"all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;"
--E. E. Cummings, "XXXIX," 1 x 1 (1944)
Alazlam: Ink and Ice
If the ink in his inkwell was not frozen, it was only because the nib of his pen broke every layer of ice in its infancy.
He had wound one of Mrs. Felix's scarves around his face, leaving a long triangular gap for his eyes and nose. The skin of his knuckles, visible between strips of flannel, was flaking away to reveal the red past the white.
He was not cold. He was too angry to think of being cold.
and in a rare accomplishment, Mr. Reed manages to conflate the Ingenious Mechanick, mentioned repeatedly in Abbot Saul's account, with the Bandit Balflear referenced in the Lay of the Judges. Unfortunately, as Mr. Reed would know if he had bothered to read the voluminous literature on the ballad, the Lay of the Judges has been shown to be a bastardization of a classical Archadian text and in no way original to the Warring States period, from which the Ingenious Mechanick dates. No serious scholar could thus possibly believe that the semi-historical figure from one account could possibly be the same individual as the purely mythic creation of a much older literary tradition, but that does not
A distant laugh pealed out and Alazlam involuntarily flicked a drop of ink on his manuscript. He swore and blotted the spot with a strip of his flannel. This technique was of long standing, as demonstrated by the pattern of leprous black smudges across his palm and fingers.
Alazlam stuffed his pen in his inkwell and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He stretched his arms over his head, and his muscles ached from too many hours spent crouched over his desk. It was getting dark. He would need to light a candle soon. He had no candles.
The laugh came again, and Alazlam looked toward the window in vaguely irritated curiosity. For the first time that day, he felt the cold.
His window had not been opened in a monkey's age. He could only raise the sash after he repeatedly hit it with his flanneled hands. His hands, wrapped in rough cloth and cold, felt nothing.
The poets liked to say that the city was deep in the throes of winter, but the city had no spasms: it lay silent and smothered. Snow lay everywhere in white heaps and dirty slush piles, and the air was dry and sharp. It was by no means the coldest winter in the city's memory, but it was cold enough to be inconvenient. It was cold enough for the warmth to bleed from any hand that lingered against stone or glass or wood. It was cold enough for the chill to insinuate itself past coats and boots and quilts to settle deep in the bone. It was cold enough for beggars to show up as blue-toed corpses beneath the city bridges. It was cold enough to make a person weary for spring.
Outside Mrs. Felix's boarding house, the snow lay knee-deep around the house, past the kitchen outbuilding, and against the low stone wall between the house and the city road. In the spring, Else would have her vegetable garden here, Alazlam was reminded, in part because Else herself was now sitting on the low stone wall. Her skirt kilted up to her knees and her gray stockings were visible to all as she leaned back and laughed with a ruddy-faced man who stood on the other side of the wall.
Alazlam shivered and drew his patchwork coat closer against himself. He leaned out the window, going from the quiet coldness of his room to the abrasive coldness of the second-story wind, and shouted Else's name.
She and her young man both looked up in surprise.
"Else," Alazlam shouted hoarsely, "I need some candles. You've let me run out of candles."
"All right, all right," she cried, sliding down the wall and brushing her skirts to swing past her ankles. She turned to say something to her young man, and it must have been amusing, for he laughed before he touched the brim of his cap and began sauntering down the street. Else turned and darted into the house. Above them, Alazlam stood with his arms crossed, grimly surveying the empty yard.
With great difficulty, he managed to close his window. By now, the gloom of the late winter afternoon had encroached upon his room, and he regarded the murk around his desk with distaste. Yet, candles were a dear expense... He should not have asked Else for candles, he realized, because Else would not be dilatory about tacking the tallow charges to his monthly bill. If he had only asked Mrs. Felix, she might have been generous about giving him the candles or, at the very least, forgetful about how many she had given him. Yes, it had been a mistake asking Else. He needed to rectify that.
He removed his scarf and left his room. Through sheerest luck, he found Mrs. Felix standing in the hall.
"Good evening, Mrs. Felix."
She looked up with a smile. "Why, Mr. Durai! It is a pleasure. I don't believe I have seen you for three whole days. You have been sadly missed at dinner, I assure you. Why, Squiddy Dan was even saying--"
"Yes, yes," Alazlam said hurriedly. "I went down to Zeltennia, for there was a book in the University's collection I needed to see. And I assure you, Mrs. Felix, that their public inns are not the slightest patch on your establishment. I am happy to be back."
She beamed at him. "I am glad to hear it. I just came up to finally repair this door to the stairs. It's been swinging loose on its top hinge, and so I thought I would nip up here and re-hang it."
"Oh, Mrs. Felix," Alazlam said, seeing his opportunity, "please allow me."
Mrs. Felix fussily protested, and Alazlam smoothly insisted, and as soon as all the standard maneuvers had been performed, she surrendered her hammer with relief. "But I surely don't know how I can rely on a guest for this little job..."
"It will be my pleasure," he said. "I pine for carpentry jobs, as a matter of fact."
She giggled. "But you will need someone to hold the door straight, Mr. Durai, so I will be some small help to you."
"An enormous help, my dear, I assure you."
And thus, when Else climbed the stairs with an armful of candles, she found her mother holding the upstairs door while Mr. Durai hammered a new hinge into place.
"Hello, Else," her mother sang out. "Mr. Durai has been good enough to help me with this door."
"Has he?" Else asked quietly. Alazlam did not look away from his hinge.
"Lord, those are a heap of candles, Else," her mother said, a trifle more sharply. "What are you doing with them?"
"Mr. Durai asked--" Else started at the same moment that Alazlam said, "Actually, Mrs. Felix, when I returned to my room this morning, I discovered that I was bereft of candles, and so I begged Else here to bring me a spare one. I think," he said slowly as he slammed the last nail home, "that with great care, I may be able to stretch that one candle out for a good many days."
Mrs. Felix gave a horrified gasp. "Oh, Mr. Durai, with the way you write? No, I don't think a single candle will last you an entire night."
Alazlam shrugged with enormous pathos and stepped back from the door. "I am sure I could use it sparingly...perhaps when it is only absolutely dark..."
"Mr. Durai, you will positively ruin your eyes," Mrs. Felix said. "No, I really must insist you take a dozen candles--no, no, you must. Your work can not be allowed to suffer from the shortness of our daylight hours."
"Well..." Alazlam said, teetering on the precipice of relenting.
"Else," Mrs. Felix said firmly, "you take those candles into Mr. Durai's room right this instant."
"Of course," Else said. "I already entered the cost into Mr. Durai's ledger."
Mrs. Felix sucked in her breath.
"Of course," Alazlam said before she could speak. "Oh, and Else, I was meaning to ask about that well-favored young man who was standing in the garden with you. I don't believe I've seen him in the neighborhood before..."
He casually ran his hand along the shaft of the hammer as he glanced to Else. Their eyes met with all the mutual menace of drawn swords.
"What man?" Mrs. Felix asked.
Else hesitated fractionally before she said, "It was just Young Joe Cobbles on his way home, Mother."
"Cobbles?" her mother squeaked. "Why, that family is no better than it should be. I remember when Old Martha Cobbles...well. Never mind that. But I would hope, my girl, that you are not embarking on anything foolish."
"He was just passing by," Else said grimly.
"He is just a brick-layer!"
"Mother..." Else hissed, and Mrs. Felix abruptly remembered Alazlam standing beside them.
"Well, anyway," she said, smoothing her skirt with her hands, "best bring those candles into Mr. Durai's room, my girl, and be sharp about it. And Mr. Durai, thank you so much for your help with the door. I do declare, I am so thankful to have some men around this house. If it were just Else and me, we would be well-nigh helpless."
Else brushed past her mother and Alazlam with her burden of candles and, in passing, trod on Alazlam's left foot.
"Mrs. Felix," Alazlam said with a grimace, "it was my pleasure, believe me."
"Mr. Durai, as a reward for your hard work, I hope you can join me in the kitchen for some hot apple cider. It is most powerfully cold, and hot apple cider will be just the ticket..."
- - -
When Alazlam returned to his room, he found Else sitting at his desk, reading his manuscript.
"What does 'objurgation' mean?" she asked without looking up.
"A scolding," he answered briefly. His chair was occupied, so he stretched out along his bed and squinted at the ceiling rafters overhead. He had not eaten anything all day, and Mrs. Felix's hot apple cider was liberally laced with strong spirits. He felt pleasantly muddled.
"Who is Mr. Reed?"
"An idiot," Alazlam said, turning his head to look at her. She had folded her legs beneath her in a boyish manner, and one gray-stocking'd knee was visible.
"Why is he an idiot?"
"Because he cannot read," Alazlam said. "Or maybe he can read but he cannot understand. He is an idiot because he makes simple things complicated and complicated things simple. He does precious little research, so he persists in 'discovering' things that other scholars have known for centuries. And when he does say something new, it is always something patently ridiculous."
"Sounds like quite a man."
"He just got a position at the University of Zeltennia," Alazlam continued dreamily. "He lives in a snug little house with three chimneys, and he eats meat and drinks wine every night with the college fellows. He wears new boots and a fur cap. He is engaged to the daughter of a prosperous sea captain."
"She probably smells of tar and hemp," Else said.
"He re-translated the account of the Abbot Saul. Which is not itself objectionable, but he changed half the names to match an old epic poem that has no relation to the account. Or maybe it does, but that is beside the point. The point is that he has named Algus as 'Argath,' and Algus is not an Argath. At least, I've never thought of him as an Argath. Argath sounds like a noise you'd make in the back of your throat when you were sick."
"I think you're drunk," Else said.
"Maybe a little," Alazlam said.
"Who is Algus?"
Alazlam was silent for a moment, and then he said, "An unimportant squire who was killed in a minor skirmish in the beginning of what we call the War of the Lions. Abbot Saul mentions him once. Either scholars do not care about him, or they care about him excessively."
"I see," said Else, who clearly did not.
"He deserves better than to be named after a gargle," Alazlam said. "More importantly, I do not want to go back and change his name in what I have already written."
"Then don't," Else said. "Just keep him as Algus -- although that sounds like a real sniffle of a name, I have to tell you."
"I may," Alazlam said. "It depends on whether I can squash this bug Reed immediately or not. He may infect other scholars before I can register a protest."
"Why would other scholars want a squire named after a cough?"
Alazlam shrugged. "History is a cacophony, you know. A chorus of hundreds of people, each singing a different song. And Mr. Reed has a particularly penetrating voice. We may have no choice but to listen to him." He tiredly pressed the palms of his flanneled hands against his eyes. "I aim to throttle him before he can do that, though."
"With a nasty letter?"
"Ours is a profession built on nasty letters."
"Gets a bit old, scribbling all that spleen, I imagine," Else said.
"On the contrary," he said. "It is a rare delight. I will write until my ink runs out, and then I will open up a vein and bleed on the paper. Better anger and contempt and truth than the blank page of mute acceptance, meek capitulation, an educated mind asleep under the snow. I will not be that. I must protest."
Else put down his manuscript. The room was dark. Outside Alazlam's window, she could see roofs stained pink by the setting sun. In the next room, she could hear the thumping noise of Squiddy Dan crossing the floor.
"I had a dream about them last night," Alazlam said in a low voice. "And I woke up thinking, how do I cite a dream? What is the format? A footnote?" He shivered and drew his coat more closely around himself.
Else looked over at him with an expression that Alazlam would not have recognized, had he seen it, but he was looking at the ceiling again and so missed it completely.
"We will be eating dinner soon," she said gently.
"What are we having?"
"Cabbage and corned beef," she said.
Alazlam groaned. "Clearly, I should have delayed my arrival by a day."
"We are having cabbage and corned beef tomorrow as well," Else said. "We are having it all week."
"It is absolutely inescapable, I see."
"It will be ready in an hour, I think, " Else said. "Come down then. Maybe you can cadge some more candles from my mother."
"I live in constant hope," Alazlam said, still watching the ceiling. He heard her stand up and arrange her skirts; he heard her cross his floor and open his door. He heard the door swing shut and silence descend upon his room to join company with the cold and the dark.
At last he stood up. He found where Else had put the candles and lit one. The pool of light flickered uncertainly across his desk. He looked at his manuscript and sighed. He reached for his pen.
It took three tries to free it from its anchor of frozen ink.
- - -
Author's Note: I haven't played the new version of The War of the Lions for the PSP, and so I haven't yet decided how I'm going to apply it to this ever-peripatetic project. I suspect I may be splitting the difference. We will see. Don't hold your breath for the appearance of anyone named Argath.
Writing Alazlam is, as you might suspect, just an excuse for me to drone on about historiography.
This chapter wasn't supposed to be about Alazlam. This chapter was supposed to be about Ramza, Delita, and Algus and their wild and crazy adventures. However, I found it impossible to write the chapter I had in mind, which I have slowly discovered is a sign that I have the wrong chapter in mind. (I forced the Wiegraf chapter, which increasingly seems like an interesting artistic choice that I should not have chosen. In my next mania for revision, it may get overhauled substantially.)