“Look — there!” Hua Nau exclaimed.
He shot a glance in Master Yu’s direction, and the color drained from my friend’s face.
Yu Dai-Yung nodded.
“The Emerald Gemstone of Thoth!” the Warlord shouted.
This was bad news.
Chapter 7
I don’t want to “go all Herman Melville on your ass,” as the kids might say in June of 1997, but allow me a digression.
The Emerald Gemstone of Thoth is said to be a tiny stone, inscribed with the secrets of the universe. Not the planet and not the galaxy: rather, all the secrets of the entire universe.
As a Roamer, I am unfortunately aware that scholars and scientists of the future (perhaps of your present) will calculate that the universe in fact holds two trillion galaxies, with somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion planets in each galaxy, and that there are therefore two million quintillion planets in the universe, give or take. In other words, there are 267,000 times more planets out there in the universe than there are grains of sand on planet Earth.[] And between the galaxies, there are trillions of lightyears of empty space, filled up with dust, some random meteorites and dark energy. Our planet is really a gnat buzzing around in a big empty sky.
If indeed life has arisen on other planets, then as Warlord Hua and I spoke, there were countless oceans lapping up on countless shores, some that were, billions of years ago, observed by sentient creatures from long-extinct, long-forgotten species. And some objectively beautiful oceans — right at that moment, as we spoke, each dappled with the light of a spectacular sunrise, multiple moons glittering in its depths — objectively beautiful oceans that had been observed by no sentient creatures, not ever. Dead planets, whose lifeforms died a billion years before, populations made up of billions of fellows who were sentient just like Warlord Hua and me — who thought they had souls — and whose entire population then lay (and now still lies) beneath miles of dust under a lifeless atmospheric canopy.
As you read this, the wind blows dust off the tops of a quintillion beautiful mountains, and the dust drifts down into a quintillion valleys, seen and observed by no one.
Did the gemstone contain all of that?
As I write this, in 1936, we’re all just getting beyond the idea that the galaxy isn’t the entire universe; fifty years ago, when I spoke to Warlord Hua as a man of the 1870s, I understood the universe to encompass merely the Earth’s solar system, and nothing more, and the Warlord, as a man of the 4th century BC, understood the universe to encompass the Chinese continent, the red-haired barbarians over the far hill, and the gods scurrying about in the third realm just above the clouds. But I, and even he, understood that the gemstone could not contain all of the secrets of the universe as we understood it. Every last one of them, all on a tiny stone.
Hua Nau laughed.
“All the secrets of the Universe!” he gasped. “All of them!”
Then, looking back and forth between us, he snorted: “哇!” which sounded a little like Wow!
“What’s this?” I asked. “The gem of — ”
“A gemstone,” Master Yu explained, “that was found in a carved tomb under the statue of Hermes in Tyana.” He tapped the scroll. “I had always heard that the gem was tablet-sized, but the Yellow Emperor says it is the size of a gemstone, which is why no one has ever managed to find and identify it.”
“Until now,” Warlord Hua said. “Eh? Now we’ve got it. All the secrets of the universe. Ha HA!” He laughed just like that: Ha HA! It was, I supposed, rather more like the memory of frivolity than frivolity itself, although I could see the humor in this idea. Then he shouted again, “哇!”, and this time his gasp of almost-Wow! was filled with ironic disbelief, which led me to the conclusion that irony of all things might have existed during the Warring Kingdoms, 2400 long years ago.
Nevertheless: All the wisdom of the universe, in a little rock, from the hands of a god. I could see how one might find the idea ridiculous and hilarious.
Yet: here was our problem. As ridiculous as it might seem, as hilarious, it was now a fact that to win the war, we needed the gemstone, the one that purportedly held within its vivid imagination all the secrets of the universe, every last one.
Hua Nau looked up from the scroll.
“I suppose you have the gemstone?” he said.
Master Yu looked at me, and I looked back.
“I do not have it on me,” he said. “But I know where it is. And it is safe.”
“And it is where?”
“In the city of Wemas,” he said casually. “West of the Maldensses Swamp. It’s held by a man named Semel. Ar Semel?”
Hua Nau shook his head.
Ar Semel, Master Yu explained, was born into Malchut in the 3rd Century, and he lived in the countryside of a region called Tingitana, just across the straits from Baetica, in a patch of land that bordered what later became known as Algeria.
Ar Semel spoke a lost language from a forgotten world. He was a fat, fifty-year-old man who lived 1600 years ago and made a thriving trade back then, in whatever it was a man could trade back then in a place such as Tingitana — perhaps olive oil? — which should have resulted in a happy life, a tranquil old age and a peaceful death surrounded by sycophantic loved ones, but Master Yu speculated that Ar Semel’s thriving trade and the resultant wealth was what led, eventually, to his murder. As might be expected of a man who had lived in 枉死城 for a millennium and a half, his Malchutian mother and daughter murdered Ar Semel.
“I do not know how he came to possess the gem,” Master Yu said. “I do not know if he descended to Hell with it, or if he acquired it down here. But he guards it with his life.”
Master Yu shrugged and tried to laugh.
“We should not worry about this gemstone,” he added. “I concern myself with the task of recruiting an army and formulating a careful battle plan.”
“I am not ordinarily a superstitious man,” Hua Nau replied, “except to the extent that being murdered by a demon — by a demon who filled up my colon! — and winding up in the sixth level of Hell, out of, you understand, a total of eighteen, would tend to make anyone superstitious. But you propose to convince me to support you based on the happenings in the Yellow Emperor’s White Pond scroll, and it does seem to me that the gemstone plays a notable role in the Yellow Fellow’s narrative. Why that is, I cannot say. Nevertheless: If this mission is real, and if the scroll, as you contend, is true, then I don’t think the mission can succeed unless all the pieces are in place.”
“Listen, Warlord Hua. Ar Semel doesn’t understand the gem. I don’t understand it. No one has understood it since the time of Thoth himself, and you and I both know that Thoth didn’t even understand it. Maybe it never really made any sense.” He grimaced, thinking. “Probably it has never made any sense; it is in all likelihood just a gem, to which someone sometime ascribed a prodigious and duplicitous moniker. And Ar Semel doesn’t know what he has, even if what he has is a fraud. As long as I keep my mouth shut, you keep your mouth shut, and O’Hugh here does the same, we needn’t worry about the gemstone.”
The Warlord scratched his scar, and he sniffed. “If you recover the gemstone, I can promise you ten thousand warriors. But only if you recover the gemstone. Otherwise, I will bid you a good day and sit here in my fortress for another thousand years, or until another brave warrior messiah comes by with a better plan.”
He blinked at us.
Master Yu held out his hands, and again he urged reason.
“Your majesty,” he exclaimed. “I beg you to — ”
“Recover the gemstone,” Hua Nau said, “and you may have ten thousand warriors at your disposal.”
Servants then came into the room, and they dished out something that seemed almost like meat, with an aroma just past-good, but not yet actually rancid, and the aroma saturated the room; a young woman filled our goblets with a liquid that appeared to be quite similar to wine.
What happened next happened
very quickly.
Lightning crackled over the Bay on the farthest horizon, and thunder shattered the air moments later. A light-green and gelatinously phlegm-like rain dribbled down from the sky over the fortress, and great screams and rumbles echoed from the valley below. Master Yu and I rushed to the windows to see the cliff walls swarm with monstrous sand crabs, saddled and bridled and piloted by creatures who resembled upright, human-size spiders, each holding the reins in her maxillae, cracking the whips with her pedipalps, staring straight up at us with her eight eyes, like fire burning up the side of the mountain from the depths below, the little hairs on her claws quivering in the grey murk of Hell.
A brave and faithful soldier threw himself from a window on the penultimate floor of the fortress and down upon the nearest spider, his sword and dagger drawn; but the spider flipped him about and quickly unsheathed her own chelicerae, which she plunged into his abdomen as he fell, efficiently disabling the soldier, after which she tossed him almost cheerfully into the chasm.
I expected to hear him hit the ground; I heard nothing.
Perhaps the soldier, numb and immobile, would fall forever.
No other soldiers followed his bold and fruitless example, and thus each sand crab, driven upward by her spider-liege, continued her ascent unimpeded.
Quite quickly the spiders and sand crabs drew within a hundred yards or so of our open windows. The spiders screamed angrily, the sand crabs roared mightily, and pebbles and grit crumbled from the black cliffs into the darkness below them.
“What is to be done?” Master Yu asked, nervously but, I thought, remarkably calmly, given our almost-certain impending and painful deaths. “What is to be done,” he continued, “about this type of situation? Is there someone whom one might summon for assistance?”
“I am calling my wizard,” said Hua Nau.
Master Yu said, “I don’t believe in the power of wizards.”
The Warlord replied, “Then his Magic cannot help you. Down here, what you believe is all that matters.”
Master Yu hastily reconsidered.
“Perhaps,” the poet remarked, “in this type of jurisdiction, wizards and other magicians might after all play a very useful and genuine role in keeping the peace.”
Warlord Hua lifted his horn, twisted and ancient, and blew a long and loud blast, which echoed over the encroaching hordes, who screamed and bellowed in response.
Some brief period of time passed, during which I wondered if the ram’s horn might truly have no effect, but then quite suddenly a wizened wizard in a dirty and tattered blue robe adorned with half-moons (just as one might have imagined!) descended from the grey clouds on a great flying and winged rat, sodden in the green phlegmy rain, who shrieked and moaned and bled brown clotted blood and blinked its red-ravaged eyes. The rat flapped its raggedy wings weakly, till the wizard skipped through our little window, and with that the rat let out an exhausted cry and spun, crumpled, into the darkness below.
I felt a bit sorry for the rat; I felt sorry for the brave soldier, still descending and, I thought, unable to move; I felt sorry for everyone who had fallen into that chasm, who fell forever, and never hit the ground; and I felt sorry for us.
“Rugæ!” shouted the Warlord with a sigh, grateful and relieved. The Warlord thanked Rugæ the wizard for making an appearance on such short notice, and noted that we had all run into a bit of trouble, Rugæ the wizard asked how he might help, the Warlord grimaced with a bit of irony — irony again! — and he tilted his head in the direction of the angry crustacean mob.
Rugæ nodded, stroked his long wizardly beard, extracted from a pocket of his robe a rather elaborately bent and twisted wand, hollered “magicae incantatores!” which was a nice bit of magical sounding hokum[], and another, slightly younger but still raggedy and exhausted flying rat appeared outside our window. The wizard stepped onto the rat’s back, held the reins in his left hand, screamed “magicae incantatores!” once again, but this time more insistently, and within a few moments, the eastern Bay-side horizon blackened with flying rats, commandeered by an army of similarly wizened wizards.
What I saw next would have seemed amazing if what I had seen every moment of the last few hours had not already seemed more amazing. The dark cloud of white-bearded, be-robed wizards, wands flashing, descended with Rugæ into the breach, all of them hollering, “magicae incantatores!” or, less-frequently, “venenum aranearum!” and, from time to time, “magia magicae magicam!”
With its relative simplicity but poetic progressions, magia magicae magicam eventually became my favorite personal spell, although it never did me much good.
“This is a bad sign,” Warlord Hua said, staring out the window.
Master Yu nodded.
“It doesn’t look good,” he admitted. “Externally. I think these are not ordinary sand crabs. They are on a mission.”
I asked whether the sand crabs — “and those spider people!” I added — might succeed in their mission, and Master Yu shook his head, and Warlord Hua shook his head as well.
“Not this time,” Master Yu said.
“But winning the battle,” Warlord Hua added, “is not always the point.”
He smiled sadly.
“This is the lesson that I learned from my life,” he said.
Magicians on rats against spiders on crabs turned out not to be much of a match, magic wands against pincers. After the battle was over, and the spiders had escaped death by floating into the dark clouds on silken parachutes, we climbed down from the fortress and inspected the battle scene, littered with dead crabs and soaked with crab blood.
Hua Nau gave the sand crabs a wide berth as he walked about the fortress grounds. The sand crabs lay prone on the dry grass, but still Warlord Hua did not trust them to remain entirely dead for the length of time it took him to return to the watchtower.
“A message,” Warlord Hua muttered. He looked away from the crabs, to Master Yu. “Until this moment, I have not had a war council for many years, many millennia, perhaps. And now here they are. A message, quite evidently.”
“Who sent them?” I asked.
“I think we know who sent them,” Master Yu said.
“Did he think he could kill us?” I wondered.
“He would not have done it if there was not some sort of possible benefit.”
“And did he succeed?” Hua asked. “Did he change what he needed to change?”
Master Yu shrugged.
“I will ask Tang when I see her,” he said.
“Mr. Tang?” Hua Nau asked. He nodded. “A very wise man. A very powerful general.”
I nodded at this, and I held my tongue for the moment, although they could sense my discomfort.
Later, we sat together in Warlord Hua’s watchtower. We drank rice wine.
Master Yu shuddered; this rice wine tasted like nearly rotten eggs, but it still gave him something of a lift, and so he drank it, and so did I.
The sun set over the mountains that hid the stronghold, bathing the valley below in a moldy yellow glow. This was breathtaking, in its way, but perhaps I had forgotten already what beauty looks like.
“How often does a thing like this happen?” I asked. “You understand what I mean. A thing like this — screaming spiders fibbering up the side of a cliff on the backs of bellowing sand crabs?” I was angry to have been almost killed yet happyish to be still-alive, and yet-still flabbergasted at the recent sight of a thousand spiders riding astride a thousand sand crabs. “How often does a thing like this happen down here in Hell?”
“Too often,” Master Yu replied. “Which is to say, sometimes.”
The spiders were not regular denizens of Hell — not your usual Heller — which attested to the presence down in 枉死城 of a more powerful than usual Fabricator. “Your average humanoid spiders,” said Warlord Hua, “come from the 11th Otherworld on the left, at last count, give or take half an Otherworld. A wobbly and webby, half-baked concoction.”
Master Yu no
dded.
“I think they came here just for you, O’Hugh,” he said. “The spiders on the great crabs, all for you.”
At the dawn, Warlord Hua came outside to see us on our journey. We would climb to the top of the mountain, retrieve our horses and make our way to Wemas to capture the Emerald Gemstone of Thoth and thus secure the loyalty of Warlord Hua and his legions. Before he left, Warlord Hua grasped my arm in his strong grip, and he said, “So, Watt O’Hugh, new citizen of Hell, what do you think of Life after Death so far?” I replied that I knew second-hand about life after death, and I thought that this wasn’t it. I understood that the Hell of the Innocent Dead was more like an idea, more like human imagination. Hua Nau nodded, because he already knew this, but he added, “Malchut, the World Above, is human imagination too. Just an idea we are thinking up as we go along.”
At the mountain peak, Master Yu stood still for a moment, and he gazed off at the surrounding valley, bathed in the sunrise, and the mountains of Kólasivouná in the south, beyond which, I knew, lay freedom. His one eye fluttered and grew filmy again, and now his pupil was gone, and he gazed right through me. He swayed in the wind, here at the top of the mountain. I feared he might fall, but his feet seemed hammered to the spot.
After a while, his gaze cleared, and he smiled.
I asked him what he saw when he was away, and he smiled and he said, “I wasn’t away, I was right here.” He said he saw a past of great blackness and darkness, even darker than our present, but a future of light, a future in which the Grey City has crumbled away. Men in white greeted him under a golden-hued glow, a tranquil and unworried pale-cheeked girl played a golden harp, and the descendants of the Hellers remembered the Grey City as nothing more than a nasty fairy tale.
“Depending on who wins the war,” he said.
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 10