Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “He is a Tellurian giant, the creature who lives in the middle of the world,” they all said. “See his black face from living in the middle of the world! I bet he knows more stories than the storyteller does, living in the middle of the planet the way he does. And he has gold. All underground dwellers have gold. Give us pieces of gold, Tellurian giant!”

  And Gold Coast O’Mally gave each of the children a big gold coin. All of his pockets were full of them.

  “Ah, Long John the Historian, come on down with us and bring your slave girl with you,” Gold Coast said. “We’ll plug this passage behind us. We’ve hit it rich, real rich. The treasure maps were true.”

  Princess Thorn and myself followed Gold Coast O’Mally down into the passage that was under the whale. We plugged the passage behind us.

  We know, though, that one of the stories the Tarshish storyteller told is true, and we know which one it is.

  It’s not the one you think.

  SIXTH CANTO

  Treasure Caves of Klepsis

  This is the ancestry and descent of the first and foremost house of Klepsis, the high house of the Brannagans. This is the “pedigree” that the old man gave me in the walk-in tomb just after I had gone through a charade that was not in fact a charade, with Tharrala Thorn.

  Christopher Brannagan is known as the Father of Klepsis. He was a peg-legged man, and it has been stated that he had no children of his own. In my own person and ghost I deny this. I had several children; my daughter, the only one on Klepsis, is the only one that pertains to this account, my daughter Margaret.

  I, Christopher Brannagan, married Margaret Summertime. She had been named Margaret Thyme, and she was the widow of John Summers, who was one of the party of Christopher Brannagan on the first arrival at Klepsis. Margaret compounded a surname, Summertime, for herself from Summers and Thyme. This is the first generation of Klepsis.

  Margaret Brannagan was the daughter of Margaret Summertime-Brannagan, the wife of the great Christopher Brannagan. It is said that this Margaret was the daughter of John Summers and not of Christopher Brannagan, but are those who say it sure of their facts? I say that she was my daughter. This daughter Margaret married Januarius O’Grogan from Tarshish. This is the second generation of Klepsis.

  The children of Margaret Brannagan and Januarius O’Grogan were:

  Juda O’Grogan-Brannagan, a gentle man who married Rose Lunaria.

  Ruben O’Grogan-Brannagan, a pirate who went and ravaged World Abounding nine times.

  Levi O’Grogan-Brannagan. Levi was Bluebeard the Pirate. He had thirteen wives and more than one hundred children from the thirteen of them.

  Simeon O’Grogan-Brannagan. Simeon accumulated and buried somewhere near Ravel-Brannagan Castle on Klepsis ten thousand large chests filled with gold and gemstones.

  Dan O’Grogan-Brannagan, a cruel and crafty pirate.

  Nefthal O’Grogan-Brannagan. He put ten thousand persons to the sword.

  Gad O’Grogan-Brannagan. The “Gold of Gad” is proverbial.

  Aser O’Grogan-Brannagan. He gave up piracy (when the game was about worn out) and became an Ocean Marshal.

  Issachar O’Grogan-Brannagan. He was killed while still a youth.

  Zabulon O’Grogan-Brannagan. He also was killed while only a youth, but he did a lot of killing of his own first.

  Benjamin O’Grogan-Brannagan. Benjamin has gone into the Klepsis story as a “good-guy pirate.” He did his own publicity, but he was not as good as he painted himself.

  Joseph O’Grogan-only. (“No,” Margaret testified for the record once. “Joseph was my son only by adoption. He is the son of Januarius by his previous marriage. He was the eldest of my tall sons, though from his boyish look you’d take him for the youngest. He and Juda are the only ones who never broke my heart.”)

  There was also a daughter of Margaret and Januarius, Dina O’Grogan-Brannagan. All of the sons except Juda and Joseph were pirates, as was their sister Dina. These were the high pirates of the great age of piracy on Klepsis. Their eleven tall ships, named the Ruben, Levi, Simeon, Dan, Nefthal, Gad, Aser, Issachar, Zabulon, Benjamin, and The Dina O’Grogan, were the terror of all the oceans and continents of Klepsis; and they also had themselves transported to sail and ravage the seas of almost every other planet. The crews of The Dina O’Grogan were more savage than the crews of any of the other tall pirate ships of this family. This is the third generation of Klepsis.

  John Hethite Brannagan was the son of Juda O’Grogan-Brannagan and Rose Lunaria. For wife he took Sheba McSherry. He was murdered however by:

  David Ravel the Elegant Interloper. David not only took the life of John Hethite, but he took his wife’s, Sheba McSherry’s, also. This was the tangled fourth generation of Klepsis.

  Cloud Ravel-Brannagan was the son of David Ravel and of Sheba McSherry. Cloud’s own wife was Brigid Hearn. Cloud represents the fifth generation of Klepsis.

  Cloud Ravel-Brannagan and Brigid Hearn had three children:

  Princess Placidia Ravel-Brannagan. She married an adventurer named Tarquin Thorn who had some idea of being the second Elegant Interloper in the Brannagan line. He failed in this, however, and was murdered by one of his brothers-in-law. Princess Placidia and Tarquin Thorn had only one child, a daughter named Tharrala. She was driven into the wilderness for a sin too unspeakable to mention.

  The other two children of Cloud Ravel-Brannagan and Brigid Hearn were the twin brothers:

  Prince Henry Ravel-Brannagan the Pirate. He is a great robber, but he is not personally an ocean pirate. He doesn’t know one end of a ship from the other. His wife is the Princess Angela Gilmartin-Ravel-Brannagan.

  Prince Franco Ravel-Brannagan the Outcast. Prince Franco has no wife.

  These children of Cloud Ravel and Brigid Hearn are the sixth generation of Klepsis.

  Princess Tharrala Thorn says that she is the seventh generation of Klepsis, but I, the old ghost, and Prince Franco the Outcast, and possibly Princess Angela, are the only ones in the family who will have anything to do with her. She stays mostly in the wilderness for her unspeakable sin (I do not know what it is, but she says she will tell me some day), and she is hardly well enough established to be a generation. If she wants to be considered a generation, let her generate!

  Nevertheless, she is a favorite of mine. I have committed unspeakable sins myself … This is written by my own ghostly hand.

  Christopher Begorra Brannagan

  The Father of Klepsis

  We were down in the galleries and arcades and passages and caves and caverns, partly natural limestone, partly hewn rocks. Going by the treasure maps, Gold Coast and his band had dug out one old shaft at one end of the complex. Then they’d traveled two hundred meters of the galleries without going into any of the side passages, and had then dug their way up through a filled-in shaft that had once been topped by an inn called “The Queen-of-the-Ocean Haven and Hostel for Tired and Irregular Farers of the Heights and the Deeps.” The map showed the “Sign of the Whale” as the sign of this old inn. But the whale in which Thorn and myself had found haven had been roasted only that afternoon. Was it a symbol after the fact? Was it a female, and could she be called the “Queen of the Ocean”?

  “Sure she was a female,” Thorn said. “Can’t you tell things like that? Even gross Prince Henry wouldn’t serve tough male whale at a gala.”

  With Gold Coast O’Mally were eight other friends who had sailed together on The Dina O’Grogan for however short a time. They were:

  Terpsichore. She now wore seaman’s tattered blue instead of her red and gold wrapper. “Oh, this is the soul of art itself!” she gushed with the same rich gushing sound that gold coins make when poured out. “There is no art anywhere like thrown-open chests of gold, except piles of loose gold. Oh, magic art! To see such as this I was born!”

  Jerome Whitewater. He had old ties with the first family of Klepsis. But did he have old ties with these caverns also?

  Bartolomo Portuguese. He h
ad the pseudonym of an old Gaea pirate, and he had the look of one. But he was from Tarshish originally. He wore his hair in a tarred pigtail, and he had a tailpiece at the back of his seaman’s trousers. He’d had all these attributes when I first saw him, but it was only now that he gave me an uneasy feeling.

  Hektor Lafcadio, the Greek God. He was a statue of a sort, of the sort that had not yet shown much real life.

  Kate Blithespirit, the Amazon from Camiroi. Aye, but she was a dropout from Camiroi. The heartiest friend ever, though.

  Fairbridge Exendine, the Penny Philosopher from the Trader Planet Emporion.

  Sebastian Jamaica. He was of Klepsis, a Klepsicle.

  Sparaticus. The green-eyed one, not the blue-eyed one.

  Eight of them; and Gold Coast and myself made ten of those who had arrived on The Dina O’Grogan. So seven others: Conchita O’Brian, Otis Landshark, Kwong Ti, Karl-the-Great Okra, Frank Shea, the blue-eyed Sparaticus, and Hogson Roadapple, had been killed by Prince Henry’s killers.

  Hektor Lafcadio was cutting the names of those seven on blank plaques in the wall. Several hundred names were already there and the title above them was, Those Who Have Died In Irregular Seas And Skies.

  “We have words to put on the plaque of Conchita,” said three parley birds who flew in. “She was a specialist in coded technology, but only we parley birds really understood her code. We have cold qualms about her dying so lively and so young. She is a cult figure to us, and these are cult words.”

  “No, no, no!” the Ghost of Brannagan roared as he made an appearance. “We’ll have no more qualms nor cultishness on Klepsis.” But Hektor Lafcadio quietly cut the cult words of the parley birds for Conchita.

  Ah well, those of us who were left made up a happy band. And Tharrala Thorn, my princess with the flaming orange-yellow-red soul, became the ornament of the band. Gold Coast O’Mally included all of us share-and-share-alike in the project of the caverns, even though it was he who had the treasure maps and who had followed the quests all his life.

  I didn’t know whether these gallery-caves held the “ten thousand large chests filled with gold and gemstones” that had been accumulated by the pirate Simeon O’Grogan-Brannagan, or whether they held the proverbial Gold of Gad of Simeon’s brother, the pirate Gad O’Grogan-Brannagan, or whether this was the treasure of the other nine pirate brothers and sister.

  These large chests in the caverns were very large, shoulder-high to a tall man, and their height was their smallest dimension. Fifty or so of them had been opened at random by Gold Coast and his friends, and they were all full of gold and gemstones that cascaded out when their lids were thrown back. They had been stuffed full-up even under the bowed lids. It was mostly gold coin, though there were also brow-arching and blood-wakening artifacts.

  ‘There is history in these gold coins at least,’ I told my own person. ‘The scripts on them are about the first written history I have found on Klepsis, though hardly any of the coins are from Klepsis. Maybe the dragon coins are from here.’

  I was very pirate-gold-conscious just then, having read, while in the whale, the “Ancestry and Descent of the Foremost House of Klepsis” as previously given to me by (possibly) the Ghost of Christopher Brannagan himself, having gotten a hint in that document of the piracies of the eleven high pirates of the third generation of Klepsis, and having moreover just heard the story “The Bloodiest Piracy of the Ship The Dina O’Grogan” from the Tarshish storyteller (it was his best story). This all excited me because I had just become related to the eleven great pirates of Klepsis by marriage and interlopership. And I had sailed on that ship The Dina O’Grogan herself for several hours of the afternoon of the day past. I had even been named by Prince Franco the Outcast as one of the officers of that ship.

  And I had also heard the story “The Treasure Caves of Klepsis” from that same Tarshish storyteller (it was his second-best story). These two stories (the finest in his repertoire) were enough to whet the appetite-of anyone for high piracy and treasure.

  “Are these the ten thousand large chests of gold and gemstones of the great pirate Simeon O’Grogan-Brannagan, do you suppose?” I asked Gold Coast O’Mally and the rest of them, “or is this the proverbial gold of Simeon’s brother Gad?”

  “What do you know about these things, notable historian?” Gold Coast asked me. “All of us have agreed to pool our knowledge of the res piratica—of the pirate ‘thing’ or ‘institution.’ How about yourself?”

  So I related to them all that I knew about these things and also let them read the document that Brannagan’s Ghost had given to me.

  It has been stated in books of elementary science and of explanations for the young, that gold and gemstones do not shine from their own light but only from reflected light. But the gold and gemstones in the caverns did shine of their own light. They glittered, they gleamed, they sparkled. In sufficient mass they do kindle themselves and shine by their own light, and it may be that these caverns are the only place where that sufficient mass of them is to be found.

  The people also had begun to kindle and shine by their own light from being inspired by the cavern treasure. There is this gold-and-gemstone light in every person, and it only needs to be evoked. All of them, all of us, shone through our bones and our skins. We gleamed. We glittered.

  The Princess Thorn added considerable knowledge to the golden caldron. She said that the signature-and-seal “T.E.H. C.O.P.O.K.” stood for “The Eleven High Covenanted O’Grogan Pirates of Klepsis.” So, treasure of them all was here. This signature-and-seal was to be found on every one of the maps.

  My brain itched to have a copy of the covenant that the eleven high pirates had agreed on among themselves. I’ll not be content till I have read this pledge of the Eleven.

  And the number eleven was prominent in these galleries. There were eleven side passages in these galleries, each of them guarded by a very large dog of non-Gaea species. They looked like Astrobe mastiffs. Gold Coast and his friends had just decided that these large dogs were mechanical dogs, but the things seemed no less threatening for that.

  The dogs became activated whenever one of us came within three meters of one of them. The red lines behind their eyes would shine and pulsate, and they made very loud sirenlike growls and howls in their throats. Their mouths would loll open to reveal several hundred frightful fangs in each of them.

  “Good God! Those are homing rockets in their mouths, rows of them!” Bartolomo Portuguese howled, and Bartolomo was a knowledgeable weapons man. “Those other fangs are Incinerating Ray Attack Nodules. Those third ones are Beauclaire Blasters. And these nozzles are of Instant Inactivating Nerve Gas. Notice their shape, and how they will throw a figure-eight spray! All of the dogs are swiveled three hundred sixty degrees. How do you say, ‘We are friends. We don’t mean to intrude,’ to a mechanical dog?”

  “I suppose that I could probably deactivate them,” my Princess Thorn spoke in a musing way, as if trying to recall the details of something. “We had one such dog in the Castle when I was a small child. It was the best friend I had in this world, an indication of what my early childhood was like. You folks may not realize it, but these ‘Deviced Dogs’ are probably almost as valuable as the treasures they guard. They were made about a hundred twenty years ago by an artisan and gadgeteer of genius who took ‘Prester John’ as his nom de gadgetier. These have now become collector’s items for the very rich and exclusive people of all the planets and private asteroids. Of the six known Deviced Dogs, out of the nineteen that were made by Prester John, you could hardly buy one for a billion thalers. And here are eleven of the fabulous lost dogs all together in this cavern.

  “And I will tell you this about them. They will grow used to you. After you are around them for a little while you will become ‘people who belong’ to them. You will be able to make friends with them in time. Work around them for several days (after all, there are thousands of chests of gold and gemstones in the main gallery that are not guarded b
y dogs), but do not for a while come too close to them and their treasures. Things will work themselves out in rapport and friendship.”

  “Thank you for the advice, Princess Thorn, but it will not be easy to follow,” Gold Coast O’Mally croaked in an avid and nervous voice. “Those glittering heaps and hills are like magnets to my eyes and hands. They draw me, they draw me! Forbidden gold has an attraction that free gold can never match. I want to revel in those heaps right now, and I do not care all that much whether a mechanical dog should gun me down from behind.”

  Indeed, some of those glittering gold mountains were like magnets. The thousands of chests and barrels full of fortune in the main gallery were one thing. The bare and uncontained gold in heaps and piles and small mountains behind the arsenaled dogs was another thing entirely. Who could resist them? There were quite a few human skeletons among that heaped gold behind the eleven contrived guard dogs. Those dogs, activated and swiveling, were killers. We were not the first people to find our way into these treasure galleries. “But, with luck, we may be the first intruding people to come out of them alive,” Kate Blithespirit the Amazon added the hope of all of us.

  Kate Blithespirit was attracted to something more than the riches, however.

  “There is something full of rotten power in this side passage here,” she said. “I could possibly trade all the treasures for it. It is rot and shame and death. But oh, the power of it, the attraction; it’s hellish.”

  “This is the side passage of the Pirate Levi O’Grogan-Brannagan,” Thorn said. “He was the Bluebeard the Pirate who had thirteen wives and more than a hundred children by them. His body is here. The bodies of seven of the eleven covenanted pirates are in their guarded side passages here. Levi (Bluebeard) O’Grogan-Brannagan has more stories about him than any of the others. The rest of them are reduced to mere skeletons, but Levi Bluebeard has hunks and globs of flesh still on his bones, putrid and rotting flesh. He became a leper in the last decade of his life.