‘I don’t have any choice in the matter.’ She bent to him, pushing back her hair so it wouldn’t hang in his face, kissed his cheek, his eyes.
He started to say something, then laughed weakly, and she asked him what he found amusing.
‘I was thinking about free will,’ he said. ‘How improbable a concept that’s become. Here. Where it’s so obviously not an option.’
She settled down beside him, weary of trying to boost his spirits. She remembered how he’d been after his arrivaclass="underline" eager, alive, and full of curiosity despite his injuries. Now his moments of greatest vitality – like this one – were spent in sardonic rejection of happy possibility. She was tired of arguing with him, of making the point that everything in life could be reduced by negative logic to a sort of pitiful reflex, if that was the way you wanted to see it. His voice grew stronger, this prompted – she knew – by a rush of the stimulant within his system.
‘It’s Griaule,’ he said. ‘Everything here belongs to him, even to the most fleeting of hopes and wishes. What we feel, what we think. When I was a student and first heard about Griaule, about his method of dominion, the omnipotent functioning of his will, I thought it was foolishness pure and simple. But I was an optimist, then. And optimists are only fools without experience. Of course I didn’t think of myself as an optimist. I saw myself as a realist. I had a romantic notion that I was alone, responsible for my actions, and I perceived that as being a noble beauty, a refinement of the tragic . . . that state of utter and forlorn independence. I thought how cozy and unrealistic it was for people to depend on gods and demons to define their roles in life. I didn’t know how terrible it would be to realize that nothing you thought or did had any individual importance, that everything – love, hate, your petty likes and dislikes – was part of some unfathomable scheme. I couldn’t comprehend how worthless that knowledge would make you feel.’
He went on in this vein for some time, his words weighing on her, filling her with despair, pushing hope aside. Then, as if this monologue had aroused some bitter sexuality, he began to make love to her. She felt removed from the act, imprisoned within walls erected by his dour sentences; but she responded with desperate enthusiasm, her own arousal funded by a desolate prurience. She watched his spread-fingered hands knead and cup her breasts, actions that seemed to her as devoid of emotional value as those of a starfish gripping a rock; and yet because of this desolation, because she wanted to deny it and also because of the voyeuristic thrill she derived from watching herself being taken, used, her body reacted with unusual fervor. The sweaty film between them was like a silken cloth, and their movements seemed more accomplished and supple than ever before; each jolt of pleasure brought her to new and dizzying heights. But afterward she felt devastated and defeated, not loved, and lying there with him, listening to the muted gabble of the Feelys from without, bathed in their rich stench, she knew she had come to the nadir of her life, that she had finally united with the Feelys in their enactment of a perturbed and animalistic rhythm.
Over the next ten days she set the plan into motion. She took to dispensing little sweet cakes to the Feelys who guarded her on her daily walks with John, ending up each time at the channel that led to the ghostvine. And she also began to spread the rumor that at long last her study of the dragon was about to yield its promised revelation. On the day of the escape, prior to going forth, she stood at the bottom of the chamber, surrounded by hundreds of Feelys, more hanging on ropes just above her, and called out to them in ringing tones, ‘Today I will have word for you! Griaule’s word! Bring together the hunters and those who gather food, and have them wait here for me! I will return soon, very soon, and speak to you of what is to come!’
The Feelys jostled and pawed one another, chattering, tittering, hopping up and down, and some of those hanging from the ropes were so overcome with excitement that they lost their grip and fell, landing atop their fellows, creating squirming heaps of Feelys who squalled and yelped and then started fumbling with the buttons of each other’s clothing. Catherine waved at them, and with John at her side, set out toward the cavity, six Feelys with swords at their rear.
John was terribly nervous and all during the walk he kept casting backward glances at the Feelys, asking questions that only served to unnerve Catherine. ‘Are you sure they’ll eat them?’ he said. ‘Maybe they won’t be hungry.’
‘They always eat them while we’re in the channel,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m just . . . I don’t want anything to go wrong.’ He walked another half a dozen paces. ‘Are you sure you put enough in the cakes?’
‘I’m sure.’ She watched him out of the corner of her eye. The muscles in his jaw bunched, nerves twitched in his cheek. A light sweat had broken on his forehead, and his pallor was extreme. She took his arm. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’m fine.’
‘It’s going to work, so don’t worry . . . please.’
‘I’m fine,’ he repeated, his voice dead, eyes fixed straight ahead.
The Feelys came to a halt just around the curve from the channel, and Catherine, smiling at them, handed them each a cake; then she and John went forward and crawled into the channel. There they sat in the darkness without speaking, their hips touching. At last John whispered, ‘How much longer?’
‘Let’s give it a few more minutes . . . just to be safe.’
He shuddered, and she asked again how he felt.
‘A little shaky,’ he said. ‘But I’m all right.’
She put her hand on his arm; his muscles jumped at the touch. ‘Calm down,’ she said, and he nodded. But there was no slackening of his tension.
The seconds passed with the slowness of sap welling from cut bark, and despite her certainty that all would go as planned, Catherine’s anxiety increased. Little shiny squiggles, velvety darknesses blacker than the air, wormed in front of her eyes. She imagined that she heard whispers out in the passage. She tried to think of something else, but the concerns she erected to occupy her mind materialized and vanished with a superficial and formal precision that did nothing to ease her, seeming mere transparencies shunted across the vision of a fearful prospect ahead. Finally she gave John a nudge and they crept from the channel, made their way cautiously along the passage. When they reached the curve beyond which the Feelys were waiting, she paused, listened. Not a sound. She looked out. Six bodies lay by the entrance to the side passage; even at that distance she could spot the half-eaten cakes that had fallen from their hands. Still wary, they approached the Feelys, and as they came near, Catherine thought that there was something unnatural about their stillness. She knelt beside a young male, caught a whiff of loosened bowel, saw the rapt character of death stamped on his features and realized that in measuring out the dosages of brianine in each cake, she had not taken the Feelys’ slightness of build into account. She had killed them.
‘Come on!’ said John. He had picked up two swords; they were so short, they looked toylike in his hands. He handed over one of the swords and helped her to stand. ‘Let’s go . . . there might be more of them!’
He wetted his lips, glanced from side to side. With his sunken cheeks and hollowed eyes, his face had the appearance of a skull, and for a moment, dumbstruck by the realization that she had killed, by the understanding that for all her disparagement of them, the Feelys were human, Catherine failed to recognize him. She stared at them – like ugly dolls in the ruins of their gaud – and felt again that same chill emptiness that had possessed her when she had killed Key Willen. John caught her arm, pushed her toward the side passage; it was covered by a loose flap, and though she had become used to seeing the dragon’s flesh everywhere, she now shrank from touching it. John pulled back the flap, urged her into the passage, and then they were crawling through a golden gloom, following a twisting downward course.