The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  The crowd became a chorus and voiced a gasp and then a sigh as the thing flapped its huge wings and flew above our heads toward the entrance. Pester, his face a mask of wonder, reached up toward it from where he sat on Durst’s shoulders. His index finger ran along its underside as it passed into the hallway, and then his finger, like a flame going out, disappeared from his hand. The boy’s mask of wonder became one of horror and he screamed. We meant to help him but by then the powder that had fallen from the moth reached our eyes. It caused in me a feeling of sorrow more deep than the one I experienced upon my mother’s death when I was five. The entire court was reduced to tears. Only Ingess had not been affected. I saw him retrieve his dagger from the floor with the same stoic look he had worn at the feast.

  When the effects of the moth’s powder had worn off, we gathered round Pester to inspect his hand.

  “There was no pain,” he said. “Only inside, a sadness.”

  Some touched the spot where the digit had been, still unable to believe it was gone. Ringlat, knowing that as the bishop he should do something profound at this point but having no clue as to what, took the boy’s hand in his and kissed the nub. Mokes actually turned to Tendon Durst for an explanation, and the Philosopher General mumbled something about insect fear and the ringed planet. Chin nodded as if he understood. The strange powder that had fallen now covered Frouch’s beauty mark and somewhat disintegrated her power of enchantment. All jabbered like magpies, and the one thing that was finally decided upon was that strong drink was required. Before we left the chapel, Ingess apologized to us, especially Pester, since it had been his royal mind that had been responsible for the moth.

  The evening ended with everyone, including the king, drinking themselves into oblivion. We wondered where the creature had wafted off to, but no one wanted to go in search of it. Sometime near daybreak, I and the others trudged like the walking dead to our sleeping chambers to feast on bad dreams. My last thought as I dozed off was of Frouch and her fleeting beauty.

  Three days passed without a sign of the moth, and the court began to breathe easier, thinking that it was now time to put aside the tragic saga of Josette’s death. I know that Ingess was approached by Saint-Geedon and some of the others about perhaps starting a project that might recapture the old spirit of Reparata, but His Royal very kindly put them off with promises that he would consider the suggestions.

  On the night of the third day, while sitting in the garden with my cage of bats, I spotted the moth. It lifted slowly up like a dispossessed thought of ingenious proportion from behind a row of hedges, causing me to drop my pipe into my lap. I considered running, but its fluid grace as it moved along the wall of green hypnotized me. When I finally adjusted to the shock of its arrival, I noticed that same sound Sirimon had made when cavorting in Ingess’s head. In less than a minute it had left a good span of hedge completely devoid of vegetation. Only a mere skeleton of branches remained. I nervously lifted the latch on the bat cage, thinking that their presence might frighten it away. As always they swarmed frantically out and around the garden, but none of them would dare go near the moth. Before I moved from my seat, I saw it consume an entire rose bush, a veritable mile of trailing vine, all of Josette’s tiger lilies, and the foliage of an immense weeping willow.

  The next morning, the moth having disappeared again, the court gathered in the garden, or I should say where the garden had been. Its destruction was so complete that I could count on my hands the number of leaves still clinging to their branches. There was a certain sadness about the destruction of that special place, but for the time being it was blanketed by a stronger sense of amazement at the enormity of the thing’s appetite and its efficiency in satisfying it.

  “Do we have a large net?” asked the Chancellor of Waste.

  “Why, do you want to be the one to wrestle with it?” asked Pester, holding up his hand for all to see.

  “It must be destroyed,” said Ringlat, “it’s far too dangerous.”

  “But it is beautiful,” said the Illustrious Seventh.

  “The garden was beautiful,” countered the bishop. “This thing is evil.”

  Ingess stepped into the middle of the crowd and turned to look at each of us. “The moth is not to be harmed,” he said.

  “But it is not righteous,” said Ringlat.

  “The moth is not to be harmed on pain of death,” said Ingess without anger and then turned and strode away toward the palace.

  The members of the court said nothing, but each looked at his or her shoes like scolded children. A death threat from Ingess was like an arrow through the heart of Reparata. In that moment, we felt its spirit dissolve.

  “Death?” said Chin Mokes when His Royal was out of earshot. He shook his head sadly. The others did the same as they wandered aimlessly away from the missing garden.

  I called to Frouch to wait up for me, but to my surprise she turned and continued on toward the palace.

  As we soon learned, the garden was only the beginning. On the next evening the ethereal glutton invaded the closets of the southern wing and, moving from room to room, devoured all of the linens and finery of those who resided there. All that remained by way of clothing was the outfits those court members had arrived at Reparata in, which had long ago been stored away in trunks. The next day I met the Chancellor of Waste at breakfast, and he was wearing the clown outfit that, in his previous life, had been his uniform. The shoes were enormous, the tie too short, the jacket striped and the pants checkered. In a loud voice, he desperately tried to explain and his embarrassment was contagious. It was a disarming sight to see half the royalty of court traipsing about in threadbare attire.

  Ingess assigned the royal accountant to bring gold so that new fashions could be sent for immediately, but when the doors of the counting house were opened, allowing the sunlight access, the moth was startled into flight and brushed past the accountant. When he was finally able to clear his eyes of the insect’s powder and his mind of its resultant depression, he discovered that the creature had a taste for more than just leaves and clothing. A good half of that immense trove of gold was gone.

  All were skeptical of the story the accountant told, suspecting him of theft, since he had actually been a pickpocket earlier in his life. A few nights later, though, when the moth returned, more than one witnessed its consumption of jewelry, and Saint-Geedon vouched that it had, in minutes, done away with every place setting of the royal silverware. Ingess had even lost his crown to it, but still, in the face of strident requests that it be exterminated, he refused to relent on his command that it not be harmed.

  I went to visit Frouch in her rooms the morning after it dined in our quadrant of the palace. My own wardrobe had vanished through the night along with just about everything else I owned. When I knocked on the countess’s door I was wearing my old jacket missing an arm and the trousers I had wandered a thousand miles in, whose gaping knee holes made the bottom half of each leg almost superfluous. Putting these things on again was very difficult, and for a moment I considered simply going about in my bathrobe as the healer had.

  There was no answer from the countess, and I was about to leave when I heard something from beyond the door that I at first mistook for the sound of Sirimon. I listened more closely and it came to me that it was Frouch, weeping. In a moment of madness, I opened the door and entered anyway.

  “Countess,” I called.

  “Go away, Flam,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, though I already had a good idea.

  “Don’t come in here,” she said, but I had to make sure she was all right.

  She stood in the middle of her room, wearing the short, revealing dress she had worn ten years earlier when walking the streets of Gile. Her hair was down and unpowdered to show its true mousey brown and gray.

  “The dream is finished, Flam,” she said, looking up at me with a face that showed every hard moment she had ever lived.

  I wanted to comfort her, but I
did not know how.

  “Countess,” I said, and took a step forward.

  “Countess,” she said, and laughed in a way that drilled my heart more thoroughly than Sirimon could have.

  “Come walk with me,” I said. “Let’s get some air.”

  “Get away from me,” she said.

  Her response angered me greatly. I left her there and went to walk the corridors, talking to myself as if I were Durst. Passing the large oval mirror outside of the library, I caught a glimpse of a fool, jawing away, dressed in my old rags, his hair undone and wild. I knew now what I had looked like years earlier to the inhabitants of those towns I had visited and been evicted from. I needed to get a hold on reality, and so decided to go to the palace attic and do some dusting. I trudged up the long flight of steps, assuring myself that work was the cure for my woes.

  I threw back the door of that hidden sanctuary, and saw instantly that the moth had visited. The creature had cleaned the place out completely, leaving not one candelabrum, not the slightest feather from the eagle decoration that had been made for the holidays five years earlier. All of the old objects I had so scrupulously cared for over the years were gone.

  “No,” I said, and the word echoed out to the far reaches of the empty expanse. Then it struck me that the moth had devoured my very title. The gardens no longer needed bats, the things in the attic did not require dusting, and as for my Monday proclamations, I had been making them long before I ever came to Reparata. At least when I was the High and Mighty of Next Week, the promise of the future always loomed ahead, calling me on. Now, all that was left was the past.

  When the moth began devouring the very marble structure of the palace, Ringlat, Chin Mokes, and the Chancellor of Waste hatched a conspiracy to do away with it. Many of the others had agreed to help them. As it was put to me when they attempted to conscript me into their plot, “Ingess is not in his right mind. We have to save him again.” I was told that Saint-Geedon had been chosen, because of his skills as an assassin, to form a plan to strike the insect down. What was I to do but agree?

  I had often wondered what the link was between the professions of hired killer and chef, because Grenis had made the transition from one to the other almost overnight when he chose Reparata as his home. After I watched him create the bomb, though, I no longer had any questions. The outer casing of the device was made from a thick crusted peasant bread called Latcha, which was a main staple of the farmers in the surrounding countryside. Through a small hole he cut in the top of the loaf, he dug out the dough, leaving it as hollow as a jack-o-lantern. Next came a strange mixture of chemicals and cooking powders, each of which he measured out in exact amounts. To this he added boxes of nails and pieces of sharp metal. For the finishing touch, he asked Pester to bring him the vanilla.

  “What does that do?” I asked.

  “For sweetness,” he said.

  To create the fuse, he pan-fried over a low fire a long piece of string in some of the same ingredients that were used in the main course. When the string had cooled, he inserted one end into the bread, replaced the cap of crust he had cut, and then garnished the outside with radishes cut into florets. We gave him a round of applause to which he clicked his heels and nodded sharply.

  The moon couldn’t have been brighter the night we put our plan into action. It had been decided that we would lay the trap outside the walls of the palace so as not to chance destroying anymore of the quickly diminishing structure. Just beyond the gates, there was a deep moat that ran the circumference of Reparata. We crept cautiously out across the drawbridge, which, since there was little threat of invasion in those times, was always left down.

  Ten yards off the bridge, and twenty yards to the surrounding tree line, we heaped up a pile of whatever belongings still remained to us. Those who had nothing to give removed curtains from the few rooms that had not been visited yet by the moth. Within this hill of things, we planted the bomb, and then ran the long fuse over to the tree line where we took up positions, hiding in the shadows at the edge of the woods.

  There were more than twenty of us in the group. Because I was nervous that Ingess might discover our treachery or that we might fail, I didn’t notice that the countess was among the conspirators until we stood beneath the trees. She had somewhere gotten a set of men’s clothing and her hair was tied back.

  “Frouch,” I whispered, “I didn’t know you were part of this.”

  “I hope that bomb blows the damned bug to tatters, the same way it did my life,” she said. There was an edge to her voice I had never heard before.

  I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off and lit a cigarette. I meant to ask her what I had done to make her cross with me, but just then the Philosopher General whispered a duet of, “Behold, the floating hunger.”

  It flew slowly out past the open gates of Reparata, its wings quietly beating the air. The powder it threw off caught the moonlight and created a misty aura around it. Its antennae twitched at the scent of curtain silk, gown muslin, old shoes, strings of pearls, and the deadly loaf at their center. When it landed with the lightness of a dream feather and began to dine, Saint-Geedon turned to Frouch and nodded. She flicked the ash off her cigarette, puffed it hard three times and then put the burning end to the tip of the fuse. The tiny spark was away in an instant, eating the treated string faster than even the creature could.

  Frouch licked her lips, Ringlat rubbed his hands together, and the Chancellor of Waste wheezed excitedly as that dot of fizzling orange raced toward explosion. When it was exactly halfway to the heap where the moth was busy vanishing an old topcoat, who should appear at the palace gates but Ingess dressed in full battle armor and mounted on Drith, his nag of a warhorse. The moment we saw him there, it was obvious he had finally come to his senses and decided to slay the creature as his subjects had begged him. He drew his long sword, pointed it at the moth and then spurred the old horse in the flanks.

  As His Royal reached the middle of the drawbridge, the spark reached the loaf. We braced ourselves for apocalypse but all that followed was a miserable little pop, weaker than a champagne cork, and the issuance of a slight stream of smoke. The moth flapped upward in a panic, unharmed, but this sudden motion frightened Drith and he reared on his hind legs, throwing Ingess from his back and into the deep waters of the moat.

  The ridiculous course of events left me standing with my mouth open wide. Everyone was stunned by the misadventure.

  Then Frouch yelled, “He’ll drown in that armor.”

  She took two steps past me, but I saw that someone else had already begun sprinting toward the moat. It was Durst, and I had never seen his lumpen form move with such speed in all the years I had known him. He did not hesitate at the edge, but awkwardly formed his hands together into an arrowhead in front of him, kicked up his heels in the back, and dove into the water. At the sight of this, we all started running.

  I don’t know how he found him in the dark at the bottom of that moat, nor do I know how he lifted him to the surface and brought him to the bank. Ringlat and I reached down and pulled His Royal up onto dry land. Pester and Chin Mokes did the same with Durst. In seconds we had Ingess’s helmet off, and much to my relief found that he was still faintly breathing.

  “He’s alive,” yelled Ringlat, and the assembled company shouted.

  Frouch helped us remove the rest of the armor as the others gathered round Durst, patting his head and slapping him on the back. I stole a look at him in the middle of my work and saw that he had lost his spectacles. When I noticed he was no longer bent by the weight of his twin, I had a feeling he would not be needing them.

  Whereas the night had brought a miraculous opportunity to the Philosopher General, His Royal had not fared so well. We freed him of his armor, but no manner of nudging, tapping, massaging, could wake him from unconsciousness. My fear that he had been too long underwater without air seemed now to be a fact. Still, we gathered him up and brought him back inside
the palace. The structures of the buildings were no longer sound because of the work of the moth, so we carried one of the last remaining beds out into the courtyard and laid him on that. Then we gathered around him like dwarfs around a poisoned princess in a fairy tale and waited with far too much hope than could reasonably be expected.

  The other members of the court who were not part of our ill-fated plot now came out of the palace to join us, bringing reports of what little remained in the wake of the moth. Ingess’s fortune was now completely gone, the food stores, with the exception of an old pot of moldy cremat, were thoroughly decimated.

  “The place is as empty as my heart,” said the Illustrious Seventh, who in her ripped tunic from yesteryear was looking none too illustrious.

  We stayed in that courtyard through the remainder of the night and the following day, standing around, watching His Royal’s every faint breath. From off in the distance came the occasional sounds of some piece of the architecture crumbling and falling with a thunderous crash, having been undermined by the moth’s earlier dining. I witnessed with my own eyes the fall of the eastern parapet. It slouched and fell, tons of marble, like a sandcastle in the surf.

  When the young ones began to complain of hunger there was nothing to give them. None of us had been at Reparata long enough to forget that feeling of utter need. Frouch and some of the others discussed possibilities of where to find food, but nothing came readily to mind. Then Ringlat removed his Bishop’s robe, throwing it to the ground. Beneath, he was dressed in the black costume of the highwayman. He borrowed a scarf from one of the ladies and tied it around his face just beneath his eyes.