The Dragons of Babel (34 page)

He reached up to stroke the creature's head.

“Watch yourself,” Alcyone said carelessly. “He bites.”

Will snatched his hand back just as the beast's serrated beak clacked together where his fingers had been an instant before.

Alcyone didn't reach a hand down to help Will up onto the saddle, but neither did she try to stop him from climbing on behind her. Briefly, her dress caught on the horn. With both hands, she ripped the skirt from hem to crotch so she could straddle her mount firmly. “Damn,” she muttered. “That was a Givenchy.” Then she slapped the reins and the hippogriff launched itself from the balcony.

Enormous wings snapped wide to catch the wind.

They flew.

T
he hippogriff's surging flight felt nothing like being on horse back; it was simultaneously smoother and more unsettling. But it suited Will's mood, which was ecstatic. He had escaped! He was alive! He could do anything! It was an incredible sensation, the best one in the world. He wanted to go right back in and escape all over again.

Alcyone was laughing aloud and so, Will realized, was he. Meanwhile, the hippogriff was flying strongly, steadily, out over the Bay of Demons. Behind them, the windows of Babel grew steadily smaller, while the city itself did not; it continued to fill the sky. The air was chill and freighted with accents of hyacinth and diesel fuel.

“Tell me something,” Will said when their laughter finally died away. “This beast wasn't hobbled. He came when you called. Why didn't you simply call him from the dance floor?”

Alcyone's head whipped around and she fixed him with a
hard stare. Then her mouth twisted up in a complicated smile. “What an odd question for a buffoon to ask.” She tied the reins to the saddle horn and then lithely swung first one leg and then the other over the hippogriff's back, so that she wound up facing Will. “Let's take off this mask and see what you look like.” She flung aside his domino, and his Pierrot glamour whipped away with it. “Hmm. A little rough around the edges, but nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.”

“You haven't—what are you doing?”

“Don't be dense.” She pushed back his jacket and undid his tie. They went flying off into the night. Then she seized his shirt in both hands and yanked. The studs leaped and scattered. The air was suddenly cold on Will's chest. “I saved your butt back there. So now I'm claiming the hero's traditional reward. Lie back and enjoy it if you can. Otherwise, fake it.”

“Hey!” Will cried as his shirt went flying away like a great white gooney bird. The rags of Alcyone's dress were fluttering wildly, stinging his face and arms. Her hair thrashed like a medusa's. “You didn't save me—I saved you!”

Alcyone put a hand on Will's chest and shoved him backward, so that he was all but lying flat. Then she ripped open his trousers—by now he was hard, of course—and said, “Let's tell this story my way, okay? Raise your hips off the saddle.” Will obeyed and she pulled his trousers off and threw them away, too. He was naked now. Alcyone's gown fluttered and snapped like a flag. Bits of her flesh appeared and were gone too fast for him to be sure of what he had glimpsed.

Slowly, Alcyone bent low over Will. He could feel her mouth approaching his cock.

Then, grabbing one of his legs, Alcyone yanked it up and over her head and down again on the far side of the hippogriff.

He tumbled off into empty space.

There was an instant's pure terror as Will went into free
fall. Then water slammed into him, hard as a board. Bubbles surrounded him.

Choking, Will fought his way to the surface.

The hippogriff came skimming in a great circle, its rider howling with delight. “Oh, Will!” she cried. “What a delightful ending to a perfect evening! Nobody ever had a better first date!”

Will shook a fist. “You harpy! You harridan! You bitch!”

Alcyone pulled up and the hippogriff hung in the air, its enormous wings laboring mightily. She'd discarded the shreds of her gown and donned a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt from her saddlebag. Now, while she held the reins one-handed, she pulled out a pair of jeans, gave them a shake, and struggled into them. “Be seein' ya, chum. Can't say it hasn't been fun.”

She shook the reins and headed for the sky.

Will stared up after the dwindling hippogriff with mingled rage and lust, willing it to come back for him. But it did not. It lofted up into the big full moon and grew smaller and smaller until it was a single mote among thousands swarming in his sight.

All this time, Will had been treading water. Now he turned around and saw that he was less than a mile's swim from the shore. Apparently the hippogriff had not headed straight out into the bay as he had thought, but had turned and angled up the Gihon. So, really, it was not so bad as it might have been. Alcyone could have dumped him so far out to sea that he'd never have made it back.

Will took a stroke toward the docks. Then he stopped and stared back over his shoulder at that big watery moon. Somewhere out there was his thief.

“Ah, well,” he sighed. “Third time's the charm.”

Then he began the long swim to shore.

S
tarting penniless and naked on the docks, it took Will three days to steal, beg, wheedle, charm, and swindle his
way back to Babel. He could have done it in one and a half, but pride demanded that he return home with enough cash in hand to pay for his tux if Nat called him on its loss.

Still, those first few hours had been cold and disheartening ones.

When Will told the story, only lightly edited, of his evening, Nat laughed until he almost choked. “You're good, son! You're almost as good as I am!”

“I thought I'd screwed it all up. The political police are onto us. Florian hates my guts. And Alcyone knows pretty much everything.”

“Does anyone have any proof?”

“Uh… no.”

“Well, then! Don't worry about making enemies—we need enemies to make this scam work anyway. The important thing is that you had fun, after all. And you did have fun, didn't you? Of course you did.”

14 T
HE
P
ETRIFIED
F
REST

T
wo immense marble lions guarded the steps to the Public Library of Babel. Will sat down between the paws of one to read the books he had just checked out. It was an unseasonably warm autumn day and, because the library fronted on the esplanade, the steps were in full sunshine.

Nat had a cold-water railroad flat not half a block from the El, but it was less than an ideal place for reading. The up-bound cog train rumbled by every ten minutes, shaking the apartment like thunder and bringing Esme running to gaze wonderingly out the window. The stairway smelled of cabbages and laundry and ancient lead paint. A clutch of trolls lived on the first floor, a pianist on the second, and lubberkins on the third, and if for a miracle they all fell silent at once, it would not be long before one or another were pounding on the ceiling, angry at some noise he had made. The street outside echoed with the shouts of children playing wall ball, flipping baseball cards, or quarreling over bottle caps. Young ellemays and their lemans, lacking lodgings of their own, sought out the shelter of the brownstone's doorway in the evening to screw standing up. Delivery trucks rumbled by day and night.

Will began by going through the stack of papers Nat Whilk had saved for him.

Nat's plan was working beyond all expectation. It had taken Will three days to beg, steal, lie, and con his way back home, which turned out to be exactly the length of time it took the media to sniff out the story. On his arrival, the rumor of the king's return was front page news in every newspaper in Babel.
RUMORS OF RESTORATION HAUNT CITY
stated the
Times
.
HIS NOT-SO-ABSENT MAJESTY?
asked the
Post
.
PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN PRINCE-APPARENT SOUGHT
proclaimed the
Herald Tribune
. And, taking up all the front page of the
Daily News
, was his favorite:
HEIR HERE?

The editorial pages were filled with wild speculation. Why, they wondered, had an heir suddenly appeared? Was the king dying? (That he was not dead was certain, an insert explained, by various signs and omens, foremost among which was the quiescence of the Obsidian Throne. So long as His Absent Majesty lived, it would obey none other than he himself or those of his blood lineage, and was death to any other who dared sit upon it, a suite of attributes that even those who supported an absolute monarchy deplored for reasons that the king's absence made manifest.) Why, if the heir had returned, did he not reveal himself? Why, if he wished to remain hidden, had he made so little effort to conceal his identity during his first quasi-public appearance? If, indeed, it was his first. Another special insert of newsroom sweepings and convoluted reasoning argued otherwise.

Will put down the last of the papers and picked up a book.

“The Care and Feeding of Hippogriffs?”
a stone-deep voice grumbled. “Why read about them? Hippogriffs are nasty beasts. Rats with wings.”

Will turned and glared. “Don't you know it's rude to read over somebody's shoulder?”

“I can't help it,” the lion said. “I'm a compulsive reader. Newspapers, cereal boxes, anything with words on it. It's my only vice.”

“You have no room to complain, then. This has words.”

“That doesn't mean I don't have preferences! Sometimes a lounger brings something worthwhile. Faulkner. Woolf. Shelley. One summer there was a knocker who came here every day until he'd read all the way through War and Peace.” The lion shivered. “That was glorious.” Then, delicately raising one toe, he tapped on Will's stack of books with a stone claw. “These, however, are mere compendia of facts. Why on earth are you wasting your time on them?”

“Well, there's this girl…”

“There's always a girl.”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Oh, no, I suppose I wouldn't. What would a lion know about females? We only keep a pride of seven to ten of' em happy at a time. Anybody could do that!”

Will put down his book. “And where are they now, this pride of yours?”

“I have the happy honor of informing you that currently they are in labor.”

“What? All of them? At once?”

“You wouldn't want me to play favorites!” the lion said indignantly. “Every wife, every night, as often and as long as they please. That is the way to promote marital harmony. Take my word on it, so long as you adhere to this simple regimen, your marriages will never fail.”

“If they're in labor, shouldn't you be with them?”

The lion smiled pityingly. “Flesh is transient but stone endures. To us, you guys are as fleeting as the glimmer of moonlight on a summer lake. No wonder you never get anything done! Our lives, however, are long enough to be savored. When I was young, there was only one continent. Imagine my astonishment when a rivulet so narrow I used to hop across it without a second thought widened and became a sea! How dizzied I felt when one land broke into many and went whizzing to all corners of the globe! Sometimes I would have to shut my eyes and clutch the ground
with all twenty claws for a few thousand years just to stop my head from spinning.

“Unluckily for me, I was courting at the time, and my intended brides wound up on a different continental plate from me. I was beside myself with anxiety. Had I been as rash as one of you flesh-folk, I would have plunged at once into the water and drowned in a misguided attempt to swim across the ocean floor to rejoin them. But though lionesses demand passion, the one trait they value above all others is dependability and thus they despise impulsiveness. So I was patient. I waited. And after what seemed, even to me, to be an ungodsly great deal of time, my continent and theirs closed in upon one another again. I stood by the shore and watched the waters narrow. I saw the lands collide and a mighty range of mountains rise up where they met. When things had settled, I located the least difficult pass between their continental plate and mine.