Timothy Ferguson's Blog, page 11

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirleess

I originally planned to string Lud-in-the-Mist across months, commenting on each episode, the way I did with “The Erl-King’s Daughter” by Lord Dunsany. I shan’t, because although I still think its an excellent book full of material which Ars Magica Players can, and should, steal, it doesn’t need an explanation. A secret passage is a secret passage. A fair in the Elfin Marches is a faerie fair. A vis source is a vis source. There are tiny pieces, like the herm in the garden and Duke Aubery’s name, which could be given a folkloric context, but a quick Google will sort that out far better than me stretching the book for a year.

I present here the first two chapters of the book, as delivered into the public domain by Nicole J. LeBoeuf and her team via LibriVox. I strongly recommend you read, or listen, to this book.

MASTER NATHANIEL CHANTICLEER

The Free State of Dorimare was a very small country, but, seeing that it was bounded on the south by the sea and on the north and east by mountains, while its centre consisted of a rich plain, watered by two rivers, a considerable variety of scenery and vegetation was to be found within its borders. Indeed, towards the west, in striking contrast with the pastoral sobriety of the central plain, the aspect of the country became, if not tropical, at any rate distinctly exotic. Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps; for beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland. There had, however, been no intercourse between the two countries for many centuries.

The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the confluence of two rivers about ten miles from the sea and fifty from the Elfin Hills.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red and tawny sails; it had flat brick houses—not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves with each generation under their changeless antique roofs. It had old arches, framing delicate landscapes that one could walk into, and a picturesque old graveyard on the top of a hill, and little open squares where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees attended by birds and lovers and insects and children. It had, indeed, more than its share of pleasant things; for, as we have seen, it had two rivers.

Also, it was plentifully planted with trees.

One of the handsomest houses of Lud-in-the-Mist had belonged for generations to the family of Chanticleer. It was of red brick, and the front, which looked on to a quiet lane leading into the High Street, was covered with stucco, on which flowers and fruit and shells were delicately modelled, while over the door was emblazoned a fine, stylized cock—the badge of the family. Behind, it had a spacious garden, which stretched down to the river Dapple. Though it had no lack of flowers, they did not immediately meet the eye, but were imprisoned in a walled kitchen-garden, where they were planted in neat ribands, edging the plots of vegetables. Here, too, in spring was to be found the pleasantest of all garden conjunctions—thick yew hedges and fruit trees in blossom. Outside this kitchen-garden there was no need of flowers, for they had many substitutes. Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely preoccupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.

In early summer it was the doves, with the bloom of plums on their breasts, waddling on their coral legs over the wide expanse of lawn, to which their propinquity gave an almost startling greenness, that were the flowers in the Chanticleers’ garden. And the trunks of birches are as good, any day, as white blossom, even if there had not been the acacias in flower. And there was a white peacock which, in spite of its restlessness and harsh shrieks, had something about it, too, of a flower. And the Dapple itself, stained like a palette, with great daubs of colour reflected from sky and earth, and carrying on its surface, in autumn, red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it from the trees of Fairyland, where it had its source—even the Dapple might be considered as a flower growing in the garden of the Chanticleers.

There was also a pleached alley of hornbeams. To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside—it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees. And is the only exit that small round hole in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze through that! You must turn back … too late! The spacious portal by which you entered has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole.

Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the actual head of the family, was a typical Dorimarite in appearance; rotund, rubicund, red-haired, with hazel eyes in which the jokes, before he uttered them, twinkled like a trout in a burn. Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the souls of one’s neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait—a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the “values,” with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.

All who knew Master Nathaniel would have been not only surprised, but incredulous, had they been told he was not a happy man. Yet such was the case. His life was poisoned at its springs by a small, nameless fear; a fear not always active, for during considerable periods it would lie almost dormant—almost, but never entirely.

He knew the exact date of its genesis. One evening, many years ago, when he was still but a lad, he and some friends decided as a frolic to dress up as the ghosts of their ancestors and frighten the servants. There was no lack of properties; for the attics of the Chanticleers were filled with the lumber of the past: grotesque wooden masks, old weapons and musical instruments, and old costumes—tragic, hierophantic robes that looked little suited to the uses of daily life. There were whole chests, too, filled with pieces of silk, embroidered or painted with curious scenes. Who has not wondered in what mysterious forests our ancestors discovered the models for the beasts and birds upon their tapestries; and on what planet were enacted the scenes they have portrayed? It is in vain that the dead fingers have stitched beneath them—and we can picture the mocking smile with which these crafty cozeners of posterity accompanied the action—the words “February,” or “Hawking,” or “Harvest,” having us believe that they are but illustrations of the activities proper to the different months. We know better. These are not the normal activities of mortal men. What kind of beings peopled the earth four or five centuries ago, what strange lore they had acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall never know. Our ancestors keep their secret well.

Among the Chanticleers’ lumber there was also no lack of those delicate, sophisticated toys—fans, porcelain cups, engraved seals—that, when the civilisation that played with them is dead, become pathetic and appealing, just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned to dust. But those particular toys, one felt, could never have been really frivolous—there was a curious gravity about their colouring and lines. Besides, the moral of the ephemeral things with which they were decorated was often pointed in an aphorism or riddle. For instance, on a fan painted with wind-flowers and violets were illuminated these words: “Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.”

These trifles clearly belonged to a later period than the masks and costumes. Nevertheless, they, too, seemed very remote from the daily life of the modern Dorimarites.

Well, when they had whitened their faces with flour and decked themselves out to look as fantastic as possible, Master Nathaniel seized one of the old instruments, a sort of lute ending in the carving of a cock’s head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity, and, crying out, “Let’s see if this old fellow has a croak left in him!” plucked roughly at its strings. They gave out one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if petrified.

Then one of the girls saved the situation with a humourous squawk, and, putting her hands to her ears, cried, “Thank you, Nat, for your cat’s concert! It was worse than a squeaking slate.” And one of the young men cried laughingly, “It must be the ghost of one of your ancestors, who wants to be let out and given a glass of his own claret.” And the incident faded from their memories—but not from the memory of Master Nathaniel.

He was never again the same man. For years that note was the apex of his nightly dreams; the point towards which, by their circuitous and seemingly senseless windings, they had all the time been converging. It was as if the note were a living substance, and subject to the law of chemical changes—that is to say, as that law works in dreams. For instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an apple on the fire in her own cosy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she would look at him with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in his waking hours, and say, “But, of course, you know it isn’t really the apple. It’s the Note.”

The influence that this experience had had upon his attitude to daily life was a curious one. Before he had heard the note he had caused his father some uneasiness by his impatience of routine and his hankering after travel and adventure. He had, indeed, been heard to vow that he would rather be the captain of one of his father’s ships than the sedentary owner of the whole fleet.

But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.

From this there sprang an ever-present sense of insecurity together with a distrust of the homely things he cherished. With what familiar object—quill, pipe, pack of cards—would he be occupied, in which regular recurrent action—the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the weekly auditing of his accounts—would he be engaged when IT, the hidden menace, sprang out at him? And he would gaze in terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures—what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their presence?

Hence, at times, he would gaze on the present with the agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past: his wife, sitting under the lamp embroidering, and retailing to him the gossip she had culled during the day; or his little son, playing with the great mastiff on the floor.

This nostalgia for what was still there seemed to find a voice in the cry of the cock, which tells of the plough going through the land, the smell of the country, the placid bustle of the farm, as happening now, all round one; and which, simultaneously, mourns them as things vanished centuries ago.

From his secret poison there was, however, some sweetness to be distilled. For the unknown thing that he dreaded could at times be envisaged as a dangerous cape that he had already doubled. And to lie awake at night in his warm feather bed, listening to the breathing of his wife and the soughing of the trees, would become, from this attitude, an exquisite pleasure.

He would say to himself, “How pleasant this is! How safe! How warm! What a difference from that lonely heath when I had no cloak and the wind found the fissures in my doublet, and my feet were aching, and there was not moon enough to prevent my stumbling, and IT was lurking in the darkness!” enhancing thus his present well-being by imagining some unpleasant adventure now safe behind him.

This also was the cause of his taking a pride in knowing his way about his native town. For instance, when returning from the Guildhall to his own house he would say to himself, “Straight across the market-place, down Appleimp Lane, and round by the Duke Aubrey Arms into the High Street…. I know every step of the way, every step of the way!”

And he would get a sense of security, a thrill of pride, from every acquaintance who passed the time of day with him, from every dog to whom he could put a name. “That’s Wagtail, Goceline Flack’s dog. That’s Mab, the bitch of Rackabite the butcher, I know them!”

Though he did not realise it, he was masquerading to himself as a stranger in Lud-in-the-Mist—a stranger whom nobody knew, and who was thus almost as safe as if he were invisible. And one always takes a pride in knowing one’s way about a strange town. But it was only this pride that emerged completely into his consciousness.

The only outward expression of this secret fear was a sudden, unaccountable irascibility, when some harmless word or remark happened to sting the fear into activity. He could not stand people saying, “Who knows what we shall be doing this time next year?” and he loathed such expressions as “for the last time,” “never again,” however trivial the context in which they appeared. For instance, he would snap his wife’s head off—why, she could not think—if she said, “Never again shall I go to that butcher,” or “That starch is a disgrace. It’s the last time I shall use it for my ruffs.”

This fear, too, had awakened in him a wistful craving for other men’s shoes that caused him to take a passionate interest in the lives of his neighbors; that is to say if these lives moved in a different sphere from his own. From this he had gained the reputation—not quite deserved—of being a very warm-hearted, sympathetic man, and he had won the heart of many a sea-captain, of many a farmer, of many an old working-woman by the unfeigned interest he showed in their conversation. Their long, meandering tales of humble normal lives were like the proverbial glimpse of a snug, lamp-lit parlour to a traveller belated after nightfall.

He even coveted dead men’s shoes, and he would loiter by the hour in the ancient burying-ground of Lud-in-the-Mist, known from time immemorial as the Fields of Grammary. He could justify this habit by pointing out the charming view that one got thence of both Lud and the surrounding country. But though he sincerely loved the view, what really brought him there were such epitaphs as this:

BAKER

WHO HAVING PROVIDED THE CITIZENS
OF LUD-IN-THE-MIST FOR SIXTY YEARS
WITH FRESH SWEET LOAVES
DIED AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY-EIGHT
SURROUNDED BY HIS SONS AND GRANDSONS.

How willingly would he have changed places with that old baker! And then the disquieting thought would come to him that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.

CHAPTER IITHE DUKE WHO LAUGHED HIMSELF OFF A THRONE AND OTHER TRADITIONS OF DORIMARE

Before we start on our story, it will be necessary, for its proper understanding, to give a short sketch of the history of Dorimare and the beliefs and customs of its inhabitants.

Lud-in-the-Mist was scattered about the banks of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl, which met on its outskirts at an acute angle, the apex of which was the harbour. Then there were more houses up the side of a hill, on the top of which stood the Fields of Grammary.

The Dawl was the biggest river of Dorimare, and it became so broad at Lud-in-the-Mist as to give that town, twenty miles inland though it was, all the advantages of a port; while the actual seaport town itself was little more than a fishing village. The Dapple, however, which had its source in Fairyland (from a salt inland sea, the geographers held) and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a humble little stream, and played no part in the commercial life of the town. But an old maxim of Dorimare bade one never forget that ‘The Dapple flows into the Dawl.’ It had come to be employed when one wanted to show the inadvisability of despising the services of humble agents; but, possibly, it had originally another application.

The wealth and importance of the country was mainly due to the Dawl. It was thanks to the Dawl that girls in remote villages of Dorimare wore brooches made out of walrus tusks, and applied bits of unicorns’ horns to their toothache, that the chimney-piece in the parlour of almost every farm-house was adorned with an ostrich egg, and that when the ladies of Lud-in-the-Mist went out shopping or to play cards with their friends, their market-basket or ivory markers were carried by little indigo pages in crimson turbans from the Cinnamon Isles, and that pigmy peddlers from the far North hawked amber through the streets. For the Dawl had turned Lud-in-the-Mist into a town of merchants, and all the power and nearly all the wealth of the country was in their hands.

But this had not always been the case. In the old days Dorimare had been a duchy, and the population had consisted of nobles and peasants. But gradually there had arisen a middle-class. And this class had discovered—as it always does—that trade was seriously hampered by a ruler unchecked by a constitution, and by a ruthless, privileged class. Figuratively, these things were damming the Dawl.

Indeed, with each generation the Dukes had been growing more capricious and more selfish, till finally these failings had culminated in Duke Aubrey, a hunchback with a face of angelic beauty, who seemed to be possessed by a laughing demon of destructiveness. He had been known, out of sheer wantonness, to gallop with his hunt straight through a field of standing corn, and to set fire to a fine ship for the mere pleasure of watching it burn. And he dealt with the virtue of his subjects’ wives and daughters in the same high-handed way.

As a rule, his pranks were seasoned by a slightly sinister humour. For instance, when on the eve of marriage a maid, according to immemorial custom, was ritually offering her virginity to the spirit of the farm, symbolised by the most ancient tree on the freehold, Duke Aubrey would leap out from behind it, and, pretending to be the spirit, take her at her word. And tradition said that he and one of his boon companions wagered that they would succeed in making the court jester commit suicide of his own free will. So they began to work on his imagination with plaintive songs, the burden of which was the frailty of all lovely things, and with grim fables comparing man to a shepherd, doomed to stand by impotent, while his sheep are torn, one by one, by a ravenous wolf.

They won their wager; for coming into the jester’s room one morning they found him hanging from the ceiling, dead. And it was believed that echoes of the laughter with which Duke Aubrey greeted this spectacle were, from time to time, still to be heard proceeding from that room.

But there had been pleasanter aspects to him. For one thing, he had been an exquisite poet, and such of his songs as had come down were as fresh as flowers and as lonely as the cuckoo’s cry. While in the country stories were still told of his geniality and tenderness—how he would appear at a village wedding with a cart-load of wine and cakes and fruit, or of how he would stand at the bedside of the dying, grave and compassionate as a priest.

Nevertheless, the grim merchants, obsessed by a will to wealth, raised up the people against him. For three days a bloody battle raged in the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist, in which fell all the nobles of Dorimare. As for Duke Aubrey, he vanished—some said to Fairyland, where he was living to this day. During those three days of bloodshed all the priests had vanished also. So Dorimare lost simultaneously its Duke and its cult.

In the days of the Dukes, fairy things had been looked on with reverence, and the most solemn event of the religious year had been the annual arrival from Fairyland of mysterious, hooded strangers with milk-white mares, laden with offerings of fairy fruit for the Duke and the high-priest.

But after the revolution, when the merchants had seized all the legislative and administrative power, a taboo was placed on all things fairy.

This was not to be wondered at. For one thing, the new rulers considered that the eating of fairy fruit had been the chief cause of the degeneracy of the Dukes. It had, indeed, always been connected with poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common sense of a burgher-class in the making. There was certainly nothing morbid about the men of the revolution, and under their regime what one can only call the tragic sense of life vanished from poetry and art.

Besides, to the minds of the Dorimarites, fairy things had always spelled delusion. The songs and legends described Fairyland as a country where the villages appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon wood, and where priests, who lived on opobalsum and frankincense, hourly offered holocausts of peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and the moon. But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these things long enough, the glittering castles would turn into old, gnarled trees, the lamps into glow-worms, the precious stones into potsherds, and the magnificently-robed priests and their gorgeous sacrifices into aged crones muttering over a fire of twigs.

The fairies themselves, tradition taught, were eternally jealous of the solid blessings of mortals, and, clothed in invisibility, would crowd to weddings and wakes and fairs—wherever good victuals, in fact, were to be found—and suck the juices from fruits and meats—in vain, for nothing could make them substantial.

Nor was it only food that they stole. In out-of-the-way country places it was still believed that corpses were but fairy cheats, made to resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance—otherwise, why should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which the corpse was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of gillyflowers. The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the “Silent People”; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland.

Another tradition said that their only means of communication was poetry and music; and in the country poetry and music were still called “the language of the Silent People.”

Naturally enough, men who were teaching the Dawl to run gold, who were digging canals and building bridges, and seeing that the tradesmen gave good measure and used standard weights, and who liked both virtues and commodities to be solid, had little patience for flimsy cheats. Nevertheless, the new rulers were creating their own form of delusion, for it was they who founded in Dorimare the science of jurisprudence, taking as their basis the primitive code used under the Dukes and adapting it to modern conditions by the use of legal fictions.

Master Josiah Chanticleer (the father of Master Nathaniel), who had been a very ingenious and learned jurist, had drawn in one of his treatises a curious parallel between fairy things and the law. The men of the revolution, he said, had substituted law for fairy fruit. But whereas only the reigning Duke and his priests had been allowed to partake of the fruit, the law was given freely to rich and poor alike. Again, fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose. But, whereas fairy magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic of the law was to his intention and for his welfare.

In the eye of the law, neither Fairyland nor fairy things existed. But then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the law plays fast and loose with reality—and no one really believes it.

Gradually, an almost physical horror came to be felt for anything connected with the Fairies and Fairyland, and society followed the law in completely ignoring their existence. Indeed, the very word “fairy” became taboo, and was never heard on polite lips, while the greatest insult one Dorimarite could hurl at another was to call him “Son of a Fairy.”

But, on the painted ceilings of ancient houses, in the peeling frescoes of old barns, in the fragments of bas-reliefs built into modern structures, and, above all, in the tragic funereal statues of the Fields of Grammary, a Winckelmann, had he visited Dorimare, would have found, as he did in the rococo Rome of the eighteenth century, traces of an old and solemn art, the designs of which served as poncifs to the modern artists. For instance, a well-known advertisement of a certain cheese, which depicted a comic, fat little man menacing with knife and fork an enormous cheese hanging in the sky like the moon, was really a sort of unconscious comic reprisal made against the action depicted in a very ancient Dorimarite design, wherein the moon itself pursued a frieze of tragic fugitives.

Well, a few years before the opening of this story, a Winckelmann, though an anonymous one, actually did appear in Lud-in-the-Mist; although the field of his enquiries was not limited to the plastic arts. He published a book, entitled Traces of Fairy in the Inhabitants, Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of Dorimare.

His thesis was this: that there was an unmistakable fairy strain running through the race of Dorimarites, which could only be explained by the hypothesis that, in the olden days, there had been frequent intermarriage between them and the Fairies. For instance, the red hair, so frequent in Dorimare, pointed, he maintained, to such a strain. It was also to be found, he asserted, in the cattle of Dorimare. For this assertion he had some foundation, for it was undeniable that from time to time a dun or dapple cow would bring forth a calf of a bluish tinge, whose dung was of a ruddy gold. And tradition taught that all the cattle of Fairyland were blue, and that fairy gold turned into dung when it had crossed the border. Tradition also taught that all the flowers of Fairyland were red, and it was indisputable that the cornflowers of Dorimare sprang up from time to time as red as poppies, and the lilies as red as damask roses. Moreover, he discovered traces of the Fairies’ language in the oaths of the Dorimarites and in some of their names. And, to a stranger, it certainly produced an odd impression to hear such high-flown oaths as; by the Sun, Moon and Stars; by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls; by the White Ladies of the Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in the same breath with such homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt’s Rump; or to find names like Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such grotesque surnames as Baldbreech, Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.

With regard to the designs of old tapestries and old bas-reliefs, he maintained that they were illustrations of the flora, fauna, and history of Fairyland, and scouted the orthodox theory which explained the strange birds and flowers as being due either to the artists’ unbridled fancy or to their imperfect control of their medium, and considered that the fantastic scenes were taken from the rituals of the old religion. For, he insisted, all artistic types, all ritual acts, must be modelled on realities; and Fairyland is the place where what we look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur.

If the antiquary, then, was correct, the Dorimarite, like a Dutchman of the seventeenth century, smoking his churchwarden among his tulips, and eating his dinner off Delft plates, had trivialised to his own taste the solemn spiritual art of a remote, forbidden land, which he believed to be inhabited by grotesque and evil creatures given over to strange vices and to dark cults … nevertheless in the veins of the Dutchman of Dorimare there flowed without his knowing it the blood of these same evil creatures.

It is easy to imagine the fury caused in Lud-in-the-Mist by the appearance of this book. The printer was, of course, heavily fined, but he was unable to throw any light on its authorship. The manuscript, he said, had been brought to him by a rough, red-haired lad, whom he had never seen before. All the copies were burned by the common hangman, and there the matter had to rest.

In spite of the law’s maintaining that Fairyland and everything to do with it was non-existent, it was an open secret that, though fairy fruit was no longer brought into the country with all the pomp of established ritual, anyone who wanted it could always procure it in Lud-in-the-Mist. No great effort had ever been made to discover the means and agents by which it was smuggled into the town; for to eat fairy fruit was regarded as a loathsome and filthy vice, practised in low taverns by disreputable and insignificant people, such as indigo sailors and pigmy Norsemen. True, there had been cases known from time to time, during the couple of centuries that had elapsed since the expulsion of Duke Aubrey, of youths of good family taking to this vice. But to be suspected of such a thing spelled complete social ostracism, and this, combined with the innate horror felt for the stuff by every Dorimarite, caused such cases to be very rare.

But some twenty years before the opening of this story, Dorimare had been inflicted with a terrible drought. People were reduced to making bread out of vetches and beans and fern-roots; and marsh and tarn were rifled of their reeds to provide the cattle with food, while the Dawl was diminished to the size of an ordinary rill, as were the other rivers of Dorimare—with the exception of the Dapple. All through the drought the waters of the Dapple remained unimpaired; but this was not to be wondered at, as a river whose sources are in Fairyland has probably mysterious sources of moisture. But, as the drought burned relentlessly on, in the country districts an ever-increasing number of people succumbed to the vice of fairy fruit-eating … with tragic results to themselves, for though the fruit was very grateful to their parched throats, its spiritual effects were most alarming, and every day fresh rumours reached Lud-in-the-Mist (it was in the country districts that this epidemic, for so we must call it, raged) of madness, suicide, orgiastic dances, and wild doings under the moon. But the more they ate the more they wanted, and though they admitted that the fruit produced an agony of mind, they maintained that for one who had experienced this agony life would cease to be life without it.

How the fruit got across the border remained a mystery, and all the efforts of the magistrates to stop it were useless. In vain they invented a legal fiction (as we have seen, the law took no cognisance of fairy things) that turned fairy fruit into a form of woven silk and, hence, contraband in Dorimare; in vain they fulminated in the Senate against all smugglers and all men of depraved minds and filthy habits—silently, surely, the supply of fairy fruit continued to meet the demand. Then, with the first rain, both began to decrease. But the inefficiency of the magistrates in this national crisis was never forgotten, and “feckless as a magistrate in the great drought” became a proverb in Dorimare.

As a matter of fact, the ruling class of Dorimare had become incapable of handling any serious business. The wealthy merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist, the descendants of the men of the revolution and the hereditary rulers of Dorimare had, by this time, turned into a set of indolent, self-indulgent, humorous gentlemen, with hearts as little touched to tragic issues as those of their forefathers, but with none of their forefathers’ sterling qualities.

A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be. For one thing, wealth had ceased to be a delicate, exotic blossom. It had become naturalised in Dorimare, and was now a hardy perennial, docilely renewing itself year after year, and needing no tending from the gardeners.

Hence sprang leisure, that fissure in the solid masonry of works and days in which take seed a myriad curious little flowers—good cookery, and shining mahogany, and a fashion in dress, that, like a baroque bust, is fantastic through sheer wittiness, and porcelain shepherdesses, and the humours, and endless jokes—in fact, the toys, material and spiritual, of civilisation. But they were as different as possible from the toys of that older civilisation that littered the attics of the Chanticleers. About these there had been something tragic and a little sinister; while all the manifestations of the modern civilisation were like fire-light—fantastic, but homely.

Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country. And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less about the common people for whom they legislated.

For instance, they were unaware that in the country Duke Aubrey’s memory was still green. It was not only that natural children still went by the name of “Duke Aubrey’s brats”; that when they saw a falling star old women would say, “Duke Aubrey has shot a roe”; and that on the anniversary of his expulsion, maidens would fling into the Dapple, for luck, garlands woven out of the two plants that had formed the badge of the Dukes—ivy and squills. He was a living reality to the country people; so much so that, when leakages were found in the vats, or when a horse was discovered in the morning with his coat stained and furrowed with sweat, some rogue of a farm-hand could often escape punishment by swearing that Duke Aubrey had been the culprit. And there was not a farm or village that had not at least one inhabitant who swore that he had seen him, on some midsummer’s eve, or some night of the winter solstice, galloping past at the head of his fairy hunt, with harlequin ribbands streaming in the wind, to the sound of innumerable bells.

But of Fairyland and its inhabitants the country people knew no more than did the merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist. Between the two countries stood the barrier of the Debatable Hills, the foothills of which were called the Elfin Marches, and were fraught, tradition said, with every kind of danger, both physical and moral. No one in the memory of man had crossed these hills, and to do so was considered tantamount to death.

The Vale of the Devil’s Head from “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville”

This week a brief extract from the travels of Sir John Mandeville. Sir John Mandeville didn’t exist. We don’t know who really wrote his book: we do know that they tacked it together from previous travel journals. Most of it is highly dubious, but in ours Magica there’s a little section that works really well as an Infernal regio.

Now over to John Moore who released this recording into the public domain: thanks to him, his production team, and everyone at LibriVox.

***

Beside that Isle of Mistorak upon the left side nigh to the river of Pison is a marvellous thing.  There is a vale between the mountains, that dureth nigh a four mile.  And some men clepe it the Vale Enchanted, some clepe it the Vale of Devils, and some clepe it the Vale Perilous.  In that vale hear men often-time great tempests and thunders, and great murmurs and noises, all days and nights, and great noise, as it were sound of tabors and of nakers and of trumps, as though it were of a great feast.  This vale is all full of devils, and hath been always.  And men say there, that it is one of the entries of hell.  In that vale is great plenty of gold and silver.  Wherefore many misbelieving men, and many Christian men also, go in oftentime for to have of the treasure that there is; but few come again, and namely of the misbelieving men, ne of the Christian men neither, for anon they be strangled of devils.

And in mid place of that vale, under a rock, is an head and the visage of a devil bodily, full horrible and dreadful to see, and it sheweth not but the head, to the shoulders.  p. 186But there is no man in the world so hardy, Christian man ne other, but that he would be adread to behold it, and that it would seem him to die for dread, so is it hideous for to behold.  For he beholdeth every man so sharply with dreadful eyen, that be evermore moving and sparkling as fire, and changeth and stirreth so often in diverse manner, with so horrible countenance, that no man dare not neighen towards him.  And from him cometh out smoke and stinking fire and so much abomination, that unnethe no man may there endure.

But the good Christian men, that be stable in the faith, enter well without peril.  For they will first shrive them and mark them with the token of the holy cross, so that the fiends ne have no power over them.  But albeit that they be without peril, yet, natheles, ne be they not without dread, when that they see the devils visibly and bodily all about them, that make full many diverse assaults and menaces, in air and in earth, and aghast them with strokes of thunder-blasts and of tempests.  And the most dread is, that God will take vengeance then of that that men have misdone against his will.

And ye shall understand, that when my fellows and I were in that vale, we were in great thought, whether that we durst put our bodies in adventure, to go in or not, in the protection of God.  And some of our fellows accorded to enter, and some not.  So there were with us two worthy men, friars minors, that were of Lombardy, that said, that if any man would enter they would go in with us.  And when they had said so, upon the gracious trust of God and of them, we let sing mass, and made every man to be shriven and houseled.  And then we entered fourteen persons; but at our going out we were but nine.  And so we wist never, whether that our fellows were lost, or else turned again for dread.  But we saw them never after; and those were two men of Greece, and three of Spain.  And our other fellows that would not go in with us, they went by another coast to be before us; and so they were.

And thus we passed that perilous vale, and found therein p. 187gold and silver, and precious stones and rich jewels, great plenty, both here and there, as us seemed.  But whether that it was, as us seemed, I wot never.  For I touched none, because that the devils be so subtle to make a thing to seem otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind.  And therefore I touched none, and also because that I would not be put out of my devotion; for I was more devout then, than ever I was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends that I saw in diverse figures, and also for the great multitude of dead bodies, that I saw there lying by the way, by all the vale, as though there had been a battle between two kings, and the mightiest of the country, and that the greater part had been discomfited and slain.  And I trow, that unnethe should any country have so much people within him, as lay slain in that vale as us thought, the which was an hideous sight to see.  And I marvelled much, that there were so many, and the bodies all whole without rotting.  But I trow, that fiends made them seem to be so whole without rotting.  But that might not be to mine advice that so many should have entered so newly, ne so many newly slain, with out stinking and rotting.  And many of them were in habit of Christian men, but I trow well, that it were of such that went in for covetise of the treasure that was there, and had overmuch feebleness in the faith; so that their hearts ne might not endure in the belief for dread.  And therefore were we the more devout a great deal.  And yet we were cast down, and beaten down many times to the hard earth by winds and thunders and tempests.  But evermore God of his grace holp us.  And so we passed that perilous vale without peril and without encumbrance, thanked be Almighty God.

The Seventh Incantation by Joseph Payne Brennan

I’ve made an error here: this item can’t be transcribed by an Australian due to weird differences in copyright law. Sorry gang!

A Vision of Learning by Lady Dilke

This week we return to the works of Lady Dilke, an early feminist, socialist, and horror writer. The following story I think is a useful parable, perhaps to be told to apprentices in the Ars Magica game to convince them to remain at the Covenant rather than going to University

Thanks to Ben Tucker and his production team.

***

There was once a boy who was born to all the joys of the South, and day and night he
was glad of his life till in his dreams he had a vision of Learning, even as she appeared to men in the lands of the far North . Ever after this he was aware of something wanting to him ; at the first, he scarcely knew whether it were so or no, but thenceforth with every hour his need
became plainer, till it mastered him, and, turning his back upon the sun, he passed over mountains and rivers, and vast plains teeming with the life of cities, and nothing stayed him till he came to the Northern Sea. There he took ship, and crossed the narrow strait which divided the land in which he was born from that island shrouded in the Western mists, where, as
he had heard, Learning held her court.

When he landed, the ghostly wreaths of fog which hang for ever about those coasts
arose and embraced him . But, though he felt their kisses on his lips, he was not
dismayed, and pressed forward on his way till, after two days’ journey, he saw, rising
amidst the woods and waters, the towers and spires of that town wherein , as he believed , Learning herself abode. And the people of the town came out to meet him and welcomed him, and when he entered within their gates he marvelled to see the beauty of their city, nor could he praise sufficiently the lordly ways and noble buildings which he beheld on every hand ; but
at the last he spoke and said : “ In which of these palaces, I pray you, hath Learning
herself her dwelling – place ? “

Then all these people answered him as one man : “ All these be her palaces, and we are all her servants, and dwell within her walls.” And they conducted him within the portals of one of the fairest, and coming to an inner court they led him up many stairs, and opening the door of a little chamber, they bade him welcome once more and left him.

When he was alone he was surprised, for the chamber allotted to him seemed scarcely such as one should have been found within a fabric so splendid in outward seeming ; and the staircase by which he had ascended thither had appeared to him very dark, and so narrow that two could not have stood abreast upon its steps ; but, in his humility, he deemed it only fitting that one who as yet could scarcely claim to be the least among her servants should find no
spacious lodging in the house of Learning. And as he thought these things, looking from his window he saw close opposite to him the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient chapel, pierced with windows of many – coloured glass, and behind the windows he saw lights moving in the gathering darkness, and as he looked he heard voices chanting.

And he said with joy : “ Lo, day by day every dweller within these walls lifts up his soul in the praise of the beauty of Holiness. When Holiness hath become my portion, and Learning
herself hath looked upon me, then shall I have entered into my reward , and shall beas one new -born .” So he became a student i n that place.

But when many days and months had passed and he saw not Learning, nor even so much as the skirts of her clothing , a great doubt came upon him which made his soul very heavy . After long silence, he spoke to the doctors and teachers and masters and said : “ Surely, sirs, Learning hath left you for space ; she hath gone upon a journey, or is holding her court in other lands. ”

But the doctors and teachers and masters were angry at this, crying out : “ What strange folly
hath possessed you ? By whom, then, are ? our words inspired ? In whose name, too , we pray you , do we bear rule over this Shall a student who is as yet a dweller but in the outer courts put questions to us ? ” And they said also : “ When you have gotten to yourself all the knowledge of the schools, then may you look to enter her sanctuary.” At this the student was abashed , and he thought : “ In the days to be, when I have gotten the knowledge of the schools, I shall, perhaps, as these have said , discover her sanctuary .”

This was in the summer. Now , though there was no heat in the summer, yet it was very close in the little court wherein the student had his chamber. Often in the evening he would walk in the dusk below his own windows, and on one evening he remained thus walking till it was well nigh dark .

Just as he turned himself, thinking that he would go once more within, he heard , on a sudden , a voiceless shriek which filled the air with terror, and looking whence it had come, he saw , perched on the edge of the decaying battlements which encompassed the roof of the chapel, a bird , in shape like to the birds which were common in his own land ; but never before had he heard one that cried in such a fashion — a note of warning, of fear, of agony! So standing there white to the lips — for the hideous sound thus breaking upon the silence had
shocked him – he watched and listened, thinking that if it should cry again the bird
might perhaps utter the low appeals, the idle chatter, and the laughter with which it had been wont to fill the dusk at springtide in the South . But the bird was silent, and presently spreading its wings, soared far away . Then the student longed to follow it, and for a while he believed almost that it had bidden him do so ; but at this time the masters praised him, saying he had done well, so he remained .

The summer drew to a close, and the woods lost their leaves, and the rain fell in torrents every day, so that the sky of that country, never very bright, had become an inky grey, and the waters without the walls of the city rose and flooded the adjacent meadows. The student could now
longer go forth beyond the gates, and there were but few dwelling in the inner court where was his chamber, so that when he looked out all was empty and silent, and the windows had that eyeless aspect which gives a ghostly air to uninhabited houses.

And, sitting in his chamber, he listened to the perpetual dripping from the eaves, and as the heavy raindrops fell they seemed to smite him, for though he had now gotten to himself much of the knowledge of the schools, and the masters and teachers and doctors spoke fair things of him, yet he knew in himself that he was none the nearer to his purpose.

Sometimes, now , in his weariness he would close his eyes, and for a little space it would be to him as though he trod once more the sunny slopes of his ancient home beyond the seas, and in the breeze the blossoms of the cistus floated as if they had taken wings to meet him in his joy, and all around him there arose the scent of thyme and of lavender and of cassia, and his nostrils
pricked with the resinous odour of the dark pines, and he saw their slender columns standing black athwart the silver sky. But when, dreaming thus, he had almost for gotten the vision which had lured him to the North, the dull, metallic echo of the raindrops falling from roof to gutter awoke him, and there was pain in his awaking.

When the autumn was far drawn into winter, it so happened that, rousing himself from one of these fits of stupor — which had now grown common to him the student went to his window , and looking up he counted, as he had often done before, the lines of a black network formed by the branches of a leafless tree just where the sky was to be seen in a little cleft between
the roof of the chapel and that of the court.

As he gazed on this, the motionless empty grey of the rain -clouds was stirred as it were by something moving, and slowly , on broad black wings, once more a bird — a bird this time of evil omen – came through the sky and settled down upon the branches. Then the student thought of that other bird , and half he expected to hear again its cruel note ; but this one remained silent, only it ruffled its black plumes and folded its wings. The movement which it made as it did so was like to that made by the doctors and teachers and masters, as they
wrapped their robes about them and took their seats in a place of honour, and the student called to mind how many questions he had asked of them , and in vain . Yet it seemed to him as if this bird had a message for him, and knew , perhaps, more than they all of the vision which he had seen in the South.

Then he began to be curious about the tree which it had chosen for its resting – place, and in the wildness of his fancy he thought : “ If I can but find the place in which that tree hath its root upon which this bird hath chosen her seat, it may be that I shall then discover the sanctuary
of which all the doctors and masters and teachers have spoken .” But whilst he was still looking on the bird, the snow began to fall, and in aa little while both the bird and the tree were hidden from sight.

It now became his chief thought how he might enter the court which lay on the farther side of the chapel, and from which he, like others of his age, had always been excluded ; so he went down at night (for not even the snow , which fell heavily, could keep him from trying the adventure ) and strove to find some way by which he might pass ; but though he succeeded in
opening a little iron gate hard by the door of the chapel, he was stopped at the end of the passage into which it led by another which he could by no means unfasten.

Night after night did the student continue to essay this second gate, but the fastening was difficult, and there was no light in the sky by which he might have seen how to handle it ; the snow, too , lay always on the ground, and the unaccustomed cold was very bitter to him. At last, there came a great storm of wind , which cleared the sky, so that the moon, then in her full, showed forth all her splendour, and on that night the student, when he went down, found
that he could open both the gates with ease .

So he entered straightway into where there was a garden, only all things were covered with the snow ; except where the drift having been swept to one side by the great storm of wind, there was, as it were, a path before him leading into the shadow cast under the farther wall. Looking about, he saw that the garden, like the courts of the building within which he dwelt, was shut in on all sides by high walls, and seeing no issue, he was daunted; when, on a sudden, the bells in an old tower on the farther side chimed with a solemn tolling sound, and there arose an echo of that sound from the other side of the wall, and looking again more steadfastly into the shadow , the student was aware of a little door in the wall, and hastening along the path and coming to it he found it ajar, and pushing it open he stepped within, and knew that he was in a graveyard.

The graves , of which there were many , were all open , and in each there sat men clothed in robes of black or of scarlet, which were strangely bright, trailing in the sheets of snow all dazzling with the moon beams. They were holding with each other high dispute, and the sound of their voices in the frosty air fell on the ears of the student like the echo of passing bells.
But he was full of his quest, and after a little pause , going up to the nearest, he said : “ Tell me, o master ! where shall I find Learning ? ” And he who sat in the grave shook his head, but he answered not, neither did he lift his eyes. Then the student went to the next, and said : “Tell me, have you seen Learning ? ” and he likewise answered him not. Then the student turned to a third, and said , with a great agony of praying : “ Answer me, I beseech you , have they , the masters, teachers, and doctors of this city-have they seen Learning ? ”

At this all the ghosts shrieked with laughter, crying out : “ Neither to them , nor to us, nor to any
that have ever abided in this city hath Learning revealed herself . ” And the sound of their voices crying thus was as the knell of his soul.

So the student, seeing at his feet an open grave in which no one sat, asked no more, but saying, “This is my place,” he laid himself down in it.

On the morrow , when he was missed, a great search was made for him , nor was it long before he was found. When they had found him they upbraided him with his folly , but he replied : “You are all liars, and now I know you for such ; for neither you, nor those that went before you,
have ‘ at any time seen Learning in this city ; the dead have spoken, and have put you to shame.”

At this all the doctors, teachers, and masters declared : “ He is mad.” So the student was bound hand and foot, and they carried him to a mad house, and there, because he was very violent, they put chains on him, and the reproaches of his ravings were very terrible to hear, and by no means could the wrath of his tongue be appeased.

For many years he remained in this state, but by chance there came a woman who felt great compassion and sorrow for those in suffering and in bonds ; frequently she visited the mad – house, and brought at the least some word of calm or look of pity to the afflicted. It was a long while before the keepers of the house would suffer her to speak of approaching the student, for they feared lest evil should befall her from his great violence. In the end, however,
she persuaded them to take her to him.

And they said to her : “ Should he ask you if you be Learning, then you will do well, perhaps, to humour his folly, and to make answer that it is even so , and that you indeed are she. ”

So, bearing in mind their cautions, the woman entered the student’s cell, and on the instant, even as the keepers of the house had foretold , he as ked her if she were not indeed Learning herself come to visit him . But she, seeing him so all distraught and well nigh dead for Learning’s sake, was filled with a yearning of grief, and , forgetting all their cautions, she cried out : “ God forbid , my poor lad ! I am but Love.”

And at these words the student began to weep bitterly.

Then the woman , without speaking, took from her bosom a red rose and put it in his fingers, and the student, taking it, made as though he would have carried it to his lips ; as he did so his chains rattled loudly, and lifting his skeleton arms to heaven, he seemed once more about to call down curses upon men, but the scent of the flower changed his purpose, and he
turned his face to the wall in silence.

Then the woman prayed that his chains might be taken off him, and before she left him she had prevailed , and this was done ; but on the third day, when she returned to know how he did, she was told, “ He is dead, ” nor could she learn the place of his burial .

The Shrine of Death by Lady Dilke

It’s always a pleasure to discover new, early, female, horror authors and today I’m bringing you a mystery cult initiation by Lady Dilke. Lady Dilke married a couple of times so her surname changes a bit, but essentially she was an early feminist and horror author. She died just after the turn of the 20th Century. I any of you are Middlemarch fans, she was the model for Casaubon.
Anyway over to Ben Tucker who we seem to be depending on awfully hard this year.

***

Life has many secrets! These were the first words that fell on the ears of a little girl baby, whose mother had just been brought to bed. As she grew up she pondered their meaning, and, before all things, she desired to know the secrets of life. Thus, longing and brooding, she grew apart from other children , and her dreams were ever of how the secrets of life should be revealed
to her.

Now, when she was about fifteen years of age, a famous witch passed through the town in which she dwelt, and the child heard much talk of her, and people said that her knowledge of all things was great, and that even as the past lay open before her, so there was nothing in the future that could be hidden from her. Then the child thought to herself, “ This woman ,
if by any means I get speech of her, can , if she will, tell me all the secrets of life. ”

Nor was it long after, that walking late in the evening with other and lesser children, along the ramparts on the east side of the town, she came to a corner of the wall which lay in deep shadow , and out of the shadow there sprang a large black dog, baying loudly, and the children were terrified, and fled , crying out, “It is the witch’s dog !” and one, the least of all, fell in its
terror, so the elder one tarried , and lifted it from the ground, and, as she comforted it for it was shaken by its fall, and the dog continued baying — the witch herself came out of the shadow , and said , “ Off with you, you little fools, and break my peace no more with your folly. ”

And the little one ran for fear, but the elder girl stood still, and laying hold of the witch’s mantle, she said, “ Before I go, tell me, what are the secrets of life ? ”

And the witch answered, “ Marry Death, fair child, and you will know.” At the first, the saying of the witch fell like a stone in the girl’s heart, but ere long her words, and the words which she had heard in the hour of her birth , filled all her thoughts,’ and when other girls jested or spoke of feasts and merriment, of happy love and all the joys of life, such talk seemed to her mere wind of idle tales, and the gossips who would have made a match for her schemed in vain , for she had but one desire, the desire to woo Death , and learn the secrets of life. Often now she
would seek the ramparts in late evening, hoping that in the shadows she might once more find the witch, and learn from her the way to her desire ; but she found her not.

Returning in the darkness, it so happened, after one of these fruitless journeys, that she passed under the walls of an ancient church, and looking up at the windows, she saw the flickering of a low, unsteady light upon the coloured panes, and she drew near to the door, and, seeing it ajar,
she pushed it open and entered, and passing between the mighty columns of the nave, she stepped aside to the spot whence the light proceeded. Having done so , she found herself standing in front of a great tomb, in one side of which were brazen gates, and beyond the gates a long flight of marble steps leading down to a vast hall or chapel below ; and above the gates, in a silver lamp, was a light burning, and as the chains by which the lamp was suspended
moved slightly in the draught from the open door of the church, the light which burnt in it flickered, and all the shadows around shifted so that nothing seemed still, and this constant recurrence of change was like the dance of phantoms in the air. And the girl, seeing the blackness, thought of the corner on the ramparts where she had met the witch , and almost she expected to see her, and to hear her dog baying in the shadows.

When she drew nearer, she found that the walls were loaded with sculpture, and the niches along the sides were filled with statues of the wise men of all time ; but at the corners were four women whose heads were bowed, and whose hands were bound in chains. Then, looking at them as they sat thus, discrowned but majestic, the soul of the girl was filled with sorrow , and she fell weeping, and, clasping her hands in her grief, she cast her eyes to heaven. As she
did so , the lamp swayed a little forwards, and its rays touched with light a figure seated on the top of the monument. When the girl caught sight of this figure she ceased weeping, and when she had withdrawn a step or two backwards, so as to get a fuller view, she fell upon her knees, and a gleam of wondrous expectation shone out of her face ; for, on the top of the tomb, robed and crowned , sat the image of Death, and a great gladness and awe filled her soul, for
she thought, “If I may but be found worthy to enter his portals, all the secrets of life will be mine.”

And laying her hands on the gates, she sought to open them , but they were locked, so after a little while she went sadly away. Each day , from this time forth , when twilight fell, the girl returned to the church, and would there remain kneeling for many hours before the shrine of Death, nor could she by any means be drawn away from her purpose. Her mind was fixed on her desire, so that she became insensible to all else ; and the whole town mocked her, and
her own people held her for mad.

So then, at last, they took her before a priest, and the priest, when he had talked with her
awhile, said , “ Let her have her way. Let her pass a night within the shrine ; on the morrow it may be that her wits will have returned to her.”

So a day was set, and they robed her in white as a bride, and in great state , with youths bearing torches, and many maidens, whose hands were full of flowers, she was brought through the city at night fall to the church ; and the gates of the shrine were opened , and as she passed within , the youths put out their torches and the maidens threw their roses on the steps beneath her feet.

When the gates closed upon her, she stood still awhile upon the upper steps, and so she waited until the last footfall had ceased to echo in the church, and she knew herself to be alone in the long desired presence. Then, full of reverent longing and awe, she drew her veil about
her, and as she did so , she found a red rose that had caught in it, and, striving to dislodge it, she brought it close to her face, and its perfume was very strong, and she saw , as in a vision, the rose garden of her mother’s house , and the face of one who had wooed her there in the sun ; but, even as she stood irresolute, the baying of a hound in the distant street fell on her ears, and she remembered the words of the witch, “ Marry Death, fair child, if you would
know the secrets of life , ” and casting the rose from her, she began to descend the steps.

As she went down, she heard, as it were, the light pattering of feet behind her ; but
turning, when she came to the foot, to look, she found that this sound was only the
echoing fall from step to step of the flowers which her long robes had drawn after her, and she heeded them not, for she was now within the shrine, and looking to the right hand and to the left, she saw long rows of tombs, each one hewn in marble and covered with sculpture of wondrous beauty.

All this, though, she saw dimly ; the plainest thing to view was the long black shadow of her own form , cast before her by the light from the lamp above, and as she looked beyond the uttermost rim of shadow , she became aware of an awful shape seated at a marble table whereon lay an open book . Looking on this dread shape, she trembled , for she knew
that she was in the presence of Death Then, seeing the book, her heart was up lifted within her, and stepping boldly for wards, she seated herself before it, and as she did so , it seemed to her that she heard a shiver from within the tombs.

Now, when she came near , Death had raised his finger, and he pointed to the writing on the open page, but, as she put her hands upon the book , the blood rushed back to her heart, for it was ice-cold, and again it seemed to her that something moved within the tombs. It was but for
a minute, then her courage returned , and she fixed her eyes eagerly upon the lines before her and began to read, but the very letters were at first strange to her, and even when she knew them she could by no means frame them into words, or make any sentence out of them, so that, at the last, she looked up in her wonderment to seek aid .

But he, the terrible one, before whom she sat, again lifted his finger, and as he pointed to the page, a weight as of lead forced down her eyes upon the book ; and now the letters shifted strangely, and when she thought to have seized a word or a phrase it would suddenly be gone, for, if the text shone out plain for an instant, the strange shadows, moving with the movements of the silver lamp, would blot it again as quickly from sight.

At this, distraction filled her mind, and she heard her own breathing like sobs in the darkness, and fear choked her ; for ever, when she would have appealed for help, her eyes saw the same deadly menace, the same uplifted and threatening finger. Then, glancing to left and right, a new horror took possession of her, for the lids of the tombs were yawning wide, and whenever
her thoughts turned to flight, their awful tenants peered at her from above the edges, and they made as though they would have stayed her.

Thus she sat till it was long past midnight, and her heart was sick within her, when again the distant baying of a hound reached her ears ; but this sound, instead of giving her fresh courage, seemed to her but a bitter mockery, for she thought, “ What shall the secrets of life profit me, if I must make my bed with Death ? ”

And she became mad with anger, and she cursed the counsels of the witch , and in her desperation, like a creature caught in the toils, she sprang from her seat and made towards the steps by which she had come. Ere she could reach them , all the dreadful dwellers in the tombs
were before her , and she, seeing the way to life was barred for ever, fell to the ground at their feet and gave up her spirit in a great agony.

Then each terrible one re turned to his place, and the book which lay open before Death closed with a noise as of thunder, and the light which burnt before his shrine went out, so that all was darkness. In the morning, when that company which had brought her came back to the
church, they wondered much to see the lamp extinguished , and, fetching a taper, some went down fearfully into the vault. There all was as it had ever been , only the girl lay face downwards amongst the withered roses, and when they lifted her up they saw that she was dead ; but her eyes were wide with horror. And so another tomb was hewn in marble, and she was laid with the rest, and when men tell the tale of her strange bridal they say, “ She had but
the reward of her folly. God rest her soul ! ”

Mythic Venice – May #Dungeon23 #City23

In case you missed the previous episodes in the series, Dungeon 23 is a writing challenge, once a day for a year. These are my notes for a Mythic Venice setting for Ars Magica as recorded in May.

My entry for May the first was included in the April episode because it was connected with the material discussed that month. This month we start on a travellers guide and set of folktales recorded by Alberto Toso Fei, who is a folklorist and travel writer native to Venice.

May 2 – Ghosts of the three Doges

The spectre of the traitorous doge, Marino Falier, wanders Venice searching for his missing head. The spectre of Enrico Dandolo wanders hunting for Falier. He is blind and has hot coals where his eyes should be. He carries a sword by its blade so he is in constant pain. No one knows what happens if these two meet. Dandolo is doing this as a curse because of the sack of Constantinople.

Tommaso Mocenigo’s ghost cannot speak. As he wanders he pulls a continuous piece of paper from his mouth. It says Veritas. Sometimes the ribbon becomes so long that it tangles around his legs. He is momentarily happy if people free him from the ribbon. Why he is cursed, Toso Fei does not say.

May 3: The jar of heroic skin.

In the church of San Giovanni et Paolo there is an urn full of skin. It belongs to
Marcantonio Bragadin. He was skinned by the Turks at Famagosta. It was stolen from Constantinople in 1596.

Plot hooks: Steal it earlier; mask magic; mysterious superhero.

May 4: The Bellringer’s Skeleton
This is a 17th century myth. A bell-ringer was hugely tall, so a master from an anatomical college offered to buy the bellringer’s skeleton after his death. He paid the man for a written contract giving over his body.

At midnight the Skeleton climbs the bell tower and rings 12 chimes. Then he walks down to his old house ringing his bell and begging for funds to buy his skeleton back. As I recall the thing doing the begging is his ghost. So it’s an example of two undead from the same person.

May 5th. San Michele
I’ve said before that the island of San Michele was created in the 19th century. It turns out I’m wrong. San Michele is merged with the neighbouring island of San Christoforo della Pace and so the island itself does predate the Napoleonic demand for a cemetery island.

The church of San Michele in Isola was begun in 1469. It was the home of Brother Mauro, one of the finest cartographers of the late medieval period. He died in 1459 so he was in the previous church. He had a factory for maps. He gets international commissions in real life and he took information from Venetian navigators to make his maps more accurate. Mythically he stole the information from Satan’s dreams and could project Satan’s dreams into the clouds. The dreams can still sometimes be seen just before lightning storms.

May 6: The Memory Witch by Kenneth Rand.
This is a street song that I may steal for Serenissima.

Fresh spells! New spells! True spells today!
A charm to keep the frost away,
that makes the rose-time never die.
Come buy.
A bit of sun and summer-breeze
of love and life and leafy trees,
When zephyrs sigh.

Fresh spells! New spells! True spells today.
A bit of magic from May.
A snatch of song where swallows fly.
Come by.
A spring day when the pulses leap
and all the southern breezes sweep
the sapphire sky.

Fresh spells! New spells, True spells today!
That point the road to yesterday.
That start the tear-drop in the eye.
Come buy.
A ghost of long-forgotten love.
The tryst, the silver moon above.
The last goodbye.

May 7: Another burning skeleton.
The ghost of Bartolomio Zenni carries a heavy bag down the Campo d’Abazia.
During a fire he didn’t help rescue children, because he was too busy stuffing his own possessions into a bundle, then he drowned in the canal. If anyone helps him carry his bundle to the Church of St. Fosca, he’ll be able to rest. If anyone touches his bundle, the ghost involuntarily turns into a flaming skeleton, which tends to frighten any aid away.

May 8: The Statue of Judas.
The Church of Madonna Dell’Orto was built in the 14th century and was originally dedicated
to St. Christopher. They found a statue of Mary in a veggie patch nearby, via a miracle, and there was a rededication. It has statues of the Apostles on the facade.

The sculptor was a Satanist, so he has Judas rather than Matthew. The Judas statue contains
one of the thirty pieces of silver stained with Judas’s blood. Remember he is meant to have
committed suicide by hanging himself. It has an infernal aura. On Good Friday night the statue
flies to the Akeldama. The Akeldama (Biblical trivia) is the name of the land that Judas bought
with the pieces of silver.

May 9th: Statues of the Mastelli Brothers
Four merchants were turned to stone by Mary Magdalene, they were cheats and hypocrites who used to swear “If I’m lying, may God turn my left hand to stone.”

May 10th, Witch in Tintoretto’s house.
On her way to First Communion at the Church of Madonna Dell’Orto, Tintoretto’s daughter was stopped by a woman. This witch told the girl that she could be like the Madonna if she retained ten weeks’ worth of Communion wafers. After hiding some wafers for weeks, she became afraid and told her father. He knew this was an initiation ritual for witches, so on the tenth week he asked his daughter to trick the witch into their house. Tintoretto locked the door after she entered and started beating her with his walking stick. She changed into a cat and couldn’t escape, so she changed into black smoke and vanished through his wall.

May 11: The ghostly nun
Chiaretta, the daughter of Lorenzo Loredan, haunts the convent of Sant’Anna. She fell in love with a carpenter, so her father forced her to take the veil. She tried to escape, but her father found out and murdered her as she was making the attempt. There is a story that her ghost sometimes helps lovers in surrounding campos or rescues the suicidal.

May 12: Infernal Aura / St Peter’s mother
God allows St Peter’s mother out of Hell for his Saint’s Day and the week before and after.
She is a vicious old woman, so the Infernal Aura rises, and the winds are strange and strong.

May 13: Han Dong
Toso Fei says that Marco Polo married a daughter of Chinngis Khan. When Polo was imprisoned, she spent her evenings singing a Cathayan love song over the canals from the balcony of her palace. When he was moved to Genoa, Polo’s sister told the princess that he had been put to death for marrying a non-Christian. She dressed in her finery, set herself aflame, and then threw herself into the canal. Toso Fei says they found the body of an Asian woman buried with a tiara during a restoration.

May 14: Notes
There is a version of the Devil and the Mason about the Rialto Bridge.
Black candles burn every night at the Virgin of the Sea to remember the Baker’s Boy.

Page 142, there is the use of a false fleet to get the Genoans to flee. This battle is commemorated with two great Palazzo columns.

Page 145, between the 9th and 10th columns on the upper level of the Doge’s Palace is where
death sentences were proclaimed.

Page 147, Cheba: tortured by a hanging cage on the southern side of the Bell Tower.

Page 149, There was a third column with a crocodile on top. It was sunk in the ocean during transport. Some nights it rises, roaring from the sea. And on those nights, a girl always vanishes.

Page 150, Story about Elizabeth I’s goddaughter, a guy who kept meeting her on the down low, was executed for espionage. She was then privately told to flee the city. Instead, she gatecrashed the Doge’s Palace, passionately explained that this wasn’t espionage just adultery
and got a public declaration, and an apology to her lovers’ family.

May 15: Giordano Bruno
Bruno was an alchemist who worked for, and tutored, the doge from 1591 to 1592. Doge Mochenigo didn’t develop magical powers, so he handed him over to the local church authorities. Bruno fled to Rome, was arrested, tortured by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600. On the night of his death, he does water-related pranks, but only in front of women 85 years old or older.

And then there’s a break for some time.

May 26: The Fade
The fairies (Fade) often appear in the night and look like women in white. They have hooves and bestial reflections. You must hide knives and mirrors in their presence if you don’t want to
enrage them. They give wealth and beauty, but they are devious.

May 27: Further notes
Page 186: There is a description of Giacomo Cassanova’s method of immortality and lifestyle,
either magical longevity or constant reincarnation in Venice. This is noted as a post-period 18th
century piece of folklore.
Page 200: there is a story of a young man who kicked the skull from the graveyard into a canal, who was then punished on his wedding night.
Page 201: Tthere are annual parades to celebrate deliverance from plague. During plagues proper burial customs were skipped, and this creates genius locis, where burial masses are needed.
Page 207: a deep part of the Punta della Dogana is home to a horse-headed sea monster or
serpent
Page 210-12: there is a story from the Pentamerone

Now we move on from Toso Fei

We have to deal with the elephant in the room, Giovanni Straparola. When I did the Pentamerone it sidetracked me for a year, and so I wanted to leave Straparola’s “Facetious Nights” alone. I was worried that it would do the same thing. However, I’ve gone through the 75 stories and set myself some ground rules in this note, which I then promptly ignored.

The entry for May 29th is a text sheet of which stories I would include, and so I’m going to skip reading that, because it will become obvious in future entries.

May 30: Cassandrino, a variant of the Master Thief, set in Perugia.
Cassandrino has a bet with a local governor that he will steal the governor’s bed and decoys him with a corpse dressed in the thief’s clothes. While the governor buries the corpse,
which he thinks is the thief who has volunteered his death because of the bet, the thief steals his bed by breaking in through his roof. Next he steals a horse.

The governor sets the thief a task – bring me a particular holy man in a sack or I’ll hang you. The thief thinks this is a trap so he dresses as an angel, tricks the priest into the sack, and then delivers him. The governor gives the thief 400 florins and says, if he doesn’t give up his thievery, he’ll be hanged, and so he becomes a merchant.

My idea for the unusual characters from Straparola is that they could be guides to Venice, that they would take the place of portal fairies.

May 30: Father Scarpatico
Set in Imola.
The priest, Scarpatico, is a miser and has a lame foot, so his housekeeper Nina convinces him to buy a horse. He buys a mule for seven florins, and then is tricked out of it by three thieves. For revenge, he tricks them into paying him money, then murdering their wives, then murdering a shepherd, so Scarpatico can steal his flock, and then committing suicide by convincing them that they will have magical powers, if Scarpatico is allowed to put a sack and heave them into the river. He even uses a bladder filled up with blood to fake murder.

June 1: Tebaldo of Salerno
King Tebaldo is in Venice pretending to be a merchant. Unlike most guides, he desperately wishes to stay in Venice because he thinks he’s possessed. He’s not, he’s an incognisant faerie, and his story is in abeyance, while he is caught in the mesh of the Player of Games’ meta-plot.

He thinks he’s the King of Solerno, and a widower. When his wife died, he believes she made him promise to only remarry if her wedding rings fits the new bride. Only his daughter’s finger fits the ring. She flees locked in a chest with a potion that, with one dose of less than a spoonful, nourishes you for a long time.

Tebaldo dresses as a merchant, gets a great store of jewels and gems, and sets out to find her.
He also has a sleeping poison. Then he gets to Venice and his story pauses. He doesn’t consciously know that he’ll murder his grandkids and get put to death by incineration at the end of his story. But he knows if he leaves he’s going to be…possessed…again.

June 2: Biancabella and Samaritana.
A baby girl is born with a snake wrapped around her neck. She also has a shining gold chain between her skin and muscle in her neck. The snake flees at birth but comes back when her sister is a young woman, and it goes through a ritual with the girl massaging a milk bath into her skin and then dowsing her with rose water. This makes the girl, Biancabella, supernaturally beautiful, and gemstones fall from her hair when it is combed. In her story she is then maimed and blinded, but she is cured by her sister the snake who has the name Samaritana. They then go home for revenge. Her story is stuck after the healing. She’s rich gorgeous and has a sister who’s a sorceress because the snake can take human shape.

They are staying in Venice. Her new hands are not her hands reconnected or regenerated. I’d like them to be a magical prosthetics.

June 3: Fortunio
Fortunio, a boy off to make his fortune, meets three magical animals arguing over a deer carcass. He gives the flesh and bones to the wolf because their teeth, the innards to the eagle, and the squishy brain to the ant.

They reward him with the magical power of changing to their shapes by saying “Would that I were a… (wolf/eagle/ant)” he can change into the appropriate animal. He later turns up at a joust as a mystery knight, clad in bejeweled white caparisons and armour, so he’s really, really, really rich. At the end of his story he marries a princess and eats his foster parents in wolf form.

June 4: Constanza and the Satyr
The king of Thebes is old and divides his land between his three daughters, who marry neighbouring kings. Then he has a fourth baby girl later in life. When she grows up the king offers the little bit of land he has kept back for expenses as her dowry and he arranges a marriage with the son of a neighbour. She refuses to marry anyone less than a king.

She changes her name to Constanza, dresses as a man and becomes a courtier in the kingdom of Bettinia. The queen tries to seduce him, but he declines, so she’s angry, and she gets the king to send him on dangerous missions. On one he captures a satyr, who he names Chiappino.

Chirpino can sense hypocrisy and deception and finds it hilarious, for example he laughs at a child’s funeral, and when asks why he reveals that the child was not the grieving father’s, but that of the priest solemnly chanting the funeral service.

June 5: Gabrina
Gabrina is an infernal sorceress who does magic by commanding demons. She can fly across Europe, divine answers to questions, change appearance, become invisible, affect others with the powers previously mentioned, and command demons generally. Her workings use a ritual circle and a drop of the magical elixir she carries in a flask. If she’s casting a spell on someone, verbal prayers ward against her powers.

June 6: The prisoner Aglea.
Aglea, daughter of Apollo, used to live in a tower with her treasures, a pet dragon and a guardian basilisk. There was a prophecy that whoever scaled the tower would be her master. Three magical brothers worked together to take her. The first heard the prophecy in a bird’s song, the second built swift ship, and sailed it through winds and currents with superhuman skill, and the third quickly scaled the tower, using a dagger in each hand.

They split the treasure, but could never agree, who deserved to marry Aglea. She uses them as servants, it is waiting for them to die of old age. She’s immortal, and her curse is inconvenient, but she’s patient, and can just poison the three and go home, if she decides to

June 7: Diogini the Necromancer
A man is apprentice to a tailor and is terrible at it. His master is, however, a necromancer and thinking his apprentice is simpleton, performs magic where he can be observed. His apprentice, Diogini, learns mastery of shapes, and then leaves his service.

Diogini and his father do the escaping horse scam, but the old tailor traps Diogini in horse form. He then beats and starves Diogini until the tailor’s daughters take pity on him, and they take him to the creek for a drink. He changes into a fish and disappears.

Later he changes into a ruby, a handful of pomegranate seeds, and a fox. He participates
in a game of transformations with his old master, who he throttles, while the elder is in the shape of a chicken. He marries a girl who hid him while he was a ruby.

June 8: Constantino
This is the origin of the Puss in Boots story as per the Pentamorone episode, It ends rather better for the cat.

Bertuccio. This is a ghostly warder that can give gifts like horses and clothes.

That is us for May, and a large start of June. Your saga may vary.

The transcripts for January – March 2023 are now available.

The transcripts for January – March 2023 are now available.

The Marrying Monster

This will be an odd episode. Claus Stamm is one of those authors who writes a few children’s books and a poem or two, but is hard to track down electronically. I’m not sure why his work was focused on Japan, or which yokai he thought he was writing about here. The name he uses – “yamam’ba” – is a variant of a sort of forest witch, but the monstrous features here aren’t ones I can directly trace to a story. I do note that Goro the bath maker is a character in a popular game series, so that’s either a striking coincidence or there’s a deeper pocket of lore I’ve missed.

Regardless, I liked the story and thought the monster would interest Ars Magica and Magonomia players. Statistics eventually. Thanks to Quartertone and their production team for the recording.

By CLAUS STAMM (Fantastic Universe March 1960. via Project Gutenberg]

Goro put down his tools and relaxed into a pile of wood shavings, his back against a half-finished bathtub. To enjoy the evening cool, he told himself, wiping his face with a blue and white rag. Actually, he wanted to postpone the evening meal. Either the rice would be overcooked to a sticky goo or he would be picking hard, underdone kernels out of his teeth all night. And bean soup, when he made it, always had things swimming in it that had no business there.

A night insect went weep-weep-weep. The sound, the night falling, and the thought of his own cooking made him think of his dead wife.

“She was a good cook, poor thing,” he thought out loud. “My, my—how I miss her.”

He gave a deep sigh. Oh, to have a wife again—a jolly, round wife and a good cook. Just like the old one with perhaps the small exception that she would not eat a man out of house and home and herself into the grave in the bargain. Had he said that aloud? Bad sign, when a man talks to the night insects—better to go into the house, better to eat rice and bean soup. He shuddered.

He began to get up and paused halfway, one hand against the wood of the tub, the other shielding his eyes. He peered into the forest that came almost to the work yard. Someone was coming through there, he heard it. He sat down again. Fireflies flitted among the trees. What if it were his wife’s spirit—would it be a chubby ghost? It should be.

A woman walked out of the forest.

She was tall, he noticed, watching her thread her way among finished and unfinished buckets and tubs, tall and slender—almost gaunt. She had her sleeves tied back out of the way with a white tasuki cord, as though ready for hard work, and her bare arms were wiry and capable looking.

She bowed.

Goro scrambled to his feet, catching a splinter or two in his shoulder on the way up. He bowed.

“Good evening,” said the woman. “Is this the house of Goro, the cooper who wants a wife that does not eat too much and is a good cook?”

Goro’s eyes crossed and his mouth fell open. His fingers scrabbled.

“You do look unwell … like a starved goldfish,” said the woman, “—I don’t mean to seem rude.”

“I haven’t had dinner …” said Goro, for want of anything brilliant to say. He felt wondrously helpless; things like this did not usually come up in the tub-making business.

“Naturally, poor thing. I’m sure you can’t cook well, either,” said the woman and Goro marvelled how ever she had guessed it. “Well, I can cook. I can do the work of three women. Into the house with you now, before you catch cold. Shoo!”

She drove him ahead of her into the house.

“I would say I’m quite charming,” she said, closing the door behind them, “when one gets used to me. As for my name, why, ‘wife’, I think, will do nicely.”

And sometime in the next few days still with the feeling that he was being left out of things, Goro found himself married.

The new wife was an excellent cook and indeed did the work of three ordinary women. Dinner was never late, and the house was generally spotless. She spoke neither too much nor too little. On evenings when Goro came home discouraged, she always had some good remark ready about the tub-making business—how much artistry and labor went into a good bucket, how unreasonably little money went to the hard-working artist—cheering things, flattering things. Goro gained weight and was not unhappy. At mealtimes his wife ate a little more than a bird but not quite so much as a large cat.

The food bills went up and up.

Goro gradually discovered that with the little eating going on, he was using up food at a rate to feed six or seven coopers together with a few aunts and uncles.

“Curious …,” he muttered, “… very,” and determined to investigate.

One morning he made a great fuss about getting measuring equipment together. He told his wife that he was going to a village half a day’s walk away, to take measurements for the village head-man’s new tub. Then he went a short distance into the forest and waited behind a tree.

When he saw his wife go to a nearby meadow to gather mushrooms, he flitted around to the back of the house. Hiding his tools behind the rear door, he crept inside. He shinnied up the center pole and flattened out against one of the big ceiling beams. And waited.

His wife came back and put on the fire the largest pot in the house. From the storage bins she took about five pounds of rice and fell to washing it. She ladled out enough bean paste to nearly fill another big pot, and made bean soup.

“Who,” wondered Goro on his beam, “is she expecting, and how many of them?” He blinked, blinked again—his eyes rather rolled up.

She had slid the kitchen door out of its frame and was using it for a dumpling factory, lining the dumplings up—lines and lines of rice dumplings like fat well-paid soldiers.

Then she stretched and peered about as if to make sure she had not forgotten something. Satisfied that she had not, she parted her hair and exposed the mouth in the center of her head.

Goro made a circle of his thumbs and forefingers, trying to calculate the size of the thing and nearly fell off his perch. It was fairly large.

Into this crater, his wife pushed dumplings by ones and twos and they disappeared. To make certain, she washed them down with all the bean soup, ladles of bean soup.

When she had disposed of everything she waited a moment, expectantly. A cheery, satisfied rumble came from the top of her head.

“Burps, too,” thought Goro. “A regular volcano. Wonder if there’ll be smoke.” He was too interested to be frightened.

But nothing further happened. She bound her hair back neatly, smiled, and left the house on some errand like any good, wifely wife.

Goro slipped down and out of the house, picking up his tools on the way. He went back into the forest, found a comfortable tree and sat down against its trunk to smoke his tiny pipe and think.

“I must have married one of the monsters the priests and old men talk about, a yamam’ba. A ‘mountain-mother’. Hmm,” he nodded, bit his lip, and squinted his eyes.

“Now why do you suppose they call them that?” he asked a squirrel that sat upright near his left foot, like an attentive, furry little doctor. “They come from the mountains—fine. But what’s motherly about them, I do not understand.

“Squeerp!” said the squirrel, and ran halfway up the tree. From there it peered down and examined Goro’s head.

He tilted his head back so that the squirrel could get a better look and told it that, at any rate, this was no kind of wife for a good man.

Then he stood up and began to walk home, looking down at the ground, kicking thoughtfully at fallen leaves and occasionally scratching his head.

He came out from among the trees and across the yard of his home, dragging his feet like a man who has walked a long way.

He started speaking as soon as he put down his tools.

“Wife, I have been thinking about our marriage and—it hurts me to say it, you understand—but it was too sudden. No—don’t interrupt,” he said, though his wife had shown no sign of breaking in. “I’m very sorry, but I feel that we’re simply not suited to each other.”

“All right, husband, I’ll leave,” she answered in quite an ordinary voice, “even if it makes me unhappy. Could you do only one thing for me before I go? Nothing much—I’d like you to make me a tub—as a kind of souvenir. A very large one. For bathing in.”

“The simplest thing in the world,” said Goro, glad to get off so easily. “I have one ready, it happens. The very one I was sitting against when you came out of the forest. A very sound tub, one of my best.”

“It has a lid, I hope,” she said.

“All of my tubs have lids,” said Goro. “Well-fitting lids. Water stays warm in my tubs, even without a fire, once that lid is on. Come, I’ll show it to you.”

He led her out to the tub.

“See? There’s the lid, right up against it,” he said, thumping the tub with his fist. “Feel that wood! Isn’t it a beauty?”

She looked into the tub and agreed that it was getting harder and harder to find real quality in tubs. “Too bad there’s that large hole in it,” she said.

“Hole?” said Goro. “Hole? A hole in one of my tubs? Impossible … where’s that hole!”

He put his hands on the edge to raise himself and peered over.

“There. Bottom right,” she said. “Can’t you see it?”

“Oh, the bottom …” said Goro, leaning further over the edge. “It’s too dark to—”

She seized Goro’s trousers in a firm grip and heaved.

“—see,” he finished, at the bottom of the tub. He was still wondering how he had gotten down there when the lid came down, bang, and it grew very dark. He felt the tub sail up, come to rest on something and begin to move forward with an up and down rocking movement.

It did not take Goro long, in his bucket-shaped night, to realize that the yamam’ba, having no further reason to pretend a feminine weakness she probably despised anyway, had placed the tub on her head and was on her way home. To the mountain.

“Excuse me,” he called out. “Where are we going?”

“To dinner,” came his former wife’s voice through the wood. It grated unpleasantly. He decided to ask no more questions.

Deep into the woods went the yamam’ba, cutting through thicket and underbrush, the tub jouncing easily on her head, up and up into the mountains. Tireless on her long, rangy legs, she travelled along dead, forgotten roads lined with gnarled ugly trees. Goro heard their branches, bump-crack-bump, against his self-made prison. A thin edge of lesser darkness began to show at the top. He hoped it was the first time the lid had slipped on a tub made by Goro; this sort of thing could ruin years of reputation. But it might mean a way out of the tub.

The opening grew wider. Looking up, he was able to see a few stars. Did he imagine it, or was the tub slowing down? He hoped he was not going to be eaten immediately.

The tub stopped and settled.

Something rough, twisted, and snakelike appeared in the opening. It did not move. Nothing moved. He put out his hand—it was a branch.

He gave the branch a delicate jiggle; it felt solid. The yamam’ba, he guessed, must have tired and sat down to rest against a tree. Very cautiously he lifted himself by the branch, trying to move neither the lid nor the tub which must still be resting on the monster’s head.

He heard a faint snore. Top or forward mouth, he wondered. He pulled himself to his feet, trying not to breathe and at last stood with his head out of the tub. The branch was thick, and the next branch, right above, looked dependable. Healthy wood; he appreciated that. Then came a few feet of bark—that would be hard climbing—but above that, four or five branches, almost a ladder. Further, it was too dark to see.

He tensed, took a deep breath, then gave a push and sent the heavy lid crashing down on the sleeping yamam’ba. Up she leaped, and the tub went flying, but Goro was already climbing from branch to branch. In a nearby tree some monkeys woke up and watched Goro’s footwork with shame and envy.

From the ground the yamam’ba stared up at him. It was a rare chance to see just what a yamam’ba really wore for a face, and he decided it was not very attractive.

Down below, the monster was letting down her horrible hair in a businesslike manner.

“Dinner will be early,” she said with a ghastly, girlish laugh. “I was getting quite hungry.”

She started up the tree, the top mouth opening and closing. There were teeth in it.

“We yamam’ba are very good with trees,” she said, climbing steadily. “Don’t climb any higher. It will only make you tired and sweaty and bitter to the taste. Say prayers instead and become calm and delicious.”

“I hope I burn your tongue if you have one in there,” said Goro, a little beside himself. “And try not to be such a chatterbox. You’re making my head buzz.”

He did hear a distinct buzzing, a small roaring right by his head where he was holding on to a thin branch. He tried to move his hand away from the sound. Something small sat down on his thumb and set it on fire.

“Ya-yowch!” he said, loudly.

“Tee-hee-hee!” went the yamam’ba, coming up with an intimate rustling of leaves.

Goro sucked his thumb which had swollen surprisingly and stared at the ball-like thing hanging only an arm’s length away. The buzzing came from it. Very carefully he reached out to see if he would be able to grab it instantly. He thought the size would be about right.

A hard, scaly hand with claws came groping through the branches. He moved his foot out of the way and waited for the head. It appeared, the top mouth gaping.

“Tee-hee-hee,” said the yamam’ba, using both mouths.

“Tee-hee-hee yourself,” said Goro. “Have a goody.” And into the top of her head he dropped the buzzing ball.

“Whatever it was, it had a bad taste and your blood will wash it away,” said the yamam’ba but just then the hornets woke up, highly irritated from lack of sleep.

They flew ’round and ’round inside the yamam’ba. A few of them tickled. Most of them stung. And all of them together worked a havoc in the delicate equipment that makes up the yamam’ba interior.

The yamam’ba made a noise like a frying and a noise like a boiling, and a noise like nameless things running through the night with their ears on fire. She tumbled from the tree, into the tub waiting below and bounced about inside it making unpleasant sounds too numerous to mention.

Goro followed, but more slowly. He arrived in time to see the tub skipping and hopping at the edge of the road which at that point was quite narrow. It teetered for a moment and then sailed out in a gracious curve, trailing its uproar behind it. Goro kneeled and peered down. It was very dark. From far below came a soft boompety-boomp. Then a mere whisper of a crash.

Goro got up, shaking his head. He dusted his knees and went away down the road, growing smaller in the cold, lonely night.

Seventh annual report

Each year I do a brief episode to say how the podcast is going and what the plan for the year is. First, however, thanks. Games From Folktales comes to you from the unceded lands of the Yugambeh People. Games From Folktales is made possible by its the patreons, who are covering its current hosting fees. In the past when the monthly patreon amount has gone a little over what’s needed for hosting, I’ve splurged on extra podcast time. I don’t need to do that any more, so I’m gathering a little war chest to pay for deck plans, cover art and maps to suit the Venice book. More on that later.

Last year my podcast host changed my price structure so I get a lot more podcast minutes per month. I’m writing more than in previous years, but I’ve been filling a lot of that extra time with Librivox recordings of relevant material. This has altered the balance of the podcast. It doesn’t seem to have put people off, so I’ll be continuing with that.

Statistically there were 10 150 visits to the blog last year (via Jetpack) and 7 070 episode downloads (according to Libsyn). That technically means the number of listeners has doubled in the last year to 195 per episode. I know those statistics can be a bit flaky because of bot scrapes from people writing their own podcatchers, but regardless, if I could get 150 people together at a con every week to talk Ars, that’d be great. I’m not trying to have a commercially-successful podcast as a side hustle, so I don’t need to hit the thousand downloads per episode that unlocks automatically inserted advertising. I’m glad people like it.

So far there’s been no replacement for the Celinni materials which you were getting one per month last year: soon there will be. It’s a book called Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mireless which came into the public domain this year. It’s marvellous and I was going to record it myself, but someone else at Librivox pipped me at the post by a literal day, and so we will use her recording. That team is just barrelling through the book at multiple chapters a week. Between now and then we may fill in with a courtesy book from Venice which affected Elizabeth’s court called Il Galateo. After that, The Discoverie of Witches, which is a Tudor skeptic’s guide to how stage magic was done in period.

The Venice book is going well and the Patreons voted that it will start as an Ars book, then I’ll considier how to recut the material into Magonomia/Fate and a single-player journalling game.
Most of my writing time this year has been focused on City#23, which is a challenge to write every day about, in my case, Mythic Venice. The amount of material is already quite large. It’s sufficient to write a set of adventures now, but not quite a gazetter, for which it needs a few extra bits and pieces as laid out in the “shopping list” episode at the end of April. The current plan is to write up all of the suitable characters from the “Facetious Nights of Straporola” as faerie guides, then go back to the shopping list, fill that then condense it down into the rough draft of a book. After that I’ll need to give serious thought as to if it is an ashcan or if I want to try to make it a formal product with a kickstarter, professional art and distribution.

Venice – Dungeon #23 for May has been delayed for a few days which is why you had (what was going to be) November’s monster of the month instead. Similarly the quarterly digest for April is now so late that I’m just going to roll it and the June one together.

In terms of future episodes the ones currently loaded on the Libsyn server are as follows. An asterisk means its the monster of the month:
June
1* The Marrying Monster (Japanese folklore through an American lens. A sort of ghoul or witch).
15 The Shrine of Death by Lady Dilke (Mystery cult initiation)
? The cider magic episode needs to come out after the Bestiary is live because it has spoilers and rights issues. It’ll be in here somewhere.
July
6* The Horror of Chilton Castle by Lady Dilke (straight up monster in a basement).
20 A Vision of Learning by Lady Dilke (straight up monster in the covenant courtyard)
August
3* The Seventh Incantation by Joseph Brennan (A cthulhu Mythos story now in the public domain).
September
7* The Visitor in the Vault by Lady Dilke (A haunting – frankly Lady Dilke rocks and more people should know about her.)

Again, thank you all for listening.

Viol d’Amor by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock

Count Stenbock was a 19th century nobleman of Swedish descent who held a domain in what is now Estonia. His father died when he was a boy, as did his maternal grandfather, so he was incredibly wealthy for much of his life, although his property was administered for him by his paternal grandfather during childhood. Many of his other relatives perished during his youth, so he was always a bit morbid and melancholy. His collected works, both poetry and prose, focus on death. This was deeply fashionable at the time, but in his work there’s a sincerity that seems, to me, to go past the bravado of some of his contemporaries.

He went to Oxford where he was a leading light, and something of a financier, of a set of young men of Decadent and homophilic tendency that loosely overlapped with the Pre-Raphaelites. Once his grandfather died he returned to his homeland for eighteen months, then returned to England, where he made a fine show as an eccentric.

It’s not so much that he kept a zoo in his garden, or that he insisted on taking a monkey with him when he travelled, that led to his reputation: It was not that he sampled a new religion every week and eventually developed his own syncretic blend, much as a gentleman might with tea or tobacco. The problem was his “son”.

The Little Count was a wooden, life-sized doll of a boy. The Count took it everywhere and conversed with it. He checked in on it daily: if he could not visually assure his son’s wellbeing, he enquired after its health. It appears, according the the Count’s family, that he spent a great deal of money on his son’s education, which was supervised by Jesuit priest.

Stenbock suffered deeply from depression, and self-medicated with increasing amounts of alcohol until his death in 1895, of cirrhosis of the liver.

Just a warning there’s a little bit of anti-Semitism in this one: it’s not a lot by Nineteenth Century standards, but a pivotal plot point is that a Jewish doctor is incompetent. This is a bit odd for period folklore, either for Ars Magica or Magonomia. Since medicine was one of the few professions Jews were allowed to practice in much of Europe, they were thought to be extremely gifted at it, as a stereotype.

The following story suits well the Italian focus of the Venetian material, and the haunted instrument which is mentioned in the upcoming Magonomia Bestiary. To briefly touch on the viol d’amor itself, they are a baroque instrument which is the size of a modern viol and played under the chin. Stenbock is wrong to suggest they are no longer made. Most had six or seven played strings with paired, sympathetic strings beneath. They are unfretted. The peg box is, by tradition, adorned with the blindfolded head of Cupid. The shape of the sound holes is called, in modern manufacture, the “Flaming Sword of Islam”.

The story is a reworking of a poem of the same title, which was published the year before. Short fiction was a popular form in Stenbock’s ay, but it also gives him space to expand his theme and frees him of the rhyming scheme. Thanks to the reader, Ben Tucker, who sounds a decade younger in this recording. Does he have a new microphone, or better software? Also thanks to the Librivox production team.

VIOL D’AMOR

One time there was much in vogue a peculiarly sweet-toned kind of f violin, or rather, to be accurate, something between a viola and a violoncello. Now they are no longer made. This is the history of the last one that was ever made, I think. This somewhat singular story might in some way explain why they are made no longer. But though I am a poetess, and consequently inclined to believe in the unlikely, this I do not suppose was the history of Viol d’Amors in general. I may add, by way of prefix, that its peculiar sweetness of tone was produced by the duplicated reverberation of strings below, with yet another reverberation within the sounding-board. But to my story.

I was once in Freiburg—Freiburg in Baden, I mean. I went one Sunday to High Mass at the Cathedral. Beethoven’s glorious Mass in C was magnificently rendered by a string quartette. I was specially impressed by the first violin, a dignified, middle-aged man, with a singularly handsome face, reminding one of the portraits of Leonardo da Vinci. He was dressed in a mediaeval-looking black robe; and he played with an inspiration such as I have seldom, if ever, heard. There was likewise a most beautiful boy’s treble.

Boys’ voices, lovely in their timbre as nothing else, are generally some what wanting in their expression. This one united the most exquisite timbre with the most complete possible expression. I was going to stay in Freiburg some time, as I knew people there. The first violinist had aroused my curiosity. I ‘ learnt that he was an Italian, a Florentine, of the ancient noble family of da Ripoli. But he was now a maker of musical instruments, not very well off—who nevertheless played at the Cathedral for love, not money; also that the beautiful treble was his youngest son, and he was a widower with five children. As he interested me, I sought to procure an introduction, which I succeeded in getting without difficulty.

He lived in one of those beautiful old houses which linger still in towns like Freiburg. He seemed somewhat surprised that an Englishwoman should go out of her way to visit him. Fortunately I was familiar with Italian, being myself an Italian on the mother’s side, and was at that time on my way to Italy. He received me with much affability. I was ushered into a long Gothic room, done in black oak : there was a very beautiful Gothic window, which was open. It was spring-time, and the most delight weather. There was a strong scent of May about the room, emanating from a hawthorn-tree immediately opposite the window, which had the extraordinary peculiarity of bearing red and white blossoms at the same time. The room was full of all sorts of odds and ends of things—caskets, vessels, embroideries—all exquisitely artistic. He told me these were executed by a son and daughter of his. We began to interest one another, and had a long talk. As we were talking, in walked a tall, grave-looking young man. He was of the pure Etruscan type—dark, and indeed somewhat sombre.

With a perturbed air, not noticing me, he suddenly made this singular remark, ‘Saturn is in conjunction with the moon : I fear that ill may betide Guido.’

‘This is my son Andrea,’ his father explained, ‘my eldest son; he goes in much for astronomy, and
indeed also for astrology, in which you probably do not believe.’ At that moment in walked another young man. This was the second son, Giovanni. He was also dark, like his brother, and tall, but had a very pleasing smile. He reminded me rather of the portrait of Andrea del Sarto. It was he who manufactured—to use the word in its proper sense—these beautiful objects which were lying about the table. After him came in two sisters: the elder, whose name was Anastasia, was a tall, stately girl, with dark hair and grey eyes, but pale face: very much like the type we are familiar with from the pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The younger sister was quite different: she was fair, but fair in the Italian manner: that glorious, ivory-white complexion so different from the pink and white of the North. Her hair was of that glorious red-gold colour
which we see in Titian’s pictures, but her eyes were dark. Her name was Liperata. It appears Anastasia was the eldest of the family, then came Andrea and Giovanni, then Liperata, and lastly, Guido, whom I had not seen as yet.

I omitted to mention, though it does not seem here of any significance at all, that Anastasia wore a blue gown of somewhat stiff mediaeval cut, but very graceful all the same. I learnt afterwards it was both designed and made by herself.

Presently there entered the room a boy of about fourteen. This was Guido. He was fairer than his brothers, though also somewhat of the Etruscan type, and was not so tall for his age. He looked singularly fragile and delicate. His complexion was more delicate than a rose-petal: he had those long, supple, sensitive hands which indicate the born musician. His somewhat long hair, of a shade of brown, had a shadow of gold on it, as if it had been golden once. But in his strange-coloured eyes, which were grey-blue, streaked with yellow bars, there was a far-off look, like a light not of this world, shining on a slowly-rippling river of music. He went straight to the window, also not noticing there was a stranger in the room, and said, “Ah, how beautiful the May-tree is! I shall only see it bloom once more.’ He seemed indeed to be looking through the blooming hawthorn at that pale planet Saturn, which then was, for it, singularly large and brilliant. Andrea shuddered, but Giovanni bent down and kissed him, and said, “What, Guido, another fit of melancholia?”

As you may imagine, I was interested in this singular family, and soon our acquaintance ripened into intimacy. It was to Anastasia that I was specially drawn, and she to me. Anastasia inherited the musical tastes of her father, and was herself no mean executant on the violin.

Andrea was not only occupied I with astronomy and astrology, but ( even with alchemy and such like things, and occult sciences generally.

The whole family was very superstitious. They seemed to take astrology and magic as matters of course. But Andrea was by far the most superstitious of them all. It was Giovanni who was the breadwinner of the family, together with his special sister, Liperata, who assisted him in his work, and herself did the most charming embroideries. The only thing was that their materials were too costly, and required a large outlay to be made before they could sell anything.

For though the musical instruments the father produced were super-excellent of their kind, and fetched large prices, he took so much care about his work that he was sometimes years in producing one violin. He was then absorbed in one idea, in producing a Viol d’Amor, an instrument which he said was the most beautiful in all the world, and which had unjustly
fallen into disuse. And his Viol d’Amor was to excel all others that had ever been made. He had left Florence, he said, because he could not stand this great Republic (for though of one of the most ancient noble families, he was an ardent Republican) being converted into the capital of
a tenth-rate monarchy. “They will be taking Rome next.” he said. And he did not know that
what he was saying was soon to come true.

They were not well off, certainly, but it was Anastasia who managed the household and cared for every one. And she was the most excellent of manageresses. And so their life was very simple, but nevertheless was elegant and refined. I very often enjoyed their simple, truly Italian hospitality, recompensing them by purchasing some specimens of Giovanni’s excellent workmanship, and a violin from the old Signor da Ripoli, which I have still, and would not part with for the world. Though, alas! I myself cannot play upon it. To cut a long story short, I had to go on with my journey, but I did not wholly lose sight of them, so to speak, and I corresponded frequently with Anastasia.

One day, just about a year afterwards, I received the following letter from Anastasia:— * Dear Cecilia,—A great calamity has fallen upon us. It is so out of the common that you would hardly believe it. Of course you know how my father is devoted to his Viol d’Amor. You also know that we are all rather superstitious, but none to the same degree as Andrea.

It appears that one day Andrea was poring into some old book, which was in that mongrel tongue, half Latin and half Italian, before the days of Dante, when he came across a passage (you know, I know nothing about the manufacture of musical instruments; but it appears that leather thongs are necessary to procure the complete vibration of the Viol d’Amor). In this passage it said that preternatural sweetness of tone could be procured., if the thongs were made of the skin of those who loved the viol maker.

[I had heard of this superstition before: I think there is some story in connection with Paganini of a similar nature, but nevertheless quite different. For as the legend goes about Paganini, the strings of a violin were made of the entrails of a person, which necessitated their murder ; but here it would appear from the rest of the letter it did not do so, and was a freewill offering,]

Andrea conceived the fantastic idea of cutting off part of his own skin and having it tanned unbeknown to our father, telling him he had got it from the Clinic, because he had heard human
leather was the best. To effect this he had to invoke the assistance of Giovanni, who, as you know, is so skilful with all instruments, and is also, as perhaps you do not know, a most skilful surgeon.

Giovanni, not to be outdone by his brother, performed the same operation on himself. They were obliged to confide in me, and, as you know, I am very good as a nurse, and clever at bandages and such like. So I managed, with a little bandaging, and nursing, and sewing up the scars, to get them quite well again in a very short time. Of course no word of this was ever said to Liperata or Guido.

And now comes the dreadful part of my story. How Guido could have divined anything I cannot understand. The only explanation I can offer is this. He is a very studious boy, and very fond of poring into the old books in Andrea’s library. He might have seen the same passage, and with his extraordinary quick intuition have guessed. Anyhow he appears to have gone to some quack…doctor, and had a portion of his skin cut off in the same manner, and brought the skin to his brothers to be dealt with in the same way, which it was. The operation had been performed badly, and, as you know, the child is very delicate, and it has had the most disastrous results. He is hopelessly ill, and we do not know what to do.

Of course we cannot tell our father. It is equally impossible to tell a doctor. Fortunately our father does not believe in doctors and trusts in us. It is a good thing all three of us know something of medical science : I think things are getting a little better. He rallied a little yesterday, and asked to be taken from his bed to the sofa in the long room. At his own request he was placed just opposite the May-tree, with the window open. This seemed to revive him.

He became, comparatively speaking, quite animated, especially when a slight wind blew some of the red and white blossoms on to his coverlet. Giovanni and I have some hope, but Andrea has not. Liperata of course does not understand what it all means. Nor does our father, who is intensely anxious about Guido, whom he loves best of us all.

— Ever affectionately,
Anastasia.

P.S.—Good news at last! the Viol d’Amor is completed. Father came down and played it to us.
Oh ! what a divine tone it has! Guido first burst into tears, and then seemed to grow quite well
again for some time afterwards. Father left the Viol d’Amor with me, that I should play to Guido
whenever he wished it. Yes, there is hope after all, whatever Andrea may say.’

Not long afterwards I received another letter from Anastasia in deep mourning. It ran thus :—
“The worst has happened. Last Friday, after having been for several days considerably better, Guido seemed almost himself again. I was alone with him in the long room. (One thinks of trivialities in great grief; I was wearing that same blue dress I had on when I first saw you.) There was a wind, also rain, which pattered against the window-pane, and the wind blew the blossoms of the May-tree like red-white snow to the ground. This seemed to depress Guido. He
begged me to sing to him, and accompany myself on the Viol d’Amor. “ It is so sweet of tone,” he said, with a sweet, sad smile, “I am rather tired, though I do not feel much pain now. I shall not see the hawthorn bloom again.”

I began to sing an old Etruscan ballad—one of those songs that linger about the country parts of Tuscany, of a very simple, plaintive cadence, accompanied softly on the Viol d’Amor. It would be soothing, I thought, at any rate. And it was. Guido laid his head back and closed his eyes. Gradually the rain ceased and the wind stilled. Guido looked up. “That is better,” he said, “I was afraid of the wind and the rain ; and you stopped them with the Viol d’Amor! Look! the moon is beginning to shine again!” There was a fuI1 moon, and it shone through the hawthorn-tree, making strange shadows on the window, and one ray shot direct on Guido’s pale face. “Go on singing,” he said faintly. So I sang on and played on the Viol d’Amor. I felt some dreadful presentiment. I dared not stop singing and playing. It seemed that a shadow literally crept through the doorway, and came up to the bed, and bent over it. Then suddenly all the strings of the Viol d’Amor. snapped! A strange wail seemed to come from the sounding-board. I dropped it, and looked! Then I saw it was 1 too late. Father took the Viol d’Amor and broke it in pieces, and cast it into the fire. His silent agony is too terrible to describe. I cannot tell you any more now.’

I was in Freiburg once again, and of course the first thing I did was to go and see my old friends. The Signor da Ripoli was very much aged. He still plays in the Cathedral. Did he, or did he not, ever know what had happened? Anyhow, he has made no further attempt to construct
a Viol d’Amor; nor may the word even be mentioned in his presence. Giovanni and Liperata have gone back to Italy, where they have set up a workshop for themselves. It is rumoured that Liperata is shortly to be married. But Anastasia remains with her father. I do not think that she will ever marry. Andrea has become a victim to settled melancholy. He lives quite by himself in a lonely tower. It was he who had the following inscription put on Guido’s tomb:—

“La musica e l’Amor che mouve
il Sole e l’altre Stelle.”