So, Joe had asked, what man or woman had founded the island that Noah had constantly referred to as “my country.” Noah had replied that he didn’t know, but there were those in the great city of b’Kether Sabbat who knew, and perhaps Joe would find favor with one of them, and be initiated into that mystery.
A frail hope, even then. Now it was not worth entertaining. The people on the shore were plainly refugees, most likely from that very city. If b’Kether Sabbat still stood, it probably stood deserted.
Joe intended to see it nevertheless. He’d come so far, and at such cost. Not to see the city which had been, according to Noah, the jewel of the Ephemeris—its Rome, its New York, its Babylon—would be defeatist. And even if he didn’t make it, even if there was only a wasteland on the other side of the trees, anything was better than lingering here, among these desolate people.
So thinking, he started up the shore, the dream of power with which he had begun this journey entirely dashed, and in its place the simple desire to see what could be seen and know what could be known before he lost the power to do either.
SIX
I
Though Liverpool had seemed charmless to Phoebe when she and Musnakaff first entered—its public buildings austere and grimy, its private houses either tenement rows or gloomy mansions—they soon encountered signs of an inner life that quite endeared the place to her. There were noisy parties going on in a number of residences they passed by, with parties spilling out onto the sidewalk. There were huge bonfires blazing in several of the squares, surrounded by dancing people. There was even a parade of children, singing as they went.
“What’s the celebration?” she asked Musnakaff.
“There isn’t one,” he replied. “People are just making the most of what little time they think’s left to them.”
“Before the Iad comes?” He nodded. “Why don’t they try and leave the city?”
“A lot of folks have. But then there’s a lot more who think: What’s the use? Why go and shiver in Trophetté or Plethoziac, where the Iad’s going to find you anyway, when you could be at home drinking yourself stupid with your family around you?”
“Do you have a family?”
“The Mistress is my family,” the fellow replied. “She’s all I need. All I’ve ever needed.”
“You said she was insane.”
“I exaggerated,” he replied fondly. “She’s just a little loopy.”
They came at last to a three-story house standing on its own, in a snow-dusted garden. There were lights burning in every room, but there were no partygoers here. The only sound was the din of sea-gulls, who sat on the roof and chimneys, staring out to sea. They had quite a view. Even from the street Phoebe was able to gaze down over a chilly but spectacular vista of roofs and spires, all snow-dusted, to the docks and the many dozens of sailing ships at anchor there. She knew very little about ships, but the sight of these vessels moved her, evoking as it did an age when the world had still possessed mystery. Now, perhaps, the only sea left to explore was the sea that stretched beyond the harbor, the dream-sea, and it seemed right to her that these sleek, elegant vessels be the ones to ply it.
“That’s how the Mistress made herself,” Musnakaff remarked, coming to Phoebe’s shoulder to share the panorama.
“Ships?”
“Sailors,” he replied. “She traded in dreams, and it made her rich beyond counting. Happy, too; till King Texas.”
As he’d promised, Musnakaff had spoken about King Texas on the journey, and it was a sad tale. He had seduced the Mistress in her prime, so Musknakaff explained, and then, tiring of her, had left her for another woman. She had pined for him pitifully, and had several times attempted to kill herself, but life, it seemed, hadn’t been done with her, because each time she’d survived to grieve another day.
And then, many years after his departure, he’d suddenly returned, begging her forgiveness, and asking to be allowed back into her arms and bed. Against all expectation, she had refused him. He had changed, she said. The man she had loved and lost, the man she still mourned, and always would, was gone.
“Had you been with me,” she’d said, “we might have changed together; and found new reasons for love. But there’s nothing left of you for me to want, except the memory.”
The story seemed to Phoebe ineffably sad, as did the notion of trading in dreams, though she had no little difficulty imagining what that actually meant.
“Can dreams be bought and sold?” she asked Musnakaff.
“Everything can be bought and sold,” he replied, looking at her quickly. “But you know that, coming from the Cosm.”
“But dreams—?”
He raised his hand to ward off further questions and led her to the gates of the house—which he unlocked with a key hanging at his belt—then ushered her up to the front steps. Here he paused to offer one last piece of advice before they entered.
“She’ll want to quiz you about the Cosm. Tell her it’s a vale of tears, and she’ll be happy.”
“That’s no lie,” Phoebe said.
“Good,” he replied, and started up the stairs. “Oh, one more thing,” he said as he went. “You may want to tell her I saved you from certain death. Please feel free to lie a little about that, just to make it seem more—”
“Heroic?”
“Dramatic.”
“Oh yes. Dramatic,” Phoebe said with a little smile.”Don’t worry.”
“Only I’m all she’s got left now that the sailors don’t come. And I want her to feel protected. You understand?”
“I understand,” Phoebe said. “You love her as much as King Texas.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“It’s not even . . . I mean . . . she doesn’t . . . ” All his confidence had suddenly drained from him. He was trembling.
“You’re saying she doesn’t know?”
“I’m saying . . . ” he studied the steps, “I’m saying she wouldn’t care even if she did.” Then, not meeting Phoebe’s eyes, he turned from her and hurried up the icy steps to the front door. It was open in an instant, and he went inside, where the lamps were turned to tiny glittering flames, and he could wrap his sorrow in the shadows.
Phoebe followed him up and in. He directed her down a narrow, high-ceilinged passage to the back of the house. “You’ll find plenty of food in the kitchen. Help yourself.” Then he headed up the lushly carpeted stairs, his ascent announced by a tinkling of tiny bells.
The kitchen, Phoebe discovered, had probably been modern in nineteen-twenty, but it was a reassuring place to sit and rest her heavy body. There was an open fire, which she fed with a few logs, there was an immense black iron stove, pots large enough to cook for fifty, and the raw materials for such an enterprise arrayed everywhere: shelves of canned goods, bowls and baskets of fruit and vegetables, bread and cheese, and coffee. Phoebe stood in front of the fire for a couple of minutes, to get some warmth back into her chilled limbs, then set to constructing herself a substantial sandwich. The beef was rare and soft as butter, the bread still warm from the oven, the cheese ripe and piquant. By the time she’d finished putting the sandwich together, her mouth was awash. She took a hearty bite—it was better than good—then poured herself a cup of fruit juice and settled down in front of the fire.
Her thoughts drifted as she ate and drank, back along the shore, through the crack and down the mountain to Everville. It seemed like days since she and Tesla had waited in the traffic on Main Street, and talked about whether people were real or not. The conversation struck her as even more nonsensical now than it had at the time. Here she was in a place where dreams were traded, eating rare beef in front of a warm fire; things were as real here as they’d been in the world she’d left, and that was a great comfort to her. It meant she understood the rules. She wouldn’t fly here, but nor would she be chased by the Devil. This was just another country. Of course it had its share of strange customs and wild life, bu
t so did Africa or China. She just had to get used to its peculiarities, and she’d be able to make her way here without difficulty.
“The Mistress wants to see you,” Musnakaff announced from the doorway.
“Good,” she said, and started to rise. She instantly felt lightheaded. “Boy, oh boy,” she said, picking up her cup and peering into it. “That juice has got a kick to it.”
Musnakaff allowed himself a smile. “It’s mourningberry,” he said. “Are you not familiar with it?”
She shook her head, which was a mistake. Her senses swam.
“Oh Lord,” she said, and started to sit down again. “Maybe I should just wait a few minutes.”
“No. She wants to see you now. Trust me, she’s not going to give a shit if you’re a little tipsy. She’s scarcely ever sober herself.” He came over to Phoebe, and persuaded her back to her feet. “Now remember what I told you—”
“King Texas . . . ” Phoebe mumbled, still trying to order her thoughts.
“No!” he yelped. “Don’t you dare mention him.”
“What then?” she said.
“The vale of tears,” he reminded her.
“Oh yes. I remember. The Cosm’s a vale of tears.” She repeated it to herself, just for safety’s sake.
“Have you got it?”
“I’ve got it,” she said.
Musnakaff sighed. “Well then,” he said, “I can think of no excuse to put this off any further,” and duly escorted her out of the kitchen, along the passageway and up the stairs to meet with the Mistress of the strange house.
* * *
II
Though the trees that bounded the shore of Ephemeris grew so close together their exposed roots knotted like the fingers of praying hands, and the canopy overhead was so dense the sky was blotted out altogether, there was not a leaf, twig, or patch of moss that didn’t exude light, which eased Joe’s progress considerably. Once in the midst of the forest, he had to rely upon his sense of direction to bring him out the other side, which indeed it did. After perhaps half an hour the trees began to thin, and he stumbled into the open air.
There, a scene lay before him of such scale he could have stood and studied it for a week and not taken in every detail. Stretching in front from his feet for perhaps twenty miles was a landscape of bright fields and water-meadows, the former blazing green and yellow and scarlet, the latter sheets of silver and gold. Rising overhead, like a vast wave that had climbed to titanic height and now threatened to break over the perfection below, was a wall of darkness, which surely concealed the Iad. It was not black, but a thousand shades of gray, tinged here and there with red and purple. It was impossible to judge the matter of which it was made. It had the texture of smoke in some places, in others it glistened like skinned muscle; in others still it divided in convulsions, and divided again, as though it were reproducing itself. Of the legion, or nation, that lurked behind it, there was no sign. The wave teetered, and teetered, and did not fall.
But there was another sight that was in its way more extraordinary still, and that was the city that stood in the shadow of this toppling sky: b’Kether Sabbat. The glory of the Ephemeris, Noah had called it and, had Joe’s journey taken him not one step closer to the city’s limits, he would have believed the boast.
It was shaped, this city, like an inverted pyramid, balanced on its tip. There was no sign of any structure supporting it in this position. Though there were myriad means of ascent from the ground to its underbelly, which was encrusted with what he assumed to be dwellings (though their occupants would have to have the attributes of bats to live there), the sum of these ladders and stairways was nowhere near sufficient to bear the city’s weight. He had no way to judge its true scale, but he was certain Manhattan would have fitted upon the upper surface with room to spare, which meant that the dozen or so towers that rose there, each resembling a vast swathe of fabric, plucked up by one corner and falling in countless folds, were many hundreds of stories high.
Despite the lights that blazed from their countless windows, Joe doubted the towers were occupied. B’Kether Sabbat’s citizens were choking the roads that led from the city, or rising from its streets and towers in wheeling flocks.
Such was the sheer immensity of this spectacle he was almost tempted to find himself a comfortable spot among the roots, and watch it until the wave broke, and it was obliterated. But the same curiosity that had brought him from the shore now pressed him on, down the slope and across a swampy field, where a crop of crystalline flowers sprouted, to the nearest of the roads. Despite the vast diversity of faces and forms in the throng upon that road, there was a certain desperation in their faces and in their forms a common dread. They shuddered and sweated as they went, their eyes—white, golden, blue, and black—cast over their shoulders now and again towards the city they’d deserted, and the teetering darkness that shadowed it.
Few showed any interest in Joe. And those few that did looked at him pityingly, judging him crazy, he supposed, for being the only traveler on this highway who was not fleeing b’Kether Sabbat, but heading back towards it.
* * *
III
Musnakaff’s Mistress was sitting in a bed so large it could readily have slept ten, propped up on twenty lace pillows and surrounded by a litter of torn paper, which was so light that the merest breath of wind from window or hearth was enough to raise fifty of the scraps into the air and make the sheets rustle like leaves. The chamber itself was absurdly overwrought, the smoke-stained ceiling painted with naked deities cavorting, the walls lined with mirrors, some cracked, the rest in severe decay. The same might have been said for the Mistress herself. Decayed she was, and plainly cracked. For fully five minutes Phoebe and Musnakaff waited at the end of her bed while she tore up pieces of paper into yet smaller pieces, muttering to herself as she did so.
What light there was came from the oil-lamps on the various tables, which were—like those in the rest of the house—turned down so that they barely glimmered, lending the whole chamber a troubled air. Its ambiguity did little to flatter the woman. Even by this subdued light she was a grotesque, her sparse hair dyed a lush black (which only served to emphasize her parchment pallor), her cheeks furrowed, her neck like a fraying rope.
At last, without looking up from her litter-making, she spoke, her thin lips barely moving.
“I could have used a woman like you, in the old days. You’ve got some meat on your bones. Men like that.” Phoebe didn’t respond. Not only was she intimidated by this crone, she was afraid her lack of sobriety would be all too evident if she spoke. “Not that I care what men like or don’t like,” the Mistress went on. “I’m past that. And it feels fine, not to care.” She looked up now. Her eyes were rheumy, and roved back and forth in Phoebe’s general direction, but didn’t come to rest. “If I cared,” she said, “you know what I would do?” She paused. “Well, do you?” she demanded.
“No—”
“I would dream myself a beauty,” she replied, chuckling at the notion. “I would make myself over as the most fetching woman in Creation, and I would go out in the streets and break every heart I could.” The chuckle disappeared. “Do you think I could do that?” she said.
“I . . . I daresay you could.”
“You daresay, do you?” the Mistress responded softly. “Well let me tell you: I could do it as easily as piss. Oh yes. No trouble. I dreamed this city, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“I did! Tell her, my little Abré!”
“It’s true!” Musnakaff replied. “She dreamed this place into being.”
“So I could dream myself a fetching woman just as easily.” Again, she paused. “But I choose not to. And you know why?”
“Because you don’t care?” Phoebe ventured.
The paper the woman was in the middle of tearing fell from her fingers. “Exactly,” she said, with great moment. “What’s your name? Felicia?”
“Phoebe.”
“Even wors
e.”
“I like it,” Phoebe replied, her tongue responding before she could check it.
“It’s a vile name,” the woman said.
“No it isn’t.”
“If I say it’s a vile name, then vile it is. Come here.” Phoebe didn’t move. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes I heard you, but I don’t care to come.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Oh for God’s sake, woman, don’t take offense at a little remark like that. I’m allowed to be objectionable. I’m old, ugly, and flatulent.”
“You don’t have to be,” Phoebe said.
“Says who?”
“You,” Phoebe reminded her, glad she’d had all those years of dealing with obstinate patients. She was damned if she’d allow the harridan to intimidate her. “Two minutes ago, you said—” She caught Musnakaff frantically gesturing to her, but she’d begun now and it was too late to stop. “You said you could just dream yourself beautiful. So dream yourself young and gasless at the same time.”
There was a weighty silence, the Mistress’s eyes roving maniacally. Then she began to chuckle again, the sound escalating into a full-throated laugh. “Oh you believed me, you believed me, you sweet thing,” she said. “Do you truly think I would live with this”—she raised her skeletal hands in front of her—“if I had any choice in the matter?”
“So you can’t dream yourself beautiful?”