Oh, you know the place: those flying peacocks, the refugee dancers from Sadlareeyah, the little-girl princess from a floating island, and her singing monkey, midnight stories by the bonfire — all entirely ridiculous stories yet verifiably true — the early morning excursion through the mountains, and the visions one might see in the highest heights, the hawks circling overhead, the Falsturm’s hawks. It’s a nice place. I’ve been there. I’ve told you about it before. Furthermore, you’ve dreamed about it yourself, and more than once. Probably you first dreamt of it when you were little. You remember those winding staircases, ascending forever, those long hallways, lantern-lit. You know the place.
Master Yu pointed up at the hawks.
“They are watching us,” he said.
Li-Ling asked why, and Master Yu said, “They hope we will never leave,” and she told him that she also hoped they would never leave, and he said, “If we never leave, the battle will be lost,” and she said that in that case, she would wish that the battle be lost, and Master Yu told her that if he were to allow the battle to be lost, the Falsturm’s forces would overrun the little inn, and Li-Ling would die along with her husband, and the babies scheduled to emerge from her womb would never see the light of the sun. “So they hope….” Master Yu continued. “These hawks hope very much that we will enjoy our stay, and that we will never leave Lady Amalie’s lodgings.”
They stayed for a very long time; they enjoyed the company of the travelers passing through, especially the singing monkey, who seemed very much like an ugly little man. He sang like an angel, but he could not speak even a word, and he was a monkey. When he wasn’t singing, his eyes spoke, in the silence. They enjoyed the excursions to the mountains. They enjoyed the food. They enjoyed Lady Amalie’s friendship. They pretended this would never end, this happiness. This Life. As do we all.
Eventually, in the night, Li-Ling awoke, and the children in her womb called to her, begging to be allowed to be born.
This happened four nights in a row.
On the fourth night, she rose from the bed that she shared with her husband, and she wandered out into the hallway. She saw a light in the distance, and she heard a very faint hum. She followed the light, up some stairs, along winding corridors, down some stairs, across a moonlit courtyard, through a cobwebbed cellar, up more stairs, until at last she came to a room at the very top floor, in which Lady Amalie sat weaving at a treadle spinning wheel.
Without looking at Li-Ling, Lady Amalie answered the unspoken question: “And why not?” she said. “I often cannot sleep, and this relaxes me.”
The old woman smiled.
“Lady Amalie,” Li-Ling said. “I want to stay.”
Lady Amalie sighed, and she kept weaving, and her body moved with the rhythm of the spinner.
Why do men and women visit Lady Amalie when they need someplace to hide, or when they face imminent death? Why do women visit Lady Amalie when they are with child, as Hester had done some years ago? Lady Amalie knows what she is doing. There is a keen strategic mind inside that kindly exterior. She knows what she is good for.
“It cannot last forever,” the old woman said gently. “The Falsturm will eventually encroach on our world. If Master Yu fights, and if your child fights, then we may win. We may not. But if he does not fight, and if your child is not born, we cannot win.”
She stopped weaving, and she turned to Li-Ling. She held the young woman’s hand.
One of the great impossible birds crossed the moon and alit gently onto the dark terrace outside Lady Amalie’s window.
“This is the way the struggle works,” she said. “Master Yu is here because he is essential. Like many others, many other small parts of our possible but not inevitable victory, he is everything. We need him.”
“I am a widow already,” Li-Ling whispered.
“I know,” Lady Amalie sighed. “I’m sorry. It must be strange to mourn him now, when he is alive and so nearby.”
Li-Ling felt she could hear him sleeping a few meters below her, a few winding hallways and stone stairways below her. She could hear him breathing as he slept, and she could feel his breath on her skin.
“I am lucky,” she said. “I imagine that I am lucky, although it does not feel that way. I lived many decades with him. A whole lifetime. But to-day, I do not feel lucky. I wish for even more.”
“I have not always been alone,” Lady Amalie said, so quietly that Li-Ling could barely hear. “And so I understand.”
In the corner of the room was a little writing table, and on the writing table a pile of papers. On the left edge of the writing table, a paper covered with Lady Amalie’s handwriting, and titled, Li-Ling and Dai-Yung: Itinerary. Beneath the title, the date, April 23, 1881, and Paris, and then various transportation instructions, Abbotsford, Dauphine, and so on.
Lady Amalie saw that the itinerary had caught Li-Ling’s attention, and she raised an eyebrow and nodded.
“Love peace, pursue peace,” she said quietly, “and love your fellow creatures. May your light burst forth like the first sunrise, and may there be peace among us.”
Far below them, in one of the other rooms, someone played a lute, and the music drifted out the window and mixed with the wind. On a mountain peak, someone danced to the music of the lute and the music of the wind.
We found Master Yu in a little clearing of scratchy brown grass, surrounded by a bed of brown and dead forget-me-not flowers, under a dead cypress tree, just a few yards east of the little valley where we had just recently left him.
“How long have I been gone?” he asked, blinking in the bleak semi-darkness. He seemed confused, tranquil, happy, mournful. I told him that he had been gone for around forty-five minutes.
Master Yu laughed, and, back then, I didn’t know why. But now I understand.
Chapter 34
We marched another day, and another Falsturm stronghold fell to us. As before, Madame Tang gave the order to destroy the town but spare anyone who wished to surrender or to remain neutral, and so An-Lee and Lung-Ping rode through the town shouting out a warning of evacuation, and when the area had been cleared, the town, as before, collapsed like a house of cards and dissolved like sugar in tea, and then as night fell, we pitched camp where the town had once stood. Two days later, we did it again, with another Falsturm stronghold. And at length, as the night fell, we drew within shooting distance of Vializ, and behind it, the Gates of Hell, and with that, the various regiments split up, as previously planned, and the infantry moved ahead. The front-line regiments dug shallow trenches and settled in.
I looked north, where a full battalion approached, ten-thousand armored men, more than half of them mounted, and a quarter of them hauling catapults or cannons. These were the armies of Warlord Hua. In another era, before the arrival of our reassuringly soft-spoken diplomats, Madame Tang and Master Yu, this army would have descended into its anger and wallowed in its resentment, blown up whatever they could, and then sent emissaries to join whatever militia they considered the most destructive. It took some skill to generate Hope in Hell.
Madame Tang assigned the Warlord Hua Nau to lead the Eastern army, which he accepted with some glee — a real war, at last! like life! like reality! — Lung-Ping would lead the western army, the gods would fly overhead, led by the titan Prometheus, and together the three forces would close in on Vializ and suffocate the city. She noted that it would begin to rain. This would have two beneficial effects: first, it would make it difficult for the ruling forces to impede our progress towards the Gates; and, second, if the rains were forceful enough, floods and landslides might ravage the lower valley that stretched from the southern tip of the mountain range, and where the majority of the Falsturm forces were headquartered. The guerillas would surface from out of their tunnels and cut off the fleeing Falsturm army. Very shortly, anyone who was not a true Believer, but rather a mere opportunist, would switch his allegiance or vanish into the landscape, and those still philosophically allied with the Eyebrows would e
merge from their luxurious Vializ homes and perish against our overwhelming forces.
I asked how she knew that it would rain.
“Yellow Emperor says it will rain,” she said. “That’s good enough for Master Yu here, with his superstitious bunkum-balderdash.”
Now she held up a small black box, which glowed here in the early night.
“Also, this machine,” she said, “has a ‘Weather’ feature.”
“A machine from the future?” I asked, and she said yes, and I asked whether it worked only in the future, and she said no, that it worked down here in Hell, too, because here there was no future and no past, “and not even much of a present,” and I wondered how that was possible, and she shrugged and said, “Magic,” and there was a little almost-playful twinkle in her left eye but no smile on her lips, and I said, “All right, then. Magic. Thank Zeus for Magic boxes from the future,” and Madame Tang nodded her agreement.[]
But hours later, not a single drop of rain had fallen, the city of Vializ seemed immune to cannon balls, catapults and dynamite, and its rooftops even repelled thunderbolts from the gods. Some rebel attacks from out of the Kólasivouná Mountains were not so much rebuffed by the Falsturm army as entirely ignored, and the rebels retreated back into the mountains. The dark clouds, so common in Hell, even began to dissipate, and something that looked like a blurry sun became visible. A nice day seemed in the offing for the first time since I had arrived, dammit.
The King of Hell’s face appeared in the sky, his white beard flipping in the breeze.
“A beautiful day in Hell,” he said, with a pleasant little tremolo in his voice. “Five degrees above normal. A bit of ice cream available in the south, to the first ten customers. Remember, the soldiers of Hell cannot be defeated. Remember that there is no possible escape.”
And he was gone.
Madame Tang pulled out the little weather box and she cursed.
“Look at this yuch’un de chich’i,” she muttered, which I gather was a Chinese way of insulting a stupid machine. “It still says terrible rainstorms.”
At this, a carrier pigeon descended from the clouds and landed on Madame Tang’s arm. She pulled a note from the bird’s leg. She read the message, and she frowned. She ripped up the note and tossed it on the wind.
“In Vializ, they sit in their villas, and they laugh at our efforts. The Falsturm’s loyalists drink champagne in their mansions in Vializ with their Red Eyebrow guests, and anyone who might want to desert and join us is stuck.” She shrugged. “We have someone on the inside, who can send us these reports.”
“Who is it?” I asked, and Madame Tang ignored me.
Master Yu turned to her.
“What do you think we should do?” he asked.
“No way to break the walls of Vializ,” Tang sighed. “Not even the gods can see in.”
“And?”
“I think we may lose sooner than we thought,” she said. “I had hoped for a noble effort, a few triumphs along the way to defeat. I had hoped to put up a good fight.”
She frowned deeply.
“Die to-day,” she muttered, “or die to-morrow.”
Master Yu put a hand to his chin thoughtfully, and he looked my way.
“Hmm,” he said.
Tang had a thought, and she turned to me sharply, but she spoke to Master Yu.
“Master Yu,” she said slowly, still looking at me. “What does the scroll say about the rainstorm again?”
Master Yu gestured to me.
“O’Hugh brings the rain,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“I thought it meant that he would arrive here to join our armies, and it would rain. I did not think that Huang-ti literally meant that he would have rain on his person.”
“And now?” Madame Tang asked. “And now what do you think?”
“I think he has rain on him,” he said. “In a pocket. In his asshole. Up his nose. Someplace on his person. But I think the rain is here. He just needs to set it free.”
This resulted in some bit of discussion, and some explaining on my part, which I stammered out as well as I could. Because suddenly I knew what he meant.
“This is notable,” Madame Tang said, when I had finished my story. “It is unfortunate that you kept this to yourself.”
I looked out at our armies, massed on the ridge overlooking Vializ, waiting for war. Even our gods were standing around, just waiting.
“I thought she was a little girl,” I said. “Charming enough. Big eyes. Sincere. But children believe what they believe. They have, you know, imaginations.”
I explained, yet again, that I didn’t think the child was giving me a literal pocketful of rain; I had every reason to think that this was a game, a poor suffering child in the sixth level of Hell, who tried to find merriment where she could.
“I know of her,” Madame Tang said. “With her rain. I call her the Rainbearer, but she has a name, an ordinary name. She is a little girl. Still, knowing now that she supports our cause is significant and encouraging.”
Under my breath, I muttered, “A little innocent waif, with a playful spirit and a winning smile. Big funny talking dog beside her.”
“You cannot keep things to yourself, Watt,” Tang cautioned me.
“Look,” I said. “This land was once covered with lakes and rivers. Forests and great farmland, irrigated by the rivers and lakes. Now it has dried out. Something not-rain falls from the sky now. It stands to reason that a child would dream of rain, that this should become her game.”
When Madame Tang’s eyes widened, I realized that I had kept another useful fact secret.
“This land,” she whispered, “was once covered with great lakes and rivers?”
“Surely,” I stammered. “Plum told me about it.”
Then I added the kicker:
“Before Mount Charon. Before the mountains came.”
Master Yu looked around.
“The mountains,” he laughed. “There was water here, before the mountains came.”
He said that we had a bit of mountain climbing to do, before the day dawned.
And contentment of a sort settled onto his face.
Chapter 35
Below us, the armies massed, waiting for inspiration. Fists clenched rifles or shotguns or hatchets, the third legion surrounded the city of Vializ, the Falsturm capital, and a deadly silence settled over the land.
In the trenches, beautiful Demeter waited with Iyakare. She held his hand.
“I tried to kill Death once, you know,” he said, and his voice shivered, and the shiver echoed across the valley. Iyakare was nervous, but Demeter seemed less-so, and that made sense, after all: no matter how logical the human race might become, the idea of a beautiful goddess, somewhere in our dreams, would never die. Demeter will always be with us.
I was out of breath already, struggling up the Turelacque pass, on the western edge of the Kólasivouná range, out of view of sentries from Vializ. Further down the pass, the Falsturm forces worked their way up the mountain. I took out my rifle and aimed, but the distance was yet too great. I feared that we would be overwhelmed and unable to defend ourselves.
“We should ride into the thick of this,” I told Tang, but she held up a hand. From behind us, I heard a horse scream with fury and power, and I turned and I saw the mousy girl I had rescued from a dancehall prison in Wemas City, much changed. Theera had a beautiful blooming blue Canterbury bell flower in her hair, which glowed and sang as she rode her horse into the air above the Kólasivouná mountains.
She stood up in the saddle, jumped, landed on the shorter soldier and pushed her sword straight through him, pulled it clean out, ran up a short embankment, leapt, grabbed hold of a dead tree branch, swung, landed on the taller soldier, pushed her sword straight through him, pulled it clean out, ran back to the embankment and leapt again, landed on her horse as it galloped up the pass. The two soldiers staggered backwards and collapsed to the rocky ground, and darkness
veiled their eyes (as the fella said).
Theera smiled.
I was glad to see her.
We sat under an overhanging crevice, beneath a dead and crooked hemlock tree, reviewing Madame Tang’s map of 枉死城.
Theera opened her saddle bag, and she pulled out her own map.
“I’ve been in Vializ,” she said to me. “The sun shines there. It’s not the real sun, but it’s something that shines, gives a bit of heat. The people are happy, and they have color in their cheeks. They are entirely unworried. They do not fear the soldiers at their gates. They can see us out here, they can hear us, but it is as though they are not even in Hell. They have a terrible army, the most ferocious soldiers I have seen. Should they venture from their lair, they will be difficult to defeat. Perhaps lucky for us, they seem to have no reason to venture from their lair.”
She sighed and paused.
“Those two sentries,” she said. “The ones I … killed.” Getting used to this idea. “The ones I killed,” she said again, this time more steadily. This was not the Theera of the future (and my past) who had killed many men with moral certainty. This was a Theera who knew how to kill, but not how to live with what she had done. “These sentries were sadists … you see what I’m saying? They were real believers. I saw them kill men, in Vializ, with despicable glee, and they did it slowly. They tortured men to death who were guilty merely of showing insufficient enthusiasm and ardor for the Cause. ‘Weeding the garden,’ they said. They were not just soldiers.”
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 29
