Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  Fennel ran off laughing, “I warn you little mouse! Don’t tempt the Raven!”

  He slipped around the corner, jumped through a hole in a stone wall and ran up toward Scarlet Square. He panted and panted and laughed. Isabella walked up behind him completely composed.

  “Having fun now?” her eyes showed a glimmer of joy.

  Fennel looked up, his hands on his knees. “Yes. Yes, my dear lady. I should say so. Now that was, in fact, (pant) that was, in all truth, my display for you. Yes, I wanted you to witness the sweet articulation of gravity.”

  “You demonstrated the forces of nature for little me? Well then, I thank you, Fennel. You’re much too kind.”

  “Well, kind is not absolutely correct. I am not kind. I am an educator. I was concerned not only for you but for those two men. They seemed far too unaware, oblivious, that they were in the presence of the Raven! Caw, caw!” He flapped his arms around and swooped at Isabella. “ It was a lesson and now,“ Fennel threw his jacket to rest on the wall. “I must teach you a lesson in Battle Ball.”

  Isabella took off her cloak, laying it on the edge of a brick wall and turned around with a small red rubber ball. The twins proceeded to play Battle Ball. They bounced the ball off the concrete and attempted to get it into the other’s square. Above them, the Cathedral Ogre loomed ominously—the minarets lined with the faces of laughing children and the sound of their ball played off the cold stone walls. Games were a necessity for them. They played them ritualistically without reproach or being patronizing. It was more akin to a bath than entertainment—just a simple pleasure that washed away the debris.

  They played it with only laughs and smiles, a simple pleasure so important to their world. The wetness of Barrenwood splashed in luminous spray in the gaslights that hung on the gateway above. With each bounce, Isabella’s mind kept wandering off. Currently, she was thinking of Mao—the road to revolution starting with the first footstep and then heading, with so many compatriots, out along the winding trail toward victory. She could faintly here Fennel rambling on about something or other.

  “Wasps, Iz. Wasps. You see, you have to keep your eyes out for things like this. They are peculiar aviators. They have those dangling front limbs. See, they are at the height of bourgeois fanaticism. Just like concubines with bound feet or behemoth dictators too fat to raise a finger, the wasps’ legs are an auspicious declaration of superiority. Yes, and you can see how they flaunt them. They just dangle their limbs with a snobbish pretension. Just a never-ending fashion show for these aviary aristocrats.”

  “Wasps?” asked Isabella bouncing the ball absentmindedly.

  “Duh, yes, wasps. Pay attention. What I’m saying is just so basic. There are hints in the apiary. The honeycomb must be combed and the hierarchies that nestle themselves away inside their labyrinths say much about the way much of humanity hangs its hog. Think about House Revan with their limp wristed majesty. It is as though one must blend a barrel chested masculinity with the sign that one need not lift a finger. Have you seen those pictures in the Guinness Book of World Records of that crazy Asian guy with the super long fingernails? It is like that!”

  He was such a yapper and Isabella usually found herself divided between enjoying it and tolerating it. It was at that moment, while the twins were bouncing their little red ball back and forth, that their lives were suddenly turned topsoil. Their minds were given access to secrets long buried in the inner heart of a city most surreptitious.

  It came in the form of a howl, or more appropriately, a chorus of howls. It hung on the wind and entered the twins' ears simultaneously. Their hair stood up on end and sweat bubbled up on their pale flesh. The sounds that they heard came out of a deep place in the soul—some kind of emotion most rare, most precious, most divine. They sensed these kinds of things at times but this sound was elegantly specific. The twins stopped Battle Ball and stared at each other hypnotically. A smallish growl let loose off the lips of Fennel.

  “What was that?” asked Isabella, holding the ball in her small paws.

  “Is that, you mean,” Fennel said, still sensing, his head suddenly taking on a wolf’s mannerism. He sniffed the air, nostrils twitching, and tilted his slicked head back and forth. He smelled for it at the edge of the wind. He listened for its ghoulish harmony at the horizon of his acute auditory spectrum. There! There it was—a rising chorus of madness in terror out there in the night. Whatever it was, it was many—many mouths howling out against the sky.

  They were wild and crazed and operating on the kind of psychic level that most assuredly got the attention of these two peculiar creatures.

  “Something,” said Fennel slowly, “is greatly amiss in Barrenwood this eve.”

  A smile grew on his lips, his teeth sparkling in the gaslight. His smile, always menacing and ironic, was never more so than now.

  The twins dashed out to hunt down the source of the sound. They were up on rooftops, bounding about with leaps and twists—their motions a blur unable to be seen by the denizens below. They flew over Barrenwood with unrelenting speed. Their small feet catching the roof tiles with assured grip, sending them up far into the coal-stained haze above to land again on the next. They both enjoyed the thrill of the hunt—that adrenaline surge that moved in their veins as they gave their minds over to overwhelming instincts.

  The sound grew all the more, filling their ears, and with it came other sounds—men yelling, the crack of a whip, wood crates loading, a symphony of the disaster that was to greet them. As they launched onto the final roof top that allowed them a view of the waterfront, they were greeted by a most fascinating sight.

  The gas lamps blinked and shuddered in the evening mist, making a strobe effect on the docks below. Lining up along the dock, covered in the muslin robes that they were known for, were none other than the mad—the literal lunatics of the Barrenwood asylums, prisons, dripping alleys and backwoods villages—lined up, with a man keeping them at attention with the flailing of his leather black whip. They were being hauled onto a large frigate—their bodies teeming in the hundreds. As the hoard of the mad clumsily made their way up the gangplank, their faces howled in resistance—each face a map of a million kinds of raw desires where their emotional states were able to carry them.

  “Get up there, ya rabble!” yelled the whipping man, his arm a mechanism of cruelty and order.

  The lunatics stumbled their way onto the ship and huddled together at its stern. Some hugged each other in a pile of wet cloth. Some tried to fling themselves overboard. Some crumpled into a ball and wept uncontrollably. Some laughed hysterically, pointing at some phantom beyond the eyes of all. Surrounding them were the mangy brutal sailors whose lives had always been one of herding those whose lives were a hair's breath away from their own. The eye patches, tobacco stuffed in lips, the scars along the necks, and the rum stained breath were the calling card of this mercenary class. Travelling from shore to shore, dock to dock, dollar to dollar, they used the wetlands of the world to put hand to mouth. The flag above waved wildly in the evening wind. A ship riding amidst high-bloodied waves was emblazed on it with the simple tag: Le Bateau Ivre.

  For Isabella and Fennel, the sight brought up in them the best kind of emotions, ones unfamiliar, strange, bordering on nausea. Their entire petite frames were made for the consumption of this kind of fanfare. They were compelled to the source of this great cacophony by the overwhelming presence of passionate emotional heft. They could literally see it—a river of water that they could lap upon. Spraying out of the mouths and bodies of this flailing chorus, the water splashed into the air surrounding the frigate. If the shacker had given them a teacup’s worth, this ensemble provided a lake. It called to them. Made them salivate. Their bodies were ever craving the tragedy and vibrant resistance that suffused the human soul and all the more so in the souls of the mad—their undisciplined lunacy stirring a raw life full of uninhibited perversity and embarrassing magic.

  “So much water,” whispered Isabella. She li
cked her lips as the water cascaded into her and Fennel. Filling their bodies, the sight and the energy fueled them. Gave them life. Made them feel alive.

  For perhaps once in his life, Fennel was speechless. He stared down wide-eyed. His heart stirred as it always did—through his whole frame. He curled his lips in distaste. As wondrous as the sight, it only confirmed an emotion in him he need hardly reinforce. Antipathy.

  “People are so stupid,” whispered Fennel. “Torturing their greatest citizens. We are looking at a perfectly painted picture of the end of humanity.”

  The docks were crowded with crates of oranges, pomegranates, bananas and kiwis. Along the western piers were the Korean plastics with their fire engine red and milk white robot toys needing batteries, children and flat linoleum surfaces. There were glistening automotive parts sticking out of plastic wrapped large boxes being hauled by the hydraulic dolly. Somewhere in the myriad of boxes was contraband of glocks, pills and who knew what else being smuggled. The smell of herring and sea salt was infused with the rotting dregs of seaside refuse. The hustle and bustle along the docks were ever renowned as the later the hour, the more the bustle. Men and women from distant isles worked madly around the clock to get the boats of spices, silks, limestone and foreign seeds, into the growing economy of this town folded up origami-style in time.

  And in the midst of this, in the bosom of this mad scene, they spotted yet another sight of peculiarity.

  A woman screamed her head off in the dark shadows near Le Bateau Ivre. She was beautiful and strained. Her features were tortured and nearly as crazy as the people on this boat. She yelled as though the world were at its end. Her hair and clothes were soaked to the bone as though she had been out there for hours. One of the sailors was holding her at bay as she tried desperately to get herself onto the ship. The smile on the sailor’s lips added extra cruelty to the crying angry eyes of this distraught chiseled beauty.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing!" she cried. "You can’t do this! Look at 'em. They are not clear on what is going on. You can’t just steal them out of here. Stop this! Stop this! Such insufferable morons, all of you. You think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t. Obeying orders. Everyone always obeying orders. No one is in charge they say. But someone is—some stupid bureaucrat high above recklessly making the world boring. You don’t see it. You don’t care. Because you gave up. You gave up. You all gave up ages ago and now you wash away the world of the world’s songs. You make me want to throw up. You make me want to vomit.”

  The woman bent her head down and bit into the sailor’s arm. He winced and let go and she ran with all her might toward the ship. Another sailor tackled her on the dock and her body landed with a thud. They wrestled in a wild pile as the other sailors on the ship whistled, laughed and continued to crack their whips. She continued to yell, but her words became muffled in the hubbub of the event. Her body writhed under the surly grip of the sailor. Her arms were strong with veins showing and the sinuous taut qualities in her muscle showing them as she resisted.

  “She screams our thoughts,” said Isabella, turning to Fennel.

  Fennel’s eyes were wet. Tears. They slipped down his cheeks in small dribbles—little snails making their way down a porcelain short cut. He was angry beyond reproach. He wiped them with a tissue he pulled from his pocket. He was dainty. A sad priss. His heart a soft plum in the mouth of a gorilla.

  “She is speaking a strange wisdom. That is true but look at her, she is so carried away. She really needs to keep it together. Insights don’t mean everything,” Fennel said, as he placed his paisley olive handkerchief back in his pocket. He didn’t like messes and this woman was certainly that. The scene was both frantic and calm. In the midst of the screams of the woman and the howling of the lunatics, the other boats and their merchants and loaders continued their work unabated. The night wind blew across their efforts without a care. The flags on all ships blowing most serene.

  “That man,” said Isabella pointing down. “He knows.”

  Her finger pointed down to a solicitor dressed in fine raiment, his tapered fingers and grey silk suit speaking of a kind of class that could only be making money off these efforts. He was no sailor and yet he stood with what could only be the ship’s captain with a small notebook in his hand. He scribbled something and his eyes looking upon the scene were rather calm, if not altogether bored.

  “The bridge,” said Fennel, eager to find someone to blame. “Whoever is robbing the city of its water is going through that fragile fledgling down there. Good work, sleuth sis. It occurs to me that Barrenwood is the riddle. The city, that is. It is a place of making and unmaking. It is a conjurer much in the same way that we are. If I were to hop down there and push that annoying man in the river, the city would just spawn another. Someone would inevitably replace him and the boat would continue to be loaded with our true friends. But if we were to untangle the knot that is Barrenwood, perhaps, yes, perhaps, I could beat with my cane the true insufferable nimrod that brought this stupidity into being. I could tease it out like a flea on a dog. Burn it off. And then rearrange this riffraff town more to my liking. That is what is at stake. I must cut the head from the snake!”

  Fennel stood proudly. He considered his insight a sudden burst of vision. He had carved a plan out for himself in a flash of disdain. It washed over him in a bath of purpose.

  “You can’t beat the sense into a city, my brother. People are bumps in the flow. To move a river, one must adjust the riverbed. The city isn’t a problem to be solved; it is a riddle without an answer. Do you really think you can just find the solution to this city’s war on the mad? Is that what you think?”

  She found her brother to be ever so reductive. Such a male—always thinking he could solve something with his puny might. She knew quite well, looking at this tragedy that played out in front of her, that there wasn’t a single person one could blame for this. Fennel on the other hand saw her comments as further evidence of her ongoing reluctance toward action. He read sympathy as fear and fear, he often told himself, was the defining characteristic of humanity.

  “I couldn’t disagree with you more. In fact, my sweet ricket, I am going to demonstrate the first phase of my now long-standing mission to cut the head off the snake. I am the Raven after all.”

  Fennel made a motion to jump, but Isabella stopped him. Her small hand held him rock still at the roof’s edge. He was very bad indeed.

  “There are a lot of people around my over-zealous companion. A little prudence might go a long way. As much fun as we are having, our master will not take kindly to us making our presence known.”

  Fennel acquiesced, his shoulders slumping back from their tense desire to attack. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “I can’t promise I will be good, but I do promise that my efforts will go unnoticed. And, by the way, the city isn’t a riddle. It is a joke and I am its punch line.”

  With that, Fennel leapt down onto the street below, his feet landing with the slightest touch. Isabella let him jump and waited to follow. She knew she couldn’t stop him and felt little desire to do so. He wasn’t wrong. The city was a joke and this latest display of expelling the mad provided only further evidence of its operatic idiocy. She turned back to the woman now being dragged across the docks by two sailors. She was kicking her legs and Isabella feared for the woman’s safety. The woman had shifted from anger to slight hints of fear. She was realizing that her protest had placed her in the paws of creatures who should not be allowed to touch a frantic, attractive woman late in the night.

  Isabella leapt down and joined her brother who had already begun his skipping walk along the docks. Even at his most casual, he remained a peculiar sight—a little boy with a top hat making his way across the city as though he owned it. He clicked his heels across the dock whistling a little song. Grabbing some kiwis out of one of the crates, he began to juggle for a few of the sailors. He was extremely adept at most circus tricks. He had the kiwis roll across his top
hat and bounce down back into his hand then fly back up to land behind his back and then back up into the air. The sailors were laughing and smoking and enjoying his show. He continued to make goofy faces, all the while sticking out his tongue and looking overall like a sort of village idiot. Isabella stayed to the back of the road hiding in the shadows making her way ever so gently toward the woman being dragged away. The sounds of her screams merely blended into the cacophony of the lunatics’ moans.

  She didn’t have much time to watch her brother’s antics as the time to save the woman was nearly running out. They had disappeared into a back wooden shack and Isabella rushed after them with blinding speed. She slipped in the doorway, not seconds after she saw the leg of the woman still kicking fall back into the shack.

  Fennel continued his pantomime. His sister would be fine he was sure. He wouldn’t miss her watching eyes anyway. Let them feel the wrath of the Raven, these soiled sods. The men laughed and pointed at him as he continued his juggling idiocy. He pulled off a leap onto a railing and continued juggling. He then slid down and landed on the docks with a summersault all the while keeping the kiwis circling in the air. He, at last, bowed down low to the solicitor and tipped his hat.

  “A few coins for your dockside entertainment, good sir?” said Fennel with a look of great supplication playing on his lips.

  The man rolled his eyes and searched his pockets. He hadn’t liked the performance and knew this would arrive. “I knew I would end up paying for this. I really don’t have time. Don’t hold it against me if I can’t find a ha'penny. I’m really busy and you’re slowing down the pace of work here.”

  The man found some change and motioned to put the change in the top hat. Fennel pulled it back ever so rapidly and the change went careening onto the dock.