– 12 –
As for Edmund, he has eaten the sacredness of death.
If you wrote it all out as a little list of ingredients —
* The footfalls of a cat
* The arms of a four-armed ape
* The spittle of a bird
* The sacredness of death
* The torment of the willing
* The bearing witness to the wrongness
* and the tape that binds an emu
* and the perseverance of hope
— you’d see that he’s making pretty good progress, as Gulleys go, against the chain that binds his wolf. A bit of eating an impossible thing here, a bit of luck with a swarm of scissors happening to attack the world and rattle down a chimney and cut a key bit of tape there, and hey presto, he’s on his way!
Which is pretty scary, I guess. I mean, that wolf (I hear), it’s going to eat the world.
But it also kind of goes to show you that this story isn’t about Edmund, either.
I mean, we haven’t even seen a four-armed ape.