‘You can if you discard the Monopoly board.’
‘And the television.’
‘Yes, and the television.’
‘And the internet.’
‘Yes and the internet.’
‘And the social media.’
‘Yes, definitely the social media.’
‘And then there’s abnegation of the ego.’
‘So we’ll leave him to Spravchik, then?’
They went to sleep thinking their own thoughts. Not for the first time, Probrius felt that if he could only stay patient things would work out nicely in his favour. Fracassus a saviour? Hardly. Fracassus a scourge, more like.
He listened to what the wind was saying, and it agreed with him.
Minister Spravchik would not hear of Fracassus and his party leaving just yet. He put a super-stretch government limo at their disposal, together with an interpreter and a guide to the country’s monuments and museums. Just as the car was about to pull away he ran out in front of it, waved it down, and jumped inside. He was wearing a track suit in the colours of his country and a bobble ski-ing hat. ‘You two can get lost,’ he told the interpreter and the guide, pointing his thumbs back over his shoulder.
Fracassus added another expression to his collection. You two can get lost. And then the thumbs. He’d use that one day.
‘What I think we’ll do first,’ Minister Sprachik told them, pouring himself a Slovitzvitzvička from the limo’s cocktail cabinet and knocking it back in one swallow, ‘is go up into the Blackbread Mountains where you will be able to see indigenous handicrafts being made and taste the local brew. Then if there’s time we’ll go back down into the White Canyon and do the same.’
He foamed with laughter, which Fracassus reciprocated.
The colour went out of Spravchik’s face. ‘The idea of meeting indigenous people amuses you?’
‘No,’ Fracassus said. All the colour that had fled Spravchik’s face flew into his. ‘I thought it amused you.’
‘Why would it amuse me? I am Culture Secretary. The welfare of our most ancient and poorest inhabitants is of the first importance to me.’
They drove into the mountains in silence. Fracassus had never been into mountains before. But he couldn’t look around him. He was too upset.
Spravchik’s mood, however, appeared to improve. ‘Come,’ he said, when the car stopped at the summit. ‘First we enjoy the view – the greatest in the world. Then we watch the ceremony of the threading of the beads. People have been practising the art of bead threading on this very spot for hundreds of thousands of years. They mine the quartz from the mountain, shape them with fintstones, drill holes through them with a sharpened dogwood stick which they rub between their hands – a method unique to Cholm – then string them on ropes made from the wild grape liana. Come. Look.’
Sitting outside a rough habitation were a dozen of the saddest, blackest individuals Fracassus had ever seen. They appeared to have been staring vacantly into space until the party wandered over, whereupon they bent their heads industriously and began the drilling.
‘It must hurt their hands to do that,’ Fracassus said. He wanted to show what a great interest he was taking in the indigenous customs of Spravchik’s country.
‘Not any more,’ Spravchik said. ‘They were doing this when you were still a bacterium in the belly of a wriggle fish. Here’ – he seized a finished necklace of beads from a woven basket and hung it around the Prince’s neck – ‘a gift from the Numa people. Now we’ll go over to witness the fermentation ceremony and have a drink.’
Fracassus fingered the beads and got immediately drunk.
‘Strong, huh?’ Spravchik said, enfolding Fracassus in his arms.
‘You?’
‘The drink. We’ll make a man of you before you leave us… Unless I can persuade you to stay. Will you?’ (It was the same low serpent hiss Spravchik used to persuade contestants to sell their sisters for sixpence.) ‘Say yes. We could invade a country together. I’ll let you pick one. What do you say Professor Probrius? Can I have him? And you Dr Cobalt? Your role is the mother’s, I presume. Can you bear to part with him?’
There was much mirth and saying ‘If only’, but it was impossible to know if the invitation was genuine.
On the road down the from the mountain Spravchik continued to enthuse about the Numa people and their customs. But the moment they were back on flat land he began to inveigh against their laziness, their alcoholism, the tawdriness of what he called ‘their shitty little customs, and the cost to the exchequer of keeping them in welfare.
The party fell quiet. Fracassus because he was asleep, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt because of who they were.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ Spravchik said to Dr Cobalt whom he had picked from the start as subversively liberal.
‘I’m not thinking anything, Minister, except how beautiful your country is.’
‘I appreciate your flattery but I know your culture and I know you are wondering how I can praise the peasants when I am among them and wish to exterminate them when I am not.’
‘I hadn’t thought you wished to exterminate them, Minister,’ Dr Cobalt said.
‘There you are. That’s the very judgmentalism I was referring to. Exterminate is just a manner of speaking. I could as easily have said ‘remove’ or ‘relocate’, but I wanted to provoke you into outrage. And I have succeeded. Allow me to say that you don’t appreciate the complexity of holding several conflicting portfolios simultaneously. I have to be all things to all people in this country. On the mountain I am Culture Secretary. Down here I am Minister for Home Affairs.’
Fracassus had woken up. ‘And you are beautiful as both,’ he said, slurring his speech.
As was the custom in Cholm, Minister Spravchik kissed him on the mouth.
CHAPTER XVIII
In which Fracassus almost reads a book
Picture the emotions warring in the chest of young Fracassus. Word of his fame as the hero of Gnossia reached him intermittently. Cholm was mountainous and the signal erratic. He tweeted his thanks to his admirers but couldn’t be sure they ever reached them. This was the wrong place to be at such a time. It was as though the world was celebrating his birthday without him. But didn’t Spravchik’s company compensate for this? He wasn’t sure whether to be flattered by Spravchik’s friendship or miffed that Spravchik wasn’t adequately flattered by his. Did Spravchik always mean what he said? Where, for example, was the promised wrestle?
But the most perplexing question of all concerned heroism. Could one be a hero and a hero-worshipper?
To the best of anyone’s knowledge, that’s to say to the best of his own knowledge, Fracassus didn’t dream, but he was getting perilously close to dreaming of Vozzek Spravchik. He felt spurred to emulation but somehow diminished at the same time. Was heroism a virtue one could forfeit in the act of admiring it in others? He would have liked to discuss this with his father, but his father was far away. This left only Professor Probrius, whom he didn’t like and after more than half a dozen words couldn’t follow, and Dr Cobalt, but Dr Cobalt was a woman. Could a man – should a man – discuss heroism with a member of the very sex heroism existed to impress?
He decided he would raise the matter with her casually, much as he might raise the matter of a missing shirt. Just by the by, did she happen to know of a book on heroism? She wondered why he wanted it. She ventured to hope he hadn’t gone overboard on Spravchik.
‘Overboard?’
‘Well he is what many would regard as a heroic figure and I can see that you respect him.’