Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. I bow in the direction of California, where Joss lives. Mutant Evils rules! Selat.

Psychomachia

Part Four

Waking, she lay with her face buried in the crook of his neck, caging him in her arms.

It had come to her like a dream turned nightmare, how few of her most recent memories had returned. In fact everything after the closing of the Hellmouth was a blank. How wrong was that? She had put her faith in Memory, and Memory had proven unreliable. She felt cheated, and fretted over it.

Oh, she was sure she had most of her life back, she could see all the events of her childhood, hear those Scooby voices; she remembered her mother, Angel, Dawn, Giles . . . and all those tragedies, those struggles and mistakes, desperate battles and doomsdays . . . right up till the moment that freedom came . . . the death of Spike.

All gates had swung wide upon a bright shiny beckoning world. Well, hadn't anything happened to her after that? She didn't know how the story ended.

Everything before was all bright and shiny, like a display of jewels under diamond lights--wedding-rings, engagement rings--and everything afterward, the sordid laundry-basket of confusion, dammit! With, like, the whites and colors all jumbled and half the socks mysteriously missing. Worse, she had a sneaking suspicion that whatever came out in the wash, it would somehow be her fault. Probably because she had been doing something inappropriate atop the washing machine. And, probably, doing it with Spike. (And not Angel. And wasn't that the whole problem?) Buffy tensed, tightened her death-grip, nuzzled deeper into his arms and told herself to feel the joy, because tomorrow was going to be another day. Spike had died for her happiness. He had saved her, she thought, in every way a woman could be saved; she relaxed at last, savoring her own profundity. Willow wasn't the only Scooby who could have culture.

Why did everything have to be so complicated?

Oh look, he was awake. At last. About time. His hand threaded through her hair, his other hand slid down and spread, big and callused and confident, over her backside so she gave a little involuntary wiggle-shiver. "S'not exactly rocket surgery, sunshine," said his rumbling voice in her ear.

"Spike?"

It was. It was. It was. Him. Spike! "Spike." It came out in a squeak. "You? Alive? Spike? Oh, Spike!"

It was him. Spike with his soul shining in his face--drawing a deep unnecessary breath, meeting her gaze with the shy eager look she had come to know. For an instant, his hand caught hers, gripping tight. Till he moved hastily away, wiping at his eyes and mumbling, "Buffy. Glad to see me?"

"Guh," said Buffy fluently.

Spike Spike Spike chanted an ecstatic voice in the background of her brain.

She ended up full-length on the grass, arms around his waist, gulping like a gaffed fish.

SpikeSpikeSpike!

"Spike, you're d-dead--"

"Yeah," said Spike. "I got--well, I guess it was some kind of a pardon. Woke up here."

"So did I! Because of some stupid--earring, I think, or a book. Look, I've got this locket too? And there are knights and nuns all over. And--hey, what are you doing?"

He had a charred twig, forked at one end, and was winding flower-stems through it, creating a sort of--was it a dreamcatcher? Trendy. "What's it look like? Making sunlight of course. Only--" He gave it a shake, made a disgusted noise. "--isn't working, is it? Don't think I'm using the right ingredients."

"You can make sunlight?"

"Maybe," said Spike; he sounded dubious. "As soon as I figured out how to get around here--"

"You know how to get around this place?"

"What? Yeah. As soon as, I got asked to do all sorts of stuff. Dumb, half-witted, pointless things mostly. Dead dumb, and this was one." He had picked a dandelion, and was shaking it over his contraption. "Still not working," he said, peering at the results.

Buffy wracked her brain for likely ingredients. She finally pulled several hairs from her head and offered them up solemnly.

But: "What're you thinking?" Spike scolded. "Sunlight's fiercer than that, love--burn you up as soon as look at you. And I need to say three words over it, to make the magic work. Only I don't have clue one which words."

"I don't know all that much Latin--"

"You're not a natural blonde either." But, seeing how she pouted, he offered her his dandelion in a gentlemanly way, and she (her spirits absurdly lifting) accepted the posy and secreted it within her sleeve. "I'd better start again," Spike concluded.

Buffy couldn't be concerned with that. She shifted up next to him, nestled against him with her hands tucked around his arm, and just sighed with contentment. "I guess we've got a lot of explaining to do."

He had pulled something even more insubstantial than threads of hair: a long utterly flimsy blade of grass, bent near one end. He began to twist it into a curl. "Why's that?"

"Because of Angel. He was right around here before--uh, did he turn into you? Because, not complaining I guess, but if he didn't, then he's still wandering around somewhere, maybe he rode away on that horse. I punched it, but I don't think that kills a horse. But I thought you were dead, see? Was sure you were dead." She sniffled unhappily, then perked up, because after all, there he was, not dead. "So you have to explain to him--well, we have to, I mean, we ought to find him and tell him about us, um . . . that is, guess I'm saddled with the Big Explaining . . ."

As she spoke, she noticed that Spike was shifting loose of her by imperceptible degrees, as if away from some small noxious and malodorous creeping thing. "What??" she demanded at last.

"You. And Angel-cakes?"

"Oh, jealous huh?" Relieved, Buffy biffed him on the arm. "Only because I thought you were dead. Spike, if only you could know what you did for me, when you gave yourself to set me free--" She stroked his arm lovingly. "I think something was healed in my heart that's been broken for a very long time. I can love again. I never could while we were together, but things are different now, and-- That's what I told Angel, but all because of you, and-- So you see--in a way it was you I meant when I told him that--" She was becoming annoyed and ashamed both at once, because his expression wasn't anything like it should be. "I really sort of actually did it all for you!" she finished.

Spike's hands were shaking. He threw his new experiment down and sat hunched and miserable--all hope of sunshine clearly gone forever.

"Spike?"

One last look at her, then he gathered himself with a visible effort. "I see it now," he said quietly. He stood up, towering over her as she sat on the lush grass, hugging herself in doubt. It was one of the bravest things she had ever seen him do, she understood that later; just then, though, her mind was blank and she could only stare as he said, his voice soft and all pretense impossible, stripped bare before her: "I know the words for sunlight. Rest of the charm, it doesn't matter." He spread his arms, and spoke.

"Summers. Dawn. Buffy."

She was instantly blinded. He vanished into an outline of tongues of flames, brilliant fire silhouetting his body as if he had become an empty doorway. Through this doorway, for an eyeblink, Buffy saw a vista of a world chock-full of day--all the sunlight that anyone could ever want--of green hills, blue sky and fleecy floating clouds, of trees and flowers and life. Next moment, as if he had stepped through and closed the way behind him, it all blinked into darkness again.

Spike was gone, and the garden of desire with him. She was left alone, huddled on bare ground, in a forest of sere and leafless trees.

Only then did she begin to comprehend her mistake.

#

Guilt propelled her onto her feet, sent her stumbling through the night forest. The boughs of the trees were like polished bones now, and leaves crackled under her erratic steps. A wind whipped up with a moan. She had lost her slippers somehow, her bare feet were bruised by stones and roots; she had lost her wimple, and her heavy skirts hampered her. Above, the sky boiled with sudden clouds--thunderheads, fiery-edged, a billowing smoke of clouds that swallowed moon and stars. Her heart was bleak. At last she slowed her dragging steps, stood beneath a skeleton oak. With a lonely sniffle, she hung her head and let a single tear fall into the dust.

In that moment, the sky opened and the rain came hissing down, great drops splashing and ploughing tracks in the withered earth of the night land. It was now perfect, velvet dark.

It rained and clouds seethed, the dead boughs creaked and tossed, and Buffy hunched her shoulders beneath the lash of the storm, heart-broken.

She saw a shining light ahead, flickering past the black bars of the wet tree-trunks.

It was an Angel passing by. Buffy froze as the light approached, serene and silvery, like the moon traveling through the zodiac-prison-house of the world: an angel caught unawares, his face serenely uplifted and hands joined in prayer, and his great wings were upraised behind him, plumage of swansdown and long ivory primaries; the sight hit her like a zag of lightning, his passionately calm face and ferocious gaze, which neither noticed nor dismissed her, but slid by without a blink; and he was beautiful. She had never seen anything like him before, never in her life. He seemed not to feel the chill of the downpour, but glided along, feet scarcely seeming to brush the ground; the slow rise and fall of his wings, carrying him forward with those long weightless steps, was a dance, a song, hymn music.

In fact, his feet didn't touch the ground at all. They left no mark behind them, did not seem to tread on the material world. She wished she could steal up behind him and pinch him, to see if her fingers passed right through. Maybe the rain fell through him too. But in the light he shed--even his feet were glowing--she noticed that the grey grass was lit with green, revealed as full of flowers, the earth warmly brown underneath, with multi-colored pebbles; the trunks of the trees he brushed past were living green, and in fact this bleak dead world was the very same world which had harbored her nuns. The sunlight that Spike had sought was here. But it was hidden.

Because he walked through it, the cemetery wood became a churchyard.

Because he did not attend to Buffy, she was made invisible.

Then he looked straight at her, and spoke.

Here was an even stranger thing. She didn't understand a single word he said, but she knew exactly what he meant. It wasn't English. But there was magic in it, irresistible. Maybe he was just chanting a rhyme, something as simple as "Rain rain go away," but if that was all, it was still magic. Because he smiled at her while he spoke, and before he had finished, the rain had ceased, the sky above had cleared and filled with sudden stars, and the bright moon was beaming down.

The woe in her heart was eased. Something crackled in her sleeve; puzzled, she pulled out the dandelion Spike had given her. It had been a flower, it was a letter now. By angel-light she read it: "All year I searched for a candle, to light the cave of your darkness . . ." Aww, it was like poetry. She had never know he could write the stuff! Her gaze leaped hungrily from phrase to phrase. "Think it's becoming a habit thanks to you . . . but I still do all the things vampires do. Drink blood, and change, and smash and bash . . ." Her lips moved (Buffy had never been a fluent reader) and the words were smiles on her mouth: ". . . lay down to sleep on a barren hillside, and you came and rested in my arms . . ." The rest of the letter was in verse. But by the time she got that far, the Angel was moving away, and the letter was changing back into a withered weed with a broken stem. "Hey--wait!" Holding out Spike's message, she trotted after the Angel.

But as fast as she walked after him--brandishing her flower beseechingly, holding it aloft like a flag--he retreated from her, leading her through the wood. He seemed to know his way. Soon enough the curve of a tall brown-brick wall became visible through the trees. Buffy spotted this, and began to walk even faster. As he reached it, a gate opened in the wall and he stooped to pass through. Buffy rushed after him then, but he had already drawn his long wings through the narrow gateway, retreating with a whisk of white feathers. She stumbled, and set her foot down on the other side of the gateway, saying, "Where did you go, Angel? And is this--?"

It was her own convent garden, and it was full of nuns.

"Mother Kynde, you've come back to us!" Thus cried Fair Play, catching Buffy jubilantly in her arms (almost scaring her out of ten years' growth); and a round dozen of her sisters were close on her heels.

"Where have you been, Mother? Oh! We gave you up for dead!"

"Sister Flibbertigibbet, hold your tongue, don't you think Mother knows she's broken the Rule?"

"How naughty of you, running away into the world like that!"

And Fair Play said, "Misery me, ever since you strayed, I've been greeting and weeping from matins to compline, a very Margery of Kemp!"

They all grabbed hold of Buffy and hustled her by main force through the gardens. "Quickly, quickly, else we'll be late!" Behind them the gate in the wall racketed to and fro. There was no sign of the Angel, though Buffy twisted in the grasp of her nuns, craning to look over her shoulder. "O be quick, quick!" She gave up the search for the Angel, and just ran. Stumbling through the garden, dodging trees her sisters would have run her straight into--though she never did drop her dandelion-prize. Till, hurried breathlessly along, she almost fell through the convent door, into warmth, firelight, torchlight, bustle, and nuns galore, nuns everywhere--and a roar of angry voices.

There were more nuns that Buffy expected, and they were all in a pother. She stopped short, covered her ears, and gaped at them. Dozens of nuns. A gazillion, even. All shouting just as loudly as they could. Nuns at the top of their lungs, she thought in a daze. They were deafening.

"Listen, I saw a . . ." She held out her limp dandelion forlornly, but no one even noticed. "Uh, guys?"

Sister Frivolous Fancy was running up and down the hall, crying out for order. Sister Daydream, who usually never paid attention, was trying in a frenzy to muster her fellows and set out platters and porridgers on a long trestle table which had been set up as if for a feast. Five or six other nuns rushed in with great salt-cellars cradled in their arms. But they were Daydream and Fancy's only helpers. The rest of the crew was doing everything but working--in fact, most of them were quarreling.

Sister Speechify, whom Buffy had secretly earmarked as the lamest of them all, was up on a chair, haranguing nobody in particular; Sister Blank Face, throwing up her hands, was just turning her back on her in disgust. Concupiscence was almost at blows with Holier-than-thou, Guilt was lecturing both of them, and flighty young Follysweetkiss (pretty as a butterfly, but always suppressed by her more forceful sisters) stood weeping nearby, wringing her hands in woe. Justice was rampaging after Lovingkindness. Sister Punning Wordplay had a split lip. And Sisters Superior and Inferior, a pair of diminutive blondes alike as twins, sported lookalike black eyes: one on the right eye, the other on the left, mirror images even to this. From the look of them, they had socked each other simultaneously.

"Mother, we are a very Purgatory since you left," cried Sister Flibbertigibbet. "Sister Duty has vanished entirely and the Rule of our order, alas, is gone with her--Lewd Dance has done the same, and you don't know how dull it has left us--everything's gone to rack and ruin, oh what shall we do?"

Buffy glanced backward, to where two particularly daft nuns (Dillydally and Contrariwise, she remembered them well) were arguing furiously over how to shut the hall door; one wanted to push and the other to pull, but the problem was that they both kept getting on the same side of the door. They were going nowhere. Meanwhile, the view through the doorway still showed midnight. So that hadn't changed.

"I saw an Angel," Buffy said. "Did one happen to pass through here recently?"

The nuns around her shook their heads. "There are many Angels," they added, not very helpfully, "more than you know," but one said, "By Saint Pierce's pardon! I'll hazard my cockleshell 'gainst half a bean that you've seen Sir Soul."

"Sir Soul?"

"His kind do not often wander abroad, but sometimes he pays us a visit."

"Oh. Look, he showed me?" Again, she held out her dandelion. "It was different," she finished, weakly.

"Did he give you that?" said Follysweetkiss, eying the dandelion. "How . . . lovely. A very rose and comfit of his love."

"Maybe he came to help greet the hunt," Fair Play suggested. "You see how we're laying the tables for a feast. For the hunt comes back within the hour, good Liam has slain his foe Lust--we have had word of it. Oh! Perhaps Sir Soul will come to help us! To do something about--" she looked around furtively, "--that sinful Maid?"

Then she shut her mouth with a snap and looked singularly guilty.

"Who's that?" asked Buffy.

She had thought she knew all of the nuns--every single one of them--but she obviously didn't, no, no, not at all. Because all the sisters within hearing burst into a storm of denunciation. "The Maid of the Black Book is none of ours!" "She's--foreign." "Doesn't wash behind her ears, and her habit? Always bloodstained!" "Worse, she fears neither man nor God." And, "Mother Kynde, don't you see her there?" Fair Play hissed in an undertone, pointing toward the feast-table. She seemed singularly scandalized. But Buffy couldn't see which nun she meant.

Meanwhile, Sister Flibbertigibbet was plucking critically at Buffy's bedraggled habit. "Oh Mother, how terrible you look, like the hare after it was shaved, or the farmwife who fought the snail--what war was fought upon this dress? it looks a very midden-heap, and you've lost your pretty slippers, oh woe is us--forgive me that I ever complained to our sister nuns of you, about your kirtle laced with silk and those pins of yours, of silver gilt, and your fur of vair . . . As for Sir Soul, perhaps he's appeared because of Lady Mede?"

"Mede?" said Buffy--her attention caught by the familiar name.

"Earthly Reward," said Flibbertigibbet, sniffing in reproof. "He's interested himself in her affairs before, has Sir Soul--haven't you heard the scandal? The lawsuit has been before every court in the land . . ." She ran on at the mouth: "There are two brothers both suing to marry her, their names are Want and Need. Want argues that he had fought hard for Mede's hand, but Need claims his case is better, in that he never aspired to look higher than her feet. And though Need has laid suit to her longer with chaste sweet love, Want says he has the more fiery desire."

"Want?" said Buffy, weakly.

"Too, though Want pretends he would be the better lover, Need knows that by every precedent he must always come first . . ."

"Need?"

"Then Need says, too, he has quested and yearned a whole century to win his Mede, whereas wastrel Want's never even wanted the prize, only entered the contest for jealousy of Need. And there is no justice in earth or heaven, Need says, if such a grasshopper fool as Want is given fair Mede. Now how to choose between them? Not even a Solomon could do it."

"Solomon?"

"And," Flibbertigibbet rattled on, throwing up her hands, "it was then that Sir Soul said, I hear, these telling words, 'To some I am an open gate, but to others, a prison wall,' and ever since, the lawyers for Want and Need have been arguing over the difference between a wall and a gate . . ."

Flibbertigibbet tittered behind her hand. And Buffy thought that if she ever became half as silly, she'd strangle herself with her own veil.

Elsewhere, matters at the feast-table had come to a boil. Contrariwise and Dillydally, at last getting their act together (and the door shut) had run over and lent a hand. Speechify, amazingly, had rallied all her sisterhood and mustered them like an army. They set the long table with silver and gold; they marched out of the hall, they marched back in, carrying jugs of foaming ale, whole flitches of bacon on platters, fish and flesh and roasts and stews, frumenty and pottage, sugar cakes, herring relish, white puddings, lark pies, sundry pastries, groats and rusks, fritters, trenchers of fine white bread, and bottle after bottle of wine. All went onto the groaning board. And then--

Just as the table could hold no more--

The doors banged open. In flew the hunt, a very Wild Hunt; in its wake the hall was transformed. It swarmed with bluebottles and centipedes, with caterpillars and squirming worms. The walls grew holes. The ceiling grew thin, till it tore like cobwebs, letting in the wind-gusts, with sheets of rain that wavered across the floor. The lamps blew out. A new hellish light leaped orange from the flagstones, flickering cold where the huntsmen had trodden. And the huntsmen themselves . . . !

They came in a frenzy of jerking legs and arms, less natural-looking than spiders darting along a wall. Every kind of vileness and insanity was there. In an instant, Buffy's nuns were swept aside. There were gribbledy-men and capering shadows, and madmen who rolled along the floor; there were ghouls and demons and waking nightmares, and many thing worse than those. Some were distorted in every source of human perception: with eyes where their mouths ought to have been, and eyesockets crammed full of wriggling fingers. Some fell apart as they rushed in, shedding wet sheets of flesh. Others were turning into giant carrion-birds, strutting roosters, hogs and animals. There were lurching suits of plate-armor that bonged like bells, revealing themselves hollow inside--nothing remaining within but old dry bones of human affection and endeavor. One had lost a foot somehow, and the fragments of its skeleton came rattling out with every step, lay strewn on the floor in a breadcrumb-trail. The black-armored knights Buffy had met before were here too, now unhelmed, unmasked. But their features were so obscured by flies and whirling beetles that she could not recognize them.

At their head was the Black Knight himself--the true Black Knight, come at last.

From his wrist, by dangling jesses, fluttered a certain something, small as a merlin falcon with rustling moth-wings. And he was dragging something else with him, something that shone, dazzling, pure. It was the Angel. He was wrestling with the Angel, he had him in a headlock and was dragging him triumphantly onward, white wings threshing in wild beats against the foulness on the floor. He was dragging the Angel toward the dinner table.

Buffy found herself shouldering past her fleeing nuns, running straight at the Knight and the Angel. She shouted as she came. She caught up a great salt-cellar, hurled it hard and true at the Black Knight. The Knight roared with laughter, ducked the missile. Then he cast what he carried on his wrist.

In jesses and bells, it was the little dragon Anomie. It grew, and grew, and filled the hall from wall to wall. It flew into Buffy's face, wrapped her round and paralyzed her, till she dropped to the floor and lay face down, staring at the stones an inch from her nose, not caring what happened anymore. Wrapped in the chains of Anomie's wings.

The Knight stepped over her; uncaring, she heard the cling cling and ring ring of his armor. The Angel was dragged over her next. She barely noticed, though she was rolled about and squashed, and smeared with gore and snapped flight-feathers. They passed her by. The Wild Hunt followed, rushing past like a gust of fever wind. The Black Knight raised up the vanquished Soul, flung him broken and bloodied onto the festive board. The good food was sent flying, every dish overturned.

With a hollow musical clang, the knights marched to their places at table. The Black Knight reached up and back, pulled off his helm and cast it away. It was Angelus.

"Dinner's served," he grinned.

To be continued ...