“The Dark Lord cannot create,” I told him again. “You have created everything here. You and the others. He has only borrowed it from you.”
“It was only a story,” he cried. “Only a story!”
I thought of Chinanga once more. That, too, had been only a story, and yet I remembered Constanzia’s face as she twirled slowly into nothingness. What are stories, after all, but reflections of a reality we make? Before Jaybee did anything, first he told himself a story about it. First I will go to her house, then I will break in her door, then I will knock her down and lie on top of her, watching her scream, then I will let my weapon out of my trousers and hurt her with it.
“To those who read it, it was real,” I told him. “They lived it, while they read it. Perhaps afterward, they lived it. Some believed it. Perhaps one of those who believe it picked up a weapon and did to someone else what you did to a character. Or tried. There was enough belief to give it reality. Otherwise you would not be here.”
He won’t believe that. He has stopped talking to me.
The cell is open. I go out. Barry comes behind me.
He is playing with us, of course.
We walk, and I think words. Somewhere they are distilled onto a page. We … walk. My feet shuffle along. Barry tiptoes, screaming when he does not get high enough on his toes to avoid the broken bone at his heel. This is part of it, of course. Tempting him to walk, to escape, so that he will try this ungainly, ridiculous gait which hurts him so. I shuffle, he tiptoes. Time goes by. We are still surrounded by others. We can feel them on all sides.
An opening. We separate. He goes one way, I another.
I found a river. I came upon a place where space breaks through into something almost real. Like the door in the cavern, like the mirror, this connects to the world. Or to some other world. It is hard to tell. Mists hang heavily over the flow, which is turgid and silent. Nothing moves in the water. There is no shore I can walk along, but only this one space where hell waits on one side and the water on the other.
Still, it is a change. I sit beside the flow, listening, hoping for a sound other than those I have heard for so long. At last it comes. A slow plopping. From somewhere to my right and behind me. Eons pass and the slow sounds are no closer. And then, at last, they are here, in front of me. A rowboat, a rower, a few other figures who are drawn up past me as though made of smoke, fleeing past me into the enormity of this place.
The rower turns to face me, his dark hood shadowing his face.
“Captain Karon,” I whisper.
“Lady Wellingford,” he smiles. “Fancy seeing you here.” His smile is a death’s-head grin, and yet there is something of the old captain there. “Back at my old trade, you see. Sometimes I miss the Stugos Queen.”
“I thought,” I say, wondering what I thought. “I thought that you …”
“Would vanish, with the rest? With my lovely Mrs. Gallimar? With Constanzia and the Viceroy? No. No, I was not part of that story only. I am part of many things.”
“You’ve thought about who you are, then.”
“I’ve had an eternity of time to think about little else,” he smiled. “Plying across the Acheron, the Styx, the Cocytus, the Lethe, the Dark Waters at the end of all things.”
“Who made them, Captain?”
“Men made them, Lady. Made them with magic their religions stole from Faery. Made them and named them and peopled them, too.”
“Along with Acheron and Abaddon and all the rest.”
“Surely.”
“And this hell behind me, Captain? Did men make this one, too?”
“Men and the Dark Lord, Lady. Each helping the other.” He sighed. “Is there anything else I can tell you, or do for you, Lady Wellingford?”
“Would you row me away from here? For old time’s sake?”
He laughed. “Where to, Lady Catherine?”
“To the other side.”
“What other side?” he smiled again, and pushed his boat away. I heard the quiet plops of the oars recede and was then drawn back into the place.
“Never mind,” said the voices. “It may be a way out.”
Giles. I have found I can almost escape this place by thinking of Giles. The voices give me silence, and I think of him.
When one is young, one thinks of love in romantic or erotic terms. I did. When I was sixteen, I thought of Giles in romantic and erotic terms. Romance when we were in the dining hall. Eros when I was in bed alone in the night hours. There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one’s own youthful awareness. I wanted Giles, very specifically, to do to me what the stallions did to the mares, what the stable boys talked of doing to their sweethearts. I had no experience of it, but my flesh knew. And then, twenty years later, when we did at last what I had longed for, my flesh knew once again. It was the single thing needed, the one thing wanted, the savor and marvel of life.
I could not imagine doing without it. Being without it.
And yet, all those years in the twentieth, I had done without it, been without it. Seventeen, eighteen years old. At the peak of urgency and desire, and yet I had done without it. Because there had been no Giles. I had remembered him, lusted after him, pleasured myself in my bed pretending he was there. He had been necessary to my joy. It would have been nothing without him. So I had thought.
And when we two had come together at last, we had been splendid, but it had been more than the splendor of the flesh.
