"Listen to that."
The activity in the air and the grass had steadily increased as they approached the copse, but with the wind blowing in the opposite direction the din of such an assembly as was gathered there had not been audible until now.
"Birds and bees," Monday remarked. "And a fuck of a lot of 'em."
As they continued their advance, the scale of the parliament ahead steadily became more apparent. Though the moonlight did not pierce the foliage very deeply, it was clear that every branch of every tree around the Retreat, to the tiniest twiglet, was occupied with birds. The smell of their massing pricked their nostrils; its din, their ears.
"We're going to get our heads right royally shat on," Monday said. "Either that or we'll get stung to death."
The insects were by now a living veil between them and the copse, so thick that they gave up attempting to flail it aside after a few strides and bore the deaths on their brows and cheeks, and the countless flutterings in their hair, in order to pick up speed and dash for their destination. There were birds in the grass now, commoners among the parliament, denied a seat on the branches. They rose in a squawking cloud before the runners, and their alarm caused consternation in the trees. A thunderous ascent began, the mass of life so vast that the violence of its motion beat the tender leaves down. By the time Jude and Monday reached the corner of the copse, they were running through a double rain: one green and falling, the other rising and feathered.
Picking up her pace, Jude overtook Monday and headed around the Retreat—the walls of which were black with insects—to the door. At the threshold, she halted. There was a small fire burning inside, built close to the edge of the mosaic.
"Some bugger got here first," Monday remarked.
"I don't see anyone."
He pointed to a bundle lying on the floor beyond the fire. His eyes, more accustomed than hers to seeing life in rags, had found the fire maker. She stepped into the Retreat, knowing before he raised his head who this creature was. How could she not? Three times before—once here, once in Yzordderrex, and once, most recently, in the Tabula Rasa's tower—this man had made an unexpected arrival, as though to prove what he'd claimed not so long ago: that their lives would be perpetually interwoven, because they were the same.
"Dowd?"
He didn't move.
"Knife," she said to Monday.
He passed it over and, armed, she advanced across the Retreat towards the bundle. Dowd's hands were crossed on his chest, as though he expected to expire where he lay. His eyes were closed, but they were the only part of his face that was. Almost every other inch had been laid open by Celestine's assault, and despite his legendary powers of recuperation he'd been unable to make good the damage done. He was unmasked to the bone. Yet he breathed, albeit weakly, and moaned to himself now and then, as though dreaming of punishment or revenge. She was half tempted to kill him in his sleep and have this bitter business brought to an end on the spot. But she was curious to know why he was here. Had he attempted to return to Yzordderrex, and failed, or was he expecting someone to come back this way and meet him here? Either could be significant in these volatile times, and though in her present venomous state she felt perfectly capable of dispatching him, he'd always been an agent in the dealings of greater souls and might still have some fragment of use as a messenger. She went down on her haunches beside him and spoke his name above the din of birds coming back to roost on the roof. He opened his eyes only slowly, adding their glisten to the wetness of his features.
"Look at you," he said. "You're radiant, lovey." It was a line from a boulevard comedy, and despite his wretched condition he spoke it with elan. "I, of course, look like ordure. Will you come closer to me? I don't have the energy for volume."
She hesitated to comply. Though he was on the verge of extinction, he had boundless capacity for malice in him and, with the Pivot's sloughings still fixed in his flesh, the power to do harm.
"I can hear you perfectly well where I am," she said.
"I'm good for a hundred words at this volume," he bargained. "Twice that at a whisper."
"What have we got left to say to each other?"
"Ah," he said. "So much. You think you've heard everybody's stories, don't you? Mine. Sartori's. Godolphin's. Even the Reconciler's, by now. But you're missing one."
"Oh, am I?" she said, not much caring. "Whose is that?"
"Come closer."
"I'll hear it from here or not at all."
He looked at her beadily. "You're a bitch, you really are."
"And you're wasting words. If you've got something to say, say it. Whose story am I missing?"
He bided his time before replying, to squeeze what little drama he could out of this. Finally, he said, "The Father's."
"What father?"
"Is there more than one? Hapexamendios. The Aboriginal. The Unbeheld. He of the First Dominion."
"You don't know that story," she said.
He reached up with sudden speed, and his hand was clamped around her arm before she could move out of range. Monday saw the attack and came running, but she halted him before he plowed into Dowd and sent him back to sit by the fire.
"It's all right," she told him. "He's not going to hurt me. Are you?" She studied Dowd. "Well, are you?" she said again. "You can't afford to lose me. I'm the last audience you'll have, and you know it. If you don't tell this story to me, you're not going to tell it to anybody. Not this side of Hell."
The man quietly conceded her point. "True," he said.
"So tell. Unburden yourself."
He drew a laborious breath; then he began.
"I saw Him once, you know," he said. "The Father of the Imajica. He came to me in the desert."
"He appeared in person, did He?" she said, her skepticism plain.
"Not exactly. I heard Him speaking out of the First. But I saw hints, you know, in the Erasure."
"And what did He look like?"
"Like a man, from what I could see."
"Or what you imagined."
"Maybe I did," Dowd said. "But I didn't imagine what He told me—"
"That He'd raise you up. Make you His procurer. You've told me all this before, Dowd."
"Not all of it," he said. "When I'd seen Him, I came back to the Fifth, using feits He'd whispered to me to cross the In Ovo, and I searched the length and breadth of London for a woman to be blessed among women."
"And you found Celestine?"
"Yes. I found Celestine—at Tyburn, as a matter of fact— watching a hanging. I don't know why I chose her. Perhaps because she laughed so hard when the man kissed the noose, and I thought, She's no sentimentalist, this woman; she won't weep and wail if she's taken into another Dominion. She wasn't beautiful, even then, but she had a clarity, you know? Some actresses have it. The great ones, anyway. A face that could carry extremes of emotion and not look bathetic. Maybe I was a little infatuated with her...." He shivered. "I was capable of that when I was younger. So ... I made myself known to her, and told her I wanted to show her a living dream, the like of which she'd never forget. She resisted at first, but I could have talked the face off the moon in those days, and she let me drug her with sways and take her away. It was a hell of a journey. Four months, across the Dominions. But I got her there eventually, back to the Erasure...."
"And what happened?"
"It opened."
"And?"
"I saw the City of God."
Here at least was something she wanted to know about. "What was it like?" she said.
"It was just a glimpse—"
Having denied him her proximity for so long, she leaned towards him and repeated her question inches from his ravaged face. "What was it like?"