Fantastic Metropolis

He belongs to them, peel and all. Hannah rears up and her lips curl over teeth as long as stakes. Her rump is the loudest to praise Darktree and offer utter loyalty to his being.

He does not comprehend the sentiments; nor do the scoundrels. It is not Hungarian. Each language of mankind lies somewhere on the alimentary canal of reason. At the mouth is Hebrew, Sanskrit and Basque; beyond the tongue gargle Portuguese, English and Korean; in the throat coughs many of the Germanic variants; the gastric grammars, Finnish and Magyar, burn in the stomach; but Hannah’s language, the lingua-farter, is Latin. Only men in togas can sniff the context.

Darktree has little trouble accepting his role. It is exactly what he set out to accomplish—he is gratified.

His first act, as bandit king, is to start a search for his missing flute. He issues the command with contorted gestures; without the shell, he will not be able to give further orders. The nautilus is unearthed by the railway track, where he dropped it. With the aid of borrowed string, a rare commodity in these parts, he lashes it to his stomach. His voice has returned; now he is back in control.

Every time the band of villains wishes to visit a tavern, they have to travel all the way to Püspökladány, the only town on the puszta where alcohol is served in straight glasses. Darktree vows to alter this state of affairs. He plans to build his own tavern on the site of the tree. He will make use of available materials…

Prising the crucified bodies from the trunk, he arranges them into neat mounds, cementing them together with paprika until they form walls and roof. A starched intestine makes a fine chimney. The tree forms the central pillar of the establishment; Darktree decorates it with plunder from a different train each week.

He still does not associate these locomotives with the abominations which drove him out of business. It is a shame; it would please him more than stabbing the left ventricle of a muffin to know he was disrupting a traditional adversary. Revenge, to Darktree, is the noblest of emotions. It is noble because it is generous; the man or woman who chooses revenge seeks to rebalance the world, an action which will benefit everybody. It is foolish to pin up the hem of redress.

When his tavern is complete, his belly dictates a sign to fix above the door: “Szabad belépés.” A very frustrating thing indeed, not to know what it means! Darktree begins to feel isolated; his stomach has all the attention, his mind is a gooseberry. He is convinced his gut insults his skull when it calls the nightly meeting.

Bandits love conferences. Darktree makes a list of the day’s catch, even when there is nothing. Then his lieutenants tell him about mythical express trains rumoured to be travelling from Budapest to China, or they show him the communal Hivatalos Menetrend—an abstruse book of national timetables. These meetings took place in the open under the old leader, at the base of the tree. The location is the same, but now the threat of rain has been eliminated. In the depths of the tavern, Darktree sprawls at the bar and bites the rim of his pewter tankard, as if it is a forged coin. Hannah works behind the counter, topping beer with froth from her wide mouth. Darktree loves a head on his stout.

The ill-gotten gains they stash at the rear of the tavern include a great many women’s shoes. The trains they hold up seem to contain mostly unhelpful freight. One battered chain of box wagons was stuffed with old kissing gates. Another held silk kites; the ruffians spent one afternoon running over the grasslands with them, until Darktree, losing his temper with the beauty, began shooting at the connecting cords. When he is sick of company, he takes himself a small distance from the tree and reclines in the shade of the puszta moon. He sits on his sack of explosive cakes, once more his property. When he is not resting in this spot, the muffins are hidden in a recess in the tavern’s bar.

It is so balmy on the Plain that he removes his heavy clothing and sleeps in a nightshirt made from the loose hair of Hannah’s tail. Brave gnats alight on his nose, the swamps of his beard. His gigantic sleeves swat at the insects on their own.

Just before dawn, dozing in this place in the seventh month of his bandit phase, he is rudely awakened by a kick. He opens his eyes and is confronted by the boiling mien of the tinker he assaulted on the Essex cliff top. The fellow leers and bows.

“Will ye be returning my kettles now, sir?”

Darktree quietly explains that he no longer has them. The tin drum maker in London demanded he throw them in with the pieces-of-seven. The tinker snatches Darktree’s discarded attire.

“In that case, sir, by way of compensation, I’ll be helping myself to your clothes. Half a year I’ve been looking for ye, I’m blasted worn out with the travails o’ it.”

Awkwardly, he pulls on Darktree’s coat and breeches and plants the tricorne hat atop his locks. Then he struts.

A chilling hiss emanates from the gloomy space behind him. Darktree thinks it is Hannah or one of his men come to rescue him. His cry of joy is tempered when he recognises the visage of the thin bear whose cave he disrupted. Surprisingly, this bear can talk.

“Twenty-nine weeks I’ve been searching for you,” it whispers icily. “My master, François l’Olonnais, condemned me to guard his treasure and destroy any thief who attempted to meddle with it. Now I’ll complete my duty with a single bite to the jugular!”

And so saying, the bear sinks its misshapen fangs into the neck of the tinker. Blood dribbles from the bony maw. What an unusual bear! Just the sort of creature one would expect to find in a circus. Darktree has heard of freakish humans, born in the form of penguins and elephants. Do bears also have mutant offspring, born in the shape of decayed corpses? It will be worth investigating one day.

As the tinker falls to the ground, drained, a brawny hand clamps on the bear’s shoulder and a figure dressed in blue, chomping on a whistle, elevates chiding eyebrows and bends its knees.

“What’s all this then? Two hundred and seven days I’ve wandered the continent looking for this anarchist. Just as I catch up with him, he is murdered by a suspicious-looking character. You’d better come with me to the station, sir, to explain your damp chin.”

Darktree recognises the constable from Clacton-on-Sea. There is the most cursory of scuffles; the starfish hat falls from the bear’s head. A typical arrest; the ursine miscreant is clamped with handcuffs and taken away, briny tears on its pearly cheeks. Darktree strips his clothes from the dead tinker and returns to sleep.

He is pleased to have heard English speech. It has a calming effect on his outlawed nerves. He doubts he will meet more strangers willing to converse or cajole in his native tongue.

He is mistaken. The following day, a customer enters the tavern who is not one of his bandits. He gives his name as Xelucha Dowson Laocoön, a cosmopolitan traveller who is walking home from Turkey. He asks for an imported beer with an endearing leer. “Berliner Weisse mit grün!” Hannah wishes to make a special effort for her first outside patron. She snorts into his drink with both nostrils.

Darktree is drawn to the fellow’s appearance. He wears three capes of different colours and carries a horribly marbled book. His panache is like chutney; it is a side dish to his pizzazz.

He seems to know all about Darktree’s exploits. “The Hungarian army is on their way here at this very moment. The authorities cannot endure a bandit who shoots at silk kites.”

“What shall I do?” Darktree is troubled.

“By your poise, I’d say your ambition was to learn as many types of outlawry as possible. Am I right?”

Darktree has never thought about this before. He nods. “I have been highwayman and pirate. I am highly flexible. But I do not know the names of any other kind of criminal.”

“Have you thought of footpad?”

Darktree shakes his head. Xelucha explains the meaning of the word. “To become a footpad, you need a city and a sandbag. There is a city in dire need of one right now. It is called Chaud-Mellé and can be found on the edges of the Alps. Follow me there.”

“I thank you for your offer, but I do not have any sand. The puszta is singularly devoid of it. Will dust do?”

Xelucha sighs. “Not really.”

Darktree entertains his guest for many weeks, presenting him with a case of Prussian beer when he leaves. During this joyous time, he thinks he can smell the approach of the soldiers.

He robs a train carrying stained glass from Madrid to Kiev. Perhaps if he redecorates his tavern as a church, the invading cavalry will trot past it unawares? In the single window of his building he fits the green and purple lozenges, turning stars ill.

There are enough moustaches in the Hungarian army to weave a rope to the moon. The pounding of angry hooves can be heard on the taut skin of the Plain. Each soldier a drummer; each horse a bugler. Rushing out of the tavern, Darktree throws himself to the ground, the better to see them. His men think he has confused the function of eyes with ears. But there is a logical reason for his position.