“Cadimon,” Dradin said. “Cadimon, I’m desperate. I need money.”
“If you are desperate, take my advice—leave Ambergris. And before the Festival. It’s not safe for priests to be on the streets after dark on Festival night. There have been so many years of calm. Ha! I tell you, it can’t last.”
“It wouldn’t have to be much money. Just enough to—”
Cadimon gestured toward the entrance. “Beg from your father, not from me. Leave. Leave now.”
Dradin, taut muscles and clenched fists, would have obeyed Cadimon out of respect for the memory of authority, but now a vision rose into his mind like the moon rising over the valley the night before. A vision of the jungle, the dark green leaves with their veins like spines, like long, delicate bones. The jungle and the woman and all of the dead …
“I will not.”
Cadimon frowned. “I’m sorry to hear you say that. I ask you again, leave.”
Lush green, smothering, the taste of dirt in his mouth; the smell of burning, smoke curling up into a question mark.
“Cadimon, I was your student. You owe me the—”
“Living Saint!” Cadimon shouted. “Wake up, Living Saint.”
The Living Saint uncurled himself from his repose atop the catafalque.
“Living Saint,” Cadimon said, “dispense with him. No need to be gentle.” And, turning to Dradin: “Goodbye, Dradin. I am very sorry.”
The Living Saint, spouting insults, jumped from the catafalque and—his penis purpling and flaccid as a sea anemone, brandished menacingly—ran toward Dradin, who promptly took to his heels, stumbling through the ranks of the gathered acolytes and hearing directly behind him as he navigated the bluegrass trail not only the Living Saint’s screams of “Piss off! Piss off, you great big baboon!” but also Cadimon’s distant shouts of: “I’ll pray for you, Dradin. I’ll pray for you.” And, then, too close, much too close, the unmistakable hot and steamy sound of a man relieving himself, followed by the hands of the Living Saint clamped down on his shoulder blades, and a much swifter exit than he had hoped for upon his arrival, scuffing his fundament, his pride, his dignity.
“And stay out!”
* * *
When Dradin stopped running he found himself on the fringe of the Religious Quarter, next to an emaciated macadamia salesman who cracked jokes like nuts. Out of breath, Dradin put his hands on his hips. His lungs strained for air. Blood rushed furiously through his chest. He could almost persuade himself that these symptoms were only the aftershock of exertion, not the aftershock of anger and desperation. Actions unbecoming a missionary. Actions unbecoming a gentleman. What might love next drive him to?
Determined to regain his composure, Dradin straightened his shirt and collar, then continued on his way in a manner he hoped mimicked the stately gait of a mid-level clergy member, to whom all such earthly things were beneath and below. But the bulge of red veins at his neck, the stiffness of fingers in claws at his sides, these clues gave him away, and knowing this made him angrier still. How dare Cadimon treat him as though he were practically a stranger! How dare the man betray the bond between his father and the church!
More disturbing, where were the agents of order when you needed them? No doubt the city had ordinances against public urination. Although that presupposed the existence of a civil authority, and of this mythic beast Dradin had yet to convince himself. He had not seen a single blue, black, or brown uniform, and certainly not filled out with a body lodged within its fabric, a man who might symbolize law and order and thus give the word flesh. What did the people of Ambergris do when thieves and molesters and murderers traversed the thoroughfares and alleyways, the underpasses and the bridges? But the thought brought him back to the mushroom dwellers and their alcove shrines, and he abandoned it, a convulsion traveling from his chin to the tips of his toes. Perhaps the jungle had not yet relinquished its grip.
Finally, shoulders bowed, eyes on the ground, in abject defeat, he admitted to himself that his methods had been grotesque. He had made a fool of himself in front of Cadimon. Cadimon was not beholden to him. Cadimon had only acted as he must when confronted with the ungodly.
* * *
Necklace still wrapped in the page from The Refraction of Light in a Prison, Dradin came again to Hoegbotton & Sons, only to find that his love no longer stared from the third-floor window. A shock traveled up his spine, a shock that might have sent him gibbering to his mother’s side aboard the psychiatrists’ houseboat, if not that he was a rational and rationalizing man. How his heart drowned in a sea of fears as he tried to conjure up a thousand excuses: she was out to lunch; she had taken ill; she had moved to another part of the building. Never that she was gone for good, lost as he was lost; that he might never, ever see her face again. Now Dradin understood his father’s addiction to sweet-milled mead, beer, wine, and champagne, for the woman was his addiction, and he knew that if he had only seen her porcelain-perfect visage as he suffered from the jungle fevers, he would have lived for her sake alone.
The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in all the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris—or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry, stamping one, two, three hundred thousand strong; no matter this savagery in the midst of apparent civilization—still the woman in the window seemed to him more ruly, more disciplined and in control and thus, perversely, malleable to his desire, than anyone Dradin had yet met in Ambergris: this priceless part of the whale, this overbrimming stew of the sublime and the ridiculous.
It was then that his rescuer came: Dvorak, popping up from betwixt a yardstick of a butcher awaiting a hansom and a jowly furrier draped over with furs of auburn, gray, and white. Dvorak, indeed, dressed all in black, against which the red dots of his tattoo throbbed and, in his jacket pocket, a dove-white handkerchief stained red at the edges. A mysterious, feminine smile decorated his mutilated face.
“She’s not at the window,” Dradin said.
Dvorak’s laugh forced his mouth open wide and wider still, carnivorous in its red depths. “No. She is not at the window. But have no doubt: she is inside. She is a most devout employee.”
“You gave her the book?”
“I did, sir.” The laugh receded into a shallow smile. “She took it from me like a lady, with hesitation, and when I told her it came from a secret admirer, she blushed.”
“Blushed?” Dradin felt lighter, his blood yammering and his head a puff of smoke, a cloud, a spray of cotton candy.
“Blushed. Indeed, sir, a good sign.”
Dradin took the package from his pocket and, hands trembling, gave it to the dwarf. “Now you must go back in and find her, and when you find her, give her this. You must ask her to join me at the Drunken Boat at twilight. You know the place?”
Dvorak nodded, his hands clasped protectively around the package.
“Good. I will have a table next to the Festival parade route. Beg her if you must. Intrigue her and entreat her.”