‘Oh,’ said she, ‘but there’s nothing I can do. It’s not my island any more. It’s the Crab’s. Why don’t you talk it through with Dui Tin Char? Taxes are his job, not mine.’
‘We would,’ said one of the agents, ‘but he’s on Jod.’ ‘Well!’ said Justina. ‘Then what’s the problem? You’re a healthy young man. And the day’s not that hot. It’s easy enough to find. Down to the end of Lak Street then turn left. First bridge to the right. Can’t miss it. Off you go! Come along now. I’ve got work to do.’
‘What work?’ said one of the agents. ‘We thought you had been replaced by the Crab.’
‘Replaced but not unemployed,’ said Justina. ‘I’ve all manner of commissions to do. Why, only today I got a message from Master Ek. He’s got a festival coming up, the Festival of Light, and there’s an unaccountable shortage of sacrifices. He wants me to help him find some. What are you doing next month?’
The revenue agents did not stay to answer.
They fled.
Once safely distant from Justina, they huddled together in their headquarters and conspired and caballed at length. To no effect whatsoever. For, since Justina and Ek both refused them help, there was nobody they could turn to for assistance. Except the Crab.
And that risk they were most certainly not prepared to run.
None of those cowardly agents was even prepared to dare the dangers of the harbour bridge and venture to the island of Jod for a consultation with Dui Tin Char.
Tin Char, head of Injiltaprajura’s Inland Revenue, was labouring on Jod as a slave. He worked in the kitchen under the vigilant eye of Pelagius Zozimus. And, three times a day, he helped take meals to the Crab.
Chegory Guy and Olivia Qasaba were always in attendance on that dignitary. Indeed, they even shared its meals. They sipped at tiny bowls of centipede soup while the Crab gravely sheared through huge loaves of cassava bread, dipped them in tureens of the same savoury concoction then fed itself with the sodden mass that resulted. They shared the Crab’s grilled flying fish, roast pig and cat-monkey pie.
And, after meals, Chegory and Olivia worked their way through huge heaps of state papers piled upon desks outside the Crab’s cave. Two lanteen sails had been rigged up as awnings to protect this makeshift office from the whims of the weather.
To Tin Char, it looked as if the Crab truly was running Injiltaprajura, with the Ebrell Islander and a young Ashdan lass acting as no more than the Crab’s
secretary-slaves. To reinforce this illusion, Olivia had obtained some white paint, and with it she had written upon the Crab’s carapace (in Janjuladoola): I AM THE LORD EMPEROR OF THE UNIVERSE.
Olivia had also made the Crab an ‘imperial hat’ of the kind affected by those ancient rulers of whom we read in the pages of the famous Hero Sword Sagas. It was a most magnificent hat of purple paper, with seven yellow streamers descending from its peak; and, glued atop the Crab’s carapace, it looked truly imposing.
Had Tin Char dared engage the Crab in conversation he would have learnt that the Crab professed a total lack of interest in the rule of Injiltaprajura; but, with the memory of the dislocation of his arms undimmed by time, Tin Char spent no more time in the Presence than was absolutely necessary.
Then, on the day on which the run on the N’barta began, Chegory Guy casually informed Tin Char that the Crab meant to have the head of the Inland Revenue for dinner the next day.
‘I am honoured,’ said Tin Char, doing his best to conceal his apprehension.
‘It is a great honour,’ agreed Chegory. ‘So please don’t chew any betel nut between now and the granting of that honour. I don’t think it makes any difference, but the Crab swears it spoils the flavour of the flesh.’
‘The flavour?’ said Tin Char, doing his best to delay comprehension.
‘The flavour, yes,’ said Chegory. ‘So no betel nut. But coconuts, that’s OK, oh, and even a little alcohol, I know it’s, um, a drug and all that, but one day’s drinking won’t hurt you any, not that it matters in any case when the end’s so close.’
Tin Char, having by now understood the nature of the Crab’s invitation to dinner, pretended to faint. He was carried to the infirmary attached to the Analytical Institute, and from there he made his escape shortly after midnight.
Zazazolzodanzarzakazolabrik was Tin Char’s destination. He durst not stay in Injiltaprajura, for the Crab or the Crab’s agents would surely haul him back to Jod to be consumed at banquet by that anthropophagous monster.
Before Tin Char escaped to the deserts of Zolabrik, he had time sufficient to tell a couple of his most trusted friends of the ordeal he had endured as a slave of the Monster of Jod. And by noon the next day the tale was all over Injiltaprajura, its details confirming to one and all that the Crab truly had made itself wazir.
‘What happened to that Tin Char fellow?’ said the Crab on the morrow.
‘Oh, him,’ said Chegory. ‘I think he’s gone to stay with his mother-in-law.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the Crab, digesting this, and simultaneously digesting a very large chunk of moray eel. ‘I wish I had a mother-in-law. Or even a mother, come to that.’
‘Never mind,’ said Olivia, saddened by the desolation in the Crab’s voice. ‘You must have had a mother once. That’s something, at any rate.’
‘No,’ said the Crab sadly. ‘I never had a mother.’
‘But you must have!’ said Olivia. ‘Your own little mother, running around under rocks and things. Then she met a daddy crab and they fell in love. So they got married. There was a feast, of course. They had shrimps, seaweed, sea anemones, all kind of things. Then they set up house together and had little crabs of their own, dozens of them maybe. There must still be lots of them left. Brother crabs, sister crabs, uncle and aunt crabs. Maybe none of them can talk, but they’re out in the harbour somewhere. So don’t feel lonely. You have got a family, really. They look just like these little crab shells I brought for you, and that’s a fact.’
The Crab sighed.
Its sigh sounded like a drowning diver bubbling helplessly deep, deep beneath water.
‘I wish it was true,’ said the Crab. ‘I wish I really did come fro m the sea. Or from the land, at the very least.’ ‘Well, you must have, ’ said Olivia. ‘I mean, you’re either a land crab or a sea crab. You m ust be one or the other. That’s logical.’
‘I’m neither,’ said the Crab. ‘I wasn’t born on the land, and I wasn’t born in the sea either. I was born in the fires of the local sun.’
‘No,’ said Olivia, ‘you can’t have been, you silly. The sun’s too hot. Your legs would have been burnt off the moment you were born.’
‘I didn’t have legs,’ said the Crab. ‘Or ears. Or eyes. Or a stomach, even.’
‘You mean,’ said Chegory, ‘you were a deformed baby?’
‘I was no kind of baby at all,’ said the Crab. ‘I was born as a.. a perturbation of chance and change. That’s how my people live. We live by… by changing chance. Modifying local probability. But a star’s the place for that, not a planet. So when I had to flee the sun, I had to find a form for myself as soon as I landed on the planet. Do you understand? Sun? Star? Planets?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Olivia. ‘The sun’s a sea urchin and the planets are the pieces of kumera. That’s how old Pokrov explained it. Then Artemis Ingalawa came along and told him to stop playing with his food.’
‘The sun?’ said the Crab. ‘A sea urchin? Child-’
‘I’m not a child,’ said Olivia Qasaba impatiently, though it was one of her days for playing the child to the hilt. ‘I’m a mature adult. Of course I know the sun’s not a sea urchin. It’s a sustained thermonuclear reaction converting the light to the heavy. Hydrogen to helium and so forth. You end up with iron. Or the star goes bang, one or the other. Gravity. Energy conversion. Inverse square laws. All that. And the planets, greasy old planets, rocks and stuff, Jof, Nan, Bruk, Hikorla-barus. Then Skrin, which is what we’re standing on. Then Pelothiasis, Mog, Ompara, Belthargez.’
All this said Olivia, and only good manners prevented her from saying rather more. She resented having her sea urchin whimsy so casually destroyed. And resented, too, being patronized — albeit by a Crab. She had spent much of her life in the study of the higher sciences, including Thalodian Mathematics itself, and therefore took umbrage at being lectured on basics.
‘Jof?’ said the Crab. ‘You call a planet thus? Those other names.. what were they? Nan? Hokarbrus?’
‘Hikorlabarus,’ said Olivia.
‘Those are no planet names,’ said the Crab. ‘You stand in error, for the local astronomers call the planets-’
