The Wazir and the Witch coaaod-7

by Hugh Cook

  It is true that this desirable state of affairs has sometimes been obtained in certain closed societies where severe sanctions (not excepting banishment and death) are available for the chastisement of the young, and where adults unite to impose upon their progeny a degree of authoritarian control which even Aldarch the Third would envy. However, the strenuous nature of such social engineering is itself sufficient to refute the contention that the happy state of affairs thus obtained (a younger generation meek, quiet, obedient and fearful) is in any sense ‘normal’.

  Rather, the realist recognizes that the young are by nature unruly and discontented; not least because they wish for the same freedoms their elders enjoy in the realms of action (and in sexual action in particular) but largely lack the means, money, skill, ability and power to make such wishes come true. This discontent expresses itself in many ways, with ‘drumming’ being but one such way; and one which arguably (though your sensationalist would have it otherwise) should not be greeted by hysterical fear on the part of their elders.

  So, while this text does touch upon ‘drumming’ on occasion, please do not get the wrong idea. This is not a lurid assemblage of horrors designed to titillate and excite. Rather, this is a sober history which will proceed largely by careful analysis and exegesis, not by exclamation marks. Here you will find no gaudy tales of monsters and maidens; and, likewise, no breathbating stories of midnight raids, of cannibalism and torture, of blood-spouting torsos and amputated ears.

  This — this is a work of scholarship, not to be confused with trite and trifling books about swords and slaughter, rapine and rape, battle and barrat. If you have an appetite for such, then you are advised to flee from the presence of these civilized pages, and find refuge from the world of reality in a romance like Chulman Puro’s famous magnum opus, The Bloodstained Dream.

  In those pages of ill fame, you will be able to indulge your purile appetites by following at length the exploits of Vorn the Gladiator, who bellows his defiance to the world as he is driven into the Grand Arena at Dalar ken Halvar. A jeering crowd cheers for his destruction. But he is yet to be destroyed!

  ‘A hero’s weapon!’ he roars, holding aloft the great sword Zaftig.

  Huge is that sword, a weapon too heavy for any mortal to lift from the sands. But Vorn the Gladiator bears its weight with ease; and, indeed, twirls it between two of his fingers as if it were a wieldy drumstick rather than a humungous weapon of murder.

  Then the Great Gates of the Great Arena are opened, and the crowd screams for murder as a huge malatotha-pus lurches out on to the burning sands. The brute is a ghastly red. It is hideous to look upon, for it looks like an obscenely mutated Ebrell Islander grown to historic size, like the worst nightmares of prejudice made flesh. The thing is so huge that its shadow alone would crush any ordinary mortal to death.

  But Vorn the Gladiator holds his ground.

  The malatothapus advances.

  The brave sword Zaftig gores the monster. But it sneers at the wound. Vorn is barely able to throw himself to one side to avoid his immediate extinction. Down to the burning sands he falls. He rolls sideways. Not away from the malatothapus but Under it!

  He grabs at the brute’s testicles and fastens his teeth in its scrotal sac. Mad with rage and pain, the malatothapus charges the wall of the arena. It rams that wall, which is made of huge slabs of iridescent opal — wealth which is typical of Dalar ken Halvar, a city where the streets truly are paved with gold, and the buildings made of silver and ever-ice.

  The slabs split, crack and crumble. Unfortunately, the ornamental chair which sustains the delicious rump of the Princess Nuboltipon is seated upon the uppermost of the slabs so destroyed. She falls screaming to the sands. She stands up, still screaming. Then she runs, fleeing across the burning sands like a common slave doomed to die for some unpardonable crime, like spilling soup over her master’s robes.

  The malatothapus snorts with fury.

  It starts after the Princess Nuboltipon.

  Following behind is Vorn the Gladiator. His feet are braced upon the shield of a lesser warrior who died earlier in the day. He is clutching the short tail which waggles behind the malatothapus. Sand spurts out from either side of the shield as it furrows its way across the sands of the arena, as the tail-holding hero is dragged along by the monster.

  The Princess Nuboltipon stops, for she can run no longer.

  She turns.

  She sees the malatothapus bearing down on her.

  She screams.

  The impact of her scream shatters every crystal wineglass brought to the Grand Arena by the wealthy members of the leisure class.

  Then Vorn the Gladiator acts. He has noticed an orifice at the rear end of the malatothapus. Keeping hold of the brute’s tail with his left hand, he plunges the right into this orifice, driving his right arm into the hot and humid flesh until it is buried to the shoulder. Vorn claws at the monster’s innards with his fingernails, which are specially sharpened so he can gouge out eyes in close quarters combat.

  The malatothapus bellows with agony, then faints from a surfeit of pain. As the monster swoons, Vorn pulls his arm free. He recovers the great sword Zaftig and hacks off the head of the brute.

  ‘My hero!’ says the Princess Nuboltipon, running to him with open arms.

  Von embraces her, though one arm is smeared with hot brown dung from fingertips to shoulder, and the other is much besplattered with the blood of the malatothapus. He crushes her to his breast. And, that night, duly reprieved and happily married, he crushes her to the bed, her perfume swooning around her as he thrusts an unmentionable part of his anatomy into a princessly orifice of hers which is equally unmentionable.

  If you have an appetite for tales of such things, then by all means turn to the indulgent pages of the books of the above-mentioned Chalman Puro. But do not expect to find any such frivolous amusement here! The historian is happy to say that no such lurid incidents will be recorded in this tome. Instead, here we have a sober book of history, complete with statistical analysis where appropriate. Here is one such analysis:

  It has been reliably computed that if the eyeballs of all the inhabitants of Untunchilamon were pulped together in a barrel, this would yield enough fluid to provide three baths for Aldarch the Third, Mutilator of Yestron. With equal reliability, it has been computed that the same amount of eyeball juice could provide the formidable Al’three with an infinite number of baths were he prepared to reuse the substance indefinitely.

  This statistic has been derived from firm experimental evidence obtained by torturers working in the employ of the Mutilator of Yestron, and is mentioned here in order to indicate something of the character of Aldarch the Third to anyone who may by chance be unfamiliar with his history.

  That character is part of the necessary background to this history, for virtually everything that was done in, on, around and underneath the city of Injiltaprajura in the final days of the reign of the Empress Justina was done with reference to the tastes, manners and mores of Al’three.

  Even people’s dreams were conditioned by the activities of the Mutilator. Though that tyrant was many leagues from Untunchilamon, it was customary for the blood spilt by his armies to pour in smoking rivers through the dreams of the people of Untunchilamon. Blood smoking, stinking, drenching, drowning — of such things is nightmare made.

  Of such we will not speak again, trusting that the reader will hold it in mind throughout the rest of this history, and will not need to be reminded from paragraph to paragraph that ‘when x did y he had the rightful expectations of Aldarch the Third very much in mind’.

  However, while we trust the intelligence and intellectual powers of our readership, repetition of some thematic motifs will be necessary if only because pattern (and, hence, repetition) is an unavoidable part of life. Therefore it will (for example) be recorded (more than once) that the sun rose; and, again, that it set. From this, only the rash will presume that the historian presumes his readers to be so
imbecilic that they need to be regularly reminded of the behaviour of the sky’s major luminary. Likewise, only a harebrained speculator would presume that the succession of night by day and day by night speaks of some hidden symbolic scheme.

  The historian makes mention of this because the world is not free from either the rash or the harebrained.

  With particular regard to the harebrained, it needs to be stressed that this is a history written with painstaking regard to fact, and the historian has nowhere indulged in any poetic flights of fancy or invention. Thus, while blood is necessarily one of the dominant thematic elements of this text, no ‘symbolic scheme’ is intended or implied, for such nonsense belongs to the province of the poets. Rather, it happens that the ruling colour of Untunchilamon is lifeblood red, and this is a fact of geography which the historian did not invent and cannot alter.

  The island of Untunchilamon has red rock known as bloodstone, reefs of red coral, seas of red seaweed, intermittent plagues of red plankton, beaches of red sand (ground coral and bloodstone mixed), and tropical sunsets which tend to be of a singularly sanguinary nature. The historian might therefore in fairness say:

  Untunchilamon: island of blood!

  But to say this is not to imply (after the style of Greven Jing, whom we have neatly disembowelled above) an atmosphere of horror. True, what one remembers most after a prolonged incarceration upon the island is the oppressive bloodstone, the sweltering heat, and the edible fires of the heavily spiced food in which the local inhabitants tend to indulge themselves.

  But the fact is that, overall, Untunchilamon is a tolerably pleasant place. One can escape the heat by retreating to the labyrinthine underground mazes Downstairs. Or, if you do not care to venture Downstairs yourself, you can ameliorate the effects of heat by indulging in ice which others have rescued from those ancient machineries which fabricate that useful substance in the depths. Apart from ice, hidden machines also make (or so we presume, for it is the simplest of available explanations) the potable water which feeds Injiltaprajura’s eversprings.

  Injiltaprajura is, of course, the capital city (the only city) of Untunchilamon, and is sited where it is (on the shores of the Laitemata Harbour) expressly because of the water, ice, dikle and shlug manufactured by the machines of Downstairs.

  On the Laitemata one might find (at night) Shabble admiring Shabbleself in the nightwater lightmirror. One would also find (at any time of day or night) the island of Jod. This was (and, doubtless, is still) a small island notable chiefly for one building in spectacular white marble, that building being the Analytical Institute which housed Jod’s Analytical Engine.

  On a hot day on the island of Jod, we find the master chef Pelagius Zozimus preparing a platter of tolfrigdala-kaptiko, that dish which consists of fried seagull livers plus a dash of basilisk gall, the said dish being served with side helpings of baked yams and lozenges of dried jelly fish.

  The perceptive reader will recall that the very same dish was mentioned in the first chapter of this history, and may suspect the existence of an unpardonable coincidence.

  The true explanation is that the historian is working with a complete set of Pelagius Zozimus’s favourite recipes on his desk, and is interleaving the labour of composing this history with the pleasures of trying out those recipes (to the extent to which the ingredients are obtainable in this region of the island of Quilth).

  Thus, when the historian came to record the departure of Jean Froissart from the city of Bolfrigalaskaptiko on the River Ka (just upstream from the great lagoon of Manamalargo on the western shores of the continent of Yestron) it happened that tolfrigdalaptiko infiltrated the text because the recipe for the dish was on his desk; the very taste of the stuff was on his tongue; the pan in which he had cooked it was sitting in a washing barrel together with all those pans, pots and casserole dishes used by the historian over the last ten days; and the historian’s favourite cockroach was feeding on one stray seagull liver which, having fallen to the floorboards, had failed to slip between the cracks between those boards.

  In addition to all the above, the notes for this second chapter were on hand when the first was written, and tolfrigdalaptiko was much on the historian’s mind because Pelagius Zozimus is recorded to have cooked It for the Empress Justina on no fewer than ten separate occasions; and, when working in the premises of the Analytical Institute on Jod, to have prepared it on every second day for the Crab.

  The historian trusts that the reader’s mind has been set at rest. A coincidence exists; but, rather than undermining the validity of this text, it serves merely to emphasize and underline the stringent research which has gone into this work of surpassing scholarship.

  Let would-be critics further note that any attempt to studiously avoid coincidence would result in the most perverse perversion of history. For it is a statistical truth that, when Aldarch the Third sits upon his throne in the city of Obooloo and drinks wine or water (or blood, or the juice crushed from the eyeballs of his enemies, or the semen of his favourite dog), there will simultaneously be other people elsewhere who are also drinking wine or water (or other substances); and the historian cannot reasonably ask all these people to cease and desist from their activities merely to avoid the occurrence of a coincidence, that entirely natural pattern of synchronic correspondences which some schools of criticism find so intensely distressing.

  Readers raised on histories of the weird and the wonderful raise another serious objection to the events of this narrative; namely, that the events it deals with are so close to those of their own lives and their own times.

  This objection can only be answered by stating an unpalatable truth: the weird and wonderful histories which gratify the appetites of such readers are nothing but a tissue of untruths.

  It is a great principle of historical philosophy (though one as yet far from universally acknowledged) that all lives are but variants of one common pattern; to the point that, were all the lives of all people from the beginning of time to be compounded into one Life Experience then divided by the number of the whole, the statistically accurate Average Life thus produced would be little different from the one the reader is living now.

  While those who deal in weird and wonderful untruths are reluctant to admit it, the truth is that all the lives of all the peoples of all of humanity are, were and always will be very much alike.

  Wherever we look, we find the same patterns repeating themselves. The gods are (and were, and will be) always distant, bad tempered and less than perfectly understood. The younger generation is always a trial to the older. Slaves are always idle and stupid, and a cause of exasperation to their masters. Chastity is everywhere preached, and the preaching is nowhere a solution to venereal disease. Youth acts in haste and age repents at leisure. Inflation prospers everywhere. Everywhere, scholarly talent starves while Chulman Puro and Greven Jing grow rich. And all cultures (regardless of what superficial differences exist between them) recognize that very special and peculiar difficulties inevitably exist between a man and his mother-in-law.

  As this is a sober history, it follows that nothing is recorded in these pages which cannot happen in your own life, or at least in your own lifetime. The Empress Justina is not the first person to struggle valiantly to secure the liberties of her kingdom against the oppressions of a foreign empire; and the fact that her best efforts ended in general disaster merely indicates a principle well known to all historians, which is that might is might and right is easily forgotten.

  One final comment.

  Great differences will be found between this history and others now extant.

  The greatest difference is that of treatment; for this is a singularly intimate history.

  It is intimate largely because of the very special advantages enjoyed by the historian. Personal experience is one of these; for the historian was actually on Untunchilamon when the events herein recorded took place. Furthermore, since the historian writes late and last, he has access to the documents of a
ll those who have written earlier.

  But the historian’s greatest advantage is that he was for long a confidante of Shabble; and Shabble was everywhere, and saw everything, or at least learnt of it thereafter by way of confession or hearsay.

  Shabble was in the kitchen attached to the Analytical Institute when Pelagius Zozimus was preparing that platter of tolfrigdalakaptiko. Shabble was there listening to one kitchen slave telling another about the delinquencies of her grandmother’s neighbour’s daughter’s son, who had run away from home and was living on the streets as a drummer.

  Later, Chegory Guy came into the kitchen to collect that tolfrigdalakaptiko, and Shabble went with Guy to the cave where the Hermit Crab lived, and watched as that formidable monster ate its way though its meal with a pair of chopsticks which its huge claws handled with the most exquisite delicacy imaginable.

  Olivia Qasaba was present at that same meal, for she had made herself the Crab’s servant. This she had done in order to have an excuse to associate with Chegory on a regular basis.

  In truth, the Crab needed no services apart from the regular provision of its meals. The Crab was a philosopher of a singularly unambitious kind, and did very little apart from sitting still, thinking, and waiting for the inevitable onslaughts of those human beings who from time to time (for selfish reasons of their own) would try to kill it.

  However, Olivia had invented a great many jobs for herself to do. Early on in her service, she had taken to adorning the Crab with flowers. Daily, she brought fresh frangipani blooms for the Crab, and glued them to its carapace (the Crab being possessed of no human-style ears behind which such flowers might have been stuck). Later, thinking the Crab in need of some more permanent form of adornment, Olivia went to work with a stronger kind of glue, and began to cover the Crab with a mosaic of white marble, cowrie shells, chips of bloodstone, old fish-hooks, brass rings, worn-out cogs from the Analytical Engine, fragments of blue and yellow glass and rags of silk.