Odours lingered warningly on Winetavern Street. Night, pregnant with possibility, awaited alignment of circumstance and personnel. Patent Pending bore night's bulk on his flank, flung easy like the inebriated sack of a drunken friend. He and it were one, Tristan and Isolde.
Like the miasm of spent gas shells planted in the salient sludge, lethal bulbs awaiting a clumsy boot's airborne dispersal, the scent filled Patent as he faced the old alley, ignoring its pleas for circumvention. Another might endure; Patent prospered in the queer aunty's musk of his fallen lady; Dirty Dublin at night, at play, at improper.
Old roads like tube lines intersected and closed off unto themselves. Strange turnings where past and present converged in dystopic medieval splendour. Historic strata visible on Fishamble Street's surface; its wind rises from the black pool like dripping neptune on tempest eve, and meanders in concrete toward the church forecourt, seat once of Sitric Silkenbeard. Later cobbling shields yesteryear's lindens interned below. Here where Patent strides, merchantmen once carried eels and fish malformed by prolonged unlight in buckets to the market to fetch their porter's price. In deference to the raven rush which joined and bound the city's distinct fiefdoms, Dubliners imbibed a potable black as their mordant wit and sacred river, from cups that seemed to alien eyes to have been filled from the lap itself. The nightpool's generous bounty permitted varied industry.
The River was a goddess. Everything betwixt she influenced; poet's pen and artist's quill, songman's flute and poor man's ills. Even those who tended stalls, owned property or collected for crown without cause to set sail made crossings in the dozens, ever in her grace.
Each weekday at dawn great galleys moored at Ormonde Quay, where the old wall dipped to treacherous stonecut steps, and ferried welders and net-tossers to upriver sites. There waited their Argus, which endeavoured to carry a full cargo every journey to ensure dividends on their investment. Each aboard, though nobly dreamt, would spend his lot on drink, howevermuch they might endeavour to stockpile amidst their lousy existence, in the itchily literal definition.
The men lined the boatsides and leant shouldertight to the flimsy awning, which offered helmsman-elect brief respite from foundry fogs that hugged the river to the sea, reputedly irritant in large doses. Once boarded the helmsman signalled the portside men, who leaned perilously, and fearlessly, over the black pool between craft and pier and kicklaunched the vessel toward the thoroughfare.
All day toiling, they returned along an effulgent coil which the setting sun cast spearlike on the flow. Despite exhaustion and wont of leisure, workers together moored their fleet to rings set in Ana Livia's pauldrons, then sold produce for wares and coin at Fishamble Street Market, and hence with mischief carried across the concourse to its dionysian counterpart, parallel in planning though twinned in purpose, aptly-named Winetavern Street.
Coins in Dublin had legs and leapt hand-to-hand like gilded fleas. Into the hamfists of sailors went the day's catch, soon bound for the limp wrists and satin sacks of merchant landlords or the cudgel-wristed mitts of Winetavern's grizzliest keeps. Ireland should rule the world, only word of the hereditary fiscal irresponsibility innate to our poet nation reached the ears of greedier elements.
This night as Patent rounds the bend and is now clear of Smock Alley, he passes Handel's onion gate, which since boyhood he has imagined as the breasted turret of a sandy kingdom's tower, bell-shaped to a needle point. Here the great composer slept in the nervous, inspired nights before Messiah on the vast organs rang to ears virginal to its majesty beneath St. Michan's vaulted roof. The wind whistled like an idle janitor and his fiery gruaig shifted, and he wondered was there an organ note played there so faint you might pause to quiz, but he didn't. Patent was naturally disarrayed and now close to disrepute. He sought and found solace in the silence of ancient shadows, now and past tormented evenings suchlike. His route, which linked home and hedonism, he had many times crossed. Well-chosen subterfuge, it peeled through and melted past main streets like a serpent unlimited by dimension unfurling endlessly.
Washerwomen spoke as they do of ambling fish, shambling bipedal creatures whose scales in the occult half-light of the ancient primate city shone like iridescent plate from the armouries of some unknowable mariners guild, who depart water to stalk midnight markets where Monto maidens scrubbed ectoplasm from petticoats with Analivia's spit. No market there was now, nor bustle. If ere those scabrous fiends had ginger stepped quayside, they had long since ceased their daring, preferring dank middens in the city's underground confluence, which swelled heroically beneath the cobbles. If one pressed ear and hope-hearted to the paving stones, one heard its rage against the firmament.
Pisces stubbornly held her sway in the street's reptile house, where arrogant tropical fish lured dope-fated urchins to their window, as had the wares of times past all laid fresh beneath gullhowl. He swept past her left transept to avoid Parliament Street, where at this hour surely only most unparliamentary actions were being committed. He paid no heed to the pissing tramp's opera. Who cares what happened the night before Larry was stretched. There was only tonight, which, if foretold, Patent would have called the Night Before Patent Time Traveled.
Don't ask him for the science. Fine man perhaps but Feynman he's not. They still don't believe him. He wouldn't believe it, only he'd experienced it himself. He had been sent backward, and like a suspicious majority of 80s action movie protagonists with purpose traversed centuries to prevent mankind's extinction; all at the whim of a man who could only be distinguished from the homeless by his winning Trinity brogue. Patent had no explanation and questioned why such was required. When old farmers spoke of cursed hawthorne and workers driven from farms by the sidhe, who asked the genus of the creatures in question, or quizzed after some metric by which fortean phenomena could be rightly assembled. His tale was one such; of the Otherworld.
Besides, it was more a mystical experience than anything permitted by accepted science, which the druid called dogma. He described 'universal laws' as one describes vicious cults, no less enraptured by their own tenets than fervent Catholics; their god of wire, his ribbed tendons and paneled skin in every child's clutch, his scrying eye the mirror of future weeping.
The man hid arcane proficiency behind frail form. Patent initially reeled from his crooked beck when first he bore forth from interminable shadow in the Christchurch backlane, thinking him some coffer-thirsty derelict job-shy. Quickly the man, whose bearing was noble, dispelled such notions and wrest control of the conversation, steering destiny as he pleased; gab he had and used, ensorcelling Patent in a labyrinth of benign cunning. His eyes were deep-set. Their azure rondures belied great wisdom. In fleeting moments between articulate flurries, Patent thought how prompt this man sought and claimed confidence without question or favour. Despite appearance, the suggestion of authority was sufficient; the library of archetypes constructed the remainder, which we call reality.
"Things have been forgotten," he gestured upward "even the Ashakic records wherein all knowledge is contained have waylaid the facts pertaining to our present discourse. Listen, you, man whose name I do not know yet whom I feel supernaturally compelled toward, and do you not feel it yourself, this electricity while we speak, growing with proximity." He came within an inch of Patent's distinctive shrón. Time seized forward, eager toward supposed destiny; but whose? He seized Patent's hand. Patent felt the man knew everything about him, from the Cornetto he stole in Londis off Shop Street after Leftover Crack played in Sally Longs, to the fearsome dildo hidden in his bottom drawer which Amazon user ButtLustNottingham83 described as having 'terrifying, macelike proficiency'. They spoke eye-to-eye but unequal; twas the eye of Horus, nae the eye of Balor 'gainst the mere beholder, the eye of diaphanous and limited mortal understanding.
Flaming swords he made with words and his inebriated flock stood transfixed, dirtied on weed. Patent Pending willingly and with announced pleasure opted for routine temporary dementia. His thoughts were tigers that plagued him. They besieged his inner compound, which though unconquered, had straw foundations. Only smoke tamed their berzerk, sated their lust for the man he had once been and now became fleetingly. As Patent thought this to himself, he thought it also to the elderly man, who as sure as Gandhi read the Guardian could read his thoughts.
