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

  A row of sand crabs stood guard on the shore, skittering about and then locking into threatening poses, as though frozen; they looked like an invasion of cockroaches that, as a child, I had seen blackening the walls of the basement in the Old Brewery. Clustered about, motionless, ludicrous and malign.

  Master Yu awaited me at the dock, standing beside an ancient woman, obese, wrinkled and muscled, with pale-pink skin and long brittle white hair, clad in rough brown leather pantaloons. The woman sat on some kind of a mule-like creature, small and compact but as ancient and powerful as the old woman. As I debarked, she lifted a metal horn to her wrinkled lips and let out an ear-piercing blast. Some sort of strange flying creature descended from the grey sky, a craggy and blubbery beast, fully ten feet long, probably four hundred pounds, hairless and pink, sporting a snout, three eyes and plump grey lips on its round face. Its fat body was lined with twenty sets of fragile, dainty fairy wings. The creature landed near the dock, farted horribly, scooped up the weapons in its mouth and flew away.

  The old woman galloped off across the parched brown land on her sort-of-mule, following the skyward beast.

  “Can we trust her?” I asked, and Master Yu laughed.

  “We can ‘trust’ no one here, O’Hugh,” he laughed. “Or up there — or anywhere! We need to make it worth her while.”

  I asked whether we should be worried that she would sell the weapons to the Falsturm, and Master Yu smiled and shook his head. The rancid wind blew through the rancid air, jostling the dead branches of the long-dead trees that towered over the dead-grey grasslands, and the world crunched and champed, and the noise hurt my ears.

  “Everything is promises and counter-promises, and escape is what we all have in common. We promise to spring Chula Valdoon from this terrible jail she’s inhabited for three-thousand long years — since her son murdered poor Chula (her son, O’Hugh!) — and in exchange for this favor, she ships the weapons to Hsi-Wang by air.”

  There it was again: Hsi-Wang, where Elias and Althea awaited us.

  “What is in Hsi-Wang?” I asked Master Yu.

  “Mr. Tang is in Hsi-Wang,” he said. “Mr. Tang and his armies.” He turned to me, and he asked, “Would you like to travel there next, O’Hugh? You and Mr. Tang have much catching up to do.”

  I thought for a moment about arguing, and then I decided not to — Master Yu was trying to make sport of me, I knew that, and why should I acknowledge it? — but then I decided to argue about it after all, and so I said, firmly, “The lady’s name is Madame Tang,” and then Master Yu laughed, because one needed something to laugh about, and this was 1880, after all, and such was the source of a man’s mirth in 1880, whether in China, New York, or Hell.

  We saddled up again for my second trip across Hell, this one the less circuitous route west from the harbor, through the sprawling and flat grasslands, to Hsi-Wang, Madame Tang’s City of Hope, which was nestled in the heartland (to the extent that the middle of Hell could be considered its “heart”) about halfway between the Bay and the unmapped jungle wilderness at the very farthest western end. We tramped through the yellow-brown wasteland, avoiding periodic brushfires; and I felt my brain start to freeze, to dim, little bits of personality escaping from the top of my head, evaporating into the atmosphere.

  At these moments, which Master Yu seemed to notice, he would tug on the reins and say it was “time” to eat, and we would dismount and sit on the yellow-grey earth under the dim yellow-grey sky and eat our so-to-speak “food,” sharing some with our horses, until we felt human-like again, and our horses seemed horse-like again, and then we would frequently gallop for a stretch, and sometimes our horses would grunt and whinny, almost-remembering what it had been like to be alive, and Master Yu and I would almost-laugh, the stenchful clotted wind blew sand in our eyes and our faces, he and I almost-alive as well.

  A prairie dog — a real prairie dog, a little bony and frightened — scurried across the trail before us, and I scratched the lice in my hair for the first time since my return from North Sadlareeyah to 枉死城; suddenly I realized that in Hell, the animals and insects — perhaps even the lice! — were left over from this other world, the world in which Plum and his ilk had lived, before the arrival of the Hell-stormers.

  Aside from this revelation, the journey was for the most part uneventful, although we were ever-aware of the eyes of the Fabricator somewhere in the haze.

  But one incident is worth relaying.

  When we were just west of the tantalizing but (I’m told) ultimately disappointing Deeyah orchard, but yet east of the Warlord’s mountain stronghold, the land grew more arid, and the patchy clusters of dead grass grew patchier and then vanished altogether, and we entered a desert region of swirling grey sand, and visibility of just a few feet. We wrapped our heads. After we had trudged a mile or so in the sandstorm, the rancid wind calmed a bit, a hole cleared in the sky, and the desert heat grew shimmering and oppressive.

  “This is a real desert!” I exclaimed to Master Yu, and he nodded, and he muttered that one would expect to cross a desert at some point in any difficult journey. Some distance away, a mirage glimmered, or what seemed to be a mirage. As we rode nearer, the mirage appeared to grow larger, till it resembled a broad expanse of water. Closer still, I could perceive what appeared to be an island some miles from the shore of this mirage. And then yet nearer to the mirage edge, I could distinguish palm trees flowing in what had to be a fresh ocean breeze, and then smiling islanders, laughing and calling out to me.

  An unutterably beautiful young woman, with long flowing dark hair, stood at the front of a crowd who laughed and sang, and who blended into a colorful cloud of joy.[*] She wore a dress of purple and gold, and her arms were bare. Her smile carried across the land like a desert wind. She was like someone whom I had once known, and had forgotten; or like someone whom I had never known, but imagined.

  “L’île fantôme,” Master Yu whispered, when he saw me staring too longingly, and too long.

  “Worth a visit,” I whispered back, and I could hear the longing in my own voice, even as I tried to laugh. The woman stared at me, smiling at me alone.

  “You cannot get there,” he said. “This is a famous place in 枉死城. It is the most obvious trap, the most transparent evil. I am surprised that this would fool you even for a moment. There is no way that you can reach it.”

  “Of course I can,” I said. “I would just swim there. It is right there. I can see it with my own two eyes.”

  We had now stopped riding.

  “Of course I can,” I insisted again.

  “You cannot,” Master Yu said. “They see you and beckon to you. But you cannot join them.”

  The horses stood together, side by side, right on the shore of the lake. How did we get here, so close to the lake, without my noticing? A moment ago we had been in the middle of the desert, and this lake was a distant mirage. How did we get here?

  I asked my friend if they were real, these happy people, and Master Yu wondered, “What is ‘real’ down here?” This didn’t help.

  “What would happen if one were to reach its shore?” I asked. “What would happen to me if I were to reach the shore?”

  “You cannot reach its shore,” he replied.

  “But what if I did?” I asked.

  “The question is pointless,” he said. “You would swim and swim and the more you were to swim, the farther away it would become. Why ask what would happen? What if you were to sprout wings and fly to the moon!”

  “What if....” I persisted. “You see? This is a question one can answer. What if I were to sprout wings and fly to the moon?”

  “I think,” Master Yu said, “that if you were to sprout wings and fly to the moon, you would suffocate in the vacuum of space, and that if you did not, you would suffocate on the airless moon. You would not gorge yourself on green cheese. You would not dance with white moon maidens.”

  I nodded. This is exactly what would happen if I were to sprout wings
and fly to the moon.

  The woman on the island was waving to me from the other side of a placid, waveless sea, and her followers were laughing. One was playing a silver flute, which glittered in the sun. The sun was bright on the island shore. I did not forget why I was here, the mission itself, or Hester, in Z’vulun, waiting for me to return. But still … I wished for some joy. Just a few minutes. A visit with joy.

  “If you were to try to swim to that island,” Master Yu said, interrupting my thoughts, “you would drown before you even drew near. If you were to launch a boat from the shore of the lake, then on the way, a storm would destroy your boat, and you would drown. Just as you could not sprout wings and fly to the moon, you could not reach the shore of that island; you would never reach the shore of that island. But if the world were a different world, if the physical laws of Hell were different physical laws, and if you could somehow reach the shore of that island, it would be as though you had landed on the moon with your magnificent butterfly wings. Something bad would happen. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen. But it would be nothing good.”

  “But they seem so happy.”

  “Exactly why they must be up to no good. Why would they lure you to join them in their happiness? Look at that beautiful woman. Look at those happy people! Why should they share that with you? Either they are as happy as they seem, and they merely wish to watch your corpse dashed on the rocks; or they somehow need something from you. Would your presence in this paradise make them happier? If it would, then aren’t they by definition less happy than they seem? Either this joy is a lie, or their invitation to you to join them is a lie. Or, most likely, it is all a lie.”

  I grudgingly accepted this analysis, and I nudged my horse away from Paradise Lake, and we plunged back into the sandstorm, and the vastness of this desert, which looked more immense than it could possibly be. I tried to put l’île fantôme out of my mind.

  Still, I imagined what might have happened had I dropped from my horse, thrown my pack to the ground, and dived into the muddy water. No matter the logic of what Master Yu had said, I could not really believe it in my heart. I really believed that if I had dived into the lake, I would have managed to push myself to the shore of the island and learned the secret of their amazing joy; if I had breathed in sea water, and felt myself fading into oblivion, I would probably have sustained myself during my last moments with the idea that someone from that magical and happy l’île fantôme would have saved me, pumped out my lungs and then, after a suitable period of convalescence, I would have learned the secret of their amazing joy.

  No one can ever really face the idea that paradise doesn’t exist.

  One morning we awoke and saw the mountains to the far north, those we had climbed to meet Warlord Hua; and then what seemed to be several days later, we crossed the border into the independent state of Hsi-Wang, where my old friend Tang awaited us, seated at a little wooden writing desk, in a dingy office in the statehouse, with a dip pen and a pile of battle plans and maps.

  Chapter 29

  The architects of Hsi-Wang had imbued the territory with a certain picturesque yet bargain-basement heroic grandeur — the heroism of a city in wartime — planting a worn-out (probably dying) row of trees in the near environs, which thus shaded and framed the avenue that led to the city, and then a low, half-built, splintered and termite-infested wall, which stretched for some miles north and south of the entry gate, which itself faced east, and which was guarded by two sentries on the ground, and two sentries in rickety guard towers, which wobbled and bobbed about, a story-and-a-half from the ground.

  The sentries at the front gate were reading copies of Watt O’Hugh — Injun Killer, my least-favorite World Above dime novel, and the two sentries in the tower were reading Watt O’Hugh — Outlaw Train Robber, one with which I previously had not been familiar, set as it apparently was in the time period after my fall from Grace into Ignominy, and subsequent to my banishment from society. I guessed that it told the tale of the hijacking of the San Francisco treasure train, and thus likely bore more resemblance to reality than my entirely fictitious and only allegedly heroic Injun slaying. (The reality was that I had nothing against Injuns and had never killed one, not even once.)

  The sentries looked up from the dime novels, smiled and waved us through.

  Inside Hsi-Wang, I could feel the warmth of Hope; the crowds trudged through the mud with purpose, the kids in the shadows watched a Punch and Judy show and laughed without a croak of sadness, and I even heard a snap of music rising from the saloon on the corner that sounded something like real music, the twang of a banjo, the plunk of a piano, the scratchy creak of a human throat fit together in a jumble that very very nearly resembled actual harmony and melody.

  Then something happened: the crowd slowed and gathered in the street of this almost-not-terrible little town, and it grew in size, massing along the narrow walkways, sloshing about in the grimy sludge. I could hear music, Chinese erh-hu and ti-tzu music from over the grey hill in the distance, and the music in the bar stopped; soldiers ran from the bar, their faces glowing with an almost Sidonian transcendence. All of them wore those masks of hope, the 1930s construction worker, the old Mongolian warrior, the 1st century Roman farmer who held hands with a 22nd century brzinet-clad pixtrellette. The two, apparently in love, linked arms and followed the call of bugles.

  I guessed what, or rather who, was coming: good old Tang, carried through the streets like an Empress, or like a bar mitzvah boy, held aloft on a golden sedan chair by smiling, dancing acolytes, her walking stick by her side. She was in her Mister Tang guise, in a dark suit and tie, hemisphere hat in her lap, but Tang otherwise looked the way I remembered; thin, wiry and muscular; bald-headed, which made her seem ageless (her age I estimated somewhere between thirty-four and sixty, although she could have been a toughened twenty-seven) and male. (We didn’t really have bald women back then, although I understand that it would become somewhat fashionable in the late 20th century.) Some years back, before she found and betrayed the Movement, she’d built the railroads; not just hammering in rails under the hot sun, but planting explosives in a Rocky Mountain peak, which is how her left foot was blasted off her leg. Now, her left leg dangled over the edge of the shoulder carriage, and her wooden foot, bare, slipped below the hem of her pant leg. Tang’s face was a tangle of sneers and scars; Tang’s foot was smooth and polished, and unscratched.

  Tang, who had saved my life on several occasions,[*] and whom I had wished to save, but failed to save, on that fateful day in Weedville, Nebraska, in 1875. Pursuing the villainous Monsieur Rasháh, Madame Tang had galloped through a strange black and ragged crater, which opened up in mid-air on Weedville’s Main Street just long enough to allow Rasháh and Tang through, but which snapped shut before I could follow. I had not seen her since, and I had feared her dead, and here she was, apparently alive and well, but in Hell (and thus, I supposed, dead, in a manner of speaking). Master Yu had his own history with Madame Tang; she had appeared to him as a spectral image, inside his mind, an event that led him ultimately here.

  We followed the Tang-acolytes and the Tang-loyalists and (probably) the Tang-opportunists, and the sedan they hauled through the streets of Hsi-Wang, blending into the crowd and periodically bursting out of it, Master Yu and I, with Elias and Althea now just behind us. At length we reached the gates of the crumbling wooden statehouse at the end of the main avenue, which lurched open, then crunched shut once Tang’s procession had passed through. I shouted my name to the guards in the front, and then Master Yu shouted his name to the guards in the front, and they smiled and laughed when they heard that we had arrived, and they waved us through.

  Tang had an office in the statehouse, on the top floor, a large room with high ceilings and windows on both sides, which looked out over the entire grey expanse of Tang’s revolutionary city, the grey stores and residences, the greenish grey rebels in the streets, who raised their fists to Heaven (or, anyway, the grey Hell-sky) in
their praise of Tang, the leader who might lead them to freedom. A rickety bureau leaned against the wall at one end of the room, and a wobbly old wooden desk wobbled at the other. Her enormous hog-leg pistol sat on the corner of the desk.

  Tang sat at the old desk, writing. When the guard announced Master Yu and me, Tang turned. Tang’s posture was sturdy and confident, arm was slung, informally, over the back of the chair, her legs spread carelessly. Tang stood, cringed on the old wooden foot.

  “I wish I could get a new one of these damn things,” Tang said. “No one makes a wooden foot in Hell.”

  Tang’s voice was steady, deep and assured.

  Yu Dai-Yung held out a hand.

  “Hello, Master,” he said, and he bowed.

  I could not think of Tang as a woman now, so complete was the disguise — or was it a transformation, a metamorphosis? This was Mr. Tang. This was a man. An illusion born of Hell’s magic? I hoped; but my resolve and certainty faltered.

  As Yu Dai-Yung shook Tang’s hand, Tang’s eyes met mine, and I saw something in Tang’s eyes, a recognition that Tang remembered a moment between us on the hills overlooking Weedville, the night before we might die. Tang didn’t smile — not at that moment, not ever — but looked not-displeased, which I imagine was Tang’s way of smiling, and that is how I took it, and so I felt welcomed.

  Tang’s posture adjusted just a bit, the muscles in the face relaxed.

  Once again, she was tough old Madame Tang. Mr. Tang was gone.

  “The armies need a man to lead them,” Tang said, “but a woman to inspire them. Do you see? Some of them — even, I think, most of them — would follow a woman-general into battle. But not all of them. And we need all of them.”