Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (16 page)

‘It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,’ she wept hysterically into the flat mattress. ‘Whether I die of this heaving inside me or die at the hands or feet or whatever of the Duke of Eyes. Whichever comes first, I suppose.’ Beneath the cot a moist nose and tongue touched her dangling hand, as though in comfort, and she dug her fingers into the loose skin of a pup. They were still there, still coming and going, present in twos and threes, always absent when anyone might be looking. If she could only find their route of entry. If she could only find one of her own.

So, each day. She lost count of them. There were ten or a dozen, all alike. Then the morning came on which the sky was a clear, empyrean blue, on which a fresh wind enlivened the cells with stomach-heaving smells of food and smoke, and on which some nearby loudspeaker broke the morning quiet with the blared announcement, The Queen is pleased to announce a HOLIDAY. All citizens are reminded of the obligation to visit a church or temple of your choice.’

Her cell door swung wide. A heavy-bellied guardsman told her to come along to church services, and she found herself in the company of some fifty or sixty other inmates, all with the same lost and shattered expression on their faces, being herded into a vaulted room crowded with images and symbols and hazed with rising veils of ceremonial smoke.

The service was conducted interminably in a language foreign to all those present. They bore it patiently as it wound its way through procession and recession, prophon and antiphon, prolapse and relapse, to its long delayed close. When they left the vault, blinking at the sudden access of light, they were given chunks of dried cake to eat and herded onto a waiting bus. Only when the bus approached the gates of the colosseum – which Marianne seemed to remember having seen before, whether personally or on TV she could not say – did she realize that this was the day of her trial. She tried to scream, but her mouth was full of dried cake, and she succeeded only in spraying gummy crumbs over an old woman sitting next to her and receiving an indignant glance and muttered curses in return.

She did not see where they took the others. They dragged her down a flight of worn stone stairs into the bowels of the place, into a kind of cell with two barred doors, one opening from the echoing corridor and the other into the arena itself. Through this grated opening she could hear and see the crowds streaming into the towering stands, could observe the velvet-draped grandeur of the royal box. This baroque edifice was garlanded with golden rope. Slender pillars reached from it to a gilded baldachin over the carved throne. Marianne clutched the bars and stared at it as though hypnotized, waiting for the moment when that dark woman would arrive.

The Duke of Eyes entered first.

From behind a mighty timbered door, a stupendous clatter overrode the crowd noises, a cacophonous thunder that shocked the muttering multitude into silence. As they watched, nudging one another, the vast door rose on creaking ropes and through it came the Duke himself.

Treads as high as Marianne’s head moved inexorably with a metallic clanging. Between and above them towered a cylindrical housing with swinging tentacles on either side. Above that projected the top of a glass-fronted coffin with something barely discernible in it, a form that might have been human.

In one tentacle it carried a bludgeon; in another a flame thrower; in another a sword; in the last a lash made up of many little chains. The crowd roared. The Queen moved into the royal box and took her seat. Across from Marianne a barred door opened and a man was thrust out into the arena, half naked, bare-handed. He stared at the creature before him with horror and dismay.

Marianne watched as long as she could. For a time the man was agile enough to escape injury. After the Duke broke one of his legs with the bludgeon, however, the contest was less amusing and the crowd began to complain, querulously, like a hive of angry bees. The Queen watched all this with no change of expression. As Marianne turned away, her stomach heaving and the sound of the man’s screams echoing in her ears, a voice spoke from behind her.

‘Maiden? Marianne?’

He stood in the doorway. Someone had opened the grating to let him through. The tattered finery that hung upon him was caked with alley dirt and thrown ordure. His trousers were mere scraps, clinging to his thighs more out of habit than from any sensible continuity of fabric. His feet were wrapped in scraps of velvet rag, and his shirt was a filthy fiction. She stared, unable to believe him, even while knowing who it must be.

‘I could not obtain a map,’ he said with some dignity. ‘So I merely followed the crowds. I’m sorry I’m so late.’

‘You’re my champion?’ she asked, breaking into hysterical giggles. ‘The man who will fight for me? Prince Charming?’

Something in his face stilled her helpless merriment. It was stern, hard, aching and yet determined. He crossed the room and stared through the window she had just left.

‘So,’ he said. That’s what Madame has waiting for us.’

‘You can’t fight it,’ she told him. ‘No one can.’

Across the cell a yellow puppy slid between two stones to sit panting on the floor.

‘If we can’t fight it, we have to escape it,’ he told her. ’You hear me, Fair Lady!’

The thing inside Marianne heaved. She retched with motion sickness as her interior landscape trembled.

‘A nice trick that would be,’ she said with a sick, feeble giggle, tears running down her face. ‘Maybe it will kill us quickly.’

‘Not on your life it won’t,’ he said. ‘Maiden! Listen to me. We have to find a way out!’

‘If we just lie down. Put our heads down. Don’t move, no matter how much it hurts us…’

He came to her, the strength of him pouring before him like a palpable cloud. He took her in his arms as though it were a ritual and pressed his lips to hers. She could not move, could not breathe. She wanted to thrust him away but more than that to lose herself in that embrace and never come out of it. The thing inside her heaved again, and again, higher and higher, breaking upward through all the strata that had overlaid it, all the time, the endless time…

‘My Prince!’ cried
Marianne
, who had been sleeping for about ten years.

‘Who are you?’ cried Marianne at once and in the same voice. Something besides herself occupied her mind.

‘Beloved,’ Prince Charming cried, exultantly. ‘Sleeping Beauty. My own!’

‘Where?’
Marianne
asked, staring around herself at the stone walls, cocking her head at the screams of the crowd. ’Where are we?’

‘We are ensorceled, enchanted, girded about with foul machination,’ he said. ‘In about five minutes, they’ll kill us – you and me. There should be some way to escape. All ensorcelments have escape hatches…’

Behind them, a blue dog slipped into the cell, closely followed by a silver one.

‘What’s going on?’ begged Marianne. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Shh, shh,’ said
Marianne
. ‘Be still. Let me see what you know.’ There was another of those seasick heavings, and Marianne felt her body move, without her volition, to the barred gate. ‘Oh, Gods of Creation, what monster is that?’

‘A very horrid one,’ he answered. ‘A crippled thing in both mind and body, given the wherewithal to accomplish its foul purposes despite its limitations.’

‘We can’t fight him.’

‘Not conceivably.’

‘We must find a way out.’

A black puppy slipped into the room, a red one close behind him, and with a rending shudder, the hoof and leg of a horse reached through just behind them.

‘Oh, most elevated and supreme Prince, most lovely Lady, guidance!’ whinnied a pathetic voice. ‘I am lost among the stones, tracking these wee doglings, and cannot find my way.’

‘Who is that?’ The Prince turned toward the wall. ‘Who calls my name?’

‘Your faithful steed, left behind in the void, oh, Prince. Shout again, and I will follow the sound of your voice.’

The red dog disappeared into the stone, and the other front leg of the horse emerged, along with its nose. The black dog leapt up, seized the bridle, and tugged the horse forward. It nodded its head and neighed gratefully as the last of its tail came through the stone, then turned confidentially to Marianne. ‘Lovely Lady, though I would walk through hell for the privilege of your company, I had not thought to make such a trip as that.’ He turned his massive head as though to look at himself. He was a ponderous gray Shire horse, feather-footed and muscular, his back a veritable field on which a high saddle sat like a minaret, garlanded about with weapons.

‘My steed?’ asked the Prince, uncertainly. ‘The fortuneteller did tell me to expect a horse.’

‘Obviously,’ said the horse. ‘What good is a Prince Charming without his faithful horse?’

The five dogs sat down in a row and regarded Marianne with a mixture of skepticism and concern. They had grown considerably since she had seen them last.

‘Are you really my doggies?’ she asked at last, the words scarcely out of her mouth before someone else inside her used her mouth to ask quite another question.

‘Haven’t we met before?’

Black Dog panted, nodding. ‘Elsewhere,
Marianne
. And in another time.’

Red Dog nodded assent. ‘An evil place, this. We find ourselves very limited in what we can do to assist you.’

‘Would your limitations extend to getting us out of here?’ Prince Charming asked, his eyes fixed on the royal box where the Queen seemed about to make an announcement.

‘There is an available nexus, yes,’ said Black Dog. ‘One. We know the momeg who holds a locus upon it, one Gojam, and he would be happy to let us through. His locus is, however, in an unfortunate juxtaposition relative to certain other material manifestations.’

‘I don’t understand.’ The Prince wrinkled his brow and rubbed his forehead while Marianne engaged in an internal colloquy between herselves. ‘You propose a way out? But say it is in an unfortunate place?’

‘The spatial location to which we refer is out in the arena. Right in the middle. Under him,’ said the momeg, pointing with one paw at the Duke of Eyes. ‘Immediately under him. If you can get us all out there in the middle, Prince, I think we may be able to do something…’

In the arena the Duke of Eyes rumbled to and fro over the bloodstained patch of sand that had been his earlier opponent. Though he moved backward and forward and from side to side, he stayed generally in the center of the area in order to permit the audience the best possible unobstructed view. The Duke seemed to enjoy the sound of his treads, a rhythmic clumpety-wump-de-clangedy-wham which filled the blind-walled chasm with thundering echoes. This clattering stopped briefly as the Queen rose to her feet. Her voice filled the stadium, seeming to need no artificial amplification.

‘Loyal Citizens,’ she cried. For your delectation, we will now have a trial by combat. Just Marianne, guilty of receiving goods stolen from the palace – the evidence is there, before you,’ she made two dramatic gestures, first toward a litter being carried around the arena on which the five gemmed crowns rested, then toward the barred gate. ’Represented by her champion, Prince Charming!’

The grating flew upward and two guardsmen entered to escort the Prince into the arena. He, however, had already leapt upon his horse and, heaving Marianne up behind him, he shouted a battle cry and thundered into the fray. The momegs, after only a moment’s hesitation, pattered after him.

‘What are we going to do?’ the horse asked in an interested tone. ‘Do you have anything specific in mind?’

‘Get him over to one edge,’ gritted the Prince. ‘Away from the middle. Then get ourselves and the dogs into the middle.’

‘An excellent plan, though somewhat easier said than done,’ murmured the horse, sidestepping in a set of immaculately executed dressage steps to avoid a tentacle thrust forward by the Duke of Eyes. Momentarily, they were out of the Duke’s vision and the crowd cheered.

‘Seven to two on the Duke,’ cried a hawker. ‘Seven to two on the Duke.’

‘Ooooh, Marianne,’ squealed a clutch of colosseum groupies. ’Ooooh, Prince Charming.’ They tossed circlets of flowers which fell around the Prince’s head and over the horse’s ears, blinding them both. ‘Ooooh, Hooray for the Duke.’

One set of tracks thundered forward, the other back, as the Duke of Eyes rotated to keep them in view. From his central position, it was obvious that the tentacles could reach almost to the arena walls. ‘Damn little maneuvering room, if you’ve noticed,’ the horse whinnied, shaking a flower circlet into his mouth and mumbling around a crisp mouthful of carnations. ’Shouldn’t you be doing something with that battle axe or that shield or something?’

‘Oh, of course,’ said the Prince, startled. He seized the battle axe and got the shield over one arm just in time to block a sword-bearing tentacle that the Duke lashed at them from behind his left shoulder. The Duke snarled, a metallic growl, twisting his flame-thrower-tentacle toward them. Before it could be brought to bear, both the Black and the Foo Dogs scampered wildly across the arena before the machine, leapt onto the right-hand tread and, running the great treadmill madly on three legs, raised their left hind legs to pee industriously into the gears and linkages. Meantime, the faithful horse had raised himself on his hind legs into a wide, hopping turn that let him pound away in the opposite direction before the flame thrower could be readied for use.