The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [162]
He couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Even if it takes no time. Anyway what good would it do? I can’t bring him back.”
“No.”
“So I hate to be blunt, but what’s the point?”
“You could offer Benedict comfort. Sometimes the living can give something to the dead. And perhaps he could offer you something too. My understanding of human emotions is . . .”
The sloth paused to ponder her choice of words.
“Imprecise?” Quentin said.
“Precisely. Imprecise. But I do not think Benedict was happy with his death.”
“It was a terrible death. He must feel very unhappy.”
“I think perhaps he wants to tell you that.”
Quentin hadn’t considered that.
“I think perhaps he could give you something too.”
The sloth regarded him with her gelatinous, glittering eyes, which seemed to pick up light from somewhere other than in the room. Then she closed them.
The ship grunted patiently as the waves beat against its hull, over and over again, monotonously. Quentin watched the sloth. By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it. He pictured Benedict, trapped and languishing in a poorly drawn cartoon netherworld. Would he want someone to come visit him? He probably would.
Quentin felt responsible for him. It was part of being a king. And Benedict had died before he found out what the keys were for. He thought that he’d died for no reason. Imagine chewing on that for eternity.
One of the things Quentin remembered from reading about King Arthur was that the knights who had sins on their consciences never did very well on the quest for the Grail. The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere. At the time Quentin thought that that was obvious, and he never understood why Gawain and the rougher knights didn’t just suck it up, get shriven, and get on with it. Instead they blundered around getting into fights and succumbing to temptation and eventually ended up nowhere near the Grail.
But being in the middle of it, it wasn’t that obvious. Maybe Benedict’s death was—if not a sin on his conscience, exactly, then something unresolved. The sloth was right. It was weighing on his soul, slowing them all down. Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.
Well, bottom line, no time is the perfect time to visit the dead in the underworld. And if the sloth was telling the truth, he could be back before anyone knew he was gone.
“So I can do this in no time at all?” he said. “I mean, literally no time will pass here?”
“Perhaps I exaggerated. No time will pass while you are in the underworld. But you will have to make certain preparations before you go.”
“And I can come back.”
“You can come back.”
“Okay. All right.” Unless he changed he was going to be visiting the underworld in his pajamas. “Let’s get started. What do I need to do?”
“I neglected to mention, the ritual must be performed on land.”
“Oh. Right.” Thank God, he could go back to bed after all. Hell could wait. “I thought we were going right here and now. Well, so I’ll just pop down next time we get—”
There was a distant clatter of boots overhead, and a bell rang.
“We just sighted land, didn’t we,” Quentin said.
The sloth gravely closed her eyes and then opened them again: indeed, yes, we just sighted land. Quentin was going to ask her how she did that but stopped himself, because asking would mean that he’d have to sit through the answer, and he’d had about enough slothly wisdom for the time being.
Not more than an hour later Quentin was standing on a flat gray beach in the middle of the night. He’d wanted to slip off to the underworld and back quietly, unbeknownst to the rest of the gang. Then maybe he would bring it up later, just drop it into conversation that by the way, he’d been to hell and back, no big thing, why do you ask? Benedict says hi. He hadn