Got home today

Nobody home, didn't think there would be.

After I got out of Toswania (curled up in the hollowed out hump of a dying camel) I took the Blue East route on a clipper. The crew were ok, except for the one-eyed guy with the lice.

I got ashore on Port Mouth Sound, the incurrence for Blankland. The customs assholes were, well, assholes. But I expected that, and so made sure I was clean.

I will now write a letter to Bêbe, and somehow explain how and why I fucked off so quickly.

But for now I will have a cup of tea and reflect on imaginary travels.

There's a knock at the door just as the kettle whistles. I have that moment of indecision (like dogs wagging tails, who can't choose between equal enticements), and then decide (turn gas off, answer door).

It's Fusel.

And then I went home

The end

This is a down day

So don't fucking talk to me Bêbe. I have nothing to say, and I'm off to practice shooting things in the castle. And Menino (who you obviously don't like) is coming with me.

Time

I still have the gun. Menino is somewhere in the village, now he's caught up. So, I will find him and ask him who he wants me to kill next.

I hope that's enough to repair the friendship. Maybe not.

Can't

That's what she is. Now I have found out what this all about. No, I will not be a part of this. Nimtum (blood around his lips) tells me to be not so angry, says I'd make a good Orc when fucked off, all angry eyes and spittle-flecked - "You got killer in you," he says.

But I love her, and will therefore hate her silently.

Mountain redoubt

Up the hill above the village, before the wilderness where Orcs thrive, is a big stone castle (is there any other kind? Like if I said wood castle you would be surprised). It's black and glassy, but not obsidian, and has slit windows set back in deep holes. It's empty (kind of bereft) and has echoes in its winding corridors. Old weeds, dried in the wind, crackle and die in courtyards under crenelated shadows.

We spend some time here, me and Bêbe (Bêbe and I then, grammar-nazi) sometimes come here as I recuperate (which is to do cuperating again). We bring cold tea to drink and pickled eggs and leaves to eat.

We don't, and won't, say much to each other. I'm still suspicious, and she's still closed. She's waiting for something, something I should say or do. I don't know what it is. And I'm not fucking trying hard in the discovery phase of this particular project.

Fusel is a shadow on us.

This is his head

Says Nimtum, this orc in his cups, and he undoes his bag under the table and shows me this wide-eyed skull with rotting flesh hanging off.

"I saw he shoot you," says Nimtum, "so I crept up behind he and separated his neck."

I am surprised and revolted, but because I am drunk and grateful (and have seen worse) just say, "thanks, man."

Bêbe spits.

Uneasy alliance

The orcs further up the mountain, stinky though they are, and with questionable taste in biped meat, are friends of sorts with the village. Even the talking baboons have little to say against them. Especially when they come down at Solstice with big grins and lots of special beer (that they make from yak piss and gorse). They are happy fuckers, not a miserable bastard among them. A bit thick on normal measure, but sharper than most.

And they're not fucking elves, the landlords here, patrician twats on horses, all wispy and aristocratic, condescending and disdainful.

Did I tell you?

That all through this I've been wearing a suit? I got it from Oxfam in the middle eighties, and therefore was once worn by a now dead guy, this suit he demobbed in, and wore threadbare to work for forty years later. It was clean and wool, and warm and cut in an indifferent way (single breasted, one vent up the back with a waist too high on the trousers, meant for braces, held up with a thin brown leather belt). And it's still holding up, dusty, tatty, fucked up like me.

Albonian air raid

Ginger told me, in the long hours in the tank train before the orange destination, that in the Fraction War (where things were done by halves), the Zeppelins came over Shithaus and dropped fat bombs.

And after the blitz there was no communal spirit, no bleeding-eyed defiance, just a weary fuck-you from the populace.

The big guns on the hill, where the capitol and secret police museum escaped unscathed from the fires below (to the harbour, in the streets) fell silent like a bunch of clichés - stopped choking out hot bullets into the sky, and mainly missing.

So the police went out in the morning and shot the wounded.

Drinking myself to liver explosions

It's the only way. I get shot twice, but don't die. I get electrocuted by fat twats who don't know the first thing about health and safety, and I bet there's not a qualified first-aider amongst them, and none of them can properly kill me. Even the asshole with the sniper rifle up the hill picks a kidney rather than my (still beating) heart; and shoots a strip off my inside under the eleventh rib and above my spleen.

That's all fine (and dandy) I'll just have to do it myself. I'll give in, up a hill, with my irritated lover in attendance.

Just keeping keeping on

There's no light at the end of the tunnel, just a series of dim glimmers in the alcoves where we crouch when the 125s go by.

If I get through this

This nasty, rain-dizzling Sunday morning endless indifference. The grey hole that's below me but beckoning. If I get over that, then I will be stronger (because it didn't destroy me). I need some Manga transformation, or at least to level up.

Looking forward to the wooden galleries of a Toswanian court with glowering turbanned fucknuts passing unpleasant judgement, on top of piled up religious books. Patterned textiles variously uncover the one true word and are accompanied by harmonium and tuneful wailing. They sing whilst they decide.

I see Bêbe in my delirium

I'm dreaming, and I see her accept me back. There's a smile and some sunshine there. It's ineffably sad that this is just a dream - my brain, firing dopamine and serotonin in equal measure, trying, in sleep, to make me feel better. So I see her smiling, though she never did in real life. I see her saying things that are complimentary to me, though she never did.

And then I wake a little, and she's there (looking pissed off and impatient) over me, and she's saying this:

• Don't die, boy
• Don't go away
• Yet
• We still have to find Fusel
• Now I've found you

I tell her I'm fine, so she sticks her index finger in the wound in my side and says, "not so fine."

Bullet from the hill took my insides out

I was in the long grass outside the main field. Breathing shallowly because the oxygen up here is metered out in small parcels. I'm not like the string and bones people round here, brown strips of skin stretched on tall bones, walking from one moss hut to another, stopping, then gossiping and drinking steaming pints of yogurt, fermented with tiny mountain flowers (small blooms, white and close-fisted), talking shit and petty intrigue in a language I don't know.

So I, gasping, stretched out under the bitter-yellow sun, on dark spinach green lawns, felt less than involved in the day-to-day; I am not interested in horses, or yaks.

And then some fucker shot me; I saw the glint above me and beyond in the sharp geology piled up over there (higher), and then heard the swish of bullet and then the dull thunk as it hit. And then I'm wondering why that hurts so much.

she's back, so that's the end

Hello Bêbe

Why don't I just die?

And switch off this travelogue. It's getting tiresome now. From one pillock to another post. Every thing I see (including granite thrust up between bent trees in the slanting hill forest) is just one more snap vision landscape that has no room in my head.

I mean, for fuck's sake, I've seen baboons remonstrate, and clockwork spiders building spires (Nouveau not Deco). I've seen deserts carved from pumice, and small glitters of glass in dunes overhanging. I've seen vines strangle, and castles full of glowering vandals. I've see orange glows behind mechanically obsolete transport solutions - tanks pulling trains, and candles in epoxied lanterns.

And if that was not enough, I'm up a cold mountain, with the lemon-juice in the eye remembrance of lost companions.

I made two friends (from the base clay) and didn't have the wherewithal to keep them close enough to shelter in my narrator's embrace. They strayed out of my authorial radius, and then went away.

Sorry, mushrooms kicking in in the gorse. Lying down in prickling things looking up at pin-bright stars, thinking back, and having regrets.

Rantiblart

That's the unbearable part of this, the thing that I strained through a wire sieve (that some ur-pokémon went to sea on).

Second person (you) has no cheeseburger.

Phlone

In there, there's four things I want to say:

• I miss you
• My aim was off
• Just need to reload
• For another go

I bruised my knee

This is the kind of shit twitter is for: I walked into a bollard (which is not a kind of seabird).

Monkey bargain

Yak boy tells me the locals have trouble with the baboons hereabouts: they are intelligent and philosophical; which fucks with the locals' parochial world-view (monkeys don't have souls) and they don't want to debate with anthropomorhics with big stinky arses.

I talked to a rheumy-eyed and grey-haired baboon (calling himself Gordon of the Matter Tree) who lives behind the big thumb rock lowering over the village (which Gordon sits on and shits from) and he said two things of note:

1. I am older than you, yet only five man years, and grey now
2. She's still in there, and alive, I can see it in your eyes

Bastard.

Dietary concerns

Recipe for a pointless excursion in the hills above the animal plain.

Didn't catch up with the green trucks, and probably hallucinated my Bêbe (see how possessive I get) due to mushroom-based dinner.

So I'm in a dog hut high up the side of a mountain in Unter-Toswania, the borderland beyond the last forts. The yak boy who spied me in his acre has been kind enough to let me shelter in the leanto where he keeps his dogs (I miss Steve). and I'll abide here until Menino catches up (I saw him, a distant speck between the standing stones in the valley, tracing my step on the steppes).

So, the food that yak boy brought out to me from his stone retreat: appears to be pounded bark of meat tree and flowers from mountain cacti, mixed in a clay pot, heated ferociously until the poison, and therefore taste, steams away; tastes like boiled A4 prints of corporate PDFs, downloaded from the About us section of an SME's website.

Fills my tummy though. And the big dogs like it too.

Elves on dope

Pointy-eared fuckers living up trees, barefoot and stoned out of their tiny faces.

Never trust an elf - they come across all hippy dippy and cooler than a fridge, but they get one mile near the voluntary sector and they are just as venal as the next greased-up fascist, but with sanctimony.

At least orcs'll fuck you before they eat you.