Crandolin

by Anna Tambour

  So Mulliana punched the wall, and to her surprise, the rocks fell out in a shower of dust. They gave less resistance than that obstreperous stage in a pile of fluffy wool when it doesn’t want to be beaten flat and turned into a felted rug.

  The crowd below rose up in noise.

  “Now hold me up again, dear.”

  So Mulliana did, and she gazed, from behind the crandolin’s head, through the fist-sized hole.

  “Did not I say HARK?” asked the crandolin of the crowd.

  “Yes,” said some, though they knew not whose commanding voice this was. Others just trembled, and some men reached, in show, for their swords, all the while looking behind them for the clearest path to the town’s gate.

  “Mulliana shall choose between three men,” said the voice.

  “Ahhh,” said the crowd, and some sat higher in the saddle, and some preened their moustaches, and some . . . but you know.

  Faldarolo hoped she chose well, but he couldn’t help tears dropping from his eyes, as he thought of the fate of nightingales. If only she could be let free! he thought, quite irrelevantly. He couldn’t bear to watch, so he turned and began to push his way back away from the tower.

  “Psst,” said the bladder-pipe. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “You just wait,” said Faldarolo. “Trust me,” he added, to shut her up.

  “This is no place for me,” said Ekmel, finally taking his leave of Burhanettin.

  “Wait,” said Burhanettin. “I must have been mad.” And he turned away from the tower, too.

  “YOU!” said the voice. “Point a broom at that one,” said the crandolin to Mulliana. “Before he gets away.”

  And as the crowd jostled with many a “Me!” and “You!” and “Not him!”, a broomstick suddenly poked from the little round hole in the tower and pointed at . . . “Not him. NO. Not him. Yes, him!”

  And hands were put upon Faldarolo’s shoulders—some kind, some jealous, some merely curious, but nevertheless, all waylaying.

  “That’s the one,” boomed the voice. “Go to the tower door.”

  And so Faldarolo did make his way, in front of the crowd, to the door of the tower, though it was the last place in the world he wished to be—me, the unworthiest.

  And there, in the glare of scrutiny, he stood at the door, and though his head was bowed and his cheeks flushed red, the crowd was able to see him fully. And a sigh rose from them, and about a third of them turned their faces and horses’ heads away, toward the town gates, whence they proceeded like a funeral procession. For each of these had thought himself more handsome than any other, and had dressed himself to suit. But this whoever he was in his torn and dirtied and archaic garb outshone the sun in the beauty of his visage and the graceful litheness of his form. Several men were so jealous of his beestung lip, and those eyebrows—that, from that day, their lives were forever blighted.

  “And YOU!” said the voice.

  Now the broom handle pointed to the great bull of a man with that ridiculous half moustache.

  And at this choice, the second third of the crowd of men broke from the crowd and slunk toward the town gate, and away. They had thought themselves strong, but they were calves compared to this man, and any man who can travel the world with a single horn! “He can’t wear the both of them,” they said on the road as they rushed away, “because if he did, his strength would be too strong to caress anything but a mountain.”

  “And YOU,” commanded the voice, and though the crowd below the tower was now a third of what it was only moments ago, there was much confusion, because no one believed that the broom could be pointing to the one it did. It waggled, and the crowd still could not believe.

  “Stop them, you fools! Them that’s gone ROUND THE CORNER!” and the crowd moaned, for they could not believe, but it was true. Only Ekmel and the donkey had just gone round the corner.

  At that, the crowd drifted away, for whatever maiden would have that for a choice? That ragged ruffian who looked fit to murder you in your sleep, just for the joy of it.

  “I’d wager you he stole that ass,” one disgusted would-be suitor said to another. “Hardly worth the wager,” said the other. “Where’s the nearest tavern?”

  Three men and an ass

  AND SO, assembled below at the door to the tower were now, three bemused men and one ass.

  “Open the door and come up,” called the crandolin.

  “How does she come up?” called Ekmel.

  “Leave her out there.”

  “Then I go.”

  The crandolin rubbed some claws together. “Then bring her in, but she must stay below, for the only way up is a ladder made of hair.”

  “Can the door be secured below so that no one harms her? I’m not coming up unless—”

  “Yes, yes,” chortled the crandolin, and for the worried one’s benefit, the crandolin boomed out in a voice heard as far as the other side of the horizon, “Anyone who harms her, pains me!”

  That seemed to satisfy the one who looked like a murderer, so he entered with the donkey, and climbed the ladder first.

  The other two came up after him. Firstly, the bull of a man, who sniffed the air and peered around the room as if he expected to find that the place was overrun with mice.

  Next came the handsome one, who was all blushes and nervous clutching at a velvet bag that hung from his neck.

  The room was dim, so the crandolin waited till their eyes had adjusted to the light, and then waited some more.

  And finally, s/he stepped forward.

  “Wondrous,” scowled Burhanettin, though what this was, he couldn’t say.

  Ekmel had travelled widely in his hunt for the best honeys, had met many beasts such as the cinnamologus and the amphisbaena, and the ostrich and the one-humped camel. Now he considered what he had missed in having thought them beasts and gauging them merely for their usefulness or nuisance value in his procurement of the precious fluid.

  He stepped forward and ducked his head. “I don’t believe I’ve met you.”

  “An admirable understatement,” said the crandolin, with a wink at the open-mouthed Mulliana.

  “Nor have I met you,” said the crandolin to Faldarolo, but the beautiful young man’s eyes would not meet his. He only had eyes for the floor.

  “Nor have I met you,” the crandolin repeated, and scritched over in that tragic lopsided gait, to the feet of Faldarolo, where s/he gave his robe a sharp tug.

  “No,” moaned Faldarolo. “I dare not stay.” He looked longingly at the hole in the floor where the ladder hung.

  “You interest us,” said the crandolin.

  “Your interest is sorely misplaced. Please let me go.”

  “No!”

  The crandolin climbed up Faldarolo’s robe and touched the velvet bag. “Is this why?”

  “Don’t!” cried Faldarolo. “I must leave before I hurt another.”

  “You will not,” said Ekmel, who turned to the crandolin. “He is a good man.”

  The crandolin climbed down and examined Ekmel.

  “We all have our troubles,” Ekmel said.

  A harsh laugh made them both turn to the musician.

  Faldarolo ripped the bag from his neck, rived its jaws open, reached in and wrenched the bladder-pipe out with such force that the torn bag fluttered to the floor and the bladder of the bag swung limp.

  In the jars around Burhanettin’s neck, Nick quivered with the overwhelming pain he felt for Faldarolo. On the skin of the bladder-pipe, Nick gleamed. “Tear me off,” he urged, but of course, Faldarolo couldn’t hear.

  “Let me go,” said Faldarolo to the crandolin. “But before I go, take this.” And groaning as if he were tearing off his own arm, Faldarolo tore the bladder off the bladder-pipe and threw it—

  “Throw me in the fire,” screamed Nick. “It’s better to die than to live with her.”

  “I’ll take that,” said the crandolin—and calmly plucked the skin from the air, and laid it against th
e wall furthest from the drain hole, the ladder hole, and the hearth itself.

  “You haven’t looked where a young man should,” said the crandolin slyly.

  Indeed, Faldarolo had not.

  “I thought I was a musician,” said Faldarolo, his eyes sweeping the floor at Mulliana’s feet. “Till I heard your voice.”

  “Hmph,” said the crandolin in a satisfied way.

  The crandolin turned to Burhanettin. “Now,” s/he said. “Do you have something for me?”

  Burhanettin turned his gaze from Mulliana and smiled ruefully at the crandolin. “You already know.” And Burhanettin handed over the two pots.

  “They can never rival the ones in your dreams,” said the crandolin.

  “Such a wasted chase.”

  “If you poison it with bitterness,” snapped the crandolin.

  “Consider it a burnt batch. That is all.”

  Abashed, Burhanettin nodded.

  “For long enough,” said the crandolin, with stern kindliness, “you have forsaken those who depend upon you.”

  “Oh,” sighed Burhanettin. “Oh that I had—”

  “Please! None of your poetry. Be off!”

  “He leaves a happy man,” said the crandolin.

  And indeed, the others could hear Burhanettin crooning as he stepped down the ladder—“Pillows of delight. Lips of love. Pshaw! The higher the pile of pillows of delight, the lonelier the lover of my sweets. The hotter the tongue that melts my helva, the icier the bed.”

  He had rudely left without leave-taking, but he boxed his own ears when he’d pushed past the donkey with not so much as an “I once knew you” and opened and shut the door, leaving the tower behind; “You should suffer,” he said, and his frown was so vile that a beggar scuttled out of the sweep of the big man’s arm. “You have deserted the lonely, who need your succour, for a taste of what? What madness!”

  Said the crandolin to Faldarolo: “Do you not have a bladder-pipe to fix?”

  “Not any more,” said Faldarolo, throwing the pipes into the fire. “A bladder-pipe clashes with such beauty,” and his glance almost reached Mulliana, and plummeted to the floor.

  “Too common an end,” declared the crandolin. “Toss it here, dear.”

  So Mulliana reached into the fire, snatched out the smouldering pipes, and threw them to the crandolin.

  “My beak needs honing,” said the crandolin to no one in particular.

  “I’ve always wished . . . ” Mulliana said, and fell silent.

  “Achem,” said the crandolin, and poked a claw into Faldarolo’s slipper, making Faldarolo look, finally more boldly, possibly to the toenails, of she who’d always wished.

  “Now now, Mulliana,” smiled the crandolin. “No one’s on the floor or in the ceiling beams. Do tell us, and do look at us when you say: What . . . could . . . this . . . wish . . . be?”

  “Tell, or I’ll eat you,” boomed the crandolin, and though s/he certainly could, s/he stuck out a lasciviously flaming tongue, and cackled with delicious coarseness.

  Always, this threat had made Mulliana burst into giggles, and rush to fulfil the beloved crandolin’s any wish. And always before, the crandolin had been treated also, to a sweet and saucy song. But now?

  Mulliana’s mouth twitched, her hands tore at each other, her eyes shone with tears. The crandolin held out a long curved claw. “I’ll tickle you.”

  “I’vealwayswishedadrumwouldaccompany me,” Mulliana said, in a voice so small, it was almost a held breath.

  “She said, good sirs, in case you didn’t hear. Such poor enunciation,” tutted the crandolin, glancing up at Faldarolo, who was now looking through his eyelashes at Mulliana, now that her eyes were gazing, as if they’d been ordered to be fascinated by it, on a stray wisp of wool on the floor.

  “She said,” repeated the crandolin, “that she wishes a drum to accompany her.”

  For one half-moment, her eyes disobeyed her commands, and met Faldarolo’s. His fled.

  The crandolin’s blue eyelids crinkled cruelly. “She doesn’t mean what she says.”

  “Oh?” “Oh?”

  All eyes were upon the crandolin, two sets most of all.

  “I’ve always wished a drum to accompany me,” the crandolin minced, a perfect imitation of Mulliana’s tortured confession, though shockingly slow and loud.

  “You mean,” continued the crandolin crisply, unremorsefully, “not drum, but drummer.”

  The crandolin turned to Faldarolo: “Good day.”

  Faldarolo left in a swirl of robe and swish of rushing slippers— breathing such a sigh that the tears already in Mulliana’s eyes were pushed out when a new sea of them pushed in.

  “What’s this?” chided the crandolin. S/he climbed up into Mulliana’s arms—arms in which the muscles fought, just as the expressions on Mulliana’s face.

  “Do you wish to throw me in the fire?” murmured the crandolin. “Good day doesn’t mean goodbye.”

  Mulliana’s breath fluttered in her windpipe.

  Just as the doorlatch clacked below, out flew from between her lips a warble—a wild, shimmering, air-beating song that ended in a longtailed ululation too complex for the nightingales, too terribly, tragically beautiful to repeat. It flew out the rough window Mulliana had punched in the stones, and was gone.

  For a moment in that tower, in its absence, sound was a vacuum. Mulliana’s lips closed. Her eyes shut tight as jail doors, and her eyelashes sparkled like jail door nails.

  A slight, muffled thud somewhere close outside was too common for her to notice. The faint of a jealous nightingale.

  “But what is that?” she said, for fainter still, was another thud of a different timbre. And then another. My own blood, my own heart? pausing— little deaths, each waking to fierce-winged life.

  She had asked the crandolin what that was, but answered now as only Mulliana could, as another impossibly-rhythmed song of songs escaped her mouth—timid and brave and wreckful. Her very heart smashed the door to its cage, and flew.

  Almost at the town’s wall now in his urgency to leave, to find a Master of the Drums, Faldarolo’s heart stopped yet again just as it had an impossible moment ago—this time for two and almost three-quarter heartbeats . . . and now, it answered yet again, louder than before, answering that wildly irregular, wholly seductive shimmering ululation with a beat as wild, seduced and yet seductive—but a heart is just a heart.

  And though it’s said by musicians that drumming needs a Master, and by lovers that the heart is the finest instrument—at the third of Mulliana’s warbles, Faldarolo threw off every memory of all that wisdom said.

  He stopped in a swirl of dust, took the bottomlessly deep breath of a bladder-pipe Master, tore open his robe . . . and beat his chest.

  Her warble trembled, caught his beat, and then they flew, high above the crowd, into realms of sound that only lovers hear . . .

  His playing was, however, just clenched fists upon a man’s bared chest in the midst of the shoving crowd where those places for travellers cluster. His eyebrows moved as tenderly as loving lovers do, but a prince from afar who’d just drunk well and was coming this way noticed not the softness in Faldarolo’s face, but the fists pounding, proclaiming the obvious—an insolent handsomeness that the prince could only dream about.

  “Spoiling for a fight?” he sneered, swinging before his opponent had a chance to answer.

  Faldarolo missed the drunken punch. Indeed, he might as well have been deaf and blind.

  But, swack, thud, the prince was swept off his feet by a brisk swipe of an olive staff, by someone in the swirl of the crowd.

  And the beats went on, pitilessly, as if Faldarolo was pounding himself tender for a meal.

  And Mulliana was no less kind to herself. Her long fluttering ribbons of love she ripped raw from her throat.

  “Cruel love,” smiled the crandolin, who clearly wanted to continue. “You must let him go.”

  Mulliana opened her eyes and wiped her eye
lashes with her sleeve. At that gesture, at least one heart in that close room tore, thinking that ‘go’ meant ‘go’.

  “And now to you,” said the crandolin, turning to Ekmel, who had not only shed a tear at Faldarolo’s departure, but whose face was as mottled as a stained map now.

  “Why does life have to be full of hopeless loves?” he asked the crandolin. “Why do I, unworthy worm that I am, find love when these worthies—”

  “Silence, worm!” said the crandolin. “And wipe your nose.”

  Ekmel’s hands waggled impotently.

  Mulliana handed him a cloth, which only made the red features on his face more complex. He snorted inwards, and choked down an unmanly gulp.

  “Finished?” said the crandolin.

  Ekmel nodded, turning to the hole in the floor.

  The crandolin grabbed for Ekmel, ending up with a clawsful of rotten threads, but that held Ekmel poised above the ladder.

  Said the crandolin: “Do you snore?”

  “No,” said Ekmel, so surprised, he laughed.

  “Do you know anything of carpets?”

  Ekmel almost lost his balance and moved away from the hole, remembering painfully that middle-of-the-night act of thievous villainy—when he was woken from a sweet dream, bundled in his own carpet and stolen from his home.

  His nose wrinkled. “A good carpet deserves a regular beating. That is all.”

  “Capital!” spat the crandolin, who rolled on the floor in an excess of delight.

  Ekmel stood politely, but was only waiting for his dismissal, for he knew it was a mistake for him to have been called up here at all.

  “No man should know too much, especially about himself,” said the crandolin to Mulliana.

  “Should you wish,” said the crandolin to Ekmel, “here is a client list . . . ”

  A rise and fall

  IT WAS A GOOD WHILE before Ekmel left the tower, but as soon as his steps and that of his companion’s could no longer be heard—

  “Unstopper those jars, dear,” said the crandolin.

  Mulliana unstoppered the jars.

  “Give me your paw,” said the crandolin.

  Mulliana put her hand in that of the crandolin’s, who announced: