‘As you are doing right now,’ observed Apto Canavalian (wise in his ways this honourable, highly intelligent and oh-so-observant critic).
Modest the tilt of my head.
Visibly flustered, Tulgord Vise grunted and looked away, chewing at his beard and biting his lip, shifting in discomfort and shuffling his feet and then suddenly finding a kink in the chain of his left vambrace which he set to, humming softly to himself, all of which led me to conclude, with great acuity, that his flusterment was indeed visible.
‘I still want details,’ said Tiny Chanter, glaring at me in canid challenge.
‘As a sweet maiden, she was of course unversed in the stanzas of amorous endeavour—’
‘What?’ asked Midge.
‘She didn’t know anything about sex,’ I re-phrased.
‘Why do you do that anyway?’ Apto enquired.
I took a moment to observe the miserable, vulpine excuse for humanity, and then said, ‘Do what?’
‘Complicate things.’
‘Perhaps because I am a complicated sort of man.’
‘But if it makes people frown or blink or otherwise stumble in confusion, what’s the point?’
‘Dear me,’ said I, ‘here you are, elected as Judge, yet you seem entirely unaware of the magical properties of language. Simplicity, I do assert, is woefully overestimated in value. Of course there are times when bluntness suits, but the value of these instances is found in the surprise they deliver, and such surprise cannot occur if they are surrounded in similitude—’
‘For Hood’s sake,’ rumbled Tiny, ‘get back to the other similitudes. The maiden knew nothing so it fell to the Fenn warrior to teach her, and that’s what I want to hear about. The world in its proper course through the heavens and whatnot.’ And he shot Apto a wordless but entirely unambiguous look of warning, that in its mute bluntness succeeded in reaching the critic’s murky awareness, sufficient to spark self-preservation. In other words, the look scared him witless.
I resumed. ‘We shall backtrack, then, to the moment when they stood, now facing one another. He was well-versed—’
‘Now it’s back to the verses again,’ whined Midge.
‘And though heated with desire,’ I continued, ‘he displayed consummate skill—’
‘Consummate, yeah!’ and Tiny grinned his tiny grin.
From the gloom close to the wagon came Mister Must’s gravel-laden voice, ‘And that’s a significant detail, I’ll warrant.’
So did I twist round then to observe his ghostly visage in its ghostly cloud of rustleaf smoke, catching the knowing twinkle that might have been an eye or a tooth. Ah, thinks me, a sharp one here. Be careful now, Flicker.
‘Peeling away her clothing, unmindful of the damp chilly air in the guest hut, he laid her bare, his rough fingertips so lightly brushing the pricked awakening of her skin so that she shivered again and again. Her breaths were a rush of quick waves upon a rasping beach, the tremulous water sobbing back as she gasped to his touch where it travelled in eddying swirl about her nipples.
‘Her head tilted back, all will abandoned to his sure embrace, the deep and steady breaths that made his chest swell and ease against her. Then his hands edged downward, tracking the lines of her hips, to cup her downy-soft behind, and effortlessly he lifted her—’
‘Ha!’ barked Tiny Chanter. ‘Now comes the Golden Ram! The Knob-Headed Dhenrabi rising from the Deep! The Mushroom in the Mulch!’
Everyone stared for a moment at Tiny with his flushed face and puny but bright eyes. Even Midge and Flea. He looked about, meeting stare after stare, a little wildly, before scowling and gesturing to me. ‘Go on, Flicker.’
‘She cried out as if ripped asunder, and blood started, announcing the death of her childhood, but he held her in his strong hands to keep her safe from true injury—’
‘How tall was she again?’ Flea asked.
‘About knee-high,’ Apto answered.
‘Oh. Makes sense then.’
Relish laughed, ill-timed indeed as her brothers suddenly glared at her.
‘You shouldn’t be listening to this,’ Tiny said. ‘Losing maidenhood ain’t like that. It’s all agony and aches and filth and slow oozing of deadly saps, and shouldn’t be undertaken without supervision—’
‘What, you think you’re gonna watch?’ Relish demanded, flaring up like the seed-head of a thistle in a brush fire. ‘If I’d known brothers were like this, I would have killed you all long ago!’
‘It’s our responsibility!’ snarled Tiny, that finger back up and jabbing. ‘We promised Da—’
‘Da!’ Relish shrieked. ‘Till his dying day he never figured out the connection between babies and what he and Ma did twice a year!’ She waved her arms like a child sitting on a bee hive. ‘Look at us! Even I don’t know how many brothers I got! You were dropping like apples! Everywhere!’
‘Watch what you’re saying about Da!’
‘Yeah, watch it!’
‘Yeah! Da!’
Relish suddenly crossed her arms and smirked. ‘Responsible, that’s a joke. If you knew anything, well, ha ha. Ha!’
I cleared my throat most delicately. ‘He left her exhausted, curled up in his arms, stung senseless with love. And much of the night passed unwitnessed for our lovely woman for whom innocence was already a fading memory.’
‘That is the way of it,’ Tulgord Vise said with solemn nod. ‘When they lose that innocence to some grinning bastard from the next village, suddenly they can’t get enough of it, can they? That … that other stuff. Rutting everything in sight, that’s what happens, and that boy who loved her since they were mere whelplings, why, all he can do is look on, knowing he’ll never get to touch her ever again, because there’s a fierce fire in her eyes now, and a swagger to her walk, a looseness to her hips, and she’s not interested anymore in playing hide and seek down by the river, and if she turned up all slack-faced and drowned down on the bank, well, whose fault was that? After all, she wasn’t innocent no more, was she? No, she was the opposite of that, yes, assuredly she was. The Sisters smile at whores, did you know that? They are soft that way. Innocent, no, she wasn’t that. The opposite.’ He looked up. ‘And what’s the opposite of innocence?’
And into the grim silence, in voice cool and low did I venture: ‘Guilt?’
Some tales die with a wheezy sigh. Some are stabbed through the heart. At least for a time. It was late and for some, dreadfully too late. In solitude and in times broken and husked and well rooted in contemplation, we find the necessity to regard our deeds, and see for ourselves all that which ever abides, this garden of scents both sweet and vaguely rotting. Some lives die with a sated sigh. Some are drowned in a river.
Others get eaten by the righteous.
At certain passages in the night the darkness grows vapid, a desultory, pensive state that laps energy like a bat’s flicking tongue a cow’s pricked ankle. Somnolent the wandering steps, brooding the regard, drowsy this disinterest. Until in the murk one discerns a tapestry scene of the like to adorn a torturer’s bedroom.
A mostly naked woman stood in fullest profile, her arms raised overhead, balanced in her hands a rather large boulder, whilst directly below, at her very feet, was proffered the motionless head of a sleeping sibling.