The Dragons of Babel (41 page)

“My Aunt Anastasia.”

“What's wrong with her?”

Alcyone looked stricken. “Early onset enlightenment.”

She sank gracefully down at the side of the bed and placed a hand on the smudged rail. “Oh, Auntie, speak to me.”

Almost inaudibly, the crone whispered, “The gods of the valleys… are not the gods of the hills.”

“What?”

“Ethan… Allen said that.” Her voice gained strength and her body took on the faintest tinge of color. “Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud. The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet. We sing, but oh the clay is vile. And there the lion's ruddy eyes shall flow with tears of gold. This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. No job too dirty for a fucking scientist. Milton Cuvier Dun-bar Blake Nixon Burroughs said that. Here also lie the rainbow gardens of the Lady. Nobody knows who said that. It wasn'tme.”

“Auntie, you're not making any sense.”

“No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number.”

Alcyone took her Aunt Anastasia's hands in her own, so
that the moonsilver ring touched the old lady's fragile and translucent skin. “Come back to the world,” she said. “I need your advice, Auntie. Come back to me.”

“Mary McCarthy said that Venice is the world's unconscious, a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. But surely she meant Babel? Babel is the mile high city, the city of light, the big apple, and the hog butcher of the world. All roads lead to it, and he who is tired of the Worldly Tower is tired of life. I am so very tired of Babel. I am so very desirous of a road that leads somewhere else.”

“Speak to me no more in riddles and citations!” Alcyone said sternly. “I command you by the authority of this ring, forged on a continent that no longer exists, before the Thousand Races arose, to address me in clear words and with a lucid mind.”

There was a faint flutter of the crone's eyelids. They opened narrowly and the eyes beneath them drifted from side to side. “You've brought me back to consciousness?” The crone's hands plucked feebly, uselessly, at her restraints. “How hateful. You always were a cruel child.”

“Yes, dear, I'm afraid I have. But my need was great. You have information that I can get from no one else.”

The eyes closed. “Then ask.”

“You had a lover,” Alcyone said. “It was the scandal of the family. Nobody would talk about it. But I overheard enough to know that you had a lover for decades before you succumbed to enlightenment. Tell me how you did it.”

“It is a long story. Ask me something briefer.”

“Oh, Auntie. You know I can't.”

“Very well. I was a precocious child,” Anastasia said, “much as you were, dear. I walked, as they say, before I could crawl, and I levitated before I could properly stand. All places were one to me and I was anchored to any given locale only
by my desire to be there rather than elsewhere. By age seven I could read the thoughts of those dear to me as easily as I could my own. Yes, yes, you could as well at an earlier age, sweetie, I know that, and who's telling this story, you or me?”

“Sorry.”

“So my guardians put me on a discipline of cold-water treatments and corporal punishment. My rank was such, of course, that nobody dared touch me, and so I acquired a whipping boy. Hodge was a common fey, like your friend, but like your friend he was a comely thing. And of course a whipping boy must be personable, the sort of individual who will quickly become one's best friend, or else punishing him would be in effective.

“So we grew up together. Alas for Hodge, I was a hellion and could not modify my ways, and so he was scourged almost every day. Afterward, to hide my shame at what I was responsible for, I would laugh at him, and lick the tears from his face.

“Do I need to say that he loved me? Of course he did. How could he not? But I, of whom such behavior was not to be expected, fell in love with him as well.”

“What's wrong with that?” Will asked.

One eye opened and moved slowly to stare at him. A few seconds later, the other joined it. “We high-elven are like bubbles which, rising, dissolve before reaching the surface. Our power is spiritual in essence and so as we gain strength our attachment to the world grows increasingly weaker. This is why we have affairs, why we interfere in the lives of others, why we involve ourselves in the machineries of governance. Sex, gossip, and bureaucracy are the three great forces that bind us to the world.”

“I knew one who claimed to stave off dissolution with treason and violent adventure,” Will said.

One eye drifted away from him. The other stayed. “It was a male who told you that—and an elderly one, or he
would not have forgotten to throw in sex. But to answer your question, the problem with love is that it has the potential to make one happy. Pure, undiluted happiness, how many days of that could one such as I or Alcyone have before it destroyed us?”

“Twenty-seven,” Alcyone said quietly.

“Yes, that sounds about right. And how swiftly pass the days when one is in love. One loses count so easily. So you see, young romantic, if you were to take up with our little Allie, she'd be as I am now within a month.”

“But you lived with your lover. You found a way around it,” Alcyone said.

“Oh, I was cunning, all right. I was most careful not to be happy. I was cruel to my Hodge and I encouraged him in a thousand ways to be cruel to me. We bickered constantly. I nagged and scolded. And every time he began to make me joyful, I whipped him until he bled.

“So it went, for many a long and miserable decade. But as with anything that is used as a substitute for sex, the punishment became eroticized. Pain became an expression of my passion for him. He understood this and egged me on to greater and greater exertions. Until a day came when my pleasure in his suffering became so perfect that I did not stop and I beat him to death.”

Will cried out in horror.

“Perfection is death,” Anastasia said. “The world is imperfect, but if it weren't, who would love it?” Her eyelids closed, absolutely solid now and pale as old paper. “Our symposium has come to an end. Leave me go back to courting oblivion.”

“Yes, dear.” Alcyone's voice was almost inaudible. “I'm sorry I disturbed you.”

“The goddam sands run out…” Anastasia mumbled. “You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world. Salinger.”

As they were leaving, Will glanced back over his shoulder.
He saw in the hospital bed not an old woman but a blaze of light.

I
n the stretch afterward, Alcyone said, “Do you believe what they say about Nanshe?”

“What do they say?”

“That she-and-he is the psyche—the ka—of Babel. That our world is nothing but his-or-her dreams, in which we live and love and fight and aspire, all the while thinking ourselves the center of the universe. But that the day will come when Nanshe wakes up and we will all suddenly and painlessly cease to be.”

“I don't know. I hope not. What do you think?”

“I wonder. The reason I left the club so suddenly? I thought I heard him-and-her moan your name, and I feared what she-and-he might say next.” She took the ring from her finger and put it away in her clutch purse. There were tears on her face, and Will desperately wanted to kiss them away. “Which is ironic, considering.”

“Alcyone, I—”

“Shush,” she said fiercely. Then, in control again, “When I was a child, I bought my first hippogriff and learned to fly because I wanted to be free. Then, as I grew older and more aware of the constraints put upon me, I flew to test the limits of my cage. Finally I flew in order to pretend that freedom might someday be possible.” The limo's tires hummed on the pavement. It was late enough that there was almost no traffic in the streets. “Tell me. Can you see any way that you and I could be happy trogether?”

“No,” Will said after a long pause. “No, I don't.”

“Nor do I.”

She dropped Will off on Broadway, a good forty blocks from where he needed to be. He walked home through a cold drizzle that blew through Babel from the sea.

The rumor spread like wildfire through Harlem and Ginny Gall and into the fringe neighborhoods of Beluthahatchie and Diddy-Wah-Diddy: A cloaked prince had come, barefoot and alone, to consult with Salem Toussaint and to obtain the alderman's blessing preparatory to claiming his throne. Haints came out into the streets, flowing down the tenement steps and pouring from the pool halls and juke joints, stumbling up from the opium dens and storefront joss houses, stepping from the doorways of the barber shops and hair salons and social clubs, abandoning the night classes and soup kitchens, their eyes bright with strange hopes, and found his footprints glowing on the tarmac.

Will and the vixen had painted them earlier with phosphorescent paint overlaid with a suppressor spell timed to wear off shortly after sundown, but of course only they knew that.

In the alderman's office, Will doffed his hood and for an instant gloried in the complete and utter bafflement of his former employer.

Salem Toussaint reached out a hand and squeezed Will's forearm, as if to assure himself that it actually was him. “Are you
really
the king?” he said dubiously. Then, reverting to
his usual decisiveness, “No, of course not. What in the world are you up to, Will?”

“Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not the heir, at any rate,” Will said. “But folks started coming up to me and telling me that I was, and…” He shrugged. “I dunno.” He should have felt bad, lying to his old mentor. But the truth was he strangely enjoyed the sensation of power it gave him. “Nowadays I'm just winging it. Going with the current and seeing where it takes me.”

“Don't you try to bamboozle me, young fella. The city talks to me. What Babel knows, I know.” Toussaint put on his sternest face. “I sure hope you know what you're doing, boy. Because if you don't, let me warn you proper: Politics is a meat grinder. Don't go sticking your head into it unless you're damned sure you know what you're doing. And even then. Now tell me why you're here in my office.”

“I came to ask for a favor, Salem.”

Toussaint's face relaxed into a smile. He was on familiar ground now. “It's what I'm here for, son.”

“Nat needs an office. Someplace that looks official but that rents to private citizens. Someplace that's both grandiose and just a little bit seedy. One that can handle a lot of foot traffic without drawing attention. And one where somebody like you could arrange for an off-the-books cash rental on short notice.” He gestured at the building about him. “Old City Hall would be perfect.”

“What on earth would you need such a thing for?”

“See… the way we figure it, if there's going to be a new king, there'll be a lot of individuals who'd like to have access to him, in order to present their complaints or schemes, who might be willing to prime the pump in exchange for that access.”

“Ahhh,” Salem Toussaint said. “You'll be selling titles and offices.”

“How well you know me! So can we do business?”

“Well, now. Much as I like Nat personally, he's just a wee bit too well known locally for me to—”

Will held up his hands. “Oh, Nat wouldn't set foot in the building. I mention his involvement only so you'll know I'm not trying to hide anything.” He went to the door. “Contessa, you can come in now.” To the alderman he said, “This is Contessa Victoria il Volpone. She'll be acting as Nat's office manager.”

The vixen was wearing a man's suit, tieless, with an orchid pinned to the lapel. The top shirt buttons were undone and the shirt itself folded back to reveal the tops of her breasts. It was an ensemble that made her look roguish and fetching while its eccentricity rendered her assumed title seem almost plausible. “I feel honored to meet you, alderman,” she said. “Will has said so many fine things about you.”

“Milady.” Salem came around his desk and, bending low, kissed her hand.

The vixen colored prettily. “Oh, my!” She fanned herself. “I hope you're taking notes, Will. This is one gent who, I swear, need never go to bed alone.”

Toussaint beamed like all the world's favorite uncles rolled into one.

Jimi Begood chose that instant to come out of the side office. When he saw Will, he whistled long and low. “Well, I'll be damned.” He raised his voice. “Ghostface, get your butt out here!” Then, “He isn't the—?”

“Well, now,” Salem Toussaint said. “Let's keep our options open on that one. We'll just wait and see what turns out to be the most advantageous thing for us to believe. Right now, this lovely lady needs an office.”