The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  He made his debut in Leviathan Square at high noon on the Feast of Valvanilla, local goddess of oysters and pearls, who is also fancied to have jurisdiction over impotence, frigidity and unsavory defluxions. The square was packed. Body-paint was confined to minimal enhancement of skin-tones. In fact the better sort of people were draped almost modestly, out of respect to the Goddess whose nude image towered over them.

  Leviathan Square fronts the bay, and a dripping boy, believed to be a virgin, hoisted himself onto the esplanade and ran to the altar with the oyster he had chosen: a remarkable specimen, big as a human skull, knobby and massive as some barbarian helmet. Its weight very nearly caused him to stumble, a fearful omen, so the crowd heaved a vast sigh when he recovered himself and passed the mollusc to an acolyte, who passed it to the high priest.

  Silence fell as the priest raised his knife to the Goddess. If the oyster contained a pearl, the year would bring potency, warmth and continence to the faithful. If it smelled strange or looked odd, if the priest’s knife chipped the shell, if he failed to open it deftly—but some fears are best left unformed.

  First lovers gazing into each other’s eyes, or victims staring up at their murderers: their looks might have seemed uninvolved, compared to the intensity of so many eyes in Leviathan Square that day. But at the height of the yearning silence, at the moment when all attention should have been focused on the priest and the knife, the oyster and the Goddess, a buzz rose from the rear of the crowd.

  This was sacrilege. What were those idiots chattering about? Idle heads turned. Marginally faithful heads turned. Then even the faithful swayed and revolved like kelp in a random current. The wet boy who was believed to be a virgin pointed and cried something that was variously interpreted. Unthinkably, the priest himself turned to look.

  What they saw was a file of four naked women that slipped forward with the swift sureness and organic cohesion of an eel through mud. Totally hairless, they were painted in those shades of green and pink that are especially sacred to Valvanilla.

  No drill sergeant could have faulted the synchronization of their barefoot steps. They were of equal height, their painted faces looked alike. Observant lechers later averred that their most intimate details were exactly the same. Were they some enigmatic message from the Goddess?

  A fat young man, out of step and out of breath, wallowed in the wake of this lovely crocodile. He was unpainted, but his streamers of pink and green gauze suggested a connection with the women. He was none other than that notorious parenticide, that son of a fishmonger, it was—and here the thousands of Sythiphoran tongues, as only they could do, produced an echoing chorus of phlegmy gurgles and glottal clicks that were the young man’s name. At this first taste of universal recognition he puffed up like—as some malicious tongues would have it—a blowfish.

  The women at last stood in a perfect line before the altar. Their escort said to the priest, who had been watching the parade in consternation, “I am Tiphytsorn Glocque, and I have come to pay homage to the Goddess with my Art.”

  Instead of denouncing this fat fool, instead of merely ignoring him in the first place, the priest stared at the painted women a moment longer, nodded distractedly and said, “Oh,” before proceeding with his duties.

  His stroke with the knife was sure. The oyster proved sweet and plump. It contained a pearl large as a walnut, though black. The priest announced that this rarity was a marvelously auspicious sign.

  Others interpreted the omen differently.

  * * * *

  Never devout, Phitithia had not attended the ceremony. She was as shocked as anyone when her brother led his creations into her quarters at their palace.

  “You painted them yourself? These slaves? How absurd!”

  “No, it’s a statement—”

  She demanded: “Who shaved them for you?”

  “I did. To trust another with any part of my statement—”

  “Oh, ugh! Get your tainted hands off me! You actually lathered them and put the razor to their—ugh!”

  “How is that worse than kissing them, fondling them, or—”

  “It is, believe me, it’s different! It’s disgusting! It’s demeaning, it’s unhealthy, it’s sick! Shaving slaves!”

  Anger always emphasized his sister’s bulging eyes, thin lips and weak chin. These are not uncommon traits in Sythiphore, but she wobbled perilously close to ethnic caricature. Her knobby shoulders always curved forward as if to hide her vestigial breasts. When the hue of nausea tinged her tallowy skin, not even the most doting brother would have called her pretty. Unable to control her stomach any longer, she dashed from the room.

  She was only trying to vex him, he knew. It had been their father’s fondest hope to marry her into a noble house, but she had conceived an absurd passion for a sponge-diver called Dildosh. Their father instructed ruffians to discourage this unsuitable young man. Dildosh somehow survived with his good looks nearly intact, though he had indeed been discouraged; but once Tiphytsorn was head of the household, his sister assumed that she would be free to indulge her imbecilic lust.

  The heir believed that the least he could do for his father would be to honor his wishes in this respect, and he had forbidden Phitithia to see the sponge-diver. Love may be blind, but there was nothing wrong with Dildosh’s ears, and he surely heard the chiming of gold and silver with each one of her wayward, knock-kneed steps. Refusing to understand this, but unable to openly defy a brother who controlled the family fortune, Phitithia bedeviled him in every way she could. He knew that her show of vomiting at his artwork fell short of honest criticism.

  He sighed and brooded on his creatures, who stood with demurely downcast eyes and blank expressions. He tried to explore the pain felt by abused and misunderstood artists, but he discovered that he was far too well pleased with himself and his work.

  He pulled the nearest slave down on the cushions with him for some fun. No arrogant painter or sculptor, he reflected, could claim that his creation, however grand, was nearly so useful.

  * * * *

  The artist felt something very like pain, but even more like blind rage, when commercial salons began to claim that their inept smearing was done “according to the Glocque technique.” His anger boiled over one day when his litter was borne past a mean stall in some squalid quarter where a scoundrel displayed a sign reading, “Be Painted by Glocque Himself!” A garish poster depicted a woman painted in the same color-scheme, allowing for its degenerate crudity, that Tiphytsorn himself had created for the Feast of Valvanilla.

  “I’ll paint you!” he roared, pouring out of the litter and bursting into the stall like a turbulent wave of quivering jowls and pectorals that sprayed spittle before it. “I’ll paint you with acid, I’ll trowel you and scrape you and rub you out!”

  “May I help you, Sir?” asked the graceful little man who intercepted him, grinning and fawning and clasping his paint-stained hands together like a fly gloating in a privy.

  “You speck, you hole, you waster of skin and paint, you offspring of a masturbating monkey and a slut’s menstrual rag, know that I am Glocque! Glocque, you thief!”

  “As am I, Sir, as am I!” The fawning smile faltered for never an instant. “Thoozard Glocque, your most humble and obedient servant.”

  Tiphytsorn recoiled before an impregnable defense. His was the commonest surname in Sythiphore, though perhaps the oldest. When he was a child, his father had shown him how a gurnard belches the name when it is drawn up in a net, and he had adduced this as proof of the family’s honorable descent from fish. There was no way he could protect his name from infringement. Any rogue who claimed his work was “just like Glocque’s” could point to this wretch, or to a dozen others.

  Tiphytsorn bellowed a laugh and clapped the rascal on a narrow shoulder. “Be Glocque, then, with my blessing! I’ll outdo you. I’ll go where none may follow.”

  “Best of luck, Sir. May Valvanilla never forget you.”

  * * * *

 
Tiphytsorn found his promise hard to keep. Meticulously detailed, weird flowers and vines would run riot over his subjects, they would be embraced by plants and creatures unknown to any human eye; but as soon as they were observed and copied, any human eye capable of looking down at its attendant skin would know them.

  For a while he vowed to keep his Art to himself. Lavishing long hours of toil over his beautiful slaves, bathing them and shaving them, priming them with saliva, semen, urine, or a few brisk strokes of the lash, and then easing oily pigments into their skin should be reward enough for any artist. Since his eye was the only one that could appreciate his work, his eye alone should view it.

  His slaves came from the island of Parasundar, where everyone looks alike to Sythiphoran eyes, and where inscrutability to Sythiphorans is the ultimate virtue. Painting perfected these qualities. Not even Tiphytsorn, who fancied he could normally tell them apart, could say which was Butaphuda and which was Phutabuda, nor had he the slightest clue what they thought of the masterpieces he made of them. But he persuaded himself that they pined for the pleasure of striking wonder into the people, and no sooner had he created a design that he had intended to keep to himself than he was parading them once again before the public.

  And no sooner had he paraded them than his design was copied by mercenary apes.

  * * * *

  The artist was a creature of the city. Great gulfs of sea and sky disturbed him. Having himself rowed to the eastern horn of the Bay of Sythiphore, a trip of less than an hour in a hired skiff, was like a voyage to the edge of the world.

  Food and wine for a banquet had been stowed aboard, select slaves had been taken to divert him with songs asserting the powers and pleasures of wealth, and a pair of inflated goat-bladders had been strapped securely to his shoulders in case of accident; but none of these was a defense against the violent expansion of the sky as his boat leaped forward. The city behind him and the ships at anchor shrank to toylike insignificance. He was an insect, exposed and helpless on an endless floor. Memories of his father’s early efforts to teach him the fishing-business, when he had hidden belowdecks, puking and gibbering, sprang back with ferocious clarity.

  “He’ll probably grow up to be a poet,” he heard his father saying, just before dumping a fresh-caught netful of wet, flopping, slimy things onto his screaming head, “or an artist.”

  This memory so bemused him that he forgot to be frightened. His father, the rudest oaf that ever oppressed the earth with his flat feet, had for once been dead right.

  He felt like an accomplished seaman by the time the skiff docked at the decayed village of Mereswine Point, and he hauled himself onto the rickety wharf without help. Having ordered Captain Calamard to wait for him, he squared his shoulders and rolled toward the skewed huddle of sand-scoured shacks with the swagger of a pirate just back from the cannibal coast of Tampoontam.

  “Your water-wings, Sir!” the captain called after him.

  His face burning, Tiphytsorn fidgeted and fumed while the captain puzzled his way through the redundant fastenings of the goat-bladders. He was sure that all the fisher-folk watched and snickered from the edges of their narrow windows while he

  suffered this like a child being fussed over by his mother. They got an even bigger treat when one of the bladders burst and he lurched forward with a shriek, knocking the captain off the dock and into the bay.

  He swept the skiff with his eyes, planning to flog any slave who smirked, but they all seemed soberly intent on retrieving Captain Calamard. The artist ripped off the remaining fastenings and threw the water-wings aside as he plodded heavily into the village.

  Odd people lived here, clam-diggers, winkle-pickers and witches. He believed that the presumptuous Dildosh came from Mereswine Point. He saw none of them on his brief walk through its alleys, whose leaning walls were festooned with drying nets and decorated with the whitened bones of monstrous sea-beasts. The only life was a flock of gulls who quarreled over a mountain of shells beyond the last of the driftwood hovels. He shied a rock at them, and was alarmed at the volume of shrieks, the thunder of wings. He raised his arms over his head protectively, but the birds only rose and circled, screaming, until he passed on.

  Wearing a wide straw hat and a loose robe against the cruel sun, he slogged over dunes. His spirits revived as he contemplated his own fortitude and intrepidity. He laughed at the lesser men who would have demanded a litter for this heroic journey, or even a guide. The hiss and slap of the surf, displaying none of the rhythmic regularity that poets ascribe to it, guided him to the sea.

  At last he stood atop a dune and saw it, stretching to a horizon that seemed unaccountably higher than the point where he stood. Before his fear of the enormous space could creep up on him, his eyes were opened to the splendor of its colors. Seven different shades of green shone in the sea, not counting various shoals of weed and the mosses on certain wet rocks, and the wooded hills to his left displayed at least four others. Only the laziest eye would have said that the sky was a uniform blue from its pellucid horizon to the height of its blazing dome. A shell that he picked up contained a pastel rainbow. His palette held none of these exact hues.

  He scanned the beach below him, where stone blocks peeked through the sand like the ground-down teeth of giant jawbones, tracing dim outlines of former streets and plazas. Symmetrical depressions might have marked the sites of grand temples and palaces; or they might merely have been symmetrical depressions. No one knew for sure who had built the Old City, or when the sea had reclaimed it, but it had inspired many unpleasant fables. Its ruins were shunned by all but antiquarians, students of dubious disciplines and eccentrics: in one or more of which classes, Tiphytsorn admitted, his own sister might be numbered.

  He had come here to find her, but his heart sank as he recognized her awkward figure lurching through the foam. He could hear nothing from the dune, but she spoke and gesticulated with great animation as she traced a zigzag course along the beach. Another observer—fortunately there was none—might have said that she was casting spells or praying to strange gods. Her brother assumed she was talking to herself.

  He scrambled down the slope to put himself in her path. She had twined her hair with seaweed and draped herself with strands of shells and questionable wrack. Her face was twisted with the intensity of her senseless monologue. He wondered, not for the first time, if he shouldn’t confine her at home. But she was ingenious, unfortunately, and he had no doubt that she would break loose and get even by revealing any number of family secrets.

  She looked not at all surprised to see him, merely annoyed. She made to pass, but he caught her arm.

  “Go away. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  He resisted an impulse to mock this nonsense and said, “I need your help with my Art.”

  “Your Art? Ha! Why should I help a slave-shaver?”

  A wave burst over his feet and soaked the hem of his robe. The sand crumbled under his heels as the wave pulled out, making him stumble. It was as if attenuated tendrils of the sea fumbled for a grip on his ankles. He drew Phitithia onto dry sand, keeping one wary eye on the water.

  “You have a special knowledge of the sea. You know certain secret properties of its plants and creatures—to cite one example purely at random, the poisonous nature of blowfish ovaries.”

  “Whom do you want poisoned now?”

  He scanned the beach nervously, but it was empty. The sea took advantage of his inattention to assault him again, drenching him to the knees and making him cry aloud. He dragged his sister higher, suspecting she had something to do with this. Allowing for her depraved cast of features, her expression was altogether too innocent.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone, I want to benefit everyone with my Art—” he pressed on through her bray of laughter—“by using pigments that no one else can copy.”

  “Again, why? Why should I help you?”

  “Dear Sister, you know I don’t prostitute my Art with private clients. When Lady Dwelp
histeena herself begged me to create a design for her birthday, I refused. But you—here, look at you, you’re not wearing a smudge of paint today, you’re not only unfashionable, you’re immodest. I could make you the envy of all Sythiphore.”

  “With those same fingers that probe loathsome sluts from Parasundar? You’ll never again lay a filthy hand on me!” As an afterthought, she jerked her arm out of his grip and brushed it with sand until it blushed red.

  He was fond of his sister, but anyone who could spurn his Art like that had to be a prodigy of malice and ignorance. He struggled to keep his hands at his sides as he roared, “Then what is it you want from me, you impossible bitch?”

  Instead of responding in the same style, as she normally would, she turned sickeningly coy. With lowered eyes she murmured, “There is a certain young man named Dildosh.... If you would get word to him that he need no longer fear our family and hide from me....”

  He studied her dispassionately. Marrying this gawky grotesque into a noble house, or into any kind of house at all, seemed an impossible hope. He doubted it was fear of him that kept the odious sponge-diver in hiding. “Done. Help me as I wish, and you can marry the beast. I’ll be proud to call myself uncle to mouthing sub-humans with webbed feet.”

  “Brother!” she cried, and forgetting all her reservations about his unwholesome habits, she flung herself into his arms and kissed him with a passion he had almost forgotten.

  * * * *

  Captain Calamard had been a trusted henchman of Tiphytsorn’s father. When they returned to the city, the young man took him aside to a wine-shop, ostensibly to make amends for knocking him into the bay.

  “Do you know a sponge-diver called Dildosh?” Tiphytsorn asked.

  The older man flexed a gnarly hand whose broken knuckles had knit badly before he replied, “I think of him often.”