The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories. Darrell Schweitzer

dreams.

      He came again upon the One with the scythe, hood, and hourglass, who hissed at him, “Ssayyy...don’t we havvv an appp-pointmenttt?”

      He spun the hourglass with his finger and hurried on.

      Above him, there were now eight moons in the sky. A ninth seemed to have become stuck somehow on the spire of St. Paul’s, like an apple on the tip of a knife. The Man in this particular Moon complained vehemently. His dog barked. He dropped his lantern into the street, where it exploded into glittering shards, each of which, Tom knew, was filled with enchantment and could lead someone on a magical, romantic quest, or provide some great and impossible revelation, or boon—but he didn’t have time for that.

      The air was thick with melancholy. Gloom hung over the city like a damp fog, dimming the outlines of the rooftops to a dull blur. In the houses as he passed, he heard sleepers cry out and sob in their dreams, dreams which might never, ever end at the rate things were going.

      He found Nick lying in the street. Several pigs nuzzled around him. But sufficient Melancholy had puddled there (a foul, dark fluid, like slops) that they were the most sorrowful pigs Tom had ever seem. They merely gazed at him reproachfully as he shooed them away.

      He shook his friend. “Nick! Nick!”

      “Oh alas,” said Nick, awakening. “I was dreaming of meat pies. I almost had a bite when—”

      “Come on!”

      “Come whither?”

      “Hither. Thither.”

      “Blither.”

      “Oh, yes. Do so Nicholas. Absolutely. Your madness is like a rare sapling, gently nurtured, which now grows into a vast forest that shall not be cut down in a single night.”

      “But what if that night never ends, Tom?”

      Tom told him what the headless queen had suggested.

      “Now you’re almost making sense, Tom. Beware! Beware!” Nick jangled his bells in warning.

      Tom urged him to consider the source. Such advice might have been sound, but how it had been obtained put it safely within the allowable bounds of madness.

      * * * * * * *

      Now all they had to do was find the one so wounded in love that all the rest had followed.

      It wasn’t hard.

      They went where the fancies were thickest, where the melancholy filled the streets like black syrup, rising above the windows, splashing over walls, while Tom and Nick swam in it amid bobbing skulls thick as foam on a stormy ocean.

      They glimpsed the hooded One with the scythe again, who was standing in an upper window, surveying all that passed below, looking rather pleased with himself.

      But when that One saw Tom and Nick paddling by in a washtub, he shouted something and ran downstairs.

      But Tom looked ahead, not behind. He saw that he and Nick had come to a forest of gallows, from which skeletons hung, all singing as the wind passed through their bones.

      I have both wagered life and land

      Your love and goodwill for to have....

      They beheld knights on quests, always failing, maidens pining away at tombs which bore the effigies of those same knights. A dragon, quite pleased with itself indeed, gobbled down the maidens one by one.

      There were ten moons in the sky, eleven. They bumped into one another. The various Men in the Moons quarrelled furiously.

      The skeletons sang:

      I brought thee kerchers to thy head

      That were wrought fine and gallantly....

      Nick tugged on Tom’s sleeve. “What’s a kercher?”

      “Rubbish!” someone shouted from a loft, high overhead.

      “I think we have arrived,” said Tom.

      * * * * * * *

      Introductions were in order.

      “Peter the Poet, I’m Completely Mad. Completely Mad, this is Nick the Lunatic.”

      “Actually his name is Tom O’Bedlam,” said Nick.

      “Ah me!” said the Poet, half in a swoon, hand to his forehead.

      “Poets do that a lot,” said Tom to Nick. “It’s part of the trade.”

      “Sort of like being mad.”

      “Yes! Exactly!” said Peter the Poet. “Even more so because I am in love!” He paced back and forth, gesticulating, waving pen and paper in the air. Tom and Nick stretched and bent, trying to read what was written, but the page never stood still long enough. Meanwhile Peter explained how he had been smitten, indeed, with the madness of love, which burned him, from which his life bled as if from a wound, as fortune’s wheel turned but would not favor him, as his fancies raged forth into the night on the holy quest of love (several hundred metaphors followed; we need not list them all), how he had given his heart away—

      Indeed, this was so. He undid his doublet, unlaced his shirt and showed them the hole in his breast where his heart used to be.

      “Good place to store cheese,” Nick remarked.

      And in a great storm of words then, in thunder and fury, in drizzling melancholy the Poet told the whole soppy, sorry story, which had no end, and could only be interrupted to further explain that a Poet’s fancies come from the heart, and if he has already given his heart away, and does not possess it, those fancies must arise in some place other than the residence where the poet resides; ergo a problem of uncontrollable proportions, which the Poet can hardly be expected to do anything about; ahem, since he, therefore, struggling with the Muse, with inspiration, can hardly be expected to recapture and rein in his fancies because what he writes has no heart in it and the result is likely to come out more like:

      Thy gown was of the grassy green,

      Thy sleeves of satin hanging by,

      Which made thee be our harvest queen.

      And yet thou wouldst not love me.

      “Doesn’t even rhyme,” said Nick.

      “It could be worse,” said Peter the Poet bitterly. “It could be Hey nonny-nonny.”

      “I shudder to think,” said Nick.

      “Does she have a name?” Tom asked.

      “Who?” said Peter.

      “Your lady-love. Now I too have some experience in the madness of love, for I was wounded in love myself, when I loved a giantess who was unfortunately moonstruck when she stood up too tall one night and the Moon hit her on the head and knocked her over the edge of the world—’twas a sad thing, but not entirely tragic, for still she tumbles in the abyss, among the stars, and she rather enjoys herself—I hear from her on occasion, as she dreams of me, or sings love-songs in her dreams, though she has fallen so far now that sometimes they take years to reach me—but as I was saying, ahem, it is my experience that in these cases the beloved usually has a name....”

      “It’s Rosalind,” said the Poet.

      “Ah.”

      “At least that’s her poetical name. I spied her from afar. I fell instantly, madly in love—something you can appreciate, I am sure—and I declared her my Rosalind. I set her on a pedestal, as my inspiration, my Muse. I gave her my heart, as you’ve seen, but still she loves me not, and my poetry cannot speak of the sorrows I suffer—”

      “But you haven’t actually ever spoken to her, have you, much less inquired of her name?”

      “What else can she be but my Rosalind?”

      “Her name might be Ethel,” said Nick.

      “You