More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “You hear only about our busts and half busts,” Melchisedech said. “The hundreds of consummate successes are closed off forever in that forgetfulness ‘where the only sound is Lethe, and where the ovations sound now’, as the poet says. Our really good work remains under the seal and the silence.”

  “That's what they all say.”

  So X sailed with them. And, really, they were glad to have him. At Our'yev, at the East Mouth of the River Ural in Tartary, Melchisedech Duffey lost his life. Oh, there was no question about it. He was killed dead: deader than a mackerel. Dead, and quickly stripped of the flesh off his bones, and that flesh cremated to ashes. A man will not walk away from such a thing as that.

  6

  The Gold Ship or the King's Ship or the Shimmering Ship is an almost universal boys’ dream. And all of the almost universal dreams have strong basis in fact. The almost universal dreams (but not ordinary dreams) are really sub-surface or simultaneous happenings which parallel the surface happenings and are often the stronger and more valid. Almost all boys realize that they have this valid dimension of other happenings and other life. But many of them, not being intelligent enough to keep up, forget it as they grow older.

  The other world of oceans and ships and adventures is really there. It is the other side of the coin. It is often the clearest and most decorative side of that coin.

  The Argo is not the only one of the preternatural Gold Ships or King's Ships or Shimmering Ships. There are a dozen or so of them. But the Argo is one of the most noble of them, and also it is one of those with the raciest adventures.

  These Shimmering Ships, with their ever-young crewmen of very great age, have all the excitement and blood and thunder of Pirate Ships or Devil Ships, but they have the advantage of being on the side of light and glory.

  But every boy reveling in their companionship by day and by night knows that their victories are not either easy or inevitable, that some of the greatest contests will be lost, that some of the great Ship Masters will be slain and skinned by their adversaries, that the adversaries are very strong.

  These adversaries are people of stunning impact, of massive mystery, of overpowering personality, of unmatchable courage. Give them all of that. So it is in the group understanding, and so it is in reality.

  Among the most shattering of the Adversaries is that group known is The Evil Prince, the Purple Prince, the Mocking Prince, the Laughing Prince. The most powerful and trickiest of all these adversaries may well be the Laughing Prince of Tartary.

  Except for a very short interlude it Wien, all the Argonauts had always been able to tell right from wrong very clearly, and they had always supported the right. They were Commando Experts of a sort, in a battle against evil things, and all of them served tours of duty at this heroic labor. They ransacked minds and seas and realms in their efforts, and they brought strength of character and lively imagination to bear.

  The Argo did, very often, sail clear outside of the cosmos, and it did also sail on the insides of minds and persons and it learned of the dangerous reefs and promontories that are within. If the Argonauts ever became confused as to ‘where’ or ‘on which side’, there was an Instruction in the chart room of the Argo to set them right. Even when, several times, the Argo had been in evil hands and ownership, the chart room and its instruction were not disturbed.

  There were, of course, gray areas that they traveled on their tours, but always they could be classified as good gray or bad gray, or they could be changed by astute battle from one to another. All of the worlds were sites of the long-drawn and never-finished battle between good and evil, and there was no one anywhere who could really stand aside from it.

  Except the Laughing Prince of Tartary.

  There had been bothersome reports of this Laughing Prince for the late while, that he was the Prince of the Third Way. He was not claimed by either God nor the Devil, and he claimed not either. He was neither hot nor cold, so he had been vomited out of the mouths.

  “But he will rue the day when he vomited me out of his mouth,” the Laughing Prince had said, and he was not laughing when he said it. “He is the enemy of my enemy, but He is my enemy also. And the enemy vomited me out of his mouth also, and he likewise will rue the day. I an not so ‘neither-nor’ as all that. I am hot as fire and cold as ice, and they were wrong to eject me. I hold this third place, and I will not successfully be invaded here. My land is a scorcher when I want it to scorch, and mine is the only cooling spring in the country. Whoever comes to my land will have to come down to my spring to drink. My way is sweet and my burden light, and my spring is poisoned.”

  It was reported that the Prince was really the vile creature out of the ‘dialectic pit’. It was also reported that he was not so no-sided as he pretended, that he really did adhere to one side, and that the truth was not in him. The Laughing Prince always wore large, black lens eyeglasses, and no one had ever seen his eyes. It was reported that he was a totally amoral person, which of course was impossible. It was reported that his laugh was really a bit of something else.

  So the Ship Argo had a work order to check out the reports on this Laughing Prince. It was hardly known of what land he was the Prince. Tartary, like so many of the other realms, had been under the dominion of the New Infidels for several generations. Tartary was not even an official name any more.

  The Argo went there by rapid but difficult voyage. Even getting a ship the size of the Argo onto an inland sea the size of the Caspian was tricky. The Argo Masters came to Tartary, and nobody there had ever heard of the Laughing Prince. They had, they said, no prince except the First Secretary of the Oblast. There were some slight indications of superimposed ambients in Tartary, but mostly the country was as it should be. So each of the Masters, and the Half-Master, searched as best they could.

  Mr. X did the things he could do best. He talked to important people, or to people whom he fictionalized as being somehow important. He obtained from them bits and snippets of information that he thought might be important. He dug up strong hints of things as they should not be. If it hadn't been for the peculiar information that he uncovered, he wouldn't have been able to identify Duffey's ashes and bones later.

  And Kasmir Gorshok, the Casey of the Zodiac and the Casey of Chicago, did the things he could do best. He sorcered up a pavilion that was like a pleasure palace. He sorcered aides into being. He gave lavish entertainments to such local officials who might be of value. He gathered all such intelligence as could be gathered by sorcery. He met the Laughing Prince in séances, and he was told by the prince that one of the coffins on the Argo would soon have its designated bones in it. There were always a few unoccupied (and some occupied) coffins on the Argo to take care of all eventualities. But Casey was not able to persuade the Laughing Prince to mend his evil or ambivalent ways, or even to admit that his ways were evil or ambivalent. “No, no, fuzz-face, my ways are beyond good and evil,” the prince told Kasmir. Kasmir wasn't able to come to the Prince in the flesh. He was told that the story that the Prince had no eyes behind those black lens glasses was false. The mystery of the black lens glasses was something other than that.

  Biloxi Brannagan did the things that he did best. He took the Argo, and he ransacked all the shores of that Sea to make them give up their answers. It was a mocking bunch of answers that they gave him, and yet not false. Brannagan was the finest seaman of all the fine seamen who had sailed on the Argo. There was nobody like him for ransacking a shore.

  Melchisedech Duffey went upland a little bit into the boondock interior, but the interiors were never well done in treacherous Tartary. (Is Tartary ultimately the same as Tartarus?) There was an emptiness and incompleteness about the interiors. It was for this reason that they were so susceptible to having other ambients superimposed on them. Upcountry, the superimposed ambients were much more noticeable than on the coast, and things were somewhat more strongly ‘as they should not be’.

  The Industrial-Agricultural country had a desert su
perimposed upon it sometimes, a desert that in reality had been driven away by the big dams and deep wells long ago. Melchisedech knew something about Asian deserts from his earlier eras, and he recognized that there were many things in this desert that did not fit. There were many skeletons of people lying around on the rocks and sand, but few of animals. There were conspicuous skulls of them here and there, but not skeletons. “And skeletons are harder to do,” said Duffey, “unless you've studied them a bit.” The rocks were not right and the plants were not. Even the blasting heat of the desert was wrong. It tore at one like the wind from a furnace, but it did not stir the plants or the sand. There was intense thirst in that desert, and rather stylized hallucinations. And yet, it seemed a skimpy net in which to allow yourself to be entangled.

  Melchisedech was several times able to break out of this desert framework and back into the basic world. Now he entered a middle-sized town that was full of trucks and bustle. He ate a good meal at a restaurant ‘Rose Ivanova's Kofeinik, You Know It's the Best, All the Truck Drivers Stop Here’, of hearty food. And he drank eleven grasses of water. That's right, eleven glasses. His subliminal thirst, induced by the desert scenes, was very great. But ordinary water might not slake it.

  Nobody in that place had ever heard of the Laughing Prince who was the enemy of both God and the Devil, and who was partisan of neither good nor evil, having a third thing going. “Such towering amorality must have left its mark somewhere,” Melchisedech said. “There is one place in every town where they will know something about every phenomenon, even if they have it all wrong.

  Melchisedech went out of the restaurant and started for the newspaper building two blocks up the street where he would —

   — but he was back in the desert again, and the town was gone. The middle-sized town, with its bustle and business, had turned into desert dust that hung faintly in the air, but the desert burning through it was much stronger. Melchisedech was tortured once more by the instant thirst. There were shocking hallucinations of the Laughing Prince. There were — no, these things could not be — hallucinations of hallucinations out of one of Melchisedech's childhoods. There were the three crooked persons with the slanted faces. They had pursued Duffey in his boyhood and tried to kill him. Later they had become cartoon characters and stereotypes and comic book persons. They were the SFM, the Slant Faced Men, of the Fantasy Rags. But now they were in the desert scene as bully boys for the Laughing Prince.

  “You have to come down to my spring to drink,” the Prince was saying like an old record on a record player. And Duffey knew that he must indeed drink of that spring even if it should be the death of him. Duffey knew that in reality he had drunk eleven glasses of water in the last half hour. But he also knew that in unreality he was dying of thirst and would have to drink at a spring that he had heard gurgling on the edge of the town. He rushed to it. He found it. It was upwelling in sparkling splendor.

  “Don't drink! It's poisoned!” millions of boys were trying to warn him out of their deep participation in the events. “It's poison! It's poison!” Melchisedech had always been in close rapport with the millions of boys. But now, though he heard them and their warning voices, he could not understand their words.

  He drank of the poisoned spring of the Laughing Prince. And he was slain and seduced and defeated just as easy as that.

  He could see everything with great clarity after he had drunk from the poisoned spring, but it was all wrong stuff that he saw so clearly. The unreality had defeated him. This unreality is the greatest of enemies.

  The spring was a gusher that was in defiance of all hydraulic laws. Duffy had drunk greedily from it, and then he had known that it was all over with him. He waited to die. The haughty prince was there to relish his death scene, but he seemed to be watching it not directly, but through some medium at second hand. The three slant faced killers slunk up. They were badly dated. They were caricatures. But now they were murder itself.

  “They simply won't do, Prince,” Duffey said. “They are American cartoon type, and they actually date before the year 1910. They grew up after that, year by year as I grew up, but they are still dated back in their beginnings. Those slant faces! Those knives! Really, Prince, you can do better than that.”

  “If you laugh at them, you laugh at me also,” the Prince giggled furiously. Duffey knew then that the Prince had misnamed himself. He was the Giggling Prince and not the Laughing Prince. He could giggle as well when furious as when happy, and he was furious now.

  “Their knives are thirsty,” the Prince giggle angrily, “and I will let them have you now before the un-pain of death saves you from them. Suffer, Melchisedech, suffer!”

  Melchisedech was paralyzed from the water of the poisoned spring, but his awareness of pain was still intact when the three slant-faced killers slithered in and began to murder him alive with their knives. It was a real death even though it was set in an unreal scene.

  Melchisedech had that clarity and perception of special information that a dying body will sometimes feed back into whatever it is separating itself from. He knew now how the Prince could be so amoral. The Prince was very young, and he was retarded in his intelligence. Not in his mentality, which was immense, but in his intelligence he was retarded. What surface glibness he had was from the televisions and the hallucinators that he watched. The mystery of the black lensed glasses, in fact, was that the two black lenses were the backs of two small television sets set close to the Princely eyes, and that these, and his own interior hallucinations, were all that the Prince could ever view. The Prince has a large but irrational brain, and great and unhinged psychic power. It was out of this that the first case ever of massive total amorality had been compounded.

  The three slant-faced killers cut all the flesh off of Duffey's bones, and that is what killed him, beating the poison to it. But his spirit still lingered with his remains, as that of a new dead person will often do. Besides, he had received no further instructions. The slant faces had done their work and they went away, one of them eating the liver of Melchisedech, one of them eating the tongue, one of them eating the kidneys. They were followed by three slack-faced men (in archetypal literature, they are sometimes confused with the three slant faces who go before them, but the Prince did not confuse them; he kept a trio of each) who built a furnace fire. The slack faces burned all the sinew and viscera and flesh of Melchisedech until they were nothing except hot ashes (they would always be hot and ready to burst into flames). They put these ashes, still smoking, into a cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain.

  The amoral desert and the amoral figures faded away. There was a slight jerk or jar then as when these things shift to a different context. The mortal remains of Melchisedech Duffey were in the middle of an unbusy street in Gur'yev, a town at the East Mouth of the Ural River in Tartary. The bones lay lankly there in the street, and the smoking ashes were in a little canister beside them. Both X and Kasmir Gorshok, gathering their information in their different ways, had coincided in their results. They came to the place in that street where Melchisedech's death and remains had impinged into the world of Reality. And they were able, by methods that were themselves very near to sorcery, to identify Melchisedech positively in both bones and ashes.

  A minor official who was there was glad enough to be rid of the whole business. “I just don't know how I would have written up a report like this,” he said. “People keep arriving out of that ‘nowhere desert’, dead and disfigured and our superiors always believe that we have been drinking when we report such things. Take them and say no more about them, and I will not.”

  “I will be the custodian of the ashes,” X said. “I have a premonition that I will meet Melchisedech alive again, and then I will give them back to him. Few men have such keepsakes of themselves.”

  X kept the ashes in their canister. X and Casey Gorshok carried the bones down to dockside, keeping to the side streets from some kind of embarrassment. And Biloxi B
rannagan was just bringing the Argo back into port, knowing that the search for the Laughing Prince had ended in disaster.

  They put the bones of Melchisedech Duffey into one of the caskets of the Argo. Brannagan, in his person of St. Brandon, said the ‘Mass of the Holy Precursor Melchisedech’ for him. (It was the Mass of April 31 when the old calendar prevailed.) And Brannagan and Gorshok and X half-believed that they had done all that they could do for Melchisedech.

  And Melchisedech lay in that coffin, and he lay there and lay there.

  “I thought there would be more to it than this,” Melchisedech said.

  The Argo Masters, Brannagan and Casey Gorshok, and the Half-Master X, went on to further adventures and rectifications, but it just wasn't the same thing without Duffey booming in the midst of them. The bones of their companion Melchisedech, just lying there, spooked them and gave an incomplete air to all their doings.

  And so it went, for about three days. Then God Himself came onto the Argo in the uncounted hour.

  “Have you been relieved of your duties as a Master of the Argo?” God asked those bones, and they leapt with joy at the sound of His voice.

  “No, I have not,” the bones of Melchisedech spoke boldly, “but I am dead and stripped of my flesh. I waited here in my coffin where I knew You would find me. I did not have any further instructions. I did not know whether I was wanted as Pilot and Master any longer.”

  “The articles of the voyage do not require that you be a fleshed Pilot and Master,” God said. “And you are always wanted. You, and you others, see to the details among you.”

  Well, it would be awkward, but it could be done. There would be a sort of joyful awkwardness in finding ways to go about it. Melchisedech still had all his faculties, his movements, his merriments. His old seaman's clothes still fit him, though a little bit scarecrowishly. Casey Gorshok made for Melchisedech a golden mask to go over his bony skull, a golden scarf to go around his neck, and golden gauntlets for his hands and wrists. These golden fabrics came from combings of the Great Golden Fleece of Colchis itself.