by Jeffrey Ford
“Flam,” he said. “If I’m not back by nightfall, you will have to think of something else.” We watched him run across the courtyard to where Drith stood drinking from a small fountain. With one leap, he went atop the back of the horse and landed in its saddle. Grabbing the reigns, he spun the mount to the left, whipped it and gave it his heels. The old nag responded and, together, they were off like a shot through the gates of Reparata.
The day was as long as any I have ever witnessed. The afternoon dragged on as our expectations of His Royal’s recovery grew more faint than his breathing. When things became almost intolerable and some of the very young had begun to cry, the Chancellor of Waste gathered them all together and, borrowing some small objects from the crowd (my pipe, a pocket watch, a knife), began juggling. Occasionally, he would allow one of the things to hit him on the head before he caught it and sent it back into the cycle. This drew some laughter from the children. For we who were older, the transformation of the chancellor himself, from fatuous ass to merry buffoon, was marvelous enough to bring a smile in spite of the predicament our king was in. He juggled, acted idiotic, and performed pratfalls for hours, until he finally slumped down onto the ground in exhaustion. The children ran to him and, climbing upon his back, used him as a boat while he slept.
“What are we going to do?” Frouch asked as we stood together at twilight, staring down at Ingess, whose condition hadn’t changed all day.
I shook my head. “I’m lost,” I said.
“We can’t stay here any longer,” she told me and I wasn’t sure by the tone of her voice if she was talking about the entire court or just the two of us.
There was no time to question her about this because, just then, Ringlat came charging across the drawbridge on Drith. With one hand he clutched the horse’s reigns and with the other he held tightly to a bulging cloth gathered up at one end and thrown over his shoulder.
“Dinner,” he called as he leaped down from his mount. When he spread the cloth out at our feet, we saw it was filled with all manner of food.
“It seems the lord provides, Bishop,” I said to him as everyone crowded around to take something.
“In this case, the lord taketh away. Righteous robbery, Flam,” he said. “That road to Enginstan always was a favorite of mine.”
“In broad daylight?” I said.
He shrugged, “I wouldn’t make a habit of it, but it seems my reputation still lives. When all I demanded was food, they were more than happy to comply. How many do you know who can claim to have been robbed by Ringlat and lived to tell of it? Something to pass down to their grandchildren.”
“You’re a generous man,” I told him as he searched around for where he had dropped his bishop’s robe.
There was just enough to eat in that sack to quiet the children and calm the adults. The last crumb of the last loaf was finished just as night settled in. We knew the moth was about, because as soon as darkness was upon us we could hear pieces of the palace coming down. I called for everyone to gather in close to Ingess in case any of the surrounding facades might give way. It was cold and we huddled together on the ground, a human knot around His Royal. The answer to the question I never got to ask Frouch earlier was answered when she took a place beside me and leaned against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and she closed her eyes.
Some slept but I stared numbly into the dark and listened to the destruction of Reparata. It was just after I was sure I heard the southern colonnade drop into the reflecting pond that Pester stood up.
“It’s coming for us,” he screamed in a shrill voice, pointing up above with his missing finger.
I looked up at what I at first mistook for the moon, but soon saw was the moth, slowly descending from a great height. The powder was falling toward us, and I roused everyone as quickly as possible so as to have them escape its ill effects. Groggy and scared, the company moved quickly back away from Ingess, since it appeared precisely there that the moth would land.
“Will it eat him?” asked Frouch as we looked on in horror, totally powerless to stop it.
“It took Pester’s finger with no problem, it devoured solid marble,” I said.
The others around us started to yell and wave their arms in an attempt to frighten it away, but the moth, as lovely as a delicate blossom on the breeze, continued its descent, showering His Royal with its powder. Frouch turned away as it came to rest, laying its body upon the entire length of Ingess. A groan went up from the assembled court as the moth wrapped its wings around him like a pale winding sheet. I watched through tears, expecting at any moment to see the huge insect lift off and leave behind an empty bed. Instead, it gave a long mournful cry and before our eyes, like magic, dissipated into a light fog that continued to hang about the body. Then Ingess roused, filling his lungs with an enormous gasp, and the airy remains of the moth entered him through his mouth and nostrils. He opened his eyes and sat up, and when he finally exhaled, it came as a blast of laughter.
As I approached him, he held his hand out to me, and I could see in his eyes that mischievous look from before the tragedy. He told us that while he was unconscious, he had been with Josette in the garden. She told him to stop grieving or she would never be happy. “We must slough off the cocoon of Reparata,” he said.
“That won’t be difficult,” said Chin Mokes, “there’s nothing left.”
At this, Ingess laughed again as he had on the day when he bestowed upon me the title of High and Mighty of Next Week. We gathered around him for the last time, penniless, homeless, facing an uncertain future.
The next day, after tearful goodbyes, we left the broken shell of Reparata and scattered out across the countryside like a brood of newborn insects. Without a word between us, Frouch and I decided to travel together. Life on the road was hard, but we had each other to rely on. For no good reason, we made our way to the coast and ended our journey in, of all places, Gile. I became a fisherman on one of the boats and Frouch took a job serving drinks in the tavern. It was a funny thing, but no one ever recognized her from her earlier days. The only one who remembered was the tavern keeper, and he told the customers who asked that she was royalty in disguise.
I had heard that Ingess eventually married again and took up farming. He became famous far and wide for the prodigious nature of his crops and the generous prices at which he sold them. It became known by all those who might have fallen on hard times that his home was a place of refuge. Although I think of them often, I can not say what became of the rest of the royal court of Reparata. All I know is that years later, when an evil tyrant arose in the north and threatened war on the entire territory, he was found one morning with his throat slit, a gob of spit on his forehead, and smelling strangely of vanilla.
As for that healer, Frouch overheard, at the tavern one evening, a visiting merchant speak of an old man in a bathrobe he had encountered in a drinking establishment in the distant port of Mekshalan. “It seems the old man had arrived with a flea circus that he was sure would cure the Great Pasha’s crippling disease of exquisite boredom,” said the merchant. “He showed me the circus and I saw nothing but meager black specks hopping about. When I asked him if he thought they were so entertaining they would lift the great one out of his boredom, he shook his head and said, ‘Of course not, but when they get loose in his beard and turban, he’ll have plenty to do.’”
In the evenings when I come in off the bay, Frouch is waiting for me at the table by the window of the tavern with plates of food and two glasses of Princess Jang’s Tears. As night falls we head home to our little shack in the dunes, light a fire and lay together, conversing and watching the play of shadows on the ceiling. In those shifting projections, I have had glimpses of Reparata, and Ingess and Josette. An image of the moth also frequently appears there, but the persistent beating of its wings no longer frightens me now that I have learned there are some things in this world that can never be devoured.
Ellen Datlow was the first editor who ever asked me
to send her a story. In meeting her I got the feeling that she wanted me to write something I really wanted to write. I’m not sure where this slant-wise fairy tale came from, but I had a great time concocting it. I remember I received her e-mail accepting the story on Christmas Day. During a follow-up correspondence of about twenty e-mails, Ellen helped me revise it. That was like a crash course in writing short fiction. Ellen has published a number of my stories since this first one, and with each, I continue to learn things. The most important lesson has always been to take risks.
Some details about this story: the image of the main character fly-fishing for bats in the beginning of the story is a direct rip-off from Washington Irving’s The Alhambra, in which a character fly-fishes for sparrows. Reparata was the name of the sister of the famous Italian goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. And Princess Jang’s Tears is an actual drink that was made for me by an illegal Chinese immigrant, who was the bartender at The House of Yu, a restaurant attached to a motel I lived in for a while. Some years earlier, one of my favorite writers, Jack Dann, labored for a while as the night clerk on the graveyard shift at this same motel.
Pansolapia
The woman of the palace, Vashmena, moves with the grace of the hornbills hunting in a sunset lake. Her black gown, like melting night, is studded with chips of quartz that catch the light of the torches and recreate the heavens. She is deep in meditation—now pacing, now swaying slightly, now standing still. When at rest, it is impossible to tell if she is breathing. The only signs that she is more than a statue are the twitch of a nostril and a quivering at the ends of her silken black hair. Then, like an illusion, she moves—slow as thick mist rolling—wide, arcing arm strokes and high, backward steps. She falls through space where speed has lost all meaning, and holds her long middle fingers curled to her palms. When she lands, back into perfect stillness, it is as if she has never moved at all.
Behind her green eyes roars an iron-colored ocean. The waves are mountains and the troughs, quick trips to hell. The sky is the color of dirt and the wind has a voice. “Sleep,” it howls at the men lashed to the rigging of a lone, double-masted ship. Nothing could be more frightening to them than its exquisite elocution, for its command is the voice of the woman they saw dance in the courtyard at Pansolapia. It follows them down beneath the waves, swamping their thoughts as the brine bursts their lungs. Their long hair rises up in wavy points toward the distant storm as the ship drifts into darkness. All hands grin. All hands stare at the woman in black, now moving like an eel, now posing like a rock upon a rock.
The stars shiver down her stomach as her hips swing with fluid speed, and the lion-pawed guard at the gates of the palace knows to let the sailors pass. He growls a command to proceed, which the long-haired foreigners take to be a challenge. They draw curved, serrated knives and wait for a fight. The old beast-man, Kilif, laughs at their weapons and steps aside. “Gusmashnease,” he says, his only word, which means nothing, and the broadest of the men sheathes his blade and smiles. “Pansolapia?” asks the traveler, scanning the crumbling turrets of the impossible structure. Vashmena breathes out slowly through her nose as she watches, at an incredible distance, Kilif nod and brush away a tear.
Her voice vibrates, filling the courtyard and frightening the vultures into flight. One word, one syllable, gets beneath the bricks and loosens them. Imperceptibly, her ears prick up in response to the echo just as they do when the sailor calls to her down the long hall of columns leading to the carnivorous gardens. Her memory of running is played out in her pulse. A hundred yards away, she feels his breath at the back of her neck. His pursuit is the gentle tapping of her left foot. She crouches and then as quickly stands and begins to spin as the bearded foreigner suddenly wakes before dawn on the day he is to begin his journey to Pansolapia. Ardnith is his name, and he looks at his sleeping wife, wondering if he will return.
They hear a sound, like a sigh, as they pace quietly, so not to draw ghosts, through the corridors of the deserted palace. How could they know it is the sweep and swirl of her dress as she comes to rest in the courtyard of Pansolapia? The place is nothing like what they had wondered when the Shaman commanded them to go in search of the future. Ardnith’s wife had wept at the order, for her recent nightmare had shown her their demise. “What is it?” asked Ardnith as he held her. “Gusmashnease,” says the loyal Kilif sometime eight years hence, and the widow soon-to-be says less. Ardnith draws his blade as the first hungry blossom descends to devour him.
Her nipples harden as she recalls his touch, creating a new constellation across her chest. The sailors look up one night on their return journey and realize they are lost. “This is not our ocean,” they cry after studying the stars. Young Freg holds tightly to the lock of hair he has stolen from the murdered Kilif, as if a lion’s courage would now breathe through him. Ardnith knows immediately that they have been cursed by Vashmena. In the courtyard, she again breathes out, this time through her mouth, and the winds begin to trouble the ocean.
As the ship founders, he remembers taking her from behind in a mirrored chamber, and all he remembers is the illusion of her. She hides and watches as he couples with her image, but when he loses his seed it seeps into her reflection and then into her through her eyes. So now, as she dances, her stomach swells with the deception of the foreigner. She dances as she had for the company before they retreated through the phantom palace toward the harbor. As Ardnith sprints for his ship, the snail-streaked walls and frayed tapestries disintegrate, bleeding atoms.
Vashmena falls suddenly back on the stones of the courtyard and opens her legs. She breathes now, only through her mouth, rapid, determined breaths. Her cries wake Ardnith’s wife as he is preparing to leave. “Please, don’t go,” she whispers to him. “The Shaman is a fool,” she says. “There is nothing beyond the rim of the world.” He tells her he must go and heads for the door. He turns back to look at her as his lungs give their last breath to the rising ocean. Vashmena is dancing, she is giving birth. The Shaman is in his cave, chanting a lion-man to life from a scrap of hide, a tooth, a claw.
As the seaweed wraps around Ardnith’s neck, his life plays itself out before his eyes. He sees his childhood, his father’s battle scars, caribou moving through the early morning frost, icebergs colliding off shore, his wife’s long blonde braid like a maze, his decision not to go. In that instant, Pansolapia is born, and Kilif shouts, “Gusmashnease,” loud enough to wake the sleeping sailor. Ardnith rubs his eyes and opens them to see the Shaman, cradling the dream child in his arms. The sly old man spins like a woman dancing and steps away into the night. Then Ardnith hears the masts splinter and crack. The blossom consumes him with a maw of thorns, in a mirrored room, at the bottom of the ocean, next to his sleeping wife.
I get a lot of place names and character names from my dreams. “Pansolapia” came to me one night after just having read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Who the hell knows what it means? I stored the name away in my memory, and it kept nagging at me to become part of a story. In order to shut it up, I wrote a lousy poem with a simplistic rhyme scheme, good for jumping rope to but not much else, about a city at the end of the world called Pansolapia. As soon as the poem was done, I filed it away.
My brother-in-law Mike Gallagher is a comic book artist and writer. You can see his work in the pages of Mad magazine from time to time these days. A few years ago, Mike worked for Marvel Comics. He wrote for the books Mad Balls, Alf, Heathcliff, Mighty Mouse, and a series called Guardians of the Galaxy. When he’d go into the city to see his editor at the Marvel offices, he used to get free comics. Every month, he’d score me the latest Conan books. Conan was a running joke with us. We admired our favorite barbarian’s methods of problem solving, his way with the ladies, his dialogue (sort of a mix between Elizabethan English and Bizarro). Some of the artists who worked on these books were truly amazing. Anyway, I’d get them and use them for bowl reading and then chop them up and make collages out of them. At one point they were a
ll over my house.
One winter day when I was making a collage out of Conan, I took a break and started reading a book called Time: The Familiar Stranger. One thing that struck me about the nature of time, as was stated in the book, was that it has been proven by physics that the passage of time is an illusion. All time is really happening at the same time. This blew me away. I had to wonder how we can know stuff like this and just keep on with our lives in the manner we always have—not that it stopped me from doing exactly that.
So I decided to write a kind of barbarian story where everything was happening at the same time. In it there is a city at the edge of the world. I cast around for a name for that place, and just as I was, the Pansolapia poem in the file drawer cried, “Me,” in that minute voice of Vincent Price as The Fly. I dedicate this piece to Mike, for without the Conans, I never would have thought of it.
The story was published by Ellen Datlow on Event Horizon, which I thought was pretty courageous on her part. I had a feeling that most who read it would shake their heads and say, “What the fuck?” And that’s pretty much what they did.
Exo-Skeleton Town
An hour ago I came out of Spid’s smoke house and saw Clark Gable scoring a couple balls of dung off an Aphid twice his size. It was broad moonlight, and Gable should have known better, but I could see by the state of his getup and the deflation of his hair wave that he was strung out on loneliness. I might have warned him, but what the hell, he’d end up taking me down with him. Instead I stepped back into the shadows of the alleyway and waited for the Beetle Squad to show up. I watched Gable flash his rakish smile, but frankly Scarlet, that Aphid didn’t give a damn. When he gave up on the ancient film charm and flashed the cash instead, the bug handed over two nice little globes, sweating the freasence in droplets of bright silver. Love was in the air.