The Smell of Telescopes

by Hughes, Rhys

  As he walked away, he heard Morgan practising with the new gun and also with an old pistol. A grunt in the ricochets of the first made him further doubt that arms were ever manufactured in, or dropped from, the clouds. To his ear, schooled in the bash of spoon on pan, it sounded like a product of Asturias. Yet a clever corsair will say little to contradict his master. Besotted with his new love affair, the Welshman was picking fruit from trees with balls, a curl of his sweetheart’s hair knotted to his own forelock. There was a lesson in this brute harvest, one croaked by the cruel hero in a stage whisper:

  “What the pistol won’t salt, the blunderbuss may pepper. Bigger is really better, my friends. And Panama’s the widest reward of all. Where shall we go from here? Where indeed?”

  There was only one more siege to scheme: retirement. The cook left the circle of merriment and picked his way through the ashes of the Cup with a horrid suspicion that he was no longer himself. What he did was broil and bake for pirates; such was his identity. The options now were those of a different man. Shuddering, he reached the outskirts of Panama, and wandered some way into the forest. There was a commotion in a clearing. A group of Indios bravos, formerly hired by the Spanish as mercenaries, were crouched over food. With a serrated knife, they were sacrificing a dish of raw vegetables. Beastly race!

  The cook squinted. He knew that supplies had been destroyed in the retreat, to save them from the gullets of the buccaneers, but this must surely be a darker ritual. He recalled ’Phagia lecturing him on how the future was a yarn written in entrails. Here, under a nose accustomed to drip more steam than sweat, a quiver of savage prophets were engaged in gross saladomancy. What should he do? Ebony skin glistening, he hurried out from his vantage, waving his arms. The warriors scattered, seeing a demon from their own mythology, a scorched man in a white hat. Thus the seeds of prediction became his alone.

  When dawn bloodied the swamps, he stumbled back to his comrades, a sacred vegetable bulging in every inner pocket. The men were silent and no sentry watched over them, or so he thought at first: but he stepped into another forest, of pikes and muskets leaning together, and was confronted with a duel. Not Morgan and his woman, nor any rogue he recognised, but figures of wood and cloth, armed with rapier and arquebus. Puppets they were; rivals worked by strings. And he could empathise more keenly with this struggle than that of skin men. His trespass distracted the wooden doll, and the other puppet shot it in the spine.

  The naïve contest between sailmaker and carpenter to win the right to amuse the buccaneers was over. ’Tology hopped in triumph while ’Lin sulked. The cook was not blamed for ruining the sport; his intervention was deemed to be down to fate. And he grinned, because the tubers and leaf of what was to come, the ingredients of the soup of time, truly were on his person. Morgan welcomed him, all insults forgotten, and requested a farewell banquet for Panama. He fried a supper from Yucatan more fabled than griffins; chillies stuffed with grated coconut; determined not to cut his prophetic groceries too soon.

  Morgan decided to lick his portion from La Santa Roja’s mirror, so that his reflection would emerge just in time for dessert. But the heat damaged the unusual ornament. From that instant, it ran slow; a looking glass not to be trusted. The captain had no use for a sluggard, even if ashore, and presented it to the sailmaker. ’Tology angled it toward his stump, hoping to glimpse his missing leg, but to dawdle that far behind the present was a feat, or foot, beyond any magic surface. Next in line was the barber and ’Ceti greeted it like a convex brother. Now he could catch, on a nape, an itch in the act.

  While he alarmed the crew by showing them the backs of their heads to their faces, Morgan divided the requisitioned sherry. From the crypt of the cathedral, which they had converted into a prison for the papist dogs and macaws of the city, bottles of Oloroso were lifted on pulleys. During the sack, these had rolled to the grumbling of cannon, betraying their presence. Now they were required to surrender their corks for the benefit of the wounded. A hundred glasses should be adequate to collect a limb’s worth for the sailmaker, to tipple him from legless to steady, against all the usual laws of intoxication.

  Bellies full of food, the rovers doused the spices with the pale fire. Only the cook was busy elsewhere, washing up in the bowl of a fountain. The juice of the nut of the barrel sent all others into a dream, but they finished the false limb first. It was hollow and lacquered with ’Ceti’s favourite restorer, to encourage hairs to grow on the calf, which was golden as an idol. ’Tology clutched it tight to his chest as he snored. Though he allowed himself a toast while he dried up the dishes with a flag, the cook had sipped too much coffee for his senses to be similarly soothed. Sober he stood, and troubled, under a rack of plates.

  When he had finished his chores, and turned to settle down, a dreadful sight made his eyebrows dance like hung felons. An odious shape, a bald ghoul, was stooping low over the sailmaker to slot something inside his leg. This apparition wore three capes abillow, but seemed in a peculiar sort of way to be a double of the cook. White instead of black, lacking an ear, breath strung with toxins rather than savours, but possessed of a Malagasy daring. It looked up, held a finger to its lips and vanished into the landscape of burnt spars and charred stone. Too embarrassed to cry aloud, the cook boiled his faith.

  He was still unable to protest when the men woke in the late afternoon and the sailmaker fixed his new leg to his stump, securing it with screws to the bone. Too late now; the chance had gone. So what was in the knee other than stale Panama air? A bomb? A spy? Nothing was too devious at this latitude. Keep quiet and forget; ’Tology was no genuine friend. He felt closer to ’Ceti and ’Phagia. But when curiosity pinched too hard, he peeled one of his oracles, an avocado, to gauge the facts. The stone was reticent until smashed; then it babbled nonsense. He cast the fragments again, for a full hour.

  Finally he achieved a coherent sentence. It repeated the captain’s dictum with a pithy variation. The bigger same is a better same. By the soul of soup, what did that mean? This divination business was a potted pantomime, not a panacea. Dusk fell, realisation dawned. The cook could hardly deliver the sailmaker, because it was he himself, or a magnified version thereof, who had performed the act of leggy subterfuge! That apparition was a double in truth, a doppelganger as they say in Prussia, a mirror image of the cook, but one warped, running as fast as ’Ceti’s glass ran slow: his identity stretched forward.

  Having grown up with tales of assorted frights—penanggalans and werelemurs—he thought himself seasoned to all chills of supernature. But the doppelganger he had not previously considered, and thus had not dreaded; it was a fresh abomination. Morgan’s rhetoric with blunderbuss and pistol had urged him up this speculative creek. The two weapons are normally perceived as separate objects, not superior and inferior variations on a single theme. But here was a truer way of regarding all guns and cooks: bleary or clear reflections of one perfect form. Pistol was he; blunderbuss, the infiltrator.

  When they left Panama, on the 24th February 1671, with 175 mules weighed down with treasures, prisoners to the tune of 600 and a flute, blisters and bouts of amnesia, the cook watched the sailmaker from a distance. A force inside the cork leg seemed to tug ’Tology off the path, which ran along a bank of the river, so that Morgan had to tie a leather thong to his thigh to keep him on the straight. They reached the village of Cruz and here, as they provisioned the canoes, the captain threw a slow wink at the cook, which disconcerted him hugely. Then he kissed the barrel of the blunderbuss with his wide tongue.

  “Ah, ’Vado. A wife who transforms into a mistress is better than a mistress who transforms into a wife.”

  “You think the gun is married to someone else?”

  “Imagine a keelhauling in the sky! And what length of chain for an aerial anchor? Mind your skull, boy.”

  The advice was strange but sincere. The cook remembered it, though his powers of recall were up to nasty tricks. Already, as they embarked for the palisadoes of Fort Chagre, the a
dventure seemed to have gone on for years. Cloud descended over the river and his mind. Did others feel the same as he? They did: ’Ceti no longer knew which dialect he thought in, though his vocabulary was large. This concerned him more, and less, as the oddity endured in time, but faded from memory. Safe in the fort, Morgan shared the loot, cheating the French rovers who had sworn fealty to him. Welsh ethic, spun like sugar.

  No more than 200 pieces of eight for any rough who sniffed brandy. When this created strife, the captain made ready to leave, removing all cannon to his flagship, and setting two things: the palisadoes on fire, and sail. Let those follow him who chose. Three barques came after; the French gave chase, chewing their dastardly moustaches. But the wind was with Morgan, who lightened his vessel by blasting rocks at his pursuers and dancing so that his heavy boots were partly off the deck. The cook baked a crumble, to represent the resolve of the hunting pack: fragile, lacking iron, rife with cooling fats.

  In Jamaica, the men parted, supposedly for good, or bad, depending on what business they next adopted. Morgan gave the bulk of the silver, emeralds and tobacco to himself. The cook planned to stay in touch only with the barber, who still had many of his utensils, and the navigator, who was inestimable. ’Ceti left for Pirano, ’Phagia for Smarje, but his own return to Europe was unsettled. He tried to remain at sea, broiling for an eccentric smuggler by the name of Marlow Nullity, but the dishes he was expected to serve were so protean and implausible that he jumped galley in a hurricane off the Azores.

  He was washed up on a Terceira reef and dried by a sunset, so that his fortune resembled a plate. From this volcanic isle, he worked brief passage to Lisbon, always alert for a looming of his double, and thence overland to a mountain republic, the isolated city of Chaud-Mellé. Here thrived villains the equal of Morgan; he might roast for them. He hoped to avoid the mistake of turning honest. Wiping clean a cauldron, but no slate, was for him a necessity of survival. He applied for a job in the Café Worm, where threadbare landlords and swindlers clad in yellow were in the habit of bartering deceptions.

  Faces in a pot of soup always alarmed him. He avoided peering over the rim into the reflective depths. The kitchens were open to view, and the patrons often berated him for his timidity. He expected to meet his doppelganger every time the doors creaked. He felt relatively secure in such ignoble chaos, an urban environment where no street was wider than a puff of breath to cool a flan, but if he could negotiate the maze, so might his distended shadow. Cats frolicked in his cupboards; he offered them curds and fern wine. Generous to a fault, but jealous of salt. And how many sayers will spoil the sooth?

  The final time he had hugged ’Ceti, he had given the barber a sack of dumb vegetables as a practical memento. Now he regretted his impulse and wrung his forks, for Chaud-Mellé’s gardens, mounted on roofs, could nurture only withered plants, and his salads were the balk of the town. The lower burghers subsisted mainly on cheese; the elite on pastries, a discipline in which he dared not compete. The Guilds had cakes sewn up, with threads of liquorice, and his Malagasy icings were most unwelcome. Banter with his customers mollified him, though they often regarded him as a steward rather than a craftsman.

  “Flagon of hot wormwood, ’Vado, for my comrade!”

  “What do you mean to do with it, Wynkyn de Rackrent? Melt parmesan over the ribcage of Beerbohm Soames?”

  “Aye, for absinthe makes the heart grow fondue.”

  The Café Worm was the perfect venue for criminals and bohemians to meet and learn each other’s ploys. The cook, whose own underworlds were wholly geological, and already undertaken, was gradually drawn into the conspiracies of the latter set; the orchid sniffers, demi-monde and men with boneless wrists. They spoke Theatre, a patois with trapdoor vowels and backstage grammar. Encouraged by their programmes, which made steam swirl more effectively than any Chinese fan, he agreed to attend a show in the company of poets and sculptors, refusing only to doff his chef’s hat, under which his oracles nestled.

  The Theatre de l’Orotund was a disappointment in terms of interior design, which was lunatic, and current production, which was an unfunny routine by a comedian named Caspar Nefandous. This buffoon was assisted by a woman who bounded across the stage as if on springs—even higher than Morgan! He walked out in the middle and returned to work. But some months later, he decided to give the thespian arts a second chance. The comedian had taken to writing opera. Alone in the stalls, the cook blinked at The Morgan Wheel, a farce based on the sack of Panama, acted as if the affair was ancient history!

  Had his sense of time been wounded so badly in the assault? During the interval, he stepped into the cloakroom for a lungful of fresh air, a rare commodity in Chaud-Mellé, unavailable in the street. Three capes hanging there recalled his double, who was close; he felt it. Rather than go back and wait for the début of the actor who took his role, he fled. Outside, he glimpsed a ship in the sky, a canoe with spiral vanes for oars! Perched on a seat under the machine was the ghoul. So Morgan had not lied about boats aloft! This one was flying south west, but whether into or out of the metropolis could not be assessed.

  Learning is strength. The next day, he visited the city library to consult a bestiary on the topic of doppelgangers. He was given a volume bound in the marbled skin of an ineffable worm. The entries were listed alphabetically, but in Enochian script, which is unpronounceable. There were no words on the relevant page, simply a mirror sewn into the paper which amplified his image. He slammed away his reflected leer and swore an oath never to be browbeaten by himself. What precautions he ought to take were still a mystery; he would discover them in due course.

  In the Café Worm, while he was disputing with Soames and de Rackrent, a new customer wove between the tables to the kitchen. His tortured eyes were sunk in hypogene sockets; he wore a beard forked triple. He ordered a cup of chocolate and coffee, sipped a mouthful and spat it on the boards. In a Dutch accent, he mocked the mocha. But this was only the trick of a salesman; he was a merchant with plantations in Java, and he was blustering for orders. Having brought enough coffee from Panama to last a hundred millennia, the cook was unimpressed, until the merchant suddenly vaulted into a pot.

  It emerged, when he did likewise, that he was hiding from a fellow who had just entered, another virgin patron. The newcomer was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chaud-Mellé, who cared not for coffee or even absinthe, but only to investigate the establishment as the site of a recent meteor shower. The violent eruption of a casserole dish the previous week had generated this rumour. The cook ushered the Professor upstairs, to a brothel where all collisions were catered for. An honest mistake, but no, the Dutchman claimed they were the same person! Coffee trader, stargazer; percolated as one.

  The cook frowned. How could a doppelganger be so dissimilar to the original model? The merchant winked uneasily. Same man, parallel pasts, or rather divergent presents. One version had chosen a scientific route through life, the other a commercial. And the trader, a physical giant, was frightened of the scrawny academic! So it was possible that he, the cook, was not the inferior segment of the bald ghoul, but vice versa. A joyous concept! The ghoul was wealthy enough to own a flying ship: must he become as successful, as rich, to compete? If so, he should exercise his single skill to its basted limit.

  His big chance came with the Chiliad Festival, a carnival of food, to which he was formally invited. This took place in the coldest season of the city’s annals, in Hauser Park. For the occasion, he risked death by preparing pastry without a Guild license. He erected a stove, a tent to envelop it, a welcoming sign in the flap. Nobody came; he was forced to knot a lasso with a liquorice cord. He cast at a passing rascal in a tricorne hat, whose bad teeth were evidence of an affection for sweets. The lasso snapped. No good; his destiny had its own agenda. At least he might read it before it was executed.

  Removing his hat, he spread the sibylline vegetables. All but one, a coco-de-mer, did he sacrifice. The cabbage said: all rovers will fai
l in honesty. The carrot: relationships are geometrical. The swede: steer a cauldron with a rudder. The potato, squash and yam: memories can grow fuller than rooms, mirrors which run slow are obscurer than squonks, an octant is a sextant in man’s britches. Turnip: Chaud-Mellé will soon be destroyed. Sprout: one of these groceries is a liar. It was time to leave the city, in the opposite direction to that of the aerial ghoul, afore the metropolis mimicked Panama.

  Naturally, it was feasible the turnip was the fake prophet. He did not, or could not, consider the logical consequences of a false sprout. That was a paradox unstirred. No, the city had the feel of expiry about it, a rotting ambience which could only degenerate. He escaped with his largest pot, rolling it north east into Austria and then Bavaria. As he trundled onward, he stopped in taverns and collected tankards of pewter which he hammered onto his vessel with his fists. Bigger is better, and it soon became the deepest, widest skillet in Europe. What supper might be boiled in this? Curry for cyclops.

  When it grew too heavy for him to turn, he paused. The sleepy town of Trostberg became his new home. He set a fire under the cauldron, and passed the time waiting for it to heat up by baking cakes. Interest was minimal, despite his vast experience. He attempted to recreate the myth of Morgan’s childhood: a blueberry pie as barbed as a harpoon. Failure, deflation, charred edges. The alternative was to cook virtuous desserts for moral gourmets, but the cabbage’s advice must not be ignored. Where were the bandits of Trostberg?

  One morning, a postman came to deliver a message in a bottle from the barber.

  “Old ’Ceti Whiskers wanted you to read this. A request for help. I think his stomach is in big trouble.”

  “Are you evil? Will you take breakfast here?”

  “No, but if I was, south I would go, to a Mediterranean isle. That is where the fashionable felons eat.”

  The cook cradled his sable head in his oven gloves. He had a rival whose soups were cooled by sea breezes! Was it his double? He shattered the bottle and read the letter. Then he hooked his thumbs in the fringe of the coco-de-mer and travelled to Pirano. At the door of the barber’s shop, he met the carpenter, who had received a similar request. Forcing entry, they found the razors coated in dust. A single vegetable bubbled in a pan—his prophetic yam! He had given the wrong grocery to ’Ceti. Did it matter? Difficult to be sure. But the coco-de-mer would tell the barber how best to shave future days.