The Nosegay

IV

The Nosegay

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“orichalk”

“piss on your orichalk, we paid merrin to be first”

“you haven’t paid me” I look to kay but all I get is a shrug.

“am i first”

“first for what”

I mumble fuck under my breath knowing as I say it how stupid I must be.  I tell Kay to give him an orichalk and it arcs a shiny path to his hand.

“each”

Unbelievable.  “you’ll be next up there if you keep stealing like this”

“i keep stealing like this, i may someday steal for the Autarch, who’s dross is the treasure of his servants.”

“who’s shit is the life’s blood of his people” I say.

I nod for Kay to give him another Orichalk.

*

The river stinks of the shit of all Saltus though we are the only ones who can smell it and that too will be gone in another week.  Morwenna would look sloppy under her rags to anyone but me.  Kay smiles under perfect clothes.  There is no privacy.

There is no calming her, she knows why we came.  Kay sits and has found things already to mutilate and toss like small ships into that thing they call Gyoll; plants and trash mostly, both gown up from the earth.  It’s all about that witch, it’s all she says, Useebia this and Useebia that, she knows exactly why she’s dying.  Kay would love her I think, be an angel pure, incumbent, attracted to that same thing in Morwenna that I have unlaced my fly for.  I used to want to sow light.  I loved Kay more when there was that thing in me that once we both had.  I rest my head on Morwenna’s bony shoulder and cry.  “play with me, make this not so evil” I whisper.  We both spit, she a good person for seeing my simulacra of that thing in her.  There is still a smell in her hair, of small flowers or herself.  “we leave soon, you do not have to be seven pages in a book”

“where” but she has stopped asking questions.  A good woman explains.  This time she will not have to.  Kay has told me that I cannot steal time, that the things I have taken for myself, for the two of us, that I never took them, that they were like water held in a fist and all this, the ship, our skin suits, a pylon of the Autarch’s war chest, it’s just wet hands.  Holding Morwenna's hand on me and moving it, I cum in my own then stand and walk, carrying it to the rivers deep edge, a father now, a destroyer of worlds as these seeds swim out into their own clear skies for our differences, for my deference to what they may become.

She speaks to Kay, her face looks into mine as I walk that length back up towards them both. She is worried of a greater evil in me, come now fed to feed again in the way all women fear but it remains untold in me and yet, for her truth, no less alive.

“he spoke my whole name for all of the life I knew him” Kay listens and is nodding.  It is such a thing, such a thing to see, how Morwenna, even on the eve of her death and borne under what grief I cannot imagine, never having had a lover and a child poisoned by my accuser, carries not the depth of soul that I see in the adroit eyes of my sister, her sharpened, pure, receptive spirit, listening better than anyone may have ever, hearing her life, and maybe she is right for I would take the woman, over my shoulder, thinking I had all of her.

I turn and walk to where Eusebia has been spitting and drop her with a fist to her stomach. There is now a line of four men, fatter than I, clear small eyes. They have not paid.  

Kay looks at me.  I will not reconcile what that thing is that is someone else’s life, it is someone else’s.  I do not own my own.  Where are my words for the things we want.

*

 
I am tired and my arm is now cut bad enough that I am more interested in the wound than even her life and I pull Kay away.  We leave our food for Morwenna to hide for herself though she will not eat. We are pushed again and this time we go.  To keep fighting back will bring consequences to us. I carry Kay back to the Inn and we sit at the table we had brought with us. I will not sew my cut nor tolerate anyone else to while I am conscious.  The words between to two of us are our own words though you may have spoken them in the quiet places of your own heart and in the deep homes of your own vaporous faith.  You have never lost their savor though those, their own bones that once knocked softly inside your pot are gone.  Though we did not want to we drank.  We have learned not to eat nor drink anything that is not very hot.  Jonas “the liar” as I have called him twice to his satisfaction tells the murderer everything he knows, the books tapestry, the greatness of that thing, it has come from him, that murderer never did any of it.  I spit up beer at least once per otrovez for the shit that torturer has stolen though to hear it be told you would say those things were given.  
“it’s not plagiarism, it’s not even being changed” Kay complains to me.

“that’s what the sycophant said to the author” I say.  Kay looks at me.  "you can't do that.  you don't even know what that means" then adds that it does not make sense, that I souldn't try to just say things, to try to fit things in, that I steal the truth from those moments when they come, from the other ones too, that were good always.  I tell here I will steal that but what I want to steal, to write is the expressions of her face.  There are not worlds enough nor time, and I would not spend it if there were.  Either way we are drunk and reckless and invisible to them. 

“you should have called it, shit some guy told me, hey” I have been pulled back before I could kick the murderers chair again.  The Caloyer runs the place and makes us go to our room.  “what happened to the hospitality industry” I shout again but even Kay is ignoring me now.

It’s my idea to sell that fucker out to Vodalus.  Everything is so obvious.  It costs me a fist full of aes on a swarm of urchins to get the ten Chrisos from those idiots that serve as his servants.  I tell them a story before I tell them where he is staying.  I tell them about the cat and the rolly polly, how the cat loved it, how fucking much he loved that fucking bug.  I ask them if they knew how they met.  He says, In the fucking garden.  I say, The fuck they did, I shout it.  He catches his beer before it falls.  Then how did they meet Optimate, he says.  I stop cursing and say, I had to shove that fucking bug in his face for a god’s damn watch.  You know what the fucking cat says when he finally sees the fucking rolly polly, do you?  They are all just shaking their heads no.  The whole inn is listening, waiting for me to get my own head struck from my own mother fucking body.  I say, He says, holy shit, I stand up to emphasize it, Holy shit I say he says, Look what I found!  Everyone but those idiots laugh.  Now, I say to the big coffin hunters all quiet like and leaning in, Now, for another five Chrisos to make it a lucky and an even ten, you can be the one who finds that rolly polly, dig it?

*

I have been sucking up to Hethor.   What a fucking joke.  I make the banjo sound with my mouth repeating it like saying dung, I go, Dung dung dung dung dung dung dung, dung dung dung dung dung dung.  He loves it, of course he does, reminds him of home.  Kay has brought out a thing we brought with us.  We put it in our drinks.  The murderer keeps out of the bar the last few days but the tin man is always there.  We four see, abroad in this third world, our world, lost to the savages who are and always will be ourselves.  like americans in Tai Pai, how do we hide?

We have been drugged now for two days when that blood orange, that 10 watt energy saver of a fucking excuse for a green planet sun rises like a soul never will from this dead and if not dead then dying world.  In the yard our rage and our numbness has given us the place in the crowd where we will feel the warm blood of wasted beauty.  That is the spot for us and we thank god for dying.  I have been working that hillbilly into a frenzy.  The murderers leap is impressive, even for a young man.  I point Hethor at him like a water cannon.  He is screaming I love you!  I scream at the top of my lungs, Bring out Barabas!  Bring out Barabas!

Kay has managed a new smile in our rage, in this resignation I have not been able to tear our lives from though we jump stars and our own fate like shady fern hidden deeps between massive fallen old growth logs from our youth. 

“your fucking inn is a piece of shit” I yell down the Caloyer.  Kay chimes in “i wan’t my two aes back” and the crowd laughs.  I love her and can’t save her and would take something.  I would save Morwenna like a stolen child, stolen wife, stolen mother.  Our faces are streaked with tears, I feel my own mix with beer and spit in my beard, and I hurt as much to see my sweet, my beautiful K’s pain, and no, nothing is ever quick enough Kay, nothing.  I watch him strike off not the head of a home-wrecker but the offered hand of our own god in every smile in every single love wherever directed and as it clops incredulously, unfairly, disastrously onto the raised wood floor, the crowd erupts and I shout “goooooooal”.  Hethor is leaping and screaming.  Kay is standing and air-firing t-squared arms like underslung shotguns con sound effects, Boosh, Boosh, Boosh!  I have not let go of Hethor once and reach around in front of him with my balled fist and sack him.  He crumbles still shouting and his voice cracks saying, I fucking love you, and but for the fact he is now parallel to the ground and underfoot of the mob, nothing has changed in his world.  The murderer is air fucking Morwennas pale and beautiful head, moving the mouth open and closed with his finger, the head losing blood like a gardening ladel, his hips swirling, unh, unh, unh, no longer god, no longer a mother, no longer mistress, no longer friend, no longer.  

*

Ater too long a time lost in the undulating mob, I almost knock over Kay who has that witch in a headlock and has bloodied and scratched the wet white flesh of her eyes and the moist pink inside her nose from the stabbing of that fucking bouquet that we alone poisoned.  Dropping the witch that in dying has somehow become an opposite, Kay looks at me.  I can remember nothing.  I tell more lies than any fool should and yet, I will never love more nor could ever forget K’s face at that moment.  I think to her, I know, everything is wrong, and it always will be, and that will never make it right.

That night while downstairs the tin man and the murderer feed each other those secrets that they can, I watch Dorcas through the cloth drape that separates our rooms wash her armpits, bare chest and crotch using a basin and the cloth of her own shirt.  I see why he would kill for her and its not her beauty though what she has is like it.   

It’s Kay’s idea to find the child.  I say it here only because it is the last thing we do.  I have renamed our flyer the Mylar Flyer, I paint the words on in red every now and again but paint doesn’t stick to it.  Kay has put the 10 chrisos in one of those foldy old man coin pouches we brought with us.  I tell them to give it to him like a bribe to not be one of them.  Kay adds that he must know in advance, that he must know when he gets hair on his balls, that it should be a temptation.  we see the kid in the back of the crowd behind that goofy fucking door.  He was shit for descriptions you know.  I wonder on our flight back how many cold hands have shoved up from the warming earth at his passing, left in the debris of a new world as much their grave as the brown heath and loam they wore before his feet fell too close above them.  I look into that little fuckers eyes who's dad was slain by a jealous hateful clinging disaterouse woman, and whose mother was killed by his savior.  I think that there can be no meaning in giving him as a temptation the gold we sold his mothers killer for and yet its truth tries to erase some fine no matter how I try with my mind not to let it.  The Old guy repeats his question more clearly. 

"and what if the young man says no"
"well if he says no then who fucking cares"