From inside Harold’s boxcar all night a shadowy glow was cast. Through my sleep I could hear his powerful soft murmur as he made low prayers or cast spells, speaking to the ocean in a strange, secret voice that only the ocean could have understood.
*
Meanwhile, a few hundred nautical miles from Youcatan….
… the Iffrit burned, and paced, and burned.
Amid the dead and dying tortured Taliban, amidst the rotting infrastructure that had for many decades served the worst, the most despicable, the most base and militaristic human element, the demon Zoellick had found a refuge. A refuge from the slavering orcs, from the tiresome business elite, from the demands of his office in Washington DC; a place to recover from the failed coup at Cancún.
*
The demon Zoellick needed to think.
“I am shoveling shadows into darkness,” he hissed to himself.
*
When I awoke, for once well rested, the sun was in the sky, a white crystal. I scratched myself, and swallowed the dry air, and sat up. And there was Natasha, sitting cross-legged, not a broom’s-length away, staring at me.
“Dadda,” she said. “I’ve been thinking… Why should it be a surprise, much less a shock, that the rhinos are gone?”
She was bright-eyed as ever, but with a wrinkle in her forehead. The sea beyond her was flat.
“The dinosaurs vanished and nobody laments their loss,” she said. “We only ogle their bones in museums. The phoenix is gone and no one knows or cares, and the same is true for so many others: the nagas, the centaur, the basilisk, the auk, the gryphon, the mastodon – all gone the way of the passenger pigeon, as the saying goes.”
“And us?”
“Us who?” Natasha said.
“Us humans,” I said. “Why are we still here? What keeps mankind alive?”
“Bestial acts, that’s what. Our will to power. When I say ‘our,’ I don’t mean you and me, dadda. I mean the bad guys. The guys whose will to power is not a will to govern, or even to command – but merely to do exactly as they please, when they please. To be more than human, in a world of humans – to escape le condition humaine. They dream of being gods – and such a dream is nothing less than a disease. And I’m afraid that, by now, this disease has consumed all humanity.”
“Natasha, I don’t disagree. Only let me refine the argument just a whit. What if the better part of humanity – the better part of us, of each of us, that is – is not the human part? What if it’s the part of us that traces our ancestry to the more-than-human world: the cave bears we once dwelt among; the micro-flora that inhabit our guts and allow us to digest the world; the mitochondria who power up the cells that make up our flesh. And what if, what if those bits of us, those more-than-human bits, are also what we share with the phoenix, and the gryphon, and centaur, and the auk?”
By our side the open ocean breathed and reflected back the silver sky. The sun skipped his light across her slow swells, a flat stone cast by a child skipping along the stillness of a creek. No birds sang.
“I like that, dadda,” Natasha said, gayly. She stood up and came over and lay her head in my lap. “You know, dadda, you continue to surprise me. You know a thing or two, don’t you?”
“I hope I do, honey,” I said. “We don’t have much time left, and its about we time we gathered our wits and learned a few things….”
“Its about time we learned to be human, right?” Natasha said. “After all, it is the Age of Consequence – there’s no room left for mistakes. And so, you and me, and mama, and, I dunno, other people who have an ounce of sense left – we no longer dream of being gods, Now, we dream of being human – and acting that way! – if even that is left us.”
*
The sun had risen almost midway up the sky by now. We’d begun to wonder where Childe Harold had gone, when he collapsed out of his boxcar into the bright daylight and poured himself onto the sand, spent.
*
Childe Harold leapt into the air and for a moment seemed to fly on the wind. I fell back in awe. But Natasha leapt to her feet and rushed toward the creature screaming, “Demon! Be gone!”
The smoke cleared and Zoellick stood still surveying the scene before him.
Something in his aspect was strange. His head was slightly bowed. Like a great turbine that had run out of steam, Zoellick seemed somehow… sorrowful. Still, a small ring of flames encircled the ground where he stood, occluding his feet as if he were levitating a few inches off the ground and letting off oily black strings of smoke.
“My child,” he said to Natasha, in a rasping voice. “My child. Have no fear. I am not the demon you take me for. I come to you in peace. To ask your forgiveness. To ask your pardon.”
Natasha sneered. “Pardon this!” she said, scooping up a handful of sand and throwing it at him in contempt.
He drew back from the cast sand as if burned. He really did look pale, and small, and weak.
“You, sorry little man!” Natasha spat. “In all your weakness, you are the destroyer of worlds.”
Zoellick fell to his knees and clasped his hands in a gesture of prayer.
“Please child, recognize my humanity! Bespeak mankind, forsooth my mind! I am human, listen to me weep! I cry like tiger cubs in the darkest night. Cruel toddler, infant of sorrows, offspring of dull propagandists, I beseech you: When you cut me do I not bleed?”
Natasha let fall a crocodile tear and then captured it in a locket. She wrapped the locket in a silk kerchief and slipped it in a pocket of her little pants (which were purple with yellow stars). She rebuilt her composure, blinked once and sliced the air with her hand as if with a cutlass. She threw a lion tamer’s gaze at the djinn and wrinkled her nose and roared, “Oh I hope you bleed!”
“Child!” the demon moaned. “When you slap me do I not sting?”
“Do tell!”
“When you disgrace me, do I not weep?”
Natasha eased her stance.
“Listen, Mister,” she said, glaring into the empty pits of his eyes. “You may be human, somewhere in there, and I may be human – all-too-human – but we are nothing alike. You are an asbestos firetrap and I am a nest of sky-blue songbirds’ eggs. You are an anvil and I am an egret. You are the slurry impoundment of a coalmine, acrid and toxic with blackwater, and I am a meadow blossoming in spring. I belong…among the wildflowers. But you…you belong among the shackled outcast ranks of evil demon powers!”
This was too much for the feigning Iffrit to take. He straightened his back and rasped, “I am your elder!”
“You are the bringer of pestilence!” Natasha fired back.
The flames died away and he planted his feet on terra firma and straightened his tie (which was yellow with purple stars). “I represent the establishment,” he said, with composure.
“You represent death!” Natasha sneered.
“Perhaps,” he said with a slight hiss. “But I am what you dream of being.”
“You are the world’s nightmare,” she spat poking a tiny finger at him.
His voice boomed in Dolby stereophonic surround-sound as if the very heavens were lined with acoustic tiles and the ocean were a resonating membrane: “I AM MANKIND’S FINAL HOPE!!”
Natasha rushed at him suddenly like a ferret charging at an ogre, her finger wagging in front of her and she leapt into the air in slow motion a pint-sized kamikaze, and she shouted, “YOU ARE A STORM IN A TEACUP.”
*
And then something strange happened.
Natasha froze in mid-air. The demon banker blinked. A million tiny tornados of sand erupted into the air. A sound as of distant thunder shook the beach.
The demon banker blinked, and his eyes rolled back into his head, and he whispered under his breath, “The antidote to the poison is … the poison!” No sooner had the words passed his demonic lips than a vision out of animus mundi darkened my sight: behind the demon banker, stretched out along the pale crescent of the beach, an army appeared. An army of orcs, their green piggish faces and shambling armored bodies lurching toward us, screaming and clamoring for blood.
At the head of the army, grunting and charging full-bore toward us, its gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun, was an enormous armor-plated white rhino.
*
As the demon Zoellick goaded his army of disfigured creatures to attack, Natasha fell to earth and retreated into my arms. I merely shivered and gaped. Childe Harold had risen to his feet. Sweat beaded his brow but his face was set, determined. enclosed the firestone in one fist and opened his eyes wide and let loose a hollering bellowing prayer in some old language that sounded like the rolling crashing wild thundering ocean itself. With the other hand he poured the parched earth a drink from the opalescent canteen and then he breathed a breath on the firestone and with an Olympian throw he heaved it to the sea.