Page 76 of Katabasis

G ertrude glided, and Alice followed. During the Italy tour Alice had climbed the steps of the Duomo in Florence, a dreadful idea in the dead of summer, four hundred and sixty-three steps in suffocating heat that she counted one by one in her head, because nothing else in that dim, unventilated, claustrophobic spiral gave her any reason to continue.

One woman suffered something resembling a heart attack halfway up, and the rest of them had to press themselves tight against the wall as she and her husband shuffled, gasping, back down.

Once every hundred stairs there was a tiny window in the stone, and everyone pressed their face against the bars as they walked past, desperate for a breeze.

Alice could only assume the architect of Dis had been inspired by the Duomo.

But the interstitial windows here afforded no cool air, only small rectangles of Hell’s burnt-orange sky.

Her legs burned; her lungs could not get enough air.

She turned all her efforts on putting one foot in front of another, on ignoring how many there had been and how many there were to go.

At last, just as she feared she might faint, they emerged into a courtyard.

For a moment Alice thought they had ascended into the living world, for what she saw here mirrored the splendor of Rome, of the Villa Borghese, of Palatine Hill.

These were not ruins, not scattered artifacts fallen through the cracks between worlds, but coherent, elegant designs.

Tiled footpaths arced around sculptures, gazebos, and burbling fountains.

Alice breathed deep, and the air that filled her lungs was crisp, fresh, and sweet.

“Come along, my dear.” Gertrude gestured for Alice to follow her up the hill. They reached a terrace lined by statues upon plinths. A dozen men and women, much larger than life size.

“The greatest among us,” said Gertrude. “Our builders and dreamers. Magicians, architects, and poets among them. All finely attuned to beauty, and convinced that beauty could be torn away from the divine.”

Alice tried to guess at the identities of these figures, but there were no names on the plinths, and the chiseled faces were strangely impersonal.

They evoked ideals more than they did particular people.

Uniform strong brows, eyes lifted upward, straight patrician noses. Mouths set in heroic, defiant frowns.

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“Still with us,” said Gertrude. “This is the Rebel Citadel. We lose no one to death.”

They walked across the terrace to an overhang.

Alice leaned over the edge. She could see all of Dis below—the bazaar, the workshops, the milling interlocutors.

The city was so much larger than she’d imagined.

The bazaar—still burning, wrecked by Cerberus’s rampage—seemed to be only one small pocket of many such marketplaces.

From here she could see a whole teeming mass of Shades, running about the city like ants, all dedicated to the same pointless task.

She stepped back. It felt good to escape above, free of the noise.

If only she kept away from the edge, she could block the bazaar entirely from view.

From this terrace, the rest of Dis might as well not exist.

“It’s lovely here,” she said.

“Isn’t it?” Gertrude beckoned. “Come over round this way. The view is better here.”

They turned a corner. Alice saw that they stood on not a mountaintop but a cliffside.

Below churned the Lethe, black and merciless.

Here it was more agitated than Alice had ever seen it, slamming furiously against the rocks below.

Here more than anywhere else the Lethe seemed not a river but an ocean, a vast black expanse that surrounded them on all sides.

She looked out to the horizon, wondering—but she saw nothing there.

King Yama’s domain remained out of sight.

“We built on the water’s edge,” said Gertrude. “The greatest rebuke.”

Proudly she surveyed her domain. Alice followed her gaze, marveling at that complex silhouette, those towers reaching defiantly for the sky. At the highest peak overlooking the Lethe, where all patterns suggested there should have been a bell tower, was a jagged, incomplete edge.

“There was a quake,” said Gertrude.

“A quake?”

“Every now and then the land rebels,” said Gertrude. “The earth is rent apart. Chasms open beneath our feat. Lava spews from beneath and sloughs off our skin, encases us in rock. Those who fall below take eons to climb out, if ever they do.”

“Oh,” said Alice.

“Once there was a most terrible quake, and the bell tower fell.” Gertrude shook her head.

“Such a calamity. We watched it tumble down the rocks, ringing the whole time, and sink beneath the waves. Still sometimes we hear a low note, humming in our bones, and we know it is the bell ringing from beneath the Lethe, ringing still.”

She said this with no sense of loss.

Alice could guess why. “There will be another bell. You will build another bell.”

“Oh, yes,” said Gertrude. “Everything ends up in Hell eventually. Everything finds its way to Dis. Souls go round and round. But all their stuff —that doesn’t get a second life.

In time we will scavenge enough to build a second world below.

Not a replica. No one wants a replica of a flawed world. We are building something better.”

For a moment Alice saw what Gertrude saw, looking over that skyline—a great city just becoming, to be filled out and completed over one millennium and then another.

Gertrude spoke as one who had the time; whose existence was not counted in days but in eras; whose project could be measured in one long breath from the birth of the world to its end.

Alice saw flashing in her mind all the outlines of cities that had come before the citadel.

Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Xi’an—all the great centers of the world, places the Rebel Citadel had outlasted.

She tried to imagine Dis from that long view of time.

Perhaps in time Dis would grow so large, so hospitable, that no souls would ever cross over. Why toil, when you could rest in peace?

Gertrude turned to the horizon. In the burning light, her profile was quite striking. Her right hand was lifted up to her chest, palm open in beneficence. Alice had gravely mistaken her for a heretic. Up here, Gertrude occupied more the role of a saint.

“Have you ever watched sand falling through an hourglass?” asked Gertrude.

“Imagine it now, in your mind’s eye. Pay attention to what happens at the bottom.

Always the sand forms a little peak. A mountain, reaching.

Then the weight becomes too great, and the sand collapses outward, and the bottom flattens again.

Time doesn’t build to a climax, you see.

Only a little peak, always about to collapse.

That is how time moves here in Dis. Tiny impulses forward, the illusion of a build.

Then the cycle repeats, again and again, while all the time the bottom accumulates.

One day we will reach the top. But it takes so very long. ”

She lifted her chin. “We will be here at the end. We will be here when the dying sun goes out. When the armies of Gog and Magog assemble to invade the saints of Heaven, when Fenrir swallows Odin whole, when Apep devours Ra and casts all in darkness, when the world turns upside down and its crust is cast into molten rock to be reborn anew, we will be here .”

She spoke with such conviction.

Alice wondered what it took to sustain that hope across years, across centuries.

Then she wondered where to locate the flaw in Gertrude’s thinking.

Was there one at all? For in a world where none of the rules were stable, why not believe in an apocalyptic reversal of the moral order?

Why was that so unlikely? Wasn’t there a perverse beauty to it all?

What conviction—to do wrong and stand by it—how much bolder it was than to do right simply because one was afraid.

Just then Alice envied Gertrude. At least Gertrude knew what she stood for.

At least Gertrude had a future to fight for, faraway as it was.

“And I can just...” Alice spread her hands, unsure how to comport herself. “You mean that I can just stay here?”

“Stay as long as you like,” said Gertrude. “Stay forever.”

“And no one else can get in?”

She was thinking of the Kripkes, but Gertrude took her to mean John Gradus. “That charlatan? He won’t bother you. Nothing enters the citadel without my knowledge.”

“And should I want to leave?”

“I will not force you to stay. No one comes to the citadel except by free will. But I think you will be much more comfortable here than you ever could have been outside.” Gently, Gertrude pressed her hand against Alice’s back. “Go on. The city is yours.”

This seemed rather abrupt to Alice. She did not know what more fanfare she could have wanted—Gertrude had delivered precisely what she had promised—but she had not expected such a quick dismissal.

“But where is everyone?”

“Resting. People come to the citadel for the quiet. We do not squabble like those down below. Wander as you like, but in time you will find you prefer the quiet as well.”

Alice felt a twinge of panic. She did not want to be all alone here; she didn’t know what to do with herself. “But where are you going?”

“To mind the city.” Gertrude gave Alice’s shoulder a firm, final press. “Go now. Find your peace.”

So Alice wandered down the marble path, feeling a bit like a child told, before the sun was even down, to go to bed.