Published 'Peripheral Visions' 1992
The hammer sword was spliced to his side-he shambled like a mammoth, with tusky beards, thickened lips, thumper nose and a frown fit enough to irrigate a greater dome even than his head.
He grunted from the depth of his chest as if his mouth had nothing to do with it. It was established, however, that he was the Weirdmonger - but, ages ago, someone or something had rudely excised his tongue so that he found it more difficult to wield words as well as weirds. But how could anybody talk with no tongue? So no one believed this part of his tale.
That night, the town celebrated his arrival. Come morning, though, all took on a new complexion, as different as sun from moon. The wild parties had become breakfasts all too easy to sick up.The crazy notions had turned to worries of the clock and the purse. The idle chitchat and pub talk had long since run out or words. The eyeballs ran with yellow wanks of snot.
They rose from their beds, made the best of bad jobs and hunched their shoulders at the smallholdings where not even a solitary chicken could scrape together enough provender for the day. They donned sufficient clothes just this side of decency and set off for the sweltering town square where they had left the Weirdmonger snoring beneath the dry fountains. Having arrived, with the eyes still glazed over with an ingredient of sleep some call dream, others life, they crouched like school children on the dusty ground, to await what must happen.
But nothing did.
The town was at the foot of a panhandle. The endemic swirling seasons there run their course without due consideration for each other.
Last night, at the height of the festivities, the Weirdmonger had mimed his journey to the town. He had endured a trek ... lengthened out his legs, lowered his head nearer the ground and pretended his feet had become only fit to be the root vegetables. His massive lungs had done nothing to cool the body spaces in each of which he had briefly inhabited along the way. The seeping of his eyes had done little to conceal the wild fury that ever danced like a cloud of fireflies he followed.
If only he had tongue enough to flicker in pace with his pantomime of passage.
He boasted that he was Weirdkeeper, Weirdster, Weirdmin, Oracle, Swordmaster, Mascot, and Beasthead. But none could even begin to believe him, for nothing continued to happen. The endless vigils merely grew hotter as the summer seasons leapfrogged each other with no winters between.
He no longer shambled: he became a mountain of stagnant flesh. Only his hammer sword remained recognizable, untarnished by the sultry air.
But, then, came another like him. Or like him, when he had first come.
The newcomer dislodged the sword from between the palpitating thews of the tidal monument and sliced joints of it asunder, like chopping away ravenous squealing runts from their mother's steaming udder.
The crowd of townspeople crooned in pain, since their own unborn babies were swollen beyond the lips of the wombs.
One of the crowd spoke, as if to describe something to one who could not see: "We flock to this baking square every morning in good faith. We kept him here to become a figurehead - we felt he had something to teach us about beauty, about ugliness about faith itself. We asked him. We had a thousand questions to ask. If our enemies came, would he up and fight? If our friends came, would he tell them of the luck he'd dispense to them as he would to us? When he decided to speak more clearly, with all gutturals forsaken, would he teach us of the past and how we're to create a new one for a brighter future? Would he ring the unfaulted brazenness of his bell along the length of our land in clear and certain tones? But without a clapper, as one of us eventually found out for sure when prizing open two loving rows of teeth in his massive jaw, to ease the pain in the rotted, rutted gums... Yes, it was his throat that indeed ran up and ran down the scales of utterance, but all we heard were boasts and more boasts, since whilst chests are boastful, mouths can only simper ... but if had ideas, if he had solutions or benedictions for our troubles, they were never transferred by the gutted cords of his oaken neck. So, he turned out as effective as the tongue of land he crossed to come here: in short, he was little better than a god!"
The deeper voice of the newcomer rang out in reply: "But I am the true Weirdmonger ... one who can speak out as loud and clear and fluent as the best of you ... give me your questions, poor folk, your hopes, your desires, your unanswered prayers - for each word or weird even in a whisper I utter becomes a truth as I utter it."
The townspeople shouted at once, all in a babble of tongues racing to communicate at last with a chosen one. Some even rose from their haunches, but such had been the length of time in crouching, they left their feet behind like carrots.
The second Weirdmonger collapsed upon the first. His words jammed up at the tip of his tongue, lungs ballooning even from his ears.
Thank goodness the townspeople never realised that their uproar had stoned the second Weirdmonger deaf as a doorpost. Or maybe they did realise, for some of them wandered off muttering, in evident horror, that unheard prayers are even worse than unanswered ones.
If the townspeople had been bright enough, they would have foisted a course in reading and writing upon their gods.
Better still telepathy!
For, you see, there is at least one god holding court in the universe somewhere whose whole basis of worship and prayer depends on this dubious branch of the paranormal called telepathy.
In the main, however, sad to report, gods and those who pray to them are pretty insensitive and unimaginative beings (which is perhaps the biggest paradox of all.)
The townspeople had a party that night which despite the hammering heat, was wilder than ever: plenty of young meat baked in wrap-arounds of old, together with a rhythmic stumping dance till dawn.
Not many stayed at home - but those who did prayed against the further encroachment of weirdities. A few even prayed that the need for prayer be lifted from their shoulders ... so that they could spend their time farming the panhandle.
