The Throne of Bones (38 page)

It was generally believed that they were dead, although they persistently refused to decay. After several months, it was remarked that the man’s right hand had moved. Formerly holding the woman’s hand, it now rested on her belly; which, some insisted, was swelling.

It’s not easy to cause a stir in Sythiphore, where people go naked in the streets and make love in plain view, likely as not with close relatives, but Tiphytsorn Glocque did.

Gossip had flurried when his parents died horribly after gorging themselves on a dish sauced with the poisonous ovaries of blowfish. His father was a wealthy fish-merchant who had started in life with his own net, who knew more about fish than the squid he resembled in his inky secretiveness and grasping nature, if not in his personal odor, and for such an expert this was surely an unlikely end.

“Glocque! Glocque!” the empurpling merchant gurgled, clutching his throat with one hand and flapping the other as urgently as the fin of a speared shark, according to the most oft-repeated and scurrilous version.
“Glocque!”

“Yes, yes, I’ll drink to that!” Tiphytsorn is purported to have cried with a maniacal laugh. “To our glorious family, you silly old pervert!
Glocque,
indeed, Glocque forever!
Tiphytsorn
Glocque!”

“And Phitithia,” his sister supposedly murmured as she scraped the sauce from her portion and dug in.

However virulent, the gossip then was brief. The real stir came later, when the young heir began to disport himself in public as an eccentric hobbyist—or, as he would have it, an artist.

Disdaining clothing, fashionable Sythiphorans satisfy their urge to make a splash, and even their convoluted notion of decency, with body-painting. They have themselves decorated by cosmeticians who vie savagely with one another to ride the crest of the latest fad. Grandiloquence comes easily to these rump-daubers, but Tiphytsorn outstripped their wildest flights when he took up their craft and called it Art.

He made his debut in Leviathan Square at high noon on the Feast of Valvanilla, local goddess of oysters and pearls, who is also fancied to have jurisdiction over impotence, frigidity and unsavory defluxions. The square was packed. Body-paint was confined to minimal enhancement of skin-tones. In fact the better sort of people were draped almost modestly, out of respect to the Goddess whose nude image towered over them.

Leviathan Square fronts the bay, and a dripping boy, believed to be a virgin, hoisted himself onto the esplanade and ran to the altar with the oyster he had chosen: a remarkable specimen, big as a human skull, knobby and massive as some barbarian helmet. Its weight very nearly caused him to stumble, a fearful omen, so the crowd heaved a vast sigh when he recovered himself and passed the mollusc to an acolyte, who passed it to the high priest.

Silence fell as the priest raised his knife to the Goddess. If the oyster contained a pearl, the year would bring potency, warmth and continence to the faithful. If it smelled strange or looked odd, if the priest’s knife chipped the shell, if he failed to open it deftly—but some fears are best left unformed.

First lovers gazing into each other’s eyes, or victims staring up at their murderers: their looks might have seemed uninvolved, compared to the intensity of so many eyes in Leviathan Square that day. But at the height of the yearning silence, at the moment when all attention should have been focused on the priest and the knife, the oyster and the Goddess, a buzz rose from the rear of the crowd.

This was sacrilege. What were those idiots chattering about? Idle heads turned. Marginally faithful heads turned. Then even the faithful swayed and revolved like kelp in a random current. The wet boy who was believed to be a virgin pointed and cried something that was variously interpreted. Unthinkably, the priest himself turned to look.

What they saw was a file of four naked women that slipped forward with the swift sureness and organic cohesion of an eel through mud. Totally hairless, they were painted in those shades of green and pink that are especially sacred to Valvanilla.

No drill sergeant could have faulted the synchronization of their barefoot steps. They were of equal height, their painted faces looked alike. Observant lechers later averred that their most intimate details were exactly the same. Were they some enigmatic message from the Goddess?

A fat young man, out of step and out of breath, wallowed in the wake of this lovely crocodile. He was unpainted, but his streamers of pink and green gauze suggested a connection with the women. He was none other than that notorious parenticide, that son of a fishmonger, it was—and here the thousands of Sythiphoran tongues, as only they could do, produced an echoing chorus of phlegmy gurgles and glottal clicks that were the young man’s name. At this first taste of universal recognition he puffed up like—as some malicious tongues would have it—a blowfish.

The women at last stood in a perfect line before the altar. Their escort said to the priest, who had been watching the parade in consternation, “I am Tiphytsorn Glocque, and I have come to pay homage to the Goddess with my Art.”

Instead of denouncing this fat fool, instead of merely ignoring him in the first place, the priest stared at the painted women a moment longer, nodded distractedly and said, “Oh,” before proceeding with his duties.

His stroke with the knife was sure. The oyster proved sweet and plump. It contained a pearl large as a walnut, though black. The priest announced that this rarity was a marvelously auspicious sign.

Others interpreted the omen differently.

Never devout, Phitithia had not attended the ceremony. She was as shocked as anyone when her brother led his creations into her quarters at their palace.

“You painted them yourself? These slaves? How absurd!”

“No, it’s a statement—”

She demanded: “Who shaved them for you?”

“I did. To trust another with any part of my statement—”

“Oh, ugh! Get your tainted hands off me! You actually lathered them and put the razor to their—
ugh!”

“How is that worse than kissing them, fondling them, or—”

“It is, believe me, it’s different! It’s disgusting! It’s demeaning, it’s unhealthy, it’s sick!
Shaving slaves!”

Anger always emphasized his sister’s bulging eyes, thin lips and weak chin. These are not uncommon traits in Sythiphore, but she wobbled perilously close to ethnic caricature. Her knobby shoulders always curved forward as if to hide her vestigial breasts. When the hue of nausea tinged her tallowy skin, not even the most doting brother would have called her pretty. Unable to control her stomach any longer, she dashed from the room.

She was only trying to vex him, he knew. It had been their father’s fondest hope to marry her into a noble house, but she had conceived an absurd passion for a sponge-diver called Dildosh. Their father instructed ruffians to discourage this unsuitable young man. Dildosh somehow survived with his good looks nearly intact, though he had indeed been discouraged; but once Tiphytsorn was head of the household, his sister assumed that she would be free to indulge her imbecilic lust.

The heir believed that the least he could do for his father would be to honor his wishes in this respect, and he had forbidden Phitithia to see the sponge-diver. Love may be blind, but there was nothing wrong with Dildosh’s ears, and he surely heard the chiming of gold and silver with each one of her wayward, knock-kneed steps. Refusing to understand this, but unable to openly defy a brother who controlled the family fortune, Phitithia bedeviled him in every way she could. He knew that her show of vomiting at his artwork fell short of honest criticism.

He sighed and brooded on his creatures, who stood with demurely downcast eyes and blank expressions. He tried to explore the pain felt by abused and misunderstood artists, but he discovered that he was far too well pleased with himself and his work.

He pulled the nearest slave down on the cushions with him for some fun. No arrogant painter or sculptor, he reflected, could claim that his creation, however grand, was nearly so
useful.

The artist felt something very like pain, but even more like blind rage, when commercial salons began to claim that their inept smearing was done “according to the Glocque technique.” His anger boiled over one day when his litter was borne past a mean stall in some squalid quarter where a scoundrel displayed a sign reading, “Be Painted by Glocque Himself!” A garish poster depicted a woman painted in the same color-scheme, allowing for its degenerate crudity, that Tiphytsorn himself had created for the Feast of Valvanilla.

“I’ll paint you!” he roared, pouring out of the litter and bursting into the stall like a turbulent wave of quivering jowls and pectorals that sprayed spittle before it. “I’ll paint you with acid, I’ll trowel you and scrape you and rub you out!”

“May I help you, Sir?” asked the graceful little man who intercepted him, grinning and fawning and clasping his paint-stained hands together like a fly gloating in a privy.

“You speck, you hole, you waster of skin and paint, you offspring of a masturbating monkey and a slut’s menstrual rag, know that I am Glocque! Glocque, you thief!”

“As am I, Sir, as am I!” The fawning smile faltered for never an instant. “Thoozard Glocque, your most humble and obedient servant.”

Tiphytsorn recoiled before an impregnable defense. His was the commonest surname in Sythiphore, though perhaps the oldest. When he was a child, his father had shown him how a gurnard belches the name when it is drawn up in a net, and he had adduced this as proof of the family’s honorable descent from fish. There was no way he could protect his name from infringement. Any rogue who claimed his work was “just like Glocque’s” could point to this wretch, or to a dozen others.

Tiphytsorn bellowed a laugh and clapped the rascal on a narrow shoulder. “Be Glocque, then, with my blessing! I’ll outdo you. I’ll go where none may follow.”

“Best of luck, Sir. May Valvanilla never forget you.”

Tiphytsorn found his promise hard to keep. Meticulously detailed, weird flowers and vines would run riot over his subjects, they would be embraced by plants and creatures unknown to any human eye; but as soon as they were observed and copied, any human eye capable of looking down at its attendant skin would know them.

For a while he vowed to keep his Art to himself. Lavishing long hours of toil over his beautiful slaves, bathing them and shaving them, priming them with saliva, semen, urine, or a few brisk strokes of the lash, and then easing oily pigments into their skin should be reward enough for any artist. Since his eye was the only one that could appreciate his work, his eye alone should view it.

His slaves came from the island of Parasundar, where everyone looks alike to Sythiphoran eyes, and where inscrutability to Sythiphorans is the ultimate virtue. Painting perfected these qualities. Not even Tiphytsorn, who fancied he could normally tell them apart, could say which was Butaphuda and which was Phutabuda, nor had he the slightest clue what they thought of the masterpieces he made of them. But he persuaded himself that they pined for the pleasure of striking wonder into the people, and no sooner had he created a design that he had intended to keep to himself than he was parading them once again before the public.

And no sooner had he paraded them than his design was copied by mercenary apes.

The artist was a creature of the city. Great gulfs of sea and sky disturbed him. Having himself rowed to the eastern horn of the Bay of Sythiphore, a trip of less than an hour in a hired skiff, was like a voyage to the edge of the world.

Food and wine for a banquet had been stowed aboard, select slaves had been taken to divert him with songs asserting the powers and pleasures of wealth, and a pair of inflated goat-bladders had been strapped securely to his shoulders in case of accident; but none of these was a defense against the violent expansion of the sky as his boat leaped forward. The city behind him and the ships at anchor shrank to toylike insignificance. He was an insect, exposed and helpless on an endless floor. Memories of his father’s early efforts to teach him the fishing-business, when he had hidden belowdecks, puking and gibbering, sprang back with ferocious clarity.

“He’ll probably grow up to be a poet,” he heard his father saying, just before dumping a fresh-caught netful of wet, flopping, slimy things onto his screaming head, “or an artist.”

This memory so bemused him that he forgot to be frightened. His father, the rudest oaf that ever oppressed the earth with his flat feet, had for once been dead right.

He felt like an accomplished seaman by the time the skiff docked at the decayed village of Mereswine Point, and he hauled himself onto the rickety wharf without help. Having ordered Captain Calamard to wait for him, he squared his shoulders and rolled toward the skewed huddle of sand-scoured shacks with the swagger of a pirate just back from the cannibal coast of Tampoontam.

“Your water-wings, Sir!” the captain called after him.

His face burning, Tiphytsorn fidgeted and fumed while the captain puzzled his way through the redundant fastenings of the goat-bladders. He was sure that all the fisher-folk watched and snickered from the edges of their narrow windows while he

suffered this like a child being fussed over by his mother. They got an even bigger treat when one of the bladders burst and he lurched forward with a shriek, knocking the captain off the dock and into the bay.

He swept the skiff with his eyes, planning to flog any slave who smirked, but they all seemed soberly intent on retrieving Captain Calamard. The artist ripped off the remaining fastenings and threw the water-wings aside as he plodded heavily into the village.

Odd people lived here, clam-diggers, winkle-pickers and witches. He believed that the presumptuous Dildosh came from Mereswine Point. He saw none of them on his brief walk through its alleys, whose leaning walls were festooned with drying nets and decorated with the whitened bones of monstrous sea-beasts. The only life was a flock of gulls who quarreled over a mountain of shells beyond the last of the driftwood hovels. He shied a rock at them, and was alarmed at the volume of shrieks, the thunder of wings. He raised his arms over his head protectively, but the birds only rose and circled, screaming, until he passed on.