The Promised Labyrinth
by
Rhys Hughes
The third of three stories
in
The
Don Entrerrosca
Trilogy
( Story 1:
The Lute and
the Lamp )
( Story 2:
The Toes of the
Sun )
Horses
are for courses — and courses are the building blocks of dinners
— and dinners, at least when hot, are always less in total than
those various things which many people do often. Don Entrerrosca
was in need of a steed. It had to be a fast one because he
wanted to ride everywhere at once, though for the sake of
plausibility he was willing to visit all the necessary points
one at a time provided he did so in such quick succession that
omnipresence could be conceded to him as a quality by neutral
observers. Why must he be in all places simultaneously? It was
because the loveliest woman in the world had escaped him, not
that he was keeping her in any way or that she was really aware
of who he was, but he had played the lute for her more than once
and mooned after her over several horizons. Sentimental buffoon!
She was everything to him, or rather all the good bits of
everything, not toads or marsh gas, but softness and excitement
and pure joy, and finding her again was almost a question of
survival, for without her he had no reason to continue his
existence.
There are alternative methods of transportation to the horse and
a great number of them are more rapid, motorbikes and hydrofoils
for instance, but Don Entrerrosca had grown up in the saddle —
awkward when attending school as a boy, seated high over his
friends, unable to hear the teacher above the snorting and
stamping — and the beast would always be his first choice when
travelling. He had owned many horses in his lifetime and coveted
more, but sprightly as they were not one had ever approached the
sort of velocity he was now looking for. He wanted a horse that
could gallop faster than the speed of light. It seemed a tall
order. He visited farms and made enquiries and was shrugged at
by stableboys and his mission proved equally futile at
racetracks and bullrings, where the seedy gamblers and arrogant
picadors turned their backs on him in contempt. The gypsies at
the fairs also failed to help him. Once he was offered an old
nag with a bridle covered in flashing lightbulbs, another time
he was shown the deflated carcass of a stallion and told that it
had fasted until it became too light, but nobody took his
request seriously. Even the museums, with their glass cases of
prehistoric horse skeletons, regarded him as nothing more than a
fool. And they were right, that is what he was.
But
time was running out and he could not afford to be sensitive
about his reputation, not that he truly had one, for as a
musician he was obscure and as a lover he was still untested,
but he took heart from the fact he was original, seeking
something even he realised was an impossibility, and originality
by definition is not run of the mill. Speaking of which, he
passed through La Mancha with its windmills, a flat and dusty
region, but more of that a little later. He was heading south
because Córdoba was where his woman resided and it seemed a good
place to choose as a first destination before he had the
opportunity of going everywhere else. He had already lingered
too long in Toledo, laughing as he wandered the steep little
streets because he kept getting lost in what was essentially a
conventional labyrinth and he suddenly realised that a
conceptual labyrinth might be worse. Then he stumbled out of the
city and over the Montes de Toledo where his skin crisped under
the sun and he roamed in frustrated circles. Walking was not the
best way of making progress in his quest. He needed a horse, a
normal horse, to find a horse, an impossible horse, and he also
needed a hat, a hat with a wide brim to protect his face. Don
Entrerrosca cursed himself for his incompetence but his curses
were lame and poorly delivered, and they proved too incompetent
to make his incompetence vanish.
The woman in question, Eber Marcela Soler, had escaped him by
employing a clever stratagem — she had accepted the marriage
proposal of another man. Don Entrerrosca did not know this and
still believed he had lost her because she remained exactly
where she was while he went somewhere on business, probably to
buy a lute, without returning. He was returning now. When he had
his special horse he would return to every spot on the earth,
including this one, this hot and uncomfortable road where he did
not have her. Returning to all the points of his return, an idea
he was unsure he understood! The problem with isolation is that
it can encourage too much thinking and this is what presently
ailed him, an excess of introspection, and only the large bag
over his sore shoulder that swung against his side at every
step, a mild but tenacious chastisement, slapped him out of a
mad slide to the very bottom of his own mind, but it was a
temporary measure and human contact was a better solution. This
happened next in La Mancha but first we must mention that his
bag was full of smiles, big smiles, little smiles, but all of
the same mouth, the mouth of Señorita Soler, drawn on pieces of
paper by a variety of artists, for reasons explained in another
tale. Don Entrerrosca had collected them one at a time from
where the wind had blown them and together they were the
heaviest of uplifting weights.
Sleeping
in barren fields night after night, shivering in the winds which
inexplicably grew stronger an hour before dawn, he was glad of
the company of the stars, though sometimes their frosty radiance
made him feel even more distant from other people, but generally
he matched each twinkle with a wink. Now he had doubts about the
wisdom of a hat, especially a wide brimmed one, because it would
shut out the starlight as he lay among the rubble. There was
always the option of taking it off at a time of his choosing,
but it was too early to think about removing what he did not
have. With names he had not yet learned, the constellations
revolved slowly above his head. He rose and ate lonely oranges
with bitter teeth. Then he speculated that renowned horses from
history might be faster than living horses of the present age
and that dancing around their tombs with weird spells in his
mouth could summon them back from the dead, but difficulties
with this approach soon presented themselves. Most of those
horses — and he listed a few aloud, Bucephalus, Babieca,
Marengo, Seabiscuit, Shergar, such exotic names! — probably did
not have marked graves at all or were buried in other countries,
meaning he would have to retrace his steps, which he refused to
do. He also suspected that the fastest recorded gallop of any
real horse was considerably slower than the speed of light. He
abandoned this idea but in Consuegra, the nicest town in La
Mancha, he came up with a superior one.
He staggered into the main square, lowered his bag and found
himself in the middle of a book market. Spines creaked below the
creaking of the windmills on the ridge above the town. He joined
the browsers. Instead of dabbling with real horses, why not use
one from literature? It must surely be faster! After all, a long
fictional journey on horseback can — if extracted from the right
volume — be contained in a few pages and those pages might be
read in a matter of minutes. Considering his location, he
decided to try first with Don Quixote. He bought the book,
removed himself to a quiet corner and attempted to make
Rocinante, the featured horse, trot out of the words, but he
knew nothing right about magic or his willpower was not strong
enough and he conceded defeat. There were other books with other
fictional horses — Shadowfax, Morgenstern, Flatulent Hannah,
Teague McGettigan's Cabhorse, Black Beauty — but they no longer
seemed worth the effort or expense. Might as well ride a hobby
horse! But he enjoyed himself among these people and spoke to
the old men about simple matters and this was good for his soul
and he felt refreshed. He did buy one more book, but only a star
atlas and studied it to become familiar with the night sky, for
a man should understand his own roof.
He
passed out of town and the going remained hard and nothing
pleasant happened to him until he reached the Sierra Morena. He
was on the northern fringes of Andalucía! The Sierra Morena is
an obscure range of mountains and forms a symbolic wall between
tedious La Mancha and the wonderful south, a south where
according to imagination — his main travel guide — the suns
warms and heals but does not fry and where breezes waft rather
than blow. This proved to be not quite the case, but it was too
late for him to worry about it because in the centre of a
crumbling castle he came across a circus with shadows made from
tall tents, a boisterous affair which captivated his senses. To
one side stood an old fashioned carousel and Don Entrerrosca
paid for a ride. He sat straight in the carved saddle, not
because he was a gentleman but because the vicious splinters in
the rotting wood fixed him like that, and as he revolved he
wondered if his quest had come to an end. Before he learned it
had not, he cried, "Faster! Faster!" to the man who operated the
machine. The man pulled levers and pretended to make adjustments
to gears and valves but it is doubtful whether the painted horse
increased its velocity by the smallest fraction.
Don Entrerrosca dismounted and rubbed his hands with glee. It
seemed to him that a series of carousels mounted on top of each
other might satisfy his need for faster than light
transportation, provided there were enough levels, for the
starting speed of the highest mechanism would already be the sum
of those below. As they all rotated separately there would come
a moment when they were perfectly synchronised and then the
light barrier would be broken, Don Entrerrosca yelling with
tachyonic glee as he held on with one arm around the horse's
neck, his unbought hat waved aloft with the other. But how many
carousels would be necessary? He questioned the operator who
counted in trillions on his fingers and then shrugged. There
were not enough carousels in the world to make the project
feasible, not to mention the fact that the contraption would
extend far out of the atmosphere. He refused to help Don
Entrerrosca. The glooms of most people are untidy but our
minstrel felt a neat despair as he walked away, chiding himself
for his lack of realism. Of course such a towering carousel
could not be constructed! What sort of music would it play? But
he still required some sort of horse that could move faster than
the speed of light, for even light takes a little time to move
between places and he had to be everywhere instantly to be
absolutely sure of finding his girl. He sighed again and this
sigh was the breath of a mood that lasted another week and then
he was in Córdoba.
The
home of Eber Marcela Soler! He was back where he had left her
and now he thought about it more closely he recalled that a lute
had been the reason for his departure, a lute he heard about in
a Jewish shop in Zamora, but it was already sold by the time he
arrived. Such a costly diversion! But this was Córdoba, city of
patios and waterwheels, and it was just a question of seeking
out her house and hoping she might still be there as a beginning
to his greater search. He walked the streets and felt confused.
Was the strength of the sun fuddling his mind? Here were hat
shops and he entered one and emerged with a wide brim sheltering
his face but his confusion did not disappear and a terrible
doubt began to grow inside him. Why did he fail to recognise a
single building? What was this enormous mosque doing near the
river? How had everything changed so thoroughly? Was it possible
he was in the wrong Córdoba? The peculiar horror of knowing he
was lost in a labyrinth gripped him, not just any old labyrinth
but the conceptual one he had imagined six or seven paragraphs
ago!
But in fact this type of labyrinth was accidental and faultless
— like a desert, ocean or forest. It was accurate to say he had
promised it to himself through ineptitude, a casual confusion of
two cities with the same name. Señorita Soler dwelled in the
Córdoba in Argentina, under the southern stars, not in the older
mass of houses and ramparts in Spain. A simple mistake. All the
same it was a grand idea for the ultimate in labyrinths — a
renaming of every city, town and village in the world until they
were the same. And then every place would be Córdoba and it
would be impossible to ask directions from anywhere to elsewhere
for there would be no clue in the answer. "Where does Señorita
Soler live? In Córdoba! Which way is that? I see, first leave
Córdoba and travel as far as Córdoba and then continue to
Córdoba before..." No, quite useless to make the attempt! Don
Entrerrosca felt defeated and he went to book a room in a cheap
hotel and sob the night away with the balcony window open and
the smell of orange trees coming in, and he did just that, but
his tearful sleep was full of nightmares which galloped over his
body, hooves slipping on the sweat which oozed from his pores,
and when he jerked awake he wondered if he could harness one of
these bad dreams and ride the mare part of it, but they were too
fragmentary, like butchered centaurs, and already wisping to
nothingness in his memory.
His
patience was at an end. He needed his unobtainable horse now.
Too much time had he squandered and the only way of redeeming
the loss was by having nothing more to do with time — by being
everywhere at once. Inspiration still did not come and he read
his star atlas by starlight to dampen the agonising fire in his
mind with cool learning. He squinted. What was this? He jumped
out of bed and stepped onto the balcony and looked up. Then he
checked his book. There was a horse in the sky! The
constellation Pegasus. It did not look much like a horse,
certainly not of the winged variety, consisting of a square of
four bright stars with a dozen or so other stars sprinkled
loosely on one side, but that was not the issue. It was a
stellar horse! But what use was it really? As he looked from
star to star he was struck by an extraordinary notion. Something
in this very room was travelling faster than the speed of light.
What was it? His focus — or to put it another way, his
concentration. First he stared at the star called Markab,
commonly known as the saddle of Pegasus, then he stared at
Scheat, a star considered to represent the shoulder of that
mythical steed. Nothing difficult in this action, nothing new or
dramatic, yet the implications were astonishing.
Although both stars were located in the same constellation they
were not close to each other in reality. The proximity of Markab
to Scheat was an illusion, partly a result of the position of
the observer, in this case Don Entrerrosca, and partly due to
the limitations of the human eye when judging distance. The
lateral separation of the two stars, approximately 12° of sky,
might represent dozens or more of light years — he did not know
enough about astronomy to make an estimate, but his star atlas
also informed him that Scheat was seventy light years further
from Earth than Markab. These enormous distances were covered by
his attention, his regard, in less than one second. Thus his
attention had broken the light barrier! He must find a way to
exploit it, focussing his mind until he became pure attention
and free to travel in almost zero time. He continued to stare at
Pegasus but he did not smile, for though he had found his horse
he did not control it. There was work to do. He watched the
constellation move across the sky until it was obscured by a
neighbouring building and his attention was snapped by the edge
of its wall. He shook his head and ran out of his hotel into the
street.
At
the river he saw Pegasus again and he crossed the old bridge
halfway to maintain a clear view of it, away from the cramped
streets, trying not to blink as he fixed his gaze on the astral
pattern, but aware that dawn would end his vigil and sabotage
his plans. He had to find a way of keeping Pegasus within his
sight until his attention became total, until there was nothing
else in his mind, no distractions, nothing belonging to the
Earth. How might this be arranged? He must rise above the city,
above the clouds, above the bulk of the world. He had to climb.
First he took a little knife from his pocket, a souvenir from
Toledo, and pierced two holes in the brim of his hat, careful
holes through which the light of the two chosen stars passed as
thin rays, the sides of a fantastical ladder, then he tore the
pages from his star atlas, cut them to the required length and
rolled them into two cylinders, securing them with lute strings,
for he always carried spares, and binding them to the soles of
his feet. These would serve as rungs. Grasping the beam of
Markab with one hand, that of Scheat with the other, he placed
his right foot so that the rung fitted between the rays, then he
lifted his left foot a little higher and did the same. One more
step and he had left the ground.
The bridge fell away, the houses and the Mezquita dwindled in
size, but soon he was exhausted, so he rested and caught his
breath. Now he was doubtful about his ability to climb long
enough to achieve his purpose, but he recalled the contents of
his heavy bag and felt elated. Relaxing his grip on one of the
beams he fumbled inside and drew out a smile and held it to his
eyes. The smile of Eber Marcela Soler was guaranteed to put a
spring in the step of any man and in this case the spring proved
highly functional, for it enabled Don Entrerrosca to scale his
starlight ladder with renewed vigour. Each time his energy
slackened he pulled out a smile and allowed it to refresh him
before the stratospheric winds snatched it from his fingers. As
the bag grew lighter, the speed of his ascent increased so that
he quickly reached a safe altitude above clouds and aeroplanes.
Any object that passed across the stars and blocked their light
could prove fatal to him. As Pegasus moved among the heavens and
dipped toward the horizon, the angle of his ascent changed, the
gradient became less steep, but the constellation would not set
because he was high enough now to peer over the edge of the
world.
The view was spectacular. He paused for a minute, one hand tight
on the beam of a star, the other on the beaming smile of
Señorita Soler, and he looked in every direction. First he gazed
east, over Andalucía and Murcia, beyond the Balearics, beyond
Sardinia and Italy and Greece, over Anatolia to the Orient, and
he saw the cities open to him, blushing with the glow of
illuminated houses and streets. Then he gazed south, to Morocco
and the desert and the coasts fringed with dunes, tents and
shipwrecks. Next he turned west and studied the greener land of
Portugal, the lighthouse at Cabo de São Vicente, the most
powerful in Europe, sweeping the broad Atlantic, and this sight
gave him an idea related to his own, for as the bulb of a
lighthouse rotates its beam describes a circle in the air, a
series of concentric circles depending on the distance travelled
by the beam, and there must come a point where this distance is
sufficient for the circle to be drawn at a speed exceeding that
of light, but of course this reasoning is based on a flaw
because nothing substantial is travelling along the
circumference of that circle, not a single photon is engaged on
that orbital journey, and the circle itself is a collection of
unrelated points, a shape existing only in the mind of the
observer.
Don
Entrerrosca shrugged without losing his balance. He looked north
over Spain, France and Belgium into the Netherlands and suddenly
his quest came to an end in every way, everything finished at
once, his struggle no longer mattered. It was Eber Marcela
Soler! A tiny figure in a white dress, a crown of flowers on her
head, arm in arm with a Dutchman! While Don Entrerrosca blinked,
a meteor flashed across the celestial dome, passing in front of
the star Markab, changing the quality and colour of the ray
slanting through the hole in his hat, but the ladder held and he
resumed climbing, tears in his eyes but part of his heart
already letting her go, for she had clearly married a man of her
own choosing and that was nothing to argue against, not now, not
from here. He would keep climbing until he won his horse or
until he suffocated outside the atmosphere.
The closer he approached Pegasus, the wider the sides of his
ladder would stretch as the two stars moved further apart and
their illusory proximity was negated, and he would lose his grip
and fall, but he must achieve one of his aims before then. He
fell anyway. An object he had not anticipated, a lightless
asteroid, drifted across his chosen stars and the ladder was
gone. He was grateful to this dark lump of rock for ending his
hope and pain without a fuss. He span spun? as he plummeted. He
was no longer above Córdoba but over the sea. Yet he deserved an
ending as fanciful as the rest of his career, for the sake of an
odd consistency, and so he did not die. He plunged into the
coolness and in the depths he met his special horse, though
speed was not why it was important to his future, nor could it
promise him happiness, merely give him another chance. If every
animal had just one name, life itself would be a labyrinth. It
was a seahorse but a gigantic one, big enough to ride, and it
carried him to a place, call it a grotto, where mermaids played,
some of them single and even tender.
 Rhys
Hughes is, by his own
admission, a heterochromic logodaedalus much
concerned with ontological fripperies, the deep
pondering of which has turned his static nimbus into a
corybantic fulgor. He may get better.
He is also the author of
350 short stories and many
books, including
WORMING THE HARPY,
THE SMELL OF TELESCOPES,
NOWHERE NEARMILKWOOD, JOURNEYS BEYOND ADVICE,
THE PERCOLATED STARS and
A NEW UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF
INFAMY. For the past ten years he has been working on a long
novel. It is nearly finished!
He enjoys travelling — when he
can afford it — and in an ideal world would spend all his time
visiting other countries. He also loves music, cooking and
reasonably light physical exercise. His literary hero is Italo
Calvino. His puppet hero is Bagpuss.
Nowhere Near Milkwood
A New Universal History of Infamy
Rhys Hughes can be contacted at
rhysaurus (at)
yahoo.co.uk
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