I said I understood. I wanted to know which was reality and which was the disguise, but I think I already knew the answer: nothing was reality. Anyway, I believed in Tang and her ability to lead this army, and I said so, but she brushed away the flattery.
“I am not so wise,” she said, “nor so mighty. I can eliminate an unneeded essence, leaving a man apparently dead. I can roam Time, as can you. I can cure certain ailments, which helps in wartime. I can talk to dolphins. This is my greatest trick! However, it does not often prove to be useful. Perhaps it will never prove to be useful. Still, that is something marvelous, I believe. Not many people can talk to dolphins.”
She was a man; then a woman; then a man again. Mr. Tang; Madame Tang; Mr. Tang. Her face changed. Now Madame Tang again, just toying with us. But she was ever-unsmiling.
“You are like Emelina,” I said, “and Emelina can do anything.”
“Emelina will live forever,” she said. “Or almost forever, I suppose. No, I am not as skilled at the Dark Arts as pretty Emelina.”
“You can lead an army,” I said. “You can win a war. I have been in a war, you know, Tang. One of the really bad ones. I think you know how to win a war.”
“Billy Golden and I spent many months in Sidonia,” Tang said, “thinking we were supporting the one Cause that would end injustice. Quite the opposite, of course. But if there is one thing we learned from the Sidonians, it was that people want someone to save them, or at least to try. Or at least to pretend to try.”
“To herd them like sheep,” I said.
Tang nodded and said, “Oh yes, O’Hugh, to herd them. Just like sheep.”
I told Tang about Plum, and about the deal that he and I had struck. She agreed to send someone to the edge of the jungle with the password, a man named Denter Fleckt. I said that one other thing troubled me. John Rising Spirit had seen my apparition, or so he believed, which told him to kill the anarchists, and told him how to use fate to kill-without-killing — a falling brick, an angry horse — things that a Roamer could know but could not use. Madame Tang had sent one of these messages to Master Yu, when she appeared to him in his dank cellar in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
“I didn’t record the message,” I said to Tang. “You’re the only person I know with this particular … oh, what’s the word?”
“Teknologie,” Tang replied.
Back then, “technology” was such a new concept, we didn’t yet have the word in English, and I had never heard of it.
“I was thinking mechanical arts,” I suggested.
“And so you’re intimating that I might have appeared before John Rising Spirit?” she asked. “Sent a message in disguise, an illusion, a Looee?”
Tang took a slug of whiskey, and then shuddered at the almost-whiskey stench of it.
“I would not ordinarily condone such a thing,” she said. “Also, when I roam, I cannot change the past using things I have learnt. Only one person I know can do that.”
I agreed. I suppose I’d known all along that he’d been behind it.
Tang tossed herself into a chair, which wobbled a bit and then fell into place. Through the window behind her, I could see the crowd in the town square.
She grimaced, which for Tang was like a smile.
“Why did he need your face to convince John Rising Spirit to kill an anarchist?” Tang asked. “I cannot tell you, or even imagine an answer, except to say that Billy Golden works in mysterious ways.”
“Sometimes, Tang, you speak of him as though he is God.” I looked around. “A God among gods.”
“Not God, a god, a ‘god,’ nor a myth,” Tang replied, without a pause; Tang had answered this same question already, and not long ago. “Someone imagined him. Prometheus, I think. But no idea lasts forever, as you can see. Not the great dung beetle who pushes the sun across the sky. Not Prometheus. Not Lamarckism, spontaneous generation, or Newtonian physics. Not God. Not Billy Golden. He grows old. (You have seen it! He grows very old.) He will die. He has died, long long ago.”
Tang sighed, and she seemed sad at the idea of Billy’s death, at the death of the wonderful near-discredited theory that was Billy Golden, following fast on the heels of the death of “Lamarckism.” (I looked it up, eventually, in a library in New York city, on a trip to 1986.)
“The more we learn, O’Hugh,” Tang said, “the less there is left over for magic or wonder or mystery.”
Tang’s eyes lit on a photograph on the desk, a picture of a crowd of Chinese men and women in a Chinese city. Squinted, then turned away.
“Billy is just a man,” she said, “who had an idea that ran away from him. And the Falsturm is another man, with a different idea, which has met with considerably more success, thus far.”
Tang turned to the desk, eyed a paper, dabbed the fountain pen, signed the paper, blew on it, folded it and creased it.
“Billy has urged you not to listen to the Falsturm’s entreaties,” she said, without turning to me. She held up her candle, let a bit of wax fall on the paper, then sealed it. “Come with me,” she whispered.
“Let’s go out the back way,” she said, and she had that look in her eye — just her left eye, not her right eye — that look I recognized, an almost-twinkle that almost-promised to evolve into an almost-smile but didn’t, nor would it ever. Master Yu told me that he had seen Madame Tang smile in 1878, but I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. As I have said, under admittedly trying circumstances, prepared to face down the Weedville militia in 1875, she and I had shared once an embrace, and it was a fizzing embrace, which had made me smile even considering the mortal circumstances in which we found ourselves, and yet Madame Tang didn’t smile, and after all that followed, the 1905 Battle of Sidonia, the rout of Manhattan during the time of the divided nation following the Great Sidonian Revolt, various victories and defeats and celebrations, I would ne’er see her smile, nor see anything that could be mistaken for a smile alight even briefly on her lips. And yet the woman (as I believe her to have been) was not entirely without joy, and not without wit.
“Follow me,” she said. “I know a place we can talk.”
She pointed to a double door at the end of the hallway, bolted with a double-acting tumbler lock.
“It’s over there,” she said. “The place I want to take you.”
From her jacket pocket, Tang pulled a beautiful old iron key; it had a short and hollow shaft and a rounded edge, and an intricately carved barrel, ancient symbols and pictures and landscapes, extravagantly detailed, but a bit faded now from polish and care. A river cutting through a city of walled hilltop fortresses, distant mountains that dripped weeping and ice-coated trees, a golden sun coating miles of plains and orchards.
“Skeleton key,” she said, as she pressed it into the lock. “It will open any lock — even a double-acting tumbler lock in Hell — but take me to one place only, no matter what lock I open, no matter what door I walk through.”
She squinted as she listened to the pins fall into place.
Wise men, she noted, often pale beside the great power of even the most insignificant key. If you put a key on the table, a war will break out in the kingdom. An iron key in your right pocket will bring good luck.
The lock clicked.
“Although I keep my key in my right pocket,” she said, “I have in life had a torrent of bad luck, and the kingdoms in which I have lived have been plagued with war.”
She pulled the door open, we stepped over the threshold and a golden, orange-hued light filled my world. The rickety termite-bitten statehouse receded into the distance until it was a speck on the horizon, and we stood in the middle of the landscape I had just seen writ on the iron key, as I suppose I had known that I would. The plains I had seen on the key spread out before us, orchards in the distance, and farther off, those icy mountains, those weeping trees. I could hear the river nearby, roaring, its clean water sparkling over white rocks, then cascading down a cliff face to the rapids below; great, golden fish w
ith blue fins struggled against the current.
I could hear all that in the sound of the water, out of view; I knew what the river was feeling. I blinked, and the dim gritty fog of Hell surrounded me. Then it cleared, and the world was sunny again, but the message was clear — the beauty in this world was temporary, and only the misery was real.
A few yards away, a young man jousted with a young woman, both of them strong and fast.
“My daughter, An-Lee,” she said. “And my son, Lung-Ping. They are also still recovering from an adversity, which lasted for many years. But that is over now.”
They did not seem traumatized, they just seemed strong and brave, and like kids, maybe kids who’d had a bad nightmare sometime in the recent past.
The girl and the boy jambled off. Devil-imps swarmed behind An-Lee, and she swatted them away with her sword, over her left shoulder, without looking. The sword’s blade flashed in the golden sunlight as the devil-imps exploded.
All right, so what is this all about?
Some years earlier, after she lost her foot and could no longer really work on the railroad, a penniless Tang and her children left the American west coast and traveled many miles to join the Sidonian Utopian movement in Montana. I managed to piece the tale together over the course of many years and decades, and the exact details are yet unclear to me (and will therefore remain ever-so), but Tang’s journey north apparently occurred upon the steadfast urgings of my old frenemy, Billy Golden, whom Tang had met in the middle of a vivid hallucination in the desert, and who revisited her in her hovel as her foot healed. Back then, Billy was a true adherent to Sidonism and its potential. Tang was less credulous, but she needed the money. But when Billy broke with Sidonism, the leaders of Sidonia sent their henchman, Monsieur Rasháh, to exact revenge. Tang and Billy escaped, but Rasháh kidnapped Tang’s children, whom he enclosed inside his own consciousness, the better to keep an eye on their mother, and then used Tang’s maternal nature against her to lure her to 枉死城.
“This was a place,” she told me, “where he thought he could watch me more closely, and where he could more easily kill me.” She squinted in the bright golden sunshine, as an army of oversized soldiers tumbled and bellowed across the plains. “As you can see,” she added, “one can make one’s own reality.”
She thought.
“As you can see,” she added, “we have some allies.”
And what allies! Gods, both the great and the comparatively insignificant: the ba, the human-headed bird, who represents the priest named Nespanetjerenpare in the land of the dead; the 9-headed bes; Ammit, with the head of a crocodile, who might eat your soul; the jackal-headed Anubis; Asiri, green-skinned, leathery and mummified, the overlord of a long-ago, long-forgotten Hell, once-human, betrayed by his brother Seth a thousand and one times, once for each cut, his body lying in pieces beneath the Egyptian sands; Kwikumat, the spirit of all that is good, and creator of land, plants and animals that abut the Colorado River; Arma, the god of the barren moon; Iyakare, the African god with repulsive and distended arms, who tried to kill Death to save Mankind (and failed, of course); Horus, with the head of a bird; Demeter, beautiful daughter of Cronus and Rhea, whom one would worship and love during the Eleusinian Mysteries each spring, if anyone still recalled the day of the Eleusinian Mysteries; Aniwye, the gigantic and hideous skunk-god of the Ojibwe tribes, who could kill a man just by farting at him and then eat his dead carcass whole; and there, up in the sky, Ares, the angry god of warfare, with his vultures by his side, in a chariot drawn by his fire-breathing stallions; and so many others, forgotten and unloved for millennia, swarmed over the plains and darkened the sky, writhing and impossible creatures, painfully and magically constructed from the needy imaginations of ancient man, but yet here they were, invincible yet defeated, unforgettable and utterly forgotten, their implausible muscles bulging, their teeth and horns and claws and wings glistening in the golden sunlight of this magical and mythical corner of Hell.
“枉死城 is where all the forgotten gods go to die,” she said. “They lived in glory for centuries. Now they have been disproven by better ideas. But though they no longer exist, their hearts were nevertheless broken by your betrayal.” She pointed. “See there.”
A handsome young man rose now from the river, bearded, his dark hair long, his flinty eyes wild. Water cascaded over a deep and angry scar that careered across his torso.
“Prometheus,” Tang said. “This is Prometheus, O’Hugh.”
I didn’t remember Prometheus, to be honest. On Randall’s Island, where I received my so-to-speak “schooling,” we tended to focus on the later myths, Moses, Jesus and Mary and the wise men, and what-not. The deposed deities of earlier civilizations were not prominent in our curriculum. But I nodded. I thought Prometheus was someone I should know, and here he was.
Tang stared at Prometheus, who stepped into golden armor, tossed his sword into the air, caught it gracefully and sheathed it by his side.
“Think of the great gifts that he gave us,” she gasped, “once upon a time. Just a titan, not truly a god, but once upon a time, he dreamed us up — we were a whimsy of his, but he grew to love us. He stole fire for us. We can thank him for filet mignon, for goodness sake, of all the beautiful things to bequeath to us. How he loved us, O’Hugh! — filet mignon! To punish him for his loyalty to the lowly man, Zeus chained him to a rock on Mt. Khvamli; a giant eagle ate his liver daily. During each night, his liver grew back.” She still watched Prometheus, and her eyes filled with pity. “Ra turned into a giant dung beetle every morning to push the sun across the sky, and upon seeing this, the giant eagle would return to eat Prometheus’s liver again. Imagine the torment, O’Hugh. And he did it for you and me, for the love of Man.”
It seemed to fit together; the dung beetle and the Promethean fire and the eagle might have made a certain kind of ignorant sense in some other version of the past, before scientists thought of evolution and the rotation of the earth, which I suppose is what Billy was trying to tell me, in Keter.
Prometheus tossed himself almost carelessly against the cliff wall, scurried across it, upright yet exactly perpendicular to the cliff and parallel to the ground, his dark locks fluttering behind him like a flame as he ran, till he flipped from the rock face onto a galloping white steed.
“When Heracles rescued him,” she continued, “hundreds of years later — after hundreds of years of daily disemboweling — Prometheus expected that his return to the world of Man would be met with incomparable acclaim, parades, new temples, an orgy or worshipful love the likes of which no one had ever imagined. And why not? Look at what he had done for us!”
Prometheus and his galloping white steed vanished into the swarm of gods, then rose like a phoenix to the sky.
“But the world had forgotten Prometheus’s gifts to Man and his astonishing sacrifice, except as a sort of bedtime story. By the time he became free again, Mankind had made up some science and had invented a more sensible-sounding God of the gaps.” She turned to Watt. “Where is your gratitude? Where is your gratitude?”
I shrugged.
“This doesn’t look like Hell to me,” I said.
“Well,” Madame Tang said softly, “this is Hell to them. To our gods of the past.”
Prometheus kicked his horse’s flank, and the steed flew higher, blasted a hole in the clouds and vanished again into the glare of the sun.
“The man must have some money,” I said, squinting, searching the sky for the titan. “I mean, he’s handsome, I would think. Almost any woman might love him, given the right circumstance. And he will live forever. Rich, handsome, eternal life. Not so bad. Why couldn’t he have just been happy?”
“You don’t understand!” she exclaimed. “There is no settling for ‘good enough’ when you are a titan or a god. They survive on the love and gratitude of those who would worship them! They sacrifice for us and love us so that we’ll revere and venerate them. They punish us when we stray so that we will not stray, be
cause they cannot live without us. They lead their followers into battle against the followers of other gods so that they will have more worshipers, and they will grow in power, so that our love for them will fill them like opium smoke, flowing through their veins and into their brains. When we turn our backs on them, they feel betrayed, and they die, and they come here.”
I nodded.
“And you are going to help them return to Malchut?” I asked meekly. “All of these gods and titans.”
She agreed.
“So that they can fight the Sidonians,” she said, “and the Eyebrows, and anything else the Falsturm might throw at us.”
This, I had to agree, made a certain kind of sense, but I wasn’t sure that we could entirely trust even a single angry, vengeful primitive god, and certainly not a whole battlefield of them.
“Will they reverse the course of scientific knowledge?” I asked. “Will they prove that they themselves are real? Will Prometheus make an observation in his notebook and prove the existence of the unnatural, or render the unnatural natural? Usher in a new godly era?
“Or,” I added, “on the other hand, is Prometheus yet doomed?”
On the horizon, Prometheus appeared again, a small, ferocious, bellowing dot against the setting sun, and Madame Tang saw him too.
“Poor Prometheus,” she said. “My poor titan.”
She turned away, and I followed her to the edge of the field where her children were playing, training for war, and I wondered aloud why Prometheus was her favorite.
“He reached into Rasháh’s mind,” she said distantly, “enchanted the imagination of my children, as such creatures do.” She looked up at the beautiful clear sky. “And now they are mine once again.”
She turned her head and appraised me.
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 26