“We are the lost cause of the philosopher’s treatise. We are that which no one speaks of, and yet everyone knows of. We are the stillness and quietness before murder in a still, quiet forest. We are the hand that does not drop the knife as it sinks into a back. We are the poisoned bite in the sweetest meal. We are the conflagration that burns cities. We are why everyone looks over their shoulders, and fills with dread. We are why everyone moves quicker at night. We are why there is weeping. We are why there is murdering. We are the frost that binds. We are heroes without monuments, without hearths, and without heirs. But most of all, we are alone. Alone! Yes, for as our favorite philosopher says, we are alone, alone as one is when the grave is closed, when the cemetery gate is shut, when night falls and he lies alone, unrecognizable, in the shape that can only evoke a shudder, alone where the multitude of the dead do not form any kind of society.”
Johannes produced a thick ram horn. “Evander, I offer you not a new life, but death. Death is all I can offer you. Do you not shudder at these words? Are you not seized by anxiety? Death is all I can offer you—and only as a reward! How midnight-weird is my oath, that offers as a reward that which no one wants! How midnight-weird is my oath, that lures with that which all flee from!”
And with that he held forth the giant ram horn, spilling with wine. And I drank as the wizards chanted:
“Come, drink of this cup,
Hear the sour lamentations of that warrior abandoned on an isle!
Come, drink of this cup,
For no one will remember you, no one will sing of your deeds!
Come, drink of this cup,
For no one will say your name, no one will weep at your lonely tombstone!
Come, drink of this cup,
For no child will sit on your knee and lovingly call you father!
Come, drink of this cup,
For no wife will beat her breast in uxorial grief over you!
Come, drink of this cup,
A great ‘What Might Have Been’ must lay across your heart, the heaviest
Of life’s epigrams!
Come, drink of this cup,
For you shall never have a home, much less a home half-built!
Come, drink of this cup,
For never will you till prosperous fields and host banqueting guests in your halls!
Come, drink of this cup and imbibe our secret doctrine of the downfall of everything!”
When I finished drinking the stars resting on the wick of each black taper were enormous and radiant, now the size of a small moon.
He splashed the remaining wine against the tombstone with no writing on it. Iridescent, glowing letters emerged as the glistening starry wine slid down the stone revealing a single word, “Miserrimus.”
I stepped towards the monument looking for a shovel, but Johannes stopped me.
“No, Evander, this is not for you. This is for your enemies. Make them the most miserable. Do not give them graves. Rend them from this life, and make them wander and wail. For death too is a home, and like the poet says, home is sweet like honey.”
I nodded.
“Speaking of home, it is time we left to destroy mine,” Scammander said looking at the grave. “It’s probably the only way I’ll be able to find this elusive book, which I believe is in my personal library.”
For once I was not sure who was more startled, Johannes or me. Regardless, the world screamed and trembled and dimmed like never before as the wizard’s gate tore into its fabric. For a moment I thought it was almost rent asunder.
When I saw Johannes’s face as I entered the glowing portal, I knew it wasn’t just my wishful thinking.
A Dithyramb for Possibility (Nil Admirari)
“Children find everything in nothing whereas men find nothing in everything.”
Leopardi
I could never understand why Scammander wanted to destroy his ancestral home. For all the horrible things the elves had said to me on Stunt’s ship, I could have forgiven them after floating through the hallowed grounds for even a few brief hours.
Throughout the day, there had been various lectures, plays, and poetry readings at various spots in the vast royal gardens. There was a lecture on loquacity, on the birth of tragedy, an inquiry into the sublime and beautiful, a treatise on sentimental poetry, and a lecture on the concept of eironia.
We spent most of the day in the sprawling gardens, and most of the early evening at the marble gazebo built in the center of a hedge maze, listening to poetry and watching fireflies. Night calmly unfurled its dark tapestry and the loud songs of birds, sunlight, and staccato cheers and applause to the conclusions of venerable speeches gave way to celestial music and soft conversation between young lovers, dignified elven lords, and students home from study at the Academy.
Inside the shady gazebo was a marble amphitheater where couples reclined into one another amidst the swirling poetry. Each row was packed from edge to edge, but no one seemed to mind. A young elf maiden was resting her head on the shoulder of a youthful elf lord who whispered lyrics into her ear as he caressed her long locks. Further back in the shade another elf was feeding his lover fruit. She smiled and blushed as the thick crimson grapes rolled off his slender fingers and tumbled over her lips. Lazy incandescent streaks of warm orange light and quick pulses of the lightning bugs created a throbbing sky inside the gazebo. I took another bite of my plum and as the juice washed over my teeth, I leaned back on my elbow and closed my eyes to the incantatory hymns of the poem, called On Sleepfulness. The wind was sweet. The words were sweet. And the punch was sweet. But my thoughts were sweetest.
A grinning Scammander woke me, holding out a cask of wine. “Time to drink,” he said, taking a long swig of his own.
“Another?” I said snatching it out of his hand. We must have consumed whole barrels of the wine by this point. I stood up and followed him and the rest of the drowsy revelers through the leafy folds of the labyrinth until we emerged on the broad glowing avenue and rejoined the huge celebration.
Everywhere groups of elves gathered along the luminous path drinking and laughing and chatting. Large golden stags with three and four children sitting on their backs trotted along, giving tours of the garden and occasionally stopping to drop them off at various sections. Other golden deer walked up to circles of talking revelers, surprising them with holiday gifts which were pulled from their mouths.
As we left the hedge maze and began walking towards the looming mansion two children raced by me chasing fireflies, one skimming my shins and giggling, the other pinching his shoulders and zipping between me and Scammander. I stretched my arm out and let my fingertips trail along the soft verdurous wall of leaves.
“I still feel odd walking forward when you had us walk backwards all the way here,” I said, rubbing my eyes and giving a good stretch to my legs with each stride. “So the gazebo in the hedge maze is where you used to come to study?”
“Only to dream,” he replied. “And the gazebo was added after I left, I used to sit on the water.”
“Where did you learn a trick like that?”
“The water nymphs taught me that one day, after they found me weeping into their pond. I never knew of their existence before that day, but a troupe of them surfaced to confront me. They said I was forbidden from weeping sad tears into their cool and sacred waters, and demanded to know the cause of my sadness.”
“So what was the cause?”
“Two things make the poet cry! the Truth and his love who never loves him. I gave them the truth and the name of my love, so that they would have more than they bargained for, and in return, they gave me magical knowledge of the streams, rivers, lakes, and ponds, to prove their munificence.”
This was the first time I had ever heard Scammander talk about love. “So what was her name?”
“I just told you, I gave it to them. I can’t ever speak it again, unless she somehow gives her name to me once again.” As it turned out, it was just like talking with him about an
ything else.
I looked down at the luminescent gravel, which was glowing so white that it looked like I was walking on a carpet of stars.
Scammander saw me looking and explained.
“According to our ancestral lore, the gods created the most beautiful and intelligent image of themselves and hung it in the sky, which at that point was completely black, for them to gaze upon. But their creation was so perfect and noble that it fell to this middle earth, where it sensed a great deal of misery, sickness, and ignorance, in order to help it.” He pointed to the great house we were slowly walking towards. “The mansion there is the oldest of all in our civilization, and is said to be built over the crater where the star fell from the sky. We dye the gravel in the gardens at the conclusion of every star cycle in honor of the star, and for a few days after our feet and sandals are smeared with the fresh glowing dye.”
We continued walking, and as we would pass groups and couples, the females all gave a lingering glance while their husbands either stared forcefully ahead or glared at us.
“What’s with these looks we keep getting? I’ve been getting stared at all day, and I think it has grown worse since the sun went down.”
Scammander stifled a laugh as he tripped and stumbled in the glowing gravels. “We are disguised as Lord Gourd and Lord Fulham, two notorious gambling seducers who show up every holiday and who make a living off their wit and goaty rhymes at Court.”
I rubbed my brow with a sigh. “Two conjugated wits from the university, is what you said.”
“Well, I discovered one was killed in an untimely donnybrook, so I had to make a few blots.”
“And so then we became conjugal.”
Scammander looked at me and shook his head with a wry grin. “But if we run into them this evening, then it will be your turn to make two blots.”
“They are still alive? And here?” I said stumbling my feet and fumbling my words.
Scammander grinned and swatted the air. “Oh I imagine they are busy wooing in the shade, it won’t be a problem.”
“But what if others confuse us for them? Won’t some play of errors ensue?”
“Well my dear Lord Gourd, there was an imaginative and very watchful psychologist who I was fond of reading after I left the Academy because he seemed to be reading from the book of my heart, reciting its phrases in the most humid and voluptuous song; this hot dialectician once observed, and, note well, you would do good to observe this observation and serve it well: ‘one who has properly occupied himself with psychology and psychological observation acquires a general creaturely flexibility that enables him at once to construct his example which even though it lacks factual authority nevertheless has an authority of a different kind. The psychological observer ought to be more nimble than a tightrope dancer in order to incline and bend himself to other people and imitate their attitudes.’”
I responded with my own literary observation: “Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advised? Known unto these, and to my own self disguised! I’ll say as they say, and persever so, and in this mist at all adventures go.”
Scammander looked at my unopened cask. “Drink,” he said as we neared the mansion. On each corner of the great home was a scowling snake wrapped like an infinity symbol, eating its own tail. Between each serpent were large, gleaming gold letters engraved across the ancient mansion. I asked Scammander what the words meant but he simply said it was written in a language that was no longer spoken. Two giant hounds made of grey stone sat at the foot of the stairs, nobly degraded from the millenniums of time’s current.
“We’re not going in until you finish that.”
“How come everyone else is carrying around slender glasses, yet you keep getting us these small casks,” I grumbled, opening the tiny barrel and tossing my head back. I kept walking and guzzling the cool purple vintage until I hit a fence and dropped the small wine barrel, then dropped my jaw.
Humans. All the humans. Too many humans. Thousands of humans.
They were all gathered just on the other side of the gate. One had his back to me, leaning on the black iron gate, lighting a cigar.
It would only take a second to crush his throat.
I cracked my knuckles and scowled.
Scammander pulled me back before I could strangle him, then looked me in the eyes and shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Where did they all come from? Why are they all still waiting outside?” I said whirling back to the crowd as my heart began to pound my chest. What were we waiting for?
“The elves invited them to this New Year’s celebration as their distinguished guests.”
“Distinguished guests?” I hissed.
“Distinguished by being made to wait outside,” he snickered. “While the elves celebrate another joyous New Year’s Eve inside our great mansion,” Scammander said pointing to a plaque which the elves and their “distinguished” guests were being asked to read before being allowed to enter:
To these gardens we permit
Only those who recite sonnets!
Only those who would prefer tangerines
And idleness and sunsets to calendar’d routines;
Therefore these bounds one cannot cross
Who hath never found himself in Philosophy lost.
While the elves recited it with ease, every human guest laughed and said there was nothing written on the plate, and demanded admittance at once. In response, the two elves standing at the gate graciously bowed in unison, said most certainly, and directed them to step aside, where they immediately started conversing with other human guests about the weather, politics, and finance.
“I’m starting to wonder if we killed any humans at all,” I said turning away from the spectacle.
“You killed one,” he said.
“And Stunt—”
“Has ticked me. Or us,” Scammander said, wincing.
“I’m starting to hate poets more than humans,” I growled.
“No reason to divide your fury, Stunt is half human,” he said idly. “Though perhaps it is time to revise our laws of combat: poets first.” He paused. “Unless there is a novelist around.” We both shivered. Novelists.
I suddenly realized I felt more awake now after consuming countless casks of wine than at any previous point in my entire life. I looked down at the dark wooden barrel and then back at Scammander.
“Special mix,” he said. “It’s got something the alchemists and brewmasters call ‘taurine.’ It stimulates.”
“How many are you supposed to have?”
“You’ve only had one,” he chuckled. “All the others were normal wine.”
“I don’t need anything to help me fight.”
“We’re going to do something far worse than fight,” he sniffed.
“Oh?”
“Yes, we’re going to socialize.” Scammander cringed a little even as he finished saying the word.
He then turned and skipped up the stairs and I followed him into the bright mansion of celebration. The golden deer were here too mixing in with the guests, their halcyon antlers slowly weaving through the crowd. One calmly walked up to me and stopped.
Scammander laughed. “Go on!” he said patting the halcyon stag.
“You first,” I said folding my arms and looking around.
“Oh very well,” he said rubbing his hands together before cupping them below the stag’s mouth. It opened and a firecracker slipped out into the elf’s palms.
The stag turned to me and opened its mouth, and as it did a gleaming longsword slowly slid out. I grabbed the handle and gave it a few swings around my head, before lowering the blade to my side. A few elves walking past me snickered softly to themselves as they pointed and laughed.
Scammander grinned. “It’s usually given to children.”
No sooner had he mocked me when six elven children came running through the crowd screaming and laughing and fencing one another, running under hastily hoisted champagne gla
sses, hiding behind grown elves, and jabbing blindly around their waists until they saw me and charged. I deflected a flurry of blows before a well-placed swipe struck my shin, followed by an even more vigorous flurry of blows about my shins and body. I dropped my weapon in the melee and when I looked up I saw the last tiny glowing sandal disappear out into the garden.
But I was laughing.
Scammander threw his arm around my shoulder and we stumbled through the vestibule towards the great hall. As we got closer the elevated chatter burst to a social roar. I rounded the corner and stepped into the grandest hall I had ever seen. The roar was sucked into a collective gasp, then swords were drawn, staves began to glow, chants and curses murmured, and I began to think about who I was going to hit first. Until I realized that everyone was looking at me.
I looked over at Scammander, who was gone, only to see his reflection in the empty champagne glass of a startled guest staring back at me.
“Scammander is a malefactor and corrupter of the youth who meddles in the matters of the heavens and earth below, who makes the Worse Argument appear the Better, and teaches others do to the same!” someone shouted. A chorus of cheers and jeers followed upon the charge.
“An outrage!” cried another.
“Scammander is mad, bad, and dangerous to know!”
“I knew it! He’s abetting those seducers with his illusions, there’s four of them here this eve!”
“You’ve all heard the rumors! He’s teaching a bull magic!”
“Teaching a bull magic? Who cares! He desecrated our unicorn grove!”
Many curses and booing followed the charge, which meant no one knew about Quillian.
“The garments! Turn over the garments at once!”
“The Circle of Friends should arrest him now! Where are they? The Dread Naughts are writing and selling spells again!”
An unsettling quiet swept over the room with the mention of the cult of sans everything.
“Whence comes this uncanniest of guests?”
Such were the myriad cries as blades crossed and lines formed between old nobility and new, climbing nobility; High Houses and Minor Houses; established scheming houses sided with new or minor ones, while ancient pacts were bound even tighter. Scammander had the whole room divided and in turmoil and he wasn’t even there.
Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse Page 13
