by Tad Williams
“Whatever. The last time I saw Eligor he showed a little of his true face, just for a moment. Not that it’s anything like a ‘true’ face,” I explained to Clarence. “Because Eligor and the other fallen angels are . . . well, they’re older than faces, actually. But he lost control, and I saw a little of his seriously-angry-demon face. I should have wondered why he always looked like Vald, even in Hell.” I felt my heart beating. I wouldn’t say I was feeling better, because I was still missing Caz so badly it was all I could do to talk and move around, but for the first time since Marmora turned to sludge in my arms, I felt there might still be something I could do. “But I didn’t think about it. When his disguise slipped in the parking garage, one of his horns was . . . well, kind of crumpled and pathetic. Like when a goat or some other farm animal gets a horn sawed off, then it starts to grow back.”
“So, you’re saying . . .” Sam began.
“That when they made their deal, and our important angel gave Eligor a feather to hold onto, it’s likely that Eligor gave the angel something, too—that horn, which still hasn’t grown all the way back. That’s why he’s been hiding his real Hell-head.”
Sam made an impressed face. “Huh.”
“But knowing that still doesn’t do you much good, does it?” asked Clarence. “I mean, if one of the big angels has Eligor’s horn, how are you going to get hold of it?”
“You mean how are we going to get hold of it,” I said. “Because I can’t do it alone. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and it’s not working. I need both of you to help me.”
Sam laughed, but it was one of his hollower efforts. “You dick. You’re joking, right?”
“I can’t afford to joke about this, Sam. It’s too important. Eligor has the only woman I’ve ever cared about, and he also cheated me out of the feather—something I risked my life a dozen times for, at least. If I get hold of that horn, then I’ve got something on him! A bargaining chip!”
Clarence had finally figured out I was serious. “No. No way, Bobby. It’s bad enough that I’m off meeting up with important demons in my off-hours, and covering up secrets that will get me in a lot of trouble if it ever comes up . . .”
Actually, secrets that will get you sent to Hell—or worse, I thought but was sensible enough not to say out loud.
“. . . but I can’t do this! Stealing from one of our bosses! So that you can get back together with your girlfriend from Hell!”
My pancakes arrived. I doused them in syrup and got to work. Suddenly, I really was hungry. “No, you can’t afford to do that, Clarence. You’re right. But you can’t afford not to, either.”
“Damn it, will you quit calling me Clarence!” He said this so loudly that people at other tables turned to look. He blushed—how come my Earth body never does that?—and leaned close to the table, as if he was only going to talk to the catsup bottle and the napkin dispenser from now on. “What do you mean, can’t afford not to?”
“Because I’m going to go after it no matter what. And although I promise I would never voluntarily rat on either of you, if and when I get busted trying to do this, Heaven will probably squeeze every bit of information about the last few months out of me. Who knows what they can do to find things out? And that means they’re going to know that you should have blown the whistle on both me and Sam a long, long time ago.”
The kid was shocked. “Are you blackmailing me, Bobby?”
“No. Really, no. I’m just being a realist. You can’t play this game both ways, Clarence—or ‘Harrison,’ if you really, honestly like that better. Personally, I think that name sounds like someone should be arranging playdates for you after your Suzuki Method violin classes.” I poured some more syrup. “Clarence is way cooler.”
He seemed stunned, although whether it was what I was saying or the fact that I’d actually remembered his name, I couldn’t say. “I don’t know. I have to think.” A moment later he got up, fumbled out some money and dropped it on the table. “I have to go. I’m on call. I’ll . . . I’ll talk to you later.”
“There goes your ride,” I said as he left.
Sam snorted. “Are you kidding? I drove. Don’t you remember?”
“That was your car we came in? How do you have a car, living in a funhouse mirror?”
“Borrowed it from Orban. He sympathizes with people who are kind of stuck between the two sides.”
“Yeah, I guess he would.” I finished off the rest of my pancakes and downed my coffee. “You wanna drop me back at my place? I’ve got to start thinking about what I’m going to do next.”
“Aren’t you worried about the kid?” Sam stood up, jingling his car keys. “That he’s going to go drop a dime on you or something? Go right to your bosses?”
“Clarence? Yeah, right. That’s why he left five bucks on the table for his cup of coffee. He’s such an idealist, and he wants to hang out with us big boys so badly, that I’ll probably have to hold him back when he decides to storm Heaven itself with guns blazing—for Justice!”
“That’s a very scary thought,” said Sam as we walked out to the parking lot, headed back to my place. “You’re not really planning something like that, are you? I mean, even us Third Way folks don’t actually want Heaven to collapse. Shit, we don’t really even want Hell to collapse—there’s a lot of scary motherfuckers locked up there, and I can’t think of a better place for them.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I agree. I think I met most of them. No, I don’t want to tear anything down. I’m just tired of being kicked around, that’s all. I want the truth.”
Sam flicked away the toothpick he’d been using to work the calamari out from between his incisors. “You know that’s exactly what people always say just before the really bad shit starts happening.”
A bit of a wind came in off the bay, fresh but surprisingly cold.
“I want answers, Sam. I just want a fair shake. I don’t want a revolution.”
He spat something onto the asphalt. “From your mouth to the Highest’s ear, B. Hope He’s listening.”
“Amen, buddy,” I said. “Amen.”
Then, believe it or not, I went home and cleaned my apartment. Because you’ve got to start somewhere.
epilogue
queen of the snows
I WAS THIRSTY. I found a little bottle of bitter lemon in Caz’s refrigerator and brought it back to bed. She was dozing, the sheet pulled up only to her thighs, and I stopped in the bedroom doorway, suddenly unable to breathe. So beautiful. I know I keep saying it, but it’s because I’m not good with words, not about things like that, anyway. She was a small woman, slender, but the curve of her haunch still made weird things happen in the pit of my stomach (and other places). I can’t explain it, but something about that wonderful slope between hip and ribs that you see when a woman’s lying on her side . . . well, it’s a lot like poetry, I guess: If you analyze it too much, you miss the most important part.
And her hair, so long, so straight, so pale, like Caz herself. The longing was already so strong in me that I couldn’t help wondering whether I’d been snared by one of those famous infernal snares. But I hadn’t. It was her, and the things I felt were real. I’d been suckered by Hell more than once. I knew the difference.
She rolled over and peered at me out of one eye. “What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a fallen woman before?”
“Never seen one who fell this far.”
“You mean to San Judas, or to you?”
“Either way.” I sat down on the edge of the bed because I wanted to look at her, and I knew if I got too close I’d get distracted again by all the fascinating novelty of touch and smell and taste.
I know it sounds crazy, but right at the moment I was thinking of a picture I’d once seen of this ’60s actress, Jean Seberg, wearing armor to play Joan of Arc. Unlike Caz, she had her hair cut really short, and, of course, she was wearing a couple of dozen pounds of metal to Caz’s absolutely-nothing-but-half-a-bedsheet. But there was still somet
hing compellingly similar—the delicacy of her face, maybe, the fragility of that slender body set against a big, dangerous world. I don’t think that actress had a much better time of things than Joan, so maybe it wasn’t a very healthy comparison.
“You’re still staring.”
Caught, I laughed. “Sorry. You’re . . . I was just thinking about Joan of Arc.”
“Why, are you planning to set me on fire?”
“Only with mah love.”
Caz laughed, which was nice of her. On her back now, she pulled the sheet up to her navel, which didn’t really solve the problem of me staring or being distracted. “I remember when she was executed.”
“Wow. Were you there?”
“Me?” She shook her head. “No, of course not. You’re such an American! I was in what’s now Poland, at least a thousand miles away. But the word of it spread all over Europe. My husband, may his soul never rest, heard about it when he was traveling and couldn’t wait to come home and tell me about it. He thought it was—I don’t know. Fascinating. Exciting.” She was silent again. “When my own time came, I thought of her. Not of her faith, though. I had none of my own left at that point.”
I was about to ask a question, but the look on her face stopped me.
“I thought of her because the horror was not in dying, but in the hatred of the crowd. There must have been at least a few watching in Rouen who thought she was innocent, after all, or at least not worth hating—someone gave her a cross made of sticks, so she wouldn’t have to face the end without God. But I don’t think there was a single person in that crowd in our city square, not even my own children, who didn’t think I deserved to die in agony.”
At that moment, for the first time, I really felt the difference between her and me, or rather, between her memories and mine. I shuddered, imagining the avid, hostile faces of the medieval crowd.
“Don’t,” I said. “It’s over. You’re here—I’m here.”
She turned to me. For a moment I thought she was angry. I’m still not quite sure what the expression on her face meant, but all she said was, “It’s never over, Bobby darling. Hell doesn’t work that way.”
I climbed in next to her and put my arms around her, and she turned until her rear was against my groin. I did my best to ignore the distracting nearness of her, her warmth against me, the feeling of her breasts moving against my forearms as she breathed.
“I can’t get over how pale your hair is,” I said as I kissed the back of her neck. I spent a lot of our night together doing that. “It’s amazing—nearly white. Do you have Vikings in your family history?” I guess it could have been dyed, although it matched the rest of her coloring, but I had learned enough in my years on Earth to know that, “Do you dye your hair?” is only a marginally more acceptable thing to ask a woman than “When are you expecting?”
She shrugged in my arms. “Vikings? Possibly. But my people were a mixture of so many things: Slav, German, Goth, even Mongols.” She slid back against me, pressing firmly, not in a sexual way but like someone seeking comfort. “There’s an old story about where the golden-haired people come from. A Gypsy story.”
“Gypsy? You have Gypsies in your blood, too?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Her voice had slowed a little; I wondered if she was getting sleepy again. “They had only been in the kingdom for a few generations. But we had a Gypsy servant when I was a girl, and she would sometimes tell me stories while she worked.”
I waited. “And the story? About the people with golden hair?”
It took Caz a moment to get started again. “Yes. She said that once upon a time, a tribe of Gypsies had camped at the base of a mountain. They didn’t go up it, because it was always misty and cold, and at night they could hear voices howling in the wind. The only man who was brave enough to climb it at all was a fellow named Korkoro the Lonely, a young man who had no family of his own. But even he wasn’t foolish enough to climb too high, because he would have been trapped there when the sun went down.
“Then one night there was a terrible, terrible storm, with thunder and lightning. The whole top of the mountain was covered in mist, so that the peak was invisible. A woman appeared near the Gypsy camp—a beautiful but very strange young woman with white hair and blue eyes—”
“Like you,” I said.
“Shut up, Wings, I’m telling a story.” She reached back and stroked me with her hand in such a way that I became very distracted. It worked though: I stopped interrupting. Of course, it did make it a little difficult to concentrate on her Gypsy story.
“Anyway, the first person who met her was Korkoro the Lonely, who liked to roam far from the camp, hunting. He brought her back and the people of the camp fed her and gave her wine to drink, but they were still frightened because she looked so strange. All the Gypsy folk were dark, with hair and eyes like night, but she was like something from another world.
“They asked her where she had come from and who her people were, and the pale-haired woman told them the she was the Queen of the Snows, and that she lived atop the cold mountain with her father, the King of Fog, but that she had escaped from his court because she had heard that humans knew how to love and that was what she wished to learn more than anything else.
“She fell in love with Korkoro, who had found her, and he fell in love with her, and at last the tribe of Gypsies came to trust her, although she was always strange to them. She and Korkoro—who was no longer called ‘the Lonely’—had twenty children, and each one had hair the color of light, like the mother. And that is where golden-haired people came from, according to the Gypsies.”
“And is that the end of the story?”
She stiffened a little in my arms. “Not entirely. I mean, not the version I learned.”
“So what happened?”
“I don’t remember. I’m tired, Bobby. Let me sleep for just a little while.”
And I should have. But I wanted every moment we had, and I also wanted to know why she’d left off the end of the story. “Is it one of those where one of the kids grows up to be some hero?”
“No.” She sighed. “No. Her father, the Fog King, was jealous of her living among humans and especially of her being married to one. So he ordered her to come back or he would destroy the Gypsies. A mist surrounded the Gypsy camp, and it was full of the Fog King’s soldiers. Their eyes gleamed like cats’ eyes. Korkoro wanted to fight, but the Queen of the Snows knew that the Gypsies couldn’t defeat the Fog King, so when it was dark she walked away into the mist and disappeared. But she left her children behind, and they all lived to grow up and marry and bear children of their own, and all of their descendants had the same pale hair, and so ever after in Poland there were people with hair like mine.” She curled herself up a little smaller. “Now let’s sleep. Please.”
“But what did Korky do?”
“What?”
“Korky, Korko, Korkodorko, whatever his name was. Her husband. The one who found her and fell in love with her. What did he do when she vanished back to the Fog Kingdom?”
“Nothing. There was nothing he could do. No living man could reach the top of the mountain where the Fog King lived. Korkoro raised his children. He remembered her. That’s the end of the story.”
“That’s stupid,” I said, and rolled onto my back.
For a moment Caz just lay where she was, but then she gave in and rolled over so that she was facing me, or at least facing my side. Me, I was staring up at the ceiling.
“Stupid? It’s just an old story, Bobby.”
“I don’t care. I want stories to make sense. I would never have let you . . . if I was that Korkadoodledoo guy, I would never have just let her go. I would have gone after her.”
“But he couldn’t.” She said it patiently, as though I could see it too if I just tried hard enough. “There was nothing he could do. She was gone. He had to learn to live without her.”
“No way,” I said. “He should have climbed that mountain.”
> “He would have been killed.” She stroked my head as though I were a feverish child. “And then the children wouldn’t have had a mother or a father.”
“Doesn’t matter. He should have gone after her.”
She stared at me—I could feel it more than see it from the corner of my eyes. Then she levered herself up a bit and lay her head on my chest. “Sometimes there’s just nothing to be done, Bobby.”
“Bullshit, Caz. There’s always something you can do.”
“It’s a fairy tale. Why are you angry?”
She was right, and I didn’t really know why I was angry. I didn’t then. I do now, of course, and I suspect you do, too.
“All the same, he should never have let her go.” I wrapped my arms around her as though to keep her with me when the fog rolled in. “Never.”
“Sometimes it’s more complicated than that,” she told me.