«Look, if you _do_ take it and go back, you'll meet up sooner or later with Jack Chili. You'll have to fight him for the fifth Bone. I can't tell you any more than that, but it will take an impossible amount of courage to go up against him. But let me finish the scenario anyway so that you have the full picture. The fifth Bone completes the quest. Get it, and you become the ruler of Rondua. Chili is out and you're in.
«But _that's_ the biggest joke of all, Pepsi. Believe me! Because ruling doesn't mean you rule – it means you _try_ to rule! You assemble all of these hopeful, silly, _mean_ beings back there. Get them under one roof and tell them what's best for them. And you will be right, because winning the Bones gives you that kind of wisdom, I won't deny you that. But do you think they'll care for a minute? Not on your life! They'll listen to you because they'll respect your achievement. That's something they'd never even dream of accomplishing. But that's superfluous, because in the end they'll eye each other malevolently and hate everyone around them who owns what they don't. Oh, of course they'll listen politely to you. But then they'll run back home and start massing their absurd little armies for yet another silly, hopeless battle.»
He got up and walked away from our small circle of lamplight. His footsteps in the dark were very loud and he spoke again from a few feet away.
«Do you know what? History teaches us that the only great rulers are dead ones: the ones we look at in museums and history books and say, 'Oh, how right he was! Why didn't any of those stupid people back then listen to him! Why would anyone want to assassinate that great mind?'
«Okay, Pepsi, let's say for a minute that you get exactly what you want: you become ruler of Rondua. _Nothing_ will change! Take my word for it! Absolutely nothing. Sure, you'll have the power to control them, but you can take it for granted they'll hate you, _despise_ you even, for holding all that power over them. And once your back is turned, they'll do what they like best of all – they'll pull out their swords or talons or fire and stick them into the nearest enemy. Listen to me! Wise men, even great men, never put a stop to hatred and enemies. They just pull them apart for a little while. That's why Jack Chili has been so successful in his reign – he doesn't _have_ to lift a finger to cause trouble. Man causes his own trouble. Trouble is the only perpetual motion machine there is!»
Pepsi's small voice off to my right made me blink hard. «I don't like you, Mr. DeFazio.»
A sad chuckle. «I don't like myself, little king. Your son dislikes me, Cullen, not because of what I have been saying but because I took him to Ophir Zik when he first . . . arrived here. I could excuse myself by saying that's only part of my assigned job here in Rondua, but I won't do that because it's a flimsy excuse. The truth is, like so many others in this universe I've grown completely indifferent . . . even to things like taking children to the City of the Dead. At the same time, I've also become a great supporter of the status quo, if you know what I mean. I believe in keeping things on an even keel and hope that lightning strikes someone else when it begins to fall. I don't question, don't challenge, don't debate. I do exactly what I'm told and then it's time to go home for a drink.
«In the meantime, I have come to the conclusion that life has a very bad case of acne which it has no desire to lose, because that would mean it couldn't look in the mirror fifty times a day and feel so sorry for itself.»
«That's a very clever, very shitty philosophy, Mr. DeFazio.»
Pepsi giggled and I smiled, liking both his giggle and what I'd said.
«Cullen, people like you love the view from up there on your high horses, don't you? The glory of human virtue! All Hail! I'll do this and one day they'll give me a statue in the park! Here, take the Bone!» He had been tossing it back and forth from hand to hand for several minutes; putting it down on the ground, he rolled it across the sand toward Pepsi.
«Can we go now?»
«Of course! Why would I stop you? Do you think _I_ want to fight Jack Chili? There are two problems with being a statue in the park, Cullen. First, you have to be dead. Second, once you're there, the birds shit all over you. I leave those pleasures to you. The fourth Bone is yours. You've been warned. Good luck with Jack Chili!»
«Our friends, Mom! There they are!»
Mr. Tracy and Martio stood in the surf, their paws raised high in the air in greeting. What a welcome sight! The uneventful trip back, although hurried along by another fast wind, was crowded for me with worries about our future.
DeFazio said no more after giving Pepsi the Bone. Hunched by the fire, his face said everything I didn't want to know – bad things were ahead, pain as common as a breeze, thirty flavors of fear. I'd hated nothing in Rondua until him; his complacent fatalism scared me more than any of the growling monsters and moving nightmares we had encountered along our way. I had known a Mr. DeFazio in college, and then a few of them after I'd graduated. To people like them, creativity, excitement and joy were all cute little flukes of nature, as doomed and impossible as the dodo bird. And look what happened to _that_ animal, they liked to observe in between yawns, sighs and weary shrugs. They were summed up by a line I'd read in a French poem somewhere: «The flesh is sad, alas, and I've read all the books.» The way they saw it, you lived and died and along the way you learned not to give a damn, because it all ends up dead and stinking so what's the use?
The ominous part was that they were right much of the time and only had to point in a number of directions to prove it.
But I had been blessed or lucky enough to know that great things did exist and were constantly available, only you had to wrestle them away from life because it held these treasures close to its chest and gave them up only after you had proved yourself a worthy opponent.
Not that I had to fight for many of the prizes that were mine, but being one of the lucky ones had only made me more aware of how important it was to appreciate them every minute. And how important it was to go to the wall protecting them when bad came around, looking for trouble.
Pepsi jumped out of the boat and splashed up the shore, where he hugged each animal and told them in a rush about our night on the sea and run-in with Mr. DeFazio. I joined them and waited until he was finished before speaking.
«Who _is_ Jack Chili, Mr. Tracy?»
Pepsi was hugging Martio for the tenth time and seemed very much the little boy again. The camel was smiling happily and watching us.
«He's a man with wings. He's a bird with fins. I can't tell you what you'll see when you see him, Cullen, because he's different for everyone. When I was young and saw him for the first time, he was a book with the same word on every page.»
«Why is he called Jack Chili?»
«That's only one of his names. What's interesting is, you'll have your own name for him when you see him.»
«What does he do? Why is everyone afraid of him?»
«They're afraid of him because he hates everything that isn't his. He lives in a beautiful valley and causes trouble everywhere. You don't remember him at all, Cullen?»
«No, nothing.»
«Maybe that's better. Would you like to go to sleep now? We can take our time; you two must be exhausted.»
All four of us curled up together on the damp beach, Pepsi and I sandwiched in on either side by the animals. I lay against Martio's warm stomach and watched the pure pearl of the morning sky above us. I felt sleepy, but wanted to stay awake a little longer so I could savor the calmness of the moment and the giant softness of my animal bed. I tried to match my breathing with Martio's, but his was so long and slow that I quickly fell out of rhythm. There were still so many questions to ask, but they could wait until later when our minds weren't so completely tired and full of recent memories. When I slept, I dreamed of a giant black fountain pen writing words across the sky: wrords that made no sense, but were very beautiful nonetheless.