—
LOKUM AGREED to marry the tyrant on the condition that there would be no more drownings, and he sent Eirini the First and Eirini the Fair across the border and into a neighboring country so that he could begin his new life free of their awkward presence. After a long absence, the tyrant appeared before Arkady to tell him this news, and to inform him that he’d lost the key to Arkady’s cell. The key couldn’t be recut either, since he’d had the only man with the requisite expertise drowned a few years back. Lokum had a point about the drownings being counterproductive, the tyrant realized. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Maybe it’ll turn up again one of these days. But if you think about it you were going to be here for life anyhow.”
“No problem,” Arkady said. And since it was looking as if this was the last time the tyrant was going to visit him, he added casually: “Give my regards to Lokum.”
The tyrant looked over at the prison guards, to check whether they had seen and heard what he’d just seen and heard. “Did he just lick his lips?” he asked, in shock. The guards claimed they couldn’t confirm this, as they’d been scanning the surrounding area for possible threats.
—
“HMMM… SPRING the lock so that the cell kills him,” the tyrant ordered as he left. The guards unanimously decided to sleep on this order; it wasn’t unheard of for the tyrant to rethink his decisions. The following day the tyrant still hadn’t sent word, so the guards decided to sleep on it another night, and another, until they were able to admit to themselves and to each other that they just weren’t going to follow orders this time. Their first step toward rebellion, finding out that disobedience didn’t immediately bring about the end of the world… the prison guards cautiously went into dialogue with their counterparts at the palace and at border crossings, and a quiet, steady exodus began.
—
THE NEIGHBORING countries welcomed the escapees, and with them the opportunity to remove the tyrant’s power at the same time as playing a prank on him by helping to empty out his territory. If the tyrant noticed that the streets were quieter than usual, he simply said to himself: “Huh, I suppose I really did have a lot of these people drowned, didn’t I…” It probably wouldn’t have helped him one way or the other to notice that as the living people left, the marshland stretched out farther and farther, slowly pulling houses and cinemas, greengrocers, restaurants, and concert halls down into the water. If you looked down into the swamps (which he never did) it was possible to see people untangling their limbs and hair, courteously handing each other body parts and keys, resuming residence in their homes, working out what crops they might raise and which forms of energy they could harness.
—
MEANWHILE THE TYRANT was congratulating himself for having dealt with Arkady. He had disliked the way Lokum had begged for Arkady’s life, and cared even less for her expression upon being told her pleas came too late. He didn’t think they’d had a love affair (that lanky pyromaniac could only dream of being worthy of Lokum’s attention), but Lokum’s behavior was too similar to that of the man Eirini the First loved. What was wrong with these people?
—
THE TYRANT set Lokum alight on their wedding day. Thanks to Arkady, fire had risen to the top of his list of elimination methods. He forced her to walk to the end of the longest bridge spanning the marshlands, and he drenched her in petrol and struck a flame. He’d given no real thought to decreasing his own flammability, so the event was referred to as an attempted murder-suicide. “Attempted” because when he tried to run away, the burning woman ran after him, shouting that she’d just that moment discovered something very interesting; he couldn’t kill her, he could never kill her… she took him in her arms and fed him to the fire he’d started. There was still quite a lot of him left when he jumped into the swamp, but the drowned held grudges and heaved him out onto land again, where he lay roasting to death while his bride strolled back toward the city, peeling blackened patches of wedding dress off her as she went. She put on some other clothes and took food to the prison where Arkady sat alone contemplating the large heap of questionable publications the guards had left him on their departure. Before Arkady could thank Lokum for the food (and, he hoped, her company) she said, “Wait a minute,” and ran off again, returning an hour later with his two friends. Leporello shook Arkady’s hand and Giacomo licked his face; this was a joke they’d vowed they’d make the next time they saw Arkady, and they thought it rather a good one. Arkady called out his thanks to Lokum, but she had no intention of staying this time either: “We’ve got to get you out of there,” she said, and left again.
“It’s autumn, isn’t it?” Arkady asked Giacomo. He’d seen that Giacomo’s shoes and Leporello’s feet were soaking wet too, but he wanted to finish eating before he asked about that.
“Yes! How did you know?”
“I don’t know. Could you bring me some leaves? Just a handful…”
Giacomo brought armfuls of multicolored leaves, and Leporello rushed through them like a blizzard so that the richest reds and browns flew in through the prison bars.
“Giacomo?”
“Yes, Arkady?”
“Is it right for me to escape this place? Those people where we used to live—”
“There was a fire and they couldn’t get out. They would have got out if they could, but they couldn’t, and that’s what killed them. If you can escape then you should.”
“But am I to blame?”
Giacomo didn’t say yes or no, but attempted to balance a leaf on the tip of Leporello’s nose.
—
WHAT ABOUT EIRINI the Fair? For months she’d been living quite happily in a big city where most of the people she met were just as vague as she was, if not more so. She ran a small and cozy drinking establishment and passed her days exchanging little-known facts with customers in between attending to the finer details of business management. Her mother had drowned soon after their arrival in the new city: This might have been an accident, but Eirini thought not. The river Danube ran through her new city of residence, and her mother had often said that if she could drown in any river in the world she wished for it to be the Danube, a liquid road that would take her body to the Carpathians and onward until it met the Iskar as it crossed the Balkan mountains, washing her and washing her until she lost all scent of the life she’d lived. Then let the Iskar take her to lie on beds of tiny white flowers in old, old glades, high up on the slopes. Or if she stayed with the Danube, let it draw her along miles and miles of canals to collect pine needles in the Black Forest. As many as her lap could hold…
Thinking of her mother’s words, Eirini the Fair had journeyed farther up the river and given the ashes into its care. Arrivals from her father’s territory frequented her bar and freely cursed the tyrant’s name as they told tales that intrigued her. If what these people were saying was true, then the tyrant’s drownings had come to an end. It was said that her father’s territory was mostly underwater now, that there was no king, no flag, and no soldiers, that there were only cities of the drowned, who looked as if they were having a good time down there. Eirini the Fair heard that one of the only pieces of land yet to be submerged was notable for having a large prison on it. The man who told Eirini this paused for a moment before asking if he could buy her a drink, and she left an even longer pause before accepting. He was handsome but the scent of his cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks. Even so, can’t loan sharks also be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?