Hugh Cook: The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers

One observes Jon Qasaba writing. One deciphers his eager notation: Birth Trauma?!

When Q_asaba looks back, one is staring at nothing. Slowly, one says:

‘Blood, too. That comes into it. Somehow, it’s… there’s blood mixed up in this. The memories, I mean.’

You get the picture? This is the kind of intellectual endeavour it takes to remain suitably mad while one resides in the Dromdanjerie. So don’t write off the insane. While they are not necessarily totally accurate in their observations, who is? Would you trust Qasaba to author this history? Qasaba, who truly believes that Rye Phobos did what he did because his mother subjected him to the Second Indignity when he was aged but three? No, Qasaba- [Here the Originator libels Qasaba at length, then argues that the status quo itself is not necessarily sane. Hence (he says) that majority which dwells outside the lunatic asylum is possibly the group which is truly mad. Surely (I say) such argument is absurd. In terms of logic and the law, lunatics are by definition those incarcerated in lunatic asylums. What more need be said? Drax Lira, Redactor Major.]

Thus, to return to the question of the provenance of our facts.

Believe me, all this is known. Or most of it. Very, very little is surmise, and the logic of such surmise is inescapable. Truly, Olivia Qasaba was at the age of change, of ripeness, of hot juice and urgent dreams, that age when nine thoughts in ten are unspeakable because of their impropriety. In her days of youth and vigour she was domiciled in close quarters with Chegory Guy, and had no other appropriate target of sexual opportunity in sight.

Ergo, she was infatuated with him. Or, at a minimum, she was continually considering (perhaps continually rejecting, but definitely considering!) young Chegory as a potential sexual partner. For such is the nature of the blood. Such is the nature of the organism. And who can deny that the organism has, shall we say, at times a certain priority? When the flesh is gorged and the urge is upon them, even the wise must [Here by Order of the Redactor Major a gratuitous crudity of considerable obscenity has been excised. Also an unpardonable elaboration of that crudity, complete with the baseless attribution of regrettable personal practices to several of History’s more dignified Perpetrators.]

Let us have an equation, then, in the manner of the famous literary theorist Sinja Larthelme. Boy plus girl equals the necessity for diligent onlookers to be ever considering the probable consequences of propinquity.

Does that satisfy?

The followers of Sinja Larthelme will doubtless answer: no. The equation is too simple. Too true. Too close to life as it is lived. Too close to commonsense. They want different equations, elaborate expressions of curves and intersections, velocities and accelerations, subsets and matrices. They pretend to be in possession of a generalised mathematics of existence which (this is their conceit) treats with human disorder (chaos, coincidence, collision) in terms of a mode of discourse possessed of a logic as rigorous as that used to clarify the dance of the stars.

Which is a nonsense.

Because [To spare scribes, readers and overburdened library shelves alike, some seventy thousand words of impassioned exegesis have here been excised by Order of the Redactor Major.]

Well, where were we?

We were at the point where Chegory Guy was loading lanterns on to a bablobrokmadorni stick for Olivia. Once the stick was loaded, she followed her father into the depths of the Dromdanjerie to help calm the inmates. She walked with a firm, confident step. She knew the mad by name, and was used to dealing with their moods and panics. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that she had a lead-weighted cosh in her back pocket.

The daughter of an Ashdan liberal, yet she carried a cosh?

Well, yes.

Life in the Dromdanjerie does tend to inject a certain degree of realism into one’s actual behaviour whatever one’s ideological outlook.

Chegory Guy did not follow. Not because he was scared, but because Jon Qasaba had often explicitly forbidden him to venture into the dormitories. Instead, he lit more lanterns, then sat silent. Waiting. As he waited, he heard all the dogs of Injiltaprajura begin to bark and howl.

What did he think of as he sat there thus? We can only guess. Perhaps he thought of Olivia, of her heat, her nipples, the marginal hairs, the faint-breathing odour easing from her secret. He was young, was he not? So what else would he think about? And Olivia was worth thinking of, oh yes, she was worth it, very much worth it indeed.

But I never touched her, I swear it.

While Shabble was exploring Downstairs and Chegory Guy was lighting lanterns, other events were taking place elsewhere in Injiltaprajura. To the treasury housed deep below the pink palace there came a band of robbers. These brigands were the Malud marauders Al-ran Lars, Arnaut and Tolon.

How did they get in?

How did they get past the guards, bars, doors and walls?

Why, by using a secret passage.

Al-ran Lars, you see, had helped loot that treasury before. He had been to Injiltaprajura years before in an ill-famed ship known as the Kraken and captained then by the notorious Log Jaris. On that raid, Al-ran Lars and his companions had snaffled the bard of Untunchilamon. Now Al-ran Lars was back for a second helping.

Some will call his intentions immoral, but surely this is unjust. What benefit has the world from treasure which does naught but sit in the dark for year on year, unchanging? Treasure thus restrained is dull stuff, not process but form. Once it is released into the world, it joins that endlessly fascinating interplay of energy which we know as the economy.

This is what it is all about.

It?

Life, strife, existence!

So Da Thee, a Korugatu philosopher near unique in his sobriety, says simply that life is energy.

Remember that while the treasure of Injiltaprajura lay untouched in doom-dark silence, its existence was (in practice) purely theoretical. In practice, it made no difference whether the treasury was filled with gold or with shadows. Therefore let us not libel the Malud marauders by calling them witless criminals. Let us see them by the light of philosophy, and know them as life-makers, releasers of energy, creators of new potential for the world’s existence.

‘Where is it?’ said Arnaut, youngest of them all and hence the most excitable.

He spoke, of course, in Malud, since that is the language of the people of the island of Asral. Not only is it their name for their tongue — it is also their name for themselves. Although, as far as the eye is concerned, they are outwardly identical to the Ashdans.

‘Hush,’ said Al-ran Lars as he raised his lantern.

Light spangled from eye-bright diamonds, from coins in cascades, from gold-woven tapestries and other wealth beyond ennumeration. Pearls the size of pears. Almandine glowing as red as roses. Carbuncles lit by their own inner fire. The glamour of ultramarines. Globes of amber. The sombre ochre light of a solitary firestone, work of the wizards of Arl, masters of both the merely luminous and the incandescent.

‘There,’ said Tolon, the big one, the muscle-man.

He pointed.

‘That’s it,’ said Al-ran Lars, and slipped his hands into a pair of mailed gauntlets.

With his hands thus armoured, he picked up the sceptre of the Empress Justina. This ornament terminated in a glittering bauble, a fierce-blazing flare of rainbows, a soft-humming triakisoctahedron. Al-ran Lars raised it to his lips. Kissed it.

‘No snakes,’ said Arnaut.

‘I noticed,’ said Al-ran Lars dryly.

When he had first come here years before, the greatest wonders of the treasury had been guarded by snakes and by worse. But security had grown slack in the intervening years. Which is not surprising, since it takes a fair amount of hard work and enterprise (not to mention raw courage) to maintain a sizeable colony of poisonous reptiles in good health in an underground treasury.