The village downtown had a saloon, and even a theater. Outlaws, apparently, love the bard as much as the next fellow. Supplies came in down the river. Farley had a little ranch with some cows, pigs and chickens.
Then there was the diamond mine. All the outlaws were investors, and that kept the village running. We were diamond magnates.
All this made for a pretty easy life, and it would have been the life I’d have wanted for myself had I given up all ambition and hope for self-improvement. I had plenty of good wine for the first time in a long while, Shakespeare whenever I wanted it, I was a diamond magnate, and Hester was beautiful.
So I was happy. I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew the battle that was coming, and that I might not survive it. I was happy, as I had been in 1863, as the last War loomed. Why not?
Sunday, April 20, was Hester’s birthday, so I rode across town to Farley’s ranch, bought myself a little cow, dragged that cow back to our house. Hester took the cow out back to slaughter – Hester had very strict ideas about the humane slaughter of animals – then returned to the house, her apron covered with blood, but a lovely steak in her hands, which I grilled, and which we ate under the stars on our second floor balcony, as monkeys swung from vines that hung from trees whose names I didn’t know, and birds I didn’t recognize squawked and chirped overhead.
The steak was good, and so was the French wine that I chose to accompany it, and I was getting nice and warm in my gut. At about 11 o’clock in the evening, we climbed into our little carriage, smacked our stallion and rode into the center of the little village that the diamond mine had built, and from the terrace of the smoky café at the very western edge of town, we listened to Christine Nilsson, the famous and almost supernaturally beautiful Swedish soprano, who sang the aria from Mignon in the town square in a rain forest by a diamond mine beside the Amazon river. Were I not already in love with the deadling Lucy Billings, and also in love with the very-alive Hester Smith, I might well have fallen in love with the beautiful and golden-throated Christine Nilsson right off-the-reel.
Hester nibbled at my ear when no one was watching.
I sighed.
“If one were to choose a final stop for one’s life,” I said, “this would have to be top of the list.”
“I should give up my mission?” she asked. “When I am so close?”
“I’ve lived through enough horrible for ten men,” I said. “For ten ninety-year-old men. That’s how much horrible I’ve lived through.” I pointed to Hester. “And you too, darlin’. You and I shared the very same long day of horrible back in 1863, if I recall correctly, and your life before that … well, you’ve got the soul of an angel, Hester, and if there were a God in heaven, He’d be looking out for his angels, you know, He’d be serving you blessings on a golden plate. Up till now, you haven’t really deserved the life you’ve been served. Up till now. And now you deserve to live happily here till the end of your life.”
As for me, I told her, I wanted to die happy and warm in the Amazon jungle, with wine in my belly, and Hester in my arms. Was it not possible that were I to survive my Sidonian mission, I could return to her warm embrace and retire from the almost-dying business once-and-for-all?
“Hester,” I said. “Please do not go.”
She just smiled.
“I’m here tonight,” she said. “And you are too. We both have things left to do with our lives.”
I wondered why she must go, and Hester said that she had sworn an oath to gather her brothers and sisters and to march to a homeland kingdom abandoned for millennia. It was an oath that she had sworn to her ancestors’ graves.
“We are dispersed around the world,” she continued, “but when rejoined, we will make a fearsome army, and we will retake our kingdom, re-anoint our king and usher in a new era, perhaps of world peace, perhaps of terrible never-ending conflict, but at least we will be home, and together again.”
“Well,” I whispered, really to myself. “You ask a silly question….”
Hester kissed me. “Come with me, Watt,” she said. “After your revenge. After you leave Darryl Fawley dead for what he has done. You should come with me. What will this village offer you, once it can no longer offer a life with me?”
The lovely Miss Nilsson hit an even lovelier high C that shattered a wine goblet at a table on an overhead terrace, and shards of glass rained down on us from above. The broken glass glowed in Hester’s hair, and the stars glowed in Hester’s eyes.
“Come with me, Watt,” she said. “Come with me across the sea and see what my Kingdom will offer you. Follow me again, just one more time. When the man you hate is dead and can haunt you no longer, hold your breath, and follow me one more time, as I held my breath and followed you into an ancient ocean.”
I had just begun to consider thinking about this, when a voice I recognized well bellowed out of the darkness.
“Watt O’Hugh the Third!” he exclaimed.
It was Billy Golden, the best Roamer who ever lived, and the only man who knew how to change the past and mold the future. He was also the worst enemy that the Sidonian movement had ever seen. He approached our table arm-in-arm with the luscious Christine Nilsson, who was smiling like a diamond in the jungle.
They sat down at our table without asking if we minded. I could not take my eyes off Billy Golden. One minute he was young; the next minute, old. I could see him roaming back and forth through Time, writing and rewriting this scene, trying it again and again, working our lives like wet clay. This particular moment in history was vital, in some inscrutable way.
“Look at him,” Christine said in her laughing Swedish accent. “One minute he is a handsome young man. Then the next minute, a handsome old man. Always, though, handsome handsome. So handsome.” The ageing and unageing did not seem as remarkable to her as his consistent handsomeness.
She smiled, and she put one hand on the crook of his arm, and the other hand on his knee.
“This is an important moment to you,” I said. “You’re working very hard to get it right.”
He smiled, and he was old.
“I’m in a jungle paradise,” he said, “with a beautiful, famous chanteuse by my side.”
“You must have puffed that one many times,” Hester said.
Billy agreed.
“Some things are worth working on,” he said. He tapped the table in front of Hester. As a toucan squawked in the jungle – a toucan he was expecting, because he had heard it many times before – he whispered “Congratulations are in order,” adding, “I don’t think I will be changing the future or your life to tell you that your baby will be strong as Hercules and will arrive as scheduled. Put your mind at ease.”
I did not hear this, but Hester reddened a bit, and she gazed down at her fingertips.
“What?” I said.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“What did you say?” I asked, but they both remained silent, and then I gave up.
I took her hand. With a keen sense of the obvious, I noted that Hester and Billy seemed to be acquainted, and Billy said that he was helping her identify brethren in far-flung locales to build her army.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “That army of Hester’s. Hester’s army.”
“How do you think she learned about roaming?” he asked. “About your ghosts? Hester loves you terribly, Watt. She loved you when she saw you battle that mob in 1863. And the minute she heard your lazy, drunk voice in that little hovel you called home, she loved you more. All that is true. But she has not told you the whole truth. She didn’t find you in the middle of the desert by accident. You have known that all along, but you didn’t ask. You always knew that someone sent her. She’s known more about you than she let on. All those questions she asked you. She knew the answers all along.”
“Don’t let him drive a wedge between us,” Hester said.
I nodded.
“He’s wily,” I agreed.
“La lucha continua,” Billy said. “Sidonia is on the
march.”
“We traveled to the future,” Hester said. “You see, Billy? We traveled to the late 20th century, and it was not a future in which Sidonia had taken over the world. So we know the end of this story, do we not?"
He sat back with a smile, took a long puff on his cigar.
“Ahah. Do you want to travel to a future in which Sidonia wins? Now that is something to see! A real horror show, Hester. We shall leave now, if you wish. Although, my dear, I cannot promise a safe return.”
In my study:
“I’m not sure that I’m glad to see you wrapped up in all this, Billy,” I said. “You agreed that I was out after the Lervine deal.”
He nodded.
“I let you out of the bargain to which you had willingly agreed,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “But you let me out. This isn’t supposed to be a Billy Golden operation.”
“But Hester promised you vengeance, did she not? Is vengeance not your reward for helping us to rob the train and retrieve the scroll? Why does it hurt to have as much help as you can?”
The opera singer sat down on an oversized chair in her oversized dress, and she crossed her legs.
“Watt,” Billy said. “Hester understands you. She knows that you need this. She knows you love Lucy, and she knows that you will never stop thinking about Lucy, not even for a moment, if you cannot avenge her. If you do not achieve your vengeance, she might as well leave you now and travel across the ocean alone, because you will never leave Lucy behind. I can be of value, I think. I have certain tricks up my sleeve.”
I stared at Billy, pondering this scenario.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.
“Beg pardon?”
I said: “On the road out of Lervine, I asked Madame Tang why she followed your Cause. She said she didn’t. And she said something like, Billy’s Cause is not what it seems, but I don’t know what it is. His Cause seems stupid, but Billy is not stupid. And so his Cause must be something else, something other than what he says it is.”
Billy nodded, noncommittally.
“The person who knows you the best,” I said, “doesn’t understand you at all, and believes that you’re a liar.”
“What is this revenge?” the opera singer asked.
“Lucy Billings was a subversive,” Hester whispered, “and Watt loved her in the 1860s, in gilded New York City. She thought the Sidonians believed what she believed – freedom, and love, and equality. So she married a Sidonian leader, Darryl Fawley. But the Sidonians believe in power, that’s all, and money. The power of Sidonia weakened her, made her sick. She was dying, but Darryl Fawley would not free her, and he imprisoned her in a Sidonian outpost called Weedville, where she died. If Watt had arrived in Weedville a day sooner, he could have saved her. As it was, he spent a night in the arms of her deadling, and she vanished by sunrise.”
“If I were a man,” Christine Nilsson said, in her beautiful voice, “and someone allowed the woman I loved to die, I would….” She yawned. “Oh, what would I do? I would shoot in the head. I would rip off arms. I would feed to the … Oh, I would not let anyone get away with this, if I were a man….”
And her beautiful voice trailed off.
I glanced at Hester, who left to mix drinks in the next room, and I asked them in a whisper if they even understood.
Billy leaned forward.
“Do you think that the Sidonians will stop with Lucy? Do you think they are finished with you? Lucy deserves to be avenged, of course. And Hester’s kingdom will be a counter-Revolutionary stronghold, and she needs to be protected. But beyond that, there are other Watts in the world, and other Lucys, and other Hesters. Watts and Lucys and Hesters who are in love and who deserve happiness, and who will receive instead death and tragedy, if Sidonia is not stopped. We’re all in the same cooking pot, Mister. We’re all swimming around in the same soup together.”
I sighed, and I asked Billy what he wanted. Hester came into the room and she planted a drink in front of each one of us, and then she sat on the arm of my chair. She held my hand.
“I only want what you want, my friend. I want you to kill Darryl Fawley. I want you to kill Allen Jerome.”
Hester clenched my hand tightly. I turned to her, and she kissed me on the forehead.
Billy looked over at the opera singer.
“I love her, you know,” he said. “She is the greatest opera singer who ever lived. But no one will ever record her voice. For centuries to come, the world will take the word of men of the past. The greatest singer who ever lived, the most beautiful voice that the human ear has ever heard, was Christine Nilsson. I am the greatest Roamer the world will ever see – a terrible burden, O’Hugh, I take no pride in this – but even I, the greatest Roamer the world will ever see, can do nothing to change this future, the beauty the world will lose.” He squinted at the singer, and he sighed, and suddenly he was old, a very old man, more than eighty. He seemed near-death, suddenly. “How I love her, O’Hugh,” he gasped, tears in his voice. “Everything I have done, throughout these terrible thousands of years of roaming … it always leads back here, to this night in the jungle, to her, that woman right there. I cannot ever leave this night behind.”
I wondered if this story had something to do with the mission to Sidonia, and I realized that it did not, that Billy was now just an old man, filled with love and regret. The old Roamer stood up from his chair with a terrible effort and walked slowly and painfully to Christine Nilsson’s side, and he knelt down slowly and painfully before her. She cradled his head in her arms, and she ran her fingers through his thin tufts of old-man hair.
I turned to Hester.
“And you, Hester?” I said. “What do you want? Deep down inside. Is it worth it, putting me back into cahoots with Billy Golden?”
“I want you to travel with me to the border of the Sidonian realm,” she said. “I want to embrace you at the very edge of eternity, and then I want you to cross over, and I want you to live within the heart of the demon city of the Falsturm himself. I want you to kill Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley, to see Sidonia destroyed. And I want you to come back to me alive, and travel with me across the ocean, to see my kingdom restored to its ancient glory. I don’t care what it takes.”
I told Hester I needed a bit of air, and I left my study and walked out the side door, along the winding stone path that led out to my little garden, well-hidden from the light of the house and shrouded in towering kapok and capirona trees that stretched above the jungle canopy. In a moment, Lucy was with me. She was sitting on a log beside the pond, her hair blowing in the light jungle breeze. Red flowers that looked like balloons dangled down from the jungle trees. Beyond the pond was a little stream I’d diverted. The pond glowed like a Christmas tree, like the Manhattan skyline.
She wore a frilly white day dress, something she might have chosen for a party in a city garden back in the New York of the 1860s. (Our New York, the city that would always belong to us, Lucy and me.)
She looked just like a living woman. But she wasn’t breathing. The last time I saw her, she told me that she didn’t breathe.
“Why does the pond glow?” she said, without turning to look at me.
“Little creatures live in the pond,” I said.
“Little creatures,” she repeated, and I could hear a smile in her voice.
“Dinoflagellates,” I added with a sad little laugh. The word sounded clumsy in my throat. “They glow. I don’t remember why they glow. But they do. They glow. Each is only a single cell, so they do not know they are glowing. They don’t know that they live in a jungle lagoon, and that the lagoon is aglow. They do not understand that human beings find them terribly enchanting, that we can watch them for hours and hours and never want to stop. They are captivatingly beautiful, and they cannot even know it.”
“Dinoflagellates,” she sighed. It sounded lovely when she said it. Even something like dinoflagellates sounded lovely when she said it.
She put
one hand in the pond, and little glowing ripples spread out across the surface of the pond, like the reflection of the lamp-lit night ferries in the black water of the North River, all those years ago.
“They want me to avenge you,” I said at last, after a long time had passed. “Billy Golden. And … this woman who lives with me here.”
She nodded, still looking at the glowing curls of water, but she disagreed.
“They don’t care if you avenge me,” she said. “Of course you know that this is not on their mind. Billy wants Sidonia burned to the ground. And Billy is also interested in someone called the ‘Falsturm’, who I understand you may have heard of by now.”
Could she tell me about the Falsturm, this creature predicted by a desert oracle? The question was on my lips; Lucy interrupted.
“And Hester wants the help that Billy will give her, if you help him.”
“Even Hester?” I asked. My heart began to break a little.
“Hester wants you to be happy, Watt,” she admitted.
She stood up from the lagoon and walked a little bit towards me. Her feet were bare and white.
“I wish I could tell you otherwise,” she said. “I may not be entirely alive, but I am still human, and I wish I could tell you not to trust Hester.” She laughed. “I want you to myself, even now. But she wants you to be happy, and she thinks it will make you happy if you avenge me.”
“You know a lot about my life,” I remarked, and she said, “There is not much to do, down in sheol.”
I could hear the sound of the great river into which this little stream flowed, and the whooping and squawking of the birds (along with an occasional melodic flutter), green birds and red ones, and even the occasional yellow one, birds I could not name, birds with accusing eyes, and birds with feathers that glowed.
A few green birds and one red one fluttered onto a nearby tree branch. They watched, down there in the clearing, cocking their heads, as birds do.
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 15