328. Two Worlds Vision Salve

328. Two Worlds Vision Salve

A week after having taken Mr. Binky to the Temple of Mayet, we all united again to accompany Pentafloris and her twins back to her seaside home. The Memorion himself offered to take us there in his ship, probably to make the occasion more solemn. Thus, if anyone got to know about this voyage, they would also know it had the blessing of AEternus’ memory.

It proved quite a pleasant and relaxing experience. The ocean blue bluer than it had ever been, the sky a lighter hue of blue too, baby blue, to match our mission. The regal ship, in contrast to its majestic look from afar, making us sneeze when below deck because of all the pepper Belvedere had scattered about to keep bugs away from the tons of books and archives that filled it to overflowing. Pepper had something to do with avoiding rust or mould too, from the humidity or something.   

“Sorry about that,” said the Memorion, “My suppliers had run out of peppercorns so I used pepper powder as a substitute. Probably a mistake. Most likely. I hope I remember not to do this again. Can I offer you all a drink?”

Despite his hopes, he seems to have been forgetting for centuries.

As we lazed on the deck lying on deck chairs and sipping piña coladas and being fanned by palm leaves and paypays moving on their own, we began to make small talk that I, Heather, think got larger than expected.  

“Poor Sunny,” sighed little Neferclari.

“But why do you say that?” I asked her.

“Because now he has got an evil twin.”

“No! Mr. Binky isn’t exactly evil. Only overbearing. And he isn’t a real twin.”  

“We’ve broken rules, haven’t we?” asked Neferclari. “Is that right?”

“We don’t exactly have rules, dear. We have conventions. Traditions, ideas about what is ethical and what is not. We may have been a little unconventional. But in what do you feel we’ve transgressed?” asked Uncle Gentlerain.

“Whoever is first to touch a baby has to keep it. Unless someone has seen it first and shouted a claim. Heather took the baby from the box. Shouldn’t she have to keep it?”

“It’s not exactly a baby,” I responded quickly. “It’s Mr. Binky suffering from a most unfortunate intoxication. I put him in that box, so I suppose it was right for me to be the one to draw him out. That doesn’t mean I have to keep him, does it?”

“He’s in his second childhood,” said Uncle Rich. “Are there rules about second childhoods and who gets stuck with the twiceborn kids?”

“Heather has kept him for like fifteen years. I think you’ve  more than done your bit, Heathie,” said Uncle Gentlerain. “We’ve all done what is best. It’s someone else I am worried about now.”   

“Fancy Feverfew. Am I right to think so?” Uncle Rich asked his brother.

“You are too, aren’t you? Don’t tell me she’s been in that cave since her late teens!”

“I am five years younger than you are and she is my age. So she must have entered that hole when she was nineteen. The year you disappeared.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” said Uncle Gentlerain. 

“Don’t be on the defensive. Of course you didn’t. It was…well, those were the disappearing years. A number of people chose to remove themselves from sight or just happened to. There was a scare about that. Most of those who had vanished reappeared in seven years. Some in seven hours. He disappeared too. But still for good.”

“Who are you talking about?” asked Beau.

Uncles Gentlerain and Richearth exchanged a look.

“Henbeddestyr’s half brother,” said Uncle Rich softly, as if he didn’t want to be overheard.

“Henny is a piece of cake,” said Uncle Gentlerain, “but his family is…sophisticated by comparison.”

“Don’t try to put it mildly. They are a bunch of self-important hysterics with egos that don’t fit in their heads and bump into everything when they move,” said Uncle Rich.

“Henny’s father is Ambivolo Parry. He lives in Italy and has children with a number of ladies. Not all at a time. Consecutively. One after the other,” said Uncle Gentlerain.

“But it’s not him that has disappeared, is it?” said Beau.

“Umbrian Silvervine is the person who did the disappering act. He is not safe to discuss,” said Uncle Gentlerain, “because he has this flaring temper. But since he has disappeared so definitely, it’s not likely he will storm in on us and bombard us with snakes and toads, for criticizing him, is it?”

“Disappeared or been made to,” whispered Uncle Rich. “The case is Umbrian was even more ambivalent than Ambivolo. He was like two people instead of one. A perfect gentleman one minute. And an enraged fiend the next.”

“It was not exactly that he was two different people. I think it was an irrational succesion of opinions that he had. I mean, he was okay with you and then, suddenly, you did something that he felt was an outrage. Usually, you had no idea what it was. And whereas up to that minute you had been a jolly good fellow in his opinion, you were suddenly an odious, undeserving lout. And from that moment on, one never knew where one stood with him.”

“A very difficult person to be around,” nodded Uncle Rich, “with a terrible temper. And then…what do you know? He laid eyes on Fancy Feverfew, the perfect example of a vocational do-gooder fairy.”

“It was the other way around, I think,” said Uncle Gentlerain. “She laid eyes on him and was enchanted.”

“Bewitched,” said Uncle Rich. “Though I will admit he was thought to be rather interesting to look at, I can’t help wondering  who hexed them. That relationship…it can’t have been natural. Opposites may attract, but no. There is no way this could have happened naturally.”

“He did feel flattered and responded well at first to her attentions,” said Uncle Gentie.   

“Too well,” said Uncle Rich. “I tell you, he was bewitched. He should have let her be. Someone as volatile as he was has no business toying with true love. That is supposed to be eternal.”

“Fancy was all sweetness and light,” explained Uncle Gent. “Curiously, she wasn’t easy to be around either, but for exactly the opposite reasons that it was difficult to be around Umbrian.”

“Cloying,” nodded Uncle Rich. “Too good to be good company. And nobody deserved her. In every sense of these words, good or bad.”

 “One has to admit Umbrian tried to please. Being liked by someone with such a great reputation for goodness sort of impressed him. To humor her, he tried his hand at doing good too. He did a couple of mortals a favor or two  when he went about with her and that made him feel good, I suppose. Good like he had never felt before. She was real pleased with him.”

“But?” asked Beau.

“It’s not easy for people to change.While the objects of his do-gooding were grateful and blessed him, and that made Fancy happy, well, well it went,” said Uncle Gent. “You know what went wrong better than I do, Richie. Do tell.”

“I don’t know the whole of it, but it sort of had to do with this mortal ignorant peasant woman who had a little child that was going blind. Umbrian and Fancy were celebrating their youth in a field rife with feverfew when that woman showed up. She wanted to gather some of those flowers to boil in water she meant to wash her kid’s eyes with. Now, Umbrian wasn’t the least bit interested in healing people, but he was Henny’s brother, so to please Fancy he took like two minutes of his precious time to procure from Hens’ apotheca a balm or an ointment or such that would restore the child’s eyesight. Unfortunately, being impatient and not wishing to wait till his brother was done with a client, he lifted the first thing he found that might do for his purpose and it turned out to not do only that. Umbrian made himself visible to the woman and gave her the eye salve he had made off with and told her she only had to apply it once on the child’s eyelids and that would cure the kid. She was to throw the remaining salve into a stream near her hut. Now, while Fancy was showing Umbrian how pleased she was with him for being so kind, the peasant woman went home. Before rubbing the salve on the child’s eyelids, she decided to try it on one of  her own, to be sure it was at least harmless. When she saw it had done her no apparent harm, she used it on the child and it worked its magic immediately. But like I said before, the salve didn’t just cure the child. A day later, this woman went to market to sell some beets and carrots and other nutrient-dense root vegetables she had taken the trouble to grow herself. So she spread a cloth on the ground and sat there in front of her basket of veggies and what did she see? She saw Umbrian barefacedly lifting all sorts of fruits and placing them carefully in a large basket of his own. Now Umbrian was only trying to be nice again, and he was preparing the basket for another charity case of his girlfriend’s. And he already had slipped some coins into the vendor’s purse, coins worth much more than the fruit he was taking, but the peasant woman hadn’t seen him pay. So, proving she was an ignorant fool, up she went and yelled ‘Stop, thief!´ at her benefactor.`What thief?’ asked the fruitseller, who couldn’t see Umbrian at all, because Umbrian was invisible to mortal eyes at that moment, but the salve the woman had rubbed on her eyes made her see what other mortals couldn’t,  because it was fairy medicine, made only  for fairy eyes, that Umbrian had unthinkingly given her. Two Worlds Vision Salve we call it. And Umbrian being as touchy as he was, flared up at being called a thief by an ungrateful person he had actually been kind to only the day before. So, without even blinking, he struck the woman utterly blind, thus proving that it is not safe for fairies and mortals to deal with each other, as our wise old folks say. And I imagine that Fancy was displeased with him for this and he with her for maybe rebuking him and not taking his side in his quarrel with the peasant woman with unwavering loyalty. And neither did Henny, who told his brother off for giving Two Worlds Vision Salve to a mortal without consulting him or anyone cunning first and I don’t know exactly what happened next, but Umbrian vanished from fay as well as mortal sight. And Fancy went into decay and began to say she’d been cursed and could no longer help anyone good, only bad people. And so I will end by saying again I don’t understand what Fancy and Umbrian saw in each other in the first place and how I suspect they were bewitched and there may be more to all this story than meets the naive eye.”