Hugh Cook: The Wazir and the Witch

In addition to all the above, the notes for this second chapter were on hand when the first was written, and tolfrigdalaptiko was much on the historian’s mind because Pelagius Zozimus is recorded to have cooked It for the Empress Justina on no fewer than ten separate occasions; and, when working in the premises of the Analytical Institute on Jod, to have prepared it on every second day for the Crab.

The historian trusts that the reader’s mind has been set at rest. A coincidence exists; but, rather than undermining the validity of this text, it serves merely to emphasize and underline the stringent research which has gone into this work of surpassing scholarship.

Let would-be critics further note that any attempt to studiously avoid coincidence would result in the most perverse perversion of history. For it is a statistical truth that, when Aldarch the Third sits upon his throne in the city of Obooloo and drinks wine or water (or blood, or the juice crushed from the eyeballs of his enemies, or the semen of his favourite dog), there will simultaneously be other people elsewhere who are also drinking wine or water (or other substances); and the historian cannot reasonably ask all these people to cease and desist from their activities merely to avoid the occurrence of a coincidence, that entirely natural pattern of synchronic correspondences which some schools of criticism find so intensely distressing.

Readers raised on histories of the weird and the wonderful raise another serious objection to the events of this narrative; namely, that the events it deals with are so close to those of their own lives and their own times.

This objection can only be answered by stating an unpalatable truth: the weird and wonderful histories which gratify the appetites of such readers are nothing but a tissue of untruths.

It is a great principle of historical philosophy (though one as yet far from universally acknowledged) that all lives are but variants of one common pattern; to the point that, were all the lives of all people from the beginning of time to be compounded into one Life Experience then divided by the number of the whole, the statistically accurate Average Life thus produced would be little different from the one the reader is living now.

While those who deal in weird and wonderful untruths are reluctant to admit it, the truth is that all the lives of all the peoples of all of humanity are, were and always will be very much alike.

Wherever we look, we find the same patterns repeating themselves. The gods are (and were, and will be) always distant, bad tempered and less than perfectly understood. The younger generation is always a trial to the older. Slaves are always idle and stupid, and a cause of exasperation to their masters. Chastity is everywhere preached, and the preaching is nowhere a solution to venereal disease. Youth acts in haste and age repents at leisure. Inflation prospers everywhere. Everywhere, scholarly talent starves while Chulman Puro and Greven Jing grow rich. And all cultures (regardless of what superficial differences exist between them) recognize that very special and peculiar difficulties inevitably exist between a man and his mother-in-law.

As this is a sober history, it follows that nothing is recorded in these pages which cannot happen in your own life, or at least in your own lifetime. The Empress Justina is not the first person to struggle valiantly to secure the liberties of her kingdom against the oppressions of a foreign empire; and the fact that her best efforts ended in general disaster merely indicates a principle well known to all historians, which is that might is might and right is easily forgotten.

One final comment.

Great differences will be found between this history and others now extant.

The greatest difference is that of treatment; for this is a singularly intimate history.

It is intimate largely because of the very special advantages enjoyed by the historian. Personal experience is one of these; for the historian was actually on Untunchilamon when the events herein recorded took place. Furthermore, since the historian writes late and last, he has access to the documents of all those who have written earlier.

But the historian’s greatest advantage is that he was for long a confidante of Shabble; and Shabble was everywhere, and saw everything, or at least learnt of it thereafter by way of confession or hearsay.

Shabble was in the kitchen attached to the Analytical Institute when Pelagius Zozimus was preparing that platter of tolfrigdalakaptiko. Shabble was there listening to one kitchen slave telling another about the delinquencies of her grandmother’s neighbour’s daughter’s son, who had run away from home and was living on the streets as a drummer.

Later, Chegory Guy came into the kitchen to collect that tolfrigdalakaptiko, and Shabble went with Guy to the cave where the Hermit Crab lived, and watched as that formidable monster ate its way though its meal with a pair of chopsticks which its huge claws handled with the most exquisite delicacy imaginable.

Olivia Qasaba was present at that same meal, for she had made herself the Crab’s servant. This she had done in order to have an excuse to associate with Chegory on a regular basis.

In truth, the Crab needed no services apart from the regular provision of its meals. The Crab was a philosopher of a singularly unambitious kind, and did very little apart from sitting still, thinking, and waiting for the inevitable onslaughts of those human beings who from time to time (for selfish reasons of their own) would try to kill it.

However, Olivia had invented a great many jobs for herself to do. Early on in her service, she had taken to adorning the Crab with flowers. Daily, she brought fresh frangipani blooms for the Crab, and glued them to its carapace (the Crab being possessed of no human-style ears behind which such flowers might have been stuck). Later, thinking the Crab in need of some more permanent form of adornment, Olivia went to work with a stronger kind of glue, and began to cover the Crab with a mosaic of white marble, cowrie shells, chips of bloodstone, old fish-hooks, brass rings, worn-out cogs from the Analytical Engine, fragments of blue and yellow glass and rags of silk.

Thus festooned, the Crab looked more than a little ridiculous. Olivia was taking a fearful risk, for, had the Crab resented its transformation, it might have lost its temper; and in its incontinent rage it could easily have destroyed Injiltaprajura, if not Untunchilamon as a whole.

But Olivia Qasaba never worried her head about that, because it never occurred to her for even a moment that the Crab might not take kindly to the programme of beautification on which she had embarked. As for Chegory Guy, he never sought to restrain the hand of his beloved Olivia; though surely concern for the common good (if not for Olivia’s safety) should have led him to veto her artistic efforts.

Chegory’s dereliction of duty — the insouciant manner in which he allowed his true love’s whim to endanger his whole world — is easy to understand when we note that he was an Ebrell Islander. The Ebrell Islanders have never been noted for caution, reason or responsibility.

That explains Chegory’s actions; or, rather, his inaction. But how are we to account for the fact that Injiltaprajura allowed a feckless Ashdan Lass and a reckless Ebrell Islander to minister to the most powerful and most dangerous entity to be found anywhere west of Yestron and east of Argan?

In explanation of this incongruity, the historian has a duty to explain that everyone else on Untunchilamon was far too scared of the Crab to go anywhere near the thing. And with good reason! Among other things, the Crab had perfected a method for turning people inside out; and such topological rearrangement is compatible with neither sanity nor survival.