. . .
It is good to spin thread, I think. It is good to have glue. It is bad to make glue out of the forbidden horses, but to have glue? That is good as a general thing.
That far — that far you may go, and be OK.
But to lure a mega-colony of soldier ants out onto your thread, only to gum them up there, uncomfortable and wobbling, when the glue finally takes hold —
That isn’t good, Hans!
That’s just mean!
They wiggle there. They struggle and they jiggle there. They jiggle on the net that Hans has woven; of thread and glue and soldier ants has woven; at the boundary line between Hans’ farm and Hell, that is deep beneath the earth.
. . .
It is bad to lock hope in a wardrobe; bad to gather it there, twisted one step away from the world, until it congeals into garments stained with red. It is bad to wrap a book-beast in chains of its own words; to milk the stones; to train great flocks of birds to drool.
Bad, I think, maybe worse than bad, to plug in a Holstein cow.
. . .
Lightning is good. Lightning is good and electricity is good and magnetism is good, I think, but not too much lightning, not too much electricity, not too much magnetism. There’s a reason that we bind it up in Maxwell’s Laws.
Not too much — and just about any lightning is too much for a cow.
Hans’ cow is there, deep beneath the earth. It is on his farm. It is shocked and it is shocking. It is crackling and it is shivering. It is dancing. It is coruscating. Soon it catches fire.
It burns.
It burns, does Hans’ cow, it becomes a fire-cow; it is made bale-kind, and it burns deep beneath the earth.
. . .
Listen. Listen.
Listen.
I know that a lot of people think that this is hip, but it is not hip. I know that Hans was doing it centuries before any of you modern hipsters were alive, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter that people will do it so freely and unashamedly in the modern circuses. It is bad to whisk a duck.
Oh, Hans!
It is bad.
. . .
It is good to whisk things, I think. It may be good to whisk things. You can make them fluffy. You can whisk them to and fro. You can whisk eggs and make them foam, and if they are not eggs of the lung-towers, the centipedes, the cave-wolves —
If they are not evil prophet eggs, nor yet the eggs of a wicked hat —
I mean, if they are ordinary eggs, you know, safe bird eggs, I am tired of listing the exceptions —
Then whisking them and making them foam is good, oh Hans; oh Hans, oh, that would be OK.
But Hans has just whisked a duck.
. . .
Look at that duck.
Look at it hanging there. It was quacking vigorously and it was fluttering and it was a very angry whisking duck indeed and maybe it seemed while it was quacking that all things would be well; but now he has whisked it too furiously and it is dead and now its spirit can never rest.
It glowers there.
Hans seizes up its spirit. He weaves it together with other things. He uses it as a portion of the chain to bind the nithrid; to bind it down, to lid it and seal it in its nithrid-hole, somewhere deep beneath the earth.
For that!
For that, he would whisk a duck!
. . .
The duck-ghost hungers. The duck-ghost glowers. The duck-ghost struggles. It enchains.
It endures its whisked existence, as it has no option but to do.
It un-lives out its painful centuries on Hans’ farm, beneath the earth.
– 2 –
Before Hans, there were heroes and heroines in their shining mail and great beasts with a thousand fangs.
There was a magic for each of us, a hope for every one of us, an answer ready to hand for each of us, before Hans bound down the world to sense.
There was Edmund’s princess — look! You can see her. And over there, there’s Sally’s prince.
She’d have both her eyes left, you know, if he’d been there for her.
And she wouldn’t be trapped in that crevasse!
. . .
If you’ll look to your left, there’s a crow that could have saved Linus Evans. It’s a talking crow. More importantly, it’s a crow that loves people like Linus Evans and knows the secrets of the world.
It could have saved him from his awful fate; would have saved him, had they met.
There was even somebody for Emily, back then, although — well, I mean, she’d hardly need that, what with having Navvy Jim.
They were there, though, anyway, all the host of them.
In the days before Hans’ dominion they shone glorious and bright.
. . .
Some of their stories yet remain, on the scroll of evil prophecy. They are written there in gold.
There were heroes and fairy-tale villains then;
But the world grew cold.
Serpent-kings cast up their empires. Magic carpets flew.
— But the world grew cold.
“We shall die,” said the princes, and the princesses with their golden hair.
“We shall die,” said the beasts that spoke, and the witches, and the frogs.
“We shall die,” they said. “The world grows cold.”
. . .
Hans it was who dreamt of such an ending: Hans, who stomped the flat world round. Hans who climbed the sacred mountain; who spoke forbidden words upon it; who brought dread winter down upon the world.
There had been unicorns, and chimera, but there are not now.
There had been dragons, too, and the gods of trees.
The winter came. It stormed out, and to Hans’ will. It brought an end to the age of fairy-tale things.
. . .
Some endured beneath the Earth or on distant worlds. Some hid in the shadows, some in the deeps, or found some hidden corner of the globe.
But only some.
The winter froze the rest of them. It buried them, it sealed them deep, and then Hans locked the winter itself away.
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