Radiance

My companion gave me a glass of her own brandy, a Callisto vintage she must have hidden away from me aboard ship; I felt my strength returning. Perhaps all the strength I’ve ever owned has come from a bottle, from an atomizer, from a syringe. Without them I am friendless.

“You are not a child now, Anchises. He cannot hurt you. He certainly can’t hurt me. I’ve stared down men with more mettle than some pisspot theatre-rat, I assure you.”

How kind she was to me then. I’ve no idea what came over her. Perhaps she was ill. If only we had known.

Boatswain and Mariner appeared, once more maddeningly silent, maddeningly masked, and led us into the dining hall. A long black table lay prepared, groaning with wonderful foods, Earth foods: glistening roast turkeys and geese, bowls of green vegetables garnished with sweet nuts and butter, steaming bread, champagne, cold cherry soup, pumpkin tarts, everything as perfect as if it were made by some St. Louis matriarch in one humble kitchen. Merrymakers already sat at table, talking, laughing, even singing, as though nothing could be the matter. We took our places at the far end of the banquet table. At the other end sat Maximo Varela, the great lighting master, the Mad King of Pluto. He wore a suit not much different from ours—yet still, too, that unsettling, uncanny Severin mask.

We ate; yet it did not satisfy. The turkey, the goose gravy, the broccoli and Brussels sprouts all tasted the same, their flavour no stronger than that of the infanta flowers: sweet, complex, but hardly a patch on a leg of lamb as I remembered it. No one spoke to us; they behaved as though we were quite invisible, reaching across us for second helpings, kicking our shins beneath the table. I searched Varela’s eyes for the man in my memory, the man who had pinned my arm with one boot while he ground his other heel into my hand. But all I could see was the plastic face of Severin Unck, expressionless, unnerving.

Afterward, the company processed into a dark chamber adjoining the dining hall. Real fear moved in their eyes. The nakedness of it all unsettled our bones—naked walls, without sound, without light, yet nothing guarded. The hyena of the human heart had been loosed in the rooms of this place. I offered my hand to Cythera, but she refused it.

“It’s not your comforting I was concerned with,” I mumbled, and she gave me that old shipboard glare I knew so well.

Very well. Comfortless, we faced that lightless room, wide and long enough for draughts and echoes to play awful, invisible hosts. I could feel the movement of bodies, hear the rustle of fabrics, the soft thump of objects, but nothing had a name or a shape; nothing was yet itself. Light, finally, began as dawn begins: barely perceptible, except as an ease in the air, a redness. I could hear, suddenly, overwhelmingly, the crash and boom of ocean waves. Shadows leapt into stark existence—cretaceous shadows, of vast ferns and trunks, of tangled bush, of thorns and brambles. I felt a raindrop land on my head. I smelled ozone, moss, a storm just wandered off. Green lights like lost emeralds spattered down from the black depths of the ceiling. The silhouettes of broken ships, of broken palaces, of broken bodies came into relief. Lights the colour of drowned flesh crept in, slithering forward to meet the King as he stepped into the world of his making.

He stepped. And stepped. And turned. In a small, tight circle, round and round. He no longer wore the mask of Severin’s face. Now a grotesque Green Man rode his skull, a tangle of kelp, wild orange blossoms, and cacao-bark; hanging vines and fish bones. The King turned round and round, his head down, clutching his hand to his naked chest. No, no, no, I whispered, shaking my head from side to side, trying to retreat, to back out of that place before the place could see me, but a wall of bodies caught me, kept me. The King spun. The heavy leaves of his mask quivered in a real wind that picked up from nowhere, swirling, clawing at my gloves as if it knew, it knew what it would find there.

I began to weep. I am not ashamed. Any man would.

The King stopped as suddenly as if he had been stabbed through the eye. He turned his head toward me, his body motionless. The eyes of his mask were holes gouged in the green. Two long tendrils hung down nearly to his waist. They ended in coppery globes sloshing with some terrible pale wine—and didn’t I know that wine? How could I not? I clutched at Cythera Brass.

“Get me out of here,” I hissed. “I cannot be here. This is cruel. Protect me. Do your job.”

“Get yourself under control,” she hissed back.

The King spoke: “No tale can truly begin until its author is shriven. Thus, I offer up my confession on the altar of the telling. Will you hear me? Will you do as I ask?”

I did not, could not, answer him.

“Do it!” the King of Pluto roared. He ran at me suddenly, as a lion after wounded prey, his limbs painted, streaked, splashed with black and white, stark, terrible. Pigment dripped from his biceps, his hipbones; viscous, greasy tears.

“Do it,” he cried again, and sank to his ruined knees. His fern-tangled mask implored me with its empty sockets. What did his face look like? I should remember it; should remember him, Max, the man with the lanterns; should recall him as vividly as

any child recalls a favourite character from some charming tale told in the wee hours of their youth. But there was nothing. My mind refused. I shook my head, held up my hands, choked back the bile churning through my body. I was all bile; I was nothing else. I did not know what he wanted from me!

“Do it,” he whispered. “Forgive me. Forgive me. I killed her. Forgive me.”

I stared down at the pitiful wreckage before me. Could it be this easy? As simple, as quotidian, as quaint as murder? He loved her, and she didn’t love him; or she fired him, and he could not bear the shame; or they quarrelled, and he did not know his strength? I tried to imagine it, his choking the life from Severin, dashing her brains out on the flat rocks where my parents had laid out laundry to dry before they were clawed from the surface of the world. Perhaps…perhaps I saw it happen, and that is why my mind refuses to grasp those unspeakable days on the shores of the Qadesh.

“Never,” I hissed. “I will never forgive you.”

But he only laughed: high, screeching, shrill, boiling laughter that steamed away into the nothingness of that horrid vault.

Maximo Varela snapped his fingers. A campfire appeared in the centre of the room, its embers seething. Drums began, and pipes as well—hooting, owlish horns. Eight figures danced around it, naked, painted, masked: a silver man in a beaked mask with deep camera lenses over its eyes like a raccoon’s bandit face; a man and a woman painted like flame and forest, her mask a clock face, his the burnt ruin of a diving bell; two men, their clothes all woven of priceless grain, a woman cyclops, her single eye a pit of blackness; an indigo man with the face of a bull and a scar like a star on his cheek; and a chalk-marked child, clutching one of his hands with the other, his mask a simple, harlequin white with two black hearts where the dimples ought to be, his mouth a heart-shaped hole. I clutched my own hand reflexively, instinctively. Beneath my glove I felt the topography of my scars; the ropy flesh; the hidden, seeping wound; the soft, sinuous writhing of it…Saints in heaven, why now? It had not stirred in years.

The child spun among the dancing adults, reaching up to them, to be touched by them, to be held by them, comforted. They ignored him. The women embraced; the camera-eyed man lifted a bowl of milk and poured it over himself, over the others—they lapped it from one another’s skin, swallowed it, danced in its fall like pale rain. The cream beaded on their collarbones, their chests, their flat stomachs. The child sucked his fingers sullenly, crouching by the fire. Then, the woman painted like the forest cried out and vanished into the shadows.

No, no, no.

The man with the face of a bull began to choke. He clawed at his throat. His face began to swell; vomit flew from his lips and the vomit was not liquid but a torrent of light, bubbling, foaming, scarlet light. Long nails pricked at the rags of my memory. Hooks, shards. Ah, but there is nothing there for you, Prospero. My memory is a land where everything dies. The cyclops lurched unnaturally, his limbs jerking at hideous angles, and a blade appeared, stuck through the centre of his monstrous eye.

The King of Pluto entered the scene. He came leading a woman painted red. No—not painted red, but soaked in blood. She wore the Severin mask, but now that porcelain face was ravaged by arterial spray. Scarlet and black blood splattered over naked breasts, clotting in the hollow at the small of her back, pooled and half-dried in the valleys of her clavicle, turning her belly into a country of crimson. She was not Severin. She was not. That body, so blatant and unguarded, was not the body I dreamt of. Still, I looked away as though it were, as though it could be. The King passed her from dancer to dancer; she was tender with each of them, even—finally, finally—with the pale child. She hoisted him up, spun him in the air. He laughed, and she threw him to the ground. I lurched forward despite myself, stupidly. He is safe, of course he is safe. It is only an act, a little mummers’ nonsense to pass the time on this godforsaken world; only you needn’t be so rough with him—he’s only small; he is a good boy. The boy’s laughter opened a door into weeping.

The drums and pipes quickened, and so, too, the sounding sea: harder, urgent, arrhythmic. The silver man, erect as a knife, lifted bloody Severin into his arms and penetrated her, the blood running liquid down her limbs and mixing with the milk—how could there be so much blood? Where was it coming from? I thought my heart would stop. Cythera watched calmly, interested, never turning away for a moment. The music groaned, creaked, sped along its jerking, spasming path toward I knew not what; the silver man fixed his lenses on the wet, red body of his lover as though he could drink her in through those black mouths. She bounced in his arms, screaming now. The others bent in their dancing, hunched over, their arms brushing the ground, fingers contorted into hooks, claws, talons.

The Mad King of Pluto did not dance. He tore a green frond from his mask and cast it into the fire, where it became a great book, spitted on spikes, the flames licking at its spine like a beast roasting. He read from its flaming pages, and his voice echoed against the crash of invisible waves:

“Take her and spare us, take her and spare us, You who moved upon the face of the deep before the dark had any need of God. Take her and spare us. As long ago the daughter of Agamemnon was called upon to present herself to the ships moored at Aulis when the winds would not blow, so the daughter of Percival gave herself so that we might live. Agamemnon’s child came in beauty like the star of the morning. Take her and spare us. The lords of men told her she was to be wed to the greatest of them, and readily she prepared herself for a soft bed garlanded with flowers, to be thus brided. Take her and spare us. But the bed was not a bed, nor were the garlands flowers. Take her and spare us. The daughter of Agamemnon lay down upon a stone altar, bound with rough ropes, and there the priest slit her throat to appease the angry moon. Take her and spare us. And from her bleeding body the winds began to sing and fly so that every man’s ship found its destiny. Take her and spare us, take her and spare us. Send us home, and send her to hell.”