The Great Fetish

2

Marko Prokopiu sat on a stool in one corner of his cell. He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists, staring down at the floor in front of him. Outside, the rain slanted grayly past the barred window.

Although to some, solitude is a punishment, Marko was glad that he had no roommate. He wanted nothing but to sit on his stool and wallow in solitary despondency.

Behind his somberly immobile face, his mind was a stew of emotions. One of his minds was proud of him for being a martyr to truth. Another was ashamed of himself for exposing himself to punishment for the sake of a mere theory, which might not even be true. A third told him that all was over, that he might as well kill himself, while a fourth tried to console him with the thought that at least his mother and his wife, Petronela, and his friend Mongamri would remain true to him….

The lock went clank and the door groaned open. Ristoli Vasu, the jailer, said: “Your mother is here to see you, Marko. Come.”

Marko silently followed the jailer into the anteroom. There stood little Olga Prokopiu, in her old raincoat of wool impregnated with stupa gum.

“Mother!” he said. He checked an impulse to hug Olga Prokopiu when he saw that she held a cake in her hands.

“Here, Marko,” she said. “Don’t try to eat it all in one bite.” She gave it to him with a sharp look. “Now sit down. I don’t want you to fall down when you hear the news.”

“What news?” said Marko, alarm shrieking in his mind.

“Petronela has run off with that man Mongamri.”

Marko’s jaw dropped. “What… when…”

“Just an hour or two ago. That’s why I came over. I told you no good would come of taking that alien into our house. Either of them. Those Anglonians have no more morals than rabbits.”

Marko sat back, waiting for his stunned wits to revive. His mother said sharply:

“Now, don’t sniffle. You’re a grown man, and it’s unseemly to show such emotions. You know what you must do.”

Marko glanced around the walls of thick stupa-wood planks. “How?”

“Something will turn up.” She glanced at the cake, which Marko’s huge hands had badly squashed out of shape.

“Oh,” said Marko. He wiped away a fugitive tear and pulled himself together. When not crushed by adversity, he could think as well as the next man. “Tell me what happened.”

“After dinner I took my siesta. When I awoke, I called to Petronela to help me with the dishes, and there was no answer, nor yet when I knocked on her door. When I went into your room, there were signs of her having suddenly packed, and on the bureau I found this.”

She handed her son a piece of paper, on which Petronela had written, in bad Vizantian:

My dear Marko:

Forgive my leaving you, but I cannot abide such a long wait. I am not well suited to life in Skudra anyway, and you will be happier in the long run with a woman of your own kind.

Farewell, Petronela

Marko read the note through twice, crumpled it, and threw it into a corner of the anteroom with such violence that it bounced halfway back. He said:

“Chet had left too?”

“Yes. I remembered that Komnenu’s stage-wagons leave around siesta time. I hurried down Zlatkovi Street to Komnenu’s stable and found him just hitching up the paxor to leave for Chef.

“There was no sign of Petronela and Mongamri, so I asked Komnenu if he had seen them. He said yes, they had just gone out on the wagon for Thine, an hour earlier. They seemed very cheerful, laughing and holding hands. Komnenu said he supposed they were going down to Thine to hire some lawyer more skillful than Rigas Lazarevi.”

Marko picked up the crumpled sheet of note paper, smoothed it out, and read it again, as if by reading it often enough he could persuade it to change its wording. The note remained the same, and so did the searing spiritual pain that flooded his mind. Finally he said:

“What should I do, Mother?”

“Wait till tonight.” She lowered her voice, glancing towards the open door into the jailer’s office. “Then eat that cake, and do what seems best to you.”

“Thanks. Come again soon.”

“I shall see you again sooner than you think. Goodbye, and keep your character up. Your father was a man of much less intelligence than you, but he had character.”

Olga Prokopiu gathered her raincoat about her and clumped out, looking too small for the voluminous garment and the heavy peasant boots, but spry for her years.

Marko returned to his cell with the note and the mangled cake. He set the cake down in a corner and himself in the opposite corner. He stared at the cake, biting his lips. He beat his fist against his palm, jumped up to pace the cell, then sat down again. He dug his knuckles into his scalp and pounded his knees with his fists. His lips writhed; his huge hairy hands clenched and unclenched.

At last, unable to control himself any longer, he jumped up with a hoarse animal yell, between a scream and a bellow. He glared at the cake, half tempted to kick or trample it—anything to work off the volcanic energies rising within him. But he retained sense enough to know he might want it later, and anyway it was his mother’s gift. Instead, he caught up the stool and slammed it against the cage bars with such force that he broke off the leg by which he held it.

“Here! Here!” cried Ristoli Vasu, coming at a run. “What are you doing, Marko? Stop at once!”

Marko picked up the remains of the stool and continued to batter at the bars until the article was reduced to splinters. Then he leaped up and down on the splinters, stamping them with his boots.

“You shall have no supper!” yelled the jailer.

Marko only screamed at Vasu, rattled the cage door, kicked the walls, and pounded his own head and body with his fists.

“This is undignified!” cried Ristoli Vasu. “Marko, you’re acting like a child in a tantrum!”

As these words penetrated Marko’s red-hazed mind, the fit left him and he threw himself down on his pallet weeping. That, too, was un-Vizantian, but he did not care.•

This, too, passed. Marko sat on the floor, having no more stool. He stared blankly, his mind filled with fantasies of horrible things he would do to Chet Mongamri and to Petronela too; only the things he would do to Petronela were not quite so horrible. He still loved her in a way.

He could not understand how such a thing had happened. Being Marko, he had simply not seen the signs of Petronela’s increasing dissatisfaction with her life in Skudra, or the mutual interest that flared up between her and Mongamri as soon as the traveler moved in. It would have been hard enough for an alien girl like Petronela to get herself accepted by the Skudrans if she had married the most popular man in town. Having married one of the least popular, she found it quite impossible. To her, social acceptance and activity were of great importance.

Deprived of his supper as punishment for destroying the stool, Marko ate the cake. Nobody, he thought, could make cheese cakes as his mother could. About the third bite, as he half expected, he encountered a file. He looked at the file and then at the window bars, beyond which the rain still fell. A slow smile formed on his broad face.

After midnight, Marko Prokopiu knocked on the window of his mother’s bedroom. The old lady got up at once and let him in.

“Good,” she said. “I knew my son wouldn’t falter when his honor had to be avenged. How will you get to Thine?”

Marko grinned. “I stole Judge Kopitar’s horse and then broke into the schoolhouse and stole the school funds. I had a key to the strongbox hidden away.”

“Why, Marko! What a desperate character my mild-as-milktoast son has become!’^

“Huh! What have laws and “morals done for me? Here, take these. You will need something to live on. But don’t spend it lavishly, or people will suspect it’s not yours.”

He pressed some of the stolen money upon her and stepped into the living room, plainly but decently furnished in the rustic style of the Skudran Hills. Olga Prokopiu’s little tame tersor sat asleep on its perch, wrapped in its membranous wings. Marko stepped over to the big ornate chest, which Milan Prokopiu had brought all the way from Chef, to take out his father’s war ax. He slid the ax head out of its leather case to see that all was well, then put it back in.

Milan Prokopiu had made this piece at the height of his powers. It had a two-foot steel shaft protruding from the wooden handle. From the other or butt end hung a leather thong to be looped over the wrist, so that if the handle slipped out of the user’s grip, the weapon should not be lost.

Marko loosened the belt of his sheepskin jacket, thrust the pointed end through the loop on the back side of the case, and buckled the belt back on. The case was large enough to keep the steel spike on the end of the shaft, or the other, curved spike opposite the blade, from poking the wearer. All the steel of the ax was blued and heavily greased. So was all ironware on Kforri, where the damp, oxygen-rich atmosphere would otherwise soon rust it away to nothing.

He also took down from the wall a round steel buckler with a single handle behind its boss, a hook on the boss to hang a lantern from, and a strap to hand the shield over his back. Although no swashbuckler, he knew that the world was a rough place.

“How about some food?” he said.

“I’ll get it for you,” said his mother. Actually, one could make the journey from Skudra to Thine without taking any food along, because the ubiquitous fungi provided nourishment. But it was known that a diet of fungi, unmixed with cultivated food, would in the long run cause bodily weakness and disease.

While Olga Prokopiu bustled about, Marko asked: “Was there anything to show where they were going after Thine?”

“No. I suppose they mean to return to Anglonia.”

Marko mused: “If they had gone to Chef, they would have taken ship across the Medranian Sea. As they have set out for Thine, they would cross the Saar by caravan.”

“You should know, son; you have traveled.”

“I shall catch them,” he said.

“See that you do.” She gazed fondly at her son. “Put them to a terrible death; something I can be proud of.”

Marko gathered up such spare clothing and other gear as he thought he would need, gave his mother a hug, and went out into the rain. Judge Kopitar’s horse was tethered behind the Prokopiu house. Like all horses on Kforri, it was an animal of medium height and stocky, massive build.

Marko strapped his traveling bag behind the saddle, unhitched, and mounted. The horse shifted its feet and shook its head uneasily. It sensed that Marko was not its owner, but his weight discouraged it from trying to buck him off. Marko pulled the hood of his raincoat down low over his kalpak, so that it nearly hid his face, and turned the horse’s head towards the road to Thine.

Marko knew all the local roads well and had once been to Thine, during his sabbatical two years before. He had, hi fact, traveled all over Vizantia. He had been to the seaports of Chef and Stambu and Moska and Bukres, to the great stupa forests of the Borsja Peninsula, and finally to Thine, where he had studied at the university.

At Chef, he had become acquainted with Woshon Seum, the representative of the Anglonian trading firm of Choerch and Jaex. Knowing Woshon Seum, he was bound to meet Scum’s daughter Petronela. They fell in love and got married, and Marko brought her back to Skudra, to the ill-concealed consternation of his mother and his associates. He had never been popular, and marrying an alien seemed to many townsfolk like the last straw.

As he trotted through the outskirts of Skudra, Marko looked back towards the center of the town. All was dark and quiet under the pattering rain. He turned and faced the road north. Little maintenance was done on this road, so that the only check on the swift growth of the fungi was the hoofs and wheels of traffic. These merely mashed the undiscourageable vegetation into slimy pulp. Despite the calks on its shoes, the judge’s horse slipped and skidded on slight slopes. On steeper ones, Marko had to get off and lead it, wishing he had been able to steal a paxer instead. This was an elephantine plant-eating reptile, which the people of Kforri domesticated and used as a heavy draft animal. The rain let up. Marko plodded on. Wet fronds or stalks of the plants that overhung the road, like grasses and mosses enlarged to tree size, brushed against him. An active volcano glowed dull red against the underside of the rain clouds and its own smoke plume. Rifts appeared in the clouds, through which Marko glimpsed Gallio, the nearest and brightest of the three little moons, sweeping through the stars.