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“I need all the help I can get,” she replied.
I picked at the label with my finger and some of it came off. A scrap of paper at the end of the word, showing part of the ornately inscribed X and IR—XIR, it looked like, or—LIR. I examined the dried glue on the back, as if it might be a pale word in a secret language. It was a glob of dried glue, no more, no less.
Still, the client wanted theatrics, and I think I was more alert than I’d ever been. I found a porcelain mortar and I burned the scrap of paper, and looked to see if I could read words forming in the arabesques of smoke. I couldn’t. I mashed up herbs and crystals and added some oil of gomba, and heated the whole mess in an alembic. I counted backward by seventeens. All the usual party tricks.
Then I popped off the cork and took a swig of the miracle potion.
I’m not a poet, and despite my profession I’m not particularly good at description. The taste burned and stank, and I felt the liquor in my eyes stew. Waves rose and fell in half formation, like apathetic ghosts, like anemic fogs. I could almost see—I reached, mentally—I could almost read what it meant. But it was shapeless as most dreams really are; we put onto our dreams the shapes we think with during the day, depriving our dreams of the message they are trying to deliver. Such it was with me. There was so much life, it was so vivid: but I could only think of it with the experience of life I had already had. And despite my evident age, that wasn’t much experience at all. It was like a five-year-old, upon learning the alphabet, being presented with a copy of the annotated Great Morphologies of the ancient tutorix Gorpha vin Tesserine. A child might be able to count the numbers marking off the footnotes, but not much more than that.
Nonetheless, I put my hands flat on the table and felt the surface of the wood grain, and tried to release my mind. The wood meant “usefulness in death” to me; the wood meant “you may be dead and you may still serve.” I had never tried to read the lifelines of a piece of timber before.
“Are you quite all right?” asked the Nanny, beginning to gather up her things, including the bottle. Apparently I looked as if I were about to expire, or explode.
“You have to leave the way you came,” I said to her.
“I only saw the one staircase,” she asserted.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what I did mean, or if it had anything to do with her at all. “History waits to be written, and this family has a part to play in it.”
• 5 •
H AH,” SAID the Lion. “You have to leave the way you come in? So what did you mean by that? You have to go out of the world the way you came into it? Imbecilic and diapered?”
Yackle didn’t speak. He pressed his point. “Did you decipher your own gibberish? You’ve been trying to die as a human, but if you never were
born as a human, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ha-ha.”
She was silent for a long time. Her hands moved as if she were picking up the green glass bottle in her mind, all over again. When she spoke, her voice had an opacity to it.
“So you did have something to give me after all,” she said. “You come in all rough edges and smarmy clothes, and it seems you have something to say.”
He shrugged. He didn’t know what she meant.
“That’s why I’ve been down in the crypt for a year without having the plea sure of a visit from a gentleman caller named Master Death. My first prophecy, and I read it wrong. ‘You have to leave the way you came.’ That was for me. Not for that Cattery Spunge.”
“Don’t look at me,” he said. His paws went up and flat like the palms of a human hand, protesting. Like a Bear cub playing dead. “I’m not certified.”
She was shaken. She left the chairback and meandered to the window. She stood there for a long time. Then, as if trying to change the subject, she said, “Someone’s got a cook fire down there. One of the houses to our west.”
“You can see now? Or are you ‘seeing’ it?”
“I’m smelling it, you blasted bog-wart. The wind is pressing up from the west, and I remember a few stone cottages out that way. If we’re in as much of a skirmish moment as you say, I’d have thought the residents of the small farms that supply the mauntery would be huddling in our great hall for protection. That’s the origin of this establishment in the first place, after all—a keep.”
“Apparently whoever lives out yonder isn’t scared, though.”
“Not scared of war? Hmmm.”
“Or maybe more scared of starvation. It’s harvest season, and the troops have been tromping their bloody jackboots all across the country. Flattening whatever modest crop of autumn wheat the locals can manage to eke out of this unforgiving soil.” He walked to the window and stood next to her. “I’m right. Their house stands amid three small fields of grain ready for harvest. If they leave that harvest too long, the armies will trample the fields for a camp, or bloody it with an encounter.”
“Still, if the farmers become the next casualties of war, they’re not going to be able to enjoy their wheat rolls. So why stay and guard their useless harvest? They should get out of the way while they can.”
“Maybe they’ve had enough of life. Maybe they’ve had their share.”
“Who has had enough of life?” she said.
“You did,” he answered. “You laid yourself down to die.”
“I laid myself down to go,” she corrected him, but then she began to cry. He assumed she didn’t really know what she meant. It must be no fun being an oracle for everyone else and being clueless about yourself.
