The Golden Cut

by Merl Fluin

“We’re on,” she told her gang. “Take position.”

  They scattered like mercury through the canyon.

  42.

  They waited. The sun moved slowly. Neither Cantos nor any of his companions appeared.

  TJ was outlined against the sky beside the smoke-leaved tree. She stood with hands on hips and surveyed the scene below. From up here she could see Lala behind a high jag of rock to her right. Lala’s rifle was trained on the narrow canyon where Lulu had rescued TJ from the Directrix long ago. The rest of her gang were tucked into invisible positions in the high rocks.

  TJ had watched Cantos and his crew squeeze into the crack in the rock beside their camp. They had gone in single file and armed to the teeth. But that had been hours ago, and they still had not come out.

  “Can’t all be crammed inside that damn crack,” she muttered and fidgeted with the six-gun in her pocket. Signalling to Lala, she pointed into the canyon. Lala shook her head, then shrugged when TJ made the same signal again.

  TJ saw Lala give the signal to the next person along, then scrambled down a rock face that was still warm from the sun. At the bottom she waited gun in hand while the others came one by one to join her. They all huddled back to back.

  “Plan B?” asked Damsol in a low voice.

  “Plan B,” said TJ. “He’s watching, and wherever I go he’s sure to follow. Let’s stick together as much as we can. We need to steer clear of combinations of the elements. Lala, which way?”

  Lala had the answer ready. “Inside the rocks, so we’re out of the air. If we avoid the water caves and stay in the dry, we’ll be fine on the elemental front. This way.”

  With keen eyes and cocked guns, they followed Lala along the base of the cave. There was an opening just beyond the point where the cave narrowed into a bottleneck. Lala and TJ pressed their backs against the rock on either side and ushered the others through the opening before slipping in behind them.

  It was pitch dark. The ground sloped steeply downwards. They descended crocodile fashion, quickly and easily, the only sounds their own breathing and their scuffing feet, until the way became too narrow for two abreast. But still they pressed on, stumbling one behind the other, each hanging onto the coat-tails or waistband of the one in front. The air began to taste of salt, the surface beneath their feet to grow smoother and more slippery.

  Her left arm stretched out in front of her to reach Lala’s belt, TJ felt sharp edges of rock graze her hips and right elbow. The darkness was a breathing thing that slid beneath her feet. She fell against Lala’s back. They had stopped moving.

  A whispered message came back along the line: “All broken up ahead. Feels like glass.”

  TJ let go of Lala’s waist and sent the command forward: “Ready your weapons.” The click of her hammer was echoed along the line.

  With her free hand she fished a match out of Lala’s pocket and struck it against the wall. Nothing happened. She struck another, this time against her own boot.

  A crystal cave leapt and flashed around them in the matchlight. Pillars of pearly quartz towered high, looming over them with an impression of mass that seemed to suck the air out of their chests. Other pillars leaned at crazy angles, propped against each other like teeth in a broken mouth. At the pillars’ feet gaped jagged anemones of white. The yawning darkness beyond gave no sense of scale or dimension, of whether the cave was as vast as a desert or as small as a cell. The mineral glitter turned TJ’s lungs brittle as the match flame died.

  A shot rang and ricocheted twice behind her.

  “Coo-ee,” Cantos sang, “I can see you.”

  A flare in front and to the right. A loud crack and a stifled cry of pain from further up the line.

  “Hit the deck,” someone hissed, and TJ went down on her belly. Ignoring slicing edges beneath hands and knees, she lunged for shelter behind the nearest pillar.

  Another match struck behind her. The brief illumination set more bullets flying. “Put that light out!”

  Cantos laughed. “Behold the demiurge.”

  A surge of gold flooded the cave. TJ lay exposed in the dazzling light that blazed from the tower above her. The rest of her gang rayed out behind her like a diagram of the sun.

  Cantos hovered before them, six feet from the cave’s high roof. Holding his robe open with both hands, he displayed his naked body. Light cascaded from the Golden Thigh. The light spun in an inverted pyramid whose sides then peeled apart to form a hexagonal prism. Golden light poured through the prism and refracted into the colours of an ancient sky where planets whirled. Cantos held a wand in one hand and a flask in the other, his left leg bent behind his right.

  “Ante up,” he said, and dropped his robe.

  Everything was engulfed in sudden darkness.

  “Torches, torches,” TJ called hoarsely.

  A rasp, a hiss. A cave wall flickered into view behind the elongated shadow of the child from Neutrino, his face illuminated by the burning yellow hair of the Directrix’s wig. Damsol reached over towards the boy’s head with a little wooden kneecap in her hand and touched it to the flame. Others took the cue and produced wooden body parts from their own boots and pockets, passing the flame to one another to set each part on fire. The floor of the cave twinkled with tiny lights.

  More shots fired from Cantos’s invisible gang. The lights scattered and danced as TJ’s gang spread out and found defensive positions behind crystal columns and spars.

  “Attagirl, little huck,” Cantos called from somewhere unseen. “Up and at ’em, that’s the way to do it.”

  TJ yelled. “Fire at will!”

  Shots cracked, stray bullets smacked the crystals and sent splinters wild. Shards rained into TJ’s beard and hair. She shielded her eyes with one arm and heard quartz chips patter on her leather sleeve. Her palm sweated against the grip of the six-gun.

  A high scream. The Neutrino boy was down, bleeding at the throat.

  One of the clowns grabbed him by the feet and pulled his body out of the way. Someone pulled the burning wig from the boy’s head and tossed it into the darkness in front of TJ’s position. The light revealed a blurred figure skittering to the left. TJ squeezed off a shot and the figure flopped. A jewelled arm gleamed into view near the fallen man.

  TJ fired again and missed. “Shit! Can’t see a fucking thing!” More burning body parts came flying over her head. A flaming hand, a burning pelvis, thrown by the gang behind her to relight the scene ahead. She caught sight of Little Dove or False Uncle scuttling away, gold gleaming in her wake. TJ yelled again: “Where’s that mirror?”

  “Here, boss.” The Companion of the Rosy Hours, a few yards away on her left.

  “Aim for the man with the Golden Thigh!”

  TJ kicked a burning eyeball towards Cantos’s gang. The thigh glinted above them and then was covered over. The Companion hurled his mirror in a high arc and it exploded into a burst of water.

  “Earth, air, fire, water.” Cantos’s voice was inside her head. “Only one thing missing.” She felt the weight of his hot body at her back, his hand beneath her jawline.

  Lala launched herself onto Cantos and clawed at his neck, howling. She prised his fingers away from TJ’s face and tried to hit him in the eye with her pistol. TJ heard the bone break as Cantos forced Lala’s gun hand backwards. Then he rolled over and reached out his arm. TJ saw the flash of the Companion’s broken mirror as Cantos slashed Lala’s throat.

  TJ screamed and shot at him but he was gone. The gun battle raged on around her as she took Lala in her arms. But Lala was already dead.

  One of Theta appeared at TJ’s side. With rapid movements she gathered up the bloody shards of mirror and reassembled them. All was stillness, TJ heard her own blood rush in her ears, the mirror was whole again. The other four Theta dragged the dead Neutrino boy over to Lala’s corpse, and together the five Theta clustered around him. They unravelled the wrappings from his head and tied his hair into knots. Then one of them pulled open his mouth while the others sang
: “Bind him like an antidote...”

  A beetle flew into his mouth, and Lala sat up.

  The sound of the ongoing gunfight roared back into life around them. TJ’s pistol clicked on an empty chamber. “Ammo!”

  “Down to a handful over here.”

  “This might be the last of it.”

  TJ surveyed the battle progress. The doctor fell right before her eyes. Damsol was bleeding from the chest but still aiming her rifle. Two of Theta from TJ’s gang were facing off against two Theta who had defected to Cantos’s side, all four faces ugly with pain and rage. Where were the rest of TJ’s gang?

  One of Theta pressed four bullets into TJ’s left hand. TJ reloaded.

  Lulu was staring at her through the gun smoke. Wrapping her arm around a spar, TJ rose to a crouch and fired twice.

  Lead flew in every direction. Splinters of light revealed weird scenes in flashes: condensations of starlight, a moonscape of skinned reptiles, a thousand cold suns run to seed. Cantos, pale and deadly, a rifle at his shoulder, his green eyes shining. She crawled towards him on her elbows, keeping her gun quiet in her hand while hell popped around her.

  Wet smears on her face tasted of blood. She touched her own head and found no wound. Her elbow bumped against another’s arm, and the next stab of light revealed Lala hunkered beside her. Mouth to mouth, they held each other close for an eternal second.

  TJ tucked one arm around Lala’s waist and reached forward with her gun in her other hand. Feeling the ground sag, she plunged the gun barrel into it. It sucked and yielded like flesh. She inched her bodyweight forwards until the whole floor gave way. Wrapped in each other’s arms, she and Lala fell through the floor of the cave in a shower of fungal spores.

  They were inside a dank, spongy maze of grey-white flesh. TJ cursed and wept as she groped her way through the tunnels beneath Alexandria. She stopped and cursed again when she saw that it was not Lala but Mei-Lin that crawled along beside her.

  “Mei-Lin, can you get to your feet?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then follow me.”

  TJ led Mei-Lin through ribbed fungal corridors until they emerged at the foot of a darkened stairwell. The stairwell had the same smell as the tunnels, and the dirty steps creaked as they climbed. At the top of the stairs they opened another door and found themselves in the entrance hall of Alexandria.

  Together Mei-Lin and TJ wandered the hacienda’s rooms and corridors, taking everything in with eyes and ears, trailing their fingers along tabletops and tapestries. The half-lion still sat at the head of its table, its massive paws on either side of a medical encyclopaedia. Kit Carson’s trigger finger beckoned to nobody. In a side room a piano gleamed amid drifts of shattered glass.

  When they came to a library, TJ stopped short. An enormous book in a central vitrine stood open at an image of the human body overlaid onto a complex diagram in ruby red and smoky black on gold leaf. The body was female, with inkspot breasts; its smudgy face was bearded.

  They walked on. Every doorway and turning led to some new interior. Misty repetitions of their own faces slithered around like fish through a hall of mirrors. Bathrooms, dressing rooms, a sumptuous bedroom with a four-poster bed where TJ spread out, face down, and breathed in the smells of sweat and semen, while Mei-Lin went on ahead of her, calling Cowhead’s name.

  Then she heard Mei-Lin scream.

  TJ ran back past the shattered vitrine, along the corridor to the entrance hall, and out into the courtyard. Cantos lounged against the rim of the plashing fountain. TJ raised her pistol and took aim.

  “Don’t be vulgar at the last minute,” he said. He inclined his head towards Little Dove and False Uncle. They had Cowhead between them, and they held a bowie at her throat.

  “Go ahead,” said TJ. “At this point I’d say you need Cowhead more than I do.”

  She turned at the sound of a cocking rifle. Mei-Lin pointed it straight at her. “Not everything is about you, TJ.”

  Cantos looked delighted. “Now, isn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king? This is what I call a good old-fashioned Mexican standoff.”

  TJ dropped the gun. One of the twins darted forwards, picked it up and handed it to Cantos. He levelled it at Mei-Lin.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  Mei-Lin handed over the rifle.

  Cantos was suddenly all business. “I think we just need to put the Mouth of Hypatia through its paces for Alexandria’s benefit, and then my charming companions and I will be on our way. After you, ladies.”

  With Cowhead and the knife-brandishing twin in front, the other twin and Cantos bringing up the rear, they made their way out of the hacienda courtyard and towards the paddock. The way was green and fragrant with flowers; the brightly coloured birds from Neutrino danced in the sun.

  They reached the stable yard and Cowhead shied, her hooves clattering. The twin yanked at her bridle. “Don’t hurt her,” Mei-Lin burst out in an agonised voice.

  Cantos raised an eyebrow and said, “Give the reins to TJ.”

  TJ took the bridle and put her six-fingered hand to Cowhead’s velvet muzzle. Cowhead bit her.

  “This is going to be even livelier than the last time,” Cantos remarked drily.

  Mei-Lin turned to TJ. “What does he mean, last time?”

  “Aw, didn’t she tell you?” said Cantos. “I had them both right here in the hacienda for a while, until TJ busted out.”

  “TJ, is this the truth?”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “You were here, and you busted out alone? Took care of number one and left my girl behind?”

  “I came back, though, didn’t I? I’m here. I’m here now.”

  “That’s right,” said Cantos. “Here you are, and here you stay. Hurry up now, gals, it’s showtime.”

  Still holding TJ’s six-gun, he opened the stable door and waved them all inside.

  They entered the ruined saloon of the Two Slits.

  One of the twins gave a little cry and ran over to the bar, which still stood in defiance of all the charred wood and blackened glass. She ran her hands along the bar’s surface, then wiped them on the front of her dress, leaving black smears.

  “Sometimes I miss this place a little bit,” she said apologetically to her sister.

  “Sometimes I do too,” said Cantos, his eyes resting briefly on Mei-Lin, “but not often.” He pointed to a silver bridle, vaulting saddle and sequinned skins that hung from a nail on a doorpost. “If you would be so kind, TJ.”

  TJ stripped at the point of the rifle and wriggled into the dirty, smoke-stinking skins. A pair of red vaulting shoes was produced from among the broken optics behind the bar, and she changed out of her boots. The reddish brown of her sunburned head and arms contrasted with the white of her legs and chest and the flash and spangle of the sequins. Her face was smudged with soot; her beard was pointed and bristling.

  Once she was costumed she went and stood in front of Cowhead, the vaulting saddle in her arms. Cowhead braced and stiffened and bent her neck low, waving her head from side to side.

  “Mei-Lin, I think it had better be you to put the tack on her,” said Cantos.

  Tears ran down Mei-Lin’s face as she kissed and petted Cowhead, murmuring in her ear. Cowhead allowed her mother to put the silver bridle on her head and place the snaffle bit in her mouth. Mei-Lin took the surcingle from TJ and drew it over Cowhead’s withers, resting her hand over her daughter’s heart for a moment before fastening the silver buckle. Finally she tore strips of white silk from her own tattered clothes and wrapped them around Cowhead’s legs to complete the outfit. Beautiful Cowhead shone.

  The sound of the audience grew louder, a rumble of feet and voices. The barroom’s cracked ceiling had been replaced by the big top’s airy canvas. TJ, Mei-Lin, Cowhead, Cantos and the twins stood on the sawdust and gazed around the ring. Theta, Damsol, Lulu, all of the Eleven Twenty-Threes, and the remains of the Star gang gazed back at them.

  Cantos went to the cent
re of the ring, as naked as the first time TJ had seen him. A red sash draped his body, from his sunflowered shoulder to the top of the Golden Thigh. The thigh glowed the same colour as his hair under the big top lights.

  Standing on his flesh-and-blood leg with the other folded behind it, a baton in one hand and a pistol in the other, he threw his arms wide and declaimed to the crowd:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, bulls and lions, eagles and angels! Didn’t I promise to show you sights unseen? Oh, this big top’s full of secrets and surprises, I’m sure you’ll agree, and now’s the time to keep my promise. Yes, right now, to delight and amaze you, I give you – the Mouth of Hypatia!”

  “Make this right,” Mei-Lin hissed at TJ.