Oggle Gush said then, “But I want to hear Nifty’s story!”
Nifty made to silence the girl, if the twitching of his hands and their spasmodic clutching (miming throttling a throat) was any indication, though who but Nifty could truly say?
“Tomorrow during the day then! Same for the other one—we got time and since there ain’t nothing to see anyway and nothing to do but walk, let’s have em entertain us till sunset! No, it’s settled and all, ain’t it, Flea?”
“Aye,” said Flea. “Midge?”
“Aye,” said Midge.
“But the night is still young,” objected Arpo Relent, and one could tell from a host of details in his demeanor that the sudden dispatch of impending death-sentences had frustrated some pious repository of proper justice within his soul, and now in his face there was the blunt belligerence of a thwarted child.
Purse Snippet then surprised us all by saying, “I will tell a tale, then.”
“My lady,” gasped the host, “it was settled—there is no need—”
“I would tell a tale, Sardic Thew, and so I shall.” With this assertion muting us all she then hesitated, as if startled by her own boldness. “Words are not my talent, I admit, so forgive me if I stumble on occasion.”
Who could not but be forgiving?
“This too belongs to a woman,” she began, her eyes on the flames, her elegantly-fingered hands encircling her clay vessel. “Loved and worshiped by so many—” she sharply looked up. “No, she was no dancer, nor a poet, nor actress nor singer. Hers was a talent born to, yet not one that could be further honed. In truth, it was not a talent at all, but rather the gathering of chance—lines and curves, symmetries. She was, in short, beautiful, and from that beauty her life was shaped, her future preordained. She would marry well, above her station, and in that marriage she would be the subject of adoration, as if she was a precious object of art, until such time that age stole her beauty, whereupon her fine home would become a tomb of sorts, her bedroom rarely frequented at night by her husband, whose vision of beauty remained forever youthful.
“There would be wealth. Fine foods. Silks and fetes. There would be children, perhaps, and there would be something... something wistful, there in her eyes at the very end.”
“That’s not a story!” Oggle Gush said.
“I have but begun, child—”
“Sounds more like an end to me, and don’t call me child, I’m not a child,” and she looked to Nifty for confirmation, but he was instead frowning at Purse Snippet, as if seeking to understand something.
Purse Snippet resumed her tale, but her eyes were now bleak as she gazed into the fire. “There are quests, in a person’s life, that require no steps to be taken. No journey across strange landscapes. There are quests where the only monsters are the shadows in a bedroom, the reflection in a mirror. And one has no companions hale and brave to stand firm at one’s side. This is a thing taken in solitude. She was loved by many, yes. She was desired by all who saw the beauty of her, but of beauty within herself, she could see nothing. Of love for the woman she was inside, there was none. Can the pulp of the fruit admire the beauty of its skin? Can it even know that beauty?”
“Fruits don’t have eyes,” said Oggle Gush, rolling her own. “This is stupid. You can’t have quests without mountain passes and dangerous rivers to cross, and ogres and demons and wolves and bats. And there’s supposed to be friends of the hero who go along and fight and stuff, and get into trouble so the hero has to save them. Everyone knows that.”
“Oggle Gush,” Apto Canavalian said (now that he’d done plucking cactus spikes from the back of his head), “kindly shut that useless hole in your face. Purse Snippet, please, go on.”
Whilst Oggle gaped and mawped and blinked like an owl in a vice, Steck Marynd appeared to add more wood to the fire and it occurred to me that the stolid, grim ranger was indeed doing woodly things, which meant that all was well, though of greater tasks and higher import something must obtain with this personage, sooner or later. One hopes.
“She would stand upon a balcony overlooking the canal where the gramthal boats plied carrying people and wares. Butterflies in the warm air would lift as if on sounds to gather round her.” She faltered then, for some unknown reason, and drew a few breaths before continuing, “and though all who chanced to look up, all who set eyes upon her, saw a maiden of promise, indeed, a work of art posed thus upon that balcony, why, in her soul there was war. There was anguish and suffering, there was dying to an invisible enemy, one that could cut the feet beneath every mustered argument, every armoured affirmation. And the dark air was filled with screams and weeping, and upon no horizon did dawn make promise, for this was a night unending and a war without respite.
“A lifetime, she would tell you, is a long time to bleed. There is paint for pallor, the hue of health to hide the ashen cheeks, but the eyes cannot be disguised. There you will find, if you look closely, the tunnels to the battlefield, to that unlighted place where no beauty or love can be found.”
The fire ate wood, coughed smoke. No one spoke. The mirror was smudged, yes, but a mirror nonetheless.
“Had she said but a single word,” muttered someone (was it me?), “a thousand heroes would have rushed to her aid. A thousand paths of love to lead her out of that place.”
“That which cannot love itself cannot give love in return,” she replied. “So it was with this woman. But, she knew in her heart, the war must end. What devours within will, before long, claw its way to the surface, and the gift of beauty will falter. Dissolution rots outward. The desperation grew within her. What could she do? Where in her mind could she go? There was, of course,” and inadvertendy her eyes dropped to the cup in her hands, “sweet oblivion, and all the masks of escape as offered by wine, smoke and such, but these are no more than the paths of decay—gentle paths, to be sure, once one gets used to the stench. And before long, the body begins to fail. Weakness, illness, aching head, a certain lassitude. Death beckons, and by this alone one knows that one’s soul has died.”
“My lady,” Tulgord Vise ventured, “this tale of yours demands a knight, sworn to goodness. Tis a fair damsel in deepest distress—”
“Two knights!” cried Arpo Relent, although with a zeal that sounded, well, forced.
Tulgord grunted. “There is only one one knight in this tale. The other knight is the other knight.”
“There can be two knights! Who is to say there can’t?”
“Me. I’m to say. I will allow two knights, however. The real one, me. The other one, you.”
Arpo Relent’s face was bright red, as if swallowing flames. “I’m not the other knight! You are!”
“When I cut you in two, “Tulgord said, “you can be two knights all by yourself.”
“When you cut me in two you won’t know which way to turn!”
Silence has flavour, and this one was confused, as follow certain statements that, in essence, make no sense whatsoever, yet nonetheless possess a peculiar logic. Such was this momentary interlude composed of frowns, clouds and blinks.
Purse Snippet spoke. “She came to a belief that the gods set alight a spark in every soul, the very core of a mortal spirit, which mayhap burns eternal, or, in less forgiving eyes, but gutters out once the flesh has fallen beyond the last taken breath. To sharpen her need, she chose the latter notion. Now, then, there was haste and more: there was a true edge of possible redemption. If in our lives, we are all that we have and ever will have, then all worth lies in the mortal deed, in that single life.”
“A woman without children, then,” Apto murmured.
“What gift passing such beauty on? No, she was yet to marry, yet to take any seed. Only within her mind had she so aged, seeing an end both close and far off, ten years in a century, ten centuries in an instant. Resolved, then, she would seek to journey to find that spark. Could it be scoured clean, enlivened to such bright fire that all flaws simply burned away? She would see, if she could.
?
??But what manner this journey? What landscape worth the telling?” And upon that moment her eyes, depthless tunnels, found me. “Will you, kind sir, assemble the scene for my poor tale?”
“Honoured,” said I mostly humbly. “Let us imagine a vast plain, broken and littered. Starved of water and bare of animals. She travels alone and yet in company, a stranger among strangers. All she is she hides behind veils, curtains of privacy, and awaiting her as awaiting the others, there is a river, a flowing thing of life and benison. Upon its tranquil shores waits redemption. Yet it remains distant, with much privation in between. But what of those who travel with her? Why, there are knights avowed to rid the world of the unseemly. In this case, the unseemly personages of two foul sorcerors of the darkest arts. So too there are pilgrims, seeking blessing from an idle god, and a carriage travels with them and hidden within it there is a face, perhaps even two, whom none have yet to see—”
“Hold!” growled Steck Marynd, looming out of the gloom, crossbow held at rest but cocked across one forearm. “See how the colour has left the face of this woman? You draw too close, sir, and I like it not.”
Mister Ambertroshin relit his pipe.
“Lacks imagination,” purred Nifty Gum. “Allow me, Lady Snippet. The village of her birth is a small holding upon the rocky shores of a fjord. Beyond the pastures of her father the king, crowded forests rear up mountain sides, and in a deep fastness there sleeps a dragon, but most restlessly, for she had given birth to an egg, one of vast size, yet so hard was the shell that the child within managed to no more than break holes for its legs and arms, and with its snout it had rubbed thin the shell before its eyes, permitting it a misty regard of the world beyond. And, alas, the egg monster had escaped the cavern and now roved down between the black trees, frightened and lost and so most dangerous.
“In its terrible hunger it has struck now in the longhouse of the king, rolling flat countless warriors as they slept ensorcelled by the child’s magic. Woe, bewails the king! Who can save them? Then came the night—”
“What knight?” Tulgord demanded.
“No, night, as in the sun’s drowning in darkness—”
“The knight drowned the sun?”
“No, fair moon’s golden rise—”
“He’s mooning the sun?”
“Excuse me, what?”
“What’s the knight doing, damn you? Cracking that egg in half, I wager!”
“The sun went down—that kind of night!”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Tulgord Vise snorted. “And the monster set a deep magic upon the longhouse. Bursting down the stout door—”
“He ran into the knight!”
“No, instead, he fell in love with the princess, for as she was ugly on the inside, he was ugly on the outside—”
“I’d suspect,” Apto said, “he’d be pretty ugly on the inside, too. Dragon spawn, trapped in there. No hole for the tail? He’d be neck deep in shit and piss. Why—”
Brash Phluster, working on his second supper, having lost the first one, pointed a finger bone at Nifty and, with a greasy smirk, said, “The Judge is right. You need to explain things like that. The details got to make sense, you know.”
“Magic answers,” snapped Nifty with a toss of his locks. “The monster walked into the main hall and saw her, the princess, and he fell in love. But knowing how she would view him with horror, he was forced to keep her in an enchanted sleep, through music piped out from the various holes in his shell—”
“He farted her a magic song?” Apto asked.
“He piped her a magic song, which made her rise as would one sleep-walking, and so she followed him out from the hall.”
“What’s that story got to do with Purse Snippet’s?” Was that my question? It was.
“I’m getting to that.”
“You’re getting to the point where I vote we spit you on the morrow,” said Tulgord Vise.
Arpo Relent agreed. “What a stupid story, Nifty. An egg monster?”
“There is mythical precedent for—”
“Make your silence deep, poet,” warned Steck Marynd. “My Lady Snippet, do you wish any of these pathetic excuses for poets to resume their take on your tale?”
Purse Snippet frowned, and then nodded. “Flicker’s will suit me, I think. A river, the promise of salvation. Strangers all, and the hidden threat of the hunted—tell me, poet, are they closer to their quarry than any might imagine?”
“Many are the stratagems of the hunted, My Lady, to confound their pursuers. So, who can say?”
“Tell us more of this quest, then.”
“A moment, please,” said Steck Marynd, his voice grating as if climbing a stone wall with naught but fingernails and teeth. “I see that unease has taken hold of Mister Ambertroshin. He gnaws upon the stem and the glow waxes savage again and again.” He shifted the crossbow, his weight fully on the one leg whose foot had not suffered the indignity of a quarrel through it only a short time earlier. “You, sir, what so afflicts you?”
Mister Ambertroshin was long in replying. He withdrew his pipe and examined the chipped clay stem, and then the bowl, whereupon he drew out his leather pouch and pinched out a small amount of stringy rustleaf, which he deftly rolled between two fingers and a thumb before tamping it down into the pipe’s blackened bowl. He drew fiercely a half-dozen times, wreathing his lined face in swirling clouds. And then said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Ordig was something sour, wasn’t he?” Brash Phluster opined, and then he laughed in the manner of a hyena down a hole, even as he wiped grease from his hands.
Grunting, Steck Marynd limped away, and over one shoulder said, “It’s suspicious, that’s all. Suspicious strange, I mean. Diabolical minds and appalling arrogance, aye, that spells them sure. I need to think on this.” And with that off into the darkness he went.
Tulgord Vise was frowning. “Addled wits. That’s what comes of living in the woods with the moles and pine beetles. Now then, Flicker, you have a burden to bear with your tale, for it must carry this Lady’s charge. Tell us more of the knights.”
“They number five in all,” did I respond, “though one was counted senior by virtue of skill and experience. Sworn were they to the execution of criminals, and criminality in this case was found in the committal of uncivil behaviour. More specifically, in behaviour that threatened the very foundations of civilization—”
“Just so!” said Arpo Relent, fist striking palm, an unfortunate gesture in that he was wearing gauntlets with studded knuckles but only kid leather upon the palms. His eyes widened in pain.
“Tender pleasures this night for you,” commented Apto Canavalian.
Of course Arpo would not permit a single utterance of agony to escape him. So he sat, cringing, jaw muscles bulging, water starting in his eyes.
“As it is known to all,” I resumed, “civilization lies at the very heart of all good things. Wealth for the chosen, privilege for the wealthy, countless choices for the privileged. The promise of food and shelter for all the rest, provided they work hard for it. And so on. To threaten to destroy it is, accordingly, the gravest betrayal of all. For, without civilization there is barbarism, and what is barbarism? Absurd delusions of equality, generous distribution of wealth, and settlements where none can hide in anonymity their most sordid selves. It is, in short, a state sure to be deemed chaotic and terrible by the sentinels of civilization, said sentinels being, by virtue of their position, guardians of property more often than not their own. To display utter disdain for civilization, as surely must be the regard of the two mad sorcerers, can only be seen as an affront and a most insistent source of indignation.
“Thus fired with zeal we see our brave knights, sworn one and all to destroy those who would threaten the society that has granted them title and privilege, and what could be more selfless than that?”
Purse Snippet, I saw in aside, was smiling, even as both Tulgord and Arpo made solemn their nods, Arpo having recovered to some
extent from his foray into the melodramatic. Apto Canavalian was smirking. Brash Phluster was dozing, as were Nifty Gum’s entourage of three, whilst their erstwhile paragon was hair-twirling (one of those habitual gestures that brings to mind the measured unraveling of intelligence or at least the appearance thereof) and, at the same time, seeking to catch the eye of Relish Chanter, the last Chanter still awake this night. There are, it must be said, men of the world who, for all their virility, will at times confuse the gender of their flirtations. For it is in my mind the woman who twirls (for how wonderfully attractive is vacuousness, assuming natural affinities to knee-high morals and such), and bats lashes with coy obviousness, not the man. Nifty Gum, alas, having no doubt witnessed endless displays of said behaviour directed at him, now seemed to believe it was courting’s own language; alas, in giving back what he so commonly received, he did little more than awaken Relish’s sneer, Relish being a goodly woman and not inclined to mothering.
“I could speak now of the pilgrims,” said I, “but for the ease of narrative, let it be simply said that all who seek to catch the eyes of a god, are as empty vessels believing themselves incomplete unless filled, and that said fulfillment is, for some reason, deemed to be the gift given by some blessed hand not their own.”
“Is there no more to it, then?” so asked Mister Ambertroshin, who seemed to have recovered his momentary disquiet.
My gesture was one of submission. “Who am I to say, in truth? Even I can see the lure of utter faith, the zest of happy servitude to an unknown but infinitely presumptuous cause.”
“Presumptuous?”
“Anyone can fill silence with voices, kind driver,” I said in reply. “We are most eager inventors, are we not?”
“Ah, I understand. You suggest that religious conviction consists of elaborate self-delusion, that those who hear the words of their god telling them to do this and that, are in fact inventing their certainty as they go.”
“I would hazard it all begins,” ventured I, “with someone else, a priest or priestess, or the written words of the same, telling them first. The mission needs direction, yes? One serves a purpose, and in the god’s silence, who is it that presumes to describe that purpose? If all are lost, the first to shout that he or she has found something will be as a lodestone to others, and their desperation will become the joy of relief. But who is to say that the one who shouted first was not lying? Or mad? Or possessing ambitions of