Page 149 of Katabasis
She ascended the steps to his throne, the Dialetheia clutched tight to her chest.
He reached out. She passed it over. King Yama held the Dialetheia up and, closing his eyes, pressed it against himself. The trees’ petals glowed a brilliant silver then, the color of starlight, and then the tree passed into Lord Yama’s chest. A bright twinkling rippled through his dark body; a million constellations winking into existence. King Yama exhaled, and the starlight dimmed.There’s more where that came from, Alice thought.Nothing exists without contradictions.
“Now.” King Yama gripped his staff. “Let’s send you home.”
A staircase materialized before them, spiralingoutward with the sound of a rushing stream. Up and up it went until they lost sight of its end, a needle through the world. Hand in hand, Alice and Peter approached its base.
“Go on,” said Lord Yama. “Be careful you do not look back.”
“Really?” asked Alice.
“I’m only joking,” said Lord Yama. “Look however much you want. Go on.”
They ascended. Alice felt lighter and lighter with every step she took. Every step brought her closer to real life; closer to fresh air trickling down from above. Air that tasted likeair; sweet and fresh and nourishing, not the stale nothing of the deadlands. Had air always tasted so good? The lower steps disappeared as they walked, one by one until they were suspended high above the air. This did not bother her; Alice was not going to fall; indeed as the steps vanished beneath her rising heels she had the strange feeling she had never needed the steps at all; they were only a heuristic, because it was too much of a leap to fly. Never had her feet felt so sure. She had no fear she would lose her way. He must throw away the ladder once he has climbed up it, wrote Wittgenstein; and then he will see the world aright.
They climbed so fast. Soon Lord Yama and his court were tiny as a doll’s house. Alice glanced over her shoulder, and the Lord of Hell waved his arm in goodbye. Minutes later they were so high above the Eight Courts she could see the entire landscape of Hell beneath her. The towers of Pride, the deserts of Greed. And the Rebel Citadel, in all its defiant fury, inhabitants trapped in the Hell of their own making. Alice could feel no animosity toward Gertrude, only a lingering pity—for Gertrude thought her refuge was so large, but from above Alice could see the citadel was only an ugly spot on an immeasurable landscape. A dollhouse, heartbreaking in its attention to detail. And here Gertrude had thought she had remade the world.
“You all right?” Peter asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Only remembering.”
She stood a while longer, letting her gaze linger over those courts. She tried to commit them to memory as best she could. Then she turned, and continued up the stairs.
She hoped it was a long time before she returned. She hoped that when she returned, after many years of agony and excitement, these dull sands would be a comfort.
“I wonder if we’ll ever get jobs now,” said Peter. “Seeing as we won’t graduate.”
“We could write about Hell,” said Alice. “Make that the dissertation.”
“Would anyone even believe us? We’ve no proof.”
“I’m your proof.”
“You’re biased.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re in love with me.”
“Hush,” said Alice, blushing. “You can’t just go around telling everyone.”
Oh, but it didn’t matter. The academy didn’t matter. Perhaps they could revise their dissertation topics in time and change their committees and scrape their way into a job, or perhaps they couldn’t, but none of it mattered because the future still lay before them, delightfully open. They could fill it with whatever they wished, and Alice’s only intention then was to spend it with Peter.
No more labs for a while. No more lectures. She imagined study dates with him in the future—tossing crumpled-up papers at each other, trading books, scribbling things all over each other’s blackboards. But for now she thought she’d quite like to get away from campus. Perhaps a weekend away—she hadn’t taken a weekend off in years, she wouldn’t even know where to go. They said Ely was pleasant. Grantchester, maybe. Supposedly that was a nice place to swim. Or perhaps something more modest; a night at the cinema, a picnic under the willow by the river. She didn’t know Peter’s favorite foods. She didn’t even know what he liked to do for fun, if he did anything for fun. She’d have to learn, she’d have to discover a million things about him. Peter Murdoch was a book with no ending and all she wanted to do with the rest of her life was to trace her finger down every page.
They reached the sky, or the part of the sky where ended this world. A rectangular sheet of metal lay horizontal above them—the bottom side of a cellar door. Light seeped through along its edges. A dozen butterflies ringed the door, brilliant glowing things. They all fluttered aside when Alice reached for the trapdoor save for one, which lingered on the cellar door’s lock, its wings wafting gently. Alice stroked her finger along one wing. It was so velvety soft. The memory of a kiss.
“Thanks, Elspeth,” she murmured. “I know.”
The butterfly flew off into the burning orange. Alice pulled. The lock clicked easily open in her hand. She and Peter raised their hands above their heads and pushed. The door swung freely upward, and suddenly they were bathed in moonlight.
Alice recognized that night sky. She knew precisely where Lord Yama had put them. This was the courtyard in Magdalene College at the end of the Fellow’s Garden by the river, the green she’d crossed so many nights with her head hunched over her chest, staring at her feet. She knew it because the stars there were uncommonly bright. Something about the effects of all the ambient magick interfering with modernity, dimming the sounds and lights of the city around. All the pollution faded back and the stars stood out with startling clarity, so you didn’t have to hike miles out to trace the constellations; you could just see them overhead, clear as diagrams. Every summer you could find astronomy students lying on their backs, penciling sketches into notebooks propped above their heads.
She’d walked once with Peter through this field. The field was out of his way; he lived in St. John’s, lying in precisely the other direction, but it was late and there’d been some news story about an escaped python, and ridiculous as that was, it made sense at the time that he walk her home, just in case the python ambushed from the reeds and swallowed her whole. Yes. Peter would fight the python. The stars were so bright that night and Peter had asked her, did she know about Olbers’s Paradox? No she didn’t; would he explain?
“The night sky shouldn’t be so dark,” Peter had told her. “If the universe is endless, then starlight should fill all the empty spaces. Light doesn’t stop until it hits a surface—so why the dark spaces? From where we stand on Earth, all we should see is light.”
“Maybe the universe isn’t limitless, then,” Alice had said.
