Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Let me repeat the story that the Tarshish storyteller told when I heard him at a wilderness settlement three years ago. It goes thus:

  “This is the way they tell it.

  “Bluebeard the Pirate, in the treasure caves of Klepsis, has not foregone his carnal activities. His body has rotted, and even his ghost has rotted. The smell of him fills all the caverns. Yet, Blue-beard was very attractive to women in life, and he is still so in death.

  “There was a little girl who went down into the caverns to play every day. Her mother had told her not to play with skeletons unless she was sure they were dead; but one day the little girl forgot that advice. The most rotten of all the skeletons, the one that still had some rotting flesh on it, called to her:

  “Give up your soul, give up your life.

  Come rot with me and be my wife.

  “‘Oh all right,’ the little girl said. So she was the wife of Bluebeard for one hundred hours in the caverns. When she came out, the stench on her was so strong that the people drove her out into the waste places. She gave birth to a little boy that same night, but he was rotten and stenchy and had only half of the flesh on his bones. She ran away and left him, but he ran after her and there was no escaping him. She still runs, and the rotting little boy still runs after her. People see them sometimes on the moors in the evenings.

  “That is the story. That is the end of the story. That is the way it has always been told.”

  “As with most of the Tarshish storyteller’s stories, this one has a lot of truth in it. I’ve seen them myself in the evenings, the two ghostly runners.”

  “Thorn, Thorn,” Kate Blithespirit admonished her. “Thy tongue will rot and fall out if you tell such things. But I have a strong interest in this Bluebeard now. I feel him, I feel him!”

  There were provisions of a sort in the caverns. The sea biscuits were dead (sea biscuits are always the first things to go bad), no more than sea casks full of dust. The sweet water had long since evaporated from its barrels. But the Cueva Rica Rum was still alive and rampant in its glass casks, and the Mock-Madeira Wine was lively and sassy in its old nine-quart bottles. The flesh of the Thousand-Year Turtles from Far Tortugas was still edible, and there were more than a thousand cases of it. We could stay down in the treasure caves for as long a time as we wished. And spading a meter into the tamped floor of the caverns would bring a lapping pool and fountain from the ocean. The sweet-water oceans of Klepsis are good to drink. We could stay down there at least until we figured out the tangled affairs that were taking place up on the surface.

  There was a wax museum figure of an “ancient scholar” sitting at an antique desk (probably of the third-generation-of-Klepsis period) in a sort of nook of the main arcade, a nook from which one could see the entire main arcade and the entrances to all the side passages. This “ancient scholar” might also be a collector’s item, if we went into the business of collectibles. And yet, it wasn’t very well done. It was too much a cliché piece. Ancient scholars don’t really look like that, except in stage versions of them. But then we all felt a faint whisper of horror when we saw that the ancient scholar was beginning to move and was probably alive.

  “Who are you? What are you?” Gold Coast asked. The man was beginning to unkink his mind and body. “I was wondering what unreal sort of wax you were made out of, wax that no bee ever saw. I should know who you are. I believe that you are a staple character.”

  “I am the tax collector,” the living figure said. “I was appointed by Rose Lunaria, the wife of Juda O’Grogan-Brannagan, to stay at this station. Juda, though the nominal ruler of Klepsis, was bullied by the eleven pirates, his brothers and his sister. But they did agree that, for his letting them cache their treasures on his domain, a tithe or a tenth of that treasure should be his. So, I was appointed to stay down here and assess the tithe on any treasure removed from here, with or without warrant. Since most of the treasure was amassed without warrant, I have not been too particular on that point.”

  “I have seen you before,” Princess Thorn said. “I always thought you were wax. But if you were appointed by Rose Lunaria, then you have been down here for a very long time.”

  “Have I? What is the date and the year? I do have an automatic dater here somewhere, but I always forget which drawer of the desk I put it in.”

  “This is the twenty-ninth day of the Month of Arpad, for I have just heard the midnight bells ringing out the twenty-eighth day on the surface above us,” Thorn told the tax collector. “And it is the two hundredth year of the planet Klepsis and the two thousand two hundredth year of the planet Gaea-Earth.”

  “Yes, I have been here more than a hundred years, then,” the tax collector said, “and I can feel every one of those years in my bones. But I have slept most of the time, and one does not age as fast when sleeping as when one is awake and active. I have this arrangement with the dogs that they will wake me up when they themselves are activated by any intrusion. And they did wake me up, but it takes half an hour or so for me to look awake. The only duties I have here are to collect the tithe when anybody takes treasure out, to write out a receipt when anybody brings treasure in, and to order more nard every nine years.”

  “Nard? Is there nard?” Fairbridge Exendine the Penny Philosopher asked. “Oh, it must be inferior nard. There is the good smell of it, but it is mixed with a bad smell in the caverns. You must have impure nard.”

  “No, the nard is to mask the smell of Levi (Bluebeard the Pirate) O’Grogan-Brannagan, whose restless bones and rotting gouts of flesh are pretty hard to mask.”

  “Can you control the dogs?” Bartolomo Portuguese asked with a touch of greed. “Can you control them?”

  “Yes, I can command and control the dogs,” the tax collector said, “but how can I command and control you ruffians? Do any of you belong to the great O’Grogan-Brannagan family?”

  “I am a member of it,” Thorn said. “I am the Princess Tharrala Thorn.”

  “Just let me look in my copy of the Handbook of the Prophecies of the Family,” the tax collector said while he turned the pages. “Yes, you are here, and with a red asterisk. They do not give those red asterisks loosely. You are the great-granddaughter of David Ravel the Elegant Interloper. You are the granddaughter of Cloud Ravel, the do-nothing ruler, and of his wife Brigid Hearn. You are the daughter of the Princess Placidia Ravel-Brannagan and of the adventurer Tarquin Thorn who was murdered by one or the other of your uncles. You yourself were repudiated by your reigning uncle Prince Henry the Pirate and were driven into the wilderness for a sin too unspeakable to name.”

  The laughter that followed this disclosure almost brought down the cavern.

  “Oh, you are a wonderful and unspeakable person, Thorn,” Terpsichore Callagy sang in glee. “Who does your publicity? That is a master stroke. I will give you no rest until you tell me what the unspeakable sin was. I was never so delighted with anyone in my life.”

  “You are one of us now,” Kate Blithespirit the Amazon cried out in joy. “Before this, you seemed a little bit distant. Now you are our intimate. Tell us what the unspeakable sin was. Tell us, tell us!”

  The tax collector seemed to be a little bit puzzled by the reaction to the matter-of-fact information that he had read out of the Handbook of Prophecies of the Family.

  “Flash me the royal sign, demotic form, if you are indeed the Princess Tharrala Thorn,” he spoke in an official-edged voice.

  Princess Thorn did flash him a sign of some sort, but it was too rapid to note in detail or to remember.

  “Good, perfect,” the tax collector said. “My assignment is always to serve any member of the family in any way. I am yours to command.”

  “Could I get a copy of that Handbook of Prophecies?” I asked this official. “It would be very handy for the work I am doing.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “You’re in the book, Duke Tyrone the Historian, so you are legally entitled to have a copy of it. I’ll make you one.”

 
; I slept for two hours then. I had been busy all the day and up to this midnight. But it was a troubled sleep I had, much intruded on by cavern ghosts and specters. I heard the terrible voice of Bluebeard the Pirate:

  “Give up your soul, give up your life.

  Come rot with me and be my wife.”

  And I heard the voice of a little girl say “Oh, all right.”

  “No, no, no,” I tried to say in my sleep. “He is rotting and he will rot you and your fruit also.” But the words weren’t voiced.

  “Wake up,” Thorn told me then. “You’re having bad dreams, and besides, there is somebody here to talk to you.” She had a wet, soggy, winy person with her.

  “It is good to be with you again,” this wettish person said. “It is good even to know such a distinguished historian.” I had heard that soggy voice before, but where had I heard it?

  “Oh, you heard it in the wine vat,” the soggy man said. “I was in there being healed for a long time, for fifty years, but I am finally healed. And I have just reported to the most august ghost on Klepsis (though in person he is not august at all), and he told me to find you and bring you and your consort to him. You were supposed to come and talk to him later in the night, and he says that it is later in the night now. And you were about to say, Duke Tyrone, that you were an historian but not a distinguished historian. Well, you had better act like a distinguished historian while you are on Klepsis. It was just two days ago that the Most August Ghost on Klepsis said to a person who was visiting him, ‘I am coming to the end of my days, even to the end of my secondary or ghostly days. I will put my affairs and the affairs of my planet in order, and for that I will need the services of a combination wizard-philosopher-prophet-politician; in short I will need the services of the most distinguished historian to be found. Get the most distinguished historian here to Klepsis and get him here within two days. Heads will roll else!’ So, for the peace of the ghostly realm, you must be distinguished. No doubt the distinguished historian is on the way here, but he must find himself preempted. Fake it, man, fake it.”

  “Oh, I’ve married the wrong man,” Thorn giggled. “Well, I’ll not trade you off now, my love. We will ride it out. You will fake it, and I will help you fake it. No, you really don’t look much like a combination wizard-philosopher-prophet-politician, but we’ll do what we can do.”

  “Soggy man, I believe that I have information on you here in the Handbook of the Prophecies of the Family,” the tax collector and general-purpose official said. “I will just read it—”

  “You will just read it silently to yourself,” the soggy man said. “But, for the present, you will not pass that information along to anyone else.”

  Thorn and myself and the soggy man went out of the treasure caverns by the shaft entrance at the far or east end of the main arcade, the shaft that had been dug out by Gold Coast O’Mally and his friends just that night. We went to keep our appointment in the walk-in tomb with the Most August Ghost on Klepsis.

  SEVENTH CANTO

  Conversations in a Walk-in Tomb

  “Ghosts wear out, you know. And a canny ghost must look to the future after he has faded away. He may want to leave something of himself,” the old man said. “I have talked such things over with this Green Robe of the order of Saint Klingensmith. And I used to talk such things over with the Seneschal Fidelis here, until he was whipped to death and stabbed to death (so they thought) by the servants of Cloud Ravel. In derision he was then thrown into the vat of healing wine and told to heal himself. But the derision was misplaced, for the wine did heal him (though it took fifty years) and he came out of the vat, healed, tonight. So now I can talk things over with him again.

  “And I also intend to talk things over with you, Duke Tyrone the Historian, the most distinguished of all historians! Do you know, another man came to my-tomb tonight, only a little while after you were married to Princess Thorn here, and he said that he was that most distinguished historian and that I had sent for him two days ago. He is now buried in the potter’s field below O’Grogan’s Mountain at its extreme west or hinder end.”

  “I wish that I could have talked to him,” I said sincerely. “We historians can often gain good information from each other.”

  “Oh, you’ll have no difficulty raising his ghost,” Brannagan’s Ghost said easily. “Within a period of seven days after death, ghosts may easily be raised by ordinary methods. But after a seven-day interval it requires extraordinary methods. And I have also, to continue my discourse, talked these things over with Princess Tharrala Thorn before she was driven into the wilderness for her unspeakable sin. And now that she is back, I will talk these things over with her again. By the way, Duke Tyrone that other man who came after you had been here, the other historian, he did seem more distinguished than you. Do not let a doubt creep into my mind about you now. Convince me that you are distinguished. Do something distinguished or say something distinguished every several minutes.

  “And now, look into my coffin here, Duke Tyrone the Historian. You are the only one here present who has not looked into it before. Am I not a ruddy and handsome man as I lie there! The ruddy look, the flaming orange-yellow-red look when it crops up in the family, is from me. The black-hair and olive-skin look when it crops up is from Januarius O’Grogan first, and from David Ravel the Elegant Interloper in the second place. These two sorts of blood do war in the family a bit, but that is of small account. Now, Duke Tyrone, what do you see about my dead and preserved body in its glass coffin that is not quite as the legends have it?”

  “The legends have it that you were a peg-legged man; and that, because of this, you set up inducements to get peg-legged persons to come to Klepsis and settle. Your reported words were, ‘Give me enough peg-legged Irishmen and I can rule the universe.’ And you are a peg-legged ghost. But your preserved body is arranged to make it seem that it is whole.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Now let me switch on the coffin X rays,” Brannagan’s Ghost said. And he switched the machine on. All the bones of that preserved body were shown clearly, and all the bones were present and in good appearance in both the legs of the body.

  “Then you were not a peg-leg,” I said. “Why the deception?”

  “If there was a deception, it was on me. I thought that I was a peg-leg. I was damned sure of it. I remember losing my leg, and nearly losing my life at the same time, quite clearly. It cannot be doubted. And I am a peg-legged ghost. This is one of the things that I want to discuss when we consider all aspects of reality. Do you notice anything else about my body that’s not in accord with the legends, Duke Tyrone?”

  “Only that you always wore a magnifying monocle in your eye, and that as a ghost you wear it now, but as a dead body you do not.”

  “Oh, there is only one monocle between us in these latter years. The other one was lost somewhere along the way. Most of the time I-the-ghost wear it for practical purposes (I like to see things in distance, and I like to see them in detail). But sometimes he-the-body seems uneasy in his death until he has it, so I put it in his eye for a while. The Seneschal Fidelis here, this soggy and winy man who came cured out of the big wine vat tonight, he has always said that I am not a ghost but rather a forgotten twin.”

  “Yes,” said the soggy man. “True ghosts do not have weight. Brannagan’s Royal Ghost here does have weight. It is not sufficient weight, but it is weight nevertheless. The most likely case is that he is indeed a forgotten twin, and that he is still a live person. It is true that he has suffered an unprecedented weight loss, and that he is more than two hundred years old. But the next most likely explanation would be clear and away out of bounds.”

  “Where did you all get the idea that a ghost is weightless?” Brannagan’s Ghost argued his case, spreading out his hands and appealing to all of us. “I was a heavy man. I weighed twenty stone in life, and that without my left leg. I now weigh about one pound in my ghostliness. If a ghost is the residue of a big and weighty person, he may not be entirely
weightless. All ghosts are not of the same sort anyhow. And for the benefit of you who came in late, in the last hundred years, a stone was fourteen pounds or about six and a half kilograms.”

  “Do something distinguished or say something distinguished, my love,” Thorn whispered to me. “You owe him that much.”

  “What is the real problem, Royal Ghost?” I asked Brannagan’s residue. “What is it that you want to find out?” Oh, possibly that wasn’t distinguished, but it was to the point.

  “I want to find out what is reality and what is not reality. That is why you are here, Duke Tyrone the Historian, to make discernments among these things. History is what is real—that is my own definition. And raw history is whatever is burgeoning into reality. But that which is not history at all will not be real at all. The situation here on Klepsis is complicated by three factors. The first of them is that we have an abundance of hallucinatory plants beyond that of any other world. Berries, root-plants, green-leaf vegetables, bush fruits, grapes, melons, and mushrooms especially are hallucinatory. These plants grow on most other worlds, but not to the extent or with the strength that they grow on Klepsis.

  “Gaea-Earth is the only planet that did not have the hallucinatory plants originally. On Astrobe and on Camiroi they have been completely eradicated now. But most other worlds have them yet, and on Klepsis we have them more than anywhere else.

  “It is for this reason that no person who has lived on Klepsis for any great length of time is entirely sane. The animals and the birds (with one exception) and the insects and sea creatures are not sane either. They are goofy. This is a goofy world.

  “I was a remarkably sane man on the several worlds I dwelt on before I came to Klepsis. And I was again sane during a seven-year exile, a marooning that I suffered on a desert island of a desert asteroid; there was much to drive a man insane during those seven years, but I remained sane. But on Klepsis I have not been.