[From a dream had after drinking 12 pints of beer and somehow finding this bed in this strange house.]

“Banes, Banes—we are over here,” came the voice of Barrister Moreno.

“Where, where am I—where are you?”

“We are headed home, Brother—home!” came the low, strident tone of his dapper patron of the argumentative arts.

He saw only a white curtain at the foot of the plush, many-pillowed bed arranged by Frazzetta Girl, the red-headed Aztec beauty who slaved for the Vanilla Gorilla. The door was gone—the windows blocked up. His glasses, where were his glasses?

‘Why am I thinking of myself in the third person? Am I dead?’

‘Of course you are dead—fool—Girdeon got you.’

‘But I’m still in this junk body. My balance is off, the sirens—they are louder this day. Good, no longer third person—I’m at least a ghost.’

The sound of ocean surf beckoned form the other side of the white lace curtain at the bed’s foot. There was no seeing through the curtain, for where there was a gap in the lace left by the pleasing weave pattern, Night sank through.

Addler Banes slid from bed, disappointed in himself for having fallen asleep in his traveling clothes. Last night there had been some revel, partly in his honor. The stomach was queasy, the throat thick, breath stale to acidic.

“His things, they are gone—he has no more,” chirped two little girls on the cusp of adolescence from the far side of the lace curtain into Night.

‘What?’ wondered he, and as if they heard his thoughts came the voices of pure good will, “His grave goods are plundered, Ocean laps at his bier, the tomb door breached. We must save his shade lest it curse the waters drowned.”

There was no pack, no suitcase, not even his instrument case, where to brush his teeth. His boots where on his feet. How could he face the lady whose bedspread he had smudged with his unnatural feet—how could he breathe the same air as the beauties beyond without brushing his yellow teeth: ‘How will I make coffee in this place with no door.’

‘Slave!’ his inner chorus called, ‘Slave!’

‘I can hear the ocean, the water will be salty to gargle, for oral hygiene at least I most go.’

“We are over here, Good Slave, over here, below the white cliff—please, save your shade from the dark wave,” sounded the two sprite-like voices.

Boots and all, Banes limped towards the curtain, ‘My medicine, before long I’ll not even limp—all gone, no medicine…'

He touched the curtain and felt relief, sensing that beyond this veil of light and Night worked a loom whose weaver lived beyond the pal of bleak and bright, weaving a tapestry in which the lost might be set in thread to mend his guilty plight.

‘I’ve walked away and…’ drool slipped down through his beard and drew him onward to the sound of surf and sprite. The curtain parted like dawn fog before sun beam and opened to a scene of innocence—two girls, one twelve and blond, one ten and dark-haired, sat a tiny sail boat, a boat not much bigger than a bathtub, a skiff-size model of a wedge-sailed craft. They tossed in the surf before him, surf that rolled up easily onto the sand he awkwardly trudged crooked and lame in booted shame.

They smiled, the tall girl at the mast and the small one at the rudder, waving him on, worried for his withered form. The surf wet his boots and then filled them. He knelt and washed face and beard and swished out mouth with bitter brine.

“Hurry, Good Slave, hurry on the back of the next wave!” they called, worry now written across their innocent faces.

“Yes,” he mumbled, tearing off his boots, breaking the right ankle in the process, not caring if that failed limb flopped like wilted spinach.

“Coming, girls—take me off, thank you,” mumbling and smiling idiot-like he limped, one dead foot facing north, the live one dragging him west into the place where he might his failures forget and his shame erase.

“Hurry, hurry!” they pleaded as he saw full-size ships, ships of the Darden men, ships of war, mighty bearded men hefting axes on decks where no oar need be plied, for their six sails billowed toward this lee.

The girl’s skiff had the wind, was being taken along the crescent to where the rudder one pointed was a small sea cave for his reclusion, “Yes, My Girl!” he smiled as he ran on firm foot and flop foot, lurching along, into the surf, onto the broad-backed wave, to be grabbed and hoisted upon the skiff by the strong girl’s hands. There, the sprite blond, strong as an old man, lashed him to her little mast so he would not fall overboard. They tore before the wind, the drum beat of the ocean driving them!

“Will he be well?” the nymph at the mast asked the nymph at the rudder.

“In the mother cave—maybe, more sail, that Bleak Chief comes!”

The gray gust chased them, driving them fast, but tossed, for their boat was tiny and the driven hulls of the wave-riding long ships, their fifty oars all at rest, only the tiller man working, bore down under the misty wrack.

The nymph at the mast cried, “They are catching us!”

“Do you have any coffee?” he asked.

“What?” screamed the blond nymph in the gust.

The rudder nymph said, “The brown beans, the addle beans, in the sack. Put some in his mouth to chew—will keep him awake so he’ll recall us. He won’t lose all hope, not right away—hurry, here comes True Day.”

The fine taste of Columbian coffee filled his mouth as he chewed and was dragged aboard, lashed as he was to the sodden plank of a drifting shipboard. The nymphs and their dawn boat were gone.

His nose cracked as the plank clacked upon the deck.

The lashes were cut, freeing him.

Two strong hands under his shoulders, and one hand stronger than his entire body clasping the loose skin at the scruff of his neck so he must look his Master in the eyes, placed him at his plightful social altitude: on bended knees.

Into the eyes of Horvald, his long ago fled from Master, he gazed. The man sat a wooden bench like a throne, his great sweep of silver-yellow hair, brows of ochre, beard of sand and grit, nose broken in half, left eye alist, bear skin vest and muskoxen cloak crowding his broad shoulders in the bitter gale. Banes shivered in his sodden linen rags. The chief of better men regarded him aglare, his voice tolling like a heathen bell “So, Harper-of-no-name, I hold you here in your shame. You, you traitor even to your lowly clover-capering race, abandoning Good King Barleycorn, for that hasty bean of the torrid waste… If I owned pity in this soul I would leave your carcass to feed the gulls on yonder shoal.”

The chief turned to his cup bearer, “Ale and mead, for your Chief. Seaweed for this wee shade of that irking rabble.”

Fetters of hard, cold iron clasped his wrists. Sea weed was stuffed into his mouth as he was told to chew. The Chief’s great booted foot came to rest upon his chicken neck. That chief poured libations to Ocean and Girdeon of the iron claw, over the bald head and white beard of the prodigal slave, drinking the health of the Northmen in jest to the doom of the Middlemen, “Skoal!” boomed his Master.

‘It is an unhappy home,’ he reflected emptily as his betters celebrated his extinction, ‘but easier than wandering alone.’

“Slave!” they roared, raising their cups and horns afroth with discordant joy, and nudging him friendly, “A song, Slave, a song?!”

And he sang, a dirge of a fallen race, that had dwindled to a shameful trace—and they chanted the Chorus of Crushed Thralls, joyfully treading Doom’s pitiless Halls—

[The above dream and the fuel, convinced the author to leave off drinking so as to be able to expand his thinking on history and return to less surrealistic fiction. 3,000 feet above Yucca Valley, Monday, July 21 2025.]