“When Rasháh used my children to lure me to 枉死城, perhaps he wished to keep me locked up. Did he think 枉死城 would be the end of me, my eternal prison? Did he think he was done with Madame Tang?”
She paused.
“Or perhaps this is all part of his plan,” she said. “Perhaps I am a part of his plan. Are we also doomed?”
She looked back at her children.
“I hope we are not doomed, O’Hugh.”
I remained silent for a few seconds, and then I took the plunge.
“I have made, I think, a most remarkable discovery,” I said. “I might perhaps have secured our future.”
Madam Tang opened her eyes. She raised an eyebrow.
“The future of all humankind?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Sounds noteworthy,” she said. “All right, then.”
She stood.
“Lead me,” she said, “to this remarkable secret weapon.”
Chapter 30
Althea sat beside Elias on a splintery rotten log at the edge of a vacant lot overgrown with withering weeds. Her mousy brown hair hung limply across her mousy pale face. Elias touched her bony white hands, lightly. His eyes were wide; he longed to kiss Althea’s bloodless pale lips.
A few yards away, Madame Tang and I watched them. Tang handed me her flask, and I took a slug of such-as-it-was whiskey. A coyote screamed in the distance; or perhaps the wind on the Bay, many miles away, whistled on the waves in a manner that sounded like Hell’s version of a coyote. Above us, the smog of Hell parted for a moment and we could almost see a globe of light that might seem to resemble the moon, and then some sort of black-winged flock passed over its surface, blocked it out momentarily, before the smoggy clouds returned.
“That was very nearly almost-beautiful,” Tang whispered, “for about a near-moment, I think.”
I remained silent, just waiting.
“This is the girl?” Madame Tang asked at last.
“Yes,” I said.
“You are sure?”
I hesitated.
“This is not, precisely, the girl I knew, years ago. When I met her, she was older. I was a little younger. Not blind-drunk, the night I met her. Steady and disappointingly sober. It was a few years ago. Now I am older, and she is much younger than she was then. Still a girl. Fragile and soft. Not a fighter.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Poor Elias,” I said. “He was nowhere to be seen, in the future, when I met her. So either he dies young, or she breaks his heart.”
“But you think that this is the girl. This is Theera?”
For a moment, I didn’t know how to explain. Was this, truly, Theera? Half-cocked, energetic-stoic smile, muscled-round legs and arms, angry-happy-frenetic, brave beyond brave? If that was the nature of Theera’s essence, as I had once believed, then this was not Theera.
“What is it that makes you unsure?” Tang asked. “Is this the girl? Or is this only maybe the girl?”
I thought about this.
“She is biologically the same,” I said finally. “You see? I feel quite certain that she has the same fingerprints as the girl I met that night in the Roamers Bar in Conconully, and she has the same nuclean.[] But she is not the fighter we have been hoping for. Or not yet, maybe.”
“What makes us who we are?” Tang wondered aloud. “That’s what you’re saying.”
I felt very smart then, and while you may not believe me, I suppose that I had suddenly invented and explained the concept of nature versus nurture many decades before B.F. Skinner emerged into the world as a little red bawling pre-nurtured blob.
I squinted at them on that splintery wooden bench, Elias and Althea. Elias plucked a brown weed, which exhibited a brown almost-flower at the end of a misshapen stalk, and he put the weed-flower into Althea’s unwashed hair.
“Maybe she could become that woman, with a bit of effort,” Tang said. “It is a worth a try.”
Althea touched the brown weed-flower in her hair, and she smiled a wan, brown-toothed smile at Elias.
“All right,” Madame Tang said, staring at her fingertips. “I will teach this soft piece of white pudding how to fight. I will teach her how to shoot. I will make her strong.”
We approached.
“Your name is Theera,” I said. “From now on, your name is Theera.”
Madame Tang said, “Watt O’Hugh is a kind man, but you may have noticed that he has gone to inordinate lengths to rescue you and to protect you. He is not kind as all that. There is a reason for this.”
Quietly, Althea said, “I thought p’raps he loved me. At first.”
Elias blinked in confusion.
“When I realized that he didn’t love me,” Althea continued, “and did not even … desire me” — this she said in an embarrassed whisper — “when I realized this truth, I didn’t understand his attentions at all. But I am grateful to be alive. Or so-to-speak alive. Half-alive. Not-entirely-dead. P’raps still conscious.”
Althea, flustered, stopped speaking.
“It is time,” Madame Tang said, “to show your gratitude. To repay this debt. To fight on our side, in 1905. To kill a few men, I think.”
“ ‘Theera’ is an old Paeonian name,” I said. “Paeonian is a lost language.”
“And a language isolate,” Madame Tang added.
“The name ‘Theera’ has something to do with thunder, and so I think the reason that you have this name is that you can shoot a pistol like lightning. Very fast, that is. Not inaccurately. You can shoot a pistol fast and accurately, so not like lightning at all. But there is even more to your skills than just that.”
“ ‘Althea,’ ” Madame Tang said, “means ‘a girl who obeys.’ More like, ‘a dog who heels.’ ”
I smiled.
“Names don’t always do justice to our potential,” I said.
Something came across Althea’s face, some flicker of confidence and pride, a bit of anger and power.
Theera lives after all, I thought.
I leaned back on my heels, exhausted with the memory of that night, and my memory of Theera. And my knowledge that somewhere out there, in Time, in some other scenario, or maybe even in this one, Theera was raising a little assassin, teaching a little girl to shoot Sidonians and Red Eyebrow generals, to lead followers into battle, in the days of the Coup and the Revolt.
Elias finally found his voice.
“I can shoot,” he said.
“I am sure,” I told him, “that you will be a help to Theera.”
Oh, Elias Pinkney, lost in time, unloved, forgotten, wiped out of existence, erased from the past. Your future, your fate — husband to Althea, dead in a little grave beside her after a happy but thrifty life, father of her children, grandfather of her grandsons and granddaughters — all this gone. Goodbye, Elias Pinkney. Goodbye Elias and Althea Pinkney.
Tang took Theera by the hand, and Theera stood, already more confident, and the two of them walked away together.
Somewhere in Time, a while ago and in the future, this meek girl might become a confident killer, and, right now, in some other time, this meek girl might be raising my child to be an equally confident killer. If we were all lucky, Theera and our child would kill in the hundreds, or the thousands.
Elias stood beside me, as the woman he loved walked out of his shadow and towards greatness. The day darkened a bit, and a few grey raindrops fell.
Chapter 31
I moved into a room in the statehouse that overlooked the town square. When I had arrived, Hsi-Wang was already a city-state preparing for war, but in the next weeks, the activity reached a frenzied level. While we prepared for war here, the Falsturm partisans prepared for war in Vializ and the little ring of loyalist villages that spiraled out to the north. Our armies arrived from across the land, and I could see the Falsturm armies traveling towards Vializ from the far horizon, from Other-Worlds; Looees and Skimmies by the hundreds.
Hsi-Wang filled to capacity, and tents
sprouted around the adjoining landscape and the near hills, and hundreds of guerillas ascended to the Kólasivouná mountains, from which they kept their eyes on the Falsturm army, Elias among them; they trained their tripod-mounted Gatling guns on the city below. Hundreds more soldiers descended into the many tunnels beneath Hsi-Wang, which spread around and under Vializ, to await the dawn of the first battle.
I asked Madame Tang how long it had taken to build these beautiful tunnels — wide, well-engineered, reinforced — and she said, “If there were Time here, it would have taken many years.” I asked her why we expected a conventional battle, fought with Winchesters and dynamite and battalia, resistance fighters in the mountains and soldiers burrowing through tunnels, and why the Falsturm — the indestructible Falsturm — might not just wipe out our armies with a twitch of his finger, and she said, “Because this is a land of illusion, and the Falsturm does not control human thought and imagination. Not yet, anyway,” she added.
The gods arrived in their puke greyish-green army uniforms, easy to blend in with the scenery; the gods who were anthropomorphous looked just like people, and rather sporty. The other gods looked awkward, uncomfortable. (The 9-headed bes, for example. But military standardization builds unit cohesion and therefore military effectiveness, or so the fella says. Still, the fella probably didn’t have the 9-headed bes in mind, nor a human-headed bird.) No sign of the demons, and I wondered if Plum would take the dive, or choose instead to live with his demons, so to speak. Also no sign of Theera, who Madame Tang assured me was doing well in her training.
EVENTUALLY, I awoke up on the morn of our first military campaign, and I wanted to pray.
Consider my circumstance: I was born at #17 Chatham Street in 1842, but following my parents’ deaths when I was an infant, I moved into the Five Points, which was the worst slum in New York city, back then. Sometimes at night I slept in one of the dark tunnels in the back of the Old Brewery, a massive and ramshackle tenement filled with crooks and murderers, or maybe, on warmer nights, I retreated to an alley, in the shadows. After the prigger-nappers nicked me for stealing an apple when I was ten years old, the city shipped me off to an orphanage on Randall’s Island, where the teachers taught us to read and write, but perhaps most notably, they also forced us to pray to their own specific deities.
Habits linger. Nose-picking, for example, and prayer. I imagine most men pray in the thick of battle, and many of them die, perhaps because prayer, unlike nose-picking, doesn’t work. Still, the habit lingers. As I prepared to go to war in an unpredictable wasteland, I was still inclined to pray to the orphanage’s deities, God, Jesus and so on. But I felt guilty praying to God and Jesus to-day, looking out over the crowd of forgotten gods, knowing of our betrayal.
And so I prayed to Prometheus, even though he was a titan, not strictly a god, and to Demeter, the beautiful daughter of Cronus and Rhea, and I prayed to the 9-headed bes, and I even said a prayer to Arma, the god of the barren moon. I felt blasphemous, heretical. But my God was nowhere to be seen, and neither was His son, which, of course, is one of their principal traits, their absence from our lives, their refusal to help us when we need them. Arma, the god of the barren moon, on the other hand, was near enough to hear me.
I joined a sub-contingent of our army, about four-hundred strong, that left Hsi-Wang before daybreak; we traveled southwest for a day, camped for the night, and before sunrise we prepared to attack the nearest Falsturm city, but when we arrived, it was close to deserted, empty houses, already crumbling. Madame Tang and I searched the boarding house, the saloon, kicked in doors. I found a couple of old men, shirtless and dirty, who swore allegiance to our cause, begged to join us. Their ribs showed through their yellow, papery skin. I said they could come along, but I expected them to stop existing before the first battle.
Madame Tang gave the order to destroy the town, which fell like a house of cards and dissolved like sugar in tea, and then we pitched camp where the town had once stood, below the Kólasivouná mountains. Some of the soldiers roasted rabbit over the fire; I supposed it was especially important to feel human to-night, facing war.
MADAME TANG PACED ABOUT, in her tent. An untouched dinner sat on a plate on the floor.
“We may win,” she said. “General O’Hugh.” She nodded, still frantic, and muttered, “Yes. General Watt O’Hugh. A nice little ring to that. I believe that I shall make you a general in my army of doom.” She stopped pacing, studied her map, then, peering out through the tent flap at her troops, she added, “We may lose. If we lose, it is the end. If we win, it is only the beginning of many battles. The Falsturm has a thousand ways to kill us, a hundred thousand.”
“Save your inspiring speeches for the troops,” I gibed.
“It is good news,” she said. “We might win. That is very good news.”
Now she looked outside at Master Yu, who sat by himself by the fire, studying the Yellow Emperor’s scroll.
“There is one piece of very bad news,” she muttered.
Tang and I had been through a lot together over the years.
I knew immediately what she meant.
Chapter 32
“Is there nothing we can do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I’ve looked here and there. Everywhere. If he fights, he dies. If he runs, he dies. There is no possible world in which our friend Master Yu does not die.”
I said nothing more.
“There is no help in that scroll of his,” she said.
In the center of what had once been the Falsturm town, some of the soldiers sang a raucous song filled with laughter, their arms about each other, men and women of all eras, singing.
“When I found him….” she said. Then she started again: “When the message I had left for him identified his whereabouts, he resided in the cellar of a hovel in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in Duncombe Alley, although he could have stayed with the elders of the city. He lived there to be close to a girl, someone for whom he wished to win this war. Someone for whom the battle against Sidonia was personal.”
She thought.
“He willingly dived through a portal into Hell, theoretically out of his loyalty to the Empress Dowager, but I gather that for most of his life, his loyalty to idleness, drink and dancing girls would have outweighed his loyalty to the Empress Dowager. Now there is no one who more wants to defeat Sidonia, the Red Eyebrows, the Falsturm and even the Dark Thief. There is, indeed, a woman involved.”
I said that I supposed that many a man who went to his death would leave behind a woman whom he wished that he could have loved.
“It is a matter of more than sentimental importance to the struggle,” Tang added. “His children are essential to the 1905 battle. And to quell the Great Sidonian Revolt of 1918. And in the dawn of the Falsturm Apocalypse. His children are more important than he has been.” She shaded her eyes, watching Master Yu. “Who would have guessed this, just a few years ago? He was so small, so inconsequential.”
She turned to me.
“It is not true, O’Hugh, that Fate has a plan for all of us, that all our lives have meaning. Most of us live for nothing and die for nothing. One might have thought that this pale turd would die without heirs in the arms of a harlot. Once, the future was quite content living without him, without his heirs, without his heroism. But ‘now’ (so to speak) we can barely go on without him. You see, the future has changed. Fate has changed. Everything is different.”
Lightning flickered feebly behind Hell’s dark clouds, and the faded light flitted through the dust and crud that floated in the almost airless air. A few seconds later, thunder farted feebly from beyond the Bay.
We sat together around the fire, Tang and I, and our friend, Master Yu. His horse stood sleeping beside him, the horse that had been an old nag in Malchut, tired and bald, already eaten up inside, but who became such a majestic beast in 枉死城.
“Some real grape wine,” said Tang, as she handed him a flask. “From the icosahedron. And some dri
ed meat.”
Yu Dai-Yung nodded grimly, but he took the flask and drank the wine.
“You see here,” he said, pointing to a line in the scroll. “Right here. I’ve read this part again and again.” He ran his fingers over and over one Chinese sentence, written out by the Yellow Emperor thousands of years ago. “When I first read it in San Francisco. ‘There are some things that one must do, even if one knows that he will die. That he will be vilified, and spat upon. And that he will die in pain, and die a failure.’ I had thought that perhaps I misunderstood the meaning of this particular language.” He looked up at Tang. “But you have saved Kobrund’s delicious food and drink for me alone. This is not a good portent.” Looking back again at the scroll. “I fear I understand all too well what this means.”
Madame Tang took his hand.
He sighed.
“I know,” he said. “I know, I know.”
“You will fight like a hero,” I said.
“Some things,” he said, “cannot be changed.” He laughed. “I never ever ever wanted to fight like a hero. I had other plans for my life. For my long long life.” He looked up at her. “What if I just remain here, down in 枉死城? What if I do not join you in battle?”
“Then at the precise age that you would have died in Malchut, the World Above,” she said, “you will instead die in 枉死城, but instead of dying as a hero, whom your beloved will adore, and of whom your children (your sons) will be proud, you will die a coward, unadored, childless. Do you want to know how?”
“Maybe you are lying,” Master Yu mused.
“Maybe so,” Madame Tang agreed. Her eyes were blank. She was roaming around, looking something up. Then she softened. “Do you want to know what Camus said about all of this? He will be a French philosopher, born some three decades from now. Falsely classified as an ‘existentialist,’ although he was not an ‘existentialist.’ He had some perhaps-useful things to say about your plight.”
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 27
