by Hughes, Rhys
Lightning licked the remote peaks, adding a revolutionary lustre to the quadrangles beneath the palace, each nested inside the others like a conjuror’s pockets. The creosoted figures did not move in the storm, but their shadows were active, darting about the squares like anarchists. He opened the doors of his treasury, cast handfuls of wooden coins over the side. The greedy outlines slid to gather them. Then the storm passed and the mob was mollified. An awful situation when a king must bribe his own followers! And who would look after Linopolis without his munificence? A canker would set in: good for mushrooms, who never had a capital to call their own. Perhaps it was time to revalue his remaining funds, to etch a higher figure on the discs? Florins as big as tables and worth a million dinners might satisfy them for years.
He refused to doff his armour even in bed. Not only because of fear of assassination; but because it was too tight to remove. The teak was not dead when he whittled it; now the roots had penetrated his lower orifice, deriving sustenance from whatever he digested. Royal banquets kept the new growth supple and fast. Finally, the visor sealed itself and he was compelled to bore holes in the beak to breathe. He thought of himself as a man with a pair of skeletons, bone and furniture. Not that he had wanted to take it apart even when disrobing, or diswardrobing, was feasible. Too secure he felt inside, unable to recollect how he coped without it, on the Main or off. Damage to the suit healed naturally; bark wandered his torso. Women were denied him, for the brothels of the Windwards did not believe money grew on trees, so love too was safer.
In Panama such precautions saved his skin, for he was hiding behind a sack of wool when a cannonball burst this defence and knotted him with unspun fleece. His porous armour drank the oil of the lambs’ curls until it was saturated. He had carved a frown into his helmet, for he reckoned it unseemly to lurch into a fight without features, or with a smile, and the grease collected in the grooves of his forehead, staining his brows. Thus did he earn his alias, when his original name was forgotten. Rather luckier than the cook, who absorbed the contents of a sack of sugar with his bare face, mainly on shut eyelids! The granules studded him sweetly, including the onion he wore on his shoulder. Later, sparks from a pistol caramelised this vegetable and his lashes. French rovers were charmed by him after that, for cultural reasons.
The crew maintained that the siege was so bloody and traumatic they were shocked out of memory. The Swede did not allow this. It was not the scarmoge, the combat, which robbed them as they plundered, but a strange event which occurred in the ruins. Morgan had vanished with a woman, but returned with a mirror and blunderbuss. The mirror was a box with a tiny lever which, when pressed, created a flash. A minute later and a picture would emerge from a slot at the base of the machine. The captain claimed it was a slow looking glass, but the carpenter had seen a similar device in the observatory at Uppsala. It was, he realised, a new type of camera obscura, one which took solid images. Remarkable! And it had fallen from a flying galleon over Pennsylvania, which was a land of tears. Who could invent such a marvel? A mythic beast!
They sat and played with it, drinking coffee and waiting for Morgan to rescind the order stressing sobriety. So he would, in due course, but only with sherry. ’Ceti won the right to keep the box, for his barbering days were not yet numbered. Before this came the episode which the Swede held responsible for the amnesia which gripped them all. The captain put away his shame and showed them how a lady kissed. None of the other crew had won girls, but the Welsh rascal was insensitive enough to parade his success with his spit. One at a time, he fixed his wet mouth to the lips of his men, wielding his tongue like a cutlass, winning every duel. Such childish laughter! The barber and sailmaker and cook snorted with irony, but the navigator accepted his attentions with a serious countenance and emerged from the fondle disappointed.
“Your turn now, ’Lin! Raise your leafy casque! How else may I reach your ruby pout? What a coy criminal!”
“Be gentle, sir. You have rough stubble.”
“That’s what a pillaging life is about. A chin like the ocean. This mattock should lever open your helm.”
It felt more like a conversation than a smooch. As Morgan moved his lips, forcing his to writhe in tandem, silent words passed between them. The captain was telling him a secret, not tickling his tonsils! Then the course of his life was diverted, because he knew something which steered his hopes higher than Biscay waves. A nasty joy overwhelmed him, and all the crew. To dissipate it a notch, a puppet battle was arranged with the sailmaker. ’Tology won by cheating and their friendship became strained. Then the sherry was opened and sense was fully diluted. When he woke, he was reconciled to what he had learned. No longer a normal man, but not a full devil. Something in the middle. And because only rovers can live in romantic mischief, not unholy savants, the disintegration of the company was inevitable. Panama was the limit.
They separated in Jamaica. ’Ceti and ’Tology, the only two he cared to keep in touch with, bought property in Pirano and Wolkenstein. It was vital they went somewhere they would not be recognised. But he, engulfed by his armour, was able to return to Uppsala. His disguise was stiff and much admired. His old neighbours did not berate him for turning bad, for they could not identify him. He lumbered down the alleys like a sentient log, feeling at home on the roof of the Gothic cathedral, the Domkyrkan, with its gargoyles. But the city had altered. There were less faces from his childhood. New people had taken over the public places. In his attic lodgings he sat on a barrel of gunpowder and fretted. This explosive was his pitiful reward for decades of service. Morgan had absconded with the pick of the loot back to Welsh hills.
On a ship, a community was sealed. A known quantity of souls pacing the deck. Recruits on the high seas were rare: an attacked galleon might supply an extra hand if he bragged a specific skill, but the majority of prisoners walked the planks he measured and hacked. And in port, unknown faces were expected, for Morgan tended to berth in cities they had never visited before. The problem with Uppsala was that it was one place which constantly evolved fresh inhabitants; this is the way it looked. Perched on the eaves of the Domkyrkan, the carpenter started to believe that new men and women were condensing from the dignified atmosphere which flowed into the sky from the open windows of the Carolina Rediviva, the college library. And when he descended to the level of the Linnaeus Gardens, the odd phenomenon was even more blatant.
He trembled under his armour in his room, so that the leaves on his head rustled and fell with autumn music. The teak was dying in the chill of the Swedish climate. Russet foliage littered the boards, mimicking an adventure to Maryland, when Morgan sailed them up the Chesapeake to meet Billy Barnett, an accomplice. They hugged an estuary bank, mast knocking trees so that a shower of muted colour celebrated their arrival. In this attic, however, the meaning was different. He went out to dine at a café below the castle. Already he was collecting details for his own capital. Over a bowl of fisksoppa, sucked up with a straw, he peered at the other customers. None were familiar, yet he had eaten in this restaurant every day since his arrival. New people again! Immigrants? No, they spoke with local accents and fitted the customs.
They must have generated spontaneously inside the city. He realised this had always been true, that it was the same for all men. Go out into the streets of a town, the thoroughfares of your home, and glance at the faces which pass close. They will be mostly unknown. Repeat the exercise on the morrow, and there will be a different set of cheeks, noses, eyes, equally mysterious. Surely these are just citizens you have not met? But the lie erodes on each successive venture, for the faces, and the owners underneath, are always original, never the same. How can these strangers all fit inside one conurbation without becoming recognisable? It must be that they do not exist until you observe them! You invent them: they are your offspring! The explanation is shocking but logical, and there is no other. We are fathers between blinks.
The carpenter’s return to Uppsala had expanded its population to an unsusta
inable level. He had played the prodigal pirate for two months in his lodging at the corner of Svartbäcksgatan and Torbjörnsgatan, near to where he had grown up. At dawn he rose and dusted himself with a napkin, then staggered north along the river to the Gustavianum, braving insults from children who did not tolerate teak pedestrians. He counted fifty or sixty new faces on the way. The panelled interior of his destination was good camouflage; he might pause here on the tiers of the Anatomy Theatre and spy on students arranging scalpels. Another seventy or eighty unique individuals! Later, a meal at Barowiak, together with ninety others, all unknown. Then rigid acrobatics on the Domkyrkan roof to work off a plate of köttbullar. A hundred worshippers!
By early afternoon he had already sired ten thousand burghers. This promiscuity must not continue! The city would end up unbearably cramped! The dangers of plague were considerable in such insanitary conditions. A slum is a brothel for disease, as Morgan often used to say. Germs with a ticket to breed! Cholera, typhus, syphilis, leprosy, smallpox, gangrene, tuberculosis, brownjack, jock itch, monkeybreath, jaundice, drunkenness, spontaneous combustion, toothache, stress attack, all the afflictions of adult compression. The Welsh rascal’s answer was fire. Had he not healed the stubborn defenders of San Lorenzo de Chagre with an arrow wrapped in burning cotton blasted from a musket? The palm-leaf thatch of the houses in the fortress ignited so quickly that it crashed down on a huge barrel of gunpowder and every pox was cured.
“Stand clear, ’Lin. These days you are at loggerheads with yourself and thus inflammable. My male dryad!”
“You still disapprove of my armour, sir?”
“There may come a time when you need a raging inferno. How will you escape that suit then? ’Tis suicide.”
No, the Swede dared not put a match to Uppsala. Also the structures and his memories were too gorgeous. The only solution was to stay in his attic and look at no face. That way he would not fabricate spare humans. Ten thousand a day for two months is more than half a million! He sat on his own cask of explosive and wrapped his head with his arms. Because of his jaunts, the city had trebled in residents. Refugees from his mind! A pounding reached his sanctuary from outside: the weight of feet stamping pavement slabs. Too much mass! He covered the single window with a sheet to keep out the sight of the crowded streets, the bodies pressed against the walls of his own home. What if the pressure broke down the front door? A tide of sick humanity, his children, rushing up the stairs to burst into his room for revenge and pocketmoney!
He departed in the middle of a dark night, when he could barely see his own legs as he hastened south into the open country. Uppsala and its improbable population was soon behind him; he felt much lighter. He took his toolbox and his powder, rolling the barrel with a sprouting foot. It was best to avoid urban centres bigger than villages, for these were the places where a man’s mind acts the part of a phallus, fertilising spaces with folks. In a village, such imagination is celibate. Still better was the shunning of all people. He walked the rutted lanes past Stockholm to Karlskrona and the hedges welcomed him as a cousin. He did not enter the port to catch a boat, but drifted out to sea on his buoyant back and met the vessel midstream. He hauled himself aboard and hid in a coil of rope like a crocodile in a static cyclone.
For pure isolation he should have paced north to Finnmark, but some story of ’Tology’s, plus a desire to keep his armour alive and unrotten, had led him to believe that the deserted isles of the Mediterranean were the perfect retreat. Warm enough to ensure his suit might repair itself, but lacking fishermen and tourists. He slipped off the ferry just before it docked in Stettin. Then it was down through Germany, drying slowly in a sun which smelled of cabbage. The sailmaker had come from Tunisia; the barren islands he knew were called Pantelleria and Lampedusa and lay not far off the African coast. Hurry! He lived on berries and hot steam from washing hung on hayricks. He skirted Görlitz into Bohemia, regretting he could not visit Prague. Through Trebonsko into Austria, past Linz, where chocolate clouds billowed and minted.
It was on the foothills of the Salza Hochschwab, at a point roughly between Waidhofen and Mariazell, that he finally understood his mistake. It was a wasteland here, dramatic but bare, uninhabited and treeless. No dwelling in sight, no artificial item of any kind. No chance to catch an unknown face! He was halfway to his final destination, but he guessed it was now beyond him, for he had truly stuffed the world with illegitimate sons and daughters. He collapsed to his knees, hugged his cask and wept. Seeing new humans did not produce them; it was not seeing them which did that! Out in a city, with the individuals in view, a population is fixed in the present. It is always on the following day, a time not yet ready, that they suddenly swell. What precisely distinguishes that present from our future? The state of being alone!
The moment he went back to his room, removed from the bustle of the street, he might be sure of one thing: an increase in local humanity for the next morning. While he was inside, without company, his non-presence externally was inseminating shadows or smells or sounds, whatever it was that served as a womb for the adult foetuses. So it was self-defeating to come to an uninhabited zone of Mitteleuropa on the way to a desert isle! Here he was in a position of permanent arousal and dispatch. No existing public to halt his elsewhere lusts! Where he was, he was celibate; where he was not, he was wanton. He lifted his head and gazed at each horizon. All were empty, fertile, monstrous. With such an expanse of nullity, the tide of humanity must be surging to ridiculous heights! For every second he spied nobody, a million were born!
He had scant choice but to destroy himself. Even as he breached his barrel, he knew the gesture was futile. Morgan’s kiss had told him this. But he struck two iron hammers together until a long spark fell into the dark powder. The explosion reminded him of Roche Braziliano’s adventures in Castilla de Oro, when that most gentle of buccaneers ignited a whisky still and blew himself over the heads of his enemies, a score of Spanish pikemen, and onto a horse. The carpenter too was knocked high, but where he landed was wholly rump, on the edge of the crater he had exposed, his armour having rotated around him a dozen times in midair, coming to rest in its proper position, so that he did not face the wrong way, and would not have to lurch backward to his birthplace, to a coffin once a cot. He was barely scratched from the impact.
At the base of the pit smoked a gigantic block of wood, the largest he had ever seen, wide as the reefs of the Azores, thick as a ship. What was it doing under the uncultivable soil? This was a secret he was never able to learn. The truth is that Nature has a short way with any species which becomes too widespread over the face of the globe. Trees once held the continents and atmosphere to ransom with root and oxygen, and so the ecological balance, a feedback system, embarked on a cull. Men filled up with an irrational loathing of wood and invented saw and axe. Humans are the chosen nemesis of forests. But in this spot the pines resisted. They scattered their seeds inversely, so that the ensuing generation of trees grew down, into the forsaken cavern of a shaman. For further protection, these fused trunks into a single unit.
And now they had been discovered by a whittler. He began to work as soon as he could unlock his toolbox, for he had calculated that peace of mind was a carving. He made a city, Linopolis, and this ended his unique claustrophobia, because it contained no citizens whose contours were not known to him. Relentless fatherhood ceased, the dangers of being crushed by excessive populations receded. He had saved the world from famine and riots and other cluttered crises. Experience with wooden suits of armour enabled him to fashion people likewise. Already hederated, masses of ivy dangling like a greasy fringe, he considered himself crowned and adopted the persona of a king. His time on the palace balcony was rarely wasted, for a competent ruler must keep watch over courtyards, shadows, weather, malcontents, affairs and all cobbles.
In the middle of one storm, he noticed a light which had nothing to do with electric clouds. It grew brighter from the south west, though it remained tiny. Entering his realm w
ithout a visa, it swerved through the mazy quadrangles, up the palace steps. He confronted it with a drill. It was a puppet! The face of the sailmaker peered anxiously from a polished head. A figure of ’Tology animated by flames! The Swede guessed it was a message, a request for a mirror, but there were no reflections to be had here; a wooden king has no need of them. ’Ceti had Morgan’s camera; that must suffice. For the sake of friendship, the Swede planned to leave his dominion for a while and visit the barber. There was a risk of decadence among his subjects in his absence, but ’Ceti had done much for him, pale whale-oil soothing his fleecy frowns.
Before he could depart, a crack of thunder above the peaks startled the vegetation on his helmet. No, not part of the tempest. A hiss like a circular swordfight, something black coming down from above. He squinted not to see. The silhouette in the main courtyard was too stolid to be an illusion. It darted toward the museum, where the carpenter-king kept his regrets on display. He went down to greet it with anger. A tall man with no attire or hair sprang out at him. He held a wicker receptacle and his shoulders were dusted with melting snow. His breath was foul, worse than a sick shark’s. He opened and closed his hands, seeking a secure grip on the teak cuirass, failing. He reminded the Swede of ’Vado, the cook, but only because of the tangled odours. Like a telescope dissolved in acids! Then the monster sneezed and giggled.
“I arrived on a helicopter, a flying machine. I’m no assassin. I am here to learn and browse. The barber sent you a letter and I made a note of the address. To learn ’n’ browse.”
“How dare you lisp my name! Who are you?”
“I am a manipulator. I am a noxious sage. My morals are curly, like Turkish slippers, but I am parallel.”
