Chapter VIII.

 (Pages 122-134)

Chapter VIII.

The Barrel Spa Routine

Thraxus Throws Several Cinquedeas

Humphrey and Desvot Find Trouble

Gruceti Sends a Simple Siege

I.

            It only takes about nine eggs with his four glasses of morning brew to send Humphrey to the bathroom setting terms with his stomach. Sir Levity in the meantime is still tearing into his first (and only) fried egg; salted and peppered just perfectly, he shovels forkfuls of its yolky excellence down his through all the while Humphrey is sending his back up it. Desvot is still trying to sleep; their two attempts of waking him only provoking an “Uunghh” and a series of snores. He hadn’t managed to sleep all the night due to Jacarbi and the ghost boys’ boisterous boozing, brawling, and banter from sundown to dawn. Zevalia meanwhile is chirping chipper from Levity’s room (wandering loose from her cage) through a beak full of pheasant feed.

            With his last mouthful of egg, Levity walks to the bathroom and hollers to Humphrey, “I shall be departing for a brisk walk and shall return by nightfall. I wish you both luck in thine endeavors and that countless customers shall come thine direction to make business.”

            Humphrey, once finished choking out his guts, manages to stomach the words, “We shall be waiting outside Jovial Nights in our cabbage stand when thou shall return. I wish thou will find some sense of happiness by the end of thine ambling hours. We shall treat thee to a sumptuous supper with a portion of our profits once we’ve closed – my treat.”

            “My many thanks, and a farewell to thee!” Levity steps out the door and takes a right turn into Trickle for a day in the town. The streets are not yet as busy as they come, most vendors have not yet opened there carts, the May Street Market is still closed for the night, but one blubbery buddy with a bushy black mustache is alive in his cart helping himself to one of their steamy-hot gyros. Myriad mongoose of jumbled genus, each fastened to the cart by their miniature leashes are falling back to sleep on account of such an early awakening.

            “Hot Gyros! Greek Gyros! Fresh from Empyrean! Hello sir, would thou like to be my first customer of the day? No one seems to wish for any gyros at six in the morning; thou would be giving unto me a boon so graciously; I would most honorably repay thee if our paths should e’er again cross when I myself am caught under less destitute terms than the present,” the man scratches his audibly hairy behind and puts on a pair of gloves.

            “Of course I shall oblige thine offer; use thou beef or lamb in thine gyros?”

            “Beef,” he says taking a pita and smothering it with tzatziki sauce and using metal tongs to fill it with lettuce, onion, tomato, and then slicing four thin strips of beef off his vertical rotisserie to complete it. He wraps a paper around the end, “That will be two silver for the gyro then, sir.”

            “But the sign here says one silver per Greek Gyro. Thou’rt cheating me!”

            “Well how else am I to pay for that which I ate myself? Do I Look rich?”

            Levity scoffs, takes the gyro, and tosses two silver onto the ledge of the food truck. “Thanks for the gyro I suppose,” he says walking off down the street.

            “And thanks for paying patronage to Empyrean Gyros!” The man walks to the front of the cart and opens the shutters in the front. A whip snaps in the air above the myriad mongoose that spurs them into motion, sending the cart careening down the cobblestone street. After eight bites of his gyro he gets sidetracked by a shifty screwball shuffling into an alleyway wearing nine neckties, babbling to himself something inaudible – he follows him down the alleyway. The walls are covered in graffiti, OBEY GRUCETI, BOW DOWN, FOLLOW HIM, HE IS YOUR GOD, GRUCETI IS READY, are painted on the walls colorfully standing out from the usual tags left by street artists. The most omphalic artwork though is a simple logographic in black, like a mountain with three peaks in the bottom it reads in capitals FEAR.

            Levity walks past it to the end of the alleyway where one can see an open dumpster next to a miscellany of effluvia littering the streets. He approaches the dumpster, from which he can hear the panting of some depraved maniac. He creeps slowly and peers inside it to see a man tearing into the thigh of a decapitated corpse with his bare teeth like a wild animal. He drops his gyro and unsheathes his Kris, “Step out of the dumpster thou corrupted creature.” Still the ‘human’ inside the dumpster continues gnawing through the meat and into bone. “Step out before I end thee immediately. I am armed with a deadly weapon.” The teething stops and the dumpster slams shut. “I demand thee to open this dumpster immediately or suffer mine agonizing wrath.” The creature starts gobbling again on his corpse; Levity gulps nervously and flips his Kris to poise it much like a Javelin – he puts his hand to the lid of the dumpster, “Thou’ve given me no other choice than to take thee by force!” He sends the lid into the air as Solomon pounces out, spraying a shower of blood that drenches Levity’s face, and with his shoulders as footing leaps over him to the ground, climbs up the wall to the rooftops. His sword clatters to the ground which he reaches down fore and puts back in its sheath.

            “Sollie escapes! Our hero has been thwarted by The Severed Strangler! Thou ditzy dolt wilt fore’er be known as naught but a ninny! Ninny, ninny, ni-nny!” Solomon spews like a fountain a stream of blood that splatters off his helmet and runs down his shoulders, dripping down his hands to the ground in a puddle. Once Levity has wiped off his eyelids, he glances back to see the lunatic lam into the majesty of morning like a murderous monkey.

            Turning to leave the alleyway, he sees at the end a wooden sign, “Baz Barel Spa,” with a backwards e and an arrow pointing him to the right. Needing to wash the blood off him, he follows the sign down the street to Baz’s Barrel Spa.

II.

            Humphrey and Desvot have their crates overturned on the street with cabbage decking the tops of them, above a sign reading ‘Head Cabbage One Silver.’ The two are periodically deriding their devotee Levity, “Cabbage, Cabbage, Come get your cabbage!” Desvot first cries.

            “Olive Oil, Extra Virgin, buy a bottle tonight; or better yet come chug it, cause I’m tired of hearing him squawking about his celibacy every day,” Humphrey hollers.

            “Do thou wish to hear a secret Sir Humphrey?” Desvot bringing his voice down only slightly so that it practically makes no difference.

            “And what would that be?”

            Desvot brings his face in to Humphrey’s and with the same volume, “I hear Levity is a gynotikolobomassophile.” He scans to make sure Levity is nowhere to witness his slander.

            “What’s a gynocolomastodon?” Desvot searches the early morning street crowd, scant, scattered sparse through the street. A drab woman in a faded blue dress catches his eye.

            “There, that woman should suffice. Now this may sound a little strange, but I want thee to sneak up on her and nibble upon her earlobes,” he points subtly. “Just be stealthy and be sure you get away fast as you can. Unless she likes it I mean, then thou may take leisure to nibble as long as thou would wish – if you like it, then you’re a gynotikolobomassophile.”

            “Oh boy, I’ve always wanted to nibble a woman’s earlobes,” and Humphrey disappears into the crowd – slowly behind her he approaches while she’s eating an empyrean gyro. He unhooks her earring unnoticeably with his teeth and like a fish taking bait begins nibbling on her earlobe. The woman begins choking on her gyro as Humphrey makes his escape, tripping into a puddle of mud as he drops her earring on the sidewalk. She runs after him down the street while Desvot sits back cackling into tears. In about fifteen minutes he returns with her undergarments in his teeth, “I got for thee a souvenir.”

            “How did thou even get those from her?”

            “I just asked her for them because I heard that thou have been running in short supply of undergarments as of late. Here, try them on,” he throws them on Desvot’s face whose hands swat them off a second after impact.

            “Those smell just like Thine Own underpants. I never had any clue thou wore women’s underwear before,” Desvot chuckles.

            “Why dost thou know what mine underpants even smell like?”

            Just as the two are near to breaking into a fistfight a female member of the Baton approaches with a sturdy, timber tonfa. “Relax thine rough-goings ye ruffians; for if thou wilt not cease thine street-fighting, I shall take you to the station by force. Arms on the stand; I must pat you down to search for weapons.”

III.

            The door to Baz’s Barrel Spa is located at the end of an alleyway past the same fearmongering graffiti as That he had previously wandered past where he had met Solomon; the same logographic labeled beneath with FEAR is tagged two times on the walls of this path. At the end of the alley a door is open with a desk inside, standing behind which is a familiar face he cannot quite put a name to. Having a burlier, harrier body than that face which he knows it to be, he decides he must just be a close relative of someone he knows.

            “What happened to ye lad? Ye look like ya’ve been mangled by something mighty ferocious,” the man who must be Baz asks as he gets to the counter.

            “Papercut,” Levity leaves his fabrication brusque.

            “One hell of a papercut; must’ve been right on an artery to bleed ye so badly.”

            “So I hear thou art the owner of a barrel spa? May I make an inquiry of thine pricing?”

            “It’s four silver per individual, or two apiece for groups,” he points to a small sign behind him.

            Levity digs deep into his haversack and pulls out four silver pieces, “I would like one barrel spa session please, Baz is it?”

            Baz takes the four silver pieces and drops a colorless fluid from an eyedropper on them watching the liquid turn blue. He wipes off the authenticated silver pieces and throws them in his drawer “Thank ye kindly; I’ll have ye enter this door to your left – or right I suppose – and follow my brother to the locker room. May I have a name please?”

            “Sir Nicholas Levity, most chaste knight in all the land.”

            “Really… I’ve never met a most chaste knight before.”

            Levity takes the door and enters a waiting room where every chair is empty. He picks up a newspaper and reads of Gruceti’s devastation; innocent civilians slaughtered by the Baton; holy men of any other faith than Bollingism imprisoned; a journalist executed for an article titled Don’t Upseti the Gruceti: How a Crybaby Tyrant Treats Dissent with Violence.

            The door to the locker room opens, “I have an appointment with Sir Nicholas Levity.”

            “That would be me, sir,” he stands up and approaches a man with the same face as Baz yet with a curly mustache.

            “My name is Zabar, if you would follow me please,” he leads him through a door to the locker room where he opens the metal door number eight, “If you would undress, place your belongings in this locker, and put on this towel please.” Zabar turns his back and Levity follows these instructions, returns his Kris and helmet to his haversack, and places it in the locker. “Now follow me to the barrel spa,” he opens the next door into a wooded interior akin to a sauna but lined with barrels. He wheels one over with water sloshing over the side, “If you would please remove your towel and enter the barrel.” He turns his back; Levity removes his towel and steps into the barrel where the steaming water soothes his skin. Zabar turns around, places the two halves of the lid around Levity’s head which he padlocks together.

            “Hey, what is the meaning of this?” He tries to push the lid off but it stays in place.

            “It’s for your own safety,” Zabar replies before gagging Levity and wheeling him forward through two swinging doors onto a spacious stage where he tears off the mustache to reveal himself to be none other than the thieving Thraxus! He throws over a cape, dons a trilby, and the curtains fly open. Leaving the barrel centerstage, he walks forward to a crate from which he pulls a spear, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I welcome one and all to tonight’s special: Thraxus’ Thaumaturgy – The Skewered Assistant.” There is a roaring applause before he takes out a blindfold and places it over his head. After a moment of aiming the spear just perfectly at the barrel he pulls back and sends it straight through the center of the barrel that if Levity had not swerved his torso would have pierced his stomach. He begins jostling himself in place to tip the barrel as Thraxus reaches into the crate for another spear; he aims it like the last and sends it forward again only to miss and stick it into the stage floor. He pulls his blindfold up to peek at the barrel only to notice he hasn’t killed Levity yet. “Sirs and Madams, it is time now for my signature Devastation of Dirks!” Thraxus pulls from the air by some astounding sleight of hand two cinquedeas which are clearly not dirks.

            Levity can hear someone in the audience shouting, “Get him in the head! Plant it in his skull!” Looking closely for the source of this commotion Levity is quick to catch the eyes of an ever-excited Jacarbi cheering on the cutthroat Thraxus. He leaves the blindfold pulled so slightly above his right eye the audience cannot even tell and sends a cinquedea soaring like a star toward his face that he bobs down into the barrel to dodge. Thraxus gets frustrated and pulls from the crate a jar containing four Moray Eels and approaches the screaming man-in-a-barrel to dump them inside with him. They rub their mucous, unscaled, serpentine bodies around his sides and tickle his flesh with their phlegmatic fins. He starts squirming around like a rabid salamander and nearly manages to tip the barrel on its side as Thraxus darts a dozen more ‘dirks’ in rapid succession at him. He ducks his head in the barrel again, though one cinquedea pierces the side and scrapes his stomach slight enough to contort his face into a compact cringe. Thraxus turns his back to retrieve a meat cleaver from the crate as Levity uses his hands to push the spear and cinquedea that has stuck through the barrel onto the stage floor. He begins punching at the lid of the crate to break himself out while one of the starving eels in its hunger decides to sink a set of sharp fangs into his Achille’s heel; he breaks through the top of the crate next to the hole to get an arm out. Thraxus sends the cleaver spinning through the air and implants it in the top of the barrel.

            “He’s cheating! I can see him peeking through the blindfold!” A man in the audience heckles as he turns for a tomahawk.

            Thraxus slips his blindfold back over his eyes, “I understand not what thou art referring to; take it for thineself and see that beneath the blindfold’s shaded shroud is naught but utter blindness.” He turns around most the way to the barrel and by some misfortunate mischance sends the tomahawk tumbling into the seats of the audience where it chops into the seat behind Jacarbi’s translucent spirit.

            “Hey! Carful with that thing! You could’ve killed me with that!” Jacarbi swallows a fistful of glistening, buttered popcorn that falls onto his seat once it digests. “Let me try,” he says taking the tomahawk and sending it brisking a millimeter past Thraxus’ right ear and forward just a hair to the side of Levity’s left all the while its momentum brings it sonic spiraling where sticks into the wall. Levity takes this opportunity to unwedge the axehead from the barrel and brings back his hand, now sending it straight into Thraxus’ right foot. He wails all the while Levity jostles until at last the barrel tips over and breaks open on the floor. Jacarbi starts back his heckling, “Hah! Look! That asshole still has a moray stuck on his – oh, uh… My bad, that’s not an eel.”

            “I should’ve just stabbed that ass outright,” Thraxus chunters as he outcries in agony; the tomahawk is removed from his foot. Levity takes the spear from the stage and sends it back into the same foot as the tomahawk had been before running backstage to find his clothes all burnt in a fire by his inimical archenemy. His haversack although is still in the locker, from which he pulls his helmet and a bandana that he ties into a loincloth. He pulls out his Kris and runs back onstage to see Thraxus has fled in a pathway of arterial spray.

IV.

            “Ye do not by chance have a cabbagery license? The fine for selling cabbage without a license is not so mild as it once was,” the Baton officer asks Humphrey and Desvot who are both bent over with their hands on the cabbage stand; Desvot is currently being frisked.

            “If I say yes wilt thou promise not to check my back pocket?” Humphrey asks with a wave of his behind. The officer rolls her eyes and once she’s done frisking Desvot immediately pats his back pockets to notice that they’re empty.

            “There is not a thing to be found in your back pockets.”

            “Check again,” Humphrey says with a grin spreading over his face. The baton officer reaches inside and feels around his back pockets. “Mmm do that some more, that feels nice.”

            “I told you sir; they are both empty. Dost thou have thine cabbagery license in another pocket by chance?”

            “You could try checking my front pocket.”

            “Your what?” She begins to reach around to his two front pockets and finds them both to be empty as well.

            “Wrong front pocket, madam Baton.”

            “Which front pocket did you mean then?”

            Just before Humphrey can open his mouth to get him into any deeper trouble, from nowhere a lunatic in a loincloth knocks the officer over the head with a haversack that is much heavier than one would expect for the size. “Ye are not getting into any trouble, are ye?” Levity asks looking over the scene.

            Humphrey picks up the pair of panties off the ground and inconspicuously stashes them in his left pocket, “No trouble at all; what makes thou believe us to have gotten in any trouble?” They all look down at the unconscious Baton officer.

            “Should we do something about her?” Desvot looks around for somewhere to hide her.

            “How about that abandoned bratwurst cart down the street?” Humphrey points.

            “Great idea. Say, why art thou not wearing any clothes? It’s just that usually I see clothes dressed upon thee when thou art in public,” Desvot takes the officer’s feet.

            “Long story; I shall elaborate at a later time, but meanwhile I must get some rest. It has been quite an eventful evening,” Levity opens the doors to Jovial Nights.

            “Though thou have only been awake for about four hours,” Humphrey states as the door swings shut behind him. He takes the officer’s hands and they sidle to the abandoned bratwurst cart where they deposit her.

            Jovial Nights is booming tonight, a whistle catches Levity’s attention upon his entry. “Hey there cutie, what’re you up to tonight?” A woman at the counter eyeballs him, checks out his body, lands on his eyes.

            “I’m going to my room to write about my virginity for a few hours. Thou may have sex with Desvot though if thou so desire; I hear he’s into that sort of thing. He should be entering with this stouter sir in about a minute or so. He should be the more fragrant fellow.”

            “I don’t want Desvot, though. I want thee.”

            “Sorry, but thou’rt not a virgin; far too libidinous to be my lass; Desvot should be perfect to spend the night with; I should really be going.” He takes no time to return to his room where he writes a ten-page-long run-on sentence describing both how chaste he is and how heart-throbbingly beauteous Delcita Lavie is to him.

            Desvot comes back into Jovial Nights with Humphrey after about a minute and the lady at the bar switches places with Humphrey – who hasn’t had a drink in hours – while she follows Desvot into his room. Outside Jovial Nights the sky flicks out earlier than usual and in the distance the fury of an infinitude of torches approaches Great Trickle; the sound of a giant’s footsteps dragging a ball and chain behind it through the dirt. A tall tree tips over and tears through the roof of a small hut far in the horizon.

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