by Hugh Cook
"You must flee from Gendormargensis," said Sken-Pitilkin,
"because, unless you flee the city, you'll have to hack it out face to face with Thodric Jarl."
"I should worry?" said Guest.
"Of course you should worry!"
"Why?" said Guest. "Because I'll get blood on my clothes?"
"Because the blood will be your own," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"You have a choice. Bribe up big to buy off Jarl. Or flee. That's the limit of the choices you have at your own disposal, though Bao Gahai may have others."
This Bao Gahai was a dralkosh, a witch, whose devices had helped the Witchlord Onosh secure power and keep it. Rumor had it that Bao Gahai's strength was faltering, but many feared her still.
"Bao Gahai?" said Guest. "I'll not be seeking help from her."
"Yet she may give it," said Sken-Pitilkin. "She desires your presence, now, today, and to tell you as much is the greater part of my reason for coming here. Well. Are you ready to go?"
"I'm not going to see her!" said Guest.
But Sken-Pitilkin was persistent, and told the boy that Lord Onosh himself wished Guest to consult with Bao Gahai. So at length the young Weaponmaster allowed himself to be persuaded into the presence of the dralkosh who for so long had aided and counseled his father.
The audience took place in Bao Gahai's bedroom, which smelt of camphor, of cats, and of antiquity. Bao Gahai was sitting up in bed with a cheeseboard on her knees. On the cheeseboard was an assortment of nuts - she never ate cheese, for she was allergic to it, just as she was allergic to catmeat and the eggs of seagulls - and throughout the audience she occupied herself by opening those nuts with the aid of a hammer, a chisel and an autoptical brain-hook. By profession she was a pathologist, and though she no longer dissected dead flesh - excitement always got the better of her, and she invariably moved from the dead to the living - she was still possessed by the scarcely controllable urge to dissect something. Hence the nuts.
"As a mark of my favor," said Bao Gahai, once she was alone with the young Weaponmaster, "I have persuaded your father to let the Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite remain as your bodyguard, for all that he has recently led you into folly by the way of gambling."
"As a mark of your favor, if I truly have your favor," said Guest, astonished by his own boldness even as he spoke, "you might see to the cancellation of my gambling debts - and Rolf's."
"It's the cancellation of your life that should concern you," said Bao Gahai. "Not the cancellation of debt."
"You think me dead at the hand of Thodric Jarl?" said Guest, alluding to the duel to which he was doomed.
"I think that a strong likelihood, unless you leave the city," said Bao Gahai. "I suggest an extended journey of exploration in the Eastern Marches."
"That would be one way of thwarting Jarl's bloodlust," agreed Guest, with an entirely unwonted cheerfullness.
"You're not thinking of poisoning him, are you?" said Bao Gahai sharply.
"No," said Guest. "Of fighting him merely. Of killing him."
"You," said Bao Gahai, flicking a piece of walnut shell in Guest's direction, "have been taking opium."
"Opium?" said Guest.
"Yes, yes," said Bao Gahai. "You have been taking opium. Or else you have a fever."
"A fever? No? Why would you think so?"
"Because," said Bao Gahai, "there is never any way under any of the seventy suns of the fifty thousand hells of Bancharoth that you will ever kill Thodric Jarl in single combat."
"My sword has slaughtered down a multiple of men in combat," said the Weaponmaster staunchly, "and I have trained long and hard since my last slaughter."
"You?" said Bao Gahai, with a laugh barely to be distinguished from the sound of nutshells snappling. "You? You have trained? With whom? With Rolf Thelemite, maybe?"
"The very man," said Guest. "And he is a Rovac warrior, is he not?"
"For sure," said Bao Gahai. "Rolf Thelemite is a warrior, as a sparrow is a bird. But I think the gray-bearded Jarl to be a very eagle in his pride, and I think the sharpness of his talons a fit complement to that pride."
Then Bao Gahai started to laugh.
She laughed and she laughed. Her full-fledged throttling was hideous, sounding for all the world like a man being strangled. Guest Gulkan took Bao Gahai's laughter as a cue to leave, and swiftly made his escape. But Bao Gahai sent Sken-Pitilkin to persecute young Guest with books, and with papers, and with irregular verbs; and to divine his intentions if this should prove remotely possible. The dralkosh did not believe for one moment that Guest actually intended dueling Jarl, so presumed he had a secret plan in hatching.
But Sken-Pitilkin found no hint of the existence of any such plan; and found, too, that the boy Guest was decidedly reluctant to settle to his lessons, for his sword seemed to have fascinated him like a bewitching love.
A date for Guest Gulkan's duel with Thodric Jarl had been fixed, and on morning before that day of destiny - to be precise, on a morning some ten days after the Weaponmaster's return to Gendormargensis - Sken-Pitilkin came to Guest's quarters and found the boy busily sharpening the long razorblade of his sword's cutting edge.
"It is written," said Sken-Pitilkin, shivering in the unheated coldness of Guest Gulkan's room, "that an icicle is but a poor room-mate. Blood, boy! Why don't you heat the room?"
"I am hardening myself body and soul," said Guest, with a studied seriousness which appeared devoid of any hint of irony. "I am hardening myself to meet with Thodric Jarl. Besides, the exercise of the sword warms me to a sufficiency."
"But I am old," said Sken-Pitilkin, "and my bones chilled with my age. It is written that the old should not suffer from the folly of the young."
"Where is that written?" said Guest. "In a book?"
"Where else?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Books truth nothing," said Guest, studying his swordblade by the winterlight which shivered through the open window. "Anyone can write anything in a book."
"So they can," said Sken-Pitilkin, settling himself of a chair and pulling Guest's best solskin horseblanket around him.
"The date of your death, for example. In the books of the city's best bookmakers, that date is written as tomorrow. But there are other things well-written in the books of the world. Irregular verbs, for instance. What say you leave that sword, and make some verbs mere chopmeat with the razor of your intellect."
As scholars have always known, languages should ever be the first learning of the man who may be destined to hold great power. recognizing this truth, the unscholarly Lord Onosh had ordered Sken-Pitilkin to labor young Guest into a linguist. But Guest hated the foreign tongues, their hookworm alphabets and their irregular verbs; and, failing to recognize their imposition as a sign of his father's love for him, he reacted as if Lord Onosh had personally invented all foreign syllabaries for the express purpose of torturing an unscholarly boy.
"Your passion for verbs is obscene," said Guest, momentarily laying aside his sword.
"Obscene?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Surely," said Guest, sliding shut the translucent paper screens designed to exclude the winter air from his quarters.
"You lust for them. You lust like a very antelope. Irregular verbs! To grope, squeeze, suck and horsewhip such! A sick passion!
As for me, I'd rather kiss a toad. I'd think that the lesser perversion."
"Then that's unfortunate," said Sken-Pitilkin, "for your father wishes me to corrupt you with the choicests of my passions."
"Then let's at least leave the irregular verbs till I have killed myself my man," said Guest, again picking up his sword.
"Before battle, I must purify myself, and abstain from all perversions, irregular verbs included."
By way of reply, Sken-Pitilkin reached beneath the horseblanket which he had snugged across his knees, and took a book from beneath his skirt. These skirts were a foreign fashion, and Guest thought they must be desperately cold, though he was wrong in his thinking, for the
y were exceptionally practical and comfortable, and Sken-Pitilkin ever demonstrated great wisdom by wearing them. Having retrieved the book, Sken-Pitilkin began to unwrap its layers of waterproofing oil-cloth. Guest Gulkan pretended to ignore the book in favor of the admiration of his own reflection in his swordblade. By manipulating the blade he could screen out the greatness of his ears - and concentrate instead on eyes and lips. The young Weaponmaster twisted his lips into a ferocious sneer then rolled his eyes in imitation of a horse gone mad.
All of which severely tempted Sken-Pitilkin, who sorely longed to fetch Guest a sharp crack with his country crook. But, of course, the boy had long since outgrown such convenient discipline.
"If you will not light a brazier," said Sken-Pitilkin, cool even though he was snugged beneath the horseblanket, "at least pass me a little wine to warm my veins."
"What makes you think I've got wine on hand?" said Guest.
"When are you ever without it?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
This was a telling point, and Guest shortly uncovered some wine, and a block of rather grubby cheese to go with it. Knowing Bao Gahai to be allergic to cheese, Guest had acquired a great store of it, thinking to devise some plan for her poisoning. But he had failed in this enterprise, and so was put to the trouble of eating the stuff.
"Careful," said Guest, as Sken-Pitilkin helped himself to wine and cheese. "Be careful, lest you spill your drink on that precious book of yours."
"The book is mine," said Sken-Pitilkin, studying the cheese from several different angles, as if suspecting that it might be poisoned, "so let me do the worrying."
"I worry for my father's sake," said Guest. "For that book is the chiefest of his torturers. Should it die in the bloodflow of your downspilt wine, he'd be ten years searching for an instrument of equal punishment."
"This book is not torture but love," said Sken-Pitilkin, wiping the cheese on the horseblanket, "as I've told you not one time but fifty. Sit! Squat yourself down, boy, then let us begin." Guest Gulkan sat, and squared himself to face the book, looking for all the world like an inexperienced gladiator forced to do battle against a dragon with a toothpick as his sole armament. The book, of course, was Strogloth's Compendium of Delights.
The eminent Strogloth - and who he is is unknown, which is just as well, as there is many a young scholar who would dearly like to murder him - had searched great heaps of grammars for their irregular verbs, working in the spirit of one of those pornographers who reads immense libraries of law and religion with the sole purpose of extracting nuggets of brutal licentiousness.
The result? Spectacular!
"We will begin," said Sken-Pitilkin, chewing on the cheese, which was not too bad, "with the conjugation of the verb porp.
Which means...? Guest? Guest, what is meant by the word porp?"
"You tell me," said Guest, "for the irregular verbs are your perversion, not mine."
"A perversion, yes," agreed Sken-Pitilkin, speaking with great self-restraint. Then, feeling the boy had had things all his own way for just a little too long: "But are you not a pervert? Is not the killing of men and the taking of their scalps a perversion of sorts?"
"It is culturally appropriate," said Guest. "You told me so yourself when we studied ethnology."
"Ah, ethnology," said Sken-Pitilkin. "A mistake."
Here it must be conceded that Sken-Pitilkin had indeed made a grievous error when he introduced young Guest to the science of ethnology; for Sken-Pitilkin had forgotten how much of that science deals in great and enthusiastic detail with vivisection, cannibalism, head hunting, ritual murder, torture, louche initiation rites, and, above all, with sex customs.
"An ethnologist would say," said Guest, gaining enthusiasm as he saw he had the advantage, "that hunting men and killing them for their scalps is a vital part of my cultural heritage. For you as an uitlander scholar to criticize or condemn this practice would represent intolerable interference in the internal affairs of the Collosnon Empire."
"No," said Sken-Pitilkin, "you are wrong, for now you have confounded a theorem of ethnology with a practical political doctrine."
"I have not!" said Guest.
But he had, and Sken-Pitilkin explained his error to him in excruciating detail.
"You understand?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "No! Of course you don't! Never mind. Let us proceed to delight, for the irregular verbs yet await us."
"Irregular verbs!" sneered Guest. "My praxis is combat, not scholarship. My destiny is to do battle, to kill men, to drink their blood and take their scalps."
"Perhaps, perhaps," said Sken-Pitilkin. "But I rule this particular battlefield, so you will conduct yourself like a prisoner of war and obey me as the chiefest of your jailors. The verbs!"
"The verbs have awaited us for years already," said Guest.
"Let them wait till tomorrow for, with my man as yet to kill, I'm in no mood for study today."
"Words are weapons," said Sken-Pitilkin. "And tools. If you aspire to be surgeon to the body politic, then you should look to your armamentarium."
"Swords are weapons far better," said Guest. "For language cannot chop heads."Sken-Pitilkin studied the young man carefully, for he was sober yet spoke with a drunkard's enthusiasm. He was drugged. Or somehow intoxicated. Perhaps, just perhaps, he was intoxicated by his own over-enterprising ambition. Certainly he looked far, far too buoyant, considering that he was due to shortly face the murderous Thodric Jarl in a duel he was certain to lose. Sken-Pitilkin wondered if Guest had any true conception of the true nature of his own predicament.
"You know, my boy," said Sken-Pitilkin, "it would be very easy for you to make your peace with Thodric Jarl, if you did but humble yourself before him. Your life is full of so much promise that it would be foolish for you to do otherwise."
"My life," said Guest, "has no promise whatsoever."
"No promise?" said Sken-Pitilkin in surprise. "But don't you realize that you're surely going to end up with the imperial throne? That's your fate of a certainty, as long as you can master your temper and learn up a little diplomacy, and just a fragment of self-control to match it."
"You do but fantasize," said Guest, "for I am but a motherless boy with no future here or elsewhere, as all the world is at pains to tell me, thrice five times a day between dawning and darkness.
But even though I must live here as a worthless bastard with all the world leagued in scorn against me, I will not surrender my pride by crawling to Thodric Jarl, no, nor by bribing him either."
So spoke Guest Gulkan, revealing depths of resentment which surprised Sken-Pitilkin, who cast about for some form of words which might improve the boy's self-confidence.
"You lie so smoothly I wish I'd taught you the skill myself," said Sken-Pitilkin, failing to find the words he sought. "Very well. Since your mastery has already encompassed the art of the lie, and since today finds you lacking the courage to tackle the smallest of the irregular verbs, though it be a naked verb, and hairless, and feeble in its antiquity - then, that being so, let us turn our minds to the study of geography."
"Not if that means maps," said Guest.
"You are in luck," said Sken-Pitilkin, "for all my maps are back in my own quarters."
"All right then," said Guest. "Geography it is."
He was relieved that they were to abandon verbs for geography. For geography was not quite so very bad, at least when there were no maps to be studied. Sken-Pitilkin had trunkloads of maps, charts and plans showing the margins of earth and sea, the sewer systems of foreign cities, the whims of the wind, the fruiting of the harvests, key infestations of dragons and the geographical range of the platypus. But while Guest knew the theory of maps, he had yet to master the art of conjuring truth from a scrabblework of isograms. Usually, when given a mapwork problem, he would stare at the parchment all day and get precisely nowhere. Guest Gulkan had such difficulties partly because so many things on Sken-Pitilkin's maps were entirely alien to his experience. The sea, for instance. He was exasperate
d by geographical figurations which suggested that in places the sea ran on for thousands of leagues without interruption, because surely the existence of such an immensity of water was contrary to both reason and sheer probability.
And a shortage of illustrations made it difficult to match these alien places with their flora and fauna. The elephant and the platypus were both delineated explicitly in Sken-Pitilkin's Book of Beasts, the one being a very large mouse with deformed teeth and a nose of surpassing length, and the other being a rat in the form of a duck.
But what of the quokka? And the jellyfish?
Of these Guest Gulkan was unable to form any clear conception.
Yet he hoped never to meet such a monster as a jellyfish in the flesh, for it had been described to him as a translucent beast in the form of a blob from which depended a million fine-stranded tentacles which stung and killed. The monster was alleged to be otherwise without features, possessed of no eyes, nose, ears, arms, head, neck, trunk or external organs of generation. Guest Gulkan had met with the jellyfish twice already in nightmare, and on neither occasion had he been able to argue the brute out of killing him. On no account did he want to meet the thing a third time in the world of the real.
He said as much.
"Fear not the jellyfish," said Sken-Pitilkin. "A far more dangerous creature is the woman. Far many more men have been killed on account of women than ever met their deaths in the tentacles of a jellyfish. You in your own flesh look to become one of them."
"It's not come to killing," said Guest. "Not yet."
Though the young Yarglat barbarian knew there would almost certainly be a killing when he met with Jarl on the morrow, he had no appetite for argument with his tutor.
"Then don't let it!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Pay out your gold!
