by Hal Duncan
An apple for Apple, he grins. Or a core for him at least, after you’re done.
Puk rolls and hassles upright, scootching cross-legged and staying the mouse in one hand’s grasp while he reaches for the Devonshire Quarrenden, small English fruit of French parentage, August seasonal so likely imported from Up North, sweet with a strawberry kick, juicy and crisp, peel crimson as the scratch on the back of Jaq’s hand.
Ouch, says Puk with a nod.
Jaq shrugs, which becomes with easy grace a shucking of his doublet, thereafter tossed to the pile.
It is twenty three hours and seventeen minutes since the kidnapping, Joi, Shim and Don assisting in the transparent ruse and transport of the target via Don’s skimpod, from the esplanade back to Renart’s, whereupon the cadres left Jaq to sling Puck in a fireman’s carry and yomp him through the brush, stray spikewire of aculeate smilax snecking the back of a hand thrown out for balance when the abducter stumbled once stepping over a log.
•
SMILAX DOES NOT taste the fleshling’s blood, barely notices it; he tromped by her with no more than a touch and that’s all she asks. She has no time for suitors in skin and stride, just a sprig of a stint to them and barely any span at all, just shift, shift, shift. She has no time for them in any dimension—does shimmy to the touch of Susurrus though, she must admit. But that’s different.
Not that Susurrus is the only idler to ease his way through Smilax asperi’s thrawn barricade of spinney. Bees buzz freely among the thicket of spiny greenbrier stems. Beetles trek methodical through the mulch she weaves with rhizome, masses with her prickle and leathery leaf, (cordate, glabrous,) hooking thorns to clamber bark and branch, near ten metres tall in places. Finches hop in and out with a flutter. She is not wholly impenetrable, really only harsher to the fleshlings who have tussled each other into her bindweed thrash, struggled yelping out with vicious scratches from the catbrier’s claws to slap at each other’s taunt and dodge, to grump sullen and swearing, nurse thin welts beading blood.
She has no time for meat and bone striplings like these anymore, not after how she felt for Krokos. Or didn’t. She loved him but he didn’t love her. He loved her but she didn’t love him. They loved each other but death sundered them. The tales contradict, so it’s impossible to say for sure. But it all ended badly, as it tended to in those days; that much is certain. Aphrodite took pity on her as she wept over the flower her boy had become, as thieving Hermes looked away sheepishly. She became a symbol of luckless love, worn only in the garlands of maenads as they danced in frenzies to Dionysus, sacred to the Erinyes who might have been her sisters, born like her of the night. No more flower boys for her.
Susurrus is a different kind of flirt though, fickle as a godling of wind can only be but light and warm as one father, bold as the other. And his is a different kind of love, one that has lasted near as long as this world has now and stayed as fresh somehow, even in his flightiness. It is Susurrus makes her sigh for those days, even though he makes them all sigh.
He does so now, not that the fleshlings would notice, though he might well carry her whispers to their ears.
Of course, while she still thinks of herself as she, as Smilax, young nymph of the forests outside Sparta, she is dioecious, and this colony has plants of both sexes, anthers and ovaries. Right now racemes of pedicellate flowers, so pale a green they’re almost white, await pollination. She will fruit in the fall, produce bright red berries that have been used to treat syphilis and psoriasis or to flavour root beer with sarsaparilla for sale in soda fountains idyllised in fictive smalltowns of American Antiquity called Sehnsucht and Saudade.
Smilax has many species to her genus, some deciduous, some evergreen.
•
DECIDUOUS, SAYS JAQ.
Evergreen, says Puk.
It is not a bickering, but a game for the newly-enabled: how fast and flexy can you riposte a counter-notion harmonically linked; how loose can you link and still claim harmony? Square binaries are beginner stuff—Jaq would have batted back quercus, oak genus defying either/or dichotomy inherent in deciduous by coming in both, the phonics of retort sleekity sneaking in a crafty binary in short versus long, velar versus dental plosive at start, but both unvoiced and the wholes, further, rhyming at the end. But still. For this naked cabin boy naïf Jaq has stolen away for a grand voyage into summer, this Geister ephebe he savvies from the guarding set of an arm across lap to have stripped for his return as much to prove his will to become a native as to actually flirt as one... for Puk, unlearned in all the games an Erehwynan kidster would have been playing for Mars years, let alone Earther years, who has only just discovered the rules of Fourier Harmonies in a nosey through the interworld, it is a start.
Not bad, says Jaq. Deciduous, circle.
An easy one for the Earther, with a glassy riposte that will pair with Jaq’s and extend his own harmony to the second domain, but Puk scrunches bafflement.
Wait, circle? How does that follow deciduous? I don’t savvy.
How could it not follow? says Jaq, more flummoxed yet. Deciduous, circle. And you’d riposte triangle.
A crunkle of brow, then: Oh.
Remember, says Jaq, it’s not meant to follow mechanically.
•
BACK TO THE road where Ana’s skimpod sits parked, nestled between orchards of the steads either side, Jaq’s home is a horseshoe galerie house, architected in the Neo-Helladic style: pale adobe and oak timbers giving a vibe half Shaker, half Tudor; ground-floored with an undercroft that would have once been stables; stairs up, at each serif of the omega layout, to the gallery; the upper floor of habitation an oxbowed Chester Row of French-windowed rooms above; master bedsuite at one end, Jaq’s and the study at the other, tabled kitchen opening into armchaired salon between; all of this then, embracing its courtyard like a poor man’s Rose Theatre of stalls and one balcony, with Renart leaning left forearm and right elbow on said balcony, leaning jutted jaw on fist, a furrowbrowed Shakespeare directing.
Jaq below in the courtyard is Ariel and Caliban ambling out of slumber into stretches of semaphore gibberish, crushing a deboxed silvery bag raised high with a pinch and suck of nozzle to drain the last citrus tang, the tart taste of Seville sangüina. He is Ariel as ballet dance of basketball, arabesqued to shoot the crumpled bag for basket of bin. He is Caliban pumping his fist in triumph, hooyah, then ambling on, guddling in his skivvies to scritch, sniffing fingers.
This is one trail of him, at least. Elsewhere, he is standing awkward, right hand clasping left wrist behind back, toe gimbling the sand, head down, eyes up, bottom lip between teeth, offering apology, excuse. Elsewhere, he is a red lion rampant—no, saltant in a hornpipe, dancing around the polished basalt font in the centre of the courtyard. And elsewhere and elsewhere and elsewhere, sauntering, stretching, stancing, everywhere the tracer mirages of his motion scrawling through each other as palimpsest of snail trails. He is the flashlight held by Pablo Picasso, the drumsticks in Gene Krupa’s hands, every subject streaming in a photoflash study made by Gjon Mili. He is Stanford’s horse Occident, in the zoopraxiscope of Eadward Muybridge, proving the flight in a gallop, hooves airborne when tucked under at the moment of switch from pull of forelegs to push of hindlegs.
He is the project Renart is working on, a confusion of sketches in virtual chalk and charcoal snatched by the pataphysician as studies toward a lucid stance.
He is, of course, also cocky in the unveiling of it all, here in the flesh, leading Puk and Ana in through the iron gates, one closed, the other open and half off its hinges, angled back to scrapyard detritus overgrown by undergrowth outside.
It’s a temple of you, says Puk agape. An unholy demented bedlam of a temple of you. I’m jargogled.
Order out of chaos, Renart calls down as if it should be plain, the latent kilter to the clutter of this latter-day Da Vinci’s workshop, Vesalius’s theatre, Feuillet’s studio. He straightens, flicks a hand to sweep the jumble of snapshot shifts away to single-im
age sprites stowed in the undercroft like alcoved statuary, and heads for the stairs to his right, descends to come greet the visitors.
Puk you’ve met, says Jaq. This is Ana.
Ana Massinger, she says.
Guy Renart, he says.
An Erehwynan greeting: a clasp of right hand to hip, left hand to shoulder, kiss on the left cheek, kiss on the right cheek. The same for Puk, with a salut and an extra slap of shoulder at the end that sends him after Jaq, who is already half up the stairs, beckoning his new friend to come see his suite.
Was that you in my skivvies? says Puk.
Mine now, says Jaq.
Please, says Renart, come in. Jaq tells me you’re at the Hovendaal... and more.
The slightest upcrink to the corner of his lips is met with a smile in Ana’s eyes.
I can imagine. My brother’s been quite garrulous on our affinities.
A moment of wry amusement is shared in what’s unsaid. Ana is pataphysicist to Renart’s pataphysician, a snick of a distinction as far as Puk is concerned, between science and art. Not to mention their kinseys. They should obviously, Jaq echoed to Renart, get to know each other.
I suspect, says Ana as they follow the conspirator cupids upstairs, we’re the only full heteros they know.
And in the same decade of life, says Renart. Clearly we’re meant for each other.
The soft laugh of Susurrus puffs a stray lock of hair across Ana’s face, and she tidies it back behind her ear with one hand as, with the other, she hands Renart the bouquet of hyacinth she savvies is customary in the Erehwyna region, where to bring wine on a visit would be considered an insult to the host’s choice.
•
A PERENNIAL PLANT, Hyacinthus orientalis sprouts from a bulb of three to seven centimetres in diameter. His ligulate leaves like straps, soft fifteen to thirty-five centimetres long, only a few succulent centimetres wide, produced from the basal whorl around a stem growing to between twenty and thirty-five centimetres tall, spiking into a terminal raceme that may bear, in the spring, as few as two, as many as fifty little flowers pointing every which way. Each flower, pendent to suberect, has a funnel-shaped perianth of only ten to thirty-five millimetres, constricted in the middle with the six lobes strongly recurved. Most often purple, the blossoms of Hyakinthos are pollinated by honey bees drawn to his nectar and sweet fragrance, at its strongest now, around eleven at night, as he sits in the vase on the table of Renart’s kitchen, taking pride of place among the remnants of the traditional Haft-Sin setting, late in the season for the true spring celebration, but offered by the maestro in the aim of hospitality, to introduce the Massinger siblings to the culture of their new environs.
Hospitality is in the bones here, Jaq said at one point during the evening. It’s ossature.
So, in front of Hyakinthos—and reflected in the mirror at his back, propped against the wall and sentried by candles that have all but burned down—there sits what is left of the seven key items: a flask of vinegar as symbol of patience in senescence; a silver dish of red sumac fruit as symbols of the dawn to come; a walnut fruitbowl that still has one apple in it, for health and beauty; a silver dish of garlic bulbs as symbols of medicine; a china plate of dried oleaster fruit, for love; empty bowls that held the wheat germ pudding, sumana, signifying wealth; and a few sprouted mung beans lurking uneaten at the bottom of their ceramic bowl, symbols of rebirth.
Other than this? Each place setting still has its painted egg. The chocolate coins are long since gone, devoured by Jaq, just as the baqlava was polished off by Puk. Nuts; raisins, currants and sultanas; berries: the bowls of healthier fare are also emptied of all but pits and shells, one stray pistachio of which floats in Renart’s fingerbowl of rosewater. The leatherbound copy of Haikonnen’s Gilgamesh that Ana found exquisite in its handsewn craftsmanship was taken with her on their adjourn to the armchairs, now lies on the cushion at her back as she leans forward, pauses to puff her cigar before making a point in a spry debate with Renart that reminds Hyakinthos of Athena and his philator Apollo at their most spirited, how he would lie with his head in Apollo’s lap—as Puk lies with Jaq now in the latter’s suite, according to the gossipy flutter of the moth batting against the French windows—while the gods argued their dialectic of justice and beauty, and Eros, who was always there whenever he was with Apollo, whispered in his ear, asking with a sly insouciance if they weren’t just the same thing anyway, and his domain when it came down to it: passion.
That was before the discus from Apollo’s hand was caught by Zephyros in a fit of pique that the braw ephebe wasn’t his, brought whipping round in the wrong direction, as the head of Hyakinthos whipped round at Apollo’s cry, too late. The next thing he knew, if knew is the right word for it, he was a flower, the hyacinth of the ancient Greeks, described by Theophrastus, Gladiolus segetum,
Not this flower then. No, Hyakinthos’s tale took a peripetaia here on Mars during the Interregnum, when he welked into a crushing melancholia, homesick and miserable that his legend was lost by the fleshlings, along with so much of their past, to discus deaths of light so bright they turned Tempe to sand, to glass, shattered a moon to dust. He wept to Susurrus that the few who knew his name at all inked it under paintings of other flowers. He was forgotten.
The godling of the Martian wind carried the sad tale to his father, Zephyros, who brooded the woe of it. Ares snorted at his pity, stropped at the soppy of it all, but gentle Zephyros, still gritted with guilt over his jealous crime, gleaned a catharsis of his hamartia. Down he swept from Olympus Mons, across the whole surface of the planet, to gather every grain of stance in which Hyakinthos was coded, to lift up the pollen of his soul, as a primitive poet might say, to glimmer it with a breath in his hand, to breeze it everywhere, to fertilise every carpel of every common hyacinth. Seed capsules, fleshy, spherical and tripartite, ripened from the pollinated flowers, split and spilled their diaspores, black grains with a white elaiosome, dispersed by myrmechocory, ants taking the seed back to their burrows, using the elaiosome for food, discarding the remains outside their nest or in a midden within.
Hyakinthos was reborn in the first generation of hyacinths germinating from those seeds, as were the fleshling cultures that surround the Hellas Sea, a joy marked to this day in Erehwyna and beyond by his presence on every table set for vernal visitations. As here and now.
•
PARTICLES, SAYS JAQ.
Waves, says Puk.
A suite: ahoy, a wall of French windows leading out onto the balcony, one opened to the night, to the warm breeze and the sound of cicadas; larboard, a wall with two doors, leading to pisser and scrubber, touchscreen between, mute to bone white; starboard, a wall arrayed with walnut dresser desk in the unornamented Mei style, open shelving and rails built round for clothes and gubbins decidedly unshipshape in the stowage; aft, a touchscreen wall also mute to bone white, with a sleigh bed also walnut, as too the shelf above said bed.
On the shelf above the bed: one glow-in-the-dark yoyo, milky-white with the piss-yellow tinge of fluorescence; one glass hand, sliver of neckchain drooped to weave between pinky and pointer, silver ring dropped on the digitus impudicus, abandoned bling of a whim for trimmings, Jaq has explained, too much hassle in the off and on; one black painted iron spearhead of a broken railing, fleur-de-lis tipped, as some hobo Prospero’s sceptre; one white slinky; one hologram diorama, capering sprites of Joi, Don and Shim, figurines in a loop of frolic that shines above its grey plinth. Joi hunkered on haunches, flop of fringe shading eyes as he skins a tab, looks up and clocks it coming just as Don tackles, tumbles them both back, downhill, head over heels over head over heels, and Shim runs in to leap atop the stramash; cut to start.
Particles, says Jaq.
Waves, says Puk.
On the bed, naked: a laze of a Puk reclines on the cushion of Jaq’s abdomen, Jaq raised on pillowheap against the headboard, looking down over tousle of crow-black hair that tickles his tum with the upturn of head, to the youth between
his legs. They are sard and carnelian figurae on a ground of saffron linen. They are art, inheritors of genetic tinkerings, of chain-reacting Martian ideologies pre-Interregnum, of runaway politics, which is to say ethics, which is to say aesthetics. Humans were not always dark this way and golden-eyed, but have been so since before even the return of Puk’s progenitors to desolate Earth. For Puk and Jaq, what they are now is as natural as the recurve bow lineament of an upper lip: Puk’s Schytian, cherubic, flesh; Jaq’s Avar, ephebic, muscle. As natural as the libidinous mash of such, as the fit of each other’s pintle in paw shoved down trews unbuttoned or britches unknotted, as the breaths between liplock to ungarb the pivot of this vast moment, frenziedly ungarb and grab back into kiss, to throw or be thrown onto the bed, to straddle or be straddled, arching to rhythm of rising tempo in the alien grasp, to throb of another rhythm sudden under it, taking over to pulse, Puk spurting first, Jaq squirting in ecstasy at the squeezing buck beneath, and O the spattering of Puk. Collapse to clasp, savouring the shift. And now they lie lazybones, quick-sprouting hanker of their week-long friendship sated. Jaq, curious, broached the subject of Puk’s sixer kinsey: hadn’t he ever thought to twiddle, to try girls? Which brought them to binaries, male and female, top and bottom, subject and object, charm and strangeness.
Particles, says Jaq.
Waves, says Puk.
Skins stick with sweat where they press, are silk to the stroke where dried by Susurrus—Puk’s shoulders smoothed by Jaq’s palms, Jaq’s thigh brushed by the backs of Puk’s fingers. The mingle of scents animal and ammonial hits notes familiar and foreign to both, inversely, each recognising the aroma of their own jism, savouring the novelty of the other’s. To Jaq, Puk is almond, vanilla, bacon. To Puk, Jaq is oranges, chocolate, cheese.
