The Clown of the New Eternities
An Exclusive Preview Excerpt
The cloud parted, came together again, like the robe of a woman who begins to seduce you at dusk but changes her mind after a closer glimpse of your face. Through the brief gap he noted they were chasing the least interesting of the two possibilities.
“A looking-glass, friend. Not a lass at all.”
They reached the side of the mirror, the highwayman clasping it for support. It was rooted immovably in the ground, and the portrait frowned into its depths in fascinated disappointment. Now the pair walked around the curio, debating its significance in so remote a spot. The fog lifted and horizons came back from oblivion.
“Look there, Darktree! ’Tis another example.”
Half a league or more distant, on a parallel ridge, a second mirror faced the first like a reluctant duellist. The visual oscillation set up by the arrangement was disturbing. With each surface bouncing light back and forth, the space between them seemed to be the midpoint of a passage stretching to infinity. The highwayman had played this trick in taverns, to multiply one coin into payment for a whole night’s drinking. But he’d used pocket mirrors, the sort employed by ladies to brush their eyebrows in carriages, and these were immense.
“Icy to the touch and cruel to the eye. How superior is this to the reprisal of a victim? ’Tis the same.”
The picture was about to answer, but it was interrupted by a shout. A man had emerged from behind the second mirror, waving his arms in fury and running toward them with the loose-limbed gait of a marmot. Darktree sighed and waited for him to approach. Too laden to flee, lacking pistol and knife, he had never felt so vulnerable. As the figure came closer he saw it wore lederhosen and Tyrolean hat and sheltered its upper lip with a walrus moustache. The odour of pickled sausages reached the highwayman just before the equally acidic voice.
“Du liebe Zeit! Herr Culprit’s reflection has appeared! He is being soon the remorseful one. Das ist verdammt ärgerlich! His photons I shall reprimand with the alpenstock. Eins, zwei, like so! Now my head will win the day, the flower of my neck will find a place in the sun. Hold still, Herr Nasty, I am the bold marksman with the sauerkraut. Your reparations are to be extracted. Ein Verrückter!”
The picture rolled its magenta eyes at the highwayman. “Old friend, this looks like the start of a new adventure.”
Darktree nodded wearily. “’Tis a bugger.”
No wonder my Muse hasn’t arrived yet! She can’t hear me above the racket coming through the wall. Even if I raise my voice it won’t do much good. They must have the volume turned all the way to maximum. I can’t discern any guitars, pianos, trombones, clarinets, ukuleles, dulcimers, shawms, rebecs, cembalinos, timbrels, hurdy gurdys, citoles, gemshorns, nakers or serpents in the songs they prefer, nor any real singing, just an endless thumping, a ceaseless pounding, an eternal stamping, in an undeviating rhythm, a monotonous, foursquare, unoriginal pulse, as if my neighbours aren’t playing music at all but clubbing each other to death with their empty heads, which, if true, must be the first act of carnage justified by its own sound. I realise I’m no longer young and that, as decades flutter, the bass control of a music system becomes less alluring than it was, and one can’t bear to tweak it any more, like the nipple of a wife you no longer love, but all the same, I’m a liberal purveyor, a blessing to the community, and I know the difference between the potent anarchy of youth expressed as a series of low notes and sheer slug. This is slug. The part I hate most is when the drums stop, but the funky riff continues on its own for a couple of bars, and then the drums come back in. Possibly it sounded good the first time it was tried, nine trillion tunes ago. I’m tempted to knock on next door’s knocker, if they have one, or ring their bell, quite politely at first, but with a rising imperiousness appropriate to my station, and request, nay demand, within a specified time, a reduction of decibels. I’m tempted to do that, but I won’t for a multitude of reasons, one of which is that my neighbours are bigger than me and if I did knock on their knocker I’d have to pray they didn’t answer, and praying to anyone other than my Muse is sure to annoy her, and then she’ll never come. Thump, thump, thump! This agony is more than I can endure. The next time the drums take a break I’ll call her in the gap. My story is falling apart without her. Readers already hate me. They are going next door, to the party.
“Welcome to Hoplite Surplus. How may I help?”
“I’m interested in your range of Thracian leathers. Do you have any padded cuirasses in stock? Also I wish to inspect your weaponry. Nothing too heavy, dented or epically stained.”
