The Clown of the New Eternities
An Exclusive Preview Excerpt
Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.
The following extracts are from the big fantasy novel I’m working on, The Clown of the New Eternities. It comes in three parts:
Part one was the novella “The Darktree Wheel” published in Leviathan 2 in 1998.
Part two is the novella Eyelidiad published as a book by Tanjen in 1996. (Yes, they were written and published out of sequence!)
The extracts are from the longest and most complicated part of this novel, “Ghoulysses”, which I hope to finish by the end of this year. When this last part is completed, all three parts will be joined together into one novel—The Clown of the New Eternities. My magnum opus!
—Rhys Hughes
The Common Miracle Age was crammed with fabulous creatures and tiny kingdoms. There were castles and windmills almost everywhere. Frequently both types of structure were joined into a single unit, especially where space was at a premium, such as in the Treehouse Principalities. Men and women encased in soft armour charged forth, or swung down from vines, to issue challenges and slice varlets. Those who graduated into heroes went on to tackle trolls, goblins, witches, ducks and innkeepers. Many of the bravest knights were also the daftest. Donna Chotty, who sang in bars in the evening, often mistook giants for windmills and tried to grind flour under their hips. Tessa Rackt used an octagonal shield which couldn’t be lifted. The Châtelaine of Blague, Claire Declare, fought with tulips and hosiery rather than weapons. But the women were more successful than the men, whose sallies were dressed in vests.
The mongrel gods had unleashed all sorts of nasty monsters over the face of the planet and some of these—the Knitting Dragons, the Frantic Lurks, the Abominable Mullers—were considered too vile even for idiots to combat. Enter into our tale a mortal so foolish that his conversation had the wisdom of pebbles about it. Sir Nanoc of the Warty Toe, a knight without a day, a dashed rather than dashing figure in courtly circles, or ovals as they were then, took it into his head to increase his status by slaying an example from one of the aforementioned categories. As soon as he made his intentions known, the folk of his realm rejoiced to be so easily rid of a prime clot. They pooled their resources to buy equipment for his quest—whip, mace and candelabrum. Then they carved an obituary on a grindstone and permitted the premature news of his death to flavour bread. He ate his memorial for breakfast.
Regretting his decision but hesitant to lose face in the company of his squires—they insisted he’d lose face later, in the adventure—Sir Nanoc controlled his fear while they strapped the armour to his body. It was at this juncture that he had the one great idea of his life—armour should be made of a tougher substance than dough. This idea proved to be useless to him, for a squire had already lowered a fresh helmet over his head and his words were annulled. There were no horses in the kingdom to spare, and those which did exist at that time were smaller than rats, so nine armadillos were harnessed to a chariot to rush his stubbed identity away. The peasants came to cheer his departure and to lock the city gate behind him. Sir Nanoc encouraged his steeds with his whip, a cat o’ nine tails, one lash for each shell. He was aware of neighbours observing him from the turrets of their posher castles.
He bounced over the moors and into a forest. When the sun went down he lit the candelabrum and held it high, like a midwife to shadows. Only the weight of the mace on his belt prevented him from jumping out of the chariot and fleeing. This woodland was a vast orchard, the property of a Knitting Dragon who picked his fangs with cardigans. Sir Nanoc entered a clearing where the beast was snoozing. He dismounted and stumbled toward the terrible head, with its singed balaclava, blowing out the candles as he did so, for he was able to see clearly by the red pilot-lights in the monster’s nostrils. He hefted his mace and was about to swing a crushing blow when the creature stirred, opened its jaws and yawned over him. Our hero was almost sucked up by the inhalation, but the outgoing breath was even more unpleasant—a curl of fire washed his body, baking his armour into a baguette and relighting his wicks.
As quietly as possible, the steaming knight turned and climbed back into his chariot. He urged the armadillos to maximum speed and spent the whole night cooling himself in a madcap retreat. He desired no more part in epics and was determined to discard chivalry with the adjuncts of his trade in the deepest pool he could find. When the forest thinned out and became a marsh and only the sycamores dared walk on stilts over the wet ground, he felt a profound but deceptive relief. Methane bubbled under the peat, playing bum notes through untuned reeds, and mosquitoes filled the space above like lost punctuation marks on his life’s sentence. They were searching for a way to cross, as this was no ordinary swamp but one of those sentient bogs which love to make mischief and whose vapours are accomplished practical jokers. Sir Nanoc was unaware of this and blindly struck at the insect cloud with his whip.
The mosquitoes parted in haste, but one was stunned by the tip of a lash and knocked into the slurry. Normally the swamp would gobble up any such offering, but in this case it had a more amusing plan. Adopting the dazed insect, it began imparting some of its sacred power, nurturing the parasite as if it was one of its own miasmas. Meanwhile, our poor knight experienced a new discomfort as his sagacious armadillos pulled up short on the brink of the marsh and bucked the chariot and its occupant to the far side. He landed safely enough, cracking his armour like a breakfast, but preserving his skin. No longer a doughty chap, he took to his heels, while the methane licked his candles and erupted in a belch of turquoise flame. He kept running, out of the conflagration, beyond nations to the barren Changtang Plateau. Here he found what he had been looking for—a black pond willing to accept his weapons.
The recent collision of India with mainland Asia had thrown up vast mountains and the Changtang Plateau lay on the north side of the crease. Lacking rivers and rainfall, it was shunned by life. The few lakes which mirrored its cloudless sky were blocked estuaries of the Tethys Sea, too sluggish to drain away when the land rose. One of them was the alcoholic punch brewed by the Old Ones, and it was into its depths that the knight cast his whip, mace and candelabrum. The frothing concoction had evolved a rudimentary consciousness, one which disagreed with itself three ways, and the separate parts bonded to each piece of hardware. The wine aspect attached itself to the whip, the whisky to the mace, and the beer to the candelabrum. They grew in and around these tools, in fantastic forms, so that the whip became a jellyfish, the mace an urchin and the candelabrum a tree, all new gods—the Tipsy Trinity.
