Annals of Klepsis

by R. A. Lafferty

  “You were the one I intended to marry, Titus Livius,” Princess Thorn said, “but then something went wrong, or maybe something went right. My, but you are a crabby man! I got my historians mixed up as I didn’t know there would be more than one of them.”

  “Being buried alive is enough to make anyone crabby for a little while. But I am not so always. Let’s get out of here!”

  “There is a shortcut,” said Prince Franco, appearing suddenly, as only he could. “We will go under O’Grogan’s Mountain, not around it. We will go down through this grave that looks like all the other graves and is not. And we’ll go into the caverns and rouse out the crew. And then we’ll go to that gallant ship The Dina O’Grogan.”

  The One Star Too Many had faded from the sky. The murder, probably that of Princess Thorn’s collateral ancestor Joshua Thorn by Brannagan’s Ghost, had been justified. Of course, Brannagan would still be punished for the murder, but not by the sky.

  We went down into the caverns through an entrance that was camouflaged as a grave. There was sufficient light in the caverns. It was like bright moonlight. There were no chests of gold or gemstones in this part of the caverns, but there were thousands of gold pieces loose on the floor.

  “There are very many entrances to these caverns, and very many passages in them, so that a stranger in them might be lost completely,” Prince Franco said. “An adventurer drawn to the caverns by the stories of great treasure to be found in them might wander for several days before coming onto the gold. Then, after taking all that he could carry, he would mark his path away from it by dropping a gold coin every few feet so that he could quickly find his way to the treasure when he came back for more of it. But almost always he would take a wrong turning and run into a blank wall almost exactly when he had dropped his last gold coin. So he would follow his trail back to the treasure again and take all the coins he could carry once more. He would select a different path this time in trying to find his way out of the caverns, but he would mark his new path in the same way, by dropping gold coins. And again he would come up against a blank wall at the same time that he had dropped his last coin. So, he would continue getting lost and dropping gold coins until he died of exhaustion. Many adventurers come into the caverns and they scatter big quantities of gold on the different paths, but they are not able to carry much gold out of the caverns.

  “There are quite a few entrances into the caverns from the Castle. One of them even comes out of the bottom of the big healing wine vat. Well, gold is a great healer for many ailments. There are several entrances winding down through the caves of O’Grogan’s Mountain under which we now travel. And there are several entrances coming from the waterfront area. If one knows the way, one can sail right into the caverns in a fairly large ship. At least two hundred persons have access to the caverns and know all about them, and every one of them considers all the treasures to belong to himself.”

  We turned a corner in the caverns then, and we came onto the full blaze of gold.

  “By the holy muse, Clio, I have never seen anything like this,” the historian Morrison-Bryce cried with joy. “Much barbarism can be forgiven a world that has such treasures as this. I would give my life to own all of this for just one second.”

  “You are too prodigal of your life, Other Historian,” Prince Franco said to the eminent person. “Every person who comes into the caverns does own all of this for many seconds, as you own all of it now; and he comes back to it again and again. I first owned it all when I was a boy of five. And when I think large thoughts about it, I am still a boy of five.

  “Ho, there is the crew! We sail on the good ship The Dina O’Grogan almost immediately. Board you the ship at once and ready her for one of the most exciting and mystifying voyages ever. It will be dream stuff and ocean stuff mixed together, and it may well be the most dumbfounding night in the lives of any of you. Board the ship and make ready.”

  “We are treasure-cave owners and no longer ocean sailors,” Andrew Gold Coast O’Mally lilted in a voice that was drunk on tincture of gold. “We are on honeymoon now with the treasure thing. Come again in another moon, twenty-nine nights from now, and we may be ready to go on the dream-stuff-and-ocean-stuff-mixed-together voyage. This is already the most dumbfounding night of our lives.”

  “Go you free or go you in chains, but you will all go on The Dina O’Grogan tonight,” Prince Franco threatened.

  “You are better than most of them, Prince Franco, but we will not go on your orders, not tonight.”

  “Will you go on my orders?” the Princess Angela Gilmartin-Ravel-Brannagan asked in a steely whisper as she entered the caverns from one of the Castle entrances.

  “Not even for you, Angie Princess, but you come closer,” Kate Blithespirit the Amazon said. “We will not be willing to do anything except gaze at our gold for a long, long time.”

  “Will you go on my orders?” my Princess Tharrala Thorn asked.

  “No, not even on your orders, one-of-us girl, but we are coming closer all the time,” the green-eyed Sparaticus spoke.

  “On whose orders will you sail, then?” my Thorn asked it.

  “On the orders of only one person on all Klepsis,” Jerome Whitewater answered. “Only on the orders of Brannagan himself.”

  “Brannagan will be on the voyage, but he will not be in charge of the voyage,” Thorn said. “He will not be in command.”

  “If Brannagan is on the ship, we will put him in command,” Sebastian Jamaica let it be known. “We sail, we sail, we sail!”

  And all of us gave the same cry, “We sail, we sail, we sail!” We swept through the water-level caverns and into the roiling water, and we swam to The Dina O’Grogan. Hektor Lafcadio climbed the main mast and whispered the news to the ship that she was going on the most dumbfounding voyage ever, and with her first master on board, he who had built her and named her The Beloved Harpy two generations before her later namesake, the woman Dina O’Grogan, was born.

  “I know it, I know it,” the ship spoke like winds in her own rigging. “Parley birds have already been here and told me.”

  Persons and personages arrived on The Dina O’Grogan then. The O’Grogan himself came. Jerome Whitewater had not been thinking clearly when he said that the crew would sail only under the orders of one man, the Brannagan. Every member of the crew would as readily sail under the command of the O’Grogan. And it was seen at once that the O’Grogan was in command. This great son-in-law of the Brannagan had always been the number-one man of the Brannagan party.

  Flobert Traxley, the man who talked to dragons, came on board. Doctor Luke Gilmartin came on board. There was some confusion. In all of the six generations of Klepsis, there had always been a Doctor Gilmartin who was official Doctor of the Realm, and all these Doctors Gilmartin had looked remarkably alike. Well, this man was either the father of the grandfather or of the great-grandfather, or of some earlier grandfather of the Princess Angela Gilmartin-Ravel-Brannagan. She knew who he was, but did anyone else?

  Seneschal Fidelis came on board. The Green Robe of the Order of Saint Klingensmith came. Then nine strongmen came and they were dragging the Brannagan (it was really Brannagan’s Ghost) in cruel chains. They chained him, with his hands and arms behind him, to the main mast of The Dina O’Grogan, his own earliest ship on Klepsis.

  “Never mind,” said Sebastian Jamaica in his whisper that was like a sandy reef barely scraping the bottom of a ship. “Let us get under way. Let us sail nine sea miles. Then we will put the Brannagan in charge, or we will know why not.”

  We sailed with a scram of ghosts in command. Oh, they were old and outstanding ghosts, but where except on Klepsis could such a thing happen?

  “It seems a puny ship and a weak undertaking, all of it, under a vagary of minds that aren’t even there any more,” I said. “Well, nothing can happen to us on a calm ocean at night.”

  “There is always the opportunity of enlargement of the voyage,” the Penny Philosopher Fairbridge Exendine to
ld me. “The old pirate ships of Klepsis and Tarshish did sometimes, in the middle of a slow ocean voyage, skip to the oceans of other planets while scarcely losing a puff of the wind in their sails. They called it ‘Crossing the Ocean of Hiatus,’ and that crossing took hardly a minute to accomplish. They also called it ‘Sailing Through the Bushes.’”

  Ah, Fairbridge, Fairbridge, the only ‘penny philosopher’ I ever knew who was worth a farthing.

  Those wraiths with Klepsis roots were not ghosts at all. They were Extended Spirits. This phrase had been coined by a person known as Quasimodo who had been as near to being an executive officer as Brannagan ever had when he ruled the Planet Klepsis.

  With the highly intelligent and infinitely compassionate Extended Spirit, the O’Grogan, in command, we sailed. But in common parlance, O’Grogan was a ghost. With a crazy-as-a-sea-coot, laughing, flame-headed giant Extended Spirit, the Brannagan, as clanking prisoner, chained to the main mast, we sailed. And Brannagan was a ghost with a real wooden leg. Brannagan’s Ghost did make a ruckus of it.

  The person at the tiller was a ghost or an Extended Spirit (one with a short tailpiece at the back of his seaman’s trousers); and the lookout up in the crow’s nest was a ghost also. We sailed on the sweet-water ocean like a song, and Brannagan’s Ghost-in-Chains was singing an old Gaea ballad:

  “He built a bonny ship and bold

  To sail the saltless sea.

  The mast is beaten pirate gold,

  The sails are cramoisie.”

  Yes, yes, the sails did look to be cramoisie, or crimson, by the light of the two moons. There was a curious little humpbacked dwarf into everything on the ship, and he seemed to be a person of consequence.

  “He is Quasimodo,” Thorn said, “but how can that be? He is here as a young and grotesque man. But he is the ‘sleeper’ at the Castle, old and grotesque. He is not dead. Can this be a youth-ghost of an old man who still lives?”

  And Brannagan’s Ghost continued to sing in his beautiful, booming voice:

  “A murder-man be chained to mast—

  (Lo! Lightning in the sky)—

  On Desolation Isle’ll be cast,

  Marooned and left to die.”

  I had never heard the Brannagan sing before, but he had a rich and wonderful voice that set the whole sky and the forty-seven stars in it to ringing.

  “Oh, queer his doom and droll his crime,

  (Oh, be you ware and wey!)

  For he has died in former time,

  And you will die today.”

  A shout had gone up, “Stowaway, stowaway, spy, spy, spy!” And a rather imposing-looking man had been dragged out of the ratlines. He was dressed as a shabby seaman, but the shabby dress did not become him.

  But the Brannagan still sang:

  “My tale is tall, my writ the sky,

  My tongue is double-jointed.

  Oh, if I wake, you all will die!

  I am the Lord’s Anointed.”

  Hektor Lafcadio brought a schooner of rum to Brannagan, but Brannagan refused it. “I have rum of which you know not,” he said. “Oh, hark the song of the barnacle geese:

  “I whittled from my lost leg’s bone

  A whistle for my daughter.

  My eight-valved heart is bleeding stone,

  My brain it is saltwater.”

  “There really is a legend of the Margaret Whistle, that of the Brannagan’s daughter, Margaret O’Grogan, that will blow louder than all the trumpets on the First Day,” the Penny Philosopher Fairbridge Exendine told me. “And the Tarshish storyteller has based one of his stories upon it.”

  And Brannagan (well, of course he was Brannagan’s Ghost, but he was so essentially the original Brannagan now, chained and high-spirited and defiant) sang another stanza:

  “The Beta Sun’s a squeaky ball

  In badly need of oiling.

  In one place only all folks all

  Inside of me are roiling.”

  Brannagan’s Great Ghost was drunk (on a rum that we knew not of) but he seemed to feel no guilt for the murder of Joshua Thorn, that railing enemy of his. Oh, it is all running like a two-track cinema, with the tracks two hundred years apart, but we are resolved not to let it confuse us. The Commission in Lunacy had found Brannagan to be a lunatic, and he had been forced to disgorge Klepsis from his rule. It had been a ‘coup of just a moment’ when his world was taken from him. He had killed the harassing Joshua Thorn with one blow of his ruddy hand, and he had been sentenced to be marooned on the most desolate island of the most desolate asteroid of the universe.

  “Oh, they are only a mime of ghosts,” I said. “With them it is all two hundred years ago.”

  “With all of us here it is two hundred years ago,” Fairbridge the Penny Philosopher said, “because time never began on Klepsis. It is still legend here, and in legend all persons are contemporaries. Hercules was contemporary with the revolt of the Titans on Gaea-Earth, and he was also contemporary with Pericles of Athens.”

  “The stowaway and spy is Grand Marshal Golconde of the Paravata Defense League,” said Titus Livius the Eminent Historian who knew faces and facts of all the planets. “He can be stowed away here for only one reason—to find out how the ships of Klepsis and of Tarshish are jumped from one planet to another. He arrived on the same transport that brought me in here tonight. He must have had a scan that told him that a ship was jumping on Klepsis tonight, and none have jumped here for many years. The Paravata Defense League has scans that go a few hours into the future, but they do them little good. They run into every sort of paradox when they try to avoid the futures. But Golconde is entirely too intelligent ever to understand how the shipjumping is done, and so are all the other ladies and gentlemen of the PDL. I did a study on the PDL once for the FHP Press. I was almost too intelligent to understand how it was done myself, but fortunately I have a goofy spot in my brain.”

  And bumptious Brannagan still sang his ballad verses:

  “My eye is clear, my beard is curled.

  I fear not man nor wooman.

  And if we jump to other world,

  We jump by short-tailed human.”

  So sang Brannagan’s Indomitable Ghost in its clanking chains.

  “Oh, Brannagan’s Ghost has just told Grand Marshal Golconde and all other persons present how the planet-jumping of ships is done,” Titus Livius said sourly. In spite of the barbarity of his greeting and his being buried alive, he had now become a partisan of Klepsis. “Yes, Brannagan told it in verse, but I hope that Golconde is still too intelligent to catch on.”

  There were several of the crewmen, both the ghostly ones and the modern fleshed ones who had tailpieces at the back of their trousers. Presumably, one or more of them were short-tailed humans from Tarshish. But could these quasi-people really jump not only themselves but whole ships from one world to another? I was very nearly too intelligent to understand it myself.

  They, the mime of ghosts (it was the O’Grogan or the O’Grogan Ghost who told me this now as I walked over to talk to him) had decided to kill the Brannagan for the murder of Joshua Thorn, but they had hesitated as they worried over Brannagan’s jibe that all of them were no more than imaginings in the great Brannagan mind; if Brannagan died it would be as if the rest of them were not, and had never, been.

  “If we kill him, maybe we’ll disappear,” one of them had whimpered at that Commission of Lunacy hearing.

  “We’ll test it by stages,” that loving son-in-law of Brannagan, Januarius O’Grogan, had proposed. “We’ll half-kill the abomination first, and then we’ll see whether half of us disappear.” They were twelve good men and true pronouncing the doom on Brannagan. They made a garrote to strangle him and they put it around his neck. They would half-kill him first. Then, if all went well, they would kill him altogether.

  They did half-kill him. Then the six good men and true looked at each other in a sort of bleak panic. Yes, half of them, the other six of them had disappeared, and they would no more be found e
ver. They had also disappeared from memory, for the six survivors could not recall the faces or names of those who were undone.

  “I believe that I suffered brain damage from that grueling half hour of strangulation,” Brannagan’s Ghost told me now. “After that time, my great mind has had islands of fog in it.”

  “We’ll travel that road no further,” O’Grogan had said when the half-death of Brannagan had resulted in the obliteration of six good men from the kangaroo party. It was then that they decided to maroon the Brannagan, and now (or then, for time had not yet begun on Klepsis, so the two-hundred-year interval could be considered or ignored at will) they were still about the business of the marooning.

  “We did maroon him,” the O’Grogan Ghost told me (for in my role as historian I was checking them all out), “in such an obscure place that even God does not have it listed. There was no way that he could have been located. There was surely no way that he could have been rescued. But, seven years later, he came back to Klepsis just as he had always been, except that his peg leg was of ivory horn instead of wood. What I believe is that his other person, his what-is-it, his lost twin, had rescued him. No one else could have located him, but Brannagan and his what-is-it were essentially of one mind.

  “And I believed, or half-believed, that we were all imaginings in the lunatic mind of Brannagan. The reason that I only half-believed it was that Brannagan, on his return from his exile and marooning, told me that he had rid himself of a cosmic onus and had loaded it onto another person.

  “So, according to one of the versions that Brannagan (and later, Brannagan’s Ghost) maintained, it is a sleeping person in Ravel-Brannagan Castle who now holds all things and all persons (including Brannagan) as imaginings in his mind. Care is taken that this sleeping and dreaming person does not wake, and also that he does not die. ‘I like it better this way,’ Brannagan told me. ‘The responsibility of it all was beginning to weigh on me.’ Ah, Historian Tyrone, I believe that we ghosts, the scraggly company of us, will soon break up, some of us going to our damnation and some of us going to our beatification.”