Hugh Cook - The Wazir and the Witch

Varazchavardan smiled slightly, his mood marginally improved by this first pleasure of the day. A second pleasure followed as he pissed upon the shower slats, taking an obscene and somewhat guilty delight in offending against one of the taboos of his people. Then he stepped beneath the first of three gravid shower-sacks, reached up, gripped a plunger between two knuckles and pushed it upwards. This unplugged the nozzle of the shower-sack, aborting its contents. Cold water began to sprinkle down around Varazchavardan. As delightful shocks thrilled through his flesh, he eased the sweat from his skin, careful lest his talons tear his own chalk-white epidermis.

The first shower-sack shrivelled, slackened and collapsed in on itself. The water-flow diminished to a dribble-drip. The pink-eyed albino began lathering his wet, hairless body, whistling as he sent a slippery amber egg glissading over his skin. This egg was pure (unscented) palm oil soap, bought at considerable expense since the product requires considerable chemical ingenuity for its formulation. Despite the pleasure Varazchavardan took in this daily ritual, his whistling was on one note; it sounded for all the world like a monotonous mountain wind lancing through a crack in the roof of a mountain shelter in the high snows of the uplands of Ang.

The second shower-sack served to wash off the soap suds, while the third was reserved for pure sybaritic bliss, letting Varazchavardan devote himself entirely to the exquisite raptures of actually beihg cold, a sensation which allowed him to pretend he was back in Obooloo in winter, a world away from this accursed island of fever dreams and suffocating heat.

He dried himself on a towel of rough cotton then stepped from the cool of his bathroom to the heat of his bedroom. Outside his shuttered windows there bloomed a much-flowering vine, profligate with aromas, one of the myriad plants of the tropics whose names he had never bothered to learn. Once again he considered having it cut down. Once again he rejected the notion, for the cloying, oppressive scent of the plant at least kept him from imagining (as he did at times when his fears took him unawares) that he smelt hot wet blood guttering down the walls.

Varazchavardan dressed, adorning himself in silken ceremonial robes most marvellously embroidered with serpentine dragons ablaze with goldwork and argentry, with emerald and vermilion, with incarnadine and ultramarine. He had once had five such robes, each identical to each, but one had been stolen and three others damaged beyond repair in sundry alarms, confrontations and disasters of the last year.

Then the wonder-worker left his bedroom and ascended to the uppermost storey of his villa, which was devoted to one single room of prodigious size. Shutters had been taken from the windows, giving him uninterrupted views to the east (a street of grand mansions, including Master Ek’s), the west (Justina’s pink palace), the north (market gardens and the wastelands of Zolabrik beyond) and the south (portside Injiltaprajura and the Laitemata Harbour).

The view gave Varazchavardan no pleasure, for, though this was his sixteenth year on Untunchilamon, he could not look upon its landscapes without aesthetic discomfort. The colours were too hot, in particular the red of bloodstone, the red of red coral, the red of red seaweed, the red sands of Scimitar and the malevolent reds of bloodshot dawns and the slaughter-bath sunsets. Varazchavardan feared that another year with such reds would send him mad. In contrast, the greens (the exuberance of market gardens and deep-gashed overgrown gullies) and blue (sea and sky at times other than dawn and dusk) were minor discomforts.

Nevertheless, while the outlook was not pleasurable, it was most marvellously informative. Varazchavardan saw at a glance that the number of ships in the Laitemata had increased from three to five. A slave was kneeling by Varazchavardan’s breakfast table, and the wonderworker addressed the slave thus:

‘What news of the ships?’

‘Nixorjapretzel Rat waits to make report,’ answered the slave.

‘Show him in once I am finished,’ said Varazchavardan, who had never found young Rat to be an asset to his digestion.

Breakfast was papaya. One papaya. The big, bulbous, yellow-skinned fruit yet awaited the knife. Varazchavardan liked to cut. He felt a special pleasure when he butchered the thin-skinned fruit, quartering its substance to reveal the smooth and succulent orange flesh. Once he had toyed with the idea of dispatching Justina Thrug and her father Lonstantine with equal ease; but when, after long meditation, he had finally tried to realize his fantasy, the task had proved impossible. And now it was too late. Now his reputation was irretrievably soiled and stained by the protestations of loyalty he had been forced to make to Justina.

Varazchavardan dug into the helpless flesh of the papaya. It yielded with much less protest that is made by the surprisingly muscular pulp of an eye when a torturer scoops it from its socket with a sharpened spoon.

‘Ah, Justina, Justina,’ crooned Varazchavardan. And then, adjusting his fantasy: ‘Or shall we say, my dearest beloved Crab.’

‘My lord?’ said his still-squatting slave, not quite catching the import of these words.

‘Ice,’ said Varazchavardan, raising his voice; he did not want even a slave to know that he had taken to talking to himself. ‘Ice, that’s what I want.’

‘My lord,’ said the slave, and erranded away for the desired substance.

On ate Varazchavardan, imagining he was eating crab, or, more precisely, Crab. It was the dreaded Hermit Crab who had compelled him to swear loyalty to Justina. Had Varazchavardan refused, then the Crab would have played unpleasant topological games with the wonder-workers’s flesh. But Aldarch the Third, notoriously stubborn in anger, was unlikely to heed such niceties; as far as Aldarch Three was concerned, Varazchavardan was most surely a traitor. Hence the news brought by the incoming ships was of vital interest and importance to Varazchavardan.

Nevertheless, the sorcerer ate slowly. Surely the ships had brought no news to upset the status quo. For surely any decisive settlement of Talonsklavara (in favour of Aldarch Three or against him) would already have been greeted by public uproar, general riot, arson and execution as adherents of the victorious faction celebrated their triumph at the expense of those loyal to the losers.

Varazchavardan finished his papaya.

Unlike Justina Thrug, the wonder-worker did not proceed to pineapple and flying fish, but crunched some freshly arrived ice and ordered that Nixorjapretzel Rat be shown into his presence. This was done.

Rat, Varazchavardan’s erstwhile apprentice, was now (in theory, at least) a fully fledged sorcerer in his own right. Wonder-working, however, was not young Nixor-japretzel’s strong suit. His endeavours in this direction tended to be disastrous; to give but one example, when Rat had first joined the members of Injiltaprajura’s Cabal House in their traditional quest to turn lead into gold, he had managed to turn every piece of gold in the building into fragmented lead.

Rat had lately found employment with the Empress Justina; he was working as her liaison officer, which at least had the advantage of keeping him too busy to get into mischief. Furthermore, this arrangement gave Varazchavardan yet another source of intelligence, albeit a somewhat unreliable source.

‘Greetings, achaan Varazchavardan,’ said Rat, making reverence to his teacher.

Varazchavardan made no reply whatsoever. He merely crunched some more ice.

‘The Empress Justina has received reports of the latest arrivals,’ said Rat. ‘One is a general trader; the other, a brothel ship.’

So said Rat. However, he spoke in Janjuladoola, therefore his report was not as brief and blunt as it may appear in translation. For Janjuladoola is a language which lends itself to studied elegance and considerable prolixity; and Rat availed himself of both those features, using for ‘general trader’ a circumlocution which translates literally as ‘dealer-in-all-from-lapis-lazuli-and-fresh-spinach-to-the — aroma-of-mountain-clouds-of-the-Singlaramonoktidad-region-and-ballast — of-that-type-in-which-conglomerate-rock-predominates’.