The Return of the Orange Virgin
by Rob Hunter
"Done. I have recruited my priestess." In a dusty underground of sentient
stones, at a branching of the way where three heads waited, the Orange Virgin
squatted on her heels. She stared ahead in the dimly illuminated underground
dark, her eyes rolled back so that only the whites showed. "Now where was I?
Yes, the golem. You will watch him―one of you―and be his cicerone."
"A baby sitter?" The Manticore.
"Yes, a baby sitter―you, since you have just volunteered."
"But..."
The Orange Virgin dismissed the Manticore. "And would you mind leaving through
the kitchen? They're draining the moat today." Their audience was declared over
and the Manticore shuffled off.
"What about us?" There were now two heads left at the pendentive where the
arches met deep below the castle.
"Yes. What about you. I will take your status under consideration. Silence,
please. I need to think. I have just had a wearying day in the world of
advertising and public relations." The Cow and the Goat were stone once more. A
day passed, perhaps two with their connecting night, and the Fata Morgana, Lady
of the Wild Things, Orange Virgin, etc., etc. was quiet for several whiles. A
spider, adventurous, crept across her nose.
It was a rainy, drippy day. It had been overcast for weeks with a vagrant
glimpse of the sun only in the late afternoons. Moss and lichens were thriving
on the shingling of the out buildings, strange fungi clogged the drains. In the
kitchens of the Dancing Lords, the fires were kept burning night and day in the
great ovens. Three families of woodcutters were kept busy manufacturing fuel.
The castle keep was busy all the year even in the dry season. The castle was
old. So old that some speculated that it had never even been built, but had
always been there by the river.
The river was the reason for the fires. The river and its constant damp, the
morning miasmas that clogged the lungs and fooled the vision, playing tricks
with perspective, making near things far and far things near. The climate was
free of cruel winters and blistering summer heats. The river was why the castle
was in trouble, why the constant fires in the great ovens burned whatever the
season. Centuries of unrelenting damp had leached the lime from the mortar. What
remained of the cement the original builders had slathered between the rows of
basaltic blocks leveling their courses had turned to sand. The castle of the
Dancing Lords was in trouble and someday likely to fall down.
His passage mirrored in a hanging dangle of polished copper bottoms, the
Manticore threaded through endless aisles of glistening enamel.
The Manticore’s jiggling image passed from pan to pan where they hung at their
iron reticules, depended by chains from a ceiling thirty feet distant. A breath
of air would set them moving, clanging, closing bell on the stock exchange, a
tinker's wagon careening downhill, a runaway cacophony of colliding utensils.
But today there was not a breath of air moving sufficient to stir them. A cloud
of vapor hung trapped three feet from the ceiling, a viscous caulk squeezed from
the pastry tube of kitchen weather - cloudy today, and continued humid. A
spectacle of glittering implements - steel, iron, tin and aluminum, quarts,
gallons, missionary cauldrons, runcible spoons, shirers, boilers, broilers and
basters, colanders, ewers, forcemeat forms, pâté molds, sieves, lids and
ladles. Fluted tin forms braided like the innards of a mollusk's abandoned husk
awaited gelatin confections, larding needles languished for a loin of pork. A
shelf of ceramic rabbits awaited their pâté masquerade. The Manticore was
indifferent to the guises of chopped liver and salmon with herbs.
The Manticore blended well in the kitchens, the toilers and the peelers, boilers
and slicers deferred to him. He made his way through the culinary clutter,
passing easy banter with the workers.
That the scullions, sous-chefs, peelers and broilers, the stokers of the ovens
might have seen in him a figment from tales told by legions of cautionary
grandmothers, a terror of nighttime fevers, did not occur to the Manticore, for
he had seldom visited abroad in the days of the Dancing Lords. What the
kitcheners, deep with sweat, wood smoke and the spatterings of hot oil, saw was
a man, tall, black and elegant: a quartermaster minor, come to count onions or
lash the recalcitrant stoker to greater effort. A not unusual sight in the days
of the Dancing Lords.
He strode on.
Where he had passed the work continued unconcernedly.
"Pâté-cake, pâté-cake," hummed the Manticore tunelessly under his breath. He
wished he had a smoke with him.
The Manticore thought of the Cow and the Goat, but kept his peace. There was no
need at this juncture to muddy the murky waters of their uncomplicated minds.
Where had they ever been, after all? They were stiff as salt cod and still stuck
in the cellar wall, after all. And here he was, experiencing life, out in the
world. The Manticore was sensitive about returning to the status of an
architectural ornament.
"Better get a move on." The Manticore picked up speed, scuttling on all fours,
claws rattling the tiles, quills extended from the ruff at his neck.
"Oops!"
The Manticore had spun around a corner and ran into a great oak refectory table.
His forward momentum wedged him under the table and, when he tried to back out,
his quills were caught. He wrenched his head from side to side and felt a quick
agony as quills tore free and hung quivering in the underside of the table.
The Manticore lashed his spiked tail and splinters flew from the nearest table
leg, a plinth as thick as the trunk of a 200 year old tree, which indeed it was,
carved and fluted, black with age and grimed with oil and soot from the kitchen
furnaces. Now the tail was stuck, driven deep into the buttressing column.
He was trapped. Further struggles only drove his venomous ruff of quills deeper
into thick quarter-sawn planking.
In an infant universe busily defining itself, much time had passed. The duck had
left and then returned, a measure of these things. The Fata Morgana floated in a well of
his intent, probing.
"You’re back."
"I’m back."
"Haven’t been hitting the raspberry again, have you, my love?"
"I was fact-finding. I seek knowledge, not wisdom."
"This is good; I am not up to a raspberry interview. Linda Winkelman."
"What. Who?"
"Do not be coy, my Old-and-Rare. Coyness does not become Queen Rhea who hatched
herself from the Egg of the World. Linda Winkelman. The name of your priestess.
You have found her. I have loved you, my dear, but never trusted you. So, you
were determined to come over, eh? Mi casa su casa, but I shall have counted the
towels and put my initials on the silver plate before you get here."
"You would never allow me back without some handicap."
"I would demand some concession on your part. About your appearance."
"I’m prettier than you. You’re jealous. This is a ground we covered millennia
past. What is it this time? You want me to have three heads and snakes for hair?
Spare me the Bullfinch, my old and rare."
"I feel a certain responsibility, a dedication to the mental health of my, uh...
constituents. It wouldn’t do to have you frightening them out of their wits with
an evocation from their race memory. Can’t have it, y’know: Mama Molasses
popping up and making a stimmis. Simply wouldn’t do, not at all. So these are my
conditions: you may come over to trouble-shoot, but no proselytizing. The status
quo has been good to me. The status quo ante... well, it speaks for itself.
Disorganized, what? All blood, ignorance and mumbo-jumbo. Gotta keep a lid on
things."
"I will be able to speak."
"You shall, my cupcake. And to demonstrate that my heart is in the right place,
I have allowed some randomness to enter the mix. In the tracking down this
self-anointed agent provocateur who is murdering your prize porkers, you are
doing holy work, of benefit to us both. You will be yourself, intermittently,
and at times unexpected and of limited duration. Just to keep you on your toes."
"Here it is expected I should demonstrate humility at your generous
open-handedness?"
"That I would expect from a robot or dancing chicken. You, Morgana, are cut from
a finer thread. We have a certain elegance, you and I. Otherwise, what were we?
Just dried peas rattling about in the attics of infinity. If this were something
important I would perhaps give it my personal attention. But..."
"My Lord Duck?"
"Yes?"
"If I may reframe what you just said, you don’t know what to do, correct?"
"Obviously. If I knew I wouldn’t be talking to you, now would I? Silly girl. Run
along and perform great works. We expect great things from you."
"But you don’t know just what."
"Precisely. You are catching on. Come on over by all means, my dear. It has been
simply eons. I had noticed that you kept your figure. Attention to the little
things―discipline, I admire that. But you are not enthusiastic. Have you ever
asked yourself why you can perform more of what your human charges call
‘miraculous’ in your venue than I can in mine? Because they have defined you
less. I am hobbled by ritual and usage."
"Poor demiurge. What would you have―the two of us charging in like the cavalry?
Science does not smile on simultaneity; denying basic physics is lethal to gods
and men alike."
"Nononono, my pet. Connivance and manipulation instead of intimidation. It’s the
wave of the future; believe me, you’ll learn to love it. Admittedly, working
through human agency is a tricky business. They are a pettifogging lot. I shall
willingly withdraw. For a time. There are things that need to get done and you
need a change, and I’ve got just the place for you. Here you are always welcome.
Why let our irreconcilable hostilities drive a wedge between us?"
Seated in the dust of her cellar, the Fata Morgana blinked her eyes. A spider
had woven a web connecting the tip of her nose to the horns of the Cow.
Satisfied, she rose and transferred a kiss from her fingertips to the nose of
the Cow, then the nose of the Goat.
"Fare-thee-well, friends. Keep my secrets. We go to perform great works."
The Goat’s lugubrious striped vanilla tongue lay across the floor; the Cow’s
blind eyes stared at nothing.
copyright 1993, 2006 Rob Hunter