by Anna Tambour
“Arise, Nick Kippax.”
A sort of sound came from one of the jars, and then the other.
“Fear not,” said the crandolin to Mulliana, and commanded in a voice of unarguable no nonsense: “ARISE!”
The stuff in one of the jars began to seethe, and the stuff in the other, to bubble, and then they boiled, and then, before Mulliana’s incredulous eyes, the stuff in the jars rose till she could see it, and it rose some more till it was two ropes red as pomegranate; and one rope twined round the other and rose still further till the rope of many twists lifted free of the pots and rose till it reached the tangle of cobwebs in the ceiling where it hissed like water thrown on a fire; and the rope bent as if it weighed too much, and it fell to the floor, and kicked up stuff into Mulliana’s eyes so that she had to rub them, and when she opened them, before her stood a man—or most of one.
He was rubbing his eyes, too, patting himself all over, till he fell.
“Are you?” he said, pointing.
“I expected wit,” said the crandolin, “if not manners.”
“You are!” said Nick.
“Still neither,” said the crandolin to Mulliana. “Shall I put him back?”
“No!” said Nick, scrabbling over on his hand and knee.
“Please don’t condemn me.”
“Condemn! Thou ungrateful wretch.”
Mulliana put her hand out to Nick, who turned his eyes to her with what looked like annoyance.
“A song for your story, sir,” she said prettily.
“He’s got no taste for song,” said the crandolin acidly.
“Something got your tongue, Nick?”
“Did you do this to me?”
“Not I.”
“But you know what happened.”
“Not all of what happened,” laughed the crandolin. “I see you’ve lost yourself somewhat.”
“Here and there,” said Nick.
“I commend the speck of humour you’ve retained.”
“What happened?” asked Nick humbly.
“Only you can say,” said the crandolin.
“You talk in riddles.”
“Then let me be plain,” said the crandolin, crawling in the crandolin’s noisy, broken way, up to Nick, and then up Nick’s lap till the crandolin’s claws pierced Nick’s black t-shirt.
“Not everyone is for eating.”
Mulliana had never been impatient before, but the silence now, between the crandolin and this man who’d lost much but not his mouth, was making her chilblains itch.
“Does he speak?” said the crandolin finally.
“Okay,” Nick said. “I get it. It’s some sort of curse against meat eaters.”
“It’s a bit more complex than that,” said the crandolin, climbing down and proceeding to the hearth.
“Remind you of anyone, mister Kippax?” said the crandolin, who turned and posed in noble profile.
“His nose!” said Mulliana.
“And my father’s,” said Nick, feeling his own nose.
The crandolin nodded.
“And gran’s flaring nostrils,” said Nick.
“And her father’s great beak,” said the crandolin, “and so on, till . . . how many do you think, Nick? You got that gas chromatograph done on the blood, but tut, tut.”
“Tut tut, what?”
“DNA.”
“How do you know about DNA?”
“Oh, I don’t know the details any more than you, but if you’d taken that scraping from the cookbook, and profiled it—and taken, say, one of your hairs I think would do just fine, you would have said more than ‘crikey’.”
“Tell me,” said Nick, who somehow knew what the crandolin was going to say, almost as if he had known it all along.
“But why did you explode me into so many parts? A limb for a limb?”
“You suppose me more powerful than I am,” said the crandolin. “But if you’d been stuck in that book for hundreds of years, wouldn’t you be overexcited at the prospect of release?”
“So you blew me to smither—”
“I know not how you were blown, but as a cook of your renown, you must surely know the old palace saying.”
“Remind me.”
“Never spit into a pot of seething oil.”
“So this Guy de something,” said Nick, “didn’t manage to bag you, but he cut some of your legs off as you sampled some of him . . . a hand, was it? But he got away and gave your legs and most of your blood, which he managed to scoop up in a flask, to his cook, Theuroy.”
“Yes,” said the crandolin, “And Guy ate the dish all by himself, all of it except the sample that Theuroy saved . . . a drop of which stained the cookbook. And so I guess you could put this in a nutshell: I live in you, and you in me.”
“And it would have all stayed cold under the surface if I hadn’t found that Theuroy cookbook.”
“Possibly,” said the crandolin.
“What happened to the rest of that sample?”
“I knowest not.”
“I knowest neither,” said Nick, to his surprise. “Sorry, but it takes a while to absorb all this information . . . Kippax, crandolin,”
“Kirand-luhun, and many more.”
“So there’s no virgin blood,” mused Nick. But . . . ”
He twisted violently in some sort of spasm. “Achbejesus. Gross! Yich. God I wish I could retch. I’ve got it. Ech, how GROSS!”
“What’s gross, Nick?” said the crandolin.
“Get that glint out of your eye. You’re enjoying it.”
“Could I ask what?” said Mulliana politely.
“I ate myself.”
“Though he thought he’d be tucking in, as I think he’d say, to part of you, dear Mulliana.”
“You did? You wanted to eat me?”
“Not exactly,” said Nick.
“But,” said the crandolin.
Nick hung his head. “Nothing personal.”
“She’s a pretty fair damsel, isn’t she, Nick?”
“Beaut, I’d say,” laughed Nick. “Pretty lame gourmandism, eh? But hey. I’ve had a great time, and though I’m not all here, I’ve had a good one. Do your thing.”
“And what, pray tell, is my thing?”
“You plan to liquidize me some way so that you can pump me back into you as type whatever crandolin blood and Bob’s your uncle and though you won’t have all your red blood cells back, you’ll be a helluvalot healthier than you look now.”
“And you’re ready to be killed for that?”
“Would I die, or live in you?”
“You’d die.”
Nick swallowed, thought briefly of the parts of him that were having wonderful experiences but were so small that he expected they’d die, too.
“I’m ready,” he said. “But can you do it fast?”
“Why?”
A boot to the solar plexus of a stinking rat at dawn. Love painted . . . Nick’s lips opened and his nostrils flared. The scent of a cinnamologus.
“Forgive me for interrupting your thoughts,” said the crandolin.
“Because,” Nick shrugged. These loves of tastes weren’t for putting into words, like . . . like a bloody wine review. He looked the crandolin in the eyes. “I’ve had the best whatever of my whatever.”
“How poetic. You know, of course, that some things cannot be.”
“You should have told my father that. Now, can we please get this over? I’m no hero.”
“I’m sorry,” said the crandolin. “We cannot. I cannot put you into me. And now that I’ve met you more fully, I would not, if I could.
“But,” said the crandolin, “I can give you three choices.”
“I should have seen that coming,” said Nick, but his eyes were flooded with tears.
“I can make Mulliana love you.”
Nick had already assessed her physical charms as quickly as he used to, the early morning catch at the fishmarkets. Her physique, that of a great cook—hands scarred fro
m boiling water and livid flame, arms that could toss a cow or an omelette with equal finesse.
And to top this, as if he needed it to be topped, her face was so beautiful that . . . “No,” he said, though he smiled at her.
“Good,” said the crandolin, and Mulliana smiled at Nick.
“Or I could, with the powers that I possess, gather the rest of you and get you all together minus some superfluous matter— spleen, appendix, an ear or two. And I can set you back where you came from . . . or perhaps a bit further away, safe from temptation.”
“Of course no.”
“Then you want the last choice?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
The crandolin chuckled.
“Subside, Nick!”
And Nick, without ado, melted back into two ropes and dropped into the two jars.
And the crandolin picked up the bladder-pipe’s skin and tossed it out of the hole in the wall, where it presumably fell upon the pile of rubble or perhaps didn’t reach that far but no one in the tower looked to see—
but where were we?
To the two jars, which the crandolin now ordered Mulliana to pick up.
“Here! By the drain,” said the crandolin, “Dash them to the floor!”
And Mulliana did as she was told—and the jars shattered to dust amongst the fluid so that the stream that came out laughing from the tower was a sort of shocking pink milkshake.
Fortune’s smile
MUNIFER PEERED—with a stupid look on his face—at a long, black, lustrous as eyes in love, hunk of hair, which possessed in every hair, the incomparable fragrance of virginity. The hair had just floated down before him, and caught in the branch of a stunted fig.
And only that day, Munifer had bequeathed everything he possessed because he knew that, if he did not turn up at the palace with the Great Timursaçi’s new moustache tomorrow, then he would be found and taken to the Bridge of Dispatch and Divorce where he would be tossed into the Pond of Sighs where his fate would be hotly argued, and where the Greatness’s crocodiles would frolic with his form.
So now he got to work with the skill he—only he—possessed.
And in no time he made a moustache that was more magnificent than any he had ever made. Perhaps it was his time in life, or the challenge of the job, but the hairs seemed to almost leap to obey his every wish, so easily did they stretch out to their great length at each side, and so readily did they bend to make those indubitable curves that further distinguished the moustache that gave the Great Timursaçi his distinguished saçiness.
And every hair in this moustache, Munifer knew without doubt, was 100% virgin, unlike those dubious hairs from the Quarter of Ill Repute that had reverted to type.
He finished the moustache by the light of the moon, and then he threw himself to the ground and gave thanks.
Now, it is said that a man who has said farewell to life is as welcome back as a guest who fails to leave a party, so he wasn’t giving thanks for saving his life. No. He was giving thanks for tossing him this one reprieve, for once he fitted the moustache on the Great Timursaçi, and his Greatness was delighted again (as Munifer knew he would be) then Munifer could drown himself in the river, which would be a much less terrifying, not to mention much less humiliating end than the one for failing his Greatness. For truly there was nothing to live for. He had no possessions, nor any hope of making any more moustaches, for he strongly doubted that he’d ever see another miracle, and didn’t know what he’d ever done to deserve this one.
So,
it went as he had planned. The next morning he went to the palace . . . And the Great Timursaçi was more satisfied than he had ever been.
And therefore Munifer, with a relatively light heart, walked out of the town, to a slow bend in the river where he tied a stone to his feet and jumped into the brown waters which closed over his head before you could say ‘moustache’, and he was quite dead before he was nibbled by the resident sturgeon, a docile creature the length of the Timursaçi’s barge.
Particular tastes
“But what kind of open-worked tarts did the lady buy?”
“Barley scented with musk, your Greatness,” said the girl with the great green eyes, the newest of his storytellers.
The Great Timursaçi popped a “lady’s thigh” pastry into his mouth and wiped his sticky fingers on the story-teller’s arms. He took a pinchful of her flesh and twisted it.
“The lady didn’t like musk,” he said. “Nor do I.”
“A thousand pardons,” said the girl, smiling with her mouth.
“No, she made a mistake with them, forgetting that she didn’t like them but the pastrymaker took them back and—”
“After or before she ate them?”
“After . . . Before!”
Her arms were patterned with blue places that his fingers had kissed, but he could not make those eyes overflow. He leaned back on his cushions. She was no fun.
“Go on,” he said. But before she did, he was inspired.
“Tell me the story of the combs,” he said. There was no story of the combs.
“The story of the combs?” she repeated.
“Are you a parrot?”
“There was a comb,” she began.
“Combs!”
“There were two combs that . . . ”
“Two combs that what?” exploded the Great Timursaçi, reaching for her nose. His fingers hovered there, the better to enjoy watching her eyes grow big. There, they are beginning to grow extra bright.
And they grew brighter, because as he reached out, the ends of his moustache reached back, and they wrapped around his neck, and around, and around, as each side of his moustache was of a length that was greater than the armspan of a man. The ends had much wrapping to do, but they did it quicker than a word, and they tightened so that they pinched the Great Timursaçi’s neck with more vigour than he had ever pinched flesh. And his face grew thick and red and then dark and blue and black, and the storyteller’s eyes grew bigger and greener and they shined like jewels and finally overflowed, as the storyteller overflowed with fear and joy.
The next Timur left the Prison of Princes and Old Wives with reluctance. He had no wish to rule, having been quite happy painting pictures of ships and other impossibilities from his imagination.
The duty was his, however—so he buckled to. And though he called himself only Timur the Twelfth, he is known as Timur the Beloved.
Kiss the beast you cannot eat.