by K. J. Bishop
Yule came and went, then the Festival of the Master Singers. There were no more Alsiso murders, and the public fear subsided. Alsiso became old news. The red carpets were put into storage or thrown away, and the old pastel ones were brought out and spread down on bedroom floors again.
But not everyone put Alsiso out of mind. Among the lower orders of society there were malcontents who liked to think of dead lords. In gin-shops without tables, in taverns with floors of mud, in labourers’ and foot soldiers’ camps, toasts were drunk to Alsiso. An anti-establishment pamphlet called Alsiso: The Voice of Blood! appeared on the streets. Four issues were printed and widely circulated before the author, a journeyman printer named Cyrus Knott, was arrested, convicted of sedition and publicly garrotted.
People forgot Knott, but some of them continued to remember Alsiso, who began turning up as a character in travelling pantomime shows. Initially there were really two Alsisos: one was a principled rogue, a knife in the hands of the common people; the other was a sinister buffoon. The latter gradually won dominance. This Alsiso wore black clothes with something red on his head, either a tall hat or a wig. He spoke in quatrains of doggerel. In the most widespread version of the pantomime Alsiso suffered death by boiling in a laundry tub, and was borne off to Hell by the demonic Prince November. In some versions Alsiso was redeemed through the kindness of another character or sheer good luck (the Prince’s coachman getting lost in a fog and driving Alsiso to Heaven instead, for instance), but these variations were never as popular as the one with the boiling.
Alsiso’s portrait was painted. Not by any renowned artist, to hang in a gallery; but the fraternity of interior decorators imported his face into the vocabulary of standard filler for corners and other awkward spots in frescoed rooms. Joining the lindworms and the lamiae, the Apple Crab, the Pope of the Moon and other grotesques, Alsiso mugged out of many a gap between more serious and important figures. In the hands of stonemasons Alsiso was brought into the family of gargoyles, drafted for cathedral downspout and corbel duty with the old cadre of goblinised pagan gods. Down on the pavements, screevers drew Alsiso in chalk. It was they who gave him new clothes, exchanging the black for a shirt and tights illuminated with blue, yellow, red and green lozenges. Following this change, the name ‘Alsiso’ was given to a type of similarly-patterned jacquard cloth from the estates of Bathro, to the polychrome glass produced by the Risper factory, and to a gaudy nudibranch from the South Seas.
A hundred and fifty years after his first appearance, Alsiso emerged from the corners and returned to the midst of high society – if only, as in the beginning, at night. Chromatic as a parrot, and as wicked as you wished him to be, Alsiso was a popular fellow at masquerade parties. Alsiso, lord of misrule! Cutter of a dash! His motley figure climbed up to balconies night after night. He appeared in bedroom windows like a stained glass saint turned profane and lewd, with a tented crotch. Morning after morning, the rising sun kissed red hairs caught on lace pillowslips. Alsiso became a famous lover.
During the years of the duelling craze, when young men made a thing of getting up early to slay each other over matters of honour, Alsiso went back to his roots. He kept his dawn appointments. He killed. And he took his turn to die, gazing into the eyes of priests.
At the same time he returned to outright villainy. One highwayman took Alsiso as his muse with such devotion that, in jail, he requested the hire of a motley suit and red wig to wear to the gallows. His request was granted. The sun kissed red hairs caught in a strong hempen rope. And when the ghost came clattering up from under the crossroads where the corpse was buried, it was Alsiso who galloped out of the earth on a black horse, his head burning with a light that sowed fires in the roadside trees.
But it was as a lover that Alsiso was known best, and for many years to call a man an ‘Alsiso’ was to call him a ladies’ man, a carpet knight, a bedroom stallion, a rake, or a fool in love. So far so good for Alsiso; but the good times couldn’t last forever. With time, the flesh under the coloured shirt and tights acquired the undesirable patina of age. When the red wig slipped askew, you got an eyeful of a head as bald as a bunion. Alsiso was now a dirty old man, a peeping tom, a goblin in the corner again.
For Alsiso there were no more parties, no more bedrooms or fights or escapades. He couldn’t get any action. Other characters had his fun.
He even lost his place in the pantomime: it was now the Tax Collector whom Prince November carried off to damnation.
Alsiso’s exile lasted two hundred years. He roamed, vagrant, in distant lands, sleeping in fields of sugar cane, searching for his reflection in flooded temples where the bodies of monks had turned to fish, and he drank the ponging lees of sanctity. He kept company with foxes, monkeys and rats. He acquainted himself with the deep nights of the earth, oceanic black hours against which the previous nights of his life were only a procession of shallow ponds.
And Alsiso walked abroad in the lands where the sun is like a lion, where there are more bells than flutes, more horses than birds, more mirrors than fountains, and more even numbers than odd.
None of this did Alsiso any good. Soaked in bad water, subjected to dust and wind and din, he began to suffer corrosion in his extremities. His discomfort increased every day. He suffered mentally, too, from the disappointment that life, even for a being such as he, is not forever. He had become so used to dying on stage and in duels without dying in the world that he felt a sort of perpetual shock at being reduced to a singular existence and therefore to true mortality.
In time, castaway Alsiso would have broken down into a pile of ash, a pile of sugar and a puddle of nonsense. But he was called back into the public world. The summoner was Mrs Wilhelmina Obie, who made Alsiso the protagonist of her novel Around the World in Seven Veils: The Memoir of an Adventuress.
Which is to say that Mrs Obie turned Alsiso into a woman. Or halfway into a woman, since Alsiso goes through much of the novel disguised as a man. Mrs Obie writes, untruthfully, that Alsiso is the name for the sea breeze on the northwest coast of Cape Cruzado, where she locates her heroine’s birthplace. The novel paints Alsiso’s life in the blue, red, green and gold of sea, blood, jungle and loot. The old black of Alsiso is reprised, too, in the complexion and attire of the heroine, in the ensign of her notorious ship, the Cargo Cult Queen, which she sails with her peculiar officers First Old Woman, Second Fiddle and Third Leg, in enough gunpowder for three or four middle-sized wars, and down in the deep sea, in myths abiding below the sun’s reach: the endless fish that consumes time from the end towards the beginning, and the lightless house of Taffy Jonah the jailer of the dead, in which Alsiso is briefly incarcerated.
In her diary Mrs Obie wrote that she chose the name Alsiso after having a dream in which she ‘encountered a roguish person of that name, in an Oriental place, with many beasts about.’
Among those who admired Mrs Obie’s book was the explorer Jude Herring. Adventuring in the highlands of New Summerland with Around the World in Seven Veils in his knapsack, Herring inscribed no less than four Alsisos – a Mount, a River, a Lake and a Falls – on the map he was making.
The book was read by children. They brought Alsiso into their counting games and skipping-rope chants: Alsiso the half-and-half, boy and girl, wicked and wild, a bad example to all.
These days you all know Alsiso. You may have heard of the Auckland surrealists who named their clique Alsiso, finding in Alsiso’s incarnations a fitting emblem for strangeness, error, and disruption to the normal order of things. You have probably heard of Alsiso the matinee idol from the era of silent film – powdered and pomaded Alsiso of the deep eyes and hawk profile, Alsiso of the sad ghetto childhood and the adult life no one could approve of. Alsiso was a taxi dancer before he got into the movies, and jealous men called him ‘Alsiso the gigolo’ to put him down. Always a looker more than a talker, he would have struggled and failed when sound came into the films. But Alsiso was saved, in a way: he was on the Princess Niobe on the night she s
ank, and was granted an apotheosis by the watery heavens.
Unless you’ve lived under a stone all your life, you know the later film By All My Sins Remembered. You’ve watched Nell Brynner and Lance Bardot kiss on the terrace of the Hotel Alsiso, and unless you are heartless you’ve reached for a box of tissues at the end. That was the film that made Alsiso a word as potent as Paradiso or Tropicana, a talismanic word in the grimoire of inimitable living.
Inevitably Alsiso became a car: a long machine with tailfins like a fantasy of a rocket ship. There was the famous racehorse Alsiso: the name seems to bring fame with it. Among today’s Alsisos are a pop group, a washing machine, a computer virus, a hurricane, a heat-seeking missile, a professional wrestler; there are Alsiso streets, nightclubs, lipsticks, condoms, codenames; you can paint a town Alsiso Red; you can get an Alsiso cocktail at any bar (recipe: 2 oz white rum, 1 oz peach schnapps, 1 oz rose syrup, poured over ice and topped with champagne).
The Earth is too crowded with Alsiso. And so Alsiso is moving out. A stray bitch is leaving the world tonight, on board a satellite. A one way trip to a dog’s death – but no need to tell Alsiso…
THE MEMORIAL PAGE
It’s my habit, of an evening, to walk along the canal, a grey and sleepy little waterway that runs through our village in the low-lying Eastmarch. I follow the canal into the countryside for two miles, to the door of the Fighting Temeraire. This old stone inn by the water is a place where one can drink an excellent rum punch, and share the evening with country people and with those interesting travellers who, for their various reasons, prefer not to stay at the Rooster in the village centre. One Eve of St Wallace, in the Temeraire’s ale room, fortune permitted me to clink tankards with no less a person than Captain Hector Drake, only a month before he met his appointment with the noose. I was sorry to hear of his fate; this country has lost one of its most convivial highwaymen. Let us drink to Drake. Inside the Temeraire I have had good conversations with, at my guess, half the brigands, gypsies, vagabonds, roaming thespians and other road-folk of the eastern lowlands. We are all served by the Temeraire’s owner, the magnificent Albina, of the monumental silhouette and jet-beaded breast, who is something of a goddess to her men. It is mostly men who come to the Fighting Temeraire, but one night in the middle of last November I met a rare woman traveller.
The north wind was blowing sleet across the canal, the willows beside the water were bare, and like frail medusae they swayed violently in the wind. A small boat, come adrift from its moorings, knocked along by itself. Wrapped in an oilskin, clutching a lantern, I persevered through this autumn inclemency, wondering if I would meet anyone worth the journey.
I was rewarded, for that night the peregrine woman was there. Her colour was very black, a marvel to see in the Eastmarch. She was sitting alone in the ale room, eating a pie dinner. I had a rum punch by myself, so as not to seem rudely forward, then approached her. Her brow was high, her nose curved, and among her white teeth there were three gold ones. As she spoke our language well, and was pleasant, I said I would stand her a drink for a story. She replied that she did not drink alcohol, but would accept the price of her meal, to which I agreed.
Her name, she said, was Arnaude. I expected her to relate something of her homeland or the journey that had brought her here to our chilly country. However, she instead began to recite a story along the lines of a legend:
‘Of all the cities that human beings have ever raised on this earth, the one which they contrived to make closest to the perfect ideal was named Njaua. It was a place of marvels which cannot be described at all. Over many generations its populace had learned the secrets of right conduct and good governance. They enjoyed peace, justice, liberty and prosperity, and had abundant leisure, which they devoted to the quest for perfection. How they defined perfection is not known, but the quest itself generated numerous beneficial outcomes. It is written that Njaua possessed sublime architecture, incomparable gardens, and a street plan whose angles and proportions generated, through occult mathematics, vibrations in the ether which had tonic effects on body, mind and soul. The scientists of Njaua created precious metals in alchemical ovens, and knew methods of fashioning automata which could perform menial labour, relieving the human citizens from all drudgery and allowing them to devote themselves to the cultivation of talent and virtue. Urbane talking beasts discoursed with the men and women in the salons and tea houses, and no hour passed unaccompanied by music.
‘If you tried to reconstruct Njaua from this description, you would fail before you began. You could not really imagine how the buildings and gardens appeared, still less how the automata worked or the beasts spoke, or what the secrets of good living were. But if you could reconstruct it, you might notice the one flaw in this superb city. The flaw in Njaua was born of her own driving ideal: in concentrating on perfecting herself, she fell out of step with the far from perfect world around her. Her citizens learned memory as a skill, but they were selective in what they remembered. They forgot about cruelty and greed, and need and suffering. It did not occur to them that Njaua was an unguarded treasure, and a feast before the eyes of the hungry. Such disputes as arose among themselves they treated as opportunities to practice rhetoric and negotiation.
‘A year arrived when one of the yellow khans came riding towards Njaua with an army of horsemen. Gold and blood were his muses. Word of sacked and incinerated cities preceded him, carried in broken mouths. Wisdom herself could not have negotiated with that man. The people of Njaua, who possessed courage as they possessed so many other virtues, chose to remain in their cherished city and defend it. However, they were not so foolish as to believe they would succeed. To save Njaua from dying utterly, they decided to preserve its essence. The vehicle they proposed for this task was a book, a codex, to contain a distilled record of Njaua: its history, plans of its streets and its great buildings, the essentials of its unique sciences, biographies of the most outstanding citizens, miniature copies of the greatest paintings in the galleries, sketches of sculpture and architecture, salient passages from the most important texts in the libraries, extracts from the scores of the finest music composed in the city during its long, luxurious life. It is not known how they decided what was the greatest, the most important, the most worthy of preservation. We do know that they made room in the book for the favourite proverbs of the people, their funniest jokes, and some of the things said by their children. Nor did they neglect to include a confession of their mistakes. They conceived this summary as a seed from which a new Njaua could be grown.
‘The book was completed only hours before the conqueror’s trumpets were heard, and a citizen was chosen by lot to carry it away to safety. The one to whom the lot fell was a tiger from among the talking beasts. His name has not been preserved. The tiger journeyed for several years with the book strapped to his great striped back, going whichever way the khan did not, stopping in every town and village he came to. He met with varying receptions. Most of the people he encountered mistrusted him. Some tried to capture him, some marvelled and were afraid, and a few tried to worship him as a god. Others showed interest in the book, but explained that they had their own ways and were happy with them. Some wanted to buy the book as a curiosity, and they learned what a tiger’s yawn looks like. But a tiger is a patient animal. He continued to search for a people into whose keeping he could deliver the ember of his lost home.
‘When the tiger was old and had walked around half the world, he arrived in a town called Vhar. The people who dwelled there, upon viewing the Book of Njaua, were filled with wonder and the desire to become great. They honoured the tiger and declared that they would henceforth be guided by the book. They taught him their language and learned his. In recognition of Njaua’s history, they resolved to make themselves enlightened, but rather than ignore the world, be a friend and an example to it, so that enlightenment should spread.
‘Over the course of centuries they achieved their desired society and built Vhar into a great-hea
rted and gracious city, full of marvels. These marvels were its own and different from those of Njaua, though in them were many traces of ideas from the book.
‘Yet history was to repeat itself. Four centuries after the tiger’s appearance, warning of a barbarian invasion came to Vhar. The Vharese had not been as successful in spreading enlightenment as they had hoped. Truth be told, they had turned inward after too many rejections. They decided that they, too, would preserve their treasured home in a codex. However, they did one thing differently from their predecessors: they sent hundreds of citizens out, each bearing a single page of the final compilation, in the hope of spreading the influence of Vhar all over the world.’
Arnaude had been speaking without pause. Now she stopped, and laid her hands on the table. ‘Everything that I have just told you,’ she said, ‘I learned from one page from the Book of Vhar. What became of the other pages, or of the Book of Njaua, I do not know. That one page I found in a tomb, buried among worthless pots. It took me two whole years to decipher the language. It was serendipitous, don’t you think, that I happened to find the page which summarises the history of both places and the construction of the books? The influence that Vhar, and through it Njaua, eventually had upon our world is unknown; but perhaps the fact that I was able to work out the language tells us something.’
I nodded and said aye. But privately I wondered whether she was telling me the truth or a tall tale. Even if she had found the page in a tomb as she said, how could she know that it was genuine? Surely it could be a forgery, someone’s joke. Or she could have honestly mistranslated it.