“I held it up over my head, so it would not fall in,” Caliban explained, still chewing. “What of the rest of you?”
The four of us who had sought out Mephisto together met each other’s eyes.
Gregor spoke up hoarsely, “Best not to talk of it.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The Battlefield of Wasted Lives
Titus’s generosity in sharing his supplies allowed us to pass through the place of punishment for the Gluttons without undue temptation. This was a good thing, for while I saw fat men and obese women gorging themselves on badly rotten fare, or worse, upon other Gluttons, my brothers reported scrumptious mouthwatering feasts as far as the eye could see. They walked blithely, restraining the desire to sample some tasty morsel, while I was forced to watch ungainly damned souls shovel filth into their mouths and guzzle the wine, which, far from whetting their palate, left them writhing upon the ground, clutching their throats, as if they had drunk a vial of acid.
Eventually, the appetizing dishes began to tempt my siblings. One and then another reached over to touch my shoulder, so that they might see my version and know the truth. After a time, we were all walking together, arm in arm.
Several times during this walk, Mephisto called up Pegasus or the roc and tried to rouse them, but the creatures remained asleep. Gregor suggested opening the vial of Water of Life and holding it beneath their nostrils, as I had done earlier; however, we decided not to risk it while surrounded by hungry souls. They might not be able to hurt us—assuming we remained calm—but they could touch our garments. None of us wished to find ourselves bodysurfing over an angry crowd of the gluttonous dead. Who knows what delicacies we might resemble in their eyes.
Once he called the black swan, but when she arrived she pecked him angrily. He promised not to call her again while Below.
As we walked, my brothers chatted cheerfully with Caliban and Mab, but my thoughts kept returning to the conversation in the lava tube.
That cur! That cad! That rakehell! That bounder! That fringuellone! Che donnaiolo! Che farfallone!
So, Astreus had a reputation for dallying with mortal maids, did he? And I had fallen for his cool elvin charm. As if my recent humiliation by the false Ferdinand in front of my family was not enough! Ooh! I was glad he was dead, the exasperating elf! If he knelt before me now, I would slit his throat in an instant!
* * *
AHEAD of us, a curtain of what looked like black gauze stretched across the landscape, fluttering gently to either side of a large gateway made of bone. As we drew closer, what we had taken for gauze turned out to be woven human hair with eye balls strung along it like beads. These eyes were still alive and swiveled to follow our movements. They gazed at us imploringly, as if they hoped we would offer some aid or comfort.
“Ugh!” I cried, recoiling. “What is this?”
“It’s a gate. It leads to the next circle down. You know, where badder baddies get paddled. I think this is the Fifth Circle we’re entering,” Mephisto explained. He then added, “For each pair of eyes hanging here, some poor twerp of a dead guy is wandering around blind, trapped in eternal darkness.”
“Dear God! What a terrible fate,” Gregor exclaimed, expressing aloud what the rest of us felt, though he then added piously, “No doubt their sins were black enough to deserve such a punishment.”
“Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?” I whispered to Mab.
“Yes, Ma’am, on the carved wall at Mephisto’s mansion. I would say that clinches the theory about the Harebrain being a demon who visits Hell occasionally, but that would be like mentioning the barn door is open after the horse has trampled your head.”
* * *
WE slowly approached the gate in the veil of hair and eyes. The demon guarding it had the thick horn and stubby legs of a rhinoceros with a huge bulbous body between. He sat upon a great, bloated reptile much like those we had seen in the Swamp of Uncleanness, only larger. He kept a constant vigil, prodding souls who tried to pass him with his pitchfork to drive them off. The few that came too close, he skewered and ate.
“I’ll get this one. I know what to do!” Mephisto tapped his staff.
I began to imagine that a cockatrice strutted before the gate. Then, the demon saw it, too. He roared and charged the poisonous creature, his lizard mount leaping comically as it charged the prey. The cockatrice stood its ground defiantly, spitting streams of poison, until it realized the demon was immune to its venomous gaze. Then, it turned and fled.
Bellowing with glee, the demon spurred its lizard and rode after it. Meanwhile, the eight of us quickly sneaked through the unguarded gateway. As soon as we were safely away, Mephisto tapped his staff again, and the cockatrice vanished like a dream, leaving the angry demon to stomp back to his post empty-handed.
On the far side of the bone gate stretched a vast barren plain, beyond which rose the Mountains of Misery, where John Dee’s ball had displayed Ulysses cavorting. The plain was as featureless as a salt flat. Every step we took kicked up soot and dust, which Mephisto claimed were the ashes of blighted, wasted lives. Great clouds of black smoke tinged with sulfurous flames hung overhead; we seemed to walk beneath upside-down volcanoes that stank of rotten eggs. As if the stench were not bad enough, the air was so oppressive we could scarcely breathe.
After a time, we began to hear an unnatural din. In the distance, two mighty hosts of damned souls battled. They came at each other like ravaging wolves, fighting with teeth and fists, for they had no proper weapons. They fastened upon one another’s throats and tore at their enemies with fingernails as long as claws, scratching and biting like angry jackals. The demons who marshaled these berserk troops drove chariots pulled by the spirits of dead men, whom they lashed with whips of flame, urging them ever faster.
The battle cries of the combatants, the thunder of their conflict, and the shrieks of the wounded made an eerie wild music that urged us all to fight or flee. More than once, I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply, despite the stifling atmosphere, to keep from bolting in fear. My brothers, clearly uncomfortable, hunched their shoulders against the sound of it. Theo and Erasmus held a tight grip on their staffs; both hummed, ready. Mab put in his earplugs. So caught up in their fray were these demons and their troops that they did not notice our passing.
Now that my mind was no longer occupied with the revolting nature of the Swamp of Uncleanness or fear for Theo’s life, the true horror of our surroundings began to dawn upon me. Every soul I had seen since I arrived—every victim of lust in the swamp, every sleeper beneath the Styx, every burning hulk who attacked his neighbors rather than escape from the molten lava, every partaker at the feast of gore, and every soldier in the two clashing hordes—had once been a living person—a person who could have escaped this wretched place had he chosen to live a better life. Every one of them had once been somebody—once, somebody’s sister or brother, somebody’s father or mother, somebody’s beloved little child.
How did they all come to this?
Even more disturbing was: where did they come from? There were always a few people whom everyone agreed would be damned: Hitler, Napoleon, the Borgias, my uncle Antonio. But no one really expected ordinary people to go to Hell. Yet, we had passed thousands of damned souls, possibly millions, and that was just in the few sections through which we had traveled. There must be hundreds of millions beside, maybe billions. Would even a single one of these sufferers have chosen to be here, if he understood what was waiting for him?
The irony, the sorrow, the sheer waste, appalled me.
* * *
WE no longer held hands, for here there were no illusions. The others were trapped in the same dismal landscape as I. The Plain of Wasted Lives, with its dark roiling sky, spread away from us in every direction.
We walked for hours, each step kicking up dust, which got in our hair, our eyelashes, our mouths. Bones crunched beneath our feet, and often we had to step over rusted breastplates and cracked he
lmets. It was like every battlefield I had ever walked, except this dreary plain lacked the stink of carnage. That should have made it less unpleasant; instead, it seemed more ghostly, a phantom battlefield, emphasizing the waste and loss, without a single reminder of life, even the unpleasant ones.
As the clouds of dust and smog grew around us, my mind drifted to the wasted opportunities of my own life. I had never known love, never been a wife or a mother. With the Water of Life running out, I would die never having known any of these things.
I had so wanted children!
How ironic that Astreus was lost to me just when I could have accepted his suit. Of course, I would have refused him—unless he was offering me his head on a pike! But, even if he had been what I first took him for, he would not have wanted a sullied mortal woman. It was the Handmaiden of Eurynome he had wanted. Or, rather, the Sibyl!
Sibyl … a low tortured sigh escaped my lips as the reality sank in slowly. I would never be a Sibyl. All that work, prayer, obedience, loneliness, all in the hope of gaining a prize that would never be mine. Since that day, at the age of five, when Father consecrated me to the service of the Unicorn, I dreamt of rising to the highest ranks of Her servants and gaining the Gifts of the Sibyl: opening locks, creating Water of Life at will, commanding the lightning! And, most of all, absolving oaths.
Had I become a Sibyl, I could have freed Mephisto from his oath to the Elf Queen, Ulysses and Logistilla from their oaths to Abaddon, and the elves from their oaths to Hell. All this good I could have done, and I still, to this day, did not know why the rank of Sibyl had been denied to me.
Oh, I had theories aplenty: it was because I held the Aerie Ones captive, or because I had held Her consort Ophion as a prisoner in my flute. But, neither of those theories really made sense. Had that been all that was needed, my Lady would merely have told me to set them free. No, whatever was lacking had to be something in me, some quality in myself, something like …
A soul!
Maybe my Lady did not want women with damaged souls to serve her.
My limbs grew cold, almost numb. It was to guard against lilim, the seductive temptresses that served the Queen of Air and Darkness, that Eurynome required her Handmaidens to be virgins. Lilith was Eurynome’s great enemy, bent upon Her destruction. The Demon Queen had been the one who furnished the enchanted weapons to the Unicorn Hunters of old, and Lilith was the one who tricked Mephisto into promising to bring her the Unicorn’s head, a promise he had sacrificed his sanity to escape.
And I … I might be Lilith’s daughter!
Had Father dedicated me to Eurynome as some kind of a ploy, an attempt to harm my Lady? But if so, why had it taken so long to accomplish? Could Father have been waiting patiently all this time, like a spider in its lair, for me to become a Sibyl so that he and his “M” could hatch some dastardly plan?
It made no sense. Eurynome would never accept a daughter of Lilith as one of Her Sibyls. I could have served Her until the end of time—I could have been the best Handmaiden there ever was—and I would never have achieved my desire. If, in truth, Lilith were my mother, then throughout my long life, all my hopes and dreams had always been for nothing.
Tears flowed down my cheeks, a hot trickle that quickly became a torrent. I wept bitterly and could not stop. I wept for the life that I had wasted. I wept for the love that I had lost—for I had loved the real Ferdinand well and truly. Had Astreus and I had more time … well, who could guess what might have come?
But it was not to be.
Theo’s arms came around me, holding me tightly, comforting me. I threw myself against him, crying on his shoulder.
“Oh, Theo!”
He held me for a bit, swaying gently back and forth, while the rest of our party moved on ahead of us. Tears splashed against his shirt and his breastplate.
He smoothed my hair. “I am so sorry. It is all my fault.”
“Sorry for what?” I looked up, my face tearstained.
“Osae…” His voice faltered. “I arrived too late.”
I hugged him fondly with a hiccup and a sniff. “How could you have known?”
“But that’s just it.” Theo’s face looked so young and sincere peering out from his helmet, so like the dear brother I had thought lost forever, that my heart ached. I feared I would begin bawling all over again. “In my excitement at seeing Gregor again, I hesitated when the Voice spoke.” He lowered his head in shame. “I had gotten out of the habit of listening to it during my long years of exile, when I had distanced myself from the family. By the time I heeded it and ran to get my staff, it was too late.”
“Voice?” I asked, startled. “What Voice?”
“The one that tells me when family members are in trouble. It’s not a voice, really.” He blushed. “I mean, not an audible sound another could hear.”
“Have you always heard this Voice?”
“Always? No … The first time was while we were taming Vesuvius. The Voice warned me that the local oreads had betrayed us and had dropped Titus into a crevasse. That was in 1631.”
“Funny, you’ve come to rescue me so many times, and yet it never occurred to me to ask you how you knew to be there. In Venice, remember when those men trapped me in that alley?”
Theo laughed. “What I remember was the time in Paris, when you jumped off the bridge into the Seine! If I’d been any later, that boat would have cut you in two!” He grew suddenly serious. “And that angry mob in Lisbon—I hate firing my staff at ordinary human beings. I wish there had been another way out!”
“Well, I was very glad you had your staff the time that Welsh wyvern woke up a decade early! Otherwise, I’d be rather crisper today!” I patted his arm. “Wait, just recently, when you saved me from Osae the Bear at the gas station in Vermont and then later, from Osae the Mab at Father’s mansion. Was that…?” Theo nodded. “Amazing! All this time, I just thought that showing up when you were needed was part of who you were.”
“Your man Mab asked me about it, and Mephisto seemed to know something about it, too. I’ve wanted to question him further, but … well, you know what it’s like getting information out of Mephisto!”
“What does this Voice sound like?”
“A flute speaking words.”
“I know that voice!” I laughed in delight.
“Do you?” Theo looked thunderstruck.
“Yes! It is the guardian angel of the Orbis Suleimani!”
“Really?” Theo cried, astonished. “Why would their angel come to me? I am not a member of their mystical mumbo-jumbo organization!” He made a face expressing his disapproval.
“Erasmus asked me a similar question when I told him she had visited me,” I replied. “I don’t know the answer. Maybe we made ourselves available when others did not.”
We began walking again, not wanting the others to get too far ahead of us. Mab was already looking back suspiciously. Theo took my hand, and we walked in silence for a time. Bones cracked underfoot, and clouds of black ash boiled overhead. The place stank.
“I was a goner, Miranda. The Hellwinds dropped me into that lava and … I was angry at everything. Everything was so unfair. I cursed the wrath of God! Then, Caliban’s voice cut through all that, calling me back to my duty, reminding me that the family needed me.” He smiled sheepishly. “My old argument of fearing I’d end up burning in Hell didn’t hold water anymore!
“Funny, how life is. For decades now, I—who for most of my life feared nothing—have lived in terror, afraid of dying, afraid of burning in Hell. And now?” He laughed joyously, such a contrast to the creepy landscape around us. “Now, it’s happened! I’ve burned in Hell and lived to talk about it. Better yet, I’m still alive, and I’m happier than I’ve been in years.”
“Happier?” I wiped mud—born of tears and dust—from my cheek and then looked over the dismal plain, dotted with pointless battles that represented the death of so many hopes. “Here?”
“It’s as if I’ve woken up from a dre
am.” Theo shook his head as if clearing away cobwebs, a distant light in his eyes. “It could have been yesterday we all gathered at Gregor’s graveside, and I took the vow to turn my back on magic, even if it meant that I would age and die. The intervening time, the years of loneliness and suffering—it’s as if I have suddenly awakened, and they never happened. All my old firmness of purpose has returned and now burns in my breast like a shining star.”
“Now, you sound like Theophrastus!” I smiled in delight, despite the lump of sorrow and regret still lodged in my heart.
Theo’s eyes blazed. “I hope we live through this adventure. There are a thousand things that need doing! The monsoons still need binding, as do the many oreads. I did get around to those along the San Andreas Fault, but other faults await. The weather has been crazy of late. A firmer hand is needed.
“Then, there’s the immorality and indulgence of modern society. Clearly some demons have escaped onto the surface and are influencing public opinion—most likely they’re in Hollywood. That’s where I’ll start looking, anyway. And then there are the modern witches that have popped up everywhere. Gregor and I—or maybe it will be Titus and I, since the two of them have apparently changed staffs; I assume they’ll tell me why at some point—are going to have quite a time sorting out which ones are innocent and which ones are doing real harm.”
“It’s good to have you back!” I hugged him. Another great weight lifted from my shoulders.
How odd and astonishing that this plain of wasted purpose brought out the best in Theophrastus, that he—of all people—would be immune to its lure.
Suddenly, I realized why I had found his behavior so puzzling over the last few decades. While Theo may have made and broken vows down through the years—regarding eschewing wine, women, and magic—he had never swerved in his pursuit of virtue and right. I kept expecting his love of righteousness to assert itself and compel him to act. I had not taken the Staff of Persuasion into account.
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