Hylozoic (26 page)

Jayjay worked a worm onto one of Azaroth's hooks and tossed it in from the stern. After a bit, the foot traffic along the river died down. It was peaceful, peaceful here, and the water was clean.

The sky was milky white; it could rain today. The mild Brabant landscape spread before them, with rows of trees along the edges of green fields. The willows had been cropped to stumps, with long shoots on their pollarded crowns.

Just then Jayjay felt a brutal tug on his line, nearly yanking the rod from his grip. He and Thuy hauled in the line together, eventually landing a slimy brown fish with spikes, a monster the size of Jayjay's own body. The thing flopped across the deck toward him, its yellow eyes alight with malice. Feeling
the ergot again, Jayjay screamed and ran to the bow. But Thuy stood her ground.

She got the hook out of the fish—Azaroth said it was a dogfish—and continued angling. For his part, Jayjay settled down on the folded cloth sack in the bow.

“Nap time!” said Thuy, smiling at him.

Soothed by the gentle rocking and the quiet conversation of Azaroth and Thuy, Jayjay dropped off. He had the sensation of literally melting into his dreams—as if his figure and the landscape around him were deliquescing into oozy globs. This was disturbing, but better than being awake.

His restless mind set to forming patterns. The blobs became glub-glubbing subaqueous silps. Jayjay himself was a live worm perched upon a fishing hook that was somehow Thuy, and her pigtails were the hook's barbs. Jayjay tugged off a pigtail and wielded it like a paintbrush, revising the appearance of the scene.

Was this composition marketable? Perhaps not. Jayjay rubbed out the dream image with his oily sleeve and started a fresh one, repeating this entire cycle 1,496 times.

 

 

A whoop from Azaroth woke him. He was feeling better now. While he'd been sleeping, Azaroth and Thuy had caught a whole basket of fish, including a thick and wriggly pair of eels. And now the Hibraner was hauling in his fishing line once more.

“A big one, Thuy! Fish of the day! Hand me that gaff to drag him in.”

The fish flopped into the skiff, bleeding from his mouth, thumping the deck with his tail, twice the size of Jayjay or Thuy. He was so fat as to be nearly spherical. Azaroth produced
a remarkably sharp knife and slit the fish's belly open. Another fish popped out, and a third fish from within that one, all of them disgorging snails, minnows, and worms. Azaroth added the catch to his basket.

Glancing farther up the river, Jayjay noticed three tall gallows standing in a plain beyond 's-Hertogenbosch. The gibbets dangled ragged bundles: skeletons with scraps of flesh. Crows were picking at them. And, there, gliding down behind the gallows field to land by the river's distant curve—was that a flying manta ray?

“Hey, Jayjay,” said Thuy, calling him back. She looked fresh and happy as life itself, silhouetted against the bustling little town. “It's vibby being medieval, huh? Azaroth says he gave the magic harp to an artist for repainting. He wants Lovva to look good again before he takes her back to his aunt. And guess who the artist is!”

“Hieronymus Bosch,” said Jayjay, lacking telepathy but reading the answer from her tone. Not that he cared that much.

“You're up to speed, kiq! Jeroen is what they call him here.” She pronounced it in the Dutch way, like
Yeroon
. “I bet that Kittie really did see him at our housewarming. It's all beginning to fit.”

“I was sort of dreaming about being a painter, just now,” mused Jayjay. “The dream was too big. Whatever you do, Thuy, don't eat any of the brown bread here.”

“I'm so hungry I could eat just about anything,” said Thuy. “Azaroth didn't bring any food. Weren't you eating brown bread with the beggars last night?”

As they drifted back down the river toward town, Jayjay finally explained about ergotism and its disastrous effects.

“That's so weird?” said Thuy when he was done. “Trust you to find a new way to get high.” Her voice trailed off sadly.

“It was an accident,” muttered Jayjay. But both of them knew
that if he hadn't been pounding the wine, he would have known better than to eat the moldy bread. “Tell me more about Bosch and the harp,” he said, hoping to change the subject.

“Bosch is just some local guy looking for jobs,” said Azaroth. “When I got here I asked around for a painter, and someone mentioned him. I don't know that he ever turned out to be a famous artist over here in the Hibrane.”

“I hope we're not about to do something that ruins his life and blocks his career,” fretted Jayjay. It seemed a risky business to be poking around in the past.

“Or maybe it's just that Azaroth's an artistic ignoramus,” said Thuy. “Can you name
any
painters, Azaroth?”

“Um, sure,” he said, followed by a long pause. “Well, okay, I can think of one. Thomas Kinkade. That's the name of a chain store on our Fisherman's Wharf. It has a snack bar. I used to sell Pharaoh cuttlefish there.”

“Kinkade's Krispy Kuttles,” said Thuy, pulling back her chin to make a doofus face. “Maybe Bosch is safe.”

“I saw the harp's painting on my trip up the vine,” said Jayjay, glad the focus had moved away from him. “I wonder if Bosch can make it exactly the same?”

“The painting was on the soundbox,” said Azaroth, not grasping the force of the question. “The subbies gnawed it off while Thuy had it. But I remember it pretty well, and I explained it to Jeroen. It
better
match, or I'll have trouble with my aunt.”

“Not to mention having a reality-shredding time paradox,” said Jayjay. He made a gingerly attempt to visualize what might happen if they disturbed the closed temporal loop of the harp's earthly manifestation.

“Lovva's painting showed a little harpist with a pair of naked lovers,” said Thuy.

“I know,” said Jayjay softly. “The painting looked like you and me.”

“I thought that, too,” said Thuy. “And it was like a detail of Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights
.”

“She even knows the titles of this Jeroen Bosch's paintings!” marveled Azaroth. They were near the water gate. “I'll take you to meet him now. And by the way, the harp is really eager to see Jayjay.”

“Good deal,” said Jayjay. “Maybe she can help us again. Lobrane Earth has blundered into a whole new apocalypse.” He sighed. “And it's all my fault.”

“I wouldn't know about any of that,” said Azaroth, sculling through the water gate with a nod to the guard. “But for starters, maybe Jeroen will hire you as assistants. You're exotic midgets. He loves strange things.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O
nce
inside the town wall, Azaroth swung the boat into a narrow, putrid canal that wended its way under round-arched bridges and past verdant backyards. Bosch's house wasn't far.

Azaroth moored his boat beside a tiny dinghy. He put a likely offering of fish into a small basket, tossed a cloth over the remainder in the boat, then led Jayjay and Thuy through a garden of turnips and carrots, past a cellar door, and up three steps into Jeroen Bosch's kitchen.

It was a large room, with the ceiling and three of the walls covered by smooth white plaster. The inner brick wall held a fireplace adorned with stone carvings of skinny dogs with needle teeth and bat wings. The dogs' long tails branched into curling
ferns that held up a mantelpiece—upon which a freshly roasted chicken cooled.

The ceiling was painted with an elaborately twining squash vine adorned with birds and beasties peeping from behind each flower and leaf. Counters and cupboards lined the walls; the floor was dark-varnished planks; a sturdy wooden table sat beside a window.

Two women were at the table: a plump servant girl peeling turnips, and a lean, gray-haired woman wearing a white linen cap and a bright yellow silk dress. Her air of self-possession made it clear that she was Bosch's wife and the lady of house.

“Good day, Mevrouw Aleid,” said Azaroth with a bow to her. “I have a fine fat cod for you, also a tasty eel.” Thuy and Jayjay hid behind Azaroth, peeping out. He drew the dogfish from his basket and held it up. “As an extra, I've brought this fearsome fellow to model for your husband.”

“That's very good of you, Azaroth,” said Aleid, with a cool smile. “But we didn't know you'd be delivering fish. We've already cooked.”

“Eat my catch tonight,” suggested Azaroth. “Have the chicken cold tomorrow.”

Just then Aleid's eyes picked out Jayjay and Thuy. Abruptly she made the sign of the triangle. “Get the knife, Kathelijn!”

The red-cheeked young maid sprang to her feet, ran to the hearth and snatched up a long, skinny blade. Aleid hastened to Kathelijn's side and turned, watching for a move from the strangers.

“These are just my cousins from the Garden of Eden,” said Azaroth nudging them into the open. “Jayjay and Thuy. Fortunately they speak good Brabants.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Thuy in her sweetest Dutch.
She even curtsied. Seeing this, Kathelijn lowered her knife and let out a shrill, nervous giggle.

“Perhaps Mijnheer Bosch would like to paint us,” said Jayjay. “We could assist in the studio or about the house. Being new to your beautiful town, we're open for any position of service.”

“We should welcome dwarves?” said Aleid, incredulous. “Creation's cast-offs?”

“We're not dwarves,” said Jayjay firmly. “We're little people, clever and strong. If you permit . . .” He stepped forward, grabbed one of the chair's legs with both hands, and lifted it into the air. Although the chair was three times his height, relative to his dense Lobrane body it felt like balsa wood, with a net weight no greater than a normal chair.

But his uncanny feat of strength only frightened the women, especially as he was moving so fast. Aleid found a knife of her own. Jayjay clattered the chair to the floor and backed away.

“Are you baptized?” asked Aleid, tapping the flat of her blade against her palm.

“I am,” said Jayjay, whose mother was a knee-jerk Catholic.

“Me, too,” said Thuy, who'd had a brief Christian period in grade school, thanks to a born-again aunt.

“Has Jeroen finished painting my harp?” asked Azaroth, trying to turn the tide of the conversation.

“Go ask him yourself,” said Aleid. “Be warned that he's in a bad mood. A beggar keeps playing his bagpipe right out front. Can you hear it?” Indeed, shrill, frantic squeals were filtering in. “We give the man a copper to go away, and he always comes back to get more. Show Jeroen the dogfish and the little people. They might very well amuse him.”

“We admire your husband's paintings,” said Jayjay.

“You're so cosmopolitan in the New World?” said Aleid, surprised. “I had no idea.” She paused, reevaluating the situation. “Were my husband to want you to stay, you should know
that you'd receive no pay. You would sleep in our cellar. It doesn't actually connect to the house, there's an entrance from the garden. It could be like your own apartment. And you could eat the scraps from our table—we don't happen to own a pig just now. I don't suppose you eat much.” Clearly Aleid was an experienced negotiator.

“We eat as much a regular people,” said Thuy. “In fact, we're hungry right now.”

“But we don't eat brown bread,” added Jayjay.

“Neither do we,” said Aleid, undermining Jayjay's half-formed theory about how Bosch was getting his visions. “We eat white,” she continued. “Brown bread is for laborers and beggars. Are you nobles?”

“In a way,” said Thuy. “We're known far and wide in our homeland.”

“Can I feed them some carrots?” Kathelijn asked Aleid, sweetening her voice. “They're cute. Like dolls.”