“You vile apparition, you imposition that walks on two legs; your existence outrages the world!”
“Yeah, well,” Malone bellowed in response as he continued to shield his face, “you ain’t no rose o’ creation yourself!”
Tongue Kills’s skin began to ripple and run like taffy, his flesh to sag. Malone had been witness to that phenomenon before, too, in the same places where he had seen the unholy glow, both in the Sandwich Islands and in the still-farther, distant Land of the Long White Cloud.
Even as he continued to shower fulminations on the mountain man, Tongue Kills was melting, unable to deny the uncontrollable fury and anger that were reducing him to his natural state. The vibrant red and orange and yellow of him spread out upon the ground, racing to take possession of the fertile valley. Where his colors, like his words, ran hot, the ground split like stale pudding and belched forth fresh fury, the earth itself melting and bubbling, until the entire region seemed to be seething and echoing the maledictions of its master.
“Enough of words!” screamed the column of molten contumeliousness that had been Tongue Kills. It towered higher than the tops of the pines, bathing the lean-to in hellish yellow light, twisting like a pillar of coiled sulfur. Malone prepared to defend himself against something stronger than fiery language.
“That weapon will not protect you!” the quivering pillar snarled. “Nothing made of man can affect me!” A pseudopod of orange fire reached for the nearly naked Malone, intent on securing him in its grasp and crushing him to a crisp.
The mountain man crouched and parried, flicking the flaming tendril aside. A moan of frustration emerged from the unstable column. Its cohesion spent, it promptly began to shrink and collapse in on itself.
Somehow Malone’s voice carried above the dispersing hell that confronted him. He gripped tightly the knife Grass-in-Hair had given him. “This here blade’s good traditional obsidian, and it ain’t of man. It’s of you.”
“Excretion of carbon!” the disintegrating pillar shrieked. “Boil upon the earth’s buttocks! You cannot take this place for your own. You cannot drive me from it. Here I have been, and here I will remain, to shout the words that will keep you from this place! Where I am now, no grass shall grow, no animals live! The land will be denied you, and the very water itself I will season so sharply that it kills! I will remain forever, deny burbleiss shussh…!”
Tongue Kills continued his epithetic diatribe without pause, but having been reduced by Malone’s carefully applied paradox to his true self, he could speak now only in the language of the earth from which he’d sprung. Malone could comprehend that speech as few others could but protected himself from it not with magic but by the simple expedient of stuffing his ears with bits of duck down extracted from his bedroll. As the mountain man gathered up his scorched but still-intact clothing, Tongue Kills continued to rage all around him. He had indeed managed to render much of the fertile region useless but had also been compelled to leave many places untouched. Malone had neither triumphed nor been defeated. He had half won and was lucky to have managed that.
Only when they were well clear of the valley and beyond earshot of Tongue Kills’s pursuing screams did man and mount pause gratefully at a clean, untrammeled pool to cool their blistered feet. Thus assuaged, a chastened but relatively pleased Malone sought additional absolution in the mountain man’s ultimate sacrifice. He undertook to have a bath.
“Ah-weh,” Grass-in-Hair muttered understandingly. “It is no wonder, then, none could outtalk him, for he was not a man but a spirit.” The chief frowned slightly. “What happened to your face?”
Malone gingerly felt of his scorched pinnacle of a proboscis. “As it progressed, our exchange grew heated. In my face you see the result.”
“You say he is still there?” Two-Feathers-Falling said uncertainly.
Malone nodded. “Still there, still a-screamin’ and a-hollerin’. But the words he shouts now can’t hurt y’all because you won’t understand ’em proper unless you get too close to him. So stay clear o’ the places where he’s doin’ his insultin’ and complainin’, and you’ll be okay. There’s still plenty o’ game about and water he ain’t poisoned with his anger.”
Grass-in-Hair replied thankfully. “You have helped us much, and we are grateful. We will move camp in three days.”
“Suit yourselves. Me, I think I’m gonna head on south. Seen all o’ this Yellowstone country I want to for a spell.” He leaned back against a heaping pile of buffalo robes.
“I mean it, though, when I say you need to keep your kinfolks away from the places Tongue Kills has kept for himself. His words may not be able to hurt you no more, but I’ll be damned if he can’t still spit.”
What You See…
It’s hard writing stories to order. Well, to request, anyway. I love writing short stories. I’d write a lot more if this was the 1930s or 1940s and the heyday of the pulps. But yo, you know, I don’t make enough to pay Stephen King’s tax bill (but then, neither does Mozambique). To stay alive as a writer, you have to write novels, which fortunately I also enjoy doing.
Which brings us to Amos Malone’s saddlebags. What’s in them, nobody knows. Not even Malone, I think. They’re big, and floppy, and full of compartments, and generally speaking not a real smart place to go rooting around in without permission.
It’s dark in there.
“…Bunions, lumbago, bad back, consumption, whooping cough, dysentery, yellow fever, heart problems, liver trouble, infertility! Afflictions of the eye, the ear, the nose, and the throat! Broken bones, sprains, strains, disfigurations of the skin, and suppuration of all kinds!”
Now, the blacksmith, he had a disposition not dissimilar to that of the mules he frequently shod, but so suave and convincing was the stranger’s pitch that the square-brick man with the arms like railroad ties stepped to the front of the milling crowd and squinted up at the platform.
“Thet leetle bottle, it can cure all thet?”
From the back of the garishly decorated wagon, Dr. Mohet Ramses gazed down benevolently at the first (and hopefully not the last) of the warm afternoon’s potential supplicants.
“Sir, I would not claim it were it not true.” He held up the compact, winsome black bottle, letting the sunlight fall flush on the florid label. “All that and more can the Elixir of the Pharaohs cure.”
“Then you best take some yourself,” shouted someone from the back of the crowd. “Maybe it’ll keep you from runnin’ off at the mouth!”
Dr. Ramses was undaunted by the scattered laughter this rude sally brought forth. He drew himself up to his full height, which though just over six feet seemed greater because of his parsimonious construction, and glared haughtily at the cloddish locutor.
“For twenty years I have endured the slurs of disbelievers, and yet fate finds me still plying my trade. Why is that? I ask you. It is because the Elixir of the Pharaohs works, my friends!”
The blacksmith scratched dubiously at his bewhiskered chin. “A dollar a bottle seems awful high, Doc.”
Ramses leaned low, bringing his voice down with him. “Not when compared to what it can buy, my friend. How much is your health worth? How much another year of life, or two, or ten? For you see,” he said, straightening and raising aloft the inimitable, the peerless black bottle, “this venerable elixir not only cures, not only prevents, but actually extends the life of the user!