I Get No Kick from Champagne

ACROSS (9)

We started off down the road towards the twinkling lights. The way was scored with deep wheel ruts where carts and carriages had slithered and struggled in the winter mud, and the mud had afterwards dried in ridges and furrows as the days warmed towards summer. After walking in the road for a while, and nearly breaking ankles a couple of times, we decided to walk along the side of the road, on the grass. We found a path there where other pedestrians had obviously done the same thing. Wiz’s magelights, little floating globes of incandescence, cast a pale silver, ethereal glow around us, but it was easy to see. From a distance, we probably looked like ghosts.

We made the town by late evening. It was walled with gigantic stout tree-trunks, their tops sharpened to points, with iron bars binding the trunks together. There was a gate, also of huge roughly hewn tree trunks, strengthened with fat iron bars. Tiltheus went up to the gate and banged loudly against it.

“Coming, coming, don’t get your knickers in a twist, coming.” There was the sound of shuffling and then a small wooden window was thrown open, and a glaucous eye peered out at us.

“What is it then?” The voice was cross and grumpy. Who did he think it was, the Jehovah’s Witnesses?

“We want to come in, old man.”

“It’s late, young sir, late, and my bones are aching.” The eye peered shrewdly at the rest of us. “And where are your horses, Lords? Lady,” he said catching sight of Sam, his head bobbing comically so that the eye disappeared for a moment.

“Kribothneia,” said Tiltheus, tersely. “Now, must we sleep outside, dogface, or will your supreme beatitude let us in?”

With much grumbling and muttering and tedious shufflings, the gate was pulled ajar, just far enough to let us in.

“The boy’s asleep,” explained the old man. “I didn’t want to wake him. But my old bones and muscles aren’t up to this.” His meaning was obvious.

Tiltheus gave him a small coin. “We thank you, honoured sir,” he said. Only I could detect the irony in his voice. How is it possible to know someone so well in just a couple of days that you, and you alone, can tell when they’re being sarcastic? “Perhaps goodfather, you can tell us which is the best inn?”

It was the ‘Wizard’s Rest’, not inappropriately, just off the main agora. We set off through the streets. One could see at once why boots were essential. So much for Greekly sandals. The streets were filthy – rubbish, mud, horse and other animal droppings, human ordure, dead rats, dogs and cats and other delicious things. When we arrived at the tavern, we took our boots off, and a small boy, dozing in an alcove next to the door, took them away to be cleaned.

“I could do it much better and much quicker with a cleaning spell,” muttered Ken in my ear. “But it would give the game away.”

“Show-off,” I replied.

“We’re going to start your lessons soon, young Steven. Your ability is strong. Don’t think you will escape the learning process. All learning is good.” So earnest and Scandinavian.

Actually, I was rather looking forward to it. Being able to cast spells would be handy and something no one else I knew (except for Ken) could do. Then I wondered what sort of powers a being of light had, and also whether my magic wouldn’t just be a part of my music. I was supposed to be a bard. So I asked Ken.

“Your most powerful magic will come from your music. You know how a great performer can put a whole crowd in a good mood? Well, you’ll be able to do that and more. With your music, you’ll be able to drive people to kill themselves, or to forgive their enemies. That magic is intrinsic in you – even on earth, every entertainer has a little. When we were at Jeremy’s and Fiona’s, you were using your power without being aware of it. If you do that well, and your audience responds, you feel better, too, and your power strengthens. When you learn control, you’ll be able to do some wonderful things.”

“Can I do wrong with it?”

“Of course.” He shot me a sharp look from under his greying eyebrows. “If you turn away from the light to the dark, you will gain terrible powers and will be able to do terrible damage. In the end, of course, it will destroy you, but by then it will be too late to change your mind. Don’t try and warm yourself at that fire, Steve – you will burn up.” The matter-of-fact way in which he said this made my blood run cold.

“And am I a being of light, like Til?”

“Yes.” It was flat and uncompromising.

“So why don’t I have wings, and glow like he did?”

“You will, one day. Be patient, Steve. It will come.” I almost asked him how and why, but he spoke with such sadness and foreboding that I forbore. I don’t know what he saw or felt in the vibrations or waves of what was to come, but I do know that I was blind to everything. Would things have been different had I been more aware? I shall never know, yet I comfort myself, vainly, that all that happened was ordained by the Gods.

Tiltheus was negotiating with the landlady, who was holding out for more money. Til was insisting that we wanted baths in the morning for all of us, and that he wanted separate beds for all of us, except the obvious couple, Sam (in his gentlewoman’s attire) and Jack, all included at the normal price. There weren’t enough rooms and beds available at this time of night – it was very late – so in the end he had to compromise.

He turned to us and said, “I’ve secured a room with four beds. Four of us will have to share.” His eyes met mine, and I nodded, feeling Damo staring at the back of my head. I turned round to glare at him. I was sore and tired. We had been walking for over three hours. I was in no mood to argue.

“OK,” I said. “You can share with Tiltheus. Or with me. Or with Ken.”

He shook his head with a reluctant grin. “Did I say anything? I’ll leave you two lovebirds to each other.” I gave him a filthy look. But his tone was forgiving.

We went upstairs to the bedroom. There were four beds, two wide enough for a couple, though not exactly double beds, and two narrower. There was a porcelain chamber pot in one corner, a basin and a jug of water on the dresser. There were no curtains on the windows – instead, there were solid wooden shutters on the inside of the glass panes, plain and undecorated. I was glad to see that they at least had glass in this world, but as it had been in our own two or three hundred years ago, they obviously couldn’t cast large sheets of glass. The windowpanes were tiny, and of uneven thickness. The room smelled of must, dust and dry straw, and herbs that had been sprinkled to take away the smells which hadn’t been totally successful. There was a single candle in a china candlestick, and the boy lit it from the one he was carrying. Dark shadows fled into the corners.

“The bogs are in the yard,” he said. “She always asks me to ask you to sprinkle ash after you’re done.” Ash! I thought, in horror. And what do we wipe with? (It turned out that there was a sponge on a stick, kept in a bucket of water. Don’t let anybody tell you that medieval or ancient times were romantic. Give me water borne sewage and soft bog-roll any time). I secretly decided I would piss from the window at night, and it turned out that all of us had decided the same thing, and in fact, that it was the norm. We would always have to be on the watch for sprinklings of heavenly water wherever we walked in towns and cities in the dark. Women, poor creatures, were obliged to make the long trek down to the privy (well, that’s what it was) or use the pot. There are some advantages to the male physique.

Worn out by our hiking, we went to bed immediately, and were soon fast asleep. This time I didn’t wait for the early hours to feel Til’s body pressed up against mine. As he got into bed, next to me, I put my arm over his chest and my legs against his, and with my head on the pillow, I fell asleep to the teasing tickle of his curly chestnut hair. Strangely enough, it was scarcely erotic. Instead, it was companionable, comforting, friendly. I could get used to this, I thought.

We slept late. The window shutters successfully excluded the light, much better than any curtains would, and we were physically tired. That makes for much better sleep than mental tiredness. So when we awoke, at what would be about ten o’clock back home, we were pretty relaxed. Except of course for one part of me, snuggled up against Til. Til didn’t leap out of bed in terror like I had. He just twisted his head round to look at me. “I take it,” he said very, very softly, “that that’s a canoe in your undies. Because you’re not supposed to be that glad to see me.” Damn, he had a nice smile, warm and forgiving and tolerant and loving. What could I do? I smiled back. And bugger me if he didn’t then turn over towards me onto his back and let me see the canoe in his drawers, tenting the blanket.

“You need to wee,” I said, just as softly. I wasn’t ready for anything else, and anyway, we were in a room with four other men. If I was going to lose my virginity, and submit to god knows what (because I certainly had only the vaguest ideas, garnered from ignorant adolescent conversations) I was so not going to do it in front of witnesses. Bad enough to chuck aside a quarter century of social conditioning, without doing it in full public view. Of course, I was being absurdly squeamish. It was perfectly clear to everybody what was happening, and everyone except Damian thought that it was touching and rather sweet. Even Damian was more or less resigned to it as inevitable.

Tiltheus smiled merely, understanding. It was getting harder to resist his appeal. There was no pressure, no nagging, no importuning. Just a quiet confidence that he would eventually get me, and a belief that we were made for each other. How could I withstand that, when it came wrapped in a package that was so damn fine and so beautiful? Trying not to let him see what I was doing, I inspected the muscles and tendons of his neck, the touchable curves of his chin, the intricate folds of his ears.

“How does breakfast work in this world?” asked Jack, from the bed in the far corner, where he and Sam were tangled in a heap under the blankets and feather doonas.

“Same way as in yours, I should think,” said Til, sitting up abruptly. “We go downstairs and eat whatever’s available in the common room.” For a prince he was completely without airs and graces, as normal as the guy next door. Well, you know what I mean, if you overlook the ears and the rings and the beauty and the being of light stuff.

We all dragged on our clothes and went downstairs.

There was a mixed collection of individuals in the common room, men, elves, and others. The others were divided into two groups. One group consisted of tall, largish humanoids, if that’s the right word, both men and women. They were quite manifestly not human, because they had skins of pale blue or green, and eyes that sparkled as if they were jewels, lit from within, ranging from red through orange to a sort of umber or tan. Their ears were pointed, like Tiltheus’s, but much longer. Whereas his were the size of a large cat’s, and in the same proportion to his skull, theirs were more like a desert fox’s or an alsatian’s and proportionately much larger, sticking up beyond the crowns of their heads. They were bigger than humans of this world, who were smaller than the typical Ozzie, I suppose because of poorer diet, and they were a little bigger even than us. I am over six feet tall, and so were the other earthlings. Because I hadn’t seen Tiltheus in his native environment, I hadn’t realised that elves were taller than humans, at least in Rhistên. The blue-green people were more muscular too, almost with the kind of muscles gym-bunnies develop. They shouldn’t have been beautiful, but somehow, they were. They were talking a language among themselves that I couldn’t understand.

The other group consisted of individuals of varying shapes and sizes (it looked like there were children as well as adults among them). The only way I can describe them is to call them lizard-men, but that did them a disservice. They were semi-naked, because they didn’t need clothes – they were covered with small scales, patterned in various shades and shapes, ranging from a brilliant red through hues of turquoise, green, grey and black. Their scales glittered and twinkled as they moved. Their eyes were for the most part dark – black, sepia, sienna, umber, with slitted cat-like pupils. Their tails were as thigh-thick at the base and tapered to the size of a forearm at the tip, and they moved all the time as they talked, just as we would move our hands in gestures to accompany the things we say. They had hands and feet with claw-like nails. Their hands were pretty human except for the scales, but their feet had only three toes. Their ears were round and flat against their head, like a humans, and their faces were human-like, but with muzzles coming forward three or four inches further than a human jaw. Male and female alike wore loin-cloth thongs, and no other clothing. The women had hips no wider than the men, and I assumed that was because they laid eggs rather than bore live young, yet they had breasts, smallish but clearly functional, which they didn’t bother to hide.

Only Ken and Tiltheus accepted this diversity with equanimity. The rest of us stared surreptitiously at these different species, fascinated and intrigued.

“Who are these peoples?” I asked, sitting down next to Tiltheus, thankful that we could all talk English and so keep our conversation private.

Tiltheus indicated that the blue-green peoples were descendants of enemies of the kingdom, who had been subdued after one too many attacks, and once peaceful, had spread through the kingdom. They were called methions.

“They are mistrusted all the same,” said Tiltheus. “Their cousins and clan-brothers and sisters live still in the wilderness, and every so often threaten our farms and townships. Our kingdom has many enemies – not just the Darklings, but also the tribes and peoples of the mountains and the wilderness. It is not easy to be responsible for the safety of all our peoples.”

“Will you be responsible one day?”

“Perhaps,” said Tiltheus sombrely.

He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t care to pursue it, so I asked him about the other group.

“They are one of the earliest peoples of the kingdom – they have been allies of ours for a thousand years.”

“They look like lizards.”

“Never say that to them! It is considered a terrible insult. But of course, you are right. They call themselves chauroi. We are very close, elves and chauroi, and they hate the Darklings with a passion. They are very beautiful to look at, aren’t they?” And they were, like exquisite parrots or cockatoos, iridescent and lovely.

Most of the individuals in the room seemed to have already had breakfast. I supposed that breakfast started before dawn, and went on until about now. Only nobles and the wealthy could rise this late in the morning. Sam was still a bit torpid, almost as if he were drugged. He was wearing the full regalia, including the hat and veil, and under cover of all the layers, I could see Jack holding his hand. There was cold meat and cheese and pickled onions and pickled turnips and bread and dried apples. There was also a rich, flavourful beer, more a sort of yeast soup than beer as I knew it, infinitely better than that cricket’s piss VB. The beer we were given with our breakfast was a foodstuff rather than just a drink, though it was certainly not fit for teetotallers. It was cloudy and full of sediment and perfectly delicious. It gave a nice buzz, too.

“Nice beer,” I said, downing half the pewter mug.

“Don’t you have beer in your world?’

“Yes, you had some at Damo’s house, don’t you remember?”

“Was that beer? Watery tasteless muck. But your wine is magnificent.” If he thought that about cask wine, then what would he think of the really good stuff? But it turned out afterwards that he was in fact referring to the expensive wine we’d had at Sam’s house. I understood that. It was utterly magnificent.

Damo was obviously enjoying himself very much. I didn’t know whether he’d decided to resolutely cast aside his sorrow at the break-up, or whether he truly didn’t feel anything. Knowing Damian, he was being all manly and tough, but was suffering inside. Still that didn’t stop him making eyes at the waitress, who looked about eighteen, with the sort of flawless body that only an eighteen year old can have, her stomach flat, her waist tiny and her breasts small, yet perfect. Her top looked as if it had come from the latest fashion shop back on Earth, revealing far more than it concealed. It was made of the fabric that shimmered and changed colour, looking as if it matched her perfect violet eyes. She had a blood-red jewel set into her navel that sparkled and glittered as she moved, and I noticed that she had no rings in her ears, so she was still a virgin. She was definitely interested in Damo, but whether it was because she thought Damo was hot, or whether she thought that Damo was a rich lord, with the wherewithal to keep her in the means she obviously wasn’t accustomed to, I don’t know. I looked properly at Damian for the first time in a while. He was good-looking – not stunning, not model-material, but quietly, ruggedly nice to look at, his face ordinary but pleasing, his body well shaped and lean from all the Shodo-Kan he did. And his face, though strong and manly, was also kind and generous. No wonder Sonya’d fancied him – his being rich was a bonus. The waitress clearly knew a good thing when she saw it. And so did Damo.

“Put your cock away, Damo,” said Ken, not unkindly, in English.

“And your tongue!” I said, cruelly, in the same language.

Jack and Sam spluttered into their beers.

Damian looked embarrassed, but pretended not to have heard.

“Thank you,” he said in Rhistênika to the waitress, ostentatiously focussing on her, and ignoring us.

She gave him the Rhistênika equivalent of ‘you’re welcome’, a smile of invitation on her face. Damo brightened considerably, and it lifted the rather hang-dog look that had kept reappearing on his face every time he thought of Sonya.

After breakfast we had to buy clothes, and horses and tack. But first, our baths.

The bathroom was a room in the basement, where there was a large boiler and a smooth stone bath. I discovered afterwards that in private homes there was often a zinc or more usually wooden tub, which would be placed before the fire, and filled with urns of hot water, and so most ordinary people used the public baths, at inns like this or those attached to the temples. Only the richest had their own bathrooms with heated water and proper drains. The bath was big enough to allow two to bath at the same time. This was another variation on the Ancient Greek model – no olive oil and strigils, but proper (albeit primitive) baths. We let Sam and Jack go first, and Ken dismissed the boy and stood guard at the door to keep any stray wanderers from coming in and seeing Sam feeding. He also averted his eyes and stopped his ears to the soft sounds of their lovemaking. He was a good man, despite being a pain, was our Ken.

After they had done, the boy replenished the water in the bath, stoked up the fire underneath the boiler, and then it was my and Til’s turn. We didn’t need anyone to keep watch, because we weren’t vampires going to feed and no one thought anything else was going to happen, and if it did, they were tactful enough not to want to be there. They needn’t have worried. I still wasn’t ready, even though I knew in my heart that it was only a question of time. Straight? I was bent as a fiddler’s elbow. But I was so not going to admit that to myself. And of course, I waited until it was too late. So that morning, in that warm, scented bath, languorous and relaxed, nothing would happen, even though the boy attendant had taken himself off somewhere else, on some errand, and we were alone and it should have been the right place and time.

“Now,” said Til, dryly, settling himself into the warm water, “you may have noticed that in my world, people often share baths.” He cast me a wicked look from under his brows.

“And what happens when they get a woody and embarrass themselves?” I grumbled, starting to get one myself.

“Well, there’s always the obvious solution.” His face was placid, but his eyes sparkled with amusement and affection.

I turned over onto my stomach to hide the damn thing, which as usual responded all by itself to unwanted thoughts. Til just grinned, and then sang, loudly, and badly, a few of the songs he’d heard from me and the others, including one of ‘Fluid Exchange’s’ more romantic numbers. When I could turn back over, I did, and soaped myself, and sang as vigorously. I started to teach him the words to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas, more to distract my mind than anything else. We began with “I’m called little Buttercup, dear little Buttercup, though I could never tell why.” I explained how Buttercup was much more than merely portly, and he enjoyed the irony. For days afterwards, he would come out with this, maddening and bemusing everyone, until they threatened to do him an injury. Eventually, the boy came in to stare, and feeling exposed (to ridicule, if nothing else), I took a towel from him, dried myself and got dressed. Ken and Damo were next, but Damo flatly refused to share a bath. The boy, with much grumbling and the passing of a small coin, did in the end fetch more water from the well so that Ken and Damo could bath separately.

Eventually we were all clean and (so far as that were possible) sweet smelling. We inquired where the best clothier or tailor was, and went out to find her.

That was when I got another surprise. The sun wasn’t round. More like two overlapping blobs. In fact, as I squinted half-blind at it, I realised that it was a binary system, with the larger star of the two a little smaller than our own, and the other, a red dwarf. I learned later that the sun was the ‘Goddess’ and the smaller star her ‘Consort’, the ‘God’.

This was not another Earth, or an Earth at some point in the past. But I had no idea whether it was in our galaxy or even universe, or somewhere else altogether. Though they spoke Greek, they didn’t dress like Ancient Greeks, they had different Gods and Goddesses, and their architecture tended more towards the timber and clay that you can see in northern Europe, though the public buildings like temples and government offices were very fifth century Greek. There were the lizard-men and the blue-greens, too. I felt suddenly homesick, longing for the familiarities of the known, and puzzled, that the language should be so similar, and everything else so different. Of course, if I hadn’t been such a thickie, I would have worked it out myself at once.

The tailor was an elf, like enough to Tiltheus to be able to tell that there was a sameness to them, but different, too, in more that just the obvious ways. Although clearly much older than Til, she was still very lovely to look at, her eyes a greenish-blue, shifting colour just like Til’s were wont to do, and her hair a deep brown, streaked with grey. She and her assistant measured us up, and she wasn’t shy, either. Her hands and the measuring tape went everywhere. These people truly didn’t care about the things that our civilisation was so prudish about. The tailor promised that the stuff would be ready the next day, towards evening.

The next stop was the horse trader. She had a yard on the edge of the city, which was a fair walk, and we set off at once. Of course, we had to stop and refresh ourselves along the way, and drink some more of the nutritious beer, and some savoury oatmeal biscuits with small sweet raisins embedded in the pastry. An interesting snack – it was odd to see what people ate when they had no ubiquitous McJunkFoods selling over-fatty muck on each street corner.

Tiltheus negotiated for our six horses, for the saddles and bridles, and for some ingenious straps onto which we should be able to attach our backpacks as well as the instrument cases – except for the guitar, which was too big. Most people with the local equivalent of a guitar carried it in a sling on their backs, slung over their shoulders.

“I wish I played the mandolin or the banjo,” grumbled Jack.

“You’re gifted. You could easily learn,” Sam said, giving him a quick grin from under the hat and veil. He looked weird wearing dark glasses. They were John Lennon type granny glasses, almost black, because a vampire’s eyesight is so strong, and so sensitive to bright light. I noticed that if people caught sight of them, they were intrigued. Usually, though, they didn’t notice. The veils were far from diaphanous.

The horse-trader’s girl saddled up the horses for us while the trader herself served us a sort of aniseed liqueur and almonds, at tables set out under the plane-tree. It might have been Greece at any time in the last two millennia.

We rode back to the centre of the town. At the inn, another of the inn’s boys took the horses and stabled them, promising to look after them well. “We will leave tomorrow afternoon,” Til told him, giving him a small coin.

The landlady had seen our instruments, and asked us whether we would entertain the guests that evening. Tiltheus, who’d taken charge now that we were in his world, turned to us and raised his eyebrows.

“Think you can give them something?”

“We don’t know any of the songs of your world,” pointed out Jack, reasonably, in English.

“I could teach you some,” offered Til, also in English.

It was my turn to raise my eyebrows.

“How rude!” said Tiltheus, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “I don’t sing that badly.”

“OK, we’ll do it,” said Jack, tiring of the byplay. In the afternoon, Til taught us the words to some of the most popular songs, and I learnt them, while Sam and Jack practised the tunes.

So that night, at about six o’clock, with the twilight casting soft purple shadows in the street and the martins swooping and diving on unwary insects from their mud nests under the eaves, we set up on a raised dais obviously used for just this purpose. We did three of the songs that Tiltheus had taught us, with yours truly doing the vocals, and then we did some jazz and swing, where I pretended to be Benny Goodman and played the clarinet. The crowd was puzzled at first, and there were some catcalls, but then they went berserk with pleasure, dancing and clapping. It was one of those sessions where the musicians play almost as a single unit, and we were good, really good. I was a bard, after all which meant that I could draw others to my musical core, and Sam and Jack were hugely experienced. Til went round with Sam’s hat afterwards, and collected enough coin to pay for our stay at the inn twice over. He might be a prince and a being of light, but he was a top bloke all the same, not too proud to do such a menial task. The fact that he was so fine to look at helped, no question. I noticed many looks lingering on his face and body. The landlady wanted us to stay on at the inn for another few nights, and offered to let us stay for nothing, because we had brought in so much business. The room had filled to bursting point as we played, and the news of our playing had spread through the quarter. Tiltheus, negotiating on our behalf as usual, declined the offer, but said that we would call in on our way back, and perhaps stay for a few days. I noticed that he was very careful not to say where we were going, and she didn’t ask.

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