Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Yes, there is sometimes a touch of embarrassment in it,” the Prince said. “I do slip at times and not realize that I have become visible again. Or I come back gradually. And other species have a wider range of seeing than do humans. For instance, these intelligent bears here could see me before you could.”

  Prince Franco was no longer vague. With his glass he studied his brother with irony, and his brother Henry studied him in lowering anger.

  “Henry will have to leave his tower at once,” Prince Franco told us. “Baron O’Tolliver has just completed the last of his executions, and now our Prince Henry must try to top him in the originality and creativity of his own. He will do so in numbers, but will he do so in originality? And I have heard that some of Henry’s victims have escaped and must be substituted for. Things like that throw Henry into a turmoil.”

  “Whence?” Thorn asked Prince Franco, indicating his telescope.

  “Oh, from the Henry Tower, of course, though they are slightly inferior. Everything of my brother’s is slightly inferior. It infuriates my brother when I steal trinkets of his, and it’s quite easy to do. Since we look exactly alike, I come and go pretty much as I wish. I must only be careful that I am not pent up in an inescapable place when I go vague.”

  What seemed to be the last of Baron O’Tolliver’s executions was a striking vignette of a man being torn to pieces by sixteen horses, eight of them pulling with great force on each leg. Oh, but he was a muscular and well-made man! Those horses heaved and strained, or they seemed to. Then I noticed an oddity about the act. Those sixteen horses were ham actors, and nothing is hammier than a trained horse. These horses were trained especially for this act. They were putting on a show of pulling, but they were pulling hardly at all. Oh, and then the man’s left leg came off and eight of the horses went galloping away with it. It took the crowd a moment to realize that the leg that had come off was an artificial leg. The man was a peg-leg clear to the hip. He laughed and hopped after the horses that were dragging his leg away, and the crowds laughed too. It is good to have a comic touch after all the bloodiness. I doubted that Prince Henry would have the light touch with any of his executions.

  And now the Prince Henry executions were on.

  The first of Prince Henry’s victims was wearing a mask, and it was a perfect mask of the seaman Sebastian Jamaica. Then one of the executioners removed the mask for a moment, and the real face of the man was not like that of Sebastian at all.

  “I wonder what his real voice is,” I asked.

  “Oh, it will be his own voice, Long John Tyrone,” Prince Franco said. “There is not as much hokus in these things as people are inclined to believe. You yourself were apparently taken in by the voices you heard coming out of the Whispering Room when you were going to the Wine Room. If you’d been able to hear them better, you’d have recognized the conversations. Prince Henry records all the conversations of prisoners in the Whispering Room. When he discovered that his wife, the Princess Angela, had released the bunch of you on her own authority, he went to the Whispering Room and played back your conversations to hear whether there was anything subversive or informative in them. He was in the Whispering Room when you and Thorn went to the Wine Room, a close encounter. Now he has had to scrounge up sixteen (or less) substitutes to execute. He got the best mask-man on the continent to fix up masks, but the mask-man was able to get a good look at only about half of you.”

  There was some business with dogs about the execution of the person who was wearing the Sebastian Jamaica mask, and I chose not to look at it.

  “What is your relationship to your brother Prince Henry?” I asked Prince Franco boldly. An historian must often ask bold questions.

  “We are full-blood brothers, historian John. That is our relationship. I avoid all other relationships, especially now when he has all the power in his hands and has put me under sentence of death.”

  “And what is your relationship to your brother’s wife?” I asked still more boldly.

  “I covet my brother’s wife,” Prince Franco said.

  The executions were crude, to my mind at least. I had heard that the high people of Klepsis, and Prince Henry in particular, took great pride in their executions. There was much pomp to them, but I could not see anything to take pride in. There were the One Thousand Trumpets that raised their brazen and blaring voices before and after each announcement. But, from my place, and scanning things with my excellent glass, I estimated this one thousand really to be no more than about a hundred and twenty trumpets and trumpeters.

  “Hearken all to the beheading of a traitor to the realm and a partisan of the interdicted Prince Franco the Outcast,” came the announcement. (No amplifiers were used on Klepsis; the proclaimers were huge-chested men who had been trained in loud proclaiming since their childhoods.) “This is the seaman and schemer named Hogson Roadapple whose death we call you all to witness. May the death he suffers here be only the first of the ten thousand deaths he will suffer in Hell in just his first hour there.”

  Hogson was the second of the victims of Prince Henry. I believe that it was Hogson Roadapple himself that they had there now. He had let himself be retaken somehow. The blade of the black-masked executioner was burnished to a high silver, and it caught the light of all the torches and spotlights, of the two moons that were bright in the sky, and of the distant Sun Proxima. The burnished blade descended to the merry chortling of calliope music, and the head rolled. Men quickly raised it up on the point of a heavy spear. Then the head grimaced and spoke, and a little wave of horror swept over the people who were close enough to hear him. After the head had spoken, it closed its eyes and died.

  Prince Franco was chuckling: “He cursed them with my own curse out of his severed head, and they reeled back in horror. So we have psyched them a little bit with that set-to. Those evil ones are more and more in fear of me now.”

  “How do you know what words he spoke?” I asked. Prince Franco looked at me in amazement.

  “You mean that you cannot read mouth?” he sputtered. “You, an historian, cannot read mouth? I would guess that ninety percent of all primary history is garnered by reading mouth at a distance through a spy glass, often through a Glotz-Kimmel glass that sees through walls. Long John, there is really no other way to discover true history in its delicto moments. Thorn, this poor historian belongs to you, does he not? Teach him to read mouth at least.”

  “Yes, I will. I hadn’t realized that he was so inept in his own trade.”

  “What is your relationship to Tharrala Thorn here?” I asked the Prince in what I believed was a sly manner.

  “I am her uncle,” Prince Franco said. “Also her Dutch uncle. And, to some extent, her funny uncle. And I am her godfather. The next victim—I thought for a moment that it was a girl from your party, but I see that it is a substitute.”

  It was a girl in Terpsichore Callagy’s red-and-gold wrapper, but it was not Terpsichore. She was thicker than Terpsichore. The girl, the pseudo-Terpsichore Callagy (she was a stronger and more determined person than Terpsichore), was to be crushed to death by elephants. Well, Prince Henry did have a prime herd of those beasts. The girl was staked out on her back, hand and foot. Then a large elephant was brought to stand on her with all four feet.

  “Women are much more durable at this than men are,” Thorn told me. “I am a one-elephant girl myself, but this will go far beyond that.”

  When the beast was led off her and the executioners came to check whether she was dead, the girl erupted from her staked-out position. She pulled those four stakes right out of the ground. She rose resurgent to her feet and, with arms akimbo, she cursed her executioners vehemently.

  I began to get into this business of mouth-reading with enthusiasm. I understood half of the girl’s fiery cursing, and I guessed at the other half.

  They staked her down again with heavier and longer stakes. They hammered her head with the same mallet they drove the stakes with. They placed a long, wide, and very heav
y plank across her body. They brought out four elephants and had two of them stand on each end of the plank for three minutes. I found that the odds on the girl surviving even this were two-to-one. She seemed to be known in the revolutionary or some other movement.

  “They’ll not kill her, not her,” people gave the opinion. “It will take more than elephants to kill her.” The executioners led the elephants a few paces off her then and came to see whether she was really dead. And once more the girl erupted from the ground. She tumbled the big plank off her body, pulled the four larger stakes out of the ground, rose to her feet, and cursed her executioners sevenfold.

  “Oh, oh, oh!” Thorn cried out. “Poor stubborn Ischyrognomon! Will they run out of girl first, or will they run out of elephants first?”

  “They will run out of girl first,” Prince Franco said sadly. “Castle Ravel-Brannagan will never run out of elephants.”

  They staked the girl down again with three big stakes at each of her hands and feet. They banged her much more relentlessly on the head with the same stake-driving mallet; and this may have been decisive. They brought four more elephants, making eight in all. They had four of the elephants stand on each end of the plank for a full nine minutes. Then they led the elephants away and came to the girl to examine her. She was dead.

  The usually stolid Prince Franco was crying. The girl must have been a partisan of his. “She is a true daughter of Klepsis,” the Prince said then, “stubborn, tough, resurgent, fearless, but not of towering mentality. A little bit stupid, really, to be so decidedly in support of such an indecisive leader. Long John Tyrone and Tharrala Thorn, come along with me for a while. We have an important and happy item of business to transact.”

  “I want to see the execution of the one who is rigged in place of me,” I said.

  “I believe that he will be very near the last one of them,” the Prince stated, “and possibly we will be able to return in time for it. But our happy item of business is more important than the executions. Come.”

  We went down a flank of O’Grogan’s Mountain. We went through an almost impenetrable wasteland, a mixture of rock and swamp and jungle, that was nevertheless very near to the Castle. We went into a large monument or walk-in tomb, and we saw an old man with a powerful and interesting face. He was sitting on a transparent coffin from the old days of Klepsis glassblowing. It had been blown as a single bubble.

  “Come you now, that all things may be done by law and order and ancient custom,” the old man said. “Here is a Green Robe of the order of Saint Klingensmith. Begin it, Green Robe!”

  The Green Robe was a large and friendly looking man, with both his hair and his beard of that flaming, vulgar, orange-yellow-red color.

  “To God the Father glory be,

  And to His Son in Kingdom Come,

  And to the Spirit One in Three,

  Nunc, et in omne saeculum.”

  So did the Green Robe intone it in a musical way. This was a charade, and I love charades.

  “Do not be nervous,” Thorn said to me. “It will be easy. It will be quick. And it will be wonderful for all our days.”

  “Oh, will you take or will decline?

  Or will you stay or will you go?

  Now comes it to the mine-and-thine.

  Do you accept?”

  “Accipio.”

  The Green Robe had intoned all of this except the last word of it, and Thorn and I had spoken that last word together, “Accipio,” though how it happened that such a word, which was strange to me, tumbled out of my mouth is something that I do not know. The charade became more interesting.

  Prince Franco gave a gold ring to me and one to Thorn. Thorn put hers on my finger, and it was so loose it wobbled. I tried to put mine on her finger, and it would not go.

  “Oh, how grotesque, my love,” Thorn chirped. “My fingers are thicker than yours are. Let us reverse them.”

  We reversed the rings, and then each of us had our fit. What is the primary meaning of rings in charades? Something, something, but I could not remember it. Then the Green Robe intoned another verse:

  “Oh, be to each a unity,

  And flesh of flesh and bone of bone.

  All blessing to be on thee! And thee!

  Conjúngo vos in Matrimón.”

  I knew that it was very clever, though I did not quite understand it. The charade seemed to be over with. Well, I would figure it out or I would give up on it and ask somebody for the answer.

  “Come again later in the night and talk to me,” said the old man with the powerful and interesting face, he who was sitting on the transparent glass coffin. “I am in better form later in the night. And here is your pedigree, pup. You belong to the family now.”

  The old man gave me a paper filled with names and generations. “This is possibly the first scrap of written history that I have found on Klepsis,” I said to myself.

  “Oh, history,” said the old man, just as if I had spoken the word out loud. “And historians. I sent for you as historian, but can you do anything about the Klepsis jumble? Historians are the only ones who do not know what is happening when it is happening, and do not know what has happened when it is over with. And there is much happening here right now.”

  What did this old man mean when he said to me, “I sent for you as historian?”

  “We will be back, father of my fathers,” Thorn told the old man. We left the big walk-in tomb then and went back towards the foregrounds of the Castle, to the area of the action.

  “I still haven’t guessed the answer to the charade,” I said as we walked. “What is it?”

  “Oh, we just got married, my wobble-brained love. We just got married,” Thorn told me.

  “Oh? What? That’d fit the charade all right. It would be a valid answer, but I’d never have guessed it. Do you mean married in fact?”

  “In fact and in fancy, my love, and in all ways. It isn’t that I’m all that taken with you. It’s just that—well, I’ll be able to manipulate you better if I’m married to you, and you are one of the pieces that we’ll have to manipulate. Oh, don’t look so glum, my love. I will guarantee you that you’ll enjoy it.

  “I had heard of “getting married” before, of course. I am an historian. But I could not quite recall all the details or meanings of it.

  From the almost impenetrable wasteland and swamp and thicket and Tartarus of stones on our right hand as we came from the big walk-in tomb and monument to the area of action nearer the Castle, there was the sound of digging. There was the sound of spade and shovel, of mattock and rock-splitter, of muck-shovel and of bailing-bucket. It was the sound of digging through sand and quicksand, loam and muck and slate-mud and gumbo clay all in the same place. Somebody was digging in the near dark in that thicketed wasteland. But who, and why?

  The gala had made considerable inroads into the provisions. The huge barbecued whale, lying on its side, was now a half-empty shell of its former self. It was a cavern. Lights flickered inside it. It looked like a theatre with a strange, slotted, fleshy door to enter by. There were torches and whale-oil lamps burning inside the hulk, and somebody inside the carcass was speaking compelling words.

  At the execution site we were barely in time. I found that it was my self, the last of the victims, who was ready to be done in.

  “I must leave you two, Princess Tharrala Thorn and Duke Tyrone,” said Prince Franco the Outcast, and he dashed off somewhere.

  “What, am I a duke now, Thorn?” I asked. “Is that a part of this ‘getting married’ business?”

  “Yes, you are a duke now. And it is a part of your getting married to the Princess Tharrala Thorn.”

  “Why am I not a prince if I am married to a princess?”

  “Because you are only my consort, until somehow and someday you seize the power of a prince. And you are not immediately a prince because all princes on Klepsis, except Prince Henry, have been put under sentence of death by this same Prince Henry.”

  That man about to
be executed was my self. There was no facial detail in which he was not. And then I saw that he was no more my self than the sturdy and stubborn Ischyrognomon had been Terpsichore Callagy. This man was too thick to be me, too tall, too strong, too springy, too robust. But he was wearing my face, and he was bawling out in approximately my voice:

  “Kill me, kill me, and the very stones will rise as rebels against you to take my place. Kill me, and there will be ten more sturdy men in place of me.”

  His strange form of execution was announced to trumpets and calliope skreeing. He was to be taken up to the top of the absolutely taboo En-Arche Bell Tower, and he was to be hurled down from it to his death.

  But that other and more robust me, standing defiantly in the circle of strongmen executioners, seemed to be surrounded by a lightning of spirit, and he made them all quail back from him a little bit. And he bawled out in my almost-voice:

  “You believe that I am weaponless? I have but to ask the True Spirit of Klepsis, and the weapon will come to my hands. I do ask it. It does come!”

  And a Ricco-recoil handgun (it was a handgun for a man who was man enough to handle it) was moving through the air towards the defiant prisoner who was on the execution spot. The man, the more robust me, grabbed it. He held it in both hands, and he—

  (“Oh, it is only Prince Franco gone vague again,” Thorn whispered to me. “He brought the weapon to your double.” “But who is my robuster double, and how did he get that way?” I asked. “Oh, maybe it was the first disguise he thought of, to look like you. He must have seen you with Franco or myself. And it would give everything away for him to die with his own face.”)

  —and he fired the gun with a booming chatter. He mowed all those strongmen executioners down. Then suddenly there were a hundred weapons being fired, or a thousand. There were presumably two sides to this sudden battle, but who could tell friend from foe?