Black Juice by Lanagan Margo

Author:Lanagan, Margo [Lanagan, Margo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2010-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

TOWARDS THE END OF THE FEAST, Dot walked away to the cow-house. The sun was lower and the world not so painfully bright.

‘Bard Jo?’ he said into the slatted darkness of the wooden hut. ‘It’s Dot here.’ And he went in.

The boards chopped up the darkness with planes of dusty sunlight. After a few moments the old man became visible on his bed against the far wall. His pale foot-soles pointed to the ceiling, and the pattern of his blanket was interrupted by his thin dark frame. He was lying on his back, breathing out illness from some serious place inside him; the hut was thick with the smell, which was of dead Ardent, with rotting wet lung added.

‘I came back for a visit, Bard,’ said Dot. If he called him by name, perhaps he could believe this really was the Bard.

The breathing worked up to speech, through spittle and twigs in the Bard’s throat, it sounded like. ‘It was Dot, was it, playing that great layer-cake of a music?’ Sweet cakes being things of evil and not proper food.

‘No, Bard,’ said Dot, into the horrible withering wind of the Bard’s disgust. ‘It was my friend Samed. But we both play.’

You must not retire like that, Kooric had told him after his first fight with Samed. You mustn’t bow your head and take it. You must speak back. You must not take Samed’s rubbish. But here in the Bard’s presence—even the failed Bard, even the corruptible Bard—keeping his back straight, and the idea of speaking, felt mannered and arrogant.

‘And you’ll have brought some rubbish for the children?’

‘A few bits of shine, Bard. Nothing harmful—’ He heard the fatal weakness of apology in his voice.

‘What would you know?’ The Bard jolted on the bed. ‘So harmed yourself, so prettied up, so taken in by all the shine and the music and the fun. Did you think it would be fun, to bring your worldly friends here, to amaze them with how spare and poor you used to be? To walk in like a god and scatter gifts, like a father, you thought?’

The Bard spat into something that had already been spat in many times.

He’s too clever a man, thought Dot, in the grip of the old fears. He’s too clever and too right. He knew me when I was only myself without any world-trappings.

‘The only father I knew never scattered gifts. He came home angry. He washed the town off himself as quick as he could—’

‘That’s not your father,’ said the Bard in a scribbly hiss. ‘Don’t try and claim that one.’ He cleared his clogged voice and spat again, and Dot could see and hear him shaking his head against the pillow.

‘Like I say, he was the only one—’

‘Your father—’ The Bard hoisted himself upon one rail of an arm, that was ragged with either flesh or shirt, Dot couldn’t tell which. A slat of light bounced off his yellow-white hair, and made a faint glow on the wall. ‘You knew your father just fine; he led you away from here as if he had a halter on your neck.

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