The camera follows the fingers, up, and up, and up.
The camera sees a mouth. Opening. The radish is inserted, halfway. Yellowed teeth champ down. Saliva perks at the corners of the lips. The mouth opens again.
“Shit,” says Mr. Tupp, spitting. “That’s awful.” The camera follows the radish as it falls, a bite out of one side, the other still glowing like martyr’s blood, wet and miraculous.
The camera sees Martin walking away with Mr. Tupp, his arm around Mr. Tupp’s shoulders in comradely fashion. For a moment the camera follows them. Then it turns downward, down to the last radish.
Jaybee always knew what made a good picture. As the camera draws away, and turns, and draws away, the radish becomes a sun on the horizon, an arc eaten out of it by a low brown hill; the leaves around it are a forest, and behind that forest the glowing ruby sun is setting. Forever setting.
The gong rings. Stronger this time, I hear a murmur, as maybe many voices whispering, “Two.”
I am alone in my place. Barry is being tortured somewhere else. I am thinking of my mama. And of myself.
I was Elly’s mother. Unwillingly. Without intention. Mama was my mother. If not unwillingly, at least without intention. She left me, left me to Westfaire and the Curse, a short span in her life, telling me to come to her when it was over. I left Elly, only for a few years, I thought, intending to return when they were over. So, perhaps, mothers leave children every day, intending to return, only to find they are too late, returning. The thing has happened. The hour has struck. The time has passed when it would have mattered.
So, are they to blame? Am I to blame, for Elly? Is Mama to blame for me?
And if the mother hovers, settles like a hen upon the nest, clucks to her chick beneath her wings and does not let it go; if the mother says, “No, the hour may strike, the thing may happen, and I will not leave you alone”; if the mother does that? What?
The chick struggles, and runs, and hides, wanting to feel the sun on its feathers, the air beneath its wings. And if it runs away and the hawk gets it, whose fault is that?
Is Mama to blame I am in hell? Was I to blame that Elly was in hell from the day of her birth?
The third gong. I wasn’t expecting it. The sound came in a great wave. It left in slow vibration, and after it the almost hysterical gabble of thousands of voices moving from a whisper to a grunt to a shout: “Three, three, three.”
Then the voices, saying the words I had taught them, words my favorite poet had made long ago, in some other place:
“From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,”
The words were ragged. I joined them, shouting, hearing Barry’s voice rise up next to mine.
“We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be”
The words came more strongly, more surely.
“That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;”
A shriek from the Dark Lord. He had heard us. Was he too late to stop us? Did all the victims believe it enough?
“That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
We were on the river shore! I heard the shriek, the cry, the bellow of the whistle of the Stugos Queen. We were standing on the riverbank in Chinanga, watching it come around the bend. From the high deck, Captain Karon waved at me. Around me lay the bodies of some dead, including Barry, who would rise up never, and some living, who now knew they would surely die. And before them was their transportation on their journey toward that final sea, the one the captain had long wished to find.
I heard a cooing voice and looked up to see Mrs. Gallimar clinging to Captain Karon’s arm. She looked like Bill. She was Bill.
So, and so. The captain had done some dreaming of his own. Or he had taken my dreams for himself.
There was a swirling darkness behind us. Out of this aching cloud a figure lunged toward me, a scrambling monster, a hurtling shadow: Jaybee, alive. Well. He had not suffered here. He belonged here, and he was coming to get me. It had been too late, and useless. His breath touched my face, his fingers touched me …
“May I drop you somewhere,” said a voice from behind me. It was Israfel. The ambassador from Baskarone. Jaybee’s hand slid away, an empty skin, a sack, something hollow and unliving.
“Ylles, Israfel, if you please,” I said in a fair imitation of Mama’s tone.
“Faery, Israfel,” said another voice. Carabosse.
He took our hands and we went up.
I looked down to see the river winding toward a far horizon, an endless starlit sea. Behind us was a seething darkness which no light penetrated. “He’s still there,” I said, disappointed that he had not vanished, as Chinanga once had done.
“A great deal of creativity has gone into that hell,” said Israfel. “You and Carabosse and I, we made a spell that freed a few of us, but it will take more than a few verses of Swinburne to free him.”
He meant the Dark Lord, of course. I meant Jaybee and all who are like him. Perhaps we both meant the same thing.
“Did you plan for him to catch me?” I asked, wondering now that it was over what it had all been about. “Did you plan it?”
“No,” said Carabosse. “Oberon planned it, and Mab. But we knew of it and let it happen. If we’d stopped it, he’d have tried something else. He had the scent and wouldn’t give up until he knew—or thought he knew. So we let it happen, but we came along to
