by K. J. Parker
Issue #192 • Feb. 4, 2016
“Told By An Idiot,” by K.J. Parker
(Our 400th story!)
“The Three Dancers of Gizari,” by Tamara Vardomskaya
For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit
http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
TOLD BY AN IDIOT
by K.J. Parker
Master Cork, the dealer in antiquities, called to see me.
He caught me at a bad moment. Even so, I’m always pleased to see him, though nearly everything he has to offer is rubbish. The same principle applies when you’re panning for gold, though it’s years since I did any of that. I told Nan to clear off the kitchen table. It’s the only room in the house with decent light.
On this occasion he had a dragon’s tooth, powdered mummy, the celebrated ring of King Solomon, the shin of Saint Sebastian, a tiny phial of King Herod’s tears, a new kind of firework, a living mirror, a demon in a bottle, the smile of St John the Baptist miraculously imprinted on cheesecloth, and an object of indeterminate purpose taken from the coffin of the last Grail Knight, a moment before the entire skeleton dissolved into dust and blew away on the breeze. I picked it up, turned it over and looked at him. “What’s it supposed to be?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said patiently. “I don’t know a lot of things. It’s the provenance that matters.”
“For which I have your word of honour.”
“Of course.”
I put it down and picked up the dragon’s tooth. “How much?”
“Eight shillings.”
There’s a sort of inverse honesty about master Cork that I find enormously appealing. A true crook would realise that a genuine dragon’s tooth would be worth eight pounds, or eighty, or eight hundred. But Master Cork—I know this for a fact, having spoken to some of his suppliers—has a system of pricing to which he adheres religiously; six times what he paid for it. That doesn’t actually prove conclusively that anything cheap he has for sale is fake, because he’s also very stupid, and he buys from stupid people; he could easily get hold of a genuine dragon’s tooth, and neither he nor his supplier would know what they’d got.
“Oops,” I said, as the tooth clattered on the slated floor. “Butterfingers.”
We both looked down. The tooth just lay there. I smiled and picked it up. He sighed, and put it away in its dear little sandalwood box. On another occasion I’d have offered him a shilling just for the box, which was two hundred years old and Greek. That’s the joy of dealing with Master Cork. He does have good things, sometimes.
“King Solomon’s ring,” I said.
He sat up straight and looked at me with his honest face. “Ah yes.”
“You’re sure it’s the genuine article?”
“Absolutely.”
I picked it up. It was big, suggesting that King Solomon had fingers like parsnips. Gold, straw colour, about three parts fine. The enamel and incuse garnets reminded me of something; it took me a moment to place it and then I knew. “How much?”
“Six pounds.”
You paid a pound, for this? I nearly said, but didn’t. “In what respects is it different from the King Solomon’s ring you offered me last month?”
“It’s the real one.”
“Or the month before that? Or that rather nice one you had last Michaelmas?”
“It’s the genuine article,” he said sadly. “Try it and see.”
Easy challenge to make, since there were no animals in the house. Well, rats and mice and fleas, presumably, because there always are. But who wants to talk to rats? “I think this is an old Saxon ring, dug up out of a burial mound, probably in Suffolk or Essex,” I said. “As such, it’s worth twice what you paid for it.”
A flicker of interest in his pale grey eyes; my lord Devereaux pays good money for anything Saxon. “Are you sure?”
“Well, no, obviously. Clearly I’m wrong. I mean, it looks Saxon to me, but it can’t be, can it? It’s King Solomon’s, I have your word of honour, so it’s much older and comes from Tyre or somewhere like that.” I shrugged. “Since it’s not Saxon, thirty shillings.”
He looked as though someone was squeezing his toes in a vise. “I don’t know.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“Two pounds. You said yourself it’s worth two pounds.”
“Ah, but I never pay full price.”
He sighed. “Two pounds,” he said, “and I’ll throw in the demon in the bottle.”
I knew perfectly well that I could get fifty shillings from my lord Devereaux. But what did I want with a demon in a bottle? Or, more likely, a bottle? On the other hand, ten shillings is a powerful amount of money, not that I needed it. Ah well. Sometimes I just like to make deals. “Done with you,” I said, and I spat into my hand and held it out for him to shake. Master Cork hates it when I do that, which of course is why I do it.
* * *
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Not my words, incidentally; it’s all I can remember of a play master Allardyce tried to sell me, when he was just starting out in the business. I remember telling him; young man, comedy isn’t your strong suit, try tragedy instead. I thought I’d mention that, to show you how perceptive I am, sometimes.
I guess the line stuck in my mind because it has a certain swing to it, and because it’s silly. The salient feature of the theatre is that the actors don’t make it up as they go along; or at least, not in my productions, if they ever want to work for me again. No; somebody writes the words, beforehand, carefully and deliberately; sometimes starting at the end and working backwards, sometimes getting to the end and then changing the whole of the first two acts, sometimes cutting out characters and deleting whole incidents, reshaping the plot and sequence of events because they don’t like how it came out. That’s not how human life works.
Nor do you get the staples of drama in real-life interactions of real people. You don’t get foreshadowing, or sudden catastrophic reversals of fortune. People don’t just drop dead of dramatic necessity (which, if the stage is to be believed, is the greatest mass epidemic of our time, responsible for more deaths than the plague and the bloody flux put together). You don’t get coups de theatre. You don’t get melodrama, specially if you’re a bachelor, like me. And most of all, you don’t get the supernatural. There are no ghosts or devils in real life, and a significant dream usually means you’ve eaten toasted cheese at bedtime.
Master Allardyce was bitterly offended by my helpful remarks and stormed off in a huff. Two weeks later he was back with Gyges Prince Of Lydia, and we started making money together. Later I heard he’d sold his stack of unfinished comedies to some hack who worked for the Other Lot, across the river, and drank the proceeds in a week. In my opinion, the Other Lot were robbed.
* * *
I often eat toasted cheese at bedtime. Mind you, I’m Welsh. Some stereotypes are justified. And I have bad dreams, but they don’t tend to come true. Nobody is writing my life. It’s impromptu, ad lib, extemporised by the clown, told by an idiot. Therefore, presumably, it’s comedy.
* * *
I was quite wrong, of course. I didn’t get fifty shillings from Lord Devereaux. I got eighty. A man like my lord would take deep offence if you asked him to pay anything less than twice the true value; he’d assume you were implying he was a cheapskate, and men have ended up dead in alleyways for less. Luckily I saw my mistake before I opened negotiations.
Four pounds, in good, unclipped gold coin. I didn’t need the money, of course, but it came in very handy. I had plasterers to pay, and carpenters, and bricklayers and authors and purveyors of fine textiles. The theatr
e business pays well, very well, sometimes, but it’s like the tides of the sea. Money can’t come in unless it goes out first, which is why I see myself as a sort of financial estuary. Fifty shillings paid for all my outstanding maintenance, a new set of alcove curtains and The Tragical History of King Henry II, in five acts, with ghosts. I read it that evening, and very good it was too, though whether it would go down well with the customers was another matter entirely. We have a saying in our business; everybody loved it except the public. Still, sometimes, you just have to take a chance.
* * *
The world is, notoriously, full of old rubbish. Everywhere you turn there’s junk, garbage, trash. Nearly everything you’re likely to encounter as you pick your fastidious way across Life’s midden is noisesome, offensive, and of no possible value to anyone. This generally useful rule of thumb doesn’t only apply only to curiosities and treasures. Same goes for places, people, and experiences. The ratio does vary, it’s true. Only about half of the cheese offered for sale in Southwark market, for example, is actually poisonous enough to kill you, whereas ninety-nine out of every hundred plays presented to me for my consideration are a wicked waste of oak-apple gall and mashed-up rags.
But the world also teems with glorious, wonderful things, rich, gorgeous, and rare. The ludicrous, infuriating, utterly delightful paradox is that the good things are invariably to be found in among the rubbish, all jumbled up in a heap. You need the discerning eye. An uncut diamond is just a pebble, gold is just sand in a riverbed, and nearly all the pebbles and sand in the world are pebbles and sand. You need the eye. I’m lucky, I have it. God knows how many tens of thousands of carters and shepherds waded through that particular ford, three miles from where I was born, in Godforsaken west Wales, and never knew they were squelching through wealth and opportunity. I saw a tiny sparkle in the dried mud lodged between the welts of my boot-sole. In my time in London, forty-six men have gone bankrupt trying to run a theatre. I glance at a few lines on a page, and I know.
I’m not, it goes without saying, the only one. I met a German once, a very learned man, who’d spent his life in the silver mines of Joachimsthal. He knew exactly what to look for—he told me, but I’ve long since forgotten—the telltale signs of a silver deposit. I met him in an inn near Carnarvon. He’d been tramping the hills and valleys for months, looking for the signs, and never found a damn thing. He knew exactly what to look for, but it simply wasn’t there. Or take my lord Devereaux. He knows what to look for as well as any man living, and he spends his life examining the wares of merchants in dockside taverns, prowling through country auctions, soiling his small, delicate fingers pawing about in the packs of pedlars and gypsies, and all he ever finds is junk, trash, garbage, rubbish. His treasures, of which he has many, have all come from wise, expensive dealers who know precisely what they’ve got and how much it’s worth. I, on the other hand, find gold in dirt, commercially viable poetry in Cheapside, and genuine Saxon rings among the wares of master Cork, quite possibly the last places on earth anyone would think of looking. The truth is, valuable rarities are rare because there aren’t many of them; you could spend a lifetime knowing what to look for and only find sand, sharks’ teeth, and doggerel. Not me. And that’s not skill, knowledge, or discernment. That’s just luck.
* * *
Talking of old rubbish, I decided against The Tragical History of Henry II. It was a fine play, with a good, strong lead and plenty of scope for Master Ackerton to pull horrible faces at the standing customers, but I knew it wasn’t for me. Nobody’s fault, except possibly the House of Plantagenet; they would insist on naming their eldest sons Henry, over and over again, and unless you’re a scholar or an antiquary, you can’t help getting them muddled up. The average playgoer can’t be expected to remember whether the play he saw last month was Henry the Fifth, Henry the First, Henry the Third part two, Henry the Seventh part one or Henry the Sixth part three. Rather than risk seeing the same play twice, he’s going to keep his twopence in his purse and wait for The Tragical History of King Stephen.
Instead, I took a walk along the riverbank, calling in at a number of rather unpleasant inns and taverns until I flushed out master Allardyce. I found him in the courtyard of the White Bear, sitting on the mounting-block with his head in his hands and last night’s dinner on his shirt-front. Recently someone had punched him quite hard in the face; his lip was swollen and his cheek was the colour of fresh liver. I walked up behind him quite quietly and tapped him on the shoulder. He rose like a pheasant, then sat down again like a dirty shirt dropped into a linen-basket.
“Tristram and Yseult,” I said.
“Go away.” He massaged his temples with thumb and forefinger. I had no sympathy.
“It’s practically finished,” I said. “You just need to fix the third act and put in some stuff for the clowns. And then you’ll get paid. Won’t that be nice?”
He shook his head, a gesture that he clearly regretted. “It’s not right,” he said. “It needs tearing up and starting again from scratch. Bloody thing,” he added bitterly. He hates his own work. I think he blames it for his misfortunes.
“Now listen,” I said. “It’s a perfectly good working play, and it’ll pack ‘em in, trust me, I know ever so much more about this business than you do. The longer you fiddle with it, the worse it’ll get. For once in your life, finish something. You’ll feel ever so much better, and I’ll give you fifteen beautiful shillings. All you have to do is fix the third act and write a few jokes. It’ll take you half an hour. Best of all, you’ll make me happy. You like me, I’m you’re only friend. Well?”
He closed his red eyes. “It’s rubbish,” he said. “There was so much I wanted to say, and it’s all got lost and watered down. Now, it’s just a bunch of idiots strutting up and down and shouting.”
“Yes,” I said. “Which is what the customers like. The sole justification of a writer is writing stuff that people want to see. Otherwise, what the hell are you people good for?”
So much for master Allardyce. I’d known him five years, and I accepted that he had the potential to write the greatest play ever; a play so good that if God were to summon Mankind before the bar of Heaven and demand to know one good reason why He shouldn’t send a second flood and drown the lot of us, all we’d have to do is hand Him the manuscript and there’d be no case to answer. I knew that, in order to write this play, master Allardyce needed to drink himself stupid, get beaten up twice a week, and generally mash himself down into a cheese, like the cider-makers do, before he could ferment and distil his very essence into words on a page. But I have a business to run, and I need crowd-pleasers. Master Allardyce’s monument-more-enduring-than-bronze would just have to wait until I retired. Accordingly, I gave him no peace.
A good morning’s work, and all done before ten o’clock. I walked back to Shoe Lane and sat in my chair for a while, until the fidgets got me and I couldn’t sit still a moment longer.
At times like that, I really miss manual labour. The way I see it, Man was built to tire himself out; unless he’s good and weary, he can’t rest, and unless he rests, he gets all used up. When I was a boy, there was always work to be done—the trick was keeping out of its way as long as possible, and to that end I had a number of subtle hiding-places, in the hayloft, under the floorboards in the barn, a sort of roofed-over priest’s hole I’d carefully tunnelled out in the tangled heart of the raspberry canes. These days I have a study with a beautiful chair and books and a Nuremberg clock and a Dutch painting of the Annunciation, but I can’t keep still for five minutes.
The bottle with the demon in it was in the woodshed, where I’d put it after master Cork went away. I didn’t really like leaving it in the kitchen, because Nan is a great knocker-over of unconsidered trifles, and although it was almost certain there was nothing inside the bottle except stale air—I picked it up and looked at it. A glass bottle, worth about sixpence; green, the colour of pine needles, but not Venetian; not old, because the glass wasn’t
noticeably thicker at the bottom than the top. It was stopped with a cork covered in beeswax, and the wax was quite fresh. I ask you.
* * *
(Now, then. When I was a boy, I was always finding things. I’ve mentioned my ridiculously overgenerous allotment of luck already—when you get to know me, you’ll discover that I refer to it all the time, to the point where my friends pre-emptively change the subject—and many of the things I found were indeed rich and rare. I found an old clay pot full of silver coins; except that they weren’t silver, it was just a very thin wash over black, crumbly copper, as we found out when we tried to melt them down on the blacksmith’s forge. I found the tomb of an elf once; he was buried under a long, flat slab, and for a moment I saw him, a very tall man in a green tunic, with a bow and arrows beside him, and then he crumbled into dust before my eyes, just like master Cork’s Grail Knight. And I found a message in a bottle.
It was the bottle I noticed; a green knob sticking up out of the sand at low tide, too regular to be a pebble. I scrabbled it out, and to my joy it was complete and unbroken, worth sixpence of anybody’s money, therefore fourpence to me, because the man in the market I sold things to always assumed I’d stolen them, even when hadn’t. Fourpence was more than my father earned in a day, and he was a skilled man, a wheelwright. And then I noticed that there was something inside the bottle; a scrap of something, like a dead leaf, but thicker.
This was after I found the dead elf, and I’d learned my lesson. Everybody said that the elf turned to dust because that’s what elves do, being magical. I figured that when something’s been kept preserved for a very long time in a sealed place, suddenly exposing it to the air did it no good at all. Basically the same reason why you should eat potted meat quickly, once you’ve opened the jar. Accordingly, I didn’t open my bottle to find out what was inside. Instead, I took it to the priest, who was a wise man and knew many things. Actually, he wasn’t. He was the wisest man in our part of the country and knew more than anybody else. That’s not quite the same thing.