The Foundling's Tale, Part Three: Factotum

by D M Cornish

  Rossamünd waited, and though bursting with a swarm of questions provoked by this riddling sermon, he did not speak.

  The pause stretched into a weighty silence.

  Rossamünd blinked.

  “Will you give me answer, ouranin?” insisted the monster-lord, breaking the stifling hush. It stepped toward him, a jaunting tip-of-toe stride, its legs elongated like a rabbit’s. Unlike the close-cut claws of its hands, the claws on its large coney feet, clicking on the paving, were wicked long and wicked sharp.

  Stoutly Rossamünd opened his mouth once, twice, but even on the third no more than an astounded gurgle came out of him.

  Chirruping urgently, Darter Brown danced winging loops about the Duke of Rabbits’ ears.

  THE LAPINDUCE

  Ears drooping slightly, the Lapinduce shot a strangely chastened look to the agitated sparrow. “Be not afraid, little wing-ed merrythought,” it murmured, addressing the bird directly. “I am no cacophrin nor simple sunderhallow to set on your friend and eat him!You may tell Lord Strouthion—my word to his ear—that though I might decline to bind myself to seek everymen’s welfare, yet I am not so lost that I would devour our own.” Ears once more erect, the Lapinduce stared down upon Rossamünd with its large limpid eyes, elbow in hand, stroking its hairy chin beneath enormous, protruding teeth in a very human manner. It gazed at him so searchingly the young factotum began to itch. “You are alive, now speak . . . What do they call you by?”

  Rossamünd fumbled, not knowing how to address this primeval creature. “My . . . my name is Rossamünd Bookchild.” He went to doff his hat diffidently and was reminded by empty, questing grasp that it was missing.

  The monster-lord laughed, a coughing, oddly person-ish noise. “Of course it is! Who was it, to bestow you such an uninspired nomination?”

  “I—uh—I suppose it was Madam Opera . . . ,” the young factotum answered a little tightly, “though I reckon it was Cinnamon who gave it to me first.”

  “Cinnamon, you say?” The Lapinduce twitched its nose and flicked its ears. “Surely modest Cannelle would not be so dim?”

  “Cannelle, sir?”

  The creature looked at him as if he were simple. “Cannelle is the one you name as Cinnamon. He has always been curious beyond his place, wandering far and farther through the eons, outside his rightful range . . . though I reckoned him sharper-soiled than to give an ouranin such a simple name—”

  Tweet! went Darter Brown touchily.

  “I think it was more a label . . . ,” Rossamünd elaborated.

  The Lapinduce cast a shrewd look at both boy and bird. “He sought perhaps to play a tease upon the everymen?”

  “Play a tease?”

  “Most certainly—jest with them! Put a theriphim so thoroughly disguised among them and fool them all, yet leave the morsel of a hint to unravel the ruse and reveal the jest.” Another coughing laugh.

  Standing still on the opposite bank of the runnel, the young factotum could not help his frown. If his arrival on the foundlingery steps was a jest, it was a very poor one.

  “Will you tell me, puzzled ouranin,” the Lapinduce crooned, “why you remain in their realms? Why have you not joined us and kept yourself away from needless troubles?”

  “I-I have not known of what I am supposed to be until only a fortnight gone. My master got a mark of my blood upon his arm to prove it, but it is yet to show.”

  “Oh, now.” The urchin-lord’s alien eyes went a little round. “Here you need no such gruesome proofs—I have told it is so; all doubts are ended.”

  His soul set so fixedly on the confirmation of Fransitart’s cruorpunxis, Rossamünd did not know what to do with so blunt a revelation. “But can I truly have come from the mud? Am I really the remaking of some lost everyman fallen dead in the wilds?”

  The Lapinduce regarded him with glittering eyes.

  “Whoever told you so told it true,” it said simply.

  Rossamünd gasped a steadying breath. “But am I an everyman or a monster?”

  “Ahh.” The Duke of Rabbits clacked its front teeth together impatiently. “Thus did Radica and Dudica, the darlings and saviors of the Brandenfolk, worry. ‘Are we mannish monsters or monsterish men?’ was ever their quest.” The monster-lord became contemplative and so completely still, the young factotum thought he had been forgotten. Finally the creature stirred. “The answer is as it was for them: you are both at once, neither more one nor less the other, an everyman and euriphim congruently and indivisibly, unable to be separated into parts. No marks on arms nor hiding behind unsmells will make you more or less than what you already are and have always been, oh manikin.”

  Despite all the evidence, Fransitart’s recounting and Rossamünd’s own knowing, a self-denying blank reached out from Rossamünd’s milt, prickling at his scalp and setting a disconcerting buzz ringing in his ears.

  The Lapinduce gave a disgusted snort. “Look at these pullings of long faces! How does knowing what you are make you any different? You have been you all this time; you will remain you for the long stretch of your life regardless of the reckonings in your thinking soils. The only alteration you have undergone is to simply have information to remedy your self-doubtings. Cease these snivels!” Again it clacked its terrible front teeth together, a loud, disapproving sound.

  The rabbit-duke turned, took up a fine glass goblet that had sat upon the wooden-keyed spinet and sipped heartily at the wriggling froth it held, chewing on a mouthful. “I welcome you, ouranin, to my warren in this miniature remnant wood of mine.” The Lapinduce bowed to him. It spread its arms like an invitation. “Come, let us walk in the cool of the morning so I might show it to you.”

  With a slow watchful stride over the tiny watercourse, Rossamünd approached the urchin-lord under its ancient tree.

  Another quaff of its frog-froth and the monster-lord coughed unexpectedly, two loud, clear hacks that bore the suggestion of language.

  As if in response, two large buck-rabbits, brown with black faces and brooding jet eyes, hopped from a hole in the flagstones between a tight bole of walnut roots. Each rabbit bore one of Rossamünd’s boots, carried somewhat uncomfortably in its teeth by the heel-loop.

  The young factotum gave an involuntary chuckle of delight.

  “This is Ogh.” Clearly pleased at the young factotum’s reaction, the rabbit-lord indicated the buck carrying his right shoe with an uncurling of its great hands. “And this”—it did the same for the rabbit holding the left boot—“is Urgh; if they had not held them for you, the littler ones might have carried your shoes away for keeping.”

  The two creatures dropped Rossamünd’s boots carefully at his feet, and as he wrestled his footwear on, one pulled the leafy blanket from his shoulders and dragged it to its master. The other hopped in lazy lopes to disappear again beneath the walnut. As large as they were, there was nothing especially threwdish about them; they were just rabbits.

  As if detecting its guest’s inklings, the rabbit-duke declared, “They are of a long line of Oghs and Urghs who have served me ear and nose, keeping watchful eye while I ponder and I play to remember the sweet piping of the cosmic firstenings.” The monster-lord reached down to fondle the ears of the one at its feet.

  The other reemerged bearing Rossamünd’s slightly soiled hat in its gentle mouth.

  The young factotum laughed again as he took it gratefully.

  Eyes glittering, the Lapinduce turned and beckoned him to follow, taking the young factotum through the arches upon the other side of the cellar. By winding root-paneled passages full of half-heard whispers, Rossamünd let himself be led upward, holding back cautiously as around and around they went, ever higher. Stooping through a veil of bracken and root fronds—the Duke of Rabbits almost bent to its oddly working knees—they emerged between the roots of an enormous olive onto a bright hillside glade.

  Dazzled and blinking, Rossamünd perceived a host of rabbits grazing and loping about the thickly flowering grass hemmed by great t
hickets of thorny trees. To the east over the treetops, where the morning sun was well lifted into the wan blue, he thought he saw the gray misted curve of the city’s entire harborage brimming with masts. Founded a dozen yards behind him on the summit dense with pungent sage like some fortalice, the hollow building of the Lapinduce’s court rose for four stories. Its banks were grown around with massive ancient trees of many kinds—walnut, sycamore, olive, turpentine—obscuring much of the skeletal tower. A powerful slumbering peace dwelt here, giving no hint that they were indeed in the middle of a vast and hostile city. Alighting with a whir in the branches above, Darter Brown played with little wrens and woodland robins.

  Closing his eyes, Rossamünd drew in a sweet cleansing breath.

  Striding down the embankment, the Lapinduce was quickly gathered about by a milling, frolicking drove of coneys and hares. The monster-lord cooed for a moment to them, then held out its long arms and turned slowly about.

  “When far-seeing Idaho was still on pap, this wood covered every dune and vale,” it spoke with chanting tone, “from Lillian of the Faye to the People of the Dogs and far into the Piltmen’s kingdoms. The Harholt, the Harleywood, Cacolagia, Nemus Cunicula . . . It has gone by many names, but each one gives it my name. Whether brave sires or cowardly heirs, wide-visioned conquerors or money-hearted gooses-grabbers, all souls have lived in it and about it by my consent.”

  “You let them cut your trees?” Rossamünd asked carelessly, more intent on keeping from crushing a rabbit as he stepped down to the grass.

  “Trees do not concern me as long as I am let alone. The ambits of this park are enough; I seek only to be untroubled by man or monster, and I let all these little naughtbringers flurrying about me flourish. I am not bound to be kind to everymen; however, it pleases me to watch their self-important antics. Ahh, everymen, one brief span you get!” the rabbit-duke cried into the sky, its tiny charges crowding about its slender feet untroubled by the monster’s passion. “You are like the twigs on a plum tree; in spring you blossom, in summer bear fruit, in autumn you drop your leaves and in winter fall and then are gathered up to be thrown as kindling on the fire . . . How I delight in watching you all scurry and toil so seriously only to depart too soon. I stop for but a movement of thought, then rouse, my nails grown again, to find that a once-familiar generation have all departed and their children have become grandsires. Think what troubles you could wreak, oh, busy, busy everymen, if your span of years were but doubled! What terrible momentum you might gather. It is well you fight with each other as much as with us and waste time making wagers over the fate of the weakling tykes in their pits.”

  The monster-lord returned its shrewd attention to its guest.

  “Are you pecked?” it inquired with a peculiarly light tone, holding out its now near-drained goblet of wriggling froth.

  Eyeing the offering with barely contained repulsion, Rossamünd declined while his stomach turned traitor and gave an audible burble.

  “No? Maybe some thrisdina?” It walked over to an anciently knotted olive, reached up and pulled several strands of the diaphanous weed that hung limply from a lower branch.

  The young factotum peered at the serving, a dull wan green frond wet with dew and unappetizingly coiled on the Lapinduce’s pale palm. Feeling obliged after his first refusal, Rossamünd opened his own hand to receive his morning repast and felt a soulful surprise of threwd shiver through his very marrow as the urchin’s truncated claws brushed his bare palm.

  The rabbit-duke did not appear to notice this contact, but explained with a strange and disarming chattiness, “You will find this growing almost anywhere with enough dampness in the air, and every variety is good for eating—whether for everyman or euriphim.”

  Rossamünd sniffed the mossy tendrils. They smelt of grass, of hidden forest glades, of dirt. He tried a nibble. It was like a mild variation on mushrooms, bland enough to be edible. “How do people not fathom you are here?” he asked, still chewing.

  The Lapinduce tapped its long-whiskered upper lip ruminatively with a crooked finger, a voluminous cuff dropping to reveal its bony wrist. “Because I do not wish it. Though some do . . . ” came the patient answer. “My steadfast ones . . . Oftentimes the short-lived dukes will know of me too and reckon well to keep mum.”

  Rossamünd could barely credit it. “They do not send in battalions of teratologists?”

  The monster-lord peered at him as if this were a ridiculous notion. “I would fill this city full of terror and empty it, make it barren for generation upon generation to become a nest for sunderhallows and darkness . . . Though your concern for me is commendable, ouranin,” it added dryly. “The last duke with whom I had to deal—and all those before him—have proved shrewd enough to keep such discernment to themselves. How-be-it, I do not know if the current fellow is the same fellow as before. Too quickly does each generation come and live and go again.”

  “Do other . . . monsters”—Rossamünd hesitated, wanting a better word—“dwell here with you?”

  “I seldom seek the company of my frair. Too often they are spoiling to harm or help the everymen, pulling at me to do the same. I prefer stillness and memory.”

  Looking up, Rossamünd beheld eoned memories that shifted in the depths of the Lapinduce’s inhuman gaze. Was this the fashion of the Duke of Sparrows’ rule as well, to watch and wait and remember sweeter times? “Are you and the Duke of Sparrows kin, sir?”

  It regarded him with what the young factotum could only read as amusement. “Ahh, the Sparrowlengis. As such things are reckoned, indeed we are—though you will find him less willing to admit the kinship. But we theraphim—you and I and the sparrow-king too—are frair all to each other and to the groaning earth too.”

  Rossamünd peered at the monster-lord in wonder. Could I possibly be kin to such creatures? “But what of the hob-rousing?” he dared to ask. “Does it not stir you to anger to have it in your land?”

  The monster-lord’s ears went flat again. “Am I to be the soul to solve the endless enmity twixt theriphim and naughtbringer?” it hissed, taking several large strides toward him and thrusting its visage into Rossamünd’s own, the young factotum retreating a small step.

  A sinister threwdishness—an angry surge that made the world go strangely dim—swirled about him. With a gasp of dismay, Rossamünd raised an arm as if to defend himself, vaguely aware of Darter Brown’s own anxious twittering above him.

  “I happen to know that Gingerrice won free!” the Lapinduce declaimed with low and sibilant ferocity. “As has that daftling Grackle; oft has he passed through the guts of kraulschwimmen and other terrible salamanders and always survived barely hurt! Did not I myself save you from that fluffed and perfumed neuroticrith looking to snatch you away? What more do you wish for, squidgereen! Do you seek to provoke me in my own city and question my mercies?” it snorted.

  Its warm, scented breath—like flowers and new-turned earth—was strong in Rossamünd’s nostrils. “No, sir, I do not,” he said in a small voice, recalling all too lucidly that this mighty creature had slain a wit in his defense as thoughtlessly as a pantry maid might strangle a chicken for a meal.

  “I—” continued the urchin-lord self-importantly, “I have never prevented the many shifting tribes of people from coming to dwell in my domain nor prevented them from conquering the previous tribe to establish themselves. I gave my consent when the two sisters Radica and Dudica—rossamünderlings just as you are and now long departed—defended this youngling city against an onrush of wretchling theraphim kin. I parleyed with the seventh duke—blind and deaf—of this current dynasty, for with me alone could he commune, and in doing thus proved his crafty advisers mendacious and insincere. And yet, I let the schwimmenbeasts take from the harbors their share of iron boats with their toothsome marrows of muscle, and leave marauding nickers to take their fill of souls in the parish lands. Complexities within complexities . . . As it has ever been.” It opened its mouth and clacked the long front teeth o
f top and bottom jaw together. “You might do well too to ask the sparrow-king—so righteous in his forest nest—why it is he lets revers be made in the hinter of his own autumn—his own realm!” It straightened to look down its long nose at him. “If you are of such wisdom and thew, frail ouranin, why do you not do better than me and go and bring out all the skulking, simple-souled sprosslings from those loathsome dog-fighting dens?”

  “I-I am but one . . . boy . . . I could barely help one,” he countered. “You are a great lord of the monsters!”

  “A boy, forsooth! Is that how you see it, oh wise one? Have clean now! You are much more than a mere boy! That is ichor in your innards and there is cruor on your hands. You have felled our frair and used your great vigor in the defense of the everyman foe. How would you answer me if I were to call you to account and pronounce judgment, as is my long privilege?”

  Rossamünd opened his mouth in response yet could offer none. He ducked his head, strange passion thrumming under his ribs.

  The Lapinduce gave a grim smile, a disconcerting expression in such an animal face. “You are right, however, when you say that I am great. I am grandfather to the hills and elder brother to the vinegar’s boundaries, but restrictions there are to my reach, margins that I have placed on myself and limits laid down upon me.” It lapsed and its sight became inward as it began to walk about the woodland hollow, touching flower and branch, leaf and stalk, humming a muted variation to the tune it played so stridently on the spinet.