Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  One of the searches caused a momentary lapse for the voice in Filidor’s head: it concerned Etch Valderoyn. He is dead in my universe, said the integrator.

  “How so?” said Filidor, as Valderoyn waited to hear of himself.

  There was the usual grand regatta to celebrate your birthday. Returning to his ship after toasting your health in several potent liquors, he misjudged the distance between wharf and gunwale, fell into the water and was crushed when the wake of a passing monitor threw the ship against the dock.

  “I see,” said Filidor.

  Just mention his collection of pizzles. He had a specimen from almost every sea creature that could boast of one. When it was written about in the press, he was inordinately proud.

  Filidor did so, to Valderoyn’s great satisfaction. When the young man had finished, there was a thoughtful silence in the strong hut.

  “Notwithstanding our young friend’s misconceptions about my perfectly licit relationships with certain clients, and concerning my little accident at sea,” said Arboghast Fuleyem, at last, “we have to accept that he commands considerable knowledge about us.”

  “Agreed,” said Orton Bregnat, “and reason argues that the knowledge must come from the device he claims is stuck in his noggin.”

  “Does it also argue,” speculated the intercessor, eying Filidor sourly, “for his veracity in claiming to be the nephew and heir to the Archon? I think not.”

  “More to the point,” said Etch Valderoyn, who had been warmed by Filidor’s praise of his prized collection, “his ‘invisible little friend’ claims to know how we can escape.”

  “Aye, and that’s a pudding of a different savor,” said Bregnat. “So say on, lad.”

  Filidor inquired of the integrator, which told him, The exact wording of the Obblob prophecy regarding the Dry Provider was recorded and transcribed by the Archon Belistanion VIII during a goodwill visit to the ultramondes some generations ago. I have it in me.

  When Filidor relayed this intelligence to the other prisoners, there was a general stir of interest -- except for Arboghast Fuleyem, who refused to be convinced. “I smell a confidence trick...,” he began.

  But Etch Valderoyn broke in with, “Well, you’d be familiar with the odor.”

  “Let us hear the Obblob sounds,” said Bregnat, “I’ve heard them often enough, calling to each other across the waves. I’d know it if the lad offers us a lot of bunkyhump.”

  But the integrator’s energy reserves had been depleted by the retelling of each prisoner’s biography, and told Filidor the performance must wait until more pilkies had been consumed. And with that it was gone.

  “Typical,” said the intercessor, when informed of the situation, filling his cheeks with air then blowing it out with a contemptuous puff. “It’s all a sham, aimed at our expense.”

  “What have we that he could possibly want?” said Valderoyn. “Our pilkies?”

  “He derives enjoyment from having us dance to his pathetic jig,” Fuleyem said.

  “I think not,” began Orton Bregnat, but at that moment the two bullyboys arrived, reclaimed the sludge pot and took away the single oil lamp.

  “Tomorrow,” promised Filidor. “Right after breakfast.”

  Arboghast Fuleyem snorted into the darkness of the strong hut, and that was the last sound of the night.

  Filidor lay down to sleep with more hope than the night before. He still felt a degree of resentment against the thing in his ear, which he believed held him in low regard compared to its illustrious master. But he had to admit that it was playing a useful part.

  In the morning, all but the intercessor waived their share of pilkies, and Filidor ate a double handful of the foul fish. Soon after, the familiar voice awoke in his head, and at his prompting, taught him the first sutra of the Obblob prophecy. Filidor, in turn, repeated the bubbling, mournful sounds, at which Bregnat nodded enthusiastically and said, “That’s Obblob talk, and no ferniggling.”

  Valderoyn said it sounded right to him, at which Arboghast Fuleyem guffawed, flecks of pilkie flesh spewing from his mouth, and condemned them all as “a pack of thimblewits, trundling off to Three-Pie Paradise in the thrall of a slippery mountebank.”

  Filidor defended himself, and was joined by Bregnat and the others, especially Valderoyn, who offered to uphold the honor of the Archonate with a balled fist if a certain person didn’t retract his vile calumnies.

  The pirates chose this moment to return for the breakfast pot. “Here, now, chummies,” said the pop eyed one, “this lacks harmony. What’s amiss?”

  Arboghast Fuleyem looked as if he wanted to say something, and was only dissuaded by dark glares from the others. But Tormay Flevvel had not missed the byplay. “We’ll take him first,” he told his slope headed helper, and together they hustled the intercessor out of the hut.

  “Yon frog-futtering pinchpoke will surely burble,” was Valderoyn’s opinion, when the door was closed.

  “Quickly,” Filidor said to the integrator, “Tell me the words of the Obblob prophecy again,” then repeated the burbles and honks that followed.

  Not quite, said the voice in his head. There is a descending dissonance on the fourth syllable.

  “I’m confident any listening Obblob will excuse a small blunder, just as one does not quibble over the grammatical errors of a talking dog,” Filidor replied.

  He tried the whole speech again, and heard Good enough, from within his head.

  The door was flung open again and Tormay Flevvel put his head in, his lesser eye even more squinty than usual. He pointed a finger at Filidor then turned the gesture into a flick of the thumb over his shoulder, saying only, “You! Now!”

  Filidor came out into the sunlight to see Arboghast Fuleyem in the sure grasp of Toutis Jorn. Fear and triumph warred for dominance across the intercessor’s face. The pop eyed pirate put a hand on Filidor’s chest and held him against the wall of the strong hut. “I’m hearing tales about you,” he said.

  “I am the King of Air and...” Filidor began, but Flevvel hard fingers came up and squeezed the young man’s lips shut.

  “Hush,” he said, and turning to Fuleyem, indicated that the intercessor should speak.

  “He only pretends to be twist-witted,” Fuleyem said. “He is talking the others around to the idea of staging a mass escape, which he will no doubt use as a diversion to cover his own flight.”

  Flevvel turned back to Filidor. “And what say you?”

  The young man sighed and adopted an air of resigned defeat. “All right,” he said, “he can be a seagrave.”

  “What?” said the pirate.

  “He wanted to be the Lord Seagrave of the Several Oceans,” said Filidor, “but I denied him the title. Now I see I have no choice but to...”

  “He’s doing it again!” cried Arboghast Fuleyem, twisting in Toutis Jorn’s grip, which earned the intercessor a quietening buffet to the side of the head.

  Tormay Flevvel looked Filidor up and down, then made up his mind. “He can’t do much harm on the wheel,” he said. “Let’s get them both walking. Henwaye can sift it when he gets back.”

  In no time, Filidor was at the wheel, the sea furze sweat suit turning his skin into an acre of torment. Arboghast was set to walk the drum beside him, and not long after, Bregnat was brought and put on the next one over. The undermate eyed the intercessor sourly as he put on his suit and walked the plank to climb his wheel.

  “Did he make difficulties, this one?” called the undermate.

  “He tried to,” said Filidor. “We are to await Gwallyn Henwaye’s judgment.”

  “Henwaye’s not one to take risks,” said Bregnat. “For his peace of mind, he’ll weight the both of you down with rocks and leave you to the creep-and-crawls out on the reef.”

  Arboghast let out a squawk of protest. “Not so,” he said. “I shall prove my wort
h to him and gain his trust. They will make me one of them, and I will dine on the sea’s sweet bounty while you eat pilkies and walk the wheel. I have many ideas for improving this enterprise.”

  “I know Gwallyn Henwaye of old,” said Bregnat. “You may have noted that his henchmen would find it a strain to outwit a sponge. That is because he pals with none who might get the best of him. He will never trust your allegiance.”

  “We will see,” said the intercessor, puffing as he turned his wheel. “I did not get where I have got to in the world, without learning the art of persuasion.”

  “You lost the place you had ‘got to in the world,’” Bregnat said, “and now you cannot go back to it. For us, this is a prison from which we hope to flee; you hope it will be a portal to a new beginning.”

  Bregnat would have said more but held his tongue as the two rogues brought in Etch Valderoyn and put him on the fourth wheel. When they were gone, Filidor and Bregnat brought the pizzle collector up to date. “We must boddle out of here, and soon,” was the sailor’s verdict, to which all but the intercessor agreed.

  “I shall plot my own course,” said Fuleyem.

  Filidor consulted the device in his head.

  I can’t talk, said the integrator, its voice faint. There is an unforeseen problem: the pilkies are contaminated with something that leaves a residue. It has begun to corrode my sheets. My capacity to hold energy is in decline.

  “Use them now, or your next lodging will be in the belly of whichever crab dines on my inner ear,” said Filidor. He quickly sketched for the integrator a description of the room, the wheels, the suits and the way the prisoners were put on and taken off the great drums. “Well?” he said, when he had finished.

  The voice in his ear was faint and fading. ...the suits, was all that Filidor could be sure of. He tried for more, but there was nothing.

  “’The suits,’ it said,” he told the others.

  “But the suits are no protection,” Bregnat said. “We’ve all been stung or nipped through them.”

  For a long while, there was nothing but the rumbling churning of the wheels. “Two suits,” suggested Valderoyn.

  “Never get one on over the other,” was Bregnat’s judgment.

  Filidor turned over his brain as he turned the great wooden drum. He wished he was that other Filidor, the one whose birthdays were toasted by men like Valderoyn. If he were that Filidor, the answer would leap at him as quickly the yellow eyed beast below had struck at his ankle. He wondered what made this universe and this Filidor so different from that and him.

  What tiny twist in the trail behind him hid the spot where he would have gone on to greatness? Was it just that he had once turned left instead of right when coming out of a theater, or chosen to idle an hour over some picaresque tale instead of wading through the footnotes of a history? Or was it something in his most essential foundation, one enzyme a little too zealous when it came to ordering his fundamental molecules?

  From speculation on the cause, he moved to consideration of how the effects might be realigned. Was it too late to be what he might well have been meant to be? Could he willfully alter his life’s meandering direction here and now, change course and hack his way through conditions and circumstances until he found once more the trail he could and should have taken?

  These were heftier questions than whether to order the soup or the sweetvetch, and the sinews of Filidor’s mind were not used to lifting them. He could not see a clear solution, yet he was conscious that just knowing himself to be demonstrably capable of more than he had thought, at least in some related cosmos, somehow raised his spirits. Even if he was doomed to walk a wheel until he expired of weariness and want, somewhere there was another Filidor who strode from triumph to accolade.

  Cheered by that vision, the Archon’s apprentice carried on up the endless wooden drum. And, by some unapprehended process deep in his underused inner workings, his efforts yielded unexpected but welcome results. Like a bubble of air long trapped beneath a subaqueous ledge until it is suddenly shaken loose by a tremor in the sea, the answer to the integrator’s riddle rose and popped into his consciousness.

  “The suits!” he cried out to Bregnat and Valderoyn. “Of course, the suits!”

  While the others looked at him aghast, he peeled the cowl from his face and shoulders, then undid the fastenings down his chest. Continuing to walk the wheel one handed, he shrugged the unused arm from its sleeve, then set the other free. Kicking his legs loose was more difficult, but by climbing higher on the drum, he was able to do it, aided by the weight of perspiration that accumulated in the suit’s lower limbs.

  He let the suit fall into the water, where the tentacled horror immediately set upon the garment, gripping it with its clawed limbs while its hooked beak tore great gashes in the fabric. Filidor, meanwhile, kept walking the drum, but edged as he did so toward the side of the pool, until he could stretch a naked limb and step onto the floor.

  “The beasts are trained to attack the suits,” he called to the others, “and to leave safe anyone not wearing one. That is why the pirates could tread the plank unmolested as they put us to the wheel. Strip off now, and you’ll see!”

  Bregnat and Valderoyn complied at once. The waters of their pools boiled as the watch creatures flung themselves at the sea furze. The two naked men soon joined Filidor in freedom from itch and ache.

  But Arboghast Fuleyem did not do as the others had. Instead, he began to shout, “Flevvel! Jorn! To me! They make to flee!”

  Filidor rushed to the intercessor’s place and called to him, “Are you bereft of sense? Here is our chance!”

  But Fuleyem continued to cry out, until Etch Valderoyn rushed over and, reaching up to one of the upper planks on the intercessor’s wheel, he pulled down upon it with all his might. The effort, combined with the walking man’s weight, caused the wheel to rotate downwards more quickly than Arboghast Fuleyem could climb it. His furze-shod feet descended to touch the water. At once, a thick tentacle full of hooks curled around his leg, to be joined swiftly by another. He was yanked bodily from the wheel and pulled beneath the surface. The intercessor gave one small “Oh!” of dismay before the water closed over his head, cutting off any further opportunity to voice his horror at what was happening to him.

  The three freed wheel walkers looked down at the surface of the roiling pool, and soon saw among swirling chunks of torn furze things that must be parts of a disassembled Arboghast Fuleyem. Orton Bregnat twitched his jaw to one side and said, “Asked for, earned and got.”

  “Never cared for yon bung sucker from the push off, and it went downslope from there,” was Valderoyn’s comment.

  Filidor moved to the curtain of kelp across the doorway and eased it open a crack. From this vantage, he could see only along the shore to where the bell hung from its driftwood gibbet. But there was no indication that the intercessor’s shouts had brought Flevvel or Jorn to investigate. The thick walls had muffled all sound.

  “Our course is obvious,” said Bregnat. “We run to the strong hut and free the others, use our numbers to overwhelm Flevvel and Jorn, then be waiting for Gwallyn Henwaye when he comes back in the jollyboat.”

  Valderoyn nodded his assent, and Filidor was about to add his agreement when a thought occurred. “No,” he said. “They are better fed and rested than we. We cannot see where they are, so we do not know if they are between us and the others. If we encounter them before we can open the strong hut, our advantage of numbers will not overmatch their strength and, I am sure, greater experience in viciousness.”

  “What do you propose, then?” said Bregnat. “For we must act before Henwaye returns.”

  Filidor said, “One of us must go first and run to ring the bell. That will draw the two thugs to a known location. The others will then rush to free our fellow prisoners, bringing them in a body to the aid of the decoy.”

  “I will
be the bait,” said Etch Valderoyn, with a grim smile. “Just don’t be too long in coming to my rescue.”

  The Archon’s apprentice was relieved that the sailor had volunteered to suffer almost certain maltreatment at the hands of Tormay Flevvel and Toutis Jorn. So he was surprised to hear himself say, “No, I must be the diversion. Only I can speak the words from the Obblob prophecy, and if there is an Obblob about, for the bell to summon, it may come to my aid. That would be decisive.”

  “He’s right,” said Bregnat. “He must be the one.”

  Valderoyn laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’re a good lad,” he said. “I’ll drink to your health when we’re out of this.”

  An unfamiliar emotion passed through Filidor, but he did not have time to put a name to it. He squared his shoulders as he had seen pugilists do, sniffed once, and slipped through the kelp curtain.

  There was no sign of the two pirates. Filidor edged around the curve of the building he had come out of, until he could see down to the strong hut. The door was locked but unattended. Reasoning that his keepers must be taking their ease in their own quarters, or doing something in the storeroom, he considered making a dash for the strong hut himself. There was strong appeal in the prospect of gathering around him a rough and ready crew of vengeful sailors before confronting Flevvel and Jorn. But the Archon had dinned just enough history into his nephew for Filidor to recognize that the surest way to undo a battle plan was for one element to go spinning off on his own tangent.

  It was fifty paces to the bell. He ran toward it, expecting each naked footfall on the island’s gritty surface to be the one that brought an angry shout from behind him. On the thirty-third of the fifty, the shout came. He looked over his shoulder to see Flevvel and Jorn down at the water’s edge beside the storehouse, where they had been helping to pull the jollyboat up onto the shore. And, seated on the rear thwart, directing his henchmen, was Gwallyn Henwaye, his cudgel thrust through his broad fish leather belt.