story,” I replied. “One with intrigue and ambition, love fulfilled and love unrequited, the ignominious deaths of the high and mighty as well as the low and forgotten, the reasons for which are known to but a few.”
She put the sign back in her saddlebag.
“Nothing like a long ride for a long story,” she said. “And you know how Portia loves to hear you talk.”
“Very well then,” I said. “It was in the summer 1191, after the recapture of Acre by the Crusaders, that I first met a dwarf called Scarlet. It was a day filled with screams.”
Two
The reason that I’m here to-night No one here can help but know, Plain to all discerning sight: Didn ’t grow.
WILL CARLETON, “THE FESTIVAL OF THE FREAKS: THE DWARF’S RESPONSE”
T here was a tavern .
There’s always a tavern in your stories, remarked my wife.
There is always a tavern, a place where fools gather after dark, after their patrons have passed out in their palaces, exhausted from an evening of carousing and arousal, fuelled by folly and doused by wine. When the normal people drift off, dreaming fitfully of the terrors that await them when they are once again sober, the fools slip away, pallid in the darkness, the moonlight reflecting off their white faces. Nodding familiarly at the night watch, they pad warily past the vagabonds settling down in the narrow alleys, seeking out the one tavern that never closes, with the tapster who welcomes any with a coin without asking how the coin was obtained, although not without assaying its true worth, inserting it between howsoever many teeth as are still available.
A tavern where God and the Devil, walking the cold earth in disguise, may meet by chance, see through each other’s camouflage, and yet still sit down for a drink on neutral territory, eventually exchanging maudlin reminiscences about the old days before things all went so horribly wrong.
The tavern in this oft-conquered hellhole called Acre didn’t even have a name. Tucked back in an unpromising dead end of an alleyway near the idle mill in the center of town, it had somehow kept going during the recent siege, running on a secret reserve of wine in the cellar while the populace slowly starved around it. The price of a drink there was at a fine balance between affordable and exorbitant, the tapster keenly attuned to the ever-shifting market. But on this mid-August day, I didn’t care what I had to pay as I staggered across the baked earth outside the city walls.
I wanted a drink. I wanted one so badly that I would have paid with my own blood if that was the going rate.
I passed through what was left of the gate at what was left of the Turris Maledicta, both having taken the brunt of the French catapults and the English sappers during the recent siege. The wreck of the massive war machine that the troops had nicknamed Bad Neighbor was still there, a monument to its owners and a testament to the greater accuracy of Bad Kinsman, the Turkish counterpart that did it in. I headed west into the city until I found the entrance to the alley. Out past the seawalls, the sun was setting. As I came up to the tavern door, I heard music—singing and lutes, the sounds that would normally have me reaching for my own instrument without a second thought.
I entered the room and waited for my eyes to adjust. Only a single candle spat its light into the unreceptive gloom. The tapster, an ancient Syrian with a wine-stained beard down to his waist, stood in front of a shelf holding buckets of viscous liquid that he would ladle into earthenware cups that may have been washed once in their existence.
Off in the darkest corner of the room, I glimpsed a pair of faces, eyes closed and mouths open. Perfect harmony emerged, so beautiful that the rest of the imbibers sat in absolute silence, not daring even to breathe loudly while it persisted. “The Lay of Charlemagne,” a song of noble warriors and conquest, sung by a troubadour and a jester.
I should say a
She put the sign back in her saddlebag.
“Nothing like a long ride for a long story,” she said. “And you know how Portia loves to hear you talk.”
“Very well then,” I said. “It was in the summer 1191, after the recapture of Acre by the Crusaders, that I first met a dwarf called Scarlet. It was a day filled with screams.”
Two
The reason that I’m here to-night No one here can help but know, Plain to all discerning sight: Didn ’t grow.
WILL CARLETON, “THE FESTIVAL OF THE FREAKS: THE DWARF’S RESPONSE”
T here was a tavern .
There’s always a tavern in your stories, remarked my wife.
There is always a tavern, a place where fools gather after dark, after their patrons have passed out in their palaces, exhausted from an evening of carousing and arousal, fuelled by folly and doused by wine. When the normal people drift off, dreaming fitfully of the terrors that await them when they are once again sober, the fools slip away, pallid in the darkness, the moonlight reflecting off their white faces. Nodding familiarly at the night watch, they pad warily past the vagabonds settling down in the narrow alleys, seeking out the one tavern that never closes, with the tapster who welcomes any with a coin without asking how the coin was obtained, although not without assaying its true worth, inserting it between howsoever many teeth as are still available.
A tavern where God and the Devil, walking the cold earth in disguise, may meet by chance, see through each other’s camouflage, and yet still sit down for a drink on neutral territory, eventually exchanging maudlin reminiscences about the old days before things all went so horribly wrong.
The tavern in this oft-conquered hellhole called Acre didn’t even have a name. Tucked back in an unpromising dead end of an alleyway near the idle mill in the center of town, it had somehow kept going during the recent siege, running on a secret reserve of wine in the cellar while the populace slowly starved around it. The price of a drink there was at a fine balance between affordable and exorbitant, the tapster keenly attuned to the ever-shifting market. But on this mid-August day, I didn’t care what I had to pay as I staggered across the baked earth outside the city walls.
I wanted a drink. I wanted one so badly that I would have paid with my own blood if that was the going rate.
I passed through what was left of the gate at what was left of the Turris Maledicta, both having taken the brunt of the French catapults and the English sappers during the recent siege. The wreck of the massive war machine that the troops had nicknamed Bad Neighbor was still there, a monument to its owners and a testament to the greater accuracy of Bad Kinsman, the Turkish counterpart that did it in. I headed west into the city until I found the entrance to the alley. Out past the seawalls, the sun was setting. As I came up to the tavern door, I heard music—singing and lutes, the sounds that would normally have me reaching for my own instrument without a second thought.
I entered the room and waited for my eyes to adjust. Only a single candle spat its light into the unreceptive gloom. The tapster, an ancient Syrian with a wine-stained beard down to his waist, stood in front of a shelf holding buckets of viscous liquid that he would ladle into earthenware cups that may have been washed once in their existence.
Off in the darkest corner of the room, I glimpsed a pair of faces, eyes closed and mouths open. Perfect harmony emerged, so beautiful that the rest of the imbibers sat in absolute silence, not daring even to breathe loudly while it persisted. “The Lay of Charlemagne,” a song of noble warriors and conquest, sung by a troubadour and a jester.
I should say a
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