A guard heard the disturbance. X froze. The guard spit on the ground, and decided he didn’t care.
Ashamed of what he’d done, X hiked back toward Plum to see if he’d had better luck.
He stopped only once more to question someone. The man he chose wore the remnants of a suit of armor, and stood at the base of one of the immense torch stands, as if he were guarding it. The knight was young, 25 perhaps, and his hair fell even farther than X’s, spilling down his shoulders and over his breastplate. His helmet appeared to have been stolen, along with one of his gauntlets and both boots.
X asked the Knight his questions: Do you recognize these things? Are you Vesuvius, or do you know anyone who answers to that name?
The Knight brightened. He declared that he was indeed Vesuvius, the very same! He beat a fist against his chest, causing his armor to clank, and swore he would cut down any man who disputed it. He reached for his sword, and frowned when he remembered that it too had been taken.
X saw the desperation beneath the Knight’s bravado, the loneliness. He suspected that for a few moments of company, the man would have claimed just as earnestly to be Cleopatra.
Plum and the Ukrainian were waiting. The guard seemed even more agitated than before. He fidgeted with his sunglasses, and drummed his metal bat against his thigh. Plum was quiet. He had his arms around his knees, like he was trying to make himself small. Maybe he’d had enough of the search already, and felt too guilty to say so. He wouldn’t quite look at X.
“You were kind to help me, Plum,” said X. “But I release you from any obligation. I will continue on alone.”
“Oh, you can’t get rid of me that easily,” said Plum. “We’ll rest a bit, and then we’ll set out again. All right? All right. Your cause is my cause.”
The Ukrainian groaned.
“Is very poetical, Plum person,” he said. “Now show him face.”
“What does he mean?” said X. “What are you hiding?”
Plum turned to X so slowly that it was like a planet rotating. His other cheek was violent with bruises: purple, yellow, black.
“The guards beat you,” X said. “Because of me.”
“It’s nothing,” Plum said. “They have beaten me before. I pity them for what it does to their consciences.”
“You think they still have consciences?” said the Ukrainian. He squatted, and whispered fiercely. “That is extremity of nonsense. As I hike on hill just now, I see other guards watching me, okay? Every move. They are suspicious, okay? They think I am not one of them. So how do I prove? I strike total innocent person with club. Then maybe one, maybe two more, why not. I hit them hard, not like I playtime with you. Always guards clap as result—they give me stupid salutes or thumbs-up, maybe. And always innocent people look up at me. Why you strike me? What I done wrong? Never did I do this previous, okay? Not even Dervish ask. Already, my heart hardens until there is something, I don’t know what, rock or pinecone maybe, in my chest.”
The guard seemed embarrassed by his tirade, but he continued.
“Plum person,” he said, “you are gentle man. Good at bottom. And these guards? This Countess? They will destroy you. Little by little, or very fast, they will turn you into one of drooling people curled everywhere in balls.”
“He speaks wisely, and you know it,” X told Plum. “Let us agree you will not risk yourself for me again.”
“No,” said Plum.
“No?” said X.
“I will not agree,” said Plum. “I’m not going to desert you. Let the guards be war—I will be peace.” He chose his next words carefully. “Try to remember that I’m not just doing this for you. I’m doing it to redeem myself. I may seem like an innocent because I ramble about lotus flowers. But whatever goodness you see in me is just a reflection of your own, I promise you. If you knew what sort of poisonous creature I was before, up there in the world, if you knew what I did, you’d turn away in horror.”
“I would not turn from you,” said X.
“And I will not turn from you now,” said Plum. He smiled almost beatifically. “All this fuss about my face. It was never very handsome to begin with.”
The Ukrainian’s anger had been percolating.
“Sorry to say, must interrupt touching TV movie,” he said.
He tugged his sunglasses down over his eyes. It was like a wall coming down.
“You are idiot, X,” he said. “You will not find magical person you seek. Would be impossible even for superheroes such as Rocket Red Brigade.” The Ukrainian searched his pockets as he continued. “You are lucky Countess did not see your sneaking. And you, Plum, moaning about your sins—boo-hoo! We all carry guilt like bag of stones, okay? You think I am damned for stealing Pepsi from vending machine?” The Ukrainian seemed to arrive at a decision. “I hear no more plans, okay? Am out of little group. Will not watch you become drooling kind.”
The guard found a piece of meat in the pack on his belt.
“What is hunger situation?” he asked X.
X looked at the dry, gray thing in the guard’s hands. It was the shape of a tongue.
“I am not hungry,” he said, “nor likely to be soon.”
“Yes, well, take for midnight snack,” the Ukrainian said, thrusting it at him. “Is last piece. I must replenish.”
X slid the awful thing into a pocket.
Later, X lay on his back, his coat bunched beneath his head. Something about the conversation with the Ukrainian nagged at him. The guard knew how rarely X needed to eat—and that he’d only just fed him. Why would he ask if X was hungry?
The answer came to him.
The Ukrainian was the only one X knew on this hill with any authority at all—the only one who could roam freely and, once X learned everything he could about his mother, aid him in his escape. But now the guard needed to gather more food for him. He would have to leave the hill to do it. And X knew what his friend in the cherry-red tracksuit would do then.
It was the same thing anyone would do.
He would never come back.
ten
X decided not to beg the Ukrainian to stay. There was no reason the guard should be chained to him. He should flee if he could. Maybe he could find a safe haven before the Countess discovered he had gone.
X turned onto his side, so that he faced the top of the hill. Yet again he couldn’t sleep.
The canopied bed sat empty. The plateau was deserted.
X sat up on his elbows, and peered down the slope. The Countess was descending—looking for victims, no doubt. Her coppery hair fell down her neck, frizzy and wild. Oedipus and Rex marched a few steps ahead, hurling bodies out of the way.
X checked to see if Plum was awake. He was. So, it seemed, was every soul on the hill. They were waiting to see who the Countess would subject to her knife.
“Close your eyes,” said Plum, “and don’t open them, no matter what you hear.”
“Why?” said X.
“Because if you watch the violence you will never forget it,” said Plum. “The Countess looks for the most depraved sinners she can find because torturing them exhilarates her the most. She hunts for them like she is looking for ripe berries.”
X shut his eyes, but it only made his hearing keener.
There were noises from down below—it sounded like the boxers were descending on someone. There was kicking. Struggling. The noise grew as Oedipus and Rex shoved the soul up the hill.
New sounds, darker sounds: the soul collapsing, crying, getting dragged to his feet and thrust forward. Or was it a woman? The cries were so wild that X couldn’t tell.
Plum tightened his grip on X’s shoulder, imploring him not to look. But X had to watch, had to see.
He opened his eyes.
The Countess had chosen not just one victim but two: the Civil War soldier called Shiloh, and the woman in the wedding gown.
Aw, stay a spell why doncha? The Bride and me don’t never get company.
Oedipus and Rex lifted them onto the giant rectangular rock at the top of the hill. So that was what the altar was for.
Sacrifices.
“The soldier,” said X. “I questioned that very man.”
“It’s a coincidence,” said Plum, his eyes still pressed closed.