The Smell of Telescopes (21 page)

The trivial being in question cleared its throat. “Sure, and it’s a long way from Monmouth. Hiding in the spokes of the waterwheel by Monnow Bridge, I was. Managed to cut a length of rope and suddenly found myself in this cavern of polychromic drunkards. Broke a fang on an iris, I did. You may arrange compensation in opals.”

“Hiding, eh? Why weren’t you in the market?” I picked him up by the nose and inverted him, but his pockets were empty. “Cheating honest folk is your standard pastime, not lurking.”

“You don’t understand. The market’s been taken over by gnoles. They have driven us out. We are unemployed.”

“Don’t be ludicrous. Gnoles live in Zipangu. That’s where they went after they were successfully burgled by Nuth. Who did you steal this lie from? Answer quickly, my beige napkin.”

“It’s true. The place is crawling with them. Please don’t wipe your chin with me! Of course gnoles live in Zipangu, but now Zipangu lives in Monmouth! It’s the waterwheel’s fault.”

I remembered the machine and Monnow Bridge, where Owain had knocked out my canine. The imp and I had two traumas in common: sore gum and exile. Yet he was enlightened and I was confused, so our woes were not entirely matched. Nonetheless, a speck of empathy required me to put him down and smooth the petals of his sunflower jerkin. An impulsive movement to gain time to ponder, to subdue my tongue for a more sober interrogation, but the imp satisfied my unvoiced queries without prompting; the wind of his trip had oiled his lips. Monmouth had changed a great deal, he insisted. It was built on three separate levels now, each precariously balanced on the other, parts of which had given way so that vast tracts were jumbled up together. There was the original town at the base, then the island of Zipangu, held over it by the iron poles of the market stalls, and a lush kingdom of hemlock forest over this, supported by the pagodas of Zipangu and trailing tendrils of vegetation over the rim. All very peculiar, but life continued much as before, except for the imps, who couldn’t compete with the aggressive gnoles. Famished, they wandered the suburbs of the town, seeking scraps to eat. Because imps are good at selling rope, and gnoles have been known to express an interest in it, our yellow friend resolved to obtain a piece and win their trust. For some reason, there were three extremely long lines wrapped around the waterwheel: two were tangled and beyond rescue, the third met his knife.

“It didn’t help much,” he muttered. “I bet the gnoles will be after me now for leaving Monmouth without a permit. Gross dictators, they are! Sipping sword-flavoured tea all night!”

The last thing I wanted was a troupe of gnoles taking over the pub, spoiling my project. With a flourish, I drew out my flawed blueberry pie from a secret pocket. “Perhaps I can assist you, lemon fool. Allow me to stain your skin with a fruity filling.”

I lifted the lid off the crust and he nodded.

“Disguise me as a blue dwarf? Superb!”

“Climb inside and splash around for a while.”

The operation was simple but effective. The instant he finished his blueberry ablutions, he was a yellow imp no longer.

Just then, there was a rumpus from outside. Not the gnoles, but the slaves, who were tired of erecting buildings and wanted to rise up in revolutionary ferment. Draping his loosened eye over his left wrist like a dishcloth, Emyr went to deal with the problem. I could hardly bear to look at him now, though he had always been ugly, and was delighted for him to go.

Returning with a worried squint (which was engineered between finger and thumb) he told us that the slaves were planning to storm the tavern and kill the verger and I. They had finally made the logical connection between our appearance and the theft of their meals. Before we arrived, beer and cakes vanished mysteriously. Now they gorged at our expense and naught went missing. So there had to be a link between our existence and this anomaly: a link to be severed with many blows of a shovel.

The blue dwarf formerly known as a yellow imp touched my knee. “You did me a favour. Let me now return it.”

And he walked out of the building. There were screams, so muted and ethereal that I thought he was kicking moths, then he came back in, tiny hands slick with a dull, viscous fluid.

“The colour of my skin is different. But I still have the skills of an imp. We are the finest pickpockets.”

“I assume you picked something else today?”

He smirked. “Livers. Do you have a loaf of bread?”

I didn’t know whether to hug or retch all over him. But Emyr tapped my shoulder. “Without a workforce, we can’t finish the town! I refuse to mix cement, heft bricks, mend trowels.”

“No need,” I replied. “Everything’s turned out for the best. We may not have a town, but we’ve got a quaint village, and that should attract pastors even more quickly. Let’s have a pint while we wait for the knock on the door. It’ll take about a month.”

And so it did. Yet when I answered the rhythmic fist, as ready to kiss a sacred hem or sing a pious hymn as sign a hissing pie, if one ever baked my way, I found no column of holy agents but a vision of feminine beauty beyond any succour of the Church. A radiant maiden, stronger on radiance than maidenliness, and full of glee, all light and smiles and frolicsome as a young fawn, loving and cherishing all things within reason, and I jumped up high to clap my clumsy hands. 

“Fair Myfanwy! You’ve come back to me at last!”

“Not quite, Gruffydd. But an explanation is in order. I followed an unwound turban to find this place. When the cable propelled the imp from Monmouth to Shropshire, a frayed end of his elaborate headwear caught in a waterwheel spoke and stretched into a yellow ribbon which led me here. Now let me tell you the part you’ve played in my little scheme. Remember when you romanced me with a carrot and clock? You lost your trousers and soul because of your lust, and when I exchanged my own to buy them back, a hatstand and three harpoons were thrown in. These simple items gave me an opportunity to improve intellectual conditions for the common folk of Wales. Before Owain, yourself and I rushed to the corners of the scalene world, I mounted a harpoon on each of our heads. Then I wrapped the ends of the trailing ropes around the waterwheel. My notion was for the barbs to stick in our destinations, the three points of existence, and for the turning wheel to gradually pull them together, so that the planet was no longer triangular but folded over like a samosa. That’s not as neat as a sphere, but Welsh mentality mustn’t be rushed. It should first be herded and dipped, then shorn of woolly ideas.

“I realise you are flabbergasted by the audacity of this operation. To be honest, I was unsure whether the Welsh were ready for such a giant leap in the science of geography. But I was tired of living in a country which still had a triangular planet. In every other nation, the world is round, like an orange. Only in Wales does it resemble a slice of pie. Of course, I feared you might spoil the venture, and so you did. Owain went to Zipangu, the eastern corner of the planet, and I reached Pennsylvania safely, the western corner. But instead of braving it out to Hyperborea, the northern corner, you stopped in Whitby. Then you inadvertently fixed your harpoon to a weak point by climbing through a window in a structure which broke free of the land and was drawn in without any background. So although two flaps of the triangle have come together in Monmouth, there is still a third jutting out into the cosmos, and Wales continues to lag behind its European neighbours. I make no mention of Shropshire, because it has an even more primitive conception of the world (a bubble in solid rock) and thus cannot be helped. Now I want you to come back with me, to put matters to rights. It’s your duty.”

Fumbling with my surplice, I cried: “You’re not going to send me to Hyperborea? What a fine woman you are!”

She nodded in agreement, turning her head one way and then another, so that her profile might have an airing. It was noble enough to be that of an empress of confections, and my heart yearned to be a berry beneath her crust, but she didn’t share my ardour, for her smile was utilitarian and would brook no syrupy emotion atop.

“It’s not sentiment, Gruffydd. The mess can be sorted out from your home in Monmouth, but I need you to operate the ovens. In return, I will help you conquer Owain and Tangerine Pan, his familiar. It’ll be the pie fight of the millennium! A prime example of batterpole, which is rougher than slapstick. Come with me, buffoon!”

I glanced at my verger for advice, but his expression was even more devious than Myfanwy’s. I knew he was formulating his own scheme when he answered: “Yes, let’s go back to Monmouth. But permit me to take Owain’s trousers first. It’s a kind of trophy.”

As we left, barman and dwarf ran up to me. I thought they wanted to commiserate, or wish me luck for the future. But what had really excited them was something far more selfish. Although his hanging orb oscillated like a pendulum, Emyr’s timing was bad.

“I’ve finally come up with a name for the pub! ‘The Plucked Eyeball’. What do you think? And my tiny friend here thinks ‘Purloin My Liver’ would be a humorous epithet for the village.”

“And accurate, because I intend to pick the livers of everybody who crosses into it,” added the blue dwarf.

“You still need a local clergyman,” I pointed out.

Myfanwy took my arm and we stepped out into the mundane wastelands. My verger skipped and bent to retrieve Owain’s trousers. They were stuck fast under the foundations and he had to strain hugely to free them. But the rewards of this toil were material.

“Look now, Gruffydd! They’re completely buckled!”

Lanolin Brows

A city made from wood. Not planks and boards nailed together, but carved out of a single pine block. Towers and temples, homes and shops, arcades with slender columns, windmills and taverns, concert halls and theatres, libraries of grainy books, squares and parks, all lovingly chiselled and planed and painted. Each oval cobble on every road is a protuberance on a whole body, not a separate element. The environment is integrated with itself. It is one. And there is no civil strife, for the inhabitants are also fashioned from wood, rooted in the ground, immobile and bevelled. A population of empty suits of armour, fixed in bustling positions at work and play. The outdoor cafés are full, the municipal buildings are packed with clerks, there is an audience at the opera, the jail has a prisoner, but none are true, all are varnished. 

The king of this timber metropolis stalks the alleyways with a saw. It is his token, as it was for Shamash, god of the Sumerian sun, who cut the days into dark and light. But he, the mortal, is a Swedish carpenter and knows nothing of deities other than Woden, who is jointed and rotten and felled. The teeth of his blade are blunt, for they have rasped much, feasting on the knots of his domain, but a symbol may serve on a loftier level. Infrequently, as he patrols the pavements, he adjusts a member of the public, perhaps notching lines of age on smooth cheeks, amputating a finger to simulate a plague, trimming a splintered beard. At night, when he surveys the city from the balcony of his palace, he can be assured it is changing in accordance with standard time. To thrive quicker than his subjects is one of his worst terrors.

His name is Lanolin Brows, though none of his people call him that. Once a pirate, now a potentate, his eye is frosted from winking slyly at the equator. It was not a safe gesture. The imaginary line is too bright at noon on a foaming sea. His memories of buccaneering are unhappy. When he followed Morgan to Puerto de Naos, creeping along the scurvy coast to Porto Bello, the captain ordered him off the ship into a canoe to attack the town more secretly, but the smaller vessel was chipped on the stern, a poor piece of work; he disapproved. His protests were disregarded. The life of a craftsman among ruffians is difficult. The arquebus nestled so awkwardly in his arms that he cast it away and charged with his tools. A drill does not need reloading. Nor a vise virtue. Glue flicked in a face is also a sticky end for expressions.

The inhabitants were asleep when the carnage began. So he fashioned cabinets from chests and spittoons from snores, unopposed. Shaping death is not as comfortable as producing chairs, but his mercy was sanded away in a professional frenzy. The richest citizens woke and hurled valuables down wells to cheat the rovers of booty. He peered over the edge of one, at a bobbing casket of pearls, wondering how to hook it out with an axe, but his musings were pounded out of his mind by a gold candelabrum which fell from the upper storey of a house. The woman who dwelled up there had mistaken his blond hair for reflected moonlight at the cistern’s bottom. From that moment he vowed never to rush into battle without armour, hewn from teak joists: helmet, greaves, cuirass. In the aftermath he span his lathe, filling the port with sawdust.

“Do you seek to choke the donkeys and prisoners? Do you not trust a swallow of grog as protection, ’Lin?”

“Not really, sir. It is inadequate proof.”

“Take care not to rot in the marshes of Panama. This raid is only a practice for our big act of bravado.”

And Morgan stomped off, to torment a captive nun. Truly Porto Bello was a dry run for an assault on the Cup of Gold, as the urban wonder was mostly called, for the rum ration had been reduced and the Welsh corsair wanted all blood thinned with water or knives, depending on nationality. The rovers ridiculed the grog which substituted for the manly stuff; the Spanish had no more affection for the blades. When the armour was ready, the carpenter tried it on, to the amusement of barber and sailmaker, his closest friends. Spermaceti Whiskers wanted to shampoo the visor, but was dissuaded by a hammer; Thanatology Spleen hoped to stitch a surcoat, but was repelled by a mallet. The suit moaned as it moved, but it was hot in winter, cool in summer, and deflected grapeshot quite as well as an iron shell. Also it floated across rivers.

The sound of wooden armour, though muted, was unique enough to give him nightmares of thorns. Now, in his own city, the kindling chords were everywhere with the wind. When ice blew down from the mountains, all his subjects would creak together. Then he would leave the palace balcony in numb anxiety and return to his throne. His saw doubled as a sceptre, his head as an orb. He listened to the crowd and it seemed they were hailing or jeering him; he could not judge. No civil strife? Ha! So what if they grew sufficiently high to oust him? Pine versus teak; he was tougher but they were more. It hardly mattered he was a benign dictator, for history is a chisel and gouges the pith with the worm. A sculpted republic might arise, with equal rights for all branches of society; a dismal prospect, against the grain of honest politics.

Lightning licked the remote peaks, adding a revolutionary lustre to the quadrangles beneath the palace, each nested inside the others like a conjuror’s pockets. The creosoted figures did not move in the storm, but their shadows were active, darting about the squares like anarchists. He opened the doors of his treasury, cast handfuls of wooden coins over the side. The greedy outlines slid to gather them. Then the storm passed and the mob was mollified. An awful situation when a king must bribe his own followers! And who would look after Linopolis without his munificence? A canker would set in: good for mushrooms, who never had a capital to call their own. Perhaps it was time to revalue his remaining funds, to etch a higher figure on the discs? Florins as big as tables and worth a million dinners might satisfy them for years.

He refused to doff his armour even in bed. Not only because of fear of assassination; but because it was too tight to remove. The teak was not dead when he whittled it; now the roots had penetrated his lower orifice, deriving sustenance from whatever he digested. Royal banquets kept the new growth supple and fast. Finally, the visor sealed itself and he was compelled to bore holes in the beak to breathe. He thought of himself as a man with a pair of skeletons, bone and furniture. Not that he had wanted to take it apart even when disrobing, or diswardrobing, was feasible. Too secure he felt inside, unable to recollect how he coped without it, on the Main or off. Damage to the suit healed naturally; bark wandered his torso. Women were denied him, for the brothels of the Windwards did not believe money grew on trees, so love too was safer.

In Panama such precautions saved his skin, for he was hiding behind a sack of wool when a cannonball burst this defence and knotted him with unspun fleece. His porous armour drank the oil of the lambs’ curls until it was saturated. He had carved a frown into his helmet, for he reckoned it unseemly to lurch into a fight without features, or with a smile, and the grease collected in the grooves of his forehead, staining his brows. Thus did he earn his alias, when his original name was forgotten. Rather luckier than the cook, who absorbed the contents of a sack of sugar with his bare face, mainly on shut eyelids! The granules studded him sweetly, including the onion he wore on his shoulder. Later, sparks from a pistol caramelised this vegetable and his lashes. French rovers were charmed by him after that, for cultural reasons.

The crew maintained that the siege was so bloody and traumatic they were shocked out of memory. The Swede did not allow this. It was not the scarmoge, the combat, which robbed them as they plundered, but a strange event which occurred in the ruins. Morgan had vanished with a woman, but returned with a mirror and blunderbuss. The mirror was a box with a tiny lever which, when pressed, created a flash. A minute later and a picture would emerge from a slot at the base of the machine. The captain claimed it was a slow looking glass, but the carpenter had seen a similar device in the observatory at Uppsala. It was, he realised, a new type of camera obscura, one which took solid images. Remarkable! And it had fallen from a flying galleon over Pennsylvania, which was a land of tears. Who could invent such a marvel? A mythic beast!

They sat and played with it, drinking coffee and waiting for Morgan to rescind the order stressing sobriety. So he would, in due course, but only with sherry. ’Ceti won the right to keep the box, for his barbering days were not yet numbered. Before this came the episode which the Swede held responsible for the amnesia which gripped them all. The captain put away his shame and showed them how a lady kissed. None of the other crew had won girls, but the Welsh rascal was insensitive enough to parade his success with his spit. One at a time, he fixed his wet mouth to the lips of his men, wielding his tongue like a cutlass, winning every duel. Such childish laughter! The barber and sailmaker and cook snorted with irony, but the navigator accepted his attentions with a serious countenance and emerged from the fondle disappointed.

“Your turn now, ’Lin! Raise your leafy casque! How else may I reach your ruby pout? What a coy criminal!”

“Be gentle, sir. You have rough stubble.”

“That’s what a pillaging life is about. A chin like the ocean. This mattock should lever open your helm.”

It felt more like a conversation than a smooch. As Morgan moved his lips, forcing his to writhe in tandem, silent words passed between them. The captain was telling him a secret, not tickling his tonsils! Then the course of his life was diverted, because he knew something which steered his hopes higher than Biscay waves. A nasty joy overwhelmed him, and all the crew. To dissipate it a notch, a puppet battle was arranged with the sailmaker. ’Tology won by cheating and their friendship became strained. Then the sherry was opened and sense was fully diluted. When he woke, he was reconciled to what he had learned. No longer a normal man, but not a full devil. Something in the middle. And because only rovers can live in romantic mischief, not unholy savants, the disintegration of the company was inevitable. Panama was the limit.

They separated in Jamaica. ’Ceti and ’Tology, the only two he cared to keep in touch with, bought property in Pirano and Wolkenstein. It was vital they went somewhere they would not be recognised. But he, engulfed by his armour, was able to return to Uppsala. His disguise was stiff and much admired. His old neighbours did not berate him for turning bad, for they could not identify him. He lumbered down the alleys like a sentient log, feeling at home on the roof of the Gothic cathedral, the Domkyrkan, with its gargoyles. But the city had altered. There were less faces from his childhood. New people had taken over the public places. In his attic lodgings he sat on a barrel of gunpowder and fretted. This explosive was his pitiful reward for decades of service. Morgan had absconded with the pick of the loot back to Welsh hills.

On a ship, a community was sealed. A known quantity of souls pacing the deck. Recruits on the high seas were rare: an attacked galleon might supply an extra hand if he bragged a specific skill, but the majority of prisoners walked the planks he measured and hacked. And in port, unknown faces were expected, for Morgan tended to berth in cities they had never visited before. The problem with Uppsala was that it was one place which constantly evolved fresh inhabitants; this is the way it looked. Perched on the eaves of the Domkyrkan, the carpenter started to believe that new men and women were condensing from the dignified atmosphere which flowed into the sky from the open windows of the Carolina Rediviva, the college library. And when he descended to the level of the Linnaeus Gardens, the odd phenomenon was even more blatant.

He trembled under his armour in his room, so that the leaves on his head rustled and fell with autumn music. The teak was dying in the chill of the Swedish climate. Russet foliage littered the boards, mimicking an adventure to Maryland, when Morgan sailed them up the Chesapeake to meet Billy Barnett, an accomplice. They hugged an estuary bank, mast knocking trees so that a shower of muted colour celebrated their arrival. In this attic, however, the meaning was different. He went out to dine at a café below the castle. Already he was collecting details for his own capital. Over a bowl of fisksoppa, sucked up with a straw, he peered at the other customers. None were familiar, yet he had eaten in this restaurant every day since his arrival. New people again! Immigrants? No, they spoke with local accents and fitted the customs.

They must have generated spontaneously inside the city. He realised this had always been true, that it was the same for all men. Go out into the streets of a town, the thoroughfares of your home, and glance at the faces which pass close. They will be mostly unknown. Repeat the exercise on the morrow, and there will be a different set of cheeks, noses, eyes, equally mysterious. Surely these are just citizens you have not met? But the lie erodes on each successive venture, for the faces, and the owners underneath, are always original, never the same. How can these strangers all fit inside one conurbation without becoming recognisable? It must be that they do not exist until you observe them! You invent them: they are your offspring! The explanation is shocking but logical, and there is no other. We are fathers between blinks.

The carpenter’s return to Uppsala had expanded its population to an unsustainable level. He had played the prodigal pirate for two months in his lodging at the corner of Svartbäcksgatan and Torbjörnsgatan, near to where he had grown up. At dawn he rose and dusted himself with a napkin, then staggered north along the river to the Gustavianum, braving insults from children who did not tolerate teak pedestrians. He counted fifty or sixty new faces on the way. The panelled interior of his destination was good camouflage; he might pause here on the tiers of the Anatomy Theatre and spy on students arranging scalpels. Another seventy or eighty unique individuals! Later, a meal at Barowiak, together with ninety others, all unknown. Then rigid acrobatics on the Domkyrkan roof to work off a plate of köttbullar. A hundred worshippers!