286. The Eighth Moonly Letter

286. The Eighth Moonly Letter,  a rather long one, that will be written and sent by Heather to her brother Arley during the Moon of the Turquoise Sea and which shall tell of preparations for the Atshebies’ Name Day Party, and how precaution seems to be confused with belligerence.

 Dear brother,

Today, even as I am writing to you, I can’t help feeling worried. As you know from my last letter, Beau and I are working on the affair of the Atshebies’  Name Day Party. I’m sure you remember that it will be difficult to celebrate this party due to the possibility of disastrous intervention by both friends and enemies of the children’s maternal grandmother. And that we had thought of approaching Uncle Gen and asking for help from the Prudent Siblinghood of Preventionists.

Beau and I decided that it would be best if I was to speak with Uncle Gen while he tried to find more support among his own acquaintances. So I went over to Gentle House, where Uncle Gentlerain and Aunt Mabel invited me to tea and where our uncle gave me, the second I asked for it,  a list with the names of 500 people who were likely to crash the party and bust the  Kittykids.

“This list isn’t complete, dear,” Aunt Mabel said to her husband. You kow how she can read at lightning speed, and she was at once telling her husband that she, for one, was not in the list. And Granny Milksops, who had treated us to a lovely lemon meringue pie, immediately asked if she was or was not in it, because she ought to be, since she had it in for Jocosa.

“Grandpa said the number of the perturbers is sixhundred and thirteen, like the seeds of a pomegranate.”

“AEternus has said something? It surprises me that Papa has allowed himself to be involved in this,” said Uncle Gen.

“He didn’t say this in so many words, but he gave Beaurenard Flynn and me a pomegranate from his garden, and Beau concluded that he was saying we had to watch out for six hundred and thirteen conflictive people, because that is the number of seeds a pomegranate usually has. I don’t know if you know who Beaurenard Flynn is,” I said.

“I don’t think there is aybody who doesn’t know who Beaurenard is,” said Uncle Gen, “or knows when he is being himself or someone else. Why, that Beaurenard…,” Uncle Gen suddenly cut himself short. I think he suddenly remembered that Beau was my lately acquired boyfriend. “No, nothing, just that he always has a finger or a foot in some kind of mess, but just as he steps into one he springs out of it. Don’t you worry, Heathie, because no matter what trouble he is in, if he doesn’t crawl out of it in one piece by himself, your gandpa will pull him out. He’s Papa's pet godson. When he was born, he was almost as promising as the child Mercury.”

“All the pomegranates that grow in this island have been requested to always enclose six hundred and thirteen seeds, and they do this religiously,” said Aunt Mabel, “but I still think even that number is too few for Jocosa’s gangsters.”

“Look,” said Uncle Gen, “only those who might harm Atty’s babies are included in my list. Neither you, Mabel, nor Granny Milksops would do that. Isn’t that so, Granny?”

“When she was a child, Jocosa was very promising too,” said Granny. “Whenever she came to the palace to play with her little cousin Titania she would arrive early and sneak into my kitchen to empty the salt shakers in the strawberry milkshakes and she would slip cockroaches into my toaster. How the creatures leapt when the heat was turned on! If the child had stolen in to swipe a cookie or two, I would have felt flattered. But no. There was no time that she visited that she didn’t explode a stink bomb in my poor kitchen, that always  famously smelt of cinnamon and freshly baked buns. That deranged child had no respect for my work, for all she would gobble up her own share of what I cooked, for she never spoilt her own portions. I hate her. Hate her, hate her!”

“Do you know that the Jocose Gang fools  would call me in the middle of the night when you were away?  Pretending they knew where you were and asking me if I did too?” Aunt Mabel said to Uncle Gen. “Of course they had no idea themselves. All they wanted was to draw me out of the house and make me go places where something horrible could happen to me for trying to recover or rescue you. Mercifully, I never fell into any of their cruel traps. But if someone had called in good faith, I might not have listened. How could I distinguish the truth from the lies? Thanks to Papa, who knows everything, and who told me he would deal with your disappearance himself and who always gave me good advice. Papa is who we should consult about the partypoopers,  but, of course, this isn’t allowed.”

I left Gentle House rather worried, though I should have been happpy, because our uncle had promised me all the support the preventers could give to ensure the Atshebies had a safe party, and you know how hyperbolic that siblinghood can be when it takes action. And it wasn’t just them I could count on. Uncle Fu had been there too, having tea with us, and he promised me to make and send to me a hefty consignment of MWSS, along with all the belligerent cranks needed to employ this, for he knew a lot of quarrelsome people who would be only too happy to put these magic wands, shotguns and sickles to the test.

And if my success at  garnering support weren’t eough, Beau was even more effective at  it, as I was soon to learn. For as I strolled back home, the Leafies Diadumenianus, a native of Apple Island who dwells in the garden of my ideal home, and Vinny, Leopold and Malcolfus, who had all three come from Miced Forest to see me, stopped me and asked me if I was aware of what my enterprising boyfriend was at.

“I know he went off to see someone, but I have no idea who.”

“The wizard Apollinaris,” they informed me.

“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” I replied.

“Lately he has been saying that he is one of the Canadian hyperboreans. You kow how there are alledged hyperboreans from several different places, but he has had to affront a change of habitat due to his questionable business affairs,” Leopold explained to me. “Now he operates in hiding, in one of the seven thousand six hundred and forty one Philippine Islands.”

“Does that mean he is bad?” I asked, anticipating the worst.

“You see,  your boyfriend  scorns risk and deals with elements who should be avoided.”

“I’ll speak to him,” I promised, “but I need to kow more about this to be able to do it properly.”

“Well, there’s a Peek Creek in your very own garden,” said Leopold.

“What is that you say I have in my garden?”

“She isn’t aware she has one,” Dudu said to the other Leafies. “I told you we would have to explain this to her.”

Dudu is how the other Leafies call Diadumenianus. And now so do I.

“Yes, but speak very softly when you do. If we are overheard, her garden will reek with peepers,” advised Malcolfus.

We went to my house and there, in a spot in my garden that goes quite unnoticed, there was  a tree stump on which some mushrooms were growing. This seemed strange to me, because I don’t have mushrooms in my garden in the spring or early summer. It turned out the mushrooms were there to help conceal another mushroom, one shaped a bit like a flower, that had the weest trap door in its centre. I had to shrink almost to nothingness, becoming smaller than the Leafies, who did some shrinking too, and we all subsequently passed through the trapdoor.

We ended up right next to a small creek that was almost totally concealed by vegetation, but the Leafies found a part where a round moon, about the size of a tiny dessert dish for the tiniest beings, was reflected, and using an equally wee thimble of silver and gold, the Leafies drew out a few drops of water and said, “Drink, lass.”

I said, “I think I probably shouldn't. I don’t drink unknown water and I am not sure that spying on Leonado, as you call him, would be right.”

“Listen, child, we can’t do this for you. Only you can experience what you will.  Twin souls are just that, they think the same way and have the same views, but true lovers go beyond that. They are but one person, and this means they have a right to know everything about the comings and goings of their other halves. This water will spare Leonado from having to tell you what he has been at, for you will know right off,” the elder Malcolfus advised me.

“We are sharing with you a very well-kept secret.  Not just anyone knows about this creek. You yourself didn’t and it’s in your own garden. Now you will be able to use it at your discretion. Trust us. Come, ‘tis only water. We wouldn’t do you harm. You are good,” said Leopold, “and we don’t do good people harm.”

“And you are my best friend’s sister,” said Vinny.

What Vinny said was what convinced me, for if he weren’t such a good friend of yours, I would not have sipped that strange water for all it was in the garden of my own ideal home without first having learned more about it. Well, I did drink, to the health of the Leafies and to yours. And the moment the three drops of the sour-tasting water  in the thimble went up my throat to my head instead of down to my stomach, I began to see...I don’t know what to call what I saw. Visions? It was as if I were awake but  within a dream at the same time.

I was and at the same time saw a golden crowned flying fox bat delicately washing a fig in a river. Once washed, he ate it. Or I did, because I was the bat. Then the creature, who was the size of a eight year old child and who looked like a grinning devil, gave a half turn and entered a tropical jungle that began by the riverbank. And it flew and it flew, always sideways, because the span of its wings was  too broad not to knock against  the dense vegetation in that forest, till it reached what seemed to be a stone fort. I entered the fort and paused before the largest building in there and observed a being who was planted right before the building’s door with a flit spray gun. 

And I thought, “Sino ba yan?” And I didn’t know what I had asked myself, but before I could worry about that, the being that stood there spat at me, “Take that, invading vermin!”  And I wasn’t showered with insecticide because I managed to fly aside.

“Araguuuuuy!” I shouted, as if the poison had reached me. “Ako ay si Acerodón! Sino ba ikaw? Nasaan si Apolenko?”

I was aware that Apolenko was Apollinaris, though I did’t know why I knew that. And after having chirped all those words that were unintelligible to me, but that the individual standing there with the flit sprayer  seemed to understand, I turned from a bat into a bat fairy.

A very pale, almost trasnsparent bat fairy, though a bit violetish. I conserved the bat´s crown of golden hair and boasted of the very sharp canines of a vampire.

“You should have warned you were coming,” growled the man with the flit. He was a plumpish, orange-haired fellow who wore a sleeveless T-shirt, white, but spotted all over with blotches of paint of assorted colours and not only sweat. He also wore orange bermudas and topless wooden clogs that I somehow knew were called bakyas. He passed a damp towel round his neck and a couple of ice cubes fell from it and landed on a nest of earthworms near his feet.

“One doesn’t give notice when one comes to a place like this,” I said. “Do you think I have been followed?” And I glanced suspiciously behind me.

“I would smell them,” said the man, sniffing the air, “like I did you.” He then turned towards the door behind him and yelled, “¡Apolliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Your friend the magkukulam bat is here to see you! I almost felled him shooting flit at his snout.”

From the inside of the building emerged Apollinaris, an enormously tall man, a giant who must measure three feet at least. I think I never reached even his knee, and that though I was the largest bat in existence. His face at first looked like anyone else’s, but when he shook his head it seemed to turn into that of a lion. This impression only lasted as long as the movement of his head.

Apollinaris also wore a white, sleeveless T-shirt, but there wasn’t a spot on it. He wore blue bermudas and a pair of those Japanese slippers that stick to your feet because your big toe and the toe next to it clutch onto them. Curiously, this giant came out of the building shivering, as if with cold, though this seemed impossible in that oven of a jungle. I noticed he wore a simple talisman round his neck, a rudimentary wooden sun painted a bright yellow that hung from a thin braided leather strap. There was another sun on him too.  A black sun tatooed on his chest that peeped from neath his T-shirt when he moved.

“What brings you here, Acerodon?” asked the wizard.

“I need warriors,” I said.

“How many and against whom?”

“A thousand two hundred and twenty-six. And with a bit of luck, against nobody. But if things get tough, against one, or six hundred and thirteen.”

“But  who would those be?”

“You are better off not knowing. And even I couldn’t tell you  for sure.”

“I ask so I will know what to give you. You know I don’t give a tinker’s cuss what you will do with what I give you.”

“You give me a bunch of mean beasts and they will do. Real mean.”

“What do you bring for me, Acerodon?”

I stuck my hand in my pocket  and drew out a small reddish pouch about the size of the pomegranate Grandpa had given Beau and me.

“Make a table appear,” I said. “One with a protective fringe that will stop what I have here from rolling off it.”

The table appeared, not very big and for four. I spilled the contents of the pouch onto it.

“Six hundred and thirteen splendid garnets, not one with a blemish,” I said.

“Shouldn’t they be a thousand two hundred and twenty six?”

“They are from AEternus’s oldest pomegranate tree, the tree from which those in the orchard of Ascalaphus descend.”

 “¡Ah!” said the wizard. “I will need a thousand two hundred and twenty six hours to make ready your order. Return in fifty two or, better, fifty three days.”

“Don’t make me waste my time. Surely you have what I need in your storeroom.

“You’d leave it empty.”

“This is for yesterday.”

We entered the buildig the tall wizard had emerged from.

What I saw in there was a workshop. A pile of logs, buckets of paint of may colours, a large working table and all kinds of instruments to carve wood with. And wooden figures resting against the walls. These were human-sized dolls. The first I noticed was a veiled gypsy fortune teller with a crystal ball in the palm of her left hand. Behind her were Little Red Riding Hood, her gran, the bad wolf and the woodcutter with his axe.  There were rainbow-coloured  carrousel horses all over the place, and my favorite group was of three shimmering mermaids. And I knew that my wooden men - that is, Beau’s lackeys – came from this shop.

The dolls that stood against the wall at the bottom of the room came to life and moved aside, revealig a crack that opened expanding till this wall was gone. A blast of freezing air, as large as the wall that had disappeared, plunged out  to surround us and as I shivered with cold I saw a second workshop, a different one with differnt materials and instrumets and machinery. And behind that was an interminable host of figures that seemed to be made of glass. And I kew this glass was bulletproof, and being magical, also safe from dynamite. And the joints of these dolls I knew to be a marvel of infernal technology.

“More than enough,” I said, for I could suddenly count so very fast. “But I have given you such good business you ought to reward me for it with an extra little something, shouldn’t you? Show some gratitude, Apolenko.”

“I might. You know very well I am interested in anything that belongs to AEternus,” said the wizard. And he looked at me in such a way that I knew what he wanted was me. And that should have scared me, but it didn’t. I ignored that look, and cheekily insisted on compensation.

“Give me something for having come to you,” I said. “You know I could have very well gone to your competitors.”

“Another lackey?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not today.”

Before I could learn what I was going to ask for, my head began to ache and I stopped having visions or whatever it was I was doing.

This experience left me exhausted. I still haven’t fully recovered. Even as I write, I know I will have to take a second nap. 

Ah! One last detail before I go off to sleep. While my head was aching, I returned to the first workshop to make my choice of a recompense and what do you think I saw there? The man who had tried to spray me with flit and whose T-shirt was full of colourful stains was now painting figures there. He was painting very slowly, not delicately, but as if unwillingly. He was not wearing a blue suit, but suddenly he reminded me of someone  you had told me about. The lazy artist you met in Salamanca. You see, he stopped painting to wipe his forehead with his towel, allowing two more ice cubes to fall from it. And when he had, he picked from the table and set on his head – though there was a ceiling above us – a blue bowler hat decorated with those flowers that are called tansy.

Your sister Heather, who is nodding off, sends you her love, Arley.

P.S. Inspired by Granny Milksops, this month I prepared a lemon meringue pie to be cake for Little Mauel’s moonly birthday. And I offered it to him surrounded by paparajotes. I am sending you the recipe for these breaded lemon tree leaves.

For four people or two really hungry ones you will need: lemon tree leaves, two eggs, half a litre of milk, half an envelope of yeast or baking powder, about five cups of flour, a cup or so of sugar, a pinch of salt, lemon zest, lots of olive oil to fry the leaves in, some powdered sugar and cinnamon to sprinkle them later with.

First thing is to wash the leaves very well. This is necessary even if they come from my lemon trees, which are never treated with anything toxic. Once washed, dry and put away the leaves for the moment.

Next is to prepare a mix in a large bowl. You beat the eggs in there and add to them the salt, the milk, the baking powder and the lemon zest. Beat well and then add at least two spoonfuls of sugar, beat again and slowly add the flour, blending it in gently. Don’t dump it all in at one go. The mixture must be neither too thick nor too thin. It has to be able to stick to and cover the lemon tree leaves fully.

Once the resulting  batter  is prepared, coat the leaves in it.

And now you have to be quick but very careful when you put the fully coated leaves in a frying pan full of boiling olive oil. You need patience now, don’t try to rush the leaves. Let them take their time so the batter will turn golden. If there is a lot of oil in the pan, it won’t be necessary to turn the leaves over. Both sides will become golden, but let them take their time.

When the paparajote is entirely cooked, remove it from the fire and set it on absorbent paper towels to remove the excess of oil.

Lastly, place the paparajotes on a pretty dish and sprinkle them with powdered sugar and cinammon.  I made a nest with them and placed Little Mauel’s lemon meringue pie in the centre of it. You know that though he is a cat, he loves citrus fruits, so he was delighted with his cake.

WARNING: I don’t think you have tried paparajotes before, so take note and remember not to eat the leaves, only their coating. The leaves are indigestible even for the fay.

More love and ‘bye for now. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.