 but if you have what it takes to return to where all the world knows your name,
then que sera, let's go sailing on
A meeting with Arthur. Mallos would almost rather take the twenty-year isolation on his own private island. Almost.
‘Do you want me to go with you, sweetheart?’ Sperantia’s voice probed his mind. Of course, she had been listening in.
‘I don’t need you to hold my hand,’ he thought back irritably. She stayed quiet, but he could imagine her rolling her eyes.
He shuffled in his chair, got up, stretched, and stared at the empty desk. What to do, now? Arthur apparently couldn’t see him until two o’clock the next day which was, frankly, an insult. Mallos was much more important than anything else going on in Arthur’s work-related life, and he had just torched half of Shaman. What did he have to do to get an earlier appointment? Turn the population of Shaman into camels?
Mallos sat back down at the desk, pulled a pencil and plain piece of paper out of one of his drawers, and set about sketching Arthur as a grumpy camel. The grumpy thing didn’t quite work, since ‘grumpy’ was the generic expression of most camels, so he rubbed it out and re-drew the camel with a rather cartoonised version of Arthur’s stern face, which Mallos had had plenty of occasion to study in the past. At least, Sperantia recognised it when she leapt up onto the desk to peer curiously over his arm, since she was the one who suggested draping it in a royal robe and adding a crown swinging from its horns. The sun had set by this point, but it was still too early for bed and there was nothing else to do, so he doodled a few designs on the robe.
That got boring pretty quickly, but it was still only about eight in the evening. Mallos threw his pencil across the room, then turned the camel-drawing into a paper aeroplane and threw that too. It didn’t go very far – probably because he’d thrown it too hard.
He got up, opened the door to the corridor, and then closed it again. Tsi was probably monitoring his movements and, even if he wasn’t, Mallos couldn’t afford to be caught anyway.
There was nothing else to do, so he went to bed and lay there for hours, just staring at the ceiling. Sperantia came and joined him at about nine thirty; she lay across his neck and stuck her nose in his ear, purring loudly and utterly destroying his chances of getting to sleep. Nevertheless, he did doze off some time before ten – but promptly woke up again at quarter past four in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so he got up again.
He put his clothes on manually, then changed his mind, took them off and put a different set on. For the next hour or so he tried to draw, but couldn’t settle on anything for longer than a couple of minutes. Eventually he tipped his pencils out of the open window and pulled some of his work out of the drawer under the desk.
Boring, boring, boring. Mallos chucked a couple of documents marked URGENT out of the window too, before pulling out a blank piece of lined paper and copying out the address of the head of his church back on Earth. Once the letter was properly formatted and addressed, he wrote in the body:
After careful consideration, I have determined that the colour blue is sinful. I cannot allow blue to be sighted at all within my temples and churches. See to this correction immediately.
Most of Mallos’ temples were open-topped, since they were dedicated to the sun, and with a burst of enormous satisfaction he imagined them all panicking to try and build roofs and remove all traces of the colour blue.
There was still hours to go, so he wrote another letter – this time to Ander – but chose not to send it. He almost did, but hesitated at the last minute and then screwed it up into a ball and threw it into the bin. For the next few hours he hopped between tasks – pulling electric appliances apart, mostly – until it reached about seven o’clock, when he went to go and have a bath. When he returned, he found that someone had come in and left a cooked breakfast which was strangely devoid of meat. Sperantia had helped herself to the sausages already.
Growing ever more irritable with how slowly time was passing, Mallos pulled a spray-can of black paint out of nowhere, gave it a shake and started to graffiti on the blank wall where Tsi had suggested he hang a drawing. He painted a fleet of camels (what did you call a group of camels? A herd? A flock?) trying to perform fairy activities – some of them trying to stand up on their hind legs or put on clothes, while others tried to grip a knife and fork between their toes.
Eight thirty.
The aerosol can joined the documents and the pencils out of the window and, as the feelings of boredom, frustration and apprehension mounted, Mallos vented his feelings by turning a couple of the horses in the royal stables into camels. Unfortunately, nobody went to go riding, so that turned out to be boring too. Work was boring. He couldn’t focus on art. He couldn’t answer prayers, because he was stuck on this stupid planet. Eventually, after taking his shirt off and putting it back on again, he picked up his guitar and started to compose a new piece. That, at least, carried him through the rest of the morning until just after midday, when a maid appeared with lunch. She must have been under strict orders not to talk to him, since she didn’t respond verbally at all to his attempts to make conversation and just smiled and shook her head before leaving again. Mallos was so annoyed by that that he turned back the clock on his duck and transformed it into a living duck, then opened the door for it and set it loose on the castle.
A satisfying shriek at about one in the afternoon indicated that someone had found the camels, but for the fifty minutes following that he couldn’t focus on anything.
What had happened at the royal family’s dinner table last night? Had Arthur been telling Mordred, Morgana, Tristan and Nimueh… what? And what had Tsi said in that letter?
At quarter to two, Mallos couldn’t take it anymore. He opened the door and strolled out into the corridor, electing to walk rather than spend another fifteen minutes stuck in that room.
He regretted not having Sperantia with him, now, but it was too late to backtrack. Annoyingly and for probably the first time in history, he didn’t get lost on the way to the king’s office and ended up having to lounge around outside for seven minutes, fiddling with his phone to give his hands something to do. At three minutes to two, he slipped the pieces of the phone into his pocket, knocked on the door and then went in without waiting to be told.
A couple of minor details in the office had changed. The king’s desk was mostly void of paperwork, which – irritatingly – indicated he’d probably had the time to clear it away. The chair in front of the desk had changed, too, to a rigid, hard-backed one. Mallos switched it to a more comfortable one before he sat in it, with slightly more bounce than usual.
“Fixed your chair,” he remarked. “What happened to the old one?”
mallos
there's a wise man in every fool
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