THE QUEST OF THE MOUTHER
A collaboration with Rhys Hughes first published in 'Visions' 1997
"He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the temperament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite." From THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES by Robert Musil.
"Is that a parrot in your pocket?" Lucy lisped, "or are you just pleased to seed me?"
It was a question which coloured Godfrey's cheek crimson: a blush which, combined with his green shirt and yellow cravat, turned him into a macaw himself.
He stuttered, "It's a parrot actually, though I do have an erection in my other pocket. My back pocket, that is."
Raising a plucked eyebrow, Lucy continued, "well, I've always fancied a cockatoo."
A restrained lady, she forbore from further puns about peckers and nuts. These lingered unsaid, and unlicked, on the Surinamese air, humid as hot marshmallow, sticky as maté tea spilled on an anaconda.
Godfrey clutched his groin and announced, in a shrill voice: "Put the cleaver down, cocoa bean. Not on your life, you've plumbed my wife. Just a dalliance, wasn't my idea. Foul rascal liar! Don't cut it off, it's the only one I've got. A chopper for a chopper. Leave me alone, there goes my bell-end..."
Lucy stood with arms on hips and sighed. Godfrey was muttering, "Shut up!" to his lower regions. He hopped and strutted and grimaced; his coat flapped like wings. Was this the true parrot fashion?
"Godfrey, who the hell you talking to?" thaid Lucy, taking up the envelope he proffered as soon as her lips unparaphrased a password about a pocketeet. The air was then one huge chicken-wing that fantailed outwards, crowing drunkenly that it belonged to a god who could make feathers speak easy.
"Don't worry, it's only small talk," announced Godfrey, whose cheek was a deeper shade of crimson as he ducked under yet another wing the air had become. "Just open the envelope, and we can see where the trail leads."
"All well and good having a trail, but a trail to be a trail needs a pearl and a dean..."
"Nobody said it's a shiny fossil that we're after beyond Surinam's Crest or even a dog collar. Only a random quest knows where its rainbow ends."
Lucy, hitching her pencil skirt to the stocking-tops, slit the envelope upon a sharpened suspender-belt clip. But before she could read the enclosed yellow parchment, the air itself flew into the sky with a cackle. And both Godfrey and Lucy donned their face masks.
"It takes a good deal of pluck..." Godfrey began, wondering if his Pan image was marred by a mask that was identical to his real face. One good thing, his privates were communing quietly together now, since even pube talk needed air.
They eventually decided to push on through the forest, which was already choking
in the vacuum. A clearing opened round them, as the vegetation withered and died. In the centre of the widening circle hovered a yogi, oily and wise and rather spicy among the wrong Indians. He wore a goldfish bowl on his shaved head, full of water and fish.
Using sign language, Lucy said: "He looks like Sri Yuvaraj Beliram, the sage of the tilted scales. He once weighed justice and coriander and found them frying in the balance."
Godfrey replied: "But he died two hundred meals ago! This must be a mirage, some sort of exotic illusion."
Lucy silently snapped her fingers. "Without oxygen there can be no life. And life is what gives meaning to the passing of time. Thus we are in a region devoid of time, where the past and future can impinge on the present! He's certainly no phoney fakir..."
The yogi nodded slowly, anxious not to upset the fish, and gestured at the ground below. In a graceful loop, large lettered cards surrounded him. Lucy and Godfrey knew at once they formed a sort of Ouija board for a Hindu hoodoo. So they ganesh'd their teeth.
With his thumbs, Sri Beliram flicked cardamon pods onto the letters in deliberate order. Squinting, Lucy saw they made a sentence: "MY QUEST IS TO CONQUER THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE FISH."
"Does he mean flesh?" Godfrey wondered.
"I AM AT ONE WITH COD. MY SOLE IS FREE FROM HAKE."
Lucy sighed. "Sole? Does he want to heel us? I don't understand it. The past really is another country."
Godfrey shook his head. "No, no, Surinam is the other country. They do things differently here. That's worse."
Godfrey shook his name, shook his mane, shook his Codfrey, until Lucy couldn't differentiate him from any one of the various miners who were surfacing from the depths of an approximate coal mine. They were large animal creatures who sported wagging human appendages as well as leonine heads. The leader was carrying a cage with a dead goldfish in it.
"OK, OK, I know it was meant to be a canary," the leader said upon noticing Lucy's mocking finger.
The rest of the bunch were struggling to keep their lungs still. Having them on the outside of their bodies, their lungs looked like perfect pig-bladder moths, except one particular set of custardy lungs displayed the butterfly beauty of its panting wings...
Sri Beliram, noticing this fine pair of translucently yellow bellows, aimed a chili bean dart and cast it upon the lamina meniscus of the vacuum. And it squarely speared the butterfly, thus venting its left ventricle, allowing the breath within to propagate the otherwise expended atoms into a new swansong of air.
"Come on, you lot, only a random quest knows its rainbow trouts's end," Sri the yogi said.
Godfrey snatched off his face mask, Lucy straightened her pencil skirt, the critter with the cage snorted at the now blossoming wind and they all followed Sri towards Lankhmar, with only the tiny gills of Godfrey's trouser-snake keeping time to their steps with wet hisses.
They passed from jungle to uplands, a region of ribbon waterfalls which giftwrapped the mountains. Toothless caves in the young rock led to a sheltered valley where the houses of a rickety town stood on poles in a steaming lake. There was a market fringing the shore. In the foggy distance, saurians snapped at gliders.
The aircraft were bringing in produce from every corner of the country's pentagonal economy. Cocoa and lutes from Onverwacht; pepper and bicycles from the towns of Marowijne; priests and submarines from Paramaribo; shoelaces and machetes from the Sipaliwini Reserve on the Brazilian border; radium and jokes from the disputed lands beyond the River Litani and the Tumuc-Humac Range.
Godfrey and Lucy browsed stalls while Sri Beliram blew disapproving bubbles in his helmet. "Something smells fishy," he tutted. "This is no innocent casbah. Are we among slavers?"
"Yes, yes, a slave-market," nodded a German trader. "Buy them now, before the morning Jew evaporates."
"I'll have a ghetto," squawked Godfrey's parrot.
One stall was manned by a potter with the hands of a weaver. Polite as a polyp, he introduced himself as John Gor'blimeysworth, exiled king of Redonda. "My ascension was the start of a new era. But I was deposed and now must sell endings to earn my tea."
"Cheer up maté," punned Lucy, inappropriately.
The endings in question turned out to be the genuine articles. They were provided by impatient readers who skip to the climax of this story, looking for rhymes or reasons, and then return to this point to sell the dénouement to the exiled monarch.
"I'd like to hear it," said one of the bestial miners.
Upon the stall were gathered wax figures, representations of every member of the company, save Sri Beliram, whose image cannot be moulded. They were connected by strings to the king's fingers and danced to his delicate touch like fevers.
The wax images of Lucy, Godfrey and the others were shown standing in front of a tiny stall upon which were smaller figures, which in turn were standing before yet smaller puppets.
And so on, and so on, and so on...
"That's not the ending, that's now!" Godfrey protested.
The king of Redonda shrugged. "Best I can do. All the ripe endings have been snapped up. New batch expected tomorrow."
The German trader leaned over and said: "A slave-market, just as I told you. You're condemned to be free!"
Another stall was postmarked "THE WEIRDMONGER". A strange name for a trestleful of cat's meat - with Blasphemy Fitzworth himself beaming behind it running his fingers through sinewy strands and gristly melts.
"Cheap shit! Cheap shit!" was evidently Feemy's new Ratnerok salescry instead of his more legendary GOUT CAT, SPOUT CAT, WATCH THE WHISKERS SPROUT CAT!
But, by now, the rainbow cortege had left the market and was heading towards a distant bivouac. The critter, who had surreptitiously left his canary-cage with one of the stallholders in part-exchange for a soupcon of speech, announced:
"Hey, you three, that there place is a harem for scarums!"
Lucy was beside herself:
"Men are beasts! That's all they can think about. Sex and more sex!"
Sri Beliram, who had changed his name by inferral to Lankhmar in honour of the quest, was slightly more together, when he responded:
"A harem, yes, but one in which it looks as if the breasts fly around like birds."
Godfrey shrugged. For him, autonomous breasts were a smidgin more frightening than they they were enticing. The king of Redonda, whose harem it was, noting Godfrey's squeamishness, said: "But it's a great sport clay-breast shooting..." but not before Godfrey had interrupted with: "Ah, I see, they're only clay ones, so perhaps we can mould them into Sri Lankhmar's shape..." until he was himself interrupted by the sight of several pigeon-chested women beckoning to them from inside the approaching harem-aviary.
By now, the critter, the parrot, Lucy, Godfrey, Sri Lankhmar, the king of Redonda, Feemy Fitzworth, not to mention the trouser-snake, were more timid than toe-larks, having seen that the faces on the harem's loose-limbed lovelies were puppets being tugged by hair into grimaces.
One even had whiskers.
"Mouser!" ejaculated the king with a surge of recognition. "Your chest is nothing but a front!"
The said Mouser pulled another face. It was a godawful world where just about any quest was enough for him to follow. But, in his case, to follow was to be instrumental in actually leading them away from the ending they would have otherwise reached. Harem in tow.
Unknown to all, including Lucy, Lucy misheard his name as Mouther.
All the same, they allowed themselves to be enticed into the womb of the bivouac, which was a marquee shaped like a flaccid dodecahedron, the most perfect of the Platonic solids. When they entered through the air-lock, their bodies increased the inner pressure just enough to make the sides of the tent stand rigid.
"I prefer making love in a tetrahedron," said Lucy.
"I prefer making love in an allotment," said Feemy. "I like fresh, young lettuce." He licked his horrid lips.
Continued here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/199.html
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