Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  And late the previous morning, just as our guests were punching through the skin of the great beast, Gustvavas Kambert, a hat-maker famous for his outrageous fashion statements, was found beaten to death with a steam iron. Mysteriously, he was found still clutching the iron, lying in a room locked from within. What could have compelled him to do such a thing?

  The Emperor remained motionless, emotionless, as the speech went on. Just the week before, the poet Deltiminy – a good friend of the Emperor and twice awarded Diemendääs’s annual ‘Strangest Attired’ award – was killed by consumption of a poisoned pudding. What was most bizarre was that only the victim’s fingerprints were on the poison jar. Also that, according to the post-mortem specialists, he seemed to have continued eating even as the poison took hold.

  ‘… And so we bring to you this humble banquet in your honour, for we are humble people.’

  ‘They’re what now?’

  ‘Shhhhh!’

  For the enjoyment of the Emperor and his honoured guests at his banquet table on this, the 1st day of the Festival of the Dead.

  Bitter essence of mountain cave-slug on a bed of snake-blood ice

  7-times-cooked blood-sucking fire ants scorched in 400-year-old tortoise liqueur and served on a paradise of giant mountain-sloth’s ear-fungus with a drizzle of salty dove tears

  A bird’s beak of cold were-weevil flesh soup smoked with giant cave-bat wings and graced with a lattice crown of bees’ web and preserved jungle-leeches

  Cutlet of giant western fighting crab (from the Sea of Sadness) embalmed in Royal Jelly from Their Majesties’ hives and served with 10,000-year-old falcon eggs on a tapestry of uncooked pheasant eyes

  Live Northern Black Widow butterfly held in a droplet of gorilla snot

  BANQUET

  At 630 local time the first course was served.

  ‘So it’s you again,’ said Prince Panduke.

  ‘So it is,’ said Kimmy. The prince was at the second to last place at the table, and the last place was empty.

  ‘Who sits there?’ said Miss Fritzacopple.

  ‘That’s Mother’s place,’ said the prince. ‘She never comes to these events, but we always leave a place.’

  ‘How sad. Is she ill?’

  ‘She is …’ said the mayor, interjecting quickly, ‘… shy.’

  At precisely 800 local time the King’s Plate was served, centrepiece of the entire feast, a signature delicacy chosen by His Majesty the Emperor to dazzle his guests.

  ‘… Butterflies?’

  Butterflies.

  ‘It is so. These are from the Emperor’s private nursery. Each was raised by hand and they have a flavour I think you will find … quite unlike anything you’ve tasted.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said the captain.

  Each plate set before them had a single butterfly, and each butterfly was held to the plate at one leg with a dot of amber snot.

  ‘I like my butterflies … done,’ said the captain as he held his shaking specimen up to the light. Each butterfly was a work of art in its own right.

  ‘Sweet mercifuls,’ said Lenore. ‘Even the smell of them is ferocious.’

  Miss Fritzacopple said nothing. Her butterfly was deepest black with pale violet circles on her wings, and she quietly pulsed upon her silver platter. Fritzacopple became aware of the freakish crunching of butterflies between teeth. The people were eating them. Not admiring the exquisite markings on their wings. These people … they were eating them.

  ‘Is everything quite all right?’ said the mayor.

  Would you eat a painting? Would you eat a song? Of course you wouldn’t. How absurd.

  ‘Everything is fine,’ said the botanist. ‘This food is … not what I’m used to.’ Her butterfly was still. The time was 816.

  By 824 a diplomatic incident was pending. Every other guest in the room had finished their King’s Plate, even Lenore and Kimmy. Several servants were now standing by the botanist, even the Emperor was gazing down from his throne at her stiff little figure.

  ‘My Lady,’ said the mayor beneath a whisper, ‘I do not want to press you, but to not eat the King’s Plate is considered a tremendous insult.’

  ‘He shouldn’t treat it that way,’ she said.

  ‘If you close your eyes it can be gone very quickly,’ offered Fabrigas. He had not eaten his butterfly either. But he had had the quick wit to hide it in his robe before the attention turned to him. Now it was gently tickling his bosom.

  ‘And when you eat it you get a warm feeling, like a short glass of brandy,’ said the captain. ‘They have brandy, do you think?’

  The butterfly was still, the botanist was stiller, but at 827, the Emperor, who had been all but motionless himself throughout the whole event, stood suddenly and floated down from his throne. The room fizzed, his porters were thrown into confusion. The ruler came to stand before the startled botanist – and her butterfly.

  ‘Does this delicacy make you uncomfortable?’ He spoke a regal version of the Internomicon.

  ‘It does, yes.’

  ‘And why? Because it lives?’ he snapped.

  Her eyes were still fixed upon her plate. ‘This is the Northern Black Widow. It is an extremely rare specimen who mates but once in its life. We have them where I’m from. You can tell when it is about to mate because it develops these violet patches here.’ And she still did not meet the Emperor’s eyes, but she extended a single finger to the butterfly’s wing. ‘She would have mated tonight.’

  The Emperor smiled faintly. It would be reported in the city newspapers the next day that he smiled faintly. It would be reported that he then ordered his porters to take the butterfly away and release it back into the butterfly garden, and that his porters did so in a panic of arms and legs.

  ‘Your compassion is … an admirable quality,’ said the Emperor, and he smiled again (faintly). The papers would report the next day that he smiled faintly and that the botanist raised her chin and smiled faintly too.

  Then the Emperor bowed and left, drifted back down the gangplank of his barge and vanished, and soon the barge too vanished in the mist.

  After the dinner the children of Diemendääs (not all of them) arrived in national costume to perform a short play about the history of their great doomed city.

  THE LEGEND OF THE FOUNDING OF OUR GREAT CITY

  [As told by the children of Diemendääs.]

  Once a noble family was forced to flee their planet by a war. They were shipwrecked on a strange world. It was a wild wilderness with fierce jungle beasts. Their bodyguard was killed by wolves and the family underwent many hardships. They barely survived the first winter.

  One day, foraging for tree-sap in the forest, the father found a giant bee trapped in a spider’s web and he cut it free. The next morning, the mother found a hollowed-out nut filled with honey on the step of their cabin. Every day they found a new delivery of honey and so were able to survive and have a daughter.

  One day the father decided to travel deep into the wilderness to find the source of the honey. His wife said don’t, but he was firm. ‘Yes, I will travel. Bring me my questing hat.’ His journey was difficult, and he came close to death too many times, but eventually he found the Bee Kingdom. The man paid honour to the bees and befriended them. The bees had a parasite on their back that was slowly killing them, but the man was able to take a burning stick and scorch the mites from the back of the bees.

  The man spent many weeks learning the bees’ dance – for this was how they communicated. The bees’ dance told him their oldest stories, and of villages on the far side of the mountain. The man suggested they go into business together, selling honey to the villages.

  By cooperating, the humans and the bees were able to build a thriving town. The man and his family grew rich from the honey, and the man was able to help the bees defend themselves against the wasps and other predators.

  The man’s daughter, meanwhile, grew into a beautiful young woman, and she fell in love with a boy whos
e family had come to live in the town. The boy was very handsome and brave. But the King of the bees had also fallen for the daughter, such was her beauty, and one night he stole her away. The village boy went to take her back from the King. There was a terrible fight in which the King bee was killed. The boy returned home with the woman and they married.

  Soon after, the girl found a tribute of honey left by Queen bee. ‘See,’ said the girl, ‘all is forgiven between man and bee.’ The couple ate the tribute and fell deathly ill. The boy died, but the girl, by some miracle, survived. The Queen’s tribute not only spared her, it made her immortal, and she lives to this day in the great city built by human and bee, blessed to see each passing year, but cursed to see each husband, child and friend pass on and leave her.

  The end.

  To Miss Maria Fritzacopple

  Perfume River Suites

  From His Royal Majesty the Emperor

  My Lady,

  I admire anyone who loves the natural kingdoms as I do. But on our world the Northern Black Widow is not rare. Her ardour in this generous tropical climate goes unchecked and makes her abundant. The males, with their showy wings, cannot hide from her love. I have many thousand in my garden, and I tend to them personally. At night, during mating season, the sound of their pulsing wings collectively is like a breath. This is why I chose to present some as my King’s Plate. This week while you are our guests I will personally take you and the children to the Museum of Natural Monsters. There you can see all the butterfly specimens we have. And the honey factories, if there’s time.

  This is one rare honour which you are not entitled to decline.

  In kindness,

  H.

  THE DEAD OF THE NIGHT

  As promised, the Emperor took them to the Museum of Natural Monsters. The Emperor walked ahead of his party as they toured the rows of specimens in the prehistoric wing. He wore a finely embroidered coat. A trained eye would have been able to tell it had been stitched that morning. They traced the course of history – not the fleeting history of human battles and discoveries, but the long, bright trail of life. They walked past dishes of microscopic uniplasm, past tower-eyed trilobites, mammoths, borenyxs, woolly rhinos, glyptodons as big as houses.

  ‘And tell me, please,’ said Lenore, ‘what is this?’ She stood beside a large display whose salty aroma had stopped her short.

  ‘Ah, the voodoo crab is a troublesome creature,’ said the Emperor. ‘Once you’ve bonded with it, anything that becomes of it becomes of you. A scientist can discover one in a rock pool, they can go their separate ways, he to his house, the crab to her burrow. They can live for years, decades, oblivious. Then one day the crab gets eaten by a giant eel and the scientist drops dead where he stands.’

  ‘My word,’ said the botanist.

  The Emperor, proud to be able to astonish his beautiful guest, smiled, turned shortly and went on: ‘These I think you’ll very much admire …’ They passed by brightly ornamented sea lilies, limpets, algae, antlered laughing fleas. Lenore tried to keep her head within the storm of smells. Young Prince Panduke lagged, nose in the air, and he never stopped talking to Kimmy, though he couldn’t stop himself from glancing at Lenore. ‘I know a lot about animals. I keep owls.’

  ‘You said that already. Owls are stupid birds.’

  ‘They’re not, they’re surprisingly clever. I’ve trained mine to take messages to people. They can track their smell.’

  ‘I see. They should have no trouble finding you then.’

  ‘When my parents die all this will be mine, though Mother won’t die for a long, long, long time. And I’ll make it bigger and better. For a start I’ll build robots to do most of the work. And I’ll find a way to make the honey without those stupid bees. And I’ll send my armies to make people buy our honey. And I’ll be rich!’

  ‘Well. Enjoy that,’ said Kimmy.

  ‘Who is that girl? Why is she with you?’

  ‘She’s my friend.’

  ‘Is she a devil?’

  ‘Yes, she’s a devil and she steals people’s breath when they’re asleep.’

  ‘She does not.’

  ‘She does. She said she planned to steal yours tonight.’

  ‘She can’t, I’m a prince.’

  ‘She doesn’t care. She’s stolen the breath from kings and emperors. She said she likes princes’ breath best of all.’

  The prince was silent as the party walked into a large room whose only exhibit was a towering glass box. The glass was two feet thick and held in place by bolted planks of steel. In the centre of the enclosure, on a plinth, was a small jar of yellowish ooze.

  ‘The zombie-moss spores,’ said the Emperor. ‘There were almost riots in the streets at the mere suggestion of bringing them here. The case is bomb-proof, earthquake-proof, and the spores have been killed with intense bursts of radiation. There are motion-sensing and heat-detecting lamps around to detect even the faintest signs of life, and in the event of a containment breach the entire enclosure will be injected with a fire hotter than the core of our planet, then liquid nitrogen, before rockets fire the entire case through the domed roof and into space. And yet some nights I still wonder.’

  ‘I’m speechless,’ said Miss Fritzacopple.

  They wandered the rows of glass-fronted cabinets with their ranks of omni-legged soldiers, the thin, white Emperor bending to peer into a display now and then, but listening still as best he could to the endless questions from Lenore.

  ‘Tell me, what is this creature?’

  And the Emperor broke away to tell them about the deadly fossil squid, who sinks itself into the mud and pretends to be a fossil, waits to be dug up, then kills and eats the discoverer. ‘We lost two good geologists to the creature,’ said the Emperor.

  ‘I am speechless,’ said the botanist, without looking at the case.

  Again, the Emperor smiled.

  *

  ‘But how is it possible,’ said M. F. Fabrigas, scientist, explorer, ‘for me to have memories of this place if I’ve never been here?’

  ‘Well, that is hard to say,’ said Dr Dray. The lab technician who the day before had overseen the decontamination of the old man’s treasured suit and cloak was a delightfully cheerful man who spoke about matters of high science with the disarming manner of a plumber talking about his pipes. ‘The memory is a slippery fish. I sometimes wonder if all memory is not just an elaborate and freaky act of storytelling, yes? When we recall something – right? – do we, or do we not, reimagine it? If you catch my shift?’ And it was true, the old man knew. The memories he was trying to discover and polish were almost a thousand years old, and so had become little better than folk legends.

  ‘But I’ve been here. At least a part of me has visited a part of this. If that makes sense.’

  The kindly lab rat shrugged his nostrils. ‘I find it’s wise to forget what you don’t know and focus on what you do, petal. You left your home to travel to the far edge of your galaxy, along the way you lost a fleet but gained two children. One’s a human computer, the other … a strange fruit.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘I’d love to meet her.’

  ‘You will. If there’s time before we leave.’

  ‘You have somewhere to be, rosebud?’

  ‘Of course. We have to find our ship.’

  ‘And where is your ship?’

  ‘We are not sure. But we must also help this girl get to where she’s going.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘We don’t know that either.’

  ‘And why does she need to go there?’

  ‘Those reasons are also … foggy.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But the boy! Ah! He is the real concern. He might have details in his head of a plot to take over the universe.’

  ‘Well, that does sound interesting, poppet. Where is he?’

  ‘We … mislaid him.’

  ‘So, my old spoon, you need to help a strange girl you’ve just met, and a sm
all boy you don’t have, get somewhere you don’t know … for reasons uncertain … on a ship you no longer possess, and which our observation stations have tracked leaving this planet and heading out into an empty region of space? That is the oddest mission I ever heard of, sparrow. And I once accompanied an emperor on a voyage to retrieve his stolen private parts.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I suppose it is odd. But it is the mission I have been given.’

  ‘And who gave you this mission?’

  ‘That is uncertain.’

  ‘I see. I see. And do you have any idea at all where your ship could possibly have been flying off to?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea whatsoever. But it is possible they are trying to go home.’

  EXECUTIVE DECISION

  When Roberto had arrived back at the Necronaut he’d grabbed a piece of chalk, snapped it in two, and scribbled an elaborate mural across the ship’s deck with both hands. His mural was meant to explain his friend’s predicament.

  Everyone on the ship gathered. ‘I cannot fathom this boy’s art,’ said G. De Pantagruel. ‘Is it abstract?’

  ‘It is obvious,’ said Descharge. ‘Our shipmates have been captured and taken to some kind of giant mushroom. We must stall our departure and mount a rescue party immediately.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Shatterhands, ‘but let us not rush too hastily into a confrontation with the natives.’ The surgeon wore a rubbery smile. ‘It is hard from this crude drawing to know exactly what is in store for us. Though if the poor sailor who returned was to be believed there are innumerable horrors out there.’ He pressed his long fingers together. ‘Better to rest, then move at dawn.’