In the Suicide Mountains (7 page)

“The maiden went on: ‘And then I dreamed that I came to a river and the ferryman asked me how long he would have to ferry.' ‘Let him put on the ferryboat the first man who comes to him, and push the boat away from the shore—and this man will ferry forever, and the ferryman can go home.' ‘And then I dreamed that I walked across the sea on a whale, and she asked me how long she would have to lie there.' ‘She shall lie there till she vomits up the twelve ships of Marco the Rich; then she will go down into the water and her flesh will grow again.' When King Dragon had said this, he fell sound asleep.

“The maiden let Vasily out of the chest and advised him thus: ‘Do not tell the whale that she must vomit up the twelve ships of Marco the Rich until you have crossed to the other side. Likewise, when you come to the ferryman, do not tell him what you have heard until you have crossed the river. And when you come to the oak, kick it toward the east, and you will discover countless riches.' Vasily the Luckless thanked the maiden and went away.

“He came to the whale and she asked: ‘Did he say anything about me?' ‘He did. As soon as I cross I shall tell you.' When Vasily had crossed over, he said: ‘Vomit up the twelve ships of Marco the Rich.' The whale vomited up the ships and they sailed forth, wholly unscathed; and Vasily the Luckless found himself in water up to his knees. Then he came to the ferryman, who asked: ‘Did you speak about me to King Dragon?' ‘I did,' said Vasily. ‘First, ferry me over.' When he had crossed, he said to the ferryman: ‘Whoever comes to you first, put him on the ferryboat and push it away from the shore; he will ferry forever, and you can go home.'

“Vasily the Luckless came to the oak, kicked it toward the east with his foot, and the oak fell. Beneath it he found gold and silver and precious stones without number. Vasily looked back and lo and behold, the twelve ships that had been thrown up by the whale were sailing straight to shore. And the ships were commanded by the same old man whom Vasily had met when he was carrying the letter of Marco the Rich to his wife. The old man said to Vasily: ‘This, Vasily, is what the Lord has blessed you with.' Then he got off his ship and went his way.

“The sailors transported the gold and silver to the ships and then set out with Vasily the Luckless. Marco the Rich was told that his son-in-law was coming with twelve ships and that King Dragon had rewarded him with countless riches.

“Marco grew furious, hearing that what he desired had not yet come to pass. He had his carriage harnessed and set out to drive to King Dragon's palace and upbraid him. He came to the ferryman and sat in the ferryboat; the ferryman pushed it away from the shore, and Marco remained to ferry forever. But Vasily the Luckless came home to his wife and mother-in-law, began to live with them and gain increasing wealth, helped the poor, gave food and drink to beggars, and took possession of all the vast treasure of Marco the Rich.”

Chapter Nine

W
hen the abbot finished telling his story he smiled and stood up, as if thinking of going to his bed now; but instead, with his head bowed, his right hand pushed inside his flowing left sleeve and his left hand pushed inside his flowing right sleeve, as he always stood except when he was praying, he walked over to the high, arched window that looked out at the stars above Suicide Leap; or perhaps it was the Leap itself he looked at, thinking about what the three of them had told him earlier. By the starlight one could see that his lips were trembling—it was quite pronounced—and one noticed that his head was slightly drawn in, like a turtle's or a chicken's, as if something had made him wince. He gave an abrupt headshake, as if in argument with himself; but precisely what the abbot might be thinking not even Chudu the Goat's Son, who was half asleep anyway, with his pipe in his fist and his hat on his knees, could guess.

Prince Christopher the Sullen, still leaning on the mantel, toying with his brandy glass, said thoughtfully, glumly, “It's an interesting story. Yet one thing I don't understand, father.”

“Yes?” said the abbot, turning from the window for a moment to scrutinize the prince. Armida, too, was watching Prince Christopher, for whatever she might think about poems and stories, she loved the sad shine she'd seen in the prince's eyes while he was listening.

“I don't understand why you've told it to us.”

“Ah, that,” said the abbot.

The fire in the hearth had died down to red coals, and there was no longer any sound of life outside the stone-walled room. The walls and beams had settled into blackness, so that the night sky beyond the high window was now brighter than where they sat. It was like looking out (Armida thought) from a funeral crypt, after everything has been decided; and the abbot's voice, for all its gentleness and kindness, was like some nagging, troublesome memory calling a ghost back, making things difficult again, confusing. She was inclined to rise to it, for the sake of the prince. For the sake of the prince she would happily reconsider everything. As for the dwarf, though he smelled like old laundry in an abandoned chickenhouse where there was garbage on the floor and the body of a cat, she would not be heartbroken if he should kill himself; but all the same it would be a loss to the world, there was no denying that; an incalculable loss, like the death of the last redwood. She tapped her lips with her fingertip, musing.

The abbot was saying: “I tell you the story—among other reasons—to remind you, dear friends, lanterns to my darkness, of a point that may possibly have slipped your minds—the moral, that is, that I called your attention to earlier:
Things are not always as they seem
.” He began pacing back and forth by the window, head bowed. “I know very little about the world, of course—” The abbot glanced shyly past his shoulder at them, gauging the effect his words were having, then started again: “I know, I say, very little about the world, cut off from things here on my mountain, so what I say may be foolishness. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there's a great truth in that tired old saw.” He spoke the tired old saw one more time, lovingly, separating the phrases, and it came to Armida that he'd no doubt said it from the pulpit many times, if abbots did, as she was inclined to believe, sometimes preach: “
Things… are not always… as they seem
.”

Gazing up at the prince, his face just visible in the red coals' glow, Armida was surprised that she should see, even now, no trace of a smile. If he had any intelligence at all, it seemed to her, he'd see the humor in the abbot's old-womanish maunderings. Yet on the other hand it was touching to her that Prince Christopher should take in this hackneyed lecturing with such solemn innocence, such— what should she say?—sweet openness of soul. She was surprised— shocked—by the sudden recollection that the prince had spoken of suicide. “I mustn't let him,” she thought. “That's all there is to it!”

She remembered all at once how the dwarf had bawled after her on the mountain road, “Armida, don't do it! Don't kill yourself!” and how he'd whooped and sobbed. She remembered his bellowing, “It
is
my business. It's very much my business!” She understood that now more clearly than she had at the time—and felt ashamed of herself. The tables had been turned on her: it was now Armida prepared to run shamelessly after the creature she loved, prepared to wail, as the dwarf had wailed, “Think of the people who love you! Think of how they'll feel!” Yet
could
she stop him from doing it? She was stronger than he, she had no doubt of that, and she was sure she could easily outsmart him. But her love for him put a constraint upon her: because she loved him, respected him as he couldn't respect himself, she was blocked, strange to say, from interfering. To control him, even for his own benefit, would be to diminish him, cheapen the value of his life—in his own eyes and even in hers. None of which was to deny that the prince's desire to kill himself was a sickness, as certainly a disease as those coughings and witherings and jerkings which the abbot each night knelt to cure. Nevertheless …

Armida wrung her hands, squinting into the glow of the coals beyond his legs. Because she loved him it was imperative that she be worthy of him, yes—be, insofar as was possible for her, the Dream Woman every man desires: soft and tender, gentle, shy as a violet in the woods. O cruel irony! Such a woman, of course, would have no possible means of preventing his self-destruction. He would brush her away like a feather, outwit her and storm off, wild-eyed, and be gone. Only if she could cause him to love her in return, spare his life for
her
sake …

Suddenly, looking up at his face, the features as still as the features of a lighted marble statue, Armida once again began to weep. No one noticed except Chudu the Goat's Son, and instantly he too began to cry. They both bent forward and shook with silent sobs, covering their faces with their hands, unaware that they were practically invisible in the room's thick darkness.

The abbot was droning on, just perceptibly smiling in the pale light the stars cast, occasionally gesturing with a mild little tilt of the head, the slight movement of a silhouetted arm. “That's the trouble, you see, with suicide. It may be that one has misapprehended the situation, that what seems so terrible and bitter in life as to make the race not worth the candle is in fact nothing more than some particularly seductive illusion, perhaps mere bad chemistry. A ripple of breath across the letter might in fact change all the writing. A little kick at the base of a tree might illuminate new golden options!”

The prince sighed profoundly. “Not in my case,” he said.

The abbot, too, heaved a sigh, and once more, for an instant, a tremble seized his lips. “Yes yes, I can see it's desperate, in your case. And yet I wish—I hope not out of sinful curiosity—I wish I knew more of the particulars. It's many a grief for which God is relief and perhaps one or two for which
I
am.”

“The tale can be quickly told,” said the prince. “My father has sent me to hunt down the six-fingered man.”

The old abbot's mouth dropped open in dismay. Startled out of his normal tranquillity, he seemed for an instant a completely different man. He waved his hand, as if quite involuntarily, in the direction of his eyes, and Armida, looking up past her own hands, that instant, noticed through her tears, or
thought
she noticed (but it was dark, as I've mentioned), that the long, pale, delicate fingers numbered six, not five! But she couldn't quite believe it, or failed to register—lost, as she was, in her own unhappiness and eagerly siding with the abbot's arguments, since he was trying to persuade Prince Christopher to continue living. Seeing (or imagining she saw) that sixth finger, Armida merely shivered, as if a bad dream had slipped into her mind and out again. And now the abbot's face was more gentle than ever, the tilt of his head more concerned.

“The six-fingered man!” he breathed. “God be with you, dear Prince!”

“I'm no fighter,” said Prince Christopher. “I'd never have a chance, and my death would be vile and ignominious. I won't have it; I won't go to him. I'd far rather die by my own hand. I may not be free to live like a poet, but I can die like one!” He stood with his right hand pressed against his chest.

“Yes, I see,” said the abbot. With sad eyes the abbot looked over in the direction of Armida and the dwarf (the dwarf was fast asleep), sitting in the darkness with their hands covering their faces. “Yes, you're right,” said the abbot with a kind of groan, and began once more to pace. “You really do have no chance against the six-fingered man. How would you even find him? I understand he's very clever—murders people, or so rumor has it, and steals their identities. How's a man even to
locate
a fiend like that?” He shot a glance at the prince. “You have a clue?”

“Nothing,” moaned the prince.

“Well, no matter anyway. You're right about this business, though it grieves me to say it. Heaven knows there's no percentage in your facing
that
man.—Of course he's not as young as he used to be, and there are always aspects of the situation that we're not aware of. But you're right, yes. Safer to do battle with a thousand-year-old dragon.”

The abbot stopped pacing as if he thought he'd heard a distant cry or something, and then his eyes lit up. He began to smile, excited, and came hurrying across the thick carpet toward the prince. He stopped a few feet short and looked up toward the corner of the ceiling, rapt, as if seeing a vision. “Now
there's
an idea!” he said.

Christopher the Sullen turned and looked doubtfully up in the direction in which the abbot was looking.

“Listen to me,” the abbot said, moving closer and peering into Christopher's eyes. “No one could call it ignominious, now could they, if you lost your life in battle against a dragon? A man's not really
expected
to have a chance against a dragon. On the other hand, even while you're dying”—he rolled his eyes, made his voice more dramatic, waved the silhouette of an arm then quickly returned it to his cassock, “—even while you're gasping out your final breath, locked in mortal combat, you just conceivably might get in a lucky stab and leave the dragon so sorely wounded that—” His eyes flashed lightning and he gazed once more up at the corner of the room: “—so sorely wounded that he would eventually die. In a week or so, perhaps. Think of it! The lot of mankind would be significantly improved. You'd be famous throughout the world, throughout all history like Saint—” He pursed his lips; the name had slipped out of his memory. “Never mind, you get the drift.”

“I,” said Christopher the Sullen, and touched his collar-bone, “should fight a
dragon?
”

“Come come,” said the abbot. “Use your imagination.” He began pacing in a circle, into the hearth's glow, out of it again, into it, out of it. “You say you want to kill yourself. I disapprove, naturally, as a man of the cloth (though I might make exceptions for a terminal illness that involved great pain), but on the other hand I can readily see your point, now that you mention the notorious six-fingered man. Very well, if you feel you must kill yourself, why not do it nobly, as Lycurgus did, for the benefit of mankind? Moreover—pay attention now—you may be wrong about everything, as I've said to you before. For all you know, the six-fingered man may have died way last January, from stepping on an icy patch and falling on his head. Ha! You hadn't thought of that, had you, Prince Christopher! You'll never win your rightful place in history by choosing self-destruction rather than confrontation with a man who's in fact been dead for months. I don't say he
is
, mind you. Very well, though. Excellent. Now we're on the track.”