Little girls smelled otherwise, Roland said. He quite liked little girls. He loved their breastless little bodies and their wee buttocks, like two eggs laid side by side. He loved their elven haunches, their dimpled knees, and pink soled feet, but all this adoration was in his eyes only. He did not lust after them. He merely worshipped them, as he worshipped the egg icons in the sanctuary of St. Frog, for what they symbolized, not for what they were. Purity. Oh, Roland adored purity. Purity and beauty. It was why he had become a chaperone, after all, in order that he might adore it. Serve it. Preserve it. And though there was much beauty, there was little enough of purity in Chinanga, so he said.
“I sometimes wonder,” he remarked to me over his second cup of cou, “what we would have been like had we not been condemned to live here in Chinanga. What would we have been like had we been allowed to settle in holy Baskarone?”
His remark was overheard by Captain Karon, who snorted and said, “Better ask what Baskarone would have been like if we’d lived there. Can you imagine the Viceroy ruling Baskarone?” Then the captain flushed and looked around himself quickly to see who might have overheard. “Meaning no disrespect,” he mumbled, catching Roland’s eye. “No disrespect, Chaperone.”
“None taken,” mused Roland. “In fact, I apprehend your question, Captain. Are we what our environment makes us? Or do we make our environment what we are? If the latter, then one might ask who really lives in Baskarone. Do we not say ‘Blessed Baskarone’? Do we not speak of Joyafleur as a heavenly city?”
It was the first time I had heard those words. They set up a reverberation within me, a humming, as though some great tuning fork had been thrust down my spine. A holy city. A blessed country. And the ambassadors from that region, ah, what were they, then? I inferred what they were and flushed as I felt myself longing for angels. Had the ambassador from Baskarone been an angel?
The captain made a face as though to spit, then thought better of it. “Well, sir, since we’re speaking frankly, how by all the serpents would I know? Not having been there. We look up toward Baskarone from these sweaty lowlands and see it all stretched out there like some great, feathery wing, full of color and design, but who’s been there? None of us, that’s sure. The border posts, they don’t let tourists from Chinanga go up to take a look, now do they?”
I caught Senora Carabosse’s eye. She was listening unabashedly, her mouth slightly open, as though ready to bite at some intimation she desperately desired.
Roland murmured, “There have been visitors from there.”
“Ambassadors. Oh, yes. Once in a while. Close-mouthed as turtles, too. I met one once, at Mrs. Gallimar’s.”
“Did you indeed? An ambassador from Baskarone?”
“A great tall, tan fellow with a sunny smile and a ready laugh, not a feather in his wings out of place, and no more information in him than there is good intentions in a woodtick.”
Was it the same ambassador from Baskarone? Had he had wings? I could not remember.
“Then what was he doing here?” asked Roland.
“Flew down to find out how many cases of wine we wanted lowered from Joyafleur. Come to find out what we had to trade. Come to find out whether any contraband was getting through, had I been bothered by pirates. Asked if Chinanga was stable, if it was safe if someone wanted to leave something here for a while. Complained a little about a few hunters climbing the wall and falling off. It messes up the trails through there, so they say, and since the wall is known to be impassable, creates a foolishness. That kind of thing. Full of questions, he was. If you ask me, he was here spying, finding out about us, about Chinanga.”
“Did you ask him about Baskarone, directly?”
“Well, you know how people will, at a dinner party. ‘How’re things in Baskarone, Your Excellency?’ ‘Had any interestin’ happenins in Baskarone?’ ‘How’s the weather been in Baskarone?’ That kind of question.”
“To which he replied?”
“Not at all,” said the captain. “Far’s I could tell, nothing ever happens at all in Baskarone. He said about six words.”
“I wish I’d been there,” Roland mused. “I would have asked him directly, ‘Tell me about Baskarone.’ ”
“No you wouldn’t,” said the captain. “You think you would, but you wouldn’t.”
“I suppose that’s true,” sighed Roland, with a sidelong glance at me. He sipped the cooling cou as he stared across the undulant waters, letting the silence settle between them.
I thought of the captain’s words often in the succeeding days. Did we suit our environments or did we change them to suit ourselves? And in that case, what were we who had lived in the twentieth? And in that case, who were they who lived in Baskarone?
Late that night the Stugos Queen tied up at what had once been and would be again, when the floods had passed, the riverbank. There, under the motionless branches of great jungle trees, Captain Karon conducted some hours of quiet business. All the passengers except myself had long been asleep before the captain and the mate opened the hatches to the forward hold and lifted out a number of cages. During the earlier hours of the evening small boats rowed by persons claiming to be from Tartarus and Tophet and Eblis and Gehenna had drawn near to the Queen, and now they surrounded the ship. Natives came aboard a few at a time to pick up consignments or to offer Captain Karon bids for his unconsigned merchandise. Cages were lowered into the waiting boats. To unsuccessful bidders, the captain offered his hand and the suggestion that they might have better luck next time. As the first fingers of dawn stroked the sky, the last native boat departed,
