Child of Fortune (57 page)

"Vraiment, once I was a Bloomenkind in the Perfumed Garden of our ancestral Eden, before I heard the Piper's song," I said, since this seemed to be the only thing he was willing to hear.

He stared at me in wonder. "And like a bodhisattva you then chose to return to the worlds of men?" he exclaimed. "Enlighten me, spirit of the forest, show me the way to your Perfumed Garden of perfection."

My aforementioned ire had been rising throughout the latter part of this discourse, and while the logical rationale for it was beyond my comprehension at the time, and the inner psychic dynamics were only to be elucidated later in the Clear Light Mental Retreat, at that moment, it seemed to me that I was once more hectoring the spirit of Guy Vlad Boca, wearing the vile crown of the Charge in the Hotel Pallas, seated in just such a lotus position under his flower smiling just such a smile of vapid bliss.

"In the Perfumed Garden, there is no one there to tell the tale, and the Pied Piper of Pan never plays his song," I told him, my eyes misting with outrage, or sadness, or mayhap somehow both. "Join the Mardi Gras Parade and follow the only tale there is to tell to the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers in the Gold Mountain, for true Children of Fortune have no chairmen of the board or Perfumed Gardens of perfect flowers."

"You have been to the Perfumed Garden and of your own free will returned to the worlds of men?" the bodhi said incredulously. "You are this Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt and these Bloomenkinder of the forest follow the song of your voice?"

"I am a simple ruespieler on the streets of Great Edoku," I told him. "I am anyone who tells the tale."

The bodhi of the wood began to draw back into the depths of himself at this, as if retreating from a surfeit of unwelcome satori, or mayhap in order to avoid suffering same. "Mayhap you are the sister of the Prince of Liars, storyteller, for you cannot be speaking truth," he said as he seemed to will his gaze inward. "No one has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder."

Thus had a terrified and lonely girl spoken to her own heart when she awoke on a leaf in the very darkest heart of the land of the Bloomenkinder with neither filter mask nor food. This doom of the spirit had that girl sworn an oath to overcome or die in the attempt.

I regarded the bodhi of the woods who now had completely resumed his gaze into the featureless emptiness of his self-chosen void, and I regarded Goldenrod, Rollo, Dome, and Moussa, my four dim creatures who had patiently stood there all the while, mesmerized by the sound of human discourse, struggling however unsuccessfully to escape from the very nullity he sought to embrace. Somehow, it seemed to me that in some strange Dreamtime of the human heart, their poor little spirits were more truly human than he.

And it was the Sunshine Shasta Leonardo who had sworn that oath who now looked on her charges with a more tender regard, and addressed them, not the immobile icon of spiritual perfection, with the very words that had begun the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt and which now served admirably as the summation thereof.

"No one," I said, "has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before."

***

After this confrontation with the bodhi of the wood, I no longer stalked impatiently ahead of my lost children of the forest, but walked among them, addressing my spiel to an audience other than myself. And while nothing could yet quite emerge from my lips that was not cobbled together out of swatches of the only tale I had to tell, I grew self-conscious of the fact that I was practicing the ruespieler's art, if for a commodity of far more absolute importance than ruegelt. And when one of my charges threatened to stray, or showed reluctance to leave a flower of our feeding, I hectored the same as harshly and insistently as was needful in tones and cadences one would apply to an unruly toddler who had yet to learn the lyric of the human song.

Thus did we proceed eastward toward the worlds of men, and thus did I sow all unbeknownst the seed of the Word in this long-fallow ground.

The same was to sprout at a carmine flower at which we had been feeding in the company of two nearly terminally torpid human creatures who had long since gorged themselves to impressive obesity on the strangely meatlike pulp of the sweet blue fruit.

Rollo, it seemed, had encountered a flower whose fruit chanced to contain molecules too puissantly congruent with the ideals of his metabolism. With unwholesome and unsettling avidity did he rip chunks of the tough chewy pulp out of the fruit and gobble them down, and when it came time to depart, he was entirely deaf to my entreaties.

"Arise, Rollo, to follow the yellow, for the sun calls you down from your ancestral trees to follow the Yellow Brick Road!" I fairly shouted in his face at length, and when this too he ignored, I shook him by the shoulders, and then turned his vision sunward by main force.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the sun, follow the yellow ..." I began to chant over and over again, for this indeed was the most primal version of the tale, the synergetic mantra which had roused me from just this condition, vraiment, from worse.

I continued to chant, pointing to the sun with one hand, and keeping his face turned toward it with the other. When all at once, I noticed a bizarre change in my own voice, for on certain syllables the single note of my vocal cords seemed to be accompanied by a harmonic chord on another instrument.

Some moments later it dawned on me that this was more, or less the case.

While my efforts to fix Rollo's attention on our song of the road and the rising sun thereof had thusfar been ineffective, Dome and Goldenrod had out of traditional tribal custom fixed their gaze thereon as soon as they had heard a few turns of the traveling mantra.

So too had Moussa.

But, ah, Moussa, Moussa my appointed namesake, raggedly, atonally, blinking with the effort, had begun to chant.

"Yellow ... follow ... yellow ... follow ..."

A moronic sprach mayhap, but certainement a sprach in the Lingo of man.

Seizing upon this amazing event, I fitted my own voice to this simple drone, waving my arms like an orchestral conductor at Dome and Goldenrod, up and down with the beat.

"Follow ... yellow ... follow ... yellow ..."

At length, Dome joined in, and once there were three of us, Goldenrod soon enough followed. And finally, roused at last by the communal efforts of his tribal siblings, Rollo gave over his eating, rose to his feet, set his eyes upon the sun, and began forming flaccid and silent simulacra of the syllables with his own pulp-smeared lips.

***

While the utility of applying this monotonous two-note chant whenever one of my charges began to fall behind or threatened to be captured by a flower proved admirably efficacious, the esthetic excruciation of it from the point of view of the ruespieler hardly rendered it suitable for a permanent song of the road, and so I continued to spiel the tale to them whenever I could, rather than make the sacrificial effort to keep them chanting.

For this I was to be chided more than once by certain mages in the Clear Light who informed me that I should have been much more diligent in my efforts to restore their powers of speech. I would counter, now as I did then, which is to say that in spite of my laxity and indifference to the approved therapeutic methods, they began to speak anyway.

If true speech it may be styled, a point of some dispute in scientific circles even today. Certainement, the sounds that Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and Moussa began to make as I spieled them through those last days on the Bloomenveldt were undeniably in the form of words, and at the end, the tribal vocabulary contained nearly a dozen of these, though only Moussa was master of them all.

"Follow ... yellow ... sun ... road ... Piper ... fortune ... Bloomenkinder ... children ... far-flung-worlds-of-men ..."

That was about the extent of it, and certain authorities were to claim that this vocabulary consisted of precisely those sounds which the teller of the tale repeated most frequently and with rhythmic emphasis, which is to say that much the same effect could be achieved with a tribe of parrots. Indeed I was once told that one of these worthies actually produced a cageful of aviary babel with just the same vocabulary to prove his point.

But when at length we finally reached the coastline, unlike parrots, my Children of Fortune were quite able to use their few poor words to make their feelings plain, or so in my heart did it seem to me.

Sunset had come the night before upon a Bloomenveldt lying under a thin cloak of fog, so that the sharp line of the horizon had disappeared into vague green mists for several hours before darkness. Morning awoke me with the wan yellow light of dawn, just as the rim of the sun was beginning to peer over the line of the eastern horizon. The fog had long since gone, the pale sky was brilliantly clear, and one by one my fellow creatures were beginning to arise from the perfumed sleep of the Bloomenveldt.

Then, as the true blaze of sunrise arose above the last vestiges of night, a brilliant mirrored sheen fairly exploded into existence as the sun emerged from it in a visual paean to glory. For halfway to the horizon, the leafy green plain abruptly ended, and a sea of rippling silvered flashes began.

"Yellow ... sun ... Piper ... fortune ...

Rollo, Dome, Goldenrod, and Moussa stood beside me as we watched the sun of our fortune arise at last over the eastern ocean.

Did they truly perceive it as I did? Did their minds contain some dim memory that the line between the Bloomenveldt and the sea was the visual dividing line between the forest of the flowers and the sapient worlds of men? Je ne sais pas, but tell me not that they could not entirely perceive that the tale of the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt had led them to a vantage from whence they could see the promised land where the Bloomenveldt of the spirit ended.

"Follow fortune, follow yellow!"

"Piper of the Bloomenkinder!"

"Far-flung-worlds-of-men!"

"Fortune Children follow yellow!"

Was it in truth only my sapient imagination overlaying random parroting with the exultation of my own spirit that spoke to me as I watched them babble their excitement at the sight of the ocean? In truth, as some would say, might a cock have also greeted the sunrise thusly, and with the same degree of sincere enthusiasm?

My spirit tells me not, nor did my eyes fail to see mouths rippling in what might have been attempts at smiles, nor was I deaf to gurgling sounds which might have been their happy laughter.

Certainement there was more than the spiritual vacuum behind the speech of a parrot in their eyes as one by one they came to look directly into my own.

"Piper!"

"Yellow!"

"Fortune!"

"Follow!"

"Vraiment, follow the yellow, my Children of Fortune," I told them, "for we lost children of the forest have now found ourselves."

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow!"

"Children found!"

"Follow Yellow Brick Road!"

They were more than human parrots; at the very least they were eager puppies, yipping and dancing to reach the end of the trail. And so did we set out for the last time into the Bloomenveldt sunrise toward the worlds of men.

Within a few hours, the interlocking foliage of the Bloomnveldt thinned out into a treacherous webwork of branches and long falls to the forest floor which we dared not approach. This was as far eastward as we could go. From this vantage, there was no seacliff plunge of perspective, nor any beach in view to mark the melding of land into sea. Some thousand meters before us, the irregular green sameness of the flower-speckled Bloomenveldt gave way to the shimmering clarity of an ocean under a cloudless sky with the clean sharpness of Occam's razor-edge.

And along this razor-sharp interface, all roads led to Rome. For a few moments, my tribe milled about in confusion, for they knew not where next to go.

"Fear not, for you are no longer lost children of the forest, my Gypsy Jokers," I told them as I turned to the south and began the final march. "Follow the Pied Piper of the Bloomenveldt!"

"Follow yellow, follow Piper! Moussa began to chant as she fell in step beside me, as if acknowledging to the both of us that the Word of the Piper superseded the mute vector of the sun.

"Follow yellow, follow Piper!" the others chimed in, tentatively at first, and then, as if achieving a level of abstraction sufficient unto resolving the conflict of tropisms by bestowing the yellowness of the sun and all that it implied upon the voice that they followed, with more certain enthusiasm.