On a piece of cheap print from Ryan Williamson’s The Stygian Blades
By Scott Zachary
In the fall of 1991, a man in a sport coat the color of a manila folder came to the parish hall at Father Dolan’s church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to warn about forty teenagers about heavy metal. He brought a slide carousel, a turntable he could drag backward with one finger, and an amount of free time that, in retrospect, should have worried somebody. I retain almost nothing of what he said about backmasking. What I retain is that he put a single album cover on the screen and left it up for something like five minutes, walking us through every square inch of it (the woman, the chains, a precise inventory of what she was and wasn’t wearing) so he could explain, in exhaustive detail, why no Christian kid should ever look at it. I have never been able to confirm that the album exists. I am totally confident that half the boys in that room spent the following Saturday at the Musicland in the Oakwood Mall trying to find it.
That man was the most effective promoter of heavy metal in Eau Claire County. Either he didn’t know it, or he knew it perfectly well and the warning was the product. I’ve been turning those two possibilities over for thirty-five years, and I turned them over the entire time I was reading A Moste Terrible and Trve Discoverie, a pamphlet of about twenty-four hundred words that sits as a facsimile inside Ryan Williamson’s new novel The Stygian Blades. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most useful thing a novelist can hand a reader: the cast list, as compiled by the people raising the hue and cry.
Start with the object.
The long s is everywhere (houſe, Iſhraq, ſeraglios), and the modern eye reads it as an f for a while, which is half the fun.1 U and v trade places by position, so you get vpon and euery and haue down in the lowercase and QVILLIAM and QVEENE and FOVRTH up in the capitals. I does J’s job: Iezebel, iudgement, Iames. Spelling drifts the way it drifted in an actual printing house, where a compositor would hand you murther in one paragraph and MVRDER in another, bloode in one breath and noble bloud further down. The date is regnal, the twenty-eighth year of a queen named Elspeth. The imprint gives you a printer, a shop sign, and a street (James Atwood, at the Sign of the Hawk, on Fount Row) because that’s how a bookseller told you where to find him: look for the painted board over the door.
The title is a formula, too. “Discoverie” was a selling word in English cheap print; Thomas Potts put it on the cover of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster in 1613. I own a paperback reprint of that one. I bought it at the airport in Manchester for reasons I can no longer reconstruct.
Even the stage direction is in costume. Where the woodcut would go, the facsimile gives a bracketed note, Here would be placed a figure cut in wood, and the note is spelled in the pamphlet’s own idiom, darke-ſkinned and ſheetes and bloode.
Here’s the move the man in the manila sport coat knew in his bones.
The pamphlet opens its entry on the Ishraq woman by telling the decent people to cover up: “let modeſt wiues and chaſte daughters ſtoppe their eares, for the truthe muſt be tolde.” Then it tells it, at greater length than anything else in the document. She’s an assassin by trade and a whore by nature. She was raised from infancy in the arts of the bedchamber, schooled in practices no Shalden woman would allow named in her hearing. A man who lies with her may wake with his purse emptied, or may never wake. She is a whore to men when it serves her purpose and a “ſodomiteſſe” to women when it serves her pleasure, after the manner of the Ishraqic lands and the seraglios of their princes. And she was seen at the house of Bartholomew Quilliam, great-nephew to the Earl of Dunmere, who was found in his own bed with his throat cut nearly to the bone, his blood soaking the sheets on which (the pamphlet asks you to blush at the thought) she had, a few hours before, performed such acts as left him asleep and insensible to the blade.
Notice what happened. The pamphlet told you to stop your ears and then made sure there was something in them. That’s the setup. The payoff is a trick it runs again and again: the polite refusal. The lewd enticements that got her into Quilliam’s chambers are ones “we may well imagine.” The Baron’s vices are such “as would offend the modeſtie of this pamphlet to deſcribe,” and this is the same pamphlet that just did the seraglios. What binds the Baron to the woman and her Moorish master, flesh or soul or both, it leaves to the reader’s judgment. What Katherine Tarlton and Moll Weaver get up to between their sheets it dares not speculate about, and so hands to the horror of the reader’s own imagination.
Every one of those refusals is a handoff. The pamphlet holds out the pen and lets the reader write the worst sentence, and a reader who wrote it himself will believe it more than anything James Atwood could set in type. Back in 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center put out a list of fifteen songs it considered the most objectionable in America (Prince’s “Darling Nikki” was the one that started the whole crusade), and I can report that by the time it reached the halls of my junior high, the list functioned as a shopping list. Nobody was buying those records for the hooks. They were buying them to find out what the grownups had been imagining.
The woodcut runs the same accounting. The pamphlet names seven Blades, and the picture goes to the woman: bare from the waist, hair unbound, sitting astride the body of a young gentleman on a four-poster, the sheets and pillows black and the blood pooling on the floor, a curved Ishraqic blade in her hand. The border is devils with erections capering with harlots, with rosettes at the corners, because even pornography wants a little trim. A woodcut is the part of a pamphlet that works on people who can’t read the rest of it, so this is the pitch to the street, and it’s the same pitch the man with the carousel made: the thing you mustn’t look at, enlarged.
And then there’s the man in the doorway, a nobleman in a ruff, one hand raised, rays of light pouring out of it. The only other man the text places in Quilliam’s house is Lord Daggerford, the woman’s companion on her errand, whose entry accuses him of casting illusions on the eyes “ſo that honeſt men ſee what is not and belieue what neuer was.” But a woodcut travels apart from its text. Hand the picture alone to someone who can’t read, and a lord in a ruff arriving at a murder room with light streaming from his palm could read as justice walking in. The figure a picture-only reader could misread is the man the pamphlet accuses of making people see things. I can’t tell whether James Atwood meant that, which seems like the correct amount of certainty to have about a picture of an illusionist.
The catalogue is laid out like a band’s lineup in a press release, if the press release were written by someone who wanted the band dead. Captain first, then FIRST through SIXTH.
Chócht gets one sentence. It’s a long sentence, roughly the length of a Springsteen song, and over its course a man’s employment history turns into his blood type. He sold his sword to every patrist prince on the Continent. He fought in the Fenlands for Calbrinese gold and in Eyrnreach for the slaughter of Reformist souls, and he turned his coat in the wars of Tìranach, fighting first for one side and then the other as the coin demanded. That’s a résumé. The pamphlet reads it as a rap sheet, and then, at the semicolon, as anthropology: this is “the nature of his wandring and rootleſſe kinde,” strangers everywhere, subjects nowhere, worshipping no god but gold and carrying treachery in the blood the way a dog carries fleas. You could swap in any people a reader had been taught to distrust and that clause would run fine with no other edit, which is how you know it’s boilerplate. He’s a Moorish Gypsy, two outsiders stacked on one man in case either one alone wouldn’t sell, and the pamphlet even holds his name against him; it sticks in the mouth like a curse in some devil’s tongue. He is indicted, among other things, for being hard to pronounce.
The next four are the ones the city is primed to fear on sight. Three arrive as a place and a noun (an Ishraq woman, an Eldrigalian doctor, a giant of the Darkward), and the fourth is a dwarf “whom they call” Cannon, a name the pamphlet takes secondhand and which happens to be a piece of artillery. For the pamphlet, the place is the person. The doctor’s entry says so outright, in what I’d nominate as the most honest sentence in the document: “For what elſe ſhould we expect of an Eldrigalian but poiſon and deceite?” That’s the pamphlet showing its work, and its work is the conclusion first. The doctor was expelled from the schools of physic for cutting open the dead and handling their organs like cuts of meat at a butcher’s stall, which is a fairly exact description of anatomy by someone who finds anatomy revolting, and from there it’s a short stroll to necromancy, invisibility, and the poisons and dark philtres behind the company’s murders. The pamphlet says he supplied those “without doubt,” which is the phrase people reach for when there’s doubt.
Then the pamphlet does something structurally smart. At FIFTH it stops to tell you to take “eſpeciall horrour,” and it spends that horror on Lord Daggerford: a Baron of this realm, ninth of his name, a man who writes lewd plays for the common stage. Of all seven, the one the pamphlet asks you to be most frightened of is a peer of the realm. The foreigners are doing what the pamphlet has already told you foreigners do. The Baron chose. Treason requires membership. And SIXTH, tacked on “as though this catalogue of wickedneſſe were not yet full,” is Katherine Tarlton: a strolling player lately fled from Fryhaven, accused of murdering Richard Percy, eldest son and heir to the Baron of Umberlow, and carrying the only price tag in the document, five pounds sterling, living or dead. The list moves from the edge of the map to the middle of the realm, from what you’d expect to what you’d never suspect, which is the direction every good scare travels. The foreigner is the hook. The neighbor is the product.
Which brings me to what I think the pamphlet is about, underneath the slurs. It has an optical theory of evil.
Cannon is its purest expression. He’s white as bone from head to foot, with pale red eyes like a rabbit’s, and the pamphlet takes this as proof that the Almighty sets “a viſible marke” on those given over to the devil; what Shalden child was ever born that pale without help from below? He’s short, so he’s neither man nor child. He’s albino, so he’s “neyther quick nor dead in colour.” He is “a creature of the threſhold,” and since a body like his fits none of the pamphlet’s drawers, it gets filed with the goblins. The giant’s blue markings make him “a walking monument to idolatrie,” as if dye were a creed you could wear. The Ishraq woman’s dark body is her training. Katherine’s freckles are Azhdrael’s handwriting. Every surface gets converted into a verdict, and the pamphlet keeps telling you to do the converting yourself: mark them well, good reader; mark her well; but mark this well. Its call for the hue and cry turns on four words, “If you ſhould ſee.” The whole thing is a course in looking.
Now look at the three entries where sight goes wrong. The doctor works the shadowed magic by which a man “may render himſelfe inuiſible to the eye.” The Baron casts illusions. Katherine crops her hair, puts on doublet and breeches, and passes among honest folk as a boy. A pamphlet whose entire method is the body tells you the truth is up against a man who can take his body out of view, a man who can put a false one in front of you, and a player who has taught her own body to say something else. Those three are the pamphlet’s real problem, because they’re in the business of the eye.
Katherine was bred on the stage, which the pamphlet calls a school of vice and a nursery of ungodliness, where boys play women and women play at being men, “and where the very diſtinction between truthe and falſhood is made a ieſte.”
Consider who’s saying that. A pamphlet. The playhouse and the print shop are working the same crowd, selling the same commodity, which is sensation with real-sounding names attached. The playhouse tells you up front that it’s pretending. The pamphlet puts TRUE in the title. That’s the entire difference between them, and it’s why the pamphlet hates the stage the way the local news in Eau Claire used to run investigative segments on what television was doing to your children, on television. Two of the seven Blades come from the competition: the Baron writes for the stage, and Katherine grew up on it.
Strip the adjectives and read the charges flat. A soldier sold his sword where there was work. A physician dissected cadavers. A lord wrote plays and healed the sick and lame, and the pamphlet calls the healing false and then concedes it works, since its complaint is that it “doth mend the fleſh onely to damn the ſoule.” A man was born albino and small. A man is marked head to foot in blue. Two women take women to bed. A player wears breeches. Read flat, the sins on the list include medicine, theater, soldiering, desire, and being born.
The flat reading also includes a young gentleman with his throat cut nearly to the bone, an heir struck down in Fryhaven, and a company that, by the pamphlet’s account, styles itself the Stygian Blades, which is presumably not the name of a quilting circle. The pamphlet’s facts are specific in the way facts are when somebody could check them: an Earl’s great-nephew by name, the sheriff’s men of Fryhaven, five pounds sterling, auburn hair, green eyes, freckles, a lean frame. Katherine’s paragraph would work on a wanted bill. It’s the most practically useful passage in the document. Her eyes are green, and they “gleame with deuilrie.” That clause is the whole craft of the thing. The nouns are reportage. The verdict rides in the adjectives. A citizen can check the color of a stranger’s eyes, and the devilry comes along for free.
The pamphlet saves its news for last. The Blades lodged at the Velvet Sheath, a brothel in the Stews,2 where the Ishraq woman worked alongside the house’s other whores when she wasn’t working murder, and the whole company plotted the Queen’s overthrow between their lecheries, at the direction of Panveric masters who’d like to see the fires of Gallowsgreen lit again for Reformist souls. And yestertide, in the dark of the closing, the Velvet Sheath burned. It is ashes and blackened timber.
Was it the judgment of Kahdishor Shald on a house of sin, or did the Blades set it themselves by sorcery, to burn the evidence and cover their flight? The pamphlet “cannot ſay with certaintie,” and it has no need to, because “in eyther caſe the cittie ſhould tremble.” Heads, God is furious with them. Tails, they’re arsonist sorcerers. Either way, buy the next pamphlet. That’s the architecture of every moral panic I’ve lived through. Geraldo Rivera’s prime-time special on Satanic cults had aired three years before I sat in that parish hall, and our youth minister was still showing the tape.3 Its logic, like the logic of the whole era, was that a lack of evidence only proved how well the conspiracy hid its tracks.
And then the pamphlet does the thing I’d call genuinely brilliant. For most of its length it has argued that these people are unmistakable: white as bone, blue from crown to sole, a darkness you can see coming, freckles like a signature. Now the house is gone and they are LOOSE, without fixed lodging, possibly in any alley, tavern, warehouse, or private house whose master is fool enough or wicked enough to shelter them. The villains you couldn’t possibly miss are suddenly impossible to find. That’s the correct order for a scare: first teach the reader what the monster looks like, then tell him it could be anywhere, so the only safe assumption is next door. Then one last turn of the screw: “let euery honeſt huſband looke well to his WIFE.” A threat that started at the far edge of the map ends up in the reader’s bed.
One last exercise, and then I’ll leave Crownspire alone. Read only the words the compositor set in capitals in the middle of a sentence, and skip the names:
WOMAN. WHORE. WOMEN. ELDRIGALIAN DOCTOR. DEAD. DWARFE. GIANT. MVRDER. FIVE POVNDS STERLING. MENS ATTIRE. WITCH. QVEENE. FIRE. LOOSE. WIFE.
It opens on WOMAN and closes on WIFE, and in between is a fairly complete map of what keeps Crownspire up at night: foreign women and the women they sleep with, physicians who touch the dead, bodies built differently from the reader’s, a woman in breeches, a witch, a fire, and a queen who apparently needs saving from all of it. That’s the pamphlet’s real subject. It’s a portrait of the city that bought it, and the pamphlet’s Blades are the city’s fears dressed up as seven people.
The text closes the way these things always close, Shald save the Queen and Shald confound her enemies, which is the part where the salesman tips his hat on the way out. Under that, the only signature belongs to the printer: James Atwood, at the Sign of the Hawk on Fount Row, in the twenty-eighth year of Elspeth.
I never learned the name of the man in the manila sport coat. James Atwood, to his credit, at least put his name on his. My guy just packed up the carousel, unplugged the turntable, and drove off to the next town, where I have to assume the record store had a very good weekend.
Scott Zachary was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the late Seventies, and has been explaining things nobody asked about ever since. He spent eleven years writing catalog copy for a hunting-and-fishing outfitter in Chippewa Falls, where he learned that every sentence is a lure and that no one has ever read a tackle-box description to the end. His essays on supper clubs, the Packers’ backup quarterbacks of the 1990s, and why a band’s third album always tells the truth have appeared in a number of publications, most of which no longer exist. He maintains that this is a coincidence. He lives outside Madison with his wife, Beth, their two kids, and a beagle who is not allowed on the couch and is on the couch right now. He keeps a list of the ten greatest mercenaries in fiction on a Kwik Trip receipt in his wallet. Chócht is fourth and climbing.
1 The ſ is a long s, a fact every modern reader learns in the first paragraph and relearns, with real delight, at “bluſh.” ↩
2 The Stygian Blades kept house at the Velvet Sheath. I’ve chosen not to know whether the pamphleteer noticed. ↩
3 It ran on NBC in October 1988. As far as I know, our youth minister’s tape is still in a box somewhere in Eau Claire County, next to a cassette of somebody playing “Stairway to Heaven” backward. ↩
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