Brigitte was not the first Guardian to arrive at the clearing, and she was glad of it. The clearing was an eerie place even by Jumanjic standards, a place where demons and sorcerers planned the abduction of children, and to be alone in it was never a pleasant thing.
One of the two Guardians in the clearing lifted up his head when he heard Brigitte approaching, and Brigitte saw that it was Sowagen, the young Abnaki brave who Guarded the rats. His was a simple mind; the way he saw it, he had accepted Jumanji's offer of Guardianship out of his own weakness and folly, and now there was nothing he could do but discharge his duties honorably and hope that the Great Spirit would look kindly on him. Brigitte had often wished that her own soul would allow her such simplicity.
"Ah, Brigitte," said Sowagen, raising a hand in greeting. "Well met."
Brigitte nodded, and glanced at his companion. Patience was the newest Guardian (she would not complete her first century in Jumanji for a few months yet), which meant that she had never, until tonight, heard the heart-wrenching cry that meant that a Guardian had been lost.
She had heard it now, and it had clearly driven her to distraction. She was wringing her hair (still wet from Lucia Vergilia's storm) so tightly that it might have been her life-line; her mosquitoes were flying about her head in a fine frenzy; and her eyes showed the fear of an antelope that believes itself surrounded by lions.
Brigitte said nothing to her. Tomorrow, or the next day, Patience would be calm again, and until that time she would want to be alone. (How well Brigitte remembered the first time she heard the cry. For two days and a night she had gone about the jungle in a state of shock, collapsing finally in a fit of helpless tears.)
She did not want to speak to Sowagen, either, for he was a handsome brave, and she was a shy girl, and three and a half centuries of shared servitude had done nothing to change either fact. When no one spoke, however, the sounds of the jungle could be heard more clearly – and for Brigitte, who heard with the ears of bats, that did not mean merely the whistling of the wind and the muttering of beasts, but also the keening of the ancient spells themselves, as they wound themselves through the sinister jungle.
Which is worse, Brigitte? she asked herself. To expose oneself to another human, or to be alone with demons?
"Do you know who it was?" she asked aloud.
Sowagen turned to her and laughed ruefully. "Not me," he said.
Brigitte smiled slightly and shook her head. "A single throat," she mused, "and not Lucia Vergilia's crocodile. That only leaves three."
"I would be sorry if it were Claire," said Sowagen. "There is a good cheer about her that is much needed in this place."
Brigitte sighed. "I fear it may be her," she said. "The good go more quickly than the wretched."
Sowagen glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "Not always," he said. "You have been here nearly a hundred hundred moons, and you are as good as any of us."
Brigitte smiled. It was nice of him to say.
There was a sudden rustling of the leaves, and Lucia Vergilia came into the clearing. Brigitte, catching her eye, was startled to find the semblance of fear; though why Lucia Vergilia, one of the oldest Guardians in the jungle, should particularly fear the death-cry, Brigitte could not say.
She was not given long to brood over it, in any case, for no sooner had Lucia Vergilia seated herself than Fatima arrived at the gathering place. She was a Spanish Moor roughly coeval with Brigitte, and had been one of the few Guardians to genuinely welcome her when she was taken – a fact that had taken the young Catholic girl rather by surprise, but Fatima had dismissed their differences by saying, "The servants of any sort of God must needs be allies in this place of the Shaitan." In that phrase, Fatima was writ plain: she was always painfully aware that one required allies on one's journey, and unless she knew a man to be wicked at heart, she dared not refuse his aid. It was, Brigitte had to admit, not a bad way to live one's life.
Fatima glanced around the clearing. "By the Prophet, how dark it is!" she said, and laughed. "Shall we have no light to build our schemes by?" She clapped her hands, and the fires of which she was Guardian roared up at the center of the clearing, casting light and warmth on all assembled. Fatima nodded, satisfied, and sat down beside Lucia Vergilia.
It was some five minutes before the next Guardians arrived; two at once this time, Elizabeth of the plague and Ibrahim of the monkeys. The amount of time these two spent together had led some to believe that they were sweet on each other, but Brigitte did not believe this; Ibrahim did not have the constancy to be sweet on anyone for more than half a century, and Elizabeth (the soberest, least emotional Guardian in the jungle) could not possibly be unaware of the fact.
Fatima gave a mock bow. "A good evening to you, Plague Maiden," she said. "Have you and your paramour then come to console us in our loss?"
Elizabeth said nothing, and her face remained as it always was, as cold and expressionless as Jumanji's crystal sky. She and Ibrahim seated themselves on the ground of the clearing, and Ibrahim picked up a nearby stick and began poking at Fatima's fire.
Sowagen leaned toward Brigitte. "I hope the Masters release the plague during this next game," he said.
"Why?" said Brigitte, surprised.
"Have you not seen?" said Sowagen. "Elizabeth's spirit is poisoned by this place. It is because of the foulness of her Guardianship, I think. She must taste the upper air again if she is to be healed."
"Perhaps so," Brigitte admitted. "But I don't think the Masters will release her, all the same. I have witnessed seven games, and I have never seen the plague released. I sometimes think the Masters fear its power."
"As well they might," Sowagen murmured. His hand moved to the scar on his cheek where the smallpox had marked him, and he said no more.
His words, however, had planted reflections in Brigitte's mind. She had known three plague Guardians in her time: Adeodatus, Jacques, and now Elizabeth. (That in itself was suggestive, for no other Guardianship had changed hands more than once since she had entered the jungle.) Adeodatus had been a cold, spiteful creature for all of the short time she had known him, and, according to the older Guardians, had always been so. Jacques had been a fairly cheerful, happy-go-lucky fellow when he had first entered the game, but his spirit had quickly deteriorated; Brigitte had thought it was because his Gypsy soul could not bear captivity, but now she wondered. And as for Elizabeth – well, she had always been reserved, but there had been a time when one could speak to her cordially and without rancor, and she had even smiled occasionally. Now, there was none of that.
Was the Guardian of the plague really more vulnerable to the jungle's evils than were the other Guardians? Brigitte wasn't sure – but when François squeaked a moment later, and she reached down to stroke his head, she found herself peculiarly grateful that he and his nest-mates were her charge.
When she looked up again, she discovered that several more Guardians had entered the clearing while she had been in her reverie. Miriamne, the Guardian of the earthquake, was reclining on the ground beside Ibrahim and Elizabeth; Khalika, of the spiders, was seated on the other side of Lucia Vergilia from Fatima; and Alexandros, of the quicksand, was sitting on a nearby tree stump, muttering to himself.
Brigitte, upon seeing Alexandros, felt the sudden upsurge of anger that the thought of him always brought her. She could forgive Jumanji for enslaving the rest of them; it was only doing what it had to to survive, after all, and it couldn't be blamed if they had been fools enough to accept its offer. But to sentence an idiot to nigh-eternal bondage, simply because he didn't understand enough to turn it down – what blackness of soul could conceive of such a thing?
Then a nearby branch rustled and Hadassah entered the clearing, and Brigitte's fury gave way to a different emotion. Hadassah was not the Guardian Brigitte most feared (that was Gretl Van Pelt, of the stampede), but she could never look on her without a shudder.
Hadassah was unique among the Guardians. All the others Jumanji had sought out in its time of need; playing upon their weaknesses, it had convinced them to surrender their freedom and serve it in its heart of darkness. It had not done this with Hadassah; rather, she had dug it up from where the previous players had buried it, summoned the spirit of the game to appear before her, and voluntarily offered it her service if it would take her out of the world in which she lived. (Only she and the Masters knew why she so desired this, and no one else had ever dared to ask.)
Jumanji had accepted, and, since there was no Guardianship then available, had fashioned a new Terror for her to guard. None of the other Guardians had ever seen this Terror (perhaps even Hadassah herself had not), but all of them had heard it: a whispering in the night, a rustling of what might have been wings, and then the scream of some poor creature as Hadassah's charges descended upon their prey.
Jumanji called Hadassah the Guardian of the Phantoms, and it was an accurate enough designation. Most of the Guardians, however, thought it failed to convey the full reality of her creatures; had it not led to too much confusion, they would have called her the Guardian of the Terrors.
Hadassah did not sit down. Instead, she walked over to a tree that stood behind Alexandros's stump, leaned herself against it, and watched the other Guardians, unblinkingly, from a distance. She had no illusions about how much intimacy with her the other Guardians desired.
The next Guardian to arrive, however, was not nearly so distant. Claire was physically the youngest of the Guardians, having been not quite nine years old when she was taken into the jungle, and somehow this had granted her not only a kinship with her leopard unmatched in intensity by any of the other bonds of Guardian and Terror, but also a seeming immunity to the darkness of Jumanji. After four and a half centuries in the accursed jungle, her spirit remained as bright and cheerful as on the day of her capture.
As she entered the clearing and sat down beside Ibrahim, a kind of relief seemed to settle on the assembled Guardians. They had all realized that the death-cry had come from a single animal, and, though only Sowagen had spoken it aloud, they had all feared that it might be Claire who had been taken from them. At the discovery that it had not, every face, even Elizabeth's, seemed to lighten – every face, that is, save that of Lucia Vergilia. Brigitte, sitting across from the storm Guardian, happened to catch sight of her face, and discovered, to her surprise, that the look of trepidation in her eyes had only increased with Claire's arrival.
Before she could satisfactorily explain this to herself, the bushes rustled yet again, and Samson entered the clearing, the alpha female of his hyena pack trotting behind him. His face was grim. Samson's face was always grim, of course, but in this case the others could scarcely blame him.
"I heard the Masters behind me as I was coming up the trail," he said, sitting down beside Brigitte. "They will be here shortly."
"With Gretl accompanying them, I suppose," said Ibrahim.
"Naturally," said Samson. He and Brigitte both crossed themselves (he in the Eastern fashion, she in the Western), Fatima and Ibrahim murmured the shahādah, and various other gestures of protection went up around the circle.
"Wait a minute," said Miriamne, frowning and counting the assembled Guardians. "There are sixteen Guardians counting Gretl, but there are only thirteen of us here. There couldn't have been two vanishings in one night, could there?"
"No," said Samson. "Probably one more member of our merry band is still on his way here."
Lucia Vergilia squirmed uneasily. "Which one, though?" she whispered, just loudly enough for Brigitte to hear.
Brigitte frowned and considered. If one excluded Gretl, there were two Guardians left, both of whose Terrors consisted of single beasts. There was no real way of saying which one had vanished – although it seemed unlikely that Will would have given up the ghost after a mere four centuries, so most probably it was…
Brigitte's eyes widened. She knew, suddenly, what it was that so frightened Lucia Vergilia – but before she could move to comfort her, the bushes rustled for the tenth and last time, and a dark and sinister company emerged.
First came the green, serpentine mist that housed the soul of Jumanji. It drifted over to the center of the clearing and settled upon Fatima's fire, turning its cheery glow into a pale and ghastly flickering. Brigitte shivered.
Close behind followed the hunter Adrian Van Pelt, walking astride a rhinoceros that carried his daughter Gretl on its back. Van Pelt was the sorcerer who had first carved the game, back in the distant past; at one time, he had worn the form of an African witch doctor and called himself Masumu, but when Patience had entered the jungle and told the Masters of the world as it was in her day, the sorcerer had concluded that the European in Africa was a more terrible creature than the Negro could ever be, and had changed himself and his daughter into Dutchmen, the better to strike fear into the heart. In this he was even more successful than he had intended, for, even as he acquired the white man's visage (as well as his ability to throw death, in the rifle he always carried), both he and Gretl retained something of the savage – in their eyes, perhaps, or perhaps in the way they walked – and the admixture was as eerie as anything in the jungle.
And behind them, walking with measured steps as though cautious of getting too close to the infernal retinue, came the final Jumanjic Guardian. There was no mistaking him: his serpent glided at his heels, and on his face was the mischievous half-smile the company knew so well – it was clearly Will, London pickpocket and all-around rogue.
There could no longer be any question of which Guardian had vanished – and, as if to make the point still more clear, Van Pelt stepped out from behind his daughter's rhinoceros and revealed the lion walking mournfully at his side. He had taken its Guardianship onto himself – a clear sign that its rightful Guardian was no more.
Lucia Vergilia let out a piercing wail. "Gaius!" she screamed. "No… no… no!" She rushed forward, clasped the lion by its neck, and began sobbing violently into its mane.
As she did so, a bolt of thunder sounded overhead, and it began to rain in the clearing – not a mild rain such as had woken Brigitte, but a violent, torrential downpour, as though Lucia Vergilia had ceased to care about her duties as Guardian and was letting the Jumanjic storm run its full, fatal course. For the second time that night, Brigitte thought that she would drown – except that now it was not a passing fancy, but an entirely reasonable belief.
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God," she whispered, "have mercy on me."