“And them that are too poor to serve,” it said, reverting to its russeted professorial cadence, “deck themselves out in the castaways tossed from the same windows as open for the overturning of the chamber pots.”

“But!” the medlar rasped. “On your fortune do not ask why there is no water in their morning cup, nor any goblet to hold drink. And though you may smell high, cover yourself with spice rather than take a bath or anoint yourself with unguent—though there be trays clotted with rose petals or rivers flowing with cardamom-scented almond oil, or lakes of water clear as tears, or.”

“Or?” said Galligaskins. “Or?”

He beat his stomach, but all he got from it was groans. The last medlar was silent, or maybe silenced. When next it spoke, its words would be lost in the trumpet calls of sooty rye, the worse half a half-rotten onion, that year-old shard of dried-peas pudding. Galligaskins cursed his gut. Now he would never know why, but follow the medlar’s orders, he knew he must. For when had a fruit ever spoken? And speak it did, to me. And besides, he had nothing else to do, his way to find a crust in that style-fevered town all dried up. He turned around and spat on the ground as a curse and riddance to that worthless, worry-induced peace he’d left behind.

He set out . . . and though it took a long time, whatwith his pulling up his galligaskins at every seventh step, and the wrong turn he made at the beginning . . . one bright morning, emerging from a dark thicket, he espied a river soup-thickened with fish so fat they floated. He walked on them easy as upon a path . . . and when he stepped upon the other bank and saw the people and the land, his nose cried: You are Here.

His mouth filled and overflowed as if the river of saliva could run down his cheek, fall upon his jerkin, drop down to his galligaskins, slither down to the toe of his boot, and from thence to the riverbank, where it could surround and drown and pull the catch back up—but how could it? Werold grabbed at his calves, but the fat slovenly hose had slipped down to his ankles again. For a moment, his mouth hung open and glistened, stupid as a dead fish, as he tidied himself with desperate speed in this place of undoubtable good fortune.

That he was always Here and never There was a lesson he’d learned only too well on this trip. At last, however, Here was where he had been sent, for here was somewhere that only the likes of a lecturing medlar would think real, and not just mischievous leaf whisper.

He bent down and peered at the ground, then picked up a scrap of brown stuff with white stripes. He sniffed, and shoved it in his mouth before he had time to obey his mother’s deathbed warning: Never shove somewhat you dun know in your gob. It’s like ter poison your blood and cause your hair to frizzle orf.

Gingerbread!

Gingerbread with thick white swirls of icing! No one from Ranug-a-Folloerenvy who could have afforded this ambrosial cake would have thought to eat it—not when there were capes to seek, and new lace caps. Their treats were only what could sit from head to feet, on them. Their insides were never seen, so had to abide with day-old-bread made by bakers who made no cakes, and nothing fresh.

Before he knew it, the argufier Werold—weary, starving, workless—ate so much gingerbread that he fell asleep with an ache in his stomach and a smile on his face—having eaten his way through the scraps of twelve nightshirts, thirteen socks, a filmy guipure sandwiched between two caps, one-half of a too-stale boot, innumerable delicacies of bodices, a stodgy codpiece, a jerkin so padded its owner could stand with his chest puffed out at Cupid. And a slice of a detachable sleeve that truly was as big as (the medlar had foretold true) a pumpkin. Although even the meanest shred of underclothing was the most heavenly food he’d ever stomached, with a smell so divine he wanted never to be out of the presence these rags, he had been able to be picky, being all alone on the bank with not a soul in sight.

When the shadows lengthened, instead of trying to eat all the skirts that lay around, he made a bed of five of them and tossed one into the river where the fish it landed on picked a hole in it large enough that Werold could see one of the fish’s protruding eyes, and the profile of its thick lips with a hint of double chin. The river that was visible between the fish was clogged with sodden clothing scraps, much as lichen hugs the rocks in a path. Every few moments, a fish barely moved its body and opened its mouth—encompassing a scrap of used apparel.

It wasn’t dawn yet when Werold woke a changed man. He sniffed the skirts and put his hands together in silent thankfulness to the wise medlar. It must be the cloves, he thought. No longer starving, knowing that he was sent here for his fortune, he was invigorated and ready to take on any argument. Versuith aey! Werold the argument-maker who hailed from that silly tumbledown, fashion-chasing town so far away, was now set for better things, Sharp as a clove, he walked to his unknown destination not caring a jot for the picture he made. Up! he commanded his galligaskins, and though they did not obey any more than they ever had, he felt as if they jumped to his raised eyebrow.

The road led to a gated town, but with no one to challenge him. Instead, the path before the gate had a pattern in white stones that said in swirly letters:

Welcome!

The townspeople, though dressed in mouthwatering display, were so obliging that he immediately felt at home. Everywhere he went, people wanted to help.

“I wish to have a sign painted,” he said. No one asked him why, but he was taken to someone who said it could be done and took his order, refusing money “for the pleasure” (not that Werold knew what coin they took, even if he had any to hand out).

Werold next sought a place to set up business, and he was led to a narrow but luxuriously furnished shop and room above on Market Square, with a place to secure a sign so that it hung out over the street and would be seen by all. “As if I were a king” he protested in so few words that it would have shamed him, if he had been quoted in his Guild of expert exponential argufiers, but he was assured that he was the first argufier to ever have graced these parts. Indeed, no one had ever heard of argufiers, but all agreed that they must be very necessary, since he was one.

So.

Just before sunset on his first night in what the townspeople were pleased to call Pleasanz, the town’s newest inhabitant hung his sign. It said:

for all your

ARGUFIER, DISPUTATOR, PILPULIST, DISCEPTATOR, LOGOMACHIC, BELICOSSIC, WRANGULUMENTOR

~needs~

Werold of Ranug-a-Folloerenvy, MoA, HLD, GKoB

From the sign hung three iron rings framing objects finely wrought. In the left ring: a fork-bladed backstabber dagger. The middle held a scene as fine as lace: a man spitted over a small bonefire, flames curling from the eyes of the topmost skull. Suspended in the right ring: a simple vial. Each object in its ring was barred diagonally with a red-enamelled banner.

After Werold hung the sign he looked for a place to eat but didn’t find one, nor a place to buy anything to eat. So, lit by stars, he crept out of town and visited the riverbank again, where he ate his fill and made another bed hidden by a hedge, as now that he had position in Pleasanz, he could not be seen to be slumming. Tomorrow, he said to himself as he snuggled into the fragrant bedding, I’ll find the measure of Pleasanz. But just before he closed his eyes, he spied a scrap of bodice within arm’s reach, and dropped it into his waiting mouth where it dissolved and trickled down his throat in a manner like gold down a wishfulfilled miser’s. If, he mused as his throat convulsed on the remains of the taste of its tail, this toothsome thing is not a Pleasanz cake, what marriage could there bake when a Pleasanz cake and wine, and my mouth meet? (For Werold was at heart, a misunderstood poet.)

He woke bathed in sweat, and tried to jump off his bed, but his hands pushed through three skirts and stuck, and his chest pulled away the topmost’s elaborate decoration so well that he looked like he’d aged twenty years and grown a mat of curlicued white hair.

He had to use his arms like flails to beat his way out. Torn skirts flew everywhere, hitting the ground with thuds. He ran to the river’s edge where he jumped onto the backs of the nearest two fish and bent down to wash the icing off his chest. It was as hard to scoop up unsullied water as gleaning the mice from the rye in an opened barrel. He scraped at his chest, grabbed at his ankles where his galligaskins lazed—and was poised to run back to town, but the sight of the fish kept him longer, longer than he had meant, longer than he would have wished. They glistened in a slow turbulence, gulping their scraps of sodden clothing in such a desultory manner that he could see from the way their lips drew back: disgust. They lay on their sides, each fish’s one bulging eye so lacking in expression, it lacked only the flattening that death brings. All these bloated creatures almost still as paving stones seemed to yearn that fate of slow choking in a basket, to lie on a slab at the monger’s.

On an impulse, Werold tore the button from his jerkin and threw it out between the banks where the fish were so massed, the river was hidden below them. Before the button had a chance to hit a body, the river shattered upwards. Fish jumped as high as his shoulder. Bodies as big as his arced up and slapped down, roiled the water and rolled in the river, their great mouths snapping, fighting for that button till the banks were slick with water and mucked with sticky, slippery brown bits as shiny and toothsome as a rotting mushroom.