Prospero Regained (16 page)

Shaking myself, I leapt into action. Mab was already creeping along the peat toward Erasmus’s last known position, reaching blindly under the surface with his lead pipe. Gregor strode along the spongy stuff and slapped the shade that had tricked Erasmus with the Seal of Solomon. The stranger screamed and shivered. Then, his eyes closed, and he fell down and began to sink into the bog. As I ran forward, I imagined that a long, sinuous hamadryad slid along the peat beside me.

“Here, follow Kaa and Soupy! They’ll take you to him!” Mephisto cried, indicating the two snakes, now slinking their way across the brown peat, the great hooded hamadryad and the slender, green, grass snake I had last seen wrapped around the waist of the Queen of the Maenads.

I grabbed the tail of the slender green Soupy, who happened to be closer, and dived in, pushing through the peat and letting the snake be my guide. Beside me, Gregor pulled off his heavy crimson robes and grabbed hold of the king cobra, diving in as well.

The black water looked ominous, but after the Swamp of Uncleanness, it seemed almost wholesome. It was thicker than normal water and black. If I had not been holding on to the snake, I would have been utterly lost. Soupy seemed to know where he was going, however, so I gripped his smooth, scaly, length tightly and pressed on.

Following the snake through the thick black water was nerve-wracking. First, I feared I would run out of air before I found Erasmus. Then, I became afraid that this black liquid was actually water from the Styx. If so, it was not something into which I should have immersed my whole body. Achilles’s mother was careful to keep his ankle out so that his skin would have a place to breathe. It would be sad to live through my encounter with the impurities of the Swamp of Uncleanness only to perish in the Styx.

Before I could fret further, however, my hand encountered Erasmus’s leg. At least, I was pretty sure it was Erasmus’s leg. At least, I hoped …

Opening my war fan, I slid it forward until it rested on the pulpy stem of the sundew petal. Very carefully, so as not to harm my brother, I slit the stem, freeing him from the plant. I could feel the sundew tremble and recoil.

Grabbing his leg, I swam upward. Only Erasmus’s leg suddenly pulled off to the left. I yanked back. His foot moved toward me then away again. Somehow, I had lost my hold on Soupy, so I dared not let go of Erasmus. Desperate for air now, I moved in the direction Erasmus was being dragged and swam upward.

I broke the surface of the water beneath the peat. The soft spongy stuff sat on my head like a hat the size of a rug. In the darkness, something splashed and sputtered. I heard a hoarse indrawn breath.

“Gregor?” I cried hopefully.

“Quick, help me!” he gasped. “I have Erasmus by the arm. The plant must still have a hold on him, though, because every time I pull him toward me, he snaps back.”

“That was me!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got his leg. I thought something was trying to take him away from me!”

“
Jesu!
If it’s not one thing, it’s another!” he exclaimed. Then he burst into laughter. Despite the horrific images still dancing in my mind, I could not help but join him.

Laughing, we drew the unconscious Erasmus out of the water, so that his face was in the small air pocket we made by pushing the peat up with our heads. Luckily, his staff was still in his hand. Gregor split the peat above our heads, and after many false starts and much splashing about, we managed to drag our brother out of the bog and onto a bramble-covered island. I snagged Gregor’s robes from Mephisto, who lay sleeping (some guard he turned out to be), and spread it over the thorny thicket to make a place to stretch out Erasmus. Gregor, meanwhile, worked on getting the water out of our brother’s lungs.

Finally, after numerous attempts to rouse him, Gregor declared, “I am not the physician Erasmus is, but I believe he is asleep … rather than unconscious or in a coma.”

“Mephisto is sleeping, too.” I glanced across the miles of brown fens with their eerie will-o’-the-wisps glowing here and there. There was no sign of the snakes, either. I hoped they would be okay. “What do we do now? Mab?”

Mab, who had managed to remain awake while we were below, crawled slowly to our position, head drooping.

“No good, Ma’am,” he slurred sleepily. “Sloth isn’t much of a threat to a wind, but this fleshly body isn’t fully under my control…” He began to slump over. “I could leave it, if you want me to, abandon the body, but…” His eyes closed and his head fell forward. He began to snore.

Gregor, lean and taut in his wet black garments, with his hair slicked back, glanced toward where we believed Titus lay, and then down at our sleeping companions.

“There is no point in waking the sleepers just to drag them farther into this bog,” he said. “The effect will only grow stronger as we continue, and they will succumb again. One of us will have to go take Mephisto’s ball and go after Titus. The other one will have to stay here and guard the sleepers.”

“We’ve got to hurry!” I cried. “Theo!”

“Perhaps I should go. You may have trouble moving Titus.”

I looked around me. Erasmus lay asleep on the crimson cardinal’s robes, Mab sat slumped over, snoring gently, and Mephisto lay sprawled out with his mouth open; staffs and gear were scattered around him.

“No. You stay here. You can protect them should the Hellwinds come,” I declared. “I’ll find some way to rouse Titus.”

CHAPTER

EIGHT

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream …

I trekked across the fen, my flute strapped to my back. The crystal ball still showed “the quickest way to reach Titus safely.” I followed it, pushing through brambles. They slid along the enchanted fabric of my gown with an eerie zipping sound but cut the backs of my hands. Blood welled out of the little scratches, drawing hordes of insects. Apparently, I did not need to be angry for them to sip my blood, once it was spilt. Or perhaps my frustration with the brambles was enough to make me vulnerable to the locals.

Like the barghests Mab and I had fought in the warehouse, which now seemed like an eon ago, the insects drew substance from my blood. Human blood granted solidity to creatures of the spirit world when they drank it, which is why the ancients were always feeding it to ghosts whom they called up from the underworld. The insects that supped off my bleeding scrapes became so solid that they could then bite my face and ears.

The carpet of peat beneath my feet rose and fell occasionally, as if something moved beneath it. I began to feel exposed. Worse things might be attracted by blood in this place than insects. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

So I went forward.

I shrugged off my fatigue, until the thought occurred to me that I might be legitimately tired, as I did not know how long it had been since I had last had a good night’s sleep. The moment a legitimate reason for my weariness occurred to me, I could hardly keep my eyes open. My eyelids drooped. My limbs grew heavy.

I stumbled.

The first three times I righted myself. Soon, however, my legs would no longer hold me. I had to put the crystal ball in my shoulder bag and crawl forward, first on my knees, then on my stomach. My arms trembled from the exertion of pulling along my body.

It seemed pointless, stupid, to crawl along across this spongy, yielding substance, my mouth filled with little twists of dry sphagnum moss I could not seem to spit out. What was I going to do when I reached Titus? Pull myself back with my fingers while I dragged him behind me with my toes?

And yet, I would not give up. The very idea of yielding to sloth was so offensive that I refused to stop, refused to give in, refused to lay my head down as every aching muscle begged me to do.

Besides, Theo needed help, and we needed Titus to reach Theo.

Hours I crawled, hauling my body across the bog, dragging myself through prickers, swimming through dark waters. My hair was wet and lank. I began to shiver.

How much more of this could I take?

I rejoiced when I finally laid eyes on my great titan of a brother. There was Titus, in the distance, asleep on the fen, just where the ball showed him to be. But my joy was brief. It was still a long way to go, and my brother was slowly sinking into the peat. If he went under, I would have no chance of finding him, and even if I did, I would not be strong enough to drag him up again.

I crawled on and on and on. Funny to be crawling across the fens to Titus. All my best memories of fens involved Titus. The loamy smell mixed with the scent of mold brought those memories vividly streaming back. Titus had been the first to return to Scotland after resigning his commission under Marlborough; this was while Logistilla and I were still living in frosty Denmark. Only, instead of returning to our estate, Titus married a country maid and took up a job as a collier cutting turf. When the rest of us arrived, some years later, Titus chose to stay with his wife and his work. Peat was the main source of fuel and warmth for much of the British Isles at the time, and Titus felt he was contributing to the quality of life of ordinary people.

I used to visit him occasionally, sometimes bringing goodies from Edinburgh, sweets and finery, for him and his family. I remembered watching him come walking across the fen after a day’s work, with the long handles of his flaughter and his tusker, his turf-cutting tools, slung over his back. He would wave at us with one of his big hands as he strode confidentially along whistling “Farewell to Lochaber.”

Sometimes, he and I would hike the fens together, talking of days past or gathering plants for him to press and sketch. Upon one occasion, I even joined his wife and his “wee lad and lassie” in laying out the cut turf to dry. We would stop for lunch sitting amidst the storrows, the pyramids made from stacks of the dried peat. Peat made a beautiful fire, I recalled; it glowed rather than burned. Titus often declared that food cooked over peat tasted better than the finest cooking at the best clubs in London.

This idyllic period of Titus’s life came to an abrupt halt when his wife, Birdie, and the little ones fell prey to smallpox. Titus sweated out the illness himself but the rest of his family did not make it. When he recovered, he burned their cottage to the ground and returned to our family estate, a sadder and quieter man.

I once overheard Erasmus asking him why he did not use his Water of Life to save his family from the illness that claimed their lives. Titus shook his head sadly and replied: “That is not what the Water is for. I gave my family into God’s hands … and God took them.”

From thoughts of Titus’s family, my mind meandered aimlessly, so weary was I from my exertions. Thoughts I would rather not contemplate snuck around my guard. Was Astreus gone already, consumed by wickedness and hate? Or did some part of him linger on in Seir, dwindling with each passing hour?

No. I could not think about that now. It was too sad. My heart would break.

Memories of my childhood seemed safer. Portraits of Father and his young family drifted by my mind’s eye: my father, Lady Portia, and my infant self. How sweet and tinged with the gold of happy memories did these recollections seem, until I recalled that it had never been so, and the gold-tinged images burst like the filmy bubbles that children blow.

For Lady Portia, the great love of Father’s life, was not my mother … if there had even been a great love of Father’s life. If that was not a lie, as well.

Had Father loved her? I wondered. Or Sycorax, or the mermaid, or sylph, or maybe a river sprite—the woman who had given birth to me? Whomever he had summoned the first time he used the great spell that now powered Mephisto’s staff. Who had he known back then upon whom he might have fathered me? Whom had he called upon?

“M.”

I sat straight up and swung my legs around before me, my bottom sinking into the spongy moss. “M,” Father’s “Fair Queen.” If my mother was not Sycorax, then it must be the mysterious supernatural benefactor who helped Father arrange his return to power.

I would have no proper soul if I were a child of the Queen of Air and Darkness!

I did not know for certain the identity of “M.” It could be someone else: Malagigi’s sister, the serpentine enchantress Melusine, or even his mother, Morgana La Fey. But could either of those beings arrange for the King of Naples to be sailing near our island during a storm? Melusine certainly could not. Morgana? Perhaps, but I believe she had already retreated from our world by then, departing to dwell in Avalon.

But Maeve, Queen of the Elves, who was secretly the demon Lilith? She could have done it. Only the Powers of Heaven had more sway over the mortal world than she!

*   *   *

TWO
hours later, or perhaps two minutes, but it certainly seemed like a long time, I reached the end of my strength. I willed myself to go forward, but my limbs did not move. I could still see, but only through the thinnest cracks in my eyelids.

So close. I could make out the pattern of Titus’s plaid jacket and the cedar
Y
that was the top of the
Staff of Silence
sticking up beside him. But it was no good. I could not continue. I should not be surprised, I told myself. Malagigi had warned me that my soul was flawed. Like Astreus, like Mephisto’s friends, I did not have whatever it took to hold out against the terrible fatigue.

Only, as my eyes slid mercifully closed, a stray thought drifted through my mind:
How come I made it this far
?

My brothers had surrendered, except for Gregor. Why was I still moving?

I gritted my teeth. It could not end like this! Theo could not be abandoned to die in agony and Father to be tortured to death by demons because the rest of us fell asleep!

If my soul could not help me, what of my sins? Why bear the Pride of Angels, if I could not use it to goad me forward?

I turned to my Lady, something I had remembered not to do until now. Of course, nothing was there, but I prayed anyway. Then, gathering the very last of my strength, I shouted.