Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  There was a moment’s silence, then a commanding voice said, “Get him.”

  Booted feet thumped on the floorboards and strong hands seized Filidor’s arms and shoulder. He was lifted bodily over the railing and set upright on the porch, while someone peeled away the shreds of the bobblobblobl. The same voice of authority said, “Somebody get Groff calmed down, and take that stinking thing out of his mouth, whatever it is, before he eats it.”

  Shamefaced to be captured under such circumstances, Filidor stood with head bowed. But then the deep voice said, “Now, who are you and what are you doing on my property?”

  The young man looked up and found himself being regarded with suspicious curiosity by a tall man of advanced years and shaved head, whose thick eyebrows and luxurious moustache were of an almost luminous white. He wore the sturdy shirt, leggings and boots that were appropriate to a hunting lodge, as did the two men behind him. None of them displayed insignia or bore weapons of any kind; they looked to be easygoing fellows who had come to spend a few days in the woods.

  They were not the police, Filidor realized; they were the Podarkes. He recognized Thorbe and behind him the fetchfellow Ommely. The man with the moustache must be Siskine, owner of the lodge. And now onto the porch, leading a docile watchbeast and shushing the yapping lap pet, came Emmlyn, dressed in a dark blouse and a buff skirt, and with a puzzled look widening her green eyes.

  “Well?” said Siskine Podarke. “Explain, or we may let Groff resume his interrogation.”

  Filidor drew himself up and assumed as dignified a stance as his confusion and the manner of his arrival would permit. He bowed and said, “I am Filidor Vesh, heir and apprentice to the Archon Dezendah VII.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Emmlyn. Her brother also expressed disbelief, and Ommely registered a cool stare of disapproval.

  It took Filidor a moment to remember that he was still wearing the false nose, eye crimps and cheek distorters from Erslan Flastovic’s make-up chest. He quickly removed them and presented his true face.

  Emmlyn did not seem impressed. She regarded him coolly and said, “I suppose you’ve come for these, now that it’s too late.” She produced his plaque and sigil from a pocket of her skirt. “We thought you’d be swooping down the moment we got home, and in an official car, with flunkies to level the path before you.”

  This was not how Filidor had envisaged their encounter. He had expected her to welcome him as an important ally in her time of desperation, with a good seasoning of remorse for the way she had treated him. Instead, she seemed unworried to be a fugitive. Her tone was flippant. He found himself irritated by her lack of respect for his office. “With that attitude, it’s no wonder you are hunted revolutionists,” he said, although the absence of any official forces actually engaged in Podarke hunting was causing him to wonder.

  The young woman looked as if she didn’t know whether to settle on scorn or simple astonishment. “Revolutionists?” she said. “Us? Because we took your bits of bric-a-brac? That was only to get you off your rusty-dusty, so you’d come out here and see what’s happening.” She tilted her head to one side and looked at Filidor in a way that he found annoying and charming at the same time.

  “It’s not because of my ‘bric-a-brac,’ I assure you,” he said. “Have you not seen the Implicator?”

  “What, that Olkney rag?” she said. “People in Trumble have better things to do than bother themselves with the inconsequential doings of vapid city folk.”

  “Besides,” said Siskine, “it does not circulate out here.”

  Filidor reached into a pocket and brought out the page with Tet Folbrey’s version of events. The Podarkes gathered around and read the article together, interrupting with bursts of mild expletives and expressions of strained credulity.

  “Notorious revolutionary cabal, indeed,” said Ommely. “Why, if the old master were alive to see this, he’d take a whickita whip to this Folbrey person, wouldn’t he though?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Emmlyn, when they had read it through. “It says we’re hiding in caves. There aren’t any caves on Mt. Cassadet.”

  “But you are hiding out, aren’t you?” said Filidor. “I mean, that’s why you’re here instead of at your own house, isn’t it?”

  “We came to visit Great Uncle Siskine,” Thorbe said. “We didn’t want to stay in Trumble and have to watch what the damned Company was doing to our finest clabber field.”

  “Under a permit you granted them,” put in Emmlyn.

  “They’ve offered compensation,” Thorbe said, “but you just can’t disturb clabber vine. It will take generations to get that field back to what it was, and how can money compensate for that?”

  None of this was what Filidor had expected. “I think I should sit down,” he said. “I’m not feeling very well.”

  They led him around to the seats on the front porch, and Emmlyn applied a handkerchief to his bleeding ankle. Ommely brought him a tiny glass of something that was brilliantly cold, liquid and wholesome. “Clabber cordial,” Siskine said. “Our own.”

  Filidor was having trouble assimilating what they were telling him. “You are not hiding from the local constabulary?”

  “What, from old Donj Waggler? He’d certainly know where to find us.”

  “But you did use my bona fides to hire an air-yacht.”

  Emmlyn sat beside him, and said, “We had to get home before you could organize the recovery of your thingums, and in our old motilator it would have taken days. We wanted you to come and see the horrid great hole the Company wanted to dig in our field, so you could tell them to stop.”

  Filidor was becoming more and more convinced that he had recently been inhabiting a reality that was at sharp variance to the rest of the world’s. Even so, he could not help noting that her voice had a curious quality: every word he heard from her made him want to hear another. He looked at her, closer now than he had ever been -- except for that moment in Vodel Close, which he preferred not to recall -- and he felt again that peculiar sensation that had struck him the first time he had rested his eyes on her: a feeling as if his lungs had been filled with the lightest of gases, as if playful fingers were lifting the corners of his lips.

  “Why are you smiling at me?” she said, and looked away before she had to give in and smile back.

  “I don’t know,” said Filidor. “None of this makes sense. I am the Archon’s heir, yet in the last few days these things have happened to me.” He briefly listed the events: he had been knocked down and robbed of the accouterments of his office, thrown from a ship at sea, rescued by an aquatic ultramonde, enslaved by pirates, and revealed as an agent of prophecy; then he had consorted with criminals, masqueraded as a mummer, provoked a riot to free a prisoner from the Scullaway Point Osgood -- here he recalled Valderoyn and asked if someone could go and fetch him -- been slandered in the public prints and seen his face on a wanted poster.

  “Now I reach the cabal of supposed desperadoes, with whom I am alleged to be in league. I come hoping for some degree of explanation, perhaps even solidarity, but instead I find them chatting on a porch and fretting about some vines. Something, somehow, is out of joint. And I wish someone could tell me why.”

  Emmlyn made a sympathetic face. “Poor fellow. Have a little more cordial.”

  Filidor sipped the yellow liquid. It had a remarkable taste, both sweet and somehow, at the same time, curdled, yet wonderfully balanced; he knew people who would think it quite a discovery. Xanthoulian’s might consider stocking it as a preprandial aperitif.

  He realized his mind was wandering. He needed to focus, but there had been too little sleep and too much purple Pwyfus in the past few days, too much fear and too little chance to weigh things out. It was as if circumstances had conspired to keep him continually off balance, always responding to new alarms and diversions. And once he voiced that thought to himself, a w
hole new window of possibility suddenly opened before him.

  “Oh, my,” he said, then he said it again.

  “What is it?” said Emmlyn.

  “I really do think that I’ve been had.”

  “By whom?”

  “By my uncle. Again.”

  Chapter 8

  Filidor had once seen a book of visual puzzles, pages on which scattered shapes and colors were thrown seemingly at random, but from whose apparent chaos a coherent picture emerged, once the disorganized mess was viewed from the right aspect. Now, he told himself, he had found the precise angle, and with a dull thud, all was dropping into place.

  His uncle had not been pleased with his backsliding and duty shirking, not to mention his sybaritic appetites, and so had decided to launch his heir into yet another madcap ordeal that would painfully smarten him up and reveal the flaws in his lackadaisical approach to existence. The little man had lined up the other players: Faubon Bassariot, the Obblob, the men on Henwaye’s island pretending to be pirates and slaves, the mummer troupe -- a thought occurred, and he said, “Where is Etch Valderoyn? I left him down the trail, just beyond that boulder?”

  Ommely had come up onto the porch, unaccompanied by any alleged pizzle collectors. “There was no one there,” the servant said.

  “There you have it,” Filidor declared. “He was supposed to steer me to your house in Trumble, where the finale has doubtless been laid on. Now he sees that the gaffe is blown and hies himself off before searching questions can be asked.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Siskine Podarke. “Who is this Valder person?”

  Filidor laughed ruefully. “A figment, just like the pirate kingdom and the grand conspiracy to overthrow the Archonate. They are probably all professional confidence tricksters from the Bureau of Scrutiny, hired and schooled by my uncle.”

  “I think the gentleman’s not quite well,” said Ommely, his finger making symbolic circles in the air near his temple.

  “Perhaps the shock of dealing with Groff,” said Siskine.

  “I suspect a more chronic condition,” said Thorbe. “Remember his conduct in Olkney.”

  “At the very least,” said Emmlyn, firmly, “let us be kind to him. Whatever has happened to him, it has clearly brought him distress, and he seems harmless enough.”

  “Not when he has a sigil and a petition in front of him,” said Thorbe.

  “Enough,” said his sister. “Ommely, take him inside and put him to bed.”

  The man did as bid, leading the Archon’s nephew, now mumbling as he rehearsed to himself the vast, emerging shape of his uncle’s scheme, to a quiet room that overlooked the lodge’s rear lawn, which was bisected by a small brooklet that ran between stone walls. The servant helped him undress and tucked him into a narrow bed, then left him.

  Filidor ran the events of the past few days through his mind, seeking to determine where reality had ended and the dwarf’s machinations had impinged. The theft of his plaque and sigil, that had been real but fortuitous, but the Podarkes were not part of the scheme. The trip aboard the Empyreal had probably already been planned; if the incident in Vodel close had not happened, some other pretext would have been concocted, and he would have been steered to some other final destination. And why must they travel slowly by boat and incognito? So that he could be thrown to the waiting arms of the Obblob, of course. He remembered through the haze of Red Abandon how Bassariot seemed to be talking to some unseen listener as he steered Filidor toward the after deck. He was communicating with my uncle, preparing my reception in the sea. And on that ship he of course met the so-called mummer’s troupe, who would play an important role in Act Two.

  But what about Ovile Germolian’s taking illicit advantage of the girl Chloe? That did not seem the kind of thing his uncle would plan; but it could well have been a quirk of the personalities involved. Perhaps Germolian, his self-esteem injured by the twist in the scheme that had him replaced by Filidor as disclamator, decided to mollify his disgruntlement by that distasteful episode of self-indulgence.

  Of course, that meant that the inner voice that enabled Filidor to play the disclamator was also part of the whole farrago. “What a coincidence,” the young man told himself, “that a tiny integrator should lodge itself in my ear, and that it should just happen to know the Obblob prophecy and the complete works of The Bard Obscure.”

  He spoke quietly, to be heard by the device. “Integrator?”

  Leave me. I dwindle, came the faint response.

  “Fah,” said Filidor. “It is your credibility that has dwindled. I have found you out: you, my uncle, your pirates, pantomimes, police and all. You have played me for a ninkum, but the game is up. I know all.”

  There was no answer from within.

  “What, nothing to say? No more paeans of praise to your Filidor of the nth dimension, that paragon of the ages? No? I thought not.”

  He put his hand to his head and sighed. His pleasure at having unraveled the Archon’s deception did not quite overcome his chagrin at having fallen for its ludicrous components. “The Zenthro Intrusifer, indeed,” he said. “And a gilded Filidor in another cosmos dangled before my eyes, while a voice coos, ‘Come, be worthy, be all that you may be.’”

  The fate of Arboghast Fuleyem then presented itself to his recollection. But when he replayed the images from his memory, he recalled that he had not actually seen the intercessor torn piece from piece; there had been a roiling of the water, and portions of meat and furze had appeared, but it was an effect easily created to gull a credulous mind.

  “It was a good show, a performance on the grand scale. But the curtain is down and the audience grows jaded,” he said to his inner voice. “I presume that you are able to contact my uncle -- he would have seen to that -- and that all protestations of diminished energy are just more foofaraw. Tell him that I will rest today and return home tomorrow, and we will have words.”

  Again, the integrator said nothing.

  “Very well,” said Filidor. “Play it to the end, if you will. I am done with my part. As the old saying goes, ‘Fool me once, your blame; fool me twice, my shame.’”

  Ommely knocked and entered. “Did you call, sir?”

  “I was speaking to myself,” said Filidor.

  “Very good, sir,” said the servant, his voice and face carefully composed. He left quietly and shut the door. Filidor closed his eyes and slept the sleep of the tired but knowledgeable.

  ***

  He awoke in the morning. Someone, presumably Ommely, had come in during the night, and left a tray of toiletries on the nightstand. His garments, cleaned and pressed, hung on a rack by the window; the contents of his pockets were arrayed on a dresser. Filidor clothed himself, then put his sigil on his finger and his plaque around his neck. He let his nose lead him to the kitchen, where the Podarkes were gathered for breakfast around a great round table of age-blackened wood.

  Filidor entered and made formal gestures of greeting, while the Podarkes regarded him with the reserve due to those whose apperceptions of reality may turn out to be more than a little off the vertical. “I regret the circumstances of my arrival yesterday,” he said, “and I thank you for the forbearance you have shown. It appears that I have been the victim of an elaborate prank.”

  He saw the postures around the table relax, and by movements of hands and head, accompanied by soft words of demurral, the Podarkes indicated that all was now as it ought to be. They invited Filidor to sit with them, and Ommely brought him a plate of steamed friggols, commonly taken as the first meal of the day in these parts, as well as a steaming cup of punge. The aroma from the hot mug immediately carried the young man back to that morning on the balcony in the Shamblings when he had glanced into the street and had seen the face of the woman who now sat across the dark old wood from him. He looked at Emmlyn through the steam rising between his hands and found t
hat she affected him no less now than she had then. Her eyes moved away from him, then returned, and a smile that had no precise name occupied her lips.

  “Pranks, is it?” said Siskine. “Well, I suppose that’s a county where we’ve all sojourned. So tell.”

  Filidor sighed and took them through all that he had thought about before he had fallen into sleep the afternoon before, including more that occurred to him now: the obviously forged front page of the Implicator, with its ridiculous falsehoods presented under the byline of a commentator Filidor was known to favor; the reliable way that someone like Flastovic or Valderoyn turned up to move him toward the next scene; the very notion that a pompous document-passer like Faubon Bassariot could ever mount a conspiracy to usurp the Archonate.

  “If I had been allowed a moment’s respite, I would have seen through the folderol,” he concluded. “But my uncle made sure that I was dodged and deflected at every turn. Until, that is, I came here and, for the first time, I found myself among people who were not actors in his play.”

  Siskine made a face that expressed the countryman’s time honored view that the bizarre is only to be expected from city folk. “I should have thought a man of your uncle’s attainments and responsibilities would have a more pressing agenda,” he said.

  Somewhat shamefaced, Filidor admitted that he had given his uncle cause for concern, that he could see how his lack of application to his duties might have driven the Archon to unusual measures. “I have not been what I should have been. I probably deserve all that has befallen me.”