"This place looks strange," Esme said. "What is it?"
"We're passing through the Whinny Moor Landfill, little grandmother. It's the largest artificial structure in the world. If you could fly with the wings of a roc, you could see it from outer space." Nat settled back in his seat. "Well. Now that we're all one happy family, I propose that we shorten the journey by telling stories. About ourselves, and where we came from."
"I haven't agreed to anything yet."
"Ah, but wait until you hear my story. That'll convince you." "All right," Will said. "I'm listening."
I was a gentleman in Babel once (Nat began) and not the scoundrel you see before you now. I ate from a silver trencher, and I speared my food with a gold knife If I had to take a leak in the middle of the night, there were two servants to hold the bedpan and a third to shake my stick afterwards. It was no life for a man of my populist sensibilities. So one day I climbed out a window when nobody was looking and escaped.
You who had the good fortune of king born without wealth can have no idea how it felt. The streets were a kaleidoscope of pedestrians, and I was one of them, a moving speck of color, neither better nor worse than anyone else, and blissfully ignored by all. I was dizzy with excitement. My hands kept rising into the air like birds. My eyes danced to and fro, entranced by everything they saw. It was glorious.
Down one street I went, turned a corner at random, and so by Brownian motion chanced upon a train station where I took a local to ground level. More purposefully then, I caught a rickshaw to the city limits and made my way outside.
The trooping fairies had come to Babel and set up a goblin market just outside the Ivory Gate. Vendors sold shish kebab and cotton candy. T-shirts and pashmina scarfs, gris gris bags and enchanted swords, tame magpies and Fast Luck Uncrossing Power vigil candles. Cupie dolls and 1:6 scale tooled-leather camel figurines with sequined harnesses. Charango players filled the air with music. I could not have been happier.
"Hey, shithead! Yeah, you — the ass with the ears! Listen when a lady speaks to you!"
I looked around
"Up here, Solomon!"
The voice came from a booth whose brightly painted arch read ROCK! THE! FOX! At the end of a long canvas-walled alley, a vixen grinned at me from an elevated cage, her front feet tucked neatly under her and her black tongue lolling. Seeing she'd caught my eye, she leaped up and began padding quickly from one end of the cage to the other, talking all the while. "Faggot! Bed-wetter! Asshole! Your dick is limp and you throw like a girl!"
"Three for a dollar," a follet said, holding up a baseball. Then, mistaking my confusion for skepticism, he added, "Perfectly honest, monsieur," and lightly tossed the ball into the cage. The vixen nimbly evaded it, then nosed it back out between the bars so that it fell to the ground below. "Hit the fox and win a prize."
There was a trick to it, I later learned. Though they looked evenly spaced, only the one pair of bars was wide enough that a baseball could get through. All the vixen had to do was avoid that spot and she was as safe as houses. But even without knowing the game was rigged, I didn't want to play. I was tilled with an irrational love for everyone and everything. Today of all days, I would not see a fellow creature locked in a cage.
"How much for the vixen?" I asked.
"C'est impossible," the follet said. "She has a mouth on her, sir. You wouldn't want her."
By then I had my wallet out. "Take it all." The follrt's eyes grew large as dinner plates, and by this token I knew that I overpaid. But after all, I reasoned, I had plenty more in my carpetbag.
After the follet had opened the cage and made a fast fade, the vixen genuflected at my feet. Wheedlingly, she said, "I didn't mean none of them things I said, master. That was just patter, you know. Now that I'm yours, I'll serve you faithfully. Command and I'll obey. I shall devote my life to your welfare, if you but allow me to."
I put down my bag so I could remove the vixen's slave collar. Gruffly, I said, "I don't want your obedience. Do whatever you want, obey me in no matters, don't give a thought to my gods-be-damned welfare. You're free now."
"You can't mean that," the vixen said, shocked.
"I can and I do. So if you—"
"Sweet Mother of Beasts!" the vixen gasped, staring over my shoulder. "Look out!"
I whirled around, but there was nothing behind me but more booths and fair-goers. Puzzled, I turned back to the vixen, only to discover that she was gone.
And she had stolen my bag.
So it was that I came to learn exactly how freedom tastes when you haven't any money. Cursing the vixen and my own gullibility with equal venom, I put the goblin market behind me. Somehow I wound upon the bank of the Gihon. There I struck up a conversation with a waterman who motored me out to the docks and put me onto a tug-boat captained by a friend of his. It was hauling a garbage scow upriver to Whinny Moor.
As it turned out, the landfill was no good place to be let off. Though there were roads leading up into the trashlands, there were none that led onward, along the river, where I wanted to go. And the smell! Indescribable.
A clutch of buildings huddled by the docks in the shadow of a garbage promontory. These were garages for the dump trucks mostly, but also Quonset hut repair and storage facilities and a few leftover brownstones with their windows bricked over that were used for offices and the like. One housed a bar with a sputtering neon sign saying BRIG-O-DOOM. In the parking lot behind it was, incongruously enough, an overflowing dumpster.
Here it was I fetched up.
I had never been hungry before, you must understand — not real, gnaw-at-your-belly hungry. I'd skipped breakfast that morning in my excitement over leaving, and I'd had the lightest of dinners the day before. On the tugboat I'd watched the captain slowly cat two sandwiches and an apple and been too proud to beg a taste from him. What agonies I suffered when he threw the apple core overboard! And now...
Now, to my horror, I found myself moving toward the dumpster. I turned away in disgust when I saw a rat skitter out from behind it. But it called me back. I was like a moth that's discovered a candle. I hoped there would be food in the dumpster, and I feared that if there were I would eat it.
It was then, in that darkest of hours, that I heard the one voice I had expected never to hear again. "Hey, shit-for brains! Aintcha gonna say you're glad to see me?"
Crouched atop a nearby utility truck was the vixen.
"You!" I cried, but did not add you foul creature, as my instincts bade me. Already, poverty was teaching me politesse. "How did you follow me here?"
"Oh. I have my ways."
Hope fluttered in my chest like a wild bird. "Do you still have my bag?"
"Of course I don't. What would a fox do with luggage? I threw it away. But I kept the key. Wasn't I a good girl?" She dipped her head and a small key on a loop of string slipped from her neck and fell to the tarmac with a light tinkle.
"Idiot fox!" I cried. "What possible good is a key to a bag I no longer own?"
She told me.
The Brig o' Doom was a real dive. There was a black-and-white television up in one corner tuned to the fights and a pool table with ripped felt to the back. On the door for the toilets, some joker had painted Tir na bOg in crude white letters. I sat down at the bar. "Beer," I told the tappie.
"Red Stripe or Dragon Stout?"
"Surprise me."
When my drink came, I downed half of it in a single draft. It made my stomach ache and my head spin, but I didn't mind. It was the first sustenance I'd had in twenty six hours. Then I turned around on the stool and addressed the bar as a whole: "I'm looking for a guide. Someone who can take me to a place in the landfill that I've seen in a vision. A place by a stream where garbage bags float up to the surface and burst with a terrible stench—"