What petty minds these umbrella peddlers do have! Palgrave gave the order to pay the sum to the devil-angel Aurelion, the seventy-ninth of the recording spirits. It would be simony well spent, whether a membership was obtained or not.
“There is an ariel and a dog here to talk to you,” Jeanie said.
“They cannot be the real ariel and real dog,” Palgrave contradicted. “They could not be on Nine Worlds at all. They’re common. And they’re time-chained. They’d never reach to here.”
“They are the real ones,” the man Lorica said. “I know them. They’ve come to look after you.”
“Quiet, umbrella peddler,” Palgrave growled. “I’m not needing any of you here.”
“Nevertheless, they want to see you and talk to you,” Jeanie insisted.
“I won’t talk to them. Why should I talk to an ariel and a dog? I’ll look at them from this distance.” And Palgrave Tacoman looked at them.
“They’re devoted,” Jeanie said softly. “They want to look after you. That’s what I want to do also. Listen to them. Listen to me. Listen to this man Lorica.”
“No. I’ll listen to nobody. I’ll speak to everybody instead, pervasively and from underneath. The ariel and the dog are waiting in the field by the horse coursing place.”
The ariel was in sunlight. She was freckled and unaccountably brilliant. She was dappled and sunbeamed. She was daylight itself, freckled daylight with clouds roiling up behind her.
And the dog was in shadow. He was a human-form dog. This dog was always somber and silent in the shadow. And it was believed that he was faithful.
“The two of them would be good at coursing big game,” Palgrave said. “She in the sunlight, he in the shadow. Let us go coursing then. What game will it be? The tiger won’t course. It is sabered, but it skulks in sedge and reeds that are more black than orange. The lion won’t course. It suns itself in tawny grass and on yellow rocks. Then it vanishes, or it strikes. The buffalo will course, but only for a while. Then it is into deep mud, and it’s a mucky business to drive it out with hound or lance.
“But I know a large and sabered animal that will course. Let the tall horses be brought. We’ll have a hunt full of bristled death.”
A dozen tall horses were brought for a dozen of the elites who would go hunting. A dozen long lances with authentic bogus-stone lance heads were brought. The post boy began to play fanfares and caracole tunes on a long brass horn. This horn was chased with hunting scenes in living color and stunning detail. One of the hunting scenes showed Palgrave Tacoman down on the ground and a giant boar killing him with its sabered tusks.
“That boar does not kill me fairly,” Palgrave protested. “The detail is wrong. Change that scene for another.”
“That isn’t easy,” the post boy said with a little shudder. “To change so completed a scene as that would drain me of every power.”
“Be drained, then,” Palgrave ordered him. “Do it.”
The post boy changed the scene on his long horn. The figures writhed and altered and mutated. The boy did drain himself of all strength for the new animation. The new scene showed Palgrave on horseback, and the horse itself being lifted and tossed high into the air on the sabered tusks and huge and bristled snout of a truly giant boar. It was a more brightly colored and more finely detailed scene than the first.
The post boy lallygagged and retched and trembled like a pale specter. It was a strong picture full of fountained blood and crawling flesh. The boy was emptied of strength and blood, and almost emptied of life. It was partly his own blood that colored the gory scene on the horn.
“So that’s the way it will be just before the end of it,” Palgrave commented. “I feel the authenticity of it. I am not sure I can avoid being destroyed as climax. Leave it as it is, boy; it’s well done.”
The dog in human form had assembled nine hound-form dogs and had gone into the bosky shadows to drive out whatever rampant animal he could find there.
The ariel had gathered two dozen young peasant girls and lads and was leading them, fear-speckled and excited, down the sunny aisles of the coursing place to rout out all furred and bristled animals.
Flocks of green parrots flew above the gathering fray, whistling, hooting, and giving advice from their level of vantage. There has always been close association between the privileged elite and the parrot flocks.
The dozen elite men and ladies mounted their tall steeds.
“Blow the ‘Giant Overture,’ ” Palgrave ordered the post boy. “Blow it to ensure that all our quarry may be giant. Drain yourself again for the blare.”
“They have just discovered—no, they have just manufactured a new element,” the pale horn boy told Palgrave Tacoman. “I thought you’d be pleased to know it.” But Palgrave didn’t understand, for the moment, the meaning this news had for him.
“Blow the ‘Giant Overture,’ ” he ordered, more sharply this time. The post boy blew the giant notes so powerfully as to split the ears of all the mounted elites and send the delightful blood gushing down their faces and necks. It was the first blood to be poured out in that day’s coursing.
A very large black boar had been stirred out right on the rich border between sun and shade, between grass and brush. It stood as tall at the shoulders as did the tall horses.
“Take it, Lorica,” Palgrave cried. “It’s a third-grade boar for a scared and scruffy umbrella peddler.”
“This boar would not be third-grade in any world of any universe,” Lorica swore.
All the riders joined in at coursing the boar. Hunting the bristled bravos with lance is one of the finest of all pleasures, so long as one does not live by it as a trade.
Parrots were like flights of fat green arrows in the air. Dogs had a catchy bark on every gasping breath, but this boar was not winded by a long and furious coursing. It doubled back repeatedly on small razor feet and huge haunches. It was quick. It had the red light of murder in its warty red eyes. It sounded!
And there came a more rampant and more powerful sounding from the cedared mountain. It was a champion coming to enter the lists of the bristled brotherhood.
But the present and embattled boar wheeled again and killed several of the harrying peasant girls and lads. It left them awkwardly broken in the sunny grass. The boar coursed again, and it foamed, not with weariness, but with fury.
Lorica, on a steep bay horse, closed in on the boar and let his horse overrun itself and become impaled on the wheeling boar. At the moment of overrunning, Lorica’s lance went into the boar in snout and mouth and throat, but the bogus-stone lance head did not touch the boar brain in any way. That animal, disdaining even to notice the lance, was into the horse with long tusks, richly and redly into the belly; and it raised horse and rider high into the air as it reared on giant bristled hams and small feet.
Lorica, quickly clear of the saddle and standing high on the fore-shoulders of that death-struck horse, thrust downward powerfully with the lance, and it was clear through the boar. The boar was spitted clean, if he only knew it.
Then the whole construct—boar, horse, rider—fell like a crashing tower; and the man Lorica stepped clear from the two dead animals.
“Good kill,” said Albrecht Fairbrow. But Palgrave had no words of congratulation for the umbrella peddler.
Very quickly then, as though some hunt master had been arranging it, another boar was rousted out of the black-shade borders of the hunting course. The new boar sounded immediately. And immediately there was a strong answering sounding from the cedared foothills. The king boar, the champion boar, was coming rapidly. But a near champion was here already.
This boar of record was stronger, faster, probably heavier, not quite so tall as the first one had been. It quickly set up a howling and screaming trail of wounded and broken dogs in the brakes. It was leaving no enemy unbloodied.
It came into the sunlit coursing alleys. It was as truculent a tusker as had ever been encountered. It sent a surge of fear through all the h
orses, through all the dogs, through all the young peasants. It nearly sent fear through the elites themselves, were they not, by definition, immune to fear.
“Take it, Fairbrow,” Palgrave said. Ah, this was the awkwardly dangerous boar that nobody wanted to tangle with. It hadn’t the fine lines of the real champions. It hadn’t the style. It had an unheroic, hunching, scurrying, very rapid way with it, and it called out an unheroic response in everyone in its path. But the scurrying boar was strongly aware of Palgrave Tacoman.
And Palgrave was now aware that his own cranky testament had been multiplied a billionfold. The post boy, the horn boy, had said that a new element had just been discovered or synthesized. And that new element had to be the correspondence to himself. He knew now that he had been accepted into the unstable-hundred company of the archetypical devil-angels. He knew that his testament, with its new bristle-boar motif, had now become a part of every pool of that ocean named the group unconscious, that it would be dipped into by every thirsting spirit of human or beast or bird or bug, or unbodied flit-brain, or stick or stone or tree or hill. Now he was one of the communicating gods of the atomic numbers, an unstable god of an unstable element. His testament, with its old humpback-flesh camel motif, was already at work in the under-minds of the very grass that his horse trod.
He knew that in the psychology books of all the worlds there had appeared a new archetype. With Imago Dei, with Orpheus, with Child Hero, with Kore there was a new arrival. With Corn-Mother, with Fenris-Wolf, with Hermaphrodite, with Python there was a new lodger in Domdaniel, the castle that is under the ocean. With Black-Beard, with George-and-Dragon, with Helen, with Houri there was a forever-person of the camel totem. One more had joined the most select company of Simon Magus and Baubo and Demeter, of Adonis and Alexander and Broom-Witch, of Leviathan and Hermes and Homunculus, of Moloch and Fisherman. There was a new oceanic companion to Huracan and to Beggar-King and to Gyne Peribebleene-ton-Helion (Woman Wrapped-in-the-Sun). With the Leper, with the Boogerman, with Body-and-Blood Giant there was now the Palgrave.
Palgrave had gained swift status as a cult figure.
But he knew too that something was gaining on him.
The scurrying boar, coming around quickly, broke the legs from under Fairbrow’s horse. The boars of this place were larger and more powerful than bulls. Fairbrow was on his feet and away from his wailing horse. He set himself to face the erratic boar with lance, on foot. And everybody watching knew that Fairbrow was already as bad as dead.
The lance was too long. Or the powerful and short-coupled boar turned on too short an arc. That boar was greased lightning indeed, leaving more grease than blood on the lance head as Fairbrow failed again and again to get a holding thrust into the beast. Then the boar was inside the sweep of the lance. Fairbrow was down. And then he was dead. It was the exact scene that had been on the post boy’s horn before Palgrave had ordered it changed. Even the face of dead Fairbrow looked at least as much like Palgrave’s as like Albrecht Fairbrow’s.
“Will you finish the beast, Palgrave Tacoman?” Leslie Whitebread called. Whitebread seemed to have become that day’s spokesman for the elites immediately on the death of Fairbrow.
“I will not,” Palgrave called back. “I’ll have no man’s leavings.”
Palgrave was clearly afraid of that arrant boar. “Fairbrow doesn’t make a very good Adonis,” Palgrave said then with jerky contempt, “and the boar doesn’t make a very good Aphacan Boar.”
The boar had to be killed by a committee. There are a few things that a committee can do well. There are very many more things that a committee will always do badly. And killing a boar is one of the things that no committee should ever try at all. There was much additional blood shed on the grassy course, royal elite blood and ignoble boar’s blood. Even when he was dead, that rogue boar seemed by the set of his ears ready to clatter back to his feet and resume the fray.
But the king boar was arriving, sounding and trumpeting, from the mountain. Palgrave would have a grander and more heroic beast to battle, but he feared it less than he had feared that scrambling and unpredictable boar that had just been ineptly done to death by a committee.
Now the king boar stood erect and high headed at one end of a mile-long coursing alley. It was a bestial and outstanding red brown fire against the soft blue foothills of the cedar mountain. Palgrave Tacoman, at the other end of the mile-long coursing alley, raised his lance in very high salute. The boar flashed his tusks like white and gold fire in the sun; it was the answering salute. This encounter was heroic, as the previous encounter of Fairbrow and the rogue boar had not been.
Palgrave on his high golden horse set to rush down the coursing alley, and the king boar was coming to meet him in a swirl of royal swinish thunder. There must be only one violent momentum and clash in such an afternoon of champions. Anything else would be repetition, and a grand climax will tolerate no second presentation.
Here was the engraved scene which was bloodily alive for all that: Palgrave on horseback, and the horse itself being lifted and tossed high into the air on the sabered tusks and the strong and bristled snout of the king boar of all Aphaca. Then the scene was full of fountained blood and crawling flesh.
Palgrave had already seen this death of his, in the brazen horn of the post boy. He had wondered whether he could avoid being destroyed as climax. He couldn’t.
Palgrave Tacoman lay in ritual death on the green and scarred and cloven grass of the course. In his death, Palgrave did make a very good Adonis. And the boar did make a very good Aphacan Boar. The beast knelt beside Palgrave. It was lance-bit and blooded, but it may not have knelt from blood loss.
At that very moment the “Adoration of the Boar,” based on the great painting of Hieronymus Bosch, was being presented as the drama of record at the Atrium Theater there on Oraioi Polloi. But did the boar that had killed Palgrave actually adore him in death? Possibly it did. The boar had a strong sense of ritual.
“The dead Palgrave had an ariel and a dog attending him,” Jeanie said to Leslie Whitebread, who had become that day’s spokesman for the elites. “What shall we do with them?”
“Whip them and send them away,” Whitebread answered.
Death on any of the Nine Worlds was a pleasant coma. There was enough of awareness; there was enough of emanating power and influence. It was a vital and sparkling repose. Everything is always pleasant on Oraioi Polloi, whether in full life or in death-coma. But the focus of attention does tend to veer away from a man after he is dead, even if he is so pleasantly dead as was Palgrave Tacoman.
And associate aspects of Palgrave were pleasuring themselves and thriving on all the Nine Worlds to La Spezia. These are things that do not end. They are going on now. They will still be going on when suns of lesser places run down and die.
But in other and starker places, there are very much ruder things going on. These things are in harsh time, and they can come to abrupt end or to very much worse term than an ending.
12
I’ll tell you a story about Mary Morey
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another about her brother,
And now my story is done.
Woolly Camel Book of Nursery Rhymes
There had been the jump, yes. But then there had been the wonderful unclocked worlds in between, which are still going on, in a sundered-off place that nobody can visit twice. And then—
—the jump forgets its interval, and the focus is on another and starker place. The stark place is real, whatever fancy context may have been framed for the fancier worlds.
He awoke, with a horrible thirst, on a ragged hillside. Ants were stinging him, but they were small and short-toothed ants. When he sat up his face was raked by thorns. There was a scrawny patch of them there, and it was long past green-thorn time. He had, as he believed, an ariel lying at his head and a dog lying at his feet. From a brindled sky a Hand of Heaven was pointing down at him most effectively.
&nbs
p; His name was Polder Dossman, which means “Sleep-Man Reclaimed from the Ocean.” But it also means “Toss-Like-a-Bull-Man Reclaimed from the Ocean.” He thought of himself more as the horned-bull man. It was a new name to him, one that he had not used before; and he hadn’t explored all the sides of it. He had apparently made a successful world-jump. Somehow it had been a rough passage, though.
“Which is my right hand and which is my left?” he cried out in the first words he had ever used in that place. “Oh, why are they continually changing them?” This confusing of the right hand and the left is a disorientation that often plagues jump-travelers.
The Hand of Heaven pointing down was a bit of meteorological manipulation, but he couldn’t remember contracting for it. Someone brought him a curious cup that was filled with either green coconut milk or green camel milk. He drained it off noisily, and it took the screaming edge off his thirst.
Polder didn’t know where he was and he didn’t believe it mattered. He had a way with worlds and with situations. He could have his will with any world, and he could have it with this scurvy one.
“This isn’t hell,” he said with confidence. “Why should it be? The odds are billions to one against my ever hitting on that one. No, this is just another of those oyster worlds which I with the sword of my wits will open.
“Up, ariel! Up, dog!” Polder cried then with a show of the energy he hoped to acquire. In reality he was sick and tired. He was suffering what some world-jumpers call the “Resurrection Blues.” “We have a new world here, I believe,” he said as to that world in condescendence, “or at least we have a new slant, or a new shape to live in. It’s weed-grown and it’s stark, but I will have my will with it. Say, is not the sun bright and beamy where it breaks through the cloud so suddenly now?”
“Hot,” said the ariel. “Hot clouds and hot sun. I freckle badly in that combination. I’ll bet it’s an unconditioned world, except maybe on the rich men’s estates. Why ever did we come to a world like this one?”
Not To Mention Camels Page 15
