The Passing of Boss Krenkel

Hi all, and sorry for my extended absence; I was on vacation.

As mentioned in a previous post, I've started to send out my novel, "The Passing of Boss Krenkel," to agents; so far no bites (I got my first rejection yesterday!), but I remain hopeful. To signify my optimism and to commemorate the book's possible future publication, I offer here its prologue. If you like it, you can do me a favor by telling all your agent friends that this is the one they can't afford to miss!

Prologue: Tidings

We had not dreamed the old man could die. It had been so long since he arrived with his merriment and good works, his jingle bells and whips, his coming lay far beyond the memory of the oldest Aleph. His advent was a thing of legend, the-time-the-world-changed; it made us forget the time-before. And though one among us kept the old stories in trust and longing for the time-after, even he did not believe in his heart that it would truly come.

If the stories of old are true, we were once a great people: Alephs, Dwellers of the Winter Light. We hunted the vast reindeer herds across the snowy tundra of Zhahiiljok, we built our deerskin dwellings in the pine forests of the interior, far from the icy shores of the Pravtha Sea. We braved the neverending winters in camps of seventy or a hundred, huddled together in deepest dark while the winds shrieked outside, shielding our eyes against the blinding snowpack by day. We launched our seacraft on frigid waters bucking with icebergs and prowled by sea monsters, whose pitch-black heads reared through solid sheets of ice and tossed our boats like tinsel. At first of day we rose, beseeched the spirits of mist and weather for good hunting, and set off across the whitened land in cloaks of sealskin and reindeer hide. Every hill and valley we traversed had its name: Kronsvuur, Niiljaraad, Gimmelsthuul. We chased our quarry--snowshoe rabbit, reindeer, great white bear--through field and forest, drove them from the icy cliffs of Taarnjak with shouts and torches, took their lives with arrows and slingshots and fire-sharpened spears. Our eyes burned in the shuddering cold, our lips and nostrils frosted over. When the hunt was done we saved the best of the kill, surrounded its carcass with sweet-smelling winter grass, and prayed to its spirit for blessing and understanding. Then we dragged the rest back to camp on pine sledges, our rabbit’s fur boots sinking with the weight, our eyes ever alert for the packs of sleek white wolves that slipped from the forest to contest our kill. The women met us at camp with shouts of joy or, on days of want and bad luck, with cries of lamentation. They then went to work dressing the kill, knitting the skins for shelter and clothing, cleaning the bones for vessels, tent poles, the frames of kayaks.

Stories were told at night, over a sizzling fire of pine boughs and reindeer fat, of the founding of the world, how Wolverine stretched his great form over the ice fields of Fjaarnjok and beheld living things wriggling in the bare, wetted ground. We recounted his stunts with the other Animal People: how he tricked Reindeer by tying antlers on his head, but made the knots loosely so the antlers would fall off just as Reindeer grew enamored of them, and laughed as Reindeer loped through the forest vainly seeking his lost glory. And how he offered Seal the choice to sprout legs or a grinning face, and how Seal foolishly chose the latter, and was left to thrash in the snow until Wolverine took pity on him and gave him fins and a warm coat so he could slip through the icy waters with ease. And how at the last Wolverine, convulsed with laughter at Seal’s frowns and grimaces and fruitless attempts to pull himself up from his belly, took the smallest, most defenseless of Seal’s children and made him stand upright, and turned his fins to legs and his flippers to hands, and removed his warm coat, and gave the naked, shivering thing thumbs and keen eyes and a quiver full of arrows, so that he might hunt the other Animal People and feed his belly and clothe his nakedness. And how he named him Aleph, first of the People People, in whom Wolverine implanted his own cunning and good humor and edge of desire. But what Wolverine had not foreseen was that such a creature would grow dissatisfied with trotting along behind its creator, fetching him small animals and scratching his belly when he itched, and that with his creator’s cleverness Aleph would fashion more of his own kind, men and women of every shape and size. And Aleph would teach these new ones to tell the different creatures’ tracks in the snow, and to descry their droppings steaming in the sun, and he would show his kindred how to drive the different creatures toward other Alephs waiting in ambush, and how to shoot them with arrows and bludgeon them with clubs of pine, and to butcher them for their meat and bone and hides. And soon to Wolverine’s dismay the Animal People would be hunted nearly to an end, and no reasoning with Aleph and his kindred could convince them to restore the rough balance Wolverine had meant for the world. And so it was that Wolverine determined to bring Aging and Death to the world of the Alephs, and make the crystal waters swarm with sea monsters, and plant the packs of hunting wolves in the forests to challenge the Alephs’ dominion and to drag off their own unwary children. We laughed to think of Wolverine’s great folly, and we grew solemn at his terrible recompense. In seasons of famine, when we pulled up our camps and trekked across the barren snows of Tiiljok in search of our vanished prey, we recalled his displeasure and pleaded with him to forgive us our impudence and ingratitude and guile.

And at winter’s peak, when times were good, when we had been rewarded for our faithfulness with an abundant kill, the scattered villages of the Alephs came together at our central camp of Aarnzhiil (“this quiet place”) to celebrate the renewal of the year. Thousands of Alephs from camps as far away as Kuulikshiim on the ragged Mountains of Basuun and Strelspaath on the fjords and floes of the Pravtha Sea came streaming in, crossing the snowplains on shoes strung with sealgut, their tents rolled on their backs, their pine sledges laden with household belongings. One heard them singing from afar, camp songs and kill songs and frolic songs, their high clear voices carried like the call of snow gulls across the frozen expanses. When they sighted the pine crests and smoke spirals of Aarnzhiil they let out the peculiar Aleph whistle, a ringing sii-sii-ju-siiii as joyous as only travelers longing for home can know. Then they unloaded their sledges and pitched their tents in a frenzy of activity made all the more raucous by the shouts of children as they hurled snowballs and wrestled with their long-remembered, long-missed kin. When all was ready and the women had begun to roast the first of the reindeer on sweet aromatic fires, the headmen of the various camps came together in the central clearing and clasped each other’s forearms in token of friendship and spoke the words that had been given to us by Wolverine in the world’s beginning: “Hantha bethardje, miirlaak” (“And so it is you, my friend”). And all assembled gave a shout and stirred the snowy air with their laughter.

For three days and nights the camp throbbed with music from the bonepipe and handdrum. Fires glowed red throughout the camp, fed with reindeer fat and the household treasures that, on a whim and a dare, each head of family sacrificed to Wolverine to celebrate our people’s reunion and our world’s remaking. The women tended the fires and watched the men dance, then the men took their turn at the fires while the women donned sweeping robes of bear and snowgrouse and went spiraling through the camp like a child’s bone top. Those of both sexes just coming of age found their first mates and retreated to tents prepared and consecrated for this purpose, where amid tens of other couples they bedded down in plush, fragrant robes and burned the icy nights away with their newfound passion, then joined the dancing horde in their intoxicated state, still-tumescent boys leaking driblets of seed on the snow and no longer shy girls gyrating with flecks of blood smeared on their pale flushed thighs. Many children were conceived in those moments--the witch women with nimble fingers and totems carved from walrus tusk could tell, placing their hands on the girls’ flat bellies, who among the revelers had been blessed by Wolverine with child--and the family of the Alephs grew ever larger, ever stronger, till the dim light of that final morning when the fires were doused and the tents furled and the sledges loaded for the long journey back.

All that has changed. None could have foretold how much his coming would change.

Now we Elves wear coats of bright red cloth, pointed boots of rubber and metal. Now we load sleds of iron painted in gleaming shades of red and green, hung with bells and ribbons of holly. Now the reindeer are gone, bred for flight in his laboratory, hunted to extinction in our fields. Now the words we use to name our homeland are words we had not heard until his arrival: "featureless,” “wilderness,” “waste.” Now we make children the way we make toys, and for the same purpose: unconsciously, and to meet his quotas. Now the stories we hear, in the gray dark of the Work Shop, speak not of the elder gods but of him: of his humble beginnings in the northernmost reaches of his own land, of his great Vision, kneeling in the northern woods with the snow-draped pines all around, in which he beheld, with the absolute certainty of foreknowledge, the Castle, the Work Shop, the yearly ride. Now when we sing it is of him as well: carols echoing across the cathedral, canticles keeping time to the clanking of machines in the Work Shop. When we pray it is for his goodness and beneficence, his fatherly care, his ever-watchful eye. He sees us when we are sleeping; he knows when we’re awake. Under his gaze we are never idle: we stoke machines, string lights, wax runners, count blessings, stock inventory. We are merry as only slaves who do not believe they are such can be. We speak of the time-after as he has instructed us to: not as an actual time but as a deliverance from all time. We speak of the time-before not as an actual time either but as a dream well dead.

And I, Aezhiil Engaart, an Aleph, am different in this one regard: I alone of my generation have kept the old stories, the old words and ways. I have learned them at great pains, and saved them at great cost. I can tell them now, as I was told them by the man who came before me. When I tell them the stories seem to come alive, the past to rise before me and I its witness. I see as in a dream what was, the chain of inexorable circumstance that brought it to pass, and I can almost believe that, like a dream, it will vanish at first light of dawn.

But not so. When I wake in truth the chain remains binding, and I can no more predict the future than I can correct the past. Of our Master’s final days I can speak with some confidence. I was there. Of the time-before I have only the broken words of a broken people. Of the time-after I have no faith and no prayer.