Ink

by Hal Duncan

  And they all lived happy ever never.

  “The Songs of Unknown Lands,” says Anna, “by the poor starving poet Guy Reynard Carter, can wait until after he's paid for his room and board… with breakfast in bed and services rendered.”

  “You make me feel so cheap and tawdry,” I say as I put down the pen.

  “You love it,” she says.

  “Is that so?” I say.

  I lay a paperweight on top of a page.

  A Match of Music

  “So, tell me, dumbass,” says Mainsail Jack, “is it Old Mellowbow who's master of these sheep?”

  Puck of the Dampseat pokes the faggot finger at him, middle finger of the right hand, down and forward.

  “Fuck you too,” he says. “No, Argon gave me them to keep for him.”

  “Poor sheep,” says Jack. “Unlucky fucking flock! Their master traipses after mistress Narrow, panicking in case she's after me…”

  Jack scritches at a leg, his exomis shorter even than the usual knee-length linen chiton, baring his thighs so high it is, and fastened at the left shoulder so it seems he's out for exercise, horse riding or hard labor. He's even gone for the short cloak of a chlamys rather than the long himation. Cock-hipped, he grins, cocksure of his own charm, tongue in his cheek.

  “Meanwhile, Argon gets fleeced,” Jack carries on, “his hired hand left in peace to milk the sheep twice hourly on the clock, thieving the lambs’ milk from the flock.”

  “Joke all you want,” shrugs Puck. “But, while you jeer, remember, Jack, I know by who you were”—he flicks a fist up with his hand in nook of elbow, with a thump, a wink—”and while the billy goats all blinked and peered the other way. And in a shrine!… although the naughty nymphs all cheered.”

  They have a history together, Jack and Puck, you might have guessed, a history of slingshot slander… though it's mostly just in jest. Of all the herdsmen of the hills, we bitmite nymphs like Jack and Puck the best.

  “Like when they saw me trashing all the trees and vines,” remembers Jack, “in Micron's orchard with a hook.”

  “Or right here by the beech trees where you broke poor Dovenest's bow and reeds. Man, you were green as ivy with your envy, jealous Jack, to see those shiny toys all given to another boy… dying to find some way to get him back.”

  “But, hey, what can the farmers do, when thieves like you run free?” Jack says. “You're worse than me. Did I not see you, while the sheepdog barked aloud, scrag, leaping from ambush in the hedges, snatching Demon's goat? Then when I cried—Hey, where's he running? Tightarse, guard the flock!—you hid behind the sedges.”

  Puck kicks a stone downhill at him but Jack darts to one side. One of his goats bleats in complaint, bell tinkling round its neck.

  “Had I not beaten Demon in a match?” grumps Puck. “Had I not won that goat from him with my own song, with my own pipes? As if you didn't know, that welching twat as much as said the goat was mine. He just refused to pay. Why should I let him get away with that?”

  Jack snorts, switches a stick to guide his goats uphill past Puck's shamble of sheep and ambling cow.

  “ When havej/OM ever beaten Demon in a singing match?” he says. “Come on. When did you ever have a proper set of wax-bound pipes? Don't you just stand down at the crossroads, dumbass, murdering a bad tune on a squawking straw?”

  Jack licks his lips as he strolls past. Hands on his hips, Puck glares. That's fucking rich. Right then, you prick…

  “OK,” he says, “let's make a match of music. Let's take turns to show what each of us can do. I bet… this heifer—no, don't cock your snoot! She suckles two calves from her udders and still comes twice daily to the milking pail as well. So, come on; tell me what you'll put up as your stake.”

  A Pair of Beechwood Cups

  “Oh, it's all right for you,” says Jack. “But some of us don't bet what we don't own. I've my old man at home, a wicked crone of a stepmother, ugly sisters, and a poor old widowed mother, with just me to care for her and all—and, see, they count the whole flock twice a day, and one of them makes sure none of the kids have gone astray.”

  Puck tucks his hands under his armpits, clucks at Jack—puk, puk, chicken—till Jack gives up.

  “OK, OK, if you're so keen to play this game,” he says, “this puts your cow to shame—I'll bet a pair of beechwood cups, carved by the subtle knife of the divine Alchemy Don, with scattered berries on a supple vine weaving around pale ivy

  Puck knows the ones he means. In each one there's a portrait: Cunning and… that sage who mapped the seasons in the skies over the whole world with his compass, telling the farmers when to put their shoulder to the plow and when to reap. He can't remember who, not being very good at history and all.

  “They're brand new,” Jack says. “They're unused. I keep them stored away and haven't even touched my lips to them. What do you say?”

  Puck shrugs, and flicks his hand as if to wave away a fly.

  “Alchemy Don made two of those for me as well, you mug, wreathing the handles round with soft acanthus, Jack, and setting Orphan in the center with a trail of trees all marching at his back.”

  He mocks Jack's voice.

  “I haven't supped. I keep them all locked up. So what? So fuck? Look at the cow I'm putting up; then you'll shut up about your poncy cups.”

  “Right then,” says Jack. “Like I'm about to let you off with that, pup's tail. No, not today: I'll take you on. Come on, we have soft grass to sit on; and what with the crops fresh in the fields, fruit ripe upon the trees, and all the woodland thick with leaves, now is the fairest time of year.”

  He flops down on the slope of grass, leans back on one arm, one leg stretched, the other nooked. Puck looks upslope, and up Jack's slant of thigh under the exomis that's hitched—deliberately, he's sure—well high. He's hooked.

  “You first, dumbass,” says Jack—who, Puck thinks, might as well be in the buff. “We'll sing in turns,” says saucy Jack. “That's what the Muses love.”

  The Music Begins

  “The music begins,” Puck sings, “in Dewpatter who loves all things and holds the whole world dear. And to my songs Dewpatter turns his ear.”

  “But Apple loves me more,” Jack sings. “His gifts are ever near me: boys who blush; and the sweet flush of hyacinth.”

  He fiddles a finger round a flower and Puck looks down the hill toward the town. He points out a woman in her yard, girdling her floor-length woolen peplos at the waist, gathering its folds into a pouch. She drapes an epiblema over her head and shoulders.

  “So?” says Puck, pointing at her. “I've got my Galaxy, my flirty tart. She throws an apple at me, darts away into the willows, wishes that I'd share my pillow.”

  Jack waves this off, points at a youth, lithe and loose of limb, at his exercises in the open square of the gymnasium.

  “Mint, my flame, is bolder,” Jack says, saucy and sweet. “He comes for my touch without being told, so much that now our dogs know him as well as all the spirits of these forest dells.”

  Trust Jack, Puck thinks, to be drawn to the gleam of sun on skin.

  “Dovenest divine in the sleep-dunes of dawn,” I whisper, “down of a cunt dappled by the daybreak's sun and dust, as you stretch through the shaft ofspringlet in through a window, as you yawn.”

  Anna stretches, rolls over in her half sleep, mumbling as I push the hair back from her eyes. Lying there on top of the white sheets, in a hunting cabin so spartan that there aren't even any curtains to keep the rising sun from pinking her freckle-dotted flesh more rosy even than it is by nature, she's my Muse, I think to myself, my Irish rose, my Celtic knotwork of complexities too intriguing to entirely untangle, as intricate as the tattoo that sleeves her right arm. A whole secret history, she has, I often think, written down in that tattoo she never speaks of, less explicable to me than all of Virgil's Latin.

  “Can you explain to me what your Songs of Unknown Lands is about?” she'll say. “In twenty words or less.”

&
nbsp; “If I could do that I wouldn't have spent the last ten years writing the sodding poems.”

  “Well, if I could explain the how and why of the tattoo I wouldn't have got it in the first place,” she smiles.

  I run a finger over the untranslatable ink of her now. Dust motes dance in a sunbeam above us, Jack and Puck riding photons that bounce between them, in my imagination.

  “I have a gift to give my love,” says Puck. “With my own eyes I've marked the place where doves have built, high in the trees.”

  “Let's see,” says Jack. “What joys might I have sent my boy, what goods? Ten golden apples plucked from deep within the woods. Ten! And tomorrow I will send the same again.”

  He lies back in the grass, his hands behind his head. Beat that.

  “Oh but how Galaxy will whisper in my ear,” Puck sings. “And what she says to me! Winds, carry her sweet nothings that the gods might hear!”

  He throws himself backward into the grass, arms wide in invocation, to beseech the breezes. Jack rolls over onto his front, tucks a fist under his chin and gazes down at the gymnast, miming desolation.

  “I know, my Mint,” says Jack, “you love me in your heart. How does that help me if I mind the nets at home while you roam, hunting boar, and we're so far and long apart?”

  I make some quick notes on the pages scattered all across the table while I'm waiting for the steel pot of coffee to boil on the stove, in between flipping pancakes, forking bacon over on the grill. I have that sort of muted but insistent mix of guilt and worry that comes from doing too many things at once and therefore— perhaps—neglecting all of them. A sizzle, a scribble, a sniff of burning.

  “Fuck! Bloody fucking… fuck!”

  I jot a last quick note, dump the pen, tong overdone bacon between the two plates of pancake, then start scraping the unsalvageable mess of burnt mix off onto the draining board by the sink, muttering more imprecations.

  “You'll wake the toe-rag if you keep swearing like that.”

  Anna stands in the doorway to our bedroom, wearing blue jeans now. I claimed my boxers back for cooking in.

  “With you for a mother?” I say. “Swearing's a lullaby for our Joshua.”

  I pick up one of the plates.

  “Thought you wanted this in bed?”

  She slides past me, scrapes a chair back.

  “Fuck it, I'm fucking well up and about now.”

  Jack and Puck glint gold and green in her eyes as she reaches for the maple syrup, licking lips already sweet with the swearing.

  A shower for Green Crop

  “Send me your girlfriend,” Puck says—”what's her name? pretty Filth?—send her to me as a birthday treat. Then when I'm offering a young cow for the wheat, oh, then send me your jealous self.”

  “Why, I love Filth before all girls,” says Jack. “But jealous? You should have seen her weeping, sighing, when I left her crying, O my fair boy, o, farewell, so long, goodbye.”

  He wipes imaginary tears out of his eyes.

  “True sorrow is a wolf among the flocks,” says Puck, “rain on ripe corn, winds whistling through the trees … or when my Moral's in a mood with me.”

  He pouts.

  “True joy is a nanny goat in her willow bower,” says Jack; “it's arbutus for her weaned kids, or a shower for green crops. Oh, but for me there's no joy that my Mint can't top.”

  Flash.

  Joshua's rag-dolly soft toy, Rabbit, bounces in time as he intones.

  “One heffalump. Two heffa—”

  Doom.

  His eyes widen as he looks at me, eyebrows disappearing under his red mop of hair at the thunder following so close behind the lightning. He turns back to the window, wiping condensation with a frenzy of fist and pressing his nose to the rain-streamed glass in keen anticipation of more flickerings and rumblings.

  “Rabbit and me are counting the lightning time,” he says in a voice reserved for Things of Importance.” ‘Cause that's how far away it is.”

  “Is that right?” I say. “Do you think two heffalumps is close then?”

  “One and a hit,” he corrects me. “I think that's really really close.”

  He bounces Rabbit up and down on the windowsill.

  “Boingy boingy boingy. Rabbit likes the lightning. He's not scared.”

  Flash.

  “One heffalump.”

  Doom.

  Joshua's wow is long and round as only a child's can be.

  Puck nods at a discus thrower down below.

  “My Pillow loves,” he says, “my rural music. So, you maids of Pyre, reward your student with a heifer as his dues.”

  “My Pillow likes new music too,” says Jack. “So make it a bull of butting horns who'll scratch the sand up with his hoof, for me.”

  Puck sighs, his hand stretched out dramatically toward the athlete drawing back now, whirling out in the release. The discus soars into the sky. Puck cups his hands around his mouth to cry:

  “May those of us who truly love you, Pillow, reach your heights, where honey runs for him and thorny brambles yield Assyrian spice.”

  Down below, visoring his eyes with a hand, the discus thrower peers up toward them.

  “And let me yoke a fox and milk a billy goat!” says Jack. “Only those who love the song of beehives love your songs, you buzzing mayfly. They're your only hope!”

  I pick my mug of tea up from the table and wander to the open front door, pondering on how I'm going to rewrite this part of the Third Eclogue I'm working on, an exchange full of references to Virgil's peers—Pollio, Bevius, Mevius— meaningless in a modern context. I never do straight translations, preferring to take the original text as … architecture, substructure, to let it serve as a seed from which strange shoots may sprout, even if it means the source is obscured, palimpsested beneath an organic growth, an arbitrary arbutus of ideas.

  Outside, the air is filled with the drum of rain battering down through leaves and bushes, down onto mud and gravel, the wood of the cabin's roof, the metal of the car's hood. The day is cloud dark, but not heavy, not humid, not a summer storm but a spring shower. Anna stands outside on the porch, smoking a cigarette. She flicks her hand at a mayfly buzzing her ear.

  An old beehive sits in the trees.

  A buzzing whine in my ear seems the song of a Puck sung in fairy time, a whole verse in a millisecond.

  And Flowers in the Fields

  “You kids there gathering strawberries and flowers in the fields,” calls Puck.

  He points at Jack with one hand, grabs his shoulder with the other.

  “Lookout!” he shouts. “Acold snake lurking in the grass. You better run. Take to your heels!”

  Jack chucks him off and tussles Puck into a headlock, hand over his mouth.

  “Hey there, you sheep,” he shouts. “Don't stray too far and wide. The river-bank's unsound. Stay near. Look at your ram; his fleece is not yet dried—” [He scuffles knuckles on Puck's scalp.] “See? He's still wet behind the ears. Ah!”

  Jack's hand jerks away from nimble nipping teeth.

  “Tightarse, head off the kids who're grazing down there by the river and I'll dip them in the spring myself,” sings Puck… “whenever.”

  “Sheep in the folds, lads. If this son steals all their milk again, our hands will work their teats all day in vain.”

  He tweaks a nipple and Puck yelps.

  I ask her about Joshua's father as we sit in the evening by the fire, Joshua in his bed and the two of us wrapped together in a patchwork quilt. She's just shut me up, interrupting as I waffle on about the stitching of Harlequin's suit, the stitching of fragments, of history, of identity, all rumpled together in folds, you see, like this quilt, so they touch each other; and under it all two lovers, naked as Adam and—

  “You know,” she's just said, “it's always the woman who gets blasted for lust, for loving just a little too much.”

  So I ask her if she's talking about her own past, about Joshua and his being illegitimate—not
that it matters in this day and age, not in the big city. In the small towns perhaps, but not in the city. Or here where there's only us two and the wonderful, precious son of her so-called sin.

  She doesn't speak much about her past, but I know she was something of a wild child, ended up disowned by her own family. Working the street for a while.

  “Sin is the snake in the grass of all modern religion,” I say. “The pagans turned prostitution into a holy ritual. You would have been a priestess in ancient Sumer.”

  She laughs.

  “Does everything come back to Sumer with you?”

  I shrug, walk two fingers across the landscape of the quilt, a giant striding across the green and yellow and brown patches of field and meadow in which Puck and Jack lie, singing against each other, singing for each other. The giant strides up the mountain of us toward the soft breast of this woman too vast in the scale of my imagination to be just a mother, just a whore.

  “Alas, look at my gloomy bull” [Puck jabs Jack's chest] “how lean he is, even surrounded with a feast of vetch. To this dumb brute as much as to the herdsman, love is death.”

  “My tender lambs,” says Jack, “all skin and bone, are wasting from a bug far worse than love. An evil eye is on my flock, some kind of curse depletes them slowly, one by one.”

  You nick one goat, thinks Puck. He still won't let it lie. He sighs.

  “OK, we'll call it quits if you give this a try. Tell in what lands the open space of sky's no more than three yards wide and you'll be Apple's equal in my eye.”

  “OK,” says Jack, “if you can answer this, I'll leave you be. Tell in what lands the flowers spring all graven with the names of kings, and you'll have Filth, with no more meddling from me.”

  “Ah'm sure ye'll be guid to her, lad,” Don had said one night round at his, with Anna through in the spare bedroom, putting Joshua down, and the whisky in our glasses. “Course ye'll huv me tae answer tae if no,” he'd said. “Ye unnerstaun?”

  He'd smiled as he said it—the grizzly old codger's bark is worse than his bite—but you can't mistake how much he cares for his surrogate… niece? sister? daughter? God knows what they are to each other, Anna and Don, but she's known him long enough that Joshua calls him “Unca Don.”