Bloody Fabulous (22 page)

“Friends, as in—”

“Yes.”

Not good. “What do they want?”

“They want you to take their picture.”

How Galligaskins Sloughed the Scourge
Anna Tambour

So long ago that the roads were topped with the dung of ass and ox, in a land rich in short days and mouldy shadows, in the town of Ranug-a-Folloerenvy, lived a master argufier named Werold but known as Galligaskins for his old-fashioned knee-high socks that (in the heat of argument) he was always hitching up.

In this out-of-the-way town called by the low, just plain
Ranug,
where the bakers sold more day-old bread than fresh, and the tailors worked all night—in this tumbly-down filth-paved town, all the men (save Galligaskins) wore long, leg-hugging fine-skein hose white and delicate as the foot of the petal of a rose. These stockings showed best in winter when the lacily laddered knit exposed a wealth of leg-skin glow—puce, blue, crimson, suet—according to the state of the wearer’s chilblains.

Galligaskins’ hose were loose and thick, and brown as feast-day pancakes for the poor. And they ended folded over just below the knee, where he tried to tie them fast but they always slid past his garter of a cord—a shocking sight but one that persevered and was accepted as something that must be; as a rainy day, which cleans the streets.

For Werold was Ranug-a-Folloerenvy’s only argufier, as necessary as the glove maker. He had much to do with the rich and would have died a slovenly but relatively wealthy ancient, if the rich hadn’t got themselves into such a muckle.

It happened this way:

One day a drab nullness of a man called Bladsteth who unnoticed, had left Ranug some time before, returned—a new man—from, he said, far Ghovenir. Or rather, that is what some people
said
he said, and though they knew not this mouthful-of-stones, they did not question where? but tsked and answered with an impatient nod and a quick “So? Yes, yes. Go
on.
” For the question wasn’t where he went, but what he
wore
now that he’d returned.

The ladies swooned, to be brought to life only with a clod of chicken scat up a nostril. Men secreted themselves, unbuttoned sleeves as fat and slashed and colourful as candied-fruit-stuffed pheasants, and blew their noses into the embroidered cloth. Each man was suddenly as ashamed to be seen in what he stood in, as Adam was in the garden that suddenly wasn’t Paradise. Tavern braggarts, cock-strutting swaggarts, lute-picking peach-firm swains, grandfathers with faces like empty sacks, all men alike—each man then counted out his wealth (which took not long) and matched that to his wits to find a tailor to make up, without much lucre, a suit like that which had caused the swoons. Now such a time began!

The children who just a moment ago, it seems, were little versions of their fine-clothed parents, now wandered free, undisciplined, unfed. And in what wear? Whatever rags they pleased. The town’s air shimmered with the cries of women, and their tearful honks. Their grief melted the starch in pleats that were once so proud, they could hold the women’s heads up from the strength of style alone—till that traveller, Bladsteth, blessed and cursed be he, the cause of all this wilt.

Every woman of any worth cursed Bladsteth’s cheek, for he’d returned alone. No lady did he bring with him, nor key, nor word to what a lady’s wear would be to mate the splendour of his cockscomb finery. Not only that, but the menfolk’s wear would beggar a dromedary caravan. And the most foudroyantly furbelowed dames, instead of crying, screamed. If only a
she
had come to town, a
Desidora
instead of
he.
For no Ranug man in normal times would risk his health ignoring the gentler sex’s cry, lady to lady:
Be mode as me, you wish! On my own man’s worth, you shall not be. Be modish, you who challenge me, as an old dried pea.

And so, what with the men consumed by fashion with no time to think of else—and the women consumed, first with grief and then with hunger (for when his tailor took the whole of each man’s all, what man had time to notice women, children, or even his stomach’s need?) whatwith all this, there came to Galligaskins such a drying-up of arguments that finally, he had None.

Though the town resounded with grief, Galligaskins’ sniffs could pick out not one rumour that added up to a dispute that he could eat from—not even one petty snivel of an accusation that the greatest troublemaking miser in the town would have normally ordered, to be paid for with a promise. As Ranug-a-Folloerenvy’s only guilded disputationist, the doubly-good sums he was accustomed to taking from both sides of any case were now, many times over, doubly lost and missed. Starved, his leather inkpot shrivelled till its sides met, skint as gentle ox’s cut-purse. The worthy citizens were too busy. For the master argufier: a ruinous state.

So Galligaskins spent a coin on a pair of boots so practical, they must have been pawned by a traveller. Wearing the best (least torn) of his two mangy shirts, a once-fashionable jerkin that was now a chest-warmer with one button, and something he considered a cape but no self-respecting ass would bear tossed over its shoulders, he left the place he had been born. His hobnails rang on the cobbles in a mockery of a fare-thee-well.

By mid-day he was so hungry that when he came upon a stunted medlar tree at the top of a hill, he braved it—a rash action. Being winter, the tree was bare of leaves. Every fruit that had met the wind had fallen, and had been eaten in the snow by creatures who knew not that the fashion for these fruits had ended generations past.

The tree had one stolid trunk and many arms, their elbows hooked together like a poor man and wife in front of the landlord. But the arms of a medlar sport sword-sharp thorns. Galligaskins bared himself, and wielding his body like a key, he stuck his arm in. Thorns raked his flesh and pricked his wrist as he stretched his fingers forth . . . and plucked the last remaining fruits.

Eleven medlars did he glean, a handful. Burnished and dry-pimpled as Winter’s cheeks, as ripe as weeping boils, they smelled of musty spice. Famished, he sucked them dry, spitting skin and stones till just after the tenth medlar when his shrunken belly, delicate from starvation, whined at this rotting richness. Galligaskins, mad with rage at this contrariness, madder still with hunger, regarded the last suppurating medlar, the most dangerously swollen of them all. Then he ravished it, swallowing every bit—its weeping tear, its tannic skin, its gassy flesh, its five rock-hard, rough-edged stones.

Now the last medlar was gone. His tongue tingled from the dry sharpness of that skin. He breathed into his hands to catch the last wisps of smell from that rank, sopped, scented flesh. Oh, he regretted his haste. His stomach turned, but as he dressed himself, he paid it not the slightest heed. He was just pulling up his right galligaskin when his gut growled a most unfamiliar note.

And with no ado, the eleventh medlar spoke.

“Walk fifty-and-seven steps,” it said, and though its voice was rusty, each syllable was quite precisely paced, “with the sun warming the right side of your face. Then cut across the field till you come to a place where there are five rocks that you can see poking from the soil at the base of the barley stalks. And,” said the medlar from deep within Galligaskins, “If you see no rocks because they have walked away or because they lie, then continue as you please until you need to stop and eat.

“Continue on, and one day you will come to another kingdom. You will know this because of the clothing—
keep still! Mind my counsel.”

Galligaskins rubbed his stomach. If the medlar only knew the stab of
clothing.

“As I was saying,” said the medlar, pausing frustratingly, so like a master argufier when interrupted that Werold held his breath in awe.

The medlar must have felt Werold’s admiration. “Mind you,” it said, chatty as if they were feasting at juicy gossip. “The people in the kingdom I speak of wear jerkins, surcoats, cloaks, skirts, mantles, codpieces, wimples, bodices, great pumpkin sleeves, guimpes as crisp as toasted eggwhite froth—clothing from top to toe, including galligaskins white as icing—all bought fresh every morning, and served with the morning cup by the serving class.
Thems that serve wears the yesterday’s, or the day before’s,
” the medlar sing-songed as if it had heard that rhyme ever since it was a bud.

“And them that are too poor to serve,” it said, reverting to its russeted professorial cadence, “deck themselves out in the castaways tossed from the same windows as open for the overturning of the chamber pots.”

“But!” the medlar rasped. “On your fortune do not ask why there is no water in their morning cup, nor any goblet to hold drink. And though you may smell high, cover yourself with spice rather than take a bath or anoint yourself with unguent—though there be trays clotted with rose petals or rivers flowing with cardamom-scented almond oil, or lakes of water clear as tears, or.”

“Or?” said Galligaskins. “
Or?”

He beat his stomach, but all he got from it was groans. The last medlar was silent, or maybe silenced. When next it spoke, its words would be lost in the trumpet calls of sooty rye, the worse half a half-rotten onion, that year-old shard of dried-peas pudding. Galligaskins cursed his gut. Now he would never know why, but follow the medlar’s orders, he knew he must. For when had a fruit ever spoken?
And speak it did, to me.
And besides, he had nothing else to do, his way to find a crust in that style-fevered town all dried up. He turned around and spat on the ground as a curse and riddance to that worthless, worry-induced peace he’d left behind.

He set out . . . and though it took a long time, whatwith his pulling up his galligaskins at every seventh step, and the wrong turn he made at the beginning . . . one bright morning, emerging from a dark thicket, he espied a river soup-thickened with fish so fat they floated. He walked on them easy as upon a path . . . and when he stepped upon the other bank and saw the people and the land, his nose cried:
You are Here.

His mouth filled and overflowed as if the river of saliva could run down his cheek, fall upon his jerkin, drop down to his galligaskins, slither down to the toe of his boot, and from thence to the riverbank, where it could surround and drown and pull the catch back up—but how could it? Werold grabbed at his calves, but the fat slovenly hose had slipped down to his ankles again. For a moment, his mouth hung open and glistened, stupid as a dead fish, as he tidied himself with desperate speed in this place of undoubtable good fortune.

That he was always
Here
and never
There
was a lesson he’d learned only too well on this trip. At last, however, Here was where he had been sent, for here was somewhere that only the likes of a lecturing medlar would think real, and not just mischievous leaf whisper.

He bent down and peered at the ground, then picked up a scrap of brown stuff with white stripes. He sniffed, and shoved it in his mouth before he had time to obey his mother’s deathbed warning:
Never shove somewhat you dun know in your gob. It’s like ter poison your blood and cause your hair to frizzle orf.

Gingerbread!

Gingerbread with thick white swirls of icing! No one from Ranug-a-Folloerenvy who could have afforded this ambrosial cake would have thought to eat it—not when there were capes to seek, and new lace caps. Their treats were only what could sit from head to feet, on them. Their insides were never seen, so had to abide with day-old-bread made by bakers who made no cakes, and nothing fresh.

Before he knew it, the argufier Werold—weary, starving, workless—ate so much gingerbread that he fell asleep with an ache in his stomach and a smile on his face—having eaten his way through the scraps of twelve nightshirts, thirteen socks, a filmy guipure sandwiched between two caps, one-half of a too-stale boot, innumerable delicacies of bodices, a stodgy codpiece, a jerkin so padded its owner could stand with his chest puffed out at Cupid. And a slice of a detachable sleeve that truly was as big as (the medlar had foretold true) a pumpkin. Although even the meanest shred of underclothing was the most heavenly food he’d ever stomached, with a smell so divine he wanted never to be out of the presence these rags, he had been able to be picky, being all alone on the bank with not a soul in sight.

When the shadows lengthened, instead of trying to eat all the skirts that lay around, he made a bed of five of them and tossed one into the river where the fish it landed on picked a hole in it large enough that Werold could see one of the fish’s protruding eyes, and the profile of its thick lips with a hint of double chin. The river that was visible between the fish was clogged with sodden clothing scraps, much as lichen hugs the rocks in a path. Every few moments, a fish barely moved its body and opened its mouth—encompassing a scrap of used apparel.

It wasn’t dawn yet when Werold woke a changed man. He sniffed the skirts and put his hands together in silent thankfulness to the wise medlar.
It must be the cloves,
he thought. No longer starving, knowing that he was sent here for his fortune, he was invigorated and ready to take on any argument.
Versuith aey!
Werold the argument-maker who hailed from that silly tumbledown, fashion-chasing town so far away, was now set for better things, Sharp as a clove, he walked to his unknown destination not caring a jot for the picture he made.
Up!
he commanded his galligaskins, and though they did not obey any more than they ever had, he felt as if they jumped to his raised eyebrow.

The road led to a gated town, but with no one to challenge him. Instead, the path before the gate had a pattern in white stones that said in swirly letters:

Welcome!

The townspeople, though dressed in mouthwatering display, were so obliging that he immediately felt at home. Everywhere he went, people wanted to help.

“I wish to have a sign painted,” he said. No one asked him why, but he was taken to someone who said it could be done and took his order, refusing money “for the pleasure” (not that Werold knew what coin they took, even if he had any to hand out).