Late again, but still arrived, more Economous is here.
May I just say too, how much I appreciate you all, whether you comment or not, and how much your comments encourage me to continue and aid in the creative process - it is like you are all some kind of beta (alpha?) testers helping guide the outcome of the final result. Anyway, lame similes aside, thank you all.
Economous
musgrove
© D.M.Cornish
PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH OR REPRODUCE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
Chapter 9 PART 2
The Sulk & Through
The next morning, with the sun already
beating with summer heat upon all uncovered pates, Economous found the lenterman
sitting easy with the side-armsman and the backstepper, all sipping the best
local under the shade of coachyard’s broad eaves.
“No passage
today, m’hearty,” the lenterman said with a lazy tip of his already lazily
tilted stovepipe hat.
The second day
proved even hotter and the lentermen all the more comfortably disposed under
the coachyard eaves, and the driver’s answer was the same as before.
“You’ll not
make the clock wind faster,” the fan-flicking woman observed as Economous
sought frustrated retreat to his small solitary bunk space.
Sat at a small
round budge-table just outside the common room door, she was sipping what the
young fabulist could only guess was salloop. Head now barely covered by an
impractically small version of a stovepipe known as a columna, she still wore
the same dark green travel cloak, satin mules of striking red poking out from
beneath the viridian hem of her light cloak. But more striking yet – and
catching Economous utterly off guard – were her eyes, now clear of any
obscuring hat-shade, were clearest blue with orbs of solid bloody red. She was
a falseman. A lie-seeing leer. A lady lie-seeing
leer.
“Neither will chiding me, madam!” Economous
retorted hotly, surprising himself so profoundly with his own heat that his
pace quickening in shame as he sought to retreat past her and seek the solace
of his hired room. Yet better nature over-ruled him the very next beat and halting
abruptly, the fabulist pivoted on his heal to face his fellow traveller.
She sat up the
straighter, fan clicking shut and readied as a weapon. She blinked at him with those disquieting eyes, expression pinned between dismay and self-defence.
“Uh…” he
fumbled, “I – I – Sorry for my impulsiveness, madam,” he bowed as low as seven
days aboard a po’lent would allow. “Please … please, allow accept my
apologies.”
This woman
beheld him in still silent deliberation.
“I am not of
the habit,” she returned at last, “for speaking freely to one of whom I am not
properly introduced.”
Economous
blinked at her. “Mister Economous Musgrove, Metrician Third Table and
Illuminator to Gentry.” The young fabulisto obliged his audience with a second
bow: a bumbling simulacrum of the sweeping bobs Mister Bidbrindle liked to beck,
if only to avoid looking into those red-and-blue eyes.
“Miss Swift, if
you must,” she returned, her voice cool but her fan a-flutter tightly. “Panapolë
Swift of Doggenbrass.”
“Well, Miss Panapolë
Swift of Doggenbrass,” Economous halted before her – A name at last! – “Surly you
find the delay tiresome?”
“I do, of
course,” she said, taking a sip of salloop, “but I know better than to fret at
a cause I cannot alter. Lights know I have had much practice,” she added, more
to herself.
With no counter
for this, Economous stood dumb, hands behind his back and cupping the bottom of
his bautis-box to give them something to do, sucking in the warm air as he
rocked upon booted heels and gazed up at the thin clouds drifting west.
“And how is it, Miss Swift,” he said at length,
“that you are still my travelling companion?”
Regarding him
for a moment with a must-thee-know stare,
she finally said: “I am seeking a particular personage in Knapphausen,” she
offered at last.
“As am I,”
Economous returned, his last syllable going mawkishly shrill in his surprised
delight.
He blinked at
her and she at him, quickly turned upon both sides to gaze-averting
embarrassment.
“It is hiring
season then, in the Subtle Pall…” said Miss Swift as she stared fixedly at her salloop
with those discomposing eyes and fanned herself with especial vigour.
“Aye,” was all
of Economous’ reply.
* * * * *
Carrying Miserichord about in its box on his back,
Economous took to assiduously avoiding Miss Swift, instead wandering about the village,
crouching to draw the sagging wooden highhouses with their distinctive conical
roofs of flax and their grim-faced denizens. At first he was a spectacle as
souls stood over him to watch him make his marks, but tiring quickly of
muttering wonders and beady observation, the fabulist fled east out through the
gated gap in Poonemünd’s warding dyke and moat. In the windy hissing solitude
of the surrounding pastures, the road actually went directly up a hill of all
things, a mound really, but a genuine lifting of the earth. It was a herald –
as he soon found – of much greater undulations east, the shadows of dark hills
on the horizon.
Clambering over
a stone fence that bordered the rutted, scarce-used way, Economous climb through
dry grasses and withered thistles to the highest point of hilly mound and found
it afforded a remarkably wide view of world. To the south the land fell away in
a series of wooded folds running over long miles to a dark stretch along the
horizon that occasionally glimmered with water reflecting the morning sun. A
fume seemed to hang over that far off strip, and from even such a distance
there was an obvious deep rouged taint upon it. With a queer inward leap of
fascinated fright then a sinking of dismay Economous realised that he was
seeing the dread Ichormeer, a vast swampland even the most closeted niavine knew
as a seat of unconquered and largely undocumented monstrous power.
“So close,” he
murmured in vocal amazement.
The trained
metrician in him thrilled to the thought of measuring even a small portion of
its unexplored precincts, report back the weird species creature he might
uncover and be an ornament to his profession at last. But the rest of him just
beheld it in the dread common to all everymen at such a prospect.
In the evening
– warm and clear, a glory had he been in the mind to care – he climbed upon a
hayloft roof as he had as a child, to lay and gaze at the meteor splendours of
the unclouded night sky until Maudlin was westering and weariness forced sleep
upon him.
The only wonder
of the next day was the late arrival of a post-lentum from the populated west,
disgorging its brood of rumpled passengers.
“Aye,”
Economous’ lenterman reported with a smirk and commendable patience as he
sipped a bowl of Mullhammer’s Best in the common room of the Cradle & Manger, “we have fares
enough to be going on tomorrow.
“Thank you,
sir,” Economous returned with a bow, taking and shaking the startled fellow’s
hand happily, “Thank you, thank you.”
“A’right,
mate,” the sidearmsman retorted, nodding over his own beer-bowl at this sudden
enthusiastic limb-pumping. “He’ll need that arm for the harness termorrow.”
“Yes, yes, of
course,” offered Economous, releasing the bemused lenterman and giving an
apologetic bob. “I will see you tomorrow.” With that he ordered [FOOD GOES
HERE] and retired to his room to wait the last hours of stranding.
At last!
