I know you did . . . husband.
Funny how even with both hands in his head, Songbird still hadn’t been able to figure how it was no mystery at all to Rook where this Place of Dead Roads might lie. ’Cause — where was the single deadest place he’d ever stood? Only the place he’d killed what little good was left in himself, with Chess’s unknowing help.
And here it was now, glistening bright beneath a spray of stars, like granulated marble: Bewelcome. Where Rook touched down lightly, skidding a bit, ’til his heels snagged in salt, then flipped open his coat’s front flap, and took out the Smoking Mirror’s uneven black disc.
He held it up high, balanced in both hands — thumbs and forefingers gripping its outer edges, the rest curved for additional support, a shallow flesh funnel — before angling it to fit neatly overtop the moon itself, like a cold iron skillet-lid.
A moment later, darkness came scuttling along the desert’s floor to engulf all in its path, from east-west to north-south, the way a photographer’s black cloth reduces the world to nothing but an upside-down reflection trapped inside a box. And the moon’s whole light was dowsed at once, in horrid sympathy.
We call that an eclipse, he told the Rainbow Lady, arms still extended, already beginning to ache. When it happens naturally, that is.
Even in this darkness, though, he could see her shake her head — that stiff coronal of hair slicing the air, axe-heavy, like she could make it bleed.
But — there is nothing natural about such things, little king, in any event. When tizitzimime eat the sun and moon, horror follows: fields
fall fallow, water sickens, unborn children wither. Bats fly up out of an empty cave, spreading disease and death.
Rook snorted. Sure they do, he thought, mostly to himself. But when she laughed as though he’d made a particularly witty quip, he knew the truth at last: there wasn’t one single thought left inside him, about anything, he could truly call his own.
It was . . . oddly freeing.
There, he told her. Done. Now what?
The words came back on the wind, night-scented, from infinite distances. Saying, only — Watch. And wait.
He did.
And finally, from the north-east . . . someone came walking, out of the dark.
It was a woman, full-grown and full-figured, well-made as a statue. Her fine features were stamped in a mould which might mark her anything from Navaho to Mex, skin copper-sheened, and from the unconscious swing of her hips and the sureness of her light-shod feet, Rook reckoned that — on any other given day — she would have stepped proudly even here, in the midst of this desperate solitude.
But there was something wrong with her overall, visible from a fair distance off — a wounded gait, with two hectic spots blazing at her cheekbones. Her skirt itself seemed stiff, stained darkly ’round where her belt should lie, while a kerchief had been thrust down her shirt-front to cushion her swollen, leaking breasts. Her dark hair was braided back haphazardly, the part frankly crooked. Both eyes sat in shadows so deep they seemed bruised.
Childbed fever, maybe. Or something more: cholera, smallpox. Dying anyhow, probably.
You just keep on tellin’ yourself that, “Rev,” he thought.
Though she was already looking straight at him, it seemed to take the woman a moment or so to realize he was actually there.
She cleared her throat, licked sticky lips and asked: “. . . who are you?”
But Rook just shook his head, by way of an answer; after the fiasco with Grandma, he wouldn’t be makin’ that mistake again. Assuring her instead, as gently as he could — “Doesn’t matter. You come a long way?”
She half-shook her head, half-shivered, teeth chattering audibly. “Far enough. But I . . .”
And here a fresh uncertainty clouded her stare, drawing it back down to both outspread hands. They were muddy from palms to wrists, nails choked with dirt, like she’d been digging without a shovel.
“. . . had a dream,” she told him, finally. “A woman — she told me where to come.”
I’ll just bet she did, Rook thought, wishing he felt worse over this nameless sacrifice-to-be’s obvious plight, her probable fate. Yet all he could summon, by this point, was a sort of random ethical weariness, too shallow to reach anything that counted.
You know what to do, husband, the Lady reminded him.
“I . . . don’t know why I’m here, is all,” said the woman. “You know?”
Rook bowed his head, and shot her his most trustworthy smile. “Yes, ma’am. I can well understand how frightening that must be, for you. But it’s okay, because . . .”
. . . I do.