Bring me the head of the mocking map maker! Bring me his bones, his skin and his hair
He lives within a creaking gloomberg of ramshackle rooms, a rookery of old dreams, far to the west in a city where the sun sets and the light flames gold before the eve; in that funky dwelling he scampers hither and yon, peeping at reality through lenses, sticking up his head, staring at the city. From there he corresponds with similar rank fellows, a network of curious ghouls spread across the land, ferreting each other mail, cracking epistles scratched in yellow fly paper in a garbled hand. (In these he has mocked me!)
There in a quarter drenched in ravens and disturbing smells, where the pie-shops glisten in the afternoon smog, wrapped in stinking mundanity, climbs a curious house, perched above the like an drunken panther in a tree. It looms; dark but unserious, eyeing the city from under slanted eves which cackle like witches in the rain, propped up and joisted by wrenched beams that howl in the high winds from the amethyst sea.
Within lairs the Mocking Cartographer, ensconced in a warren of maps, each more deadly than the last. Like a rube Goldberg machine in there it is, or a dolls-house labyrinth.
THERE, in a room which is not a room, in a house which is not a house slinks that cartographer of smirks.
He thinks himself invulnerable for each of his enchanted maps has the power to drink in adventurers , invaders and thieves, trapping them in tiny parallel pearls of alternative sense. Each one a dungeon or labyrinth, castle or some other scene of "adventure"- the distant sky nothing more than an impenetrable painted board, the characters within nothing but feigned recycled mummers prancing through their sorrows. Here are snared the Mock-Mans foes, to be freed only on completion of the test, or else plucked from the parchment like a wriggling ant! Dropped into a jar - a collection of miniscule derps, trapped in jam!
In the house of the Mocking Man, one never knows if one has opened a door to a True Room, or been enchanted and ensorcelled into some comedic jiggerypokery.
For the Mocking Man mocks us all.
He mocks the wise and the deluded, the heroic and the dark, he mocks the Knight and the Thief, the Soothsayer and Sage, he mocks the very principals of adventure itself! The agon of the hero! The pathos of the monster! The luciferian ego of the villain! All reduced to nonsense in his glimmering eye!
He is probably mocking you right now!
Therefore! I have set;
A BOUNTY ON THE MOCK-MANS HEAD
A bounty of wonders itemised by part.
For each section of the Mocking Mans body I shall return an equivalent selection - in precious materiel; bones of gold, flesh of ebony and ivory, clothes of spider silk and silver leaf, skin of tessellated jade, hair of spun ambergris, each eye a great gem, the brain a moonstone, largest in the world! The tubes I will exchange for amber guts. Any stools recovered for quartz.
Bring me the flesh of the Mocking Man!
This was a cute way to do this.
ReplyDeleteOR WHAT IF the mockman were so named not because of their behavior, but because of their mocking resemblance to the human form?!? Their ropelike arms, so innocuous at a distance, which look like giant earthworms as you approach? The pillow-shaped head and thorax, faced with dinner-plate eyes as big as those of the giant squid, giant flat glistening ovals?
ReplyDeleteGlad the book is getting made!! Looking forward to drawing for it!!