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“Come, share the feast,” she says.

“Where did you catch it?” I say. “In what desert lair?”

“On Zithering,” she says. “Yes”—quiet, almost questioning, as if she's only now uncovering a truth long buried deep inside—”Mount Zithering,” she says. “That's where he died.”

I know I have to take it slowly, coax her gently through the puzzle of the past, from abreaction into anamnesis; brutal Phreedom with her heart brittle as glass.

“Who struck it first?” I say.

“That joy was mine. Among our band I'm known as happy Columbine.”

She looks down at the body of the Duke, the slick of black that's taking it apart. Jack crouches down at one side of the mess. He's cut the ropes around the wrists and rolled the body over, ripped the bodice open; he's examining the graving on its chest.

“My sisters struck the creature after me,” says Phree. “Yes, after me, they did the rest.”

——

“Fate smiled upon your hunting then?” I say.

She points at limber, nimble Jack, his head cocked like a dog's in curiosity.

“The spirit of the pack,” she says, “inspired the maidens as we chased our kill and dragged it from the lion's den.”

Jack's finger traces the hatchwork of scars.

“He is,” I say, “a hunter with great skill.”

“Then you approve? The progeny of Pantaloon—and my own son Pierrot, too—will praise me soon for capturing this prey”

I pause. The body of the Duke lies crooked-armed, the skirt pushed up to show one leg twisted beneath the other. One hand seems to reach out, open, with its palm up, like a beggar's, reaching out to me, to Phreedom, to anyone. Phree looks at me, a cat that's brought some bird with broken wings and lolling head home, as an offering. A strange sort of prey I think, and strangely caught.

“Of course,” I say. “It's what you had to do.”

It's what she needs to hear.

I let a hint of hidden meaning enter into what I say.
But… be gentle.

“You're proud of what you've done?”

“I'm pleased,” she says.

Her voice is empty though, repeating what the bitmites whisper in her ear, and with the smell of entrails spilled onto the floor making the bile rise in my throat, that burning taste of sick, I wonder what cruel fucker said revenge is sweet.

“I've won a victory for all my land to see,” she says.

I feel the slightest tremble of her shoulder as I turn her round to face the audience and the slick of gore. I still can't look at what she's holding in her hand—or I don't want to. Really I don't want to. But every one of us here in this room, courtiers and servants, players just as much, and Phreedom, my poor Phreedom most of all, all have to see. To really truly understand.

“Let's
all
gaze on the glory of the prize you've won,” I say.

She holds it up by its long hair, the head of the dead Duke.

“Go on,” I say “let's all take a good look.”

The townsfolk scatter as Phreedom strides into the agora, overturning stalls and barrows as she passes. She takes the steps in front of the Basileus's marble hall
two at a time, wheels round within the portico. Framed by Corinthian columns, under the pediment's relief that shows the legendary Sacking of Washington, she holds the angel's head up.

“Citizens of fair-walled Themes,” she says, “come see the fierce wild beast we girls have caught.”

Sandminers whisper in a gruff group. A silk salesman gathers yards of sleek purple cloth out of the dust of a toppled stall. Fishmongers, bakers, fruitmen and matchgirls, all stand wary guard over their goods. Butchers reach for their cleavers.

“This is no idle boast,” she says, “by men with weapons bought from armorers’ stores. We caught this prey and tore the monster limb from limb with our bare hands,” she roars. “No catapults or spears or traps.”

No, she thinks, none of that crap.

“Where is the old man? Call him here. Where is my boy? Tell him to bring a ladder, raise it up against the house and nail this lion's head up on the wall, my treasure from the hunt.”

Don slips into her memory like a dream, a seamless interpolation, just a simple, subtle alteration. He simply walks round from behind the Basileus's hall.

“Follow me. Roond tae the front, men, wi’ yer burden in yer arms. Aye, follow, wi’ the corpse of Pierrot. It took a long an’ weary search tae find it as ye see it, torn tae bits and scattered a’ through Zithering's glade, wi’ no two bits thigither. Bring it hither.”

He spots her standing there, holding the head up like a torch, and stops.

Can ye see it? Husht now. No and I Moody well won't if ye
—
Why are we no mov-in? Can ye see it yet? Sure and there's all the nobs and gentry to let off first so we'll be left to last as ever. Can ye see it? And would ye get yerfeckin elbow out of me ribs? Ah haud yer whisht. Look. Look!

The babble of voices is as crammed, as mixed up all together, as the rabble of third-class passengers all squeezed into the corridor with their cases and their bundles and their greetin weans. It's the noise of blathering gobshites with their caps off craning their necks over the mob of heads and shoulders, newlyweds wittering excitedly as they kiss a hand and turn to try and catch a glimpse of something other than that wee patch of blue sky up where the corridor opens out onto the steamer's deck. Oh, but there's hundreds of them all pressing forward, moving so slowly up toward the gangplank and their new lives in the New World. In New York.

“It'll be magic, Jack,” she says to the babe cradled in her arms. “Oh, it'll be grand. Oh, yes it will. Oh, yes it will.”

She nuzzles his nose with her own and he smiles, gurgles. Oh, he's a darling, so he is, all this time in steerage and the noise all day and night and hardly a peep out of him, no, but he slept as peaceful as Jesus in his manger for most of the trip.

He's awake now, blue eyes shining up at her like that tiny wee bit of sky ahead that they're inching toward so slowly.

“Who's my cheeky wee boy?” she says. “My
cheeky
wee boy.”

The crowd moves forward, little by little, and the chatter grows louder now as those ahead of them are saying,
look now, look at it, sure, and it's grand, so it is, by Jesus, look at it, just look at it.

She can't really see it herself for all the nodding heads and hats of these immigrants in their Sunday best like they were filing into the chapel for midnight mass. She just sees glimpses of the giant robe sweeping off the shoulder, of the upraised arm, and the sunburst crown of that greenish girl like an angel or an ancient god of justice, but a
true
one, yes, a true angel that's come down from heaven itself to hold its torch up as a beacon for humanity. She can't really see it herself, so she can't, but she holds Jack up above her head so
he
can see it. Oh, look at it, Jack. Can ye see it? Isn't it everything we ever dreamed of?

She brings him back down to cradle him, as they move another few inches forward, and as he burbles in her arms, his eyes as wide and blue as the sky itself, she can almost imagine that the glint of sunlight in those eyes is the vision caught magically. A tiny reflection of Lady Liberty photographed, imprinted on his soul.

Phree stands there in a daze, the bitmites swarming along her arm, around the severed head, and spreading out, an iridescent haze that fills the hall with shades of lives that never were but might have been. The past is no more certain than the future out here in the Hinter. Like the sudden moments of recasting in a dream, when the whole scene shifts in an instant and your memories adjust, the Hinter slips and slides from side to side; new histories rise to the surface even as the old ones crumble.

“So I return to you,” says Don, “with my son Pierrot slain by the maidens.” With his gaze fixed on the bitmites’ tumbling imagery of forests, mad aristocratic mothers of action roaming through the oaks (Indo and Autonomy— their names are whispers in the air), he looks so solid and so humble, and I wonder if it is this … stoic reticence of his that makes it natural for him to slip unnoticed into someone else's dreams. Jack rips through Havens like a whirlwind. I skip after him, and Guy and Joey make their own marks in bold strokes of pen or knife. But none of us can do what Don does, reaching deep down into
someone's life. Now, playing Pantaloon with gravitas in place of pomp, he walks out toward Phree, speaking with gentle Cant.

“They told me Columbine was here,” he says, “and acting wild. As Scaramouche and I entered the city walls, returning from the rites, they urged us,
hurry
, told us this … atrocity was done by my own child. They didn't lie,” he says. “I see her now, a sorry sight.”

To me she's barely visible among the rising blizzard of the bitmites. There're too many different and conflicting sights—a marketplace of stalls, some sort of hall of refugees dressed in Depression drab, dark woods full of wild women, darker docks, a steamer with a gangplank coming down from it, and Guy and Joey dressed up as policemen or as palace guards. I can't follow the confusion that the bitmites are projecting out of her into the room. But Don is calm. It's like he's simply gazing through the sham, ignoring this mere … scenery, the costumes and the props.

The rest of us stand back, our parts played out, with just a few lines left for me and Jack. It's down to Don to find my sister in there now, among the Annas and the Anaesthesias, pull her from the ruins of her past.

She laughs.

“Old man, be proud and sing out loud,” she says. “You're blessed by our courageous feats. Your daughters are the best of any mortal race, and I'm the purest of our breed. We left our weaving at the loom to free our hands for noble deeds, you understand, to chase the savage beast whose head I've brought for you to nail up on the palace wall. You see? Take it, old man, and call your friends to feast in honor of the kill.”

The palace of the Basilisk rises behind her, the Duke's Haven fading into gray. The mask of Guy's rewritten play peeled back and stripped away, the ancient myth emerges. Jack is Harlequin is Dionsyus. But the vision shimmers as Don speaks to her. The air itself vibrates with his gruff Cant.

“The murder in your hands,” he says, “this invitation to the feast, is too horrific for a mortal eye. The prey you offer the divine was precious, Columbine. I weep for your regrets … and mine.”

She looks confused as he comes closer to her, bitmites swirling into shapes of glassy towers and marble halls all round them, into streets of skyscrapers. Ghost men and women clutching carpetbags and suitcases now stand among the courtiers all shivering along the wall, merchants and slaves in chains from more archaic pasts, the host of souls long buried in the dust under the Haven's stone, a single huddled mass.

Don steps down off the stage, but it's a steamship moored behind him now and I can smell the oil and fish and human sweat, the rotting fruit in the warehouses around us. Snow is falling from a winter sky and someone's singing of how Irish eyes are smiling, and,
Oh, but it seems so far away now
, someone's saying—and I realize that it's me, carried along on the flow of dreams. I recognize the skyline now as Anaesthesia's Hinter fades into this other scene.

“The Harlequin is harsh,” says Don, “for one who claims to be our kin. Does anyone deserve the shame he sends?”

But I can hear the echo underneath his words—
some bloody faither God is, Jesus, sending us this kind of bloody weather
—as the cursing Scotsman takes her case out of her hand so she can hold her child in both arms, wrap the shawl around him tight, to keep him warm against the New York winter night.

“Come on, lass,” he says, “we've got tae get ye in ootae this cold.”

She looks so scared and lost now, shaking like a leaf, but the wry tone to his voice is warm and comforting and so she follows him toward the immigration building, through the crowd, and having this stranger at her side—his name is Don, he says, MacChuill—well, you can see it in her eyes, the sheer relief.

So it's Don that walks beside my sister, down into this dream of New York winter, streets of gold and Lady Liberty, to find herself in Hinter's cold, to help her face her false eternity of grief.

To make her Phree.

Berlin. 1936.

I listen to the Fuhrer give his speech to the Reichstag, played on the hissing radio behind the sliding glass window of the guard's cubicle room. I hear the cheers in response to Hitler's ranting rhetoric and I hear the screams of butchers become victims, dragged out of their beds to slaughter—not on the radio, those last, but in my head. I've been waiting to hear it for the last seven years, this echo of another night of long knives in another time, another place. Things happen slower in this world, not quite so condensed. But they still happen. There is no Futurism in this world, but it is not that different underneath.

The opening of the gates, my brother called it, and he was right. I think somehow we crossed over a threshold that night, both of us. Perhaps the whole of Germany crossed over a threshold on that night, and reached out from the other side to drag the rest of the world down with us into the depths. The opening of the gates.

But he was wrong as well, and in so many ways. This is not the world he thought it would be, I think. It is grayer, I keep thinking, dimmer than the glory he expected, if I understand the way my brother's mind works. And I have thought about this a lot in my time in the Institute, in this slower, grayer world.

“Thank you. Where were we?”

Pickering snaps the lighter shut and pockets it. He leans back in his chair, looks at Reynard. Really, this is all so bloody pointless. MI5 is jumping at their own shadows these days, every continental a potential Futurist, every Irishman a Fenian, every queer a spy. And let's not forget the Russian Jews; why, you never know what subversives might be lurking in among those exiled intellectuals. Mosley's rhetoric of the enemy within is all very well. The new patriotism of Empire Albion is all very well. But Pickering's never really trusted all that talk of fighting fire with fire, Britain—sorry,
Albion
—standing strong and pure against the Slav.