“Haven’t been up here for a while,” Umber remarked, trotting away. “Closer than you think!”
Janet’s shoulders sank. Dammit! We could chase this guy forever and never catch him. But Poppy, just reaching the top, was totally undaunted. Without breaking stride—in fact she picked up speed—she ran straight at the portal, planted her hands on the windowsill, did a handstand, let the gravity flip as she broke the plane, and landed on her feet on the grass, upside-down with respect to Janet and facing her.
It made Janet want to puke just watching her. And she wasn’t even pregnant.
“Come on!” Poppy said brightly.
She spun around to face the receding ram-god. Even Umber seemed dismayed by her sprightliness. He startled like a mountain goat hearing a distant gunshot.
“Good-bye!” He called, and He was off like a greyhound, and the portal winked out.
Janet took a half step toward it, too late.
“Just like a fucking god,” she said.
She was still standing there, arms crossed, glaring at it, when Josh came heaving up the top step like he was trying to get himself out of a swimming pool.
“I am gonna sack that guy’s nutcastle,” he croaked.
She brought him up to speed on the departed god, his absent wife, etc. He seemed oddly unperturbed.
“By the way, your wife is pretty impressive. I think I underestimated her. So kudos on that.”
“Thanks, Janet.” Josh was pleased. As he should be. “I never thought I’d hear you say the word kudos.”
“Doesn’t count cause we’re underwater.”
“So he did a portal, huh,” Josh said. “Did you get a good look?”
“Hills,” Janet said. “Grass. Sky.”
Josh nodded, saying nothing, but his eyes were busy. He sketched rapidly in the air with his thick fingers, invisible diagrams and sigils.
“East coast. Northeast.”
“What are you doing? Oh.” She forgot Josh knew like three times as much as anybody else about portals.
He was already lost to concentration and his imaginary magic finger painting, which he accompanied now with satisfied grunts and hums. Janet had to give him credit: when he understood something, he really understood the hell out of it.
“Pfft,” he said. “You gotta be kidding me.”
He got up and began pacing around the room, looking around like he was tracking a mosquito nobody else could see.
“I figured He must be working on some, like, special secret divine transport grid that us mere mortals are locked out of, by virtue of our fallen mortal nature. Right? But not even! So where exactly was He standing when He threw this thing open?”
Janet gestured vaguely.
“Show me,” Josh said. “I need to see it or it doesn’t work.”
Janet sighed.
“If you look at my ass I’m telling Poppy.”
She got down on all fours, Umber-style, and reenacted the sequence exactly. Josh nodded gravely, staring at her ass.
Then he walked over to the window where the portal had been and pressed his palms against it. He rubbed the glass in slow circles, and it was like he was doing a grave rubbing: wherever his hands went, a ghostly, silvery afterimage of the portal appeared, or rather the view through the portal: a range of low hills, but oddly regular. Each hill was perfectly smooth, and more or less the same height as the others, and they were arranged in perfect straight rows. On top of each hill was a single tree, an oak tree by the look of them.
“Where the hell is that?” Josh said.
“Chankly Bore,” Janet said. It had to be. Nowhere else like it. “Up north next to Broken Bay.”
“Weird.” Josh leaned in to study it, put his nose against the glass. “Chankly Bore. Is ‘chankly’ an adjective? Modifying ‘bore’?”
“Some mysteries it doesn’t pay to pry into. Josh, can you get us there?”
“Can I?” He snapped his fingers, once, twice. “Almost had it.” Snap. On the third try the ghostly image burst into full color, hi-def, streaming live. “There you are, my queen.”
—
Janet wound up inching herself across the low windowsill feet first, on her bum, her face chalk white, allowing the gravity to get a grip on her feet and drag them downward to where Josh could reach up to receive them from the other side. The gravitational sheer was just not something she could get her mind around, let alone her body—she froze halfway, looking a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh stuck halfway in and halfway out of Rabbit’s burrow. In the end he had to yank her bodily through.
Then she was standing on Fillorian soil again, less than four hours after she had boldly set forth in search of the rogue god Umber, of Whom there was no sign. She ruminated, again, on the eternal return, the widening gyre, that seemed to govern human history. There is a tide in the affairs of men. A slack tide, that heaves up wrack and slime and rotting seaweed and deposits them on the sand, like a cat leaving the corpse of a rat on your doorstep. Then it slinks back in search of more.
They’d been so close. They could have solved everything. And now they wouldn’t. He’d gotten away.
At any rate the Chankly Bore was a majestic sight in person. The hills ran on into the distance in their rows, not perfectly regular, she saw now, but almost, like the rubber dimples of a nonslip mat writ very, very large. Each one had its own tree at the summit, like a candle on top of a cupcake, and each tree was different. In places the flanks of the hills had been bleached a tawny golden yellow by the endless unyielding iron summer.
There was Poppy, waiting for them, a quarter-mile off. She pointed—wait a minute, maybe all wasn’t lost after all. Umber wasn’t hiding, He was standing right there, looking at them, at the summit of one of the hills—one row in, three over. He wasn’t even moving! They could see Him totally plainly!
She started toward Him.
“Don’t run!” she shouted, pleaded even, as if the sound of her voice could keep Him there. “Don’t run away! Please! Just stay there!”
Umber didn’t run. He waited for them.
He didn’t even look especially concerned as the three humans, two queens and a king, plus a royal heir in utero, came straggling up the slope. As backdrops for earthshaking events went, the Chankly Bore was a corker. The view was sublime. Janet wondered if someone had planted the trees on the tops of the hills or if they’d just grown like that.
Actually the entity most likely to know the answer to that question was ten yards away and closing. As she came up to Him she slowed, hardly believing that He wasn’t going to bolt the moment she came too close. His stupid woolly face was impassive.
“So,” Janet said, breathing hard from the climb, hands on knees, “did somebody plant these trees or did they just grow like that?”
“Do you like them?” Umber said. “They’re Mine of course. My brother did the hills, though I don’t think He meant to leave them like this. I’m sure He planned to scatter them about artfully later on, here and there. He liked to create the appearance of deep geological history. But I said, ‘No, no, they’re wonderful just as they are.’ And I put a single tree on top of each one, and they’ve stood like this ever since. From the First Day.
“One of them is a clock-tree now.” That short quavering moan again—that was how He laughed, it turned out. How incredibly annoying and affected. “Don’t know how she did that. A marvelous facility, that witch has.”
His manner was different from Ember’s. He was genteel, a little distracted, a little amused, a touch effeminate. Like if He’d been wearing any clothes He would have worn a bow tie and a purple waistcoat. She couldn’t tell if He was sort of lofty and above it all or just a bit dotty.
But it didn’t matter because either way the moment was here. This was it, exposition time, He was going to tell them everything, all the missing pieces, and then they would know what to do to make Fillory live again—oh God, she realized, how she wanted it to live! She didn’t want to go back. She wanted to stay a queen!
Another case solved. After all that urgent chasing Janet suddenly felt like she had all the time in the world. A deep red sunset was getting going on the horizon, like a livid bruise just starting to show.
“You seem different from Your twin brother,” she said.
“From who?”
“Your brother? Ember? Your twin?”
“Oh! Oh.” He had a bit of a selective deafness thing going on. “We’re just fraternal.”
“We thought You were dead.”
“Oh, I know!” Whinnying laugh. Umber actually trotted once in a circle, like a cat chasing its tail, such was His pleasure. “But I was just pretending. Martin wanted it that way. Such a strange boy. Never came out of the Oedipal phase, I don’t think. He was always talking about his mummy in his sleep, wondering if his father was alive, that sort of thing.
“But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead god, why would they? Though I did spend a while in the Underworld. Not that I had to, but I was getting into the spirit of the role. They wanted Me to be the lord of it, the dead did, but I wouldn’t. Imagine that—Me, god of the Underworld! I much preferred something less grand. More like, I don’t know, a visiting research fellow.
“But I did enjoy My time there. It’s so quiet. And the games are so charming! I could have stayed forever, I truly could have.
“And then I spent a few years as Ember’s shadow, following Him everywhere, trotting around under His feet. He never knew! I would have thought it would be obvious, with My name. But you know, Ember doesn’t think that way. He never did. He’s very literal about things.”
“But why would You do it in the first place?” Poppy was frowning and shaking her head. “I mean not the shadow thing, but why would You turn Martin into the Beast?”
A deep sigh from Umber. He dropped His golden eyes to the turf.
“That turned out very badly. Very badly. He wanted it so much, and I thought it would be good for him. But in the end I was so disappointed in Martin—his behavior. Disgraceful. Do you know what it was about Martin? He had no self-control. None!”
“I would say that yes, that turned out extremely badly,” Josh said. “Not a lot of winners there.”
“Not even Martin, in the end,” Umber said sadly. “Poor boy. He wanted so terribly to stay here. He never stopped talking about it. And he was very brilliant. I couldn’t say no, could I? I wanted to give him what he wanted, I only want to give everybody what they want! But then the things he did. He gave up his humanity, you know, in order to stay here in Fillory. He sacrificed it to Me, and there’s a great deal of power in that. Even I was surprised at how much he got out of it.
“But then would you believe it, it was the best part of him! The rest of him turned out to be an absolute turd. I just went into hiding—he really might have killed Me if he could have found Me. Then later he said he did, and I let it stand. It’s disappointing.” Umber sighed and settled down onto the grass, making Himself comfortable. “So disappointing. We had to change the rules because of it. That’s why We let you lot stay, you know. We don’t send the kings and queens home anymore.”
“But why did you take it?” Josh said. “I mean his humanity?”
“Well—” And the ram looked down again, this time coyly embarrassed. He trailed one of His fore-hooves in the grass. “I suppose I had a notion that if I possessed Martin’s humanity, I could be king of Fillory. As well as god. A god-king, you might say. It was just an idea. But then I’ve been enjoying being dead so much, I haven’t even tried!”
This conversation wasn’t going quite the way Janet had thought it would. She didn’t expect to like Umber, but she hadn’t expected to hate Him so much. She was hoping for more of a charming-supervillain type. That she could relate to. But Umber wasn’t charming. He had a way of not taking responsibility for things. She may have been a bitch, but at least she copped to it.
“This is all really fascinating,” she said. “Truly. But it’s not actually why we wanted to talk to You.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Which by the way,” Josh said, “since we’re talking, why did You sort of run away just then, and then stop running away?”
“Oh!” Umber looked surprised. “I thought you’d like that. Bit of a chase. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”
“Not really, no,” Janet said.
“Though I did like the part when I saved everything,” Josh said. “That was good. You know, with the portal.”
“There!” Umber said. “You see? And you needed the exercise too.”
This had the effect of canceling out Josh’s triumph. Poppy patted his arm.
“Well, whatever,” he said. “Look, what about this apocalypse thing? End of the world. How are we going to stop that? That’s Your thing, right?”
Umber actually looked wounded.
“The apocalypse? Oh, no. That’s not one of Mine.”
“It’s not?” Janet said. “Wait.”
“Goodness no. Why would I do that?”
The two queens and the king looked at each other. Something began dying a little inside Janet. Oh yes—hope. That’s what people called it.
“But if You’re not—?” Poppy said. “Then how are we going to—?”
The astonishment was plain even on Umber’s inhuman face.
“Stop it? You can’t think I would know! I don’t think you can stop it. How would you stop an apocalypse? It’s just nature. It happens by itself.”