The Wondermark Gazette

I’d never have found the cave entrance on my own, even if I’d had a detailed map and searched for a week. It was a scrub of bushes one second, and a hollow in the rock the next; the woman gestured for me to enter, and I did, slowly and tentatively, a bit apprehensive about caves in general. My dreams had plunged me into a cavern of deadly magma, and before that I’d slipped on seal-fat in a subterranean city populated with misshapen freak-creatures; before that, however, I’d had a very nice birthday party in a cave once, but then before that it had been bad all the way back to childhood. My relationship with caves was a tortured one, and the frightful woman hauling a dead goat wasn’t making it any less scary.

I needn’t have worried. The narrow tunnel soon gave way to a sprawling, rock-hewn chambre, in which lines of marble and brick snaked up interiour walls in spindly columns, creating the impression that we were inside an egg being embraced by a giant spider who was holding very still and whose legs were for some reason made from building materials. Airy, spiraling stair-cases bore dim figures towards far-off hallways; a series of crystal sky-lights amplified and refracted the late-evening sun-light. The entire chambre glowed an orange that seemed to hang in the air like floating dust-motes. It was lovely and surreal, until I sneezed and everyone turned to glare at me.

The woman handed the goat-carcass to a man in a spattered apron, and that seemed to replace the stares with overt lip-licking and tummy-rubbing. Everyone within view was of hardy build, like the woman, and possessed of the same poor fashion sense. I saw old men wearing riding-chaps and young girls in over-coats; comely wives in over-large ruffled collars drew water from a burbling spring, while a scampish lad the size of my old serving-dwarf toddled about in what looked to be the remains of a potato-sack to which huge brass buttons had been affixed. The impression was a traveling troupe of entertainers who specialised in being the ‘before’ subjects in make-over exhibitions. The whole lot of them cried out for a flamboyant fashion expert to lead them through a department store.

I was shown to a small room, where I was provided with fruit and a steaming copper wash-tub; the former was sweeter than God’s own tears to my famished gut, and the latter was like the searing brand of Hephaestus upon my mud-blood-and-brine-soaked carcass. I must have dozed off for hours, because when I sat up suddenly I noticed that the water had become tepid, to say nothing of filmy and disgusting; also, I had a half-eaten apple-wedge jammed in my teeth, and a crusty line of apple-drool down my straggling beard.

But it was nice, nonetheless, to finally taste a small measure of the luxury I had once been accustomed to. Months at sea had made me wonder if I would ever smell scented soaps again, and though a wire-stitched squirrel-bladder seeping with juicy washing-fat was a full yard afield from lavender, honey-suckle and opium, it was at least a nod in the right direction, and I hoped the trend would continue.

I found, as I towelled off from the bath, that an ugly (but warm) yak’s-wool robe had been laid out for me, and I wondered where in the world they had obtained such an Asiatic item on this tiny island in the Irish Sea. Trinkets in the room only deepened the mystery: here were South African bum-beads sitting beside a Canadian beaver-tooth bottle-opener, both nestled within a dish carved from an Aztec’s brain-pan (I’d know the gnarl anyplace). Who were the Yam-Runners, anyway?

I let my robe fall open, and turned to the door, where a tall, thin man was standing, leaning nonchalantly in the stony corner. “Enjoy the bath?” he drawled, in a deep, raspy rumble.

I yelped a bit and snatched the yak-skin about me once again. “Just standing there, are you? Didn’t feel like speaking up?”

“Come along,” he said, and ducked through the door, never taking his hands from his vest-coat pockets.

He led me to a room lit brightly by ten gas-lamps set in a wide circle. I sat as indicated on a tall chair in the center of the lanterns, listening to the man splash in a wash-basin behind me. A ringing chime of leather against metal was a soothing lullaby: I was about to get a shave. This scratchy Grenadon-beard business had gone on long enough, thank you.

“So, what’s your name?” I asked, as he tilted my chin back and snipped prissily at the longest scraggles with long, thin scissors.

“Paco,” he murmured, “and don’t move your chin.”

With the tufts cut away, his spindly fingers wrapped my face in soapy foam. His straight-razor glinted in the lamp-light, and my heart stopped for a moment as he touched the blade to my throat. But Paco was deft, and I felt the delightful tingle of newly-shorn skin gradually spread across my neck. This was nice.

“Be heading to the banquet, then, I assume?” came a voice from behind the row of lamps, and I startled — Paco clucked his tongue at my sudden movement, and when he drew his blade back, I saw a tiny spot of blood. He tapped my neck with a styptic pencil, but I hadn’t felt a thing.

The oaken-built woman from earlier stepped into the ring of illumination. She wore a wide smile in addition to her ridiculous sailor’s shirt. “We haven’t been properly introduced. You can call me Ursula. Because it’s my name! Ha, ha!” Ursula slapped her thighs, which was a motion I thought was reserved for vaudevillians and sarcastics. But she genuinely seemed to have amused herself.

“Hello, Ursula,” I said through a clenched jaw and lips piled with shaving-foam. “Quite a setup you folks’ve got going on, here.”

“We used to rule this rock! We gave this island its name! But now we’re stuck under-ground like voles,” she snapped, beginning to pace around my chair, disappearing behind Paco and the wash-basin, then re-appearing on the other side. It was a creepy effect, her voice circling and surrounding me. “Generations have lived and died in this mountain, and generations live and die down on the Shorelands. The difference is — we can see them. But they can’t see us.”

“So you’ve seen all the people coming to the village, these last few days?” I asked.

“Terrible,” Ursula nodded. “Drowning the island with that trash. Oh, there’s not much that escapes our notice, no sir. We keep a close eye on affairs down in the village, all around the island, yes we do.”

Paco scraped my cheek delicately, precisely. Had a hint of something dark crept into Ursula’s voice? It was probably just the blade dancing around my face, making me nervous; that, or the fear that my junk was hanging out of my yak-robe.

“We saw you, even,” she added slowly. “Quite an entrance you made. One of Narwhal’s old barrels, was that? Thought I recognized the trade-stamp. Distinctive wanger on that whale — he’d always insisted on it.”

My mind lurched inside my skull. She knew! How should I respond? So many lies and double-truths and negative-half-insinuations had tumbled from my lips lately that I didn’t know which would be most credible. Could I claim to be Grenadon, again? Or else a simple traveller, who’d happened to crash on the shore in a salt-barrel?

“I am a traveling kelp-merchant who fell in with some bad hands in Reykjavik,” I said with what I hoped was an indifferent certainty. “My crew was trying to toss Cap’n Narwhal into a steam-geyser over some old debts. I saved the man, and asked only for a barrel of his salt in return. The rest you know.” Whew. That was a pretty great story — I’d have to remember that one to tell the grand-kids. Oh, I’d embellish it, of course, with daring sword-fights at the geyser’s rim, and graphic tales of Narwhal’s attempted sexual assault of the local marine life (which would be sure to earn me rounds at the tavern commensurate to the level of detail I could stomach to describe), but at the moment for skin-saving it would do just fine.

“You are a patrician from Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats who has killed Narwhal and his crew,” Ursula said flatly, and I became vaguely aware in my periphery of Paco’s blade at my throat. “You have killed Grenadon, and now Peapoddy in his dirigible.” She tilted her head to a sinister angle, and narrowed her eyes in the lamp-light. “You are an odd agent, to have killed both Peapoddy and his enemies.”

I wasn’t sure if I should speak, with the blade so close to my wind-pipe, but when she didn’t continue, I managed to form a few sentences. Should I add the bit about the marine-life? “Peapoddy was my enemy as well,” I squeaked. “Because of him, my manor was lost to flames, and my love to probable death. Because of that snake, I have been left with nothing.” What! Truth! Come on, brain, get with the program.

“Your love, you say?” Ursula arched an eyebrow in a gesture I couldn’t quite read. She retreated beyond the circle of lamps, and I heard the clinking of thick glass against wicker; then she returned with a stubby cylinder of crystal. It resembled a clear wine-bottle, except that it was solid through and heavy to the hands.

“Put it to your eye,” she said, and after a bit of fumbling I managed to look through the end of the cylinder. I saw a flicker of motion, but not much else; certainly nothing I could determine. “Look at the light — it helps,” Ursula added, and I moved to point the glass at the brightest lamp.

It was a blurry image of me and Rikah, riding Rikah’s late horse along that narrow, twisting mountain path at midnight. I saw myself clinging to her like a man on an uncomfortable saddle, which I had been. She wasn’t doing much to object; we were close, the two of us. It was kind of hot.

“Our array of telescopes are pointed at every corner of the island at all times,” Ursula explained, “and are fitted with these light-jars of different thicknesses. It is an ancient design; we temper them in the earth’s crust, deep beneath the ocean. You are holding the core of the world in your hands.” She said it simply, as if were obvious. “Light cannot pass through it but slowly — so when you gaze at the light-jar, you are seeing yesterday.”

I turned the heavy glass over. It was utterly unremarkable from every side but one — but when I looked into that one side, I saw my own past. Light from yesterday, trapped in this cell’s core, moving sluggishly as a slug. Incredible.

“So you see, there is nothing that is hidden from us,” Ursula continued. “I could take you up to the observatory and show you light-jars from yesterday, last week, last year. I could show you yourself, landing on the beach; I could show you that woman you were with, spending yesterday afternoon in the forest glade with the Mayor’s son. I could show you the Mayor praising Grenadon in the town square. And if we went deep into the library, I could show you a light-jar ten feet long and a yard thick — and with it I could show you Grenadon himself, leaving this island on Narwhal’s ship, vowing revenge on Peapoddy.”

“I would like to see the forest glade thing, if it’s not a lot of trouble,” I chirped.

“Later,” Ursula said, and nodded to Paco; a moment later, a warm wash-cloth swabbed the shaving-foam from my smooth, beautiful face. “But first, do me a favor and cover your genitals with the yak-fur we’ve provided. Tonight, you’re going to the Mayor’s banquet.”

NEXT: Subterfuge

Share This