Crack'd Pot Trail

  Before kingdoms rose from the dust

  There was a king—”

  “Hang on,” said Tiny. “If it was before kingdoms, how could there be a king?”

  “You can’t interrupt like that! I’m singing!”

  “Why do you think I interrupted?”

  “Please,” said the host whose name escapes me again, “let the Poet, er, sing.”

  “There was a king

  Who name was ... Gling

  Gling of the Nine Rings

  That he won

  “On his bling!” Flea sang.

  “That he wore one each day

  Of the week—”

  Apto broke into a coughing fit.

  “Gling of the Seven Rings

  Was a king whose wife

  Had died and sad was his sorrow

  For his wife was beloved,

  A Queen in her own right.

  Her tresses were locks

  Flowing down long past

  Her shapely shoulders and

  Long-haired she was and

  Longhair was her name

  She who died of grief

  Upon the death of their

  Daughter and so terrible her grief

  She shaved her head and was

  Long-haired no longer

  And so furious her beloved

  Gling that he gathered up

  The strands and wove a rope

  With which he strangled

  Her—oh sorrow!”

  The ‘oh sorrow’ declamation was intended to be echoed by the enraptured audience, and would mark the closure of each stanza. Alas, no one was in a ready state to participate, and isn’t it curious how laughter and weeping could be so easily confused? Savagely, Brash Phluster plucked a string and pressed on.

  “But was the daughter truly dead?

  What terrible secret did King Gling

  Her father possess

  There in his tower

  At the very heart

  Of the world’s greatest kingdom?

  But no, he was a king

  Without any terrible secrets,

  For his daughter had been

  Stolen, and lovely she was,

  The princess whose name was ...

  Missingla

  And this is her tale known to all

  As Missingla’s Tale

  Beloved daughter of King Gling and

  Queen Longhair,

  A princess in her own right

  Was Missingla of the shapely shoulders

  Royal her eye lashes

  A jeweled crown her sweet lips”

  Oh dear, I just added those two lines. I could not help it, and so I do urge their disregard.

  “Was Missingla of the shapely shoulders

  Stolen by the king in the kingdom

  Beyond the mountains between the lake

  In the Desert of Death

  Where almost nothing lived

  Or could hope to live

  Even should we live in hope”

  Ah, and again.

  “and this king his name was...Lope

  Who bore a sword twice as tall as he

  And the armour of an ogre made of stone

  And cruel was his face, evil his eyes,

  As he swam the lake at night

  To scale the tower to steal her away

  Missingla—oh sorrow!”

  The Entourage cried, “Oh sorrow!” and even Purse Snippet smiled over her secretive cup of tea.

  But she was waiting oh yes, for

  Cruel and evil as he was, so too rich

  Beyond all measure ruling the world’s

  Richest kingdom beyond the mountains

  And so not stolen at all, sweet daughter

  No! Missingla Lope they swam away!

  In the chaos that ensued, Brash thrashed at the strings of the lyre until one broke, the taut gut snapping up to catch him in the left eye. Steck’s crossbow, cursed with a nervous trigger, accidentally released, driving the quarrel through the hunter’s right foot, pinning it to the ground. Purse sprayed a startlingly flammable mouthful of tea into the fire, and in the flare-up Apto flung himself backward with singed eyebrows, rolling off the stone he’d been perched on and slamming his head into a cactus. The host’s hands waved frantically since he could no longer breathe. The Entourage was in a groping tangle and somewhere beneath it was Nifty Gum. Tulgord Vise and Arpo Relent were scowling and frowning respectively. Of Tiny Chanter, only the soles of his boots were visible. Midge suddenly stood and said to Flea, “I pissed myself.”

  By this extraordinary performance Brash Phluster survived the twenty-third night and so would live through the twenty-fourth night and the following day. And as he opened his mouth to announce that he wasn’t yet finished, why, I did clamp my hand over the offending utterance, stifling it in the rabbit hole. Mercy knows a thousand guises, say you not?

  Madness, you say? That I should so boldly aver Brash Phluster’s suicidal desire to further skin himself? But while confidence is a strange creature, it is no stranger to me. I know well its pluck and princeps. It bears no stretch of perception to note my certain flair in the proceeding of this tale, for here I am, ancient of ways, and yet still alive. Ah, but perhaps I deceive you all with this retroactive posture of assuredness. A fair point, were it not for the fact of its error in every regard. To explain, I possessed even then the quiet man’s stake, a banner embedded deep in solid rock, the pennants ever calm no matter how savage the raging storms of worldly straits. It is this impervious nature that has served me so well. That and my natural brevity with respect to modesty.

  Upon recovery, whilst in relief Brash Phluster stumbled off to vomit behind some boulders, Calap Roud made to begin his tale. His hands trembled like fish in a tree. His throat visibly tightened, forcing squeaking noises from his gaping mouth. His eyes bulged like eggs striving to flee a female sea-turtle’s egg hole. The vast injustice of Brash Phluster’s dispensation was a bright sizzling rage in his visage, a teller’s tome of twitches plucking at each and every feature so fecklessly clutched beneath his forehead. He was not holding up well to this terrible pressure, this twill or die. Unraveled his comportment, and in tumbling, climbing pursuit a lifetime of missed moments, creative collapses, blocks and heights not reached, all heaved up at this moment to drown him in a deluge of despair.

  He was the cornered jump-mouse, the walls too high, the floor devoid of cracks, and all he could do was bare his tiny teeth in the pointless hope that the slayer looming so cruelly over him was composed of cotton fluff. Ah, how life defends itself! It is enough, oh yes, to shatter even a staked man’s heart. But know we all that this modern world is one without pity, that it revels in the helplessness of others. Children pluck wings and when grown hulking they crush heads and paint rude words on public walls. Decay bays on all sides, still mourning the moon’s tragic death. Pity the jump-mouse, for we are ourselves nothing other than jump-mice trapped in the corners of existence.

  In his desperation, Calap Roud realized his only hope for survival would be found in the brazen theft of the words of great but obscure artists, and, fortunate for him, Calap possessed a lifetime of envy in the shadow of geniuses doomed to dissolution in some decrepit alley (said demises often carefully orchestrated by Calap himself: a word here, a raised eyebrow there, the faintest shakes of the head and so on. It is of course the task of average talents to utterly destroy their betters, but not until every strip of chewable morsel is stripped from them first). Thus lit by borrowed inspiration, Calap Roud gathered himself and found a sudden glow and calm repose in which to draw an assured breath.

  “Gather ye close, then,” he began, in the formal fashion of fifty or so years ago, “to this tale of human folly, as all tales of worth do so recount, to the sorrow of men and women alike. In a great age past, when giants crouched in mountain fastnesses, fur-bedecked and gripping in hard fists the shafts of war spears; when upon the vast plains below glaciers lay like dead things, draining their l
ifeblood into ever-deepening valleys; when the land itself growled like a bear in the spring, stomach clenched in necessity, a woman of the Imass slowly died, alone, banished from her ken. She was curled in the lee of a boulder left behind by the ice. The furs covering her pale skin were worn and patched. She had gathered about herself thick mosses and wreathes of lichen to fight against the bitter wind. And though at this time none was there to cast regard upon her, she was beautiful in the way of Imass women, sibling to the earth and melt-waters, to the burst of blossoms in the short season. Her hair, maiden braided, was the colour of raw gold. Her face was broad and full-featured, and her eyes were green as the moss in which she huddled.”

  A worthy theft to my mind, for I knew this tale. Indeed, I knew the poet whose version Calap was now recounting. Stenla Tebur of Aren managed to fashion a dozen epic poems and twenty or so hearth-tales (or garden-tales, as the Aren knew them, having long since abandoned such rustic scenes as sitting round a hearth beneath stars unmarred by city smoke and light), before his untimely death at the age of thirty-three. The altar upon which he breathed his last, I am told, was naught but grimy cobbles behind the Temple of Burn, and the breath whereof I speak was a wheezing one, thick with consumption. Alcohol and d’bayang had taken this young man’s life, for such are the lures of insensate escape to the tormented artist that rare is the one who deftly avoids such fatal traps. T’was not fame that killed him, alas (for, I would boldly state, death in the time of fame is not as tragic as it might seem, for lost potential is immortal; far greater the sorrow and depression upon hearing of a once-famous life ending in the obscurity of the obsolete). Stenla had given up his siege upon the high and solid walls of legitimacy, manned as it was by legions of jaded mediocrities and coddled luminaries. Forays of vicious rejection had crushed his spirit, until senseless oblivion was all he sought, and found.

  “What terrible crime had so cruelly cast her out from her own people?” Calap went on, quoting word for word and thus impressing me with his memory. “The wind howled with the voices of a thousand spirits, each and all bemoaning this fair maiden’s fate. Tears from the sky lost the warmth of life and so drifted down as flakes of snow. The great herds in the distance had wandered down to the valley flanks to escape the wind and its dread voices of sorrow. She curled alone, dying.”

  “But why?” demanded Sellup, earning venomous glares from Pampera and Oggle Gush, for in showing interest in a tale not told by Nifty Gum she was committing a gross betrayal, and even the Great Artist himself was frowning at Sellup. “Why did they leave her like that? That was evil! And she was good, wasn’t she? A good person! Pure of heart, an innocent—she had to be! Oh, this is a terrible fate!”

  Calap raised a hand in which was cupped borrowed wisdom. “Soon, my dear, all will be known.”

  “Don’t wait too long! I don’t like long stories. Where’s the action? You’ve already gone on too long!”

  And to that criticism Pampera, Oggle and Nifty all nodded. What is it to trust so little in the worth of a tale well and carefully told? What doth haste win but breathless stupidity? Details of import? Bah! Cry these flit-flies. Measures of pace and the thickening of the mat into which the awl must weave? Who cares? Chew into rags and be on to the next, spitting as you go! I look upon the young and see a generation of such courage as to dare nothing more than the ankle-deep, and see them standing proud and arrogant upon the thin shorelines of unknown seas—and to call this living! Oh, I know, it is but an old man’s malaise, but to this very moment I still see Sellup and her wide-eyed idiocy, I still hear her impatience and the smack of her lips and the gulp of her breaths, a young woman who could pant herself unconscious in her haste to see her mind transported ... elsewhere. A stutter of steps, a stagger of impetus, oh, so much she missed!

  “Would she lie there unto death,” Calap asked, “nameless and unknown? Is this not the darkest tragedy of all? To die in anonymity? To pass from the world unremarked, beneath the notice of an entire world? Oh, the flies wait to lay their eggs. The capemoths flutter like leaves in nearby branches, and in the sky the tiny spots that are ice vultures slowly grow larger with their cargo of endings. But these are the mindless purveyors of mortality and nothing more than that. Their voice is the whisper of wings, the clack of beaks and the snip of insect mouths. It is fey epitaph indeed.”

  Steck Marynd limped close to the fire and set down another branch collected from somewhere. Flames licked the hoary bark and found it to their liking.

  “So we must turn back, outracing the cool sun of spring to the colder sun of winter, and we see before us a huddle of huts, humped upon the bones and tusks of tenag, thick bhederin hides stretched tight over the skeletal frames. The camp crouches not upon the highest hills overlooking the valley, nor upon the banks of the melt-water stream in the basin of the valley itself. No, it clings to a south-facing terrace a little more than halfway up the valley side. The wind’s fiercest force is cut in this place and the ground is dry underfoot, draining well into the soggy flats flanking the stream. The Imass were greatly skilled at such things; perhaps indeed their wisdom was a bred thing, immune to true learning, or it may instead be true that those not yet severed from the earth know full the precious secrets of harmony, of using only what is given—”

  “Get on with it!” shouted Sellup, the words jumbled by the knuckle bones she was sucking clean. Spitting one out she popped another one in. Her eyes shone like candle flames awakened by a drunkard’s breath. “It was a stupid camp. That’s all. I want to know what’s going to happen! Now!”

  Calap nodded. Never argue with a member of one’s audience.

  Well, perhaps he believed that. For myself, and after much rumination on the matter, I would suggest the following qualifiers. If that member of the audience is obnoxious, uninformed, dim, insulting, a snob, or drunk, then as far as I am concerned, they are fair game and, by their willingness to engage the artist in said contest, should expect none other than surgical savaging by said artist. Don’t you think?

  “These Imass in this camp had suffered a terrible winter. Their hunters could find little game, and the great flocks of birds were still weeks away. Many of the elders had walked off into the white to save the lives of their children and grandchildren, for winter spoke to them in a secret language only the aged understand. ‘In life’s last days, the white and the cold will lie in the bed of the old.’ So said the wise among them. Yet, even for this sacrifice, the others weakened with each day. The hunters could not range as far as once they could before exhaustion turned them back. Children had begun eating the hides that kept them warm at night, and now fevers raced among them.

  “She was out, upon the high ridge overlooking the camp, collecting the last autumn’s mosses where the winds had swept the snows away, and so was the first to see the approaching stranger. He came down from the north, thickly clad in tenag furs. The long bone-grip of a greatsword rose behind his left shoulder. His head was bared to the winds at his back, and she could see that he was dark, stone-skinned and black-haired. He dragged a sled in his wake.

  “In the time before he drew closer, hard thoughts rattled in her mind. They could turn no stranger away in times of need. This was a law among her kind. Yet this warrior was a big man, taller than any Imass. His hunger would be a deep pit, and weakened as her clan’s warriors now were, the stranger could take all he wanted if he so chose. And more, she was troubled by that sled, for bundled as it was, she knew it bore a body. If it lived it would need caring. If dead, the warrior was delivering a curse upon her people.”

  “A curse?” Sellup asked. “What kind of curse?”

  Calap blinked.

  Seeing that he had no specific response to this question, I cleared my throat. “Death leaves such camps, Sellup, and that is well and as it should be. This is why the elders, when they decide it is time to die, walk out into the white. It is also why all kills are butchered well away from the camp itself, so that only meat, hide and bones intended to be made into
tools—gifts to life one and all—enter the camp. Should death come into the camp, the hosts are cursed and must immediately make propitiations to the Reaver and his demon slaves, lest Death find the camp to his liking and so make it his home. When the Reaver finds a home, the living soon die, do you see?”

  “No.”

  Sighing, I said, “It is one of those rules couched in spiritual guise that, in truth, has a more secular purpose. To bring someone dead or dying into a small camp is to invite contagion and disease. Among such a close-knit clan, any infection is likely to claim them all. Thus, the Imass had certain rules to prevent such a thing occurring, yet those rules, alas, conflicted with that of never turning a guest away in times of need. So the woman was with troubled thoughts, yes?”

  “But he’s evil—he has to be! He’s the Reaper himself!”

  “Reaver,” I corrected, “or so the citizens of Aren so call the Lord of Death.”

  Calap flinched and would not thereafter meet my eyes. “So she stood, trembling, as the stranger, who had clearly chosen her as his destination, now drew up to halt nine paces distant. She saw at once that he was not Imass. He was from the mountain heights. He was Fenn, a giant of Tartheno Toblakai blood. And too, she saw that he bore the marks of battle. Slash wounds that had cut through the woolly Tenag hide had encrusted the slices with the warrior’s own blood. His right hand and forearm were blackened with old gore, and so too was his face spattered in violent maps.

  “He was silent for a time, his heavy eyes held upon her, and then he spoke. He said—”

  “Finish this tomorrow night,” Tiny Chanter said, cracking a wide yawn.

  “That’s not how it works,” Tulgord Vise said in a growl. “We can’t very well vote if one of the tales remains incomplete.”

  “I want to hear more, don’t I?” Tiny retorted. “But I’m falling asleep, right? So, we get the rest tomorrow night.”

  I noticed that Nifty Gum was endeavouring to catch my eye. In response I raised my brows and shrugged.