The Six Messiahs

Three slovenly crew members on the foredeck above him were braying about their coming shore leave; using his second sight, Kanazuchi could see the anticipated drunkenness and debauchery already stimulating their lower centers. He slipped back into the shadows as the last of the Chinese were herded down the gangway.

With the steel strength of his fingers, he shimmied twenty feet up a halyard, dropped silently behind the crew members, and waited until one of them broke away, a muscular, bandy-legged engineer's mate, moving to the sea-side rail to empty his bladder. As the mate finished urinating, two hands clamped onto his face with the strength of bear claws; whip motion, a quiet crack, the man's neck snapped. His clothes stripped in thirty seconds, body hoisted and carried over the side on the Holy Man's back.

Kanazuchi used the rail to slide sideways along the ship's bulwark until he reached the anchor line, then lowered himself and the engineer's mate down along the heavy chain to the water, where he gently set the body adrift in the oily bay. Holding his clothes and the bundle that carried his weapons, powders, and herbs dry above the water, he swam a quarter mile along the pier to an empty berth and scaled a ladder to the wharf.

The clothes were a reasonable fit. A small amount of American money in the pockets. So far the gods were smiling, but his journey had only begun. Kanazuchi did not neglect to thank the dead man for the gift of his life and prayed that he was already enjoying his reward.

He climbed over a fence undetected, slipped the pack that held the Grass Cutter over his shoulder, and started walking toward San Francisco. He knew his conscious mind need not worry about where he was going or how he would arrive: Sensei had said the vision which had chosen him for this task would lead him to the missing Book.

A dark tower rising from the sand.

A black labyrinth beneath the ground.

Chinese coolies digging a tunnel.

An old thin man with a white beard and a round black hat.

We are Six.

As he walked Kanazuchi repeated the phrase he used to begin his meditation: Life is a dream from which we are trying to awaken.

BUTTE, MONTANA

'Now they will never return me alive to that cursed black tower of Zenda! And I have you to thank for my life, my best

and dearest friend, Cousin Rudolfo, and for my return to the throne of Ruritania!'

Bendigo Rymer dropped heavily to his knees beside the king's sickbed, and as usual the shock shimmied the moth-eaten backdrop of the lush, cartoonish Ruritanian Alps. Rymer windmilled his arms, indicating the depths of emotion he wrestled with; speech, just this once, deserting him.

'Come on, you ridiculous cow, don't flog it to death,' muttered Eileen, watching from the wings as she waited for her entrance; she checked the pins in her hair to make sure her cheap paste tiara wouldn't go flying into the orchestra pit as it had last week in Omaha.

'Your Majesty, my work here is finished, I can accept no praise. I am only too happy to have served you in the only way an Englishman knows how: with all my heart and soul,' said Rymer finally, before rising and turning across the footlights to the audience. 'Sacrifice in the service of so noble a cause is no hardship.'

That brawny declaration begged for applause from the men, brought out the ladies' hankies, and once again the good citizens of—where were they, Butte, Montana?—were only too happy to hold up their end; Rymer basked in the snug glow of their uncritical affections.

Eileen snorted in disgust. Even for an actor, a breed not celebrated for their sense of restraint, the man was completely incapable of shame.

'But there is still one way in which I can be of use to Your Majesty....' Bendigo made a dashing beeline north, upstaging the witless nincompoop playing King Alexander before he could counter the move; six months on tour and the moron still hadn't learned how to hold center stage. 'I shall return to you the love of your fiancee, Princess Flavia, who has stood by through the darkest hour of your uncertain fate, praying for your return.'

Ha! If I was Flavia waiting to marry this bad haircut, | thought Eileen, by now I'd've slept my way through a squadron of Royal Mounted Dragoons.

Rymer gestured toward the wing; Eileen gave her bosom a shove to encourage a plump decolletage—getting a little long in the tooth for this ingenue crap, aren't we, dearie?—and pranced ethereally onstage.

'My lord, you're alive! My fondest hope! Heaven bless you!'

She draped herself over King Chucklehead and sniffed experimentally. Good, at least he hadn't been munching green onions while offstage in the tower of Zenda. Then the big kiss—the kid hadn't thrust his tongue down her throat again since she gave him a knee in Cleveland—and Bendigo's ever so touching turn downstage, shielding his eyes from the indelicate spectacle of watching the woman he loved returning to the king whose life he had saved, as the final curtain fell and predictably brought down the house.

American audiences were pathetically easy to please.

'Eileen, darling, in our final scene together when I declare my, uh, undying love for you, do you suppose you could come back with your line about my ring always being on your finger just a bit, uh, faster?'

Bendigo Rymer was staring at himself in the mirror, at the midpoint of stripping off his shiny greasepaint. Mesmerized as a charmed snake.

What in the world does he think he's looking at? wondered Eileen. Sharing a stage with the man was punishment enough; inhabiting the same dressing room, as necessity required in some of these rural outposts, felt like a prison sentence.

'Bendigo, darling, the point of Flavia hesitating has to do with being torn between her obligation to Kingy-poo and the incredible passion she feels for dear Rudolfo. If she replies too quickly, I'm afraid it suggests you don't hold nearly the same dangerous command of her affections.'

She waited for the gears of his mind to engage the idea and could nearly hear them grinding. 'That's always been my interpretation anyway,' she added modestly.

'If it's played that way ...' he said, stroking his chin; as with every pose he struck having to do with thought, it seemed effortful. 'It's rather useful to us, that pause then, isn't it?'

'If Flavia is desperately in love with you, it's probably best to let the customers in on the secret.'

'How right you are!' he bellowed, jumping to his feet.

'Bless you, my dear! I have always maintained you are a genuine asset to my company!'

Bendigo tilted his head back and showered his mouth with a deluge of the McGarrigle's Throat Comforter he kept in the atomizer on his table.

Oh God, that means he's going to kiss me.

Rymer's breath generally gave the impression that he'd recently devoured an embalmed cat; the McGarrigle's only succeeded in making it seem as if the cat had been marinated in cheap cologne.

Rymer loomed over her. Eileen skillfully, and somehow graciously, offered him only the top of her head; grease smeared her hair as his lips struck a glancing blow. Then Bendigo was off pacing the room, running his hands through his long dyed locks, simulating the look of a man in the frenzied grip of inspiration.

I'm living a nightmare, thought Eileen Temple, not for the first time. Not even the first time that night. When she'd set sail for America ten years before on the wings of hope and youthful ambition, who could have imagined her star would plummet so far below the visible horizon?

Bendigo Rymer's Penultimate Touring Players. (She'd never had the heart to ask him if he knew the actual definition of 'penultimate'; her guess was no.) Former matinee idol Bendigo Rymer—Oscar Krantz from Scranton, Pennsylvania, truth be known; she'd come across his birth certificate once in the company strongbox—was pushing fifty, if it hadn't toppled already.