Whether, as the stylites insisted, as retribution for such libertine governance on the part of King Blancmange, or, as the cheesemakers gloated, for the guzzling of so much illicit milk on the part of Lord Cowsuck, the Bittern line never again produced more than one child in a generation, and that always a girl, not even after the bonfire of the songbirds, when they were given the crest of the fish-eating bittern to wear in shame for all time, not even once the fact of their being technically within the line of succession had been forgotten by all except the more discerning and scholarly voles in the palace walls, two of the stylites, and by something neither a vole nor a stylite that lived in the granary, not even when the certain child I have mentioned was born with a tower in the place of her torso, all the way to the cleft where a woman becomes a world to the cleft where a throat becomes an intellect, and tore her mother in half with the bricks of her birthing, and called Vnuk, and left alone in her father’s arms while the stars rained stitches of silver into a room hot and sour with death, its floor carpeted in blood and its ceilings chandeliered in blood and its lock so full of clotting that no one could get in for the three days it took to summon the royal locksmith from his pilgrimage, all the while the infant cried and cried for milk that, though it belonged to her, would never come.
THE SMARTEST, THOUGH never the wisest, yet almost certainly the most intolerable man ever born in the universe was named Chancel upon his birth in the village of Nyolc, and Chancel the Sophist upon his adulthood in the grand metropolis of Öt. Like all his people, he was stout, short, and agoraphobic, with a color to him like the flesh of hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, eyes like the bottoms of long-dry wells, and little enough jawline to speak of. By the time he could walk, the boy had already read every book in his village synagogue three times and spoiled the endings, not to mention the middles and beginnings, for everyone else. When the rag-and-bone man came calling with his birch-wheel cart down the thin dirt roads, the thick pastoral sunlight, for which Nyolc is so famous among painters and poets, pooled so heavily in his eyes that he did not notice one of the bundles of rags was rather heavy, and noisy, and squirmy, and named Chancel, until he was halfway down the mountain path to Öt and stuck in a snowstorm. Having no other idea what to do with objects, the rag-and-bone man sold Chancel, along with several yards of muslin and wool shearings as well as four deer femurs and a boiled rabbit skeleton, to an Öttian jewel-thief, for burglary was in those days the most fashionable occupation of Öt, and its various techniques the city’s most valuable export.
By the age of four, Chancel had stolen the Thirteen Treasures of the Common Man from the oligarchs of Öt (these being the first stone knife, the first arrowhead, the sternum of the first mastodon felled by mortal hand, the first woven basket, the first necklace, the charred ashes of the lightning-blasted tree that first revealed the logic of fire, the first wheel, three fossilized berries from the first plant used to narcotic effect, the first snowshoes, the stone on which the first abstracted writing was scribbled, the skull of the first person intentionally murdered, the first leash used on the first tamed wolf, and the first water jug) and used the sternum and the writing stone to keep his table from wobbling. Before the age of six he had married and divorced twice, the second time to the idea of a woman who had not yet been born, of which he grew tired, for it would not stop nagging him. At seven, Chancel had received his doctorate in both alchemy and astrology, having cured Sagittarianism to the satisfaction of his dissertation committee. Shortly thereafter, Chancel the Sophist married for the third time, a young and quite deaf tinker named Clerestory, perhaps the only one who could ever truly give her husband the ultimate expression of love: never once telling him to stop talking or she would scream. Thus finally settled in a house on the high street, an untroubled lady, and absolutely no friends at all, Chancel the Sophist, at nine years old, began work on writing the Amaranthine Bible. On his deathbed, one of his devoted followers asked why he had called it so. The sage Chancel coughed into his hand and answered: amaranthine sounds properly occult and mysterious. I wouldn’t have sold half so many copies of the Sorry, All the Paper in the Shops Was a Bit Green, It Was a Dry Year in the Forests of Tíz I Guess Bible.
This sort of very unsatisfactory thing was why Chancel only had acolytes and wives, not friends or companions. While he lived, whether or not the Amaranthine Bible was mean to be taken literally or was, in point of fact, the longest and least funny joke ever told by man or beast or man about a beast, was a subject of much debate. If Chancel were a comedian, even a dreadful one, he and his interminable shaggy dog story would be protected under the laws of the poor exploded king. If he were, however, practicing divine revelation on a freelance basis, both he and his book ought probably to be boilt for blasphemy. Death, however, has a way of making religion out of bad books. Death, and enough time.
Those were not, however, his last words. In the last breath of his life, the great man looked out the window of his house onto the wide, dark streets of Öt, breathed in the scent of broiling sausage and old rainwater and rich women’s perfume, and whispered to the sternum of the first slaughtered mastodon: from the time of my youth I have dreamt of a wall I have never seen, the color of ginseng root, with moss growing upon the towers of it like snow, and little red flowers among the moss like blood. Do you think, perhaps, before the sun, and before the stone, before even the paprikas, there was this dream? I wish I had a whiskey, damn everything to hell.