Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (14 page)

“That’s a long time!” the chorus said.

“At least the insulter was brought closer to the grave by the insulted.”

“Caspar’s hands, those awful, gigantic hands, were easily large enough to grasp the full girth of an average man’s neck. One fist was enough to lay a strong man down for days.” The speaker looked down at Heraclix’s hands with a puzzled expression.

“Or the end of days!” one soldier said.

“Thankfully, his nature wasn’t as brutish as his body. Truth be told, he rarely fought.”

“Aww!” the soldiers lamented.

“No, Caspar was more of a lover than a fighter. And this was his undoing.”

“Boo hoo!” the chorus sarcastically lamented.

“Yes, love and good natured friendship. You see, while some were indeed jealous and fearful of Caspar’s gargantuan size, most liked having him around for the good cheer he invited. This he did by being the unwitting brunt of sidelong jokes and subtle jabs that he could never quite understand. He was, in a way, a sort of celebrity. He rarely had to buy himself drinks.”

“Must be nice!” a soldier said.

“His friends, or those who called themselves his friends, were free with their geld around him, considering any money they spent on his behalf was money well spent on entertainment.

“So the giant, through his ignorance, enjoyed some things not even enjoyed by those who subsidized his excesses.”

“Dumb lucky!” the chorus yelled.

“This included the attentions, paid for by his group of companions, of course, of the whore Vatanya.”

“Vatanya!” the soldierly chorus shouted.

“Aye, Vatanya!” the veteran said with the hint of a sigh. “Two feet shorter than Caspar, yet the tallest, and longest, girl in town. She intimidated most men, which was good for business when you realize how many men think upside-down and want to be intimidated by a woman.”

“Cowards!” one soldier said.

“But Caspar, Caspar wasn’t cowed. No, he was never smitten by her, though he was smitten by love.”

“Ah, Vatanya!” the chorus said in mock girlish voices.

“Vatanya, was used to having her way, so she found something new in Caspar, a man who wanted to please her out of love, rather than out of fear or perversion. This was something so new to her that she didn’t quite know how to act. She liked that he was her match, in many ways, but she knew he wouldn’t be around forever and needed to maintain the appearance of dominance in order to preserve any future business.”

“Business is business,” a soldier said.

“Now one way in which the man was no match for the woman was in their respective wits. Vatanya was no genius, but she had more brains than Caspar, who had very little. So it was easy for her to convince the giant that he should . . . ahem,
acquire
certain gifts for her in order to keep her favor.”

“That seems fair!” one of the soldiers said. The others vehemently nodded their agreement.

“Of course, Caspar was not a good burglar, but doors and locks did little to stop him. His victims could do little to stop him, either, both because he was a giant and because he wore an imperial soldier’s uniform.”

“Huzzah!” yelled the chorus.

“And no one argues with a soldier . . .”

“Huzzah!” again.

“. . . but another soldier.”

Grumbling assent bubbled up from the troops.

“And so it happened . . .”

“It was inevit-, inev-, unavoidable!” shouted one of the soldiers, more drunk than the rest. The veteran looked at the man with disgust, perturbed by the sot’s interruption.

“And so it happened that one of Caspar’s victims, a man who, though not a soldier, had a soldier for a brother, convinced said sibling to talk giant Caspar into stealing a gift, a most precious gift, for his sweetheart, something from the General himself.”

“Hoa!” one of the soldiers yelled.

“A fair move!” shouted another.

“A soldier’s a soldier!” a third.

“Of course, it was a setup, and the framed simpleton was caught red-handed.”

“Or, rather,
made
red-handed!” said the chorus.

“Yes, made red-handed. For when the General learned of the theft, he had Caspar tortured by burning off the giant’s palm prints and fingerprints as a lesson to all that what is the General’s is the General’s.”

“A good lesson,” the soldiers agreed, “well taught.”

Heraclix folded his arms, hiding his palms underneath the fabric of his cowl.

“He also had his feet and toes ironed, to show that a common foot-soldier dare not cross the General’s threshold without permission.”

“Hear, hear!” the chorus heard.

Heraclix looked down at his boot-clad feet. He thought he knew what he would see if he removed the footwear.

“And then, with a full three whacks from the executioner’s axe, he was beheaded.”

Pomp carefully studied the seams between Heraclix’s body and neck. She knelt carefully on his shoulder, shifting her weight to the outside, then flew out from under the cowl where she had been hidden.

Heraclix started at the movement.

“What? What is it?” one of the soldiers said.

The most drunk of the bunch looked at Heraclix suspiciously.

“Hey. Ain’t we supposed to be looking for someone big?”

“Haw!” laughed the veteran, who walked over to the drunk and gave him a slap on the back so hard the man almost vomited. “This ain’t him. No way! Lookit him. He looks just like poor old Caspar. Could be his twin! Though a touch uglier.”

“You know what this giant looked like?” Heraclix asked.

“No, no.” The veteran had a far-off look in his eyes. “Caspar has been dead for a long, long time. Before my time, even. He’s a legend, old Caspar.”

The men all solemnly nodded, lowering their eyes to show respect to Caspar’s memory.

“But I thought you said—” Heraclix began.

“Look here,” the veteran said, trying, unsuccessfully, to rest his arm over the giant’s back. “We’re supposed to take anyone who is ‘unusually large,’ as the orders go, in for questioning.”

“But you . . . you’re like one of us, I’d say. What do you say, boys?”

“Huzzah!” said all but the one who was still doubled over on the ground.

“That’s right. One of us, like the ghost of old Caspar himself, heh?” he said.

Heraclix forced a chuckle.

“So you head on over to Hradčany, by the castle. There’s a bright blue flat there, stuck between a red butcher store and an orange flat. That’s where old Caspar lived, a long, long time ago. I’m sure his family still lives there.

“Thank you,” Heraclix said.

“No need! You’ve brought back some good memories, friend. And you needn’t worry about us ratting you out. We never saw you, did we, boys?”

“Never!” most of them said.

“Mmph!” said the drunk, shaking his head and vomiting into his own hands.

“Well then, we’d best disappear,” Heraclix joked. He heard Pomp gasp in surprise.

“We?” said the veteran, looking around Heraclix’s girth to see if anyone was hiding behind him.

“Nothing. Ah, never mind,” Heraclix said, “Figure of speech.”

He quickly headed off toward Prague Castle, leaving the soldiers behind. He walked mechanically through the streets, letting his body take him where it would. His thoughts were on his body, though he felt a strange separation of physical form and conscious thought. He recalled the brightly colored illustration contained in Mowler’s book and stopped momentarily.

“Why have we stopped?” Pomp whispered.

“Just thinking,” Heraclix said, reaching into his pouch to retrieve the book. He started walking again, slowly, while thumbing through to the illustration. “It’s a map,” he said.

“A map?” Pomp asked.

“Yes, a map of who I am, and who I was.”

“This is good to have, right?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m even more confused than before.”

He closed the book, put it back in his pouch, and walked. His legs were taking him to their next destination, but his thoughts wandered off into regions unknown.

C
HAPTER
9

F
inding the blue house in Hradčany is like finding a specific grain in a teaspoon of salt. Blue, red, and orange houses are everywhere. Also yellow, white, lavender, and three shades of green. Windows and doors vary in shape, size, and quantity. The buildings are united by their proximity to each other, a chaining together of rain gutters like some strange airborne river, and, of course, by their utter lack of uniformity. No two neighborhoods look exactly alike, but all are part of the same organic whole, rows of homes growing out of cobblestone fields fed by rain gutter canals.

Heraclix and Pomp wander for hours looking for the flat as described by the veteran soldier. Pomp scouts ahead, identifying blue building candidates and navigating Heraclix, who soon becomes lost in the twisting streets, through the neighborhood in the shadow of Saint Vitus Cathedral. The spire’s umbra has grown long, stretching toward the river like a dark dagger blade by the time they finally find the place.

Pomp peeks in the windows.

“No one home,” she says.

Heraclix knocks, but there is no answer.

Pomp flies up above the building where Heraclix can’t get in.

There, there is a chimney, just big enough. She goes down, wriggling, punches a large spider who tries to bite her. The spider falls to the fireplace below. Still, she has to tear her way through
the webs, down the flue and into the ash pit. The spider shakes, clenches in on itself like a fist, dies. Pomp looks around, up, down. Where is the spider’s ghost? Where did it go? Would it haunt her?

Pomp backs out of the fireplace, turns around and scans the apartment. It is sparse: a desk, chair, bookshelf—papers strewn about, a silver thaler on a chain and a crucifix adorn the wall. Cobwebs are everywhere.

The shimmer of the thaler catches Pomp’s attention. She lifts the chain from the wall peg. The man on the coin is different from the faces on Heraclix’s gold coins. Heraclix’s gold shows a woman with curly hair and a double chin. This coin shows a man wearing a laurel. His hair is just like Pomp’s—short, cut in a bob. She will keep this coin!

Heraclix waited outside until his presence at the door began to draw people’s attention. A pair of women nudged each other and spoke in hushed tones. Their disapproval was clear on their faces. A group of young children chased each other until one of them spotted Heraclix, pointed at him, and ran away screaming. The others followed screaming, looking over their shoulders to see what it was that they were screaming about.

An old man bumped into Heraclix and let out an almost inhuman growl. He looked up into the giant’s eyes and gave an evil glare.

“Excuse me,” Heraclix said.

The man pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, then carefully backed away. After making some distance between them, the old man cast a hateful glare at the giant, then turned and ran away.

Heraclix walked away from the apartment.
He’s gone to fetch the constable,
Heraclix thought.
Best to clear out and find a place to hide for a while
.

He turned and walked down the street toward the river. “This has been fruitless,” he said to himself. “I have no direction. I don’t even know where to begin. The more I learn about my . . . self,” he hesitated to use the word, “the less I know.”

Heraclix entered the west doorway of Saint Vitus Cathedral and, sitting on a back pew in the nave, brought forth the papers that Pomp had acquired earlier, hoping to find some inspiration in
them. The pews were empty, allowing Heraclix to meditate on the puzzles that plagued his thoughts. But as he began to read, he was surprised to see a silver thaler on a chain materialize, seemingly out of nowhere, and plop down on top of the papers.

Pomp said. “I just find this.”

“Just find? Where?” he said with a tone somewhere between amused and chiding.