Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Come along, my love; come, come,” she spoke.

  We went down iron ladders through a fetid darkness to reach a giant cellar of the Castle. We went past a hundred iron doors, and then we went past an iron door that I remembered. It was the door to the Whispering Room where, for a while, I had been prisoner. On Klepsis there are no duplicates of anything, no two of anything; surely no two iron doors could be alike.

  “I wonder what poor unfortunate prisoners are in that hateful room now,” I mused out loud. “I hope the room is empty.”

  “The Whispering Room is seldom empty for very long,” Thorn said. “I believe that there are sixteen persons in that big room now. I believe that they will be taken out of there quite soon and executed for the entertainment of the wellborn visitors at the gala. Prince Henry has always been quite proud of his executions. Such creativity as he has he pours into them.”

  “But there were sixteen of us held in that room as prisoners this very evening,” I jabbered. “We were to be held there till it was time for us to be executed. There is something very wrong about this. I hear voices that chill me. Thorn, I’m dizzy. I’m very, very sick. I believe that I am suffering from the ‘unreality syndrome’ that afflicts many persons who visit planets not their own. It is the hallucination sickness that cannot easily be resolved. It is the only sickness that cannot be cured until it is proved wrong. As a disease it is very serious: many people die from it. And, as a part of it, there’s the terror of falling, down, down, down, out of the unreality and into the reality, to be dashed to death on the reality. I’m wrenched almost apart. If only I didn’t recognize some of those voices!”

  “Oh, we all get the unreality sickness on Klepsis, my love. It’s a warning, and it’s a signal to—well, I forget just what it is a warning and a signal for. Let us go into the room of the giant wine tun. You can be healed of almost anything there.”

  “Thorn, there are voices in the Whispering Room,” I stated with more alarm, “and I recognize those voices.”

  “Do not let it worry you, my buried treasure. It is only another reality, and it must be avoided. Come and swim in the giant tun.”

  “Thorn, that is the voice of Gold Coast O’Mally sounding in the Whispering Room, sounding in fear. And he came out of that room when I did. There are the voices of Conchita O’Brian and Jerome Whitewater and Bartolomo Portuguese and Hektor Lafcadio and Kate Blithespirit the Amazon. Thorn, that is my own voice in that room, my very own voice. Thorn, I’m shaken by this. It crumbles everything.”

  “Come to the giant tun, my love. It will uncrumble you. It will heal you and make you right and sane.”

  We went to the big wine cellar which was quite near. The giant tun was the main thing in that room, for there wasn’t space for much else. We went up a tall ladder to a catwalk that circled the lip of the big tun. Yes, it would surely hold a hundred thousand glasses of wine, and perhaps its capacity was twice or thrice that. But the level of the wine was about a meter below the edge of the tun.

  “How do you drink from it?” I asked Thorn. “We have brought neither bucket nor pitcher.”

  “Plunge right in, my love. Then you can drink any way you will!” Thorn yiped with sudden merriment and she tumbled me into the big vat. I sank. Then I rose to the surface again.

  “Help, I’ll drown!” I called out. “No, I suppose I won’t,” I quickly amended. “But I did envision myself as drowning for a moment there, or as falling more and more rapidly through the wine to be dashed to death on a bottom many kilometers below. There is something very pinnacled about wine in extraordinary quantities. The quick fear of plummeting down barely missed being ghastly.”

  “Oh, cut it out, kid,” Thorn hectored me. “Only goofs have that fear of falling. Only tedious Lucifer had it really bad. And so he fell down when he was thrown from the skies. Why in the world would anybody fall down if he had a choice? He forgot that he was a winged creature and needn’t fall at all.

  “But, Long John my love, we also are winged creatures. Let us never forget that. And let us have no more odd notions for the moment. The wine heals you.”

  Yes, the wine was healing me, was healing my skewered thumbs and my shredded back, healing my confused mind and my pawky spirit. It was not soothing me, no. It healed in an opposite manner. It excited me and lifted me up. Through my brain there paraded vast and happy rhapsodies of wine and of wine spirits. I still heard the voices of familiar persons from the Whispering Room that was very near to us. I heard my own frightened and fluttering voice among them. But the me who swam and sported in this spirited ocean of wine was neither frightened nor fluttery. The duplicity of voices was only an interesting puzzle, no more.

  “Thorn, you weaponed loveliness,” I called up to her. “If I knew what sort of person could distinguish reality from unreality, I would follow that person to the ends of the galaxy.”

  “So would I do, so will I do,” she said. “There is only one sort of person who can tell the real from the unreal, and that is the historian.”

  “But I am an historian.”

  “I know it. I wouldn’t have you be anything else. And you have the green stone in your brain that can distinguish reality from unreality. It was for this gift of yours that I came looking for you until I found you.”

  “Thorn, you are kidding, are you not?”

  “Oh, a little bit, yes. I kid quite a bit.”

  “Who are you really?” I called up from the healing ocean of wine. “And how did you happen to be born in Ravel-Brannagan Castle?”

  “I am named Tharrala Thorn-Ravel-O’Grogan-Brannagan really, and one must be born somewhere.”

  I was afraid to look and I was afraid to feel, but I believed that all the bloody wounds and broken bones of my back and ribcage and thumbs had healed.

  “Of course they are healed,” Thorn said, matching her words to my thoughts as she had done several times. “You now have beautiful scars on your skewered thumbs and your shredded back, but you are healed.”

  “How is it done?” I asked. “Is it only the wine? It is common red wine. I should bottle such wine as this, and sell it as a cure-all, and get rich.”

  “A big enough bottle of it would impoverish you, my love. It is the wine that heals, yes. But below a certain critical mass it will not heal. If the mass is below five thousand barrels, forget it. There are only critical masses of wine at about a dozen places on all the planets, and at half of those places they do not even know about the curing properties.

  “Come now, my love, there are entertainments going on. There are plots and intrigues taking place. There are people being chopped down like weeds. There are romances springing up like April flowers. There are new things being done in music and eloquence. There are huge treasure chests to be discovered under the ground in the company of your friend Gold Coast O’Mally and some of your other friends. And we will find those treasure chests, for I know exactly where they are. We will hear a genuine Tarshish storyteller in a theatre of the sort that you couldn’t guess in a million months. Historian my love, his stories are such things as history is made of.

  “There is a metamorphic encounter that we are to hold with a Green Robe of the order of Saint Klingensmith. We will have a meeting with my own great-great-great-grandfather. Well, you do want to meet my family, don’t you? We will talk with Christopher Begorra Brannagan himself. Is he alive or is he dead? Well, he seldom leaves his tomb nowadays, but I believe that he is alive. And he is interested in you. We will find history for you, Long John, as it coils and uncoils in its nest. Let us go now, my love, or we may miss part of the fun.”

  I could not reach the edge of the vat. I had visions of staying in the big vat of wine till I drowned or at least died. The depth of the critical mass seemed to have diminished by at least a meter, and it was now two meters from the lip of the vat down to the surface of the wine.

  I dove deep (in the depths a voice spoke to me, “What is the date?” “The twenty-eighth of the month of Arpad,” I sai
d. “Then, tonight is the night that I come out of this place,” the voice spoke). I came up with a rush, leaped out of the wine, reached my hands up, and Thorn reached her hands down. She caught mine and she lifted me up easily.

  Thorn and I climbed O’Grogan’s Mountain when we had gone out from the Castle. Januarius O’Grogan, he who had married a Margaret Brannagan who was the daughter of Christopher Brannagan, the founding father of Klepsis, this Januarius had many things named after him here. O’Grogan’s Mountain wasn’t a high mountain. It was a long and gentle hill that rose about a hundred meters above the surrounding country, at the highest. But the easy rise of its kilometer-long slope gave comfortable seating or lounging room to more than a hundred thousand persons at one time. And there were probably a hundred thousand persons on it now, watching the colorful doings around Ravel-Brannagan Castle below them. But the highest points of the Castle rose almost exactly even with the highest point of O’Grogan’s Mountain.

  The highest points of the Castle were the six watchtowers named the Christopher, Januarius, Juda, David, Cloud, and Henry Watchtowers. These were named after Christopher Brannagan, Januarius O’Grogan, Juda O’Grogan-Brannagan, David Ravel, Cloud Ravel-Brannagan, and Henry Ravel-Brannagan, the alpha men, the true-liners, and the interlopers of the six generations of the first family of the Planet of Klepsis. There were really nine families on Klepsis which claimed to be the first family, but none of them was more first than the Brannagan clan.

  Even higher than the six watchtowers, even higher than the highest point of O’Grogan’s Mountain, was the En-Arche Bell Tower. Nobody now living knew just what it was for. Nobody knew how the giant bell, which had never been rung, could indeed be rung. There was a complex mechanism to ring it, but who now understood that complexity? There was a sort of taboo on this highest bell tower. People did not raise up their eyes or their voices to it. They ignored it, or they tried to. But what was it for? And who was En-Arche?

  Five of the six regular watchtowers were inhabited by ghosts. Those were the Five Royal Ghosts of Ravel-Brannagan Castle. (There were about a hundred other ghosts associated with the castle, not an unusual number for such a large and storied place.) The sixth of the towers was sometimes inhabited by a man who was very like a ghost in his carrying on, Prince Henry Ravel-Brannagan the Pirate. The first five named of these towers had no stairways. The stairs had been taken down from each of them on the day that the namesake had died, on the same day that construction began on the watchtower of the new ruler. If the name-ruler came back as a ghost, it was reasoned, he would not need a stairway. Brannagan’s Ghost, however, was said to climb painfully up the stone shaft from which the stairway was taken, much hampered by stiffness and by having a wooden leg. And yet the Brannagan Ghost could go through walls in the true ghost fashion.

  In each of the first five watchtowers there was nothing except the eight broad-field telescopes, one at each of the eight corners of the wind; the big swinging warning bell—without the bell-pull rope which was also taken away on the day of death of its patron; and the lantern—without oil.

  But the staired sixth watchtower, that of the living Prince Henry, had all the amenities, for he spent much of his time up there.

  “There is a light in the Juda Tower,” I said to Thorn.

  “Hush, my love, hush,” she said. “It is bad manners to mention it. Juda believes that his light is unseen. Juda’s Ghost is the most gentle of all of them. He never angry-faces the people below. He never sets his warning bell to roaring. He never sets it to banging or pealing at all, but sometimes he plays little tunes on it with a hammer. He produces the different notes by striking the bell at its different curvatures. He plays pretty little tunes such as ‘Oh Death Irregular that Comes Betimes’ (his own death was irregular and came betimes), ‘Rosa, Rosa, Rosa’ (his wife was Rose Lunaria), ‘Wait Here Until the World Begins,’ ‘Oh Sheba Played the Harp a While a Hundred Years This Morning’ (Juda’s daughter-in-law was Sheba McSherry), ‘Oh Darkened Skies that Once Shone Bright,’ ‘Nineteenth Continent Rag,’ ‘I’ll Wait for You a Hundred Years/I’ll Wait for You Till Morning.’ I believe that Juda O’Grogan-Brannagan, who has been dead just over a hundred years, is lonesome. And Juda is not at all a portentous ghost. No direful meaning is ever given by the people to his appearances.”

  “Bad manners it may be to mention it, Thorn,” I said, “but now there is a light in the David Tower also.”

  “The ghost of David Ravel, the Elegant Interloper (that is really the official title that he gave to himself), is often not a gentle ghost at all. At times he goes into rages, and I suspect that he will do so in just a minute, when he checks his tower and finds what is missing from it.”

  “And what is missing from the David Watchtower, Thorn?”

  “These two telescopes. David had them made on Gaea-Earth in Germany, where the best telescopes were then made. This one, from the southeast-corner-of-the-wind station is for me to use tonight. And this one from the southwest-corner-of-the-wind station is for thee to use. It has always been known that the finest of the telescopes are from the David Tower.”

  “How and when did you get them, Thorn? If there is no stairway in that tower, you would have to have climbed the sheer tower itself. And there was no time that you could have done it.”

  “But there was time when I could have done it, Long John, my love (if there is no time, then I make time), and I did climb the tower itself, up the outside of it.”

  “You climbed that sheer one-hundred-meter height that is all stone-built? And the mortar of it is loosened, as I can plainly see through the telescope.”

  “I climbed it so, yes, my love. Look at the Januarius Tower now. The ghost of that greatest O’Grogan is sitting in the dark there with his lantern unlit, and he is looking through his telescope of the west-corner-of-the-wind directly at the two of us. Turn your glass on him, my love, and you can even see the specks in his magnified viewing eye.”

  “And he in ours, Thorn.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Of course he can.”

  “Thorn, do you know that there were several human bodies floating in the lower levels of the great wine tun where my wounds were healed a short time ago?”

  “Yes, there are six of them, and each one has its own story. I was hoping you wouldn’t see them and be frightened. The popular account is that one of them is not dead. This is the one who was flogged till he seemed quite dead and was then thrown in there by Cloud Ravel-Brannagan, the father of Prince Henry the Pirate and Prince Franco the Outcast and of my mother. Cloud did not believe in the healing properties of that vat of wine. ‘Heal yourself, revivify yourself if you can,’ he mocked at that person when he threw him in. Now Cloud Ravel is long dead, and his victim perhaps is not. That body, that person, heals slowly, but he heals. When he has been there for fifty years (so the popular story of him goes, and he has now been in there for forty-nine years and an uncertain number of months), his healing will be completed and he will come out.”

  “Thorn, your tongue is crooked. You made it up.”

  “I did not make up the living body in that vat. He spoke to you, and you to him. I heard it. And the story I told about him is the popular story.”

  There were five bears on O’Grogan’s Mountain that evening, and they did not look like Klepsis bears, so the bear-watchers said. These were two big bears and three little bears of a deep golden color and very good behavior. They sat up straight there on O’Grogan’s Mountain, just as people do, and watched all that was going on. Then Prince Franco let them use his telescope for a while, and they passed it from one to another, all enjoying it. But the father bear had to show one of the little ones how to focus it.

  “You look like the Five Royal Intelligent Bears who disappeared so mysteriously from the Golden Garden on Astrobe recently,” Prince Franco said to them conversationally. “A completely new species and immensely valuable. Two big bears there were, and three little ones. Astrobe authorities say that there w
as no way you could have got off that planet, for all transportation there is monitored. Are you the same bears?”

  The father bear seemed to nod assent.

  “We can’t talk very well,” one of the little ones said. “Our mouths are made different from people mouths.”

  “Well, how did you get off Astrobe?” Prince Franco asked them.

  “Jumped,” the father bear said. He said it very thickly. They really couldn’t talk very well.

  Was that really Prince Franco sitting between us and the bears, when there had been nobody sitting there a moment before? It sure did look like him.

  “Are there archives in the Castle, Thorn?” I asked her.

  “No, historian John, not written archives such as you could transcribe out as history. They are in other forms. Oh, hear the angry bell that David Ravel the Interloper has set jangling in the David Tower, my love. ‘Thieves in the Night, Thieves in the Night’ is the tune it peals. Did you know that a silver-bronze bell was capable of such anger? Hear that refrain ‘Robbery, Robbery!’ It peals, but nobody will look for the robbers. People are afraid to get mixed up in the affairs of ghosts. Are these not wonderful telescopes, my love?”

  Yes, they were. We could read the facial expressions of people as far as two or three kilometers from us. But we felt ourselves watched, at the same time, by a person (not yet a ghost) only half that distance from us. It was Prince Henry the Pirate watching us from the Henry Watchtower, and he had his southwest-corner-of-the-wind telescope trained directly on us. His own look was one of anger and unease.

  “Yes, Prince Henry is looking directly at the two of us,” Thorn said, following my thought and observing what I observed.

  “No, he isn’t,” interposed Prince Franco the Outcast. “He’s looking at me. I’m not sure that he’s noticed the two of you at all.”

  So Prince Franco had come back to visibility. It had been an odd, even a taboo, interval for me. I hadn’t known whether I was supposed to have noticed that Prince Franco had come back. What if he believed that he was still invisible?