Myth Alliances

don't say anything at all.'

— d. rickles

The resulting non-argument about where to eat might have been entertaining to watch, but it stretched on for hours. By the time they decided who would have the honor of hosting us, night had fallen.

'That's it, then!' Gubbeen announced, waking us all out of the bored doze we had fallen into. He came over to us, rubbing his hands together. He was still smiling, but he looked tired. 'We will all go to Montgomery's Tavern, where you will sample the average in Wuhs cuisine! You will be our guests.'

'But if we are hiring them to help us,' an earnest female in spectacles put in, 'then properly, they are our guests, but the cost of meals ought to be accounted for as part of their fee.'

Another overly polite discussion started. 'Hold it!' I insisted, stopping the argument before it began again. 'We'll pay for ourselves. We'll negotiate the fee separately, once we see how serious the situation is.' 'You didn't set the fee up front?' Tananda asked me in a whisper, as eager hands reached out to pull us towards a brightly lit doorway up ahead.

'Uh, no,' I admitted, feeling guilty.

A green eyebrow climbed up her flawless brow. 'What if they don't have any money?'

'Well, we can't just leave them under the thumbs of ten Perverts!'

'Just watch me,' Tananda asserted, flicking her middle finger against her thumb. 'Nobody's dead. Nobody's starving. Your services have value. You can't just run a major freebie like that. If word got back to the Bazaar…'

I opened my mouth to say that I was retired, but that wasn't true either: I was on sabbatical, as I'd told Wensley… as I'd told everybody. Some day I would be finished with my studies… and I didn't know what I wanted to do then. Tananda was right: if I went back to the Bazaar and rumors had gone around that I was giving away my talents for free I'd be flooded with applicants wanting me to take on ridiculously petty tasks, or epic heroics with no hope of remuneration. It had happened before.

'I… I…'

'Don't worry, Skeeve,' Bunny assured me, planting a palm in my chest as she passed by me to go first into the brightly lit restaurant. I stopped, the breath knocked out of me. Bunny works out. She is very strong. 'This is my job. I'll take care of it.'

Montgomery's Tavern would not have been called a tavern in any other dimension I'd ever visited. It served liquor and spirits, as well as a simple dinner menu, but since it suffered from a total lack of smoke, graffiti, bar fights or drunks, it put me more in mind of a tea room, the kind in the town near my father's farm that my mother visited when she and her fellow teachers held a meeting on a rest-day. Montgomery's was so orderly and neat I wondered how anyone could relax in it. 'It's a fern bar,' Tananda observed, belting down one drink and signaling for another. 'I'd love another one of these lemonades,' she smiled at the innkeeper, a stout Wuhs with ruddy curls.

'I hope you're not finding our citrus martinis too strong,' Montgomery said, filling her glass from a pitcher.

'Not a bit,' Tananda said, monitoring her drink carefully. Montgomery stopped pouring. Tananda cleared her throat meaningfully. With a startled glance, he filled her glass to the top. 'That's better. You might as well leave the pitcher. Thank you, you handsome man.' When Montgomery went back to polishing the shiny wooden bar, Tananda shook her head. 'They'd get thrown out of the Bazaar for watering their drinks. There's hardly any alcohol in these at all. I'll have to visit the necessary about six times before I ever get a decent buzz.'

That lack made little difference to me. I was intent on nursing one beer throughout the evening so my head would be clear.

And I needed all of my clarity. Now that they had a champion to save them from their conquerors, the committeefriends of Pareley decided to hold a secret meeting to discuss how they wanted us to do it. Wensley introduced representatives from each of the kingdom's fifteen committees. For people who never fought, these Wuhses sure managed to make agreeing sound like an unresolvable blood feud, even though they never spoke directly to one another, or uttered a single harsh word.

'My learned friend,' orated Wigmore, the chairman of the Committee for Public Health, 'probably didn't hear me very well when I explained my position. I know he would concur with all of my points if he had. The absence of influence of a legitimate democratic system in Pareley is deleterious to the well-being of every Wuhs. It is therefore a direct concern of the health system that we are being governed without our whole approval. Therefore, I and my committee ought to be at your side to consult about the course of action you might take in this matter. If you would concur, Master Skeeve.'

'My learned friend from Public Health,' intoned Yarg, the chairman of Public Safety, 'can't claim I am anything but fair to him. He understands, as we all do, that having outsiders assuming functions that, while it is very kind of them to take such an interest, since we presently lack the ability to counsel them as to our wishes it suggests this case to be within the breadth of Public Health. We would like Master Skeeve and his party to consider having us just a trifle more in his mind than health. Not that health is not incredibly important, you see.'

There were a few gasps from the assembled. These were strong terms for any Wuhs to utter. Every one of them was still smiling, still seeming friendly, but if their eyes could shoot fire like dragonbreath, every one of them would be scorched. As Yarg retired to his seat another committeefriend leaped to her feet. The crux of her address was that Wensley should trust all of them and return the D-hopper to common circulation, specifically to her custody. In spite of the energetic gestures her speech was as mindless as the others had been. I felt myself starting to drowse. Gleep had already fallen asleep with his head on my foot. My head drooped over my half-full glass. Bunny nudged me awake in time to nod approvingly when Ardrahan sat down.

Each speaker had to have his or her turn. I felt like grabbing each one by the neck and telling them they had only one sentence to inform me what they wanted, or I'd take my entourage and go home.

Zol was perfectly at home in the midst of all this. A tea room was all he would ever need. He refused all offers of wine, beer, liquor, liqueur, intoxicants, narcotics or hallucinogens (not that any of our hosts would ever admit to partaking of the last three). The Wuhses seemed a trifle chagrined at first that he turned down their offerings in fa- vor of tea, and tea alone, but they began to produce dozens of varieties of infusions, until they covered the entire table except where his modest little pot, cup and saucer sat. I began to see why the Pervect Ten had been called in to help the citizens of Pareley in the first place. Their extravagance had to have put a severe drain on the kingdom's finances. Some of the teas I recognized as the most expensive ever grown. They were for sale in the Bazaar at approximately a gold coin per ounce. For that much the tea would have to nourish a family of eight for a month, not be thrown out after making a mere six cups. Zol sipped from his cup and listened to the exchanges.

'Yes, it is good to explain what you feel,' he kept saying. 'Through sharing lies clarity and understanding.'

I'd long ago finished my beer. I sat slumped with my fist holding my chin up off the table. I heard birds begin singing outside. Through the window the dark sky began to lighten. Morning was approaching, and no one had really said anything yet. My eyes were burning. I didn't think I could stand one more speech. As the eighth committeefriend stood up and launched into her tale of woe, I interrupted her.

'Tell me more about the actual oppression,' I insisted, pulling myself upright. I turned to the assembly, most of which looked as tired as I felt. 'You've all been talking about how your committees ought to be involved with their overthrow, but what is it the Pervect Ten have really done to you?'

'Haven't you heard what our friends have been saying?' Wensley asked. 'They've taken over everything! No one can do what they want to do. They control every coin. They visit all the craft centers, the factories, the farms, and keep track of everything we make.'

'They would take away everything that we've gotten from all the other dimensions, too, if they could,' Ardrahan bleated. 'We need it. We haven't got very much magik of our own. All these labor-saving devices are so useful!' 'And the items we bought to defend ourselves—not that we need defending, no!' Yarg insisted. 'We have no enemies. Pareley is the safest place you could live. But… just in case… we bought a few things. We feel much safer now that we have them. The Ten want us to give them up!'

'We don't want to be cut off again,' Wensley added. 'All these centuries Wuh thought it was alone in the universe. Think what we've been missing! Perhaps we are not very experienced in the ways of other cultures, but