for the bitter fury in his eyes. He waits to be discovered (for even in Reliant City his reputation was not one of discovery but of pathetic bullying, backstabbing, sordid underhand graft and of course gaggles of hangers-on of all sexes willing, at least on the surface, to suffer the wriggle of Calap’s fickler every now and then; and worse of all, poor Calap knows it’s all a fraud). Thus, whilst he has stolen a thousand sonnets, scores of epic poems and millions of clever offhanded comments uttered by talented upstarts stupidly within range of his hearing, at his very core he stares, mouth open, upon a chasm on all sides, wind howling and buffeting him as he totters on his perch. Where is the golden cage? Where are all the white-headed fools he shat upon? There’s nothing down there but more down there going so far down there is no there at all.
Calap Roud has spent his entire albeit modest fortune bribing every judge he could find in Farrog. This was his last chance. He would win the Mantle. He deserved it. Not a single one of the countless vices hunting the weakling artists of the world dragged him down-no, he had slipped free of them all on a blinding road of virtuous living. He was ninety-two years old and this year, he would be discovered!
No alchemies or potions in the world could do much about the fact that, as one grew older and yet older, so too one’s ears and nose. Calap Roud, as modestly wrinkled as a man in his late forties, had the ears of a veteran rock ape of G’danisban’s coliseum and the nose of a probiscus monkey who’d instigated too many tavern brawls. His teeth were so worn down one was reminded of catfish mouths biting at nipples. From his old man’s eyes came a leer for every woman, and from his leer came out a worm-like tongue with a head of purple veins.
Object of his lust, more often than not, was to be found in the Nemil beauty sitting languidly upon the other side of thefire (and if temptation burns where else would she be?). Purse Snippet was a dancer and orator famous across the breadth of Seven Cities. Need it be even said that such a combination of talents was sure to launch spurting enthusiasm among the heavy-breathing multitudes known to inhabit cities, towns, villages, hamlets, huts, caves and closets the world over?
Lithe was her smile, warm her midnight hair, supple of tongue her every curvaceous utterance, Purse Snippet was desired by a thousand governors and ten thousand nobles. She had been offered palaces, islands in artificial lakes, entire cities. She had been offered a hundred slaves each trained in the arts of love, to serve her pleasure until age and jealous gods took pleasure away. Lavished with jewels enough to adorn a hundred selfish queens in their dark tombs. Sculptors struggled to render her likeness in marble and bronze, and then committed suicide. Poets fell so far inside their poems of adoration and worship they forgot to eat and died at their garrets. Great warleaders tripped and impaled themselves on their own swords in pursuit of her. Priests foreswore drink and children. Married men surrendered all caution in their secret escapades. Married women delighted in exposing and then murdering their husbands with ridicule and savage exposes.
And none of it was enough to soothe the unreasoning fires crisping black her soul. Purse Snippet knew she was the Thief of Reason. She stole wisdom from the wise and made them fools, but all that she took simply slid like lead dust between her amorously perfected fingers. She was also the Thief of Desire, and lust pursued her like a tidal surge and where it passed other women were left bloodless and lifeless. But with her own desires she was lost in frantic search, unable to alight long on any branch, no matter how inviting it had at first seemed.
So she had found a grey powder that she took in draughts of wine and this powder which had so blissfully taken her away from everything now revealed its true self. It was the Thief of her Freedom.
She would enter the famous shrine of the Indifferent God, seeking the blessing that none other had ever achieved. She believed she could win this, for she intended to dance and sing as she had never before danced and sang. She would steal the indifference from a god. She would.
She could not remember when last she had felt free, but she could not think of anything she wanted more.
Each night, alas, the powder beckoned her.
Arch rival to Calap Roud was the illimitable, ambitious, inexcusably young Brash Phluster. That he delighted in the old bastard’s presence on this journey could hardly be refuted, for Brash so wanted Calap to witness youth’s triumph in Farrog. With luck, it would kill him.
Seven years Calap had been defecating on Brash, trying to keep him down on the crusty floor, but Brash was not one to let a rain of guano discourage his destiny. He knew he was brilliant in most things, and where he lacked brilliance he could fill those spaces with bold bluster and entirely unfounded arrogance. A sneer was as good as an answer. A writhe of the lip could slice throats across the room. He eyed Calap as would a wolf eye a dog, appalled at a shared pedigree and determined to tear the sad thing to pieces at the first opportunity.
True talent was found in the successful disguise of genius, and Brash accounted himself a master of disguises. His future was glory, but he would reveal not a single hint, not one that some cragged critic or presumptuous rival might close in on, stoat fangs bared. No, they could dismiss him each and every day for the time being. He would unveil himself in Farrog, and then they would all see. Calap Roud, that stunning watery-eyed dancer, Purse Snippet, and the Entourage too-
The Entourage! Whence comes such creatures so eager to abandon all pretense of the sedentary? One envisages haste of blubbering excitement, slippery gleam in the eye, a lapdog’s brainless zeal, as a canvas bag is stuffed full of slips and whatnot, with all the grace of a fakir backstage moments before performing before a gouty king. A whirlwind rush through rooms like shrines, and then out!
Pattering feet, a trio, all converging in unsightly gallop quick to feminize into a skip and prance once He Who Is Worshipped is in sight. The Entourage accompanies the Perfect Artist everywhere, gatherings great and small, public and intimate. They build the walls of the formidable, impregnable keep that is the Perfect Artist’s ego. They patrol the moat, flinging away all but the sweetest defecatory intimations of mortality. They stand sentinel in every postern gate, they gush down every sluice, they are the stained glass to paint rainbows upon their beloved’s perfectly turned profile.
But let us not snick and snack overmuch, for each life is a wonder unto itself, and neither contempt nor pity do a soul sound measures of health, lest some issue of envy squeeze free in unexpectedly public revelation. The object of this breathless admiration must wait for each sweet woman’s moment upon the stage in the bull’s eye lantern light of our examination.
To begin, we shall name all three and attach to each select obtuberances in aid of future recollection. Sellup, first for no particular reason, has seen twenty-three summers and remembers in excruciating detail four of them, from the moment she first set eyes upon her beloved Perfect Artist to the very present found in this tale. Of her first eighteen years she has no memory whatsoever. Was she born? Did she possess parents? Did they love her? She cannot recall. Brothers? Sisters? Lovers? Offspring? Did she eat? Did she sleep?
Dark brown and springy was her hair, whirling in spirals down upon her shoulders. Singular was her eyebrow yet miraculously independent in its expressions at each end. Her nose, narrow and jutting, bore all the mars of inveterate ill-considered interjection. Her mouth cannot be described for it never ceased moving long enough for an accurate appraisal, but her chin jutted with blurred assurance. Of her body beneath her flowery attire, no knowledge is at hand. Suffice it to say she sat a saddle well with nary a pinch upon the horse’s waist. Sellup of the blurred mouth, then.
Next was Pampera, linguistically challenged in all languages including her native one, hers was the art of simpering, performed in a serried host of mannerisms and transitory parades from pose to pose, each pose held, alas, both an instant too long and never long enough. In the span of one’s self settling into a chair, Pampera could promenade from crosslegged on a silk cushion with elbows upon inside knees and long fingers laced to bridge the weight of her chin (and presumably all the rest above it) to a sudden languorous stretching of one long perfectly moulded leg, flinging back her head with arms rising in rampant stretch to lift and define her savage breasts, before rising to her feet like smoke, swinging round with a pivot of her fine hips wheeling into view the barrel cask of her buttocks before pitching down on the divan, hair flowing like tentacles as she propped up her head with one hand whilst the other (hand, not head) endeavoured to reinsert her breasts into the skimpy cups the style and size of which she likely settled upon a month into puberty.
For Pampera, it must be noted, puberty was buried beneath virginity deep in a tomb long sealed by a thick mound of backfill, with the grass growing thick and high and all significance of the hump long lost to the memory of the local herders. Despite this, she was nineteen years old. Her hair, for all its tidal pool titillations, was the hue of honey though tipped with black kohl ink a finger’s width at the ends. She had the eyes of a boy’s fantasy, when eyes meant something, the two of them being overlarge and balanced just so to hint at warm scented boudoirs wherein things slid from mothering to something other with all the ease of a blinking lid (or two). Sculptors might dream of smoothing out her likeness in golden wax or creamy clay. Painters might long to lash her fineness to canvas or
