MICHAEL SHEA FOR EVERY TATTER IN ITS MORTAL DRESS An aged man is but a paltry thing -- A rag of flesh upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress! --W.B. Yeats WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE pawnbroker's, I found that a little old man had chained his leg to the rim of one of my pushcart's wheels. "Rat crap!" I shouted, "What is this?" The old man looked down at the cobblestones stubbornly. Silence. It was near sunset. At the precise moment the sun sank, I was supposed to be at the palisades to meet my zounce connection. The old man stood still as I searched his pockets, and somehow managed to ignore me completely while I did it. He had no key. Let him be damned, I decided. After my connection I would find a smith. I shoved off the cart and we set out down Sevens Lane. The wheel the little old man was chained to gave a regular jolt as it went over the iron collar. "You might at least have chained it to a spoke," I snarled, merely to relieve my feelings, for I knew words wouldn't affect him. He marched along still ignoring me. We turned on Wraith, where I spared a moment to hustle the fishwife to buy one of the rings I'd just got from the pawnbroker. She wrinkled the wartless half of her nose. "Frippery. What about pictures?" "Five lictors for a scintillating deck of twelve." "Bah!" shouted the little old man, startling both of us. "I've viewed them, madam. Softcore cartoonery. Not a hard-on in the lot." The fishwife spat on the ground and bought two decks. We started off again, the wheel still limping. "A smith will soon set us right," I told him. "Impudence! Why is all I ask. What am I to you?" Of course he didn't answer, or even glance at me. And after some moments I decided: why struggle? Soon I would cut him loose. Meanwhile, in civil conversation, something might be gained from him -- a bit of news, some arcane fact, an anecdote. For I always try to approach situations constructively. I searched for a topic. After a minute I said: "Ah well, the world does go oddly on. Perhaps you can confirm what I've heard -- they say that Death is back in the vicinity, and perhaps even in the town." The old man shivered in the dark breeze. "When was he here last?" I continued. "Not since last spring, a full year ago, it seems to me." This got an answer, though the old man didn't seem to be addressing it to me: "Death was here two months gone," he told his feet. "At the Smugglers Hall during the winter dramas. He slew full half the guild." "Just so," I said. "And now I think, he came in the fall as well. Yuley Wiper the herdsman and all his flock were found scattered through the highest branches of the trees round Pastor's Common." "He came twice in the summer," the little old man said with a quick glance behind him. "At second sowing he came in the form of a dream contagious to the old. And then again at early harvest he came as a pennyballad man, and sold love-songs with fiend-summoning spells imbedded in the lyrics. Nubile girls suffered most." We turned down Firkitt, which the dusk made crookeder with shadows. The little old man was terribly skinny. He seemed almost to vibrate slightly, like a hollow reed in the wind. I suddenly felt that death had been a tactless topic, and was silent. But after a short time, as we neared the palisades, the little old man sniffed the sea air with gusto. Flinging out his arms he embraced the world at large. "This is the choicest style of life!" he exclaimed. "To move about! To circulate! It is a marvelous stimulant to the mind. It aids digestion, and promotes ample and regular bowel movements. In truth I've always felt it," he concluded admiringly to himself. "I've always scorned the sedentary and the constipated. I've made the right move!" We had reached the palisades. My cart roiled smooth as a boat over the grass of the cliff top, which softened the wheel's limp. I felt high in advance, steering among the tree trunks toward the brink of the grassy cliff, with the leaves of the pungent silvergum rattling and splashing in the wind, all gilded. The sun was two-thirds sunk, and there leaned Kirp against a cliffside tree ahead. I leaned blithely on my rudder, coasted in and docked near, so to speak, the little old man bobbing alongside. I snapped down the cart's kickstand, and told him: "Kindly sit on this side of the cart. View the sea." I pointed to where it stumbled in, two hundred feet below. "We will be off again instantly." Then I stepped over to Kirp. "I managed four knuckles of excelsior," he said. "Princely! What sum?" "Nine lictors and a double deck of illos." "Equally princely, alas. So be it." At this point the little old man, straining the length of his chain, howled at us from less than a yard away: "ZOUNCE?? ZOW-W-WNCE? THUGS! HELP! HELP! DEGENERATES!" And pointed at us in horror. Kirp looked wildly around -- the palisades are never empty. The four knuckles which had not yet left his hand, like suddenly live coals, he flung from the cliff. Glaring outrage at me, he fled. I recall the little old man's face--the only thing I could bring to focus in my dismay. His jaw still flapped on a broken spring of outrage, and he grew calm only after he had gasped one grim consummating ZOUNCE locking me up, as it were. By the time things had focused more, I was sitting near a tree, hugging my knees. My legs had ceased their struggle to reach the little old man, but he was not yet safe. I rallied my raging heart: "Naturally you feel disturbed. You planned to tour the stars tonight on wings of zounce. Instead you will go to the smithy, to dinner, and to bed. You have been robbed of a miraculous night, perhaps one of those irreplaceable high points allotted to you by your calendar." My heart agreed and blazed within me. "Consider this old man," I tried again. "There he crouches, half shod, grooming his crooked toes. Though more goatish, complacent, and officious than most men, surely he is like many another whom senility has made vapid and spiteful. Undeniably, he is a man like others then, and as such, possesses values...views. He approves of the peripatetic life. He disapproves of zounce and those who snort it." "Chained as he is," my heart replied, "he'll be assumed your slave. No one will question your swift amputation of his leg." "Fool!" I sternly chided. "Let it pass. Call the zounce undestined. We are well-heeled with time. He is a pauper near the end of his hours. And, we'll soon be free of him." So I shoved off to find a smith. The little old man had to hop like a cricket to keep up. But the divorce failed. The smith, swearing windily, fractured two chisels and a sledgehammer on the unscathed chain, then he charged me the standard wizard's consultation fee, indicating that recourse to a wizard was the method of spell-unbinding universally preferred outside the fraternity of those who walk around ass-first. The old man warmly confirmed that the chain had a spell on it, as he had said himself from the first. The difficulty lay, he portentously assured the smith, in trying to tell anyone anything these days. When we left he presented the smith with a deck of illos from my cart, exiting with jovial disclaimers. The next day I spent learning that my two cartwheels were unique in all the city, and no spare existed to substitute for the wheel he was chained to. Only the radical surgical solution remained -- a loathsome work. I resolved to wait a while in the hope of alternatives. Thus, since my livelihood had to roll, we went my rounds, and he met my customers. Some he liked, and for these he often proclaimed fifty percent discounts from my stated price, pressing my merchandise on them heartily. Those he disliked he utterly ignored, slouching nearby during the sale, and emitting unmuffled flatulences from time to time, to emphasize that he considered himself alone. Still it was just bearable, and I might have wavered to my ruin, for my purse could not long withstand him. But on the third night, as I copulated strenuously with the fishwife's comely niece, I beheld the little old man crouched at chain's end in my tent's doorway, our avid audience with both hands employed -- one of them in holding up the tent flap. That dawn I wheeled us out of town on the north highway, determined to sunder us. He had already ruined two of my best nights, and soured three potentially good days. If I did not act he would just keep on whittling down my life with his senile interferences. Still I couldn't actually get out the sword and strike. It was too revolting. He was ruinous to my life, but still hadn't done anything to me as directly or deliberately hurtful as hewing off my leg. On we limped up the north road -- 1 plodding with arms paralyzed and feeling the sky begin to lean on me in my bondage like a huge stone. Meanwhile the little old man didn't like our whereabouts. Trying tact first, he started out by grumbling, asking himself loudly where that idiot was driving us now, and had he forgotten our customers -- all as if I lived upstairs, and overhearing, would take the hint. I kept plodding. So he addressed me directly, but in voice only, staring ahead, his words a sidewards nudge he was no party to: "Turn us back to the city. This trekking wastes my strength." It suddenly came home to me that only in the zounce panic, and again as I'd humped the fishwife's niece, had the old man ever looked straight at me. So I watched the road and said aloud to myself: "Son of a turd, why does the old fart jabber so?" "Plunderers watch roads like this." He was still looking ahead. "Ah the open sky!" I exclaimed. "Surely I will walk forever! Farewell sour urban toil, I'll not be soon returning!" "Plunderers take their daily bread from such roads as this, wher...
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