by Hal Duncan
They’ve strayed far from the stead, delved into wildwoods tracing a tributary of the Erehwyreve that flows down from Euripus. Fir trees edge a gully of sides steep enough they fancy a pre-Interregnum road perhaps cut through, a pathway to the mountain mines. Below, the base is nigh level: rubble of boulders at the base of the rock bank, pebbly, but then mudflats mostly, filmed with water, but the river such that it is mostly just a shallow weave through the centre, higher in winter likely but hardly a torrent to carve a gorge. Up here and on the far bank, all is forest—maybe not so peachy for a storm, says Puk.
Maybe not, says Jaq.
A rimbombo of thunder rolls, the smirr of rain turning to heavy globs now, splatting hands and backs of necks. Puk up ahead carries Jaq’s doublet slung over his shoulder, as Jaq carries Puk’s jerkin, sleeves cut off after reckoning Ana’s snazzy thus—plus it solved the cuff brevity issue—both playing prudent for the expedition by setting out full-togged, trek boots and everything, both ditching uppers in the mugginess that’s built the last hour.
Lookit! says Puk
A dead tree toppled angles from roots still half-rooted down into the gully, spiked with shatterings of branch and wet moss slick on the trunk, it looks an ugly peril, but navigable for the limber—and a canny move to clear the firs towering tight to the gully’s edge. So they tightrope it down, arms winged, a skiting foot and jerky flail to rebalance from Puk halfway, Jaq snagging britches on a shard at the last stretch, yanking free, shoogling perilous, springing hard to a muddy splot rather than come a cropper.
The rain is peltering down, wind blattering the trees above, by the time they find an overhang for shelter. Sheet lightning limns the opening heavens, and they count: one element; two elements; three elements; four—the thunder rumbles.
Electric, the skies stance a show for them, fury and sound, only fifteen minutes but such a span.
On the way home, cloying damped by the sweat of scrambling boulders and pebbles, and by pissy showers that won’t opt to be off or on, they start to drag. Puk groans as another spatter of rain starts up. Jaq cricks his neck and limbers shoulders with a windmill of arms. They rest a stint in a cracking of sunlight that dulls over to move them on, dried just enough to be clammy. At a stretch where the mudbank eats up the pebble edge of the riverbed, Puk slips and planks sideways, right knee and elbow deep into the slop, mudsplat clarting that whole side.
Then: as if to spend all in the final stretch, a shower that starts the same half-arsed patter as every of the last five hundred yonks, cuts loose, and of a sudden it’s bucketing again; and Jaq throws his hands out, palms up in luckless trodden supplication—really? really?—muttering and flapping ire until he clocks Puk, rivulets running down his face, trying not to smirk.
What?
Puk dints him a link to his own privates, stancings stored for Sifu Renart.
You should see yourself right now.
Jaq calls it up. It’s... the pitiful drench of Diogenes in the bath, crossed with a stimhead in full froth.
And it’s one of those moments where misery tips into the absurd, the farce of indignity, and suddenly there is no tribulation, just a brace of fleshlings laughing, throwing heads back to strake fingers through their hair as in a scrubber, flinging arms wide to twirl in the deluge, and the folly of hooking arms to birl that lands them both in the mud which tips it all wilder still until, with all the gusto of kidsters jappling in a dub, they’re digging hands into the glaur to chuck dods, after which it’s pretty much just glorious stupidity.
So, out of the wildwoods they come, finally, droukit and manky, clarty, maukit, traipsing back into more familiar terrain, the carse of the Erehwyreve, fields and foresty steads, and at last crashing through the undergrowth at the bottom of Jaq’s sward, the adventurers return triumphant.
•
GROWS ON MOUNTAINS at altitudes between three hundred and seventeen hundred metres, with a rainfall of over a thousand millimetres, reaching forty to fifty metres high, sometimes even sixty, with a trunk diameter of up to five foot, an astringent antiseptic bark, and beneath that bark a timber which is light and soft, durable and pliable, and so was used in the furniture of Pompei and Herculaneum, while the Greeks used his gum, the Menses of Eileithyia, medicinally in childbirth, and the balsam extracted from his harvested oleoresin, Strasburg Turpentine, to preserve new wine, others in other eras using it for perfumes, or for medicine, or for caulking ships, just as they used the residue left from the extraction of Oil of Turpentine as a solvent, rosin oil, for varnishes and lacquers, although here in the scrubber what’s in use is actually his flattened needle-like leaves—one point eight to three centimetres long, two millimetres wide, point five millimetres thick, and generally a little notched at the tip, glossy dark green above, with two greenish-white bands of stomata below, and rich with an essential oil, a bronchial sedative, disinfectant, and ingredient of medicine and perfume—which are, like his rheumatics and neuralgia salving rubbing oil resin, as expectorants, common in cold remedies and cough mixtures, whether in lozenge or inhalant, also in folk medicine for bronchitis, cystitis, leucorrhoea, ulcers, flatulent colic, albeit here a simpler use is being made of them in the scented bath products with which the fleshlings cleanse in foamy bubbles and suds, with no small focus on those acute reminders of what he lost in exchange for tall cones, nine to seventeen centimetres long, three to four centimetres broad, with between one hundred and fifty to two hundred scales, each with an exserted bract and two seeds, ripening in the late autumn, disintegrating on maturity to release the winged seeds, that cone which, atop a staff in the thyrsos of Dionysus, was a symbol of the god’s phallus, or in the orgiastic rituals of Kybele, high in the mountains, centred on his decorated trunk, of what he snipped off himself on her orders, when she discovered the handsome youth she loved had been unfaithful and transformed him to a large evergreen pyramidal conifer Attis, Abies alba, the Silver Fir which
•
WHICH IS WHICH? says the Duke of Burgundy, alighted on the banister of the balcony beyond the french windows, a fat-bodied butterfly who once went by the less grandiose name of Mr Vernon’s Small Fritillary, flexing his wings a little, chocolate brown with amber spots.
After the scrub, they lounge on Jaq’s fresh-linened bed, a sloth of rampaged Thracian savages with the stead as Persian palace conquered for a pochle of grub and booze, plumbing and cushy nest of duvet and pillows, not to surrender to this decadence of civilisation, honest, just for a wee shift from the puffmat Jaq humphed up to the treehouse—how many weeks ago was that?—just since Renart is in Erehwyna again, visiting Ana, and besides they’re knackered, today’s jaunt near as trachling as the grand trek of the thunderstorm and Mudfest, as they’ve come to call it. Not to mention the results of Jaq’s experiment in eau d’ardour, cultivating sweat of fuckery in loin and oxter, and a bouquet of mingled jisms liberally spattering tum and chest, mussing pubes, dabbed and swiped with Puk’s skivvies, but only so said skivvies could be worn.
Pink evening clouds over darkening blue, outside the sky is fuschia. Getting close to the gloaming enough the Duke of Burgundy might risk being mistaken for a moth, but he did have to flit by and see in full tetrachromatic splendour these fleshlings that are all the buzz, while he still had the stint. He’s only got the five days as an adult after all. Five. It’s lucky he can’t count. While his myriad ommitidia offer from every angle a span of shade beyond the fleshling’s violet though—so that sky looks richer yet to the Duke of Burgundy, tasty as a primrose in dappled sunlight—focus is not his forté, so whether it’s Puk lolled on the cosy bed and Jak astride him or vice versa is as fuzzy as his piliform-scaled arse.
The plum mumbler is Puk, ouias?
You can’t tell? says Susurrus.
Jaq’s eyes are acuminate, his jawline acute, his nose gracile. Puk’s eyes are ovate-acute, his jawline elliptic, his nose celestial. Jaq’s lips are divaricate, Puk’s succulent. Jaq’s neck is velutionous, his chest... holosericeous but for ciliolate
nipples, sauveolent even in the axial flocs, where the scent before the scrub was—seriously, Jaq—distinctly vulpine, verging on hircine. Jaq likes that smell; it’s him, both of them. It wasn’t that bad, was it? Yes, it was. Puk crinkles his neb. Now though... Jaq’s abdomen is also holosericerous, becoming lightly pilose in the mesial runnel, in a whorl around umbilical dint, (versus Puk’s nubbin,) thickening to hirsute pubic floc.
His pecker is virgate, striving for arborescent under the tongue of a knacky lad.
Thumb sleeking glair over the crinkle of frenulum, down the keel of pintle, brings the tadger full astrut with a jigget. Tongue tip takes over when the grasp reaches root, slicking up the shaft to glabrous seam, then succulent lips and the warm wet plunge beyond that rim, the sucking deep slide of throat set to sheath it all without gag, though, after the wavebeat of unswallowing lunges down and over and drawing back, with a gasp at breaking for air. In a rapture of supplication and mastery, Puk glances Jaq’s breathy shock of acute jawline opened wide as a snake’s in his gasp, as if at waist-high splash into icewater, and gullets the cock again full, to gaze up now and eyelock, to make eromenos doe-eyes of... not servility exactly but the yen to be subject, in all ways, of his love’s regard. An enquiring gaze, asking ardent regard to bask in, silent because it’s needless to articulate the question being answered in every gasp and in that wondrous blissom adoration being returned, eye to eye, from Jaq.
He is encompassed himself, in the steering clasp of hand on shoulder and scrubber-fluffed noggin bobbing in prayer to the gods of cock, filled with grace from the sacred font of the phallus.
Then, sensing from quiver of thighs and rising arrhythm of breath and bleat the moment of shift, he bears down to a jiggety blur of hand taking over as he slips back and off mouthwise, so he can watch with bitten lower lip the full glory of the fountain.
A geyser to mock the Pierian Spring, he swanks as Jaq’s whoopings and commendations die down. And tasty too.
As if a slice of orange turned out not be there between thumb and forefinger, Puk sooks the crook of his purlicue, smacks lips. He turns the back of his hand up and round, this way and that, to lap up the glop skeeted up to fall, and spurted up to spatter, and squeezed out to spill over it, all the while holding Jaq’s eyes with his, all mischief and gloat.
A dip down then, to taste from the spicket with the scrimple of sac below: glans sapid, slightly sweet with fructose, decides the aulete of the tadger astrut. His tongue tip traces and chases, a lapping cat at a spillage. He finishes with a swipe of his palm around Jaq’s belly to swab slaver. Whereupon a hand flat on Puk’s chest pushes gentle to topple him recumbent, so Jaq can scootch from supine himself, to his knees, then a tappety tug to the Earther’s arm to tell him flip, and Puk rolls with a shoogle to prone. Shuffles arse up at the guiding grasp of hips. Feels fingers tease into the groove.
Jaq, of course, as he squeezes the rump afore him and bends to his own task, is already marking the faintest ammonial whiff as a note in his still otherwise pine fresh aroma, and plotting a sneaky play of Puk that will add to it, as he begins again the cultivation of his billy goat’s kinabra.
•
EREHWYNA OLD TOWN city-planning of the Neo-Archaic: broad leafy boulevards of Paris; roads lowered to Amsterdam canals in tarmac paralleled by pavements and arced by bridges; off-streets narrowing to London alleys with hints of the Mediterranean or Minoan, fractaling to branched wynds and zigzags, traffic noise rising from the grilled vents of the subroads. A labyrinth, said Puk, as they wove a shortcut from Boulevard Max Keirinckx.
On Hovendaal, Puk looks over balustrade as battlement, in the scent and under the shade of a potted needle cedar, watching the subway scuttle below, pointing out: the quais of Paris with the Seine snipped out, Left Bank and Right stitched together; driveways for dry docks and wharves of garages, arcades of arched doors in bold colours; steps up to the cobbled streets that are rooftops to these townhouse undercrofts. To the right a little ways, a humped bridge crosses from one pavement to the other. To the left, a canopy bridge vaults a crossroads in the spiderweb of reticulated trenches with a cobbled square of gentle camber, kiosk on the near corner where steps serve for the humphing up to it of a delivery from a skimcart parked under.
Tenements of stonework bevelled at the mortared interstices, with lintels over doors and ledges under louvred windows. Lintels are important, according to Sifu Renart, stancing a cue we glean, albeit subwise and seldom noted, but subtly welcoming as a gesture of shelter, to homecomer or visitor. Baroque fuss is for Tempeans, of course, and a clean cut aesthetics of the minimal, the ergonomic, is fit for interior living, even for subrural steads cutting sharp shapes in the forests, but a city must stance itself against any ambience of hive with architectural quirks. A door without a lintel is like a meeting without a kiss hello.
As they turn up an offstreet, Puk’s knuckles knock against Jaq’s where they stroll side by side, arms brushing as they swing, and he slips his hand round to lace fingers, gets a bump of shoulders, a grin, and a squeeze of the handclasp in return.
It is two weeks, three days, five hours and eight minutes since Jak first clocked Puk on the Left Bank esplanade and... there! That was the thirteenth second, gone in a tick, unlucky for some but a snug click into the Fibonacci Sequence of stints Jaq has just idly noted to this shift.
Above, embroidered tapestries hung from balconies reveal parental pride and kidster fancy in images of feathery dinosaurs, racing gliders, ponies, skimbikes, kittens. Maman Cartier still has Jaq’s somewhere in the undercroft, he reveals on prodding, a crude botchwork of sunflowers in a vase which Puk will never see. These add a unity as they cut through the arch of a bastion conversion into the New Town, and the tenements now start to intercut with, until outbred by, Neo-Helladic galeries, in blocks and cram-ins, all cleanlined adobe and skillion roofs, the tapestries hung from oak balconies now. No subroads here, just slim cobbled pavements at undercroft level with stairs to galeries or tenement terraces, then just steps to stilted boardwalks over skimpod buzz, walkways bridging to balconies like twigs off a branch, as with the one they now reach which takes them to the Cartier home.
•
DIOGENES YIVVERY FOR scraps, fidgeting forward in a bum-shuffle and scribble of claw, thudump of hindlegs on parquet flooring that doesn’t actually settle him any closer, just advertises his proximity, the cadge. A lick of chops at the taunt of treat forgotten in Jaq’s hand, hovering on the verge of offer surely, swayed this way and that to a grousy yowl perfectly translateable as oh, come on already! as the blatherskite blabs on.
Jaq the callant is blowsting of grand exploits, conjuring a scene of Don hefting him up with a punty onto Joi’s shoulders to grab an edge of wall, scramble up. Down the street, Shim keeks round a corner, keeping edgy, tenty for trouble. Acrobatic at the top, Jaq’s picking the apples and tossing them down when—
Jaq! says Maman Cartier. One wastrel in the kin’s enough.
Jaq’s kidster cousins sit afore him, Verniq and Felis, gawps to his braggadocio, albeit with sporadic shy scrutinies of Puk, who’s squeezed in beside Jaq on the sofa, Uncle Bruno on the other side of Jaq talking to Aunt Beatris in her armchair that way, while Puk, in between cardamom and rosewater mouthfuls of Papa Cartier’s yazdi cakes, has found himself chitchatting to Aunt Indira, in the arnchair to his side, about... well, this, being plunged into the Erehwynan culture as an outsider, which she knows only too well, coming from Kasei herself. This is not to mention: Robot, lying on Puk’s feet; Papa Cartier in constant circuit with his baking; Maman Cartier distributing coffee; Aunt Katje feeding Cousin Hans in the kitchen; Grampapa Cartier and Uncle Jaq out on the balcony, smoking cigars; Cousin Grietje somewhere around; and various others whose names and relationships Puk can’t remember, all together turning the Cartier abode into a hugger mugger of the extended familial with any hint of spread in the notion of extended blithely cannoned to the skies.
It is, for Puk, a keen shift from the previous visits.
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First visit, the home was just a strange house with a crazy happy mutt, parentals off visiting and Jaq to tend Diogenes while Puk snuck a chance for a furtive nosey. Second visit was whirlwind, in and out. This time... Jaq’s Aunts Beatris and Katje, Maman Cartier’s younger sister and her spouse, have just had their second sprog, ickle Hans, so Jaq’s namesake uncle, Maman Cartier’s brother, is in town with his spouses, Bruno and Indira, and their sprogs, of course, Verniq and Felis, as is Grampapa Cartier, with his mutt, Robot, for the naming feast in Sanderpark tonight, all staying in the Cartier abode, with Katje’s parentals here too, and Grampapa and Gramaman Arnaud, Papa Cartier’s parentals, dropping by later, and various other kith and kin massing here as jumppoint for the celebrations, or swinging by just to see the sprog and/or family members who haven’t been back in Erehwyna for a while. Or maybe just, Puk thinks, to angle for a critical mass of greetings where it takes so long to kiss hello to all another sprog has popped and it’s time to start all over again.
Everyone else is at Aunt Elen’s, Jaq blithely informed him at one point when he fancied the chaos peaked. You’ll meet them all later.
It can be a stagger, ouias? says Aunt Indira. Welcome to Erehwyna!
•
WELCOME TO EREHWYNA. Rumbumtious haggersnash.
Jaq snirtles with a headshake at the tourist in conniption at a skimbooted kidster, bullering at the top of his voice, over a whiz across his path. He apes puffed belligerence, daddles up as if to duke it out, drops it when the tourist glares, but with a shrug and pinky wiggle that stances targeted unrepentance: ouias, I mean you.
Argyreans, he says. They come here to quaff till crapulous, bumble through the Old Town nightlife soused, then get all fashing and fratchy that they’re visiting a home with a hound!