Stories From a Lost Anthology

by Rhys Hughes

  Similarly, the throne is connected to the rear wall by a device which can lift it to the ceiling along a disguised groove. There are changes of clothing inside the hollow seat. The idea was originally to impress ambassadors and visiting dignitaries from the west. A diplomat would be carried into the presence of the Emperor by two eunuchs and then set down. He would be expected to prostrate himself thrice, throwing himself at full length on the floor. Each time he looked up after one of these prostrations, the Emperor would be in a different position on the wall and in a new set of robes. It would be mystifying.

  But now the workings are worn and inefficient. The throne squeaks as it jerks toward the ceiling, threatening to throw its occupant off.

  A real bird flaps into the Palace and lands on the bronze tree.

  It is a pigeon. The Emperor reaches forward and removes the message from its leg. He unrolls the paper and arches an eyebrow.

  “A letter from the Sheriff of Nottingham,” he says.

  His Vizier bows deeply. “You asked him to keep you informed of developments.”

  “Did I? So I did! Now let’s see, what does it say? Ah! Apparently some fellow called Robin Hood was killed by an arrow and was laid inside a new coffin and the lid was about to be secured and nailed down when Nina, Queen of the Amazons, threw herself on his body. He was her son, she wailed, and therefore she had no choice but to love him, even though she had killed him. She kissed him on the lips. To everyone’s horror, the corpse returned to life. It seems that Nina had kept a god in a jar and had promised to let it go if it granted her a wish. It did so, but she cheated on her side of the bargain. She released it from the jar, yes, but by swallowing it! She chewed it up and digested it! Anyway, the magic powers inside the god must have transferred themselves into her metabolism, allowing her kiss to be suffused with implausible restorative qualities! So she kissed him back to life! But the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Do you know why?”

  The Vizier shakes his head. “Sorry, no. I don’t speak Latin. This is Byzantium and my language is Greek. I didn’t understand a word of that!”

  “Nor I! It’s just a mass of squiggles. It doesn’t matter anyway, because it will be out of date now. The events it describes are in the past.”

  The Vizier licks his lips. “Can we have the pigeon for lunch?”

  Maid Marian, Little John, Guy of Gisborne, the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Queen of the Amazons are patiently explaining to Robin Hood why he must be buried alive. He is lying in his coffin and only Nina’s foot on his chest prevents him from getting out. She holds the lid in her hands. She smiles sweetly.

  “If there was another way, you know I’d take it.”

  “Call yourself a mother?” squeals Robin. “I’m alive now!”

  “Yes, that was an enjoyable magic kiss. But the rules are clear. A final request must be obeyed, and you asked to be buried under the spot where your arrow ended up. It stuck in your own heart. So now we have to bury you here. The fact that you are a living person is completely irrelevant.”

  “But I’ll suffocate down there and be dead again!”

  “So what are you complaining about? That sorts everything out.”

  “I thought you loved me!”

  “I do. As a mother loves a son. But there comes a time when two people, whatever their relationship, have to let each other go.”

  “I don’t want to be buried alive! I don’t want to be buried alive!”

  “Oh stop whingeing, you little pansy!”

  Pressing him down firmly, she positions the lid on the coffin. Maid Marian and Little John hurry forward with hammer and nails. There is much banging. The screams of Robin Hood are muffled now. The coffin is sealed.

  “Lower it into the grave!” cries the Sheriff of Nottingham.

  The pit is six feet deep. The coffin fits perfectly at the bottom. The knights kick the loose soil back until the hole is filled. Guy of Gisborne leads his horse over it a few times, to stamp it flat. The screams are now very faint. Perhaps they are not really there. It could just be a thousand worms writhing.

  “I hate these ceremonies,” says the Sheriff of Nottingham.

  “Well it’s all over now,” replies Nina. “What will you do? All of you, I mean.” Little John and Maid Marian exchange glances. “I’m going to retire to a convent.”

  “So am I! After a shave, that is. And an operation.”

  Guy of Gisborne barks: “My place is still by your side!” “Phasswass! Shoowshss!”

  “And you, my Queen? What are your plans?” the Sheriff adds. Nina sighs and looks around. Then she shrugs. “I’ve done what I came to do. I think it’s time to return to Scythia But what about you?”

  “Oh, I owe the Emperor of Byzantium a long letter.”

  The Sheriff of Nottingham and his knights decide to accompany Nina, Queen of the Amazons, out of Sherwood Forest. But before they reach its edge, she reins in her horse and sighs. Then she turns around.

  “It’s no good. There’s a big problem.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I can’t leave Robin down there. He’s my son now and I carry him in my heart. And the way things have ended up, he has to be buried below himself. I mean, that’s what we’ve just done. So to keep to the spirit of the request, and the way we have interpreted it, he ought to be buried below wherever I am.”

  “But you’ll be constantly on the move now!”

  “Yes. Pity there’s no such thing as a portable grave!”

  He frowns. “Perhaps there is! Follow me!”

  The Sheriff of Nottingham spurs his horse back to the Damsel & Pointy Hat. The grave lies off to one side. He dismounts and enters the tavern. After a few minutes, he comes out and signals to Nina.

  “The landlord’s a carpenter, remember? I asked him if he could make some sort of device like a snowplough to attach to the front of the coffin. He said yes.”

  “You mean I’ll be able to drag the coffin under me wherever I go?”

  “Yes, the plough will automatically shift the earth aside. The grave will remain a constant six feet under all the way back to Scythia.”

  “Taking it across the Channel might be difficult.”

  “You can hire out a ship with a hold packed with soil.”

  The knights have already disinterred the coffin. The knocking from inside is very feeble. The landlord emerges from the tavern with the prepared device. While he fits it, Nina decides to open the lid for a last look.

  Robin Hood’s face is contorted. There is much sweat on his brow.

  “Thank God! I was on my last breath!”

  “I haven’t come to rescue you, silly! Just to tell you that we’re about to start on a long journey. We’re going home, my dear son.”

  “What? What? What?”

  She answers the question by replacing the lid.

  A rope is secured from the coffin to her hand before the soil is replaced. Now she can pull the grave along behind her. When the rope is taut, it carries the vibrations of Robin’s frenzied knocking. When she holds it close to her ear, she can hear his screams and pleadings. It will provide entertainment on the voyage.

  They leave Sherwood Forest by a different route. She crosses a dry riverbed. The Sheriff of Nottingham is behind her. Behind him are the fifty knights. While they are still crossing, a giant scorpion bears down on them. Shocking what the Crusaders brought back with them! A terrific fight begins. Many of the knights really are empty suits of armour after all.

  It is none of her business. She keeps going.

  The New Giraldus

  “The Welsh people rarely keep their promises. . . . The only thing they really persist in is changing their minds.”

  Gerald of Wales

  Real ale and false opinions. The tavern sold the former but offered the latter for free. Each beer came with a different notion on a variety of topics. Stout was always served with an observation on politics; bitter was never pumped without a religious platitude; lager arrived gassy wit
h bubbles of economic insight. Glyn found the ritual rather annoying, but Rhiannon reminded him that this was Aberystwyth; the barman was probably unaware of the mechanics of the process. It was a tradition as ineffable and automatic as overcharging.

  To confuse him, Glyn ordered one half of cider and another of dark, mixed in a single glass.

  The barman blinked. “A snakebite?”

  “Not quite as venomous. I call it a wormnip.” Glyn grimaced as he watched the flavours clash.

  The barman considered the implications of the blend. The subjects assigned to both tipples merged into one lick. “National identity,” he announced, “during foreign wars.”

  “There’s a contentious theme for you,” Glyn interrupted quickly. He winked at Rhiannon, but his other eye passed straight through her. “Did you know the Welsh fought the Bretons at Agincourt? Cousins pinning each other’s throats. That’s us all over.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You’re a southerner.”

  “Go on then. Tell me something truly absurd. Perhaps our identities are defined less by our people than by our enemies? It’s always been the same. Wales isn’t one country, or even two, but three separate states of consciousness: the lower, the empty and the diluted. Only foreigners and clouds see them blurred together.”

  Rhiannon tugged at his sleeve. “Listen to yourself! You’re a drunk geology student; your words are fossilised in your meanings rather than the other way round. Come and sit down.”

  Glyn shook her off. The barman had dropped his gaze, as if seeking wisdom in the cellar. Outside, the wind had picked up, lashing the cold sea over the Promenade. The cries of natives came from afar; it seemed their voices were being shaved. And were they playing drums filled with blood or was the commotion in his head?

  After an uncomfortable pause, the barman looked up and spread hands gnarled as barrels. His comment was too wide for his mouth; he eased it out slowly. “There’s always Giraldus.”

  “That sour fraud? He united with his feet and divided with his pen. I have no respect for his habits.”

  “He passed close here, on his way to Tywyn, accompanied by Rhys ap Gruffydd, who left them on the banks of the Dyfi. They crossed in little boats. The men of the north, he said, preferred the use of spears to the bow. The differences were in method, not aims. The sand in his shoe made a noose round the country; then he pulled us closer. He sentenced us to life—and that’s what we deserved.”

  “Wales has never been a single country.” Glyn was stubborn, feeling close to drowning in his own lesson.

  “Yes it was. Giraldus wrote us together. His travels can be stored on one shelf. His chapters don’t fight.”

  Rhiannon giggled. Her auburn hair flowed down her shoulders like a guest ale over a harp. “You’re both as daft as each other. Nobody talks like this in real life. Stiff poetry!”

  Glyn finished his drink. “We must be characters.”

  The barman arched a reviewer’s eyebrow; he had skimmed the content of his opponent’s speech with closed lids. He knew the value of a cover in making fast judgments. Glyn was too portly to have valid opinions on anything other than humour; he wore no beard and thus was no scholar on fishing, hornpipes, whisky or folklore. His teeth were those of one who reads atlases without travelling. As Giraldus himself had passed over a black stream near Newport—the Nant Pencarn—by plunging straight in, but over the conduct of the sons of Owain Gwynedd by plunging out, into silence, which is a bridge over belief, so the barman now oscillated at a fantastic rate between muddying his feet directly in the argument and finding a lateral approach above it.

  “The main thing is that we’re different from the English. Whatever we think of Pembroke or the Rhondda—and I hear they still eat children in Blaencwm—we never forget to have chins.”

  Glyn tugged at his jowls. “I’m not denying we’re superior to beings from across the border. What I’m saying is that we’re still not perfect. Wales is a tawdry mosaic which has been broken not only by geography and invaders but our own heavy feet. We’ll never stick it back until we stop refusing to learn from others. That’s our first monumental mistake. This doesn’t mean we can borrow anything of value from the English! Of course I’d rather be basted in Blaencwm than hunt cups of tea on horseback, but what about Scotland, Spain, Sicily?”

  The barman smiled malignantly and a cloud passed behind his eyes, a sudden eclipse of his dry tolerance.

  “What can we learn from Sicily, my friend?”

  Glyn cleared his throat in embarrassment. He ordered another drink, the same amalgam of fermented apple and mouse. If it became necessary to back down from the debate, if the discussion turned violent, it would be a simple matter to defuse the tension by choosing a different drink. The surf outside watered down his ears, making the barman’s question gentler as he bathed it in his mind. The individual words were no longer dressed in black suits, tinted glasses and trilby hats. They had thrown down the violin cases nestled under their arms.

  “Well, yes, we do have an Assembly at last. So that island has made its contribution. But what have we taken from the rest of Europe? Forget the complexities of autonomy and let’s turn our brains to culture. Wales does a marvellous line in seaweed.”

  “Complexities? Devolution is an issue as simple as choosing knives. Better to cut our own throats than permit England to do so. We’ll make a worse job of it and might even survive.”

  Rhiannon was growing bored. “Politics is supposed to be poured with the stout. Glyn’s gargling wormnip. Anyway, I disagree with you both. It doesn’t really matter what we take from our neighbours. What is important is how we export our own resources. We are amateurs in that respect. We used to keep cool about our attractions; now we ruin them.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The voices were synchronised.

  “We always accentuate the second-rate. We hoist the mediocre on top of a platform too lofty for it. The slightest storm from abroad and down it falls. We have only one internationally renowned writer, for example, but we pretend to have others. Yet their names are so elusive even their professed admirers can’t remember them.”

  The barman pouted. “You mustn’t slur Dylan Thomas with praise. Just because he stands stomach and pug-nose above his rivals, it doesn’t indicate his achievements were unique. The real reason we love him is for the way he made cholesterol romantic. After his life, it was possible to be arty without shedding weight. He elevated tubbiness and curliness to bohemian status and glamourised the frying-pan.”

  “Well, my difficulty with Dylan is that his morality was also tubby and curly. What happened to him during the War? How can evil be defeated with assonance? He rhymed in shame.”

  “No, it was a principled stand for pacifism. He had a conscientious objector under his skin—his liver.”

  Glyn, who found literary discussions more painful than blows to the skull with a dictionary, snared the subject with his tongue and dragged it wailing into the shadows of a rival art-form. “We don’t live in poems. It’s Welsh architecture I can’t digest. There are simply some things we don’t do well; one of them is cities.”

  The barman snorted. “Have we pretended to?”

  “Well, we proclaim Cardiff Docks as ‘Little Venice’ and Swansea Bay as ‘New Naples’. In Cardiff’s case, I’ll grant that both are damp—but the belching stacks of the steelworks to the east of Swansea don’t truly compare with the crater of Vesuvius.”

  “What are you getting at?” The barman was eager to learn.

  “Merely that you can’t talk up an inferior product. Why waste large amounts of money on pointless soliciting? No amount of glossy brochures, complimentary holidays for councillors or pavement tables will ever turn Caerdydd’s or Abertawe’s shopping precincts into piazzas. Have you tried to eat an ice-cream in Welsh drizzle?”

  “Sulphur sorbet,” murmured Rhiannon. “Delicious!”

  “My point,” continued Glyn, “is that our funds might be better used to develop our latent strengths. The
Welsh mentality is elaborate, small and bearded. We design good morsels but poor feasts. We were never meant to huddle together; that’s an English imposition. Let’s knock down every one of our urban sprawls and build villages from the rubble. Portmeirion is an ideal Welsh capital: it stands on tiptoe and peers over England to see its real cousins. Let’s drink and fight and hurl songs at each other and run away and juggle flaming leeks.”

  While he punctuated his speech with unsuitable gestures, adolescent rain stayed up past its bedtime, thrashing staccato dance-rhythms on the disapproving panes. It was too chill to stand straight. Hunched over the bar, Glyn sent his arms on forays into the gloom, smiting foreheads, not all his own, and knocking ashtrays filled with the stubs of resolutions. He knew how to misbehave in a mature way, disguising tantrum as passion, nationalising his prejudices. As Giraldus had lost his temper in a habit and snipped a tonsure from reason, so Glyn huddled in his accent and cut objections with unsheathed vowels. The barman waved for him to continue, a good example of unnecessary manners, and yet he frowned with the anger of a goat: an honest Welsh combination.

  Oblivious, Glyn clambered towards his conclusion:

  “Let’s concentrate on the things we do well. Forget trying to chase England into a selfish, polluted future. Let’s reclaim the mountains and the meadows! It’s time to seal all the remaining miners and farmers into the caravans which infest our coasts and push them over cliffs. I want a Wales where all towns look like Portmeirion and every tourist looks good enough to sacrifice in a forest glade.”

  The barman nodded. “Well, yes, that does sound appealing, if rather implausible. But what’s this about miners and farmers? Don’t they soothe our land with their grime and scythes?”