LUDIC LOG

As with many stories involving those eternal partners, swords and sorcery, this one begins in a tavern. Not begins: no story begins, really. But a tavern, yes. Not an inn: there were no beds. Sleeping was done at home or in an alley. Nor yet a saloon or a bar, strange words for this world ­ a tavern then. The only reason to be in a tavern was to drink, in quantity if not quality. In many ways will one tavern differ from the next, in being a place for noisy camaraderie or for lonely anonymous alcoholism, in being a genteel drinkery or a malodorous pit. But the germane point in the philosophy of each is this: it is a place to drink. Its customers may choose one over another for any number of reasons, but none of them as compelling as the proximity and availability of strong spirits. The powerful need in the minds of the great to get occasionally fucked up no doubt accounts for the fact that so many stories begin within a few feet of a bowl of complimentary peanuts.

This tavern was called "The Mermaid's Cove". There were said to be real mermaids in this world, but none of them ever stopped by to confirm. A sea-foam green wooden sign hanging over the door signaled to passersby, with its tasteful lettering and discreet colors, its intricate carving and gently swirling representation of a wave, the Cove's pretense of class. If a thirsty guilder were to wander in for a tipple after a long day of commerce, however, his sensibilities would be in for a short sharp shock. The propensity of the owner to dilute his dirty rum with even dirtier water, the grog-shop language of the clientele (always bellowed rather than spoken), the huge oil painting above the bar of a mermaid with breasts so gigantic it must have been difficult for her to remain underwater, all confirmed that while the Mermaid's Cove may have aped the patrician style, it was destined all its days to remain a dive.

Still and all it was a popular destination for a certain type of person in the two-tiered metropolis of Kurtana: people who flattered themselves "adventurous" or "daring", perhaps even "bohemian" if they'd had the word. Those less disposed to acts of semantic charity would call them "delinquents", "layabouts", or "the unemployable". Kurtana being the capital as well as the largest city of the kingdom of Ronomo there was a large and amorphous population of this sort of person, and the Mermaid's Cove had prospered in the fifteen years since Kovo Movran retired from the slaughterhouse trade and opened its door. Kovo liked to tell people that he commissioned the mermaid painting, which he thought quite sophisticated. Commissioning a work of art seemed like the sort of thing the sort of person he wanted to be would do. He ran the tavern with the help of his younger wife Alitta, who staffed a tiny rear kitchen that produced awful food. Having her run the kitchen generated extra income for the tavern, which allowed him to avoid eating her awful food at home. A hand-scrawled boast above the small portal to her workspace read: "thee finet fried fruit plate in thee kingdom". There was on this particular coldish autumn evening only one person in the Cove who gave much thought to the way these words were written: his name was Kenneth Swallowtail, and he was not of this world.

The tavern held a fairly large crowd for a Vountsday evening; the new potato convoys were moving in from the east, and the drivers and crew wanted somewhere to drink. They weren't drinking at the Cove, of course: even the sorry fake class it displayed was enough to drive them off. But the hangers-on, fellow travelers and free-ride-seekers were out in full display, pissing their roadwork salaries into a wooden trough and familiarizing themselves with Kovo's ungenerous credit policies. Men ­ and women too, for Kurtana was quite a modern city ­ populated every corner, coloring the air with a dozen different dialects, all calling for more watery drinks. The eye caught on unusual garments and exotic body-decorations, the ear on strange accents and tall tales, and the nose on the unwelcome odor of someone who's been riding for three weeks with an ox caravan. Swallowtail sat alone at a table near the large hearth, nursing what was called with little regard to linguistic legitimacy a "dark beer" and scribbling in a small spiral-bound notebook. That he was the only person in the city who had ever heard of, let alone possessed, a small spiral-bound notebook was the least of what set him apart from the rest of the caravan crowd with whom he had arrived some ten months earlier.

He had since arriving in this particular quarter of the Low Half become known as the local eccentric, no mean feat in a city as teeming with eccentrics as Kurtana. He drank quite a lot even by the standards of the boozy regulars and if you stood him enough drinks he would tell you he was from another planet.

He certainly acted the part. He dressed in foolish clothes, presumably from whatever life he left behind, and his command of the spoken language was excellent but with a slight and unidentifiable accent. He had a nervous rabbit look; some people, or rather some drunks, said that he popped his eyes out of his head at the end of each day and kept them in a jar, watching over him as he slept. He talked to himself constantly and tended to laugh at the most inappropriate things.

Still, he was harmless; when he first came to the city, in the company of an anonymous pinch-faced government official, he had been quite angry and hostile but had since settled into a vague and ill-focused resentment no different than that of most workingmen. He did not work, however: he slept in a small room in a nearby boardinghouse and all of his accounts were paid for out of a government stipend. He spent his days wandering the city, never going more than a few miles in any one direction, and his nights in the Mermaid's Cove, reading, writing and drinking. Most people believed he was a former military officer or spy who had gone mad and that the official who brought him here was a caregiver or case officer. He sometimes wore a sleek, expensive rapier on his jaunts around the city, which seemed to support this hypothesis. It was a good idea, but it was wrong in most of the important ways.

The youngest of the three barmaids that Kovo Movran employed, a girl just of age named Kasryn (after the goddess), stopped by Swallowtail's table to see if he wanted anything else to drink. She was well-turned out and fit with an easy sense of humor and a great deal of tolerance for the worthless clientele. She wore her hair in the style of would-be sophisticated young women of the day: shaved extremely close, almost to the skull. Unfortunately Kasryn had bright red hair and the overall effect was to make it seem as if she had a large rash on her scalp.

"Another beer, Mr. Swallowtail?"

"You know, Kasryn," he said, looking up from his little book, "it's not as if I particularly wanted to rob banks, or anything. It's that I wanted banks to be worth robbing."

"Oh, I know, sir," she answered, not rolling her eyes at all. She was quite familiar with his particular line of nonsense and didn't bother to ask questions anymore. The last time she asked him why he was so angry all the time it was almost daybreak before he stopped talking and she didn't understand a word of it. She did briefly wonder who this Banks was and why Mr. Swallowtail wanted to rob him but she knew better than to ask. "Why not have another drink, and you'll get this Banks fellow later, hey?"

"Whiskey, this time." Kasryn blinked, half-smiled and turned on her heel; whiskey was a sure indicator that he would have to be carried home tonight rather than merely pointed in the right direction. Swallowtail was not a loud drunk or a violent drunk; he was a talkative drunk, which she disliked most of all. Noise was easy to ignore and the grabbers and punchers got thrown out bodily by Kovo himself, but talkers demanded her attention and gave her nothing in return. His act was wearisome, too, wrapped up as it was in a self-pity she found unattractive in a healthy man who didn't have to work to earn his life. Kasryn wanted to be an actress, because actresses got paid more to pretend to care about things than barmaids. "When do the next caravans leave?" he asked her turned shoulder. "Because I'm going to be on the next one. I can goddamn guarantee that."

She answered him without looking. "Well, they leave after loading the winter wheat, Mr. Swallowtail, and that should be by next Ubsday. But surely you don't want to be traveling then, hey?" Ubsday was named for the god of death, and it was said to be bad lick to start any new endeavor on that day. But her warning was conversational only; they both knew he wasn't going anywhere. He never went anywhere and he never would. He made a nasal sound indicating something, recognition or defeat or something meaning 'the end'.

"You know what the problem is, Kasryn?" His strange accent turned the vowels into unnaturally long moans full of disappointment.

She knew, because he had told her: "Nothing ever happens, Mr. Swallowtail. That's the problem." She turned back towards him, her lips parted slightly showing boredom and buck teeth, gave his table a functionless wipe with a filthy bar rag, and walked to the counter to get his whiskey.

"That's right," he confirmed to the empty space where she had been standing. "That's exactly the problem. The problem is, nothing ever happens." But things did happen: that was the real problem. Things keep happening and people don't notice them. Kenneth Swallowtail had wanted things to happen all his life, and they never did. Finally something happened, but it turned out to be the wrong thing. Of course, things were still happening, but he only noticed the things that weren't. Everyone does this: you notice only what's not specifically happening to you and don't take the time to notice what's happening to someone else, until it blows up or spills over and starts happening to you also. By this time it's usually too late to stop it from happening, which is usually what you want at this point. Eventually it starts happening to everybody, although, back in your old habits already, you only notice that it's happening to you. This is probably why most people are so miserable all the time. Although it is perhaps possible to get too carried away with this idea. The point is this: something was happening to someone else at this very moment, and it was about to start happening to Kenneth Swallowtail.

All that was happening to him now was that he was drinking whiskey. He didn't really like it. Tom Rink, his best friend back home, when it was home, and when he had a best friend, loved scotch; he spent far too much of his professorial salary on rare blends and single malts of fine vintage. Kenneth would visit Tom at his home, and Tom would tell him of peat and charcoal and highlands and body and color and describe things with florid adjectives like "honeyed" or "syrupy". The words and the ideas behind them rolled off of Kenneth like heated drunk-sweat. He didn't care about whether it was good or bad; Tom's exquisite tipples and Kovo Movran's diluted swill were all the same to him. They burned his throat and made him wince and gave him a fright in his heart. But whiskey was good for why he drank. It helped him get drunk, and that is the only way he knew to change his world. Kasryn had brought him a large glass with an surprisingly satisfying ratio of alcohol to dirty bilge and he drank it almost in gulps, as if he thought that "quenching your thirst" with liquor was something you could really do rather than simply something you said as an excuse to drink. Not that he needed an excuse to drink. He was encouraged to do so since it kept him out of trouble, or at least the bad kind of trouble.

But trouble was coming for Kenneth Swallowtail. Fights, such as the one which was about to end his attempt to become sotted and give him something else to do for the night, are often said to "break out" by those more familiar with cliché than with fights. Fights do not break out, as if they are obnoxious plagues or vivid and sudden skin ailments. Fights, rather, blossom: they begin as curled-up buds of resentment and anger and grow under a warming light generated by people who can't stand each other forced into close proximity. Then, when properly fed with drink or rhetoric, they bloom into vibrant displays of gaudy violence. This particular fight sprang from seeds of hate, the hate borne by the moronic drunken ignorance of the barbarian for the mindless drunken stupidity of the metropolitan. It was watered will with drink (rhetoric, as a word or an actuality, was rarely to be had in the Mermaid's Cove) and further furnished with that finest of fertilizers, the unequal distribution of money. It had begun its languid blush over a card game that had started before Swallowtail arrived some hours earlier, and started to unfurl its petals as he was drinking his third tankard of the grim, unwholesome beer. Now, as Kasryn confidently ignored his inept hand gestures meant to indicate the bringing of more whiskey, it was about to fully blossom.