The story so far... Le’Roy revealed that he and the blue Bear C’lementine are alter-creatures; products of shared memory not living flesh and bone, though no less real for all that. The story of how they came into being is told in the previous chapter. Now he is going tell Leanne about the Furies.
***
Well, I have already told you something of the Furies, of how they carry their heads, once long ago struck from their necks in a grim punishment, between their knees, and of how they have wings like an eagle. Let me tell you of how they are now, of how each wonderful feather is smoothed against the others to deliver such perfectly controlled lift and precise manoeuvrability, even at the highest altitudes and the windiest skies.
In fact, such is their mastery of the skies that they can make their homes on cliff edges, where no other animals live, eschewing the company of alter-kind in preference of the constantly skwarking gulls and terns, where only the brown Hawk can reach them. There they live off a diet of raw mackerel, herring, bird’s eggs and the green, bulbous bladderwrack, which is a form of edible seaweed, and they stink to high heaven.
But, before you say a word Leanne, because you are serving a customer and must not speak, lest they think your brain has come loose and your tongue rattles around in your head like a dried pea in a cup, I know you would say my Furies do not smell so bad. But that is because the three of them have been living with me, away from their sea cliff homes for so long that they have shed their pong, and reek no more.
That is because they must be stealthy in order to complete the tasks I ask of them. For the fishy smell is the only technique by which they can be located. Until a Fury carries or attacks you, there will be no other indication where they are for you will not feel them. Many times my friends have taken me from place to place, yet I have never felt their touch, neither a fingertip nor a feathertip.
They have deliberately and completely withdrawn any sense of touch or visual stimuli from the world because it was the world who allowed them to be punished so cruelly, and they are the most unbelieavble sulkers. The only way that we know how they look is from the drawings of the old stories. When they tell you of how they look now you must not believe them, for unlike the green Boars, they are able to dissemble.
They do not call themselves ugly, although at heart they know that to be the truth. They were very beautiful women once. Now with no one able to see them and contradict them they imagine themselves to be that way again. To hear them speak to each other is to listen to the most sycophantic conversation you can imagine.
They constantly congratulate and applaud each other on the nature of their costume and hairstyle, pretending to be swathed in only the best silks, laces, velvets, printed cottons and nylons, all covered in sequins and glitter, and all cut in the latest fashions. Their curls will have been set just recently in the French way, in glossy auburn, brunette or seductive blonde, or a trendy combination of the three. Their bare neck stumps will be strung with pearls and cut stone necklaces, cleverly anchored to their clothes with golden thread, for they have no heads to stop them falling off otherwise.
According to them, the colouring of their great eagle wings is borrowed from the gamut of avian kind; the dash on the Goldfinch’s side; the iridescent bottle-green head plumage of the Mallard drake in season; the shifting eyed tail feather of the Peacock; the mottled back of the Partridge, apparently dull yet seductively patterned; the delicate lime, lemon and peach of the Lovebird, and the vibrant scarlet, blue and green of the Amboina King Parrot, are just some. Furthermore, they claim to have decorated the ornately jewelled felt slippers, and the hats sometimes worn by the heads, with the moulted tail plumes and flourishes from tropical birds.
They must be stunning. But if you can imagine such a sight Leanne, then I do not know whether to be jealous or afraid for you.
All in all, I think it not a bad thing for them to imagine themselves so. For imagination harms nobody and it eases their isolated hearts. For, as well as still suffering their original punishment, they cannot properly take up their place in our reality that they took as compensation for the hideous crimes made against them.
Unfortunately, in my reality there is an assumption that what is invisible may as well not be there at all. Even though all the evidence points to the contrary. Everyone will tell you Furies exist, but sadly, because they can’t be seen that existance cannot be proved. So in the alter court of law they are not accepted to be true alter-beings. You must be clever to accept proof beyond that which you can see, but as you must realise by now, dear lady, we are not terribly cleveref beast. So the Furies live in a strange kind of limbo, they are an alter-creature like me, but they are also not.
Anyway, that is by the by. If a Fury is observed, well, it would strike a level of fear into the hearts of timid beasts strong enough to kill them on the spot. For we ferocious ones, it would paralyse us with fright and then we could be cut down where we stood frozen like statues. It is because of that they they are great use in battle, but, as I will tell you now, thier other qualities mean their currency in a fight must be spent thinly, for there are dire consequences for not doing so.
Though they came to our reality of their own volition rather than being tricked into it, and so are cleverer than we alter-beings, they are also quick to anger, remembering as they do the crimes against them. It cannot be said that they don’t know how to hold a grudge.
This is dangerous because they are also empathic, but only with one emotion, the one they are named for: Fury.
Do you know the concept, Leanne? The one of making your feelings felt? Well, that is what they do. When one Fury gets angry the others are attracted to her like a moth to a lamp, for they feel the pain of their own kind. This multiplies the feeling and when it reaches a certain point it will tip over and spread all around, infesting the air like the stench of death. When those in range breathe in the fury they also become furious and then they lash out at their companions, even those they love dearly; friends they have known since childhood, lovers with whom they have just been reunited, and even their own children.
The use of furies in war very often becomes the reason that war continues, for each side will be blinded by anger and all number of imagined slights cannot go without revenge. So, as you may be able to understand, it is very dangerous to deploy the Furies, unless you want your war to continue through generations and many good people die as well as bad.
The only way of preventing this is not to allow more than three Furies at a time to gather, and that is why my friends are only three. More than three and the danger of the fury tipping over at the slightest provocation is too high. No more than three and everyone gets along just fine, because should one become upset the other two will calm her down. In the case of the Furies, three is indeed, the magic number.
There are stories of great warriors, champions of just and fair causes, coming to a bad end just because they asked for the help of Furies and forgot that simple rule. One such was H’mberto de Kier, one of the brown Hawks. Who like all the Hawks was brave, fast, sharp-sighted and capable of great concentration and focus. The obsessive Hawk is able to create great things, for instance they are great builders, but they are also cursed with a narrow vision that frequently causes their projects to fail.
In this case, H’mberto simply wished to defend his forested lands from N’ro, the white Hart, who damaged the bark of his trees and caused them to fall sick from disease.
It was not the deliberate fault of N’ro. For when he ruts, he loses his mind. Like all Harts all he cares about at springtime is proving himself a worthy mate for his beloved doe. Love is both his gift and his curse. If he had hands such as yours, Leanne, capable of making such wondrous things, then he would build castles to prove his love. But he cannot. All he has are four pairs of hooves and a magnificent crown of antlers that he must shed and grow new every year. Unfortunatly, the antlers emerge covered downy skin that itches like crawling ants as the horns reach maturity, so he would go to H’mberto’s forest each year in early spring to rub his antlers against the tree trunks to remove it and reveal the wonderful hardness of his new crown.
Now, every year until this one, N’ro stopped his altercation with the trees after a few days, and the damage to the bark revealing the tender living wood inside was bearable. While without their hard shells some trees would catch disease, but the majority recover, and H’mberto understood this and left N’ro to his own devices.
However, one year, on leaving the woods with his proud new set of horns to go and search for his female companions, N’ro glanced back to admire the trees that helped to cure his horrible itch. From that middle distance he suddenly realised the marks he had made on the bark of the Hawk’s trees were like writing that the bears made and used to communicate with each other. He realised his marks could be writing too, so he started to make more marks to proclaim his love for his female companions for everyone to see.
As a romantic gesture, it worked admirably. They were very simple gouges, but to the female Hart, they were as seductive as poetry.
However, being caught in midst of run away sexual emotion, N’ro went a overboard, and when the Hawk returned from his hunting trip, he was shocked to find nearly a tenth of his forest home laid to waste. Some trees had even been felled by N’ro gouging too deeply, and now they lay in a higgledy-piggledy pile on the forest floor as if a giant child had laid down a game of pick-up-sticks, while others looked as though they had been gnawed at by a giant rat.
By this time the white Hart was far away enjoying the attentions of his impressed hareem. So the Hawk cried his lust for revenge for the rest of the alter reality to hear. For if the Hart wasn’t stopped, then what would become of the Hawk’s forest next year? The tenth would never recover in time. It wasn’t just his home but that of many other creatures too, and the trees were living things, why should they die just because N’ro had discovered how to write?
Of course, N’ro was terribly sorry when he realised what he had done but before he had the chance to apologise and offer to compensate the Hawk the Furies sent by H’mberto were upon him. From this point onward, all sense was lost and Harts and Hawks called revenge on each other for generations, each biting the other back for every kind of wrong doing imaginable, and some unimaginable. Inevitably, other alter-beasts became involved and the war spread thickly on both sides. By the end we faught because we faught. We knew no other reason. We could no longer conceive of place in which we did not fight.
Hostilities continued for generations, as I said, until the brown hawk L’renzo ended it. He was a more clear-sighted Hawk than most, and it is only because of him that a ceasefire was brokered and we live in the relative peace that we do today. He was a direct decendent of the original H’mbert, yet he was weary and tired of battle, of seeing beloved members of his family plucked from the sky before their time. He drew a council of alter-beasts together and we petitioned the Furies to desist in helping either side. Which thankfull, they agreed to do.
Only the Furies regretted the ceasefire. For though they mourned such senseless loss of life, they couldn’t help their nature and whilst the war continued they’d had a purpose. For a while they had been back in the limelight, it reminded them how wonderfull it had been to be in demand as beautiful women, and they loved that. Now, they are invisible again and nobody wanted them. What’s more, most of the alter-reality blamed them for the war and forgot it originated in a H’mberto crying revenge on a N’ro.
***
While Le’Roy had been relating his tale, four customers had come and gone from Cobblers and Keys. Leanne had struggled through, managing to act what she hoped was normal, and fortunately, nobody had said anything to make her think they knew different.
Two had been picking up shoes and hadn’t stayed long, while the third had wanted a key cut and busied herself doing something on her mobile phone while Leanne cut it for her.
The forth had been another matter entirely; a long-faced but otherwise non-descript man in a cheap dark suit with a brown overcoat and no bag, obviously a salesman passing through. Salesmen always wanted to talk, even if they weren’t trying to sell you anything directly, and this person had been asking inquisitive but mundane questions for the full ten minutes it took Leanne to cut his key. It had been very difficult to answer sensibly because it was the moment when Le’Roy had got to the part about the Hawk and Hart, and she had wanted to listen. She wasn’t sure she’d caught everything either party had said.
She peered out of the shop window to make sure he had properly gone and no one else was loitering wanting to come in. The day was brightening up at last. Being late November it was foolish to expect sun, so the little peeking through the clouds now was enough to brighten her spirits. She yawned hugely, not bothering to cover her mouth because nobody was in the shop. Sometimes you want to yawn like a lion, and a yawn can revitalise you and make you feel like the day is only just starting, and you’ve had your proper allocation of eight hours sleep instead of having spent half the night trapsing over town to an alternative world hidden behind a secret door in a brewery wall.
The secrecy of the door seemed debatable if in fact an ordinary postmen delivered to it as Le’Roy had described. The door had allowed her to find it easily enough, but then, as they said, she was supposed to be special, even if she wasn’t sure yet if she should let herself be persuaded of this. Best, she thought, to treat that idea with caution. Their idea of special could mean anything, after all, they did use chocolates as weapons. Though it still wasn’t clear how. She checked the bar of Dairy Milk in her pocket. Better safe than sorry.
She wondered what was so special about the brewery. She knew it was old, but there was no answer she could think of. Perhaps it would be wise to check the local history section in the library, or on the internet, for which she would need to go to the library anyway. She added the question to the mental list of things she needed to ask which was growing longer by the minute. She wasn’t sure either, if he had explained what great crime the furies had suffered. It was very frustrating to have to listen and be unable to interrupt with questions.
“Phew!” She exclaimed. “I thought he’d never go. Sorry Le’Roy, I missed quite a lot of that. Can you tell me again what the poor Furies did to get their heads chopped off?”
“Oh, but my dear lady, I never got to that part of the tale. I am much remiss and yet you didn’t miss a thing.” Which was a mistake for Le’Roy to say, because of course Leanne had missed some of it.
He launched into the tales of the Furies great punishment just as the doorbell rang to annouce the entrance of another customer.
To be continued...
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