Fantastic Metropolis

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 Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.

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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

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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.

These are the deities which mostly concern us. Three sisters, nasty schemers, violent hangovers, they matured in strength but not mercy. Not any old wine, whisky or beer, mind you, but golden drinks, yellow as the courage of Sir Nanoc, who continued to flee, nobody knows where. Nor any old jellyfish, urchin, tree, but specimens with a thousand protuberances each, sting, spine and branch. Let’s unveil them properly! Wine’or, with breath like a cork, first. Rotten! Malt’or next, bilious and warm. Foul! And most wicked, with an unacceptable head, the sardonic Beer’or, smooth in the glass but gassy in the belly. Overpriced…

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“Mother, may I play around in a new story by that fellow, Hughes, who is rapidly becoming a self-indulgent bore?”

“No, Thais, you must ignore his invitations, however couched, as he is precisely the sort of rotund demagogue who’ll attempt to get you on that couch, and that won’t serve literature.”

“He sounds desperate, mother, and honest folks have paid good money to be entertained and it’s my job, after all, to help poetasters improve their work. My involvement might justify the considerable sacrifices his readers have made to acquire this book.”

“No, Thais, it is inappropriate, with your red hair tumbling all in waves down your back and over breasts barely concealed by a toga which a bird could pluck off as readily as a man, a garment which is not only an immodest shift but two millennia out of date. No, I repeat it with added emphasis, considering what happened to your sisters, Chloe, Eva, Phoebe, Alice, Polly, Medusa, Bess and Diggory.”

“Heavens, mother, you fret so! But what happened to this Diggory? I was unaware of a sister called Diggory.”

“He didn’t fit in, Thais. His shape and emotions were wrong. Gambol along now, with your lyre, and leave me in peace, for I am scrumping the apples in the garden of the Hesperides here and if you wake the owner of the apples, who is the horrid dragon Ladon, he’ll throw a poisoned cloak over us, or failing that a poisoned sock, and we shall be burnt together and there’ll be no fine pie for supper.”

“What if I change my toga, mother? What if I drop down in something new? I hear ‘Typhoon’ is having a sale.”

“No, Thais, the clothes on offer at ‘Typhoon’ are scanty and absurd and worn mostly by arrogant women, not nice Muses. If you really want to visit this Hughes you must attire yourself cheaply and abundantly at the Hoplite Surplus Store, with a padded cuirass of Thracian leather, a zinc helmet concealing your auburn locks and leggings of lacquered wood. Only then will I be positive you are safe from his dastardly machinations. He even tried to seduce me once, near an olive grove. Well not a grove exactly, more like a jar, a jar of black olives.”

“But, mother, it will take ages to strap on all those accoutrements and the tale will be half done by then.”

“You must do the best you can, Thais, with the freedom you have. It is foolish to take total responsibility for every scribbler who calls on you. As long as you put in an appearance at some point in the text, even if only in the last chapter, to raise the work above its present prosaic level, you’ll have fulfilled the terms of your contract. Until then, let the pompous jackass stew. Now seal your lips, for Ladon stirs, his scaly eyelids quivering like orange peel maps in a sneeze, his stinking breath withering outcrops of wild garlic. Also his horns are cruel and not even a full Chorus need chant to us of them.”

“I shall, mother, and am grateful.”

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The highwayman crested the hill and paused for breath against a boulder. He carried two burdens, heavier than a wife’s shopping, which helped him to regard the universe as essentially bleak and hostile. The first was a mechanical body in parts, strapped to various locations of his frame, as if he was a soul who had burst out of its owner. The second was himself, a younger version thereof, stuck in the guise of a portrait. Nicely done in oils, it canvassed for attention.

“Let me down! My chiaroscuro is aching all over.”

“Fie!” snapped the highwayman. “’Tis I who must bear you over these bumblasted hills. They don’t get smoother.”

“How far have we walked from Lladloh?”

“Four spare heels, a moon and a sack of muffins.”

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.

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.”

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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.

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“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.”

“The light javelins are kept under the counter. But why is a gentle Muse tooling herself up like a mercenary? One assumes you’d rather spend your drachmas in a ‘Typhoon’ boutique.”

“Restrain your maleness. I’m free to shop where I like.”

“Of course you are. I’m curious, that’s all. Put your lyre down and follow me. Don’t worry, my cat will look after it. He’s a noble creature with sleek fur and whiskers which catch flies. I often play the stave of his twitch on a flute. Hold this lamp and mind the oil doesn’t splash on your gorgeous bare legs like a lover’s hot seed.”

“I’m quietly confident it won’t.”

“Consider this rack of breastplates, just in from Colophon. Further along, you may observe reticulated nipple-shields, less cumbersome and a product favoured in Lesbos. Keep going and you’ll come to a pile of iron anoraks, modest but effective, useful when scouting the motions of steam horses and proof against Hydra juice.”

“These aisles are excessively lengthy.”

“Well, they were designed by Eupalinus of Megara. In fact, he owned the store before me. He used it as a studio, carving aisles from pillars of marble and placing them side by side. But he couldn’t get them out of the door and had to abandon them where they lay. Their sides decayed and all that was left was the room within.”

“I thought they smelled vaguely Ionic.”

“You still haven’t told me what you want this equipment for. Please don’t think I’m trying to get you into bed, but taking an undue interest in customers enables me to assist them more accurately. Are you going to attend a kinky boyfriend keen on straps?”

“Forfend! He’s too scruffy and short for that.”

“I get it. You’re auditioning for a job as a model and he’s a faded rock star waiting for you in a wine bar?”

“Hardly. It’s just a simple visit to a writer.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t recommend that. Times have changed and writing’s no longer worthy of the exertions of ravishing Muses. No less than eight have already come to grief this way.”

“What do you know about my sisters?”

“A great deal. I have a huge brain. Now let me assist you with this segment of armour, which fits over your ample breasts, with their russet aureolae visible through the sheer toga, like autumn fits over September and October, and take you this sword and buckler and visor, for methinks you gleam like Athene in her bathroom.”

“I’ll have them all. How much do I owe?”

“Thank you. That’ll be 726,348 drachmas. Pay up, quick.”

“I can’t possibly afford that!”

“Then you must stay and work off the debt. Don’t try sprinting past me. At a signal, my cat will operate a hidden lever and you’ll fall down a trapdoor into a dungeon occupied by a Frantic Lurk. You have no option but to permit me to imprison you in the tower on top of the store, where you shall slave away, with my other captives, fitting together pieces of metal gathered in numerous buckets.”

“Damn your throbbing occipital sinuses!”

“And don’t try to escape by dangling your luxuriant red hair out of the window to tempt roving knights. The tower is too lofty for that, and we live in an age of chivalry recession.”

“Alas, that’s true enough!”