They walked for many hours, following a maze of paths that led down a steep hillside and through the thick of the trees. After a time, a light could be seen glimmering through the woods: Prue saw that it was the city lights of Portland, of the Outside. They were nearing the Periphery, the edge of the Wood. The path they were following snaked along the steep bank of a rushing creek that, some many yards down the hill, opened up into a watery inlet, surrounded by a thick weft of trees. In this inlet was anchored a very large and very old-looking sailing ship, its bevy of massive sails sitting dormant in the still air.
It looked to Prue like the ship had been swept ashore from some long-gone century, something that would be more at home battling Nelson’s tall ships at Trafalgar than sitting dockside in a quaint, twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest river inlet. A moon-woman, half flaxen-haired lady and half crescent moon, was the ship’s figurehead, and the shutters and eaves of the vessel’s many windows were painted bright blue. The ship’s central mast reached easily as high as the closest Douglas fir tree, and a veritable spider’s web of ropes and rigging stretched down from its spire to the dark decks below.
Several fellow mariners came rushing up from the dock when they saw Prue and her captors approach. “What’s going on?” shouted one. “Who’s this?”
“Our instructions,” said one of the men holding Prue, “are to bring this one to the Crag.”
Soon, a crowd of seamen had gathered to greet the newcomers. “Ain’t that the Bicycle Maiden?” said one.
“Aye, ’tis,” confirmed one of the men at Prue’s side. “She’s been indicted.”
Before any of the men had a chance to speak their disbelief, they saw the hooded Caliphs appear from behind the group. It was all the proof they needed that the sentence was lawful. They cowed, visibly, under the presence of the masked men. A man with a blond, wiry beard and a black visored cap came forward. The other men seemed to step aside in deference to him, and he spoke with an uncompromising authority: “This is the one?”
One of the Caliphs nodded solemnly.
“Very well,” said the man. “Let’s get her onboard.” He looked at Prue and said, “I’m very sorry this has to be the way, miss. I’ll try to make your passage as comfortable as I can, given the circumstances. My name is Captain Shtiva. The Jolly Crescent is my ship. Long live the revolution.” He paused and glanced at the Synod members present. “And long live the spirit of the Blighted Tree.”
“Where are you taking me?” asked Prue. She still wasn’t entirely clear what was happening to her. “What have I done?”
The man, Captain Shtiva, frowned. “You are an enemy of the state. I have written authority from the Interim Governor-Regent-elect to carry you to your permanent incarceration on the Crag.” He held up a long and wide envelope, its seal freshly broken. “In the event of your not capitulating to the demands of the Synod.”
“Enemy of the state?” gasped Prue breathlessly. “I’m the hero of the state! They’re poisoning the people—they’re feeding them that stuff—on the tree! It’s changing them! I saw the Bandit King—the Wildwood Bandit King—behind one of those masks! I think there may be more bandits among them! Something very terrible is happening, Captain. I need to stop it. Please, let me go! I have orders from the Council Tree. I have to rebuild the prince. I have to find the makers to reanimate the half-dead prince!” The words now were flowing from her mouth in jerky rivulets. She could feel the spittle flying from her lips.
The captain watched her with a look of abject pity on his face. Her entreaties seemed to make no dent in his resoluteness; if anything, her every word seemed to erode whatever pity he had stored up. He seemed to look at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “Get her onboard,” he said finally. “There’s a berth for her in the lower hold. Make sure she’s locked up tight.”
The men began to hustle Prue away when the captain turned and said, “But keep her safe. I don’t want any harm done in the process. I will not have my hands bloodied further. Is that clear?”
The men murmured their understanding; Prue was led down the path to the bottom of the bank, where a worn dock spread out from the ground into the placid waters of the inlet. The sailors holding her tied hands sniffed at the air; one said, “No mist. How we gonna get to sea?”
“Let the captain manage that,” another said. “Let’s get this one belowdecks.”
Lanterns, hanging from the stout wooden pilings along the dockside, lit the way as Prue was led toward the awaiting ship. She could see the winking lights of the Industrial Wastes just beyond the shade of the trees that marked the boundary between the Wood and the Outside; she assumed the Periphery, that magic ribbon that served as the protective shield around the so-called Impassable Wilderness, was somewhere in her vision, invisible.
The ship swayed as they stepped onto the deck; a crowd of like-dressed sailors stood, mopping the boards, coiling rope, shouldering wooden crates. Prue was escorted toward an opening in the floor; arriving there, she was instructed to climb down a stepladder. A smell of stale beer and moldy cheese attacked her senses as she arrived at the rough wood floor of the belowdecks. Down a crowded passageway she was led to a door made of iron bars, which opened onto a small, closetlike hold. A cot and a tin pail were the room’s only furnishings. A porthole above the cot, its glass pane hatch-marked with iron bands, looked out onto the dark harbor.
Something cold was pressed to her wrists; her bonds fell away and her hands were freed. She rubbed at the sore, reddened welts the ropes had left. Her captors seemed unconcerned that she would attempt any kind of escape.
“Make yerself at home,” one said. “It’s a long journey.”
“Where are we going?” asked Prue. To her recollection, there wasn’t any kind of inland sea in the Wood; if her direction sense was not failing her, they would be plying the waters of the Willamette River.
“To th’ Crag,” said the other.
“What’s that?” When she sensed they were not about to tell her, she tried on her best twelve-year-old-girl pleading voice: “Don’t I have, like, a right to know?”
The two sailors looked at each other uncertainly before one said, “I’ll tell you as much, seein’ as how you’re the Bicycle Maiden. I don’t cotton to what they’re doin’ to you here, but I’m just under orders, right? You’ve been sentenced to the Crag. It’s a rock out in the ocean. It’s a hard, barren place. There ain’t no escapin’ it.” He looked saddened by this description. “I expect you’ll live out yer days there, miss.”
Prue gasped. “What?”
The man shrugged. “Orders, miss.”
“For the good of the revolution,” said the other.
The door was closed in her face, and Prue felt her knees buckle out from under her; she caught herself on the lip of the cot and sat down heavily, her head in her hands, and began to cry. Loud, heaving sobs. They seemed to bucket up from the deepest wells of her gut.
Voices could be heard through the locked door. “Shame, what they’re doing,” said one sailor to another. “A shame.”
“Well, we ain’t going anywhere till we got a mist.”
“It’ll come. Calling for it tonight.”
“Believe it when I see it. C’mon.”
Footsteps trundled up the stepladder; the hatch slammed noisily down behind them. Prue was alone in the hold of the ship. She looked over her shoulder at the dark porthole. Standing on the thin mattress, she peered out the dirty window to watch the lantern light reflected against the water of the placid inlet.
Time passed, slowly.
Far off, the stars were beginning to be blotted out by an approaching fog. Prue turned her face away from the gray window and stared at her small prison cell. She thought about what she’d done, what had transpired to this point; she thought about the great mess she’d caused. She wondered, as people often do when faced with the very real consideration that all their plans have failed miserably, how it could be possible that she could go so wrong. Why
had the tree picked her? Why had she received this communication? Certainly, there were people more qualified for the job of wrangling two missing machinists from exile to re-create a robotic boy prince in the wake of a popular revolution and an aggressive religious takeover.
The hatch on the above-decks opened, and a figure moved silently down the ladder. Prue looked over to see that it was one of the Caliphs, the silver-masked Mystics, come to hold vigil.
“Hi,” said Prue.
The Caliph didn’t respond. Instead he sat down on a chest directly across from the barred door of her cell. Straightening his shoulders, he set his hands calmly on his robed knees and stared straight ahead, his mask glinting in the low candlelight. The ticking noise sounded in Prue’s ears, like a winding clock.
“What’s your name?” tried Prue again. “Are you one of the Wildwood bandits? Jack? Eamon?”
Nothing.
“Right, vow of silence.” Prue crossed her arms and stared at her feet, at the tattered canvas of her Keds.
The ship bucked in the current of the river; the boards moaned under the pressure, and Prue could hear shouting from the sailors on deck. The hatch door opened suddenly and a voice called in: “Underway!”
The Caliph on the chest did not move; he only stared straight ahead.
The hatch door closed and Prue lay back on her cot, staring at the ceiling. The ticking was there, in her mind, sounding to her from some strange source inside the Caliph.
She waited. The night poured on, like a thick syrup. Somewhere, distantly, an explosion sounded.
CHAPTER 16
The Undisputed Therapeutic
Benefits of Singing
It was not often that Desdemona Mudrak missed the Ukraine. To her, memories of that place conjured up dusty, potholed roads, disused warehouses, and brusque state employees. They brought to mind bad television, barely received by throwback TV sets in cold living rooms, and empty shelves in grocery stores. She’d grown up fairly well off, by former Soviet satellite standards, the only daughter of a self-employed florist and his wife. Her mother spent summers busily canning whatever food they produced at their modest dacha in the country and storing it in the two refrigerators that occupied their small kitchen.
But looking out over the Industrial Wastes, here in liberated, wealthy America, she found herself longing for the days of her childhood in Kiev. The smokestacks and chemical silos that she was now looking over dwarfed, by grimness standards, any similar landscape she imagined from her childhood; it seemed ironic to her that she should come here to escape the bleakness of her home country, only to arrive in a land of such emptiness as to make the industrial squalor of the world she’d left look like Disneyland. And it was all on display, every blinking light and pall of smoke, from the top floor of Titan Tower, where Desdemona was standing, etching a sad face on the windowpane with her finger.
“Whatcha doin’ there, honey?” asked Brad Wigman, sitting at his desk and absently shuffling through the day’s progress reports.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I am to doing nothing.”
“Well, why don’t you to fetch me a cup of coffee? I’ve got my hands full with these reports.”
Desdemona frowned; it was an unfortunate downside of being at the mercy of the Chief Titan, now that her home and business had been destroyed and her boyfriend was completely missing in action, presumed insane: She was little more than a personal assistant to Bradley Wigman, Titan of Shipping. “You have secretary for such things,” said Desdemona.
“It’s late, Dessie,” said Wigman. “She’s got a home to go to. A job she needs to rest up for. Which is more than you could say for some people in this room.” He looked up, scanning the large, windowed office. “I’m only seeing the two of us in here. And I have a job. And a home.”
Desdemona rolled her eyes and stalked away from the window. As she passed the bookcase on the north wall, she ran her hand along the fake spines that populated its shelves. She knew what the folly hid: a secret room, a panic room—the creation of a powerful and paranoid man. Which was understandable, considering the rise in industrial sabotage the Wastes had experienced over the last several months. The man couldn’t be too careful. However, at present, the room was performing an altogether different function. “Shall I bring the captives some drinking or food?”
“Sure,” he said. “While you’re at it. I think there’s some snack mix in the break room. And they’ll likely need more water.”
“Consider it achieved,” said Desdemona. She wandered through the maze of decorative pedestals in the large space, each displaying some sort of prize or commemorative statuette honoring the Chief Titan. Opening the gigantic brass doors at the far end of the room took some doing, for a woman of Desdemona’s frame, but soon she was out in the lobby, making her way toward the small alcove that served as the break room for the staff. She nodded to the two hulking stevedores who stood guard at the main elevator doors. She poured a bowlful of snack mix, grabbed a few bottles of water (emblazoned, strangely, with Mr. Wigman’s chin-dominant and smiling face) and a bottle of Lemony Zip for herself. She sipped at the soda while the espresso machine gurgled its brackish liquid into a small cup.
Her arms full, she delivered the coffee to Mr. Wigman, who received it with barely a mumble. Without looking up from his papers, Brad shot the coffee back with a jerk of his head and held out the emptied cup to Desdemona. She took it with an annoyed frown and set it on the desk. Wigman seemed not to notice. Then she was off to the fake bookcase. She scanned the titles on the shelf, the very picture of an eager bibliophile, until she found the one she was looking for: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. She hooked her finger to the top of the spine, and pulling it back, she heard a loud click and a whirring noise. The bookcase rolled sideways, by an unseen mechanism, to reveal a small, pale-green room with two cowering individuals inside.
“Hello,” said Desdemona. “I’ve broughten you some snack mix.”
The old man barely moved; his shoulders were hunched over as he sat in his plastic chair, and his unseeing wooden eyes, which had struck Desdemona as decidedly creepy the first time she’d seen them, stared at the floor. Across from him sat the girl, Martha. She was holding a book in her hands. She nodded to Desdemona wearily as if to say, Whatever.
Desdemona set the bowl of snack mix and the two bottles of water on the floor. “What is it you are reading now?” she asked. She’d tried this before, to make conversation with the two prisoners, to varying degrees of success. In a sense, they’d been housemates these last few months: Desdemona had been occupying one of the temporary housing units on the lower floors. She, too, was homeless, in a manner of speaking. And so, she’d tried to remain friendly in her role as guardian to the two captives—though she suspected it was a doomed task.
Martha glared at her. She still wore the goggles on her forehead, despite her changed circumstances. Desdemona suspected it was some form of mental tic.
“What do you care?” said the girl.
“Who is it?” asked the old man, Carol, apparently having woken from some sort of trance.
“Who do you think?” said Martha.
Desdemona gamely played up her thick Slavic accent: “Yeess, hoo to think it eeez?”
“Oh,” said Carol. “Hello. You’ve interrupted our reading.”
“And I was only inquiring what the book it is you are reading, is all,” said Desdemona. “And bringing you sustenance, which is a thing to thank a person for, I think.”
“The Count of Monte Cristo, actually,” said Carol.
“Ah,” said Desdemona. “How fitting.”
“And thanks but no thanks for the snack mix,” said Martha.
Desdemona glared at the little upstart. Even in the orphanage, the young Asian girl had always rubbed her the wrong way. Too precocious for her own good.
“And we’ll be done soon with this book,” continued the little girl. “I don’t suppose you got my list, did you?”
“Ye
s, yes,” said Desdemona. “I did get the list. War and Peace. Lord of Rings. Encyclopedia Britannica, complete. It appears you have little positive outlook on your time in captivity.”
“Should we?” asked Martha, a sneer on her face.
Desdemona glanced over her shoulder at the man at the desk. “Mr. Wigman say that man will come for you soon.”
“Oh, great. Then what?”
The old man said nothing. He said nothing because he knew precisely what was next. Roger Swindon had told him when he and the girl had first been deposited in their jail cell. He was to be taken back to that place. Back to the Wood. And there forced to re-create the most difficult and challenging project of his entire life, the thing that had changed his life so drastically: It had both given him a new insight into the mechanics of life itself and, in turn, robbed him of his ability to see. He was to be reunited with his old partner, Esben Clampett, and together they were to take on this retreading of their old work. For what? He couldn’t imagine. His mind reeled at the thought of his being a pawn yet again to a ruthless and clinically insane government power; if they had taken his eyes and his compatriot’s hands so that they might never rebuild, alone, the thing they had created, what would they possibly do to them this time, after the miraculous work was done? And where would they send them? In what magic wasteland could they expect to spend the rest of their days?
They needed only to find Esben, Roger had said that. And then it was only a matter of time.
“That’s for Mr. Wigman to decide,” answered Desdemona. “Now, eat your snack mix.” With that, she pressed a button on the side of the door and the panel slid back into place, concealing the two of them once again behind the bookcase.
“The prisoners,” she said, walking back over to Wigman’s desk, “are asking about when Roger will return.”
This made Brad look up. “Soon,” he said.