by Rudy Rucker
“Hey, Jayjay,” said Thuy, calling him back. She looked fresh and happy as life itself, silhouetted against the bustling little town. “It’s vibby being medieval, huh? Azaroth says he gave the magic harp to an artist for repainting. He wants Lovva to look good again before he takes her back to his aunt. And guess who the artist is!”
“Hieronymus Bosch,” said Jayjay, lacking telepathy but reading the answer from her tone. Not that he cared that much.
“You’re up to speed, kiq! Jeroen is what they call him here.” She pronounced it in the Dutch way, like Yeroon. “I bet that Kittie really did see him at our housewarming. It’s all beginning to fit.”
“I was sort of dreaming about being a painter, just now,” mused Jayjay. “The dream was too big. Whatever you do, Thuy, don’t eat any of the brown bread here.”
“I’m so hungry I could eat just about anything,” said Thuy. “Azaroth didn’t bring any food. Weren’t you eating brown bread with the beggars last night?”
As they drifted back down the river toward town, Jayjay finally explained about ergotism and its disastrous effects.
“That’s so weird?” said Thuy when he was done. “Trust you to find a new way to get high.” Her voice trailed off sadly.
“It was an accident,” muttered Jayjay. But both of them knew that if he hadn’t been pounding the wine, he would have known better than to eat the moldy bread. “Tell me more about Bosch and the harp,” he said, hoping to change the subject.
“Bosch is just some local guy looking for jobs,” said Azaroth. “When I got here I asked around for a painter, and someone mentioned him. I don’t know that he ever turned out to be a famous artist over here in the Hibrane.”
“I hope we’re not about to do something that ruins his life and blocks his career,” fretted Jayjay. It seemed a risky business to be poking around in the past.
“Or maybe it’s just that Azaroth’s an artistic ignoramus,” said Thuy. “Can you name any painters, Azaroth?”
“Um, sure,” he said, followed by a long pause. “Well, okay, I can think of one. Thomas Kinkade. That’s the name of a chain store on our Fisherman’s Wharf. It has a snack bar. I used to sell Pharaoh cuttlefish there.”
“Kinkade’s Krispy Kuttles,” said Thuy, pulling back her chin to make a doofus face. “Maybe Bosch is safe.”
“I saw the harp’s painting on my trip up the vine,” said Jayjay, glad the focus had moved away from him. “I wonder if Bosch can make it exactly the same?”
“The painting was on the soundbox,” said Azaroth, not grasping the force of the question. “The subbies gnawed it off while Thuy had it. But I remember it pretty well, and I explained it to Jeroen. It better match, or I’ll have trouble with my aunt.”
“Not to mention having a reality-shredding time paradox,” said Jayjay. He made a gingerly attempt to visualize what might happen if they disturbed the closed temporal loop of the harp’s earthly manifestation.
“Lovva’s painting showed a little harpist with a pair of naked lovers,” said Thuy.
“I know,” said Jayjay softly. “The painting looked like you and me.”
“I thought that, too,” said Thuy. “And it was like a detail of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.”
“She even knows the titles of this Jeroen Bosch’s paintings!” marveled Azaroth. They were near the water gate. “I’ll take you to meet him now. And by the way, the harp is really eager to see Jayjay.”
“Good deal,” said Jayjay. “Maybe she can help us again. Lobrane Earth has blundered into a whole new apocalypse.” He sighed. “And it’s all my fault.”
“I wouldn’t know about any of that,” said Azaroth, sculling through the water gate with a nod to the guard. “But for starters, maybe Jeroen will hire you as assistants. You’re exotic midgets. He loves strange things.”
CHAPTER 11
HIERONYMUS BOSCH’S APPRENTICE
Once inside the town wall, Azaroth swung the boat into a narrow, putrid canal that wended its way under round-arched bridges and past verdant backyards. Bosch’s house wasn’t far.
Azaroth moored his boat beside a tiny dinghy. He put a likely offering of fish into a small basket, tossed a cloth over the remainder in the boat, then led Jayjay and Thuy through a garden of turnips and carrots, past a cellar door, and up three steps into Jeroen Bosch’s kitchen.
It was a large room, with the ceiling and three of the walls covered by smooth white plaster. The inner brick wall held a fireplace adorned with stone carvings of skinny dogs with needle teeth and bat wings. The dogs’ long tails branched into curling ferns that held up a mantelpiece—upon which a freshly roasted chicken cooled.
The ceiling was painted with an elaborately twining squash vine adorned with birds and beasties peeping from behind each flower and leaf. Counters and cupboards lined the walls; the floor was dark-varnished planks; a sturdy wooden table sat beside a window.
Two women were at the table: a plump servant girl peeling turnips, and a lean, gray-haired woman wearing a white linen cap and a bright yellow silk dress. Her air of self-possession made it clear that she was Bosch’s wife and the lady of house.
“Good day, Mevrouw Aleid,” said Azaroth with a bow to her. “I have a fine fat cod for you, also a tasty eel.” Thuy and Jayjay hid behind Azaroth, peeping out. He drew the dogfish from his basket and held it up. “As an extra, I’ve brought this fearsome fellow to model for your husband.”
“That’s very good of you, Azaroth,” said Aleid, with a cool smile. “But we didn’t know you’d be delivering fish. We’ve already cooked.”
“Eat my catch tonight,” suggested Azaroth. “Have the chicken cold tomorrow.”
Just then Aleid’s eyes picked out Jayjay and Thuy. Abruptly she made the sign of the triangle. “Get the knife, Kathelijn!”
The red-cheeked young maid sprang to her feet, ran to the hearth and snatched up a long, skinny blade. Aleid hastened to Kathelijn’s side and turned, watching for a move from the strangers.
“These are just my cousins from the Garden of Eden,” said Azaroth nudging them into the open. “Jayjay and Thuy. Fortunately they speak good Brabants.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Thuy in her sweetest Dutch. She even curtsied. Seeing this, Kathelijn lowered her knife and let out a shrill, nervous giggle.
“Perhaps Mijnheer Bosch would like to paint us,” said Jayjay. “We could assist in the studio or about the house. Being new to your beautiful town, we’re open for any position of service.”
“We should welcome dwarves?” said Aleid, incredulous. “Creation’s cast-offs?”
“We’re not dwarves,” said Jayjay firmly. “We’re little people, clever and strong. If you permit . . .” He stepped forward, grabbed one of the chair’s legs with both hands, and lifted it into the air. Although the chair was three times his height, relative to his dense Lobrane body it felt like balsa wood, with a net weight no greater than a normal chair.
But his uncanny feat of strength only frightened the women, especially as he was moving so fast. Aleid found a knife of her own. Jayjay clattered the chair to the floor and backed away.
“Are you baptized?” asked Aleid, tapping the flat of her blade against her palm.
“I am,” said Jayjay, whose mother was a knee-jerk Catholic.
“Me, too,” said Thuy, who’d had a brief Christian period in grade school, thanks to a born-again aunt.
“Has Jeroen finished painting my harp?” asked Azaroth, trying to turn the tide of the conversation.
“Go ask him yourself,” said Aleid. “Be warned that he’s in a bad mood. A beggar keeps playing his bagpipe right out front. Can you hear it?” Indeed, shrill, frantic squeals were filtering in. “We give the man a copper to go away, and he always comes back to get more. Show Jeroen the dogfish and the little people. They might very well amuse him.”
“We admire your husband’s paintings,” said Jayjay.
“You’re so cosmopolitan in the New World?” said Aleid, surpr
ised. “I had no idea.” She paused, reevaluating the situation. “Were my husband to want you to stay, you should know that you’d receive no pay. You would sleep in our cellar. It doesn’t actually connect to the house, there’s an entrance from the garden. It could be like your own apartment. And you could eat the scraps from our table—we don’t happen to own a pig just now. I don’t suppose you eat much.” Clearly Aleid was an experienced negotiator.
“We eat as much a regular people,” said Thuy. “In fact, we’re hungry right now.”
“But we don’t eat brown bread,” added Jayjay.
“Neither do we,” said Aleid, undermining Jayjay’s half-formed theory about how Bosch was getting his visions. “We eat white,” she continued. “Brown bread is for laborers and beggars. Are you nobles?”
“In a way,” said Thuy. “We’re known far and wide in our homeland.”
“Can I feed them some carrots?” Kathelijn asked Aleid, sweetening her voice. “They’re cute. Like dolls.”
Aleid nodded, and the maid gave each of them a raw June carrot, crunchy and sweet.
“How about a couple of chicken legs, too,” said Thuy. “We’ve had a long trip.”
Aleid raised her eyebrows, but gave Kathelijn the go-ahead. Jayjay and Thuy made short work of the big drumsticks. Relative to their dense Lobrane jaws, the meat was spongy and easy to wolf down. It tasted wonderful. The women laughed to see the midgets eat so heartily and so fast. Then Kathelijn handed them white bakery rolls the size of their heads, and they gobbled them down, provoking further expressions of wonder.
“Go see Jeroen,” reiterated Aleid when the eating was done.
Jayjay and Thuy followed Azaroth up a staircase to a sunny studio in the front of the house, clambering from step to step. As it happened, the studio windows gave directly onto the big triangular marketplace and its articulated hubbub. The room sounded with a hundred conversations, with vendor’s cries, with the scuff of shoes and the clack of hooves—all of this overlaid by the vile drone of an incompetently played bagpipe.
A cluttered worktable sat in the middle of the studio, and beyond that was Jeroen Bosch, standing before the window, brush in hand, the light falling over his shoulder onto a large, square oak panel.
“Aha!” he exclaimed, seeing them. “Azaroth brings fresh wonders.” His face was lined and quizzical; his mouth and eyebrows flickered with the shadows of fleeting moods. His chin was stubbled. He looked to be in his mid-forties.
“These are my cousins, Jayjay and Thuy,” said Azaroth. “They’re from the Garden of Eden.”
Bosch smiled, clearly doubting this.
“Your wife says they might stay here and work for you,” added Azaroth.
“I wouldn’t have time to train them,” said Bosch, his gaze drifting back to his panel. “I’m very busy on my new work.”
Azaroth changed the subject. “How goes the progress on my harp?” The instrument was nowhere to be seen.
Jayjay looked around the studio, fascinated. The worktable held seashells and eggshells, drawings of cripples, a bowl of gooseberries, a peacock feather in a cloudy glass jar, and a variety of dried gourds. Upon the wall hung a cow skull and a lute. A stuffed heron and a stuffed owl perched upon a shelf.
Two newly painted panels leaned against the wall, facing toward Jayjay and Thuy, mottled microcosms, brimming with incident and life. The panels were half the width of the big square that Bosch was working on, but the same height, four times as tall as the Lobraners. Thuy was avidly staring at them.
“I’m nearly done decorating the harp,” said Jeroen. “But she’s locked in the attic. She’s too precious to uncover with so many people about.” He made a gesture toward the bustling marketplace. “Conjurors, charlatans, jugglers.”
“I can’t see it?” said Azaroth, incredulous.
Rather than answering, the painter set down his brush and walked over to them, keeping an eye on Jayjay and Thuy. He accepted the dogfish from Azaroth, set it on his worktable and propped its mouth open with a porcupine quill. “Hello,” he said to the dogfish, making his voice thin. “Do you bring a message from the King of Hell?”
Bosch was playing—seeking inspiration by enacting a little scene that he might paint. To ingratiate himself, Jayjay responded as if speaking for the fish, flopping his tongue to make his words soft and slimy. “The pitchfork wants to strum the harp,” he said, nothing better popping into his head. He reached out with his hand and waggled the fish’s gelatinous brown tail.
Bosch nodded, appreciating the mummery, and then the artist fell to studying the singular objects on his table, nudging them this way and that with the tip of his delicate, ochre-stained finger—as if composing a scene. “Do you feel that all things have souls?” he asked Jayjay, turning his eyes upon him, brown eyes with flecks of yellow and green.
“Where we come from, it’s obvious that everything is alive,” put in Thuy, speaking Dutch. She’d slowed her voice to Hibrane speed. “Nobody debates it. It’s a fact of nature, not a heresy. We talk to our objects and they talk back. That shell there, it might be saying, ‘I’m spiral, and my inside chambers are private. I used to have a slippery mollusk inside me, but then a dogfish ate her. The air is eddying inside my empty mouth; it’s faster and thinner than water.’ ”
“Very plausible,” said Bosch, still studying the Lobraners. “And your names are Thuy and—Jayjay?” He said the name like Yayay. “Why are you here?”
“To see the harp,” said Jayjay, finally finding his voice. “The harp is alive.”
“I know this,” said Bosch softly. “Her name is Lovva. I’d very much like to keep her.”
“If you kept her safe in your family, that would be fine,” said Jayjay.
Azaroth sharply cleared his throat, wanting to argue. Jayjay turned and addressed him in rapid English. “That’s how your aunt gets the harp in the first place! Think it through. The harp is supposed to stay here and pass through the generations so that your aunt inherits her.”
“Um—maybe,” said Azaroth, confused. “But if I leave it here and come home empty-handed my aunt will—”
“It has to happen this way,” insisted Jayjay. “We’re in your past, dog. We have to make sure all the same events take place.”
“You don’t know Aunt Gladax,” said Azaroth, unhappily shaking his head.
Bosch was looking back and forth from one to the other as they talked English.
“Here’s an upside,” continued Jayjay urgently. “If you give Jeroen the harp, you can ask him for a favor. Ask him to hire Thuy and me. That way I get a chance to play the Lost Chord and unfurl lazy eight for the Hibrane! It’s all preordained.”
Azaroth glared at Jayjay for a moment, then looked over at Bosch. “You can keep the harp if you let my cousins stay with you,” he said in Brabants Dutch. “They need a home. They’re just as clever and strong as full-sized humans. They can help you in your studio and around the house.”
“You truly grant me the harp?” said Bosch, his face lighting up, wrinkles wreathing his lively eyes. “That’s wonderful.”
“She belongs with you,” said Azaroth, not liking this.
“I suppose I could make Jayjay an apprentice,” said Bosch. “My brother Goossen’s sons avoid my studio. They chafe at my slow pace.” The bagpipe music droned on, just outside. “For certain jobs, it’s essential to have someone nimble and young,” he continued. “Like painting escutcheons on the columns in the cathedral. Or decorating a house’s gables. Or surreptitiously repainting a—” He squatted down, studying Jayjay, wearing an impish smile. “Would you be willing to desecrate an icon for me, boy?”
“I would.”
“What about me?” said Thuy. “I’m the artistic one. I’m a writer.”
“If you’re in here, I’ll always be thinking about your tiny slit,” said Bosch shaking his head. “Forgive me. I’m a weak and sinful man.”
“I’m staying anyway,” said Thuy firmly. “I’m Jayjay’s wedded wife.”
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br /> “Oh, now they have the marriage sacrament in the Garden of Eden?” said Bosch. He cocked his head, staring at them. His green and brown eyes were amused. “Don’t imagine you can gull me. Where are you really from?”
“California,” said Jayjay after a pause. “Not Eden, but, yes, it’s in the New World, so far west that it’s very nearly the Spice Islands, which is approximately where my wife’s parents were born.”
“The world grows apace,” said Bosch.
“We were married in City Hall,” said Thuy. “In California, that’s just as good as church.”
“Well, I suppose you can sleep here, too. But you’ll have to busy yourself elsewhere during the days. Two gnomes underfoot is too much.”
“She can spend the days with me,” said Azaroth. “She’ll help with my fishing and I’ll show her around town.”
“Fine,” said Thuy. She was still studying the tall paintings leaned against the walls. “These panels—they’re the wings of The Temptation of Saint Anthony!”
“Indeed that’s the theme of my triptych,” said Bosch. “Very perceptive of you to read the iconography.”
“I recognized the panels, too,” lied Jayjay. Thuy and Bosch just laughed at him, neither one believing him.
“Is your husband at least good with his hands?” Bosch asked Thuy.
“I guess so,” said Thuy. “But, really, I might be the better one for you to—”
“Let’s go, Thuy,” interrupted Azaroth. “We’ll take the rest of my catch to the fish market. And I’ll show you the tavern where I live. Lots of vibby types in town for the annual procession. Musicians, actors, acrobats.”
“The Muddy Eel,” said Bosch. “Alive with whores and music. Which reminds me—”
With no transition at all, he strode over to the room’s window and began screaming Low Dutch imprecations at the unseen man who was playing the bagpipe. The music broke off, and a tenor voice called up, wheedling for alms. Bosch cursed again; the squealing resumed.