Six
"Lucky Joe," said the face looming over Phoebe. It was as cracked as Unger's Creek in a drought.
Phoebe raised her head off the hard pillow. "What about him?"
"I'm just saying, he's damn lucky, the way you talk about him."
"What was I saying?"
"Mostly just his name," King Texas replied.
She looked past his muddy shoulder. The cave behind him was vast, and filled with people, standing, sitting, lying down.
"Did they hear me?" she asked Texas.
He smiled conspiratorially. "No," he said. "Only me."
"Have I broken any bones?" she said, looking down at her body.
"Nothing," he said. "I'd never let a woman's blood be spilled down here."
"What is it? Bad luck?"
"The worst," he said. "The very worst."
"What about MusnakaflP"
"What about him?"
"Did he survive?" King Texas shook his head. "So you saved me but not him?"
"I warned her, didn't I?" he said, almost petulantly. "I said I'd kill him if she didn't turn back."
"He wasn't to blame."
"And neither am I," Texas said. "She's the trouble. Always was."
"So why don't you just put her out of your mind? You've got plenty of company."
"No I don't."
"What about them?" she said, pointing to the assembly on his back.
"Look again," he said.
Puzzled, she sat up, and scanning the assembly, realized her error. What she had taken to be a congregation of living souls was in fact a crowd of sculptures, some set with fragments of glittering ore, some roughly hewn from blocks of stone, some barely human in shape.
"Who made them?" she said. "You?"
"Who else?" "You really are alone down here?"
"Not by choice. But yes."
"So you made these to keep you company?"
"No. they were my attempts to find some form that would win Mistress O'Connell's affections."
Phoebe swung her legs off the bed and got to her feet. "Is it all right if I look at them?" she asked him.
"Help yourself," he told her, standing aside. Then, as she walked past him he murmured, "I could forbid you nothing."
She pretended not to hear the remark, suspecting it would only open a subject she was not willing to address.
"Did she ever see any of these faces?" she asked him, wandering between the statues.
"One or two," he replied, somewhat mournfully. "But none of them made any impression upon her."
"Maybe you misunderstood-" Phoebe began.
"Misunderstood what?"
"The reason she doesn't care for you any longer. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the way you look. She's halfblind anyway."
"So what does she want from me?" King Texas wailed. "I built her highways. I built her a harbor. I leveled the ground so that she could dream her city into being."
"was she beautiful?" Phoebe said.
"Never."
"Not even a little?"
"No. She was antiquated even when I met her. And she'd just been hanged. Filthy, foul-mouthed-"
"But?"
"But what?"
"There was something you loved."
"Oh yes... " he said softly.
"What?"
"The fire in her, for one. The appetite in her. And the stories of course." "She told good stories?"
"She's got Irish blood, so of course." He smiled to himself. "That's how she made the city," he explained. "She told it. Night after night. Sat on the ground and told it. Then she'd sleep, and in the morning what she'd told would be there. The houses. The monuments. The pigeons. The smell of fish. The fogs. The smoke. That's how she made it all. Stories and dreams. Dreams and stories. It was wonderful to watch. I think I was never so much in love as those mornings, getting up and seeing what she'd made."
Listening to his reverie, Phoebe found herself warming to him. He was probably a fool for love, just as Maeve had said, and clearly that had made him a little crazed, but she understood that feeling well enough.
There was a rumbling now, from somewhere up above them. A patter of dust fell from the cracked ceiling.
"The lad has arrived," he said. "Oh my God."
His pebble eyes rolled in his sockets. "I think it's overturning her city," he said. There was a calm sadness in his voice.
"I don't want to be buried down here."
"You're not going to die," he said. "What I told Maeve is true. The lad will pass over, but the rock will remain. You're safe here with me."
The tremors came again. Phoebe shuddered. "Come into my ar7ns if you're nervous," Texas said. '
"I'm okay," she replied. "But I would like to see what's going on up there."
"Easy," he replied. "Come with me."
As he led her through the labyrinth of his kingdom@n the walls of which he'd configured and reconfigured his face ten thousand times, rehearsing it for a love scene he'd now never play-he meditated aloud about life in the rock. But with the turmoil from above escalating with every stride she took, and the walls creaking and stones pattering down, she caught only fragments of what he was saying.
"It's not solid at all," he said at one point, "everything flows, if you watch it for long enough...
And a little later: "A fossil heart, that's what I've got... ut it still aches and aches... "
And later stilclass="underline" "San Antonio is the place to die. I wish I had flesh still, to lay down in the Alamo... Finally, after maybe ten minutes of such bits and pieces, he led her into a sizable chamber, the entire floor of which was raked and polished. There, in the very ground beneath her feet, was a periscopic reflection of what was going on above ground- It was an awe-inspiring sight: the seething darkness of the lad's body invading the streets of the city she'd been walking in just hours before, carrying before it remnants of the places it had laid waste on its way here. She saw a head lopped from some titanic statue rolling down one of the streets, felling entire buildings as it went. She saw what looked to be a small island deposited in the middle of a city square. Several ships had come to rest among the spires of the cathedral, and their sails had unfurled as if to bear it away before the next wind.
And among this debris, in numbers beyond counting, were creatures trawled from the depths of the dream-sea by the lad's passage. The least of them were fantasias on the theme of fish: gleaming shoals of visionary life, thrown up in waves above the city's roofs, then falling in glorious profusion. Far more extraordinary were the creatures drawn up, Phoebe supposed, from Quiddity's deepest trenches, their forms inspired by (or inspirations for) the tales of mariners the world over. was that glistening coil not a sea-serpent, its eyes burning like twin furnaces in its hooded head? And that beast wrapping its arms around the masks of a grounded cutter, was that not the mother of all octopi?
"Damn it," King Texas said. "I never liked competing with that city of hers for her attention, but this is no way for t to end."
Phoebe said nothing. Her gaze had gone from the debris to the lad itself. What she saw put her in mind of a disease-a terrible, implacable, devouring disease. It had no face. It had no malice. It had no guilt. Perhaps it didn't even have a mind. It came because it could; because nothing stopped it.
"It's going to destroy Everville," she said to Texas.
"Maybe.
"There's no maybe about it," she protested.
"Why should you care?" he said. "You don't love it there, do you?"
"No," Phoebe said. "But I don't want to see it destroyed either."
"You don't have to," Texas said. "You're here with me.
Phoebe pondered this a moment. Plainly she wasn't going to get him to intervene on her behalf. But maybe there was another way. "If I were Maeve-2' she began.