Rosie turned right and began walking with Caroline-it was as good a name as any, surely-cradled in her arms. She never quite lost that nightmarish floating feeling, nor her fear that she would eventually come to an intersection she had forgotten to mark with a seed, but at every choosing-point the seed was there. Erinyes was there, too, however, and the thudding of his hooves on stone, sometimes far-off and muffled, sometimes close and terrifyingly sharp, reminded her of the time she and her parents had gone to New York City when she had been only five or six. The two things she remembered best about that trip were the Rockettes high-kicking their way across the stage at Radio City Music Hall, their legs moving in perfect unison, and the intimidating bustle and confusion of Grand Central Station, with its echoes and huge lighted signs and its tidal flows of people. The people in Grand Central had fascinated her much as the Rockettes had (and for many of the same reasons, although this idea would not come to her until later), but the sound of the trains had scared her badly, because you couldn’t tell where they were coming from or where they were going. The disembodied squeals and rumbles swelled and faded, swelled and faded, sometimes distant, sometimes seeming to shake the very floor under one’s feet. Listening to the bull Erinyes charge blindly through the maze brought that memory back with amazing clarity. Rosie understood that she, who had never wagered a single dollar on the state lottery or played a single card of church Bingo for a turkey or a set of glassware, was now running in a game of chance where the prize was her life and the forfeit would be her death… and the baby’s death, too. She thought of the man in Portside, the one with the handsome, unreliable face and the game of three-card monte set up on top of his suitcase. Now she was the ace of spades. The cold fact was that the bull didn’t necessarily need its ears or its sense of smell to find them; it might stumble upon them by dumb luck. But that didn’t happen. Rosie came around a final corner and saw the stairs ahead. Gasping, crying, and laughing all at the same time, she hurried out of the passageway and ran for them. She climbed half a dozen, then turned and looked back. From here she could see the maze twisting and sprawling its way into the dimness, a right-and-left-angled confusion of turns, junctions, and blind alleys. Somewhere far off to the right she could hear Erinyes galloping. Galloping away. They were safe from it, and Rosie’s shoulders sagged in relief. The voice of

“Wendy” filled her head: Ne'mine that-you get on back here with the child. You done good, but you ain’t done yet. No, she certainly was not. She had over two hundred stairs to climb, this time with a child in her arms, and she was exhausted already. One at a time, dear, Practical-Sensible said. That’s how you have to do it. One step at a time. Yes, yes. Ms P amp; S, Queen of the Twelve-Step Philosophy. Rose started up (one step at a time), looking over her shoulder from time to time and thinking half formed (can bulls climb stairs?) dreadful thoughts as the maze fell behind her. The baby grew heavier and heavier in her arms, as if some weird mathematical law had come into force here: the closer to the surface, the heavier the kid. She could see a starpoint of daylight above her, and she fixed her eyes on it. For awhile it seemed to mock her, growing no closer at all as her breath came faster and the blood pounded in her temples. For the first time in almost two weeks her kidneys really began to hurt again, throbbing in dull counterpoint to her laboring heart. She ignored all of these things-as well as she could, anyway-and kept her eyes fixed on the starpoint. At last it began to swell and to take on the shape of the opening at the top of the stairs. Five steps from the top, a paralyzing cramp sank into the big muscles of her right thigh, knotting the flesh from the back of her knee almost all the way up to her right buttock. When she reached down to massage her leg, it was at first like trying to knead stone. Groaning softly, her mouth pulled down in a trembling moue of pain, she worked on the muscles (this was something else she had done for herself many times during the years of her marriage) until they finally began to loosen. She flexed the leg at the knee, waiting to see if the cramp would seize her again. When it didn’t, she cautiously climbed the last few stairs, favoring the leg as she went. At the top, she stood looking around with the dazed eyes of a miner who has, contrary to all his expectations, survived a terrible cave-in. The clouds had rolled away during her time underground, and the day was now filled with hazy summer light. The air was heavy and humid, but Rosie thought she had still never drawn a sweeter breath in her entire life. She turned her face, wet with sweat and tears, gratefully up to the faded blue denim she could see between the unravelling clouds. Somewhere in the distance thunder continued to rumble balefully, like a beaten bully making empty threats. That made her think of Erinyes, running in the darkness below, still looking for the woman who had invaded its domain and stolen its prize. Cherchez la femme, Rosie thought with a trace of a smile. You can cherchez all you want, big fella; this femme-not to mention her petite fille-is gone.

Rosie walked slowly away from the stairs. At the head of the path leading back into the grove of dead trees, she sat down with the baby in her lap. All she wanted was to regain her breath, but the hazy sun was warm on her back, and when she raised her head again, some small change in the lie of her shadow made her think she might have dozed a little. As she got to her feet, wincing at the pain that shot through the muscles of her right thigh, she heard the harsh, squabbling cry of many birds-they sounded like a big family having a rancorous argument at Sunday dinner. The child in her arms made a 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