Tales from the Labyrinth: The Collection

By Frances Mason

Welcome to the labyrinth. Here an ancient tome moulders. Lost in this library of improbable spaces its language is almost forgotten. A lone monk remembers though. He will find the shelf where it has languished. He will translate for those who come after. Will you follow him?

A collection of tales that redefines weird. More bizarre than Jackson Pollock on acid, from a monkey who might be Shakespeare to an alchemist discovering the meaning of immortality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frances Mason
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215492895

Frances Mason

Alright, before my usual paragraph I have to say something current and coviddy. Today is Sunday 5 April 2020. Coronavirus is sweeping its scythe across the world. More than a million infections worldwide, and that's only the ones we know about. I'm hiding in my home as much as I can (the more things change the more they stay the same - don't you love cliches?). When I have to go out I'm holding my breath whenever I walk past other people, walking in wide loops around them, looking suspiciously whenever I hear a cough and glaring when someone wanders too close to me. Phrase of the year, 2020: social distancing. Learn it. Do it. Live (or at very least don't kill me - you see how altruistic I am?). When I come home I'm taking my shoes off at the door, and washing my hands more than I ever have in my life. Am I nuts? Probably. But at least I won't get COVID-19. Cough.Now follows my usual paragraph (mostly).Frances Mason is a resident of sunny Australia (consequently is too much i' the sun - ok, we're heading towards winter now, so not so much sun), loves great literature, especially Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dawn Powell, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce and Joyce Cary, and is currently writing a fictional life of Shakespeare, fictional lives of a number of other Elizabethan playwrights, a collection of Elizabethan picaresque tales, a fictional memoir (based very loosely on a much loved brother, who's recently deceased and therefore can't sue for libel), and too many short stories to list. Recent hobbies include, avoiding quality time with relatives (successfully), solving the Rubik's cube (slowly), juggling (poorly), and being paranoid about COVID-19 (without stocking up on toilet paper - don't you miss the days of the daily newspaper, when you always had a steady supply with which to print the day's headlines on your bum?).

Book preview

TALES FROM

THE LABYRINTH

The Collection

FRANCES MASON

Copyright © 2022 Frances Mason

All rights reserved.

In Memory of Brad

1970-2019

You are lost, lost too soon;

A head and heart of fire by self consumed;

A father

Lost,

A son

Lost,

A brother

Lost

Too soon.

A man of contradictions,

Flaming red hair shorn to the scalp,

Oriental dragon tattoo

Across your chest, half finished,

Much too much like you.

Too like the years you should have been

Like yourself or unlike:

Brutal and gentle,

Selfish and selfless,

Mad and seeming mad;

A natural bullshit artist,

In the truth of whose pain

I failed to believe,

Until too late –

Too late.

We will not meet again,

Unless in memory:

In a thousand passing faces

That are and aren’t the same;

Like a phantom limb

That will not support me,

But will not fade away –

Until I too am lost

In the vastness of voided time

And placeless space,

Where all undifferentiated

Finally we sleep.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: The Labyrinth

VOLUME I: The Tower

INTERPOLATION: Illumination

VOLUME II: The Carver

VOLUME III: Gallery of the Real

VOLUME IV: An Eye for an Eye

VOLUME V: Creation

VOLUME VI: Uncertainty

VOLUME VII: The Coat Maketh the Man

VOLUME VIII: Runner

VOLUME IX: Evil Eater

VOLUME X: The Science of Magic

VOLUME XI: Statuesque

VOLUME XII: The End of Man

VOLUME XIII: Elixir of Life

VOLUME XIV: Son of Man

VOLUME XV: Believer

VOLUME XVI: Memoria

EPILOGUE: Neglected Books

PROLOGUE: The Labyrinth

THE LABYRINTH EXTENDS in higher dimensions, intersecting with an infinitude of space-times, folding them and their physical laws into each other. Even here, in this vast, dusty library, it seems not to obey causal laws. No human knowledge is vast enough to navigate its stacks. No ordinary map and compass can comprehend its mysteries or encompass its confusions. And yet monks wander here, lost only in their thoughts. Past shelves stuffed to overflowing with mouldering scrolls and heavy tomes. Pages of goat skin parchment or woven reed papyrus or pulped wood paper. Among ideas as light as air or heavy as pondering. Philosophy and science and stories. A million dialects of a hundred thousand languages. Images, words; magic.

One wandering monk looks up from his thoughts, examines the gem that pulses warmly in his hand and sees the light within. The gem feels soft and pliable, more like flesh than stone. It beats like a faceted heart and with each pulse the light within flows, along rectilinear corpuscles that extend and cross, cross and extend, to a diminishing infinity.

At an intersection of two of these lines of light a tiny figure glows. It moves as the monk moves, contracted to the space within the gem. Another point glows in the lattice of corpuscular radiance. Not far now. The homunculus turns between two tiny shelves, passes along a narrow corridor exactly replicating the larger library. The monk climbs a spiral staircase between more shelves, their shapes conforming to the curve; crosses an octagonal room. Everywhere he goes light surges, not candles or lanterns or oil lamps or reed torches, or even ghostly will-o’-the-wisps captured in crystal globes, but inexplicable, sourced from nowhere or everywhere, casting no shadows. It flows along walls and floor and ceilings, bleeding from scrolls and tomes and shelves, illuminating from within grotesque statuary in alcoves, saturating all with a weird living radiance.

A final turn. He holds up the gem. There is a sudden contraction of radiance to a single tome. He reaches up, takes it down. He almost collapses under its enormous weight. On the spine a sequence of runes. He knows the language. He may be the last man who does. He must learn its secrets, before it is too late. Pass down the knowledge before he dies, and a lifetime of scholarship with him.

The light has become diffuse again. At the end of the stack is a lectern. Upon it he opens the tome. Within, on the first page, is a magnificent capital letter, elaborately scribed and illustrated. Though it is clearly the letter I it looks like an image of a tower. Tiny figures try to climb it, some are falling. Around its base many others raise up their hands as if in supplication or to shield themselves in terror. Closer to the tower are more variegated figures. Despite their size they are fantastically detailed and seem to come to life on the page: a priest with his arms cast wide and sunken eyes exhorting the crowd; a mage bent over a cauldron, images within reflected on his face; a heavily tattooed man with a great sword raised high; a man whose eyes can be seen to be blind, a great snarling hound beside him, each tooth clearly delineated. In the background an army on charging warhorses, eyes glowing and teeth gritted with rage. Between tower and army a burning pyre on which a bound man’s death struggles can be discerned.

The monk touches the magnificently illustrated letter reverently, with the tenderness of love. Such skill. As amazing as is the magic of this library, this labyrinth in which he has spent his days, fasting and praying, cataloguing and copying, annotating and translating, worshipping the word, this artistry impresses him more.

He will prepare paints for capital illumination later, the reds – burnt ocher, cinnabar, minium, carmine, folium and madder; the yellows – ocher, orpiment and saffron; the greens, blues, violets, blacks and whites; the colours without names in his own tongues, and others only designated by the alchemy of colliding stars. First, he must copy the tales, translating, as far as the languages will allow it, into his own first tongue, a popular dialect of a thriving language, which the cooing nuns gave him, in the warm recesses of memory, as babbling crawled from incoherence to meaning. He takes ink and quill and parchment from beneath the lectern. His hand hovers above a parchment sheet.

He begins to read:

VOLUME I: The Tower

IT HADN’T BEEN THERE A WEEK AGO. Adrian leaned on his shepherd’s crook, crafted from an ash sapling, carved with ancestral runes, and gazed at this wonder. He had often grazed his sheep here, most recently last week. He was sure it was here he had been. He wandered about the vast mound, his best friend, Laddie, following, wagging his tail. It was definitely the same mound. There was no doubting it. The rock formation there, shaped like a hammer, a hundred yards toward the rising sun and just beyond it an orchard. The trail around the base, where merchant carts had worn ruts in the pasture and horse’s hooves had churned the soil, looping in from the west, doing a half circuit, then heading off at a tangent to the north. The smudge of smoke above the tree line in that direction, where the hamlet of his kin lay. The lightning blasted oak standing alone, moss and green shoots sprouting all over it, upper trunk split like a shaman raising arms in supplication to the ancestors. The stream that ran through fields and forest and meadows and turned the millstone in his hamlet, bubbling over boulders on its way. No, this was definitely the same mound.

He breathed in, out, then hawked and spat. Usually the air up here would be rich with the scent of flowers and grass and soil and cowpats and sheep droppings and horse dung. The smells of life. Now it was different. It smelled of…he wasn’t sure. Perhaps dust. Yes, a dusty smell, and taste, like when the rains don’t come and the protruding ribbed cows stagger and kick up the dust, and the udders shrivel up and the calves drop dead in the wilting fields beside their mothers. Or like an ancestral grave when you dig it open to add another who has passed, mingling the newly dead with the bones. Yet life was all around, daffodils and dandelions and floating bees and swooping sparrows and scuttling dung beetles and buzzing, aggravating flies. In fact, the mound was carpeted with green and yellow all the way up to the strange structure.

He climbed the mound, huge, like a hill but too perfectly circular, one of many that spotted this landscape, said to be the tombs of great ancestors. His sheep grazed and bleated. Overladen with wool like fat clouds sunk down under the weight of winter rain to wander the earth. Ready to be shorn. Over-ready. His father would not be happy. Laddie followed at his heels, but kept a suspicious eye on a ewe that was wandering away from the flock, its lamb bleating forlornly, searching among the flock for its mother.

Adrian didn’t know why anyone would build a mound for an ancestor. Why would you want them to be so far away from your village? Why not keep them close where you could propitiate them? Why not bury them underneath where you slept, so that they could speak more clearly in your dreams? The ancients had strange ways. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe this was not a burial place. His grandfather had told him that it was, but his grandfather, with his skewed eyes and smiling wrinkles, deep as his years were long, told many tales, and as entertaining as they were only some of them were true.

Laddie, yapping, sped off down the slope and nipped at the legs of the ewe. It jumped, and ran back to the flock, and heard its lamb’s distress, pushing through the others to find and feed it. Laddie rounded the flock, nipping outliers into a neater grouping, then ran back up to Adrian.

Adrian knelt down beside the new formation. It exuded the dusty, musty smell overpoweringly, and Laddie sniffed at it, and licked at it and barked. It was a layer of a grey substance, ringing the top of the mound. But it was only a few feet tall, as if someone had started to build, then lost interest. He had seen stone buildings before, in the market town of Dar Ashgurion. But there was a precision to the stonework here that he hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t that the vertical planes were perfectly flat, they weren’t. There were bumps and protrusions all over. But each stone was made of pieces intricately locked together, like some kind of bone puzzle, such as his grandfather had fashioned for him from the bones of chickens and ducks and pigs. And between the stones was a mortar with even more delicate pieces, tinier and tinier to the point of vanishing grey granularity. He ran his fingers over the surface of one stone. Very much like a bone puzzle, only more intricate than anything the village elders made to entertain the children.

Now that he was examining it he was sure that it was actually made of bone. There was a thigh bone. There was a jaw bone. There was a skull. Here was a tooth. They were of many sizes, taken from many men and women, and children, even newborns and younger it seemed, stillbirths perhaps. And all the bones locked together with perfect precision, into large, rectangular stones. Wherever he looked he could find no gaps beyond a finger’s breadth deep. The bones of all shapes and sizes had been perfectly chosen to fit together.

He realized he was still touching the surface. He drew his hand away, and begged the forgiveness of the dead. He didn’t know whose ancestors they were, but it was taboo to touch the bones of ancestors not your own.

It would have taken so many ancestors to build this single ring atop the mound. Was it sacrilege? He didn’t know. Many people had different customs, perhaps the customs of the builders were different. Now that he thought of it, because they didn’t bury their ancestors beneath where they slept, they clearly were not from this region. But who were they? And how could they have so many dead? And how could they make such perfect stones of them? And why stop? Did they run out of ancestors? And why build here? Adrian knew all the hamlets and villages and market towns within a day’s ride. All were like his people in their ways. Who had done this? And how?

But if they had meant to build a house of their ancestors, they might want to live in it to be close to them. That would make sense. Perhaps they weren’t so different after all. But could anyone craft so carefully on such a scale in a single week? Anyway, he had passed not far from here only two days before, to find grazing ground for his flock further afield, and he hadn’t noticed it then. Who had built it? Who could have built it?

While he pondered these things he knelt and gathered herbs and flowers. Not from the summit of the mound, for he didn’t know whether they would be polluted by the ancients beneath, or the others in the ring of bone-stone above. Instead he collected them some distance from the mound. He wondered whether he should allow his sheep to graze on the slopes, but the grass was so thick there. He hoped they didn’t sicken.

That night he spoke of what he had seen to his grandfather, Aimeric, father of his mother, Gale. She stirred the herbs Adrian had collected into the pottage over the central fire. Aimeric’s wrinkles smiled, and frowned as Adrian spooned watered down pottage into his mouth with a horn spoon, and scooped what dribbled down his chin. Aimeric’s eyes blazed clearly, then faded, staring into some other world that only very old men can see. He muttered something about omens, then slept. Adrian wiped his grandfather’s chin with a moist piece of linen.

Gale said, He tires so easily now.

Thibault, Adrian’s father, a man of solid body and stolid mind, said, Soon he’ll get all the sleep he needs.

And then I’ll dream his dreams.

And talk his nonsense, adding it to your own.

Adrian asked his father what he thought about the ring, but Thibault only said he was talking nonsense and, no, he wouldn’t come to the mound. Keep away from those mounds. Evil spirits congregate around them. They’ll affect your mind, and make you see what isn’t there. Look at your mother’s father.

Adrian still sat beside his grandfather. The old man slept peacefully. His mind was not like that of a young man. But was he mad? He was an elder. The chief often came to him for advice on his dreams. The chief was wise, all the men said it, even his irascible father wouldn’t openly deny it, so surely his grandfather must be wiser. And was wisdom madness?

Thibault continued, If you want to be as crazy as him, keep going to the mounds, and seeing things that aren’t there.

Perhaps he would. If madness was wisdom, and the mounds would make him mad, it would be wise to become mad. But he wanted to press his father about the ring of bone. So you know it isn’t there?

Why would it be?

It seemed a poor answer. Have you seen?

What’s to see? I wouldn’t go there. It’s dangerous. It’ll twist your mind.

Sometimes he wanted to hit his father, an obstinate and brutal man, but the memory of years when his father had struck him and he had been a powerless child weighed upon his courage, and for all his young man’s strength, he didn’t dare. Instead he challenged him. How do you know, if you haven’t been there?

I was young once.

So you have been there.

Stop talking nonsense. Tend to your flock. And shear them. You’ve left it late. The prices will fall the longer you leave it with all the others selling already.

It was true, he had left it too late. The next morning he and his father sheared them, and his father baled the wool and they threw it on the cart and he goaded the reluctant oxen to take him to the nearest market town, grumbling about the poor price he would get this late in the season. Adrian watched the cart rattling away along the rutted road. Just then a chill northerly blew up, and the shorn sheep shivered, and Adrian drew his sheepskin coat around him.

Beyond the village green an old woman with a straight nose, flat at the tip, dark hair on her upper lip, and white hair on her head, fine and sparse as broken spider’s silk, leaned on a roughly hewn staff, more a stick really, with green leaves sprouting in defiance of death, and watched the smoke rising from the smith’s forge. Adrian knew her name, but to most she was nameless. They would refer to her, if at all, as, the nameless one. She had been ostracised in a formal ceremony, smoke cleansing her home, and banished from the village. She had been the former smith’s wife, and mother to his children, but they had all died in the plague that had followed the famine. The younger smith, Renard, born in another village half a day to the west, apprenticed to her husband when he lived and still manning his forge as a journeyman when he died, had said before the village council that she was cursed by the ancestors. He had dug up the floors, cast oil in the graves and burned their bones. Before she had been banished she had mixed philtres and concocted remedies and made poultices. She had cast spells for young lovers, and Adrian knew she still would for a few coppers. Her spirit power was indisputable. So when the crops had been blighted she had been blamed, Renard foremost among her accusers. He had seen her practices, he had said, living under the same roof. She had been cast out, forbidden to return to her wedding bed, to the room her children had been born in, to the house they had died in, to the soil where they had once been buried and from which they had spoken to her in dreams.

Now she stood beyond the edge of the village and muttered. Most of the villagers feared her and avoided her, but Renard, coming out and seeing her, chased her away. She hissed and spat at him and shook her staff, but he laughed, not truly afraid of the magic he had claimed to fear so much.

Esther, the dairy maid, smiled and waved at Adrian as he herded the flock from the fold. He had given her a bracelet of flowers last night. She always said she liked wildflowers the best, though Pepin, her blind widowed father, pottering in his garden – always with Growler, his giant protective hound, standing sentry – produced some of the most impressive blooms, as well as healthful herbs and roots of the richest flavour. She showed him the bracelet, on which the small flowers were already beginning to droop.

Will you bring me fresh flowers tonight?

And every night after.

Her cheeks dimpled and she trudged along the muddy path, spilling swill over a fence for her pigs to snuffle through. She came over to him and slid the braided leather bracelet off her wrist. Here, take it with you, then you can put the flowers straight onto the thong. She took his hand in her warm hand and pushed the loop from her wrist to his, her mouth slightly open, then peered up through her eyelashes into his eyes with a look that made him burn inside, and stir all the way down to his loins. He made to turn away, but she quickly grabbed his face and kissed him, then skipped away, with all the innocence of the little girl she no longer was. He looked down at the bracelet. What did she mean by that? Was it what he thought, or was it nothing? But then, why would she kiss him like that, right then when he was feeling that way? Did she know what he had felt?

You’re an idiot, he said to himself. He saw the sheep doing it often enough, and Laddie with whatever bitch he could find that was in heat. He was acting like a city boy. Not that he knew what a city was, other than vague imaginings based on the descriptions of his grandfather or of vagrant bards who begged for bread and told a lot of entertaining lies. But if cities really existed and boys within them knew nothing of nature, their thoughts might be like those he was thinking now. Esther had that effect on him. Surely, it wasn’t just a stirring in the loins. Or maybe it was. He shook his head, laughing inwardly at himself, and whistled to Laddie. Laddie bounded to his side, then sped around the flock, nipping them into good order, urging them on.

By the afternoon the sun was bright enough to warm them as they grazed near the mound. He wouldn’t usually graze them again so soon after so near the same place. Meadows need time to spring back. But he couldn’t keep away, and the grass here was unusually lush, and the mound was large, so it would take a long time for them to graze all the way round. As he came closer he saw he wasn’t the only one.

The chief, Jacob, shield of his people, stood near the summit, tapping the bone ring with the tip of his sword. He wore leathern breeches, roped cloth boots and an armless sheepskin coat, and his bare arms were covered with tattoos. Some were ceremonial, others reminders of good years, others charms against a bad harvest. But most were warrior marks, one for each life he had taken, to ward him against the spirits of the defeated. For they would find his tribe by finding him, and he must stand strong against them or his people would suffer their vengeance. His face was broad and his brow projected, denoting the strength on which his people relied. Around his neck hung a silver chain strung with sabre teeth. He was not alone.

Adrian’s grandfather was there.

The next day more people were there. It seemed everyone from the nearby village had come, as well as most of the dwellers of the outlying hamlet in which Adrian dwelt and even some cottagers from the forest. Gale was there, Aimeric leaning on her. Esther was there, wearing the bracelet with fresh flowers. Despite his earlier admonitions even Thibault was there.

The day after that all the chieftains of the surrounding villages were there, along with many other villagers. Each day there were more people there. And they debated vociferously. The chiefs and the elders and the shamans of the villages and the merchants and mages of the towns led the shouting from the top of the mound, both inside and outside the bone-wall. They asked many questions of each other, or of themselves. They had many answers. But few would agree. Arguments became heated. Punches and kicks were thrown. Opponents were spat at. And day by day the crowds grew. They camped in the fields. They forgot their crops and their flocks. The grass was trodden flat. The pasture turned to churned dirt.

An elder said the ring of stone was not built by strangers, for if it had been someone would have seen them, and no one had seen any but the usual handful of vagrant tinkers and mendicant shamans. It was agreed though that strangers must be dealt with, for they must have something to do with it, even if it was built by locals. They must have incited locals to do it. So a stranger was found and dragged up there the next day and was told he would answer for his irreligion. His clothes were roughly stitched together rabbit skins, his face and hands dirty. He looked from side to side, confused.

Stranger, the crowd screamed.

I’m not, he said, but his voice was drowned out.

Eventually one of the elders, whose village bordered the woods, spoke up above the rabble. He explained to them:

This is Nicholas, a cottager in the woods. He isn’t a stranger. You haven’t seen him because he rarely comes out of the woods.

A hunched man standing just outside the ring of bone-stone, turned to the crowd. He wore a loose black robe. He drew himself to his full height, a whole foot taller than the crowd, and threw his arms wide. With a self-righteous look on his gaunt face and a feverish flame in his bulging eyes he said, If we haven’t seen him how can he not be a stranger?

Behind him the elder began to speak, I just told you…, but the rest of his statement was unheard beneath the loud voice of the gaunt faced preacher.

You said we haven’t seen him.

Yes, I said...

Yes, you’re right. If we haven’t seen him he’s a stranger. How can he not be? How could he live without coming into any village or town to trade? Every farmer needs to trade. Every smith and miller and baker and brick maker and fisher and eel trapper and weaver and swineherd needs to trade. Every man needs to trade.

A monk doesn’t need to trade, sneered a man with a bald head and bulbous nose and swelling paunch, but he was quickly hushed by his wife who looked a lot like him only less pretty, though she did have a few more strands of hair than him.

The elder said, Nicholas tends bee hives and traps rabbits and eats roots and berries. He lives like a hermit.

That sounds like a strange way of life. If a man is strange isn’t he a stranger?

Though the elder tried to explain that the kind of strange he was talking about was foreignness the crowd didn’t hear him beneath the screams of their agreement. Even those who didn’t agree didn’t dare to challenge them. The bald man who had spoken before got an elbow in the paunch from his bulbous nosed bepaunched wife and stayed silent even if he looked like he had something to say.

The chiefs saw the people wanted blood regardless of the truth, so it was agreed between them they could name Nicholas stranger and he would be one. So they named him stranger and prepared to execute him for irreligion, in the traditional way, and we all know it’s important to maintain tradition. So decapitation it was, or was to be, if they could agree on the finer cultural points of beheading. Culture must be defended at all costs, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But how can we execute him? said another elder, an old man with one blind eye, war tattoos on his face and large ears and nose with hair sprouting from his earholes and nostrils.

The crowd hissed at him.

But who will handle the body? It’s taboo. None here are his kin. This is why we always leave executions to kin.

Who knows his kin?

We must find them. They must do it.

But he’s pronounced stranger so he has no kin.

Then must he not be touched by kin? Are his kin still his kin?

They are foreign, so are nothing to us.

He won’t be dead when he’s being executed.

Then an argument sprung up among the mages, who had come from their town towers and their wilderness dungeons and their cave catacombs and their mountain eyries and all the other places, wholesome or rank or even pestilent, that mages think most apt for the practicing of magic or science or natural philosophy, or whatever else they choose to call it. It was started by a mage with snowy white hair bristling on his cheeks and bushing on his eyebrows and not anywhere much else, at least that you could see. The bell shaped sleeves of his robe grew so wide as they went that with his arms raised to a few degrees above the horizontal to silence others their hems hung all the way to the ground from the wrists. He was called Tod, which doesn’t sound like a very magical name, but then I suppose a mother doesn’t know what a son is going to become when he’s born. But as unimpressive as his name was and as impractical as his tailoring was he had a serious point to make, Does the condemned man become dead as the blade strikes? Then the end of the cut is a touching of a dead man.

A miller, who will remain unnamed, because I don’t know his name, although I suppose we could call him Mr Miller, begged to differ, But that’s nonsense. He’s not dead till long after the neck is completely severed. How else do you explain the way a man’s eyes roll and his mouth tries to speak after his head is cut off?

His neighbour, who disapproved of him and had been ripped off by him more than once, let’s call him Mr E, said, I’ve never seen anything of the sort.

You obviously haven’t attended many executions, responded Mr Miller, Only last week I saw a man tell his wife he loved her, after his head had been cut off mind you.

His head had been cut off? Mr E said with a sceptical look.

Clean as a servant’s hands on laundry day.

So his neck had no lungs?

Mr Miller rolled his eyes as if explaining to a child, Obviously.

Mr E was having none of that. Then there was no sound? Then how could he say anything? And if he did say something it could have been anything at all. You could interpret his lips twisting to say whatever you like. He could have said, ‘Fuck off bitch,’…

The man with the bulbous nose and swelling paunch nodded here. His wife scowled at him.

…or, ‘don’t forget to collect the eggs from the hen shed.’ Or he could have said nothing at all.

Tod the mage said, If his lips spoke does it mean that he spoke, or was it his lips?

A second mage, let’s call him Tom, nodded sagely, That’s another interesting question.

A third mage, probably named Dick, wasn’t having any of it though, No, no. This is all nonsense. Meaningless questions that are nothing but tricks of language, or in this case the absence of language.

Tom said, But is it absent? That’s the question. Look at it this way, if it doesn’t exist, what doesn’t exist? It can’t be something, because for anything to be a something it must exist. So can it be language? Language is something, not nothing. Hence language must be present, which contradicts your assertion, doesn’t it?

Dick said, I’ll contradict your bloody assertion.

Tom calmly replied, It’s not an assertion, it’s a question.

A rhetorical question is an assertion.

Are you sure?

A fourth mage (I’m sure you’ll agree he must have been called Harry) raised his hands diplomatically, These are all meaningless questions. What we want to know is, does a man die before his neck is severed? And I have an elegant answer. The blade must cut through half of his neck first, then half the remaining half, then half the remaining quarter. There are such infinite gradations of neck cutting that his head must still be attached to his body before he’s dead. Therefore he’s dead before his head falls off.

Dick said, Talk about nonsense! There are infinite gradations of life’s departure, as finely divided as is his neck, so his life will last as long as his neck lasts.

Tod, who you’ll remember was the first mage, and understand he was feeling a little left out of things by now, said, And if it doesn’t? Who’ll take the risk?

All the mages were silent, including Tod, Tom, Dick and Harry, though they each thought all the others were idiots and shook their heads sadly at the folly of poor scholarship. The crowd beyond the ring was silent, more puzzled than enlightened by all this erudition.

Jacob ignored the finer arcane points and offered a practical solution, Say that his life doesn’t last until his neck is severed. Surely it is severed by a blade not a hand, so there is no taboo touching of the dead.

Another chieftain nodded. Soon the chiefs were all in agreement.

A shaman cleared his throat to be heard, and when the others looked to him said, His blade must be cleansed afterwards though. The shamans all nodded agreement with this, and Jacob drew his great sword and dragged Nicholas to the ring of the wall and pushed him down to his knees. He struggled and Jacob struck him on the side of his head with the pommel of his sword. He went limp. The chieftain picked him up by his neck and draped his body over the bone wall with his head protruding in the direction of the baying crowd.

But what about his body after you’ve cut his head off? Yelled a voice from the crowd.

Will you shut up? hissed the bulbous nosed wife to her grinning husband, elbowing him in his paunch, sure that he was just making trouble. "You’re a disgrace, and I’m the one