POOT!
(a play)
The first speech of the wizard runs thusly, spoken sotto voce
from the wings:
"Lo! 'Tis thus upon the plain! Stormclouds rake the land, now, and lightning spits
between viper teeth! There, there, where I look, men shrink from the italicized
thunder! Babes crawl through mud, mothers bleed milk, old grand-dames struggle up
the sides of hills stabbing the frozen streets with sharpened canes! Tall buildings die
from the cold! Fire snakes through the alleys and into the opened windows of every
house!"
This is his speech of triumph, inauspiciously placed at the beginning of the play.
It is the first we see of Mauvignon, the tiny villa in the bowl of the great valley,
to which such unmeasurable sorrow is to come. There, in the meanest and narrowest
of streets, sits the dusty, half-starved child who all too soon will become the hero
of his people. And above it all, crouching in the lee of a boulder at the edge of
a high cliff overlooking the villa, is the wizard Ash-Tok. Through the graphite-grey
whiskers of his long moustache, he cheers the flood of darkness and misery that pours across
the valley. But it is too soon in the play for triumph to be maintained. It is,
in truth, his peak, the closest he comes to definitive satisfaction. It is close
enough, be sure. The horrors that flew from that cursed word, the El-Ahl Majj, or unspoken,
when Ash-Tok in the blindness of his greed gave it voice!
In the next scene, Sarane, the forester, is sitting on a fallen sapling bemoaning
his fate:
"Alas, alas! The trees are all blasted to the ground by lightning! The people flee
the cities, leaving the penniless, elderly, pregnant, children! My own wife and
child lie in the streets, without food for three days, while I fell the last of the
forest for what few pennies I can still command! Ash, ash, all is ashes."
The child, of course, is Duinn, Fledgling, heir to a great destiny he must undertake
to bear, though it break him. So unprepared--young, ravenous with hunger, innocent
entirely of the machinations of evil, unskilled in the ways of the sword and of magic.
Indeed, it seems absurd: against the ultimate treachery, the coldest of deeds, the
curse of El-Ahl Majj, to send this--this tiny sparrow? And yet, fate moves with such
mystery as to shame the subtleties of Ash-Tok. And even now, within the breast of
the child, there burns a thin, fierce flame that will not go out.
Okay, and then everything goes kablooey.
THE END