Page 19 of Katabasis
“I’m sure.” She had a terrible urge to punch him, accompanied by an even more terrible urge to wail as loud as she could. Neither seemed appropriate, so she settled for a muted, keening sound into her palms. “I know how male anatomy works, Murdoch. Please. It’s fine.”
“I would never disrespect you on purpose.” Peter seemed about to cry. “Never,ever—”
“Stop,” she gasped. “Please, can we just—can we eat some breakfast.”
“Yes. Breakfast.” Peter reached for his foil of Lembas Bread, grabbed it by the wrong end, and spilled food all over the gray sand. He stared at it in dismay.
“It’s fine,” Alice choked. “Have some of mine.”
They sat opposite one another and chewed, blinking very much and saying nothing. There was nothing to look at on the monotonous desert plane, so Alice could only stare into space if she wanted to avoid Peter’s eye, which she could not do without being very obvious about it. Instead she concentrated on her Lembas Bread. Cardboard. Mm.
It was an excruciating morning.
Somehow Alice had not given much thought to the daily indignities of the journey, and she had not accounted for daily hygiene, let alone daily functions in the presence of another. They packed their things and freshened up in silence. Peter had to pee, and Alice had to do the other thing, which she piled sand over like an embarrassed cat. She reflected on the horrors of embodiment. In many ways, she thought, the Shades had it much better.
Finally Peter broke the silence. “Maybe—maybe we should think about charting the rest of our way.”
“Hm?”
“Through Hell, that is.”
“Oh—yes, all right.”
He pulled a notebook out of his rucksack and began fumbling through the pages. “Honestly, I didn’t expect to get this far. I really hoped he’d be in the fields.”
“I did too.” Alice brushed the crumbs off her lap and then reached into her rucksack for her own notes. “But I’ve got some maps drawn up...”
“Me too.” Peter turned his notebook around to show her. “Suppose we head for the Court of Desire first?”
“Desire’s the Second Court.”
“Yes, but I think we can skip over the first, don’t you?”
“I’ve no idea how we would do that.” Alice peered down at his notes, frowning. Peter’s map of Hell looked bizarrely like a pizza. An anus, really. He’d circled in red a dot at the center, with courts branching off all around and arrows pointing in all directions. “What map is that based on?”
“The Orpheus map,” said Peter. “Penhaligon’s reprint. Find the center, where all the courts converge... which means we’re looking for something like a mountain, something elevated. The Sumeru Throne, as it were. And then we can simply make for the court we need, instead of wasting our time going in order.”
“Oh, Murdoch, that map is trash.”
“How do you mean? Everyone cites Orpheus.”
“Orpheus was mad with loss,” said Alice. “He was driven solely by longing for Eurydice.”
“So?”
“So he didn’t care about anything around him. From his perspective of course it was a straight line to wherever Eurydice ended up because that’s how it went in his mind’s eye. That map is worthless. It’s a fantasy of grief.”
Peter lowered his notebook, deflated. But this was a virtue of Peter’s—he wasn’t an asshole when proven wrong. “How do you figure, then?”
“I subscribe to the accumulative theory.” Alice flipped to her own maps to demonstrate. “That is, the courts proceed in order of karmic severity. First Pride, then Desire, then Greed, et cetera and onward. Now, there’s some disagreement over whether one sin really entails all the lesser ones. For instance, if you’re guilty of wrath, do you necessarily need to be punished for pride? Does greed entail desire? Is it all a nesting doll of wrongdoing, or can you skip over some courts? It’s not clear to me how the judges handle that. But it does seem that you’ve at least got to travel in order. And when you’ve passed, you get to cross the Lethe over to Lord Yama’s throne.”
Alice tapped a black line running round the edge of the courts. “The river Lethe runs perpendicular to all eight courts and marks the boundary of reincarnation. So Hell looks less like a pizza anus—”
“Excuse me?”
“And more like,” she continued without clarification, “I don’t know, a Möbius strip. The Lethe bounds all. You’re trapped on this plane until you’re done. And then you go somewhere beyond. Makes sense?”
Peter rubbed his chin. “May I see?”
