‘I, well, I’m here because I got lost, basically,’ said Chegory. ‘Lost underground.’
‘How?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Doubtless,’ said the bullman. ‘A story which you will tell in my torture chamber. Gome!’
So saying, the bullman overturned a barrel and began rolling it out of the room in which Chegory had been caught sleeping. The young Ebrell Islander was bitterly disappointed to realise he had not evaded another ordeal of pain, but nevertheless followed without protest. Torture, torture! Thus he helplessly mindsaid, silently wailing with despair as he followed his massively muscled captor. Drump-thrump echoes rolled into the darkness ahead of them as the bullman kicked the barrel over flagstones and cobblestones then up a series of ramps.
Then the bullman stopped.
‘Here,’ he said, passing Chegory the lantern. ‘Hold this.’
Chegory held it. This was his chance! To smash the lantern, punch the bullman on the snout and then go haring off into the darkness. But he did not seize that chance. He had at last run up against one challenge too many. His resources of courage, initiative and daring were exhausted entirely.
Of course, he should have dared. He should have tried. He should have attacked — then fled. Since the alternative was to endure monstrous horror in the bullman’s torture chamber he had nothing to gain by cooperating with the hideous thing. Yet cooperate he did, holding the lantern while the bullman bullhandled the heavy barrel up through a bullhole, grunting bullfully as he did so. Then he hauled himself up through the same hole, reached down for the lantern and uplifted it.
Run!
Thus spoke Chegory’s last reserve of daring. But already the bullman was reaching down, and Chegory, helpless to resist, found himself extending his own hand to the monster. The bullman hauled Chegory into the darkshadowed room above then closed a heavy trapdoor on the bullhole and bolted it.
Chegory was trapped.
A prisoner in the bullman’s lair!
‘Through here,’ said the bullman, opening a door to reveal a small room lit by bright and cheerful light flooding in through skylights. Blue sky! Blue sky! A startlement of colour pure and bright. So beautiful that Chegory almost wept to see it.
‘What day is it?’ he said.
‘Today,’ answered the bullman. True, but unhelpful. Then: ‘Come,’ said the bullman, ‘in through here.’
So saying, he opened another door and rolled the barrel into a room much larger. By the light flooding in through a dozen latticework windows (more sky, a courtyard view, a wall, no hope of escape, not yet, not that way) Chegory saw all. A huge stove at the near end of the room, and a woman cooking at that stove. A dozen tresde tables with benches set before them. Two dozen assorted fishermen and such seated on those benches, all those fishermen busy talking, eating, and drinking from pewter tankards. Doubtiess there was liquor in those tankards, for this was surely a speakeasy, a house of degradation built to cater for the depraved tastes of helpless drug addicts, the addicts in question being the fishermen yattering-laughing over their breakfasts.
‘You’ll stay for breakfast,’ said the bullman.
‘Oh, of course,’ said Chegory, hoping that he himself would not be one of the courses at that breakfast.
Then he caught the smell of a well-spiced cassoulet and realised he was hungry, very hungry, famished, starved, ravenous, a cat among mice, a dog among cats, a dragon amidst lambs, a fire in a heap of paper, so short commoned it was miraculous he was more than dwarfish, his skeleton clad with ghost and fast demanding man, mass, heat, weight, blood, nerve, sinew, bone, kidney, liver, heart, lung. He was ready to grab, claw, eat, bite, suck, gnaw and swallow, hungry enough to shark it out with the sea’s mobsters for a bucket of offal, possessed of hunger such that he was ready to beg for his mother-in-law’s paps then feed from her twat as well, as the proverbial saying has it, or squeeze a stone for blood, or peel the stone itself then cook it and eat it.
‘Here,’ said the bullman.
So saying, the monster caused a miracle to manifest itself in the form of a bowl of hot, steaming cassoulet. Beans! Meat! Pieces of cassava! A bit of baked banana on the side!
‘Well, boy,’ said the monster. ‘Don’t just gape at it. Sit down. Get into it!’
Moments later young Chegory was sitting at table gulleting into the cassoulet.
‘Slowly, young Chegory,’ said one of the fishermen sitting at the same table. ‘Slowly, or you’ll do yourself an injury.’
‘Oho!’ said the bullman. ‘You know this lad, do you?’
‘No lad, Log Jaris. This is a man in the prime of youth. Isn’t it just, Chegory? You got into that sweet Olivia yet?’
‘Working on it,’ said Chegory.
‘Oh, I bet you are! More meat on that than a chicken, hey?’
‘Leaving aside this question of Olivia chickens,’ said the bullman Log Jaris, ‘what’s the rest of your name, Chegory?’
‘Chegory Guy,’ said Chegory Guy.
‘Oho! Not the son of Impala Guy, by chance?’ said the bullman. ‘Not the son of old man Impala, Japone’s beloved stillmaster?’
‘The same,’ said Chegory.
So saying, he managed a crooked smile.
A crooked smile? Let us be more exact. Chegory Guy experienced a certain degree of discomfiture but was loathe to make this known; hence he tried (but without complete success) to make pleasure rather than displeasure express itself on his face. Following convention, we say therefore that he smiled a crooked smile, though in point of literal fact he did not.
Some people who are in perfect health (and some who are not, such as some who have suffered strokes or varying degrees of severity, or who have been mutilated, or who are under the influence of certain unethical drugs) habitually express themselves by means of a smile which does not run the full length of the mouth, and which can therefore accurately and literally be termed ‘crooked’. Some people can do this with ease, just as some people can wiggle their ears.
Chegory Guy could not have wiggled his ears to save his life (except by the expedient of grasping the said ears with his hands and causing them to move by an application of manual pressure). He was completely bereft of innate ear-wriggling talent, just as he was born without poetic potential. Nevertheless, since he had a fair degree of control of the voluntary muscles which supervise the lips, he could no doubt have managed a crooked smile if his life had been at stake. However, he did not. Indeed, he rarely (if ever) did anything so unnatural as smiling crookedly. Even after the most diligent research, it has proved impossible to find a single witness [The Originator appears to have succumbed to a fit of what Kerkransolifski Bodo has so neatly termed ‘that painful accuracy which makes all Truth impossible’. To preserve the communicability of that which the Originator has elsewhere managed to capture in phrase, and to lessen the incidence of repetitive strain injury among our scribes, an exercise in pedantry which extends for no less than ten thousand words has here been deleted. By Order, Sptyx Rhataporo, Surveyor of the Office of Overview.]
[What, pray tell, is wrong with pedantry? I applaud the Originator’s outbreak of accuracy and must severely deprecate Rhataporo’s unwarranted excision of the same. Brude, Pedant Particular.]
After Chegory Guy had confessed to his true identity Log Jaris conducted a gentle interrogation which soon told him all he needed to know about his young visitor. Then the bullman took down an amphora and poured mugs of foaming brown fluid for himself, the fisherman and Chegory.
‘What’s this?’ said Chegory, looking into the mug with the deepest of suspicion.
‘Something for the pain,’ said Log Jaris.
‘The pain?’ said Chegory.
‘To exist is to suffer,’ said the bullman. ‘Learned philosophers proved this way back in the dawn of human history, whereupon the greatest genius of the day was assembled to provide a remedy. That remedy you have before you. Drink! For by drinking we prove ourselves true students of the higher philosophy.’
Chegory had never heard anyone espouse such a doctrine before, though it is certain the dogma was not the bullman’s original invention; indeed, it is rumoured that the Korugatu philosophers of far-distant Chi’ash-lan first evolved a similar theory over a thousand years ago, and have laboured mightily ever since in an attempt to refine it
