soft snorting sound as Rosie shifted her to a more comfortable position, blew a little spit-bubble between her pursed lips, then fell silent again. Rosie was both amused by and deeply envious of her placid, sleeping confidence.
She started down the path, then stopped and looked back at the single living tree with its shiny green leaves, its bounty of deadly reddish-purple fruit, and the Classical Fables subway entrance standing nearby. She looked at these things for a long moment, filling her eyes and mind with them.
They’re real, she thought. How can things I see so clearly be anything but real? And I dozed off, I know I did. How can you go to sleep in a dream? How can you go to sleep when you’re sleeping already?
Forget it, Practical-Sensible said. That’s the best thing, at least for the time being.
Yes, probably it was.
Rosie started off again, and when she reached the fallen tree blocking the path, she was amused and rather exasperated to see that her arduous detour around the snarl of roots could have been avoided: there was an easy path around the top of the tree.
At least there is now, she thought as she went around it. Are you sure there was before, Rosie?
The rocky babble of the black stream rose in her ears, and when she reached it, she saw that the level had already begun to drop and the stepping-stones no longer looked so perilously small; now they looked almost the size of floor-tiles, and the scent of the water had lost its ominously attractive quality. Now it just smelled like very hard water, the kind that would leave an orange ring around the tub and toilet-bowl.
The squabble of the birds—You did, No I didn’t, Yes you did—started up again, and she observed twenty or thirty of the largest birds she had ever seen in her life lined up along the peak of the temple’s roof. They were much too big to be crows, and after a moment she decided they were this world’s version of buzzards or vultures. But where had they come from? And why were they here?
Without realizing she was doing it until the infant squirmed and protested in her sleep, Rosie hugged the baby tighter to her breast as she gazed at the birds. They all took off at the same instant, their wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline. It was as if they had seen her looking at them and didn’t like it. Most of them flew off to roost in the dead trees behind her, but several remained in the hazy sky overhead, circling like bad omens in a western movie.
Where did they come from? What do they want?
More questions to which Rosie had no answers. She pushed them away and crossed the stream on the stones. As she approached the temple, she saw a neglected but faintly visible path leading around its stone flank. Rosie took it without a single moment of interior debate, although she was naked and both sides of the path were lined with thorn-bushes. She walked carefully, turning sideways to keep her hip from being scratched, holding
(Caroline)
the baby up and out of thorns’ way. Rosie took one or two swipes in spite of her care, but only one—across her badly used right thigh—was deep enough to draw blood.
As she came around the corner of the temple and glanced up at the front, it seemed to her that the building had changed somehow, and that the change was so fundamental that she wasn’t quite able to grasp it. She forgot the idea for a moment in her relief at seeing “Wendy” still standing beside the fallen pillar, but after she’d taken half a dozen steps toward the woman in the red dress, Rosie stopped and looked back, opening her eyes to the building, opening her mind to it.
This time she saw the change at once, and a little grunt of surprise escaped her. The Temple of the Bull now looked stiff and unreal ... two-dimensional. It made Rosie think of a line of poetry she’d read back in high school, something about a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The odd, unsettling sense that the temple was out of perspective (or inhabiting some strange, non-Euclidean universe where all the laws of geometry were different) had departed, and the building’s aura of menace had departed with it. Now its lines looked straight in all the places where one expected such a building to look straight; there