Storymania - The Promise Ese by June M Harcourt

The Promise Ese (42)
June M Harcourt

Musical ablutions streamered through the Antarctic air as moraines streak the edges of black and virulent mountain chains.

“Ah what is that I hear?” ugged the almost crippled Morris, his finneskoe [footwear] having sprouted claws. “Must be a pow-wow”.

“Uh, uh, I’ve been educated,” disputed King Hector at his most authoritative, “It’s ‘the halls of the mountain king.’ That narrows down the nationality.”

“Don’t you think we should take precautions? The Vikings are a surly lot. They use their ski poles to skewer people.” Morris dropped back his pace and melted behind the huge fur girth of his leader, comforted by a very distant and irregular tractor dirge.

Suddenly, to their tired and musty eyes, the buffed black shell of an antique gramophone emerged from the gentle drifts. The weather was improving as they neared their goal. Accompanying it like an amphibious orchestra, a shoal of wandering penguins, an unknown pedigree with red and white crosses upon their breasts.

“Swedish spies, that’s their livery,” Hector whispered somewhat nonchalant. “These are the diminutives. The maximus are twice as high, big as me,” he added, reaching above his hood to demonstrate height. “ Predictably it was the diminutive wearing a monocle that spotted them first. He hollered in time to the music, faster and faster until a human-being materialized from an extremely well camouflaged tent – white.

“Speak English? “ shouted the neo-georgian boss, pulling down his hood to expose his noble and notable countenance, haggard from frostbite but nonetheless memorable.

“Of course” the mousy Swede squeaked. “ we ski Mt Snowdon in summer. We buy British goods and sell them at double price to the Norwegian devils.”

“Can that racket. I hate music.” A brash diminutive reared up as if to strike but suffered the fate of all good footballs. Hector merely dusted the gore from his soles then asked for the Swedish headman.

“Out there” all the penguins pointed their little flippers into the weird white.

Morris whispered, tacitly, “still searching for the pole, I believe boss.” This information lipped a laugh of avalanche scale from Carpenter. “What after four years, you tell me he still hasn’t found it! Well there’s only a few thousand miles to cover, easy- as –pie. Mapping on the run I suppose. How far from here?”

The Swede took out an unusual compass from the tent as if pulling a rabbit from an invisible topper. The needle circled around and around and around, then a smiley toy seal popped out.

“Ah,” said the Swede with a satisfied jerk of his head, this way. The seal points this way.”

“Anything to eat first? Do you think they may barter food for feminine charm?”

“Plentiful supply, reindeer herd and dogs for afters of course. They make how you say ‘smashing’ crumpets.”

“Cutlets”

They plodded on. The sun came out from under the moon until they were forced to strip. Vermin of all sorts wriggled out from their eskimo suits. They walked for a while in their pyjama jackets until another familiar sound delighted their snow-crunched ears. A dictatorial audible sequence, scuffed and irritable and human.

“No I will not. You pick up all those bones and air these execrable bags, they stink. Good heavens, you Vikings are pigs! Then go and say your prayers, its bedtime… Why Good afternoon my lord.”

“Who are you?” asked Hector.

“Jobs of course, lady in waiting to the queen. She is in there…”

A marvellous sight, as bedazzling as the jewel encrusted sapphire scented palatially splendid, royally blue, lisant, minareted and bloshed by the dimes of silver-dollared, mandarin sun-runnels, as jovial as Xanadu the whitely wefted compound divided into its base hues and the rainbow tents of Bergstrom the unwitting, emergent. His tent looked the brightest, biggest and streamlinedest. Trilling female junkets of fabulous chatter resounded. Hector and Morris crept close enough to send their ears.

“I’m starving but I won’t be eating that muck. I want the food of the Gods. And I won’t be wearing those clothes. Who do you think you are, my husband or something? You’re not good enough. I demand a hero to sweep me away. You are puny and a pipsqueak, reek of dog, because I know what you Northerners do with your beasts, your coffee is burnt and besides – where is the pole, the least I expect. My true husband will be arriving tout suite to rescue me from the depraved and smudgy- white limp locks. Keep your paws off my knee, boy ‘o.”

“Never try it on with me either. I have been well-bred by my mistress goody-goody, my mumsie. You have heard no doubt of the fabled spy-mistress, lady Carpenter? She will have hectored legions of scouts, the young knights of the empire into embarking on a quest to save Gwen, the jelly-bottom. I expect them any moment.”

Just then, the tractor rotored into the compound. Hunt nowhere to be seen but his minions, flitting like bats across the pale sky, mischief-making bats came as a cloud from the diesel puffs.

“Well, Hector clamoured above the engine din, “what are you waiting for. The girls are inside.” He folded his arms and looked fierce.

“We are instructed to await the arrival of our erstwhile Boss, Tundra Hunt. Busy slicing up hounds, hates the task but it inflames him.” Said a sleazy member of the vanguard. Greaves suddenly wailed that they were torturing him, beguiling his swollen feet with cotton wool like Tantalus at the drink. Hector grumbled like the winds of all-direction pervasive, inspiring but destructive to the small flotsam not battened down, the ambulant rubbish, yet soon as he neared the conveyance, muttering ‘final straw’, a strange and loathsome beast mushroomed from the snow country, a fiend in dog-skin, a Hunt rampant.

“Aha,” Hunt pirouetted to face his mortal enemy. “I have learnt many things from the Swedes, how to camouflage myself in the white by donning white skin, how to make women my house-slaves, how to not discover the South Pole and how not to treat fellow human-beings, as followers and never fraternally like the fisherman his boat-accomplices. No such thing as a small fish or a big pond. Only many fish surging in a sea of tolerance and duty and fun and loyalty. The boy-scout code – honour, loyalty and usefulness. I devour these words and spit them as ice-darts into the eyes of the ones without goggles, the seers. Anyway, the floating pole is mine. I’m sure they have discovered it by now but aren’t telling, but every man has his price. Gold, what can’t be purchased with gold? Even knowledge I can buy or swap for the women. Carps, you should have kept far, the Pole is hereabouts, it is mine to claim, you promised it to me remember? And a man’s solemn oath is his honour.”

Then for no reason apparent to Hunt himself, the crowd of peregrinating individuals he called his army began laughing and pointing, hopping from the tractor and shamming surprise for really Hunt amounted to a ridiculous and ticklish sight. The great knowledge and wisdom of the north, oh yes? His fur was black as night, his boots blacker still, his mitts as black as limp lambs tails. And his face burnished by the sun, red, redder than blood, redder than ridicule, as red as a baboons bum.

“I’m sure they’ll cut you in on the secret, King Hunt, yes and then they’ll dye you as white as the tents with their milky piss and use you as some kind of beacon for all the other would-be heroes who couldn’t pass muster, the sparkless, the useless, the deviant and cruel. There is nowhere to hide in the White you know. It makes every measly sin a heinous crime, bends every straight line into a snake-tail coiling inwards, forever coiling without beginning or end to wind the aggrieved and the helpless and the hopeless into the circle of perfect bliss and atonement. Safe in their coil of cable, safe in the belted loop of paradise, safe from the snares and meglo-mania and mean-spiritedness that has won in the game of desert ramble, hitherto, or has it? Found the spot to hoist the flagstaff. Where is the very centre of the universe, my son, the trig of the highest map ever mounted the windiest and the loneliest yet the most complete and serene heart, a heart of ice that colours with the eyes of those that see it clear in the inner recesses of their hearts and souls and the pin-pricks of light in their retinas. That is the true pole. It may never be yours, brother scout because you are about to prove disloyal. Betray your clan and country and comrades. Make your ambition the driver and your disgrace the passenger that hogs the seats and ejects the footsore wayfarers from a last ride to the roadside, to the spiky trail, to the tepid warmth and creeping disease.” Amaranthus cheered:

“Ah this be my man. Listen to that, the heroic incarnation of compassion. Farewell Viking. No need to wage war, I can crush you with my fairy-light footfall. Ha Ha, tundra king, a pretty poor monument you make, what about some painted concrete, lay it on wet and thick and as it hardens so is preserved for all time that ineffectual, self-piteous sigh of horror – horrified because we are smirking at you.” She poked out her tongue. There was a coin upon it, foreign money, tastes bad, she said spitting the silver onto the ice. Tastes like second best. True gold is for my tongue now, the taste of victory, the taste of the Sun.” The ladies had protruded their raiment bundles from the chief tents and their faces the faces of ecstatic appraisal.

Hunt drooped, fading like the trails of laughing ridicule as fatal to his cause as very death itself. Unintelligible shouts off-stage enter left, “Troll-master, come you quick.”

“What is it speak.’ Bergstrom had sauntered from his tent, a cheroot in his mouth, blood-shot eyes and a few bite-marks from Queen Amaranthus.

“We have spied something in the distance with our binoculars, might be a pole.”

“A pole, already there?”

“It is black and rises from the ground like two sticks, a marker of some kind or a mast, maybe a ship?”

“What in the middle of the ice-waste? No it must be the South Pole. Was it striped?”

“Couldn’t be sure but we see little lights winking on and off.”

“Huh you make it sound like a Christmas tree.” Bergstrom looked incredulous, stumped his cheroot, said “oh well better investigate’ and began rallying the troops to action. Too late. Scott had jumped the gun. What was a ship to him? An escape and a mask for his ridiculous face. Alternatively, what the pole? A crutch to support his own disillusionment. He doubted the strength of his own powers. He didn’t want the women anymore, he preferred men and goats.

“I’m off,” he spat to the boys, “whose for death or glory?”

“Oh we’re too tired and sick and you are too hasty. Maybe it’s an hallucination.”

“But sir,” said Greaves feebly, “if it be a vessel you will come back for us we need a way out of this icicle quagmire, I’m not much longer for this world if you leave me to freeze here.”

“Huh, you in particular laughed the loudest, Greaves, far as I’m concerned its everyman for himself.” Hunt hurled himself on a kind of giant scooter and zipped over the snow like a mamba towards the staves and sticks. Bergstrom had first to apply ski and then ski-binding and then check every single stitch in his snowsuit for holdfastness. By the time his procession had gotten underway, Hunt way ahead alone had almost reached the thence discernible masts of a ship but a broken one.

‘Damn, damn and double damn,” He had dismounted and was scuffing the snow when all of a sudden the ice cleft apart like a huge book, seamlessly, noiselessly and slowly, slower in fact than Hunts own comprehension. He was wondering how to jolly well fix wheels to the thing so he could sail away over the land with it to civilization before the pack caught up with him. He sat on a spar like ‘the thinker’, crackling with amazement when with a deadly silence, spar, ship Hunt and all sank down into the deep, burbling like the runoff from a canyon, the masts like the branches of old trees snapping and drifting to dam somewhere, somewhere fathomless as the roots of thought carrying Hunt like a woodlouse into the eternity of dudgeon. His hand came up once, his finger a frost twig, his red face a drop of blood in the palm of time.

Bergstrom observed all through a telescope as if it were new land looming through a fog.

“He’s gone boys. Now he will know the wonders of the deep, if there be any underwater.”

Under where?

‘Nothing beside remains. Around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

So this left King Hector, stauncher of wounds and lover of women, to account for the party of abandoned voyagers. Bergstrom certainly promised faint help.

“Not the pole, thought it an illusion, lets draw up stakes and move on. Anyway the reindeer require a fresh slush. Look at these feet, not fit for pickling. I think we take this nugget here, evidence that Hunt never found the Pole. I sure he would have used it to buy publicity – how many cameras you think? My gosh, a studio in Hollywood…”

As he and his fellows bustled about stowing possessions, Hunts men, the Carpenter defectors and three women sat up a dervish wholloaing. What would become of them? But none of them banked upon the resourcefulness of Sir. H. A. Carpenter, king of kings. They thought he was an old has-been, that the fever had fuddled his wits, that his weeks of near-starvation had starved his brain-tissue into comatose stasis. They thought a man who looked fat in a fur had a fathead. How little they knew his fat-heart.

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