by Jeffrey Ford
“He’s a fake,” Chin Mokes cried out, and this got the others going because who better to know a forgery than the Regal Ascendiary?
“Eats insects,” said the Exalted Culinarity, spitting as the stories told he had once done on the foreheads of each of his victims.
The Chancellor of Waste went right for the jugular. “He’s no physician, he’s Grandfather Mess. He couldn’t cure a pain in the ass unless he left the room.”
“He is legendary even on the remote Island of the Barking Children,” I told them.
“Probably for keeping the sidewalks clean,” someone shouted.
All of the jewelry of the assembled members of the court dazzled my eyes, and my head began to swim. Perspiration formed along my brow, and for the first time since coming to Reparata, I had that feeling of abandonment which had haunted my wandering for so many years.
Then the countess stood up and the others instantly quieted down. “You’ve all had a chance to pass wind. Now its time to get on with the necessity of saving His Royal. Unless one of you has a better plan, we will all follow the healer’s advice and see his treatment through.”
The Chancellor of Waste opened his mouth wide to speak, but Frouch, without even turning to look at him said, “If you don’t want me to laugh at you, you’d better reserve that part of your title that is about to issue from your tongue.”
The Chancellor relented and sunk down in his seat as if to duck a derisive giggle.
Before sunrise the next morning, the treatment was begun.
His Royal lay completely naked on a bare table in the palace infirmary, rocking slightly from side to side and muttering all manner of weirdness. Frouch and I were present to represent the court during the medical procedure. Beside the healer, the young lad, Pester, Prince of the Horse Stalls, was in attendance, sitting on a stool in the corner, ever ready to do the physician’s bidding. We also called for Durst, the Philosopher General, to see if he could decipher what might be Ingess’s last message to us. It was a generally held belief in those days that one madman could easily interpret the ravings of another. The healer was anxious to begin, but we forestalled him, explaining how important a message from Ingess might be to his loyal subjects.
Durst came in dragging the invisible weight of his twin, and performing the impossible feat of discussing two different subjects simultaneously from either side of his mouth.
“My dear Philosopher,” said the countess. “You give sanity a bad name.”
He bowed as far as his stomach would allow, and then stood and listened with something verging on attention to our request. It was heartwarming to see how proud he was to have been of some use in the crisis. He strode with an official bearing over to the table where Ingess lay and leaned down to listen to the feverish stream of words.
While the Philosopher General was performing his duties, Frouch poked me in the side with her elbow and we both had difficulty holding back our laughter at the sight of him. The healer, witnessing the whole thing, merely shook his head and sighed impatiently.
When Durst finally turned around, we asked him what Ingess was saying.
He looked puzzled and told us, “It all sounds like gibberish to me.”
The countess and I broke out laughing.
“But,” he continued, holding up his right index finger, “my brother says that His Royal is concerned with a stream running under a bridge.”
“Fascinating,” said the healer as he ushered Durst out of the infirmary.
Upon his return, the old man lifted his burlap sack onto the table next to Ingess’s head. From within it, he retrieved a pair of spectacles whose lenses were long black cylinders capped with metal. He fit the arms of these over His Royal’s ears and adjusted the tunnels so that they completely covered the eyes. The moment this strange contraption was in place, Ingess let loose a massive sigh and went completely limp.
“What’s this?” I asked.
The healer undid his bathrobe tie, wrapped the flaps around him more completely and retied it securely. “At the ends of those two tunnels there is a picture that appears, because of the way our sight overlaps, to have a third dimension. It is so endlessly fascinating to behold that the viewer thinks of nothing else. Time, pain, regret, are pushed out of the mind by the intricate beauty of the scene.”
“What does it show?” asked Frouch.
“I can’t explain,” said the healer, “it is too complex.”
“Why is it necessary?” I asked.
“Because,” said the healer, “what I am about to do to your liege would otherwise be so painful that his screams would threaten the sanity of everyone within the confines of the palace.” With this, he reached into that bag of his and pulled forth a wriggling green creature the size of a man’s index finger.
The countess and I stepped closer to see exactly what he was holding. The creature was a segmented, jade green, centipede-like thing with a lavender head and tiny black horns.
“Sirimon,” he said with a foreign inflection in his voice.
“It looks like a caterpillar,” said Frouch.
“Yes, it does,” said the old man, “but make no mistake, this is Sirimon.”
“His Royal’s not going to eat that is he?” I asked, swallowing hard the memory of the healer’s midnight snack.
“Perish the thought,” the healer said, and with great care he brought his hand down to Ingess’s left ear. He gave a high, piercing whistle, and the diminutive creature marched forward across his palm and into the opening in His Royal’s head.
Frouch laughed at the sight of it in an attempt to control her horror. I turned away feeling as though I would be sick.
“Now we wait,” I heard the healer say. He pulled up a chair and sat down.
Somewhere into our fourth hour of silent waiting, the old man jotted down the ingredients to Princess Jang’s Tears and gave it to Pester.
“Tell the barkeep not to forget the bitters,” he said.
The boy nodded, and before he could leave the room, I called out, “Make that two.”
“Just tell him to keep them coming,” called Frouch.
Pester returned, carrying a tray with three glasses and the largest pitcher in the palace, which contained a veritable monsoon of liquid sorrow. Frouch lit a cigarette and the healer poured. We made small talk, and, in the course of our conversation, the healer regaled us with a tale of his most recent patient, a man who, through the obsessive reading of religious texts, had become so simple and crude that he had begun to revert back into the form of an ape.
“His wife had to coax him down from the trees each evening with a trail of bananas.”
“Did you change his reading habits?” asked the countess.
“No, I shaved his body and then prescribed three moderate taps on the head with a mallet at breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
I was about to ask if the poor fellow had come around, but before I could speak, I noticed an irritating, disconcerting little sound that momentarily confused me.
“What is that?” I asked, standing unsteadily.
“Yes, I hear it,” said Frouch. “Like the constant crumpling of paper.”
“That is Sirimon,” said the healer.
I walked over to Ingess and listened. The diminutive noise seemed to be coming from inside his head. Leaning over, I put my ear to his ear. It was with dread that I realized the sound was identical, though quieter being muffled by flesh and skull, to that of the healer working away at his bowl of locust.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I yelled.
The old man smiled. “Sirimon is rearranging, creating new pathways, digesting the melancholy.”
I had fallen asleep and was wrapped in a nightmare memory of childhood when a hand came out of the shadows and smacked me on the back of the head. Coming to, I rubbed my eyes, and standing before me was the healer holding forth his infernal green worm, now bloated and writhing in its obesity.
“Sirimon has finished,” he said.
Frouch was over by the table that held Ingess. Her powdered hair had deflated and now hung to the middle of her back. She stared blankly down at His Royal and was laughing as though she was weeping. The healer’s optical contraption was gone and Ingess’s eyes were rolled back to show only white. His mouth was stretched wide as if trying to release a scream that was too large to fit through the opening.
“Quickly,” said the healer, “to the kitchen.”
Just then Pester came in leading a group of men—Chin Mokes, Grenis Saint-Geedon, Ringlat, and Durst. There was a whirl of frantic activity in which we were told to lift His Royal and carry him to the kitchen. Once there, we were instructed to tie him to the huge rotisserie spit on which the Exalted Culinarity would turn whole hogs at feast time. When His Royal was lashed securely to the long metal rod, the healer told Grenis to turn the handle and set it so that the patient’s left ear was toward the floor. Then the old man called for Pester to bring a large pot and set it down in the ashes, where the fire usually burned, directly underneath His Royal’s ear.
A moment after the boy set the pot down, a dollop of viscous white fluid dripped from His Royal’s ear and splattered inside it. The assembled company all took a step back at the sight of this. Then a steady stream of the goo began to fall, like beer from an open tap, filling the pot.
“He said we must let no harm come to this substance, no matter what happens to it,” said Frouch, who had just arrived in the kitchen.
“What in the Devil’s name is it?” asked Ringlat.
I turned to ask the healer the very same question, but he was no longer in the room.
“Nice work, Flam,” said Chin Mokes, “you’ve turned the king into a flagon of goo.”
“Where is that physician?” said Grenis Saint-Geedon, pulling a butcher knife from his rack. He left the room with a murderous look on his face.
Over the course of the next two hours, the pot filled nearly to the brim, and the healer was searched for everywhere but never found. At daybreak, Ingess opened his eyes and yawned.
The Palace Reparata rejoiced at the fact that His Royal had been returned to full health. It had been necessary to help him see to his needs for a week or so, but as soon as this period of convalescence had passed, he was up on his feet and performing his royal duties. Much of the hair he had lost had already begun to grow back, and he regained nearly all of his muscular vitality. The deep melancholy, though gone, had taken some small part of him with it, for now, in his face, there was a series of subtle lines that made him look more mature. No longer did he weep for hours on end. In fact, I did not witness one tear after the ordeal. Neither did he laugh, though, and this small formality was like a troublesome pebble in my shoe.
I went one night to the gardens to release the bats and found him, sitting on the bench across from the Fountain of the Dolphins, staring up at the moon.
“Durst gave a lecture today on the nature of the universe. His belief is that it began with a giant explosion,” I said and laughed too hard, trying to get him to join me.
Ingess merely shook his head. “Poor Durst,” he said. “I never told you but I had sent for some word about him to the asylum that he wandered away from. It seems he had a twin brother who drowned when he was ten. He might have saved him but he was too afraid of the water.”
“His Royal,” I said, exasperated with his response, “why do you stare at the moon?”
“Don’t call me that anymore, Flam. I’m not a king. Just a pirate’s grandson who was left far too much gold.”
“As you wish,” I said.
He turned then and forced a smile for me. “I want you to have Saint-Geedon prepare a feast. I need to thank everyone for their efforts to save my life.”
I nodded and left him.
Later that night, I sought out Frouch and found her on the terrace that overlooks the reflecting pond. She was sitting in the shadow of a potted mimosa, feeding breadcrumbs to the peacocks.
I pulled up a chair and told her about the feast that would be held in another two days. She brightened at the prospect of this.
“I have a gown I’ve been waiting to wear,” she said.
“How do you feel now that everything is back to normal?” I asked.
“You were brilliant as the Conscience of the King,” she said.
“I’d rather put that entire affair behind me,” I said. “But there is one thing that I still wonder about.”
“The picture at the end of the healer’s strange spectacles?” she said.
I shook my head, “What became of that muddle that dripped from Ingess’s ear?”
She clapped her hands to send the birds scurrying away and sat forward. “You mean you haven’t seen it?” she asked.
“No.”
“Come now,” she said and stood. “You’ve got to see this.”
She actually took my hand as we walked through hallways, and it made me somewhat nervous to find myself behind the protective field of her dangerous laughter.
We ended our journey in the small chapel at the northern end of the palace. The Ministress of Sleep, old Mrs. Kofnep, was just lighting a last votive candle as we entered. Beyond her, resting on the altar atop a satin pillow of considerable size was a huge ball with fine white hair growing all over it.
“There it is,” said Frouch.
“That thing?” I asked, pointing.
Mrs. Kofnep greeted us and then turned her own gaze on the strange object. “I haven’t decided if it’s an egg or a testicle or a replica of the world,” she said with a self-mocking smile.
“It took that form of a perfect sphere the day after it came from His Royal’s head,” said the countess.
“The white hair wasn’t there two nights ago,” said Mrs. Kofnep.
“I had it moved here to protect it,” said Frouch.
We stared at it for some time, and then the Ministress of Sleep left us with the usual complaint about her insomnia.
The next day I was busy with preparations for the feast, but before turning in, I went back to the chapel to have another look at the oddity. Changes had obviously taken place, for now it was stretched out and tapered at either end with a large bulge in the middle. The white hair had grown profusely, and wrapped itself around to swaddle whatever was there gently undulating at its core.
The feast was held in the grand ballroom and the Exalted Culinarity had outdone himself with the exotic nature of the dishes served. Crow-liver pâté on paper-thin slices of candied amber was the appetizer. For the main course there was fowl, hog, beef, and even crocodile done up with fruit and vegetables to appear like tropical islands floating in calm seas of gravy. On each table was placed a punch bowl of Princess Jang’s Tears, the drink that had of late become all the rage at Reparata.
Ringlat gave a benediction in which he likened the loss of Josette to highway robbery and our combined efforts to revive Ingess as the true power of the Law. With the exception of Mrs. Kofnep, none of us was overly religious. I looked around as Ringlat finished to see bowed heads and all manner of halfhearted religiously symbolic hand gesturing. When Durst took the podium, I was relived, knowing his drivel would cast out the seriousness of the Bishop’s sermon. He did not disappoint. His gift to Ingess, as he put it, was the discovery of the meaning of Time. To represent his tangled ball of musings in a nutshell, he surmised from one side of his mouth that Time existed to make eternity pass more quickly, and from the other side that it served to make it pass more slowly. We gave him a standing ovation and then started drinking.
Through the entire gala, His Royal sat on the dais, neither eating nor drinking, but nodding with a mechanical smile to one and all. By my third serving of the Tears, I forgot about my concern for him and stepped out on the dance floor with the countess. For that evening, she had applied a false beauty mark to her upper lip, and I found it remarkably alluring. At some point in her life, she had been beautiful, and on that evening, dressed in a cream-colored gown, her hair done up in two conical horns
and decorated with mimosa blossoms, she approached her former radiance like a clock frozen at only a minute to midnight.
“Flam, your dancing leads me to believe I will have to guide you to your room later with a trail of bananas,” she said and whisper-giggled into my left ear. The sound of that laughter did not frighten me, but instead made my head spin as though it were Sirimon opening a new pathway to that portion of the brain that houses desire.
Chin Mokes walked on his hands. Pester spun like a dervish. The Illustrious Shepherd of Dust sang an aria about the unrequited love of a giant. The Majestic Seventh did impressions of farm animals until she passed out beneath the table which held the island of roasted hog. The ballroom was a swirling storm of good will and high spirits while at its center sat Ingess as though asleep with his eyes open. Not once did his smile disappear, not once did he miss a chance to shake hands or give a thank-you kiss, not once did he laugh.
Then, sometime well after the dessert of chocolate balloons, there was a shrill cry of distress and the room went absolutely silent. I looked up from my drink to see what had hushed the crowd and saw the Ministress of Sleep, Mrs. Kofnep, standing just inside the northern entrance to the ballroom, working madly to catch her breath.
“Come quickly,” she cried, “something is happening in the chapel.” She turned and left in great haste and we all followed.
The small chapel was just large enough to accommodate all of us as long as Pester sat atop Durst’s shoulders. We crowded in, panting and perspiring from our dash through the Hall of Light and Shadow, across the rotunda of the Royal Museum, and then down the steps just past the observatory. Upon the altar, the white entity, which I now knew to be a cocoon, rippled wildly, rocking and emitting sharp cries high and thin enough to pass through the eye of a needle.
There was an awed silence among the members of the court, and only Ingess had the wherewithal to draw his long dagger in case the expectant birth came forth a terror. People clutched each other as the white fabric of the thing began to tear with a sound like a fat man splitting his trousers. Ingess audibly groaned and his dagger clanked to the floor as the thing began to unfurl itself. An explosion of fine white powder was released at the moment of birth and then immediately blown away by some phantom breeze. When that cleared, I saw it above the altar, hovering in the air, a huge, diaphanous moth with wings as big as bed sheets. It looked only a hair more substantial than a ghost, glimmering in the light from the flickering votives.