Bloody Fabulous (23 page)

Werold next sought a place to set up business, and he was led to a narrow but luxuriously furnished shop and room above on Market Square, with a place to secure a sign so that it hung out over the street and would be seen by all. “As if I were a king” he protested in so few words that it would have shamed him, if he had been quoted in his Guild of expert exponential argufiers, but he was assured that he was the first argufier to ever have graced these parts. Indeed, no one had ever heard of argufiers, but all agreed that they must be very necessary, since he was one.

So.

Just before sunset on his first night in what the townspeople were pleased to call Pleasanz, the town’s newest inhabitant hung his sign. It said:

for all your

ARGUFIER, DISPUTATOR, PILPULIST, DISCEPTATOR, LOGOMACHIC, BELICOSSIC, WRANGULUMENTOR

~
needs
~

Werold of Ranug-a-Folloerenvy, MoA, HLD, GKoB

From the sign hung three iron rings framing objects finely wrought. In the left ring: a fork-bladed backstabber dagger. The middle held a scene as fine as lace: a man spitted over a small bonefire, flames curling from the eyes of the topmost skull. Suspended in the right ring: a simple vial. Each object in its ring was barred diagonally with a red-enamelled banner.

After Werold hung the sign he looked for a place to eat but didn’t find one, nor a place to buy anything to eat. So, lit by stars, he crept out of town and visited the riverbank again, where he ate his fill and made another bed hidden by a hedge, as now that he had position in Pleasanz, he could not be seen to be slumming.
Tomorrow,
he said to himself as he snuggled into the fragrant bedding,
I’ll find the measure of Pleasanz.
But just before he closed his eyes, he spied a scrap of bodice within arm’s reach, and dropped it into his waiting mouth where it dissolved and trickled down his throat in a manner like gold down a wishfulfilled miser’s.
If,
he mused as his throat convulsed on the remains of the taste of its tail,
this toothsome thing is not a Pleasanz cake, what marriage could there bake when a Pleasanz cake and wine, and my mouth meet?
(For Werold was at heart, a misunderstood poet.)

He woke bathed in sweat, and tried to jump off his bed, but his hands pushed through three skirts and stuck, and his chest pulled away the topmost’s elaborate decoration so well that he looked like he’d aged twenty years and grown a mat of curlicued white hair.

He had to use his arms like flails to beat his way out. Torn skirts flew everywhere, hitting the ground with thuds. He ran to the river’s edge where he jumped onto the backs of the nearest two fish and bent down to wash the icing off his chest. It was as hard to scoop up unsullied water as gleaning the mice from the rye in an opened barrel. He scraped at his chest, grabbed at his ankles where his galligaskins lazed—and was poised to run back to town, but the sight of the fish kept him longer, longer than he had meant, longer than he would have wished. They glistened in a slow turbulence, gulping their scraps of sodden clothing in such a desultory manner that he could see from the way their lips drew back: disgust. They lay on their sides, each fish’s one bulging eye so lacking in expression, it lacked only the flattening that death brings. All these bloated creatures almost still as paving stones seemed to yearn that fate of slow choking in a basket, to lie on a slab at the monger’s.

On an impulse, Werold tore the button from his jerkin and threw it out between the banks where the fish were so massed, the river was hidden below them. Before the button had a chance to hit a body, the river shattered upwards. Fish jumped as high as his shoulder. Bodies as big as his arced up and slapped down, roiled the water and rolled in the river, their great mouths snapping, fighting for that button till the banks were slick with water and mucked with sticky, slippery brown bits as shiny and toothsome as a rotting mushroom.

Werold turned away, sickened.

His stomach was now upset as a sober man’s.
I ate used clothing, like a fish!

On dry land, he spent an hour looking for just the right yesterday’s clothes, enough and good enough to make an outfit that could pass as fashionable, and fresh. When he finally found shoes modish enough, he next found a plain undecorated cloak. Then he stripped himself bare laying his cape, hat, jerkin, shirt, and boots upon the cloak. He balled his galligaskins and shoved them in his boots. Then with a look back at the fish, who he didn’t trust, and a unanswered question about the future—What of the people in this town to come, the limits of their discontent? In case he had to run, he shoved the bundle into the hedge as far as he could reach, at shoulder height. Only then did he dress in his strange but magnificent clothes. These new galligaskins were thick and soft, and stood upright as toy soldiers.

Back to town he walked, no longer needing pause to bend.

The morning was just getting a move on when he stood under his sign, where he was immediately surrounded by curious Pleasanzers—so many that he had to mount a barrel to explain what an argufier does, and what he could do to improve the lives of all who flourish here, in this
most pleasant town, if I may pun,
he smiled. His audience smiled back, but there were some raised eyebrows. “Perhaps you do not pun,” he bowed, in case some in the crowd were inclined to take offence. They looked so physically capable—if they spoiled to fight. He pointed out each swirly word in his sign and explained it bare. No one had ever heard or seen an Argufier, Disputator, Pilpulist, Disceptator, Belicossic, or Wrangulumentor.

To illustrate the wonders that his advocacy would bring, he then pointed to the iron-circled red-enamel bannered wrought-iron objects creaking merrily under the sign. His explanation had always worked before because what they showed, and their barring, spoke plainly to everyone who couldn’t read in Ranug-a-Folloerenvy (and that meant pretty much everyone). But the people in Pleasanz, though most fragrantly and exquisite equipped, knew nothing of barring, let alone backstabbers, fork-bladed or not (Someone held up a butter knife and asked, “You mean us to use our fingers?”). They smiled and clapped when Werold said “bonefire”, and an elder showered compliments at the graceful curls of flames shooting from the topmost skull, but this could not cover up their embarrassment of befuddlement at the bonefire itself and the man slowroasting over it on the spit, which they thought he was clasping, an urge they assured the newcomer they were free of.

And “No wine?” asked one worried Pleasanzer about the vial. Poison was too foreign a something for them to understand.

So Werold ended up saying that these portrayals were too ancient for him to know, but that the work he did was too modern and necessary for anyone in Pleasanz to be concerned about such old ways,
so consider them effuzlements of portriment, he said. That, invermore, by the by when all is said and done . . .

The Pleasanzers were most pleasant, but they were drifting off. Werold had begun to treat them as he did an argument from a rich man,
by the word impregnable.
Panicking, he employed yet another argument without meaning, but this one contained the word
today.

The result was faster than a new fashion sighted in Ranug-a-Folloerenvy.

Werold learned in moments that
Today
was the Pleasanzers’ most important word, concept, creed, bond, promise, source of panic, pride, and aspiration. Everything in Pleasanz revolved around
today.
So much so that he got so much work that first today, and the next, and the next, that he had never been so busy.

They paid well, too: anything he asked. They didn’t want to bargain, never cried poor. Pleasanzers carried wads of paper money that they liked to stuff their clothes with, pulling notes from sleeves and hat brims as often as a pocket.

Within days, Werold the Argufier had forgotten he’d ever been called Galligaskins. He was rich, and not only that—so well respected! Since no one had ever had a dispute here, they left them all to him. He proposed, and they paid. He crafted arguments that spread a web across Pleasanz more interconnected and elaborate than that of the most flamboyant spider. So complex were his arguments, so refined that sometimes he cried reading them, they were so perfect.

Like all perfections, however, this was flawed. Each Pleasanzer wanted Werold to argue: for each, an argument a day. If they could not get him to make an argument, they wanted what they considered the next best things, in the order of his sign: a disputation, pilpulation, or . . . If he was too busy to make them one of those, a . . . And if he couldn’t fit any of those in, everyone settled for a wrangulumentation because, as everyone said within a week of his setting up, “Fie if anyone this side of the firmament is as great a wrangulumentor as Werold of . . . where this Master hails.”

Within two weeks he had so much work that he had no time to count his money and no time to buy a trunk, so he began to stuff it in his chimney. He was so happy at first that he had no time to worry. On the twenty-second night, however, for no reason attached to the number 22 as far as he knew, the fault faced him, as big as that crack opens between your feet on the upper story of your house, and yawns wider . . .

Everyone in Pleasanz just hired him to be agreeable. No one cared about what arguments he made. “They pay me to see the pleasure in my face,” he grizzled, grabbing a wad of money clogging the fireplace, and tossing it in the dusty air tinged, as always, gold from the Pleasanz dust of disintegrating gingerbread: rye, cardamom, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, mace. Werold guessed the rest, but he had never found any place where Pleasanz cloth was made, let alone where all the gorgeous raiments were created. He never even found a poor, cross-legged Pleasanz tailor. And what town doesn’t have a wealth of those?

Though he sought, wandering alone in the hours when the population slept, those places of creation—cloth and clothing—they were not the only places he sought but never found. They were minor searches, to satisfy his curiosity. Sating hunger was something else. Being a prominent new citizen, as everyone assured him that he was—he could not say to anyone, “If you please, where do you buy your meat and cakes?” The market that he stared out at, only sold shirts and skirts and cloaks. Not an egg. Not a hen. Not a fish or cake nor cabbage. He could not find another market.

As to a place where he could drink a drop of ale, that was hidden, too. He could smell, at times, a glorious ferment that insinuated itself past the stench of gingerbread—but could he find a tavern? No. Nor a place to buy a slice of pease pudding or a pig’s knuckle; nor could he even hear a woman selling pies. Werold could find not a scrap of food in Pleasanz, and was so well bred, everyone said, that he was too encumbered by respect, to ask.

At night, instead of following Pleasanz custom and tossing all his wearings of the day out the window onto the street below for the rubbish collectors to take out to dump at the river—every night he ate just enough to sate his hunger without causing his stomach to revolt. He had to pinch his nose as he ate. To stare at the beauty of the collar of the day, a lace of crisp rolled wafers hung together with suspended loops of icing—then to break it apart wafer by wafer and shove them in his mouth, where his teeth crunched the brown lace, and the loops melted on his tongue while he tried not to retch. A fine shirt, he bunched into a ball and squeezed till it was a pill that he swallowed. At first, these were the easiest to digest, the thicker clothing being too hard to keep down, but by the twenty-first night, he was so hungry he ate a whole padded jerkin, and then worried himself to sickness at the thought that a collector might notice that he was not discarding his dailies as he should.

Maybe the rumour would go around that he did not dress freshly. Maybe he would be unwelcome soon. Maybe he would starve here, in abject wealth. For he had nothing to spend the money on, except for his daily order of wearables—the richest available, only what was expected of him—delivered as was the custom, on the doorstep at dawn.

Come the next night, the twenty-second, he could not eat a thing. He picked up a brilliant argument and tossed it to the floor.

Then he picked up a wad of money, and tossed that upon the argument. He turned his head to the door, opened it and did not look back. He met no one as he walked out of Pleasanz, and his gingerbread soles made no sound on the cobblestones. Out of the town gate he went without looking back at its great smiling face. Along the road he went, till he reached again, the riverbank.

He stripped, tossing everything into the river, and rolled on the dew-laden ground till the revolting smell of Pleasanz had rubbed off.

Then he reached into his hiding place in the hedge and pulled out his bundle.

Rain had made its way past the thorns and leaves. The cloak had been sopped as bread in milk, then dried as a crust. Then it had split, and its pieces grew a velvety coat of blue-green mould. He opened it on the grass. There were his travelling boots, mouldy but still good for a thousand leagues. Their outsides stunk of gingerbread, but tucked inside each was a galligaskin, the hose soft and thick and unable to stand as ever, and though spotted with mildew, not smelling at all of Pleasanz. His shirt, jerkin, cape, and hat stunk. Though the gingerbread cloak was also green with mould on its inside, the smell of those hideous spices stuck to the clothing like an evil curse. In a fury, he tossed shoes, shirt, jerkin, cape and hat high, over the hedge. Then he sat on the grass and shoved the balled stockings in his face.

These galligaskins were moist and rich with the scents of his unwashed traveller’s feet.

He dropped one ball in his lap and tore at the other one till he ripped it into pieces in the more worn and rotted places, the feet and inner calves. He stuffed a piece into his mouth. He sucked it, rolled his tongue around it and through the holes in the knitting. He put his hand up to his mouth so that he could breathe out upon his palm, and inhale.