The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [160]
The hold was emptier than he remembered it. A year at sea would have that effect. Black water sloshed around in a channel that ran along the floor. The sloth was a weird-looking beast, maybe four feet long, with a heavy coat of greenish-gray fur. It hung upside down by its ropy arms at about eye level, its thick curved claws hooked up over a wooden beam. Its appearance smacked of evolution gone too far. The usual pile of fruit rinds and sloth droppings lay below it in an untidy heap.
“Hi,” Quentin said.
“Hello.”
The sloth raised its small, oddly flattened head so that it was looking at Quentin right-side up. The position looked uncomfortable, but the sloth’s neck seemed pretty well designed for it. It had black bands of fur over its eyes that gave it a sleepy, raccoony look.
It squinted at the light from Quentin’s candle.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been down to see you very often,” Quentin offered.
“It’s all right, I don’t mind. I’m not a very social animal.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Abigail.”
She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.
“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.
A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.
“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”
“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”
“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”
It sure was.
The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.
“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”
Quentin nodded sagely.
“I did not know that.”
It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.
“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”
“That is very different from how humans live.”
“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”
The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”
He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.
“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”
“Benedict? What about him?”
“Would you like to speak with him?”
“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”
It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been