Ink (36 page)

Like a doorway into the abyss, his mind opens up now all the way. A barrage of anti-aircraft gunfire comes from somewhere in the Rookery but Joey hears it like a sound effect turned low. Distant. Unreal.

“Dream on, you petty tyrants. Let me tell you all a little story about Pentheus, the King of Tears, who tried to trap the god of wine and song
…”

Jack flicks the flap of his longcoat back and Joey's hand trembles as he points the gun at that empty heart under the scarlet shirt with the chi-gun shoulder holster crossing it and—

And there's a stick of orgone-saturated dynamite jammed in the holster, and Jack's opening his fist now, shit, and there's a silver Zippo in it which he opens up with a flick of thumb and, fuck, clicks into flame in one swift move. And Jack, eyes closed, touches the fire to the fuse beside his silent heart, and opens up his arms.

The explosion rips their world apart.

And Jack appears up on the wagon's roof, a dancing god of horn and hoof. The lights drop to a single spot on him.

“How strange your path is, Pierrot,” he says. “It leads to scenes of woe so weird you'll win a fame that reaches high. Reach out your hands, Columbine. You, her sisters, daughters of old Pantaloon, reach to the sky, the sun and moon.”

Coyote's trickery projects a scattering of constellations on the ceiling of the hall. Jack throws a hand into the air as if to grab and swing it round. Almost diagonal, one foot kicked out behind to balance him, he flips the move into a twist, a sort of angled spin, a tap-dance step, I think, or Cossack thing. The drum keeps time and, as he reels, the constellations start to wheel, slow at the start but gradually faster. Gold and silver disks of sun and moon flash past, in time with Jack and with the drum. The cycling signs of days and months, of seasons, years and aeons, turn. It seems the circling wheel of time itself, of fate.

Then Jack stops suddenly. The stars stop in their track.

“The end to which I bring this young and foolish king is great. The vietory
will be Harlequin's,” says Jack. “It will be mine. I'll say no more. You'll see the rest in time.”

“Run to the hills,” I sing, “swift dogs of madness howling in the night. Run to the hills where Columbine and all the daughters of old Pantaloon revel in mysteries and rites. Howl at the moon!”

And lights come on behind the wagon. Don has dropped the screen again and shadows dart across it, shapes too quick to see, just the suggestion of an arm, a head, a whirling sword, a wing outspread. A human form with antlers and a rupter raised. A lion's slashing paw.

“Excite the Maidens into a wild rage,” I sing.

The shadows flit across the screen, a silhouette of bovine horns out to the left, three dancing things with bestial heads.

“Yes, let his mother catch first sight of Pierrot her son in drag, dressed as a slag to spy among them, peeping from behind some boulder, through a tree split by a lightning bolt. Her call will raise all of the Maidens.”

A shadow points in accusation. Amped and modulated by Coyote's tech, the voice of Phreedom shakes the hall.

“Who is this son of Pantaloon come speeding to the hills to spy on us, my pack? Whose spawn is this?”

I hear her whisper after it, as well.

“You're not my Jack.”

The shapes of shadows swirl into confusion, suddenly resolve, a man in woman's dress, his arms spread wide by chains. He struggles, flails from side to side. His horned, winged captors hold him tight. The chaos under the thin skin of everything, Guy calls this scene. The creatures of Pierrot's id. The creatures of the night.

“Let justice show herself,” I sing, “her sword in hand, to thrust it through the throat of Aching's son, that godless, lawless child of dust!”

The creature caught behind the screen gives out a muffled shout. He thrashes, pulls against his chains and lashes out. It looks like Guy and Don are having trouble holding him.

“He was not born of woman's blood, but spat from some gargantuan lion's lips. With wicked heart and lawless rage, with mad desire and frantic aim, he comes to meddle with his mother's holy games, defies the spirit of the pack. He thinks to tame with his weak arm a strength untamable as yours.”

“Let justice show herself,” I sing, “her sword in hand, to thrust it through the throat of Aching's son, that godless, lawless, child of—”

Dust flies up beneath Jack's feet as he jumps down from the wagon to the flagstones, landing by my side. I sneeze.

“Gesundheit.”

“Dankeschon.”

We look around. There's no other exits from the prison courtyard of a square, just the portcullis of the seventh gate closing behind us now, its distant glint of daylight disappearing as the outside doors swing shut, just that and the wall to either side of it all chains and tracks going up, it seems, forever, lit by torches for as far as I can see. It's a vertical terminal of funiculars, caged metal carriages all topped with gears and cogs like clockwork cable cars, some no larger than an apartment-building elevator, others built to carry carts or larger cargoes. There are counterweights the size of small buildings, loading platforms, ramps and cranes.

Soldiers move in around us, and a nod of the head among the looming guards shepherds us toward one of the midsize cages. Guy drives the wagon in past a soldier's waving arm,
that way, keep it moving now.
A dozen or so of the soldiers follow Jack and me into the cage, flanking our wagon as an armed escort.

The grilled gate slides shut with a clatter, and the cage's gears grind into action. Deafening clangs and shrieks of metal. The whole cage shudders as it starts to rise.

Jack presses his nose between the bars, looking up into the height of the grand shaft, down at the floor falling away below us, awed by the fantastic artifices of eternity. I take a seat on the running board beside Joey, frowning as he reads through Guy's script, shaking his head and muttering about how if we just stuck to simple themes for once, maybe dealt with fucking human nature for a change, then maybe it would save us all a lot of pain. He wishes Fox would just leave the big ideas to others, I guess, and, as we chunter slowly up toward the Duke's grand castle in the sky, I sort of see his point.

Me, I've always found more fun in living life from day to day and night to night, in finding truth not in eternity but in the minutes and the hours. Fuck, isn't that a finer goal to strive for than to live forever in some ivory tower?

I pick a piece of fluff from Joey's shoulder, flick it away.

“You want to help me with my lines?” I say.

He shrugs OK.

Thing is, what Joey doesn't get is that it shows much
more
respect for the divine to say
the fuck with all these lousy laws
—at least I think that's what Monsieur Reynard is trying to say. But Joey, our eternal nihilist, is, of all of us, I guess, the true idealist.

I hand him my copy of the script, pointing to where I am, and he settles back against the wagon's side.

“Now, Harlequin,” I sing, “show us your mocking grin. Show us your hundred heads, the bull's horns, and the hair of snakes, the fire of your lion's breath. Come! Throw the deadly noose about the hunter of your pack as he swoops on the Maidens gathered yonder.”

Jack turns back to grin at Joey and myself. The cage rolls on up the great shaft. Jack the Giant-Killer, I think, going up his mechanical beanstalk to slay the tyrant in the clouds, rescue the princess. Christ, I think, maybe the Duke
is
just another Jack, a bit of him, a someday might-be dream of him thrown out into the Hinter, living in a giant sandcastle built to be kicked down.

And I still fucking love him.

Shit, man, maybe we're all just different dreams of Jack.

“O house of Satan, once the greatest of all Hell!”

A hand appears stage left, slaps round a pillar, leaving bloody smears as Guy Fox staggers on, his shepherd costume, face and hands all crimson spatters.

“House of the old prince who sowed the serpent's crop,” he wails, “of men born in the fields!”

He sobs and grabs my arm, leans in to whisper that it's done. I nod. He turns, hamming his horror.

“I may be a slave, but still … a good slave's heart breaks at his master's grave.”

“What's this?” I sing. “News of the pack?”

“The son of Aching, Pierrot, is dead.”

“My king,” I sing. “My Harlequin!”
[My Jack
‘At last you show yourself in all your might.”

“Woman,” gasps Guy, “what are you saying? You
delight
at my poor master's pain?”

“What? Do I sing my joy in a foreign tongue? Pierrot's dead? Good! I no longer fear his chains.”

“Do you think Themes so poor there's not a man who'll—”

“I'm a stranger in this land,” I cut him off. “It's Harlequin I answer to, not Themes's demands—”

“To glory in his murder is a crime, and this of all things will not be forgiven.”

I snort with derision.

“Tell me,” I say. “Tell me how he died, that scheming villain.”

The homesteads of the land of Themes behind them now, Elixir and the Basilisk splash through the Stream of Sophists, and begin the climb up Zithering's heights, the stranger striding out ahead to guide them to the scene, glancing over his shoulder now and then to smile at them with glinting eye and teeth that gleam. Basileus or Bacchus, poor Elixir isn't sure which of the two deserves more fear, and why exactly he is here, but he has no say in it, of course. So, just as the Basilisk follows the stranger, so Elixir tags along behind the Basilisk—

Basileus
, he thinks. Gods, don't forget to use the proper word or the Basileus—
bastard basilisk basileus
—will have him flogged when they get back to town. It's not as if he'd be the first. His Misery is not exactly known for mercy.

They follow the trickling water of a brook through a nook in a rock wall, and Elixir listens to the tread of each footfall as they pick their way beneath the pines, light on the bed of needles, his own breath held tight, released in whispers. They stop in the shade of shrub, crouched down to look without being seen, and gaze into a grassy glade.

The Maidens sit there busy with the work of joy. Some wind fresh curling ivy-sprays around their wands, while others sing hymns to each other, to the rapture of the pack. Like colts let loose from the yoke of a carved chariot, Elixir thinks, they have no cares.

The stranger is smiling at the sight. Elixir is nervous at his own furtive delight. The Basilisk just glares.

“Stranger,” he says, “I cannot see the pack from here. I'll have to find some higher ground or climb a tree to see their shameful acts.”

Elixir sees the stranger work a wonder then. He pulls a vine out of the ground and, like a whip, he snaps it through the air and round a dead tree's splintered tip. He draws it down lower and ever lower to the dust, this dead tree; stripped of needles, bark and branches, little more than ragged, jagged trunk, but this man bends it like Accordion strings his bow, so smooth, so easy; or like the old philosophist Hairclippers drawing a curve of wheel in a slow line of stick in sand.

So the stranger draws the tree down, bends it to the earth by some inhuman power; and it does not break. The stranger tells the Basilisk to hold on to the highest branches near the tip, then lets it straighten up into the sky, lets out the whip, hand over hand, so slow, so careful, so as not to shake Elixir's master from his grip. It rises like a flag over a battlefield, or like some amphitheater's hoisting trick of rope and pulleys built so that, at the climax of the show, some god can enter from the sky.

But now the Basilisk up on his perch, this lofty throne, is seen far better by the Maidens down below than he sees them, and, oh, as soon as he is seen, Elixir thinks … He turns to voice this fear but finds the stranger disappeared, and now Elixir feels the terror of a dream out of control. And from the sky there comes a voice, the voice of Dionysus it would seem. The sound of thunder, a drumroll.

“Maidens, I bring the man who tried to mock us and our mystic rites.”

A shaft of sun between the clouds picks out the tree, a fiery pillar rising bright between the heaven and the earth.

“Take vengeance on him,” says the light.

Don yanks a knot loose and the sandbags drop, and rising from behind the wagon, bound like a queer Christ upon his cross, the victim in his riding dress, face hidden by the hood, appears. The skirt, once green, is stained with blood still streaming from his wounds; it flutters as he struggles. I can hear his screaming even through the gag. His arms bent back over the crosspiece of a rupter, bodice open, showing his scarred bloody chest, he rises like some knight speared on a pike, like some unholy banner of unholy war. Jack, crouched upon the wagon's roof, howls his delight.

I look out on the audience, the mix of fear and thrill upon their faces. Serfs and courtiers who know their places, maybe they don't know what's going on, so maybe they're still thinking this is just a show, a song. But somewhere in their dreams, I think, this is a scene that part of them desires; and will desire as long as they live in these Havens built on fear. The Vellum is a harmony of op-posites, of tensions, good and evil, order versus chaos, and the Troupe d'rey-nard … well, we all have to play our parts. As long as there are Dukes of Hell, there will be those like us, the rogues and rebels, drunks and junkies, thieves and tarts, and the true king, unbound because unrecognized, my saucy Jack, my Jack of Hearts.

“This is the ritual death of reason,” Guy explains as we ride through the doors into the hall where all the lords and ladies of this corner of eternity are gathering, the serfs and courtiers ruled by their sorrow for their own lost lives,
trapped in this fantasy of reason's power over sin. And Joey grumbles that we'll never win, and Don is gruff and skeptical—-just how reliable is Jack? Guy worries over every line, each scene, each act, and I complain about soft skin but all the time I'm watching Jack. And Jack just grins: