198. Hake Cauldron and Cheese Crunchies

198. Hake Cauldron and Cheese Crunchies

At the Altar of the Sun we watched the sun rise. And we were lucky enough to spot two sea serpents frolicking in the sea watch it rise too. Then we moved along the Coast of Death, leaving magical place after place behind, until we reached a very small fay fisherman’s village where we stopped to ask if anyone knew Clepeta Aprietos Bivalva. The nine villagers that lived there all  pointed at a cliff and said in unison that her house was up there.

We were flying up the cliff when we saw that, perched on a rock, a little girl, perhaps seven or eight years old, was staring at us. Her face was as round as the sun, and rather red. Her hair was like gold, and her eyes, blue as the sky on a clear day.  

 “Girl,” I said, “do you know someone called Clepeta?”

The child nodded.

“She’s supposed to live somewhere here, but I don’t see a house.”

“The house is inside a cave,” said the child. She pointed at two stones, one above the other, that jutted from a cliff.

“That space between them is the front door. What do you want with Clepeta?”

“We have business with her. The  Bluebell twins sent us here.”

The child nodded as if she knew what I was talking about. She studied us from head to toe and asked,  “Which of you is Alpin?”

“He is,” I said, pointing at Alpin, who was very quiet.

“Come back at noon,” she said. “But don’t go too far. You have to fish for our lunch first.”

“Fish?”

“Go down there and get into the water and be sure to come back with seven large hakes. We will have caldeirada de merluza for lunch.”

“Hake in a cauldron. Sounds good,” muttered Alpin.  

“We only eat faux fish,” I said.

“Trust me. It will be okay,” said the kid. “Just go for them.”

She gave us seven wicker baskets and we descended to the seashore. I had no idea how one fishes for hake.

“Just go into the water and grab one by the tail,” said Alpin.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said. “It’s murder. You do it. You are going to eat this.”

“You are going to be rude to Clepeta and scorn her food?”

“Yes, very likely.”

“What one has to do for one’s beloved!” said Alpin.

He leapt into the water and swam about and came up with a small octopus on his head.

“What does hake look like?” he asked me.

“I have no idea. Like a fish.”

“Is this for Clepeta?” asked the small octopus.

“Yes,” said Alpin.

“I’ll call the hakes,” he said. He jumped into the sea and about a quarter of an hour passed by before a school of large-headed, strong-jawed and elongated fish appeared before us.

“Do you bite?” Alpin asked the fishes.

“How many of us does Clepeta need?” they asked.

“A kid up there said to bring seven.”

“More than usual,” said a fish.

“She must be having a crowd for lunch,” said another.

“Okay, we´ll let you have them,” said yet another. “Bring the baskets to the water!”

Alpin did and seven big fishes jumped into the seven baskets. 

We waited until the sun was saying it was about to be noon and then we flew up the cliff again. There was nobody in sight, and we were about to make noise to attract Clepeta when a girl came out of the two-stone door.

She looked like she was thirteen and was less round-faced than the little girl and skinnier too. Her face was much less red and her hair was wavy. She wore a becoming blue ribbon in it.

“You are Clepeta, aren’t you?” said Alpin.

The girl nodded.

“I see you’ve brought the fish. You needn’t have brought them all the way up here. I’ll go down and cook for you on the beach.”

She went back into the cave and started bringing things out of it. She brought four sacks that turned out to be full of potatoes, three baskets with tomatoes, a large basket full of onions and garlic, bottles of olive oil and vinegar, a glass container with salt in it, and another with sweet red pepper powder. We brought all that down to the beach. When we looked up again she was coming down with two cases of bottles of apple cider. We helped her with that and she went up again and entered the cave and emerged carrying a huge cauldron.

“Don’t touch it!” she cried when we tried to help her with it.

She looked up at the sky and said it was good it didn’t look like rain. We gathered wood strewn on the beach and with that she made a bonfire. She put most of everything we had brought down into the cauldron and cast the seven fishes into it too and let everything boil in there, now and again stirring and muttering words we couldn’t make out well.

Alpin seemed to be entranced staring at the food, and I was entranced watching the pocket where he kept the enamouring grass.

“I’m not going to use the grass now,” he murmurred. “It’s too soon to know if she will reject me. You can take your eyes off it, Arley.”

 What he didn’t know is that on the way there I had already switched his grass for something that looked similar but was less harmful.  

When the food was cooked, we sat on some rocks and began to eat it. 

“You won’t do for me,” Clepeta whispered to me. “You don’t trust me. You’re not eating the hake. Just the potatoes.”

I apologized as best I could.

“I do know it tastes great,” I said. What I was eating – the potatoes, tomatoes and onions - was very well cooked indeed.

She moved away and sat next to Alpin, and I moved away so they could be alone.

I decided to give Alpin and his girl some privacy and wandered a little way off and disappeared behind a rock and sat down to have the first questionable meal I’d had since we started our journey.

“What are you eating?” said a familiar voice. I took my eyes off the sea and put them on Uncle Wildgale, who sat down a little ways from me. He was looking very blue, and I don’t mean only depressed. His skin always has a slightly bluish tint and his hair is definitely blue, sometimes turquoise, other times aquamarine, and often indigo or  navy blue. Sometimes all four.

“Cheese crunchies,” I replied. That was what I was having. That, and a bag of salted peanuts and pop.

“Arley, give me cheese crunchies,” said Uncle Wild.

I did, and as he munched on them saying they were less fattening than a full meal, I decided I had to ask.

“What are you doing here, Uncle Wild?”

“Same as you. I’m looking after an idiot.”

“Uncle Richearth is here too?”

“Give me more crunchies,” said Uncle Wild.

“Where is he?”

“I’ve lost track of my idiot, Arley. Is yours with Clepeta?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I take it that you have no idea where Rich is, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

“Did you and Rich come to court Clepeta too?”

“We’ve already seen Clepeta. We’ve even had dinner with her twice. Last night she said she would rather have me than Rich and he took this dramatically and disappeared so she and I could be together. Except I already have a wife, and I’m not interested in Clepeta at all. Neither is Rich. If she hadn’t said she preferred me, we would be back home by now. But he is hiding somewhere to punish me for what she said. That never happens. Nobody ever prefers me. Not even my wife. That’s why she and I aren’t speaking to each other. I act like I’m civilized about that. But Rich goes and takes offense because a  fishwife says I am airier than he is. Now I have to play hide and seek with that moron. And I don’t know where to begin to look for him. And the truth is I don’t even want to find him. But I have to. Or we will all starve. He has to show up before September.”

I didn’t understand a thing and I said so.

“Of course you don’t. Okay, I will explain. From the very beginning. In the beginning, Virbonus – that’s your grandpa, you know that – worked very hard to keep his people fed and contented. He organized everything very well so no one would go wanting for anything. He had lots of people working in the fields, and there were three harvests plus a fourth for the beasts of the fields and forests. Your uncle Gentlerain was a very good son and helped him all he could, watering the plants, right amount of water, you know. Evenfall, who has more class, was in his own misty, bittersweet dreamworld. Brightfire was kept away from the fields except when stubble and other waste had to be burnt. And nobody had any use for me, because these rustics didn’t use wind to spread seeds and pollen and stuff. All these redneck farmers did was yell at me so I wouldn’t blow down their crops. Sometimes they would ask me to give them a nice little breeze so they could cool off a little. But that was it. And then, one important day, while I was doing just that, because I am not too resentful, Richearth the Great was born. I noticed this odd spot where the grass was growing like crazy before my eyes and I told Dad and we went towards it and there was little Rich, already half hidden by the grass, humming to himself. Daddy saw him first and Daddy picked him up, beaming with happiness. “If this is what I think it is, we will never go hungry again,” he said.  We were never ever hungry. But that was because there were people who worked on it. Now we had a portent among us who would make everything easier for everyone. It was a grand day for lazy bums and bliss-seekers. Only those who liked to work would work.  It was just like Dad said it might be. Richie gave his first steps in a barren field and there was no need to plow it or  anything. The soil began to do something like rotate, and then there were green shoots springing up wherever the baby had stepped. The opposite of Othar, eh?”

“Othar?”

“Attila’s horse.”

“Ah!”

 “Ah, and whenever the cute little kid sang, a plantation would grow aroud him. As he grew bigger and his voice louder, so did the orchards and the  plantations that grew around him. Daddy taught Rich how to organize himself, and in no time nobody but Rich needed to work in the fields. If you can call strolling round a field singing work. Or flying over it. Even that would do the job. He did this only a few days a year and that was all we needed to have all the harvests we wanted. Your grandpa was so pleased with his little Amphion that he decided to retire and leave him in charge of feeding his people. He brought his kids together and divided most of what he had, all that disturbed him,  among us.  To Rich he ceded all fields where anything of interest grew. To Gentlerain, he gave his mountain tops, his rivers, fountains, streams and the clouds that drifted into our airspace. Evenfall wanted nothing but to live in his own world. Even so, Daddy gave him the evening sky above us, which doesn’t need much looking after, for the moon and the stars come and go correctly on their own. No problem ever. They are very disciplined. And we have barriers to drive off meteors. Brightfire was a problem. There are no desserts here, we hate them, so Fi couldn’t get that. Daddy was scared to leave him in charge of the sun above. Nominally, he did. But he made Fi promise he would let Gen supervise him and warn him whenever he shone too brightly. Brightfire understood. No hard feelings there. When Gen had to disappear, Evenfall took over looking after Brightfire. Now Fi works as a blacksmith, Even had him trained for that, but that’s another story. Ah! Your mom, our sister, she got the crown, the pomp and the circumstance and all that means. As for me, Daddy said he would give me eerie moorland, where nothing I could easily tumble down grows, but he would give it to me on one condition. I had to supervise Rich and see he always did his job.”

Suddenly Uncle Wild began to shout, “And I was foolish and greedy and accepted! Because I didn’t want to be left out!”  

“Then you were neither foolish nor greedy. You only needed a little more attention than you were getting,” I said.

“Attention! Attention is what I have been giving that airhead for centuries. And now I have to go hunting for our drama queen because a rustic cavedweller has said I am cuter than he is.”

“I suppose you have looked in your crystal ball. He’s made himself invisible, hasn’t he? He might be right here, sitting next to us.”

“If he were here, moss would be growing on these rocks like crazy and he would show himself just to ask you for cheese crunchies. Give me cheese crunchies, Arley. Where did you get them?”

“Have some pop too,” I said. “I bought junk food in the village. Peanuts?”

“They have junk food? In a hick village like that? What do you know? Those nine fishchasing, berrypicking appleknockers know what junk food is! Live to learn. I eat this sort of stuff when I am depressed,” said Uncle Wildgale. “It does wonders for me.”

“What you’ve just said makes me think maybe I am depressed too. I’m trying not to be. I really am!” I pushed away the junk food as I said that.

“Why should you be depressed? I don’t think Clepeta will want to marry Alpin. She’s old even for me.”

“She doesn’t look it. Not much. She looks thirteen. Sometimes a little more, like fifteen, maybe.”

“What?”

“You know, before we came, I looked into my crystal ball and I saw a middleaged woman cleaning fish. I thought that would be Clepeta. But it turned out that was not. Yesterday morning we saw this kid who was like seven or eight out here, and I thought, wow, Clepeta has kids. Alpin is going to be a stepfather. But no. It turned out Clepeta is like a teenager. The woman I saw must be her mother too.”

“Arley, we are making ourselves invisible,” said Uncle Wild.  “I want to have a look at the teenager without her seeing us.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you why when I know what to tell you.”

Alpin and Clepeta were nearing the end of their meal. I had brought an enourmous bowl of cinnamony milk and rice pudding with a hard crust of burnt sugar as a gift for Clepeta in case she invited us to have lunch, which, as you know, she had. She was nibbling away at a bit of that and he was downing all he could. When they were done, Clepeta asked Alpin to cast all the leftovers into the cauldron. She tossed what remained in the dishes in there too.  Then she lugged the cauldron over to the sea and turned it upside down in the water yelling “Thank you!”

Seven hakes shot up as soon as the debris hit the water and said, “You’re welcome, Clepetiña!”

“It’s a magic caludron!” I whispered. "The fish have come back to life!"

“Yes!” Uncle Wild whispered back. “Didn’t you know that? It’s the only reason the meddling twins matched this woman with Alpin. They thought he would love having someone who could contribute to feeding him. What I didn’t understand is why this woman isn’t already married.”

“You do now?”

“I will tell you tomorrow morning,” said Uncle Wild.

Alpin then began to shout and call for me, looking all about.

“Arley! Where are you? We have to go! Clepeta has things to do. She says we must return tomorrow, same time, same place. She will be cooking octopus for us, so we have to catch some first.”

“You heard that,” said Uncle Wild. “Same time, same place. Us too. I’ll be waiting for you right here at noon and will probably have something to tell you.”

“Where will you sleep, Uncle Wild?”

“Don’t worry about me. I have something to do. I’ll be alright.”