Please—
let—
me—
burn.
No?
I see. All right, you win.
I know what you want. You want to know how I got from wandering with Quitoon into the pages of a book. Am I right?
Is that what you’re waiting for? I should never have mentioned that damnable Secret. But I did. And here we are, still looking at one another.
I suppose it’s understandable, now I think about it. If the situation was reversed, and I’d picked up a book and found somebody already possessing it, I’d want to know the Why and the When and the Where and the Who.
Well, the Where was a little town in Germany called Mainz.
And the Who was a fellow named Johannes Gutenberg. The When I’m not so sure about: I’ve never been good with dates.
I know it was summer, because it was unpleasantly humid. As to the year, I’m going to guess it was 1439, but I could be wrong by a few years in either direction. So that’s Where, Who, and When. What was the other one? Oh, Why. Of course. The big one. Why.
That’s easy. Quitoon took us there, because he’d heard a rumor that this fellow Gutenberg had made some kind of machine and he wanted to see it. So we went. As I said earlier, I’ve never been much good with dates, but I think by then Quitoon and I had been traveling together for something like a hundred years. That’s not long in the life of a demon. Some of the Demonation are virtually deathless, because they’re the offspring of a mating between Lucifer and another of the First Fallen.
I’m not so pure bred, unfortunately. My mother always claimed that her grandmother had been one of the First Fallen, which if it’s true means I might have lived four or five thousand years if I hadn’t got myself in a mess of words. Anyway, the point is this: Neither Quitoon nor I aged. Our muscles didn’t begin to ache or atrophy, our eyes didn’t fail, or our hearing become unreliable. We lived out that century indulging in every excess the World Above had to offer us, denying ourselves nothing.
I learned from Quitoon in the first few months how to stay out of trouble. We traveled by night, on stolen horses, which we’d change every few days. I have no great fondness for animals. I don’t know a demon that does. Perhaps we’re afraid their condition is a little too close to ours for comfort, and it wouldn’t take more than a whim on the part of the God of Genesis and of Revelations, creator and destroyer, to have us down on all fours, with Humankind’s collars around our necks and leashes on those collars. After a time I came to feel some measure of sympathy for those animals that were little more than slaves, their inarticulate state denying them the power to protest their enslavement, or tell their stories at least. Oxen yoked and straining as they labored to plow the unyielding ground; blinded songbirds in their plain little cages, singing themselves into exhaustion believing that they were making music to pleasure an endless night; the unwanted offspring of bitches or she-cats taken from their mother’s teats and slaughtered while she looked on, all unable to comprehend this terrible judgment.
Nor was life so very different for those men who wearily trudged behind the oxen, or who caught the songbirds and blinded them or those who dashed out the brains of unweaned kittens on the nearest stone, only thinking as they did of what labors lay ahead once they’d tossed the corpses to the pigs.
The only difference between the members of your species and those I saw suffering every day of that hundred years was that your people, though they were peasants who could neither read nor write, had a very clear notion of Heaven and Hell, and of the sins that would exile them forever from the presence of their Creator. All this they learned every Sunday, when the tolling of bells summoned them to church. Quitoon and I attended whenever we could, secreting ourselves in some high hidden place to listen to the pontifications of the local priest. If he spent his sermon telling his congregation what shameful sinners they were, and how they would suffer unending agony for their crimes, we would make it our business to secretly watch the priest for a day or so. If by Tuesday he had not committed any of the felonies he’d railed against on Sunday, we would go on our way. But if behind closed doors the priest ate from tables that creaked under a great weight of food and wine the likes of which his congregation would never even see, much less taste; or, if he turned private prayer meetings into seductions and told the girls or boys, once he’d violated them, that to speak of what he’d done would certainly damn them to the eternal fires, then we would make it our business to prevent him from further hypocrisies.
Did we kill them? Sometimes, though when we did so we were careful to make the circumstances of their slaughter so outlandish that none of the shepherd’s flock would be accused of his murder. Our skill of inventing ways to torture and dispatch the priests was elevated to a kind of genius as the decades past.
I remember we nailed one particularly odious and overfed priest to the ceiling of his church, which was so high nobody could understand how the deed had been done. Another priest, who we had watched unleash his perverted appetite upon tiny children, we cut into one hundred and three pieces, the labor of which fell to Quitoon, who was able to keep the man alive (and pleading to die) until he severed the seventy-eighth part from the seventy-ninth.
Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn’t just Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love, and widows; tales to tell to children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing. It seemed to me that there wasn’t a single subject he did not know something about. And if he was ignorant about a certain subject, then he lied about it with such ease that I took every word he said as gospel.
He liked chiefly the torn and ruined places in the world, where war and neglect had left wilderness behind. Over time I learned to share his taste. Such places had a great practical advantage for us, of course. They were largely shunned by your kind, who believed that such places were the haunts of malicious spirits.
Your superstitions were, for once, not so far from the truth.
What Quitoon and I found alluring about a particular piece of desolation was often appealing to other night-wanderers like us who had no hope of ever being invited over the threshold of a Christian soul. They were the usual gang of minor fi ends and bloodsuckers. Nothing we ever had any trouble kicking out if we found some of them still in residence in a ruin we’d decided to haunt for ourselves.
It may seem strange to say but when I think back on those years and the life we two made for ourselves in the ruins of houses, they almost resembled the arrangement between a husband and wife; our century-long friendship became an unblessed and unconsummated marriage before half its span was over.
That is as much of happiness as I know.
It seemed to me, while I was talking of the brief, harsh years of those who plowed fields and blinded birds, that life—any life—is not unlike a book. For one thing, it has blank pages at both ends.
But there’s generally just a few at the start. After a matter of time the words appear. “In the beginning was the Word,” for instance. On that detail, at least, God’s Book and I agree.
I started this brief story of my far from brief life with a plea for a flame and a quick end. But I was asking for too much. I see that now. I should never have expected you to do as I asked.
Why would you destroy something that you had not even seen?
You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug.
You have to see the sores on the woman before you kick her out of bed. I understand that now.
But the consuming flame cannot remain unignited forever.
I will tell you one more tale to earn myself that fire. And it will not be, believe me, another like the ones in the pages that came before. My last confession is one that nobody but me could tell, a once-in-a-lifetime
story that will end this book. And I will tell you—if you are good and attentive—the nature of that Secret I spoke of earlier.
So, one day in a year I’ve already admitted to forgetting, Quitoon said to me:
“We should go to Mainz.”
I had never heard of Mainz. Nor at that moment had I any desire to go anywhere. I was soaking in a bath of infants’
blood, which had taken no little time to fill, the bath being large and the infants hard to acquire (and keep alive so the bath was hot) in the numbers required. It had taken me half a day to find thirty-one infants, and another hour or more to slit their squealing throats and drain their contents into the bath. But I’d finally done the job and had barely settled into my soothing bath, inhaling the honey and copper scent of infants’ blood, when Quitoon came in and, kicking aside the littered providers of my present comfort, came to the edge of the bath and told me to get dressed. We were off to Mainz.
“Why do we need to move on so quickly?” I protested. “This house is perfect for us. We’re in the forest, out of human sight.
When was the last time we spent so long a time in one place and were not troubled?”
“Is that your idea of a life, Jakabok?” (He only called me Jakabok when he was spoiling for an argument; when feeling fond, he called me Mister B.) “Spending time in some place where we won’t be troubled?”
“Is that so terrible?”
“The Demonation would be ashamed of you.”
“I don’t give a fig for the Demonation! I only care about—”
I stared up at him, knowing he could finish the sentence without any help from me. “I like it here. It’s quiet. I was thinking I might buy a goat.”
“What for?”
“Milk. Cheese. Company.”
He got up and started back towards the door, kicking drained corpses ahead of him as he went.
“Your goat will have to wait.”
“Just because you want to go to someplace called Mainz?
To see another failure of a man make another failure of a machine?”
“No. Because one of these bloodless brats under my feet is the grandchild of one Lord Ludwig von Berg, who has raised a small army of all the mothers who lost their babies, plus a hundred men and seven priests. And they are even now coming this way.”
“How did they find out we’re here?”
“There was a hole in one of your sacks. You left a trail of wailing children from the town into the forest.”
Cursing my ill luck, I lifted myself up out of the bath. “So, no goat,” I said to Quitoon. “But maybe in the next place?”
“Wash the blood off with water.”
“Must I?”
“Yes, Mister B.,” he said, smiling indulgently. “You must.
I don’t want them sending dogs after you because we smell of—”
“Dead babies.”
“So shall we go to Mainz, or not?” Quitoon asked.
“If you really want to go so much.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“There is a machine I have to see. If it does what I’m hearing, then it will change the world.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, spit it out,” I said. “What does it do?”
Quitoon only smiled. “Wash quickly, Mister B.,” he said.
“We have places to go and sights to see.”
“Such as The End of the World?”
Quitoon surveyed the litter of innocents around my bath.
“I said change, not end.”
“Every change is an end,” I said.
“Well, listen to you. The naked philosopher.”
“Do you mock me, Mister Q.?”
“Do you care, Mister B.?”
“Only if you mean to hurt me.”
“Ah.”
He looked up from the dead babies, the gold flecks in his eyes blazing like suns, scorching all trace of the darker hues. All was gold, in his eyes and in his words.
“Hurt you?” he said. “Never. Bring me popes, saints, or a messiah and I’ll torment them until their minds crack. But never you, Mister B., never you.”
We vacated the house through the back door while von Berg’s legion of soldiers, priests, and vengeful mothers came in at the front. Had the forest’s depths not been so familiar to me from the many hours I’d wandered there, naively imagining my idyllic life with Quitoon and the goat, we would doubtless have been chased down by our pursuers and cut to pieces. But my meanderings had given me a greater grasp of the forest’s labyrinthine ways than I’d known I knew and following them we gradually put a comfortable distance between the von Berg’s legion and ourselves. We slowed our pace a little, but didn’t stop until every last cry they made had faded away.
We rested awhile, not speaking. I was listening to the birds calling to one another, their music far more intricate than the simple bright notes the birds who lived in the sun-filled trees at the fringes of the forest sang. Darkness changes everything.
Quitoon was apparently thinking about Mainz, because much later, as we emerged from the other side of the forest, easily thirty miles from our point of entry, and he spied three huntsmen on horses, he immediately suggested we hunt the hunters, take whatever clothes, weapons, and bread and wine they were carrying, along with their horses.
With this done, we sat amongst the naked dead while we ate and drank.
“We should probably bury them,” I said.
I knew as I made the suggestion that Quitoon would not want to waste time digging graves. But I had not foreseen the solution he had in mind. It was impressive, I will admit that.
At his instruction we dragged the three dead men perhaps fifty yards deeper into the forest, where the trees grew high and the canopy thick. Then, to my astonishment, Quitoon cradled one of the corpses in his arms and dropping to his haunches suddenly sprang up, throwing the body up into the branches with such force that it pierced the heavy canopy. It was quickly gone from sight, but I heard its continued ascent for several seconds until it finally lodged in some high place where bigger, hungrier birds than those that sang in the lower branches would quickly strip the flesh from it.
He did the same thing with the two other bodies, choosing a different spot for each. When he was done he was a little breathless, but well pleased with himself.
“Let those who finally find them make sense of that,” he said. “What does that expression mean, Mister B.?”
“I am merely amazed,” I said. “A hundred years together and you’ve still got new tricks up your sleeve.”
He did not disguise his satisfaction, but smiled smugly.
“Whatever would you do without me?” he said.
“Die.”
“For want of food?”
“No. For want of your company.”
“If you had never met me, you would have no reason to mourn my absence.”
“But I did and I would,” I said, and turning from his scrutiny, which made my burned cheeks burn again, I headed back towards the horses.
We took all three animals, which allowed for each to have some respite from being ridden, which speeded our way. It was late July and we traveled by night, which was not only cautious but also had the advantage of allowing us to rest in some secret place by day, when the air, unmoved by even the faintest of breezes, grew fiercely hot.
Limiting our traveling to the short summer nights made Quitoon foul-tempered, though, and rather than endure his company I agreed that we should travel by both day and night so as to be in Mainz sooner. The horses soon sickened from lack of rest, and, when one of them literally died beneath me, we left the survivors with their dead companion (about whose corpse they displayed not even the slightest curiosity) and taking our weapons and what little food remained from a theft of the previous day we proceeded on foot.
The horse had perished just after dawn, so as we walked the heat of the climbing sun, which was at first balmy, steadily bec
ame more oppressive. The empty road stretching before us offered no prospect of shade beneath roof or tree, while to each side of us stretched fields of motionless grain.
The clothes I’d taken from the huntsmen, which fitted well enough and were the garments of a moneyed man, stifled me. I wanted to tear them all off, and go naked, as I had in the World Below. For the first time since Quitoon and I had left the blood-red grove together, I wanted to be back in the Ninth Circle, amongst the troughs and peaks of the garbage.
“Was this how it felt?” Quitoon asked me.
I cast him a puzzled glance.
“Being in the fire,” he said, by way of explanation, “where you got your scars.”
I shook my head, which was throbbing. “Stupid,” I muttered.
“What?”
There was a hint of threat in the syllable. Though we had argued innumerable times, often vehemently, our exchanges had never escalated into violence. I had always been too intimidated by him to let that happen. Even a century of thieving, killing, traveling, eating, and sleeping together had never erased the sour certainty that under the right stars he would kill me without hesitation. Today there was just one star in the Heavens, but oh how it burned. It was like a blazing unblinking eye frying our rage in our brain pans as we walked the empty road.
Had I not felt the fever of its gaze upon me, and the weight of its judgment within that gaze, I would have muzzled my anger and offered some words of apology to Quitoon. But not today; today I answered him truthfully.
“I said stupid.”
“Meaning me?”
“What do you think? Stupid questions, stupid mind.”
“I think the sun’s made you crazy, Botch.”
We were no longer walking but standing facing one another, no more than an arm’s length apart.
“I’m not crazy,” I said.
“Then why would you do something so idiotic as to call me stupid?” His volume dropped to little more than a whisper.