Tag: Fictions

CASTING AN APPREHENSIVE BACKWARD GLANCE, Prosatio Silban flicked the plaited yak-hair reins to hurry his quaint lumbering dray-beast. He was passing through rough and rocky countryside, and wanted to reach his destination at speed – as befitted a pursued man on an urgent mission.

Let us wind back the calendar three days, to when that mission was first laid before him. The beefy cook’s galleywagon had been parked in the marketplace at Machar’s Rest for longer than he wanted it to be. If I can’t soon attract any custom, I will die in this village, he thought with a wry, if wan, smile. His dire economic situation wasn’t due to a lack of diligence or inventiveness. But what is one to do when the only passersby are as destitute as oneself?

Just as he began to despair in earnest, the Flickering Gods (for those who believe in them) lent a hand. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Sentimental Voyage”

PROSATIO SILBAN SIPPED AT HIS glass of white duliac, savoring the wine’s herbal essence, and continued to enjoy the Arrow-and-Wheel’s boisterous patrons.

Rustic farmers occupied most of the plank tables, discussing the weather, the prospects, whose cows were ill and why, whose cart-zebra kicked whom (and why), and assorted small family matters. Many were drinking from deep clay mugs of the local ale, while a few attacked with gusto great wooden bowls of rich stew and plates of fragrant olive-bread paired with wedges of sharp yellow cheese.

Is there anything more soothing for the spirit than a happy noonday colloquy at the village inn? he thought. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Revealer of Secrets”

“A CHANGE OF CLOTHES IS not a change of man,” goes the old Uulian proverb – and neither is it a change of cultures.

Prosatio Silban wiped the copious sweat from his hairless brow and sighed. He and his quaint lumbering dray-beast, Onward, were making their way with difficulty through the infamous Emerald Incessance – that vast, reed-thick wilderness bordered on the west by the decadent Uulian Commonwell and to the east by the forbidding Blacktooth Mountains.

The beefy cook’s galleywagon swayed from side to side as it rolled over bumpy loam and through overtowering vegetation, following a barely discernible footpath. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Ersatz Indigene”

SOMETIMES, EVEN AN ENCHANTER NEEDS a bit of mundane help.

Prosatio Silban was sitting, chin in hand, at one of his galleywagon’s two tables-and-chairs in cosmopolitan Soharis’ eastern marketplace, watching potential customers walk by and wondering what he could do to tempt them into spending some time (and coin!) at his portable establishment. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Proportional Mystery”

STARLESS DARKNESS FILLED THE OBSERVABLE universe.

Where am I? Prosatio Silban thought.

He tried to make his voice work, but couldn’t find or even feel his throat. In fact, his entire body seemed to be missing.

What am I?

Only silence answered; a silence so profound that he felt part of it, that he was it.

Am I?

He had no answer to that question, nor to the next one. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Evasive Death”

SOMETIMES, AND WITHOUT MEANING TO, religious faith can eat itself by blurring the lines between divine desires and human humbuggery.

By which is meant, O Patient Reader, that while the Flickering Gods always have a clear idea as to what They want, Their followers can (and often do) convince themselves that their gods want what they want.

Case in point: the village of Everfaire, situated on the dividing-line between lands administered by the city-state of Pormaris and those overseen by neighboring Soharis. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Agreeable Disagreement”

IT BEGAN WITH A SIMPLE question: “What is the most challenging place you’ve ever visited?”

“The place where I learned not to drink,” Prosatio Silban replied, raising a glass of blue duliac.

“But you are drinking now!” pointed out his interlocutor.

“Yes – but no spirit other than duliac, and never now to excess,” said the beefy cook. “Allow me to relate to you the circumstances, which took place more than a quarter-century ago. I had just left the Sacreanthood, and the Uulian Commonwell entirely, and was looking for the next chapter of my personal story. I was also sorrowful over having recently met – and lost – the love of my life, and so decided to go to a place I had never been but of which I had often heard: many-fabled M’zir, home of inscrutable Intuids, masterful weavers, and abundant yava-brewers…” Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Sacreantal Reflex”

IT WAS A DARK AND stormy night, and Prosatio Silban, thoroughly soaked, could feel a watchful gaze upon him as he parked his galleywagon under a crumbling iron roof.

He shivered, searching for the source of his unease. But nothing stood out amid the unfathomable gloom. Perhaps it’s only my storm-tossed fancy, he thought. I don’t need any unpleasant surprises. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Forgotten God”

AND THEN THERE WAS THE time Prosatio Silban sold a meal for a song – literally.

The beefy cook had set up his galleywagon in the small, quiet, and mostly indifferent marketplace at the village of Taverner’s Luck, but had so far that day served only a sparse handful of customers. The weather matched his mood: cold, windy, with low-hung clouds portending rain.

A passing woman paused to study the cook’s painted menu board. Her short black hair, wide eyes, and long, multicolored tunic proclaimed her a minstrel from far-off Aydnzmir, City of Musical Harmony. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Advertent Appetizer”

EAST OF THE UULIAN COMMONWELL lies the shaggy, semi-marshy expanse called by Commonwell-folk the Emerald Incessance. Few of those outsiders traverse it without purpose, or dread, or both; its green depths do not long hold even well-known paths, and what they do hold rarely emerges.

Prosatio Silban clucked reassuringly to his buopoth, Onward, as the quaint lumbering dray-beast trundled the cook’s galleywagon over spongy ground beneath an overtopping growth of slender wicket-reed. They were following a narrow trail which so far led nowhere.

The beefy cook jerked the reins twice, and Onward ceased his forward trudge with a rattling hoot. Prosatio Silban climbed down from the driver’s seat, slid through the tall greenery and tapped the buopoth’s flank. Something like a trunk lifted him atop what might have been a shoulder. The reeds were now only waist high, and he strained his eyes against the fading sunlight.
Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Royal Fete”

ALL GOOD THINGS MUST EVENTUALLY be replaced, though not without some effort or expense – so Prosatio Silban discovered on a cloudy summer’s day in stony-hearted Tirinbar, whose inhabitants were the most reputedly avaricious in the Uulian Commonwell’s Three Cities and Thousand Villages.

To be precise: the beefy cook’s beloved, six-burner fatberry-oil cookstove with the dented chimney pipe suffered a rather fiery demise due to his having pushed the ancient equipment’s limits once too often. He was in his galleywagon preparing separate breakfasts for a handful of different customers (marbled eggs, poached eggs, eggs over easy, 180-heartbeat eggs, sausages, and root-hash, each accompanied by various types of oven-toasted bread), when all at once he was dumping frantic handsful of sand on leaping flames and trying to keep the adjacent bulkhead from igniting. The latter effort was largely successful, but the range itself (not to mention the food) was a complete loss. Continue reading “Workman’s Wages (A Prosatio Silban Tale)”