The Glorious Path

Behold the sword resting peacefully on the mantelpiece! It hums softly, patiently, telling us that peace is a subset of war: by means of peace Oerstra may yet be exalted—but only because she exalts the warrior. Nothing moves without the warrior.

-Talathastro Maslor

The Record

of the Murilánni

Book I

The Glorious Path

by

SETH COOPER

OERSTRA WORKS PUBLISHING GROUP

Copyright 2016 by Seth Cooper

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration and design copyright 2016 by Erik Yount

Published by Oerstra Works™

ISBN 978-0-9973497-2-6

Smashwords Edition

To learn more about Oerstra Works and find the print edition, visit

www.oerstraworks.com

Table of Contents

Part One

I. The Young Deviant

II. In the Land of the Learned

III. Crossing the Long Ghyll

IV. Meddling with Demigods

V. Down Again

VI. That Questionable, Troublesome Prize

VII. Xarthirë Faces the Ponderous ‘No’

VIII. The Tinely Intervention of Sedh the Hermit

IX. The Unscathed Stone

X. Naug Faloth Contra Standon

Part Two

XI. The Anthrophobe Falters

XII. The Riddle of the Paladach

XIII. Gottar’s Debt

XIV. Lightning out of Ghâld

XV. The Several Victories of Lucifan

XVI. A Blossom in the Dark

XVII. The End Well Met

Afterword

Appendix of Epigrams: Whisperings from Saunoth

Part One

I. The Young Deviant

Dawn tried yet again to break on Naug Faloth, the Realm of Ease. The latest in a long, grueling struggle! Of all places in the world, this was the one to which the soothing dominion of night most obstinately clung. Not that it was a nothing as such against which dawn here strove: meaning, that for all this, power lay in Naug Faloth; for most of its inhabitants, an arrangement of power they found pleasing, for it was nowhere very much concentrated but spread out, quite safely and ably, amongst them so as to blunt its effect to the greatest degree possible; for certain outlanders who did not arrange power for themselves in this fashion, it was felt as a type of dread which, say, knowledge of spreading plague inspired. A coarse fact: Naug Faloth occupied the greater part of Oerstra’s northern, livable regions. But even this, a fact? For, at bottom, did Naug Faloth occupy the lands over which it spread? Had it ever? It blemished them, smouldering, not even burning, festering en masse even as some dark recollection festered the hearts of its institutions. That is to say, at least from a height it could have easily been seen as such—and even from not so high up was seen as such by many folk living outside the range of its power, particularly by the most precarious who found their rarity in retaining memory of times before. But that would have presupposed a good deal of length of memory, in that it was long ago—but not very long ago—that Naug Faloth had assumed the form of a league of provinces, each of which was disposed in kind to an ethnographic exhaustion that, allowed to go on for too long, would invariably end in loss of will for asserting a national goal and in place of this permit—and eventually laud—a diffusion of laughably small values, a league bound by contract never to wage war one upon the other but only against common perils—which, in time, came to mean against perils to what was common. From the outset its unity lay above all in the pursuit of measures for the maximal easing of the lives belonging to all those whom their mores had them deem important, in principle ‘everybody’ (and, oh, how often that principle got paraded!) but in praxis working down from the powerful, which here meant those possessing the greater part of control over the making and moving of both commodities and creeds, the two great ‘soothers’—Naug Faloth’s two great narcotics. Ever since this historic mobbing together (in which something designated ‘The People’s Charter’ had been created), underneath the reputable ideal that all men were equal, the tacit faith that one day they would become so (and not only regarded as such through fine words, etc.)—and all be equally narcotized—to the flushing out of every vestige of distinction, mollifying the resentment of the hitherto disadvantaged and quieting the consciences of a withering gentry, had diffused itself from east to west, i.e. ever since, a national slumber-spell had been strengthening.

Yes, on this again dawn tried to break—and failed, failed abjectly, supposing one permitted himself the license to confine the idea of ‘dawning’ to the unfurling of potencies capable of being received by those over whom they washed as baths of bronze and gold promising new things, new hopes, new heights—as tokens of some secret recrudescence.

Nonetheless, far off, above the snow clad pinnacles of the Sundering Mountains, that indomitable spine of the earth running south from that even more formidable sequence of peaks, the Grey Tors, whereof the Sundering Mountains could be deemed only a lesser arm (and obtrusion), yet sufficient still to hem in the timorously prudent peoples of Naug Faloth and deter them from straying into the dangerous, quasi-human parts to the east, the sun did manage to mount. And because today the sun did manage to do this, sending forth wanton beams of brightness out of its overflowing core of light and vigor across all the folds and inharmonious contours of a land that might as well have remained—and remained contented to be—enshrouded in dark, obscured to itself, to say nothing of shining forth to the outer world, the peoples of Naug Faloth were, once more, stirred from their beds, though forcibly, by the happy, inexorable invasion of morning brilliance into their nocturnal quiet. But as was their long inveterate way, they mostly ignored this brilliance itself, instead throwing themselves forthwith into a maniacal succession of prosaic duties, into a regularity and rites of business, of honoring ‘tasks’, above all of creating much, sudden noise beneath the silence of the arching sun—and nobody, not one of the hundreds of thousands that had come to be strewn throughout those regions, numbering among the droves of hurried heads, was tempted to go errant, tempted by the thought of halting, relishing dawn’s warmth, laughing, and then daring to go out, to go up. More accurately, owing to fearfulness (and to whatever else), not one of them considered doing these things seriously enough, in the unusual cases that considered them at all, not to reject the notion (sooner or later) as silly at best or depraved at worst: for one thing with Naug Faloth at least was clear, that its good men had since learned to dismiss as silly that which they found frightful, and condemn as evil whatever they found very frightful.

In sum, the accumulation of man’s history (as the species in Oerstra in imperiō) had been short and unimpressive over against that belonging to what far preceded him; to name one example among others, that remote and queer race of the aforesaid eastern parts whose fate, for the most part, so far had had almost nothing to do with man’s affairs, and would continue to do so for centuries to come, until a certain evil transpired which was as yet not possible strictly because the good it would infringe had not yet even been invented: all the rest of what follows chronicles the invention of this good.

Respecting the history of Naug Faloth, never had its addiction to an industrious perfunctoriness been truer or in firmer sway over the expectations of its masses than at present, and nowhere truer than in Nórichæ, that town of no inconsiderable breadth seated along the east shore of the River Ninioth and more or less at the center of one of Naug Faloth’s wealthiest sub-republics, Calavâgh, which meant, The Quiet Pasture: a half-truth. Commercially, Nórichæ had grown complex over the centuries (its folk viewed this development as ‘success’) owing to its situation nigh the core of a nexus of trade routes, by water and land, along which took place an ongoing, assiduous increase in the ridding between interested parties of less desirable merchandise in exchange for more desirable merchandise (or the funds to purchase it): not stream water alone had long constituted the current of the Ninioth. Thus the town itself had grown out of a frenzy of trade, merchandisers had created it, and they and their offshoots (money-lenders, chiefly) now sustained it, a bustling complex of tamed tit-for-tat that permitted in its excesses no few parasites as well. Some manufacturing occurred there, too, to be sure, even some true handicraft, most of which all for the sake of being drawn into the surrounding flow of trade. From certain northerly and southerly perspectives, Nórichæ stood as yet another obtrusion on the face of Oerstra in the form of a marketplace, raucous and happy never to look too far ahead, an organization comprised of the distant descendants of barbarous vagabonds—in a word, in the form of a townspeople.

Not that the ceaseless, ritualistic, and regulated this-for-that-ness of the Nórichæans afflicted them as a diversion; there was, inane as it may seem, nothing from which their self-imposed and self-maintained industry kept or hid them—on the contrary, it constituted them; it was and had been their life-content. To be sure, as if to deny this truth, the common bell tolled today at the customary hours, ordering, and at the same time ratifying the expression of that order belonging to, their lives. Its crier, marching along the tight (and often filthy) avenues dodging in and out of the mobs of swine and people—marching when, verily, a sleepy saunter should have sufficed for his errand—announced something small, but as energetically as if what he proclaimed were lightning from a mountaintop, as if to herald the storming of some god since repudiated come to revitalize the destinies of men. As it was, the most urgent thing he could ever have proclaimed might have dealt with the arrival of Mavid Turnip, who dwelling in Ôrodrom, capital city of Naug Faloth, held the highest office in the land, Minister-in-Chief and First Servant of the People—a position rivaled in sway only by the collective power of the Protectorate, that balancing body which existed to supplement the Minister-in-Chief’s discretion and mitigate his power. For officials at all levels in Naug Faloth hoped to earn sympathy and approval (and hence legitimacy) by proving themselves capable securers, and as things were, security is precisely what the nature of the spirit of Naug Faloth’s masses demanded above all, security and supinity, and so the whole arrangement ‘worked’.

What the sun himself estimated as she soaring above the sky-thirling peaks rife with inexhaustible promise gazed over all of this for the hundred-thousandth time, an exceedingly pressing question to any of an errant spirit, none in Nórichæ sought to ponder. That may have been because all vestiges of a spirit needful for such pondering had long since been bred out of this folk, these modern men. And as for what these modern men, these diligent, responsible, safety-seeking Naug Falothians—what they had since made of the Ægothi, for example, the primordial masters of Oerstra, into what their collective memory, through a spurious evolution of iconography, tale-spinning, and the unconscious effect of ‘ethno-morphing’ and ‘icon-confecting’, as it were, had turned them, well, one the stomach scarcely had for saying, but this one consideration doubtless played a central part in how their spirit had turned out. One might have justly guessed more, however, guessing with a lurching suspicion that what had happened, year by year, little by little, was the degradation of the idea of the masters into reifications of the Naug Falothian’s own increasingly boorish, trite inclinations, his conflated desire to be, on one hand, left alone, and on the other, to be watched over (a clever means for being able to posture oneself as intrepid). The summary result: the Ægothi, collapsed into a unity, had been turned into something as shameful as invisible, honorary members of the Protectorate, eager for solicitations for relief and disburdening, eager for appeals—sycophancy! As if the Ægothi, those sublimest of beings ever to have arisen among the what-is so far, had ever entertained even the remotest inkling of a principle that would set up man as an end ‘in himself’! The truth that they never had, however, these good folk had long ago lost the nerve for knowing.

It ought, perhaps, to be pointed out, in order to elucidate this demotion of the Ægothi, or the diluted, anemic memory thereof, in Naug Faloth, that if by some stroke of wizardry the instrumentality with which the Ægothi had actually regarded humanity (and even themselves), devoid of any degree of buried rancor or hidden revenge, had suddenly with unmistakable clarity been apprehended by the Nórichæans, forcing them to put away their error and silly idols, their existences would not in any way have met anything like upheaval. No fundamental crisis would have occurred; no impetus for questioning, still less any sense of a loss of irrecoverable glory. Likely, all that would have happened, if one permitted himself such fancifulness, was a magnificent display of obstinacy—in the form of insisting that along the way the had fallen into some grave error, insofar as the inherently infinite value of man was insisted upon. This, followed by some inveighing against the coldness of the Ægothi. Finally, to push the fancy to its end, in due course a swift forgetfulness would have swept over all, as the all too familiar and quite present Protectorate time after time appeased everybody by carrying out the very officia iucunda that many supposed the Ægothi had once existed exactly to carry out. Then, business as usual.

Again, certain outsiders, had they known of it, may have been gratified to be told that the Maslor proprietorship, at the least, whose shop was situated right in the thick of Nórichæ amid a throng of similarly purposed buildings, mitigated, and in part stood as an essential exception to, the aforementioned nature of Naug Falothian life; told this not at all on account of some need for there to have been some redeemable seedling among a meadow chocked in weeds to rally around, but because the current proprietor, Gúmlad Maslor, had three sons, the youngest of whom, named Talathastro (an absurd name inspired not after some hero or saint but a visiting tightrope walker whose final and disastrous performance had impressed his father evidently, though some simply called the boy ‘Tal’ in abbreviation for derision or affection, depending on the speaker), though at present but ten years in age, did happen in fact to be of the very spirit of adventure, if he had never been on an adventure, or could have been. This ‘spirit’, this intricate complex of what was instinctual tracing back to forgotten brutish histories, existed quite at odds with his cramped, clustered, busy, plebian, unavailing surroundings. Even at ten he felt himself hemmed in, stifled, stunted—day after day he had felt himself to be an antipode to the milieu into which fate had thrust him and, funnily, by which he had been shaped, if he may not have possessed the words to think so.

What so far had constituted the life of Talathastro, insofar as outer behavior and achievement were concerned, did not differ in any substantial manner either from that which had made up the lives of his siblings or from what Gúmlad had always tacitly willed should constitute it. To master the skills of glove-making and of selling gloves just outside, where the marketplace began (for the Maslor house stood as though flush on a bulkhead pressed by the sea), two distinct yet inseparable talents, two mutual imperatives: to excel here, the only achievement any Maslor had ever hoped for himself, and hitherto, the highest end even conceivable within the bounds of expectation. End, not means, as one may have supposed; for one thing characterized a Nórichæan or nothing at all: that bereft of the preconditions under which labor (in all varieties, at all classes top to bottom) had become necessary for the endurance of the day-to-day, he would have been at a tragic loss—more truthfully, his already being at a loss might have become unmistakable to himself for the first time.

At any rate, good gloves Gúmlad and his sons knew how to make. Of that Gúmlad could boast—and one should have let him! His customers almost never failed to get out of his handiwork what they expected. This should not be overlooked, lest the banality of the Maslor enterprise overshadow all acknowledgment of the tangible quality of their product.

Already Talathastro’s skill in working out something that anybody with hands and fingers would readily call a glove had surpassed that of anybody who lacked the advantage (in this respect) of having been reared up into the trade under professional, fatherly instruction. Soaking, pressing, measuring, cutting, twisting with awl and sewing with needle, and overall, staying true to form and function: such feats heightened the demanding delicacy of hand and eye which his inchoate nature had ever insisted that they should develop. Where he failed particularly, however, where his brothers proved much more competent than he, lay in the street sale. Something about that delicacy intrinsic to the crafting aspect of his trade had worked its way into his temperament, or rather the delicacy of his temperament made possible the further refinement in skill of his hand; in either case, the streets were far too rowdy for him—too smelly, as well. On the other hand, his brothers had no difficulty whatever engaging with the morning throngs. They delighted in it. They liked casting their voices into the general clamor, liked becoming part of it. Even so, however unsuitable his nature may have been for the task, Talathastro was none too seldom compelled by Gúmlad during market hours to step out, try not to appear ill, and raise his voice in advertisement of their wares.

Once, some two years before, weary of this liturgy of crying out, he had waxed impatient and thought: ‘What is this? But the people ignore my calls! If father wants them, the people, then I will lead them to him, my father.’ Therefore, upon leaping down from his father’s seat, he had mingled into the current of passersby, becoming one among them, and having found the richest looking man with naked hands, he had seized his sleeve and tried dragging him back to the shop. What bewilderment Talathastro had caused in the rich man, even when, a moment after, the latter had gathered that it was no cutpurse that had accosted him! Affronted, the man had indeed visited the shop, as led, but only to rebuke Gúmlad for his son’s insolence, nor vow ever to buy anything from him. For Talathastro had been and still was naive in such matters as moonshine—he was no ‘diviner’ where the psychology of the coin was concerned, had no ‘feelers’ for it.

For his act Gúmlad had lashed him, though he had found it odd when Talathastro failed to cry whatever: but this was only because he had failed to see that pain was not something his youngest had ever presupposed to be alien to existence, an objection. Angered by this, Gúmlad had then forbidden him leaving the house for a good deal of time after. But whether this had been punishment or reward depended on its effect. The boon: Talathastro had not been made to shout in the street during that time.  On the other hand, restriction to the house had meant temporary isolation from his friends.  But in the end this, too, had proved nothing to regret, for the laughter inspired in his friends when at last he had rejoined them and recounted to them his antics with the rich man (and not only in order to explain his recent absence) easily compensated for both stripe and isolation, a golden harvest of levity he would not have exchanged for anything of worth of which he yet knew.

With regard to these friends, it was something of an oddity that Talathastro had ever had any at all—despite that the same might well have been said for anybody born in Calavâgh, in that friendship, as a rule, was not a virtue fostered there with any immediate deliberation, existing usually by happenstance, like perfect fruit hanging from a wild tree. In Talathastro’s case, there were two predominant ‘reasons’, facts special to him, why it was odd that he should have known friendship.

To begin with the more trivial one, his was a rather awkward appearance. He did not much look like a frivolous youth; somehow, mostly in the eyes and heavier brow, he resembled a certain ancient sage renowned in various parts of Naug Faloth—not that he knew of the resemblance. Yes, the wand of beauty had tapped his mother’s belly but lightly: his head had come out too big, and nose too snub. ‘Ugly’ would have been perhaps too severe a word for him, but his looks were sufficiently amusing to forbid many of his peers from befriending him, and girls had never much to do with him, unless one counted inveterate mockery. But his pain from rejection had never amounted to as much as one of lesser fortitude may have supposed; he did suffer—there was no reason to deny that about him—but not ruinously so, since he had early learned that he possessed the prerogative and power to laugh at himself. But he knew how to laugh back, as well as, perceiving all too sharply foibles and stupidities in whomever they occurred—and how stupid his peers so often appeared to him! He had recognized fast that those who mocked him made use of his shortcoming in beauty to fill a vapidity in their existences which was at least as severe as his own, and that, moreover, measured against the overall vapidity to which all of Nórichæ seemed subject, their lives were of little account anyway, and so their derisiveness had failed to bite deeply, sticking more like playful, blunted darts than arrows of war. Grateful for such play, he had thus undermined his capacity for hating an enemy.

Secondly, but of singular importance, the essence of his being comprised peculiar and rare combination of instincts, resulting in an accident expected to be wholly adapted to the world of Nórichæan valuations but with which that very essence simply could not find sympathy—thus an unhappy accident (at his present age, his antipode would have been that townsman to whom even the thought of life not constrained and determined by long marketplace habits would be experienced as insufferable and nightmarish). Not that Talathastro was a pure monster, an uncaused aberration, even if in many ways a lad sui generis: each constitutive instinctive element in him could have been found, if one persevered in his search, in one Nórichæan or other, sometimes more than one in one. Thus, what separated him—what accounted for his peculiarity—was not the embodying of new types of instincts (such novelties never simply sprang up on a sudden like that) but the fact of his belonging to a unity of instinctual subtleties each of which was rare in Naug Faloth, making the unified aggregation surpassingly rare. He was a product of Naug Faloth alone; from woman and man he had sprung, his parents both from Calavâgh; the seed from which he sprouted was no more or less celestial than that found in every man. It was simply a rule of the world that every ‘monster’ could ascribe itself to the ugly, blind doings belonging to it own species’ past, just as every precious stone existed only because crude material had for so long surrounded and lain working towards its creation: praise be to crude material!

Notwithstanding all this, Talathastro had been able to seduce a few youths into friendship. To be honest, he had sniffed them out from the crowds—heeding what he smelled well was itself a function of his instincts. Amazingly, somehow or other, a few others belonging to natures approximating his own he had found, and they had all bonded fast, and their discovery of each other had been the only true joy any of them had experienced till that moment. When given precious time off from chores and able to convene, typically securing privacy in a wine cellar or attic belonging to one of their fathers, how sinister they would become, these toothless frondeurs! Nothing sordid: mutinous, more like it. Evil in one instigated recalcitrance in the other, vice instigating virtue, and the other way round too, abolishing the difference. Adventuring they would promise to each other, disclosing their lust to venture beyond the security of Nórichæ (none had any notion of just how large Naug Faloth was, alas) and witness for themselves, even become imperiled by, the doings of those questionable, short-lived, and free-spirited peoples of whom even they had managed to catch distant, tremulous rumor; for example, the ravening sea-farers of Umark, masters of runes and swordsmithing, who plundered throughout the iceberg-riddled Bay of Dëofal, or the fierce horse-riding marauders of the Steppes of Reimas far away to the east and south, or (why not?) even the partly anthropoid races said to dwell in distant mountains, reclusive ancient nobles and wild homunculi whose remoteness to man was matched only by their indifference to him so far.

At times short songs of their own make they would sing together, when they felt as though their fancy for adventure would never amount to anything more than mere fancy (this unspoken anxiety represented the worst thing in Talathastro’s experience, worse than the hectic, aimless crowd, worse than beatings). Sometimes sheer boredom was the moist soil out of which their songs were born. To one short song each had contributed a few lines, though an overall meaning seemed to have surfaced all the same. For the work of boys it was not bad, and they found it laughably eurhythmic—and that was good enough for their taste.

Wake up! Wake up! The night is passed

when dark things crawl; when weird things creep.

For now the people move astir

like upset cattle,

like hungry roaming little sheep.

Take up your duties, see them through:

the chimney needs a thorough sweep

and chamber pots don’t rinse themselves—

no time for stories,

still less for cozy, dream-fraught sleep.

We mind our work and do it well;

but when chance affords we steal a peep

to drifting cloud, to red horizon far,

and when we do

our embers glow, our spirits leap.

By twilight all our blisters yell:

‘Again to bed, lest ye do weep!’

But one day we shall disobey,

bewitched by stars,

declaring drudg’ry’s cost too steep.

Let us slip away and say ‘farewell’!

With tousled hair and heavy eyes,

legs apt to spring, knees good to bend,

let us slip away and say ‘farewell’!

One other element featured in Talathastro’s existence that must not be overlooked, particularly in relation to the role it played in his coming to have a critical experience from which he would later suffer, one that lent it some ‘justification’ and for now imparted on it no mean degree of tolerability. Years earlier, he had discovered a penchant for, and, soon after, achieved some skill in, the whittling of small forms. What had made this possible was once, from a queer impulse, he had filched a knife from the cobbler’s shop across the street, for no reason other than that its polished surface, glinting in the sun through the crowd, had caught his eye. He had not been wholly without conscience in its taking: he had wished both he and the cobbler could possess it—in any case, ever since it had been his prized possession. At first he had worn it like a hidden sword but soon had begun putting it to a use suitable for what it really was. Small chunks of wood, often swirling of grain and fragrant, he would acquire now and then as gifts from his dead mother’s brother (his mother had died of Talathastro’s birth), a tradesman in the lumber industry, scraps left over from the milling of exotic trees shipped from as far as Zîndhar that otherwise would have been incinerated in the mill furnace, which once in a while his uncle would retain for him (not for his brothers, who never showed any interest). At first, Talathastro kept them for their pleasing smell and that they had come from so far away, from so different a place.

Once he had filched the knife, however, he had begun to give these scraps new life. For no better fate than to fall into this awkward boy’s experimental hands could the wood have hoped. Into finches, cats, and (once he started getting handier at the art) how he imagined the barbarians of Umark of the Hoar Firths must have looked, and even the savage woodwoses who dwelt in the great coniferous forests nigh to them, he had since been wont to carve the scraps—or rather, into some resemblance to all these things relative to the competence exerted upon them. Not surprisingly, from the start Talathastro had improved in the craft, and as such, the finished results had increasingly satisfied him. Why it was whittling precisely that satisfied the boy so no sage might have said with surety, but looking back, after all was said and done, one would be strongly tempted to guess that it had been on account of the enjoyment of the excising away of what was superfluous. A paring knife in Talathastro’s fingers was as good as a sword in one of the Ægothi’s fists—it conferred an empowering aptitude for divine discretion.

One further point with respect to this hobby: never would he waste any of his stock representing things commonplace in his experience, or distinctive of it: none would ever have found among the not inconsiderable cache of figurines he had by now amassed and kept stored in a lockbox beneath his cot a miniature bank clerk, for example, or constable or faux pence or besotted rustic.

Thus not all for Talathastro was pure bleakness; both his insidious camaraderie and furtive pastime made sure of that. The power of either to hold it back, however, was soon put sorely to the test when, a month before his eleventh birthday, his father surprised him by bringing home a woman—and not only a woman, but two more ‘brothers’ to add to the two by blood he already had. These boys were younger than he, ‘promoting’ Tal at once to the middle child. In terms of his new mother’s antipathy, he seemed to be in the middle, as well. This duty-encrusted matron, whose mouth had long ago forgotten the signs and sounds of gaiety, represented the Nórichæan spirit par excellence—serious, gloomy, industrious, leaden, matter-of-fact, petty, trite of ambition, quick to denounce but slow to action—and her children, mirrors only, small and well polished, but having only shadows to reflect, in whom no promise scintillated. In impressively small time this woman detected the aberrant bent of Gúmlad’s youngest, could sense an odor foul to her nose left in his trail, the horrible aroma of his lukewarm-ness and musky anticipation for either solitude or dawdling with his secretive friends. Gúmlad bore no such smell, and only but little did his eldest two (for weak and infrequent signs of Talathastro’s incorrigibility they did exhibit), and certainly not her own exemplary children, the little well-greased cogs, with grease-clogged eyes, noses, and ears. For the sake of domestic peace, if only Talathastro would fall in line! So complained the woman often from the first. As things were, however, day-by-day he proved to be only a sand grain in her eye that would not wash out. Otherwise, her new home was her castle.

Talathastro disliked her, too. It would be a failure of understanding to think him an object of harassment only, a mere victim—he had fiber of his own, fortitude, which she would call to his face ‘stubbornness’, as if that choice of wording would wound him, make him remorseful, and not simply encourage him. The more this little woman (never mind that she was, by all accounts, heavyset, showing no signs of having been starved recently, to say the least) prodded, criticized, lurked, and obtruded herself, the more Talathastro resisted. A force ‘to be reckoned against’, to be sure, though she grudged him for it: she was no fighter, in that sense. Gúmlad as shopkeeper had always been safely inane (his wrath seldom, pragmatic, and predictable—even predictably dull), and because of this, however bored Talathastro might have been at a given hour, he had ever abided his father, whose gravest wrong was the innocent, obtuse attrition of spirit he occasioned even as he reared the flesh; this woman by contrast was obnoxious, noxious for him, really. And her two sons? Ferrets unleashed to do her will, their job being to survey Talathastro, undetected when possible, and report back to her of his lapses in duty that she might have further grounds to reprove him. Almost always Talathastro was up to the challenge, feeling himself ‘pushed’, a strain he was able to use to turn his lukewarm-ness into actual but subtle lapses in duty, and from these, as the war with the woman got on, into more egregious instances of dereliction; for example, flitting off to see his friends during proper business hours.

Once, he marked one of his stepbrothers observing him askance as he sat repairing a leather mitt and said: ‘At what do stare, you nervous tomnoddy? Or is watching me work your work? How I wish I had your job!’ Despite his trepidation at retorting somebody older and bigger than he, the boy said: ‘Yes, it is, Tal. And it is very tedious work: all slugs are tedious to stare at, especially ones ugly as you.’ At this, Talathastro strode over to him, throwing the mitt into his face and knocking him back into a basin of grimy mop water. ‘That ought to have enlivened you,’ said Talathastro, chuckling when he saw the staggered panic in the boy’s widened eyes. ‘For the bath you may thank me later, after you’ve run off to mum to patter you dry!’ The boy scrambled to his feet and ran off indeed, dripping and pouting as he went. The other stepbrother, who having just come into the room had witnessed the row, wagged his finger and laughed in malice—and not at his fleeing brother.

Shortly after, that matron-arriviste to whom his father had fettered himself summoned Talathastro, and now she really had something for which to punish him, that is, now had a convenient opportunity for demonstrating the extent of her power over him. For he had trespassed upon a sore spot: her child. What hilarious paroxysms the sow put on! Seeing the anguish his infraction had caused in her, displayed with such exaggerated indignation as she, that master of outrage, patted and pampered her fawning, sniveling child, while managing to also work in the evilest of lowering glances at Talathastro with skill and harmony, imparted on him no small degree of satisfaction. But whether that satisfaction did not outweigh the punishment the matron levied on him Talathastro would never decide. Her sense of vengeance was keen, though in a way typical of all Naug Faloth and not particularly genius. But, poking back at what she surmised all too well to be Talathastro’s sore spot—his time with his friends—this she forbade him, and that was effectively painful. In fact, she had longed to find occasion for forbidding him contact with them, having noticed Talathastro’s good cheer, how his air of defiance always seemed intensified, how his armor against her always seemed to have picked up another layer of scales, whenever he returned from them: hence she distrusted, feared, and hated these friends. Punishment qua punishment merely had come along as a useful pretext for getting to act on this swelling antipathy.

What of Gúmlad, the man of the house? A sorry question! By far more effeminate than this ‘flower’ of a mother plucked from the new factory in town, who with such facility and in so little time had conquered his household, on whose say he had lost most all effect, even over his own children. A hundred miles was he from being able to amend her present verdict, to say nothing of vetoing it or passing his own. Will it have gone too far to suggest that a father for the Maslor children Gúmlad had introduced into the home?

Now Talathastro spent his days shorn of friendship, days which became weeks, a period of drought during which he struggled to keep alive something of himself over against what the otherwise beleaguering prosaicness of his existence demanded of him as a master glove-maker-and-seller in the works. In this he succeeded, for in spite of everything, he still had recourse to whittling, which he was prudent enough to do now surreptitiously only, lest the matron should think of forbidding this, too, next time Talathastro offended her, which was inevitable. The whittling having become surreptitious, he did it yet more vehemently and to superior results. Thus nurtured in secrecy his eye for form honed itself: for instance, holding in thought the image of a bird he had seen a falconer bear in a cage, envisioning it somehow bursting out of its cage and soaring up, high above even the nearby Temple steeple, he would not know peace one of his inert lumps of wood, to at least some degree of satisfaction, had taken the shape of that thought, reflecting his fancy back at him—though he would never feel as though he had quite captured this image, to his happiness and agitation of esprit. And even when he ‘worked’, burning away the hours in the shop or on the street, his thought dwelt on his play, that is, his other, self-made work, deciding what his next crypto sculpture would be and casting about for imagery for it in the nooks and neglected corners of the street. But as this habit got on and deepened, his behavior began to betray his reverie, an observable distraction that the keen-eyed matron at last detected and began reproving him for, though the cause thereof she could not guess as yet, and so she seethed.

In time, Talathastro overfilled his little wooden lockbox (the only reason why he was glad of the small scale of his joy), and he was forced to do the hard thing of choosing which figurines pleased him least of all and discarding them to make space for new ones, lest the exposed overflow be spotted by one of his doltish stepbrothers, or the matron herself.

What proved more difficult to conceal than the end was the means of his creativity. One night one of the aforementioned dolts caught him awake late into the night beneath the counter—the place where Gúmlad lacking bedrooms kept him—struggling furiously to turn a bit of rosewood into a miniature shaw-cat by the light of a small lamp. For several moments in silence the two stared at each other, whereupon the dolt slunk leering back into the dark. Now even Talathastro’s last recourse awaited annihilation before the gaze of the matron’s damned evil-eye, and there was nothing he could think to do about it. But the next day came and went and nothing was said of the incident, and that despite the exceptional bleariness with which he worked for having stayed awake so late: no doubt, a sort of tactical silence, and it was dreadful.

The following morning, however, something out of the ordinary—yet still dejecting—happened. As Talathastro stood outside the shop contending with the passing throngs trying to sell some of his family’s wares, one who belonged to the forbidden, perhaps the most forbidden, Patyr Gäst, whom Talathastro loved, his younger by two years and virtually his devotee from the outset, appeared squirming his way out of the flowing crowd. Patyr’s house, where he lived alone in austere conditions bordering on squalor with his widowed mother, stood an entire district away, and so Talathastro had never before seen him at this hour, the busiest hour, and the sight of his friend’s face at that boisterously dismal, deadening moment, ragged and anguished as it was, came like a shock of soothing ice upon the neck in summer.

‘Patyr!’ cried Talathastro. ‘Look at you! Where have you been? And why did you go there?’

‘I might ask the same of you, Tal,’ said Patyr. He was unmistakably distressed, and even more disheveled than usual. ‘Things have been much too dull for the lot of us without you.’

‘I have guessed so. But my father brought us a new mother—did you not know that? And she hates me, and because of that, hates all of you, as well. That is why I have been gone.’

‘Oh! That’s ill for us.’

‘Yes. But I still do my whittling, Patyr. More so than ever.’

‘You’d better: you mustn’t ever give up that, Tal!’

‘I don’t know as I could speak more truly. But why have you come? And why so unkempt, and thinner, as if you have been feeding on even less curds and greens?’

Patyr began to sob. ‘You have gained a mother,’ he said, his face buried in his elbow’s crutch to cover his shame, ‘but mine I have lost. She died three days ago. Now times are hard—harder than before, I mean—and I’m lost for what to do or where to go.’

At that moment, the matron’s sons stepped out of the shop, glaring at Talathastro as he stood speaking with Patyr. Talathastro ignored them, though the malice of their staring crawled over his skin.

Patyr remained oblivious.

‘How did she die?’ Talathastro asked his friend distractedly, loathing his question the moment it slipped out. ‘Nay! Never mind: forgive me my coldness! She is gone—that is all. A pity my new mother had not died in her stead. You may have her, if you please.’

Patyr, despite his tragedy, laughed. ‘No, please! I think I’d sooner do as I now do—wander alone.’

‘You wander alone?’ said Talathastro, realizing too late that this, too, was a deplorable question.

Patyr nodded. ‘Like a true pauper. The street swine teach me how to survive; they guide and comfort me, now that my mother is no more and ruffians have taken over the house. Who knows? Maybe soon I shall be butchered for rashers, such meat as is on me: such is my worth in Nórichæ.’

‘Patyr, dear one!’ said Talathastro, clasping the other’s shoulders. ‘For what it counts, to me you are worth more than everybody else I have seen this morning put together! And I have seen even a few oafish magnates stumble by, too, with their colorful hats, shiny baldrics, and big, heavy boots. A lord of great men my lights say you ought to become: would you might strive to become this!

But listen! For now I forbid you your life among swine. Do this: come to my door at midnight and I will meet you. Trusting you can slip the curfew watchmen: all good urchins can evade watchmen.’

Patyr nodded again. Then off he sped vanishing back into the dun crowds, his unshod step lighter, much lighter than when he had appeared.

Without so much as glancing at his stepbrothers, who just before Patyr departed had begun to move towards him but had not overheard for the din of the marketplace what Tal and Patyr had planned, Talathastro cast himself back into his task at hand of luring buyers off the flowing street. Their chance for reproach voided, the brothers halted, shrugged, and slunk back into the shop.

The remainder of that day could not have crept toward evening any more slothfully, and when at last the sun westered pulling down the dome of night after it, Talathastro felt as though not seven hours but years had passed. After all the household retired for the night and shortly before the appointed hour itself struck outside, Talathastro, stirring from his cramped cot picked across the dim room lit only by what starlight filtered through the front windows, gathered a few (though by no means surplus) goods from the cupboard, very quietly unlatched and opened the front door, and then waited hid in shadow. His lockbox, too, he took with him. Given everything, he was quite lucky to have got out without rousing anybody—for unlike the matron and her two coddled creatures, Talathastro was not at all used to lurking around and spying.

A little later there came from the street a faint patter, followed by a darting shade that drew up to the house facade. Suddenly a dark mass as of a head appeared poking through the railings. ‘Tal, Tal!’ uttered the voice of Patyr, hoarsely. ‘I’ve come. Tal, where are you?’

‘Patyr, I am here,’ Talathastro whispered withdrawing from his hiding. ‘Come round this way.’

Sidling down the adjacent alley, Talathastro led Patyr into the small courtyard at the back where, behind a square plot reserved for rubbish and a vegetable garden, stood a shed. This shed stored tools and the like but it was stout and daubed and contained a wood stair that went up into a little attic lit during day by a wood louver and empty for the most part. Up that stair and into the attic they climbed. Then they rolled on the dusty, uneven floor, stretching their limbs, indulging in their privacy.

Once they stilled, Talathastro handed to Patyr a cloth in which he had wrapped a biscuit and some cheese. Patyr ate greedily and cheerfully, and Talathastro, laughing at his greed, began to nibble on some crust he had brought out for himself that his friend might not eat alone.

Then they talked and laughed, speaking mostly about past nonsense, not fretting themselves about the future. When their serious trifling ended, Talathastro produced his lockbox and showed Patyr all his wooden creations, old and new, though Talathastro had to tell him what most of them were meant to resemble: to whose failure this necessity was owed, the artist or the critic, it mattered not—Talathastro rather enjoyed, not disdained, having to interpret his work to his friend in defense of his honor as a sculptor. At bottom, of course, both boys could neither shape nor interpret any better than what their parochial upbringings permitted: for anything belonging anywhere outside their little commercial districts both relied equally on hearsay—and who knew which of them had had more occasion for that? Yet, however abashing or quasi-didactic the showcasing turned out to be, given their momentary seclusion it counted for each as his happiest experience so far.

All too fast their time together waned, and soon the night had worn on so late that Talathastro had to return to the house lest somebody awake to find him gone. His own head cried out for sleep, too, though if he had been able he would have stuffed his ears in denial of those cries from the inside. And not only of need for sleep was he in denial. Thus, when the time came and the wordless question was posed in Patyr’s eyes, Talathastro answered him as though he had well thought out everything in advance and was assured of his feasibility, saying: ‘No, you shan’t go back out there, of course. Why, just stay up here—nobody ever comes up here—and I’ll bring you out some food in my pockets when I am able. What’s more, to keep you from growing over-bored, I think I will leave my carvings here with you—though mind you do not break them, still more not try to improve on them.’

Meager sleep Talathastro managed to get—it could not have been more than two hours when his brothers woke him. As such, all the next day a great weariness showed in his face, a languor that he had no hope of the matron not noticing. She noticed it straightaway—it was one of the first things she did that morning, in fact. And when she did, she looked long on him, gloomily and in silence. But Talathastro persevered that day fulfilling his daily tasks as usual, if they seemed more arduous to carry out than usual. But what counteracted the difficulty, what nearly imbued him with greater than normal vitality, was of course the thought of Patyr waiting for him in the shed, and of all the pleasant (if sleepless) nights that this arrangement promised. Twice that day he slipped away for a quick and furtive visit to take him some food, and both times the sight of his friend, who had all the figurines arrayed over the floor in two opposing groups as if set for battle, excited Talathastro, gladdening his heart. But Patyr appeared increasingly anxious, having receptive instincts of his own, like a wild animal able to feel in advance the unseen tempest.

Twilight came; night fell, Talathastro having spoken to nobody save in brief, inevitable affirmatives. Then, once again he stole from the house after all had fallen into sleep, though his sleep deprived head protested still more loudly than the night before. He may have caused some clamor getting outside this time, too. After he crossed the garden and entered the shed, he called out for Patyr—and received no reply. He dashed up the stair—to become alarmed at once, all his languor vanishing in a chilled flash. Patyr was not there. Nor his figurines or lockbox. That Patyr might have run off with his creations did not occur to Talathastro in the least; actually, if it had, he may have found some consolation! As things were, he felt merely consternated.

Through the gable louver the glow of a flickering redness danced, and laughter, malicious and vindictive, drifted. Talathastro descended and came out.

There next to a small fire burning on the turf stood the matron, feet apart, her stocky arms folded beneath her misshapen, bloated bosom. Wrath, mingled with delight in being able to discharge it upon the culprit—in short, the posture of ‘justice’—shone in her face, and one foot she tapped. Her two brats were there, too, gloating, bloodthirsty, poking at the fire with hearty contempt. As for his father and brothers, of them there was no sign, for true to their natures they were asleep, fast.

‘Well, children, see who we’ve got here sneakin’ about in the middle of the night!’ said the matron.

‘Where is Patyr?’ asked Talathastro boldly.

‘How should I know? Not here, certainly, where that foul street-rat has no right bein’, and that’s all what matters. Did you really suppose you could keep a body on my premises without my noticin’?’

Talathastro gave no answer.

‘Surely you must’ve knowed that I’d learn of your sordid little trysts, sooner and not even later, which of course I did, thanks to my obedient and attentive children. What a fool you must take me to be! That’s very insulting.’ Her sons, who had snickered at the word ‘trysts’, glowed proud in the light of the flames they worked to kindle, and they said: ‘Fire’s good and hot now, mum.’

As it was, however, Talathastro had never taken her to be idiotic: actually, he thought her a very cunning animal, a mordant cow. In any event, he still made no reply.

‘What?’ the matron said. ‘You’ve got nothing to say for yourself? Not that I particularly want to hear your miserable excuses. Still and all, I got rid of our rat—and he left here striped and empty-handed, I promise you that!’

Grasping what the matron was implying, Talathastro fell instantly distraught. ‘Where’s my lockbox!’ he cried.

‘Oh—that!’ she said feigning distraction, her children having renewed their sneering and wicked glances. ‘Well, Tal, after sendin’ the dirty waif back to the street where he belongs, I realized as what you’ve did really amounts to a twofold insult to me; first, keepin’ a body on my premises in secret, and second, that body bein’ one I’d specifically forbidden. Clearly, you’ve no respect either for me or all I do for this household! You need to be taught this respect, and what comes your way when you slight me in this manner or any other.

How fittin’, then, it was we also found your silly lockbox up in the attic: crime and means of penance for it both in single place.’

She pointed to one of her sons, who stooping lifted a sack which resting in shadow had escaped Talathastro’s notice. From it the boy withdrew the lockbox, his entire bearing spoiling for revenge.

‘Give it back!’ Talathastro demanded, annoyed at his inability to conceal his distress.

‘No, I think not,’ she said lazily.

Talathastro rushed at the boy who held forth his lockbox, dangling it teasingly, the same son whose face he had struck. But the boy’s brother was ready and sprightly and bore down on Talathastro before he could so much as lay a finger upon him, while the agitator, still dangling the lockbox, came over and kicked him as his brother held him.

‘Enough!’ said the matron at last. ‘I know even this hasn’t yet made you contrite. But perhaps this will—’

As Talathastro kneeled pinioned by his stepbrother, he watched as the other, at a signal from his mother who poorly suppressed her glee, cast the lockbox into the blaze.

There was delighted howling and sudden crackling.

Talathastro lowered his gaze, unable to look on as the flames destroyed his handiwork, the results of his creativity, those actual, substantial, vulnerable reifications of all that, so far, his soul had found to be of value.

‘There now!’ the matron said smugly after a while. ‘It’s too cold out here, now that the fire is dying! Come back inside, everybody. Come!’ Her sons commenced dragging Talathastro toward the house by the arms, while the matron assured him that a stripe awaited him in the morning when she would direct his father after breakfast to complete his punishment (after breakfast, because then when he would be more inclined to comply with her demands: when sufficiently strained by discomfort, Gúmlad was wont to assert something for himself, to prove some autonomy of the gut, an insight the matron had gained, and learned how to circumvent, well before marrying him; also, because she knew it would bother Talathastro more to be beaten by him on her behalf and than by her herself ).

At bottom, the miserable woman did not grasp—had no faculty for grasping—what she had just done. She misunderstood her own deed. She supposed that she had begun the taming of Talathastro, of sedating him with an exercise in remorse through loss and pain. Could anybody have been more wrong? Far from being extinguished, the flames of his contempt—contempt not for the matron only (she was much too small to serve as the sole object of his antipathy!) but the entire grotesque matrix of languid, bleak, unpromising conditions that made up his life as a Nórichæan, of which the matron was merely the most obtruding sign—raged within him, as though the heat and energy put out by his destroyed creations were being absorbed into his heart and burned now like an undying dynamo to the great fueling of his spirit. One could even have said that during those moments Talathastro waxed happier than ever! Certainly the two dolts who had just brought him inside and still held him did not have the slightest suspicion of this. Too bad for them—for everybody!—that for a brief instant one of them became incautious, loosening his grip. What a poor snake-handler! He paid for the error. Sensing the slight release, Talathastro jerked free his arm, driving an elbow into the boy’s face (regrettably, the same face he had struck earlier). Then, just as fast, like a mule he kicked the gut of the boy at his back, sending him into his mother who, catching him in her rolls, cursed aloud before tossing her dazed son aside in order to get at Talathastro. But Talathastro, who was very light on his feet, sprung for the nearby window whose sash, by chance, one of his brothers had left open, and slipped through its frame well before she could get her ponderous, jiggling arms round his neck.

‘Come back here this instant, you godless scamp!’ wailed the woman. ‘Do you hear me? Come back here! Come back!’

She barked a few more futile imperatives and hypocritical accusations through the open window into the night—imperatives and accusations Talathastro most decisively failed to heed.

And with that, Talathastro would never again either see or hear anybody of the Maslor household, which is to the point, in that he would see and hear a good deal of things further before his life would end a good deal of time later.

II. In the Land of the Learned

Commitment to the hands of fate—

a shaking off of all concern

embracing virtue cheerfully;

what men who live to die cannot discern

and go on living tearfully;

and thus is my imperative—

before I die t’least once to live.

Might one invent imperatives

that one can’t hope to satisfy—

to toy with the impossible—

when to ‘ought’ a thing is ‘can’ implied?

Thus are taught the malleable,

to take the soul as filled with lies,

to doubt himself and thus wax ‘wise’.

And what is ‘wisdom’, I dare ask,

that thing so rarely found in men,

so precious, yet so common claimed

as none disclaim it b’yond his ken?

In truth, she ought to be renamed,

and for myself I shall avow,

a wisdom new unnamed till now.

Ha, ha! My mind against this moves!

A name already fetters me

prescribing melancholy bounds:

my wisdom shall of names be free—

all referencing it must confound

that it the nets of words evades,

unsaid, unbound, and not betrayed.

Thus, now I canter namelessly

amid the streets of Nórichæ

whose narrow paths do ill contain

the soaring heights to which I fly

arising lightly un-detained,

ah, unencumbered, not defined

by peevish names so oft assigned.

Such language in later years, somewhere in the midst of an outrageous career headed towards the creation of a living, mercurial amalgam of engineering and art out of man himself, Talathastro would stitch together in honor of his having darting out of his home that into the night-darkled streets. ‘Naming Oneself’ he would be wont to call these lines.

One might have marked the utter lack of panic in the rash youth, a lack fostered, predominantly, by the absence of pursuers from the house. As to why the matron, patently upset by her convict’s escape, nonetheless, refrained from ordering somebody to give chase, who knew? Four conjectures, however: first, at bottom she did not really mind him being gone; second, she knew her clumsy-legged sons stood no chance of catching a self-liberated Talathastro; third, a greater punishment awaited him as a penniless juvenile runagate at the hands of the magistrates than what even she might have meted upon him; lastly, the pain caused by his desertion in Gúmlad would be her revenge against him for having so recalcitrant a son as to have put a blunt upon that total control she had demanded openly as a precondition for marrying him. Perhaps all four had some truth to them. Who knew? Who cared? Certainly not Talathastro!

But Talathastro’s fate did not end here, of course. On the contrary, he would go on and become the amorously fearless and earnestly humane, ‘Anthrophobe of the North’.

All the rest of his days would belong to nothing other than an account—strange, synthetic, and unforeseeable—of how he got to be that way and what he willed to do in keeping with this questionable honorific, how