by Hugh Cook
"Ha-hmmm," said Rolf Thelemite, as he inspected Jarl.
"Get it over with, man," snapped Jarl. "Tell them who I am."
"Who are you supposed to be?" said Rolf.
"Stop being ridiculous!" said Jarl. "You know full well who I am."
"Do I?" said Rolf.
"Of course you do!" said Jarl. "I'm Thodric Jarl, son of Oric Slaughterhouse, and blood of the clan of the bear."
"Ha-hmm," said Rolf. "I did know a man named Thodric Jarl.
You could tell him because – what was it? A cow, that was it. This Jarl, he had a little cow tattooed on his throat. A pretty cow it was, with a small golden bell hanging from its own throat."
Thodric Jarl's response was a roar of rage, but at last he calmed down, and allowed the junior Banker to uplift his beard to check for tattoos. To the Banker's patent amusement, there was indeed a little cow tattooed on Jarl's throat – a very pretty cow with a buttercup emblazoned on its flanks – and the design was completed by a pretty little bell colored to match the buttercup.
"Yes," said Rolf, visually reacquainting himself with that tattoo, "this is indeed the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl."
"You," said Jarl, speaking to Rolf in the Rovac tongue, "I'll deal with you later!"
Then Jarl was consigned to a winch-basket, together with a sack of fish fillets, a woman with a teething baby, the Banker with breath so bad it could scare a dog, and with five heroically unscared dogs which had been for a constitutional walkabout on the docks.
When they were half-way up, the winch-rope jammed, and Jarl was left swinging for an eternity. Then the basket was at last hauled to its full height, and Jarl stepped out into the tunnel system of the mainrock Pinnacle. Having thus entered the Grand Palace of Alozay, Jarl waited until a number of his traveling companions had been winched up to join him, and then they went in force to seek out Guest Gulkan.
The mainrock Pinnacle: the spike of rock which rises from the Swelaway Sea on the island of Alozay, and which overlooks the city of Molothair. The mainrock is pierced and hollowed by the stairs and chambers of the Grand Palace of Alozay, in which is found the administrative machinery of Safrak and the precincts of the Safrak
Bank. In the same Grand Palace are the quarters occupied by Guest Gulkan and those who came with him from Gendormargensis.
It was then spring in the year Alliance 4306, as has been already stated, and Guest Gulkan had just recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday. At age 16, Guest was no wiser than he had been at birth, but the wizard Sken-Pitilkin was still relentlessly continuing those pedagogical labors which he had begun when Guest was aged but five.
Though Guest had acquired no one iota of wisdom in a full eleven years of instruction, he had won some knowledge of geography – he could tell the Pig from the Yolantarath, and Molothair from Gendormargensis – and was an enthusiastic student of ethnology. He had also made progress with some of the simpler languages, such as Toxteth – the language of beer-and-dice companions such as Hrothgar – and Galish.
Now Galish is of course but a poor toy for the intellect, being dismally deficient in the more complex irregularities, so Sken-Pitilkin took no joy in his pupil's growing proficiency in that tongue. Nor did he rejoice in Guest's accomplishments in Toxteth, since its mastery was linked with Guest's dangerous ambition to be a Guardian. Sken-Pitilkin endeavored to steer Guest in a safer direction – that of the largely academic challenges of Strogloth's Compendium of Delights. But Guest rejected the book, refusing, for example, to learn even one of the intricately irregular verbs of Slandolin, the elegant literary language of Ashmolea. So Sken Pitilkin tempted him by offering to teach the High Speech of wizards – a necessary adjunct, surely, to Guest's ambition to become a wizard! Guest then stabbed at the High Speech, but his stabs were wide of the mark, and so far he could not bring a word of it to his tongue. Sken-Pitilkin sometimes found it a great relief to abandon the intricacies of linguistic instruction for the comparative simplicities of geography.
Pedagog and pupil were hard at work on geography when Thodric Jarl arrived at the docks which served the mainrock
Pinnacle; they were still hard at it when Rolf Thelemite exposed Jarl's cute-cow tattoo; and they had not yet exhausted the subject when the dwarf Glambrax intruded upon their lessons.
They were discussing the Untunchilamons.
There is of course only one Untunchilamon, but Guest Gulkan had got it into his head that there were 27, thus making it obvious that he had mixed them up with the islands of Rovac, which are a different pot of frogs and grasshoppers entirely. Sken-Pitilkin was busy enlightening him when Glambrax intruded, and kicked Sken-Pitilkin in the shins.
"My lord," said Glambrax, formally advising them of his presence.
"What did you say?" said Sken-Pitilkin, attempting to swat
Glambrax with his country crook, but missing.
"I said," said Glambrax, "that someone wants to see Guest Gulkan."
The dwarf had in fact said no such thing, and in any case Sken-Pitilkin believed it extremely unlikely that anyone had any requirement for the boy's presence. The scholar suspected, rather, that the dwarf had arrived by preconcerted plan to liberate the boy for larrikinism.
"Guest Gulkan is busy," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"But there are people to see him," said Glambrax.
"Then," said Sken-Pitilkin, at last succeeding in landing a retaliatory blow upon the quick-leaping dwarf, "they can see him later."
"They will see him now," said Glambrax, unchastened by his chastisement. "They insist."
"Then let them insist," said Sken-Pitilkin, raising his country crook as if for fresh assault.
"They insist they'll boil me alive unless I let them in to see him."
"Then boiled you will be, so you'd better get used to the idea," said Sken-Pitilkin. "You could use a bath in any case."
"They'll boil you too," said Glambrax. "These you can't keep waiting. Thodric Jarl's out there, Lord Alagrace with him."
"Really," said Sken-Pitilkin, in a manner which made quite clear his opinion of dwarves, Jarls and Alagraces.
"Truly and really," said Glambrax. "They want the boy Guest for a purpose too foul for my tongue, and in their fervor they'll boil you in oil if you hold them to no."
"I'll do all the oil-boiling round here," said Sken-Pitilkin warmly. "Get off with you!"
"I can't tell that to Jarl!" said Glambrax. "He'd spit me and split me. You know what he's like."
"Then, that being the case," said Sken-Pitilkin, "he can get on with the spitting of you immediately. But as for seeing young Guest, why, he can see young Guest when I'm through with him."
"Is that your final answer?" said Glambrax.
"My first and my final," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Go tell them, whoever them may be, that Guest is much too ugly to be seen. Tell them to come back later, after I've cut his ears off."
Then he turned to his pupil, who was engaged in the studious dissection of a flea.
"Untunchilamon," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"What?" said Guest Gulkan, looking up from his anatomising.
"We were talking of Untunchilamon," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Have you forgotten?"
"No, no, not at all," said Guest. "Untunchilamon. Well. It has fleas, probably. Most places have fleas, especially this one.
As well as fleas, Untunchilamon has 27 islands, and lots of people, who one and all consume the staunch, which is cream and water curdled, and makes you drunk."
"No!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "That is not Untunchilamon, that is
Rovac, as I just told you."
"You just told me nothing," said Guest. "You just told Glambrax something about baths, that was what you just told."
"Then never mind what I said," said Sken-Pitilkin. "And let go of that flea, boy, it's far too small to eat. Come, boy, settle. And let us return to our dragons."
"Our dragons?"
"I meant," said Sken-Pitilkin, "let us get on with our business. And did we not cover that very prec
ise idiom only a week ago?"
"What's a week?"
"You've asked me that question already, and I believe you've already had a perfectly good answer. Anyway. Our lesson.
Untunchilamon. Where was I? Oh, bloodrock, that's it.
Untunchilamon has bloodrock – "
"And women."
"And women, yes. Also torturers, and I wish I had one such on hand to restore a little discipline. And it has jellyfish, flying fish, parrots – "
"Parrots?"
"A type of bird."
"Like a vulture?"
"Approximately. Anyway, it has parrots. Parrots, then. And monkeys. A monkey being, before you ask, a creature in the form of a dwarf, only it has fur, and climbs trees, and has no speech but a chatter of anger."
"You're making that up!" said Guest.
"It is true," said Sken-Pitilkin solemnly. "Also on Untunchilamon we find the coconut, which is a nut the size of your skull, with a thin juice within, or a white meat, or a mix of both, depending on the ripeness of the nut."
"A nut the size of my skull," said Guest, rehearsing this datum in tones of patent disbelief.
"Thus did I truth it," said Sken-Pitilkin.
But young Guest thought this purported truth to be one more absurd impossibility, fit to rank alongside the whale and the crocodile – the crocodile being a legendary animal of singular ferocity which was alleged to have the ability to change itself at will from a floating tree trunk to a ravaging monster.
"Have you held this coconut in those very hands of yours?" said Guest, in tones of challenge. "Have you eaten of this coconut, as you have eaten of the flying fish?"
"I have eaten both," said Sken-Pitilkin. "I have eaten each alone and both in alliance together on the same plate, the site of my gormandizing being Injiltaprajura, that city which serves as the capital of Untunchilamon. Injiltaprajura lies on the shores of the Laitemata Harbor. There – "
"There irregular verbs breed in great quantities, doubtless," said Guest.
"So they do, so they do," said Sken-Pitilkin. "For all manner of languages are amok amidst the islanders."
"And, pray tell," said Guest Gulkan, "what quirk of character took you to a place so impossibly distant?"
"I was young," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Yes, boy! Don't look at me like that! I was young, once, for all that you disbelieve it.
Young, and bold, and stupid, and singularly proud of it, for I was born and bred in Galsh Ebrek, where the Yudonic Knights value a swordsman's stupidity even more than do the barbarous Yarglat of Tameran."
"So youth took you to Untunchilamon," said Guest. "It must be a place most crowded if youth alone suffices to fate a world of unfortunates to its shores."
"In my case," said Sken-Pitilkin, "it was more than youth which took me there. I went there on a quest."
"A quest!" said Guest.
"The quest for the x-x-zix," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A dangerous quest, that," said Guest. "Why, you'd break your very jaw just trying to name the thing you were questing for. How did you say it again?"
"The x-x-zix. A particularly wild and dangerous species of irregular verb. It has two teeth, which are in the shape of saws; and it has fifty tails, the tips of these being poisonous. It is valued on account of the feathers it grows from its nose, which are more fanciful than those of the ostrich."
"The ostrich?"
"A type of chicken. But with feathers of a value exceeded only by those of the x-x-zix, the irregular verb we were discussing, which is notable not just for its feathers but also because it subsists exclusively upon liquid tar and excretes amber and ambergris on alternate days of the week."
"The week!" said Guest. "It is a measure of days, like the month!"
"Did I not tell you precisely that just a little earlier this very morning?"
"You did not," said Guest. "I worked it out myself, though I can't for the life of me work out why you'd chase to Untunchilamon for a verb, be it a regular verb or otherwise."
"The lust for knowledge, boy," said Sken-Pitilkin. "A safer lust than the lust for loins. Not that Untunchilamon was all that safe. Why, I almost got turned inside out by a certain crab which took exception to my taste for research."
"You tried to eat it?" said Guest.
"No. I merely tried to engage it in discussion, but it told me – "
"The crab talked?"
"It did," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Oh, I see," said Guest Gulkan, abrupting into something perilously close to bad temper. "A story about talking animals, is it? And what do you think I am? A child?" Guest's change of mood was as abrupt as that of a man who, while idling down a pathway in a meditative mood, is precipitated into a pit-trap. While abrupt, this mood-change was in no wise feigned.
At sixteen, Guest Gulkan was far too old for fairy tales.
And, even as a small boy, he had always despised stories about talking animals. Since coming to Alozay, he had several times encountered crabs in the flesh of the fact. True, they were the freshwater crabs of the Swelaway Sea rather than the greater crabs of the Sea of Salt. Still, having met with crabs, and having been torn by their pincers while trying to dissect them – your average crab being more of a warrior than your average flea – Guest thought he knew to a nicety both the talents and the limitations of the breed. And he in the days of his self-proclaimed maturity most certainly had no time at all for any ridiculous nonsense about a talking crab.
"Well?" said Guest, as Sken-Pitilkin gave him no answer.
"Well what?" said his tutor, who was still trying to work out just what had offended the boy.
"You insulted me," said Guest. "And I asked for an explanation. Are you going to give it?"
"Where lies the insult?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A talking crab!" said Guest. "Is that not insult enough?"
"It is but knowledge," said Sken-Pitilkin, genuinely puzzled.
"It is but knowledge, for I have but been retailing a few facts from my own experience. Where lies the insult in that?"
"A nonsense of talking crabs and parrot-vultures," said Guest, working himself up into a proper rage even as he talked.
"Is that not insult? Stuff for children! Fish that fly and crabs that talk."
"They are facts, and I have witnessed them," said Sken-Pitilkin mildly. "But if you have made up your mind to be angry, then don't let mere fact prevent you from indulging unreason."
"You fiddle the world so often with word-games that you forget the world is not a game," said Guest, rising to his feet.
"The world is what it is, and men are what they are, and I am a man, and I will not be insulted like a child."
"Why not?" said Sken-Pitilkin, feeling it was high time for some home truths to be spoken. "For you have the singularly changeable moods of a bad-tempered and over-indulged child."
"Men have been killed for less than that," said Guest Gulkan, doing his best to snarl and grate, to bitter the words from his lips like so much poison.
"So they have, so they have," said Sken-Pitilkin, relapsing into placidity. "But character is destiny, and if mine is to die at the hands of a Yarglat lout over the matter of an imagined insult, why then, so be it." Sken-Pitilkin showed no fear of the quick-boil of the young man's temper, but instead comported himself as calmly as if engaged in a tea-tasting ceremony. This enraged Guest Gulkan all the more, so much so that he almost ventured to strike his tutor.
But he restrained himself, remembering what had happened on the occasion of their last physical confrontation. Sken-Pitilkin had avoided the blow and had rapped Guest painfully with his country crook, which had left the boy seriously sore for the next three days thereafter.
So in the heat of his anger Guest Gulkan did not venture to strike, but instead stormed toward the door.
"And where do you think you're going?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Character is destiny," said Guest Gulkan. "And I'm going to find mine."
As the boy was so speaking, the door was thrown
open, and in came destiny in the form of Thodric Jarl and his associates. Guest Gulkan was taken aback by this metal-crashing parcel of armed men, all swords and gauntlets, boots and helmets, shields and chain mail. He fell back before them, and seized Sken-Pitilkin's country crook in lieu of a sword, for he thought the intruders bent on murder.
"Out!" said Sken-Pitilkin irefully, as the intrusionists came trampling into his educational laboratory with their muddy boots on. "You can't come in here! We're in the middle of a lesson."
"The lesson is over," said Thodric Jarl, the leader of the intrusionists. "The lesson is over, for life has begun."
Thus epic heroes are wont to speak, but Thodric Jarl was no epic hero. He was a run-of-the-mill hackman, a mediocre mercenary who had long ago been exiled from Rovac for stealing sheep. (Or so at least Rolf Thelemite was wont to allege, and Sken-Pitilkin had heard the allegations, and had often declared himself inclined to believe them.) Jarl was young, and over-vigorous, and decidedly curt in his manner. Sken-Pitilkin was not at all pleased to see him, and made his displeasure plain.
"You say the lesson is over?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "The lesson is hardly started yet! But I'll give you a lesson you won't forget, not when I'm through with you."
"Hush down, you irascible old man," said Lord Alagrace, one of Thodric Jarl's companions in boorishness.
This annoyed Sken-Pitilkin intensely, for while Thodric Jarl could never transcend his stiffnecked nature, Sken-Pitilkin knew Lord Alagrace of old, and knew that Alagrace could be quite the diplomat when he thought it worth his while.
After all, sal Pentalon Sorvolosa dan Alagrace nal Swedek quen Larsh was no brute of a Yarglat barbarian. He was the scion of one of the High Houses of Sharla, and the Sharla, as has been noted above, were ever a sophisticated people. Ethnology teaches one the natural limits of peoples such as Yarglat and Rovac. One expects such barbarians to brute their way through the world like slum-born streetfighters. But ethnology could make no excuse whatsoever for Lord Pentalon Alagrace. He knew better, and Sken-Pitilkin thought he should demonstrate as much.
"Get out of here!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Get out of here, the lot of you!"