Mister B. Gone (11 page)

The first of my pursuers to appear on the far side of the grove was the soldier clad in mud as well as armour. He took his helmet off so as to see me better, showing me in doing so his own muddy, sweaty, raging face. His hair was cropped to little more than a shadow; only his dark beard had been allowed to grow.

“Well you’ve given me quite an education, demon,” he said.

“I knew nothing about your people.”

“The Demonation.”

“What?”

“My people. We’re the Demonation.”

“Sounds more like a disease than a people,” he said, curling his lip with contempt. “Luckily, I’ve got the cure.” Pointing his halberd in my direction, he tossed down his helmet and unsheathed his sword. “Two cures, in fact,” he said, moving towards me. “Which shall I stick you with first?”

I looked up from the roots of the tree, idly wondering how deep into the earth they went; how far short of Hell. The soldier was halfway across the grove.

“Which shall it be, demon?”

My dizzied gaze went from one weapon to the other.

“Your sword . . .”

“All right. You’ve made your choice.”

“No, your sword . . . it looks cheap. Your friend has a much finer sword. The blade is nearly twice as long as yours, and so heavy, so large, I think he could probably drive it all the way through you from behind, armour and all, and the mere length of what came out of your belly would be longer than that ridiculous weapon of yours.”

“I’ll show you ridiculous!” the soldier said. “I’ll cut—”

He stopped midsentence, his body convulsing as the claim I’d just made was proved, the sword his companion wielded emerging from the armour intended to protect his abdomen. It was bright with his blood. He dropped his halberd, but continued, though his fist trembled, to cling to his sword.

All the color had gone from his cheeks, and all trace of rage or murderous intent had gone with it. He didn’t even attempt to look back at his executioner. He simply lifted his own paltry sword up so as to compare its length with the visible portion of the blade that had run him through. He drew one last, blood-clogged breath, which gained him a few seconds more in which to lay the two blades side by side.

Having done so he lifted his gaze and, fighting to keep his leaden eyelids from closing, he looked at me and murmured:

“I would have killed you, demon, if I’d had a bigger sword.”

Upon the uttering of which, his hand dropped to his side, the length-impaled blade slipping from his fingers.

The soldier behind him now withdrew his own impressive weapon, and the corpse of my tormentor fell forwards, his head no more than a yard from my mud-encrusted feet.

“What’s your name?” he said to me.

“Jakabok Botch. But everybody calls me Mister B.”

“I’m Quitoon Pathea. Everybody calls me Sir.”

“I’ll remember that, sir.”

“You got hooked by The Fisherman, I’ll bet.”

“The Fisherman?”

“His real name’s Cawley.”

“Oh. Him. Yes. How did you work that out?”

“Well, you’re obviously not part of the Archbishop’s guard.”

Before I could question him further he put his finger to his lips, hushing me while he listened. My human pursuers had not turned back once they had reached the fringes of the forest. To judge by the way their clamor knitted, they had become a small mob, with one thought on their minds and tongues.

“
Kill the demon! Kill the demon!”

“This isn’t good, Botch. I’m not here to save your tail.”

“Tails.”

“Tails?”

“I have two,” I said tearing off the dead lover’s trousers and letting my tails uncoil.

Quitoon laughed.

“Those are as fine a pair of tails as I ever saw, Mister B.,” he said, with genuine admiration. “I was of half a mind to let them finish you off, but now I see those—”

He looked back towards the torn undergrowth where the mob would soon appear. Then back at me:

“Here,” he said, casually tossing his glorious sword in my direction.

I caught it, or more correctly, the sword caught me, convulsing in the air between its owner’s confident hand and my own fumbling fingers so as to place itself in my grip. The soldier was already turning his back on me.

“Where are you going?”

“To raise the heat in
this
,” he said, slamming his fist against the chest plate of his armour.

“I don’t understand.”

“Just take cover when I call your name.”

“Wait!” I said. “Please. Wait! What am I supposed to do with your sword?”

“Fight, Mister B. Fight for your life, your tails, and the Demonation!”

“But—”

The soldier raised his hand. I shut my mouth. Then he disappeared into the shadows off to the left of the grove, leaving me, the sword, a corpse which was already drawing summer flies eager to drink his blood and the noise of the approaching mob.

Let me pause a moment, not just to take a breath before I attempt to describe what happened next, but because in revisiting these events I see with a fresh clarity how the words uttered and the deeds done in that little grove changed me.

I had been a creature of little consequence, even to myself.

I’d lived unremarkably (excepting perhaps the patricide) but I would not, I was suddenly determined, die that way.

The shape of the world changed in that place and moment. It had always seemed to me like a Palace that I would never know the joy of entering, for I had been marked as a pariah when I was still in my mother’s womb. I was wrong,
wrong
! I was my own Palace, every room of which was filled with splendors that only I could name or enumerate.

This revelation came in the little time between Quitoon Pathea’s disappearance into the shadows and the arrival of the mob, and even now, having thought about the event countless times, I am still not certain as to why. Perhaps it was simply having escaped death so many times that day, first at the hands of Cawley’s gang, then from the lover-boy’s knife attack and later from the crowd on Joshua’s Field, and that I was now facing it yet again—this time with a weapon in my hands that I had no knowledge of how to wield, and therefore expecting to die—that I gave myself the freedom to see my life clearly just this once.

Whatever the reason, I remember the most exquisite rush of pleasure with which that vision of the world blossomed in my skull, a rush that wasn’t spoiled in the least by the appearance of the human enemy. They appeared not only from the spot where I had entered the grove, but also from between the trees to left and right of it. There were eleven of them; and they all had weapons of some description. Several had knives, of course, while others carried makeshift clubs of living wood, hacked off trees.

“I am a Palace,” I said to them, smiling.

There were a lot of puzzled stares from my executioners.

“The demon’s crazy,” one of them remarked.

“I got a cure for that,” said another, brandishing a long and much nicked blade.

“Cures, cures,” I said, remembering the dead soldier’s boasts.

“Everybody has cures today. And you know what?”

“What?” said the man with the nicked blade.

“I don’t feel in need of a doctor.”

A toothless virago snatched the nicked blade from the man’s hand.

“Talk, talk! Too much talk!” she said, approaching me. She paused to pick up the small sword the dead soldier had left in the grass. She picked up his halberd too, tossing both of them back towards the mob, where they were caught by two members of a quartet who had just appeared to swell the crowd: Cawley, the Pox, Shamit, and Father O’Brien. It was the Pox who caught the halberd, and seemed well pleased with what circumstance had handed him.

“This creature murdered my daughter!” he said.

“I want him taken alive,” Cawley said. “I’ll pay good coin to whoever brings him down without killing him.”

“Forget the money, Cawley!” the Pox cried. “I want him dead!”

“Just think of the profit—”

“To hell with profit,” the Pox said, shoving Cawley in the chest so hard that he fell back into the thorny briars that prospered around the grove.

The priest attempted to haul Cawley out of his bed of barbs, but before he could raise the man up, the Pox started across the grove towards me, the halberd that had first been used to goad and prick me once again pointed in my direction.

I looked down at Quitoon’s sword. My weary body had let it droop until its point was hidden in the grass. I looked up at the Pox, then down at the sword again, murmuring as I did so the words I’d used to speak of my revelation.

“I am a Palace.”

As if woken by my words, the sword raised itself up out of the grass, its point cleansed of blood by the damp earth where it had settled. The sun had risen above the trees, and caught the sword’s tip as my own sinews took up the duty of raising the weapon. By some trick known only to the sword, the sun’s light reflected off it and momentarily filled the entire grove with its incandescence. The blaze held everything and everybody still for several heartbeats, and I saw everything before me with a clarity the Creator Itself would have envied.

I saw it all—sky, trees, grass, flowers, blood, sword, spear, and mob—all one lovely view from the windows of my eye.

And yet even as I saw the sight before me as a single glory, I also saw its every detail, however insignificant, the vision so clear I could have made an inventory of it. And every part of it was beautiful. Every leaf, whether perfect or eaten at; flower, whether pristine or crushed; every glistening sore on the Pox’s face, and every lash upon his gummy eyes: My awakened gaze made no distinction between them. Both were all exquisite, all perfectly themselves.

The vision didn’t last. In just a few heartbeats it had gone.

But it didn’t matter. I owned it forever now, and with a shout of death-loving joy I ran at the Pox, raising Quitoon’s sword above my head as I did so. The Pox came to meet me, the point of his spear preceding him. I brought the sword down in one lovely arc. It cut off a foot or more of the Pox’s spear. His step faltered, and he might have retreated had the chance been offered, but the sword and I had other plans for him. I lifted the sword and brought it down again with a second swoop, bisecting the length of halberd that the Pox still held. Before he had time to drop the remains of his weapon I again lifted the sword and struck a third blow, slicing the Pox’s hands off at the wrist.

Oh Demonation, the noise he made! Its colors—blue and black with streaks of orange—were as bright as the blood that gushed from his arms. There was such beauty hidden in his agony; my delight knew no bounds. Even when cries of vengeful rage rose from the crowd behind him I saw more loveliness in their venomous colors—sour-apple greens and bilious yellows—that my own jeopardy seemed remote, inconsequential. When it came it too would be beautiful I knew.

Quitoon’s glorious sword was not distracted by these visions, however. It sent a vicious shock wave up through my arms and shoulders and into my dreaming head. It hurt so much it stirred me from my reverie. The colors I’d been glorying in withered and I was abandoned in the dull lie of life as it is commonly seen, smothered and sorrowful. I tried to draw a clear breath, but the air tasted dead in my throat and leaden in my lungs.

A sagging, but dogged hag amongst the mob started to goad the men around her:

“What are you afraid of?” she said. “He’s one. We’re many.

Are you going to let him go back to Hell and crow about how you all stood in terror of him? Look at him! He’s just a little freak! He’s nothing! He’s nobody!”

She had the courage of her convictions, it must be said. Without waiting to discover whether her words stirred the others into action, she started towards me, wielding a crooked branch.

Crazy though she surely was, the way she diminished me (I was nothing, I was nobody) gave the rabble fresh fury. They came after her, every last one of them. The only thing that stood between their ferocity and me was the Pox, who turned as they approached, extending his gouting arms as if one amongst the mob might heal him.

“Out of the way!” the harridan yelled, striking his massive torso with her crooked branch. Her blow was enough to make the weakened man stagger, his blood splattering those who crossed his path. Another of the women, disgusted that the Pox had bled on her, cursed him ripely and struck him herself. This time he went down. I did not see him rise again. I saw nothing, in fact, but angry faces screaming a mixture of pieties and obscenities as they swarmed around me.

I lofted up Quitoon’s sword, holding it in both hands, intending to keep the mob at blade’s length. But the sword had more ambitious ideas. It pulled itself up above my head, the paltry muscles of my arms twitching with complaint at having to lift such a weight. With my hands high I was exposed to the mob’s assaults, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. Blow after blow struck my body, branches breaking as their wielders smashed them against me, knives slashing at my belly and my loins.

I wanted to defend myself with the sword, but it had a will of its own, and refused to be subjugated. Meanwhile the cuts and blows continued, and all I could do was suffer them.

And then, entirely without warning, the sword cavorted in my hands, and started its descent. If I’d had my way I would have sliced at the mob sideways, and cut a swathe through them.

But the sword had timed its descent with uncanny accuracy, for there in front of me, holding two glittering weapons, stolen no doubt from some rich assassin, was Cawley. To my bewilderment he actually smiled at me in that moment, exposing two rows of mottled gums. Then he drove both of the blades into my chest, twice piercing my heart.

It was the next to last thing he ever did. Quitoon’s sword, apparently more concerned with the perfection of its own work than the health of its wielder, made one last elegant motion, so swift that Cawley didn’t have time to lose his smile. Meeting his skull at its very middle, not a hair to left or right, I swear, it descended inexorably towards his feet, cutting through head, neck, torso, and pelvis so that once his manhood had been bisected, he fell apart, each piece wearing half a smile, and dropped to the ground. In the frenzy of the assault, the Cawley bisection earned little response. Everybody was too busy kicking, beating, and cutting me.