The New Weird (33 page)

Two harrowing months of sodden depression slithered by at a snail's pace before word finally came that a man from a distant land, a traveling practitioner of medicine, had recently arrived by ship in Gile. Frouch and I went in search of him, traveling through the night in the royal carriage, driven by none other than Tendon Durst. Though I was wary of the philosopher's sense of direction, his invisible brother was usually trustworthy. We arrived at daybreak by the sea and witnessed the gulls swarming as the fishing boats set out. "Do you think it is a good idea that you came back?" I asked her as we left the carriage.

"It's a test," she said, as she adjusted the position of her tiara atop her spiraling platitudes of hair and stamped out her cigarette. Heels were not the best footwear for the planks and cobblestones of Gile, but she wore them anyway. I thought the mink stole a little much, but who was I to say? To look the Conscience of the King, I wore one of his finer suits, a silk affair with winged collar and matching cape. In addition, I borrowed a large signet ring encrusted with diamonds. We left the Philosopher General in deep meditation and went forth as royalty, past the heap of fish skeletons, toward the boardwalk that led to the tavern.

The tavern keeper had known the countess in her earlier life and was pleased to see her doing so well. We asked if he had beheld the foreign healer and he told us he had.

"A short fellow," he said, "with a long beard. All he wears is a robe and a pair of boots." The tavern keeper laughed. "He comes in every day a little after sunrise and has me make him a drink he taught me called Princess Jang's Tears. It ends with a cloud of froth at the top and a constant green rain falling in a clear sky of gin toward the bottom of the glass. I'd say he knows a thing or two."

I ordered two of them for us, using gold coin as payment. The tavern keeper was ecstatic. We sat by the large front window that looked out across harbor and bay. Neither of us spoke. I was contemplating my transformation over the past years from unwanted vagrant to the executor of a kingdom, and I am sure by the look in Frouch's eyes, she was thinking something similar. The strange drink was bittersweet, cool citrus beneath a cloud of sorrow. Then the doorbell rang and our healer entered.

The tavern keeper introduced us, and the healer bowed so low as to show us his star-shaped bald spot. He told us his name was unimportant but that his reputation was legendary even on the remote Island of the Barking Children.

"You are far flung," the countess said to him, "but can you cure loss?"

"I can cure anything, Countess," was his reply.

"Death?" I asked.

"Death is not a disease," he said.

He agreed to accompany us back to the palace if we would have a drink with him. The tavern keeper created a round of Princess Jang's Tears on the house, and we sat again at the table near the window.

"I feel you have a strong connection to this place, Countess," said the healer.

"You're as sharp as a stick of butter," she said, and lit a cigarette.

"Do you regret your days here?" he asked her.

"If I did, I would have to regret life," she said, turning her face to the window. Princess Jang's Tears were not the only ones to fall that morning.

The healer nodded and took his drink in a way that showed me he might have a regret or two himself. My hope was that these disappointments did not stem from the health of his patients.

We rode back to the palace in perfect silence. The healer sat next to Frouch, and I across from them. As the carriage bounced over the poorly maintained road from Gile, I studied the man we had hired. His face, though half-hidden by a gray beard, showed its age yet still shone with a placid vitality. I knew he was smiling, though his lips did not move. On the palms of each of his hands were tattoos of coiled snakes. The robe he wore did not appear to be some form of foreign dress but in all reality a cheap, flannel bathrobe that might be worn by a fisherman's wife. Around his neck hung an amulet on a piece of string ― an outlandish fake ruby orbited by glass diamonds set in a star of tin-painted gold. His small burlap sack of belongings squirmed at my feet.

"The young man's grief will consume him if I don't take drastic measures," the healer said to me after he had spent a day studying His Royal. We sat in the dining hall at the western end of that table which was so long and large, we at court called it the island. It was late and most of the palace was asleep. I sipped at coffee and the healer crunched viciously away at a bowl of locust in wild honey that the palace chef, the Exalted Culinarity, Grenis Saint-Geedon, once a famous assassin, had been so kind as to leave his bed to prepare.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Do you see what I am doing with this bowl of holy sustenance?" said the healer, a locust leg sticking out of the right corner of his mouth. "It will eat out his soul."

"Will he die?" I asked.

"That's not the worst part of it," said the old man.

"What are these drastic measures?"

"Let me just say, once I have begun, you will wish you hadn't requested I do so," he said.

"Can you cure him?" I asked.

"That," he said, lifting the bowl to lick it, "is a certainty that has roots in the very first instant of creation."

Either this man was an idiot or so great a physician that his method and bearing were informed by some highly advanced foreign culture. His dress and the manner in which he ate did not suggest the latter, but my most recent glimpse of Ingess trudging like a somnambulist along the great hall was enough to convince me that the healer's diagnosis was correct. His Royal had shriveled miserably and was totally despondent. Even that blonde hair was now disintegrating into salt and floating away in his lethargic wake.

I feared the countess would lash me with her laughter when she heard of my decision, but I told the healer right then, as he set his bowl back on the table, "Do what you must."

Then the old man's lips moved into a wide grin to reveal a shattered set of teeth. He lifted the amulet from his chest and kissed the audacious ruby at its center. "You'll live to regret this," he told me.

"I already have," I said.

The next morning I had to address the assembled royalty of the court of Reparata on the subject of Ingess and his treatment. We met in the palace theater, all fifty-two of us. I took the stage, again dressed in the fine clothes of His Royal as a way of adding authority to my words. Miraculously, Frouch spared me as I apprised them of my decision, but the others were very skeptical. How could they not be ― they had seen and met the healer.

"He's a fake," Chin Mokes cried out, and this got the others going because who better to know a forgery than the Regal Ascendiary?

"Eats insects," said the Exalted Culinarity, spitting as the stories told he had once done on the foreheads of each of his victims.

The Chancellor of Waste went right for the jugular. "He's no physician, he's Grandfather Mess. He couldn't cure a pain in the ass unless he left the room."

"He is legendary even on the remote Island of the Barking Children," I told them.

"Probably for keeping the sidewalks clean," someone shouted.

All of the jewelry of the assembled members of the court dazzled my eyes, and my head began to swim. Perspiration formed along my brow, and for the first time since coming to Reparata, I had that feeling of abandonment which had haunted my wandering for so many years.

Then the countess stood up and the others instantly quieted down. "You've all had a chance to pass wind. Now its time to get on with the necessity of saving His Royal. Unless one of you has a better plan, we

will all follow the healer's advice and see his treatment through."

The Chancellor of Waste opened his mouth wide to speak, but Frouch, without even turning to look at him said, "If you don't want me to laugh at you, you'd better reserve that part of your title that is about to issue from your tongue."

The Chancellor relented and sunk down in his seat as if to duck a derisive giggle.

Before sunrise the next morning, the treatment was begun.

His Royal lay completely naked on a bare table in the palace infirmary, rocking slightly from side to side and muttering all manner of weirdness. Frouch and I were present to represent the court during the medical procedure. Beside the healer, the young lad, Pester, Prince of the Horse Stalls, was in attendance, sitting on a stool in the corner, ever ready to do the physician's bidding. We also called for Durst, the Philosopher General, to see if he could decipher what might be Ingess's last message to us. It was a generally held belief in those days that one madman could easily interpret the ravings of another. The healer was anxious to begin, but we forestalled him, explaining how important a message from Ingess might be to his loyal subjects.

Durst came in dragging the invisible weight of his twin, and performing the impossible feat of discussing two different subjects simultaneously from either side of his mouth.

"My dear Philosopher," said the countess. "You give sanity a bad name."

He bowed as far as his stomach would allow, and then stood and listened with something verging on attention to our request. It was heartwarming to see how proud he was to have been of some use in the crisis. He strode with an official bearing over to the table where Ingess lay and leaned down to listen to the feverish stream of words.

While the Philosopher General was performing his duties, Frouch poked me in the side with her elbow and we both had difficulty holding back our laughter at the sight of him. The healer, witnessing the whole thing, merely shook his head and sighed impatiently.

When Durst finally turned around, we asked him what Ingess was saying.

He looked puzzled and told us, "It all sounds like gibberish to me."

The countess and I broke out laughing.

"But," he continued, holding up his right index finger, "my brother says that His Royal is concerned with a stream running under a bridge."

"Fascinating," said the healer as he ushered Durst out of the infirmary.

Upon his return, the old man lifted his burlap sack onto the table next to Ingess's head. From within it, he retrieved a pair of spectacles whose lenses were long black cylinders capped with metal. He fit the arms of these over His Royal's ears and adjusted the tunnels so that they completely covered the eyes. The moment this strange contraption was in place, Ingess let loose a massive sigh and went completely limp.

"What's this?" I asked.

The healer undid his bathrobe tie, wrapped the flaps around him more completely and retied it securely. "At the ends of those two tunnels there is a picture that appears, because of the way our sight overlaps, to have a third dimension. It is so endlessly fascinating to behold that the viewer thinks of nothing else. Time, pain, regret are pushed out of the mind by the intricate beauty of the scene."

"What does it show?" asked Frouch.

"I can't explain," said the healer, "it is too complex."

"Why is it necessary?" I asked.

"Because," said the healer, "what I am about to do to your liege would otherwise be so painful that his screams would threaten the sanity of everyone within the confines of the palace." With this, he reached into that bag of his and pulled forth a wriggling green creature the size of a man's index finger.

The countess and I stepped closer to see exactly what he was holding. The creature was a segmented, jade green, centipede-like thing with a lavender head and tiny black horns.

"Sirimon," he said with a foreign inflection in his voice.

"It looks like a caterpillar," said Frouch.

"Yes, it does," said the old man, "but make no mistake, this is Sirimon."

"His Royal's not going to eat that is he?" I asked, swallowing hard the memory of the healer's midnight snack.

"Perish the thought," the healer said, and with great care he brought his hand down to Ingess's left ear. He gave a high, piercing whistle, and the diminutive creature marched forward across his palm and into the opening in His Royal's head.

Frouch laughed at the sight of it in an attempt to control her horror. I turned away feeling as though I would be sick.

"Now we wait," I heard the healer say. He pulled up a chair and sat down.

Somewhere into our fourth hour of silent waiting, the old man jotted down the ingredients to Princess Jang's Tears and gave it to Pester.

"Tell the barkeep not to forget the bitters," he said.

The boy nodded, and before he could leave the room, I called out, "Make that two."

"Just tell him to keep them coming," called Frouch.

Pester returned, carrying a tray with three glasses and the largest pitcher in the palace, which contained a veritable monsoon of liquid sorrow. Frouch lit a cigarette and the healer poured. We made small talk, and, in the course of our conversation, the healer regaled us with a tale of his most recent patient, a man who, through the obsessive reading of religious texts, had become so simple and crude that he had begun to revert back into the form of an ape.

"His wife had to coax him down from the trees each evening with a trail of bananas."

"Did you change his reading habits?" asked the countess.

"No, I shaved his body and then prescribed three moderate taps on the head with a mallet at breakfast, lunch and dinner."

I was about to ask if the poor fellow had come around, but before I could speak, I noticed an irritating, disconcerting little sound that momentarily confused me.

"What is that?" I asked, standing unsteadily.

"Yes, I hear it," said Frouch. "Like the constant crumpling of paper."

"That is Sirimon," said the healer.

I walked over to Ingess and listened. The diminutive noise seemed to be coming from inside his head. Leaning over, I put my ear to his ear. It was with dread that I realized the sound was identical, though quieter being muffled by flesh and skull, to that of the healer working away at his bowl of locust.

"What's the meaning of this?" I yelled.

The old man smiled. "Sirimon is rearranging, creating new pathways, digesting the melancholy."