The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers coaaod-6

by Hugh Cook

  And if most of the witnesses to these events were mad, what of it? The intellectual powers of the insane are no weaker than those of people fool enough to accept the status quo. You may doubt this. But reflect! Suppose one has done something heinous. Suppose one has raped one’s brother, burnt down a temple, embezzled half a million dragons or finally settled accounts with one’s mother-in-law. What is smarter? To throw oneself on the mercy of the court, and get oneself executed? Or to discover that one is in truth insane and really indulged in delinquency because one was, for example, frightened by a goldfish in early youth.

  Believe me, unless one is truly demented it takes a lot of calculated intellectual discipline to maintain one’s madness in the face of the implacable investigations of that most scholarly of all therapists, Jon Qasaba.

  Suppose one has yet again been hailed to the Drom-. danjerie’s interview room, there to face the tenth interview in as many days with the formidable Qasaba. The ever-resourceful Ashdan thinks he has at last found a clue which will explicate one’s behaviour. He enters. He seats himself. He shuffles through a great heap of notes, observations and laborious speculations. Then he looks one in the eyes (he is still ignorant of the fact that my people consider such eye-to-eye contact extremely rude) and he says:

  ‘Why did you use an axe to kill your mother-in-law?’ ‘Because I wanted her dead.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know that. But why an axe? Why that particular implement and not another?’

  In the teeth of such a question, what is one to do? One’s natural reaction will be to laugh. Or voice one of the quips which come so easily to the tongue:

  ‘What was I supposed to use? A toothpick?’

  But one cannot safely do either of these things. The mad are supposed to be serious and devoid of wit. So: will the truth serve? No. For the truth is too simple. It was pleasure, pure pleasure, to see the bitch smashed apart, to see her skull burst like a rotten cantaloup, to see great globs of blood [Here a lengthy descriptive passage has been excised. By Order, Drax Lira, Redactor Major.]

  Anyone can understand this. Or should be able to. However, Jon Qasaba is so obsessed by his pursuit of arcane knowledge that he has lost touch entirely with the blatantly obvious. So one thinks long and carefully, then answers: ‘Weight.’

  ‘Weight?’

  ‘Yes, it… the axe, it… I mean, it was heavy. Oppressive. It was… there was a memory. I mean, what I’m trying to say is that there’s all these… these…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It goes back to… to when I was little, that’s when the weight, the weight, the pressure, it first… or maybe it was before then.’

  One observes Jon Qasaba writing. One deciphers his eager notation: Birth Trauma?!

  When Q_asaba looks back, one is staring at nothing. Slowly, one says:

  ‘Blood, too. That comes into it. Somehow, it’s… there’s blood mixed up in this. The memories, I mean.’

  You get the picture? This is the kind of intellectual endeavour it takes to remain suitably mad while one resides in the Dromdanjerie. So don’t write off the insane. While they are not necessarily totally accurate in their observations, who is? Would you trust Qasaba to author this history? Qasaba, who truly believes that Rye Phobos did what he did because his mother subjected him to the Second Indignity when he was aged but three? No, Qasaba- [Here the Originator libels Qasaba at length, then argues that the status quo itself is not necessarily sane. Hence (he says) that majority which dwells outside the lunatic asylum is possibly the group which is truly mad. Surely (I say) such argument is absurd. In terms of logic and the law, lunatics are by definition those incarcerated in lunatic asylums. What more need be said? Drax Lira, Redactor Major.]

  Thus, to return to the question of the provenance of our facts.

  Believe me, all this is known. Or most of it. Very, very little is surmise, and the logic of such surmise is inescapable. Truly, Olivia Qasaba was at the age of change, of ripeness, of hot juice and urgent dreams, that age when nine thoughts in ten are unspeakable because of their impropriety. In her days of youth and vigour she was domiciled in close quarters with Chegory Guy, and had no other appropriate target of sexual opportunity in sight.

  Ergo, she was infatuated with him. Or, at a minimum, she was continually considering (perhaps continually rejecting, but definitely considering!) young Chegory as a potential sexual partner. For such is the nature of the blood. Such is the nature of the organism. And who can deny that the organism has, shall we say, at times a certain priority? When the flesh is gorged and the urge is upon them, even the wise must [Here by Order of the Redactor Major a gratuitous crudity of considerable obscenity has been excised. Also an unpardonable elaboration of that crudity, complete with the baseless attribution of regrettable personal practices to several of History’s more dignified Perpetrators.]

  Let us have an equation, then, in the manner of the famous literary theorist Sinja Larthelme. Boy plus girl equals the necessity for diligent onlookers to be ever considering the probable consequences of propinquity.

  Does that satisfy?

  The followers of Sinja Larthelme will doubtless answer: no. The equation is too simple. Too true. Too close to life as it is lived. Too close to commonsense. They want different equations, elaborate expressions of curves and intersections, velocities and accelerations, subsets and matrices. They pretend to be in possession of a generalised mathematics of existence which (this is their conceit) treats with human disorder (chaos, coincidence, collision) in terms of a mode of discourse possessed of a logic as rigorous as that used to clarify the dance of the stars.

  Which is a nonsense.

  Because [To spare scribes, readers and overburdened library shelves alike, some seventy thousand words of impassioned exegesis have here been excised by Order of the Redactor Major.]

  Well, where were we?

  We were at the point where Chegory Guy was loading lanterns on to a bablobrokmadorni stick for Olivia. Once the stick was loaded, she followed her father into the depths of the Dromdanjerie to help calm the inmates. She walked with a firm, confident step. She knew the mad by name, and was used to dealing with their moods and panics. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that she had a lead-weighted cosh in her back pocket.

  The daughter of an Ashdan liberal, yet she carried a cosh?

  Well, yes.

  Life in the Dromdanjerie does tend to inject a certain degree of realism into one’s actual behaviour whatever one’s ideological outlook.

  Chegory Guy did not follow. Not because he was scared, but because Jon Qasaba had often explicitly forbidden him to venture into the dormitories. Instead, he lit more lanterns, then sat silent. Waiting. As he waited, he heard all the dogs of Injiltaprajura begin to bark and howl.

  What did he think of as he sat there thus? We can only guess. Perhaps he thought of Olivia, of her heat, her nipples, the marginal hairs, the faint-breathing odour easing from her secret. He was young, was he not? So what else would he think about? And Olivia was worth thinking of, oh yes, she was worth it, very much worth it indeed.

  But I never touched her, I swear it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  While Shabble was exploring Downstairs and Chegory Guy was lighting lanterns, other events were taking place elsewhere in Injiltaprajura. To the treasury housed deep below the pink palace there came a band of robbers. These brigands were the Malud marauders Al-ran Lars, Arnaut and Tolon.

  How did they get in?

  How did they get past the guards, bars, doors and walls?

  Why, by using a secret passage.

  Al-ran Lars, you see, had helped loot that treasury before. He had been to Injiltaprajura years before in an ill-famed ship known as the Kraken and captained then by the notorious Log Jaris. On that raid, Al-ran Lars and his companions had snaffled the bard of Untunchilamon. Now Al-ran Lars was back for a second helping.

  Some will call his intentions immoral, but surely this is unjust. What benefit has the world from treasure which does
naught but sit in the dark for year on year, unchanging? Treasure thus restrained is dull stuff, not process but form. Once it is released into the world, it joins that endlessly fascinating interplay of energy which we know as the economy.

  This is what it is all about.

  It?

  Life, strife, existence!

  So Da Thee, a Korugatu philosopher near unique in his sobriety, says simply that life is energy.

  Remember that while the treasure of Injiltaprajura lay untouched in doom-dark silence, its existence was (in practice) purely theoretical. In practice, it made no difference whether the treasury was filled with gold or with shadows. Therefore let us not libel the Malud marauders by calling them witless criminals. Let us see them by the light of philosophy, and know them as life-makers, releasers of energy, creators of new potential for the world’s existence.

  ‘Where is it?’ said Arnaut, youngest of them all and hence the most excitable.

  He spoke, of course, in Malud, since that is the language of the people of the island of Asral. Not only is it their name for their tongue — it is also their name for themselves. Although, as far as the eye is concerned, they are outwardly identical to the Ashdans.

  ‘Hush,’ said Al-ran Lars as he raised his lantern.

  Light spangled from eye-bright diamonds, from coins in cascades, from gold-woven tapestries and other wealth beyond ennumeration. Pearls the size of pears. Almandine glowing as red as roses. Carbuncles lit by their own inner fire. The glamour of ultramarines. Globes of amber. The sombre ochre light of a solitary firestone, work of the wizards of Arl, masters of both the merely luminous and the incandescent.

  ‘There,’ said Tolon, the big one, the muscle-man.

  He pointed.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Al-ran Lars, and slipped his hands into a pair of mailed gauntlets.

  With his hands thus armoured, he picked up the sceptre of the Empress Justina. This ornament terminated in a glittering bauble, a fierce-blazing flare of rainbows, a soft-humming triakisoctahedron. Al-ran Lars raised it to his lips. Kissed it.

  ‘No snakes,’ said Arnaut.

  ‘I noticed,’ said Al-ran Lars dryly.

  When he had first come here years before, the greatest wonders of the treasury had been guarded by snakes and by worse. But security had grown slack in the intervening years. Which is not surprising, since it takes a fair amount of hard work and enterprise (not to mention raw courage) to maintain a sizeable colony of poisonous reptiles in good health in an underground treasury.

  Al-ran Lars passed the sceptre to Tolon, who hefted its weight easily. Tolon bent back the copper clasps which bound the triakisoctahedron to the sceptre, freed that fabulous bauble, then let the denuded sceptre fall. It clanged against the flagstones.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Arnaut, eagerly claiming the wishstone from Tolon.

  The triakisoctahedron was warm to the touch. It vibrated constantly, as if it was not a jewel which he held but a huge insect, its wings ever seeking to urge its mass to flight. Arnaut raised the wishstone in both hands and said:

  ‘I wish I may I wish I might have a — a loaf of bread tonight.’

  Nothing happened. Al-ran Lars laughed.

  ‘I told you,’ said he.

  ‘It was worth trying,’ said Arnaut, crestfallen.

  ‘Come,’ said Al-ran Lars. ‘Let’s be gone.’

  Then he led the way to the door through which they had entered. It closed with a heavy thlunk-clunk, and the treasury was once more in darkness. Before venturing back through the tunnels Downstairs, Al-ran Lars searched first Tolon and then his nephew. But neither had taken any trinkets which might betray them.

  ‘Good,’ said Al-ran Lars, pleased with their discipline.

  But this discipline was only to be expected. This raid had been planned and rehearsed for two years. It was slick, professional and cunning. Oh, how cunning!

  When the loss of the wishstone was discovered, Injiltaprajura would be turned upside down by thief-seeking soldiers. Any foreigners who had just arrived in town would naturally be under suspicion. This was why Al-ran Lars had brought the Taniwha to Untunchilamon shortly before the beginning of the Long Dry. For long dull days of windless weather the brig had floated at anchor while Al-ran Lars bought and sold in the markets of Injiltaprajura. Now his ship was so familiar to all the city that it was but part of the scenery.

  When the season of Fistavlir ended and the trade winds blew once more, the Taniwha would sail from Injilta-prajura with the wishstone aboard. Even her crew would be ignorant of this special cargo, knowledge of which would be restricted to Al-ran Lars, to his nephew Arnaut, and to his blood-brother Tolon.

  Al-ran Lars was sure the wealth the wishstone would win would be worth all the effort and the danger which went with it. The two years of planning. The long, dangerous journey east from Asral. The days of trial and tension which yet lay ahead. Wealth would compensate for all. So he thought. Little did he know what horrors awaited them! What dangers fearful! What doom near-inescapable. But he was to learn. Oh yes, he was to learn soon enough.

  The Malud marauders hustled along through the underways Downstairs till they came to a flight of stairs. Up they went. Al-ran Lars extinguished his lantern then opened the sally port at the top of the stairs. He and his companions then sallied out of it. They were in the open air again. To be precise, they were in Thlutter, the steep, jungle-growth gully just east of Pearl.

  Injiltaprajura’s portside slopes steeply from Pokra Ridge to the waterfront. Gullies steeper yet gash the slope. For the most part, roads and houses avoid these gullies, which are choked with vegetation in which there dwell indestructible black pigs, snakes, spiders, scorpions, centipedes half as long as your arm, bush dogs, numerous cats and mosquitoes in their millions.

  Many of these mosquitoes began to bite the three pirates (for such the Malud marauders were, surely, though they guised themselves as honest merchants) as soon as they emerged into the night air. Muggy night air, air alive with the splitter-splatter of a dozen fountains, with the smells of dank earth, coconut rot, over-ripe bananas, decayed mangos and frangipani.

  ‘Dogs!’ said Tolon.

  ‘I’m not deaf,’ said Al-ran Lars.

  Dogs in their hundreds were barking. To north, south, east and west. It sounded as if every dog in Injiltaprajura had been roused to wakefulness.

  ‘Come on,’ said Arnaut. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Wait!’ said Al-ran Lars.

  Next moment, the bells of the pink palace rang out. These were the midnight bells, marking the end of undokondra (that quarter of the day which lasts from dusk to midnight) and the start of bardardornootha. The bells had scarcely died away when rainbows flourished through the heavens. The peacock-plumage blaze of colour lit up Thlutter. Lit up the broad-leaved banana trees, the trailing scorpion vines and the faces of the Malud marauders. Faces which clearly revealed their dismay. Then the rainbow light snapped out. Vanished! Gone!

  The three Malud blinked blind at the darkness.

  ‘The wishstone!’ said Arnaut. ‘The wishstone, the stone, that’s what’s doing it!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Al-ran Lars, closing his eyes in an effort to recover his nightsight.

  ‘Maybe it’s the wonderworkers,’ said Tolon. ‘Warning us. Hunting us.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Al-ran Lars. ‘They can’t know anything. Not yet.’

  But he was worried. The rainbows in the sky had echoed the inner life of the wishstone. The relationship between sky and stone might be spurious, accidental, coincidental. Nevertheless, the sky-brightening had surely been a symptom of a fearful exercise of magic.

  Al-ran Lars came to a swift decision.

  ‘We’re going back,’ he said. ‘Back Downstairs.’

  ‘You really wish to run?’ said Tolon.

  ‘Rather that than fight my way through Injiltaprajura street by street.’

  ‘It’s not far,’ argued Tolon. ‘We could be back aboard soon enough.’r />
  ‘With these dogs on the rouse?’ said Al-ran Lars. ‘With the sky amok with colour? The whole city will be awake by now.’ Arnaut said: ‘I think-’

  ‘Think later!’ said Al-ran Lars. ‘Thinking we can do when we’re safely underground.’

  So saying, he led his comrades back Downstairs. Down there, of course, Shabble was still on the loose.

  What precisely did cause those dogs to rouse, those rainbows to flourish through the sky? With the benefit of perfect hindsight we can say, without a doubt, that those phenomena were associated with the arrival of a demon in Injiltaprajura. Yes, a hideous Thing had broken through from the World Beyond, and would in due course do appalling damage to the dignity of some of the city’s leading citizens.

  But this was not known at the time, hence the shock, alarm and bewilderment felt by the Malud marauders was shared by others in the city. Priests roused themselves from bed and went to pray to their gods and to make whatever sacrifices their religions demanded. Sentries standing watch woke their superior officers and were cursed for their pains. Fishermen in canoes which were working the Laitemata and the lagoon by night extinguished their lamps, stowed their gear and began rowing for shore, fearing the sea itself might be next to manifest an unexpected disturbance — perhaps one which would doom their frail craft.

  We see, then, that many of the worthy citizens of Injiltaprajura were disturbed by these manifestations which were, at that time, so inexplicable. One of those who suffered a certain degree of angst as a result of the phenomena-of-unknown-origin was Justina’s Master of Law, Aquitaine Varazchavardan.

  The name rings a bell?

  I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Varazchavardan is a formidable figure who has doubtless found his way into many histories by now, so there is every possibility that you will have encountered him already in your reading. Nevertheless, let us tell him in detail even so.