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.
