Arnulf the Destroyer (2 page)

“They just can’t.”

“Why?” she said, forcing him to look her in the eyes.  “Only because we let it be.  Only because we let a bunch of swaggering bullies have their way.”

Randy’s face fell as realization dawned on him.

“You....you saw that,” he said more than asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” she assured him.  “You are still Arnulf.  I know you are.  You just don’t believe enough to let it out.  You just don’t....”

“Stop it,” he cut her off, a look of deep hurt on his face.

“I’m not Arnulf here,” he said.  “I’m just Randy.  That’s all I’ll ever be here.  And because you saw what happened I can’t be Arnulf there either, not anymore.” 

“Don’t say that Randy,” Jenna pled.  “Don’t let them take that from you.  Don’t let them kill that brave spirit I know is in you even now.  It’s with you always.  It’s who you really are.  I know it, and so do you.  You are Arnulf.”

“It was an escape,” Randy said.  “That was all.  In the Kingdom we can be whoever we want, we could get away from who we are here.  We have the illusions that we only dream about.  It doesn’t work here.”

“You say that but you won’t tell me why it has to be that way,” Jenna protested.  “Why do we have to let that happen?  Why do we have to let the bullies and the perfectly dressed girls tell us who we really are?  Why does it have to be their rules?”

“Look around you Jenna,” Randy said, spreading his arms to indicate the row upon row of efficient monotony.  “This is their world.  They are the kings and lords and we are the mailboys.  This is their domain.  They make the rules.  And their rules say they don’t like us and they won’t tolerate who we want to be.  So if we want to eat and live and pay their stupid bills then this is what we have to do.”

“What about the Kingdom then?” Jenna said as a last defense.  She felt the faith she had so recently built crumble beneath the defeat in Randy’s voice.  “Does the Kingdom mean nothing at all?”

“That’s where we go to get by,” Randy told her.  “To pretend the world is different.  We can pretend the world is a place for people like us.

“Don’t you see?  That’s why we couldn’t meet.  It’s ruined now.  The illusion is ruined.  When you look at me in the Kingdom you won’t see Arnulf.  You’ll just see Randy, the dork that always gets pushed around by dipshits.”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but didn’t.  He shook his head and walked back to his mail cart.  Shoulders slumped, head down, there was little Arnulf in him then.  Perhaps that warrior was only a phantom, a fiction.  Perhaps this world was too much for him.  Perhaps the Kingdom was not enough, an escape for rejects and misfits, for half-matured men and women who can’t bear the burden of real life.

Jenna almost let herself believe that grim realization.  She almost believed it....except.

Except.

His hair.

Bound though it was to please convention, Randy let his hair grow long.  It was the mark of who he was.  He let it grow and did not hide it in this world, but only kept it contained.  Jenna saw in that moment that the same was true of Arnulf.

“No,” she said emphatically, carrying all the conviction she felt.  Heads looked up from their work, wondering at this strange show of power.

Randy turned too.  He looked at her with the sad face of defeat.  But Jenna was not going to let that deter her.

“I know who you are,” she said, taking his hands and pulling him close to her, so close their bodies touched and their lips hovered inches from each other.

“I have seen you chase brave men from the field of battle.  I have seen women swoon at your feet.  Your enemies hate you with the vehemence of envy and your friends love you with the loyalty of admiration.  The spark of courage fires your heart, and your heart beats with the blood of a true warrior.”

“You are Arnulf the Destroyer,” she said, allowing her lips to drip with sensuality.  “I have seen your blade, and it made me tremble.”

Without waiting for a reply she turned and left.  Whether Randy or Arnulf would answer was up to him.  She, however, was Lady Eleanor of the illustrious House of Tyria.  That’s what she would be to believer and unbeliever alike.

The secretary stepped out from a corridor and crossed her arms at Jenna.  She opened her mouth to protest Jenna’s presence, but stopped when she saw something powerful in her bearing.  With head held high as only a noble lady can, Eleanor of Tyria did not dignify the secretary with a glance.  Such trifling people were far too below her even to notice, and she let it show.  No one dared confront her as she pushed through the glass doors.

It is a strange thing, the faith a man has in himself.  All at once it can be life or destruction, arrogant pride or the power of confidence.  In the briefest of moments it can flare or die.

For just one person to show faith in us can make all the difference.  And if that faith is from a woman a man loves, then the effect is boundless.  One person is all it takes, just one, and the character and strength that lies dormant within us, the true essence of our being, the greatness that God has endowed us with, can come struggling free from its confines of self-doubt.

It was that way with Randy Yarbis, mailboy.  For once someone in the world outside of the Kingdom saw him as he saw himself; saw him as he did in the moments when he nursed his deepest dreams, when he saw naked the potential that slumbered within him.  In the Kingdom others saw it, if only for moments.  There he could safely walk in his dream self, without the worry that someone would mock and tear him down and tell him that this deep and powerful man had no place in the world of real life.

Maybe it was this life that was the illusion, Randy thought as he undid his hair and let the golden locks fall free and glorious.  Maybe this world is the fiction, crafted by small men of small minds and small courage.  Frightened of the blaze of greatness in others they crafted this mediocre world where true passion, true love, even true life, cannot threaten their safe and predictable existence.

The sound of obnoxious laughter drew Randy’s attention down the corridor.  A young woman leaned over a copier.  Rich stood behind her using his hockey stick to lift up her skirt.  She turned to swat him away but he persisted.

Randy had witnessed scenes like this countless times, had even been a victim of them.  It had always seemed to him as a powerful bully taking his rights as strongest of the pack.  But now he looked through the eyes of Arnulf.  And a slight change in perspective altered everything.

Randy took hold of his mail cart and charged forward.  Bearing down on the fiend, the scoundrel who would stain the honor of an innocent maiden, he rumbled past the unsuspecting workers buried in their computers.  A battlecry erupted from his lips as the cart slammed into the unsuspecting Rich.  The hockey stick flew out of his hands as he thumped to the ground.

“Randy, what the hell?” Rich stammered, a look of confusion and panic etched in his features.

“I’m not Randy,” Randy said, the mad blaze of the warrior burning in his eyes.

“Who…who are you?” Rich asked.

Climbing up to straddle two desks, Randy looked over the sea of cubicles.  His prison.  His prison no more.

“I am Arnulf the Destroyer!” he cried out, brandishing the hockey stick above his head, the spoils of victory.

“All tremble ye who look upon my blade!”

Reading Wine

Most people believe I am magic.  That’s what it looks like to them at least.  But to me it comes as natural as breathing, reading the wine.

I didn’t name it reading wine.  Other men who saw what I do called it reading wine and the name stuck.  I guess that’s how things go.  I guess that’s how people try to grasp what they really don’t understand.  They slap a label on it as if a name says it all.  Never mind that most of our names are useless anyway.  That’s how they think at least, you name something and you’ve got it figured out.

Like reading wine.

I just call it tasting.  Then again, everyone calls it tasting, and everyone claims to do it.  But I found out real early in life that no one can do what I do.

I can assure you that all I do is taste.  I can’t read wine like I read a newspaper or you are reading these words.  I simply let the wine dance across my palate and I can taste every drop of rain, every ray of sunshine, the tilt of the earth, the coolness of the air, even the dirt on the hands that picked the grape.  It all jumps out on my tongue in an instant.  I promise it’s nothing magical.  All I do is taste.

By now you’ve probably figured out who I am, or rather, who I was.  Leo the Amazing Wine Reader I was called.  Without effort I became the world’s most renown food and wine critic.

Yes, I can do it with food too.  So of course I became a total food snob as well as popular critic.  But it wasn’t always for the wrong reasons.  With the kind of gift I have you can only eat free range chicken if you eat chicken at all.  It is simply impossible to force down even the finest roasted hen when all I can taste is the feces the bird waded through while penned up in the dark its entire six weeks of life.  Conventional vegetables are their own trial.  All I can taste of them is the powdery and antiseptic flavor of pesticides.

Wine, by far, is the true tasters delight.  Most people never experience the true complexity of taste.  And to understand wine is to understand what taste truly is.

With practice and training anyone can taste a lot in wine, can discover some of the complexities of the drink.  I can taste everything.  And I mean everything.  With one sip I can tell you not only the type of wine it is, but also the year, the location and every single condition that went into that wine from seed all the way to shipping.  I even once tasted a wine that had been heavily jostled or jarred.  The amused and incredulous wine merchant scoffed at me until he discovered that the delivery truck had, in fact, been in a wreck, and the bottle I tasted was from one of the few cases that survived intact.

I am always on the search for that one, exquisite taste of wine.  My whole body anticipates it whenever I open a new bottle and the aroma drifts into me.  It is wonder as well as excitement.  What is the story of this wine, I ask myself.  What are all the subtle parts that went in to making this vintage?

Deep down I am looking for the ultimate wine.  I want to savor that draft that holds everything within it, that when I taste it, I will know peace.  It may sound strange to hear me say this about wine, but you do not know wine as I do.  There is, however, something in your life that is like this, that drives you and has you searching.

Maybe you are a builder who longs to build that perfect house, a lawyer waiting for the case that will define your career, a musician who writes songs until he writes that one that he knows he is truly capable of.  Whatever it is that drives you, that has you searching, longing, expecting, it doesn’t change the fact that we are all driven to search, we are all driven by thirst.

What I thirst for is a wine that can fulfill the potential of wine.  It holds so much in it, but there has never been a wine I have tasted, no matter how full and rich it was, that did not have an emptiness to it.  It is hard to explain, but in every wine I can taste something missing, some element, some flavor, and essence that I know should be there though I don’t know what it is.

During my first trip to Europe I tasted the legendary 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.  A mentor of mine, an Italian we all called Santi, pulled a bottle from his labyrinthine cellar of old, dusty bottles one night.

“I have been waiting many years for this,” Santi told me as we sat on his balcony covered by a Roman night.  “But you are the only one who can truly appreciate this.  I have never seen a palate such as yours.  You were made to taste this wine.”

He looked at the bottle longingly, studying its worn label by the moonlight.  He was scared to open it.  Perhaps the anticipation would eclipse the reality.

“No one can say for sure what makes this wine extraordinary,” Santi mused as he carefully poured our glasses.  “1945 was a banner year for wine.  No one knows why.  Maybe you can tell us.”

As I drank that first swallow of ‘45 Rothschild I felt giddy.  This was, after all, considered one of the finest ever made.  And it certainly was exquisite.  I could taste an ideal year of sun and shade, a gentle rain, a goodness in the soil and careful cultivation.  But there was something else.

I had tasted it before yet always found it too subtle to identify.  It would escape my taste buds just before I could recognize it, slipping away like a phantom from the corner of my eyes. 

As I let this legendary wine roll over my tongue the elusive taste screamed out at me, filled the wine, burst from it.

What made the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild so incredible is that it tasted like hope.  There was no doubting it.  I could taste hope in that wine.

It all makes sense if you think about it.  It’s what makes wine so incredible.  A wine will absorb everything around it.  They call it the terroir, or lay of the earth.  Everything that surrounds a wine gives it a unique taste.  Until then I didn’t know how much.

In 1945 the land had been liberated from a terrible evil.  The Nazis had been pushed back and the people rejoiced.  The people were full of hope, and that hope bled into the wine.  Even the earth itself was joyful, I could taste it in that wine.  There is no doubt that it is the sweet savor of hope that makes 1945 such a wonderful year for wine.

People always ask me if that was the best wine I ever tasted.  They are always surprised that it isn’t the Mouton-Rothschild, and even more surprised when I tell them what was the best.  The best wine I ever tasted was from a little vineyard in Chile, a wine that hardly sold beyond the nearest town.  You would have never heard of it.

The wine came from an obscure, family winery.  I discovered it while traveling through the Chilean wine country for a wine guide I had been commissioned to write.  I saw the little plastic sign pitched on the side of the road and stopped on impulse.  The vintner was a stooped old man, his face hidden by wrinkles and his voice hoarse and trembling.

Yet there was a sparkle of joy in him as he showed me his estate.  Sometimes he would reach out and lovingly caress the vines we passed by.  With impeccable patience he walked me through his cellars and spoke gently in his thick accent about wine.

Finally he let me sample, and it was heaven.  At first it only tasted like a simple yet elegant wine.  The oak and earth accents were obvious, though not overwhelming.  It followed with an exotic taste that sent strange bouquets through my head.  And just as these tastes faded, touching my tongue with a musky finish, something incredible happened.

The ‘45 Rothschild took on the feelings of hope that surrounded it.  This wine, this humble Chilean vintage had all that and more.  It was more subtle and at the same time more profound and powerful.  A warmth suffused through me, like sunshine in the middle of winter.  I tasted a depth of the deepest earth, a richness of a thousand flavors, a feeling that swelled up from my heart and into my head.

I tasted love.

From this obscure vineyard I could taste the love that the old man poured into his wine, as if it were made from a part of his very self.  I tasted every second of patience, every caress of the grapes, every detail that he employed.  But more than that I could taste the pure goodwill for the people for whom he made the wine.  He made it for his family and friends, and from that he made love I could taste.

I wept with that first sip.  The old vintner smiled as if he knew.  And I think he knew what my tears meant.  I drank slowly, savoring every blessed drop in my tongue.  I felt like I lived his entire life in that glass.  When I had finished, I put the glass down and left without a word.

It is rare that I can taste emotion in a wine.  On occasion something powerful or primal bursts through.  The mouth feel changes such that something delightful or terrible comes through.  More often than not it is joy that I taste.  I have also detected bitter hints of pride or the sparkle of excitement.  When I taste from a new vineyard I can almost always pick up a hint of excitement, as if the vine is full of child-like exuberance.  Sometimes I taste sadness or even determination.  Only once have I tasted evil.  A mere sip and I was nauseous the rest of the night.  But the occasions are rare because the emotions must be strong to come out in the wine, even for my taste.

You would think that such an experience would make me happy; to have a talent such as mine.  I imagine some of you are even thinking to yourself how wonderful it would be to have my talent.  And yes, it is wonderful.  But I am still thirsty.  I am always thirsty.  There is something missing in the wine that I taste, in all of it, even the ones brimming with emotion.  No matter how robust the wine, I can always taste an emptiness.  If you still want to insist that I read wine then this emptiness I taste is like finding blank pages in the middle of a book.  You see writing before, you see writing after, but something crucial is missing in the middle.  I know something is supposed to be there in the wine as surely as if I came across blank pages in the middle of a book.  The pages stand for something that should be there, only I don’t know what.  I only know that I can taste the emptiness.

I could have gone on thirsting forever had it not been for the International Wine Festival in Paris, 2008.  There I tasted the most extraordinary, and dare I say, magical, wine that has ever passed over my tongue.  For there I finally found the wine that was full.

That night started much like those festivals always did.  Here we were, a pack of self-proclaimed elitists, turning our noses up at everything, desperate to find something that no one else likes, eager to trash what most enjoyed, and all the while feeling dizzy with our own sense of superiority and class.

I was their king, and had good reason to be.  No one had a palate like mine, and everyone knew it.  It filled me with such indescribably smug enjoyment to watch the snobs turn to sycophants when I approached, all of them eager to agree with anything I said about the wine.  If any of them had happened to identify a taste before I had tasted that wine then he would absolutely glow with self-delight.

The wines that year were pretty much the same as the previous years.  Every year was unique, so there were always different qualities to what I tasted.  But the same vineyards showed up year after year.  People would try to trick me, and were always disappointed.  One man even tried to fool me with some laboratory imitation of La Morachet.  I almost gagged on the flavor of plastic and ammonia and sterile solution.  His face showed a profound shock at my insight.  I knew immediately the swill had been cooked in a lab.  The poor scientist didn’t know what to make of it.  His mind was just too small.

As the event wore on I shooed away the entourage that hounded me.  For just a few moments I needed some solitude and fresh air.  Outside, the Parisian night smelled of cars and pollution, but if I inhaled through my mouth I could detect the savor of an old world, brim full of human drama.

Coming back into the building I noticed a stall sitting alone in a recess.  It was humble and wooden, no banners or decorations or gimmicky giveaways to attract the wayward.  It looked like a medieval merchant stall, weathered and full of character.  An old man sat there alone, gazing at the crowds that ignored him.  He reminded me of my Chilean vintner, the one who put love in his wine, so I sauntered over for sentiment’s sake.

“Ah, it’s Leo the Amazing Wine Reader,” the old man greeted me in a velvety smooth voice that carried undercurrents of sarcasm.  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

This was not unusual.  Most of the booths at the show eagerly anticipated my appearance.  A nod from me was enough to make the Expo a success for any vendor.

“Did you make this?” I asked as the old man poured from a decanter so old the glass had become clouded.

The old man laughed deep with a hint of hidden joy behind it.

“I could never make this,” he said.  “I am just a salesman.”

I wondered at the oddity of one so old still in sales.  He didn’t have any of the brash charisma a rep usually carried.  Quite the contrary, there was an assurance about him as if he could have cared less whether you liked him or his product.  But at the same time, his eyes fixed on me as I lifted the glass, and over the rim I could see he was intensely interested in me.  He didn’t look at me as the other merchants did.  They were interested in me because of the way I could hurt or help them.  This man stared as if he were interested in me, as if I were deeply valuable to him for a reason I could not fathom.

The old man’s eager and care-filled eyes stayed on me as I brought the glass to my lips.  His lips parted, mirroring my own motions, anticipating that first taste with me.  I smiled at his excitement, such a childish gesture in one so old.

“Drink deeply,” he instructed.  “Open yourself to it completely.”

The wine touched my tongue and at first I thought it was just a bad merlot.  I tasted the mild California coast, a cheap grape, overtones of nitrogen fertilizer, migrant worker hands.

I started to remark as such, to wonder aloud why this salesman had come to the Paris Wine Expo to push a ten dollar bottle of grocery store merlot on the world’s greatest wine taster, when my palate came alive.

Suddenly, I could taste something older, much older.  The Mediterranean sun danced across my taste buds, the salt sea air, an arid but fertile earth.  I tasted sawdust from a carpenter’s workshop.  I tasted miles of endless, burning wilderness.  I tasted a storm, a hatred, thousands of sweaty hands pressed close in, putrefaction and then cleanliness, disease and wholeness, crying, pleading, the awe of thousands, the cry of triumph.

Then deeper, a taste soaked deeper into me.  I tasted anxiety so acute I felt it myself, a distress I didn’t know was humanly possible.  The saltiness of sweat and tears filled with cold fear passed through me in a shudder.  I tasted the gall of betrayal, cruel laughter, unbridled rage.  I tasted the sting of leather, the crack of flesh tearing open.  I tasted a burden hefted through dusty streets, a breathlessness, the acrid tang of metal, despair, excruciating pain, thirst, the nausea of abandonment, and then.....

I almost choked.  My whole body trembled at that final taste.  I looked up at the old man in horror who was still smiling at me, sadly now.  Was he a madman?  Who would do such a thing?

“What do you taste, Leo?” the old man asked as dizziness overtook me.

I opened my mouth but no words came out.  I couldn’t answer.

“What do you taste?” he asked again.

I swooned and the world began to fade away.  Distantly I felt the floor beneath me and a rush of people.  Still that question screamed in my head.

What do you taste?

I tasted blood.

Over the next days everything tasted awful to me.  No matter what I put in my mouth it all felt rotten and dying.  It seemed I tasted blood everywhere.