CHAPTER 12
It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, when they were back on their horses and heading southwest, the direction of blessedly solid dry ground and, eventually, Barion and its clear alcoholic balm, that Janet cleared her throat and said:
“So I guess you’re probably wondering how I all of a sudden turned into an amazing ice goddess with magic axes just now.”
Eliot was, actually. But he was going to see how long he could go without mentioning it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know, they both knew he did. It was a game they played.
They both knew he would cave eventually.
“With what now?” he said airily. “Oh. Sure. I guess so.”
“I call the right axe Sorrow,” she said. “You know what I call the left one?”
“Happiness?”
“Sorrow. I can’t tell them apart.”
“Mmm. Mm-hm.”
They rode together in silence for another five minutes. They were both seasoned players. Eliot kept looking over his shoulder—he was paranoid that one of those pink jellyfish things was going to come up on him from behind and drape its tentacles all over him. After it stopped his heart it would probably reel him up into its innards and you’d be able to see him being digested through its translucent flesh. It would all be very public.
Though again: what did it matter, if the world was ending? But it did matter. He knew that. Everything still mattered. Now more than ever. He decided to concede the loss.
“OK, so how did you all of a sudden become etcetera and so on?”
“I’m so happy you asked! Remember that time when you guys went off to sea and left me in charge of Fillory for like a year and a half?”
“And saved magic and by extension the entire world? I do.”
“Well, it was fun running everything and making all the decisions and implementing long-overdue reforms, but then after a month things got a little slow, and I needed a project. So you know that desert that’s south of Fillory, across the Copper Mountains?”
“I know of it.”
“I annexed it.”
“Wait.” Eliot reined in his horse, and they both stopped. “You invaded the desert?”
“I annexed it. I was thinking how in the books other countries are always coming after Fillory and threatening it and so on. I figured why not turn it around? Let’s go expansionist! Preempt some shit! I mean, we have all the magic and freaky monsters in the world. Just the giants alone are basically the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal. Oh and plus we have our own god, who’s actually real. It’s practically a moral imperative. Manifest destiny.”
Eliot heeled his horse, and it ambled into motion again. He loved Janet, but she really was beyond belief. He waited what felt like a suitable interval.
“Don’t think that because I’m not saying anything I’m not stricken with shock and regret,” the High King said. “Because I am. That’s why I’m not saying anything.”
“Well, if you didn’t want me to invade the desert, you shouldn’t have gone off and saved the world,” Janet said. “It was a very popular initiative internally. The people loved it. And our standing army was just standing there, and the lesser nobility were spinning their wheels looking for a way to climb the ladder. Earn some honors and titles and whatever. You have to use that stuff or it ends up going bad on you, like with the Fenwicks.”
Eliot snorted.
“Well, this is why you don’t understand politics,” Janet said.
“Politics doesn’t understand me!”
“And think of the mineral resources out there. Our raw materials are crap in this country.”
“Please forbear to insult the High King’s minerals.”
“They’re crap. So I took a regiment and a bunch of Talking Elephants and that ninja lady Aral—you know, the one Bingle beat in the tournament, which don’t get me started on that travesty of justice—and we crossed the Copper Mountains. Which by the way, have you ever seen them? It’s amazing. They really are practically all copper, and they’ve turned this great green oxidized color. There’s even a special word for it: aeruginous. Aral taught me that. Turns out she’s a demon at Scrabble.”
“Copper is a mineral. And we call them brigades, not regiments.”
“And I’ve never really been sure whether or not we owned the Copper Mountains, you know? It’s not clear on the maps.” It was like Janet couldn’t hear him. “So now we do, because I annexed them on my way to the desert. It only took a couple of days. An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn’t see what they did, but when they were done—it took a day—the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him. I’ve never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don’t know why we rule them, they should rule us.”
“That’s treason,” Eliot said lightly. “True, though. What was the desert like?”
“The desert? The desert was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Having spent a lot of time around Janet, Eliot was used to the way she shifted smoothly and without warning from irony and aggression to honest expressions of actual authentic human emotion.
“You must go, Eliot. Go in winter. The Wandering Desert is like an ocean of sand, which I realize is a cliché, but it literally is like an ocean. The dunes move along like big swells in the open sea. Slowly, but you can see it. We spent a day just sitting on the slopes of the Copper Mountains watching them roll in and smash themselves against the foothills, all in silence, like humongous breakers.”
“And then,” Eliot said, “realizing that you were about to invade a beautiful but otherwise useless and wholly innocent desert, you took stock of your tactical and ethical errors and turned around . . .”
“But I didn’t. I didn’t turn around. In fact that was when I knew why I’d come.
“I sent the elephants back. Elephants—God, I don’t know what I was thinking, bringing a bunch of elephants over the mountains. Hannibal, I guess. They were nice about it, but it was no place for them. I told them they could go graze the Southern Orchards. That seemed to square it.
“I sent the regiment back too. Brigade, whatever. They were good sports, very valiant, and they didn’t want to go, but I ordered them and they had to. I guess they were hoping for a fight, but there was nobody to fight. Once they were gone I walked out into the desert alone.”
“Why,” Eliot said, “the hell would you do that?”
As they rode the landscape around them was turning back from bogs into meadows again, going from squashy to firm, the dry land sorting itself out from the wet like it was waking up from a bad dream. But Janet was far away and seeing a different landscape entirely.
“You know, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it. It was just so pure. Suddenly all this life, all this greenery, seemed so needlessly elaborate and wet and messy. The desert was honest and real: just dry sand making smooth curves against an empty sky. It was like I’d been floundering in the mud my whole life and here was the way out.
“I suppose I was taking my life in my hands, but it didn’t feel like it at all. I felt safe there. Safer than I’d ever felt anywhere. I didn’t have to seem anymore, I could just be.” She sighed in frustration. “I’m not explaining it right. God knows I’m not a spiritual person or anything. I just felt like I could breathe out there.”
“No, I get it. Keep going.”
For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her. No wonder she liked it out there by herself.
“That night the most amazing thing happened: the stars came down from out of the sky. They weren’t used to seeing human beings, so they weren’t afraid. They were like tame birds—they were all around me, a few feet off the ground, each one about the size of a softball. Spiky, and a little warm, and they sort of squeaked. You could hold them.” She sighed again. “I know that sounds weird even for Fillory. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.
“I walked for three days, till my supplies ran out, but it never crossed my mind to go back. Not once. I kept waiting to lose my nerve, but I never did. I kept going south. The swells get big out there in the middle, in the deep desert, big as hills. At the top you could see a long way, but I never did see the edge. Maybe they go on forever.
“Well, you can guess what came next. I passed out from hunger and exhaustion and woke up in some guy’s sand-boat, sailing across the desert.”
“Really?” Eliot said. “I was going to guess that you realized you were going to die and went back the way you came. Either that or that one elephant who fell off the cliff before and came back to life showed up, galumphing majestically through the dunes, and rescued you. With Aral riding it maybe. I figured you were setting that up as a surprise twist.”
“Well, I wasn’t. I woke up on this guy’s boat. It wasn’t much of a boat—basically it was a board with a pole stuck in it and a sheet tied to the pole. It was more like a windsurfer. He sat cross-legged on it, with one hand on the tiller and one on the mainsheet—his forearms were like bowling pins—and the whole business went flying across the sand.
“He didn’t say anything, but he was incredibly good-looking. Tall, lean, big nose, brown skin. He took me back to his home, which was in a huge rock outcropping sticking up out of the sand. At the top was a big crater full of black earth with things growing in it. A whole tribe lived in little cells carved out of the rock in a ring around it.”
“Where did they get water?” Eliot asked.
“I wondered that too. I found out. But I’ll get to that.
“They were a pretty hard crew. This guy who saved me, he was the leader, they called him the Foremost. I tried to explain to him that we were invading him, or that I was, and that this desert was all part of Fillory now. I thought about letting it go, since he saved my life and all, but come on: an invasion’s an invasion. Or an annexation. Anyway I figured I’d better put it out there up front, that they were now free to enjoy the benefits of being a semiautonomous quasi-national territory within the larger embrace of the Fillorian empire.
“But the Foremost was having none of it! He was very firm. Said he’d never even heard of Fillory. I know right? It pissed me off, but it impressed me at the same time. So I hung around.
“I liked it there. For a bunch of people with no obvious enemies they had this dope fighting style: they all carried a personal weapon made out of this wicked black metal. Light and strong, and when it hit something it struck blue sparks—very mysterious, I couldn’t figure out where it came from. The Foremost had a whole spear made out of it. He had a big speech about how great it was. Forged in the desert, slew a god, that kind of talk. He said it acted as a focus for magic—amped up your discipline—but I never saw him use it like that.
“I decided I was going to win them over. The charm offensive. I started helping out around the place, trying to get into the rhythms of the tribe. You wouldn’t have believed it, a queen of Fillory on her hands and knees pulling parsnips out of the ground, eating these gross grubs they sieved out of the sand—I tried to think of them as lobsters, but they were grubs. And you know what? I didn’t even mind it. It didn’t make me angry. I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt less angry than I did out there.
“And I slept with the Foremost. I didn’t love him, but I liked him a lot, and I loved his world. I wanted to be part of that place. And God knows he was easy on the eyes. Sex with him was amazing. Like going to bed with the desert.
“After about three months—”
“Wait,” Eliot said. “You’ve been in Rockville for three months at this point? What was going on in Fillory?”
“In Fillory matters were unfolding according to protocol. What did you think was going to happen? You set up a country right, it runs itself. I got those people thinking I could hear their thoughts, for Christ’s sake. They were scared to piss in the shower. No way were they going to try anything.
“Anyway after about three months the Foremost told me that if I was going to stay any longer I had to undergo their initiation rites. It was a major deal, every year a couple of people died. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready to leave. And if you passed, you got one of those black-metal weapons. Never say I do things by halves.”
“I will never say that,” Eliot solemnly promised. “Janet, this is kind of intense.”
“I know. And you haven’t even heard the intense part. So I’m breaking a sacred oath by telling you about it, but what the hell, here’s what it was. The Foremost took me out of the city, back out into the desert, and then he kneeled down with me and picked up a handful of sand and told me that what I sought was in there. Well, what the hell right? But so I looked at the damn sand.
“And after a while I began to notice that there were little glittery bits in it. Not a lot of them, but every once in a while you’d come across a black grain with a shiny sheen to it. I started to get it. That was the black metal the weapons were made out of. It was all around us, in the sand. One grain in a thousand, the Foremost said.
“He gave me a canvas sack and told me that I had to sit alone in the desert until I’d filled the whole sack with just metal grains, one by one. I was like, filled-filled? Like overflowing? Or just, you know, a nice amount? He said I’d know because when I was finished, when the sack was full, something called the Smelter would come. It would turn the ore I’d collected into pure metal and fashion a weapon for me.”
“Really?” Eliot said. “How incredibly nice of it.”
“Well, I know. Pretty convenient. You’d think I would have been suspicious. But I had to have one of these things. Had to.
“So I stayed out there. I would take a handful of sand, make a little pile in my palm, pick out the black specks and sort of brush them off my palm into the sack. No magic, it was just me and my sack and my bare hands. After a few hours my eyes were red and streaming and just about crossed. By the time the sun rose the next day I was hallucinating. The bag was filling up, you could weigh it in your hand, but it was going to be a race to see whether I finished or went insane first.
“It was pretty bad. All the usual stuff happened that happens in an ordeal. I peed myself. I practically went blind. I threw up at one point. It was really, really unpleasant. But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true. I thought a lot of that kind of crap while I was collecting my grains.”
“Janet.” Eliot didn’t know what to say. He’d never heard her talk this openly about her feelings. Whatever happened out there, something about her really had changed. He hadn’t seen it till now. “Janet, how could you do that to yourself?”
“I don’t know, I just knew I had to. I picked and I picked and I picked. My hands were shaking like crazy. The sun was going down the third day when I started to feel like maybe I was pretty close to done. It wasn’t a huge sack—more of a bag, really—but it was looking pretty full. If somebody asked you for a sack of ore you wouldn’t be embarrassed to give it to them.
“Supposedly if you had even one grain of regular sand in there the Smelter wouldn’t come, and I don’t know if I believed that or not, but I kept shaking the bag and fishing around in it to see if somehow one had gotten in. I really loved my bag of black metal. It felt cool, and oily, and so dense. It had a special smell. I was proud of it. I just could not wait to see what kind of weapon came out of it. I knew that whatever it was would be like the sharp, unbreakable expression of my innermost will. It would be what I’d been waiting for my whole life.
“I guess my defenses were low, because a lot of stuff came back to me out there that I’d been pretty much avoiding thinking about for a long time. Like I thought about Alice coming to Brakebills for the first time, thrashing through the woods, not even knowing if they’d let her in. I thought about how shitty I was to her before she died or whatever. I thought about Julia waiting for Brakebills to come and get her, waiting and waiting alone in her room, and Brakebills never coming.
“I thought about you, and how I used to feel about you, and how bad that felt. I thought about how far you’ve come. You really got yourself together when you came here, Eliot, and I respect that. I guess I never told you that. Everybody does.”
“Thank you.” She hadn’t. It felt good.
“I thought about this one time when I was at boarding school. I never think about my childhood, ever, but that night it all just came oozing out. You know my parents sent me away to boarding school when I was eight? Now I think it was too early, but at the time I just assumed it was normal. I don’t even think the school takes students that young anymore. And as it turned out it was a rough year for my family—I had a baby brother die of SIDS—and I think they kind of forgot about me for a while there. What with all the grieving and such. They just figured I’d take care of myself.
“Which I guess I must have. But it was a pretty bad year.”
“Why haven’t you ever told me this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I never really let myself feel how much it hurt. But I kind of relived the whole experience that fourth night, waiting for this Smelter thing to come. I literally regressed to being eight years old.
“Anyway then it was June, and the school year was all over. Time to go home. But on the last day there was some kind of mix-up, my dad thought he sent a car for me, I guess, but his assistant forgot, or the driver never showed, either way nobody came for me. I sat on my suitcase in the lobby all day, while the other kids got picked up one by one, and I kicked my legs and read one of those big floppy Peanuts books over and over again, and nobody came. That was before cell phones, and they couldn’t track down my parents. The staff were whispering behind my back. They felt sorry for me, but I could tell they kind of wanted me the hell out of there too so they could go home.
“I can still remember the view from the lobby: the line of palm trees through the glass doors, the sunset highlights on the wobbly linoleum tiles, the smell of the varnish on the wooden benches. I’ll never forget it. I’d look at the shadows and think, definitely he’ll have come by the time the shadow of the window frame hits that corner of the bench, but then he wouldn’t come, and I’d pick a new spot. I was realizing for the first time what a small part of my parents’ world I was. They were everything to me, but I wasn’t everything to them.
“The staff let me eat dinner with them, which ordinarily students never got to do. They ordered in from Popeye’s. I felt so excited and special.”
Eliot wished he could go back in time and get that mini-Janet, scoop her up and take her home. But he couldn’t.
“Then after dinner my dad finally showed up. He came striding through the door, stiff-arming it open without breaking stride, tie loose, walking too fast. He was probably pissed off at himself, about the mix-up, but it came off like he was pissed off at me somehow. Like it was my fault. He was pretty much of an asshole about the whole thing.
“I guess you can see where this is going. I was seriously weak at that point. I had the spins. I was falling asleep every five minutes. I woke up at dawn on day five and I knew that the Smelter wasn’t coming. And I gave up. It was over.
“Somebody stronger would have stayed out there till they died. Julia might have. Alice, maybe. I guess if somebody really wants to break me, it turns out I can be broken. There it is. I didn’t know. Now I know.