by Ellen Datlow
But before he did that he had to try to learn a little more about his challenger, so he returned to his apartment on the rue de Condé and resumed his human form. His efforts in the Undercity and just now as a bird had totally depleted his body’s reserves of fat and energy; he was gaunt and trembling, so that those passersby he approached after making his way down the back stairs to the street who weren’t frightened away by his diseased look were unusually generous. After he’d made the phone call that confirmed that, yes, an official challenge had been registered against Julien de Saint-Hilaire, he was able to buy not only the wine he needed to approach his fellow clochards but some food from the soup kitchen behind the Marché as well.
He slept that night in the metro, curled up on the benches with three other clochards, one of whom was a woman, though as much a shaman as himself or the other two. The woman had a bottle of cheap rose; they passed it back and forth while they talked, and he listened to them while saying as little himself as possible, trying to find out if they knew anything about his enemy without revealing what he was doing, but either they knew nothing about his opponent or they were siding with him against Eminescu and keeping their knowledge hidden. Which was quite possible: He’d seen it happen that way a few times before, with older shamans who were particularly arrogant and disliked, though he’d never imagined it could happen to him.
The next day he spent sitting on a bench on the Pont Neuf, panhandling just enough to justify his presence there while he tried to learn something from the spirits in their nests on the statue of Henri IV. He even promised to free Napoleon from the statuette in which the former Emperor was trapped and promised him a place in one of the highest eagle’s nests on the Eiffel Tower from which he’d be able to make a triumphant return to politics, if only he’d tell Eminescu his enemy’s name or something that would help him find him. But Napoleon had been imprisoned there in the statuette in King Henri’s statue’s right arm pleading with and ranting at the shamans who refused to so much as acknowledge his existence for too many years and he’d become completely insane: He refused to reply to Eminescu’s questions, continued his habitual pleas and promises even after Eminescu had begun hurting him and threatening to silence his voice forever unless he responded rationally.
Eminescu finally left him there, still ranting and pleading: It would have been pointless to waste any more of his forces in carrying out the threats he’d made. He had enough money to pay his entry to the Eiffel Tower, so he flew there as a pigeon, cursing the unaccustomed heaviness of his iron-wrapped bones, then transformed himself back into a clochard in the bushes and went up to the observation deck in the elevator, there found his son and General de Gaulle in their respective nests and asked their advice. De Gaulle—perhaps because the nest in which he was preparing his triumphal return was next to Eminescu’s son’s nest and the two had come to know each other fairly well—was always polite to Eminescu, wherein the other politicians and military men, able to sense the fact that he wasn’t truly French and themselves chauvinistic to the core, refused to even speak to him.
But neither de Gaulle nor his son knew anything useful, and his son seemed weaker and less coherent than the last time Eminescu had spoken to him, as though the forces conspiring against his birth were already beginning to make him fade. Still, at least he was safe from any sort of direct attack: The invisible eagles that guarded his nest allowed no one not of their own kind to approach the tower in anything but human form, and would have detected and killed any mere shaman like Eminescu or his enemy who’d attempted to put on an eagle’s form to gain entry.
He returned to the rue de Condé so he could beat his tambourine and sing and dance without danger of interruption, and thus summon the maximum possible power. It was night by the time he felt ready, so he took the form of an owl and returned to the apartment overlooking the Parc Monceau, perched outside the bedroom window, terrifying the mynah birds, and killed the tapeworm embryos that had made their way into Liz’s bloodstream again. It was easier this time: He had a lot more strength available to him as an owl, though it was harder to hold the form and he paid for that strength later on, when he regained his humanity.
He examined the worms in Liz’s intestines with the owl’s sharper eyes to see if there was some way he could destroy them without harming Liz or risking his own safety, saw that even as an owl he didn’t have enough concentrated spiritual strength at his disposal to destroy all the worms together. There would have been a way to do it with quartz crystals, replacing those sections of her intestines to which the tapeworms had anchored themselves with smooth crystal so they’d lose their purchase and be eliminated from her body, but he was far from skillful enough yet to carry out the operation without killing her, since loose quartz crystals in her body would be like just so many obsidian knives, and he lacked the experience needed to mold the quartz to her flesh and infuse it with her spirit so as to make it a living part of her.
He could have done it if he’d had a chance to go to that Australian convention he’d planned to attend in the fall. As it was he’d have to try to find another way.
That night he slept under the Pont Neuf on some sheets of cardboard a previous sleeper had left behind him, satisfying the tremendous hunger his efforts as an owl had awakened in him as best he could from the garbage cans behind Coesnon’s and some of the other gourmet boutiques on the rue Dauphine.
The next morning he flew to his offices on Avenue Victor Hugo as a pigeon and spent a long time watching Jean-Luc and Michel. It had been months since he’d last been there as anything but Julien de Saint-Hilaire and he wanted to make sure that neither of them had developed the kind of power his challenger so obviously had. They were, after all, the two persons most likely to covet his position and the two most prepared to fill it when he was gone, despite the fact that a challenge from either of them would have been a clear violation of medical ethics and that his challenger had registered his challenge with the Ordre des médecins in thoroughly proper fashion.
He watched them working, soothing souls in pain, coaxing lost or strayed souls back to the bodies they’d left. They were both small, slim and dark, both immensely sincere, and they were both fumbling around blindly in the spirit realm for souls that they could have recovered in instants if they’d known what it was they were really doing. No, their instincts were good, but they were still just what he’d always thought them to be, talented amateurs with no idea of the true nature of their talents, even though those talents seemed to be growing, in Jean-Luc’s case in particular.
Since he was there Eminescu used the opportunity to undo some of the good Michel had done a young schizophrenic he had no intention of seeing recover, then returned to the rue de Condé, and from there, as Julien de Saint-Hilaire, to his apartment overlooking the park, stopping only briefly on the way to buy and eat seven hundred and fifty grams of dark chocolates.
Liz was asleep, passed out half dressed on the living room sofa with a partially eaten meal cold on a tray on the table beside her. The kitchen was littered with empty and half-empty cans and bottles.
The servants were all gone and he knew Liz well enough to be sure she’d sent them away, unable to bear the idea of having anyone who knew her see what had happened to her legs, just as she would have been unable to face being examined by another doctor.
She twitched in her sleep, shifting the position of her legs on the sofa, then moved them back the way they’d been. The blue veins in her thighs and calves looked perhaps a little less fat and swollen than they’d seemed when he’d first found out what’d happened to her, but only slightly so: Even though he’d gotten rid of the worms in the veins themselves and replaced a tiny fraction of the damaged vessels it would take a long time for the rest to regain their elasticity. He might even have to replace them altogether.
He’d stopped at a pharmacy run by a minor shaman he knew on the way over to order the various medicines he’d need to deal with the tapeworms as well as a comprehensive selecti
on of those sleeping and pain pills which Liz had a tendency to abuse when he failed to keep her under close enough supervision but which would serve now to keep her more or less anesthetized and incapable of worrying too much for the next few weeks, until his present troubles were over one way or another. And there was at least the consolation of knowing that if he did succeed in discovering his opponent’s identity and destroying him, the other’s attack on Liz would have served to further reinforce the way Eminescu’d conditioned her to associate his every absence with unhappiness and physical misery, his return with health and pleasure.
He picked up the phone, intending to awaken her with a faked call to the pharmacy so as to make it seem as though he’d just entered, taken one look at her lying there with her legs all swollen and marbled with twitching blue veins and had immediately and accurately diagnosed her condition and so known exactly what he’d have to do without needing to subject her to the indignity of further examinations or tests. It was what she expected of him: Liz had always had a childlike faith in doctors and medicine for all her fear of them. But at the last moment he put the phone down again and went back into the bedroom to take a careful look at the two mynah birds in their cage.
His presence alarmed them: They started hopping nervously back and forth between their perches, making little hushed cries of alarm as if afraid that if they were any louder they’d draw his attention to them. But hushed as their cries were they were still making more noise than he wanted them to, so he closed the heavy door behind him to cut off the sound and keep them from awakening Liz. Without his cap and costume he couldn’t examine them to find out if they were just the rather stupid birds they appeared to be or if one or even both of them were spies for his enemy, perhaps that enemy himself in bird-form. (But could two shamans together challenge a third? He had the impression it was forbidden, but that there was perhaps a way for a challenger to make use of a second shaman’s aid.) In any case, the mynah birds were living creatures over whom he exercised no control and which had been introduced into his home with neither his knowledge nor his permission at a time when he’d been away, and he couldn’t trust them.
He opened the cage door, reached in quickly with both hands and grabbed the birds before they could escape or make more than one startled squeak apiece, then wrung their necks and threw them out the window, aiming the bodies far enough to the right so that Liz wouldn’t see them if she just took a casual look out the window. He could retrieve them later and take them back with him to examine more closely at his other apartment before Liz’d had a chance to leave the house and discover them dead.
He left the cage door open and opened the window slightly, to provide an explanation for their absence when Liz noticed they were gone, then covered the cage to keep her from noticing it immediately.
He went back into the living room. Liz had turned over again and was scratching her right calf in her sleep, leaving angry red scratches all up and down it. He played out the scene he’d planned beforehand with the faked call to the pharmacy, reassured her as soon as the sound of his voice awakened her: He was back, he’d known what had happened to her as soon as he took one look at her, it was a side-effect of certain illegal hormones that people had been injecting dairy cows with recently and which had been showing up, for some as yet unexplained reason, in high concentrations only in certain crémes pâtissiéres used in such things as napoleons and eclairs, and he knew how to cure her condition, it wasn’t even really anything to worry about, she wouldn’t need surgery and in a few weeks she’d be completely cured, there wouldn’t be any scars or anything else to show for the episode but some unpleasant memories, her legs would be as beautiful as before and she shouldn’t worry, she should just trust him.
She’d burst into tears as soon as she’d seen him there, was holding on to him and crying with relief by the time he’d finished telling her not to worry, that everything was going to be all right.
The bell rang: the pharmacy, one of the few in Paris willing to deliver, with the medicines he’d ordered. He paid the delivery man, tipping him extravagantly as always, then went back into the bedroom where Liz’d run to hide herself when she heard the bell and gave her two sleeping pills and a pain pill. Only when she was completely groggy and he’d tucked her into bed did he explain his absence, telling her about the two weeks he’d spent completely isolated in a tiny village in the mountains where the Japanese government was carrying out an experimental mental health program and from which it had been impossible to phone her, though he didn’t understand how she could have failed to receive the long, long telegram he’d sent her from Tokyo after he’d tried so many times to get her on the phone without once succeeding.
She started nodding out near the end of the explanation, as he’d intended: She’d never remember exactly what it was that he’d told her but only that he’d explained things, and he could always modify his story later and then tell her that the modified story was exactly the same as the one he’d told her before. Though that was probably just an unnecessary precaution: She always believed even the most implausible stories he told her, just as she seemed to have believed his story about the hormones.
He got her to take the various pills, powders, and liquids he’d obtained to treat the tapeworms with—there’d been a number of new medicines he’d been totally unaware of on the market, yet another reminder of how out of touch he’d been allowing himself to become—then gave her two more sleeping pills to make sure she’d stay unconscious for a while. He waited until she was asleep and snoring raggedly, then left.
He retrieved the two mynah birds from the bushes, put them in a plastic sack and caught a taxi to his other apartment, where he put on his costume to examine them.
But the birds were just mynah birds, as far as he could tell when he took them apart, and when he returned once again to his other apartment as a pigeon and flew in through the bathroom window he’d left open for himself he saw that the medicines he’d used were having no effect whatsoever on the tapeworms—no effect, that is, except to stimulate them to a frantically accelerated production of new eggs.
Once again his enemy had anticipated him, known what his next move would be long before he himself had done so and had arranged to use it against him. He was being laughed at, played for a fool, a clown.
But for all the anger that knowledge awakened in him there was nothing he could do about it yet. He had to stay there beside Liz on the bed for hours, stalking nervously back and forth on his obscenely pink legs as he plucked embryo after embryo from her bloodstream and destroyed them, until he was so hungry and exhausted he could barely keep himself conscious. Then he had no choice but to return to his other apartment—resting every two or three blocks in a tree or on a window ledge—so he could resume his identity as Julien de Saint-Hilaire long enough to pay for a large meal in a restaurant.
He ate an immense meal at an Italian restaurant a few blocks away, followed it with a second, equally large, meal at a bad Chinese restaurant he usually avoided and felt better.
He tried telephoning John Henry Two Feathers Thomas Thompson but was told that the old Indian’s number was no longer in service and that there was no new listing for him. Eminescu didn’t know if that meant he was dead, or had moved, or had just obtained an unlisted number. But there was no one Eminescu could trust who lived near enough to his former teacher to contact him, and he didn’t have the time to fly to America and try to find him himself, either as a bird or by taking a plane as Julien de Saint-Hilaire. So he sent the old Indian a long telegram, and hoped that he’d not only get it, but that he’d have something to say that would help Eminescu.
He bought a sandwich from a sidewalk stand and ate it on the way back to the rue de Condé apartment, then resumed his caps and costume and returned to the Parc Monceau apartment yet one more time as a pigeon to try to deal with the embryos, yet despite the huge meals he’d eaten and the hours he’d spent in his other identity he was still too hungry and too exhausted to
keep it up for more than a few hours before the embryos started getting past him despite everything he could do. And the worms in Liz’s intestines seemed to be producing their eggs ever faster now, as though the process he’d begun when he gave her the medicines was still accelerating.
Defeated and furious, he returned to his other apartment, passed out as soon as he regained his human form. When he reawakened he barely had enough strength to crawl over to the sink where he’d left the two dismembered mynah birds and strip the meat from their bones and devour it.
There was no way he could hope to save Liz if he continued the way he was going. All he was really doing was destroying himself, using up all the forces which he’d need to protect himself from his opponent when it finally came to a direct attack on him. For a moment he was tempted to just abandon Liz, give up his identity as Julien de Saint-Hilaire and let her die or be taken over by the challenger when he moved into the Julien de Saint-Hilaire role in Eminescu’s place. But he’d come too far, was too close to the true power and security he knew his son would provide him with, the assurance that he himself would be born in one of the Eiffel Tower’s eagles’nests, to abandon everything now. Besides, Liz still pleased him, though it wasn’t just that, just the kind of sentimental weakness that he knew would destroy him if he ever let it get the upper hand. No, what mattered was that Liz was his, his to dispose of and no one else’s, and his pride was such that he could never allow anyone else to take her away from him. That pride he knew for his strength, as all sentimentality was weakness: Without his pride he was nothing.
