Prospero Regained (25 page)

“Bah! Of course not.” Gregor waved his hand dismissively and lay down. “It was the delirium of a sick man.” He added, his voice intent, “But it made me
think
!”

*   *   *

I AWOKE
before my brethren and lay for a time staring up at the black billowing smoke shot through with red-orange flames. It was hard to convince my body it was morning—morning being a relative term here—but I eventually rose and, finding my shoulder bag, drew out a brush. Sitting down upon Gregor’s robe, I brushed out my raven-dark hair.

Behind me, a voice was speaking softly. I turned, stifling a scream when I saw someone standing within our camp. The light was dim, and the figure’s back was to me. I could not make out who it was. He stood, motionless, as if gazing at the battle of the dead raging in the distance. Even before my eyes made out who he was, I had determined his identity; for now I could make out the words:

Since Death has all my brethren tak’n

He will not long me leave alone

On force I must his next prey be;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Since for the dead remedy is none

Best is that we for death dispone

After our death that live may we;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Erasmus turned, smiling his self-mocking smile through the lank dark hair that fell over his eyes. “Seems appropriate to the place, does it not? Frighteningly appropriate, even.”

As he walked away and retrieved his long green coat, I had the oddest feeling that he had not actually recognized me. Perhaps, this was true, for he did not pause to say something disagreeable.

*   *   *

MY
respite from malice was fleeting.

“Up early, are you, O Get of Sycorax?” Erasmus asked almost cheerfully.

I sighed. “Erasmus, now that we know about the dolls and their spell, don’t you think that it would behoove you to make some effort to resist the spell-induced hatred? You are deliberately allowing yourself to be influenced by dark enchantments.”

A wave of antipathy overwhelmed me, but I dismissed it sternly. It was a magical attack and not my own feelings. I did not need to bow to it. I briefly recalled Theo’s admonition to forgive Erasmus but could not bring myself to go that far.

“My disdain for you, Sister dear, does not come from any spell. Logistilla, or whomever cast the spell, was merely taking advantage of an enmity that was already present.”

“Then why do you hate me so?” I repeated the question I had asked him when we were sipping Mango juice back in Boston—what now seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Maria, of course,” he answered.

I caught myself before I blurted “who”? Clearly, this person was important to my brother and he expected me to remember her. Maria? The name sounded vaguely familiar. Father had had a nurse named Maria during his illness after Gregor’s “death,” but I could not recall that Erasmus had much to do with her.

I vaguely recalled Erasmus’s first wife, a sweet young woman with a round face, long legs, and a colt’s large brown eyes. Her name had been Maria, I was nearly certain, but I had hardly known her. How could I have offended her?

I waited, hoping he would say more.

“Because of Mother and my Maria,” he continued.

“Your mother?” I asked, astonished. Could this quarrel of his be so old as Isabella Medici? Both Isabella Medici and Erasmus’s first wife had died centuries ago. “What do they have to do with me?”

“You murdered them,” he replied.

“I?” I exclaimed. “I was not even present! Your mother choked on a chicken bone at a dinner served by her own great-niece—a party to which I had not even been invited—and your wife, if I recall, died in childbirth.”

“Exactly,” replied Erasmus. “You weren’t there.”

I sighed with exasperation. “Don’t tell me this is the old Water of Life argument again! Life with an immortal Isabella Medici would have been intolerable!”

“She was my mother! What if it had been Lady Portia, whom you apparently continue to insist Father adored. Would you have saved her?”

“Of course. Father loved her.”

“Well, I loved Maria.”

“You would have tired of her eventually,” I repeated by rote what Father had told me.

Only now, the words sounded flat to my ears. I recalled, for some reason, the old lady I had seen crossing the overpass in Chicago. If matters had been different, and Ferdinand had lived, might it have been me who lay dying upon a birthing bed, as Maria had? I felt strangely disoriented, as if familiar objects had suddenly transformed into an unfamiliar landscape.

“Is that so?” Erasmus said. “Funny, I never have tired of her memory. In all the years since, I’ve never met a woman who compared with her. No woman since has been as sweet, as gentle, as faithful. No woman, again, has made me feel as complete.”

When I did not answer, he continued, “She died in my arms, you know, her sweet brown eyes calling out to me to help her, to stop the pain. Her blood ran through my fingers … all my scholarly learning could not help me stanch its flow. And all I could think of, as my love’s life ebbed away, was that a single drop of Water from the lily-white hand of my older sister could save her, could stop the pain … could save the child, the fruit of our love. A single drop. They both died that night, the mother and the child, leaving me to grieve and our four older children motherless.” He paused momentarily unable to go on.

Eventually, he continued, speaking haltingly. “You’ve tried to take my family from me, but you have failed. Do you know I’ve kept track of them all? Every single offshoot of my and Maria’s love down unto the twenty-third generation? They number in the ten thousands now, yet I know the name and location of every one. That boy you saw guiding Cornelius, is the twenty-third of my line, the twenty-second eldest son in a direct line from my eldest son Sebastian.”

That was why the young boy who had been guiding my brother Cornelius around back at Erasmus’s house had showed up when Mab and I asked the Santa’s Naughty and Nice pool to show us children who were members of our family. How strange and disconcerting to think that I had thousands of great-great-nephews of whom I knew nothing. Worse, Mr. Mustache had probably been one of these descendants, too. This meant that the man I had led to his death when he had tried to chase my sailboat at night on our way to Logistilla’s had been not only innocent, but also a family member!

Erasmus was speaking again. “In those wee hours, as my Maria’s life seeped inevitably away, I cursed you in my heart, and I have never forgiven you. You are the murderer of my love as surely as if you had killed her with your own hands.”

“A ridiculous supposition, Erasmus. Do you also hold me responsible for every other person who had died between then and now? Theoretically, I could have gotten the Water to them as well.”

“What do
I
care about
them
?” he rasped. “You could have saved my Maria and my baby!
My
wife and
my
child—I never even discovered whether I lost a boy or a girl. It would have cost you nothing! As Maria lay dying, I left her, even though she called out to me not to leave her alone, and spent some of our precious last minutes together begging Father on my knees to force you to help her. But, he refused. He said the Water was yours, and only you could decide how it would be used.”

“Father said that?” I whispered, shocked. “How strange…”

Something in my tone caught my brother’s attention. Erasmus halted his diatribe and peered at me. “How so?”

“Because Father was the one who told me not to give it to you.”

“What…?” Erasmus leaned forward, his eyes glittering.

“Do you think that I, a young woman with no husband, could have known anything of love? How could I have made the judgement that you would tire of Maria? I know nothing of the ways of men and women.”

“I thought that was precisely why you did it … because you were bitter over Ferdinand and wanted others to suffer,” he said, a touch of uncertainty creeping into his voice.

“Certainly not!” I objected. “I would not be motivated by such pettiness! I merely did what I always did.… I obeyed Father’s wishes.”

For a moment, Erasmus looked pained, then he laughed harshly. “Very cunning of you, Sister, to try and frame Father when he is not here to defend himself. I am not fooled. You cannot blame your crimes on him. Nor do I buy Theo’s theory that Father has enchanted you. You are the culprit behind all our family ills, and here, in Hell, the truth shall come out!”

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Bite the Angel’s Finger!

Mephisto awoke and summoned up his friends again. Pegasus proved bright-eyed and whinnying, but the others remained fast asleep.

“Ma’am, didn’t you once tell me that Pegasus was a magic horse who could carry your whole family?” Mab asked, yawning. He stretched, trying to straighten a crick in his back caused by having slept on a rock.

“Yes!” I laughed and turned to Mephisto. “Shall we ride?”

“All aboard!” Mephisto gleefully threw his arms out. “But keep in mind that Peggie gets tired easily when he carries everyone. I don’t know how far he’ll be able to take us.”

“Anything is better than walking the whole way,” Erasmus murmured gratefully.

So all eight of us mounted the magic horse. Mephisto took the reins. I sat behind him, with Theo behind me, then Mab, Gregor, Erasmus, Titus, and finally, upon the haunches, Caliban. None of us knew how Pegasus could bear such a burden; it must have been part of his magic, and we gloried in it.

What a joy to fly, to leave the dust and din of the plain below us and soar through the air. True it was smoggy, sulfurous, and we had to fly quite low to avoid the black boiling clouds, but it was a pleasure to see the ground fly by beneath our feet.

Several times, Mephisto checked on Ulysses in the crystal ball, but Ulysses was always somewhere in the same rugged landscape, running naked along cliffs and rocky ramparts.

We flew on, squished together like living spoons, the ground flashing by beneath us. As I watched it fly by, I was reminded of the Aerie Ones, for whom seeing solid land flash by beneath them was an ordinary occurrence. I thought of Mustardseed and Windflower and the others back at the company and wondered how they were coping without me.

This past month was the longest break I had taken from my corporate duties, since the last time I had left on the year-and-a-day journey to the Well at the World’s End to fetch more Water of Life, sometime back in the 1960s. Back then, my absence had not mattered as much, as Father had still been in charge.

Ah, Prospero, Inc. I chafed to be back at the helm. I missed the office, the buzz of Aerie Ones about their business, the challenges of keeping everything moving smoothly. It was a life I loved, work I understood. I could not wait to get back.

Mentally, I reviewed the Priority contracts soon to come due. Again worry gnawed at my innards. Could Mustardseed handle everything on his own? The Priority contracts seldom came due without some complication that required my direct action. I hoped this time would prove the exception, that they would carry on competently without me.

We flew for hours but eventually our ride came to an end. Our flying steed grew weary and could no longer bear our burden. He landed and trotted for a time. When even that became too much for him, we dismounted, and Mephisto sent him home. Then, he briefly called up his maenad, Queen Agave, and gave her instructions to see that the winged horse was properly curried and fed.

We set out on foot again, sore from our ride but rejoicing at the territory covered. The jagged purple peaks of the Mountains of Misery now loomed above us. Beneath them rolled their foothills, where Ulysses waited, only a few miles away. And, yet, our every footstep still kicked up a cloud of dust that made the already oppressive air even harder to breathe. Some of my brothers began wheezing.

A loud
rat-a-tat-tat
reverberated across the landscape. Ahead, a group of damned souls manned a machine-gun nest, strafing the countryside.

“How do we get past this?” Titus asked.

“We walk. Aren’t we safe so long as we do not become upset?” asked Erasmus.

“Perhaps, but what about our garments? Will the enchanted cloth resist the spiritual bullets?” Titus fingered the cloth of his ruffled shirt.

“What bullets?” Erasmus scoffed at Titus. “They could not possibly have bullets. Where would they get them?”

“A strange time to quibble with the reality of all this, isn’t it, Brother?” Theo gestured at the tanks, the barbed wire, the broken-down Jeeps. “Where do they get any of these things?”

“That’s different,” Erasmus replied smoothly. “I can imagine being in Hell with barbed wire. I cannot imagine being in Hell and having enough bullets.”

With that, Erasmus walked jauntily across the gunners’ fields of fire. The rest of us watched intently, uncertain how to rescue him if the impact of spiritual bullets upon his garments should fling him to the ground. He strolled across the entire field of fire. The huge guns worked noisily, strafing the area. My brother remained untouched. He moved confidently to the next trench, beyond the range of the gun nest. Turning back toward us, he waved.

Mephisto, who had been gaping in astonishment, pushed his jaw shut with his hand and declared, “I may be insane, but he’s crazy!”

*   *   *

EVENTUALLY,
the rest of us found the courage to walk through the machine-gun fire. On the far side, Caliban stood in the shallow trench and lifted us over, except for Titus whose legs were long enough to step across by himself. Beyond that, more flat, featureless plain stretched toward the rolling foothills, which grew closer as we trekked onward.