“This I will not do,” Melchisedech told him. “I have said ‘be thou opened’, and you are opened. One would have to be perverse to object to being cured.”
“Of course I'm perverse,” the man said. “That's the whole idea. I can move worlds whether I am bound or loosened, but I can move them in a crooked way only when I am bound. I want to be furious and frustrated! That is part of my mission. If I have not this goad of fury, I will be a cheerful man. And if I am a cheerful man, the destruction that I have sworn to do will not be done.”
“Be cheerful. Be opened. Stutter no more,” Melchisedech said. “And destroy no more. This turns you from an evil genius to a good genius, or at least a complacent genius. Out of here, companions, out of here!”
Duffey and Brannagan were instantly out of there, out of that time and out of that town. They were already reading the work order for their next mission. And Casey Gorshok Szymansky, where was he? Oh, he would be along in a moment. Sometimes he loitered a bit as he dawdled over the curiosities of the world. Sometimes he seemed completely unable to keep his hands off of this thing or that thing. But he would be along in a moment. Likely enough if some Argo Master gave the brilliant man his stuttering back, he would be frustrated all over again, and his powerful mind would be slanted towards evil or awry things. But why did Casey Gorshok the Sorcerer and Argo Master lag so far behind the other two Masters that day?
When Casey did join them, he had a new, sly look about him. Take that not to heart. Casey always had a new, sly look about him. But one Argonaut surely would not slip back and undo the work of another.
At Milano, on the Po (or nearly so), they took Mr. X on board the Argo. This X was not a true master of the Argo, however much he wished that he were. He was not really one of the long-lived persons, and his present manifestation was likely to be the only one that he would have. He was not a Sorcerer, but he swore that he could reproduce any trick of any sorcerer if he saw it twice. He was acquainted with all three Masters who were presently on the Argo. He was good and amusing company. There was no reason why he should not have ridden on the ship. But easily tendered accommodations are not appreciated as much as those that are more hardly given. “I do not know you, man,” Biloxi Brannagan said, “and our sublime destination can hardly be yours. Nor are you able to riddle our riddles.”
“I do not know you, man,” Melchisedech Duffey said. There was always fun to be had with X.
“I do not know you, man,” said that piece of the Talking Oak that was set into the ship's wheel. “I believe that it is the nature of X to be unknown. Are you in Scripture? Are you in Inscription? Nobody comes onto the Argo who is not to be found in one place or the other.”
“I am in Inscription,” X maintained. “In the Attic Ephebic Inscriptions, X equals ‘Xenoi’. No, I am not otherwise in Scripture or in Inscription, but I ask you to take me into your Company. All of you do know me.”
“ ‘Xenoi’ means ‘Strangers,’ ” the piece of the Talking Oak said. And then it fell silent, for that was much more than it usually talked.
“Oh, I suppose that we halfway know you, X,” Brannagan conceded, for he had a kind heart under his ruddy hide, “and you have always been good on the conversation and the news. Set your golden medallion there on the steersmen's sideboard, and we will accept it as your identity.”
X rubbed his hands together in the professional manner. He had seen real sorcerers do this trick more than twice, so he could do it also. And he did produce a big gold coin, according to first appearance. It had his coat of arms on it. It had half of all the fancy things he wished to put on it.
“There it is,” he said. “Was there ever such a coin as that!”
“But, X, it is only a one sided coin,” Casey chided him. “That makes it a very one sided and deficient identification. Are we not allowed to see the contra against you, the reverse of your own coin?”
X turned the coin over and it disappeared. There wasn't any reverse to it. X had just crossed magic with real magicians, and the real magicians had won.
The coin is still there, on the steersmen's sideboard in the cabin of the Argo. It is a curiosity the way it seems perfect and valid and will then disappear when it is turned over.
“Yes, X, you may sail with us,” Melchisedech said. “But you do not sail as a Master of the Argo. You are talented, sure. And you are always all over the place. But, with you, it is always the question of not being able to see the water for the fish. You will receive half shares only of whatever prizes we win. Most underlings receive only quarter shares.”
“That is all right,” said X, “and you do need me. Some of your latest exploits have been worse than just ‘bad show’. Gentlemen, they have been bush.”
So X sailed with them. And, really, they were glad to have him.
At Our'yev, at the east mouth of the river Ural in Tartary, Melchisedech Duffey lost his life. Oh, there was no question about it. He was killed dead, deader than a mackerel. Dead, and quickly stripped of the flesh off his bones, and that flesh cremated to ashes. A man will not walk away from such a thing as that. This is the background of losing his life:
The Gold Ship or the King's Ship or the Shimmering Ship, it is an almost universal boy's dream. And all of the almost-universal dreams have strong basis in fact. The almost-universal dreams (but not ordinary dreams) are really sub-surfaces or simultaneous happenings which parallel the surface happenings and are often the stronger and more valid. Almost all boys realize that they have this valid dimension of other happenings and other life. But many of them, not being intelligent enough to keep up, forget about it as they grow older.
The other world of oceans and ships and adventures is really there. It is the other side of the coin. It is often the clearest and most decorative side of that coin.
The Argo is not the only one of the preternatural Gold Ships or King's Ships or Shimmering Ships. There are a dozen or so of them. But the Argo is one of the most noble of them, and also it is the one with the raciest adventures.
These Shimmering Ships with their ever young crewmen of very great age have all the excitement and blood and thunder of Pirate Ships or Devil Ships, but they have the advantage of being on the side of Light and Glory.
But every boy reveling in their companionship by day and by night, knows that their victories are not either easy nor inevitable, that some of the greatest contests will be lost, that some of the great Ship Masters will be slain and skinned by their adversaries, that some of their adversaries are very strong.
These adversaries are persons of stunning impact, of massive mystery, of overpowering personality, or unmatched courage. Give them all of that. So it is in the group understanding, and so it is in reality.
Among the most shattering of the Adversaries is that group known as the Evil Prince, the Purple Prince, the Mocking Prince, the Laughing Prince. The most powerful and the trickiest of all these Adversaries may well be the Laughing Prince of Tartary.
Except for a very short interlude at Wien, all the Argonauts had always been able to tell right from wrong very clearly, and they had always supported the right. They were commando experts of a sort, in a battle against evil things, and all of them served tours of duty at this heroic labour. They ransacked minds and seas to realize their efforts, and they brought strength of character and lively imagination to bear.
(But the popular sympathies of the world were often against them, and with the Purple Princes and Ambiguous Adventurers. It doesn't seem fair, but that is the fact of the matter.)
The Argo did, very often, sail clear outside the Cosmos, and it did also sail on the insides of minds and persons, and it learned of the dangerous reefs and promontories that are within. If the Argonauts ever became confused as to ‘where’ or ‘what’ or ‘on which side’, there was an Instruction in the chart-room of the Argo to set them right. Even when, several times, the Argo had been in evil hands and ownership, the chart-room and the Instruction were not disturbed.
All of
the worlds were sights of long-drawn-out and never quite finished battles between order and disorder (or what is sometimes called ‘between good and evil'), and there was no one anywhere who could really stand aside from it.
Except the Laughing Prince of Tartary.
There had been reports of this Laughing Prince for the recent while, that he was the Prince of the Third Way. He was not claimed by either God or Devil. He was neither hot nor cold, so he had been vomited out of their mouths.
“But he will rue the day when He vomited me out of his mouth,” the Laughing Prince had said, and it was reported that he was not laughing when he said it. “He is the enemy of my enemy, but he is no friend of mine. And the enemy vomited me out of his mouth also, and he too will rue the day. I am hot as fire and cold as ice, and they were wrong to eject me. I hold this third place and I will not successfully be invaded here. My land is a scorcher when I want it to scorch, and my spring is the only cooling spring in the country. Whoever comes into my land will have to come down to my spring to drink. My way is sweet and my burden light, and my spring is poisoned to those of the other two lineages.”
It was reported that the Prince was a vile creature out of the ‘dialectic pit’. It was also reported that he was not so no-sided as he pretended to be, that he really did sometimes adhere to one side or the other, and that the truth was not in him.
So the Argo had a work order to check out this Laughing Prince. Tartary, like so many realms, had been under the dominion of the New Infidels for several generations.
Tartary was not even its official name any more.
The Argo went to the area by rapid but difficult voyage. Even getting a ship the size of the Argo onto an inland sea (the Caspian) was tricky. But the Argo Masters did come to Tartary, and nobody there had ever heard of the Laughing Prince. They had, they said, no Prince except the First Secretary of the Oblast. So each of the Argo Masters, and the half-master X, searched as best they could.
Mr. X did the things he could do best. He talked to important people, or to people who he fictionized as somehow being important. He obtained bits and snippets of information that he thought might be meaningful. If it hadn't been for the information that he gathered, he wouldn't have been able to identify Duffey's ashes and bones later.
And Kasmir Gorshok, the Casey of the Zodiac and the Casey of Chicago, did the things that he did best. As Sorcerer, he sorcered up a pavilion that was like a pleasure palace. He sorcered aides into being. He gave lavish entertainments for such local officials as might be of value. He met the Laughing Prince in a séance and was told that one of the coffins on the Argo would soon have its designated bones in it. There were always a few unoccupied (and some occupied) coffins on the Argo to take care of eventualities. But Casey was not able to persuade the Laughing Prince to mend his evil or ambivalent ways, or even to admit that his ways were evil or ambivalent. “No, no, fuzz-face,” the Prince told Casey, “my ways are beyond good and evil.” Casey was never able to meet the Prince in the flesh, but only through mediums.
Biloxi Brannagan did what he did best. He took the Argo and he ransacked all the shores of that Sea to make them give up their answers. It was a mocking bunch of answers he got, and yet they were not outright false. Brannagan was the finest seaman ever. There was nobody like him for ransacking a shore.
Melchisedech Duffey went upland into the boondock interiors, but the interiors are never well done in treacherous Tartary. (Is Tartary ultimately the same place as Tartarus?) There was an emptiness and incompleteness about the interiors of those boondocks. It was because of this that they were so susceptible to having other ambients superimposed on them. And there was the strong feeling that things were not as they should be.
The industrial-agricultural country sometimes had a desert superimposed on it, a desert that in reality had been driven away by the big dams and deep wells years before this. There were many skeletons of people lying around on the sands, but few of animals. “Animals are harder to do,” said Duffey. The rocks were not right and the plants were not. But suddenly the desert was gone and Duffey entered a medium-sized town that was full of bustle. He ate a good meal at a restaurant “Rosa Ivanova's Kofeinik. You know it's the best. All the truck drivers stop here.” There was hearty food, and Duffey drank eleven glasses of water. He had a premonition of coming thirst. But nobody in the place had ever heard of the Laughing Prince. “There is one place in every town where they will know something of every phenomenon, even if they have it all wrong,” Duffey said. He went out of the restaurant and started for the newspaper office two blocks up the street where he would—
—but then he was back in the desert again, and the town was gone. Duffey was tortured by instant thirst, and there were shocking hallucinations of the Laughing Prince, but that person remained one step removed from being there in the flesh. And there were glimpses of three crooked persons with slanted faces who had pursued him in his childhood and had tried to kill him. Later these SFM or slant faced men had become cartoon characters and stereotypes and comic book persons.
“You have to come down to my spring to drink,” the Prince was speaking like an old record on a record player. Duffey knew that in reality he had drunk eleven glasses of water in the last half hour. But he also knew that in unreality he was dying of thirst and would have to drink at the sparkling gurgling spring.
He drank.
He could see things with great clarity after he had drunk from the spring, but it was all wrong stuff that he saw so clearly. Its unreality defeated him. This unreality is the greatest of enemies.
The three slant faced killers slunk up. They were badly dated. They were caricatures. But they were henchmen of the Laughing Prince of Tartary. The slant faced killers cut off all the flesh from Duffey's bones. That's what killed him. The slant faces burned all the sinew and viscera and flesh of Melchisedech Duffey until they were nothing but hot ashes. They would always be hot and ready to burst into flame. And they put these ashes, still smoking, into a cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain. Then the mortal remains of Melchisedech Duffey were in the middle of an unbusy street in Our'yev, a town near the east mouth of the Ural River in Tartary.
X and Kasmir Gorshok came on them there in a matter of seconds. The minor official already at the scene was glad to be rid of the whole business.
“I just don't know how I would have written up a report of this,” the minor official said. “People keep arriving out of that ‘nowhere desert’, dead and disfigured. And our superiors always believe that we have been drinking wine when we report such things. Take them away and say nothing about them. And I will not.”
“I will be the custodian of Melchisedech's ashes,” X said. “I have a strong premonition that I will meet him alive again, and then I will give them back to him. Few men have such amusing keepsakes of themselves.”
X kept the ashes in their canister. X and Casey Gorshok carried the bones down to dockside, keeping to the sidestreets from some kind of embarrassment. Biloxi Brannagan was just bringing the Argo back into port, knowing that the search for the Laughing Prince had ended in disaster.
They put the bones of Melchisedech Duffey into one of the caskets on the Argo. Brannagan, in his true person as Saint Brandon, said the ‘Mass of the Holy Precursor Melchisedech’ for him (It was the Mass of April 30th when the old calendar prevailed). And Brannagan and Casey Gorshok and X half-believed that they had done all that they could do for Melchisedech.
And Melchisedech lay in his coffin, and he lay there, and he lay there. “I thought there would be more to it than this,” Melchisedech said.
The Argo Masters, Brannagan and Casey Gorshok, and the half-master X, took the Argo on further adventures and rectifications, but it just wasn't the same thing without Duffey booming in the midst of them. The bones of their companion just lying there spooked them and gave an incomplete air to all their doings.
And so it went for three days. Then God Himself came onto the Argo in the uncou
nted hours of a night. And directly he went to the coffin of Melchisedech.
“Have you been relieved of your duties as Master of the Argo?” God asked those bones, and they leapt with joy at the sound of his own voice.
“No, I have not,” the bones of Melchisedech spoke boldly. “But I am dead and stripped of my flesh. I waited here in my coffin where I knew that you would find me. I did not have any further instructions. I did not know whether I was wanted as Pilot and Master any longer.”
“The articles of the voyage do not require that you be a fleshed Pilot and Master,” God said. “And you are always wanted. You, and you others, see to the details among yourselves.”
Well, it would be awkward, but it could be done. There would be a sort of joyful awkwardness in finding ways to go about it. Melchisedech still had all his facilities, his movements, his merriments. His old seaman's clothes still fit him, though a little bit scarecrowishly. Casey Gorshok made for Duffey a golden mask to go over his boney skull, a golden scarf to go around his neck, and golden gauntlets for his hands and wrists. All of these things were made from combings from the Golden Fleece of Colchis.
Melchisedech could have made these things himself, but Casey wanted to make them for him as a sign of their friendship, which was indeed in need of repair. Melchisedech could no longer speak properly because of having no throat box. But he could communicate, and one did not always notice that his communication was not in ordinary speech.
And so it was that, with the bones of a dead man at the helm, the Argo sailed on some of her highest adventures. She became the talk of the sea.
And Melchisedech, though he had no face, had frequent reminders of what his face had looked like. Somebody else on the Argo was wearing Melchisedech's face, a correct though rather weary version of his face.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 343
