“I don’t know,” Pie said. “All, I assume. But everyone has a different theory.”
“What’s yours?”
“Well, when we move between the Reconciled Dominions, you’ll see it’s very easy. There are countless passing places between the Fourth and the Third, the Third and the Second. We’ll walk into a mist, and we’ll come out into another world. Simple. But I don’t think the borders are fixed. I think they move over the centuries, and the shapes of the Dominions change. So maybe it’ll be the same with the Fifth. If it’s reconciled, the borders will spread, until the whole planet has access to the rest of the Dominions. The truth is, nobody really knows what the Imajica looks like, because nobody’s ever made a map.”
“Somebody should try.”
“Maybe you’re the man to do it,” Pie said. “You were an artist before you were a traveler.”
“I was a faker, not an artist.”
“But your hands are clever,” Pie replied.
“Clever,” Gentle said softly, “but never inspired.”
This melancholy thought took him back, momentarily, to Klein, and to the rest of the circle he’d left in the Fifth: to Jude, Clem, Estabrook, Vanessa, and the rest. What were they doing this fine night? Had they even noticed his departure? He doubted it.
“Are you feeling any better?” Pie inquired. “I see some lights down the road a little way. It may be the last outpost before the mountains.”
“I’m in good shape,” Gentle said, climbing back into the car.
They’d proceeded perhaps a quarter of a mile, and were in sight of the village, when their progress was brought to a halt by a young girl who appeared from the dusk to herd her doeki across the road. She was in every way a normal thirteen-year-old child but for one: her face, and those parts of her body revealed by her simple dress, were sleek with fawny down. It was plaited where it grew long at her elbows, and her temples, and tied in a row of ribbons at her nape.
“What village is this?” Pie asked, as the last of the doeki lingered in the road.
“Beatrix,” she said, and without prompting added, “There is no better place in any heaven.” Then, .shooing the last beast on its way, she vanished into the twilight.
The streets of Beatrix weren’t as narrow as those of Vana-eph, nor were they designed for motor vehicles. Pie parked the car close to the outskirts, and the two of them ambled into the village from there. The houses were unpretentious affairs, raised of an ocher stone and surrounded by stands of vegetation that were a cross between silver birch and bamboo. The lights Pie had spotted from a distance weren’t those that burned in the windows, but lanterns that hung in these trees, throwing their mellow light across the streets. Just about every copse boasted its lantern trimmers—shaggy-faced children like the herder—some squatting beneath the trees, others perched precariously in their branches. The doors of almost all the houses stood open, and music drifted from several, tunes caught by the lantern trimmers and danced to in the dapple. Asked to guess, Gentle would have said life was good here. Slow, perhaps, but good.
“We can’t cheat these people,” Gentle said. “It wouldn’t be honorable.”
“Agreed,” Pie replied.
“So what do we do for money?”
“Maybe they’ll agree to cannibalize the vehicle for a good meal and a horse or two.”
“I don’t see any horses.”
“A doeki would be fine.”
“They look slow.”
Pie directed Gentle’s gaze up the heights of the Jokalay-lau. The last traces of day still lingered on the snowfields, but for all their beauty the mountains were vast and uninviting.
“Slow and certain is safer up there,” Pie said. Gentle took Pie’s point. “I’m going to see if I can find somebody in charge,” the mystif went on, and left Gentle’s side to go and question one of the lantern trimmers.
Drawn by the sound of raucous laughter, Gentle wandered on a little farther, and turning a corner he found two dozen of the villagers, mostly men and boys, standing in front of a marionette theater that had been set up in the lee of one of the houses. The show they were watching contrasted violently with the benign atmosphere of the village. To judge by the spires painted on the backdrop the story was set in Patashoqua, and as Gentle joined the audience two characters, one a grossly fat woman, the other a man with the proportions of a fetus and the endowment of a donkey, were in the middle of a domestic tiff so frenzied the spires were shaking. The puppeteers, three slim young men with identical mustaches, were plainly visible above the booth and provided both the dialogue and the sound effects, the former larded with baroque obscenities. Now another character entered—this a hunchbacked sibling of Pulcinella—and summarily beheaded Donkey Dick. The head flew to the ground, where the fat woman knelt to sob over it. As she did so, cherubic wings unfolded from behind its ears and it floated up into the sky, accompanied by a falsetto din from the puppeteers. This earned applause from the audience, during which Gentle caught sight of Pie in the street. At the mystif’s side was a jug-eared adolescent with hair down to the middle of his back. Gentle went to join them.