The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It is a good enough tongue,” a Quevenes Indian called Melas said, “but it would be better if we had drummers to drum it and fluters to flute it. It lacks a little without them.”

  “But when I came upon you, Esteban, you were a boy of no more than thirteen years old,” Captain Dorantes said, “and that was thirty-two years after the year 1481 of Restored Salvation.”

  “Oh, that is a part of a different story,” Esteban said, “in which I had found and drunk of the fountain of youth and had become a young boy from it. And in my boyish guise I had wandered away from the Kingdom of Sonrai, and I have lost it this while.”

  “I'll tell you a tongue of an adventure that I had,” said the Quevenes Indian called Glaukos, “which concerned the devil and his ugly sister. This was the devil named Jube, not your own devil named Diablo, who is not a real person.”

  There were five of them sitting on the mud-sand of Matagorda Bay of the Gulf of Mexico, and the year was probably 1530 or 1531. They were the big black man Esteban of Azamor, and the two Spanish men Captain Dorantes and Captain Castillo. These three were the first great explorers to cross the North American Continent, but there was no one to call them great here. They were temporarily (for more than a year now) slaves of the Quevenes Indian people. And there were two Quevenes Indian men, Glaukos and Melas. All five of these were ‘head-taller men’, men who stood a head taller than ordinary humans. All five of them, as it happened, were starving to death. In all other things they were distinctive and did not resemble each other very much.

  This area was parched and its grass turned brown and black from lack of rain. Salt water had risen in all their water holes. Black buzzards were hanging in the hot air discussing whether this would be ‘carrion evening’ or not. They were weighing the five tall men with their hard eyes.

  “I was rolling stones with the devil,” Glaukos the Quevenes said. “I had a fine stone with six sides, all of them square, and the numbers on it were from one to six. But the devil (you can believe this or not, as you wish) had a stone with one-more-than-six sides to it, and on the extra side was the one-more-than-six number. As you know, we Quevenes have only the six regular numbers, and we have the saying that anything that cannot be counted with six numbers belongs to the devil. Well, that was all right for a saying, but now the devil was claiming that he had beat me at the stone rolling by rolling a number that I could not match, and that I owed him everything I owned, my fish-trap, my bow, my club, my shells and my colored stones, my life, and my death. ‘If I owe them then I will pay them,’ I said, ‘except the last two. I want to keep my life and my death away from you.’ We have more communication with Jube the devil than other tribes of people have because we are more evil than other people, more Jube's kind of people. ‘I will offer you a barter,’ the devil said. ‘Marry my sister who is the ugliest woman in the world, and I have not been able to find a husband for her anywhere. In barter for your marrying my sister I will wipe out all the debts you owe me and I will also give to you and your group the most favored land in all the world to live in.’ ‘I accept that barter,’ I said. So I married the sister of Jube the devil, and I and my group received this wonderful land, this bay, these islands, these long necks of land, the smaller bays and smaller islands. It's true that this is the most favored land in the world. We have it good here, and we starve only five moons of the year. What other tribe of people in all the world does not starve it least six or seven moons of the year? And for two moons every year, when the stinker fish are swarming, we become the fattest people in the world. And my wife being the ugliest woman anywhere doesn't bother me at all, since I am the ugliest man. I tell you that there is nobody who can get ahead of me on a barter, not even Jube, the devil. This is my own tall tongue. It is the life of myself and of all my group.”

  “It is a good tall adventure,” Captain Castillo acknowledged. This, as it happened, was in the middle of the five-moon period in which the Quevenes people always starved, and their one black and two white slaves would starve with them. Besides it being the regular starvation season, there was a terrible drought in the area this year. The Matagorda Bay (the name meant ‘Fat Bush Bay’ or, ‘Fat Thicket Bay') was ‘Skinny Bush Bay’ this season.

  Oh, there were sand fleas to catch and eat, but it takes 20,000 of them to make a good meal, and it takes five days to catch that many of them. The sand-mud shore of the Matagorda was very low, and it seemed as if they looked up at the hazy green water and its puny waves as they swished over the mud-sand. It was dry in that land and all of their sweet water holes had gone salt.

  “I will tell you all an heroic adventure of my own,” Captain Dorantes said. “It happened in the year 1520. Esteban will tell you that it could not have happened, that he was with me every moment of that year. But Esteban is mistaken. He has a forgetfulness of ninety-nine days during which I left him with a pawn broker in the town of Florence, in Italy. ‘Let us step into this pawn shop and see if we can buy a good used falcon cheap,’ I said to Esteban on that day. I am sorry that I just used a Spanish word, but I don't believe that the Quevenes have such a word or thing as pawn broker.”

  “We know what he is,” said the Quevenes called Melas. “He is one who barters in used property and used persons.”

  “Yes,” Captain Dorantes said. “I came to the pawn shop in Florence because, whatever people say, one thing is not always as good as another. What I wanted must be of the City-of-Florence sort, and no other variety of it would serve. When I walked into the Florentine pawn shop with Esteban, I gave a secret sign to the pawn broker. He nodded to me. Then he took a needle with a leather bulb attached to it and jabbed it into the arm of Esteban. Esteban immediately became glazed-eyed and out of his wits. The pawn broker took the lid off a clay jar that was taller than a tall man. Then he jabbed Esteban in the buttock with a different sort of needle; and Esteban, still out of his wits, jumped three varas up in the air and came down inside the clay jar. ‘One hundred ducats for him for a hundred days,’ the pawn broker said as he put the lid back on the big jar with Esteban inside it. ‘I agree,’ I told him, and the pawn broker counted out one hundred gold ducats to me. One of the hundred, however, was a Spanish gold ducat, and I had him replace it to me so all of them would be Florentine ducats.

  “ ‘I'll work him at night, of course,’ the pawn broker said. ‘I have a fulling mill for fulling cloth. It consists of a strong man with a hammer. He will be the strong man. I have a treadmill that squeezes honey out of the reed-canes from overseas that we begin to grow here. I have another treadmill that drives the grinders to mill wheat and barley and rye and millet. These slaves work very hard for me when they are in this mind-captured state, and they do not really suffer. They believe they are only dreaming that they are trudging on worse treadmills than those in hell and are suffering more hellishly.’ ”

  “That is all right,’ I said. ‘He is very strong.’ I took my hundred gold Florentine ducats then and I went to Spain. There was a civil war going on in Spain at that time and certain cities had risen against the realm. I served as captain for our brave Emperor of Spain to put down this rebellion. But I also intended to locate and possess the greatest treasure in the world which was buried somewhere under the Alcazar Fortress.

  “As captain of infantry forces, I broke the back of the rebellion of the against Spain. ‘Brave Captain Dorantes,’ the Emperor Charles told me, ‘For your services I will pay you almost any sum as reward. I'll give you twenty gold ducats for having saved Spain.’ ‘One hundred and twenty,’ I countered him. ‘Twenty-five,’ he came back at me. ‘One hundred and eighteen,’ I lowered my figure a little. But we finally fastened onto one hundred gold ducats of Spain as the reward for serving the country. I put them in my pocket along with the hundred gold ducats of Florence, and I went to the Alcazar Fortress and down into the cellar of it. Then I went down into the cellar under the first one, and then to a still lower cellar. I knew that the greatest treasure in the world was in the lowest cellar of th
e Alcazar. I also knew that the monster who guarded it could be bribed, though this was against the common belief that the monster was incorruptible. But he could only be bribed with the gold ducats of Florence. The father of the monster, a Florentine dragon who had been in the service of the Great Lorenzo, had taught that the only trusted specie in the world was the Florentine. So the monster would have nothing to do with the gold ducats of Spain or Naples or Venice or Constantinople.

  “I gave the monster (he was of the genus Draco) the one hundred gold ducats of Florence that I had received from renting out Esteban, and the monster declared me to be the new owner and master of the fortune. I looked at it through the little peep hole into the iron room which contained it. As I had no other place to put it, and no way to carry it away with me, we decided to leave it where it was. The monster transferred the key to the treasure room from one to another of his pockets in token of the changed ownership. So now I am the richest man in the world and the owner of the world's greatest treasure.”

  “What are ‘pockets’?” Glaukos asked. “How many of them did the monster have? Maybe that monster had a good thing going.”

  “I went back to Florence,” Captain Dorantes said. “And I paid the pawn broker back with the one hundred Spanish ducats. He grumbled that he would rather have Florentine ducats, but he accepted the Spanish. The pawn broker wakened Esteban by jabbing him again with a needle in his buttock, and Esteban leaped three varas up in the air and came down outside the clay jar in which he had been living. I set the good used falcon into Esteban's hands as he woke up. ‘It is a perfect hunting bird, just what I wanted,’ he said. He did not know that ninety-nine days had passed since we had first entered the pawn shop. He thought it had only been an instant.

  “The pawn broker gave me one of the motivating sort of needles just to show what a pleasure it was to do business with me. I have it yet. I can, but I will not, jab Esteban in the buttock with it and he will leap three varas into the air and land in a clay jar, though I don't know where the jar will have come from. This is the heroic account of how I became the owner of the greatest treasure in the world.”

  “If you make me leap three varas into the air, you will be the clay jar that I will come down in the middle of,” Esteban told Captain Dorantes, “and I will come down hard.”

  Matagorda Bay is not the hottest place in the world. It is no more than the third or fourth hottest ordinarily, though now it was a little bit hotter than that because of the long dry weather. It is not the most stinking place in the world. It is about the fifth most stinking. The mosquitoes there are not the largest in the world. They are only the eighth largest. But if the Matagorda was not the worst place in the world, neither was it the best. The official name of the place was Holy Ghost Bay, but the Holy Ghost had traded it off to Jube the devil. “I'll tell you the tongue how I became the greatest hunter in the world,” the Quevenes Indian named Melas said. “I had always been a great runner. I could run so far and so fast because I imitated the running animals: the wolf for the long hard run, and the mountain lion for the shorter bursts of steep speed. A man can sometimes run down a deer by himself, but he does it by running like the running animals. I ran so much like them that I became them. I ran down on four legs. I leaped. I pounced. I was the tireless wolf for most of the chase, and then I was the leaping mountain lion for the catch and the kill. Persons who saw me running in those ways thought that I was a wolf and a mountain lion. I felt myself to be them too. And so I was them. I would rise in front of the deer in my wolf form and send the deer running wildly across the prairie. And then I would circle around it and get ahead of it again. I was able to do this because when I tired myself out running as a wolf I would change, and then I would have the rested strength of the mountain lion still waiting for me to use. And then, when the myself-as-lion ran, the myself-as-wolf rested; but the itself-as-deer never got to rest. So I am able to drive most of the deer where I want them, and I kill most of them in my own area here. When I kill one, I bury it in the sand-mud for three days to rot a little and to become loose in the joints and easy to devour. And I did that with a deer just three days ago. I had forgotten about it, but now the smell of that deer comes to my nostrils. So we will dig it up and eat it when the sun has dropped one bow-length lower.

  “But first I must tell you that all deer are not as they seem. Some of them are human people. Young women and girls like to run in the form of doe deers, and they cannot change back into their human form while they are being hunted and kept on the move. It is a sort of summer moon-madness that compels them, some of them quite young girls, to run across the grassy plains and on the edges of the salt marshes as doe deers. And some of the young men like to run in the form of buck deers. I believe it is persons blowing on little cottonwood flutes who set them onto this notion of turning into deers and running. Seven years ago, a young woman of this region gave birth to a little fawn deer. And I think it must have been that both herself and her young man were running and playing in the deer form when they mated.

  “When you kill a human in the deer form, then it dies as a deer and you bury it as a deer. But when you dig it up to eat it three days later, you may find that it is the dead body of a human person. I myself have got several bleak surprises this way, once digging up the body of one of my daughters that I had buried as a killed deer, once digging up the body of one of my sons in the same kind of event. I have digged up five different human persons that I have buried as deers. They all have a whiff on them a little bit different from that of those who are both buried and dug up as deer. I think I catch that little-bit-different whiff now, from a mud mound only six paces from here. When the sun has dropped another half bow-length, we will dig it up and see which it is; but I will put another log on the fire now to be ready. And when we have dig it up and roasted it a little bit, we will eat it with either a sad or a happy stomach, whatever the case may be.”

  Well, they were hungry. They needed big meat of some kind.

  “I also have an heroic story-adventure to tell,” Captain Castillo said. “It is not that I myself am a hero either inside or outside of the story. It is that I have been in places that were themselves heroic, that I have washed in heroic sunshine and heroic water, and I have walked on heroic hills, aye, and in heroic skies. But what I am going to do now is live out a small heroic adventure rather than tell it. “John writes in his Apocalypse ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no sea. I believe that this passage as we have it is somehow incomplete. A seaman once spoke to me of this very passage ‘If there is no sea there, then I won't go.’ But I believe there will be a new ocean, one of sheer crystal, and that John somehow forgot to mention it. I am a man who is in love with water, even such rotten water as surrounds us here.

  “I have been called a dreamy man; and all my life I have dreamed (both sleeping and waking) of blessed and crystalline water of every form. When I became a doctor of medicine, this dream of sweet waters went through my healing. When I became a captain of soldiers, the oceanness of writhing waters ran through all my authority. I have walked on arching bridges of water; not of ice, but of water. I have climbed cliffs of water and lived in water castles. And I've gone down into watery caverns deeper than the dolphins can go.

  “I believe that water is the same as grace when it falls as rain on the earth. I believe that an insufficiency of sweet water is meant to be a pang and a punishment, and that the present salt swamps of the Matagorda are the salt swamps of Purgatory itself. But I also maintain that every person and group can say when his sentence and punishment has gone on long enough. I am about to say it now.

  “I myself have been given powers. I am able to lock up a sky so that neither rain nor grace may fall upon a region, though I have never done that. Now I believe that I have the power to open a clogged sky so that rain and grace may fall again.”

  “Not quite yet,” said the Quevenos man named Glaukos. “Let us s
et the rocks above the fire first to make a roof over it.” They had two very large flat rocks, and it took all five of the powerful men to work together to lift each of them. They lifted them and set them on a frame of sticks and stones about the height of a man above the hearth stone. It would shed rain pretty well. It would protect the fire.

  By the time the hearth was roofed, the armadillos had arrived. They stood and rattled their armor, and whimpered. There were five of these armadillos in a small tribe that had come for the last four days and rattled insistently. The men always knew what the little armored beasts wanted, that they should dig with their spade deeper into the sand-mud than the animals could dig. For four days, in response to their whimpering, Esteban had dug with the spade more than eight feet deep. Each day the animals had gone down to the water that seeped into the hole, and had found it salt, and had gone away sorrowful. If there was any sweet water at all it would ride on top of the heavier salt water. Today the armadillos came even less hopefully than before. If they did not find sweet water today they would die. So Esteban began to dig another deep hole. And Captain Dorantes and the Quevenes called Melas set out all their clay pots and bowls to catch the rain.

  “There is a small cloud,” Captain Castillo was saying. “I command that it become a big cloud and that it come over us. I command it as a natural element, and I pray to the Holy Ghost that it may happen.”

  “This man does not know how to command!” the Quevenes called Glaukos jeered. “It is I who command it! Tremble, cloud, and come.”

  “Let us all command, exhort, pray, and cajole the cloud at the same time,” Esteban boomed reasonably enough from the hole he was digging. And the five of them, the Captains Dorantes and Castillo, the African Black Esteban, the two Quevenes Indians Glaukos and Melas, all commanded and reasoned and prayed and cajoled. Then something began to happen with a jolt, as if the machinery of the sky had made a mechanical shift.