Many people came to visit with me in the room of billowing curtains. Some of them were dead.
Iota came one day—I remember his visit clearly. He dropped to one knee, put his palm to his forehead, then took the low chair beside my bed where my gray nurses sat to scrape off the old poultices （which hurt）， clean the wound （which hurt more）， and then put on fresh poultices. That greenish muck—Claudia’s creation—stank to high heaven, but it was soothing. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have preferred a couple of Advils. A couple of Percocets would have been even better.
“You look fucking terrible,” Eye said.
“Thank you. Very kind.”
“It was wasp venom that did for me,” Eye said. “On the knife. You remember the knife, and the man behind the door?”
I did. Jeff, a good old American name. Or Geoff, a good old British one. “I had an idea Petra had him tapped for her consort once Elden died and she became queen of the realm.”
“He probably had one of the gray men stick that knife into a nest long enough to get a good coating. Poor fellow was likely stung to death.”
I thought that more than likely, if the wasps in Empis were as big as the roaches.
“But would that bastard care?” Iota continued. “Nah, nah, not that bitch’s son. Wasps weren’t so dangerous in the old days, but…” He shrugged.
“Things changed once Flight Killer was in charge. For the worse.”
“For the worse, yuh.” He looked quite amusing, sitting in that low chair with his knees up around his ears. “We needed someone to save us. We got you. Better than nothing, I suppose.”
I raised my good hand and poked up the ring finger and pinky, my old friend Bertie’s way of shooting someone the bird.
Iota said, “Petra’s poison may not be as bad as what was slathered on that bastard’s knife, but from the look of you it was bad enough.”
Of course it was bad. She had licked off the Elden-thing’s drool, and that residue had been in her mouth when she bit me. Thinking of it made me shudder.
“Fight it,” he said, getting up. “Fight it, Prince Charlie.”
I didn’t see him come in, but I saw him leave. He passed through the billowing curtains and was gone.
One of the gray nurses came in, looking concerned. It was possible to discern expressions on the faces of the afflicted now; the worst of the deformities might remain, but the steady progression of the disease—the curse—had been arrested. More, there was slow but steady improvement. I saw the first tinge of color in many gray faces, and the webbing that had turned hands and feet into flippers was dissolving. But I didn’t believe there would be permanent recovery for any of them. Claudia could hear again—a little—but I thought Woody would always be blind.
The nurse said she’d heard me speaking and thought I might be lapsing back into delirium.
“I was talking to myself,” I said, and maybe I was. Radar had never so much as raised her head, after all.
Cla dropped by for a visit. He didn’t bother with the palm-to-brow salute, nor did he sit down, just hulked over the bed. “You cheated. If you’d played straight, I would have laid you out, prince or no prince.”
“What did you expect?” I asked. “You had at least a hundred pounds on me, and you were fast. Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same in my shoes.”
He laughed. “You got me there, I give it to you, but I think your days of breaking a fighting stick over anybody’s neck are over. Are you going to get better?”
“Fucked if I know.”
He laughed some more and walked to the billowing curtains. “You’ve got some hard bark on you, I’ll say that much.” And he was gone. If he was there at all, that is; you’ve got some hard bark on you was a line from an old TCM movie my dad and I watched during his drinking days. Can’t remember the name of the film, only that Paul Newman was in it, playing an Indian. You think some of the things in my story are hard to believe? Try imagining Paul Newman as an Indian. That’s a real credibility-strainer.
That night—or some other, I can’t be sure—I woke to the sound of Radar growling and saw Kellin, the Lord High himself, sitting at my bedside in his fancy red smoking jacket.
“You’re getting worse, Charlie,” he said. “They tell you the bite looks better and maybe it does, but that infection’s gone deep. Soon you’ll boil with it. Your heart will swell up and burst, and I’ll be waiting for you. I and my troop of night soldiers.”