The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories. Darrell Schweitzer

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      * * * * * * *

      Now all they had to do was find the one so wounded in love that all the rest had followed.

      It wasn’t hard.

      They went where the fancies were thickest, where the melancholy filled the streets like black syrup, rising above the windows, splashing over walls, while Tom and Nick swam in it amid bobbing skulls thick as foam on a stormy ocean.

      They glimpsed the hooded One with the scythe again, who was standing in an upper window, surveying all that passed below, looking rather pleased with himself.

      But when that One saw Tom and Nick paddling by in a washtub, he shouted something and ran downstairs.

      But Tom looked ahead, not behind. He saw that he and Nick had come to a forest of gallows, from which skeletons hung, all singing as the wind passed through their bones.

      I have both wagered life and land

      Your love and goodwill for to have....

      They beheld knights on quests, always failing, maidens pining away at tombs which bore the effigies of those same knights. A dragon, quite pleased with itself indeed, gobbled down the maidens one by one.

      There were ten moons in the sky, eleven. They bumped into one another. The various Men in the Moons quarrelled furiously.

      The skeletons sang:

      I brought thee kerchers to thy head

      That were wrought fine and gallantly....

      Nick tugged on Tom’s sleeve. “What’s a kercher?”

      “Rubbish!” someone shouted from a loft, high overhead.

      “I think we have arrived,” said Tom.

      * * * * * * *

      Introductions were in order.

      “Peter the Poet, I’m Completely Mad. Completely Mad, this is Nick the Lunatic.”

      “Actually his name is Tom O’Bedlam,” said Nick.

      “Ah me!” said the Poet, half in a swoon, hand to his forehead.

      “Poets do that a lot,” said Tom to Nick. “It’s part of the trade.”

      “Sort of like being mad.”

      “Yes! Exactly!” said Peter the Poet. “Even more so because I am in love!” He paced back and forth, gesticulating, waving pen and paper in the air. Tom and Nick stretched and bent, trying to read what was written, but the page never stood still long enough. Meanwhile Peter explained how he had been smitten, indeed, with the madness of love, which burned him, from which his life bled as if from a wound, as fortune’s wheel turned but would not favor him, as his fancies raged forth into the night on the holy quest of love (several hundred metaphors followed; we need not list them all), how he had given his heart away—

      Indeed, this was so. He undid his doublet, unlaced his shirt and showed them the hole in his breast where his heart used to be.

      “Good place to store cheese,” Nick remarked.

      And in a great storm of words then, in thunder and fury, in drizzling melancholy the Poet told the whole soppy, sorry story, which had no end, and could only be interrupted to further explain that a Poet’s fancies come from the heart, and if he has already given his heart away, and does not possess it, those fancies must arise in some place other than the residence where the poet resides; ergo a problem of uncontrollable proportions, which the Poet can hardly be expected to do anything about; ahem, since he, therefore, struggling with the Muse, with inspiration, can hardly be expected to recapture and rein in his fancies because what he writes has no heart in it and the result is likely to come out more like:

      Thy gown was of the grassy green,

      Thy sleeves of satin hanging by,

      Which made thee be our harvest queen.

      And yet thou wouldst not love me.

      “Doesn’t even rhyme,” said Nick.

      “It could be worse,” said Peter the Poet bitterly. “It could be Hey nonny-nonny.”

      “I shudder to think,” said Nick.

      “Does she have a name?” Tom asked.

      “Who?” said Peter.

      “Your lady-love. Now I too have some experience in the madness of love, for I was wounded in love myself, when I loved a giantess who was unfortunately moonstruck when she stood up too tall one night and the Moon hit her on the head and knocked her over the edge of the world—’twas a sad thing, but not entirely tragic, for still she tumbles in the abyss, among the stars, and she rather enjoys herself—I hear from her on occasion, as she dreams of me, or sings love-songs in her dreams, though she has fallen so far now that sometimes they take years to reach me—but as I was saying, ahem, it is my experience that in these cases the beloved usually has a name....”

      “It’s Rosalind,” said the Poet.

      “Ah.”

      “At least that’s her poetical name. I spied her from afar. I fell instantly, madly in love—something you can appreciate, I am sure—and I declared her my Rosalind. I set her on a pedestal, as my inspiration, my Muse. I gave her my heart, as you’ve seen, but still she loves me not, and my poetry cannot speak of the sorrows I suffer—”

      “But you haven’t actually ever spoken to her, have you, much less inquired of her name?”

      “What else can she be but my Rosalind?”

      “Her name might be Ethel,” said Nick.

      “You haven’t actually—?”

      “I poured my love into a poem, and thus I gave her my heart. It melted into the paper like butter into toast. I followed her to where she lived, and slid the poem under the door—”

      “Where for all you know the scullery-maid found it, and used it to wipe her nose when she sneezed.”

      “All gooey with melted butter?” asked Nick.

      “Alas, for unrequited love!” said the Poet. “Now sorrows and fancies pour from my heart, which is somewhere else, so what can I hope to do about it?”

      “I think I know,” said Tom.

      * * * * * * *

      And One who bore a scythe and hourglass, and had to hold both rather uncomfortably under his bony arms as he paged through his notebook, stood on the doorstep of the house where the Poet lived in the loft. There were by now twenty-seven moons in the sky, but the night was still somehow dark, the light itself steely, gleaming of death, the air chill, Doom and Gloom and Melancholy flowing by in the street like a vast river from an overturned witch’s cauldron. (In fact every witch in the kingdom rushed out with a jar or a jug to get a sample.)

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