburied because the earth was too hard to be dug.You can’t imagine.well, perhaps you can.” He gave Will a curious little smile.“Can you see it in your mind’s eye?”Will nodded.“So far,” he said.“Good.Well now.I was in St.Petersburg, with Mrs.McGee in tow.She had not wanted to come, as I recall, but there was a learned doctor there by the name of Khrouslov who had theorized that this lethal cold was the beginning of an age of ice, that acre by acre, soul by soul, species by species, it would grasp the earth.” Jacob closed his stained hand into a fist as he spoke, until the knuckles blazed white.“Until there was nothing left alive.” Now he opened his hand, and lightly blew the silvery dust of dried blood off his palm into the dying fire.“Plainly, I needed to hear what the man had to say.Unfortunately by the time I arrived he was dead.”“Of the cold?”“Of the cold,” Jacob replied, indulging the question despite his edict.“I would have left the city there and then,” he went on, “but Mrs.McGee wanted to stay.The Empress Anna, having recently executed a number of well-loved men, had commanded an ice palace to be built as a distraction for her disgruntled subjects.Now if there’s one thing Mrs.McGee loves it’s artifice.Silk flowers, wax fruit, china cats.And this palace was to be the greatest piece of fakery ice and man could create.The architect was a fellow called Eropkin.I got to know him briefly.The empress had him executed as a traitor the following summer—it wasn’t the last winter of the world, you see, except for him.But for the months his palace stood, there on the river bank between the Admiralty and the Winter Palace, he was the most admired, the most lionized, the most adored man in St.Petersburg.”“Why?” Will said.“Because he’d made a masterpiece, Will.I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen an ice palace? No.But you understand the principle.Blocks of ice were cut from the river, which was solid enough to march an army over, then carved, and assembled, just the way you’d build an ordinary palace.“Except.Eropkin had genius in him that winter.It was as though his whole career had been leading up to this triumph.He’d only let the masons use the finest, clearest ice, blue and white.He had ice trees carved for the gardens around the palaces, with ice birds in their branches and ice wolves lurking between.There were ice dolphins, flanking the front doors that seemed to be leaping from spumy waves, and dogs playing on the step.There was a bitch, I remember, lying casually at threshold, suckling her pups.And inside—”“You could go inside?” Will said, astonished.“Oh certainly.There was a ballroom, with chandeliers.There was a receiving room with a vast fireplace and an ice fire burning in the grate.There was a bedroom, with a stupendous four-poster bed.And of course people came in there tens of thousands to see the place.It was better by night than by day I think, because at night they lit thousands of lanterns and bonfires around it, and the walls were translucent, so it was possible to see layer upon layer of the place—”“Like you had X-ray eyes.”“Exactly so.”“Is that when you had your moment of.of—”“Epiphany? No.That comes later.”“So what happened to the palace?”“What do you think?”“It just melted.”Jacob nodded.“I went back to St.Petersburg in the late spring, because I’d heard the papers of the learned Dr.Khrouslov had been discovered.They had, but his wife had burned them, mistaking them for love letters to his mistress.Anyway, it was by then early May and every trace of the palace had gone [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]