Crandolin Read online

  CRANDOLIN

  Anna Tambour

  Cheeky Frawg Books

  Tallahassee, Florida

  This edition copyright © 2015, Anna Tambour and Cheeky Frawg Books.

  Crandolin was first published by Chomu Press, UK, 2012, 2014.

  Illustrations and cover art and design by Anna Tambour.

  Ebook interior designed by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-0-9863177-3-6

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  This is a work of fiction for readers who can also enjoy surreality. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or not.

  Please NOTE: Some eReaders may not be able to translate certain characters so in the interest of readability for all eReaders, the editors have made the decision to change certain characters that contains a diacritic to remove the diacritic (in this case the macron mark).

  Check out the full line of Cheeky Frawg Books at:

  http://www.cheekyfrawg.com

  to Alistair Rennie

  The crandolin wakes

  THE LUMINOUS STAIN ON PAGE 67 contained traces of quince, rose, grains of paradise, ambergris, pearl, cinnamon, and what could only be surmised. Kippax surmised, all right. Blood. The colour of the stain (livid pink) confirmed what he had read, though no test could. This cookbook was indeed, as the frontispiece said, For the Adwentoursomme.

  It had once been common knowledge that drinking crandolin blood cursed the drinker to a long life of madness, and the recipes on the two pages driving Kippax mad were for Crammed Amphisbaena, and A Pudding Mayde of Crandolin. The recipe for amphisbaena added only butter, no spyce, and said serve with no sauce but onely salte.

  This morning Kippax fed a miserly scrape of the stain, smuggled out under his fingernail, to his portable electronic tongue. The gas chromatograph, as sensitive and stupid as a bloodhound, tasted spyce compounds aplenty but no butter, and then ran just to look like it was doing something. It was clueless.

  The sauce had to be crandolin.

  Amphisbaena was a daring catch, this serpent with a head at each end. But crandolin cost at least one life. It was once-upon- common-knowledge that crandolins were light pink as the dawn they imitated as they probed cracks in the shutters protecting pink virgins in their beds. They could only be caught when Crikey! This blood is also ancient virgin blood.

  He felt an attack of dizziness coming on, but a quick double punch made his ears ring—that problem solved, the better to tackle the big one.

  The temptation to taste the crandolin had been terrible before (he was confident that his palate could sieve the spices from the meat). But the temptation was too much now, for any mortal. And in some moods, Nick Kippax did tell himself that he was indeed, a mortal.

  He wet his finger and touched the stain—almost.

  At the last millimillimetre, he drew his finger back into his meaty palm.

  He felt his blood rushing around his body. It moved with as much purpose as a crowd of people released by a crosswalk light. Fascinating? No.

  He picked up the open book and sucked the parchment.

  A honey-lake in suspension

  WHITE HONEY was the only honey that would do. The honey delivered was brown as wet leather, and smelled like a stables. Burhanettin the confectioner showed the merchant the whites of his eyes. “Drown him,” Burhanettin implored. “In a honey lake.”

  The donkey snorted, eager for its load to be removed, yet the sweetmaker hadn’t finished his wish. “Drown him in a lake of honey from the flowers that grow around the cesspit!”

  The fat little honey merchant squirmed like a newborn maggot. “The season for white honey has end—”

  “As your life will, if you say another word.”

  The merchant showed the confectioner an obsequious mouthful of rotten teeth. “I’ll try—”

  “By my Will, you’ll do more than try!”

  No mortal soul in the town had the confidence of Burhanettin. The sheer blasphemy would have stolen most men’s breaths.

  Not Ekmel the honey merchant. “This afternoon,” he smiled. “Go feed your nightingale and settle your nerves with its song, dear friend.”

  Burhanettin leaned over and shook his fist in the man’s face. His forearm was thick and gnarled as the trunk of an old carob tree. “Move,” he said.

  The honey merchant stepped to the side, and the confectioner reached into a bag suspended from his belt.

  Out came a long stick of nougat.

  The donkey’s lips opened like a flower at sunrise.

  Moans of the bladder-pipe

  THE BLADDER-PIPE PLAYER’S eyelids flutter like a virgin’s heart upon awakening. The sheep’s bladder crackles faintly, but the voice of the pipe is all that the guests will hear, if they listen over the din of their own lips. Faldarolo doesn’t care if they listen or no; only that they will pay him enough to eat, or toss him a scrap of something before they are too drunk to know he exists—a few piastres would be nice. A small gold necklace shouldn’t be too much to expect—but a gnawed bone would be luckier than some nights.

  In the meantime, the music keeps him fed. The bladder-pipe has a will of her own. Sometimes she sounds like a great swarm of bees, sometimes a goose, a magnificent goose; and sometimes she’s a woman with a voice that could skin a man with one long sigh.

  She has ruled the poor musician from the first moment that he, having grasped her sides, put his mouth to the pipe that leads at right angles but as straight as beauty to grief—to the bladder, and then down, following the line of his torso to his lap where her moans emerge, mingled with his hot, wet breath.

  His eyelids are the colour of bruised violets. Above them, great black eyebrows dance, left, right . . . left, left, left, right. He had never trained them to do this, but over the years they developed an incapacity to sit still. Smitten with song, they leap to its command, arching, flattening and stretching, sinuating. Now, when the bladder-pipe sings with the speed of a flow of honey, the eyebrow dance is strange but dignified, with the hauteur of a great moustache soaking up fat.

  But wait.

  The poor musician’s eyelids now dance as if they walk on fire. And his eyebrows! The muscles around his eyes are slaves to their command, but his eyebrows are slaves to the bladder-pipe.

  How ridiculous Faldarolo looks. But even the deaf man doesn’t notice, his feet soaking up the sound of spoons, hands, wooden bowls hitting the table; wooden clogs pounding the dirt.

  The evening progresses . . .

  And now is the time for the songs to those guests who aren’t dead to the world from drink. They waited for this—the time of magnificent torture. They sit, the old men, lips slack as a donkey’s whose ears are being stroked. The music grips their memories, and shakes.

  The young hunger for something not on the table, but under it. By ones and twos, they follow the suggestions of the wordless song, and slip away. O heartless bladder-pipe! Even as Faldarolo fills her to repletion, she cares nothing for his insides.

  The stream above the rails

  THE SPUTNIKS stamped into the steel glass-holder were black, as if the steel were old silver. Savva finished his tea and sighed. Work must be done. He swung his legs out from under the window table and left his train compartment. He refilled the samovar at the end of the passage and looked down the length of the carriage. Six hours’-worth of sunflower-seed shells decorated the rug. Although the day was not yet born, and most of the passengers were sleeping, lulled by the regular thudding of wheels on rail ties, a faint crackling betrayed jaws that were busy. There! A spray of spit flew out of a compartment halfway along. He bent to the carp
et’s end, picked up its sides, and twitched his right hand. His technique was so good that he didn’t need to take another step. The carpet flipped quickly as a woman’s mind.

  Time for a cup of tea? He looked at his watch, and dithered. Would Galina have any new supplies of caviar? Might be worth a walk.

  The restaurant car (where the only menu item was borscht) was three carriages down, so he locked his compartment, walked straight down the swaying carriage, opened the door and was immediately arrested by an uncommonly fine smell. He’d expected the usual crowd of smokers: infrequent travellers puffing fast and looking anywhere but down, regulars hunched, drawing deep. The sound was deafening, so words between the cars was rare, but this was no time for small-talk.

  “You look like you need a bar of chocolate, sir,” he said to theonly person there, a person of such width but such admirable self-knowledge that he played a drum roll on his stomach with his left hand.

  “You have such a thing as a bar of chocolate?”

  The passenger held his right hand out at arm’s length and gazed at it. Held between forefinger and thumb was a long, white cigarette out of whose end wastefully poured a stream of smoke as delicious as caviar should taste.

  Savva did not, if the truth must be told, have even a lost dried fish, but Valentin . . . Valentin probably had a bag of lost dried fish. Valentin probably had a lost bar of chocolate—no, a case of lost chocolate. And only yesterday, Savva had earned himself a fortune when he accidentally came upon Valentin pulling a knife the size of a sabre on a passenger who looked to be the sort who has cases of anything you can imagine—but was very alone. Savva left quickly at that point.

  At this point, the fortune begged to be spent. Valentin would most likely laugh at the blackmail. He should. Valentin was a regular depot of lost goods. And I can’t help it if I don’t have his skill. I was raised with standards.

  The passenger hadn’t taken another puff. He seemed to be acting like a sculptor’s model, holding his hand out with that almost unsmoked cigarette—a long white beacon in the between-car gloom.

  The smoke stream stretched, and it now reached Savva’s nose, where it slid down the short length, flipped at the upturned end and plunged down into the space between the cars.

  “So, chocolate?” Savva smiled, finally catching the passenger’s eye.

  “Don’t care for it.”

  And he flicked the cigarette out, onto the steppes.

  A psychic tempts the omniscient

  LIKE SO MANY BEFORE HIM (and likely, many more to the end of Time) the Omniscient’s scepticism fell before his overwhelming need for certainty. He disguised himself as a voice and hovered over the telephone, desperately yearning to ring the $2.95 per minute “Live psychics answer your call”.

  Paying was ponderously difficult.

  Yet I must do something.

  Again, he went to the mysterious Web and read:

  The Channeling Threshold

  Each guide and each connection is different, special, and unique. Some guides are poetic, some are inspirational, and some are instructive. Some of you may find yourselves able to channel books or write with such ease that books just seem to “get written” for you, for channeling seems ideally suited to writing. Channeling helps you connect to a constant, steady source of inspiration and information. Some of you will channel art, music, and other forms besides writing.

  Art, music and other forms didn’t interest him, but writing! Who was being channelled, and how? It surely wasn’t him. He could barely get into the Web, and the only channelling he knew about was story #ζλξβ-89Ϡ89#7ϠϠ, and, in that, the channellers were a thousand naked slaves and ten thousand donkeys. And in that story, there certainly weren’t any guides, just drivers.

  This channelling was something as airy and unreal as the Web itself, and the guides—were they as real as stories or as rubbery as people? People, in all their frustrating glory—people for whom he existed, rubbery beings, not characters—and who, as beings, hadn’t changed their stock personalities one trait, from millennium to millennia.

  The whole idea of channelling made him ill. “I know I haven’t been my best lately,” he said to no one but himself. The rubbery didn’t even credit him, though they used his work, took it for granted, without a thought of acknowledging his role in the writing. Why, if it weren’t for him, story-tellers would be dry as that well in story #ξϐЂЋ6455-ЗϠΩ/Ύ77. Drier!

  As he hovered over their shoulders, But for me, he had often chuckled, you’d be crawling, seeking stories in the dust. He looked down upon them, watching their so-called pain, but he had enjoyed his powers. He, the giver of stories, the magic ink that flowed from the writer’s pen.

  Not now. Now, curiously, he felt a bond to the rubbery ones that he had never expected. His problem was common to the rubbery, and from them, he might find the cure.

  The beloved at home

  SHE TOSSED A CLUMP OF HAIR out of her eyes, jerking a tower of ash off her cigarette into the pot. The butt was too short to smoke, so she dropped it into an emptyish bottle and rolled another cigarette from the papers and leaf-litter in the pocket of her once-flowered apron.

  The stuff in the pot—animal, vegetable or otherwise—smelt burnt. She huffed off the flame and reached for a full bottle, twisted its cork out, stuck her lips to the rim and pulled glugs till she had to unlock for air.

  “Falleydo-hooh . . . ugchhh!” Her burp—racy, sweaty and pungent on the nose—resonated with almonds and flint to the fore, perhaps an unreasonable amount of broccoli coming through on the finish, but redeemed itself on the afterscent with a lingering note of something indescribable.

  She tilted the bottle to her full lips and sucked again, and again till its contents were only a sludge unreachable to her long, experienced tongue. She murmured the judges’ comments on that winning Sauvignon Blanc in the latest Sydney International: “Quite a cat’s pee . . . a lovely wine. Sweaty armpit character.” Those were the sacred words of Nick Kippax himself, who also declared the winner “a great combination”.

  “Ayee! This combination’s greater.”

  The earth groaned with the egos of ‘artists’, staked out like graveposts from Vietnam to Antarctica probably, covering the ground in great vats and supercenters and little brick and wattle and daub and roadside tin and bubblewrap bistros, and glittering glass dumping grounds, and bottles bobbing in the—

  “Gorgonna!” She pulled herself out of that spiral of complaint, something new she had picked up lately, from them. Never before had she realised that they could affect her. But all their exhibitionism, their competitiveness, had.

  What do I care what they think?

  “Ruump! Quit your whinging, yar boofa sister.” She planted her hands on her hips and pushed herself up straight.

  “Yow-ay o! You love to be loved,” she reminded herself.

  “Yor-mah o,” she argued back. “But they don’t love me.”

  “Enough!” It was best not to think of that, or she might as well carry an axe to work.

  To work.

  She shrugged, and tossed her apron.

  Time to put her face on.

  They expect that of the Muse.

  The cinnamologus’ treasure

  THE CINNAMOLOGUS had plucked the wad of fluff from a thorntree. Pickings were rare out in the desert, and this fluff, glossy as fresh blood, was a nest decoration that outdid all his rivals’. While they had to spend their time killing to refresh all the red decoration that attracted females, this wad of fluff glowed with a red that never darkened, even when night fell.

  The cinnamologus had never seen its like, but he was not the contemplative sort at this time of year when there was dancing, mating, and nest-guarding to be done.

  At this moment he stood on the edge of his great nest of cinnamon bark frilled with red fluff, beaking his scented body oils through his iridescent feathers in a post-coital preen. The female of the moment was arranging her drab little self in his nest. She had just tuc
ked without complaint, the eggs of three other females under her breast.

  And watching without eyes, feeling without skin, screaming without sound: Nick Kippax, or to be exact, the chimera that Kippax had become after sucking the parchment with that crandolin blood.

  Nick (for lack of a better name) screamed irrationally, but as he was only red fluff in the eyes of the cinnamologuses, he was unable to communicate anything other than colour—an extremely attractive hue, to be sure, requiring eternal vigilance if it were not to be plucked by an indifferent wind or a rival beak.

  The worst part of his new state could have been that his mind was still the same as it had ever been, and that he was trapped in this bit of fluff till the effect wore off.

  But that was not the worst part of his new state.

  Kirand-luhun

  EKMEL THE HONEY MERCHANT waited outside Burhanettin’s sweet shop, cursing himself.

  “Why didn’t I fill my stomach with pilaf before I came? Why didn’t I fill my nose with cotton?”

  The donkey’s eyes were black curved mirrors reflecting Ekmel, enlarging his considerable nose. But the donkey’s ears were pointed toward its Mecca.

  Great invisible clouds floated from Burhanettin’s kitchen, out into the nostrils of Ekmel and his ass. Roses, sesame, hot butter, toasted flour, pistachio, cinnamon, mastic, ambergris—mere wisps compared to the great bulk of the clouds as same and yet individual as all clouds are: the scents of those expertly made confections of the honeybees.

  Ekmel rang his bell again and sang his peculiar song. The donkey’s sides heaved, the sign for a heartfelt bray—

  And pointed yellow hat first, Burhanettin emerged, his striped outer-robe flapping with the sound of a tent in a storm. “I’ve missed you, dear friend,” he said, throwing an arm round the neck of the donkey, who answered with a happy crunch, its nose in Burhanettin’s hand.