[Bemusedly]: As the night is my witness, Ben, I killed the huri. No, the boonie can’t believe it either. Nevertheless, it’s true.
Look at him. He’s making slow figure eights with his chin. He thought me just another low Asadi dog, but I’ve boggled him past recovery. When he was finishing carving up that pitifully helpless woman, that sweet, long-legged lady, he set the huri atop her carcass and busied himself devouring her viscera, the sweet discarded bones of her limbs and skull . . . I had to do something then, of course. I pulled myself up – but the huri was sitting there on her butchered body staring at me blindly and daring me to move. I wasn’t supposed to move, you see; I was supposed to be a good cannibal and wait until dinner was properly served . . . But I’m not an Asadi, and I paid no heed to the boonie’s stupid sentinel, Ben. I killed it. That’s the heed I paid it. I ran up and kicked the huri with my boot, it fluttered backward, and I was upon it with my reinforced heel, grinding its filthy little no-face into the grass. Its body split open. Pus spilled out of the lesion like putty from a plastic tube, stinking to the skies. Strands of the stuff coagulated in the gelatinous mass, grew silken and feathery in the air. The smell was intolerable . . . That’s what made me sick, I’m afraid, the sight and the stink of the huri’s silk-making innards. I stumbled away, fell to my knees, and heaved until I thought my guts would wrench loose inside me. You can’t imagine what it felt like . . .
The Bachelor never moved. Killing the huri had given me a hold over him, a power. He just sat, like he’s sitting now, half hunkering, half flat-assed on the ground, and watched me be sick. The smell of the grass revived me, convinced me of my own feeble heroism, and that’s when I had to tell you about it, when I started talking through my sickness and the heavy, too-sweet smell of the grass.
[A period of silence, during which only the wind in the tropical vegetation and an ambiguous, intermittent rustling are audible.]
Hello. Are you still there, still with me? The Bachelor just stood up, uncoiled from his crouch, and faced me like an enemy. I thought I was dead, I really did. I know that’s a turnabout – you don’t have to require consistency of me under these circumstances, do you? . . . But he didn’t attack. He merely stared at me for a minute, then turned and walked across the open clearing toward the temple. He’s climbing the steps right now, very slowly, a grey shape remarkably like the grey shape he killed.
Every moon is up. The three of them ripple his shadow down the tier of steps behind him. Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior arrayed in virtual conjunction. The pagoda itself, in this light, scarcely has substance. It looks to have been built of water, water frozen not into cloudy masonry blocks of ice but into a transparent crystalline structure contiguous with the very atmosphere. How to say this? It seems to be merging with the jungle, Ben, Eisen, everyone. The pagoda is slipping out of my vision like a scarf slipping from my hand, just that easily and casually.
[Shouting]: Damn you! You can’t leave me here in this gut-strewn glade! I’m coming after you! Do you hear me! I’m coming!
IV. CHANEY: Where is it, Eisen? You said we could see it from this hemisphere, you said it was visible. But I’m standing here, standing out here in front of the Asadi’s fading temple where there aren’t any branches to block my view, and, damn you, Eisen, I don’t see it! Just those blinding moons dancing up and down and a sky full of flaming cobwebs. Where’s Sol? Where’s our own sun? Nowhere. Nowhere that I can see.
[Suddenly resolute]: I’m going back into the temple. Yes, by God, I am. The Bachelor’s abandoned me out here. Twenty minutes I’ve been out here alone. I don’t intend to die in this place. I killed his huri, and my suspicion is that he wants me to die for my deed. But is a man who kills a huri the sort to accept a passive death? I hope not, Ben. I’ve taken too much shit, heaved up too much of myself, to sit cross-legged under the trees and wait for either my own death or the onset of the corrupt hunger that would keep me alive . . . I won’t eat his offering, and I won’t stay out here in that poor butchered lady’s company. I can’t.
There’s a beautiful golden cord in the pagoda, a beautiful golden cord. That should do it. If the boonie’s still too shaken up with his loss, his stinking bereavement, to lead me back to the clearing – the
