The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers coaaod-6

by Hugh Cook

  A prisoner in the bullman’s lair!

  ‘Through here,’ said the bullman, opening a door to reveal a small room lit by bright and cheerful light flooding in through skylights. Blue sky! Blue sky! A startlement of colour pure and bright. So beautiful that Chegory almost wept to see it.

  ‘What day is it?’ he said.

  ‘Today,’ answered the bullman. True, but unhelpful. Then: ‘Come,’ said the bullman, ‘in through here.’

  So saying, he opened another door and rolled the barrel into a room much larger. By the light flooding in through a dozen latticework windows (more sky, a courtyard view, a wall, no hope of escape, not yet, not that way) Chegory saw all. A huge stove at the near end of the room, and a woman cooking at that stove. A dozen tresde tables with benches set before them. Two dozen assorted fishermen and such seated on those benches, all those fishermen busy talking, eating, and drinking from pewter tankards. Doubtiess there was liquor in those tankards, for this was surely a speakeasy, a house of degradation built to cater for the depraved tastes of helpless drug addicts, the addicts in question being the fishermen yattering-laughing over their breakfasts.

  ‘You’ll stay for breakfast,’ said the bullman.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Chegory, hoping that he himself would not be one of the courses at that breakfast.

  Then he caught the smell of a well-spiced cassoulet and realised he was hungry, very hungry, famished, starved, ravenous, a cat among mice, a dog among cats, a dragon amidst lambs, a fire in a heap of paper, so short commoned it was miraculous he was more than dwarfish, his skeleton clad with ghost and fast demanding man, mass, heat, weight, blood, nerve, sinew, bone, kidney, liver, heart, lung. He was ready to grab, claw, eat, bite, suck, gnaw and swallow, hungry enough to shark it out with the sea’s mobsters for a bucket of offal, possessed of hunger such that he was ready to beg for his mother-in-law’s paps then feed from her twat as well, as the proverbial saying has it, or squeeze a stone for blood, or peel the stone itself then cook it and eat it.

  ‘Here,’ said the bullman.

  So saying, the monster caused a miracle to manifest itself in the form of a bowl of hot, steaming cassoulet. Beans! Meat! Pieces of cassava! A bit of baked banana on the side!

  ‘Well, boy,’ said the monster. ‘Don’t just gape at it. Sit down. Get into it!’

  Moments later young Chegory was sitting at table gulleting into the cassoulet.

  ‘Slowly, young Chegory,’ said one of the fishermen sitting at the same table. ‘Slowly, or you’ll do yourself an injury.’

  ‘Oho!’ said the bullman. ‘You know this lad, do you?’

  ‘No lad, Log Jaris. This is a man in the prime of youth. Isn’t it just, Chegory? You got into that sweet Olivia yet?’

  ‘Working on it,’ said Chegory.

  ‘Oh, I bet you are! More meat on that than a chicken, hey?’

  ‘Leaving aside this question of Olivia chickens,’ said the bullman Log Jaris, ‘what’s the rest of your name, Chegory?’

  ‘Chegory Guy,’ said Chegory Guy.

  ‘Oho! Not the son of Impala Guy, by chance?’ said the bullman. ‘Not the son of old man Impala, Japone’s beloved stillmaster?’

  ‘The same,’ said Chegory.

  So saying, he managed a crooked smile.

  A crooked smile? Let us be more exact. Chegory Guy experienced a certain degree of discomfiture but was loathe to make this known; hence he tried (but without complete success) to make pleasure rather than displeasure express itself on his face. Following convention, we say therefore that he smiled a crooked smile, though in point of literal fact he did not.

  Some people who are in perfect health (and some who are not, such as some who have suffered strokes or varying degrees of severity, or who have been mutilated, or who are under the influence of certain unethical drugs) habitually express themselves by means of a smile which does not run the full length of the mouth, and which can therefore accurately and literally be termed ‘crooked’. Some people can do this with ease, just as some people can wiggle their ears.

  Chegory Guy could not have wiggled his ears to save his life (except by the expedient of grasping the said ears with his hands and causing them to move by an application of manual pressure). He was completely bereft of innate ear-wriggling talent, just as he was born without poetic potential. Nevertheless, since he had a fair degree of control of the voluntary muscles which supervise the lips, he could no doubt have managed a crooked smile if his life had been at stake. However, he did not. Indeed, he rarely (if ever) did anything so unnatural as smiling crookedly. Even after the most diligent research, it has proved impossible to find a single witness [The Originator appears to have succumbed to a fit of what Kerkransolifski Bodo has so neatly termed ‘that painful accuracy which makes all Truth impossible’. To preserve the communicability of that which the Originator has elsewhere managed to capture in phrase, and to lessen the incidence of repetitive strain injury among our scribes, an exercise in pedantry which extends for no less than ten thousand words has here been deleted. By Order, Sptyx Rhataporo, Surveyor of the Office of Overview.]

  [What, pray tell, is wrong with pedantry? I applaud the Originator’s outbreak of accuracy and must severely deprecate Rhataporo’s unwarranted excision of the same. Brude, Pedant Particular.]

  After Chegory Guy had confessed to his true identity Log Jaris conducted a gentle interrogation which soon told him all he needed to know about his young visitor. Then the bullman took down an amphora and poured mugs of foaming brown fluid for himself, the fisherman and Chegory.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Chegory, looking into the mug with the deepest of suspicion.

  ‘Something for the pain,’ said Log Jaris.

  ‘The pain?’ said Chegory.

  ‘To exist is to suffer,’ said the bullman. ‘Learned philosophers proved this way back in the dawn of human history, whereupon the greatest genius of the day was assembled to provide a remedy. That remedy you have before you. Drink! For by drinking we prove ourselves true students of the higher philosophy.’

  Chegory had never heard anyone espouse such a doctrine before, though it is certain the dogma was not the bullman’s original invention; indeed, it is rumoured that the Korugatu philosophers of far-distant Chi’ash-lan first evolved a similar theory over a thousand years ago, and have laboured mightily ever since in an attempt to refine it by practical research.

  ‘This is a drug, isn’t it?’ said Chegory.

  ‘You would worry about that?’ said Log Jaris, with open amusement. ‘You, a crazed adventurer who daily dares life and limb Downstairs for the sole purpose of indulging a craving for zen? Will what’s in this mug turn your insides out or split your skull to spill your brains upon your feet?’

  ‘No, but-’

  But it was liquor, surely.

  ‘Make a choice,’ said Logjaris, with less amusement than before. ‘Are you my friend or my enemy? My guest or my prisoner? Come, boy, it’s not bub, it is but beer.’

  Then Chegory gathered his courage, and did what he needed to do if he was to survive. He lifted the mug of beer to his lips. He drank. What was the alternative? To be trampled to death by the bullman, surely. To be battered and gored, pulped and destroyed. Nevertheless — was that not the better course? For is not addiction to drink a fate far worse than death? And was not young Chegory well-launched upon such a fate? For he had been boozing in the lair of Firfat Labrat just the day before, and now here he was drinking up large in a scurvy speakeasy in the worst of low company imaginable.

  But Chegory lacked the courage to die. He wanted to live, to escape from this place of evil, this hell-hole with its amphorae filled with liquid death, these all-too-jolly fishermen who had already succumbed to the sly seductive wiles of unholy chemical combinations. He wanted to walk once more beneath the clean sky. To walk again in the sunlight. To be pure, and law abiding, and at peace with himself and the world.

  So drink he did.

  Remember he was but a
poor ignorant Ebrell Islander whose philosophical tutoring had been neglected entirely. He had yet to learn that ends seldom justify means, thus he did not realise that his hopes of escaping to a life of purity and peace were doomed when, to secure his survival, he adopted means that were foul, unclean, unlawful, destructive, polluted and corrupt, and evil, immoral, unethical and incontinent, and vile, dirty and sickening to boot. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that by sharing the bullman’s beer he did indeed enhance his short-term chances of survival, and of escaping from the speakeasy with both his life and his hide intact.

  ‘You don’t look happy,’ said Log Jaris. ‘What’s wrong? Is there something the matter with the beer?’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ said Chegory, with a touch of desperation. ‘I mean, what I said — Shabble, the soldiers, Varazchavardan, the whole thing — you think that’s some kind of joke?’

  ‘Oho, we have us a most unhappy little fellow here!’ said Log Jaris. ‘Why, from the way he talks, you’d think him up to his neck in sharks already. Yet the worst he’s dared already. What’s worse than zen? Naught that I know of. The rest is but trouble in trifles. Don’t worry about it! Soon enough it’ll all blow over.’

  ‘It can’t, it won’t, I’m done for, there’s nowhere to hide.’ Thus Chegory, in something of a wail.

  ‘Can’t!’ said Log Jaris. ‘You’re very free with your can’t and your won’t. How comes this can’t and won’t so freely from a strong man like you? Have you not legs you can run with? If bad comes to worse then surely your legs can carry you. Jal Japone will welcome you surely. After all, you’re the son of Impala Guy.’

  Chegory was infuriated by the jesting tone which had entered the bullman’s voice. He wanted to pour out his protests in a flood of incoherent anger. Instead, he restrained and controlled himself. He said merely:

  ‘Not Zolabrik. Not ever. I’m not running away.’

  ‘Oho!’ said Log Jaris. ‘A hero indeed! Yet it wishes to live regardless. Very well! A change of face will do it. Do what I did, my bloodskinned friend. Hide your face forever by means of transmogrification.’

  ‘By means of what?’ said Chegory. ‘You mean you weren’t — you chose — you — you-’

  Log Jaris laughed.

  ‘I wasn’t born like this,’ said he. ‘In truth I’m a man of Ashdan descent. My hometown was Pondros Yermento, which-’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Chegory, cutting him off. ‘I’ve lived with Ashdans long enough, you know, they talk Ashmolea no end.’

  ‘Well, if you know you know,’ said Log Jaris, more than a little offended by Chegory’s interruption.

  ‘He’s only a boy,’ said a fisherman. ‘Don’t be hard on him.’

  ‘I’m not being hard on him!’ said Log Jaris. ‘I’m offering him escape. Anonymity forever! The secret of transmogrification.’

  ‘I’ll worry out my own problems,’ said Chegory.

  Thus he failed to learn about the transmogrification machine Downstairs which, if he had dared to use it, might have turned him into dragonman or dog, centaur or merman, satyr or rundicorn, giant or dwarf. Or — better yet — he might have kept his born proportions while losing his skin of Ebrell Island red. He might have come out black like the Ashdans, or white like the leucodermic Varazchavardan. He might have emerged in an elegant shade of grey like the Janjuladoola of Ang, or in the pink- tending-to-pallor of the natives of Wen Endex. Or bark-brown like many of the peoples of Argan, or strangulation blue like the scholars of Odrum.

  Alternatively, if the luck of the stars had been with him, the young Ebrell Islander might have won an appearance like mine own, which would have given him green skin, green hair and two thumbs on each hand.

  [What is one to think? Does the Originator truly believe the scholars of Odrum to be blue in hue? We know ourselves to be in truth an eclectic selection of the best brains of the Twenty Seven Superior Races. So does the Originator err by accident or with malice? Furthermore, what is one to think of the Originator’s self-description? If he is mad, as Reader Zeb has suggested, then possibly he believes himself to dwell within flesh configured as described, though nothing matching the description is accounted for in the Library, unless we accept into the Body of Knowledge certain wild rumours concerning the impenetrable jungles of the interior of the island of Quilth. These matters scholarship must attend to closely until in the fullness of time thay are elucidated. Inserted by Order, Jon Jangelis, Scrutineer.]

  Thus did Chegory lose his chance to enlist the help of the formidable Log Jaris and to learn of the transmogrification machine. But, since he was only a backward Ebrell Islander, he knew not that he had lost anything at all. Instead, he occupied himself by trying to think of some smart way to escape his quandary.

  ‘Well,’ said Log Jaris, ‘since you don’t want my help, I can guess where you’re going next.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ said Chegory.

  ‘To the pink palace. The next petitions session is at noon today.’

  With that said, Log Jaris ushered young Chegory out into the street, and, with the slightest hint of a shove, dismissed him and closed the door on him.

  Young Chegory Guy was so surprised to find himself out in the sunlight — he had still been at least half-expecting imprisonment, torture and sudden death — that at first he entirely failed to recognise this narrow lane. Then, as he orientated himself, he realised he was in one of the sideways of Marthandorthan, not far from the warehouse where his ill-favoured cousin Firfat Labrat presided over a vigorous business in illicit drugs.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Since Chegory Guy was bereft of original inspiration he thought first to throw himself on the mercy of Firfat Labrat. So he went to the warehouse, but found it boarded up. Unbeknownst to Chegory, Firfat had gone to ground for the duration of the State of Emergency, which was still in force. During the night Firfat had wholesaled his liquor at loss to bolder men like Log Jaris, then had removed himself and his followers to a secret hideout on the fringes of Injiltaprajura, in among the market gardens on the far side of Pokra Ridge.

  Where now?

  To portside, to the home of his law-abiding uncle Dunash Labrat? No! The stern and solemn apiarist would not appreciate being involved in scandal. Indeed, notwithstanding family ties, he would probably turn in young Chegory as an escaped criminal.

  To the Dromdanjerie, then? Or to Jod?

  Again, no.

  Soldiers would be searching for him in both places if they seriously sought his rearrest, which they surely would.

  So where?

  As Chegory was still thinking about it a squad of soldiers came marching down the street. His thoughts flew apart like so many skimble-scamble scatter-sticks, and he strolled as casually as he could round the nearest corner then gave way to terror-deranged flight.

  Despite his panic, Chegory soon slowed, panting and sweating heavily in the morning heat. He was walking by the time he gained the waterfront, whereupon he took the path of crushed coral and broken bloodstone which fringed the Laitemata.

  He walked along past those open air cafes which served fishermen who did not care for speakeasies; past stalls selling huge bunches of bananas variously green and yellow; past hawkers with trays of spiced rice, curried lizard, pickled cockroach, sunflower seeds and prophylactic amulets sacred to seven different religions; past fish shops abuzz with flies which pestered over clams, crabs, sharkmeat, groper, moray eel, sea slugs, turtie, octopus, tuna and brightsilver sea ghost.

  Doctor Death, who was at work in his open-air dental workshop when Chegory went by, straightened up and nodded pleasantly. The patient reclining in Death’s operating chair emitted a low groan. Death had a pair of bloody pliers in his hand. A small heap of bloodstained molars sat upon a white porcelain saucer on a nearby table. Chegory shuddered, and hurried on.

  He went by a pharmacy where a chemist proudly displayed jars of oily pyrethrin and like mosquito-killers, twists of ground horn of unicorn and other aphrodisiacs of eq
ual reputation, bundles of ginseng and cannabis, small vials of oil of hashish and vials smaller yet of opium, jars of honey, contraceptive calendars, and, taking pride of place, ceramic bottles holding mead and other types of medicinal alcohol (available on prescription only).

  He heard sellers and buyers alike ababble in Jan-juladoola, Ashmarlan, Toxteth and Dub, in Malud and Frangoni and in other alien argots stranger yet. He saw a man selling dragon’s teeth, a woman with herself for sale, a stockbroker auctioning shares in the Narapatorpabarta Bank and the Imtharbodanoptima Brothel. He sauntered past money changers whose hired scimitars stood guard over banks where sunshining ems rivalled their glitter against the sheen of grass-green saladin rings and the shimmer of zeals, the glitz of dragons, the allure of pearls and the argument of damns and dalmoons alike.

  Chegory was amazed to find all these people going about their business as usual, as though the State of Emergency meant nothing to them. Here he was, living through a madness equal to anything heard of in legend, yet the world lazed on through its habitual routines as placidly as ever. Young Chegory had endured attack by kraken, arrest by soldiers, beatings, riot, capture first by an elven lord and then by mad Malud marauders, threats of torture from a transmogrified bullman and more — all this is scarcely more than a day and a night! Yet the world still bought, sold, traded and cheated as usual as if nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary had happened at all.

  Through the hot sunlight he went, past fortune-tellers and astrologers, pardoners and tax advisers, past letter-writers and story-tellers, snake-charmers and chandlers, travel agents and slave-traders; past greengrocers presiding over counters laden with taro, cassava, mangos, pineapple, paw-paw, kumera, blue potato and breadfruit; past a blood-reeking butcher’s shop where more flies yet were competing for space on the skinned carcases of dogs, rats, cats, goats, chickens and pigs; and then past the jeweller’s shops bright with rainbow-rivalling paua, pounamu most precious, silver beaten to the brightness of the moon and teardrops of gold basking in the adoration of the sun.