Fantastic Metropolis

The picture frowned. “What’s that over there?” It tried to point at a shining object on a distant ridge.

The highwayman squinted and shook his head. “I’ve only got one eye. It looks like a woman or a mirror.” He shivered. “Since leaving Lladloh, I’ve kept glimpsing her. ’Tis a bad augur.”

“Do you suggest we’re being followed?”

“Aye, from the front.” The highwayman fumbled in his pocket for his pipe. He found it and eased the stem between his lips. “She always stays just out of focus but the contours of her blur are familiar. I’m certain we’ve met before. However, in my profession, that’s not always a tactful thing to avow. She might be after redress.”

“’Sblood! As long as she hunts clothes and leaves us alone, we have no cause for worry. But she won’t be able to try on a redress here, ’tis out in the air and accessible to all.”

“Revenge, you dolt! Besides, I am gentleman enough to avert my eyes when a lady removes her garments. You, my younger self, are less decent. I recall how you wasted my yearly income on the pinkpots and hipflippers of Bolton, Newcastle and Berwick-on-Tweed.”

“’Twas my income too!” The picture sulked. “You have a dirty mouth, old friend. They weren’t pinkpots and hipflippers but puddletrotters and fastfannies. ’Tis the world o’ difference between ‘em. Akin to comparing a huge platter of figs with a boiled nose.”

The highwayman accepted the rebuke, not gallantly, indeed extremely gruffly, but the portrait guessed the question of morality was bothering him at a deep level and did not press the point. Since pledging to give up crime, after his latest misadventure had led to the destruction of an entire village, the rogue had pondered the whole meaning of goodness and badness without any clear resolution of the issues. The subject was more tricky than he’d assumed—its lack of absolute standards was irksome to one who had spent his life holding up carriages. Why could he not accost and rob the hackneys of knowledge this way?

“The crux o’ the matter,” persisted the highwayman, “is that a girl who wanders these hills alone is unlikely to have an approachable bosom. She’s doubtless a virago and best avoided.”

“Indeed so, Darktree.” The picture frowned awkwardly. “Yet whenever we take a sensible course of action, trouble comes regardless. Let’s see what she wants and have done with it. Gee up, laddie.”

“What an oily martinet ye are!”

“Aye, done in the style of Hugo van der Goes.” This was a plain lie and the highwayman knew it. The portrait often liked to pretend it was a masterpiece of Flemish art, though as Darktree had commissioned the work in the first place, from a Swansea itinerant, the claim was ignored with justified disdain. “He went mad, you know.”

“’Tis understandable. Hold on.”

Adjusting the weight of the square on his shoulders, the highwayman hefted the portrait down the slope toward the glittering mirage. A guide might claim this as one of the most spectacular Welsh landscapes, though his believers would be few or English. After losing their way in a dense wildwood outside Lladloh, nearly falling down a gold mine, lurching over the lands of the Black Mountain and into the gorges of Fforest Fawr, the pair were now heading for the chilly waterfalls of Pontneddfechan. Their original destination, Carmarthen, was dispersing behind them in the west like the smell of an unwashed wizard.

Not that this marginal tract between the rugged and the tame lacked all wonder. Far from it. The light was plush, gradients were gentle, but too many cows were sighing frosty plumes into the atmosphere. Visibility was generally superb, but when the bovine wisps congealed into a rolling cloud, it was impossible to see what one was treading on. The highwayman extracted his foot from a bubbling pat and shook it distastefully. Above the hazard, the portrait chuckled, revelling in its absence of legs. For a team who had made the outdoors their attic, with noctilucent clouds as slates and stars the holes between them, they had an incredible aversion to manure. They peered into the mist.

“I’ve lost my sense of direction again, Darktree.”

“There she is! Flashing through the fog. Don’t slacken now, friend, or the mystery will remain a maiden.”

“Flashing? ’Tis most progressive in a female, though I question the psychological motives of the action.”

The highwayman took his bearings from the pale glint with a sextant slung around his neck. When not in use, it dangled like a medallion on a wedge of chest revealed by an unbuttoned shirt. Indeed, it was a grander aid to dancing than navigation, though he’d not had a chance to test its worth in the former activity. It had lain in a ditch on the Ystradfellte road, waiting for him to claim it as a substitute for a cherished locket lost in Lladloh. He had renounced theft, but this was good luck, and one must always guard against fanaticism.