'Surely,' said Guest, sliding shut the translucent paper screens designed to exclude the winter air from his quarters.
'You lust for them. You lust like a very antelope. Irregular verbs! To grope, squeeze, suck and horsewhip such! A sick passion!
As for me, I'd rather kiss a toad. I'd think that the lesser perversion.'
'Then that's unfortunate,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'for your father wishes me to corrupt you with the choicests of my passions.'
'Then let's at least leave the irregular verbs till I have killed myself my man,' said Guest, again picking up his sword.
'Before battle, I must purify myself, and abstain from all perversions, irregular verbs included.'
By way of reply, Sken-Pitilkin reached beneath the horseblanket which he had snugged across his knees, and took a book from beneath his skirt. These skirts were a foreign fashion, and Guest thought they must be desperately cold, though he was wrong in his thinking, for they were exceptionally practical and comfortable, and Sken-Pitilkin ever demonstrated great wisdom by wearing them. Having retrieved the book, Sken-Pitilkin began to unwrap its layers of waterproofing oil-cloth. Guest Gulkan pretended to ignore the book in favor of the admiration of his own reflection in his swordblade. By manipulating the blade he could screen out the greatness of his ears – and concentrate instead on eyes and lips. The young Weaponmaster twisted his lips into a ferocious sneer then rolled his eyes in imitation of a horse gone mad.
All of which severely tempted Sken-Pitilkin, who sorely longed to fetch Guest a sharp crack with his country crook. But, of course, the boy had long since outgrown such convenient discipline.
'If you will not light a brazier,' said Sken-Pitilkin, cool even though he was snugged beneath the horseblanket, 'at least pass me a little wine to warm my veins.'
'What makes you think I've got wine on hand?' said Guest.
'When are you ever without it?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
This was a telling point, and Guest shortly uncovered some wine, and a block of rather grubby cheese to go with it. Knowing Bao Gahai to be allergic to cheese, Guest had acquired a great store of it, thinking to devise some plan for her poisoning. But he had failed in this enterprise, and so was put to the trouble of eating the stuff.
'Careful,' said Guest, as Sken-Pitilkin helped himself to wine and cheese. 'Be careful, lest you spill your drink on that precious book of yours.'
'The book is mine,' said Sken-Pitilkin, studying the cheese from several different angles, as if suspecting that it might be poisoned, 'so let me do the worrying.'
'I worry for my father's sake,' said Guest. 'For that book is the chiefest of his torturers. Should it die in the bloodflow of your downspilt wine, he'd be ten years searching for an instrument of equal punishment.'
'This book is not torture but love,' said Sken-Pitilkin, wiping the cheese on the horseblanket, 'as I've told you not one time but fifty. Sit! Squat yourself down, boy, then let us begin.' Guest Gulkan sat, and squared himself to face the book, looking for all the world like an inexperienced gladiator forced to do battle against a dragon with a toothpick as his sole armament. The book, of course, was Strogloth's Compendium of Delights.
The eminent Strogloth – and who he is is unknown, which is just as well, as there is many a young scholar who would dearly like to murder him – had searched great heaps of grammars for their irregular verbs, working in the spirit of one of those pornographers who reads immense libraries of law and religion with the sole purpose of extracting nuggets of brutal licentiousness.
The result? Spectacular!
'We will begin,' said Sken-Pitilkin, chewing on the cheese, which was not too bad, 'with the conjugation of the verb porp.
Which means…? Guest? Guest, what is meant by the word porp?'
'You tell me,' said Guest, 'for the irregular verbs are your perversion, not mine.'
'A perversion, yes,' agreed Sken-Pitilkin, speaking with great self-restraint. Then, feeling the boy had had things all his own way for just a little too long: 'But are you not a pervert? Is not the killing of men and the taking of their scalps a perversion of sorts?'
'It is culturally appropriate,' said Guest. 'You told me so yourself when we studied ethnology.'
'Ah, ethnology,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'A mistake.'
Here it must be conceded that Sken-Pitilkin had indeed made a grievous error when he introduced young Guest to the science of ethnology; for Sken-Pitilkin had forgotten how much of that science deals in great and enthusiastic detail with vivisection, cannibalism, head hunting, ritual murder, torture, louche initiation rites, and, above all, with sex customs.
'An ethnologist would say,' said Guest, gaining enthusiasm as he saw he had the advantage, 'that hunting men and killing them for their scalps is a vital part of my cultural heritage. For you as an uitlander scholar to criticize or condemn this practice would represent intolerable interference in the internal affairs of the Collosnon Empire.'
'No,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'you are wrong, for now you have confounded a theorem of ethnology with a practical political doctrine.'
'I have not!' said Guest.
But he had, and Sken-Pitilkin explained his error to him in excruciating detail.
'You understand?' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'No! Of course you don't! Never mind. Let us proceed to delight, for the irregular verbs yet await us.'
'Irregular verbs!' sneered Guest. 'My praxis is combat, not scholarship. My destiny is to do battle, to kill men, to drink their blood and take their scalps.'
'Perhaps, perhaps,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'But I rule this particular battlefield, so you will conduct yourself like a prisoner of war and obey me as the chiefest of your jailors. The verbs!'
'The verbs have awaited us for years already,' said Guest.
'Let them wait till tomorrow for, with my man as yet to kill, I'm in no mood for study today.'
'Words are weapons,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'And tools. If you aspire to be surgeon to the body politic, then you should look to your armamentarium.'
'Swords are weapons far better,' said Guest. 'For language cannot chop heads.'Sken-Pitilkin studied the young man carefully, for he was sober yet spoke with a drunkard's enthusiasm. He was drugged. Or somehow intoxicated. Perhaps, just perhaps, he was intoxicated by his own over-enterprising ambition. Certainly he looked far, far too buoyant, considering that he was due to shortly face the murderous Thodric Jarl in a duel he was certain to lose. Sken-Pitilkin wondered if Guest had any true conception of the true nature of his own predicament.
'You know, my boy,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'it would be very easy for you to make your peace with Thodric Jarl, if you did but humble yourself before him. Your life is full of so much promise that it would be foolish for you to do otherwise.'
'My life,' said Guest, 'has no promise whatsoever.'
'No promise?' said Sken-Pitilkin in surprise. 'But don't you realize that you're surely going to end up with the imperial throne? That's your fate of a certainty, as long as you can master your temper and learn up a little diplomacy, and just a fragment of self-control to match it.'
'You do but fantasize,' said Guest, 'for I am but a motherless boy with no future here or elsewhere, as all the world is at pains to tell me, thrice five times a day between dawning and darkness.
But even though I must live here as a worthless bastard with all the world leagued in scorn against me, I will not surrender my pride by crawling to Thodric Jarl, no, nor by bribing him either.'
So spoke Guest Gulkan, revealing depths of resentment which surprised Sken-Pitilkin, who cast about for some form of words which might improve the boy's self-confidence.
'You lie so smoothly I wish I'd taught you the skill myself,' said Sken-Pitilkin, failing to find the words he sought. 'Very well. Since your mastery has already encompassed the art of the lie, and since today finds you lacking the courage to tackle the smallest of the irregular verbs, though it be a naked verb, and hairless, and feeble in its antiquity – then, that being so, let us turn our minds to the study of geography.'
'Not if that means maps,' said Guest.
'You are in luck,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'for all my maps are back in my own quarters.'
'All right then,' said Guest. 'Geography it is.'
