The Stranger's Magic: The Labyrinths of Echo: Book Three

by Max Frei

  “See, Shurf, you’ve surprised me so many times that I decided to give you a taste of your own medicine,” I said. “Did I succeed?”

  “You did,” said Lonli-Lokli. His face had already recovered its usual dispassionate expression. If I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I’d have thought I was seeing things.

  “Nice place,” I said. “I especially like the faces. Say, Anday, are all these people poets?”

  “Almost,” said Anday. “Including some of the best. Not just your everyday rhymesters and peasant scribblers. We’ve also got true poetry connoisseurs, like Lonli-Lokli here.”

  “And this kind of contingent comes here every day?” I said.

  “Not just this kind! Usually it’s not this crowded, though. Today we’re having a lot of readings, a sort of poetry contest. It happens whenever there’s a new moon. It’s a tradition here, so you’re in luck.”

  “A contest? What are the rules?” I said.

  “Well, actually, anyone can volunteer to recite some new poetry, and the so-called contest happens later when everybody gets drunk and starts beating each other up,” said Lonli-Lokli. “It is a natural phenomenon: at a certain level of intoxication talented people find it particularly hard to come to an understanding.”

  I shook my head. Sir Shurf was definitely in his element here. Or maybe the place had a special inspirational charm.

  While I was chatting with my friends, someone had already come to the bar and begun reciting something. The tavern was so noisy I couldn’t make out a single word.

  “Maybe we should move a little closer,” I said. “I can’t hear a thing. Can you?”

  “There’s nothing to hear,” said Anday nonchalantly. “At the beginning of the evening, it’s just random people. You know, kids who first managed to rhyme three and a half words with the help of a bottle of Jubatic Juice the night before. When one of the masters gets up there, everyone goes quiet. It’s a very delicate moment: you need to catch when to stop talking and start listening. Usually everybody catches, though.”

  “Holy moly! Another familiar face,” I said when I saw Sir Skalduar Van Dufunbux, our “coroner,” walk in the Three-Horned Moon.

  “Ah, yes. Sir Skalduar is a regular,” said Anday in a respectful tone. “When I came here for the first time about thirty years ago, he already had his own table. The old man doesn’t write anything, but boy does he catch! The dinner is over! How do you know him, Max?”

  “What do you mean? He works in the House by the Bridge.”

  “Are you saying that gentlemen is a regular rodent?” Poor Anday was dismayed.

  “Well, he’s anything but regular,” I said. “He is the Master of Escorting the Dead. The old man examines the dead bodies that end up in our organization.”

  “So he’s an expert in stiffs that the rodents find?” Anday reinterpreted the new information. “Not too shabby!”

  “It’s time you dropped the phobias of your youth, pal,” I said. “I’m sick and tired of telling you that there are decent fellows among the Capital’s police force.”

  “Time I dropped the what?” said Anday. “I don’t catch.”

  I had to laugh. My conversations with Anday resulted in the most peculiar combinations of colloquialisms of the two Worlds.

  Meanwhile, Sir Skalduar Van Dufunbux paraded across the crowded tavern to a table next to ours, sat down, and greeted us.

  “It looks like Sir Anday is not just one of the best poets of our time but also a great proselytizer,” said Van Dufunbux. “Soon the entire staff of the Secret Investigative Force will be gathering here in the Three-Horned Moon. Only the infallible Sir Juffin Hully will be sitting in the Glutton in solitude.”

  “You don’t know Juffin,” I said. “He’ll make a timetable, and we’ll be forced to take shifts sitting with him there. He’s a tyrant.”

  I made the joke almost mechanically. I was shocked by the fact that Sir Skalduar had called Anday “one of the best poets of our time” without a hint of irony. I had been under the impression that Anday had been exaggerating his literary talent, to put it mildly. I had never bothered to listen to his drunken mutterings. (Anday only had the courage to recite poetry when he got himself besotted.) Somewhere deep down inside, I held the moronic, naive conviction that a brilliant poet had to be tall and handsome, with a fiery gaze, covered in a veil of mystery—oh, and preferably cold sober, too. Stupid, I know.

  Then the tavern fell silent, as though an invisible director had taken it into his head to press a button and mute the sound in this speck of the Universe. A pleasant, gray-bearded man was shuffling his feet by the bar. His appearance, by the way, was very close to my deeply harbored ideal: tall, slender, handsome. Except he was a far cry from being covered in a “veil of mystery,” and his “fiery gaze,” if there was one to speak of, was hidden behind his eyeglasses.

  His poetry, however, was magical. The last thing I could have imagined was that one could hear something of that caliber in a crowded tavern a stone’s throw away from the Square of Spectacles and Entertainment—or, indeed, anywhere in this World. Maybe somewhere in a very special heaven for poetry lovers.

  During the rest of the evening, the reverential silence that attended recitals worthy of note fell a few more times, but the poetry of other masters did not strike any special chords in my body. Perhaps I had no chords left in me, having spent them all on the first poet. That mild-mannered, gray-bearded bard had stolen my heart and soul.

  “Max, you have not been yourself for the past half hour,” said Lonli-Lokli. “Has something happened?”

  “Something horrible has happened,” I said. “I heard good poetry and was impressed. Now I’m going to walk around in a waking dream and demonstrate signs of inborn imbecility for three days running. I’m rarely impressed by something, but if I am, it’s very deep. Does anyone know the name of that bearded fellow?”

  “Which one?” said Anday. “There are many bearded fellows here.”

  “Are there? The one with a gray beard and glasses. When he came to the bar, it was the first time this evening that silence fell.”

  “Oh, that was Kiba Kimar himself!” said Anday. “Did you really like his poem, Max?” He sounded unconvinced.

  “Does it show?” I said. It’s not easy for me to admit such things. Stripping naked in public is easy for me, but admitting that good poetry touches my funny soul in a special way is too much.

  “Man, you catch big time!” said Anday, shaking his head. “They say his poetry is intended for the best connoisseurs only! Frankly, I don’t always catch myself why there’s all this fuss about Kiba. Sometimes I catch, too, but not before I eat at least three bowls of the thickest broth from the Old Thorn.”

  “I also believe that Sir Kiba Kimar is the best of the best,” said Shurf. “He somehow manages to write only about the things that really matter. And he holds back exactly as much as is necessary. So the reader—that is the audience in our case—has to supply what he is holding back. Usually we do not realize that we create our own extension of the poem. If you have not noticed, one can never memorize a single stanza of his poetry. I have tried to many times. In this regard Kiba Kimar’s poems are akin to the powerful spells of ancient times, some of which took hundreds upon hundreds of years of daily recital to be memorized.”

  I listened to Lonli-Lokli but refrained from commentary. For the first time in a very long while, I felt I needed to be silent. More than that—I couldn’t say a word. I had thought that the phrase “enchanted by poetry” was a cheap metaphor. As it turned out, in some cases, it was a cold, hard fact.

  Closer to midnight, my friend Anday Pu also got up and went to the bar. I prepared to listen to him attentively.

  His poetry would have been as good as my own might have been, a long time ago, if something incredible had actually been there, behind the intricate interweaving of semitransparent hints. But underneath a thin veneer of nimble word juggling lay nothing but endless loneliness and almost childish b
ewilderment: How come, nobody likes me, darn it, wonderful fellow that I am?

  “It gives me immense pleasure to look at you when you listen to poetry,” said Lonli-Lokli. “You should see the guilty expression on your face. One would have thought that you had asked Anday to recite some of your own poetry and then realized that you did not like it.”

  “Do you like it?” I said.

  “Of course. It is absolutely clear that Anday Pu is a very talented young man,” said Shurf.

  “Right,” I said, sighing. “It is absolutely clear.” I was in no mood for arguing, not to mention arguing with Sir Lonli-Lokli—an absolute waste of time and effort.

  Anday Pu finished amid dead silence. As I had come to understand, this was a sign of absolute recognition. The fellow was beaming like a freshly minted coin. In his joy, he ordered a pitcher of spicy Ukumbian bomborokka: the blood of his pirate ancestors was bubbling in the veins of this tubby little man.

  “Did you like it, Max?” he said. To my surprise, I realized he wasn’t boasting but honestly wanted to know my opinion. He looked at me with a timidity that I hadn’t noticed in him before.

  “Well, I did and I didn’t,” I said. “You’d probably be surprised to learn that when I was a poet I used to write similar stuff. It’s hard for me to be objective.”

  “You used to write similar stuff?” said Anday. “The dinner is over! Why haven’t you ever read it to me? Did you think I wouldn’t catch?”

  “No,” I said, smiling. “It’s just been a long time since I got myself that drunk. See, I only remember my poetry at a particular stage of drunkenness: after I begin to throw up but before my face hits the plate. In any other state, I’m incapable of such feats.”

  “And so we learn not only that can Sir Max write poetry, which in itself is outside the frame of my mind’s picture of him, but also that he can get himself sozzled,” said Shurf. “Are you really full of surprises, or do you just enjoy pretending you are?” The question might have seemed rude if it hadn’t been accompanied by a hint of irony.

  “Is there a difference?” I said. “In that case, I don’t know. Both, I suppose. It’s not all that bad, though. Those feats are in the past. A long, long forgotten past. You should know, if anyone does, that people do change, sometimes radically.”

  The former Mad Fishmonger nodded. He could hardly disagree.

  “Why aren’t you writing now?” said Anday. “Or are you? Do I catch?”

  “I once realized that you should write poetry on napkins while you’re waiting for your order in a small café. Reading is unnecessary: it only spoils good poetry. Once you’ve written all over the napkin, you should crumple it—better yet, put it in an ashtray and burn it. Not the most ingenious habit, of course, but one I adhered to so adamantly that I became really good at it. Then I thought that, instead of wasting perfectly good napkins, it’d be just as good if I simply looked at them and told myself that the words I wanted to write on them didn’t exist in any language. It turned out all right in the end. The last thing this World needed was my poetry.”

  “I don’t catch,” said Anday. “It’s too complicated.”

  “Yeah, I don’t catch myself,” I said. “The atmosphere in this place doesn’t do me any good. I think I should go back to the House by the Bridge before that clueless young man in me wakes up. And we’ll all be better off if he remains sleeping.”

  “I must be going, too,” said Lonli-Lokli, folding his snow-white looxi around himself. “I was going to leave sooner, but I wanted to stay and listen to your poetry, Anday.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Anday. He had already recovered from my confession. A healthy portion of bomborokka can make any problem seem insignificant.

  “Want me to give you a lift, Shurf?” I said. “I hope the streets are almost empty now. That means that you’ll be home in a quarter of an hour.”

  “Thank you, Max. It is very kind of you,” he said. “And most timely.”

  Silence fell in the Three-Horned Moon. Another master was reciting his verses. We whispered our thanks to Anday, bade goodnight to Sir Skalduar, and left.

  “I sometimes think that you are much older than you seem to be,” said Shurf. “You have known bad times, you have been a poet, and you have been a drunkard. When did you have time to do all that, Max? Or is this a secret?”

  “A hole in the heavens above you, Shurf!” I said, laughing. “This is no secret. First, I’m very quick. Second, I did it all at the same time. Plus, I exaggerated the ‘face in the plate’ part for Anday’s benefit so he could feel he had something in common with me. It’s my way of sucking up to the master. I didn’t really do much carousing. As for my age—Well, that will have to remain my little secret.”

  “From the pictures that you call movies and the books you fetched from your World, I have inferred that your lives are much shorter than ours,” said Shurf. “Do you grow up faster?”

  “It’s not just the growing up part that we do faster,” I said.

  “Does it affect you, too?”

  “It did while I lived there. Now I live here, and Juffin says I have every chance of living as long as any of you. I sure want to believe that.”

  “So you’re not older but younger that you seem to be?” Shurf was too much of a pedant to let it go without nailing it down.

  “That’s correct,” I said. “I’ve only lived a little over thirty years. Oh, but please don’t tell Melifaro. He’ll immediately try to adopt me and send me to preschool.”

  “I am not in the habit of exposing someone else’s secrets,” said Shurf. “Nor have I ever been. I think you know that. How odd: you have surprised me so many times tonight that it is almost beyond my capacity to be surprised. Are you doing this on purpose? And if so, what is the purpose?”

  “Are you kidding, Shurf? On purpose? What nonsense! Today’s just been that kind of day. New moon, the Three-Horned Moon, poetry contests, sentimental reminiscences, and so on. Let’s change the subject. Have you finished the book I fetched for you yesterday?”

  “Not yet. I am going through it very slowly. I have to keep going back and rereading parts that I do not understand. It talks about very odd things. People from another World visit yours. They are very powerful, as far as I can tell. They have rather peculiar ideas about how the Universe works. They believe that all living creatures can be classified according to a principle I do not quite follow. In light of this notion, they are going to exterminate humanity, sparing only a select few, which are somehow different from their fellow humans and are thus entitled to be left alive. I am afraid I cannot tell you much about it. One should have some understanding of the contents of a book in order to retell its plot.”

  “I think you got another sci-fi book,” I said, sighing. “Another dystopian novel. You’re just lucky with this genre from the looks of it.”

  “Both of the books you obtained for me belong to a particular genre?”

  “Heh. ‘Particular’ is the word here,” I said. “In your case, it’s particularly ironic: to get introduced to a strange world by reading stories that were deliberately created to represent a universe as different as possible from the author’s reality.”

  “It is ironic indeed,” said Shurf. “Yet I have managed to pick up some valuable information—your life expectancy, for example. There were other details, as well, such as elements of culture, everyday life, and a few other things that are vastly different from what I am used to. This is an excellent mind game, to paint an accurate picture of an unknown World using only bits and pieces of information that cannot always be distinguished from fiction. Yet however fascinating and educational this may be, Max, we have arrived at my house. To my utter regret, we will have to continue our conversation tomorrow. Good night.”

  “Good night,” I said, watching Lonli-Lokli’s white silhouette dissolve in the darkness of the garden, as though he were a beautiful ghost from an old movie.

  I wish I knew what kind of picture of my World he had painted i
n his own mind. I was sure any science fiction writer would be dying to know that, too.

  Kurush wasn’t the only one waiting for me in the House by the Bridge. Sir Kofa Yox had decided to keep him company.

  “I should’ve brought more pastries,” I said, smiling.

  “Why?” said Kofa. “There’s nothing worse than eating pastry on an empty stomach. On the other hand, the Glutton is entirely empty now, and you and I can have a late dinner there and talk, of course.”

  “Kurush, will you be okay here all by yourself?” I said.

  “Some time later, I will need you to clean my beak,” said the buriwok. “So please try to come back in an hour.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Sir Kofa, will you kindly remind me?”

  “I will, I will,” said Kofa. “So much fuss about this.”

  “Where are today’s trophies?” I said, opening the Secret Door of our staff-only entrance.

  “The headband is in Juffin’s safe—we won’t be needing it any time soon. As for the cloak, I’ve already broken it in. I’m not parting with it now. So much better than changing my appearance all the time. Oh, thanks for reminding me. I left it in the office. I’ll go fetch it now. I was planning to take a walk in town later tonight.”

  “It’s bad luck to go back,” I said.

  “Did you say something?” said Kofa, turning around.

  “Never mind me. It’s silly. When I was a kid, many people believed in it. I hope it doesn’t pertain to other Worlds.”

  Kofa didn’t listen. By the time I was through, he’d already returned, holding the cloak under his arm. “It would be rude of me to put this on now,” he said. “You’d have to drill a hole in me with your eyes just to keep me in sight.”

  We didn’t disappoint Kurush: we were so hungry the dinner only lasted forty minutes. The service at this late hour had been very prompt so as to get rid of customers as quickly as possible.

  We parted in the doorway. I had to go back to the House by the Bridge to clean the sticky sweet cream from Kurush’s beak, and our Master Eavesdropper had other plans. He was going to hunt for new secrets and rumors in Echo’s all-night taverns.