Experiment #3 - 'Touched by Venom' - Chapter 1

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Touched by Venom - Chapter 1
By Janine Cross


My first memory: white dust.

Harry: Wow, that was a good party!

Cool and airy, drifting upon my head like a blessing. The taste of it a fine, gritty tang I later knew to be kaolin. The soft thud of hammers crushing lumps of dry clay into small pieces, the crunch of rolling pins reducing the granules to powder. The unbroken rhythm of hands kneading air pockets out of damp clay, the thuds as steady and resonant as a heartbeat.

Xion: There wasn’t a whole sentence in that entire paragraph.

I was born a danku rishi via, a pottery clan serf’s girl, on the dragon estate known as Clutch Re. I could claim none as my navel aunties,

Xion: How’s that different from a normal auntie? And do I really want to know?
Harry: Pretty sure someone can’t be the aunt of a particular body part.

however, for my mother was not born in Clutch Re, but in Clutch Xxamer Zu, the very same dragon estate infamous for reckless wagering during Arena events. When of a day the Xxamer Zu estate owed Re a sum it could ill afford, my mother was one of the serfs given in lieu of lucre.

Harry: I’m starting to think this is a world created by someone who just really wants to win at Scrabble.

She arrived in Clutch Re late one Fire Season evening, ill and filthy from the monthlong march from her birth Clutch. Due to her skill with clay, she was placed in the pottery clan, and no sooner did my father lay eyes on her than he claimed her as his roidan yin, his garden of children.

Xion: That’s kind of creepy...

Within days, it became obvious she would have difficulties in her new home: She would not, could not, be piously servile. Even to her claimer. She wanted to create with clay whatever she wanted, whenever the whim took her.

Harry: Also known as the First Grade Art Class School of Rebellion.
Xion: *imitating a child* I’ll make the grass yellow if I want to.

So she did.

Mother’s defiance against the men’s daily Proclamations about what could be sculpted, when, was tolerated for three reasons only: my father’s mastery of clay, mother’s own impressive skills, and her sweet, light nature.

Xion: Nice people are allowed to break the rules. But wait, isn’t one of the parts of being a nice person not breaking the rules?
Harry: I’m a little more thrown by the fact that people who accept other people as a unit of currency are so susceptible to the old ‘Disney Princess’ routine.

For yes, contrary to how many have painted her, my mother was the softest creature I have ever known. Soft-spoken, soft-stepping, her face alight with kindness that drew children to her knees. Almost a sacrilege, that, to have such a benevolent countenance upon a lowly Clutch serf. Yet there it was: the calm eyes, the gentle smile, the infinite patience of the dragon-blessed shining from my mother.

Xion: For some reason. I don’t think “calm” when I imagine dragons.

The immensity and population of Clutch Re helped conceal her oddness. A fertile, hill-pebbled valley sprawling between jungle-choked mountains, Clutch Re was home to almost a hundred serf guild clans, or rishi kus. It boasted an enormous infirmary, several smaller hospices, three mills, a plethora of apothecaries, an infamous dragonmaster who was the best in the nation, though admittedly the most eccentric, and enough egg workers to form a veritable regiment, all necessary for the welfare of Re’s seven thousand brooder dragons. Our pottery clan, danku Re, was just a blot on the huge map of Warrior-Lord Re’s Clutch. Mother was invisible--and safe--as long as she lay quiet.

Xion: Though Susan Storm wants her powers back.
Harry: *to ceiling* Excuse me? Does this mocking session come with a glossary?
Xion: I feel bad for the author’s thesaurus.

My second memory: my father’s arms.

Ruddy, brawny, thick, with coarse black hair, his hands from the wrist down pale, soft, and hairless from the endless hours immersed in clay solution.


Throughout our childhood, my sister, Waisi,

Kuzco: Is she also soft?

insisted this could not be a real memory, not so young in my life as I claimed, and perhaps she was right--really, she must be--for my childhood was spent with the other potters’ children in the women’s barracks. I had little close contact with my father. Indeed, I only understood him to be such when I was about four.

Xion: Because hints about men and women’s relations aren’t enough, we have exposition.

Like all women regardless of clan or status, my mother lived separate from the men and saw her claimer privately only when summoned to the mating closets. Otherwise, all conversation with him was in the manner of orders received or words exchanged in the course of a day’s work. My intimate memory of his hands so early in my childhood must therefore be fabricated or transposed, lifted from later in my life and transplanted back to the time when I still crawled on all fours.

Xion: I wonder how much a memory transplant costs.
Harry: So basically, this is the creepy fantasy equivalent of ‘7 Minutes in Heaven?’
Kuzco: I wonder what the creepy fantasy equivalent of ‘Spin the Bottle’ is like...

Was my father, Darquel, as weak as history portrays him? Or bewitched by the evil spirit that supposedly inhabited my impious rebel mother? Neither. Merely obsessed. Obsessed with my mother, who was called Darquel’s Karvarria, Darquel’s obsession, after father claimed her, though others called her his Djimbi whore when out of earshot; obsessed with his eldest girl-child, Waisi, who was determined to rise in status somehow, anyhow; and obsessed with me, his youngest, Zarq.

Yes, that was my father: obsessed with three vastly different women.

Xion: Which isn’t creepy at all.
Harry: I think being possessed by an evil spirit would actually be less disturbing than this.
Kuzco: How can you guys even read past all those names?
Harry: Ancient wizard secret.

I remember the first time I heard the word Djimbi applied to my mother. I was nine years old, and my mother, sister and I were watching Mombe Taro, the annual ceremony when chosen boys were publicly inducted into apprenticeship to the dragonmaster. Dono stood beside me, shoving and elbowing and leaning forward for a better view. He and I had been playmates when younger, and I was enjoying his company, despite his insistence that I address him only by his full name, Yeli’s Dono.

Xion: Because that’s the only way the author can let the readers know his full name.
Kuzco: Dono arigato, Mr. Roboto...

He should not have been standing beside me, young Dono. Although only nine years old, he was regarded as a man, and men are supposed to line one side of the Lashing Lane,

Kuzco: That sounds unpleasant.

the road used during Mombe Taro, and women and children the other. But as the men have to stand behind the monks, they are deafened by the gonging of the monks’ ceremonial water bowls, and blinded by the reflecting tin and water of the same. Thus, while approximately half the men observe the segregation, the rest crowd onto the women’s side of the “lane of pain.” This is all conveniently overlooked by Temple wardens.

Kuzco: It’s because they’re soft and nice enough to disobey the rules.

Never do the women stray over to the men’s side, need I point out.

Kuzco: You need not point out.
Xion: Because the earlier exposition should be enough of a hint.
Harry: Quiet, or the author will throw more made up words at us.
Xion: Good point.

We had walked all morning to reach the Lashing Lane by high noon. The stable stench of dragon dung, decomposing nests, and maht, regurgitated dragon food, coated my tongue like thick jelly. Waisi stood on my left, pinching my neck and complaining she couldn’t see. Dono stood on my right.

Harry: One; ew. Two; that kind of imagery doesn’t really work when the smells we’re supposed to imagine belong to animals most of the audience has never seen. I mean, hell’s bells, I’ve met a dragon, and I’ve got no idea what any of those things are like.
Xion: I don’t even want to imagine the smell.
Kuzco: They could have just said it smelled like an uncleaned llama stable; would have been good enough for me.

“Look, look!” he screamed. “They’re coming!”

Harry: *snicker*

The cries of the crowd lining the lane momentarily drowned out the noise of the water bowls.

The First Holy Wardens of Clutch Re came out of the largest stable, resplendent in their robes of iridescent porphyry, indigo and green. They walked with eyes straight ahead. Each carried a bronze crucible of holy oil and a whisk, which they dipped in the oil and flicked over the whipping bar that ran down the median of the lane. They moved with such grace that the feathery antennae atop their three-cornered hats barely quivered.

Harry: I call shenanigans. Porphyry is not a color! Also no one could walk gracefully in a hat that stupid.
Xion: The hat makes that much of a difference?
Kuzco: The secret is that the antennae aren’t attached to the hat.
Harry: I’ve been told hats make the man. It’s why I don’t wear them.

I know now what I didn’t then: Those antennae aren’t real. The real ones, reverently removed from the corpse of whatever male dragon has died, are horded by the Ashgon himself, the sacred advisor to the Emperor and titular head of Ranon ki Cinai, the Temple of the Dragon. But back then, I was dumbstruck to see the graceful, irridescent antennae arching above the heads of those men.

Xion: All the made-up words are starting to get confusing, especially since she gives the definition later.
Kuzco: Starting?

“They can thmell better when they wear them,” Dono shouted, his lisp pronounced in his excitement. “They can thmell just as good as a bull dragon, hey-o!”

I doubted the truth of that. Wearing a dead bull’s olfactory antennae hardly seemed likely to improve the senses of the wardens’ fleshy nares. But I held my tongue. Clutch women are taught young not to dispute the male word.

Kuzco: Fleshy nares? What’s wrong with “noses”? Okay, author, you’re just doing this to make me mad, aren’t you?

“I can’t see,” Waisi shouted, though her cries were just one more noise in a storm of excited shouts and babble.

Only the monks remained impassive, their faces made flat and silver by the harsh reflection of tin and water. They sat cross-legged on the ground, lining the entire lane, their water bowls before them. Naked save for their loincloths, their bony bodies were coated in dust stirred up by the crowd. They never ceased moving their thin arms; each left hand held a metal rod, which was struck against a water bowl, which each right hand constantly nudged the bowl, making the water within swirl. This produced an eerie, atonal noise, a quavering wong that was both metallic and liquid.

It was not a noise you’d wish to hear at night.

Harry: I beg to differ, I usually like my nonsense sounds during afternoon tea.
Xion: Really? I’ve always thought getting them out of the way with in the morning is better.
Kuzco: I like them right around noon; good backdrop for lunch.

Following the First Holy Wardens came the Temple Superior of our Clutch, and behind him the Ranreeb of the Jungle Crown, the holy Overseer of the collective of Clutches to which Clutch Re belonged.

Harry: And behind him was the High Grand Puba of The Mountains of Cheese, followed closely by the Grand Interior Decorator of the Three Chocolate Palaces and his good buddy, Steve of the High Holy Cafeteria Gadugadu

...what, I’m hungry?
Xion: *pulls out sea-salt ice cream* Want some? I finally managed to make it.
Kuzco: I think the real question here is, how much clutch could a holy clutch clutch if a holy clutch could clutch clutch?
Harry: Woah, you just blew my mind a little there.

It was a mark of Re’s status that the Ranreeb was present; Mother said he’d never attended Mombe Taro at her birth Clutch.

The Ranreeb had a vast disdainful face skirted by thick, turgid chins that bulged obscenely fore and aft his neck.

Kuzco: He’s a boat now?

I stared at that face above its magnificent robe of iridescent bull scales, those ones real, not fake.

“How can such an ugly man be holy?” I wondered aloud.

Harry: Hi there, I’m the Ranreeb of the Jungle Crown, and I’m the guy who’s not judging you on your appearance.

Waisi ignored me, save to cry, “Move out of the way, Zarq. Move over!”

“Hey-o, hey-o!” shouted Dono, capering like a rabid monkey. “Here they come!”

And so they did: the apprentices.

The inductees came first, some stumbling and ashen in terror, others lock-jawed and stiff-necked, eyes fixed not on today or tomorrow or even the near future, but on some distant time, when they might hear this crowd’s awe and reverence. A dreamtime, that, a phantom time.

Kuzco: Lucky for me, I get to hear the crowd’s awe and reverence today, tomorrow, and yesterday too!

The servitors came next, several years older, much fewer in number, as fearful as the inductees but able to control it with discipline and bravado. Their necks, backs, chests, arms, and calves all bore the snakelike scars of previous Mombe Taros. They knew what they had to endure that day and knew it intimately.

Last came the veteran dragonmaster apprentices, the ones who’d walked the Lashing Lane many times and whose bodies were bas-relief maps of scars. There were only seven of these, all between age sixteen and twenty. All had entered Arena and survived. All burned with the fervor of achieving master status, of becoming the next dragonmaster of Clutch Re. Chances were, they wouldn’t. A dragon claw or fang or a fellow apprentice would put them early into a sepulchral tower. Maybe this year, maybe the next.

Harry: Just say grave. Put them into an early grave. It’s not that hard.
Xion: I think the author likes big words.
Kuzco: I think the author wants to elope with her thesaurus.

But such cogency had no place in the mind of a veteran apprentice.

Right away, I noticed their erections.

Harry: *spits out drink*

Truth, I’d been looking for them, as had Waisi and Kobo’s twins, Rutvia and Makvia. All four of us poked each other and tittered. Behind us, Mother yanked on Waisi’s and the twins’ braids with her strong potter’s hands. She even yanked on my own scabby bristle, causing instant tears. We paid heed. Unwise while in the presence of so much masculinity to mock the phallus.

Harry: yes, it is wise not to mock the phallus, for you are...and there’s no possible way to end this joke tastefully.
Kuzco: Can I just point out that all that supposed masculinity is “hiding” on the women and children side of the road?

Yeli’s Dono still pranced beside me like one crazed.

Kuzco: Like one crazed what? LIKE ONE CRAZED WHAT?

“Lookit the thize of that one!” he bellowed. “That’th a cock, hey-o!” He tugged on his own little thing beneath his dirty loincloth.

A venom cock, they’re called. I’d heard the words grunted respectfully among pottery clan men. I’d also heard the words mentioned by women wearing a carefully blank expression cultivated to hide opinion. Understand, women do not revere the venom cock as men do. They see it for what it is: an uncontrollable reaction to an impeding event, and a slightly foolish reaction at that.

Xion: I think they’re talking about penises, but then why not use that word?
Harry: *flustered* Look, I’m just pretending they’re talking about poisonous roosters and nothing is going to convince me otherwise!
Xion: Wait, that’s a word for rooster? But I thought...
Harry: IT’S A ROOSTER!
Xion: Okay...

Dono’s reverence was a mystery to me back then, made all the more mysterious by his assertations about what a venom cock could do: slay a woman! Cripple a baby! Turn pleasurers into deaf, blind, barren idiots!

Xion: ...I don’t want to know
Harry: *to ceiling trying to cover Xion’s eyes* HEY, I’M PRETTY SURE THIS MOCKING SESSION SHOULD BE RATED 17 AND UP!
Xion: *starts to block Harry’s hands, but then decides that she’s actually okay with this.*
Kuzco: *grabbing on Harry’s sleeve* Hey, hide mine too! My royal eyes need to be protected!

The only truth I knew about the subject was what my eyes told me: The veteran apprentices looked mighty silly waddling up the lane to the whipping bar, their penises pointing the way.

Xion: Because penises are such good guides.
Harry: *Still trying to cover Xion’s and Kuzco’s eyes, muttering* Stay strong Harry, don’t make a seeing eye penis joke, be the better man.

The dragonmaster, the cinai komikon himself, came last, a suitable distance from his underlings. He wore no Temple finery, just a loincloth and a multitude of furious white scars. In his arms lay the venom whips, oily black in the sun’s rays.

Xion: I didn’t know scars could have feelings.
Kuzco: I didn’t know penises could lead the way, either. The more you know!

The noise of the crowd died to respectful murmurs as he strode down the lane. Even Dono stopped capering. The eerie wong of the water bowls reigned supreme.

Xion: Can’t forget the background noise.
Harry: All bow to the Wong! For only he can take care of Dr. Strange!

He was grinning, the dragonmaster. A big, gap-toothed grin. Occasionally, he cackled, his sinewy neck taut with rivers of veins. He looked demented despite his awesome tolerance of venom, built up from years of contact with uncut dragons; he was clearly intoxicated by the venom-soaked whips that lay in his bare arms.

Now and then he paused and nodded to someone in the crowd; everyone in the vicinity of the nod looked at each other in panic. You? Me? Was he nodding at me? What does it mean?

Harry: And the high school analogy keeps on giving!
Xion: Can’t get away from it, even in a fantasy world.
Kuzco: I can’t wait to see their dress loincloths for Prom!

He terrified me with his scars, his grin, his whips, and his cackles. Waisi’s grip on my arm grew tighter. The twins pressed close.

Wong. Wong. The atonal wavering of the monks’ bowls vibrated in my chest.

Harry: *singing* Double Your Wong, Double your fun! That’s the song of the great bong in Double Wong Gum!