Each night, alas, the powder beckoned her.
Arch rival to Calap Roud was the illimitable, ambitious, inexcusably young Brash Phluster. That he delighted in the old bastard’s presence on this journey could hardly be refuted, for Brash so wanted Calap to witness youth’s triumph in Farrog. With luck, it would kill him.
Seven years Calap had been defecating on Brash, trying to keep him down on the crusty floor, but Brash was not one to let a rain of guano discourage his destiny. He knew he was brilliant in most things, and where he lacked brilliance he could fill those spaces with bold bluster and entirely unfounded arrogance. A sneer was as good as an answer. A writhe of the lip could slice throats across the room. He eyed Calap as would a wolf eye a dog, appalled at a shared pedigree and determined to tear the sad thing to pieces at the first opportunity.
True talent was found in the successful disguise of genius, and Brash accounted himself a master of disguises. His future was glory, but he would reveal not a single hint, not one that some cragged critic or presumptuous rival might close in on, stoat fangs bared. No, they could dismiss him each and every day for the time being. He would unveil himself in Farrog, and then they would all see. Calap Roud, that stunning watery-eyed dancer, Purse Snippet, and the Entourage too-
The Entourage! Whence comes such creatures so eager to abandon all pretense of the sedentary? One envisages haste of blubbering excitement, slippery gleam in the eye, a lapdog’s brainless zeal, as a canvas bag is stuffed full of slips and whatnot, with all the grace of a fakir backstage moments before performing before a gouty king. A whirlwind rush through rooms like shrines, and then out!
Pattering feet, a trio, all converging in unsightly gallop quick to feminize into a skip and prance once He Who Is Worshipped is in sight. The Entourage accompanies the Perfect Artist everywhere, gatherings great and small, public and intimate. They build the walls of the formidable, impregnable keep that is the Perfect Artist’s ego. They patrol the moat, flinging away all but the sweetest defecatory intimations of mortality. They stand sentinel in every postern gate, they gush down every sluice, they are the stained glass to paint rainbows upon their beloved’s perfectly turned profile.
But let us not snick and snack overmuch, for each life is a wonder unto itself, and neither contempt nor pity do a soul sound measures of health, lest some issue of envy squeeze free in unexpectedly public revelation. The object of this breathless admiration must wait for each sweet woman’s moment upon the stage in the bull’s eye lantern light of our examination.
To begin, we shall name all three and attach to each select obtuberances in aid of future recollection. Sellup, first for no particular reason, has seen twenty-three summers and remembers in excruciating detail four of them, from the moment she first set eyes upon her beloved Perfect Artist to the very present found in this tale. Of her first eighteen years she has no memory whatsoever. Was she born? Did she possess parents? Did they love her? She cannot recall. Brothers? Sisters? Lovers? Offspring? Did she eat? Did she sleep?
Dark brown and springy was her hair, whirling in spirals down upon her shoulders. Singular was her eyebrow yet miraculously independent in its expressions at each end. Her nose, narrow and jutting, bore all the mars of inveterate ill-considered interjection. Her mouth cannot be described for it never ceased moving long enough for an accurate appraisal, but her chin jutted with blurred assurance. Of her body beneath her flowery attire, no knowledge is at hand. Suffice it to say she sat a saddle well with nary a pinch upon the horse’s waist. Sellup of the blurred mouth, then.
Next was Pampera, linguistically challenged in all languages including her native one, hers was the art of simpering, performed in a serried host of mannerisms and transitory parades from pose to pose, each pose held, alas, both an instant too long and never long enough. In the span of one’s self settling into a chair, Pampera could promenade from crosslegged on a silk cushion with elbows upon inside knees and long fingers laced to bridge the weight of her chin (and presumably all the rest above it) to a sudden languorous stretching of one long perfectly moulded leg, flinging back her head with arms rising in rampant stretch to lift and define her savage breasts, before rising to her feet like smoke, swinging round with a pivot of her fine hips wheeling into view the barrel cask of her buttocks before pitching down on the divan, hair flowing like tentacles as she propped up her head with one hand whilst the other (hand, not head) endeavoured to reinsert her breasts into the skimpy cups the style and size of which she likely settled upon a month into puberty.
For Pampera, it must be noted, puberty was buried beneath virginity deep in a tomb long sealed by a thick mound of backfill, with the grass growing thick and high and all significance of the hump long lost to the memory of the local herders. Despite this, she was nineteen years old. Her hair, for all its tidal pool titillations, was the hue of honey though tipped with black kohl ink a finger’s width at the ends. She had the eyes of a boy’s fantasy, when eyes meant something, the two of them being overlarge and balanced just so to hint at warm scented boudoirs wherein things slid from mothering to something other with all the ease of a blinking lid (or two). Sculptors might dream of smoothing out her likeness in golden wax or creamy clay. Painters might long to lash her fineness to canvas or stuccoed wall, if not ceiling. But one could not but suspect the obsession was doomed to be short lived. Can an object of lust prove much too lust-worthy? Just how many poses are possible in the world and how did she come by them all? Why, even in sleep her repose palpitates in propitious perfection. The sculptor, looking upon this, would despair to discover that Pampera is her own sculpture and there was naught to be done to match or hope to improve upon it. Painters might fall into toxic madness seeking to match the tone of her flawless skin and it is to the toxic we will return to precipitate our reminding of dearest Pampera.
Could a poet hope to match her essence in words without an intermission of nausea?
…
To return to these three, then, we at last come to Oggle Gush, innocent of all depravity not through inexperience, but through blissful imperviousness to all notions of immorality. A slip of mere sixteen years since the day in wonder her mother issued her forth, as naturally unaware of her pregnancy as she was of the innocence her daughter would so immaculately inherit, Oggle Gush deserves nothing but forgiving accolades from paladins and scoundrels alike (excepting only Great Artists). Ever quick to smile even at the most inappropriate of times, shying like a pup from a masters twitching boot one moment only to cuddle in his lap upon the next, squirming as only a thing of claws, wet nose and knobby limbs can.
Not one of her deeds was ill-meant. Not one of the numerous fatal accidents trailing her could be set upon her threshold. When she sang, as she often did, she could not find a solid key if it was glued to her tongue, but all looked on in damp-eyed adoration-and what, perchance, were all thinking? Was this an echo of personal conceits crushed and abandoned in childhood? Was it the unblinking boldness of the talentless that triggered reminiscences of childish lavishments? Or was it something in her dramatic earnestness that disengaged some critical faculty of the brain, leaving only sweet-smelling mush?
Oggle Gush, child of wonder and plaything of the Great Artist, all memory of you is sure to remain immortal and unchanging. As pure as nostalgia, and the cold cruelty with which you were misused, ah, but does this not take us to the Great Artist himself, he with the Entourage? But it does indeed.
Nifty Gum has thrice won the Mantle of the Century’s Greatest Artist. His Entourage of three as found upon the trail across the Great Dry, only a month past numbered six hundred and fifty-four; and if not for Oggle’s well-intentioned house cleaning beneath the deck of the transport barge, why, theyd all still be with him. As if Oggle knew a thing about boats and whatnot. As if she even understood the function of hull plugs and drain holes, or whatever those things were called.
He looked taller than he looked, if one can say such a thing and by the sure nods all round, it seems that one can. He wore his cloak and measured his stride as if he was a bigger man than he was, and not one of his even features could be said to be exaggerated yet neither were they refined. In gathered host they were pleasant on his face, but should one find them neatly severed and arrayed among rivals on a hawker’s bazaar table, why, none would even so much as reach for them, much less buy them-except, perhaps, as curios of mundanity.
Of talent’s measure Nifty Gum had an ample helping, nothing to overflow the brim, yet something, a fire, a wink, a perspicacity for promotion, the brazen swanning of his sweep and flurry in passage (trailed as ever by his giggling entourage), something or perhaps all these things and more, served him so well that his renown was as renowned as his songs and poems. Fame feeds itself, a serendipity glutton of the moment prescient in publicity.
For such a figure, no exaggeration can be overstated, and the glean of modesty rests in uneasily thin veneer upon a consummated self-adoration that abides the presumption of profundity with all the veracity of that which is truly profound. And to this comment my personal failure as a poet has no bearing whatsoever. Why, I have never viewed words as worthy weapons, having so many others of far more permanent efficacy at my disposal.
Indeed, as I look upon myself at this fire upon the twenty-third night, I see a young(ish) poet of modest regard, scant of pate and so casting nothing of the angelic silhouette upon yonder tent wall as Nifty Gum’s cascading curls of thick auburn hair achieve without his giving it a moment’s thought, as the gifted rarely if ever regard their gifts except in admiration, or, more deliciously, of admiration in witnessing the admiration of others for all that which is of himself be it voice or word or hair.
No, I am retracted unto myself, as was my wont in those times, the adventurer none knew, a teller of tales to defy the seam of joinings between those I spun in the Great Dry all those years ago, and this tale that I spin now.
Lives hang in the balance at every moment, in every instant, for life itself is a balance, but sometimes the sky is bright overhead and brilliant with sun and heat and sometimes the sky is darkness with the cold spark of stars dimmed by mistral winds. We see this as the wheel of the heavens, when such a belief is only our failed imagination, for it is us who wheel, like a beetle clinging to a spinning ring, and we are what mark the passing of days.
I see myself then, younger than I am, younger than I have ever been. This is my tale and it is his tale both. How can this be?
But then, what is a soul but the mapping of each and every wheel?
Upon such stately musings rests lightly, one hopes, this addendum. On the twenty-third day just past, the grim mottle of travelers came upon a stranger walking alone. Starved and parched, Apto Canavalian was perhaps in his last moments, and as such might well have met a sudden and final demise at the hands of the Nehemothanai and pilgrims, but for one salient detail. Through cracked lips that perhaps only filled out with a steady diet of wine and raw fish, Apto made it known that he was not a pilgrim of any sort. No, more an adjudicator in spirit if not profession (aspirations notwithstanding), Apto Canavalian was among the elite of elites in the spectrum of intellectualia, a shaper of paradigms, a prognosticator of popularity in the privileged spheres of passing judgement. He was, in short, one of the select judges for The Century’s Greatest Artist.
His mule had died of some dreaded pox. His servant had strangled himself in tragic mishap one night of private pleasuring and now lay buried in a bog well north of the Great Dry. Apto had made this journey at his own expense, the invitation from Farrog’s mystical organizers sadly lacking in remuneration, and had nothing left of his stores save one dusty bottle of vinegarish plonk (and, it soon became known, his dread state of dehydration had more to do with the previous nine bottles than with a dearth of water).
If artists possessed true courage (and this is doubtful) their teeth-bared defense of Apto’s life in the moments following his discovery would do well as admirable proof, but so often in life does one mistake desperation and self-interest for courage, for in mien both are raw and indeed, appalling.
Even venerable Tulgord Vise withdrew before the savage display of barely human snarls. In any case, the vote had already been concluded.
The night is younger than you might think, and the tale now lies before us, an enormous log of mysterious origins quick to drink flames from the bed of coals, and the fat sizzles and the circle is drawn tight save the Dantoc who remains, as ever, within her carriage.
Let us, for convenience, list them once more. Apto Canavalian, newly arrived and perhaps more pallid than salvation would invite. Calap Roud, an artist with a century of mediocrity lifting him to minuscule heights. Avas Didion Flicker, venerable voice of this modest retelling. Purse Snippet, demure in the sultry flare of flames, her eyes haunted as dying candles. Brash Phluster, destined as first to speak in the circle only moments away, sitting like a man on an ant hill, feverish of regard and clammy with sweat. Nifty Gum, redoubtable in his reclination, polished boots gleaming at the ends of his outstretched legs upon which are draped two of his Entourage, Oggle Gush, her lashes brushing in every slow blink the precious bulb of Nifty’s flower, and Sellup, brow awiggle like a caterpillar on a burning twig, whilst Pampera shifts to a new pose artful in breastly impression upon the side of Nifty’s auburn-flowing head and what gurgling promise does that single imprisoned ear detect?
Tiny and Flea and Midge Chanter command the bulwark upon one side of the circle, a pugnacious wall wildly bristling and smelling like a teenaged boy’s bedding, and close to Tiny’s scabbed hand sits Relish Chanter, lips smeared in grease and casting hooded wanton but unwanted glances my way. Steck Marynd paces off to her right, ghostly in the faded glow of the hearth. Growl might his stomach but damned if he will soothe it in this company of beasts. Well Knight Arpo Relent sits in the shiver of firelit gold glaring at the Chanters while Tulgord Vise picks at his (own) teeth with the point of a dagger, poised as ever for a cutting remark.
At the last seat is our host, and lest we forget his name, it is suited to muscled sartorial commentary, thus stunning the memory to recollect Sardic Thew, avian in repose, cockerel in assuredness though perhaps somewhat rattled by this point in the proceedings.
Thus, and so well chewed this introduction not a babe would choke upon it, one tremulously hopes.
The tale begins with sudden words in the light of the fire, the heat laden with watering aroma, and in the gloom beyond three horses shift and snort and the two mules eye them with envy (they look taller than they really are, and those brushed manes are an affront!). The Great Dry is a frost-sheathed wasteland beyond the fiery island, a scrabble of boulders and rocks and stunted shrubs. The carriage creaks with inner motion and perhaps one rheumy eye is pressed to a crack in the curtains, or an ear perched upon dainty hopes cocked in the folded crenellations of a peep-hole.
And of the air itself, dread is palpable and diluvean. A Recounting of the Twenty-third Night
“But listen! Whose tale is this?” So demanded Brash Phluster, a man who was of the height that made short men despise him on principle. His hair was natty and recalcitrant, but fulsome. He had teeth aligned in a mostly even row, full lips below a closely trimmed moustache and above a closely trimmed beard. It was a mouth inclined to pout, a face commissioned for self-pity, and of his nose nothing will be said.
Declamation ringing in the night air, Brash awaited a challenge but none came. We may list the reasons, as they could be of some significance. Firstly, twenty-three days of desperate deprivation and then horror had wearied us all. Secondly, the pullward weight of necessity was proving heavy indeed, at least for the more delicate among us. Thirdly, there was the matter of guilt, a most curious yoke that should probably be examined at length, but then, there is no need. Who, pray tell, is unfamiliar with guilt? In punctuated pointedness, fat snapped upon coals and almost everyone flinched.
“But I need a rest and besides, it’s time for the critical feasting.”
Ah, the critical feasting. I nodded and smiled though none noticed.
Brash wiped his hands on his thighs, shot Purse a glance and then shifted about to make himself more comfortable, before saying, “Ordig’s only claim to artistic genius amounted to a thousand mouldy scrolls and his patron’s cock in hand. Call yourself an artist and you can get away with anything. Of course, as everyone knows, shit’s fertile soil, but for what? That’s the question.”
The fire spat sparks. The smoke gusted and swung round, stinging new sets of eyes.
Brash Phluster’s face, all lit orange and flush and lively, floated like a thing disembodied in the hearth’s light; his charcoal cloak with its silver ringlets shrouded him below the neck, which was probably just as well. That head spouting all its words could just as easily be sitting on a stick, and it was still a wonder that it wasn’t.
“And Aurpan, well, imagine the audacity of his Accusations of a Guilty Man. What a heap of tripe. Guilty? Oh, aye. Guilty of being utterly talentless. It’s important-and I know this better than anyone-it’s important to bear in mind the innate denseness of the common people, and their penchant to forgive everything but genius. Aurpan was mercifully immune to such risks, which was why everyone loved him.”
Flea Chanter grunted. “Give that leg a turn, someone.”
Brash was closest to the spit but naturally he made no move. Sighing loudly, Mister Must Ambertroshin leaned forward and took hold of the cloth-wrapped handle. The crackling, sizzling haunch was weighty, inexpertly skewered, but he managed it after a few tries. He sat back, glanced round guiltily, but no one met his eyes.
Darkness, the flames’ uncertain light and the smoke were all gifts of mercy this night, but still the stomach lowered heavy and truculent. No one was hungry. This cooked meat would serve the morrow, the aching journey through a strangely emptied Great Dry, the twenty-fourth day in which we travelers felt abandoned by the world, the last left alive, and there was the fear that the Indifferent God was no longer indifferent. Were we the forgotten, the sole survivors of righteous judgement? It was possible, but not, I fair decided as I eyed the leg over the flames, likely.
“So much for Ordig and Aurpan,” said Tulgord Vise. “The question is, who do we eat tomorrow night?”
Critical feasting being what it is, sated and indeed bloated satisfaction is predicated upon the artist on the table, as it were. More precisely, the artist must be dead. Will be dead. Shall be naught else but dead. Limbs lie still and do not lash back. Mouth resides slack and rarely opens in affronted expostulation (or worse, vicious cut the razor’s wit, hapless corpses strewn all about). The body moves at the nudge only to fall still once more. Prods elicit nothing. Pokes evoke no twitch. Following all these tests, the subject is at last deemed safe to excoriate and rend, de-bone and gut, skin and sunder. Sudden discovery of adoration is permitted, respect acceptable and its proud announcement laudable. Recognition is at last accorded, as in ‘I recognise that this artist is dead and so finally deserving the accolade of ‘genius,’ knowing too that whatever value the artist achieved in life is now aspiring in worth tenfold and more.’ Critical feasting being what it is.