Monday, November 30, 2009

Love, Inc.

Magnolia burst into Zem’s hotel room at Bombay. “Have you changed my plans for the Grand?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

She bore down on him across enough lush carpeting to cover a fairway. If Zem should take a notion to tee off inside Bombay’s Ganesh Suite, all he’d need was a caddy and a five iron. “You know you’ve put them months behind,” she burst out when she reached his couch.

He was watching television, a new habit that particularly drove her mad. Not that she minded having something else around to amuse him, besides her. The TV and its hosts and actors provided a very useful divine babysitting service, as far as Magnolia was concerned. But when she wanted his attention these days, she had trouble disengaging him from leering at beach babes, or scoffing at game shows.

“They were almost finished with the Temple of Small Coin,” she raged on at him. “It was going to fit beautifully into their new low-limit slot area. Now they’ve had to start all over. What the hell’s going on?”

Zem paused as he flipped among fifty channels faster than she could focus. He looked her over, and raised his eyebrows milding. “What’s wrong with you?”

He didn’t really care, she knew. She walked around and joined him on the couch. “Oh, nothing,” she rolled her eyes. She’d given up all but an hour or two of sleep a night, these past months. She’d hustled endlessly from City Hall to architects’ offices to every boardroom in every hotel in Southern Nevada, over and over, to complete the rebuilding plans. And she’d successfully kept the city running and kept the press from uncovering the Great Zem Plan, to boot. But then, apparently, last week sometime, Zem had wandered oh-so-casually into the office of Skip Thompson, CEO of the Grand Hotel. And, over coffee or shots or whatever afternoon indulgence Skip favored, he’d mentioned some regrets about the relatively unglamourous attraction the Grand had drawn in Magnolia’s scheme.

“What are you thinking?” she demanded now.

“It’s Venus,” he shrugged. “Now, look at that,” he waved a hand at the screen. “All that purple goo dumps on the kid’s head because he couldn’t hit the target, but is it acid? Is it heated oil? No, it’s just melted jelly, or something. Who cares?” He shook his head in disgust. “These human game shows are so disappointing. If the losers don’t die at the end, what’s the point?”

Magnolia considered his profile. If Zem hosted a game show, she thought, we could offer real prizes: life or death, irreversible transformations if contestants displeased him, rewards beyond human imagining... Not to mention that Zem’s smooth smiles and cunning glances to the camera would seduce the masses– whatever masses were left that hadn’t already succumbed to his promises of well-being and reassurance.

She blinked, filed the notion under “Things to Do: 2005" folded her arms across her chest, and waited for a commercial break.

“What about Venus?” Magnolia asked in an opportune moment. Zem, luckily, had no interest in cleanser ads.

“We can’t ignore her,” Zem said.

“We can’t?” she asked rhetorically. Magnolia had heard of Honoré’s new wonder girl. Of course she’d heard. All Vegas was gossiping about her. She was the hottest thing on the Strip since… well, since the Strip itself. The eternal Streisand was having some trouble trumping her in terms of New Year’s Eve ticket sales, and word was the recording diva was not happy about that.

She looked down at the sketches she was holding, and uncrumpled them slightly. She’d snatched them off Skip’s desk and stormed directly over here, her posse straggling in her wake.

“We never thought of impotence,” Zem commented. He grinned at her. The commercials reflected against the corners of his eyes. “It’s perfect. With Venus? The Goddess of Love?” His grin widened and turned into a leer, and he winked at her like a greasy conventioneer in a two-bit suit looking for a cheap whore to bring his Vegas fantasy to complete fulfillment. “I bet there’ll be balding fat men lined up for miles to see her.”

Magnolia swore there were actually glints in his pupils, somewhere behind the reflected TV images. Tiny, mocking lightning flashes. “Hm,” she said. She looked again at the plans. And she let her imagination go to work.

A gigantic shaft plunged through the Grand’s casino ceiling, extending five floors up and down. It required an atrium, with viewing balconies on every level. From the gaming tables, it would merely be a column. But when one stood beneath it, looking up, when the whole affair became visible, especially that cap thing on top…

Magnolia laughed in spite of herself. “And what is Venus supposed to do?” she asked. She couldn’t be the real Goddess of Love, could she? “What will constitute the cure? Or the ceremony, for that matter? Are you planning on an endless orgy? Or something more private—”

“Oh, orgies all around, definitely,” Zem said. “I think we should sell tickets, and make the poor buggers perform with Venus for the public. Or with each other, maybe, if she’s busy. One sex act and they’ll be cured, of course, no matter what their problem is. Psychological, biological— I’ll guarantee they’ll function from that moment. And along the way they’ll get a shot at the most desirable woman who ever graced the earth. A little audience is a small price to pay,” he shrugged.

“What about Venus, herself? Won’t she mind the crowd?”

He settled himself deeper into his couch. “Get me more of these grapes, will you?” he said.

“Hm,” Magnolia said pensively.

Venus in Las Vegas? The real, true Goddess of Love, embodiment of desire, making a living as a showgirl? It was far too silly to consider.

But then, as Magnolia stood behind Zem’s chair and listened to him shout answers about historical wars and great disasters at game show contestants, she reflected that silliness was relative. She pursed her lips and made a note on the sketches, then rolled them up and left the suite. Zem never noticed.

Perhaps the time had come to check in with her old boss and unacknowledged parent, Miss Honoré Jerques, she decided.

NEXT POST: BACKSTAGE FANTASY (Friday 12/4)

Friday, November 27, 2009

The Star of the Show

Miss Honoré Jerques knew a thing or two about showgirls. She’d been one, herself, long, long ago when the business was different and a pretty girl could still get somewhere in this town. Now it was all so shallow, all so sleazy. Vegas had been going downhill ever since the last Mob family had been run out in the Seventies, as far as she was concerned.

Miss Honoré had known the Mob. She’d liked them. And she was just the kind of girl they liked. She’d started as a dancer in the line at the old Thunderbird, then moved on to the Gold Rush and the Flamingo hotels. The girls shared the stages with big name stars, in those days, doing a number or two before Tommy Dorsey, or Rosemary Clooney, or Edgar Bergen came out to do their bit. Honoré Jerques had worked behind the best. And she’d shone just as brightly as they did. She remembered it as if it were yesterday.

But then, just when the hotels started building bigger showrooms, and the Stardust took the radical step of staging a full-time production show, an American version of the fabled Lido de Paris, instead of star acts, she’d retired. She stepped off stage for the last time and moved into management. The Golden Era of Vegas’ stage shows, the days of Lido and Casino de Paris and Folies Bergere’s Las Vegas outposts passed her by– Honoré spent the Fifties and Sixties hiring other girls for smaller shows and teaching them how to strut their stuff. She bided her time and she proved her mettle.

And when ground was broken for the Grand Hotel, and rumors were swirling about its showroom, the largest and most grandiose ever, anywhere, Honoré was first in line to take the reins. She signed on a whole year before the first audition. And she sat through every meeting, every rehearsal, till Extravaganza! debuted in May, 1969. It was the biggest hit Vegas had ever seen, and ran for six years. Its successor, Extravaganza! 2 opened in ‘75, with a pre-Bicentennial, red, white, and blue finale that was still legendary among those who remembered. And by the time that show closed and Extrav! 3 replaced it in ‘82, Miss Honoré was an institution and had never thought of leaving.

Now, three decades later, she reigned from her smoke-yellowed desk in the bowels of the Grand, and hired and fired and shuffled contracts, and effortlessly terrorized one hundred twenty children with flawless bodies and bright smiles and, when she was lucky, perfectly empty minds.

And most recently, just three weeks ago, in fact, when her show had outlived all its competition, when the hotel no longer wanted to spend any money on entertainment, when production shows were said to be out-of-date and passé and no longer worth their cost, Miss Honoré had found a girl who might just perpetuate the run of Extravaganza! and the popularity of tits and feathers and the mystique of Vegas itself for another lifetime or two. Venus was the stuff of legend, a bombshell like the nostalgic memories of bombshells. As Honoré stood at the back of the theater and watched her, the showroom was fuller than it had ever been. Word had spread. They’d had to move in chairs, make space for more tables. Extravaganza! was the hot ticket on the Strip again. Venus was indescribable, she was a sensation.

Miss Honoré smiled to herself like a cat that had just swallowed something chirping and fluffy. She leaned against the back wall of the theater, just to one side of the huge gilt doors that opened out into the Grand Hotel casino, her arms folded across her ample chest. She spared a moment to curse the day smoking had been outlawed in the audience. She wanted a cigarette, she thought, just like the good old days when she used to sit in a King’s Row booth and watch the whole show, beginning to end, with a fag in one hand and a whiskey in the other. Those were the days. Now everything was so god-damned clean and sober and healthy and respectable, you’d think Vegas had been bought by Disney. Which maybe it had. Who could keep track of the corporations, or who owned whom and had a finger in which pie? When the Mob was here, you knew who was who and who owed whom and whom to ask for what you wanted. In those days everybody had a name, and the important guys had only one– Tony, or Gino, or Stu– easy names you could keep straight. And if you were a pretty girl, or even if you were a handsome woman who had once been a pretty girl, your path was pretty much assured.

Now she couldn’t smoke and couldn’t drink, and she had to treat her dancers with respect, for god’s sake, as if they were little princesses and corporate heirs. It was like a nursery school back there, she thought, full of spoiled children who didn’t know the first thing about Vegas or what they were doing or all the girls who’d gone before. They thought they were something special, but she could tell ‘em they didn’t know special, they hadn’t even seen special–

Except for Venus. Miss Honoré looked up at her new star, and Venus didn’t disappoint. She stood there, barely moving, certainly not doing anything you’d call dancing, because why should she? Why waste the effort? Nobody would notice. Venus was just standing and walking and looking here and there, and she was perfect, she commanded the whole stage around her, she was the sum total of everything that Miss Honoré had ever believed Las Vegas had to offer, the pinnacle, the height, the ultimate, exemplary, point-for-point perfect fulfillment of a showgirl. She was Vegas Glamour, in one tall, blond package. She was Pussy Galore squared and cubed, what Pussy only dreamt of being, and Miss Honoré stared at her, and she thought that if she had ever liked girls, if she had ever once in her long life felt any inkling whatsoever to go dabbling in a bit of slit, Venus would have been the one. She found herself licking her lips without even thinking about it, and she didn’t care if her packed-on lipstick got smeared. The room all around her was dead-silent, there were 1376 pairs of eyes riveted to the stage, and if there had been an earthquake at that moment, no one in the room would have moved a muscle till Venus completed her slow walk. Then they would have panicked.

Miss Honoré, herself, had come out to watch every number Venus did in every show since she had opened. The hapless Gina would ask every time if she didn’t want to skip one. Surely the stairs were too hard for her over and over. Surely the show was fine, would take care of itself, surely Miss Honoré didn’t need to be out there each time anymore.

But Miss Honoré brushed her aside and climbed the stairs and made her way out here again and again, without fail. She was sure she would be doing it for months and months, for as long as she could keep that girl in the show, for the rest of her life, if she could manage that, somehow. Now, she watched Venus pout, and pounce on a boy no one had noticed coming up to her. They danced a little, which mostly meant Venus stood and scowled at him while he approached and retreated, dancing near her in what used to be a pas de deux. Miss Honoré had had it re-staged for Venus, of course.

She took a sudden breath, realizing that she hadn’t breathed in longer than she could remember. You forgot mundane things like breathing when you were watching Venus. She found herself trying not to blink for fear she’d miss something. Some move, some gesture. Some hint of something. Something vital. Venus doing anything. Venus being– that was vital.

Miss Honoré leaned back again, relaxed as the crowd exploded into applause. Venus had left the stage, but they didn’t care what came next. All they wanted was to worship her, see her, and then wait eagerly for her next number. Miss Honoré smiled to herself, her arms folded, her fingers tapping quietly against her arm.

There was a photo shoot tomorrow. All new pictures were planned for the showroom’s entrance– all of Venus, naturally. Miss Honoré had organized the shoot, made plans to have it downstairs where they’d use all the costumes and any set that girl could curl herself onto. She’d make this goddam show look good no matter how tired and tatty it had gotten, no matter how badly it needed new costumes, refurbished sets, an overhauled sound system, better lights. Miss Honoré had struggled for seventeen years to get the show maintained, to get the pinheads who ran Vegas now to see the value of throwing a little money her way now and then, but her message was lost, ignored.

Now, the money was suddenly coming. The executive boys in their suits were tripping over each other to pour new cash into old Extravaganza! They did it just to have the chance to come “check in” on their investment. They did it for Venus, so that she might smile at them when she tried on the new costume they’d bought for her.

The irony was, of course... who cared? After seventeen years, Extravaganza! desperately needed to be cleaned up, but with Venus in it, no one noticed, anyway. No one would notice if the roof fell down on top of half the cast. As long as Venus stood there in her g-string and her heels, the world could go to hell for all this audience cared. But still, it was a little vindication for Miss Honoré. Miss Honoré would make the most of things, as only she knew how to do.

She and Venus. They would be a team. Whether that girl even realized it or not.

Miss Honoré watched Venus enter for Big Bows and stand there in the hugest costume that had been available, one enormous gingham bow that sat squarely on her perfect ass, the largest bustle ever seen, a wrapping for a present every man here, and every woman, too, would give his eye teeth, his life savings, his life and the life of everyone he loved to unwrap.

Venus minced and pouted her way down to the very apron of the stage and stood looming above the front row. All the men down there, and what few women had fought to get one of those seats, leaned forward, staring with their mouths open.

Miss Honoré leaned forward too, and she watched Venus and she watched the audience. The number was almost over. Venus turned and swung the bow, and then she paused to face the crowd one more time– in times past, Before Venus, there had been a line of girls who did that, but now there was only her, only the goddess, and who needed any others? They could fire the whole cast, probably, and no one would notice. Miss Honoré watched and smiled like a big and cunning cat, and the audience held its collective breath and stopped blinking to capture every single nuance of every single move that Venus made. Miss Honoré’s fingers twitched as if they held the cigarette she’d be longing for in precisely thirty seconds, and she held her breath, too, until the explosion came and all around her there was wild cheering.

NEXT POST: LOVE, INC (Monday 11/30)

Monday, November 23, 2009

Inspiring Magnolia

The boy scouts had gotten into trouble again, so Magnolia led them on their matching leashes through the casino of the Vegas Spire. Their baas and shufflings got laughs from the crowd, and elicited pets and cooings, but Magnolia forged on, making her way to the special elevator that led only to the roof, and sparing only the barest of smiles and nods to anyone who made eye contact.

She had no posse today, only a pair of guards who had been instructed, in no uncertain terms, to keep their distance. They’d remain here, in the casino, while she went about her private business.

She had a date with Zem this afternoon. Or, at least, she planned to speak with Zem, to confront him. This would be their most important conference yet, which he had no idea was coming. It would determine all future relations, not to mention who would run this city, who would serve him, and what would happen to her.

The whole world, if it had known what she was planning, should have been fixed on Magnolia’s passage through the Spire, goats in tow, that afternoon.

She didn’t have as much time as she would have liked. Her schedule was booked tight, these days. She zipped from meeting to meeting, hotel to hotel, with an hour or two at City Hall whenever she could fit it in. The bureaucrats and staff there would descend on her, waving papers and clipboards. Her personal assistant, Peter, had been seen to cry last week as she disappeared after only a few minutes’ visit, having answered not one of his questions.

But the New Las Vegas was happening fast, so she had no time to waste. Today, when Dan and Sam had transformed in the middle of a screaming match at Bombay with Errol Manoff and Jim Bubo and three other casino heads, everybody had just rolled their eyes. Magnolia had checked her watch, observed the rest of the table restacking notes and discussing when to reconvene, and headed out as soon as possible. She’d never have taken the goats along if Errol hadn’t insisted.

And she would have dropped them off at their own office if she’d had time. But she only had an hour. Then she’d promised Peter she’d come back, for the whole afternoon, to sign things and make mayoral decisions. These damn Boy Scouts would have to come along for the ride.

She couldn’t leave them in the car, where they would inevitably destroy the upholstery and stink up the place. So here they were, slowing her down as she marched through tourists and slot machines. The elevator operator looked down his nose at them.

“Mayor,” he acknowledged.

“I’m going up,” she announced. “And they’re going with me. Sorry– I’ll try to keep the damage to a minimum.”

He hesitated, but then nodded and pulled aside the ornate gate and ushered her and her charges inside. “Have a good trip,” he invited.

Magnolia snorted.

Zem’s Hall of Audience had been finished for a month– the very first of Zem’s “attractions” to debut. The small cosmetic augmentations to the Spire’s roof had gone quickly once workmen had been hired– a more difficult task than usual, given the particular requirements of the job. In the end, the “mile-high crew” had bonded like survivors of a natural disaster. They’d probably be holding reunions till they were all dead, Magnolia thought.

There’d been a wild party after it was done, but Magnolia had merely put in an appearance and then run back downstairs, where the wind did not whip napkins and whole serving trays down to their destruction far below. The place gave her the creeps, for all that it was her idea. Zem, of course, loved it. He’d stayed up there, often right by the edge staring down at his developing realm, from mid-afternoon till sunrise the next day– or so she’d been told. The waiters were asleep on their feet by the time he left, tying themselves to anything handy to keep from stumbling off the edge in the dark.

And now Zem’s New Vegas was initiated, and the god’s ear was available to anyone who took the long ride. Of course, after January 1st, getting into this elevator would be much more difficult than merely walking up and stepping in. The regular elevators to the Spire’s peak, the ones that carried countless tourists up the its top floor restaurants, bars, and observation decks, cost $20. This private ride would cost nothing, but only those who’d proved their worth beyond all doubt would be allowed.

For the moment, though, the Lift to Destiny was just an anonymous door watched over by a man in a suit at a lectern. It might have led to a private penthouse, or the hotel’s steakhouse.

Magnolia drummed her fingers and pulled the hem of her skirt out of a goat’s mouth. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with them at the top. She wasn’t sure if they understood human speech when they were in this state, but she didn’t want them close enough to hear, in case they did. “Stupid goats,” she told them. They looked up at her, and one of them– she thought it was probably Sam, who always seemed the more recalcitrant even in this form– reached out to chew her skirt again. She flicked his face. “Away,” she said.

The elevator ride took five minutes. Zem had specified a slow, shaky ride– he didn’t want his petitioners striding into his presence too cockily. There was a boom as it reached its goal, and then a shifting, and a twist, and finally, several seconds later, the doors opened.

The wind was the first thing one noticed. Magnolia felt it hit her full in the face. The goats’ hair blew back, and they baa-ed in complaint and shook their snouts.

“Come on, you,” she jerked their leads.

Stepping out into the Hall itself was like climbing onto the roof of a 747 for a stroll at several thousand feet. Magnolia bent her knees instinctively, and braced against the air as it boomed into the elevator. The Hall stretched away before her, a barbell-shaped pavement lined with marble columns and ending in a sheer dropoff as the roof underneath sloped away. From this doorway, she could see the city through the columns, as distant as a mirage and as tiny as an architect’s model. She thought suddenly of all the mock-ups of new hotels she’d admired over the years, and grimaced sourly to think how unlike the reality they’d proved.

“This way,” she growled at the goats.

There wasn’t much to secure them to. But the elevator was flanked by two huge urns– the original flower arrangements they’d held had blown away in seconds, and rained down in shreds over the north end of the Strip– and she looped their leashes through a handle and tied them to each other.

“Now stay there,” she told them, and turned her back to stride away.

At least, that was what she meant to do. Striding down the length of the Hall, announcing herself at its furthest end, the Place of Audience between the last two pillars, where all the earth lay somewhere miles below her feet and her toes rested practically on thin air... that was her intention. But, as she’d found at that horrid party, her control over her own muscles was suddenly curtailed, and she froze on the spot.

Magnolia was afraid of heights. She’d known this about herself, discovered it on one ill-fated trip up the Eiffel Tour with a hot French boy to celebrate her first showgirl opening (at the famous Lido) and the successful beginning of her life as Magnolia, not Frank. She’d thrown up over the side onto some tourists’ heads far below, and then passed out, and done her very best to ignore and forget the evening ever since.

But her phobia had never been much of a problem since she’d returned to Vegas. There simply weren’t heights, in the flat and desert valley. She had no reason, usually, to go above the second floor. Acrophobia simply hadn’t been an issue.

But if she wanted to face Zem in this place, she’d have to find a way past her fear.

She looked back at the goats, holding still for once and watching her, and had two clear thoughts.

One: I’m never coming up here again. She had a demand for Zem, and this was her one and only chance to voice it.

And two: the Goats will laugh at me forever if I give up now. And they’d tell the story to every other executive in town, how the Mayor had pissed herself and run from the Hall. And Zem would laugh along. She stayed put.

“Okay,” she took a deep breath. “Here we go.”

She stepped over to the first column and laid her hand against it firmly. There– that felt solid, reassuring. She took another step and reached out for the next column, but she couldn’t quite reach it. “Okay, okay,” she told herself, let go and took the biggest step she could. She practically fell against the second column, and she hugged it with all her strength. She felt slightly dizzy, but she felt she’d discovered a system for getting through this. She took a breath, stared down at her feet and the stone pavement, and tried it again.

Another couple steps, another couple columns, and she was making her way down the barbell. The roof of the Spire fell away, sloping underneath her toes while this Hall stretched out into empty air, but as long as she just kept her eyes glued to the square foot she was standing in, she didn’t have to think of that. She distracted herself, as usual, with thoughts of the future. She’d bet every studio in Hollywood would be calling her to beg to shoot here, once this was revealed. Every fashion designer would want to use it for a runway, to show off his new collection.

Magnolia had no intention of cheapening Zem’s Hall by renting it out as a mere location. But imagining those toadying phone calls bought her three more columns’ worth of distance.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” she mumbled. She stared at her hands on the smooth stone. Laid there, pressing firmly, they looked so solid, so reliable. Unfortunately, she could also glimpse views of the tiny city beyond. “Oh shit. Oh shit.”

She knew she was approaching the end, where the pavement flared out again into the smaller loop of the barbell and the roof underneath fell away altogether. At the very end was the dreaded Place, the spot where a wider space gaped between the last two columns, and all of Vegas lay like a particularly avant garde Christmas village miles below. Zem would be ready and waiting there, if he could be believed, to receive petitions.

He’d better be. She had a doozy to lay on him.

She took a breath, waited an extra moment or two for the wind to die down slightly, and literally pushed herself away from the column she was holding into the middle of the Place of Audience. She had no idea where she should look, there was no safe place to fasten her eyes. But as it turned out, that didn’t matter, because she felt so dizzy and so nauseous that she couldn’t focus on anything, anyway. She saw flashes of columns, flashes of the city, flashes of the distant mountains, only visible from here because she was above the smog line.

“Zem,” she cried out. “I’ve come to ask a boon. I’ve earned it, and it’s right that I should have it.” She could feel herself hyperventilating, but if she just concentrated on the words coming out of her mouth, she was sure she would calm down. Communicating was her great gift, when all else failed, she always knew how to talk. She’d built her whole life and all her success on that.

She’d done some studying before she made this climb. Heroic visitors to gods always began by declaring their fitness. Unless they were Christians, at least, in which case they began by groveling. She knew Zem had equal disdain for grovelers and Christians. “I was your first supporter, your first and most fervent servant.” Fervent servant? That hadn’t been in the trial versions she’d slaved over for the last few weeks. She tried to marshal her thoughts, and also to open her eyes. They seemed to have fastened closed on their own, but that was almost worse as she felt herself swaying with the raging wind, and imagined her body pitching, tumbling over the edge, on its way to splattering–

Enough of those thoughts! She cleared her throat and picked up where she’d left off. “I have redesigned this city for you,” she shouted. “I have made its leaders swear loyalty to you. I have served you well, Zem, and I have come up here, to this holy and terrible place you’ve established, to demand my reward. Yes, I said demand! Give me what I crave and I will serve you for as long as you deign to remain among the race of men!” She liked the words “crave” and “deign”. They sounded particularly heroic.

“I have come up here to speak to you about what I am, and what I am to be.”

“Then tell me,” she heard his voice.

Unholy shit! Magnolia ducked, for that voice had sounded huge, produced by a mouth that could swallow the Goodyear blimp in one gulp and want more.

“Uh,” she said.

“What do you want?” Zem’s voice rattled the colonnade. Literally. She felt the pavement shaking and one of the columns across the circle produced a tiny crack. She reached out to steady herself, then resolutely dropped her arm.

“I– I want to ask you–” she began.

She took a deep breath. She allowed her eyes to close again while she collected her wits. When she opened them, she looked at Zem. He was standing in front of her, his heels all but hanging over the drop-off, and waiting with his customary blank expression.

“What do you demand of me?” he asked. And waited to see if she’d repent the word and grovel.

He’d hardly seen her recently. She’d been busy, either bullying the construction crews and hotel bosses, or back in her office shuffling papers and strong-arming the city council. Meanwhile, he’d drifted from hotel suite to hotel suite, killing time while his new city was built.

Zem and Magnolia had never discussed what would become of her after the New Year’s announcement. She’d laid the groundwork for his future admirably. Now the time had come, it seemed, to address hers.

Zem waited.

“You owe me,” she said. “Not only that, but you own me. I can’t return to my old life, I can’t return to any life. You’ve ruined me for human existence. I’m yours now, whether that was your intention or not. And I want you to make it permanent.”

Zem considered. “You want a lifetime appointment?” He looked her over. Magnolia was over fifty, he knew, and from what he understood, humans weren’t useful workers after about seventy or so, modern medicine notwithstanding. So... twenty years? He’d be happy enough to have her for that long, he supposed. By that time he’d just be beginning his real domination of the world. It hardly seemed worth climbing up here and demanding formally.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want a lifetime appointment. I mean, I guess I do. But I want you to fix my lifetime. I want immortality. And no cheap tricks like that guy in the myths who just kept getting older forever. I don’t want to be decrepit. In fact, I want you to make me younger. I want you to make my body the best it’s ever been, make me the best I can be, physically, and make me immortal, and I’ll serve you forever.”

“Hm.”

That was a request worthy of the trek up to this rooftop and all the bells and whistles of formality. Zem turned and looked out over Vegas.

“Let me think about it,” he said, and stepped off the edge.

“No!” Magnolia yelled after him. He’d dissolved his body as he felt it start to fall, so now he turned around in the air to focus on her. He saw in her face not alarm, but outrage. She’d taken a step forward as he’d gone, and now she stood there staring through him, fear of the height washed away by indignation.

“Zem!” she yelled again. Invisibly, he studied her.

She’d not moved to help him, as he appeared to fall. She’d moved in order to demand an answer. She’d not seen him as a man in danger, but as a god who might be cheating her.

He laughed, suddenly, and the air around him shivered as in a rainstorm or a wave of heat. But the atmosphere was dry and at that elevation it was cooled by the same breezes that lifted the birds and planes aloft. Magnolia was still standing and staring.

“All right,” he said gently, and saw her relax.

She looked out toward where he hung, estimating his position pretty well, then nodded once. Then she turned and walked back up the colonnade. She congratulated herself that she only broke into a run at the end, when she was more than halfway up the Hall’s length.

NEXT POST: VENUS DISARMS 'EM (Friday 11/27)

Friday, November 20, 2009

A Clutter of Cats

Rachel and Testy moved into half of a large apartment on West 99th. The other half was possessed by an eighty-year-old ex-Rockette named Belle, and her thirty-seven cats.

“There might not be thirty-seven,” she declared at the top of her lungs from her La-Z-Boy in front of the tv. “I just say that ‘cause it’s got a good ring. That’s the number I stopped counting at. They’ve all got names, and if you can’t remember, just make ‘em up. I call that one U-Turn, ‘cause his mother was Eunice. And those are Fee, Fie, and Foe. Fum’s somewhere else. This orange one is Forty-two. I mean that’s his name, not his age. Cats don’t live that long! I never used to think I would!”

Belle had a tv tray next to her recliner, piled high with takeout menus. She watched news and game shows for hours on end, shouting at Peter Jennings and Pat Sajak with equal enthusiasm. She claimed not to have left the place in ten years, and could recite the phone number for every grocery store and restaurant within a five block radius. “Never liked New York. Moved here when I was seventeen, when Lincoln was still president!” She hooted at them. “Yeah, right! But I never liked this city. Why should I spend my old age wandering around it like all those pathetic has-beens with their wire carts on wheels? I’ve got my retirement, I’ve got a little nest egg. And I’ve got eight rooms with rent control, darlin’s, and two of them can be yours. Five hundred a month, combined, just ‘cause I like you. Now. I’m ordering from Ling’s– what’ll you have? I don’t suggest the Moo Shoo Pork. I don’t think they’d know a pig if it snorted at them. Moo Shoo Rat, more like it!”

“We’ll share a room to sleep in,” Testy told her. “I could use the second one for sewing.”

“Suits me,” Belle shouted, raking her beady eyes over Testy. “What do you sew?”

“Costumes, probably,” the dresser told her.

“Ha! Know something about those, myself! Maybe I can hook you up!”

“Thank you.”

And so they moved in and joined the household. Rachel “put those gorgeous tits to the use God intended,” as Testy said, and got a job serving cocktails. Testy made a name for herself as a skilled seamstress with a talent for beads and rhinestones, but not among the city’s drag queens as she’d expected.

“I guess I’m out of touch, babe,” she told Rachel. “These girls are either all slick like Fifties housewives, with little flip hairdos and polyester skirts, or else they’re tatty and threadbare. I saw one queen in a boa that didn’t even have any feathers left, last night. I wouldn’t want to touch ‘em.” But the opera set, she quickly learned, had taken up where drag queens had left off. They understood her kind of glamour– and they had much more money to pay for it. “I’ve got me a good gig, honey,” Testy confided one week after landing at Belle’s. She’d taken to sewing alongside their landlady, shouting at the television and feeding the cats bits of sushi or eggplant parmigiana. Rachel just sighed and took herself to bed.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked once in awhile. She’d formed the idea that Testy’s mysterious friend moved through a sort of underground network, and word of his arrival would come to them through some code or hint imperceptible to the untrained eye or ear.

“Any day now,” Testy told her.

“Really? Because–”

“Don’t worry. He’ll show up.”

Rachel did her best to stop worrying. She picked cat hair off her clothes, and kept trying.

“Ha!” Belle yelled. “You know what a bunch of cats is called? A clutter! A damn clutter! They said it on Hollywood Squares in June, 1992. And dammit if this place isn’t cluttered with cats! Ha!”

Rachel scratched a fat tom called General Tsao under the chin and smiled. Testy pulled a huge tackle box of threads and needles out of the hidden recesses of the Drag Queen’s trunk and sewed rhinestones.

The magic of New York, such as it was, swept them steadily through the weeks and months, as inexorable and uncaring as a street cleaning machine pushing a pile of old New York Times issues and discarded french fry boxes along the gutters of Upper Broadway.

NEXT POST: AND WHAT I REALLY WANT IS... (Monday 11/23)

Monday, November 16, 2009

Pussy On Parade

Miss Honoré held emergency auditions three weeks after Rachel’s last appearance in Extravaganza!

What she was looking for was merely some bodies. Good bodies, tall bodies, bodies with a minimum ability to count music, she hoped, but mostly bodies, just to fill the stage and give the costumes a place to hang.

What she hoped for, as always, was Pussy Galore reborn.

Vegas showgirls have been called many things, but in Miss Honoré’s mind they were no more nor less than the ultimate Bond Girls. Super feminine and super powerful, willing to melt in any man’s arms who proved himself worthy, but steel-spined bitches to any man who failed. They were what feminism aimed for but missed, what the ancient Amazons tried for but couldn’t conceive, what women were designed to be, as she’d lectured more than one cowering reporter over the years. She sat down in the Extrav! audience twice a year hoping for that girl, that magic, and was invariably disappointed, no matter how much dancing ability or how much beauty she observed. Pussy Galore, Honoré mourned, had passed away once and for all. She collected and stacked the new resumes, and leafed through them as she called this audition to order.

Auditions, under Honoré, followed an invariant pattern. Barring magic, she wanted to see the hopefuls demonstrate they could dance, prove they could listen, and show some small indications of poise and professionalism. She had her own system for testing these attributes, which did not always go over well with the participants in question.

There was nothing resembling ballet in Extravaganza!, but Honoré always began with a short ballet combination, anyway, choreographed and taught by her assistant, Gina. Gina was never much of a presence anywhere– she’d acceded to the assistant company manager position mostly because she’d survived more Extravaganza! contracts than anybody else. In fact, Miss Honoré had been surprised she was still around, when the question of an assistant came up. She hadn’t noticed the girl in years.

Gina usually taught her ballet steps so quietly and unobtrusively that the girls who were supposed to be learning them never noticed her, either. They certainly couldn’t hear her, and generally had no idea she was anyone of importance. The ballet portion of the proceedings tended, therefore, to be chaotic, disorganized, injurious, and marked mainly by dancers stridently demanding to know what was going on and who was in charge. It was also, in consequence, mercifully short. After being treated to three or four raging stampedes of girls rambling across the stage with no rhythm, displaying not the least hint of grace or choreography, Miss Honoré would pick up a mic, yell “Stop, stop!” in tones that had been known to shatter eardrums, and then she would slide out from her seat in the center booth and stomp on stage to take control of things, herself. Gina, in shame, would melt into the shadows of whatever booth was nearest and shuffle some papers.

Miss Honoré would then proceed to tutor the auditioners in something basic, like a showgirl walk. Showgirls in Vegas, as Testy had explained many a time to brand-new ballerinas who had somehow landed on her row (Ellen had been the most recent) do not just schlep from place to place on stage. Neither do they float, as ballerinas are wont to do, or grind their way, as Broadway dancers might. Showgirls swivel, they reach their long legs out like flamingos, they slide along sideways without ever turning their displayed breasts anywhere but straight ahead. Their hips swing and twist and move in half-circles, their legs extend so far they cover more floor with each step than any other woman could in three. They mesmerize and scandalize. The showgirl walk may be the single biggest contribution the state of Nevada has made to sex, legalized prostitution notwithstanding. And that walk, that undulating, sexual, super-feline way of moving, was generally Step Two of an Extrav! audition, tutored and demonstrated by Miss Honoré herself, and leaving, all who beheld her aghast and in awe.

“Wow,” one out-of-town girl told another on this particular occasion, “She’s some old broad– imagine your grandmother doing that?”

“Sh!” her friend told her, staring and struggling vainly to move her hips in anything like the figure-eight inverted swirl of Honoré’s. “If we can’t do this it’s back to L.A. and waiting tables for a buck fifty in tips.”

“I bet they’d tip better if we walked like that,” the first girl commented, and, indeed, they did, when both girls were thrown out five minutes later, along with half the others who’d also failed to meet Honoré’s standards. They drove, dejected, back to Southern California, where they worked on their walking technique and soon had income and table service jobs beyond their wildest dreams. They eventually gave up dancing altogether, and opened the first waitress employment agency, where they made millions teaching other girls The Walk that Honoré had shown them and then reaping a percentage of the take from restaurants all over Southern California.

“Gina’s going to teach you a number, now,” Honoré announced over the mic again, having returned to her booth and resettled herself. The two or three stage hands who were present watched her warily, ready to stuff cotton in their ears. But Honoré’s walking stint always calmed her. “Now, pay attention this time.” And she set down the mic with a heavy clunk and waited while the hapless Gina set about familiarizing the girls with a few eight counts worth of dancing from Extravaganza!

On this memorable occasion, Honoré realized early on, watching the two dozen or so remaining hopefuls stumble through the movements, there was only one girl up there worth looking at. One girl, indeed, caught her attention right away, and held it. That girl wasn’t bothering to watch Gina, or learn the number, or do anything remotely similar to anything the girls around her were doing. Honoré stared at her, and kept staring. She couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t noticed her in the walking. Or even the ballet.

“That’s enough, that’s enough,” she cut Gina off early. “Let’s see what they’ve got. You–” she pointed at the one girl, and riffled without looking down through the pictures and resumes on the table in front of her. “What’s your name?”

“Venus,” the girl said.

Honoré waited. “Venus,” she repeated when a moment had passed. She noticed, out of the corner of her eye, that all the stage hands had stopped in their tasks, far upstage and in the wings and out here in the audience. They were all staring at... Venus, if that really was her name. Honoré was sure she’d seen no resume with anything like that on it.

“Have you ever danced before?” she asked into the mic.

“For years,” the girl answered.

She tossed her hair a bit. She stood center stage and waited. Honoré heard a gulp from her left. One of the sound guys, busy rewiring a speaker till half a minute ago, was nearly falling off the stage.

This “Venus” obviously knew nothing about the business. Her hair was all over the place, she wore no makeup, and she hadn’t even offered any contact information. Honoré had certainly never considered anyone who didn’t know at least those basics. “Let’s see you,” she said, and Venus waited while four other girls, hastily hustled out by Gina, took their places all around her.

Honoré waved a hand, and the music started. And the four girls around Venus danced.

At least, Honoré assumed they danced. They must have– they still wanted the job, they were trained dancers—when music came on, all dancers danced. That was how they were built, how their brains were wired. But in this case, at this particular time, Miss Honoré Jerques never noticed what those four girls did at all. Because Venus, in the middle of them, also moved.

You couldn’t call it dancing. Not exactly. There was nothing discernable as a step. But it was... sensuous, and enticing, and utterly, utterly fascinating. Honoré heard a sudden clatter and assumed that the careless sound man had fallen the four feet to the pit floor. No one made a move to help him. Venus kept on shimmying, or shifting, or whatever she was doing, long after the other girls ran out of choreography. The music ran on until it ended, which, since this was a cut from the show, itself, took about five minutes.

There was silence for another minute. The girls on stage all stared at Venus. Gina forgot to get out of sight. She stood right out in the open where Miss Honoré might yell at her, eyes fixed on Venus, jaw hanging loosely. All the stage hands and waiters who’d come in early to set the room stood still. Miss Honoré caught a flash of dark blue to one side and saw that a pride of executives had wandered in from the hotel offices. They, too, were silent, and moved only to get closer to Venus, creeping slowly down the rows toward the pit where they could worship her more intimately.

“Ahem,” Miss Honoré cleared her throat, and it echoed through the speakers and around the theater. “Very nice. And... Venus–” she’d have to do something about that name, it was ridiculous, “are you available immediately?”

Venus smiled down from on high, and everyone else in the room smiled back, their faces lighting up and lifting to meet her warmth, pouring out from center stage at them.

“I’m here for your pleasure,” she promised, and raised her eyebrows naughtily. She giggled.

Miss Honoré disciplined her lips into a straight line. “Let’s go down to my office,” she said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

She set the mic down on the table and slid out of the booth again. Then she made her way along the row, down the stairs to the pit, through the tables, and up to the stage one more time, while all around her the room stayed silent. The crowd waited, their every breath and every muscle held perfectly still. Venus kept smiling, and looked all around at everyone, meeting, it seemed, each pair of eyes that stared at her, and dimpling back at them. Honoré heard tiny, individual gasps from around the theater, and adjusted her jacket, her skirt as she climbed on stage. “Won’t you come with me?” she asked Venus.

“Of course!” the marvelous girl said, and Honoré knew that Venus was not just happy but thrilled. She was fulfilled to walk– with her, Honoré and only Honoré– down the stairs, through the hallways, to the office. Just them. Just the two of them.

Pussy Galore could eat her heart out.

Honoré nodded at Venus, and Venus shook her hair and fell in with her, and they strolled across the world’s largest stage and disappeared, and all around the room the dozens of dancers, and the dozens more who’d been dismissed but hadn’t left yet, and the stage hands, and the waiters, and the hotel executives who’d come in for a cheap thrill at lunch, and Gina, all stared after them as they went and didn’t say a word or take a breath until they’d gone.

NEXT POST: A CLUTTER OF CATS (Friday 11/20)

Friday, November 13, 2009

When A Drag Queen Speaks...

Seeing the town took two weeks, and at the end of that, Rachel still had no idea why they’d come to New York or how long Testy planned to stay.

“Test,” she broached the subject one afternoon at Rockefeller Center. They were sitting on a bench in the Channel Gardens, staring up at the tops of the buildings, where they’d spied half a dozen people hanging over the edges and staring back at them.

“Bastards,” Testy groused. “Lording it over us that they still have access to those terraces up there. You know they were all supposed to be public, originally? Why, when Rock was building this place, he had plans for each one to represent a different county, with all kinds of imported plants and things. I gave him the idea. It was going to be great.”

She sighed. Rachel watched her.

“Rock? You mean—”

“Never mind, doll. So, what do you want to see next?”

“I don’t know, Testy. Shouldn’t we be… doing something? Finding this friend of yours? Not just wandering around and sightseeing?”

Testy folded her arms. “Honey, we’ve been looking since the moment we got here. I’ve been looking. You didn’t know how to. But there’s been no sign, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it’s the wrong month.”

“Wrong… what? You’ve been—Testy, you’re not making sense.”

“Yeah I am, doll. You just don’t have all the information. But don’t worry about that. What say we go apartment shopping, settle down and see what this wormy ol’ Apple has to show us in six months or so. Say, around the holidays. Maybe New Year’s.”

“What? New Year’s? Testy, you didn’t ask me to move here.”

“Well, I kind of did, but you weren’t really ready to hear that part, so I didn’t push it. What are you going to back in Vegas, anyway? Go crawl back to Honorė, who probably won’t even remember your name? Try out for some other show, even older and tattier than Extrav!? Is that really what you want, doll?”

“It’s what I thought I’d be doing a little longer,” Rachel said. “I mean… a little while, anyway.”

“Oh, doll. Come on. Give this a try. For your Auntie Testy. You know you really want to.”

And when a determined drag queen says things like that to an indecisive, aging chorine, there’s little or no chance she’s going to be refused.

“But Testy, really… six months?”

LaLesbiana patted her hand. “We’ll see, darlin’. But it’ll be good. I promise.”

And so that was settled.

NEXT POST: MISS HONORÉ STRIKES GOLD (Monday 11/16)

Monday, November 9, 2009

The Crone

Of course there was a wise old woman. There always is, in every fairy tale. In every story, probably. She’s the fairy godmother, or the hero’s great-aunt, or just the crone who lives next door.

If the hero and/or heroine are somehow so unlucky as to have grown up without a godmother, or great-aunt, and in a crone-less neighborhood, it doesn’t matter. She shows up, anyway, like clockwork, at their isolated cabin in the woods as a storm rages at midnight, just as the baby’s being born, or the crisis is coming, or the good fairy/bad fairy is about to lay a blessing-that-will-be-a-curse, or a curse-that-will-bless, on somebody.

Apparently, these women are simply everywhere, unavoidable, tripping over each other in the streets and desperate to impart their hard-won wisdom. The crone will show up, come hell or high water or logic.

The question that occurs to any halfway intelligent, thoughtful listener is, of course, what is the frail old biddy doing out there in the forest, in the night, in the middle of a raging storm? What is it about deep, dark, untraveled forests that proves such a draw for old, stooped women? Why don’t they just stay home, or at least walk around during daylight hours, when they could see where they were going?

On the other hand, in every story everywhere, they always find shelter and help when they need it, so maybe this is a given, if you are a crone. And, if that is true, then presumably the crones know it, and so they know they don’t have to worry about mundane details like paying attention to where they’re going or being sensible about their travel plans.

It’s curious, really, this crone lore: who are they really? One could mine a lifetime of research, probably, if one were an academic in search of a particularly esoteric Phd., out of the habits and lifestyles of fairy tale crones.

Speaking of which, do you know what those Grimm Brothers were really doing, when they collected and wrote down all their alarming stories? (No need to rehash that old chestnut about how grim the Grimms truly were. Consider that settled.) The Bros. G were researching language, comparing stories and noting how they diverged across the countryside. (Little Red Riding Hood might have been Little Pink Knickers in one town, and Big Red Shawl in another— somehow, they used the differences to diagram an evolution of words and grammar—and thus invented History of Language, causing many English majors much misery for generations.)

In this story, if it’s a real story, then, there has to be a Crone, and there is. Don’t we feel lucky? We’ll meet her now. She’s not a godmother, nor an aunt, nor anybody’s neighbor. She’s not even necessarily old. But she is the requisite wise woman, or the closest approximation we’ll get here. She is called simply The Crone. We’ve typecast her in title and office, because really, why waste time trying to fancy things up?

It was to this woman, large and square and waiting, tapping her foot on a path running along a cliff over a broad, slow river, that Faraway brought Seth when they’d escaped the bloodthirsty virgin and her clamoring warrior clan, when their wounds dripped hot blood (red from the hero, green from the dragon)and they’d both nearly blacked out in the darkness, the insensibility, the sheer confusingness of their flight.

“Oh ho!” she cried, “What happened to you?” And then there was a time of ministering, and inspecting, and poking and prodding, most of which neither Seth nor Faraway much noticed, as they were both just too glad to be on solid earth, and free from pointy Medieval hunters, to care about such minor details.

This may have been the moment, so far, when the two of them were most attuned. Getting away, then getting down, and all the dizziness and blood loss and desperation that went along with those, were their shared experience. They had been blooded, as a partnership. They lay now, on the still ground, while the crone tended to them, and thought of little except the stillness, and the quiet, and the freedom they’d gained from quick death or slow and painful hacking. And each other. When they thought back, or at all, at that moment, each included the other in his thoughts.

—When Faraway’s better..., Seth’s more cogent thoughts began.

—When this hero can stand..., went Faraway’s.

You see they were a team now. Sometimes, barbaric as it may sound, shared peril is the best thing to cement a team, and shared injury is good glue.

“And where have you boys been?” the crone asked. And Seth found, to his minor surprise, that he could answer; that her words pierced his thoughts and came clearly. Moreover, he found that he wanted to answer, that the time for talking, for discussing and understanding, had come.

(You must know that the essence of all stories only comes in the telling. Understanding is born of relating. The meaning, the shape and reasons for our past comes into focus not as it happens, not as we think about it, but through words, as we tell. Any number of things may happen to you, but until you use them in a story, they are only random incidents. It is as you relate your tale, as you string those incidents onto a thread of logic like a rosary, that they take on shape and function. Virginia Woolf said we impress our memories, and she thought doing so was artificial and wrong. The Apostle Paul said we redeem the time, and he thought this was godly and good. But all they both meant was that we make sense of the un-sensical, that which does not have, inherently, a pattern or point. And what would the Apostle Paul and Virginia Woolf think of being cast together as our great and worthy wise ones? They’d be offended, no doubt, and one would rail while the other might laugh. You decide which would do which, and when you tell someone else about it, you’ll have made that story yours.)

“We’ve been to a small planet taken over by a flower, and to, I guess, the Middle Ages, where there was a woman who was hunting a unicorn. That was... pretty disgusting,” he added. “And... we didn’t do much. Mostly, almost as soon as we got there, we had to start trying to escape. The flower wanted to to turn him into mulch and make me protect her, even though she didn’t need it. And the hunters just wanted to kill him, but I think they would have killed me, too, pretty quickly. But we didn’t do anything. I don’t know why we were there.”

He frowned at the dragon then.

“Did you rescue anybody?” the Crone asked. “Set free any prisoners? Right any wrongs?”

“No. Like I said, mostly we just had to get away.”

She nodded. She’d been washing his worst wound, where a rock– or something– had struck him on the shoulder and torn a flap of skin loose. She’d already wrapped up Faraway’s leg. She seemed to have about her no end of linen, bandages, and little bottles of heaven-only-knows-what which she used to dab at them, pour over their cuts, soak their bandages, or demand they drink. So far, Seth had enjoyed one that tasted of vanilla and gagged over one that tasted like burnt cabbage.

“Pretty stupid, then,” she agreed with him. “Terrible waste of time for a stalwart hero like you.”

She went back to her wrapping, not stopping till his entire shoulder was mummified and he couldn’t move it. “That should hold,” she nodded.

“Do you do this much?” he asked.

“What? Oh, almost never. But then, it’s not often that a mythical beast and his hero come swooping down pouring blood and looking bedraggled. I go with what the world hands me, you know?”

Seth nodded vaguely.

“And now let’s get you bedded down so you can rest, and then we’ll see what tomorrow brings. Come this way.”

She waited while Seth hauled himself up, and then they both stood still while Faraway gravely, slowly brought himself to his feet. Then she turned and led them along a sketch of a trail, through trees and thick bushes, and eventually right into the densest, most inaccessible copse in the woods.

She’d disappeared. Seth looked hard at the riotously intertwined foliage to find a way through, and failed.

“Oh, here,” he heard, and a hand reached out and grasped his shirt, pulling him past branches and sharp twigs that caught at him but somehow failed to dig in, and leaves that seemed to magically open... until he found himself standing next to the crone in a clear space, with a hedge of trees and greenery all around, and a palm-sized patch of sky overhead. And Faraway had found his way in, as well, somehow, so that they were all curled into the space together, touching on every side but comfortable, fitted. “And here you’ll be safe until you’re ready to move again, to find your next quest or rampant flower that needs pruning.” And the crone grinned at him, toothy, mocking, yet friendly, and he somehow found himself smiling back, although at the same time shame over his last two adventures burned in his throat and weighed down his mind.

“Thank you,” he mumbled. “Um–”

“Oh, don’t worry. No one will find you. Except me, I’ll come back. But for now you need to sleep, the both of you. Give my salves and potions a chance to do their work. Get you healing. Go on now, find a spot and stay there. Make yourself at home.” Again, she grinned, already backing away into the undergrowth. “I’ll check in on you in the morning.”

And a soft forest floor, it turned out, was a surprisingly comfortable place to sleep, particularly when curled up against a warm dragon, the dark of the copse all around them, and with the tiniest opening into the sky as a nightlight.

When you are a hero, a warm bed is a rare thing. Regular meals are just as rare, and if you are a hero traveling with a dragon, human conversation also falls into this category of strange-and-valuable. Seth had been enjoying long hours of sleep next to Faraway in their copse of trees, and feasting on fruit and meat and fresh green vegetables that the crone brought him, and chatting with her about inconsequential things – the time of year, and whether the nights would stay warm, and the denizens of that area, and who might wander by to discover him. Three days went by like this until Faraway decided to hunt, and took off in a crack of air and a rattle of branches, and the Crone led Seth back up to the cliff-top path where she’d met them, and showed him a likely spot to sit and look down on the river rushing far below.

Rivers are gossipy things, chattering and moving their news along, always eager for what’s coming, what’s next. You can’t trust rivers, but by that same token, you needn’t worry over them too much. They are too flighty, and too hurried, to catch many details, and what they do hear will be broken up, splashed into pieces, before they ever have a chance to repeat it clearly.

“What do you do here?” Seth asked.

The Crone shrugged. “I live.”

“But what does that mean?” the hero asked. “Are you a prisoner in this forest? Were you driven out of some city somewhere, made to live here alone in some hovel somewhere? Is there a king of a prince who has wronged you, sent you to this wilderness?

She glanced at him. “I live here.”

“But–”

She gazed down at the river as it passed, chittering, below. A couple of birds were squabbling over some trash on the far shore, and far upstream there might have been a boat coming into view around a corner. Finally, the Crone sighed, and shrugged, and looked up at Seth.

“I am not a prisoner, or a victim of any kind, hero-boy,” she informed him. “I came here by choice – and how do you know I even live alone, anyway? I do, but that’s beside the point. My home is in a city near here– at its edge, anyway. You’re the one sleeping in a forest. I’ve lived in many places, and I’ll live in many more, before my life is over. I’m happy here, for the moment. But I don’t need rescuing, or avenging, or any other heroic service, thank you very much. That’s not how life works, and you should learn that if you’re going to actually be a hero, and not just some dumb kid running around swinging his sword where he shouldn’t.”

Seth was taken aback, and also a bit angered. He’d only meant to make conversation, and see if perhaps he could offer anything to the Crone. She had fed and cared for him and Faraway, after all. It seemed only right to, well, go out and kill something for her, or something, if she needed that.

“I didn’t–” he began.

“Oh yes, you did. Listen, boy, let me teach you something. You don’t owe me anything for this, it’s just what old, crazy women do in stories– they take care of fallen heroes and patch up raggedy monsters. I’m a supporting character here, got that? But I also get to share some wisdom. Ready? Listen then: life isn’t a story, that you can make up. Oh, it is a story, really, but only after the fact. You don’t get to write it till you’ve lived it, first. Then you can tell it any way you want, and make anything you like out of it. Completely heroic, savior of the world, whatever you want.” She looked at him closely, and saw that she’d lost him. “What I mean is, no one gets to plot out their own path in life. You don’t get a map, and you can’t draw your own. What happens to you, how your adventures turn out – you can’t choose those things. Things happen, and you just have to do the best you can as you face them. So all your worry about being heroic, about doing the heroic thing, at all times and in all places - it’s ridiculous. You can’t know what’s heroic. You won’t find noble quests every place you go, and you probably won’t even recognize them when you do. But if you’re prepared to serve some greater good, if you’re really ready and willing to take on injustice when it shows its face– and you are, I can tell that, so you don’t need to prove it– then you’ll do that when the opportunities arise. And until then, you just have to muddle through like the rest of us. When you’re telling people about your adventures afterward, then you can edit out all the boring parts, the days and weeks you think are un-heroic. You can tell your story however you want– that meeting you had with that killer Rose has the makings for a fine heroic tale, if you ask me. And the story of the bloody virgin, too. That’s a very fine adventure, the revealing of evil lurking under its cover of beauty, the proclaiming of horror where the public sees what’s right and proper. Good stuff,” she nodded vigorously. “You just have to learn to tell it. But this obsession you have for recognizing your own heroism as its happening, or knowing which path in front of you is going to hold the greatest nobility– that’s just stupid. It won’t work. And you’ll drive yourself crazy, and end up doing nothing if you don’t stop.”

“Is this what Faraway told you?” Seth asked her. His voice was stiff, and he was sitting very still, and he said it not because he thought the dragon actually had been talking to her, or would have said any of the things she’d just said, but because he had to argue, had to find a way to oppose what she said, and that was the only objection he could think of.

“No, it wasn’t Faraway. Good God, boy, who do you think I am? I’m here to give you advice, that’s my function in this life, I suppose, and it’s certainly the right I’ve earned, after cleaning your wounds and feeding and keeping you. Hear what I say and do what you will with it– you can cast me as the bad witch or the wicked stepmother or just a senile old biddy, if you ever tell anybody this part. But what I am is a friend, and what you are is going nowhere, when you could go great places, and be great use to a great many people. And I think that’s what you’d like, isn’t it? Am I wrong, boy?”

After a second, Seth shook his stiff head. No, she wasn’t wrong there.

“Good. Then... go. Fly off with Faraway. And see what comes next. Where will he take you, what will you find there? You’ll never know until you go, boy. But you’ll cheat yourself of your greatest story if you go with a pre-planned agenda, always rushing off after the nearest injustice, or the most convenient battle to fight or maiden to free. Sometimes you have to live in a place a little while before you can see where the real injustices lie. You have to get to know people before you can understand who needs your help, and who just wants to use a handy hero. And then,” she finished, looking satisfied, “You won’t find yourself chatting up bloodthirsty virgins who get off at the sight of their barbarian boyfriends slicing off the heads of whatever’s around them.”
“But,” Seth took a deep breath, “But once you get to know people, it’s harder to know if they’re good or bad. It all gets... complicated.” He sighed heavily, his chest heaving as if in a great release.

“Well, yes,” she agreed, tilting her head reflectively. “People are complicated, and their good guy/bad guy status is generally full of shades of gray and very inexact. But still, life’s better when you acknowledge that instead of just bashing ahead and refusing to take time to see it.” She turned her head and looked at him, frowning. The river slowed its rushing to hear. “The problem with a complicated situation isn’t knowing what to do,” she said. “The problem is making yourself do the right thing when you see its consequences. Sticking around to get to know people means you’re going to realize how your actions will affect them. And even when you’re righting wrongs, there’s going to be some fallout. If you save the virgin tied to the stake, you’ve saved her life, but then the dragon she was being sacrificed to is going to be mad, and want something else instead, isn’t he? And if you kill him, well, maybe you’ve murdered a good creature, who deserved to live and never meant to cause all that trouble. Or, even if it was a nasty, horrible dragon, once you kill it all the sheep and goat populations in the area will start to get out of control, and you’ll have created an ecological disaster. Never thought of that one, did you?”

Seth certainly hadn’t.

“I thought,” he began, but then didn’t say anything.

“You thought there was nothing to it, that being all heroic meant glorious battles with cheering crowds, and probably a girl throwing herself at you when you’d finished. Blood and battle and wine, women, and song. Well, it can be all that– but only when you tell the story. And those are really not the most interesting parts of an adventure, anyway. There’s much more interesting stuff to tell before and after the battle, and in the shadows behind the big celebration. Go for the interesting stuff, hero. You’ll find plenty that’s worth your attention.”

Seth sighed again, lifting his shoulders and dropping them, inadvertently dislodging a pebble to go bouncing down the long, steep slope into the river, which hurriedly sped up and rushed on as if it hadn’t been listening in. Seth never noticed.

“What should I do now?” he asked.

The Crone gathered herself up, and stood above him dusting her not-inconsequential body off. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she told him. “You’re the hero – go adventuring! You’ve got a dragon – fly off on him. See what he thinks, where he wants to go. The whole world is open to you, my boy. Go explore it, and come back someday to tell me what you found and what you did there.”
She turned and started to walk away. But, like all Wise Women (or Aunts, or Godmothers, or Crones anywhere, in any story) she stopped when she thought of one last word to share.

“Go gather a story,” she told Seth. And then she walked off.

“I will,” he muttered. And he waited for Faraway to fly back, and then took off with him and flew higher and higher, and winked out in the empty blue of the sky, and went places he’d never imagined, and saw situations he could never have understood.

And so their story was started.

NEXT POST: COME INTO MY PARLOR (Friday 11/13)

Friday, November 6, 2009

Some Fairy Tales

The Rose:

Consider, if you will, the physics of riding a dragon. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Like the greatest roller coaster ride any amusement park ever came up with. Swoop and glide and soar high over the earth, look down at your friends and revel in what you’re seeing and experiencing that they never will.

Yeah, but keep in mind there are no seat belts. And dragons, who do not generally act as taxi services, are probably not particularly well-aware of a human’s needs or abilities: how would they know, for instance, exactly how many g-forces a human body could withstand comfortably, or how tightly a human could cling to their scales, to allow for how much rolling and looping through the sky, very, very high above anything like solid ground and security?

So dragon riding is risky, and you’d better be a hero before you even attempt it. Even at that, even if you are, there’s no guarantee you’ll have fun.

By the time Faraway landed, Seth wanted to throw up, fall to the ground, clutch his head to keep it from spinning, scream at the dragon, and stay very, very still forever. Since it wasn’t possible to do all those things simultaneously, he leaned over and gurgled. A few seconds later, he also threw up, just a little, over the dragon’s shoulder. Unlike, say, barfing in the midst of a killer hangover, which can make you feel much better, this did not prove to be a cleansing experience.
It did, however, mark a turning point, because when he’d finished gagging, Seth finally noted the smell he’d been smelling. It had reached out to pummel his nostrils from the first moment they approached this place, from when the light grew brighter and the dragon began to come in for a landing. But he hadn’t taken note, in the way that people in a burning building can fail to notice how ugly the carpet and the wallpaper are.

Imagine a stench– no, you can’t. Think, then, of fermented garbage– but that will not communicate it. Go stick your nose in a compost heap and breathe deeply, have someone dump a new load of garbage over your head, and then add in the sickliest, sweetest scent you can find – some kind of overpowering air freshener, or flowery soap, or a gallon bottle of perfume. This will not come close to equaling what Seth smelled, but it does give you the components.

Imagine a world overcome by vegetation. Not just a vegetable world, without people or animals cluttering the place up. Imagine a land where the very ground has disappeared, where the earth is buried in generations of vines and leaves turned to mulch; where greenery grows on greenery till the mass of it is almost black, and can no longer be separated, by the normal eye, into new growth and old death; where the pale young shoots are intermingled and enrobed with their slimy, decomposing ancestors and where the smell of decay is so ripe, so overwhelming, that the only response– as Seth found– was to gag again, to cling even tighter to the dragon’s hide and hope, vaguely, that this, too, would pass and disappear, and that he’d someday, somehow, feel normal again and able to sit up.

“Where are we?” he croaked, which was about all the sound that the miasma of stench would allow. It was overwhelming, which, technically, means “so great as to render resistance or opposition useless”—a remarkably clear and colorful definition—and which can therefore be somewhat freeing. When all hope is gone, in other words, despair gives up and goes home. What power does it possess? There is no fear anymore, when doom is certain.

So Seth realized he could face this stench. It did not lessen, and he did not get used to it so that it ceased to smell bad to him. It smelled horrible. More than horrible. There were no words for how it smelled. But he coexisted with it. He forced himself up, away from the dragon’s hot skin, and looked around.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A rose,” came the answer.

And this is how Seth’s thoughts went then (and how yours would, too, if you were even capable of thinking in that situation): -A rose. A rose? A rose? One? Oh, come on...

“What?”

“It has taken over the planet.”

To which Seth had no response, because there were simply too many possible questions.
—Planet? he thought. —This is a different planet? Come to think of it, the horizon does seem awfully close, and too curved. But wait a minute—would there be roses on another planet? And how could Faraway fly there? And... what?

He wondered if the rose’s stench were interfering with his thinking.

“I don’t understand,” Seth said out loud.

“Listen,” Faraway suggested.

Our hero did. There was a crunching, rustling kind of noise. He strained, and thought he could hear things pushing through the vines, leaves being made to scrape past each other, thorns catching and tearing. It came from all around them, from underneath the green. He reached and gripped his sword hilt, looking for enemies circling, for a pack of predators. But there was no disturbance in the green, only a leaf that fluttered here and there. He tightened his grip on his sword anyway, and held it in front of him.

That is what heroes do, in any story, when things start to threaten.

“Do you know what they are?” he asked Faraway. The sounds didn’t seem to be coming closer, but they were getting louder. As if all the beasts were rousing themselves, building up to a killing frenzy, readying for the attack. He still could not see any sign of their passage.

“A rose,” the dragon repeated. Then: “There is only one,” it added, apparently feeling it had not been as communicative as possible.

And then it said the words Seth might have been expecting, if he’d watched more horror films and spent less time heroing. The dragon said, “I am caught.”

Of course the dragon was caught. If he were free to fly away, there’d be no tension, would there? Now, with the rustling, crunching threat rising up upon them, of course he found that he could not move. Seth leaned far over, still watching the greenery down below with suspicion, and tried to inspect the dragon’s legs. They were sunk in the plant life, which was not surprising, but just as he was trying to lean farther, to see how entangled they might be, he heard a weird, wet slap behind him, and looked back to see that a particularly fat and heavy stem had fallen over the dragon’s tail. It shifted, slightly, as he watched, and settled securely. Suckers reached out to anchor themselves to the scaly hide, and new tendrils reached up, finding the light and the air.

“Jesus,” Seth breathed. He sat forward again, scowling and ready to move. “You’ve got to move, throw it off,” he directed.

“I cannot,” came the answer, and the dragon shifted slightly to show how firmly caught he was.

“Damn. Okay, let me cut it off– we’ll have to do this quickly or they’ll just reattach.”

Seth started to turn so he could deal with Faraway’s tail, but the dragon stopped him.

“Wait–”

“What?”

“It is coming to us.”

Seth sat up higher, held his sword ready, looked around for movement again, but nothing had changed.

“What–”

“Wait.”

There was a flicker, down by the dragon’s front leg. Seth craned over and saw a tiny, pale green shoot reaching up. He watched it darken, actually saw its color shift and deepen as it thickened and lengthened, and more pale green budded from its end. A leaf unfurled, and then a thorn punched its way out.

“What the hell?”

In the 1950s, there were lots of terrible horror movies about killer plants. Did you ever wonder, when you ran across them at 3:00 in the morning when you were twelve and loved the thrill of cheesy terror, just how the damn things moved? Did you see shots of fat, hungry vines snaking across floors, or little branches curling around some buxom blonde’s helpless limbs, and think to yourself, ‘What? Plants don’t have the muscles for that!’ Or did you just watch, and shiver, and maybe shift a little farther away from your mother’s philodendron?

The makers of monster movies are rarely hamstrung by a sense of logic. This story isn’t, either, but the explanation here, for those who want one, is that this overgrown escapee from a garden party didn’t really move or catch things, it just took advantage of the sunlight and the extremely nutritious compost provided by its own earlier iterations. It grew really, really quickly, in other words. It sent shoots up all around Seth and Faraway, and many of those shoots found handy notches and rough patches on the dragon’s hide where they could anchor themselves. And so it raised itself up till it crept over the dragon’s back and shoulders and sent one narrow tendril around his neck just about at Seth’s eye level.

“That’s far enough!” the hero announced. He’d stood up, balancing on the dragon’s shoulders, and now held his sword pointed at the neck-encircling vine, which particularly annoyed him. Climbing up legs was one thing, but strangling the dragon was offensive.

The vines stopped growing. Seth was surprised, but watched the shoot that faced him suspiciously, waiting to see what it would do next.

And around him, the growth had not exactly stopped, either. The vines stopped getting longer, but they thickened, and sent out leaves and thorns. And in front of Seth’s face a bud appeared. It thickened and colored, too, darkening from light green to dark, and then to purple before it burst open in a firework of petals. And then it was red, red. Red as a pair of lips, red as a drop of blood. Red as a rose, in fact: the prize rose at an international competition for redness, the envy of all rose growers everywhere who spent their lives seeking its color and lusting after its ripe pinnacle of blooming.

It stopped blooming abruptly, having hit that point of perfection when to grow more risks cartoonishness, ludicrous overkill. So many roses don’t know when to stop, and a bloom that has overreached itself has the same appeal as a carnival in the daylight. All its tatty crassness is exposed. But this bloom pulled back, stopped its explosive unfolding, and hung there, swaying slightly, bobbing before Seth’s nose in a picture of perfect rose-ness. Seth waited. He had no idea what to do now.

The flower coughed.

“It is very chilly here,” she complained.

Seth stared, nonplused.

“Has my prince sent you?” she went on. “Have you come to protect me until he returns? You should really say something, and not just stare at me like that with your mouth open. I admit I am beautiful, and most men simply like to look at me, but it is very rude when you are being addressed.”

This was all simply far deeper into the realm of fairy tale and silliness than our hero had been prepared for. Dragons, fine. Flying off to unknown lands where the horizon seemed too close and nothing moved but ridiculously overfertilized vegetation, fine. But really– talking, scolding flowers? Had he been reduced to this on his weird quest? Was this what happened to heroes who weren’t self-directed enough? Should he be expecting twittering bluebirds any moment, or chipmunks who’d scurry up onto his shoulders and give him pointers on swordplay?

“Are you ignoring me?”

“No— no,” Seth stuttered. “I was just—wondering how you could speak.”

“Why shouldn’t I speak? If you will only listen, you will find I have many interesting things to say. First, though, answer my questions. Are you my protector? Has my prince sent you to serve me?”

“I—no, ma’am.” Seth looked suspiciously toward Faraway, whom he assumed was listening but who hadn’t bothered to snake his head around to watch the scene. Seth frowned. “I do not know your prince, and I am on a quest of my own. I am not a gardener.”

The bloom pulled itself up haughtily. “I do not need a gardener,” it declared. “I need a hero. A prince to protect me. Perhaps you are not up to the task. I suspect you aren’t.”

Seth sighed. Not only scolded, but now scorned by a flower.

“I’m not sure what protection you need,” he suggested carefully. He hadn’t forgotten that Faraway’s legs were caught, and he understood that antagonizing this escapee from a lunatic potting shed could be very dangerous. He wondered if she’d actually eaten this prince she referred to. “You seem to have conquered this place,” he told her. He started to edge away from the flower, thinking of the fat vine that had wrapped itself over Faraway’s tail behind him. If he could get one good swipe at it, he might be able to cut it off. Then, if the dragon could somehow free his legs, they could be up and away before this blossom-in-imagined-distress knew what hit her.

“I have subdued my world,” she allowed as he slowly shimmied backward. “But one never knows when new predators may strike. And the cold wind still blows at night. I am very vulnerable.” She coughed again, quite piteously.

“I don’t think so,” Seth told her. And he pulled his sword around and sliced off the fat vine from Faraway’s tail.

“Oh—you wound me! You are a horrible villain. You are no hero!” the flower cried. Her stem, where Seth had cut it, fell away to both sides, and all the other loops seemed to loosen. “I—” her voice suddenly cut off, and the blossom fell over and wilted.

“Did I just kill it?” Seth wondered, and then he looked down to see how things were going around Faraway’s legs and lower body. “Can you move yet?” he yelled.

“It seems I must,” the dragon rumbled, and began to shift and struggle. Seth held on mightily, looking down at a seething, raging green mass. No more indistinct slithers and whispers now– the rose had given up subtlety and was boiling out new growth all around them. Seth saw buds fattening on at least half a dozen vines. He swung his sword, cutting any creepers he saw. “Move!” he yelled to Faraway. “It’s going to trap us again.” And he stood up on the dragon’s back, threw an arm around its neck, and leaned out as far as he could to lop off every vine he could reach. Pruning time! he might have yelled, if he’d been a hero in a badly-written movie. Or: Fertilize this! But, as a real hero caught in a real crisis, he just saved his energy for fighting and clinging, praying that the dragon would break free and fly soon.

“I fear,” he heard the dragon breathe.

“What? What?”

There was no answer. But a second later, there was a hollow sort of breath by his ear: a rush inward, all the air around him being sucked into some sudden vacuum. And then a roar, distant but growing instantly, and then jet engines of heat and fire burning by, flames scorching all the space around them. Black vines curling, disintegrating, turning into ash. A scream—surely that was only his imagination, it couldn’t possibly have carried over the roar of the fire, even if it had been uttered—from flowers that burst, exploded into burning petals, then turned to gray, ashy waste even as his eyes were dazzled. As Faraway breathed fire down and out in all directions, the rose retreated, the vines all fell away and blackened. And then—

“Hold on,” our hero heard, and he felt a leap and a thrust, and not only was the flame gone, but so was the ground, as the dragon beat up hard into the air above the vines, and Seth scrambled to get situated safely on his back again.

He looked down over the scaly shoulder, still clutching his sword. Beyond the ring of still-smouldering wreckage, the massive greenery of the Rose was untouched. It seethed and surged, new vines even now unfurling and flapping toward them before falling back. They were helpless, Seth saw, with nothing to anchor to.

“Should we go back?” he suddenly wondered. Had they acted too hastily? Had the flower really meant to trap them? “Was that the right thing to do?”

“Oh, yes,” the dragon told him. “She meant to kill us. Me first, while she forced you to tend her. But you, too, I think. Because you would not serve forever. Like her prince who left her. She did not mean to lose a prince again.”

Seth looked back up at the back of the massive, scaly head stretched before him. “Why did you take me there?”

The dragon actually made a show of glancing back as it flew. Seth caught one instant’s glimpse of a yellow eye, unblinking and impenetrable. “It is a human story, which speaks of purpose and heroism. I thought to learn what it meant.”

“What are you talking about?” our hero shouted. But he wondered where he’d heard of something like the Rose, on a very small planet, before.

“We must try another.”

And with that, the blackness closed in, and our hero clutched the dragon’s neck tightly, and ground his knees down into its scaly hide, and clung desperately, hoping only that he wouldn’t fall off before this weird beast reached its next destination.

What else can you do, if you’re a hero who’s joined with a dragon, chasing a quest that makes little or no sense, pursuing it through worlds you don’t know?

The Virgin:

Having met, and jousted verbally with, and finally overcome a Rose, our Hero and his Dragon friend next sought a Virgin.

What could be more natural? Heroes and virgins are surely made for each other, and we’ve already established that virgins and dragons are no strangers. So as Seth found himself circling down over a lushly forested landscape on Faraway’s back (after another of the long interludes of darkness, rushing winds, unidentifiable sounds, lights, and dizziness that seemed to comprise traveling with dragons), he rejoiced.

“This looks better,” he called to the dragon. “Where are we this time?”

Faraway didn’t answer for so long that our hero thought he hadn’t heard him. He was just wondering if he should shout louder, or if that would be a waste of energy, when he heard some low words coming back to him through the brisk air.

“We seek a woman.”

And seeking a woman sounded all right, so Seth was more than happy about their new destination. He was especially happy about it in light of their last stop. He wasn’t sure, thinking through it, precisely what the incident with the Rose had been meant to accomplish, but he couldn’t help but feel he’d failed at it.

“That’s good,” he called back to Faraway. The dragon didn’t answer.

And so they circled, and swirled, and banked and slid, till the treetops were brushing Seth’s ankles. And then those highest branches were above his head, and the forest floor came closer, and then with a final whoof of cupped air under his wings, Faraway pulled himself tight to fit into a small space between the trees, and landed. Seth caught his breath at the sudden silence of no wind rushing past him and no great dragon wings beating, beating. He swung his leg over the dragon’s shoulder and slid to the ground.

A couple of birds began to chirp again as he walked forward toward Faraway’s head, and the forest resumed its normal rustling, twittering pace. Seth glanced around and felt pleased.
“Where is this woman?” he asked. “Are we here to save her? Is she imprisoned? Captive?” A fairytale setting and a downtrodden female boded well to his hero ears. This new adventure might offer balm to his slightly-sprained pride.

“I do not know,” the dragon said. “You must tell me.”

Which wasn’t exactly the tale of terror and bloodshed, and injustice ripe for righting which the hero might have hoped for, but he simply frowned and looked around again.

“Well, where is she?” he asked.

“She is this way,” the dragon told him, and began sliding through the parkland, slithering sinuously between close-set trees and looking snakier than Seth had ever noticed before. He suppressed a shudder.

And then he hurried to catch up with the monster’s head, and walk alongside, because even if he had to rely on a dragon, traditional foe of both heroes and maidens, to lead him to a girl in peril, at the very least he meant to stride alongside it, rather than having to jump and crawl and dodge snapping branches in its reptilian wake.

The forest continued twittering and rustling around them. Seth did wonder, now and then, why the small birds and other creatures weren’t frightened off by the giant dragon slipping past them. Didn’t they know that Faraway could swallow them all, probably all at the same time, with one good gulp?

On the other hand, perhaps he wouldn’t bother, perhaps anything smaller than a sheep (or a virgin) wasn’t worth his time, and the birds knew that.

Which suggests, if you think about it, that these were awfully thoughtful birds, well nigh intellectual, which isn’t usually an adjective applied to anything that comes in flocks. But these were the hero’s thoughts, not mine, so just accept them.

The forest was an oddly patterned one, he also thought, and there we must agree with him. The grass they were walking over, when he looked down to inspect it, seemed almost woven. The bark of the trees had a sort of warp and woof to it, as if it had been loomed. Even the pale sky, when he caught sight of it between the leaves, had a slight knobby texture. The whole scene might have been woven onto stretched canvas. It was a very stately scene, and vaguely, teasingly– as with the Rose’s planet– familiar to him.

He turned to Faraway. “Where, exactly–”

But the dragon had stopped. “She is there.”

And so she was, and she was everything a maiden, virgin, fairytale damsel should be.

She was sitting on the grass, leaning against a very tall tree just in front of Seth and Faraway. One ring of trees and a few bushes still stood between them and her, so she hadn’t seen them. Moreover, a little enclosure, a sort of ornamental knee-high fence, ran around her and the tree that she leaned against. She was arrayed, as only fairytale princesses can be; in other words, she was so set within her scene as to be a perfect cameo, a subject for artists, the very ideal of lost maiden in medieval woods.

And the unicorn didn’t hurt that effect, of course. It lay before her, its horned head in her lap, and she was crooning to it as she stroked its fur.

“Wow,” Seth muttered. Did I mention she was blonde? That is a given, right? With long rings of hair tumbling down around her hidden face, and richly jeweled clothes and little, fetching soft shoes peeking out from under her skirt. They were completely impractical for doing anything other than curling up against a tree with a unicorn in your lap. We can’t blame Seth for his simplistic reaction. Everything about her was constructed to make men say wow. Or whatever was the analogous expletive in their own vernacular.

She looked up. “Oh,” she said softly.

Seth stepped forward. “Madam,” he began, “Forgive me if I’ve startled you.” And even he was surprised at how courtly he sounded suddenly. It seemed to come naturally in this place. “I offer my service. Do you wish to flee this place? Save this creature who so obviously adores you? Is this ring of wood around you enchanted? Holding you helplessly captive?”

She hadn’t stopped stroking the unicorn’s soft head. It rolled its eye toward Seth, regarded him, but seemed uninterested. The eye closed again, and it nestled a little closer into the maiden’s lap. Its back legs twitched, ever so slightly.

“I, captive?” she laughed. It was a trill, a tripping brook, amused water words bouncing against hilarious rocks and having a laugh together. “More likely the dogs are captive, who will shortly arrive to rend this rare, rutting flesh. My own future lord, who leads the hunt, might be captive more than I. On this day, kind sir, I rule them all. I am no more captive than the North Star, set at the crown of heaven to guide sailors in their way, whither it be to or fro, their way home or their path to adventure. I am no more captive than that, sir.”

Seth took a moment to work his way through this speech. When he was sure he understood it, he cocked his head at her.

“I only wondered because you are surrounded by a fence, my lady, which seems to have no opening.”

Again, she trilled with laughter. Perhaps it was her habitual way of starting a conversation.
“Oh, sir,” she returned, “This would hardly hold me. I am the daughter of dukes and earls, the Tower itself is required to hold one such as I. No, this small palisade may appear strong wood and nail to you, but it is ruse and ritual, most thoroughly. This furred one, alone, is held, who enters it only once, as all his kind do– as a fish into its net or a bird into its snare, coming home to their justly decreed offering.”

This time, Seth’s translation talents failed. “I beg your pardon?” he asked. “What do his kind do?”

Her voice took on a storytelling sing-song, and her laugh came more lightly and briefly as she told her tale. “When a one such as me, a daughter of ten generations, foretold to be the mother of ten more, jewel of a known house, enters this encircled space, stepping into it lightly as into a ring of soft moonlight readied by the forest spirits for us, knowing as they do the proper times of all things, birth and death and maidenhood, the forest stills as when prayertime bells forth in a village, silencing its streets as sweetly as a mother her fussy babe. And then one and only one of these fabled horned ones, miles or even days away, perhaps, points that gift which gives him fame to the sun, and, figuring his sacrifice, stretches his neck to cover all that canny distance, and looses a long, warbling cry to ring through the forest. No bird ever cried like that, nor other creature, neither, and all who hear it—who are all, all in the forest, as the creature’s sound ripples like water spreading through the trees, sir—all know that one more of these proud beasts is come to his end, that their number is diminished by another digit, that one less blessed stalk and pair of sky blue eyes will haunt the earth’s park, for that cry is both an announcement and a query, and the beast who utters it has to me proposed his end, and my and my line’s beginning.”
Seth did some mental prestidigitation, playing shell games with her statement to see what a little rearrangement would reveal.

“Then,” he began carefully, “You’re here specifically to lure a unicorn to its death?”

A longer, louder trill. The unicorn in question shifted again, nuzzling deeper and kicking its legs as it lay there. “How else should we catch them, I ask you?”

“Why do you catch them? Why do you wish to?”

This time her laugh sounded sharper, less amused by him. “Oh, sir,” she remonstrated. “Heaven has decreed to all things their time and space, and their continuance. This one lives to die for me. As without him I would die a lordless old hag. His blood is made to quicken mine, and the life he gives up will sweeten when it is reborn into many sons.”

“Then,” Seth said slowly. “This is a marriage rite?”

“Oh, sir!” And this time the delight was back, but it sounded exaggerated, overdone. “What else makes the heavens spin, turns night into day and back again when they would have grown too bored to do aught but sleep and mutter to themselves like old men, but the thrill of birth and new life? We all play our parts, and I merely follow the lead of my grandmothers, as this beast follows its fathers here to seek me!” And here she actually gave him what he was certain was intended as a saucy, naughty wink.

His brow furrowed. “I–” The unicorn shifted again, straining in the grass to nuzzle deeper into her skirts, and Seth saw that she caught her breath, her face frozen for a second while the creature rooted around and pressed closer.

Something, he’d identified, was definitely odd in this. “I fear–” he began conversationally, but he couldn’t juggle the high-flown phrases this time, so he broke off and just stared at the two of them.

It had looked so peaceful and childlike at first. The woman– girl, one or the other, all blond and ringletted, not a child but surely young, fresh– she sat demurely, her skirts spread around her. And the unicorn lay in her lap, its head ready to be petted.

But its nose was deep in her skirts, and as Seth watched, it shoved its hooves against the grass once more, and more of its muzzle disappeared among all the heavy fabrics. The maiden started again, and then let out a long aaaahhhhh, a jarring sound in the parklike, faintly twittering forest.
“Is this beast...” Seth wondered how in the world to express his thought in her flowery, obfuscated style, “Does this beast take liberties, madam? Does it molest you?” And he drew his sword, to show that he was ready to defend her.

A trill of laughter, cut short by a quick gasp.

“Oh, ‘tis not abuse, kind sir, though a deeper– aaahh– sensation than any tales would have told me. My own mother spoke of icicles, plunging deep within her gut, but to me ‘tis more like– ah ahh— rushing brooks, oh cold, clear water, dashing on its way who knows—aaahhh—where?”
Seth blinked. “Indeed,” he said gravely. “And—” he paused as she and the animal both shifted slightly, “This does not disturb you? I would be happy to, um—” he waved his sword vaguely, “dispatch the creature for you.”

“Oh no, sir!” she said quickly. “How else would I step forth into my womanhood, how else be set on my course to wifehood and motherhood? This beast gently—ah-aahhh!—nudges me to immortality, sir.”

“I see,” Seth said, though he didn’t. The unicorn, whose long, downy snout had almost half disappeared into the tangle of fabric of the girl’s skirts, snorted and rooted ever deeper, causing her to shiver and roll her head back against the tree behind her.

“I shall dine richly indeed,” she continued, her voice raised in pitch and sounding a bit strained, “with the memories of—this—” a sudden gasp, “this moment as sauce for this beast’s meat.”

Our hero, who was beginning to feel more than slightly revolted, took a half step back and thought about this comment. “You mean you’re going to eat it?” he asked.

She focused on him long enough to give a smile that, had she been any less fresh-faced and any less lovely, Seth would have had to describe as a leer. “Its loins for my breakfast, its rump for my lunch, its sweet brains pickled for my supper.” She caught her breath again and closed her eyes for a second. “And its blood fermented for my wine to drink all through my first year married. How else? It is how the world turns and how we—ah—we grow immortal in our husbands’ beds. Ohhhh—” her voice dropped an octave, and when she recovered and focused on Seth again, she seemed to have moved on to an entirely new thought. “I have learned a new prayer,” she said. “I beg God in Heaven to grant me sons, boys to give my husband, never daughters. For sons can get their pleasure by drawing blood and killing anywhere, but daughters—ah!” the pitch of her tone went up again, “my daughters will be condemned to a pleasureless, half existence without these—ahhh!—beasts to come—ah ah ahhhh—to them. Oh, I do pity daughters born in these days, with the earth bereft of these horn—oh—” she’d grabbed the unicorn’s horn where it pressed against her belly, and now she rubbed it mindlessly, up and down, as her eyelids fluttered, “—horned ones.”

“You mean this is the last one?” Seth demanded, scandalized.

“There are three, perhaps four, but this race runs only to males, no female has been seen since my father’s father’s time, and that was the beast that came to his wife and mother. Ahhhhh.”
Seth did not waste time trying to untangle her family relations. “So you’ve made them extinct, just so you can—” he wasn’t sure how to say it. “—just for your pleasure? And now they’ll be gone?”

“But this useful spear will hang above my bed always,” she crooned, stroking the glistening member as she caught her breath and the unicorn lay, for the moment, still. “And ‘twill serve me, and bring this sweet moment back to me all my life.”

“But—but that’s—”

Seth found himself wordless again, and he stepped back once more and looked around to see what Faraway was doing.

What the dragon had done was to slither into the trees again, retreating from the maiden and her apparently besotted prey, and he watched now, his yellow eyes shining faintly, from the leafy shadows some yards away.

“What am I supposed to do here?” Seth hissed.

Faraway turned his ponderous head to focus on the hero, and might have answered, but the moment was interrupted.

The maiden had leaned back against the tree once more. Her posture was no longer elegant. Her legs were open widely across the turf, and the unicorn lay as if boneless on top of them. Its head was now entirely concealed, and only its pearlescent horn extended free of her skirts to rub steadily against her thigh and stomach. She seemed utterly insensible of the world around her. Seth doubted whether she’d notice if he and the dragon left, or ate popcorn and watched, or waged fierce battle all around her.

“But she’d notice if we dragged that unicorn away,” he muttered. And then he didn’t have any more time for random musing, because there were sounds through the trees beyond her, noises of dogs and horses and men. The hunt, to which she’d alluded earlier, was arriving.
“Oh my lord,” the lady gasped out, “the beast—is—nearly ready for your swift stroke.”
There were a dozen riders, and half a dozen dogs. They milled and walked through the trees in front of Seth, and came up to the little fence inside which the lady lay, nearly insensible, and looked on with interest. One or two of them acknowledged Seth, nodding to him mildly. But the scene at the tree’s base held much more interest.

The lady’s lord, a huge man in dark leathers, riding a horse that could nearly have looked eye-to-eye with Faraway, pushed his way through to approach the maiden. He loomed over her, though Seth doubted she noticed, while his horse stamped occasionally and the other riders held back, waiting. The man himself gazed down at his fiancé with something less, our hero thought, than adoration. He frowned, and stared at the unicorns hind legs shifting, shuffling in the dirt, its entire head and shoulders lost to sight, and he waited. If watches had been available in his land and time, he no doubt would have tapped his.

Seth stepped forward. This whole travesty, he thought, must not be allowed to simply play out without some re-examination. “Sir,” he began, “forgive me, but your lady and I have spoken, as she waited here for—” Seth glanced down at the maiden and her creature, both twitching and emitting curious sounds as they lay entangled on the turf, “you. And I must question whether it is wise to strike down nearly the last of its kind. If it lived, more might be found, and a female, even, to perpetuate its—” he glanced down again, and grimaced, “noble race.”

“Bah.” The huge man spat down on the ground, a prodigious distance, but he aimed away from our hero, so Seth didn’t take it as an insult. “Filthy, rutting beasts. You’d have me allow it its freedom after it’s dishonored me?”

“But—” the fact that the lord was standing by and patently waiting while the aforementioned dishonor was finished seemed to undercut his argument, but Seth wasn’t sure how to politely explain that.

“The thing’ll give me sons, I’m told,” the lord cut his thoughts off. “Other than that, it has no use on earth.” He glanced back at his lady, now slid down nearly flat on her back, her head pressed hard against the treeback. “Bah!”

“Sons? Really?” Seth questioned. The maiden had said something about sons, too, but they certainly weren’t her primary concern at the moment. Seth risked one look her way, and found her looking back, through nearly closed eyes. Her lips quirked, slightly, as if sharing a dark secret, and then her mouth fell open, her eyes closed tightly, and she emitted a piercing wail that went on and on and on until all the horses of the hunt grew restive and their riders muttered and buzzed among themselves. The dogs howled.

The sound cut off suddenly, and the lord hesitated not one single second. “That’s the thing, then,” he growled, and he swung his sword down, practical and ruthless, leaning far over to reach it past the small fence. His reach was huge, Seth noted. He stabbed the unicorn, thrust the blade in, pulled it out with a gush of blood that splattered in all directions, and then jumped down from his horse, kicked over a wooden crosspiece, reached out to grab the unicorn’s hind legs, and jerked it out into the muddied earth, pulsing and fountaining its life’s blood. Wasting no time, he swung his sword and began to hack away at it. By the time he’d severed its head from its body, he’d been joined by his companions, all intent on dismembering the thing into as many pieces as possible, apparently.

Seth grimaced, not enjoying the carnage. He saw a brief flutter, and noticed that the maiden—was it still correct to call her that?—had stood up against her tree and was waiting, watching avidly, for the hunt to finish its work. She was licking her hand, which had been splattered with blood.

“Why did you bring me here?” our hero asked Faraway, but the dragon either didn’t hear or didn’t care to answer. It was lurking back in the forest, maybe watching him struggle through this chaos, maybe just waiting in its inscrutable way.

“Well, will you join us?” a voice boomed. Seth refocused on the scene before him to see the Lord standing there, fists on hips and looking much happier, dripping with blood, and waiting for an answer.

“Uh... it looks as though you’re finished.”

“Ha ha,” the man boomed even louder. “That pile o’ fur and blood is only the beginning. Join us for the feast, man, the celebration. Besides—” he fingered the hilt of his sword as his eyes roved past Seth, “There be other things to slay today.”

Seth glanced back at Faraway. “Him? Oh no—no, that’s my—we’re traveling together. He brought me here.”

“Did he indeed. A lucky choice, for you, man.” The Lord’s fingers were gripping and beating on the hilt of his sword as if it were the world’s biggest TV remote and he were desperate to discover all its features at once. “Come, you’re holding your sword. Put it to use, and prove yourself one of us.”

It was at this moment that our hero realized the other members of the hunt had spread out and were all standing around him. They’d moved individually, and without fuss, as they’d finished slicing and stacking the bits of unicorn near the maiden. Now they faced him on three sides, only the dim forest and Faraway clear behind him. He felt s distinct reminder of schoolyards and bullies here.

“Go, my lord,” came a muffled voice from behind the crowd of bodies. Seth craned as they all turned to look, and found the putative lady stepping forward, swaying slightly, and dripping unicorn blood from her skirt and hands. “Strike down this creature of nightmare, show yourself a terror against evil. Fill this forest with the screams and rendings of—” she wobbled and leaned against the tree, passing a bloody hand over her face, “your love for me.” She finished and dropped down again.

Everybody turned to watch her lord’s reaction.

“Bah,” he spat. He looked back at Seth and, meaningfully, past him at the dragon.

“I don’t think—” our hero began, taking half a step back.

“What’s to think, man?” the Lord growled. Growled? That’s too aggressive. The man rumbled, he purred. It was almost as if he were seducing Seth, forget the sanguine virgin ten paces to his rear. “Swing your sword, as you were born to.” He’d taken a step to match the hero’s. “Join us, and be our brother.” The crowd around them and stepped forward, too.

“No. He’s my companion,” Seth said.

“A monster’s no fit companion for a hero,” the man said, and he was suddenly much closer, looming, towering over Seth. “Take your place among men, or will ya abandon your own kind for a great slimy snake, unnatural to God and man?”

“He’s not—” Oddly, it was the word “slimy” that caught Seth’s attention. He’d had his own doubts about his current status as partner to a creature usually well-established as Dark and Evil, but as to Faraway’s physical characteristics, he was quite clear. If this man couldn’t even get that right, he thought, then clearly he had no idea what he was talking about.
Seth’s logic may have been unreliable, but his conviction was clear.

“He’s not slimy,” he declared. “His skin is quite dry. He keeps me warm—it’s very cold, when we fly.”

And then, without planning it in advance, or really thinking much about it, Seth turned and ran, dashing toward Faraway and yelling, waving his sword wildly, jumping over tree roots and leaping bushes, calling something like “Get ready!” to the dragon. He saw, through the dimness, the great legs tense, saw the neck lower and coil itself as it did when the dragon was preparing to leap free of earth, and he hoped, for one brief second, that he hadn’t misjudged, that Faraway didn’t plan to fly off before he got there. But no, the dragon crouched but paused, and waited for him, and as he made a final, Olympic-caliber leap, arms and legs flying, sailing through the air, feeling branches scratch him and at least two or three other impacts on his body that might have been thrown rocks, the dragon rose up to meet him, and he landed heavily, nearly blacking out, on its back. And so they took off, Seth clinging as well as he could, the dragon crashing, breaking through the trees on all sides, shedding greenery and raining down broken branches, and the hunt scattering below, even as their Lord stood and waved his sword after them, catching one of Faraway’s legs with a deep chop that got a deafening bellow, and finally they were out, they broke free, and the air was clearer and the sounds of tumult below them faded.

NEXT POST: THE CRONE (Monday 11/9)