The Travellers Are Described
IN THIS CIRCLE let us meet Mister Must Ambertroshin, doctor, footman and carriage driver to the Dantoc Calmpositis. Broad of shoulder and once, perhaps, a soldier in a string of wars, but for him the knots have long since been plucked loose. His face is scarred and seamed, his beard a nest of copper and iron. He serves the elderly woman who never leaves the tall carriage, whose face is ever hidden behind the heavy curtains of the windows. As with others here, the Dantoc is on pilgrimage. Wealth yields little succour when the soul spends too freely, and now she would come bowl in hand to beg before the Indifferent God. On this night and for them both, however, benediction is so distant it could well be on the other side of the world.
Mister Must is of that amiable type, a walking satchel of small skills, quick to light his pipe in grave consideration. Each word he speaks is measured as a miser’s coin, snapping sharp upon the wooden tabletop so that one counts by sound alone even when numbers are of no interest. By his singular squint people listen to him, suspicious perhaps of his cleverness, his wise secrets. Whiskered and solid, he is everyman’s footman, and many fates shall ride upon his shoulders anon.
The second circle is a jostled one, a detail requiring some explanation. There are two knights among the Nehemothanai, the stern pursuers of the most infamous dread murderers and conjurers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, and close upon the corpse-strewn trail of these two blackguards are these dangerous men and women, perhaps only days from their quarry. But there is more to their urgency. It is said a mysterious woman leads a vengeful army, also seeking the heads of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. Where is she? None here know.
Tulgord Vise has announced himself the Mortal Sword of the Sisters, and he is purity in all but name. His cloak is lined in white fur downy as a maiden’s scented garden. The bold enamelled helm covering his stentorian skull gleams like egg-white on a skillet. His coat of polished mail smiles in rippling rows of silver teeth. The pommel of his proud sword is an opal stone any woman could not help but reach out and touch – were she so brave, so bold.
His visage glows with revelation, his eyes are the nuggets of a man with a secret hoard none could hope to find. All evil he has seen has died by his hand. All nobility he has granted by his presence he has sired in nine months’ time. This is Tulgord Vise, knight and champion of truth in the holy light of the Sisters.
Wheel now to the other knight, so brash as to intrude upon the Mortal Sword’s winsome claim to singular piety. By title, Arpo Relent is a Well Knight, hailing from a distant city that once was pure and true but now, by the bone-knuckled hands of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, a sunken travesty of all that it had once been. So does the Well Knight charge, and so too is announced the very heart of his vow of vengeance.
If blessed white bolsters the mien of Tulgord Vise, it is the gold of the sun to gilt Arpo Relent’s stolid intransigence, and the concatenation of comportment between these two knights promises a most uncivil clash to come. Arpo is broad of chest. Sibling swords, long-bladed and scabbarded in black wood filigreed in gold, are mounted one upon each hip, with pommels like golden eggs that could hatch a woman’s sigh, and proud indeed of these weapons is Arpo Relent, and most unmindful of sighs is this paragon of chastity, and what might we make of that?
With the company of three brothers who might well beat up gorillas for merriment, Relish Chanter could be destined to live a life unplucked, and had not Tiny Chanter himself stared hard at the haggle of artists and said, clear as the chop of an axe, that any man who deflowered sweet Relish would get cut so clean not even a starving sparrow could find the worm?
In the middle of this stark, blood-draining pronouncement from her biggest brother, Relish had wandered off. She’d heard it a thousand times, after all. But what is known at present and what is to become known are different things. For now, let us look upon this most charmingly witless woman.
Black silk, as all know, is the mourner’s vanity, and one is reminded of such flowing tresses when looking upon Relish’s hair, and in the frame of such dangerous honey there resides a round face with cheeks blushed like slapped buttocks, and raven feathered lashes slyly offering obsidian eyes to any who would seek to claim them. Fullest of bosom and pouched below the arms, sweetly round of belly and broad-hipped, this description alas betrays a sultry confession, as I am yet to note clothing of any sort.
But such brothers! Tiny’s mother, lost in the forest of Stratem beneath a most terrible storm, found refuge in a cavern, plunging straight into the arms of a cave bear, but in the instant of crushing contact, all notions of culinary anticipation alighting fires in the bear’s brain quickly vanished and in their place a sudden expostulation of amorous possibility lifted them both heavenward. Who would knuckle brow at the audacity of such claims, when the offspring of the wrestlers’ pact stood solid and true before all witnesses? The giant man’s eyes dispensed all confusion regarding the contrariness of his name, for they were beastly small and rimmed in lurid red with all manner of leakage milking the corners. His nose was a snubbed snout glistening at the scent of blood. His teeth had the busyness of rodents. He bore the muscles of three men misaligned upon his ursine frame and hair sprouted from unlikely places to match the unlikely cunning of the words trickled out from between curling lips.
His brothers held him in much terror, but in this detail’s veracity one must roll in a bed of salt given the malice of their regards upon the turn of Tiny’s montane back. Midge Chanter was twin to Flea Chanter, both being the get of their mother’s misadventures upon a sea strand where walruses warred in the mating season and she had the tusk-gouged scars to prove it. Such origins are beyond argument, lest whiskers twitch and malodorous weights heave upward and close in deadly lunge. Unlike Tiny and his beastly cloak, Midge and Flea wore with brazen pride the hides of their forbearer.
Other siblings abound, t’was said, but mercy held them at bay with a beater’s stick; elsewhere and of their grim tale we must await some other night here at the flames of poetic demise.
Among the circle of hardened hunters but one remains. Silent as a forest and professional as a yeoman, Steck Marynd is no boaster of past deeds. Mysteries hide in the crooks of roots, and if eyes glitter from the holes of knots their touch is less than a whisper upon death’s own shadow. He is nothing but the man seated before us. His face is flat, his eyes are shallow, his lips thin and his mouth devoid of all depth. His beard is black but sparse, his ears small as an ape’s and muscled as a mule’s as they independently twitch at every whisper and scuff. He chews his words into leather strips that slap wetly at night and dry up like eels in the day’s sun.
Upon the back of his shaggy horse he carries a garrison’s arsenal, each weapon plain but meticulously clean and oiled. He has journeyed half the world upon the trail of the Nehemoth, yet of the crime to spur such zeal he will say nothing.
We now turn, with some relief, to the true pilgrims and of these there are three distinct groups, each group seeking blessing at a different altar (though in truth and as shall be seen, they are all one and the same). Sages, priests and scholars stiffen their collars to unwelcome contradictions that nevertheless speak true, but as I am none of these worthies, uncollared as it were, that which on the surface makes no sense disturbs me not. Thus, we have a host of parallel tracks all destined to converge.