‘Somebody should try.’
‘Maybe you’re the man to do it,’ Pie said. ‘You were an artist before you were a traveller.’
‘I was a faker, not an artist.’
‘But your hands are clever,’ Pie replied.
‘Clever,’ Gentle said softly, ‘but never inspired.’
This melancholy thought took him back, momentarily, to Klein, and to the rest of the circle he’d left in the Fifth; to Jude, Clem, Estabrook, Vanessa and the rest. What were they doing this fine night? Had they even noticed his departure? He doubted it.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ Pie enquired. ‘I see some lights down the road a little way. It may be the last outpost before the mountains.’
‘I’m in good shape,’ Gentle said, climbing back into the car.
They’d proceeded perhaps a quarter of a mile, and were in sight of the village when their progress was brought to a halt by a young girl who appeared from the dusk to herd her doeki across the road. She was in every way a normal thirteen-year-old child, but for one: her face, and those parts of her body revealed by her simple dress, were sleek with fawny down. It was plaited where it grew long at her elbow and her temples, and tied in a row of ribbons at her nape.
‘What village is this?’ Pie asked as the last of the doeki lingered in the road.
‘Beatrix,’ she said, and without prompting added, ‘There is no better place in any heaven.’
Then, shooing the last beast on its way, she vanished into the twilight.
2
The streets of Beatrix weren’t as narrow as those of Vanaeph, but nor were they designed for motor vehicles. Pie parked the car close to the outskirts, and the two of them ambled into the village from there. The houses were unpretentious affairs raised of an ochre stone, and surrounded by stands of vegetation that were a cross between silver birches and bamboo. The lights Pie had spotted from a distance weren’t those that burned in the windows, but the lanterns that hung in these trees, throwing their mellow light across the streets. Just about every copse boasted its lantern-trimmer - shaggy-faced children like the herders - some squatting beneath the trees, others perched precariously in their branches. The doors of almost all the houses stood open, and music drifted from several, tunes caught by the lantern-trimmers, and danced to in the dapple. Asked to guess, Gentle would have said life was good here. Slow, perhaps, but good.
‘We can’t cheat these people,’ Gentle said. ‘It wouldn’t be honourable.’
‘Agreed,’ Pie replied.
‘So what do we do for money?’
‘Maybe they’ll agree to cannibalize the vehicle for a good meal, and a horse or two.’
‘I don’t see any horses.’
‘A doeki would be fine.’
‘They look slow.’
Pie directed Gentle’s gaze up the heights of the Jokalaylau. The last traces of day still lingered on the snow-fields, but for all their beauty the mountains were vast and vanishing.
‘Slow and certain is safer up there,’ Pie said. Gentle took Pie’s point. ‘I’m going to see if I can find somebody in charge,’ the mystif went on, and left Gentle’s side to go and question one of the lantern-trimmers.
Drawn by the sound of raucous laughter. Gentle wandered on a little further, and turning a corner he found two dozen of the villagers, mostly men and boys, standing in front of a marionette theatre that had been set up in the lee of one of the houses. The show they were watching contrasted violently with the benign atmosphere of the village. To judge by the spires painted on the backcloth the story was set in Patashoqua, and as Gentle joined the audience two characters, one a grossly fat woman, the other a man with the proportions of a foetus and the endowment of a donkey, were in the middle of a domestic tiff so frenzied the spires were shaking. The puppeteers, three slim young men with identical moustaches, were plainly visible above the booth, and provided both the raucous dialogue and the sound effects, the former larded with baroque obscenities. Now another character entered - this a hunchbacked sibling of Pulcinella’s - and summarily beheaded Donkey-Dick. The head flew to the ground, where the fat woman knelt to sob over it. As she did so, cherubic wings unfolded from behind its ears and it floated up into the sky, accompanied by a falsetto din from the puppeteers. This earned applause from the audience, during which Gentle caught sight of Pie in the street. At the mystif’s side was a jug-eared adolescent with hair down to the middle of his back. Gentle went to join them.
This is Efreet Splendid,’ Pie said. ‘He tells me - wait for this - he tells me his mother has dreams about white, furless men, and would like to meet you.’
The grin that broke through Efreet’s facial thatch was crooked but beguiling.
‘She’ll like you,’ he announced.
‘Are you sure?’ Gentle said.
‘Certainly!’
‘Will she feed us?’
‘For a furless whitey, anything,’ Efreet replied.
Gentle threw the mystif a doubtful glance. ‘I hope you know what we’re doing,’ he said.
Efreet led the way, chattering as he went, asking mostly about Patashoqua. It was, he said, his ambition to see the great city. Rather than disappoint the boy by admitting that he hadn’t stepped inside the gates, Gentle informed him that it was a place of untold magnificence.
‘Especially the Merrow Ti’ Ti’,’ he said.
The boy grinned, and said he’d tell everybody he knew that he’d met a hairless white man who’d seen the Merrow Ti’ Ti’. From such innocent lies, Gentle mused, legends came. At the door of the house, Efreet stood aside, in order that Gentle be the first over the threshold. He startled the woman inside with his appearance. She dropped the cat she was combing, and instantly fell to her knees. Embarrassed, Gentle asked her to stand, but it was only after much persuasion that she did so, and even then she kept her head bowed, watching him furtively from the corner of her small, dark eyes. She was short - barely taller than her son in fact - her face fine-boned beneath its down. Her name was Larumday, she said, and she would very happily extend to Gentle and his lady (as she assumed Pie to be) the hospitality of her house. Her younger son Emblem was coerced into helping her prepare food while Efreet talked about where they could find a buyer for the car. Nobody in the village had any use for such a vehicle, he said, but in the hills was a man who might. His name was Coaxial Tasko, and it came as a considerable shock to Efreet that neither Gentle nor Pie had heard of the man.
‘Everybody knows Wretched Tasko,’ he said. ‘He used to be a King in the Third Dominion, but his tribe’s extinct.’
‘Will you introduce me to him in the morning?’ Pie asked.
‘That’s a long time off,’ Efreet said.
‘Tonight then,’ Pie replied, and it was thus agreed between them.
The food, when it came, was simpler than the fare they’d been served along the Highway but no less tasty for that: doeki meat marinated in a root wine, accompanied by bread, a selection of pickled goods - including eggs the size of small loaves - and a broth which stung the throat like chili, bringing tears to Gentle’s eyes, much to Efreet’s undisguised