by Michael Shea
His happiness returned with the wind outside. He decided to stroll down the Academy Quay as a ritual of farewell. On the way there, he made humorous partings with various acquaintances he met on the streets of the quarter. He reached the waterside in time to see a ship gliding berth-ward, her lanterned masts on a level with the quayside lamps. Another omen? Yes—he must include a scale doublet in his wooing-outfit! At this moment the moon—just off the full—began its rise from the sea’s edge—propitious.
The parchment broker converted Bramt Hex’s library into a hundred and fifty lictors. At the haberdasher’s, Hex converted sixty of these into a wardrobe that scorned any appearance of self-effacement—for had he not chosen a bold role? He emerged from the shop in boot-length moccasins, pleated hose, and a hooded cape of lavender velour. A collier-scale doublet was the jewel of his attire. Its flexible, rainbow-coruscating scales, each as big as his palm, were woven to overlap, like those of a fish. On Hex’s bulky frame, it looked like a glittering barrel. Still, with his cape closed against the wind, he looked heroic enough.
A melodeon was next to be found. Among the student population, this custom had long been thought comic and passé. Hex, however, felt sure that the practice was still much used among the affluent, whose mores undoubtedly changed much more slowly than those of poorer, more experimental folk. He began his search in a district that abounded in taverns, for the keepers of melodeons were notorious drinkers—a habit due, some said, to their emotionalism, which gave them the empathy necessary for a rapport with the tender-voiced, quasi-verbal breed they handled. Indeed, Hex found a melodeon-keeper with his beast at the fourth tavern he tried, sitting on a bench in the stable-yard.
He had not looked in the yards of the previous inns because no keeper would have thought of tethering his beast—they formed a proverbially inseparable pair. But, as he crossed this yard, he heard a soft, gulping yodel from one corner, and saw there a melodeon and keeper sitting side-by-side in the shadow, backs against the wall. It seemed that the keeper comforted the creature.
“… water under the bridge,” Hex thought he heard him say, as he approached. The keeper looked up.
“Good evening,” said Hex. “What’s your fee for an evening of melody?” Hex thought the man shot his beast a dubious look before answering.
“Seven lictors, sir.”
“And what is the price for a shorter bout—three hours say?”
“Five lictors.”
“Consider yourself engaged, friend keeper.”
The keeper nodded, and turned to whisper to the melodeon, which sobbed faintly as it listened. Then, gently, the keeper hoisted the melodeon into the leathern papoose-frame which keepers wore always on their backs.
If the melodeon’s trunk, legs and loins had matched the proportions of its huge, sleek-furred head, it would have been able to carry the keeper. But the beast’s shrunken lower half—specially bred into the strain—rendered it a helpless infant, utterly dependent on its human partner. Its sad monkeyish face looked infantile.
The keeper trudged behind the scholar up the windy streets. Because of the beast’s intermittent sobs, Hex was moved to ask: “Is your melodeon in spirit tonight? I want to impress someone whose taste is as exquisite as her rank is high.”
“My colleague is perfectly well, sire.”
Hex thought the man sounded hurt.
“Excuse a distracted suitor,” he said. “I certainly don’t mean to slight your companion. He is a handsome creature, I notice.”
“Indeed he is,” said the keeper with relenting warmth. “You see, their nature is finely tuned. You ask if my Molinor is in spirit because you have heard his sounds of grief. Molinor will rise above this sadness, because Molinor is a true performing artist.”
Hex could detect that the keeper’s words were aimed as much at the melodeon as at Hex himself. It worried him that the man was still trying to enspirit the beast.
“And what was it that caused Molinor’s sadness?”
“My own negligence!” cried the keeper with anguish. “I left him in my seat at the tavern a week ago—briefly, to relieve myself. But there was another melodeon, a female, on the premises, and by the time I returned, the two of them had consummated their instantaneous love under the table. The other’s keeper, you see, was in a stuporous state. Of course Molinor still pines, for his breed is an ardent one, but he is a noble creature, and will answer the call of his Art, leaving his pain aside for the sake of song.”
Again the melodeon was the intended audience of these inspirational words, and Hex felt renewed misgivings. The melodeon’s song was directly connected with its passions. Indeed, its music was no more than its richly varied courting cries, slightly improved by training. They came in view of the escarpment that gave the Scarp Heights district its name.
The street, flanked by the spear-tipped palings of broad, landscaped grounds, rose steeply to the foot of the starlit crag. Hex had often enjoyed wine and daydreams sprawled on its crest, with Glorak’s great half-circle at his feet, and the Glides coasting past at eye-level, riding the updraughts from the hills. Now, it looked grim—the sentinel of the great properties surrounding it. The wind at Hex’s back almost cancelled the effort of climbing the slope; he felt he was being borne up towards the Scarp’s black, fang-like form.
A man in a cowled cape emerged from a side street and proceeded downhill towards them. He crossed the street to meet them. When he was near, Hex saluted him.
“Good evening, sir! May I detain you in such impossible weather? I am looking for the house of the Dowager Poon.”
The man halted before them and bowed decisively, as if it had been his own purpose to stop and talk with Hex. “I am delighted to be able to help,” he said. He simpered as if swallowing a giggle. “The esteemed widow, sir, of the late Orgle Poon still lives in the mansion he built for them. I knew him well, sir! Ah, Poon, Poon! You preposterous bag of slag! Whither blown, foul-wind? For his breath, sir, earned him the fame of having a bunghole at both ends, while his body reeked with ancient greedy sweat, more offensive than any other kind. His strong-stomached lady survives him and still lives, as I say, in his house. Are you a man of business, sir?”
Hex answered simply: “No. I am, and have long been, a scholar.”
“You are not a man of business. I see, I see. You’re one of the parasites then, you say? Sucking life out of the blood of the men of business, drinking their sweat and cursing them as you feed? Well, well, I am intensely delighted to meet you sir, intensely.” He spoke with unmistakable warmth, seized Hex’s hand and pumped it cordially.
Uncertain whether the man was mad or jesting, Hex pulled his hand away.
“Listen sir,” Hex said, “I am no parasite. If anything it is the men of business themselves—I take it you are one? It is just such men as yourself who are parasites upon my kind. For my kind live on scant scrapings and till the fields of speculation which bear the fruits of culture and insight which you, greedy privateers, buy up for a song with your blood-stained millions.” Hex had argued this case before, but still he felt pleased with the fire of his delivery. The plump stranger, beaming, shook his head.
“No, no, no sir. It is we who wade in the muck of murderous realities, winning the fortunes that someone must win, while such scholarly scum as yourself, sweet sir, sit curled up with pipedreams and noble fantasies, which you sell to the brainless wives of the men of business, forcing us to tolerate you for the sake of peace at home!”
“Muck! What muck do you wade through?” Hex’s temper was coming up. The melodeon behind him whimpered, and the keeper murmured to soothe it.
“What muck?” beamed the stranger. “You ask what muck, and know of Orgle Poon? The illegal aphrodisiacs of his homunculus farms? The sick meat of over-breeding that swelled his productions? What of his rape-and-murderees? Supported in luxury to a contractual age, then his sole property, and object of his degenerate lusts? All, all truths of common knowledge and officially blinked at! If Poon
had not stooped to these revolting practices, unthanked, day in and day out, getting that he might spend, then vast sums would be out of circulation, thousands would starve outright for lack of diseased meat to prolong their miseries! Such was Poon, self-crucified in a wallow of bestiality, solely that the vast idle, begging populace might not starve. He dredged the seas themselves for new infamies, and scoured the highest peaks! Ah, Poon, where now your waxy snout, and brow sweaty with recent gorging? Incorrigible cornholer! His grim-faced widow survives him, sir, and continues still in the house he built. Do you know who I am, sir?”
“No, I do not.”
“I am the greatest muckmaster of them all! A thousand times greater than the piddling Poon! I am Arple Snolp.”
“Gratified, I am sure. I am Bramt Hex.”
“You do not understand! I am Arple Snolp. I have bottled and sold the plague to destroyers of cities! I have sold to ravenous populaces tons of a confection whose main constituent was loon-excrement! I am king of the immensely lucrative lines of gladiators, torturing implements, and peel. Poor Poon! I hate to say it, for many’s the time he buggered me, dear man, but he was a mere nothing compared to me. He merely rubbed his jowls against dung I’ve wallowed in! But please! Merely ask the Dowager Poon when you see her if I have not spoken the plain truth in all respects. You will find her, as I have said, still living in the hall Poon built for them. And so, good night sir!”
“But where is Poon’s house?”
“The first to the left of where this street ends at the crag,” Snolp called as he marched on down the walkway.
“Madness!” growled Hex to the keeper, who shrugged and continued speaking to his beast in whispered exhortation. Hex strode on; despite the ugly outpourings with which he had just been regaled, he must sustain at all costs his precarious momentum, his fragile romantic feeling, or the unlikelihood of the whole project would overwhelm him.
The iron palings which surrounded the property contained a dark zone of lush shrubbery from the centre of which the mansion rose, a four-tiered pyramid. The terraces of its two upper tiers bristled with yet more plantings. The house was huge, its monolithic impact modified only by the immense presence of the Scarp, its backdrop. From the gate Hex could see—at the end of a frond-bordered lane—the main door, a high, two-valved portal flanked by torches and bearing the Poon crest. Hex turned to the keeper.
“That is what we, my friend, by the sweetness of your melodeon’s song, must open. Music’s a potent key, but then, that’s a heavy door. Can we do it? I think so, by all the powers! Let’s begin!”
The man unfolded his little portable stool, sat down, unslung the melodeon and settled the creature in his lap. He stroked the beast’s sleek-furred throat—which still rippled with suppressed sobs—to prime it, and then nodded his readiness to Hex. Hex advanced to the gate and cried out—fervently, he hoped—
“Incomparable Madam Poon! Poor Bramt Hex, a scholar of renown, is heartstruck! He has abandoned his books, put by his pandects and his scrolls! He has set his life aside, and come to sue for your love. Hear his song, oh adored and lofty Lady!”
The melodeon lifted its song, and Hex’s heart sank. Plainly, the animal was near emotional collapse. It opened with the traditional boom warble. But its boom, instead of the plangent and cavernous hum so justly esteemed by connoisseurs of sound, was a broken, rheumy groan, a dank, rocky noise as deep as a tomb; while its warble—no soaring, sweet falsetto—was a shrill and gassy squeal, the searing soprano of a thing in torment. Moreover, seeming to have forgotten the development of this passage, the melodeon repeated it, starting anew each time it faltered.
“Enough!” Hex rasped. “It’s dismal, a mockery! Silence it!”
The keeper hissed reproachfully, but the animal had heard the slur, which snapped the last frail threads of its self-control. It abandoned the pretence of song, and gave way to its grief. Escaping the keeper, it scuttled to the gate, whose bars it clasped with all four of its spindly limbs. Hex was awed by what now rose from its throat, an oratorio of mind-stunning volume and repetitiveness. This consisted of an acidulous wail which collapsed, in its latter half, into a gargling, flatulent racket that sounded like a bull bladderfish caught on a reef.
Almost immediately a small lozenge of light appeared in the left valve of the great portal: a man-sized door opening in the larger. A stout female silhouette filled this.
“What are you doing? Take your murders elsewhere!” she bellowed.
“You misunderstand!” Hex shouted.
“What do you say?”
“Damn you, silence it!”
“How dare you, you saucy scum!”
“No, madam, please—I am a suitor!”
“A what?”
“A suitor!”
“I am married! Cease that din!”
“I want to see your mistress!”
“I want no mistress either!”
“SEE your mistress. Roast you! Begone, begone! I dismiss you!” Wildly Hex flung down five lictors. The keeper took this with a scowl, but he seemed unable to pry the melodeon off the gate—or unwilling to apply the necessary degree of force to his associate’s frail body. Sunk in despair, Hex watched his all-too-gentle struggles with the thunder-throated jot of fur and flesh. With frantic invention, Hex howled to the figure in the doorway:
“Life and Death Message for Dowager Poon! Life and death! Admit me!”
The silhouette did not move for a minute. Then she marched forward, her swinging skirts leaving the fronds nodding in her wake. She was a squat, solid woman. She came up to the bars and thrust a ferret-eyed, knob-cheeked face up at Hex, who stood gripping a bar in either hand, like a prisoner waiting release.
“Silence that animal,” she said.
“It is not mine, I cannot. The pair followed me, Madam—they have followed me for some time. They plague and spy on me. They wish to prevent me from seeing the dowager.”
Hex felt each sentence he uttered locking him more and more irrevocably out of the dowager’s mansion. He looked desperately for something tangible, a hard fact to convert his appearance of lunacy into one of persecution. “Arple Snolp!” Hex cried. “Arple Snolp, or so he called himself, set them upon me when I asked my way here.”
The stout woman cocked her head at this, a gesture both amused and canny. She hesitated, then unlocked the gate.
“Enter, messenger.”
And in moments, with an amazement his confusion could not wholly obscure, Hex found himself in the antechamber of the mansion, with a heavy door interposed between himself and the din outside. The room was barrel-vaulted, flagged with tiles stamped with the Poon Crest, and furnished round three of its walls with fur-upholstered benches. A door was centred in each of these walls.
The woman bowed Hex to a seat on a bench, then folded her arms and cocked her head at him when he was seated. She smiled broadly, revealing strong and evenly gapped teeth. Hex did not care for the rodentlike intensity of her black eyes.
“I am Korl, my lady’s housekeeper sir. So. You have come with a message, of life-and-death weight, and with a malign melodeon pursuing you, trying to thwart your mission?”
“Unaccountable as it may seem,” Hex answered with a show of affront. He had just felt the stir of a suggestion, a plausible rearrangement of his wild statements. “You’re implying that my explanation is unlikely. I can’t help the appearances. Here are the facts. On my way here with my urgent message, I asked the way of a passerby. This man launched an astonishing series of obscenities and slanders regarding the late Orgle Poon, and of himself to boot! He called himself Arple Snolp and boasted of great notoriety, though I had not heard of him.
“It was but a few moments after I disengaged myself from his fulsome particularizings that I found this keeper with his beast pursuing me. The man insisted on believing—pretending to believe—that I came as a suitor to the dowager. He ignored my rebuffs and clung to my heels with his offer of service. I feel certain this Snolp desires the failure
of my message to your lady. Wouldn’t you infer the same, given the circumstances?”
“Yes sir, from those circumstances.” The uproar, which the closing of the front door had lowered to bearability, suddenly receded, and then all but vanished, from which Hex guessed that the melodeon had been carried round the corner and down the hill by its keeper.
“They have given up,” said Korl with an ambiguous smile. “Now what is your message, sir?”
“It is deliverable solely to your mistress. You may tell her it comes from Bramt Hex, and that I am an infra-magus of the Academy.”
Korl nodded, smiling, but did not move to leave. “Your hose are most imposing,” she said. “Are they new?”
“Comparatively,” said Hex stiffly.
“And your doublet! It is a most admirable doublet. Nay, I will go further—it is a prodigious doublet. Surely it is new?” She asked this ingenuously.
“No—it is old actually. Will you take my message to the dowager?” Korl shrugged at this, stood smiling a moment more, and went out of the chamber by the door to the right of the entrance.
Hex sat, imagining the hugeness of this ziggurat he had entered. The thought of its sheer bulk pressed upon him. The dowager owned this outright, and vast holdings besides. She was a woman of great power, pure and simple. How callow to think her susceptible to poetic wildness!
The door opened and the dowager entered. Hex rose, looking desperately into her eyes, even as he bowed. The name of Arple Snolp had got him past her door. With it then perhaps he could jar that autumnal face’s remoteness.
“Madam Poon, I lied to your servant. I didn’t come as a messenger. But an ugly accident has made me one! You are in danger from a slandering madman. He called himself Arple Snolp. I’m stunned. The foulness of the man! And the incredible luck of my meeting him, so I could warn you! You see, I came as your suitor!”