"I know what he said. I heard that too. I have very sharp ears. I also have a strong will. I was not ready to die."
"So you heard but you couldn't act for yourself9"
"Exactly so. I'd lost my will to his suit." "So you were hurting."
"Oh yes. I was hurting." Fee lifted his right hand into view. Two of his six fingers were reduced to gummy stumps. "And I would have gladly killed the man, when I woke."
"Why didn't you?" "He is mighty, Afrique, now he's back in b'Kether Sabbat. While I am very far from home." He looked past Joe now, towards the sea.
"There are no ships, Wexel."
"What about The Fanacapan?"
"I saw it sink." He took the news philosophically. "Ah. So perhaps I did not outlive the others so that I could go home." He made the first smile Joe had seen on this woeful road. "Perhaps I tried to meet you again, Afrique."
"My name's Joe."
"I heard my enemy call you by that name," Fee replied. "Therefore I cannot use it. This is the etiquette in my country. So I will call you Afrique." Joe didn't much like the dubbing, but this was no time to offend the man. "And I will come with you, back to b'Kether Sabbat. Yes?"
"I'd certainly like your company," Joe said. "But why would you want to come?"
"Because there are no ships. Because I found you in a crowd of ten thousand souls. And because you may be able to do what I could not."
"Kill Noah."
"From your lips, Afrique. From your lips." caravan that descended the steep hill from the house on Canning Street was nine souls strong. Phoebe and Musnakaff, both on foot, Maeve O'Connell, traveling in an elaborate sedan chair, home by four sizable men, plus an individual leading the way and one tagging along behind, both of them very conspicu ously armed. When Phoebe remarked upon this Musnakaff simply said, "these are dangerous days. Who knows what's loose?" which was not the most reassuring of replies.
"Come walk alongside me," Maeve said as they went. "It's time you kept your side of the bargain. Tell me about the Cosm. No, forget the Cosm. Just tell me about my city." "First," said Phoebe, "I've got a question."
"What is it?"
"Why did you dream this city instead of another Everville?"
"I was a child in Liverpool, and full of hope. I remember it fondly. I didn't remember Everville the same way."
"But you still want to know what's happened to it?" Phoebe pointed out.
"So I do," Maeve replied. "Now tell."
Without knowing what aspects of Evervillian life would most interest the woman, Phoebe began a scattershot account of life at home. The Festival, the problems with the post office, the library annex, Jed Gilholly, the restaurants on Main Street, Kitty's Diner, the Old Schoolhouse and the collection it contained, the problems with the sewage system "Wait, wait," Maeve said. "Go back a little. You spoke of a collection."
"Yes-"
"It's about the history of Everville, you say?"
"That's right." "And you're familiar with it?"
"I wouldn't say-"
"Yet you didn't know who I was," Maeve said, her face more pinched than ever. "I find that strange." Phoebe kept her silence. "Tell me, what do they say about the way Everville was founded?"
"I don't exactly remember," Phoebe replied.
Suddenly, the virago started to yell. "Stop! Everybody stop!" The little procession came to a ragged halt. Maeve leaned out of her chair and beckoned Phoebe closer.
"Now listen, woman," Maeve said. "I thought we had a bargain."
'We do."
"So why aren't you telling me the truth? Hub?" "I... don't want to hurt your feelings," Phoebe said.
"Mary, mother of God, I've sufferings to my name the likes of which-" She stopped, and started to pull at the collar of her robe. Musnakaff started to say something about not catching cold, but she gave him such a venomous look he was instantly silenced. "Look at this," she said to Phoebe, exposing her neck. There was a grievous scar running all the way around her neck. "You know what that is?"
""It looks like-well it looks like somebody tried to hang you.
"they tried and they succeeded. Left me swinging from a tree, along with my child and my husband."
Phoebe was appalled. "Why?" she said.
"Because they hated us and wanted to be rid of us," Maeve said.
"Musnakaff? Cover me up!" He instantly set to doing so, while Maeve continued her story. "I had a very strange, sour child," she said, "who loved nothing in all the world. Certainly not me. Nor his father. And over the years people came to hate him in return. As soon as they had reason to lynch him, they took it, and took my poor husband too. Coker wasn't of the Cosm, you see. He'd come there for my sake, and he learned to be more human than human, but they still sniffed something in him they didn't like. As for me-" She turned her head from Phoebe and peered down the hill.
"As for you?" Phoebe said.
"I was what they wanted to forget. I was there at the beginning-no, that's not right-I was the beginning. I was Everville, sure as if it had been built of my bones. And it didn't suit the Brawleys and the Gilhollys and the Hendersons and all the other fine upstanding families to remember that."
"So they murdered you for it?"
"they turned a blind eye to a lynching," Maeve said. "That's murder, I'd say."
"Why aren't you dead?"
"Because the bough broke. Simple as that. My sweet, loving Coker was not so lucky. His bough was strong, and by the time I came out of my faint he was cold."
"That's horrible."
"I never felt love for any creature the way I felt love for him," Maeve said. As she spoke Phoebe felt a mild tremor in the ground.
Musnakaff apparently felt it too. He turned to his mistress with a look of alan-n. "Maybe it would be best not to speak of this," he said. "Not out in the open."
"Oh pish!" Maeve said to him. "He wouldn't dare touch me. Not for telling what he knows is the truth."
The exchange puzzled Phoebe, but she didn't let it distract her from her questions.
"What about your son?" Phoebe said. "What happened to him?"
"His body was taken by beasts. He always had a stench to him. I daresay he made a better meal than Coker or me." She pondered for a moment.
"This is a terrible thing to say about your own flesh and blood, but the fact is, my son was not long for this world one way or another."
"was he sick?" "In his head, yes. And in his heart. Something in him had curdled when he was a child, and I thought for the longest time he was a cretin. I gave up trying to teach him anything. But there was malice in him, I think: terrible malice. And he was best dead." She gave Phoebe a sorrowful look. "Do you have children?" she said.
"No." "Count yourself lucky," Maeve replied.
Then, abruptly shaking off her melancholy tone, she waved Phoebe away, shouting, "Rouse yourselves!" to her bearers, and the convoy went on its way, down the steep hill.
The state of the dream-sea had changed considerably in the hours in which Phoebe had been a guest in Maeve's house. The ships in the harbor no longer lay peaceably at anchor, but pitched and bucked, tearing at their moorings like panicked thoroughbreds. The beacons that had been burning at the harbor entrance had been extinguished by the fury of the waves, which mounted steadily as the party descended. "I begin to think I'll not be able to keep my end of the bargain," Maeve said to Phoebe once they were on flat ground.
"Why not?"
"Use your eyes," Maeve replied, pointing down towards the beach, where the breakers were ten or twelve feet high. "I don't think I'll be speaking to the 'shu down there."