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The Inferno, thought Shandy - third canto, if I'm not mistaken. And, at the moment, who cares?
The bridges were very close together now, and the sky was lightening in a direction that might have been east. Hurwood's light-lines were becoming less visible on the sand - which was, in the faint daylight, taking on a rusty hue - and Hurwood and Friend were working faster. The shapes rising and falling above the center of the pool were losing their color and becoming gray, and now looked much more like clouds of water spray than like billows of fire. With the approach of day the total silence seemed even more eerie - there were no bird or insect cries, and neither the unrestful crowds nor the Fountain made any audible sound. The air had cooled since they'd left the jungle, though his feet were warmed by the iron tacks in the soles of his boots, and it was easy to warm his hands by holding them near his smoking knife scabbard.
He had been looking back at the remote dot that was the torch, and so he bumped into Hurwood when the group halted.
There was only one bridge now, and they were right in front of it. It was about six feet wide and paved with broad, flat stones, and stone walls rose at the sides to shoulder height. Though when seen from afar the bridges had seemed to arch steeply up from the pool's edge, from where Shandy now stood it looked almost level, rising only very gradually as it narrowed away with distance and faded among the shifting clouds of the Fountain. In spite of its outlandish location, Shandy thought he'd seen the bridge before.
"After you," said Hurwood to Blackbeard.
The giant pirate, whose belt and boots, Shandy noticed, were smoking and sparking like the match-cords in his mane, stepped onto the bridge -
- and seemed to explode. Fluttering blurs of gray erupted from his mouth, nose and eyes and shot away in all directions, and his clothes leaped and shook on his huge frame like waves in a choppy sea. His hands jigged helplessly in front of him as the gray things blasted out of his sleeves, but in the midst of the ferocious detonations Blackbeard roared and managed to turn around.
"Stay there!" shouted Hurwood. "Don't step off the bridge! It's your ghosts leaving you!"
The exodus was tapering off, but Blackbeard didn't stop jumping. His belt and shoes were on fire, and he grabbed the smoldering hilt of his cutlass, drew the redly glowing blade and touched it to his belt, instantly burning through the leather. He tossed the cutlass out onto the sand and with sizzling fingers snatched his belt buckle loose, drew the pieces of leather free and kicked it all after the sword. He sat down and pulled off his boots, then stood up again and grinned at Hurwood.
"Now abandon all iron," he said.
Ye who enter here, thought Shandy.
"You can step down and just wait for Leo and me right here, with the others," said Hurwood. "Your ghosts are gone, and there's still plenty of the black herb - when we recover the two other torches and get them lit too, there'll be no danger of becoming reinfected on the way out of the jungle. Our bargain is completed, and Leo and I will be back here before long to lead you all back to where this region links with the world you know."
Shandy sighed with relief, and he had started to look around for a place to sit, when he noticed that Friend had made no move to put Beth Hurwood down.
"Wh-who," Shandy stammered, "who's going over and who's staying here?"
"Leo and the girl and myself are going over," said Hurwood impatiently, putting his lantern down on the sand. He took off his belt and shoes, and then in a grotesquely unwitting parody of intimacy he knelt in front of Friend and, one-handed, disconnected the ornate belt buckle from the fat man's belt. Friend's mud-caked slippers evidently contained no iron.
"I'm going over, too," pronounced Blackbeard, not stepping down from the bridge. "I didn't fight my way in here two years ago just to pick up a peltful of ghosts." He looked past Hurwood, and a moment later Stede Bonnett and the boatman stepped forward. Bonnett began unbuckling his belt and stepping out of his shoes, but the boatman's clothes were sewn shut and he was barefoot. "They're coming too," Blackbeard said.
Davies' face had become perceptibly more lined and hollowed since leaving the fires by the seashore, but there was some kind of humor in his eyes as he took a step forward and then crouched to shed his boots.
No, Shandy thought almost calmly. It just can't be expected of me. I'm already on the sidewalk outside reality - I'm simply not going out farther, into the street. None of these people will ever come back, and I'll have to figure out Hurwood's magic lantern just to find my way back to the goddamned jungle! Why did I ever come along? Why did I ever leave England?
He found he was implicitly confident of a way out ... and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood - the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.
What right had these people to put him into such a humiliating situation?
He looked at Beth Hurwood, draped over Friend's shoulders. She was still unconscious, and her face, though heartbreakingly beautiful to him, was drawn and tautened by recent horrors - innocence intolerably abused. Wouldn't it be - couldn't a case be made for it being - kinder to let her die now, unconscious and not yet ruined?
While still in doubt he caught Leo Friend's eye. Friend was smiling at him with confident contempt, and he shifted his pudgy hand on Beth's thigh.
At the same moment, Hurwood began crooning reassuringly, and he got down on his hands and knees. He muttered some vague endearments and then, gently but strongly, he lowered himself flat, face down on the sand. Still murmuring, he began to flop there in a ponderous rhythm.
Leo Friend blushed furiously and snatched his hand off of Beth's leg. "Mr. Hurwood!" he screeched.
Hurwood, not stopping, chuckled indulgently.
"He seems to snap out of these fits before too long," said Blackbeard. "We'll wait this one out and then get moving."
Are you all crazy? wondered Shandy. Hurwood was the only chance, and a damn slim one at that, of anyone recrossing this bridge alive, and now he's madder than old Governor Sawney. There is no chance of surviving any further advance, and I don't want to take my eternal place among the silent gray legions on this unnatural horizon. Jack Shandy will wait right here, until dark, and when you doomed fools have failed to reappear I'll somehow use Hurwood's lantern to get back to the torch and the jungle and the boats and the shore. I'll no doubt regret this cowardice later, but at least I'll be able to lie in the sun and have a drink while I'm regretting it.>Blackbeard swore again and then stepped through the gap, and a moment later so did his boatman. Shandy and Davies exchanged a glance, shrugged, and followed.
The jungle was gone. In front of them a flat and plain stretched away under the unobscured moon, and a couple of hundred yards ahead was the knee-high coping wall of a circular pool that looked wider than the Roman Colosseum. Way out over the center of the pool hung a vast luminosity that might have been fire or spray, and the dimly glowing masses of it rose and fell as slowly as opals in honey. Staring at the shifting lights, Shandy realized with a chill in his belly that he had no idea how far away they were; at one moment they seemed to be colored glass butterflies glowing in the light from Hurwood's torch within easy arm's reach, but at the next moment they were some astronomical phenomenon taking place far beyond the domain of the sun and planets. The pool, too, Shandy noticed now, was optically tricky - he peered and squinted, but finally had to admit that he had not the remotest idea how tall the coping wall was. Far off to the right and left, slender bridges of some kind rose from the wall and arched high and away out of sight toward the center of the pool.
The buckles on Shandy's boots were now very hot. He burned his hand drawing his knife, but managed, crouching first on one foot and then on the other, to hack the buckles off. He straightened again, trying to ignore the way his leather scabbard smoked when he put the knife back and wondering when he'd start to feel the nails that held his boot soles on. Thank God Blackbeard had forbidden pistols.
"I didn't get much farther than right here," said Blackbeard softly. He turned to Davies and grinned. "Go ahead - walk out to the pool's edge."
