Tag: The Cook For Any Price

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)”

IT IS SAID THAT WERE it not for the leather-lunged hawkers of epicurean Pormaris, the sun would not know when to awaken. But whether or not that’s as true as it sounds, the great island-city’s markets are indeed its economic heart.

Before they open, however, they must be supplied. Sturdy fisherfolk, each armed with breakfast-pail and lantern, constellate like fireflies along the docks and jetties at Pormaris’ southern edge. They climb aboard small craft, some mounted with triangular sails, others with only oars, and fan out across the vast iridescent Teardrop Lake in a web of light, alert for finny treasure. Continue reading “Day’s Life (A Prosatio Silban Tale)”

FROM THE INEXORABLE RULES OF mercantile interplay comes the inescapable principle: “There’s Always One.”

“With what may I please you?” Prosatio Silban asked the stoop-shouldered man sitting down at one of two tables-and-chairs in the lee of the beefy cook’s galleywagon. The portable venue was assembled in one of cosmopolitan Soharis’ livelier marketplaces, and the milling morning crowd had promised – and delivered – a variety of hungry (and moneyed) clientele. Take the present customer: long in years, dapper of dress and mannerism, but wearing a face creased by a thousand petty disappointments. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Difficult Patron”

THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES to every collegial association: protective fellowship on one hand, and tedious bureaucracy on another. And as a more-or-less “free spirit,” Prosatio Silban sometimes found it a difficult balance.

The beefy cook was also a Freehander – a member of the Uulian Commonwell’s fluid middle class, those who profit by their own labor. He was happy and content to be both, as they respectively provided him with autonomy and social standing. Thus, he was surprised (and a bit taken aback) by a gnarled Cook’s Guild auditor late one busy afternoon in the village of Tollingdrum.

Although his visitor wore the same traditional green apron as Prosatio Silban – a symbol of the Commonwell’s cooking sector – the latter did not know exactly who he was until after offering his signature greeting, “With what may I please you?”

“You may please me by shutting down operations,” the Guild representative announced in an authoritative baritone. “At once.” Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Professional Contretemps”