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)

by Steven Drachman

  Chapter 25

  I fell and I fell and I fell, and then I fell some more, the vertigo was overwhelming, and the terrible-smelling water soaked me to the bone. Still, I did not particularly mind the falling part of my afternoon, because it delayed the crashing-against-the-rocks-and-dying-painfully part of my afternoon.

  But instead of crashing against the rocks, I landed gently on soft, white sand. I rose, and I stood on the deserted shore of a moderately large salt water lake, strikingly clean, nearly transparent water. Tiny fish darted around happily at the shallowest edge. I looked around. Further north, beyond the opposite shore of the lake, rose a city of domed buildings that seemed to be made of gold. This was West Xiorian, though of course I didn’t know it, back then. Beyond that, the ocean. Far behind me, villas randomly dotted the southern hills. I saw no people in any direction.

  I waited an hour, perhaps two, sitting on the shore, staring at that beautiful lake.

  An aside, while I wait on the shore:

  As you know, throughout this magnum opus, I have periodically written about Sadlo’reen, and North Sadlareeyah, and Xiorian. Master Yu first met a vision of Madame Tang on the deserted dock just west of North Sadlareeyah, for example.

  Sadlo’reen is not Otherworld, which is a pale copy of our own.

  Instead, Sadlo’reen exists within our own world.

  That sounds impossible. But here’s the answer: Sadlo’reen does not follow Pauli exclusion principal restrictions, and therefore, like the fella says, it may occupy the same quantum state as the world you know.

  I am not a scientist. All I know is that wiser heads than mine have told me that impossible things are true.

  My travels in Sadlo’reen would take me only from West Xiorian to North Sadlareeyah.

  I entirely skipped Algoria in the West, “land of rocks and seas and pretty melodies,” as it’s known, towers and spires carved into the rock by an ancient storm, which all rise from the placid Algorian Sea and whistle like an organ and harpsichord in the wind; I didn’t dine in the pleasure boats on the Emperor’s Golden Lake, which echoed with the roar of orchestras; I didn’t climb the steep multi-tiered garden carved from mountain rock, which served as the entrance to the gleaming terraced city of Vvolnaryu, the winter home of the Emperor, in days gone-by.

  I did not meet the hardy and brave working men and women of the dim industrial city of East Darthmund; I did not cross the 100-mile bog to visit the far northeastern hinterland meadows, a paradise in the shadow of the impassable Mt. Amutaine. I did not dine on yellow vine fish from the Algorian Sea, brined in vinegar from M’loreanne, olives from Faerold stuffed with dragon milk cheese from the mountains of Castriolle (not made from real dragons!), steamed banana leaf salad from the jungles of Rostrll drenched in the butternut oil of Gradrin, and flower fruit pie for dessert.

  I indeed did not travel or experience the full length and width of Salo’reen, but to set foot on her land, to breathe her air for a moment, to sleep beneath her purple sky with orange clouds, to watch, from a train window, her landscapes shift and slide — all of it is to be changed, to be in love.

  The waterfall in Hell had smeared a thin coat of Hell-muck all over my clothes and body, left my hair matted, my face greenish brown, and so I left my filthy tuxedo in a heap on this white shore, and, wearing only my drawers, I dived in.

  I descended deeper and deeper, cleansed in the warm water, kissed by the friendly Sadlo’rean fish; a gelatinous blind fish, an almost transparent fish with tiny unseeing eyes and a white head, swam by me; a glowing starfish fluttered by like a moth, then unfolded itself in front of me to reveal a very human face surrounded by eight-tentacled arms; not an unpleasant face, very pretty in its own way, gentle and soft and kind, especially its smiling eyes. (Was it really smiling?; was it really happy?)[]

  I drifted down to the lake floor, feeling a sense of tremendous well-being, not breathing, not worrying. A young woman in a diaphanous white dress swam towards me, her brown hair flowing behind her. She took my hands, looked into my eyes. Her eyes were like a blue emerald, flecked with light green. We stayed down there, under the water, for a while, skimmed along the lake floor perhaps for a mile, till we reached the crumbling ruins of an old city. We passed under stone arches and into wrecked living quarters, in which only fish lived to-day. I wondered what had happened here. I wondered whose home this had been. The young woman looked back at me with her smiling eyes.

  Was she beautiful? Indeed, she was infused with a uniquely Sadlareeyahian joy and energy and loveliness with which I became acquainted all-too-briefly. She looked especially beautiful underwater, in her diaphanous white dress.

  At length, she pulled me to the surface.

  We burst into the light and air.

  “Watt O’Hugh!” she exclaimed. “I’m Kaelour.” With a smile: “I am your Sadlo’reen tour guide.”

  I was happy to have found her, but I was disgruntled that she hadn’t met me at the portal, and that she had allowed me to idle away the hours under the Sadlareeyahian sun. She replied that she knew that I — a man coated in the grime of Hell-air, and then washed in the sludge of a Hell-waterfall — would certainly be unable to resist the enticement of a beautiful clear lake, and so she would simply await me on the lake floor, fed by the air of the caverns. “It is invigorating,” she said. I wondered how she could have been so sure that I would dive to the bottom of the lake. I might have sat on the shore, a stranger in a strange land, disoriented and frightened, until someone — some enemy — had captured me.

  “You did dive to the bottom of the lake,” she said. “I don’t understand your question.”

  “But what if I had not?” I persisted.

  “Are you concerned about events in a merely hypothetical Otherworld?” she asked. “Are you concerned about the corollaries of a subjective theorem within an impossible paradox?”

  She looked beautiful out here in the sunlight, with her wet hair and her wet dress, and her laughing eyes. Here in Sadlo’reen, did no one understand the terror of terrible things that might have been? Was she toying with me?

  I gave up.

  There we were at the lake edge, Kaelour beautiful in her wet dress, and Watt O’Hugh finally clean again, and so I imagine that this sounds as though this is leading to a different sort of story, doesn’t it? and I wish I could tell you it will, because you deserve a bit of spooning right about now, but of course I had a woman in Z’vulun, whom I had not seen since September 1879, except in a place I had visited only in a dream, and equally importantly, Kaelour had an insatiable, passionate interest in delivering a load of guns to defeat the Red Eyebrows, the Sidonians and the Falsturm, and nothing else. This is the truth: there was no time for bedswerving. However, if one of your Hollywood “producers”[] wishes to turn my Memoirs into a “moving picture,” I hereby give him permission to add a scene filled with all manner of fleshy naked spooning, and you are welcome to imagine that it really happened. But it did not happen.

  Instead, we emerged together on the opposite shore, the shore nearest West Xiorian, where Kaelour had left an outfit that would suit my North Sadlareeyah visit. Kaelour politely turned her back as I dressed, and as she dried off, in the sun.

  And that’s all there is to tell about that.

  In my new Sadlareeyahian duds — loose white silk trousers, a big white silk shirt, buttoned up to the neck, and white sandals — I followed Kaelour to the train station, at the edge of the golden domed city of West Xiorian. On the way, she said, quietly, “The weapons are in North Sadlareeyah. It is not very far. It is a bit east and then a bit west, along the coast. But we must be careful. We have justice and freedom on our side, and the ramifications of our mission, as you know, extend far beyond this little continent. But not everyone sees things our way. Here in the southern nation-states, imperial sympathies are not uncommon. So we must be discreet.”

  The train arrived promptly, twelve minutes after we got to the station. We kept our heads down, showed our tick
ets, rushed to our compartment, shut the door and pulled the curtains. Once safely ensconced, Kaelour breathed a sigh of great relief, leaned back in her seat and looked up at the ceiling, blinking back tears.

  “I am glad to be over that hill,” she said, and she smiled. “Away from West Xiorian and especially away from Algoria.”

  Outside, the sun was setting, and Sadlo’reen’s two moons were rising. One was very large and filled the western half of the sky, and the other was the moon that I know from home.

  “We had thought,” Kaelour said, “that everyone was happy to be rid of the imperial yoke years ago, after the transition to the era of the nation-states. In North Sadlareeyah, and in the northern states, we believed that everyone shared our views.” She sighed, and she whispered, “I don’t know whether Emperor Magnano and G’ia, the Dark Thief, have been ever popular in the regions, but beautiful Algoria has become a hotbed of intrigue.”

  “Don’t the people have a right to be ruled by an Emperor,” I asked, “if that is what they want? Even if the intellectuals on the coast don’t prefer that?”

  Kaelour agreed. “But they are letting the Falsturm in the door. And his liege, G’ia. This is more than a debate about the best form of representative government, O’Hugh.”

  Then, confidentially: “The Dark Thief exists only in the Shadow World. For now.”

  A few minutes later, Kaelour said, “West Xiorian is a beautiful city. It was built by poets. The people, even, are nice. Not evil. Algoria is a city of music. The people there are the most welcoming you will ever meet, if you do not discuss the Empire, or the Dark Thief.” She sighed now.

  A few hours later, I asked Kaelour to explain to me again how it was that Sadlo’reen and, say, France exist in the same world, yet Sadlo’reen has two moons, and she said that “No one human in France can see the second moon. But the bats in Beauséjour in France can see it. So can the bats in Berești.” I queried that one, and she replied, “It is in Western Moldavia, which is in Europe in your World. You don’t know of this city, I am certain. But we know it here! It has a marvelous energy, and a vivid connection to Sadlo’reen, especially East Darthmund, where the imperial sympathies are less stubborn. East Darthmund could be a bellwether against the Falsturm, if it comes to that.”

  I regretted to conclude that it would indeed come to that.

  As you can see, Sadlo’reen is a complicated place, and it is all happening right under your nose. At that time — on a brief respite out of the Hell of the Innocent Dead, with its own internecine alliances and allegiances — the last thing I needed or wanted was to get myself enmeshed in another incomprehensible regional feud, but so be it; life always has surprises in store, as I discovered when the door to our compartment opened rather suddenly, and a middle-aged goon entered, waving around a flat-top double action revolver and hollering about the scourge of the anti-imperialist pro-Castrilleans, which I gathered was an accurate enough description of Kaelour and me. Then he started to get specific — identifying us by name, for example, in his slurry drunkenness — and so I didn’t bother to protest, and in fact startled the fuddled thug by announcing, “Guilty as charged” before startling the thuggy fud further by pinning his gun arm to the wall with my right hand while I crushed his smeller with my left fist, and then with a second punch, I crushed his face pancake-flat, like the real-life version of something out of one of those gruesome Warner Bros. cartoons you grew up with.

  Well, he grabbed his face and moaned and screamed, and blood spurted out through his fingers and got into his eyes, which made him scream more, but also temporarily blinded him, so that we could shove past.

  We vamoosed toward the caboose, but a band of railway soldiers blocked our way. Five broad-shouldered mustachioed killers in blue and red uniforms, each brandishing an imposing barking iron. They saw the desperation in our eyes and ran towards us, and so we thought to absquatulate toward the locomotive, but a band of railway soldiers blocked our way there as well, equally stern and threatening, each with an equally threatening barking iron. Enemies fore and enemies aft, leaving us no choice but to surrender to capture and likely be killed or to jump off the train and likely be killed, but without betraying our “cause” (which I gathered at the moment was the movement to prevent the resurrection of the Magnano empire throughout Sadlo’reen, something that I didn’t care about except to the extent that Emperor Magnano’s ally, the mad, blind sea captain known as G’ia the Dark Thief, had some sort of allegiance with the Red Eyebrows, who supported the Sidonians, who were responsible for the death of my beloved, Lucy Billings … which come to think of it seemed a tenuous reason to jump off a train).

  So these are some of the things that I considered during the split second in which I needed to decide whether to give myself up or to jump off the train with Kaelour, and the admittedly tenuous link between Lucy’s murderers and the villains running at us from all sides was really the only justification I had or needed to grab Kaelour’s hand and hurl ourselves from that cussed train.

  I have jumped from a moving train on several occasions, and surprisingly, so had Kaelour.

  It is really very dangerous.

  Things to consider when jumping off a moving train: First of all, try to avoid it. But if one absolutely must jump from a moving train, if it is entirely unavoidable, one ought to try to jump from the final car, which increases one’s odds of survival. But we were unable to reach the final car. One also ought to wait till the train comes to a hill or goes around a curve — which slows the train’s speed — but the soldiers were running at us from both sides of the train. Kaelour pulled out a pistol and shot straight up, which gave us a few seconds to breathe, but then the soldiers drew their weapons, and that was that. I looked for a soft patch of ground, took Kaelour’s hand.

  “Bend your legs and push off perpendicular to the train,” I said. “Hit the ground and roll.”

  Which is what we did.

  It could have gone worse.

  We nursed our bruises under Sadlo’reen’s two moons.

  “Public transport was a bad idea,” I muttered.

  I could hear the ocean nearby.

  “We follow the coast,” Kaelour said, “and we won’t get lost. We’re lucky that it is nighttime and that we made it as far as we did without detection.”

  We walked all night, and then we passed through a mist and came out in sunlight, and it was as though we had crossed a physical barrier. Kaelour said that this was my imagination.

  “But it is different now,” I said.

  “The sun has risen.”

  “It’s more than that,” I insisted.

  “On this side we feel safe,” she said, “and so it seems brighter and more colorful. The air smells better to you, but you’re really smelling the absence of your own fear.”

  In late afternoon, we reached North Sadlareeyah, part Medieval kingdom, part far-future technopolis, a beautiful sparkling city at the edge of miles and miles of orange-purple forests and lakes to the northeast, and the great ocean to the west. (The Atlantic Ocean, to be precise, but the Sadlareeyahians had their own name for it). We sat to rest our feet, and I gazed.

  In Kaelour’s carriage an hour or so later, we swept across a town of colorful blue brick and white stone buildings in the darkening twilight, Kaelour drove us along spotless boulevards under great stone sculptures, glowing red in the setting sun, and whisked us through narrow side streets lined with mysterious, shadowy shops. In the North, Mt. Sadlar, and its mountain villages, shaded the city, and always in the distance was that great expanse of nature, miles of trees and lakes; birds, deer and antelope stood beneath the towering boughs, watching us.

  She looked across the street to a café on the main thoroughfare, called Otto’s. She knew the owner, an eight-year-old boy whose name was Jallaj, not Otto. She had known Jallaj back when she had been an eight-year-old girl. She had changed; Jallaj had not. Otto’s was the perfect restaurant for a kid under the age of ten, and to-day it was filled, as it al
ways was, with smiling kids who rode in on their pet elephants, mules and horses, no grownups in sight. The walls were painted purple; a parrot flew through the restaurant, singing for the kids. Kaelour could see Jallaj through the window. He was dark-skinned, small and skinny, with a big smile, and an exuberance that made one forget his slight stature.

  “He named his café Otto’s,” Kaelour said to me quietly, “because Otto and Jallaj are both palindromes.” Jallaj had told this to Kaelour when they first met, when Kaelour was a little girl. Kaelour told me that Jallaj said it often, that he thought it was very clever, and that he was very proud, at the age of eight, to be the owner of a successful café, and to know what a palindrome was.

  Kaelour watched as Jallaj delivered to one little girl a steaming cup of chamomile tea.

  “It is a café only for children,” she said. “I miss it. We cannot go there. We are no longer welcome. Jallaj no longer recognizes me.”

  Instead, we sat down outdoors at a café across the street from Otto’s, and the waiter brought us two cups of strong coffee.

  “Jallaj is a little boy, asleep in his bed in Pirkuke,” she said. “That is a little town in your world, so small that it’s not even shown on any maps and so insignificant that no country has even bothered to claim it. Pirkuke has tomatoes — not very good ones — and not much else. Jallaj dreamed up Otto’s, and in his dreams, he opened it on the great Sadlareeyahian thoroughfare. He doesn’t even know that it’s real, that the dreams he dreams really happen.”

  Sipping her coffee carefully, Kaelour watched a group of three dancers who had gathered across the street; two girls and a boy, not much older than Jallaj. Now they were dancing on the pavement, pounding their shoes, leaping into the air, hanging from balconies and dropping lightly back to earth. A small crowd had now gathered around the dancers. Everywhere energetic dancers spun about at the street corners; some juggled torches whose flames burned purple and blue; they sang mysterious melodies, music hovered around the Sadlareeyahian dancers, music that came out of the earth, from some ancient underground place. One dancer, with what seemed no effort, flipped upside down and floated gracefully, her head just a few inches from the ground, swaying gently to the music, in the breeze; then the other two joined her, all three of them floating upside down on the corner, the music wafting about them, into them, through them.