Dantalion’s warnings were well-taken, but after three nights’ sleepless and intimate acquaintance with dear missus Daskalakis et al. his words were far from my thoughts, and one evening I found myself with little surprise waltzing into Athamasius’s.
It was a cozy sort of establishment, as far as these things go, and it didn’t take long to spot Tatterdemalion tucked in the back corner, presiding over a table of four.
Introductions made, it was an odd bunch. Tatterdemalion — tall, rail-thin, indistinguishable from the homeless — was nominally the leader, though gracious about it. You might never guess his past as a distinguished academic from his unfailingly shabby fashions: his newest subject, apparently, was those tantra of a prurient bent.
Then there was Scrimshanker; a short, pudgy, and irrepressibly shady character. The man was some enemy soldier on foreign assignment, or from the interior ministry — it was never quite clear. Bright eyes gleamed beneath a wide-brim hat; one always kept a hand on their wallet near him, by instinct alone.
Next, Fainéant. A woman — and what’s worse, French. Cherchez la femme, as the sages say. Her contrary streak stymied many a suitor; she loved loathing like little else. Epicure, synesthete, and supposedly the foremost expert on Occitan lyric poetry on the continent. A rare wit.
Lastly, there was Fatty Wang, who always struck me as a bit out of joint with the genre, to tell the truth. He rarely spoke but to turn up some hoary wisdom, and paired with his perpetual faint smile it was enough to make you wonder if he weren’t some immortal down from the mountain to observe the red dust of the mortal world. At any rate, he was an enormous gastronome — and for a bodhisattva, a mean saucier.
Despite their differences, they all professed to share the same soul; in our colloquies this proved to be a soul of rarefied intellect and unusual appetites. But when I brought up my object for the evening, they kindly deflected.
“Daskalakis et al., he says,” Tatterdemalion grinned, and started pouring, “Could use some fortification first, methinks. Poison for poison.”
“Dear auld Mithridates!” sighed Fainéant.
Fatty leaned back his head and took a slug to the stomach with sagely tolerance.
“Malt does more than Milton can, to justify gods’ ways to man,” Scrimshanker philosophized, then slid me a glass of bronze. At my questioning eyebrow, he glimmered. “Chamomile tea.”
I ventured a sip and nearly sputtered. This ‘chamomile tea’ bore a remarkable resemblance to pure-pot still whiskey to me, but I held my suspicions to myself. That was the trouble with these chaps out the asylum, I thought judiciously, they’d be all charming as you please, but you never knew when they’d fly off the gasket at the slightest quibble.
Case in point, I listened with interest as Tatterdemalion recounted his impassioned grudge against his landlady’s monozygotic twin sister. He shook a fist. “If it weren’t for that damnable disorderly conduct clause, I’d show her!”
“Well, why not?” Fainéant had a sly smile. She enjoyed being something of an instigator.
“She drubbed you square, goodman.” Scrimshanker shook his head piteously. “Just swallow your whiskey and your pride. Let it go.”
I nudged Tatterdemalion. “He’s quick with the antanaclasis, eh?”
He looked at me disappointed. “Antanaclasis? I thought better of you, Teller, that was zeugma.”
The jaws of the trap snapped shut.
“Zeugma balls.”