1: FADED LESA

There is a tale told of how -- some time around the 1600th year before the Fragmentation of The World into The Empire and The Dross -- the House of the Ellonia came to the throne of Harmadree. Whether it is true or not is a matter beyond human judgement, but it is believed by the common folk of the Dour Mountains region of that land, and it is as likely as many of the other histories of the early days of The World. Besides, it has the feel of truth, and that must surely count for as much as any more objective reckonings of historical accuracy.

The tale goes maybe like this:

# # #

The arms of death had almost completely embraced the old chieftain -- everyone knew it, including himself. For days he had been confined to his tent, lying abed and cursing steadily, but steadily more weakly. His face was a grey, putty-like mask, the skin hanging in wrinkles from the all-too-visible bones. Sometimes his eyes showed the clear blueness they had possessed of old, but more often the light in them shone but dimly -- unless, as sometimes happened, his wrath rose and his eyes blazed briefly with the glare of madness.

It had been his own fault: that was why he was so unremittingly furious with his shamans, his nurses and his wife, Lesa the Faded. None of them could legitimately be blamed for the fact that, despite all their chidings, he had insisted -- at his age! -- in going out on a storgh hunt with the younger warriors of the tribe. He did blame them, of course, nonetheless -- he blamed them for not being legitimately blamable, although that was only among the more minor of their many offences. Much worse was the fact that nobody had thought to tell him that marrowsuckers had become stronger, wilier, more vicious and more swift-moving during the years since last he had hunted one. The blasted reptile had taken a fist-sized hunk out of his left calf muscle: a lesser man might have screamed and fainted; the old chieftain, made of sterner stuff, had merely fainted. The next he had known he had been back here in his tent, struggling to avoid drowning in the many poultices and potions his shamans had insisted on thrusting at or into him.

That was the shamans' major crime. Had he not had to waste so much energy in fighting off their attentions he might have been able to concentrate his venerable mind on the more important matter of curing his wound. As it was, the exposed flesh had been allowed to rot. The rot had been eating him up these past three weeks, and now he knew it was encroaching close upon his heart, the seat of his emotions and all his higher mental functions.

The crime of his nurses was that of being nurses. A traditionalist, he detested nurses as much as the illnesses which they feigned to tend. In the early days after his injury he'd been able to strike out at them with something like full force, squashing noses and breaking the occasional satisfyingly important bone, but now he was reduced to impotence as they bathed him in their fresh, bright and -- worst of all -- irremediably cheerful smiles. There was no escaping their merry cries of "Good morning, Overlord of the Sky and All That Depends Therefrom, and how are we feeling today?" or, most loathsome of all, "Have we moved our bowels this morning?", followed by an ignominious wrestling behind him with the bedclothes and an icily cold chamberpot.

Ach! Were he fit enough he'd pronounce a mandatory sentence of death, throughout the Universe, on all the craven scum who pretended to the profession of nursehood.

But their crimes -- nurses and shamans alike -- were as nothing compared with the vile sin committed against him by his Lesa the Faded.

Deliberately, purely in order to spite him for his quite accidental liaison with a visiting Sanjranian priestess, his vixen of a wife had borne his two sons in the wrong order!

To call the elder, Ellonium, a milksop would have been to invite protests from all the milksops of the region. A lanky vegetarian youth with a thin face and a pimply nose, Ellonium was at his happiest when going for -- very short -- country rambles with his mother in order to gather nosegays with which he might bedeck his tent. The old chieftain had first begun to suspect the feeble-mindedness of his firstborn when the youth had been only six or seven, and his father had discovered him tickling a kitten rather than pulling its legs off, like any self-respecting future warlord. Now, though Ellonium had been informally banished forever from his father's sight, the old man could still sometimes hear him, when the wind blew southward across the camp, singing lullabies to the flowers in his tent.

Thog, now -- ah, Thog, the younger boy, was something different. Stockily built and steadfastly unimaginative, Thog was a lad after his father's heart. Undisputed champion for several years now in the tribe's annual wrestling and gouging contests, he was a master of every weapon except the sword, a childhood misapprehension concerning the use of which had cost him the first two fingers of his right hand. Thog the Squat, as the tribesmen affectionately called him, looked less like a human being than like a shaved grizzly bear, but he was the apple of his father's eye for all that.

Yet, by every law known to humankind -- and the old chieftain should know, being the hereditary Overlord of the Sky and All That Depends Therefrom -- it would be Ellonium, not Thog, who would succeed to the Mandrake Chair in a few days' time. How the dying man cursed his own procrastination of early years! Often enough he'd decided that his elder son should encounter some inexplicable but heartwarmingly fatal accident, but always he'd put off the execution of the deed, preferring to prolong the thrill of anticipation . . . and now, now he lay on his deathbed and it was too late to thwart Lesa the Faded's malicious designs!

Or was it?

Thought did not come easy to the old chieftain. He tried to wrinkle yet further his already entangledly wrinkled brow. There was something he'd once heard about . . . Perhaps there was a way in which he might leave at least a part of his territory to his favoured son . . .

In a weak voice he called for his chief henchman. "Mikra-Maus! Mikra-Maus!"

# # #

Four burly warriors carried the old chieftain out into the weak sunlight for what everybody knew was to be the last time. Lesa the Faded wept copiously -- and probably falsely -- by the side of his rude stretcher while his elder son, Ellonium, simpered nearby. With some difficulty Thog was lured away from a particularly exciting stomach-punching contest in which he had been engaged.

The light in the old man's blue eyes waxed to a feverish brightness as Mikra-Maus reverentially placed the ancestral longbow and the ancestral arrow across the shrunken chest. The chieftain's claw-like fingers scrabbled at the haft.

"It is the rule of our people," wheezed the old warrior, "that on the death of a leader his eldest son should succeed him as ruler. However," he improvised frantically, "it is permitted that the father should also make provision for his younger offspring, and this I choose to do. Thog, my lad, come close to me."

"Why?" said Thog blankly. It was dawning on him that the old codger looked a bit peaky this morning -- had been for the past few days, in fact. Must have been one heck of a binge . . .

"Never mind that now, my boy," croaked the chieftain. "I bequeath to you as much of my territory as will lie outside a circle around this spot, a circle of radius as great as the distance that you can shoot the ancestral arrow. Here, fine fellow -- take the bow, and loose the arrow!"

Thog looked momentarily confused -- geometry had never been his strong point -- but he accepted the intricately carved weapon eagerly enough. Firing arrows was something he understood. The longbow seemed like a living, throbbing creature in his hands as he nocked the obscenely wrought arrow -- point foremost, as he had been laboriously taught -- to the singing ancestral string.

The surrounding warriors backed off warily.

"Do not loose your shaft in the direction of the morning sun," hissed Mikra-Maus. His wizened eyes narrowed. "There's someone over there."

Thog, distracted by the partly heard whisper, stared in the appropriate direction. There was indeed someone there, about a hundred metres off -- just within arrow-range -- and walking through the mud away from the little gathering. It was difficult at first to tell whether the skinny figure was male or female, for it was clad in a long, rust-brown cloak that reached down almost as far as its naked ankles. He squinted. Above the neckline of the cloak was a head of scruffily cropped copper-coloured hair. A boy, he decided. He didn't like boys. He didn't like girls, either, which made his decision all the easier.

He tensed the bow.

"And do not fire your arrow too far," added Mikra-Maus. "Your father wished me to tell you that."

Thog scowled at him. It seemed clear the henchmen was trying to bamboozle him. The tribal territory was huge, as everyone knew -- at least five bowshots across -- so clearly Thog's best plan was to fire the arrow as far as possible. He wrinkled his nose, suddenly doubtful about this. He was better at geometry than he was at arithmetic.

"Father!" said Ellonium suddenly, seemingly at his mother's prompting. "Father, stop this!"

The old chieftain growled threateningly.

"Don't you see how unfair it is, Father?" Ellonium's voice was close to cracking. "Nasty Thog could simply let the arrow fall to his feet, and there'd I'd be, disinherited, the heir to none of your land at all!"

"That's what I ..." the chieftain began, but then thought better of it. "What do you propose instead, you pathetic young whelp?"

"I propose that I be the one that fires the arrow," said Ellonium after a few seconds' hasty consultation with Lesa the Faded, "and that I fall heir to all the ground that lies within the circle described by the place where the arrow should fall." This would still leave his brother with the lion's share of the inheritance, of course, but most of the tribal lands outside this immediate area were anyway worthless bog. Ellonium produced as much of a beaming grin as his ferret-like features could manage.

Thog looked at his brother. His puddle-coloured eyes crossed as he tried to follow the reasoning. If one of them didn't hurry up and fire an arrow, the brown-cloaked target would squelch out of range. At last he shrugged reluctantly and passed the ceremonial bow over to Ellonium, followed by the blackened, phallus-encrusted arrow.

"Do your worst with it, brother," he said.

Ellonium examined the bow curiously, then turned to gaze at Lesa the Faded. With a few movements of her eloquent fingers she mimed what he must do. As he nocked the arrow in an even clumsier parody of what Thog had done scant moments before, there came a weary whisper in his ear.

"As I told your brother," said Mikra-Maus, "take care not to loose your missile towards the morning sun. The stranger still walks there."

"Aw, come off it, ol' bozo," growled Thog. "Ain't you got no sense of fun? Let Ellonium try to spit the lad an' we can all have a bit of a laugh. 'Specially if -- fat chance for such a skinny limpwrist -- he succeeds."

Ellonium shrugged and turned deliberately away from the morning sun. Ahead of him the bogland stretched away from him greasily and emptily. He raised the bow high in front of him and drew back the string as far as it would go, the haft of the arrow feeling incongruous between his fingers. He tried to breathe steadily and easily.

From the outset it was obvious that the shot was poor. The arrow seemed to flutter and waddle in the air as it struggled through the first part of a feeble parabola. But then something -- the wind perhaps? -- seemed to catch it. To Ellonium and the others it was as if the arrow had suddenly been given a fresh injection of strength, shrugged its shoulders and decided to persevere. In a slow graceful arc it began, paradoxically, to rise higher above the fetid, moss-greened ground. Then the wind must have taken it again, for at ever increasing speed it curved up and high over their heads, so that the little party, mouths hanging open, had to turn on their heels to watch its flight.

Straight as -- well, straight as an arrow, actually, it whistled and whooped directly towards the caped figure, now further than two hundred metres away.

With a firm choccckkk! -- like the sound of an axe slammed into a ripe cantaloupe, mused Ellonium -- it slammed into the stranger's back, neatly between the shoulderblades.

Ellonium closed his eyes in misery. That he, a lifelong pacifist and vegetarian, should inadvertently have caused the death of a fellow human being. His gorge rose. It had been a long time -- weeks and weeks, for sure -- since he'd last had an accident like this, but age hadn't made his anguish seem any easier to bear.

"Look," said his mother's voice. "It's a miracle."

Reluctantly he prised one eye open.

The stranger still stood -- no, more than that: the stranger was still walking unconcernedly away from them, despite the evil-looking arrow protruding jauntily behind.

"Armour," said Mikra-Maus in wondering tones. "The boy must be wearing thick leather armour under that cape of his. That's the only possible explanation. But even then the impact should've knocked him flat on his . . ."

The old man's words died away into a mumble.

"To horse!" cried Thog gleefully. "I'll deal with this!"

Obediently a couple of warriors fetched the tribal horse. Thog took its reins and began to check his weaponry: swords, daggers, axes, spears, morningstars, maces . . .

"No!" shrieked Lesa the Faded when she saw what was up. "That person is a stranger and therefore our guest. Fetch him back here so that we may extend our hospitality to him, and tend any wound that he might have."

Thog looked confused.

"Kill 'im," grunted the old chieftain. "The way I see it, he's a trespasser on our land. Quartering's the only language trespassers understand."

"No, father," said Ellonium pluckily, finding his voice at last. "I shall pursue the lad myself and bid him share our supper while mother draws the arrow from him and bathes his wound."

"Beware the Swamp of Thomasina!" cried Lesa the Faded, her hands wringing at her ample bosom. "The Mutant Hordes of the Dark Masters who dwell there would eat you as soon as look at you! And you know how poorly you can become if you get your feet wet."

The old man humphed and grumphed, but there was nothing he could do from his bed. Finding courage from who knows where, Ellonium shouldered aside his younger brother. Scrambling into the saddle in a flurry of limbs, he spurred the ancestral horse, and soon had left the very different cries of his mother and brother behind.

# # #

The day grew hot, and still Ellonium rode in pursuit of the stranger. The horse was old and overweight, but this hardly explained the fact that, however much he raked at the beast's barrel with his spurs, the rust-caped youth remained a couple of hundred metres ahead of him. To add to his perplexity, the slight figure seemed to be doing no more than ambling along, and once or twice even paused for a moment to regard solemnly a clump of sphagnum. He wondered if the stranger might be a chimera, a spectre sent by the Gods to test his valour and stamina so that they might be assured of his suitability to inherit a parcel of his father's land.

It came to him suddenly that the relevant parcel had already become an extremely big one, and was growing even more so by the minute. Twisting in the saddle, he stared back the way he had come and realized that he had already crossed two broad tracts of bogland, not to mention the range of rolling hills between them. Very soon, he reckoned, he and the enigmatic youth whom he was so doggedly following would reach the shores of the vile Swamp of (there was a loud splash and the ancestral horse lurched beneath him) Thomasina.

As he struggled to pull the beast back ashore, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the object of his pursuit was standing not ten metres away, watching him soberly. Even that swift glance was enough to tell him that this was no boy, as he'd thought, but a young woman.

Once he and the horse were safely back on dry land he took another look. The woman was unlike any other that he'd seen before. In the light of the afternoon sun her short frondy hair looked as if it had been blown from copper. Her hands and her feet were small and pale; her body seemed to him so slight that a gust of wind might bear her away. She stared at him frankly, her air one of complete composure, and he realized that her eyes, the yellow-green of a cat's eyes, were as large as all The World. The dully feathered shaft of the ancestral arrow peeped at him over her shoulder, but he barely noticed.

"Hurry up and get yourself riding again," she said. "We've got a long way to go before this day is done."

"I came to apologize . . ." he began. His throat seemed full of treacle. He tried again. "Stranger lady," he said, "you . . ."

"Stranger than whom?"

"Stranger than . . . No! That's not what I meant. No, you seem perfectly normal to . . ."

Two pink spots appeared abruptly on the woman's face, one at the tip of each cheekbone. "'Strange' I can cope with," she said sourly, "but continents have been sunk for less than a 'perfectly normal'."

"That's not what I . . ." Ellonium began again, tumbling eagerly from the saddle. "Let me offer you my horse, so that you may rest your . . ."

I'm in love! he thought through the clamour of his heart's singing. I, who never thought that such a pure and wondrous emotion dwelt within me -- except towards my mother, of course, but that's different -- I, Ellonium, heir to the tribal bogland: I -- AM -- IN -- LOVE.

"I often have that effect on men," said the woman coolly, the temper fading from her face as rapidly as it had appeared, "but it's nice to know that I haven't lost my touch. Life begins at a couple of billion, say I." She looked distractedly at her fingernails; her smile told him that she judged them perfect. "Now saddle yourself up, my boy, and carry on following me. We've got to go all the way round the Swamp of Thomasina before nightfall -- I've no fancy to travel in the dark, have you? Come on! Bat away the tweety bluebirds and the little pink puffy hearts from around your head and let's get moving."

She turned away suddenly, and immediately she was once more a couple of hundred metres away. She stood impatiently by the swampside as he clambered back into the saddle.

Love! he thought anew once the ancestral horse was again jogging arhythmically beneath him. Isn't love a marvellous thing? Already I feel like a new man -- twice as strong, twice as intelligent, twice as . . . twice as well hung as ever I was before!

In the distance, he could see the shoulders of his adored one shake, and for just a moment he feared that she might be in some distress. He relaxed in the saddle as she continued to walk steadily away from him.

Poetry! he thought. Yes! That's what impassioned young swains are supposed to compose for the objects of their adorations. I have it! I have it! I'll form an epic ballad, stuffed with heroic couplings and stanzas by the fathom, entwining the two driving ardours of my existence -- vegetarianism and my yearnings for the affections of this fair lady! She'll like that: it'll win her for me, for sure! It's the next best thing I can offer her aside from dying of unrequited passion. "She's the apple of my eye" -- yes, that's good, that's good! "A bright marrow hath piercèd my heart" -- yea: the words are singing within me! Now, if I can only find a rhyme for "kumquat" . . .

2: LESA FADING

Darkness was falling by the time the young woman strolled back into the tribe's camp. Catching up with her at last, Ellonium was certain that darkness really should have fallen some considerable while before -- about a week and a half, at a guess -- but he saw no reason to complain. Thanks to his father's idiosyncratic injunction and the short-haired lady's incomparable walking skills, he was now the ordained ruler of a territory larger than any that the tribe had ever envisaged in even their wildest dreams. From today he, Ellonium, could proudly boast, as his father had never been able to do, that he was in truth the undisputed Overlord of the Sky and All That Depends Therefrom! Moreover, he was four hundred and thirty-eight stanzas into what he had come to recognize was already a veritable lyrical bonanza.

The old chieftain took one baleful look at the slender woman and another at his elder son, who'd got his foot tangled in his stirrup while attempted to dismount. Then he died.

The tribesmen, awed, fell to their knees. "Our leader is dead. Long live Ellonium," intoned Mikra-Maus, speaking for all of them.

"Yes," said the strange woman quietly, standing off to one side, forgotten by everyone else there except the new Overlord of the Sky and All That Depends Therefrom, "long live Ellonium indeed."

# # #

Later that night, once the perfunctory funeral was over and the under-provisioned celebrations were in the fullest swing they were likely to manage, Ellonium, somewhat tiddly on his mother's sweet-rosehip pick-me-up, sought out the woman who had, quite literally, led him to his position of pre-eminence. She was sitting cross-legged in the flickering shadows well away from the roaring campfire and the banquet table, humming an atonal tune to herself. In the muted light her strange eyes seemed to glow.

"I must proffer you my thanks, fair lady," said Ellonium, bowing lankly.

"Consider them proffered," she said. "Come here. Sit down beside me." She patted a miraculously dry piece of ground next to her. "You'll be wondering what you can offer me in return for the tremendous favour I've done you. Well, wonder no more: I've taken the burden of decision off your shoulders. You can marry me."

Ellonium stared at her, speechless. He had loved her -- yea, passionately and true -- for the whole of a livelong day, which was longer than he could remember having felt any strong emotion about anything before, unless you counted his mother. And, come to think of it, her spinach bake. But marriage -- that was something he had never contemplated. According to all that he had read, and all that he had heard from the troubadors who occasionally passed hastily through these lands, the next steps along the path of true love consisted of silent yearnings, unspoken glances, insuperable obstacles, broken trysts, cureless afflictions, ashen countenances and, after a decorous period of pining, a mordant death. There seemed to him something vaguely improper about the prospect of marriage to the woman of his dreams. But then he thought of his ballad, and of how he might be able to recite it to her in its entirety rather than merely having to smuggle her the occasional stanza or two in the guise of a laundry list.

His mouth snapped shut and his jaw adopted a new resolve.

"Right willingly shall I take you to my heart, fair lady," he said grandly, sweeping his arm around as if to embrace the Sky and All That Depended Therefrom, as he now had every right to do. "To my heart and to my bed, and everything that I have I shall share with you."

"We can discuss the 'bed' part of that later, and probably acrimoniously," said the woman. More loudly she said: "I accept your proposal, King Ellonium -- 'King', for that is what people shall come to call you. There's no need for us to bother with a long engagement, don't you think? We can just hop over and tell your mother and that'll be that."

She pulled herself to her feet, brushed off her cape -- even though for some unaccountable reason the mud and slime that adhered immovably to everything else seemed to shun her and her clothing -- and led him by the hand towards the campfire.

"Er, what's your name?" he stuttered as they picked their way.

"You may choose the name by which you call me," she said.

"Lesa?"

"Apart from that."

He tripped over a root and swore.

"That's a nice name," she said brightly. "You may call me Maglittle."

3: LESA, FADED

Ellonium was weeping. Two years had passed since his nuptial night, and the tiny tribal territory that his father had ruled was now the core of a large nation bordering the Swamp of Thomasina. On that bizarrely long day when he had pursued Maglittle wherever she might lead him, he had unknowingly tracked out a colossal area of bogland and jungle, much of it poor but also much of it, especially along the river valleys and in the open land around the north of the swamp, fertile and rich. The minor tribes that had inhabited those regions in the old chieftain's day had with various degrees of gratitude conceded Ellonium's rule over them, and he in return had brought to them a hitherto unthought-of prosperity. Even the Kindelwuersten Kindlybears, the gentle folk who dwelt along the fringes of the Swamp of Thomasina, had drawn themselves from their contemplations of the goodnesses of Nature long enough to acknowledge a truce between themselves and his people; Ellonium even had hopes, never mentioned to his wife, that one day the ancient Temple of Ascidian, built at the swamp's heart by a race of people who had been long gone from this land before history had begun, would come under his sway. But that was to look far ahead. In the mean time, the threat from the Mutant Hordes of the swamp had been at least temporarily contained: some of the gloomier of his shamans predicted that the foul beasts would soon erupt from their heartland and reclaim the territory they regarded as theirs, but for the moment that hazard seemed as far distant as the incorporation of the Temple of Ascidian into his realm, and the recently designed banners of the Dour Mountains of Harmadree fluttered carelessly above the turrets of Thog City (pop. 1706), the capital which Ellonium had founded on the shore due south of his father's old camp, and which he had so-named in a not-so-subtle but apparently successful attempt to quell any rebellious thoughts that his brother might nurture.

The sun shone each day brightly on the Dour Mountains of Harmadree, as if it would do so for all the rest of eternity.

And yet Ellonium wept.

His brother looked at him unsympathetically. They were in the regal apartments in the North Tower of Castle Thog -- a building only somewhat less grand than its name. Sunlight beamed in through the narrow windows and played across the crudely tiled floor. From outside there were the faint sounds of the city going about its work. The wind, blowing today from the north, brought with it the sweet scents of rotting vegetation and fresh woodsmoke.

"You got everything," said Thog roughly. "You got the kingdom. You got the power. You got the doxy, for what the scrawny midget's worth. You got no cause to go blubbing your eyes out, like girls do."

"I've got everything but the thing I want," sobbed Ellonium.

"Wossat?" Thog's brows, undecided as to whether to knit or beetle, wrestled furiously.

"The 'doxy', as you call her. Maglittle!"

The right eyebrow seemed to have the left in an armlock, but the contest was clearly far from over.

"But you and her, you tied the knot, di'n you? Spliced the mainbrace? I thought you was as close as chalk and cheese. What you mean you ain't got the doxy?" Thog picked up a jug of mead from a jewel-encrusted table and drained it at a draught. Smacking his lips, he picked up another.

Ellonium plucked at the hem of his lavishly embroidered robe, staring beyond it to the floor. His brother was coarse of locution, yet Ellonium recoiled from the prospect of expressing himself in the same vulgar terms. How to explain to him in a way that he'll understand? he thought. As ever, his roving mind fell upon its eld-loved topic.

He imagined himself to be in a marketplace. All around him were stalls displaying the ripest and richest products of the farms and fields of the Dour Mountains. But, to Ellonium's mind's eye, the brightly coloured fruits and vegetables of the displays had an additional, fresh meaning: they were also similes and metaphors rendered into physical form, so that he could pick and choose among them as he wished. He felt his inner face wrinkle with indecision as he approached the first stall. The stall-holder beamed ruddily at him.

Melons. Perhaps, in the circumstances, not. Nodding politely to the now disappointed countryman, Ellonium moved slowly away towards the next display. Maybe pawpaws weren't what he was looking for, either.

He controlled his breathing, forcing himself not to panic. The market was huge: he was aware without having to look that it stretched for hundreds of metres if not hundreds of kilometres to every side of him. Unfortunately, however, he appeared to be the solitary customer, which meant that the fruit- and vegetable-sellers were eagerly watching his every move, hoping that their monarch would choose to purchase their products, and theirs alone. He felt as if he were at the focal point of a lens, his skin in danger of frazzling in the hot sunlight of their stares.

Shiftily he continued to browse. Leeks were out, obviously, as were bananas and corn on the cob and especially aubergines. He gave the strawberries barely a glance, puzzled over a pair of brussels sprouts and a stick of rhubarb before hastily rejecting them -- likewise the gherkins and the courgettes -- and regarded the mangoes, figs, peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries, oyster plants and walnuts in frank dismay. A towering heap of passionfruit made him shudder audibly.

Celery, carrots, parsnips, plums, fennel, runner beans, gooseberries, jackfruits . . . the nightmare continued. By now Ellonium was sprinting in full hysteria up and down the aisles of his vast mental marketplace, seeing the strongly coloured displays as little more than blurs of light as he sped past them. The expressions on the faces of the stall-holders merged into a single, tooth-packed, kilometres-long leer. Chicory, chick-peas, chard, chives, checkerberries, cherimoyas and chillies smeared past him in a kaleidoscopic cornucopia. Lingonberries, lychees, loquats, limes and loganberries -- a thin scream was trickling from the sides of his mouth -- tangeloes, tangerines, tamarinds, turnips and tomatoes. A plantain cackled at him, a jaboticaba hooted, an olive ogled, a horse-radish whinnied and he was perfectly certain he heard a boysenberry belch. Huckleberries snapped at his heels like crazed terriers, while sapodillas spat and scallions scowled. His breath was coming in cruel, choking whoops as he pounded onwards, the thunder of the pursuing produce -- a mountain of tumbling fruits and vegetables dwarfing him as it trundled menacingly after him -- seeming to echo at him from the very walls of The World.

With one last despairing scream he found himself back on the wooden throne of his kingly apartments. Thog was eyeing him alarmedly.

"What you bin doing?"

"Trying to think of a way to explain my problem to you," gasped Ellonium. Cold sweat was pouring from his forehead and down the concavity of his chest. "It's a bit . . . well, personal."

"Just say it, man!" Thog hurled another empty jug towards the pile in the corner. "Say it straight out! I can take it. I'm a warrior."

"Well, you know what . . . er . . . kohlrabi is."

"Greens, right?"

"Yes, that's it. And . . . um . . . guavas. And custard apples and persimmon. Not to mention grapes."

"Yes. Girls' stuff."

"Well, Maglittle isn't letting me make a fruit salad out of those."

Thog blanched. "I say, that's a bit close to the knuckle, brother!"

"I couldn't think of a more refined way to put it. I . . ."

"Yes, but -- what if Mother had heard you?"

The two men looked guiltily around the room's gilded walls, as if Lesa the Faded might at any moment spring from behind a panel and swoon at them. Reassured, they nevertheless moved closer to each other and began to speak in quieter, more urgent tones.

"Right from the outset she's been the same," said Ellonium. "The very night of our marriage, when I was expecting . . . well, not much, because I'd been drinking a lot, but at least a bit of a squash, or maybe even an endive . . ."

"A cuddle, you mean?"

"Yes, if you have to put it as crudely as that. But she said no way, not ever, that wasn't what she'd married me for. What she'd married me for was to install me as ruler over the Dour Mountains of Harmadree for as long as we both should live -- which, she hinted darkly, would be a very long time indeed, or else."

"Glug," went Thog's throat as another pint of mead disappeared. "Couldn't you have, er, truffled?"

"I truffled to the point of mushrooming!" exclaimed Ellonium, slapping his thigh to emphasize the point. "'Honeydew,' I said to her, as civil as you'd wish, 'honeydew, my sweet mamey apple, a married man needs his lentils, his okra and his onions. To deny him those is to deny the dictates of his inmost gumbo.' But all she said was: 'Hagberries!' I didn't know what she meant then, but" -- he began to sob afresh -- "I do now."

"Well, I still don't." Thog's right eyebrow had been thrown right out of the ring, but was gamely crawling back in.

"That first night, I tried to follow her into our tent. The very moment I crossed the threshold she . . . changed. It was hideous -- hideous!"

Thog said nothing, just stared glumly at the last jug of mead. He had the feeling that courtesy dictated he should leave it for his brother, but he also had the feeling that courtesy was nothing but a blasted nuisance. He reached for it.

"There, in the moonlight," Ellonium was continuing, "she altered from the trim young bunch of spring greens I'd been following all day into . . . into a crab apple! She looked as ancient as if she'd been in her grave six weeks. Her head was shiny -- not a hair on it -- but her nostrils more than compensated for that. Dewlaps . . . pimples . . . boils . . . She gave me a terrible toothless smile, and just then her glass eye dropped out. I . . . I'm not ashamed to admit, brother, that I fainted."

"Sissy."

"And it was the same every night after that, until finally I couldn't take it any more, and gave up. Since then I've been perfecting my epic ballad, born out of my ardour for her, but she refuses to listen to me declaim it. What can I do?"

His final wail was truly piteous. He threw his face down onto his forearms and whimpered.

Courtesy be damned: Thog drained the final dregs of the mead.

"You've thought of getting yourself a bit of asparagus on the side?" he said to his brother's convulsing shoulders. "I know a perky little slice of civet fruit as'll give a man . . ."

"It's no use! It's her that I want -- not some substitute! Oh, woe . . ."

Thog shifted in his seat uneasily. After a last exchange of forearm smashes his brows declared a truce. "Well, brother," he said ponderously, "not to set too fine a point on it, you could always just put out the lights. As the old tribal saying goes, in the night all manzanillas are . . . well, whatever colour manzanillas are. As of this moment I can't rightly recollect. But you get my dri--"

"You fool!" bleated Ellonium, wrenching at the cloth of his robe and staring viciously at his brother through bloodshot eyes. "That's no help at all!"

"Whyever not?"

"Because she glows in the dark!"

4: STAINLESS ALYSS

She's got to sleep sometime, thought Thog grimly as he prowled the castle that night, sharpening the blade of his favourite sword. My brother may not be much, but I owe him something -- didn't he go and name a whole city (pop. 1706) in my honour, after all? I'll rid him of his soursop, and then perhaps he can find himself a complaisant jujube and reign happily ever after.

The queen, who never slept any time, smiled as she listened to his thoughts. Thog didn't know it yet, but he was going to have tremendous difficulty tonight -- and any other night -- finding his way through the castle's maze of corridors. The very next door he charged through should land him in -- yes, the swearing had started -- the castle midden.

Leaving him to his fate, she thought for a few seconds longer of the more important problems that faced her: Ellonium, and his happiness. She had really grown unconscionably fond of the gawky youth -- as fond as she could ever be of a mere mortal -- and she had no wish to hurt him unnecessarily. The thought of succumbing to his blandishments was momentarily appealing -- she liked a good laugh -- but only momentarily. No, far better to tell him at last of the reasons that had brought her here and had led her to create the nation of which he was now monarch. And, too, she should inform him of her plans for his future.

She issued a silent summons, and felt Ellonium, in his own bedchamber, suddenly jerk out of his fitful sleep. Half a minute later he was at her door.

He was staring at her, aghast, his knees beginning to fold beneath him . . .

"Oh," she said, "silly me. Sorry about that. Just habit." She swiftly readjusted the pimpled, dewlapped image of herself that she had projected into his mind. "There, is that better?"

His eyes told her that it was. Sitting in the middle of her bed, she looked to him as she always did during the day -- like a slim, wiry but somehow very feminine woman, dressed in incongruously boyish clothes. She ran her fingers through her hair absently, smiling affectionately at him.

"It's time that you and I had a talk," she said. "But you'd better keep your distance."

"A talk about what?"

"About the future we're going to share, you and I."

"Together?"

"Together. Not all of the time, and not quite in the way you might think, but together."

"Maglittle . . ."

"For a start, you should know that my real name is Alyss. 'Maglittle' is the name that you gave to me, and I'm happy enough to live with it. But Alyss is the name by which I've been known since time began -- and it's my name for myself, also. You presumably know it well." She preened.

"Er . . . no," said Ellonium. "Now look here, Maglittle, you once said that we'd rule the Dour Mountains of Harmadree together for a very long time. Just quite how long did you mean by that?"

"For a few thousand years." Pouting, she ignored his open mouth. "About three and a half thousand, to be exact. At least. After that, if you still want to, you can carry on ruling in my absence. But I need to be here, as the long-established queen of the Dour Mountains, in the year BF5070."

"You're immortal?" he said at last, wondering what 'BF' stood for. Not what it normally meant amid the ribald badinage of his infantry, he assumed.

"I'm surprised it surprises you," she said calmly. "You must have noticed that I am not . . . not as other women."

He looked at her dumbly, and she abruptly realized that he had had little to compare her with except his mother. Which meant that . . . It struck her that she'd been being crueller to him than she'd intended, these past two years. "I mean," she said gently, "mortal women don't shapeshift at will. They can't fly. They can't walk faster than a speeding horse, or make a single day endure for weeks."

She read in his face that this was all news to him. His mother couldn't do any of these things, of course, but obviously it had never dawned on him that his mother was a woman. She brushed his mind lightly and discovered that yes, indeed, he'd concluded that women were all magical, strange supernatural beings like herself. Except that other women grew old and eventually died. She wondered how he'd been able to derive some of the more fevered images involving herself that were currently clogging his mind.

"I'm not really a woman at all," she breathed. "I'm female, I think, inasmuch as that term has any meaning when applied to me, but it's only an illusion that I'm a woman. I've deceived you -- and I apologize for that: it's been a necessary deceit. With your collusion, I propose to continue that sham." She thought it best not to add that it would be pifflingly easy for her to enforce his cooperation -- enforce it in such a way that he would never even be aware that she had done so. She would rather that he be her willing partner in this enterprise.

"Why?"

"I told you. I need to be the queen here in the year BF5070, when a certain individual will come to Harmadree on a particularly important quest -- one that is so important that I don't exaggerate if I say that the future of The World hinges on it. Moreover, I need, with your help, to have guided the history of this nation in such a way that the conditions here are just right for that individual to have the best possible chances of attaining his goal and escaping afterwards with his life."

Unspoken questions were making a battleground of Ellonium's face. Again she brushed his mind, extracting from it a list.

She held up the little finger of her left hand, resting the index finger of her right hand on its tip. "One," she said. "No, I have no objections to your taking up with an occasional perky little slice of civet fruit on the side, as your brother so eloquently put it, so long as you're discreet in doing so. I think it would be good for you if you did. Indeed, as part of my plan you will spend extended periods away from the capital, so you may well wish to have a succession of families quite independent of your relationship with me.

"Two" -- she adjusted her fingers accordingly -- "if you value your good looks, such as they are, you won't even think the part about 'if she's not really a woman then -- yippee! -- doesn't that mean our marriage is null and void?', because that would be to cast a slur upon my form and my personality, which are perfect the way they are. As you can imagine, I can be very dangerous if someone makes me petulant."

Ellonium cowered. The sight cheered her up, and her voice was bubbling as she continued. "Three, in order that the people of our domains don't eventually rebel against what they might come to regard as our necromantic reign, we will perform a simple charade, whereby we will seem to grow old and die, to be succeeded on the throne by our children, who will of course look remarkably like us as they slowly grow old and die, to be succeeded by -- you follow my meaning?"

He nodded.

"Sometimes we'll rule together, sometimes singly. Your 'son', Ellonium II, for example, will be a fearless fighter, and will drive back into the Swamp of Thomasina the Mutant Hordes that I, in my weakness as your empty-headed widow, will have allowed to terrorize the countryside in the years after Ellonium I's 'death'."

She grinned at him. "Four -- gosh, Ellonium, this is a silly question. Of course I can confer immortality on you. Don't regard it as an unmixed blessing though. You've got only a mortal's brain, with all the limitations of potential that that implies, so in due course you'll become bored by the vistas of eternity -- they'll be largely beyond your comprehension. By the time Jol . . . by the time the individual I was talking about has come and gone, and me with him, it's my guess you'll be keen enough to be allowed to die. But it'll be your decision.

"Five -- no, I'm not a God. If I were, things would be run a little differently around here. There'd be no need for all these quests and subterfuges. Unfortunately the Gods insist on running their universes their own ways, and in this particular one the Gods are very keen on allowing the free will of mortals to have full rein -- twerps. All I can do is influence outcomes a little, in the same way that a teacher can help children understand things but can't actually do the understanding for them.

"Six -- it's a very flattering idea, but I thought I'd made my feelings on that issue crystal-clear. At least for the next couple of thousand years. If that offends you, then just tell yourself that one of the disadvantages of immortality is that a woman's headaches tend to persist for an awfully long time."

She touched his mind once more, and discovered that a seventh and an eighth and a ninth question had come shuffling to the fore.

"Yes, I did say 'universes' in the plural. The reason that I'm in this one at the moment is that I'm in all of them at the moment. And no, I'm not making your mother immortal as well -- she'll just have to take her chances like the rest of them."

He stared at her. Most men would have fled for the refuge of insanity long before, but with part of her attention she'd been redecorating his mind so that it seemed to him far too alluring an environment to leave.

"Why," he said at last, "why do you wish this individual to succeed in his quest?"

"Because otherwise Evil will swamp The World -- and in due course the whole of your Universe. He is an important factor in the maintenance of Good and the eventual Fragmentation."

"But why--?" He broke off, and she watched him fondly as he fumbled to find the words. "Why are you on the side of Good? Why does it make any difference to you whether Good or Evil comes to rule the Universe, or if this Fragmentation you talk about comes to pass?"

She smiled at him. "I could tell you that it's because I'm so inherently Good myself -- although I doubt you'd believe that. There are qualities within me that roughly correspond to what you mean by the word 'Good', but they're not the same, and I know that by their very nature they'd be incomprehensible to you. Or I could tell you that it's because the God of the Temple -- Ascidian -- begged me to come here to this rather poxy little universe. But that wouldn't be true, either: that would be to impute to me a motivation greater than whim, which is the most I ever feel."

Her smile deepened. "You know something, Ellonium, my dear, dear Ellonium?"

"What, my love?"

She giggled.

"You know something terrible? And be assured that you would get the same answer to your question from any of the Gods who purport to wave the flag of virtue and benevolence, and indeed if you asked any Dark Master or even the Devil himself why he was so eager to perpetrate Evil throughout The World. So let me be as honest with you as ever I will be.

"The truth of the matter -- the ultimate truth for me as much as for any of the demons or deities who dwell in the infinite universes that comprise the polycosmos . . .

"The terrible truth is that I don't know why."

First published in a limited-edition chapbook as History Book -- A Thog the Mighty Text (1994) and then, revised, in sections in The Rotting Land (1994) as by Joe Dever and John Grant. Further extensive revisions by the author for this publication. Copyright © 1994, 1999 John Grant.