Complete short fiction, p.88
Complete Short Fiction, page 88
“Clearly I must speak with this deluded creature,” said John, standing up and brushing off his crimson cloak. “Not to mention that the prophet Daniel, who has always been very certain of who and who would not be redeemed, would be most . . . instructed if I should convert the creature.” His eyes gleamed. “And smarty-pants Isaiah would be pretty surprised, too . . .”
“Um, just to warn you, he won’t . . . admit it or anything. I mean, he’s really stubborn.” Pogo forced a laugh. “Ha ha! You know these giants! You’ll have to keep after him. It may take a while.”
John seemed full of energy and high spirits. “No fear–after all, we have until the Second Coming!”
Pogo almost had to run to keep up with the ancient Evangelist, who seemed to be heading right for the stables, so keen was he to begin the ogre’s conversion. “But what about me getting to the moon?”
“Don’t worry,” John called back over his shoulder as he broke into a run. “I’ll have one of the grooms hitch up the chariot for you. Practically drives itself . . .!”
#
As the golden chariot was tugged into the sky by the four ruby-red horses, and the ground fell away with sickening speed, causing Quidprobe to grab the railing and gasp at the unfamiliar (and queasy) feeling of acceleration on organic skeletal structure, he could still hear the giant bellowing far below.
“No! Shut up and leave Caligorant alone! ‘Suffer little children’ only good part!”
Quidprobe looked down at the retreating ground once, then decided not to do that again. Instead he tried to focus on the great, pale orb of the daytime moon, which was growing larger every moment.
“Are the horses going to be able to breathe?” the Pogocashman asked. “Like, in space?”
Quidprobe shook his head, although he was mildly impressed with the question: the Pogocashman hadn’t shown much interest in such practical things to this point. “This is based on the medieval imagination, not reality,” he said. “Point one–these horses are magical flying horses, so they can probably breathe where we’re going. And, if we’re lucky, so can we.”
“Huh.” The Pogocashman looked down at his armor. “Hadn’t thought about us. This isn’t exactly an astronaut suit, is it? Pretty cool, though. I mean, if I was twelve again I’d think this was the greatest thing ever.” His bemused smile didn’t last long. “Right now, though, I’m just kind of wanting to go home.”
Quidprobe sighed. “When I was a youngster, I dreamed of being the world’s foremost jelly-tube architect. I never imagined I’d be flying around in the open air, wearing a body with bones in it.”
“Poor little dude,” the Pogocashman said, patting him on the head in a way that made Quidproble’s dwarf-whiskers bristle. “Don’t sweat it–we’ll get out of this okay. You said it’s a story, right? Stories always end happy.”
Quidprobe was glad none of his colleagues from the Existential Despair Division were present. Clearly the Pogocashman was familiar with only the most elemental kinds of fictional universes. A moment later, though, Quidprobe realized that he desperately wanted the Pogocashman to be right.
By the Silver Buttocks of Eddison and the Smoking Jacket of Cabell! he thought in sudden horror. What if this is one of those stories where the companion dies?
Quidprobe spent the rest of the ride sitting in the bottom of the chariot trying not to hyperventilate.
#
The surface of the moon was even crazier than Pogo had thought it would be, like the abandoned set to some ancient black and white movie, with bits of ruined walls and statues poking through shifting dunes of sand and the Earth hanging close above their heads in a most disturbing way. The saint who rigged up the chariot had told them to head toward the highest hills, and soon they were standing on the peak of the highest looking down into a bowl-shaped valley which from this distance appeared to be nothing so much as a badly tended landfill littered with a zillion odds and ends. They left the chariot on the hill and made their way carefully down the slope.
“So this is it?” Pogo asked as they neared the lake of bric-a-brac. “We’re supposed to find Roland’s brain in all this?”
“Everything here is something that someone on earth lost,” the dwarf explained. “That was Ariosto’s idea, anyway. The saints said all the lost wits are in one part.”
“Ah, I got it, just got to find the right section. Like Men’s Casuals, or Children’s.”
Quidprobe looked puzzled, but Pogo was on familiar ground now. He scrambled a little way back up the slope and began to scan the valley, looking for clues as to how the merchandise was inventoried. In his store, they kept all the similar things together, so all the men’s black dress shoes were in one area, all the brown ones beside it, and a little farther away, the men’s casuals and sport shoes. It shouldn’t be too hard to make sense of this, if he could only recognize what the various objects were.
“Start walking around,” he called down to Quidprobe. “Tell me what some of this stuff is.”
The little man began an awkward tour through the mounds, calling out what he found to the best of his ability to recognize it. “Lost keys!” he shouted as he stepped through a field of clinking bronze and iron. “Letters!” he yelled, then picked one up to read a few lines. “The prose is quite romantic–think this might be lost loves.” He trudged along, stopped to shade his eyes against the Earth-glare. “There’s a mountain over there that looks like it’s made of . . . suitcases and steamer trunks. Goodness, it’s quite big!”
“Lost luggage, I bet,” Pogo called. “Keep going!”
The dwarf picked his way through artifacts both real and imaginary–the collars of thousands of lost dogs and cats, a lake of corroded clocks representing lost time, and an even larger sea filled with silver and gold coins and paper money, perhaps the monetary losses of drunkards and gamblers. For a moment, Pogo considered slaloming down the sandy hill and filling his pockets with some of those coins–the gold itself should at least be worth something–but since Quidprobe kept telling him this was all imaginary stuff, he doubted it would come back with him . . . if he even made it back home, that was.
Immense piles of bent swords and broken arrows which might represent lost battles or lost nerve; delicate masks cracked and dirtied–Quidprobe guessed they might have something to do with lost reputations–and an immense, uneven field of toys and dolls that the little man suggested might stand for lost innocence, the dwarf listed them off and Pogo took note, trying to see something like the organizational grid he had learned in his management training workbook, “Knowing Your Inventory = Sales Power!” As the timeless day wore on and he could begin to make out some patterns, he scrambled down the slope and joined the little man. All of the saddest and most personal things seemed to be clustered at one end of the immense sea of lost wages, savings, and livelihoods, where the coins glittered like the foamy caps of frozen waves, so he led Quidprobe there and they began to search every mound, puzzling for long minutes sometimes over what the objects might represent.
“Hey, Dickrobe,” he called. “I think I found something!”
“It’s Quickpoop!” snarled the little man, kicking something in his irritation. “No, Quidprobe! Quidprobe! See what you’ve done! I don’t even know my own name anymore!”
“Whoa. Mellow, dude. I was just messing with you.” He’d actually figured out the dwarf’s correct name several days ago, but it was more fun to make up new ones, especially because each time he pretended to get the name wrong, Quidprobe squeaked like a rubbed balloon. “Anyway, I think I might have found what we’re looking for–it’s a bunch of little jars with people’s names on them.” He bent and picked one up, read the carefully engraved label. “Who’s Em-pee-dockles?”
“Empedocles–Greek philosopher,” called Quidprobe from somewhere on the far side of a heap of lost opportunities. “Jumped into a volcano to prove he was a god.”
“Was he?”
“No.”
“Jackpot!” Pogo picked up another. “Pie-thuh-gore-ass?”
“Pythagoras. Another brilliant thinker, except he thought beans had little human souls in them.”
“Okay, this is looking good. Joan of Arc?”
“Heard voices,” said Quidprobe. “Trusted the English. Crazy as a coot.” The dwarf sounded much more cheerful. “Hold on, I’ll come help!”
As he and the little man clambered over the mounds of shifting glass jars, each one filled with a cloudy but slightly luminous liquid, a label caught Pogo’s eye. He picked it up and examined the jar, which was larger than most of the others, although still no bigger than a soft-drink can. CALIGULA. He knew the name–it was a dirty movie about some emperor guy who had sex with everything that moved and a few things that didn’t; there had been ads all over one of the men’s magazines Pogo kept in a box in his closet. If this was that Caligula guy’s wits, did that mean his memories were inside it, too? Pogo lifted the jar up and tried to stare into the shifting fluids, hoping for just the faintest visible scene of a Roman orgy, but no matter how he stared he couldn’t make out anything but the cloudy liquid.
“Oh! Oh!” Quidprobe began to shout quite close by, startling him. Shamed, he hid the Caligula jar.
“What? What is it?”
“By the Hierarchies of Heinlein, I believe I’ve found it! Come over here!”
Pogo made his way across mounds of shifting cut-crystal jars to the dwarf’s side. The little man was holding up a container nearly as large as Caligula’s. Pogo squinted at the silver name-plate and shook his head in disappointment. “No, man, this belongs to some dude named ‘Orlando.’ ”
“That’s the Italian way of saying Roland,” the dwarf told him. “And look at how big it is! It’s his, it must be!”
By the little guy’s excitement, Pogo could tell that Quidprobe was feeling ready to go home, too. “Well . . . cool, then, I guess. Let’s take it and get going. Good job.” But Pogo was a little sad he hadn’t found it himself. After all, wasn’t he supposed to be the hero of this story?
#
“Well, it was nice of those saints guys to let us hang onto the chariot,” Pogo said, staring over the side as whatever ocean stretched between Ethiopia and Charlemagne-land rolled away beneath them. “So where are we headed now?”
“Paris,” said Quidprobe. “The fairies and the Saracens have it under siege, and only Roland can save the day.”
“Right.” Pogo squinted at a sailing ship far below, so tiny he half-expected to see someone wading after it, trying to recover it and put it back into its bottle. “What’s a Saracen, again?”
“The villains in this particular epic,” the dwarf told him. “Non-Christians.”
Pogo thought guiltily of his own meager forty-watt faith. “Right. Damn those Saracens.”
After some time had passed, they swooped down over fields of ripening grain, gliding so low that Pogo could see workers looking up in astonishment. It was kind of cool, really, riding in a flying chariot. He wondered if he would be rewarded for bringing this Roland guy back his brains. Maybe Charlemagne would give him a castle of his own and a bunch of servants. If he got to keep the chariot it would be even better. All it was missing to be the near-perfect ride was a righteous sound system, so he could swoop down on bad guys blasting “Smoke on the Water” at concert volume . . .
But really, I’d rather go home, he had to admit. Somewhere they already have stuff like James Bond movies and car stereos and onion rings. Somewhere I know how things work.
At last, they reached Paris, where the twin armies of Islam and Faerie had surrounded the city walls like coffee grounds filling the sink around a failed garbage disposal. As they flew over, many of the enemy troops pointed up at them, shouting curses and firing arrows, but the flying horses nimbly avoided the hostile shafts and then brought the chariot swooping down over the walls to land in a commons at the center of the city where the tents of the besieged army were massed, their many colorful banners trembling in the breeze like (Pogo couldn’t help thinking) the triangular pennants of the world’s largest used-car lot.
When they landed, the dwarf announced who they were and they were taken by a company of armed men to the king.
Seated on his throne, armored all in gold, gray-bearded Charlemagne looked noble enough to make Pogo instantly wish to enroll in whatever management training courses he offered. Now this was what a supervisor should look like!
“Our thanks, noble Duke Astolfo,” the king said in a voice almost exactly like the dad from Bonanza. “You have done us a great service by freeing Prester John, and soon may prove to have done an even greater one, if you can bring back the wits of our greatest paladin, Sir Roland.”
Pogo mumbled that the king was welcome.
“Already the messenger pigeons tell me that Prester John has brought his armies to bear on both Duke Aelfric’s Faerie and Agramant’s infidel lands,” Charlemagne continued. “Both have already lost much of their stomach for this siege. I think if Roland should be returned to health and bring his mighty blade Durendal back to my service, their resolve should quickly crumble.”
“But where is Roland, your Highness?” asked Quidprobe.
“Ranging all across Paris like the madman he is, destroying property and the lives of those who try to restrain him. I have asked my bravest knights to harry him hence, with trumpets sounding, so that we may try this sovereign cure you have brought us for his broken wit.” He paused. “Hark? Do you hear? Even now he comes toward us.”
Pogo could hear the horns quite clearly, dozens of them all blatting and tooting excitedly, like a monster rush-hour backup on the San Diego Freeway. Charlemagne and his court got up and hurried outside in time to discover one of the strangest things Pogo had ever seen–several dozen knights in armor getting their butts severely kicked by one naked, frothing, bearded man.
It was pretty impressive, actually, like an episode of the Hulk where they’d run out of budget for green make-up. The knights were armed with shields and spears and swords and axes, and the naked guy with nothing but a massive spar that might have been the roof beam of a large house, but which he was swinging as though it were a Little-League-size Louisville Slugger, bashing armored men out of their saddles and sending them flying through the air to crash in crumpled heaps that Pogo suspected would be impossible to do anything about until someone invented the can-opener.
“Ropes,” shouted Charlemagne in his booming Ben Cartright voice, “throw ropes about him!” Now Pogo really did expect to see Hoss and Little Joe run out with their lariats, but instead a variety of soldiers came forward and flung loops of rope over Roland, who seemed more bemused than angry–at least until he tried to move on and found that the ropes prevented it. As he was flinging the soldiers around at the end of their cords like armored yo-yos, more soldiers ran in with more restraints until at last Roland was temporarily brought to a helpless standstill, and could do nothing but growl and snap at the air.
“Now!” said Quidprobe, shoving Pogo forward. “The crystal jar! Hurry up and make him inhale it!”
“Go to him, Duke Astolfo!” cried Charlemagne. “The fate of all the Christian world is upon thy brave shoulders!”
Pogo couldn’t help noticing that even with more than two dozen men holding him, bearded crazy Roland was looking like he might break free any moment. Pogo swallowed hard, then dashed forward past the soldiers and between the straining ropes, trying to get close enough to make the mad knight breathe the fumes.
Roland fixed him with a rolling eye. “Argle argle argh!” he shouted, spittle flying. “Kill!”
“Uh, yeah. I totally would too, if I were you.” Pogo reached under his chestplate and pulled out the crystal jar, then cracked it open beneath Roland’s nose. Something glowing and silvery rushed out and into the knight’s distended nostrils.
“Argle! Bargle argle!” Roland roared, then suddenly a very different look crept onto his face–an expression of surprise.
“Sweet Jove!” the great knight shouted, looking down at himself in dismay. “I am naked and hairy! What have I done . . .?” The look of surprise quickly turned into something more severe–an expression of horrific shame. “By the Vestals–I made my horse a senator! What was I thinking? And I married one of my own sisters as well–not even the good-looking one!”
With this, Roland threw himself in the dirt and began to crawl on his hands and knees, weeping and pulling his hair. Pogo stood watching, trying to figure out what had happened. Was this what the knight was normally like when he was sane? If so, Pogo couldn’t understand how he was going to be much use against the fairies and Samaritans.
While everyone else was also staring, Quidprobe sidled up next to Pogo. “Uh . . . are you certain that you gave him the right wits back? I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he sounded less like Roland than like one of the crazier Roman emperors–you know, like . . .”
“Caligula!” Pogo said. “Damn! I must have pocketed his jar when you called me.” He reached under the breastplate and found a second jaw waiting there. He took it out and saw to his relief that this one was indeed labeled “Orlando.” “So what do we do now?” Pogo asked.
King Charlemagne and his court watched in slightly uneasy wonderment as Duke Astolfo and a dwarf chased a scuttling, weeping Roland around the town square. When they caught him at last, Quidprobe managed to get a foreshortened leg-lock around one of the knight’s arms so Pogo could get the vial under his nose and pull the stopper. As Roland inhaled between wails of lamentation, the silvery stuff flew up his nose. The naked man paused, as if tasting something beloved and familiar, then relaxed, smiling with relief.
“Yes!” he cried. “Praise God I am released from my madness! I am Roland again!” This time the naked man leaped to his feet with a loud cry of joy and relief, incidentally throwing Astolfo and the dwarf quite a distance, so that as the noise of celebration rose at the bold knight’s return, Pogo and Quidprobe just lay on their backs and waited for the sky to stop spinning.
“Dude,” Pogo said at last. “That was pretty weird. Does this mean we can go home now?”
