by Hal Duncan
He may not be a titan now, but Sykeus still has fair stature against the fleshlings, growing to a height of twenty-three to thirty-three feet tall, with smooth grey bark beneath which, in the green parts, lies a sap that acts as irritant to human skin. His leaves are twelve to twenty-five centimetres long and ten to eighteen centimetres wide, and deeply lobed with three or five lobes. Three to five centimetres long, the fruit has a green skin which sometimes ripens towards purple or brown, as if to hint at the imperial might of gods or the chthonic brawn of titans, at king’s robes and warlord’s leathers.
•
A GEIST IS just, as far as Ana is concerned, the clay-fleshed skull of an ancestor shelved in some home shrine of Çatal Huyuk, a clockwork calliope built into the wall behind, a library of stances coded in pianola rolls that are switched by the keys we press, so steam whistling through the lips seems to voice the persona of the dead.
She pauses for breath as she sets the bowl of figs down on the table.
You never bought it? says Renart.
Raised outside the faith, she says. But that doesn’t mean outside the law.
Her parents didn’t want to be geisted at all, but estrangement from the Geister fellowship meant nada to a federal law favouring the doctors’ oath over the most ardent layman’s testament. So, after the accident, the gleaning and upload went ahead, with Ana protesting all the way to New Jerusalem, and there they were in the Ancestry, the geists of Fellows Mona and Hari Massinger.
It’s not us, was the first thing they said.
Your mother’s geist isn’t going to lie to you, is it? Not if she wasn’t lying to herself in life.
That’s what the other geists are doing, she says, stancing delusions copied into them, going through the motions of belief. It sickens her, generations of cowards taking echoes of their forebears’ fears as proof. Everything is ephemeral, every something anyways. Only anything persists.
•
MINGLING JASMINE AND hyacinth, the scent of Narkissos, Narcissus poeticus, or Poet’s Daffodil, is heady enough to cause headaches and nausea, even vomiting in over-abundance. Still, the essential oil has its use in perfumes and, being laid on with Loliacean meal and honey, Dioscorudes claimed, in his Materia Medica, it draws out splinters.
Not just a pretty face then, Narkissos. Though he does have a pretty face, even now, from a stem twenty to forty centimetres high, blooming a single flower, with a short corona in light yellow edged with red, his perianth having three white sepals to the calyx, three white petals to the corolla.
Of all the flowers and shrubs and trees who were once human, Narkissos reckons himself the most familiar in all likelihood, a whole pathology of egoism named for his cautionary tale of a lad who wasted away sat on a riverbank, mooning over the unattainable beauty of his own reflection, or leaning over to kiss his image, falling in and drowning. It is a beautiful poetic tale, he likes to think, painted through the ages less in caution than in melancholy, all those artists understanding the acute yen for a union with the imago of self, seeing in him not the folly of shallow vanity, but rather the projection out into the world of this ephebic symbol of the soul, a recognition of the way the world returns to us, if we gaze upon it as a mirror, the beauty of our humanity, and oh, what it is to look upon, to see the soul in a river looking back at you, to see the potential of perfection; is there any way to not yearn for a fusion with the ideal?
That’s where the true tragedy is, he says, that I was right to love and want this image of the perfect self, that it is exquisitely to be wished for; but even as we surrender to the rapture of our grace, we are bound in flesh, so ephemeral, so delicate, creatures who waste or drown, ever starving and ever gasping, unless and until translated to some eternal form as, say, a flower with a white trinity of petals.
Sure, says Susurrus. If you say so.
Truth be told, he thinks the Poet’s Daffodil has a worse case of self-love than any narcissist was ever diagnosed with, might have found his ideal more attainable if it included eating... and looked a little wider or a little deeper than the face upon the surface of the water; but the precious blossom is unconscionably pretty, so Susurrus tholes the whole hand-nailed-to-forehead fantasy to flirt, to brush by with a saucy stroke that makes Narkissos shiver. Still, after only a few minutes tickle and twirl, such wishful double-thinking always makes his head hurt and his stomach churn, as it’s doing now, so he gives a last curl of a kiss and slips away, leaving the flower where he grows, down by the river’s edge, where Puk stood earlier that day, (or maybe yesterday? or last week?) fuming in an inarticulable stance, racked from raw bone-and-flesh experience of the ephemeral, that Narkissos has no sense or savvy of, and no salve for. Too big a splinter, thinks Susurrus.
He was strewn on graves, Narkissos, back on Earth, back in antiquity, because Persephone was gathering a posey of his blossoms on the day that Hades took her. Pretty flowers for a grave, thinks Susurrus, but... as if the stench of the rotting dead needs made more vomitous. And he has to wonder if perhaps the god of the dead was drawn out by that smell.
•
THE SECOND OF three set scenes in vase paintings of the erastes-eromenos relationship, as classed by Beazley, is the presentation of a small gift, often hares or roosters, sometimes deer or cats. None of these being wholly practical for Jaq to filch or Puk to tend—except cats, on which subject Jaq agrees with his Diogenes: they’re just plain wrong—Puk hadn’t, he admits, really expected more than the symbolic here. Sat on the basalt rock with Jaq at his back, he chomps a bite of soft pear, talks through the noms: really he’d been prepped for a sim like the cup, or a wordplay on cock most like. That, he says, was neat.
That morn, Puk woke to a prod in his shoulder socket, prod, prod, and a hand over his mouth stifling mumbley yawn, blinking bleary to focus on Jaq’s face afore him, finger to lips. Slowly drawn away and, with slightest move, crooked to point down the valley between them, toward the treehouse door. Where, just inside, a mouse nosed the floorboards, frecking a scamper and twitch around, this way and that, in murine questing, bold as a brat till Puk shuffled in perk and sparked a dash, a scurrying straight for escape and gone.
Apple, said Puk, sitting up. Well... maybe.
Had to wake you, said Jaq. I was fretted your snores would scare him off.
Jaq’s impression, half pig snort, half donkey bray, won a slap. Then thanks, Puk gazing after the scarpered rodent, asmile at the small gift of a glimpse, Apple or otherwise. Frau Apple, Apple Junior, First Apple Twice Removed, it’s enough that this little bundle of bone and fur is still quick.
So now, Puk wipes the pear juice from his lips—a Starkrimson, bud mutation of Clapp’s Favourite, its creamy flesh sweet and aromatic, its skin thick and smooth and red, deeper red than Jaq, same sard as Puk himself almost. Or it was, nom nom. He hops himself down from the rock, winds back as a catchball pitcher at the serve, and whiplashes, hurling the core out over the sward, high and far. Wipes hands on britches.
Show off, says Jaq.
Puk ganders Jaq on the rock, propped on his arms, lounged back with one leg up, one out, naked today rather than nekkid; he flicks a nod of sorts, a sideways back c’mere; and Jaq does the puzzled mutt head-cock thing that Puk hunches he understudied Diogenes on, deliberately. (Jaq’s thesis, blithely resolute: Paleolithic domestication by dogs rather than of them; anthropomorphism is really caninomorphism, see, bald apes having learned to project upon themselves such doggy traits as loyalty, exuberance. You don’t really believe that, do you? Absolutely!)
What? says Jaq.
Third scene, says Puk.
And Jaq, with a grin, clambers forward, hops down as Puk unlashes his britches, slides them off his hips. The third of three set scenes in vase paintings of the erastes-eromenos relationship, as classed by Beazley, is the consummation.
Standing? says Jak.
Ouais, standing, intercrural, AKA the sumata of the Samurai, the Oxford Style, the Princeton First-Year, the Ivy League Rub. Good enough
for ensigns of industry, Shaka Zulu, Alexander the Great. The Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene has Zeus extoll the slippery thighs of a boy, as Billy Greene swooned over Lincoln’s, as perfect as a human being could be, he said.
Streaks of lavender, says Jaq, spots soft as May violets. Ouias.
•
TRUE MYRTLE, MYRTUS communis, Myrsine to her friends, she is a tender evergreen shrub or small tree, reaching up to five metres tall, as Aphrodite found most useful when, one day, she was caught naked on the Isle of Cytheraea, casting round in shame for any sort of hiding place. Myrsine stepped up to the mark, blithe to oblige the goddess, who was often seen from that day on with myrtle leaves around her, each leaf entire, a dense dark green, three to five centimetres long and lanceolate or elliptical, with a fragrant essential oil, a sweet and spicy aroma when bruised or crushed—a reward from Aphrodite, who held her as a favourite for that kind deed, decreed that Myrsine should be evergreen and ever so aromatic, that worshippers should plant her round their temples. Some gossipy sorts spread rumours that she was a priestess of the love goddess, but angered her with a desire to marry a young man she loved, a breach of vows. Nonsense. When she rose from the ocean, Aphrodite wore a wreath of myrtle. Nuff said, really.
The scent and symbol of Eden, in late spring and summer, she is cloaked in wonderfully scented star-shaped flowers, each with five creamy white petals and sepals, and myriad stamens giving her an exotic appearance. These flowers pollinated by insects, the fruit that follows is a round blue-black or purplish berry containing several seeds to be dispersed by birds that eat them and flit away, as far and wide and swift as Myrsine and Athena racing. That’s how it really happened: Athena being a sore loser, slaying her in petty spite—and instantly regretting it, turning her body to a myrtle tree in grief and guilt, loving her everafter.
In the islands of Sardinia and Corsica—and so widely known in the former as to be deemed a typical drink—they made an aromatic liqueur by macerating her in alcohol, two varieties, no less: Mirto Rosso from her berries; Mirto Bianco from the leaves. Others were less appreciative of her taste; in Jewish lore the pairing of her pleasant fragrance with unpleasant flavour made her a symbol of those with good deeds to their credit despite a dismal ignorance of the Torah.
Still, that’s not so bad, she thinks, and she could hardly be insulted when the pilgrims in Jersualem held three branches of her—three! and only one palm leaf, one citron, even willow rating only two!—as they walked round the Temple, in the ceremonies of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. To Jewish mystics, meanwhile, she was held a symbol of a phallic force at work throughout the cosmos, virile masculine vitality embodied in a sacred plant; and so her branches would be given to the bridegroom sometimes, at the wedding’s end, upon his entry to the nuptial bedsuite.
In England too they saw her flowering as auspicious, augury of wedding in the air. She brings good luck in general, so they said, a healthy myrtle tree or two upon one’s land a sign of peace and comfort for one’s family, a happy home. She’s long been linked with lovers, thought to link them, to inspire love and to make it linger.
She was, if Aristophanes is right, the garland of Iacchus, riotous dancer of the meadows, juggling torches at Eleusis, bringing starlight to the darkness of the rites.
He was right, she says to Susurrus. I remember him. I always liked Iacchus.
And you’re sure it’s him?
Not literally, of course, but pataphysically? Trust me.
Fingers stretched to brush Myrsine as he passes, tickling her near as flirty as Susurrus, Iacchus Jaq weaves through the brush and shrub, trailblazer to himself if not to Puk, who follows less as an explorer with a native guide, more as a drifter on the raft of Jaq, not at all fussed where they’re going or why, simply riding the shiftstream of grass and undergrowth parted as in the wake of a ship.
It is noon. Month, week and day do not matter. It is noon.
•
NO, IT IS five. They have been gathering morels. Where? Under the leaf-laced sky, in the subrural forests far beyond the ambit of Renart’s stead, through the cheep of birds, the bummling of bees around a byke nooked in the oxter of a branch, skirting burr thistles, skulking into neighbour’s acres to graze fresh-fruited cherries and apricocks, raspberries and strawberries. Whether Puk’s sweet tooth or Jaq’s colt’s tooth was impetus is uncertain, but certainty is overrated anyway.
I’ll be your huckleberry, Jaq said, chewing on a fiddlehead of bracken, brushing through a spiderweb while Puk was rubbing a dock leaf on a louping nettle sting.
Now, exploring the carse of the Erehwyreve, around where the bickering burn spreads and slows and flows into the river, Puk is busied in a flail at midges jiggeting the damp brush, air hoaching with them. Now, he misses the dip underfoot and treads shin-deep in a brackish pool slimed with frogspawn. Ick!
Foot splurged deep down into sucking mud, stumbled forward to splash and sink the other foot, he squeals the squeeze of sludge between his toes, the slime gooping legs as he struggles at his bogging, near toppled in imbalance and each foot only sinking more, the more the other rises. Throughout this, Jaq is of course, hooting with laughter, for which Puk, when finally a hand’s offered and he’s hauled from the muck, gives a mock-sullen thank you and then a sudden shove, sending the mocker to poetic justice on his arse.
A handful of spawn scooped and flung, ducked. Puk shrieking as Jaq scrambles out with more, coming for him. The chase is brief and ends with Jaq crowing triumph over a sliming of hair, Puk squeezing out the slick to flick at him, pointing out that Jaq still has the worst of it.
Five, says Puk as they walk on after.
Five what? says Jaq.
An average three thousand eggs laid by a female, and after predation of the tadpoles by goldfish, newts, dragonflies, water beetles and nymphs, and after predation of the frogs by foxes, hedgehogs, rats and who knows what else, maybe five will make it through of the whole brattling of tiddlers.
Five.
•
DAPHNE, LAURUS NOBILIS, the laurel, bay tree, sweet bay or bay laurel, grows in a great variety of sizes and heights, sometimes as high as ten to eighteen metres tall, in other places often clipped to a low hedge or, being widely cultivated as an ornamental plant in warmer climates, used in topiary, a single erect stem created with a twisted, spherical or cubic crown. Here on the edge of the stead that Jaq and Puk are skirting, she was once the latter, pruned to a crisp geometry by the novice gardener who, next thing she knew, was famous for his renovation of the Jardins Rochester. Grown wild now for a good while, on the far edge of a stead in ruin, few would twig her as his handiwork these days, but Daphne’s fine with that. As crowns go, she’s much happier adorning heads of heroes, wishes Puk the best of luck in his browfurrowed trial to weave a wreath for Jaq.
She is evergreen, bearing leaves of six to twelve centimetres long and two to four centimetres broad, with a distinctive margin, wrinkled and finely-serrated. She is dioecious, with male flowers on this plant, female flowers on that, each flower pale yellow-green, around one centimetre in diameter, blooming with a partner beside a glossy green leaf. A glossy sharp green leaf. She really didn’t mean to cut his finger; it’s just how she is. Well, if he manages to achieve it, even with the glassy how-to gleaned from hylenet scrying, it’ll be a victory wreath in every sense.
Her small shiny fruit, a black berry around one centimetre long, one seed within, may be used as a robust spice when dried, as can her pressed leaf oil, while a strong smoke flavoring can be achieved with her burnt wood. A poultice steeped in Daphne’s boiled leaves is said to relieve rashes caused by nettles, poison ivy or poison oak; aqueous extracts may be used to salve open wounds or as astringents; while her aromas will alleviate arthritis and rheumatism, hypertension and earaches. Allegedly. As far as Daphne is concerned, she’s far more useful as cuisine ingredient—though even cooked her leaves remain so cutting they’re best plucked before the dish is served, or ground for use in soups or stocks or Blood
y Marys.
Bloody is the word, Susurrus snickers. Bloody fingered. Bloody minded. Bloody—
Shusht, she snips, due credit for the effort, and I’d like to see you try, blowhard.
She’ll have no mockery of anyone who plays the game. She can’t abide gauche winners or spectators jeering clumsy cock-ups. That’s her story, after all: Apollo being an insufferable boor, deriding Eros as a rubbish archer, getting shot for it, and suddenly all over her; she ran and fought, and fought and ran, but in the end the only way out was her father Ladon, river god, transforming her to this. Since then... she’s never liked smart arses making fun of others. Banter’s banter, sport in its own right, but at the Pythian games in Delphi, held in honour of Apollo, where the victor’s wreath was made from her, from branches gathered in the Vale of Tempe, Daphne didn’t sit upon those winner’s heads so they could sneer. That Aristotle fellow had a word for it, you know. He called it—
Magnanimity, Susurrus says. I know.
•
A SMIRR OF rain, sky murkening to iron, charged. The shift of the oncoming summer storm’s so palpable, Jaq wonders how the ancients couldn’t have the notion—shift, he means. How could they fancy time a one dee stream when they could see the gradient in the clouds? Puk dints an image gleaned sharp as a word sprung to the nous from pre-lingistic call: the welter of a van Gogh sky over a wheatfield thick with crows.
Maybe they did, he says. That looks like shift to me.
Ouias, but they tagged him mad, says Jaq.
