'In my case,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'it was more than youth which took me there. I went there on a quest.'
'A quest!' said Guest.
'The quest for the x-x-zix,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'A dangerous quest, that,' said Guest. 'Why, you'd break your very jaw just trying to name the thing you were questing for. How did you say it again?'
'The x-x-zix. A particularly wild and dangerous species of irregular verb. It has two teeth, which are in the shape of saws; and it has fifty tails, the tips of these being poisonous. It is valued on account of the feathers it grows from its nose, which are more fanciful than those of the ostrich.'
'The ostrich?'
'A type of chicken. But with feathers of a value exceeded only by those of the x-x-zix, the irregular verb we were discussing, which is notable not just for its feathers but also because it subsists exclusively upon liquid tar and excretes amber and ambergris on alternate days of the week.'
'The week!' said Guest. 'It is a measure of days, like the month!'
'Did I not tell you precisely that just a little earlier this very morning?'
'You did not,' said Guest. 'I worked it out myself, though I can't for the life of me work out why you'd chase to Untunchilamon for a verb, be it a regular verb or otherwise.'
'The lust for knowledge, boy,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'A safer lust than the lust for loins. Not that Untunchilamon was all that safe. Why, I almost got turned inside out by a certain crab which took exception to my taste for research.'
'You tried to eat it?' said Guest.
'No. I merely tried to engage it in discussion, but it told me – '
'The crab talked?'
'It did,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Oh, I see,' said Guest Gulkan, abrupting into something perilously close to bad temper. 'A story about talking animals, is it? And what do you think I am? A child?' Guest's change of mood was as abrupt as that of a man who, while idling down a pathway in a meditative mood, is precipitated into a pit-trap. While abrupt, this mood-change was in no wise feigned.
At sixteen, Guest Gulkan was far too old for fairy tales.
And, even as a small boy, he had always despised stories about talking animals. Since coming to Alozay, he had several times encountered crabs in the flesh of the fact. True, they were the freshwater crabs of the Swelaway Sea rather than the greater crabs of the Sea of Salt. Still, having met with crabs, and having been torn by their pincers while trying to dissect them – your average crab being more of a warrior than your average flea – Guest thought he knew to a nicety both the talents and the limitations of the breed. And he in the days of his self- proclaimed maturity most certainly had no time at all for any ridiculous nonsense about a talking crab.
'Well?' said Guest, as Sken-Pitilkin gave him no answer.
'Well what?' said his tutor, who was still trying to work out just what had offended the boy.
'You insulted me,' said Guest. 'And I asked for an explanation. Are you going to give it?'
'Where lies the insult?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'A talking crab!' said Guest. 'Is that not insult enough?'
'It is but knowledge,' said Sken-Pitilkin, genuinely puzzled.
'It is but knowledge, for I have but been retailing a few facts from my own experience. Where lies the insult in that?'
'A nonsense of talking crabs and parrot-vultures,' said Guest, working himself up into a proper rage even as he talked.
'Is that not insult? Stuff for children! Fish that fly and crabs that talk.'
'They are facts, and I have witnessed them,' said Sken-Pitilkin mildly. 'But if you have made up your mind to be angry, then don't let mere fact prevent you from indulging unreason.'
'You fiddle the world so often with word-games that you forget the world is not a game,' said Guest, rising to his feet.
'The world is what it is, and men are what they are, and I am a man, and I will not be insulted like a child.'
'Why not?' said Sken-Pitilkin, feeling it was high time for some home truths to be spoken. 'For you have the singularly changeable moods of a bad-tempered and over-indulged child.'
'Men have been killed for less than that,' said Guest Gulkan, doing his best to snarl and grate, to bitter the words from his lips like so much poison.
'So they have, so they have,' said Sken-Pitilkin, relapsing into placidity. 'But character is destiny, and if mine is to die at the hands of a Yarglat lout over the matter of an imagined insult, why then, so be it.' Sken-Pitilkin showed no fear of the quick-boil of the young man's temper, but instead comported himself as calmly as if engaged in a tea-tasting ceremony. This enraged Guest Gulkan all the more, so much so that he almost ventured to strike his tutor.
But he restrained himself, remembering what had happened on the occasion of their last physical confrontation. Sken-Pitilkin had avoided the blow and had rapped Guest painfully with his country crook, which had left the boy seriously sore for the next three days thereafter.
So in the heat of his anger Guest Gulkan did not venture to strike, but instead stormed toward the door.
'And where do you think you're going?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Character is destiny,' said Guest Gulkan. 'And I'm going to find mine.'
As the boy was so speaking, the door was thrown open, and in came destiny in the form of Thodric Jarl and his associates. Guest Gulkan was taken aback by this metal-crashing parcel of armed men, all swords and gauntlets, boots and helmets, shields and chain mail. He fell back before them, and seized Sken-Pitilkin's country crook in lieu of a sword, for he thought the intruders bent on murder.
'Out!' said Sken-Pitilkin irefully, as the intrusionists came trampling into his educational laboratory with their muddy boots on. 'You can't come in here! We're in the middle of a lesson.'
'The lesson is over,' said Thodric Jarl, the leader of the intrusionists. 'The lesson is over, for life has begun.'
Thus epic heroes are wont to speak, but Thodric Jarl was no epic hero. He was a run-of-the-mill hackman, a mediocre mercenary who had long ago been exiled from Rovac for stealing sheep. (Or so at least Rolf Thelemite was wont to allege, and Sken-Pitilkin had heard the allegations, and had often declared himself inclined to believe them.) Jarl was young, and over-vigorous, and decidedly curt in his manner. Sken-Pitilkin was not at all pleased to see him, and made his displeasure plain.
'You say the lesson is over?' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'The lesson is hardly started yet! But I'll give you a lesson you won't forget, not when I'm through with you.'
'Hush down, you irascible old man,' said Lord Alagrace, one of Thodric Jarl's companions in boorishness.
This annoyed Sken-Pitilkin intensely, for while Thodric Jarl could never transcend his stiffnecked nature, Sken-Pitilkin knew Lord Alagrace of old, and knew that Alagrace could be quite the diplomat when he thought it worth his while.
After all, sal Pentalon Sorvolosa dan Alagrace nal Swedek quen Larsh was no brute of a Yarglat barbarian. He was the scion of one of the High Houses of Sharla, and the Sharla, as has been noted above, were ever a sophisticated people. Ethnology teaches one the natural limits of peoples such as Yarglat and Rovac. One expects such barbarians to brute their way through the world like slum-born streetfighters. But ethnology could make no excuse whatsoever for Lord Pentalon Alagrace. He knew better, and Sken-Pitilkin thought he should demonstrate as much.
'Get out of here!' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Get out of here, the lot of you!'
'Who is this unruly old man?' said one of the sworders who had bruted his armpits into the room in company with Jarl and Alagrace. 'Shall we kill him?'
'No,' said Thodric Jarl, 'we'll not kill him, for he's not worth the bloodspill. He is but a useless old beggar whom the Witchlord chased from Gendormargensis for drowning a child's pet dog, and other crimes equally as cowardly.'
Thus Thodric Jarl in his youth, gross in libel and uncouth in epithet. But even a dog can count its own legs, as the saying has it, and sometimes Jarl had a truth or two to his tongue. Certainly he hit the mark when he called
