Barnaby the Wanderer

Chapter 1: Monsters are Much, Much easier

The Dark Market of Persephone made no gloom-filled plaza of shadow and silence. Like its twin across the river, it bustled with merchants hawking wares from barrows, blankets and booths. Folk wandered chatting, sampling food and drink; else setting to the work of bargaining, words spiced with waves of hand, stamps of foot. Children scurried laughing through the crowd like forest creatures between the rooted adults. Singers and acrobats performed to claps and shouts, twixt the repeated passing of the coin-hungry hat. Same as the Bright Market across the Lethe.

And yet to Barnaby the total held a different feel. On the Demetian side of Persephone, the light weighed dense; gold cloth upon the outstretched hand.

Here in St. Plutarch's half of the city, it was the shadows that bore weight; piling thick beneath the garden trees, filling the branches of cypress and yew, the leaves so dark a green as to be near black.

Barnaby noted fewer fountains, more memorials. Less trees; far more statues. All about the market square stood stone and bronze figures on high pedestals, gazing down upon the living. Their fixed faces carrying a clear and common message: Travelers, life is brief wandering. Best keep to serious steps.

Were these stern figures men and women of Plutarch past? Perhaps their ghosts sat in councils now, guiding the land with wisdom gathered across centuries.

Barnaby pictured the robed ghosts coming here by night, standing beneath their own statues, pondering what they'd learned upon each side of the curtain of existence. Perhaps before their stony images they laughed, enjoying how wise they'd become.

Or maybe they whispered into their own stony ears how all wisdom was folly, before the grave, after the grave. What had Belinda the Rat told him? Death is an ending. What comes after does not continue what passed before. Talking of Pentateuch's lost love for her. Or hers for him? It came to the same.

He stared up at the statue of a woman in marble robes, her head bedecked with a mother superior's wimple. Stone face; but the sculpting caught wrinkles, dimples, a hundred scars of flesh suffering the outrages of time and heart. The carven eyes narrowed, as if peering into mist. Mouth just slightly, lightly set in smile.

He pictured the statue calling to him from her high, wise pedestal, asking 'Barnaby son of Barnabas, why do you take your friends into deadly danger?'

He shook his head. "I don't know."

"Don't know what?" asked Cedric. Looking from Barnaby to the statue.

"He talks to himself," replied Bodkin.

"Also to butterflies, axes, candles, hearth fires, cats and ghosts," added Val.

"Who knew millers were such complex fellows?" wondered Jewel.

"It's all them wheels turning round and about," declared Matilda. "Gets in their poor heads, it does."

"Next on the list," read Bodkin, raising voice to override non-essential conversation. "Tents. We'll need two. One for the ladies, one for us masculine sorts."

"And a third to shelter supplies," reminded Cedric.

"Oiled cloth, so rain doesn't leak upon our faces," advised Val.

"They always leak," sighed Cedric.

Barnaby turned from the statue, considered his friends. Should he tell them to end these preparations? Did he have the right to do so? What would they do instead? What would he do?

"I'm off to the horse dealers," declared Val. "I'll shop for a mule.

"No stealing them," warned Bodkin. "You aren't any good at it."