Brainstorming at Bupleurum

“You’re not too tired to talk to my friends, Uncle Ernie?” Rose asked anxiously.

“No, no, I feel quite rested, thank you my dear,” he replied. “It was lovely to travel by moonlight – I can’t remember when last I did that. And everyone here has been so kind since we arrived.” The old woman at his side nodded in agreement.

Rose made the introductions: “Uncle Ernie and Aunt Lilly, meet my friends.”

Rose’s friends murmured polite phrases while looking increasingly doubtful of her Uncle’s capacity to help. Uncle Ernie was ancient for a human, a wrinkled, tiny, dried-up bit of a person with bright inquisitive eyes. Aunt Lilly was also old, despite being at least a generation younger than Ernie. He rested on the softest cushions Bupleurum could provide, in its loveliest garden. His body looked as though it might at any moment forget to take the next breath. Yet his attentive expression suggested something else – a spirit at once older than the great oaks that shaded them, and as young as the spring flowers that spilled their fragrance with such abandon into the soft breezes.

“So,” he said as the formalities concluded, “tell me about the time-storm.”

“It’s growing,” Broad said, “and becoming more mobile. We had to dodge it a couple of times on our way here. We hear that it struck one or two of the groups of royals travelling back to their ancestral places; several people are missing.”

“Our Guard briefed theirs before they left Briar,” the Queen said. “The Über Celestia Guard told our men that the safest thing to do was to keep very low and quiet if it approached, and they passed that on. I guess, though, my royal cousins-in-law have never been good at keeping low... or quiet.”

“And so they ended up feeding it. Typical,” Uncle Ernie murmured. “Well, it has to be re-anchored. Has anyone any idea of how to do that?”

“We were hoping you might know, Uncle Ernie,” Rose told him.

There was a long silence. Finally Uncle Ernie spoke: “When I was young I worked in the library at Briar Castle, for six months of every year. When the Seneschal thought I was too old to work any more, he stopped paying me, but the Queen, bless you my dear, insisted I still be allowed free access. So I looked up stories to tell Princess Rose, and read bits of things I found interesting. The only other people that used the library much were the court fairies. They thought they were locking their magic books away, but it was quite simple to bypass their wards. In fact it was so simple that even the mice and bookworms could bypass them; I found that out when I went one day to look at an old book on the nature of Time. There was a part of a rhyme on a half-eaten page, that has stayed in my mind since. It said:

When the oldest woman
in the Nine Worlds
grows young again,
and gives to
the Gods of Time
the most beautiful gift
in the Nine Worlds
they will relent,
and...”

“And what?” several voices demanded.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Ernie replied apologetically. “The rest had been eaten away.”

“I could ask for a search of the Archives,” Broad suggested. “We might have a better copy, or a matching fragment. Do you have a pigeon I could send, Polly?”

The Queen watched as the message was prepared and despatched. “That is wonderful,” she said. “How long will it take?”

“The pigeon will be there in about an hour,” Poly told her.

“The brownies can search the whole Archives overnight,” added Broad, “as long as we have money in the cookie budget. The pigeons will start back with the answer at sunrise, as soon as there’s light enough for them to fly.”

“Fantastic!” said the Queen. “In the old days we would have had to send riders to all the castles. And who knew how long it would take for them to search their libraries, if they even bothered – or send an answer if they happened to find one.”

“I remember,” said Uncle Ernie. “Sometimes, by the time you had an answer, you’d forgotten who asked the question.”

“We’re proud of our p-mail system,” Polly said. “I handled the pigeon part, while Broad worked hard on the interface with the brownies.”

“It was mostly getting the cookies right that took the time;” said Broad, “figuring out which crumbs the pigeons would like enough to work for, but not so much that there would be a mob of pigeons competing with the brownies and messing up the place. And even when we knew what we needed, you wouldn’t believe what we went through, and how long it took, to get a budget for them! The archives don’t have a law firm’s budget, or even a king’s.”

At breakfast a pigeon flew in and settled on Polly’s chair arm. She passed the message to Broad.

“Another fragment,” he said. “I’ll read it.

a gift so fine
the Gods of Time
forget their spite –
the hourglass flips,
and suddenly
we’ve time enough
for...”

“For what?” several voices demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Broad apologetically. “That’s all the brownies found. The next page had been torn out. We try our best to keep mice and bookworms out of the Archives, but students sometimes do similar damage.”

“What do you think?” asked the Queen. “Are we going to get anything more or better, before the world slips into the maw of yon time-twister? Two bits of bad poetry . . . is it enough, is it magical enough, to go on with?”

“No use everybody sit and look stupid,” said Minsky. “Like we say in Marsh, ‘You want your agenda prevail, you hustle butt and make it so!’”

Toby blew a smoke-ring at him. He caught it and spun it back at her.

McLaren sighed and shrugged. “Okay, who’s the oldest woman in the nine worlds?”she asked. “And which nine – by the most recent count I know, there are more than 9,999,999.”

“Is somebody from Castle,” said Minsky.

“Of course,” Rose agreed. “As long as the woman is human, we are all our own ages plus 250 years, and that has to be a record. Mamma had several old pensioners besides Uncle Ernie and Aunt Lilly, living in the huts by the herb garden. Who would be the oldest?”

“Would it be you, Lilly,” the Queen asked, “or old Dumpling Dora? Mabel’s younger than either of you, I think.”

“I’d be the eldest, Madge,” said Lilly. “Dora’s almost a year younger, and Mabel’s at least five less. But I’m too old to believe in being young again.”

“Have you seen Brandyburg’s advertising for their 12-year-old spirits, ” Polly asked, “the ones they’ve just released, from the Year of the Elegant Monkey? They are calling it the ‘Water of Youth’. They’re suggesting that a bottle would turn a knackered old donkey into a colt again, or an old Silenus into a bright young boy.”

“Second childhood, more like,” said Broad.

There was a long pause.

“Has anyone heard what happened to the Brandyburg royals when they got home?” asked Rose.

“The birds are saying that it went surprisingly well,” Polly told her. “The Silenus met them, and offered the Duke and Dutchess a cottage, another for Prince Thomas, and another for the courtiers.

“He invited them to dinner, served a scrumptious repast, with a different wine for each course. And for each wine, he talked about how the vines were fertilized the year the grapes grew. Other growers depend on green manures, he said, but the Friends and Relations use red manures as well. ‘Now this lovely full-bodied red – a troop of bandits turned up that spring, really the best you can get when dug in well. And the sparkling rosé, refreshing and impudent at once – a gang of juvenile delinquents had decided to raid the vineyards, as a high-spirited prank Wasn’t it amazing how the high spirits carried through into the vintage? And that white; to fertilize whites techniques similar to those used in preparing veal seem to work best.’”

“Is all that true?” demanded Rose.

“Mostly not,” Toby told her. “For all their claims of organic production, they’re buying commercial fertilizers just like the other growers. They’d have to be prosecuted if their neighbours were disappearing regularly. But then bandits and bootleggers never officially appear, so it’s difficult to tell if they have disappeared. They told us in our course on property law that it was pretty grim in the early days, when various groups were challenging their possession of the Burg.”

Polly looked at Toby reproachfully. “Anyway,” she continued, “the royals began to get a glimmer of what they are up against. So they’ve accepted Brandyburg hospitality for the moment. When they find out that they are expected to work for their living, they may want to move on. But their choices will be limited. The villagers also expect people to work.”

“Getting back to the Water of Youth,” said McLaren, “should we be asking the Silenus for a bottle?”

Everyone looked at each other, and ended up looking at Uncle Ernie.

Finally he nodded. “If no one has a better idea,” he said, “it does give us a place to start.” Then with a mischievous grin he added “Besides, as experiments go, this ought to be more enjoyable, or at least less painful, than most!”