Will could not make out the any details of the interior for the murkiness within. But there were flames inside and the smell of gasoline and cold iron.
Stark terror gripped his heart and squeezed. But he could not bear to display cowardice in front of Alcyone.
He took a deep breath and stepped forward.
"Oh, no, you don't." Alcyone slammed the door shut before he could pass through." You're only here for support." To their cicerone, she said, "This has nothing to do with him, understand? It's my own worst fear I need to confront."
With an apologetic smirk, the devil unlocked the door with another key. It opened onto an entirely different space.
Alcyone stepped within. The door shut behind them.
Will almost gagged from the mingled stench of stale urine, feces, and physical decay that rose from a hospital bed at the center of the room. But the room itself was clean and well-appointed, with blue rose patterned wallpaper and lace curtains so thick that only a joyless gray light shone through. To one side of the bed was a table with a vase of dried flowers and a bowl of dusty wax fruit. At its foot was an aquarium in which a lone Siamese fighting fish swam around and around a ceramic castle in slow and unvarying circles. A clock on the wall ticked steadily, its slimmest hand twitching in place once a second, perpetually three hacks from the hour and never quite reaching two.
At first Will thought that the crone lying in the bed was but a shadow or a trick of the light. Then, with the slightest shift of perception, there she was: transparent, like a glass filled with water. Straps had been tied about her waist and chest to keep her in place. Her mouth hung open in a frozen gasp of pain. "Who is she?" Will asked.
"My Aunt Anastasia."
"What's wrong with her?"
Alcyone looked stricken. "Early onset enlightenment." She sank gracefully down at the side of the bed and placed a hand on the smudged rail. "Oh, Auntie, speak to me."
Almost inaudibly, the crone whispered, "The gods of the valleys... are nor the gods of the hills." "What?"
"Lilian... Allen said that." Her voice gained strength and her body took on the faintest tinge of color. "Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud. The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet. We sing, but oh the clay is vile. And there the lion's ruddy eyes shall flow with tears of gold. This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. No job too dirty for a fucking scientist. Milton Cuvier Dunbar Blake Nixon Burroughs said that. Here also lie the rainbow gardens of the Lady. Nobody knows who said that. It wasn't me."
"Auntie, you're not making any sense."
"No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number."
Alcyone took her Aunt Anastasia's hands in her own, so that the moonsilver ring touched the old lady's fragile and translucent skin. "Gome back to the world," she said. I need your advice, Auntie. Come back to me."
"Mary McCarthy said that Venice is the world's unconscious, a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. But surely she meant Babel? Babel is the mile high city, the city of light, the big apple, and the hog butcher of the world. All roads lead to it, and he who is tired of the Worldly Tower is tired of life. I am so very tired of Babel. I am so very desirous of a road that leads somewhere else."
"Speak to me no more in riddles and citations!" Alcyone said sternly. "I command you by the authority of this ring, forged on a continent that no longer exists, before the Thousand Races arose, to address me in clear words and with a lucid mind."
There was a faint flutter of the crone's eyelids. They opened narrowly and the eyes beneath them drifted from side to side. "You've brought me back to consciousness?" The crone's hands plucked feebly uselessly at her restraints. "How hateful. You always were a cruel child."
"Yes, dear, I'm afraid I have. But my need was great. You have information that I can get from no one else." The eyes closed. "Then ask."
"You had a lover,'' Alcyone said. "It was the scandal of the family. Nobody would talk about it. But I overheard enough to know that you had a lover for decades before you succumbed to enlightenment. Tell me how you did it."
"It is a long story. Ask me something briefer."
"Oh, Auntie. You know I cant."
"Very well. I was a precocious child," Anastasia said, "much as you were, dear. I walked, as they say, before I could crawl, and I levitated before I could properly stand. All places were one to me and I was anchored to any given locale only by my desire to be there rather than elsewhere. By age seven I could read the thoughts of those dear to me as easily as I could my own. Yes, yes, you could as well at an earlier age, sweetie, I know that, and who's telling this story, you or me?"
"Sorry."
"So my guardians put me on a discipline of cold-water treatments and corporal punishment. My rank was such, of course, that nobody dared touch me, and so I acquired a whipping boy. Hodge was a common fey, like your friend, but like your friend he was a comely thing. And of course a whipping boy must be personable, the sort of individual who will quickly become one's best friend, or else punishing him would be ineffective.
"So we grew up together. Alas for Hodge, I was a hellion and could not modify my ways, and so he was scourged almost every day. Afterward, to hide my shame at what I was responsible for, I would laugh at him, and lick the tears from his face.
"Do I need to say that he loved me? Of course he did. How could he not? But I, of whom such behavior was not to be expected, fell in love with him as well."
"What's wrong with that?" Will asked.
One eye opened and moved slowly to stare at him. A few seconds later, the other joined it. "We high-elven are like bubbles which, rising, dissolve before reaching the surface. Our power is spiritual in essence and so as we gain strength our attachment to the world grows increasingly weaker. This is why we have affairs, why we interfere in the lives of others, why we involve ourselves in the machineries of governance. Sex, gossip, and bureaucracy are the three great forces that bind us to the world."
"I knew one who claimed to stave off dissolution with treason and violent adventure," Will said.
One eye drifted away from him. The other stayed. "It was a male who told you that — and an elderly one, or he would not have forgotten to throw in sex. But to answer your question, the problem with love is that it has the potential to make one happy. Pure, undiluted happiness, how many days of that could one such as I or Alcyone have before it destroyed us?"
"Twenty-seven," Alcyone said quietly.
"Yes, that sounds about right. And how swiftly pass the days when one is in love. One loses count so easily. So you see, young romantic, if you were to take up with our little Allie, she'd be as I am now within a month."
"But you lived with your lover. You found a way around it," Alcyone said.
"Oh, I was cunning, all right. I was most careful not to be happy. I was cruel to my Hodge and I encouraged him in a thousand ways to be cruel to me. We bickered constantly. I nagged and scolded. And every time he began to make me joyful, I whipped him until he bled.
"So it went, for many a long and miserable decade. But as with anything that is used as a substitute for sex, the punishment became eroticized. Pain became an expression of my passion for him. He understood this and egged me on to greater and greater exertions. Until a day came when my pleasure in his suffering became so perfect that I did not stop and I beat him to death."
Will cried out in horror.
"Perfection is death," Anastasia said. "The world is imperfect, but if it weren't, who would love it?" Her eyelids closed, absolutely solid now and pale as old paper. "Our symposium has come to an end. Leave me go back to courting oblivion."
"Yes, dear." Alcyone's voice was almost inaudible. "I'm sorry I disturbed you."
"The goddam sands run out..." Anastasia mumbled. "You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world. Salinger."
As they were leaving, Will glance
d back over his shoulder. He saw in the hospital bed not an old woman but a blaze of light.
In the stretch afterward, Alcyone said, "Do you believe what they say about Nanshe?"
"What do they say?"
"That she-and-he is the psyche — the ka — of Babel. That our world is nothing but his-or-her dreams, in which we live and love and fight and aspire, all the while thinking ourselves the center of the universe. But that the day will come when Nanshe wakes up and we will all suddenly and painlessly cease to be."
"I don't know. I hope not. What do you think?"
"I wonder. The reason I left the club so suddenly? I thought I heard him-and-her moan your name, and I feared what she-and-he might say next." She took the ring from her finger and put it away in her clutch purse. There were tears on her face, and Will desperately wanted to kiss them away. "Which is ironic, considering."
"Alcyone, I—"
"Shush," she said fiercely. Then, in control again, "When I was a child, I bought my first hippogriff and learned to fly because I wanted to be free. Then, as I grew older and more aware of the constraints put upon me, I flew to test the limits of my cage. Finally I flew in order to pretend that freedom might someday be possible." The limo's tires hummed on the pavement. It was late enough that there was almost no traffic in the streets. "Tell me. Can you see any way that you and I could be happy together?"
"No," Will said after a long pause. "No, I don't."
"Nor do I."
She dropped Will off on Broadway, a good forty blocks from where he needed to be. He walked home through a cold drizzle that blew through Babel from the sea.
17
A Prince in Ginny Gall
The rumor spread like wildfire through Harlem and Ginny Gall and into the fringe neighborhoods of Beluthahatchie and Diddy-Wah-Diddy: A cloaked prince had come, barefoot and alone, to consult with Salem Toussaint and to obtain the alderman's blessing preparatory to claiming his throne. Haints came out into the streets, flowing down the tenement steps and pouring from the pool halls and juke joints, stumbling up from the opium dens and storefront joss houses, stepping from the doorways of the barber shops and hair salons and social clubs, abandoning the night classes and soup kitchens, their eyes bright with strange hopes, and found his footprints glowing on the tarmac.
Will and the vixen had painted them earlier with phosphorescent paint overlaid with a suppressor spell timed to wear off shortly after sundown, but of course only they knew that.
In the alderman's office, Will doffed his hood and for an instant gloried in the complete and utter bafflement of his former employer.
Salem Toussaint reached out a hand and squeezed Will's forearm, as if to assure himself that it actually was him. "Are you really the king?" he said dubiously. Then, reverting to his usual decisiveness, "No, of course not. What in the world are you up to, Will?"
"Well. I'm pretty sure I'm not the heir, at any rate," Will said. "But folks started coming up to me and telling me that I was, and..." He shrugged. "I dunno." He should have felt bad, lying to his old mentor. But the truth was he strangely enjoyed the sensation of power it gave him. "Nowadays I'm just winging it. Going with the current and seeing where it takes me."
"Don't you try to bamboozle me, young fella. The city talks to me. What Babel knows, I know." Toussaint put on his sternest face. "I sure hope you know what you're doing, boy. Because if you don't, let me warn you proper: Politics is a meat grinder. Don't go sticking your head into it unless you're damned sure you know what you're doing. And even then. Now tell me why you're here in my office."
"I came to ask for a favor, Salem."
Toussaint’s face relaxed into a smile. He was on familiar ground now. "It's what I'm here for, son."
"Nat needs an office. Someplace that looks official but that rents to private citizens. Someplace that's both grandiose and just a little bit seedy. One that can handle a lot of foot traffic without drawing attention. And one where somebody like you could arrange for an off-the-books cash rental on short notice." He gestured at the building about him. "Old City Hall would be perfect."
"What on earth would you need such a thing for?"
"See... the way we figure it, if there's going to be a new king, there'll be a lot of individuals who'd like to have access to him, in order to present their complaints or schemes, who might be willing to prime the pump in exchange for that access."
"Ahhh," Salem Toussaint said. "You'll be selling titles and offices."
"How well you know me! So can we do business?"
"Well, now. Much as I like Nat personally, he's just a wee bit too well known locally for me to—"
Will held up his hands. "Oh, Nat wouldn't set foot in the building. I mention his involvement only so you'll know I'm not trying to hide anything." He went to the door. "Contessa, you can come in now." To the alderman he said. "This is Contessa Victoria il Volpone. She'll be acting as Nat's office manager."
The vixen was wearing a man's suit, tieless, with an orchid pinned to the lapel. The top shirt buttons were undone and the shirt itself folded back to reveal the tops of her breasts. It was an ensemble that made her look roguish and fetching while its eccentricity rendered her assumed title seem almost plausible. "I feel honored to meet you, alderman," she said. "Will has said so many fine things about you."
"Milady." Salem came around his desk and, bending low, kissed her hand.
The vixen colored prettily. "Oh, my!" She fanned herself. "I hope you're taking notes, Will. This is one gent who, I swear, need never go to bed alone."
Toussaint beamed like all the world's favorite uncles rolled into one.
Jimi Begood chose that instant to come out of the side office. When he saw Will, he whistled long and low. "Well, I'll be damned." He raised his voice. "Ghostface, get your butt out here!" Then, "He isn't the—?"
"Well, now," Salem Toussaint said. "Let's keep our options open on that one. We'll just wait and see what turns out to be the most advantageous thing for us to believe. Right now, this lovely lady needs an office."
So they talked. Numbers were named and percentages haggled. Terms were put on the table and taken off again. There came a brief magical moment when all were in accord and Will stepped in to declare the deal accepted, lest the vixen and the alderman rush past it, going on and on into the night for the sheer pleasure of negotiating with a fellow professional. Toussaint gave the vixen the key to a room not too close to his own, but certainly not so far away that he couldn't keep an eye on her. The vixen put her hands together and bowed formally. "Domo arigato."
"De nada," Salem Toussaint said. Then, "What's that noise?"
Jimi Begood opened the window to discover that the street outside was thronged with haints. They were all staring up at the building. Seeing movement at the window, they began chanting. "Give-us-the-king. Give-us-the-king."
"Holy fuck," Ghostface said.
"Hear that, kid? They love you," the vixen said. "Step out on the balcony and give em a wave."
But against all expectations this show of devotion seemed strangely sad to Will. "Why should they care?" he asked. "Were things ever any better for them when the king sat over Babel. Babylonia, and the Contingent Territories? Why should folks who never benefited from the monarchy welcome its return?" "Give-us-the-king."
"His Absent Majesty is the personification and embodiment of justice," Salem Toussaint said. "So naturally every honest citizen awaits his return, and all who exploit them fear it." One gold tooth caught the light. "As you can hear, my constituents are all honest citizens."
"Give-us-the-king. Give-us-the-king."
Jimi Begood had been tugging on the French doors that opened onto a small and long neglected balcony. Now they banged open.
"Put that hood back on," Toussaint said. "Then go out there and let them see you."
Will stepped out onto the balcony, feeling light-headed and almost dizzy. He looked down on a sea of upturned faces. Then he raised a hand.
As one, every haint
in the street cheered and applauded. Pinpricks of light twinkled as flash cameras took picture after picture. A great wash of love surged up from the crowd, filling Will with an incredible energy. He felt strong enough to lift a bus and deft enough to walk on water. It was a wonderful sensation. He turned from side to side, waving with one hand and then the other, grinning madly. It did not seem possible he could feel this alive.
Alter all too short a time, hands seized his arms and shoulders and tugged him back inside. He was gasping with exhilaration.
Salem Toussaint was saying something. "Listen to me, boy!" The alderman shook Will. "Are you listening? I sent Ghostface out to bring the car around. We're going to get you out of here." He turned to the vixen. "This proposition is way too dicey for me to be directly associated with it But I'm getting a funny feeling about it. Take Jimi Begood with you. Everyone knows he's one of mine, but if things turn sour I can always say he went along as an observer."
Then, to Will again. "Good luck, kid. I still think you're a fool to be doing whatever it is you're doing. But I hope you come through it okay."
"Thanks, Salem. You're a mensch."
"I'll hammer a nail in the nkisi nkonde for you."
There were throngs of gawkers standing around the front steps of Old City Hall and almost as many around the back, so Will slipped out a side door. But he was spotted anyway.
Somebody he didn't remember said, "It's the white boy."
Embarrassed, Will shook the haint's hand. "Hi, good to see you." He clapped another on the shoulder. "How are you doing?" More and more haints appeared, murmuring in wonder, reaching out to touch him, ghost-soft whispers of fingers stroking his arms, his shoulders. He shook hands and slapped backs like a younger version of Salem Toussaint. "I'm with you," he said, and "Thank you for your support." and "Don't think you're forgotten, because you're not."
The Dragons of Babel Page 28