37.Too Many Mouths
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SO Guivric quitted his appointed enemy. And at the next door sat a discomfortable looking dyspeptic, crowned and wearing an old shroud, and huddled up, as if by spasms of pain, upon a tombstone, very neatly engraved with the arms and the name and the parentage and the titles of Guivric of Perdigon. Only the date and the manner of Guivric’s decease remained as yet vacant. And the crowned toiler put aside his chisel, and he grinned at Guivric rather pitiably.
“I really must be more careful,” observed this second warden, groaning and fidgeting and shaking his fleshless head, but of necessity grinning all the while, because he had no lips. “I am decreed, you see, to keep no measure in my diet; I must eat sheep as well as lambs; and afterward I find out only too plainly that there is not any medicine for death.”
Guivric, without a word of condolence, took out of his pocket a handful of coins, and he selected from among the thalers and pistoles a newly minted mark. This coin he tendered to the second warden, and thetomb-maker accepted lovingly this shining mark. Then Guivric walked widdershins in a circle about this warden also: and when the king of terrors had been thus circumvented, Guivric went forward into the next room. A sweet and piercing and heavy odor now went with Guivric, and clung to him, and it was like the odor of embalming spices.
This room was hung with white and gold; and in this room a plump and naked man, wearing only a miter, was praying to nine gods. He arose and, after brushing off his reddened knees, he said to Guivric, “It is needful that you should believe.”
“I wish to believe,” replied Guivric. “Yet when I ask— Well, but you know what always happens.”
“Such, my dear errant son, is the accustomed punishment of unhallowed curiosity. It should, equally, be looked for and overlooked. The important thing is to believe.”
Guivric smiled rather bleakly now, beneath his cap of owl feathers. He said, like one who repeats a familiar ritual, “What should I believe?”
Upon the arms and upon the chest and upon the belly, and everywhere upon the naked body of the mitered man, opened red and precise-looking mouths, and each mouth answered Guivric’s question differently, and in the while that they all spoke together no one of these answers was clear. The utmost which Guivric could distinguish in the confusion was some piping babblementabout Manuel the Redeemer. Then the mouths ended their speaking, and closed, and became invisible. The mitered man now seemed like any other benevolent gentleman in the middle years of a well-fed existence, and he was no longer horrible.
“You see,” said Guivric, with a shrug. “You see what always happens. I ask, and I am answered. Afterward I am impressed by the unusual phenomena, and I am slightly nauseated: but I, none the less, do not know which one of your countless mouths I should put faith in, and so bribe it to smile at me and prophesy good things.”
“That does not matter at all, my son. You have but to believe in whatsoever divine revealment you prefer as to what especial Redeemer will come to-morrow, and then you will live strongly and happily, you will go no longer as a phantom in the Sylan’s House.”
“Heyday!” said Guivric, “but it is you who are the phantom, and not I!”
The other for a moment was silent. Then he too shrugged. “With secular opinions as to such unimportant and wholly personal matters no belief is concerned.”
“I,” Guivric pointed out, “do not think this an unimportant matter. At all events, each one of your mouths speaks to me with the same authority and resonance: and in consequence, I can hear none of them.”
“Well, well!” said the plump mitered man, resignedly,“that sometimes happens, they tell me, when the Sylan is at odds with anybody. But, for one, I keep away from the Sylan, now that the Sylan is about to become human, because I suspect that at the heart of the Sylan’s House abides that which is too pitiable and too terrible for any of my mouths to aid.”
“I do not know about your aiding such things or any other things,” replied Guivric. “But I do know that, even though you dare not accompany me, I intend to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic; and that we shall very shortly see what comes of it.”