Shaking like a wedding announcement in a misogamist's fist, Alobar examined the shoe, unfolded and reread the note. He turned them over and over. He even sniffed them. There were no marks, no odors, nothing unusual in any way. Yet they had been moved, he was positive of that! The question was, had they been moved during the night — in which case, the perfume was a lure, after all — or sometime during the preceding five months? The light had been so dim, his emotions so swollen on the previous evening that he easily could have overlooked such a slight, though significant, displacement.
Unable to learn anything from the slipper or paper, he scrutinized the room itself, patrolling the carpet, inch by dusty inch. Nothing. The walls, too, were a tabula rasa. When his gaze settled on the fireplace, however, his spine was straightened by a fulminous jolt. On the mantelpiece, next to Kudra's beloved silver teapot, a word had been written in the dust!
Yes, someone, using a fingertip as implement, had plowed a grafitto on the surface of the marble, where the dust lay thick as fur. The script, while instantly familiar, was not Kudra's style, however, nor was the word in her single written language. When Kudra had finally become literate, it was French that she learned to read and write. The word on the mantelpiece was from the Slavo-Nordic tongue that his clan had used to speak of battles, bear hunts, beet harvests, and broken mirrors, and the handwriting was that of the only woman in his kingdom with the ability to write that language: Wren.
For a long time, Alobar just stood there, grasping the mantel ledge for support. So shocked was he by the implications of language and penmanship that he didn't even consider content. When at last he turned his attention to it, his bafflement only increased. The word was a transitive verb, an exclamation, a command, of which an exact English translation is impossible. The closest equivalent probably would be the phrase:
Lighten up!
Lighten up, indeed. Against his better judgment and to Pan's chagrin, Alobar remained in the flat for a week, subsisting on crusts of stale bread and flakes of moldy cheese. Each night he placed the open bottle of K23 in the sitting room, each morning he rushed in and searched for messages in the dust. There were none. That is, there was but one, the one and only: Erleichda. “Lighten up!”
Alobar watched the last grain of green cheese work its way down Pan's invisible gullet while some morbid hymn about the gore of Christ drifted over from across the street. He chewed a mouthful of dried blossoms from the shop's supply. They tasted like Grendel's underpants. He spat them out, wiped his beard with his sleeve, and asked, “What shall we cook for dinner? The drapes?” Had Guy LeFever, who was next door closing his deal with the abbot, overheard him, the businessman might have snapped, “Not drapes, you idiot, draperies. Drape is a verb.” LeFever did not overhear him, but Alobar knew that it was merely a matter of time before one of the monks did hear him, or spot him through a window (the upper ones were not boarded), a prospect that caused his empty stomach to rattle its chains.
He was sitting there in the universal slouch of hopelessness, the old droop of despair, when he felt the pressure of Pan's hand on his arm. The god had never touched him before, and Alobar had to confess that his first reaction was that he must defend himself against intended buggery. Pan simply squeezed him, however, and remarked, “Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth.” Then he walked away, his hooves beating a slow rat-a-tat on the floorboards, pausing to call over his presumed shoulder, “Puny homer.”
That must have done it. Alobar slumped there for another quarter-hour, then rose, bathed, shaved off his tear-encrusted beard, donned his finest clothes, polished his spare boots, pulled on and powdered the frazzled wig that Pan had dragged home from Descartes's funeral, and beckoning to the god, who may or may not have been smiling, slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon.
Packing the perfume, beet distillate, and little else, the pair made its way to Marseilles, where the last ship of the season was preparing to sail for New France.
For more than a decade, the French had dominated the Great Lakes region of what would eventually be called North America, but unlike the English and Spanish, the French tended to view the New World in terms of its spoils — furs, fish, Christian converts, and a possible westward route to the Indies — rather than as a place to build homes, towns, and a new life. Disease, attacks from hostile Iroquois, and a major earthquake in Quebec in 1663 had brought its fur-trading company to the brink of ruin and set weary settlers to crying “Back to France!” before Louis XIV stopped waltzing long enough to rectify matters. Rumors of a mighty and mysterious river flowing southward from the Great Lakes, perhaps as far as the Pacific, had reached King Louis, and, murmuring “Mississippi, Mississippi” into his scented hankie, he raised New France to the status of a royal province, secured it with a regiment of highly trained soldiers, and appointed a capable executive to oversee its internal affairs. Henceforth, Louis decreed, qualified settlers (those with skills) would take precedence over missionaries and trappers on the ships to Montreal.
When Alobar approached the captain of the Mississippi Poodle, he found that it had space for several more single male passengers — most families were waiting for spring before emigrating, not wishing to begin colonial life at the onset of a harsh northern winter — and were he deemed fit, he could not only travel free of charge, he would be paid a small bonus for his commitment. Alobar contended that he was an aristocrat who'd recently lost his fortune, and since he had a gentlemanly manner, and since there was another fellow aboard in an identical situation ("Sieur de La Salle by name, is he a friend of yours?") the captain believed him.
There was some worry about Alobar's age, however. “Just how old are you, sir?” inquired the chief immigration officer. Alobar didn't know what to say. He had no idea anymore what age he looked to be, and God knows he couldn't tell the truth. He stammered a bit, finally blurting out, “Forty-six,” a figure arrived at by doubling K23. “A hale and hardy forty-six, accustomed to leading men.”
Up the gangplank he went, aromatic liquids gurgling in his sack, suppressed laughter gurgling in his throat. Pan followed.
The Mississippi Poodle slid across the Mediterranean as slickly as an asparagus spear gliding through a serving of hollandaise sauce, but once past Gibraltar and into the open Atlantic, she ran headlong into a mass of cold air and choppy water. With each dark day, the waves grew more pugilistic. Passengers could imagine her hull turning blue from the chilling and the pounding.
It was routine sailing for that time of year, of course, and the seamen not only took it in stride, they seemed as content a crew as the captain had ever commanded. There was a curious sweet aroma aboard that, while it could neither be identified nor pinpointed, lifted everyone's spirits in a shy, private way, fostering the secret hope that some wonderful encounter waited just below deck (if one was above) or on deck (if one was below). Like habitual snuff users, the men sniffed as they went about their work. “This tub smells like a Bombay whore,” grumbled one old salt, but the younger men, who'd never seen Bombay, only grinned and, being sailors, lost little sleep over the pornographic nightmares that with increasing frequency invaded their hammocks. Homosexual impulses, which normally didn't surface until the men had been parted from their wives for several months, began to flicker a few days past Gibraltar, more to the amusement than disturbance of those so visited.