The Rose was laughing. Sam Oakenhurst had never seen a creature so filled with joy, with the rage of risk and skill which marked the greatest jugaderos. He had never known a creature so daring, so wise. And it seemed to him that some new strength bound him to her, through all the colour-flooded fields of the multiverse. And then she began to sing.
The beauty of her song was almost unbearable. He began to weep and his tears were blinding quicksilver. It was as if she had summoned a wind and the wind was her voice calling to him.
‘Look up, Sam! There, beyond the colour fields! It’s the Grail, Sam. It’s the great Grail itself!’
But when his eyes were clear of tears Sam Oakenhurst looked up and all he saw was a lattice of light, like roots and branches, twisting around them on every side, a kind of nest made of curled gold and silver rays. And through this, with happy ease, the Rose steered the machinoix meat boat. Her hair was wild around her head, like flames; her limbs a haze of petals and brambles; and her song seemed to fill the multiverse.
The meat boat was a fat brazen lizard crawling over the surfaces of the vast fields, following the complex river systems which united them, replenished them, blending with new multihued mercury fractures running through a million dimensions and remaking themselves, fold upon fold, scale upon scale, until they merged again with the great main trunks, ancient beyond calculation, where (legend insisted) they would find the final scale and return, as was their destiny, to their original being: reunited with their archetype; no longer echoes. ‘And this shall be called the Time of Conference,’ said the Rose, bringing the meat boat down into a clover field of white and green. ‘The Time of Reckoning. That, Sam, is the fate of the Just.’
He had managed to reach her and now sat at her feet with his arms around the stem of the wheel. He watched her as a new force took hold of the boat. A sudden stench came up from the holds, as if something had ruptured. She struggled with the wheel. He tried to help her. She sang to whatever elements would hear her but she was suddenly powerless. She shook her head and gestured for him to relax. There was nothing more they could do.
‘We can’t go any further now, Sam,’ she said. ‘We’re not ready, I guess.’
‘Not you yet. No, no, no.’
Turning with sudden recollection they saw oddly shaped jewelled hands disappearing below. How long had the machinoix been with them?
‘She must be close to death,’ said Sam Oakenhurst.
‘Can you help her?’ asked the Rose.
It was only then that they saw the shapeless ruin of Paul Minct, its upturned mask a blazing battleground of brands, its eyes enlivened at last with the fires of hell.
The Rose made a movement with Swift Thom. There came a jolt, like a mild shockwave. Sam Oakenhurst felt water wash up his legs and reach his back.
He heard the sound of a tide as it retreated from the shore and he smelled the salt, the oily air of the coast. He opened his eyes. The boat was gone.
Eventually his vision adjusted. He understood what had happened. He lay on his side in the water, as if left there by a wave. A little above him, on the beach, the Rose was calling his name. ‘Sam! The Fault has taken the meat boat.’
‘Maybe Paul Minct achieved his ambition?’ Away in the distance were the tranquil skies which marked the Biloxi Fault. Mr Oakenhurst turned on to his back. He began to get to his feet. He shuddered at the state of his clothing and was glad there were no witnesses to their coming ashore. The Rose appeared unaffected by their adventure. Taking his hand she waded briskly through the shallows and brought them up to the tufted dunes. A light wind blew the sand in rivulets through the grass.
‘The meat boat was accepted and we were not. Whose sacrifice?’ She pointed. ‘See! We have Biloxi that way, New Orleans the other! We shall go to the Terminal, Sam. I have a purpose there.’
‘I cannot go there yet,’ he told her. ‘I must go to New Orleans. Is it too much for me to learn? Too much that is novel and incomprehensible?’
‘Ah, no, Sam. You already know it in your bones. Come on to Biloxi, mon brave. Later, maybe, you go to New Orleans, when I can come with you.’ Standing against the yellow dunes, her hair still wild, a red haze in the wind, human in form but radiating the quintessence of the rose, all its exquisite beauty, Mrs von Bek made no indirect attempt to persuade him, either by gesture or word, and for that he loved her without reserve.
‘You must go alone to Biloxi,’ he said. ‘There is a price for our salvation and I return to New Orleans to pay it.’
‘Oh, don’t go, Sam.’ Clearly she found this request almost distasteful, though she had to make it. ‘Are you sure this is nothing more than your own addiction?’
‘On my honour, I swore to help you. On my honour, I must keep my bargain with those who helped me fulfil that pledge to you.’
She accepted this in silence, but it seemed to him that he had wounded her or that she disbelieved him. He said more softly:
‘I will meet you at the Terminal. It is not my life I owe them, but my respect. I must acknowledge their sacrifice. Courageously they defied their most powerful taboos to do what I asked of them. And here we are, Rose, thanks to their courage.’
‘And ours, Sam. I would return with you now, but I, too, am bound to a promise. If I lived after my business with Mr Minct I said I would deliver a message to Mr Jack Karaquazian at the Terminal Café. So I must make my way there and, yes, I will wait for you, Sam, at least until the boredom grows intolerable.’ She smiled. ‘Yes, I will meet you again, whenever our luck will have it so. Then, I hope, you will want to come with me beyond the colour fields, beyond the universe known as The Grail, to the wonders of the Second Ether, where plurality forever holds sway. There you will discover what it is to be jugaderos and paramours, Sam. What it is to be alive! There’s more than me in this for you, Sam.’ Her lips released a sigh.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think you will not forget me, Rose. You know who I am.’
‘By and large, Sam.’ She turned away.
As he put the Rose, the ocean and the dunes at his back and took the broken old road towards Louisiana, her voice returned to him on the wind.
‘Ma romance, nouvelle romance. Ma romancier, muy necromancier. Ma histoire, muy histoire nouvelle. Joli boys all dansez. Joli boys all dansez. Sing for me, ole, ole. But they shall not have muy vieux carre. Joli garçon sans merci. Pauvre pierrot, mon vieux, mon brave. Petitpierrot, mon sweet savage. Le monde estfou. El mundo c’est moi.’
There was to be a final miracle: It seemed to him that the distant yell of the Biloxi Fault took fresh harmonics from the Rose’s song and amplified and modified it until for a while a vast unearthly orchestra played the old tune, told the old story of lies and truth, of betrayals and sacrifices, of quests and oaths, of love and loss and resolutions that are not always tragic. The old story which is echoed by our own.