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.