II.
There would have been little hope for a crop the year Judikha was born even if it hadn’t been for the volcano.
Two years of unrelenting drought had converted most of the farm to a fine, dry dust that was carried away by ceaseless westerly gales. Sunsets all over Guesclin, and as far away as the Continent, were made gloriously lurid by the airborne farmland, though housewives and maids in the capital were forced to repeatedly clean their furniture of the fine, grey, gritty film that accumulated almost hourly and grumbled at the inconvenience.
Rains finally did come, but they were torrential and fell during the winter when the ground was hard and lifeless. Whatever of a farm still clung tenaciously to the bedrock was scoured and carried off by thousands of muddy freshets. The streams and then the rivers became swollen, opaque and brown. The Wladir River, which drained the western country, looked like a broad, chocolate-colored highway. One could sit motionless on its bank and watch all of the dissolved West pass by. Fishermen and ship captains complained bitterly that the silt was choking the channels and that fish were dying in the turbid, oxygenless water. The dredgers were constantly busy while new docks had to be built ever further downstream on the increasingly unnavigable river.
Now the volcano had erupted and what it had not buried beneath its gritty ash it obliterated beneath the pasty lava that poured from its flanks. Geologically, the landscape was not the least volcanic. The eruption was the result of a kind of accident that had occurred more than two hundred years earlier (an accident, perhaps not surprisingly, with which Princess Bronwyn had some connection*). For most of that time, the benign outpouring of lava had engendered a flourishing tourist trade. The volcanic region of Strabane became a popular tourist attraction and its hotels, resorts and spas had been a generator of income for hundreds of miles around—directly, for thousands of employees, indirectly for the vast infrastructure of farms, orchards and dairies that surrounded the region. Hotels, restaurants and shops catered to the people who came to enjoy the bizarre plutonic sights and to indulge in whatever benefits they imagined lay in the sulfurous hot springs and pools of bubbling mud. Then something happened and Strabane had burst like a lanced carbuncle.
Now the molten rock had spread in a vast, incandescent sheet almost to the door of the farmer’s small house. Where there had once been the stubble of shriveled crops, there was now an endless black plain, simmering, steaming and bubbling through its sintery crust like a hot meat pie.
Obviously, something had gone very wrong.
The farmer and his wife watched the daily eruption with a kind of bovine resignation. The volcano proper was invisible, since it was only a relatively low dome easily hidden behind the smoldering horizon, but during the day the heavy column of ash and smoke that poured from its vent boiled high into the sky. At night its location was marked by a lambent shimmer, like distant lightning or forest fire. At every hour, day or night, its discontented grumbling made the earth shiver like a chastened dog.
“We’d be almighty rich if there was somebody who’d want to buy magma,” said the farmer. “I suspect that we got more than ‘bout anybody has any right to.”
“Now, Dittmer,” said his wife, “you know that there ain’t magma. Magma be molten rock that be still underground. That there be lava.”
“Well, if it ain’t one damn thing, it be another.”
“That be true.”
“You gotta keep a look on the bright side, though.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Not much chance the bank’ll ever want to foreclose on that,” he said, gesturing toward the plain of steaming cinders. Somewhere under it lay the carbonized remnants of a sign advertising a sheriff’s sale.
“No, we ain’t be going to be hearing much from them no more, I guess.”
“Already wasn’t worrying much ‘bout taking care of the cow, now I ain’t having to plow under, nor plant nor harvest no more neither.”
“It’s going to be like a vacation, Dittmer.”
“Ain’t never had no vacation before.”
“Where should we go?”
“We ain’t never been over to that there hill over there before.”
“Just feel that there heat, Dittmer! Come winter, it’ll keep us snug as bugs. Why, you won’t have to be chopping hardly a lick o’ wood!”
“Why, I ain’t never thought o’ that! Now that there is good news. That’s a chore I always found a mite intoler’ble.”
Smiling, the farmer and his wife sat back in their chairs, rocking them on their back legs, appreciatively contemplating the scab-like mass that stretched to the horizon, where a vast grey column of smoke and ash marked the distant volcano. Silent lightning laced the cloud in a lazy weave.
They thanked Musrum for such a wonderful blessing.
“Kinda pretty, ain’t it?” she asked.
“Yep. Feel like I could just sit here and do nothing but watch ‘er for days.”
“Me, too.”
They appreciatively watched the eruption for a few days more.
“Kinda miss the chickens,” she said.
“Whatever for? Nothing but a bunch of trouble.”
“Well, they sure looked kinda nice, out there, scratching in the dirt and all.”
“Gotta admit, a chicken’d go down right nice, right about now.”
“Or a egg.”
“A egg would be right nice.”
“But they ain’t be no chickens no more.”
“A egg, curling up all brown ‘round the edges, swimming in butter.”
“Ain’t be no butter neither. Cows is all gone.”
“Kinda miss those cows. Chickens, too, now I think of it.”
“Bet you could fry a egg on that lava, there.”
“Bet you could!”
“But we ain’t got no eggs.”
“Nor any soft, sweet, yellow butter.”
“We’d have some pancakes or biscuits or cornbread if we had a crop this year.”
“Ain’t got a bit of flour nor corn neither.”
“Not a bit.”
“Got plenty of lava.”
“Can’t complain ‘bout that!”
“Shoot. All this talk has done made me peckish.”
“Me, too.”
“Wished I had something to eat.”
“That’s just from all this talk ‘bout food, Dittmer. It’ll pass.”
“No, Helmla, I do b’lieve I really am peckish, I believe. What we got to eat in the house?”
“Ain’t be much, Dittmer. We only been getting credit at the store for what no one else wants.”
“Well, old Grobbarger ain’t got much to complain of—we been doing him a favor. Where else he going to be getting rid of that stuff? Shouldn’t have stocked it in the first place, if no one wants it, is what I say.”
“You sure are right, there, Dittmer! You sure are!”
“Wished you hadn’t mentioned them chickens, though. Makes a man peckish thinking ‘bout them chickens.”
“Got some nice creamed okra for tonight, Dittmer.”
“That sounds real nice, it surely does. But okra ain’t a chicken.”
“No it ain’t, that’s a fact.”
That evening, during dinner, the farmer’s wife seemed distracted and nervous; she merely pushed her okra around her plate with her fork. Knowing how partial his wife was to okra, the farmer asked her if anything was wrong.
“I just been waiting for just the right time to tell you something, Dittner.”
“We ain’t outa okra, are we?”
“No, Dittmer, it’s something good. Just when it seems like we’re more blessed with good luck than we have any right to be, Musrum has decided to bless us one more time.”
“What do you mean, Helmla? Is the chickens back?”
“No, Dittmer,” she said, suddenly blushing, shyly looking down at her plate. “The chicken’s ain’t back. I am with child.”
“With what child?” he replied, looking around the empty room. They were alone.
“Our child, Dittmer.”
“You is bearing a child?”
“I is.”
“Great Musrum! How long you been with this child?”
“Why, I wanted to wait ‘til I was right positive sure before saying anything to you.”
“Well, what d’you know ‘bout that? A baby! When you specting the little booger?”
“Long ‘bout two-three days now.”
“Two-three days? Great Musrum!” he leaped to the feed company calendar and stabbed a bony finger at it. “Just what I thought! Looky here! Looky here! The baby broker’s due just ‘bout then!”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as anything!”
“It do seem like a murckle, don’t it?”
“The little booger’ll hardly have time to hit th’ floor ‘fore th’ broker’ll have it an’ we’ll have enough money t’carry us clear through th’ summer. We can be eating us some chickens for sure!”
“What’ll we do with all this okra, then, Dittmer?”
Instead of answering, Dittmer peered out the open window, where the lowering sun was making the fresh lava beds even more lurid, which scarcely seemed possible. “Musrum wouldn’ta given us so much of something,” he continued, “for no good reason. By th’ time th’ broker’s money runs out, I’ll have surely figured out some way we can make some money off that there magma.”
“That there be lava, Dittmer.”
True to her word, in three days’ time the woman gave birth to a healthy baby girl and the broker was there to catch her on the first bounce as it were. He wrapped her up in a swaddling cloth, passed over an envelope filled with crumpled blue banknotes, climbed back into his wagon and was off down the road. The farmer and his wife watched him go. The whole exchange hadn’t take more than fifteen minutes.
The farmer thought he felt something touch his face and turned to look at his wife, in time to see a drop of liquid roll down her cheek. He thought for a shocked and distressful moment that she was crying, then realized it was only a raindrop.
The first of many, it turned out. The dust and ashes with which the volcano had been filling the atmosphere had provided the necessary nuclei upon which the scant moisture in the tired, desiccated air had finally condensed. A trillion more drops were soon pattering around the couple—each making a tiny crater in the dusty ash in the bowl of which rested a muddy grey spherule—drawing a hazy curtain across the landscape, withdrawing their view to a few hundred yards. The sound of the rain on the hot lava was like the sizzling of bacon. It made the farmer feel right peckish.
A mile away, the baby broker cursed his luck, pulled his wide-brimmed hat further down over his eyes and his cloak tighter around his scrawny neck. His horse steamed like a fresh meatloaf; it looked dejected, an expression for which horses are peculiarly well-suited. The surface of the road, collecting dust for months, quickly became a soupy glue and the animal sank into it as far as its ankles. Each time it withdrew a foot, there was a repulsive sucking sound that seemed to depress the horse even more. It reconciled itself, however, by thinking of its many cousins and acquaintances who were now sealing envelopes and satiating overstuffed cats and tried to be glad that it at least had honest work. From the caravan behind the broker came a confused caterwauling as the day’s collection of infants protested the dampness (both atmospheric and personal), cold, noise and rough road. The hell with ‘em, thought the broker, glumly. The hell with ‘em all, thought the horse, morosely.
It was almost four hundred miles to the capital, Blavek, and the broker had intended to have had half of that distance covered by now. But the damned shifting lava flows had forced him into innumerable detours. That in itself would not have been intolerable had not the detours circumvented the villages and hamlets that were his customary haunts. Not that it really mattered all that much, he thought resignedly, since most of the inhabitants had long since fled from the noxious products of the eruption.
There was an inn, he knew, only a few miles down the road and, though it was still early, he was in no mood to prolong his journey further. He might as well stop now and make this evening no more miserable than it already was. Something hot to eat and a little more than enough to drink would suit him very well.
It still took more than an hour to reach the inn and neither the broker’s mood nor that of his horse was improved by the delay. The pall cast by the ashy sky had caused an early nightfall and it was already dark by the time the caravan came to a creaking halt in front of the dilapidated building. The horse sighed, but tried to not get its hopes up in case this was just a temporary respite from its labors. The thought of continuing the miserable journey was almost more than it could bear.
The innkeeper came out just as the broker was descending.
“Well, well!” the former said. “If it ain’t old Gerber! Haven’t seen you by this way in two-three years I s’pose.”
“It would have been another two or three years if it’d been up to me.”
“Tsk, tsk,” the innkeeper clucked in an ill-conceived attempt at wit. “I suppose you don’t approve of our volcano?”
“You think I’m an idiot? This might be my last load. Just may give up the whole business after this trip. Barely worth the effort in the best of times anyway.”
The innkeeper rapped the side of the caravan and was rewarded with a choral howl.
“Got a full load?”
“Enough. Can you get your old lady to feed ‘em and hose ‘em down? I’m bushed. Gotta get something to eat and drink.”
“The missus is a bit laid up right now. Old girl’s getting along, you know. Not as spry as when you were last here. Daughter’s full of pep, though. Growed like a weed since you last saw her. She’ll take care of your goods for you, don’t you worry.” He winked knowingly at the broker with those last words, but if they meant anything to Gerber, or if Gerber even noticed, he gave no sign.
“Fine. Don’t want to even think about ‘em ‘til morning.”
“Don’t worry ‘bout a thing, Mr. Gerber. Get on inside where it’s warm and dry. I’ll have the boy run the caravan ‘round back an’ take care of the horse, too.”
“Fine, fine.” Without another word, the broker strode into the inn. He unfurled his cape, shook it dry and hung it from a peg just inside the door, hanging his big-brimmed hat over it. The room he turned to face was small, low-ceilinged and dark. It smelled of spilled ale and stale tobacco. Along one wall was a bar made of unvarnished wooden planks. A half dozen small tables and a dozen chairs comprised the remainder of the furnishings. There were only three other people in the room: a trio of badly-worn old men who sat apart and, for all the broker knew, were as strange to one another as they were to him. They seemed unaffected by the fire that was filling the room with acrid fumes from a poorly-damped fireplace. For lack of any other fuel, the innkeeper was burning dung. The old men glowered at the newcomer through red, gummy, weeping eyes.
The innkeeper followed Gerber into the room and closed the door behind him.
“Have a seat anywhere you like an’ I’ll get some hot food for you right away.”
“I need a drink first.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Gerber, sir. What’ll be your pleasure?”
“Give me brandy. I need to get the chill out of my marrow.”
“Right away, Mr. Gerber,” said the innkeeper as he stepped behind the bar and rummaged among the bottles that crowded the shelves. Finding a likely-looking, bulbous flask, he blew the dust from a snifter and poured into it a generous portion of dark liquid. The broker accepted it wordlessly, frowning at the greasy fingerprints on the glass.
“It’s always hard to believe that you can find something to do with all them squalling brats,” said the innkeeper. “Can’t imagine what anyone’d want with ‘em all.”
“Where do you think baby oil comes from?”
The innkeeper started, frowned, then laughed. “You are the kidder, ain’t you! Ha! Ha!”
“Sure I am,” the broker lied.
A heavy-set blonde girl peeked through the curtain behind the bar and asked, “What about that there wagonload of squallers, dad?” Gerber thought that if this was the daughter who’d grown like a weed, it had been a highly apt metaphor.
“They’ll hold, Gelkie. First get this gentleman here something hot to eat.”
“Sure, dad. There’s some meat just comin’ to the boil an’ a potato an’ a cabbage.”
“Well, what are you waiting for, then?”
“All right! All right! It’s on its way! It ain’t the King of bloody Tamlaght,” she added from the other side of the curtain.
The bartender refilled the broker’s snifter and leaned his elbows on the scarred counter.
“I ‘pologize for my daughter. She’s a good girl but just a little rough ‘round the edges. She don’t get much advantage of society out here. Needs a bit of sanding, I guess you’d say.”
Gerber, who had no intention of encouraging the man’s inane conversation, ignored him—though privately he thought the girl needed eradication more than sanding. No point in stopping with that; might as well eradicate the father, as well, since he’d obviously be lonely without her and Gerber was not the man to endure another’s suffering. Eradicate the mother, too, why not.
“Still, she’s good enough at heart,” continued the innkeeper. “Like her poor mother, sick abed these last three weeks. Suffering something terrible from the ague-cake. Gotta keep a bucket by the bed day and night, and the sponges and rags we go through! Musrum only knows how we do it. It’s a burden, I got to admit it. A burden. Lemme tell you, if there was a market for phlegm like there was for babies, I’d be a rich man.”
“I really don’t think you ought to start saving any.”
“No? You don’t think so? Well, shit. And here I got nearly a barrelful already.”
“It ain’t the ague-cake,” said one of the three old men, whose presence Gerber had entirely forgotten. “It’s a curse.”
“Shut up,” snarled the innkeeper. “It ain’t no curse.”
“It is too a curse.”
“Ague-cake ain’t a curse, it’s a disease. That’s natural. Curses ain’t natural.”
“Yes they are.”
“The volcano’s natural and it’s a curse, for sure,” added a second old man.
“No, it ain’t,” said the first old man. “It’s just a mountain. Mountain’s ain’t curses.”
“They are when you don’t want one. You know anyone wants a volcano?”
“I sure didn’t want a volcano,” agreed the third old man. “My house is under it. If that ain’t a curse, I’d like to know what is.”
“I seen your house,” argued the innkeeper, “and I would of dropped a mountain on it if I coulda. I’d say it’s a blessing you got a volcano on top of it.”
“There you go!” cried the first man, caught up in an ecstasy of vindicated logic. “There you go! If you can have blessings, then you gotta have curses! Just like you can’t have good without there being some evil.”
“That’s right,” said old man number two, “it’s a question of balance.”
“And contrast. You gotta have contrast.”
“Yeah,” agreed the innkeeper sourly, “like you three make me feel young, smart and handsome.”
“Now that ain’t showing much respect, Master Thwern!”
“Yeah? Well, you can’t have respect unless you got some disrespect. Chew on that there contrast a while, you old fart.”
“Why don’t you show me my room?” asked Gerber. “And have my meal sent up to it.”
“Certainly, sir,” replied the innkeeper, glaring murderously at the three old men, who were, in fact, too blinded by the smoke to notice. He led the broker up a stairway almost as narrow as Gerber’s thin shoulders. It made two sharp turns before it opened onto the second floor. There was a hallway, barely wide enough for one man to pass, with only three doors; the innkeeper opened one, squeezing aside to allow his guest to enter. The room was dark, its only window a small, square, shuttered hole. The only furniture was a bed, a chair and a small, square table. Like the rest of the inn, the woodwork was unpainted and unvarnished: grey and splintery where it wasn’t stained black with grease.
He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him . “I hope that’s my dinner finally arriving,” he said.
“I’m sure it is, sir.”
“Good. I’ll leave the dishes outside the door when I’ve finished. I don’t want to be disturbed for the rest of the evening.”
“Yes, sir.”
The girl, carrying a cloth-covered tray, appeared behind her father who turned to her and said, gruffly: “About time! Go ahead now! Give the poor, starving man his dinner! What’re you waiting for?”
“I can’t get to him, Dad, you’re in the way.”
“Well, go around me, girl! Go around! Do I have to tell you how to do everything?”
“No, Dad,” she said, though it was obvious she thought he did.
The innkeeper pressed his back against the wall outside the door, but his stomach still nearly spanned the space. His daughter, a two-thirds scale model of her father, tried to sidle past him, her back against the opposite wall, but the overlap of several inches of flesh confounded her. She had to hold the tray directly above her head where, atop her stumpy arms, it was pretty much on a level with Gerber’s eyes. He lifted it from her hands and stepped back into his room.
“Miss?” he said.
“Yeff?” she replied as best as she could with her breasts pressed against her face by her father’s stomach.
“This reminds me—will you see to the brats in the caravan? Clean ‘em up as best you can—hose ‘em down en masse if you want—the bottom of the wagon has a drain—and give ‘em something to eat—milk, if you have it, I suppose. But be sure to cut it in half with water if you do.”
“Yeff fir,” she answered as Gerber closed the door on her and her father. The broker hoped they would not be there in the morning, still jammed in the hallway.
He placed the tray on the table and removed the cloth. His already thin lips compressed into invisibility at the grim sight of pale gristly meat of unidentifiable origin embedded in a greenish aspic of already-congealing grease, a single boiled potato that looked no larger than nor more appealing than someone’s big toe, a half dozen watery-looking cabbage leaves, a chunk of stale, grey bread and a glass of thin beer that looked disturbingly like a urine sample. He ate as much as his stomach and mood could handle, but after a few minutes decided to give the whole day up as a bad job.
He pulled off his clothes and neatly hung them over the back of the chair, which under the unaccustomed weight tipped over backwards in a dead faint onto the grimy floor. He let them lay there. He blew out the candle and felt his way to the bed, which was as damp and clammy as he expected—bringing to mind the innkeeper’s wife’s ague-cake. Musrum’s pendulous balls, let not my thoughts go there, please.
As he wriggled his skinny flanks into the lumpy mattress, he wondered if perhaps it might not be worthwhile trying to save something worthwhile from an otherwise miserable day; a kind of dessert as it were. He thought about the blonde girl. She was soggily fat, like a loaf of bread left in a pan of water, her skin looked like wet crêpe paper, her hair was stringy and her dwarfish features were crowded into the center of her moon face like lumps in a bowl of cold porridge. He put his hands behind his head and thought about the prospect. She had not been able, he decided upon reflection, to take her eyes from him. Surely, he concluded, he was not suffering from an unwonted conceit: it would have been difficult for anyone to mistake her expression of openly lascivious fascination and invitation, like that of an amorous cow. He fell asleep among these pleasant contemplations. This was, as it would have proved, fortunate, for, difficult though it may have been for him to imagine, he was in fact mistaken in his interpretation of the girl’s interest. She herself was just then also falling asleep, in the room directly below his own, had he but known it, wondering if such a pockmarked face as the broker possessed would absorb water like the sponge it so closely resembled. She imagined his oversoaked head oozing all night and wasn’t looking forward to having to drag the mattress down the stairs and outside for drying. It was bad enough taking care of her mother’s things. She reserved her secret lusts for the professional wrestlers to whom she wrote ramblingly illiterate pornographic letters under the pseudonym “Ursula.”
The following morning was as grey as the last, but, at least for the moment, it was not raining. Instead, a fine ash was sifting from the low clouds. The broker declined breakfast and went directly to the stable.
“Fed the babes last night,” offered the innkeeper, sidling along beside Gerber, “and again this morning. Didn’t have much milk—cows’re a little scarce lately, as you might imagine, sir. But we did our best with some leftover gravy, gin and wine.”
“I’m sure,” said the broker. “How much do I owe you?”
“Well, sir, a quarter-crown, sir, would suffice. We’ll call that even. But I’m bound to inform you, sir, that some of them babes in your wagon is dead. I cannot assume responsibility, sir, I hope you appreciate that. They got washed and fed along with the rest, and that’s all you asked of us. Spooned in the feed whether they took it or not; all got their fair share; didn’t cheat you there, sir, not so much as a spoonful.”
“Yes, yes. Get my horse ready. I must be on my way.”
“Yes, sir, right away, sir.”
The innkeeper bustled into the open door of the stable and kicked at a pile of straw that proved to be the stable boy’s bed.
“Get the gentleman’s rig together, boy,” he ordered as a gaunt, stupid, pimply face emerged and looked at its master sullenly. The innkeeper repeated the order as the boy shuffled off, scratching his skinny posterior.
“Now,” he continued, turning to face the broker, “perhaps the good gentleman might consider a, um, business proposition?”
“Business?”
“Yes, sir. I was just wondering...well, sir, I was just wondering what you planned to do with them dead babies in there. Seemed to me that they can’t be doing you much good now.”
“No. They’re expected losses. I make allowances for a certain percentage.”
“Well, then, sir, that being the case, perhaps you might consider selling them to me?”
“Selling them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you’re perfectly correct: I have no use for them now. Wouldn’t do any harm at all if I could turn a little profit on them. What were you thinking of offering?”
“Well, sir, would you consider, say, five pfennigs each?”
“Five pfennigs?” He had paid fifteen apiece, but this would at least cut his losses by a third.
“Well, six, then,” offered the innkeeper, misinterpreting the broker’s thoughtful silence.
“Sold. How many did you find?”
“There was five dead’uns as of this morning. But I’ll take all you got.”
There proved to be six and the innkeeper handed over thirty-six copper coins while the stable boy removed the tiny bodies, dropping them into an empty feed bag. That left twenty-one still alive. at least five crowns apiece, perhaps more, there was still a handsome profit waiting in Blavek, even if Gerber lost another half dozen. This did not cause him to reconsider his promise to retire and he was even then contemplating his brother’s long-standing offer to join him in his pencil eraser business.
The transaction satisfactorily completed, the broker climbed atop his wagon, tied a handkerchief over his mouth and nose against the pervasive ash, and flicked the reins. The horse, its head hanging morosely and coughing delicately, like an aesthetic consumptive, began to move. Gerber glanced over his shoulder, but both the innkeeper and the stableboy were gone. Only the daughter was visible, struggling to drag a soggy mattress from the door and into the open yard. He turned back to face the long road to the east. It glistened like a snail track amid the black landscape. He didn’t give the innkeeper another thought, though several hours later he did momentarily wonder what he had wanted with the babies.