What terrible secret did King Gling
Her father possess
There in his tower
At the very heart
Of the world’s greatest kingdom?
But no, he was a king
Without any terrible secrets,
For his daughter had been
Stolen, and lovely she was,
The princess whose name was…
Missingla
And this is her tale known to all
As Missingla’s Tale
Beloved daughter of King Gling and
Queen Longhair,
A princess in her own right
Was Missingla of the shapely shoulders
Royal her eye lashes
A jeweled crown her sweet lips”
Oh dear, I just added those two lines. I could not help it, and so I do urge their disregard.
“Was Missingla of the shapely shoulders
Stolen by the king in the kingdom
Beyond the mountains between the lake
In the Desert of Death
Where almost nothing lived
Or could hope to live
Even should we live in hope”
Ah, and again.
“and this king his name was…Lope
Who bore a sword twice as tall as he
And the armour of an ogre made of stone
And cruel was his face, evil his eyes,
As he swam the lake at night
To scale the tower to steal her away
Missingla-oh sorrow!”
The Entourage cried, “Oh sorrow!” and even Purse Snippet smiled over her secretive cup of tea.
But she was waiting oh yes, for
Cruel and evil as he was, so too rich
Beyond all measure ruling the world’s
Richest kingdom beyond the mountains
And so not stolen at all, sweet daughter
No! Missingla Lope they swam away!
In the chaos that ensued, Brash thrashed at the strings of the lyre until one broke, the taut gut snapping up to catch him in the left eye. Steck’s crossbow, cursed with a nervous trigger, accidentally released, driving the quarrel through the hunter’s right foot, pinning it to the ground. Purse sprayed a startlingly flammable mouthful of tea into the fire, and in the flare-up Apto flung himself backward with singed eyebrows, rolling off the stone he’d been perched on and slamming his head into a cactus. The host’s hands waved frantically since he could no longer breathe. The Entourage was in a groping tangle and somewhere beneath it was Nifty Gum. Tulgord Vise and Arpo Relent were scowling and frowning respectively. Of Tiny Chanter, only the soles of his boots were visible. Midge suddenly stood and said to Flea, “I pissed myself.”
By this extraordinary performance Brash Phluster survived the twenty-third night and so would live through the twenty-fourth night and the following day. And as he opened his mouth to announce that he wasn’t yet finished, why, I did clamp my hand over the offending utterance, stifling it in the rabbit hole. Mercy knows a thousand guises, say you not?
Madness, you say? That I should so boldly aver Brash Phluster’s suicidal desire to further skin himself? But while confidence is a strange creature, it is no stranger to me. I know well its pluck and princeps. It bears no stretch of perception to note my certain flair in the proceeding of this tale, for here I am, ancient of ways, and yet still alive. Ah, but perhaps I deceive you all with this retroactive posture of assuredness. A fair point, were it not for the fact of its error in every regard. To explain, I possessed even then the quiet man’s stake, a banner embedded deep in solid rock, the pennants ever calm no matter how savage the raging storms of worldly straits. It is this impervious nature that has served me so well. That and my natural brevity with respect to modesty.
Upon recovery, whilst in relief Brash Phluster stumbled off to vomit behind some boulders, Calap Roud made to begin his tale. His hands trembled like fish in a tree. His throat visibly tightened, forcing squeaking noises from his gaping mouth. His eyes bulged like eggs striving to flee a female sea-turtle’s egg hole. The vast injustice of Brash Phluster’s dispensation was a bright sizzling rage in his visage, a teller’s tome of twitches plucking at each and every feature so fecklessly clutched beneath his forehead. He was not holding up well to this terrible pressure, this twill or die. Unraveled his comportment, and in tumbling, climbing pursuit a lifetime of missed moments, creative collapses, blocks and heights not reached, all heaved up at this moment to drown him in a deluge of despair.
He was the cornered jump-mouse, the walls too high, the floor devoid of cracks, and all he could do was bare his tiny teeth in the pointless hope that the slayer looming so cruelly over him was composed of cotton fluff. Ah, how life defends itself! It is enough, oh yes, to shatter even a staked man’s heart. But know we all that this modern world is one without pity, that it revels in the helplessness of others. Children pluck wings and when grown hulking they crush heads and paint rude words on public walls. Decay bays on all sides, still mourning the moon’s tragic death. Pity the jump-mouse, for we are ourselves nothing other than jump-mice trapped in the corners of existence.
In his desperation, Calap Roud realized his only hope for survival would be found in the brazen theft of the words of great but obscure artists, and, fortunate for him, Calap possessed a lifetime of envy in the shadow of geniuses doomed to dissolution in some decrepit alley (said demises often carefully orchestrated by Calap himself: a word here, a raised eyebrow there, the faintest shakes of the head and so on. It is of course the task of average talents to utterly destroy their betters, but not until every strip of chewable morsel is stripped from them first). Thus lit by borrowed inspiration, Calap Roud gathered himself and found a sudden glow and calm repose in which to draw an assured breath.
“Gather ye close, then,” he began, in the formal fashion of fifty or so years ago, “to this tale of human folly, as all tales of worth do so recount, to the sorrow of men and women alike. In a great age past, when giants crouched in mountain fastnesses, fur-bedecked and gripping in hard fists the shafts of war spears; when upon the vast plains below glaciers lay like dead things, draining their lifeblood into ever-deepening valleys; when the land itself growled like a bear in the spring, stomach clenched in necessity, a woman of the Imass slowly died, alone, banished from her ken. She was curled in the lee of a boulder left behind by the ice. The furs covering her pale skin were worn and patched. She had gathered about herself thick mosses and wreathes of lichen to fight against the bitter wind. And though at this time none was there to cast regard upon her, she was beautiful in the way of Imass women, sibling to the earth and melt-waters, to the burst of blossoms in the short season. Her hair, maiden braided, was the colour of raw gold. Her face was broad and full-featured, and her eyes were green as the moss in which she huddled.”
A worthy theft to my mind, for I knew this tale. Indeed, I knew the poet whose version Calap was now recounting. Stenla Tebur of Aren managed to fashion a dozen epic poems and twenty or so hearth-tales (or garden-tales, as the Aren knew them, having long since abandoned such rustic scenes as sitting round a hearth beneath stars unmarred by city smoke and light), before his untimely death at the age of thirty-three. The altar upon which he breathed his last, I am told, was naught but grimy cobbles behind the Temple of Burn, and the breath whereof I speak was a wheezing one, thick with consumption. Alcohol and d’bayang had taken this young man’s life, for such are the lures of insensate escape to the tormented artist that rare is the one who deftly avoids such fatal traps. T’was not fame that killed him, alas (for, I would boldly state, death in the time of fame is not as tragic as it might seem, for lost potential is immortal; far greater the sorrow and depression upon hearing of a once-famous life ending in the obscurity of the obsolete). Stenla had given up his siege upon the high and solid walls of legitimacy, manned as it was by legions of jaded mediocrities and coddled luminaries. Forays of vicious rejection had crushed his spirit, until senseless oblivion was all he sought, and found.