Robert Silverberg: Dark Times at the Midnight Market

Ghambivole Zwoll allowed himself to think that perhaps a return to the prosperity of old might be in its early stages.

By the end of the week the job was done. There was one moment of near catastrophe on the evening when Ghambivole Zwoll arrived to begin his night’s work and found the massive Skandar charwoman Hendaya Zanzan bashing around with her mop in his rear workroom, where he had left the vials of ingredients that would go into the marquis’ potion sitting atop his desk in a carefully arranged row. In disbelief he watched the gigantic woman, who was far too large actually to enter the room, standing at the entrance to the room energetically swinging the mop from side to side and thereby placing everything within in great jeopardy.

“No!” he cried. “What are you doing, idiot? How many times have I told you—Stop! Stop!”

She halted and swung about uncertainly, looming above him like a mountain as she shifted the handle of the mop from one to another of her four arms. “But it has been so many weeks, master, since I last cleaned that room—”

“I’ve told you never to clean that room. Never! Never! And especially not now, when I have work in progress?”

“Never, master?”

“Oh, what a great stupid thing you are. Never: it means Not Ever. Not at any time. Keep your big idiotic mop out of there! Do you understand me, Hendaya Zanzan?”

It seemed to take her quite a while to process the instruction. She stood with all four burly arms drooping, the slow workings of her mind manifesting themselves meanwhile by a series of odd twitchings and clampings of her lips. Ghambivole Zwoll waited, struggling with his temper. He knew it did very little good to get angry with Hendaya Zanzan. The woman was a moron, a great furry clod of a moron, a dull-witted shaggy mass of a creature eight feet high and nearly as wide, hardly more than an animal. Not only stupid but ugly besides, even as Skandars went, flat-faced, empty-eyed, slack-jawed, covered from head to toe with a bestial coarse gray pelt that had the stale stink of some dead creature’s hide left too long to fester in the sun. He had no idea why he had hired her—out of pity, probably—nor why he had kept her on so long. The shop did need to be cleaned once in a while, he supposed, but it had been madness to hire anyone as bulky as a Skandar to do the sweeping in such a small, cluttered space, and in any case Shostik-Willeron had little enough to occupy his time and could easily take care of the chore. But for the grace of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty-royal job Ghambivole Zwoll would have let her go in another week or two. Now it seemed that he could afford to keep her on a little longer, and he would, for discharging her would be an unpleasant task and he tended to postpone all such things; but if business were to slacken once again—

“I am never to go into this little room,” she said finally. “Is that so, master?”

“Very good, Hendaya Zanzan! Very good. Say it once again! Never. Never.”

“Never to go into. The little room. Never.”

“And never means—?”

“Not ever?”

He didn’t care for the interrogative tone of her reply; but he saw that it was the best he was going to get out of the poor thing, and, sending her on her way, he went into his workshop and closed the door behind him. It took him no more than an hour to complete the final titration for the marquis’s potion. While he worked he heard the Su-Suheris moving about in the outer room, talking to someone, then pointlessly shifting furniture about, then whistling to himself in that maddening double-headed counterpoint his species so greatly cherished. What a useless fool the man was! Not a dolt like the Skandar woman, of course, but certainly he had little of the clear-eyed wisdom and cunning that the Su-Suheris, with the benefit of their double brain, were reputed to possess. Ghambivole Zwoll had badly needed an injection of fresh capital to meet the ongoing expenses of his shop or he would never have taken him on as a partner, an act that unquestionably would have brought fiery condemnation upon him from his forebears. If only business would pick up a little, he would surely buy Shostik-Willeron out and return to running the place as a sole proprietorship. But he knew what a futile fantasy that was.

Scowling in annoyance, Ghambivole Zwoll poured his completed potion into an elegant flask worthy of the twenty-royal price, inscribed the accompanying spell on a sheet of vellum. On the appointed day the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran returned, clad even more grandly than before, high-waisted doublet of orange velvet, long-legged golden breeches bedecked with loops of braid and buttons, slender dress sword fastened to a wide silk sash tied in a huge bow. “Is this it?” he asked, holding the flask up to a glowglobe above his head and studying it intently.

“Be certain that you are the object of her gaze when she drinks it,” said the Vroon. “And here,” he said, handing him the vellum scroll, “are the words you must speak as she consumes the potion.”

The marquis’s brow furrowed. “Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour ? What nonsense is this?”

“Not nonsense at all. It is a powerful spell. The meaning is, ‘Let her be well disposed to me, let her fall in love with me, let her yield to me.’ And the third word is pronounced mouroph-, take care that you get it right, or the effect may be lost. Even worse: you may achieve the opposite of what you desire. Again: Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour .”

“ Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour .”

“Excellent! But rehearse it many times before you approach her. She will fall helplessly into your arms. I guarantee it, your grace.”

“Well, then. Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour.”

“Mouroph, your grace.”

“Mouroph. Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”

“She is yours, your grace.”

“Let us hope so. And this is yours.” The marquis produced his bulging purse and casually tossed two coins, a fine fat ten-royal piece and a glossy fiver, onto Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk. “Good day to you. And may the Divine protect you if you have played me false! Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour. Mouroph. Mouroph. ” He spun neatly on his heel and was gone.

Three days passed quietly. Ghambivole Zwoll made two small sales, one for one crown fifty weights, one for slightly less. Otherwise the shop did no business. Creditors devoured most of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty royals almost at once. The Vroon returned to the state of gloom that had occupied him before the arrival of his aristocratic client.

On the second of those three evenings Shostik-Willeron was late coming to the shop; and when he did both his long pallid faces were tightly drawn in the Su-Suheris expression of uneasiness verging on despair.

“I warned you we were making a great mistake,” he said at once. “And now I’m sure of it!” It was the right-hand head that spoke: the cheerful, optimistic one, usually.

Ghambivole Zwoll sighed. “What now, Shostik-Willeron?”

“I have been speaking with my kinsman Sagamorn-Endik, who is in service at the Castle. Do you know that the Lady Alesarda of Muldemar, whom you have delivered so blithely into the clutches of that ridiculous dandy with your drug, is spoken of widely at court as the promised bride of the Coronal’s son? That by interfering in those nuptials, by despoiling this precious princess, your marquis runs perilously close to treason? And you and I, as abettors of his crime—”

“It is no crime.”

“To sleep with a simple scullery maid or some illiterate juggler girl, no. But for the fourth son of the third son of a provincial count to seduce a noblewoman destined for a royal marriage, to interpose his sweaty lusts in such high and delicate negotiations, or simply to be the ones who enable him to carry out such a thing, to be the agents who help him to have his way with her—oh, Ghambivole Zwoll, Ghambivole Zwoll, let us hope that that little potion of yours was a worthless draught! Otherwise your marquis is destroyed, and we are destroyed with him.”