That the average true number of ferrymen in the guild rarely rose to such heights was of small moment, for it held its megalolepidopteromachy latest in the year of all, and could thereby accommodate the champions and runners-up of lesser guilds in its lists. In such fashion, indeed, Muir-Bmysis himself had been recruited from a minor up-river guild, for it was the practice to hang the success of applications for membership of the larger, and more prosperous, guilds on the lepidopteromachic skill and luck of them who applied, rather than their mundane ferrycraft and scullsmanship. Muir-Bmysis was not noticeably gifted in these latter respects and consequently had no especial name or popularity among the passengers of the middle-river, more than one of whom he had indeed capsized on the crapulous morning following a victory; but among the ferrymen of Yihh he was a two decades’ byword whose lightest word on the rearing and upkeep of dueling butterflies was treasured like snow.
Light words were almost invariably those he dispensed, for he had his secrets to guard from the espionage of his rivals, and not merely secrets directly anent his butterflies, for in truth he owed as much of his success to his horticultural skill as to his entomologic, knowing as he did how best to cultivate the favorite herbs of favored species and which blooms yielded best nectars to encourage forwardness in breeding and fierceness in combat. He had won much in the gambling that illicitly but ineradicably accompanied the lepidopteromachies, and sunk most of it in his lepidopteria and garden, devoting the remainder to retaining the loyalty of his wives and inflating the wages of his servants, who he knew were at constant threat of bribery and coercion. Thus it was, as an added precaution, he changed his servants regularly, never allowing any to become expert in his routines. But in this very caution lay his downfall, after the following wise.
It was easy for him to invent an occasion for the dismissal of nine servants in ten, whereby they felt no especial rancor when they left his service; but those rare paragons, the ones in ten, proved harder of dismissal and occasionally forced him to deceit or injustice. Knowing their own worth, they harbored resentment against him and one year a nucleus of such paragons, three in number, came together to plot a mild but stinging revenge. They knew that Muir-Bmysis took especial pride in his haor-mhubda, or “golden peacocks”, a rare species of mountain-dwelling and cool-delighting butterfly few other ferrymen had succeeded in breeding at the level, and in the clime, of Yihh, let alone rearing to yearly championship of the lepidopteromachies. Three of the gauze rearing-tents in Muir-Bmysis’s garden were devoted always to the haor-mhubda, and the paragons gradually evolved a most piquant plot against the tents and their golden-winged occupants.
One of their number, a skilled scribe well-practised in dissimulation, was employed now by an alchemist of the city and was, after his wont, rapidly absorbing his master’s professional secrets, which he readily consented to make available to the plot. The conspirators obtained specimens of a species of yellow butterfly whose wings hinted sufficiently at the glories of the haor-mhubda, and devoted all in their turn to certain experiments in capnomancy, or smoke-magic. The alchemist’s amanuensis, Iudrac-Assenav by name, then prepared five arrows for discharge from a wall overlooking Muir-Bmysis’s garden by the veteran soldier among the conspirators, Siriar-Utapa by name, as he stood atop the broad shoulders of the major-domo among them, Ronimsu-Thnanihr by name, one cloud-busy midnight of full moon. The plot went off without a hitch: in a brief interval of moonlight Siriar-Utapa notched thrice and fired, to be back-clapped almost off his feet by Ronimsu-Thnanihr when he sprang from the latter’s shoulders to the alley down which they two and, accompanying them as watch-out, Iudrac-Assenav had crept.
“¡I swear that Tsvang-Zhiip, god of archers, could have done no better, my friend!” Ronimsu-Thnanihr cried. “Aye, so I swear, and but one thing lacks to us now, and that is sight of the face of our erstwhile master Muir-Bmysis in the morning, when he opens the tent-flaps to admire his treasures anew. But we can picture it well enough, ¿say ye not?”
And the other two, with nods and chuckles of hearty agreement, strode off with him to find a late-serving tavern in which to celebrate their success. Here the three pass out of our story, but their deed, like an idly tossed stone on an avalanche-prone mountain-side, wrought great change for the man of whom they had spoken. His face, sure enough, was a picture of contending horror and astonishment in the morning, when he opened the flap of the first haor-mhubda tent to discover its occupants feeding or flitting in sad transformation. The arrows fired by Siriar-Utapa had carried, tied around their shafts with fine-drawn wire, the smoldering ingredients of a dense but swift-dispersing alchemic smoke wherein the wings of the haor-mhubda, panicked into noctural flight, were transformed from Muir-Bmysis’s favored gold to the green of the species favored by his closest rival.
The instrument of his humbling cracked beneath his foot as he stepped forward into the tent, and he stooped to lift the half-snapped arrow, muttering oaths and threats against he knew-not-whom as he realized the significance of its scorched shaft and found the slit its thrice-sharpened head had pierced in the gauze of the tent. Then, with a cry of foreboding and a convulsive clutch at his thinning hair, he rushed from the tent to examine its two counterparts, and found in each, as he had feared, the malefic trinity of slitten gauze, scorched arrow, and transformed butterflies. By nightfall Muir-Bmysis was no closer to solving the mystery of who had struck against him with such ingenious malicity, though by extrapolation from the position of the gauze-slits he had tracked down the wall-perch wherefrom the arrows had been fired and even attempted to find tracks in the packed mud of the alley below it.
But the quest was hopeless, and Muir-Bmysis’s gloom was deepened by the reflection that he would be forced to abandon the grand lepidopteromachy for this year, having no desire to render himself a laughing-stock by flying freakish green haor-mhubda against his opponents. He might, it was true, invent some tale whereby to explain the transformation, but his unknown enemies would doubtless pass whispers of the truth to find ready enough hearing even, or especially, among those who bet most heavily on him and loudest lauded his lepidopteromachic skill. Tsi-nam teng’ nd’alamaph aeh hiu-zrao, the Yihhian proverb ran, and he realized its truth more than ever now, and even noted an ironic echo of his exact situation in the colors of the comparisees: “Laurels lie oft heavier than gold.” A king’s right to his crown is granted at birth and revoked only by death, but the athlete’s sweat and bruises purchase but a lease on his champion’s wreath.
It was true that he himself had sweated little and bruised not at all in pursuit of his lepidopteromachic victories, yet the reasoning adapted well enough. He had enjoyed a long summer, but now the first coolth of autumn drifted in among his vines, harbinger of the winterchill to come. Nevertheless, it was not in his nature to retreat before defeat was certain, and he sought a means of restoring his haor-mhubda to their golden pride and even, unknowing whom the man employed, interviewed the alchemist of his erstwhile scribe. But the alchemist, having examined the single chlorosis’d aos-mupta he brought in a crystal cage, shook his head and opined that the transformation was irreversible, save at expense of the butterfly’s life. Muir-Bmysis thanked him, paid the fee he had been requested, and departed sadly homeward. His entire stock of haor-mhubda was useless, then, and the lesser species of his other tents, which he employed as test-beds of new techniques and nutriments, could never substitute for their absence beneath the lozenge-pierced ceiling of his guild’s sun-shafted lepidopteromachery.
But on the threshold of his house he was struck by a thought of possible salvation. He paused, pondering the steps of the logic. His Yihh-bred haor-mhubda, he knew, were presently useless, though the alchemist had assured him that they would breed true and transmit no chloric taint to their offspring. Accordingly, next year, having topped his walls with outward-facing spikes to deter any future repetition of arrow-borne disaster, he could join the lepidopteromachy with all the confidence of old. But this did not signify that he had to abandon all hope of the current year’s championship, for he had but to travel to the mountain-home of haor-mhubda to renew his stock. Perhaps, indeed, the greening would prove a blessing in disguise, for had he not had a harder fight of it in the championship of the past three years, ¿a warning, he was now prepared to concede, that the blood-line of his haor-mhubda was thinning?
He then entered his house to inform his wives that he was undertaking a pilgrimage to a distant shrine of Tsammogwer for success in the coming championship; and was soon swaying north atop a borrowed camel, with three linen-swaddled cages of haor-mhubda striking a muffled tattoo on the creature’s haunches. He had not cared to leave the butterflies chez lui in even the closest-mouthed servant’s care, lest some whisper of the disaster that had befallen them came to his rivals’ ears, and intended to release them in the mountains, before re-filling his cages with wild specimens. Yet two days later, when he stood and surveyed the head of the secluded valley wherein he had captured their progenitors of a dozen and more generations before, he was thrilled by the realization that there was some deeper significance to the disaster of the capnomancy than he had guessed. ¿For what did he see before him but that the valley-head and its waving slopes of blood-bloomed lriu-dhau, the sole food-plant of the aos-mupta caterpillar, had been swallowed by an avalanche pouring from the stern-pitched slope of an overlooming mountain?
Though scarlet splashes of lriu-dhau nodded here and there among the frozen torrent of rocks, signifying that the plant might outlive the mountain’s vomited assault, not a golden wing stirred through all the leagues of clear mountain air he surveyed, where he might have expected to see dozens of the haor-mhubda at a glance. This was the only site of haor-mhubda he knew, and if the breed’s wild colony were expunged here, perhaps the only remaining specimens in the world were those he carried in his three crystal cages. He hurried to uncap the cages, therefore, and watched his Yihh-bred haor-mhubda wing off with characteristic stateliness, if in uncharacteristic colors, to re-establish their right to the valley. It was now that he saw a wild aos-mupta of unusual size and brilliance, perhaps the last survivor of the avalanche, launch upward from rocks where it had evidently been sunning itself, and hurl itself upon the newcomers.
His heart came into his mouth as he watched the combat, for despite being greatly outnumbered, the wild golden aos-mupta scattered his tent-bred green haor-mhubda like chaff, whirling victorious in duel after eye-blink duel, often against two or three intruders at once, till in what seemed less than a minute it circled in triumph over its sun-perch, then settled to enjoy undisputed possession with luxuriantly spread and quivering wing. Hardly daring take his eyes off the creature, Muir-Bmysis slipped his net from his saddle-gear and set forth over the rocks to capture it. But bold as it was against its own kin, the aos-mupta was, Muir-Bmysis now learned, most wary of creatures of another order and took to the wing as he came, with suspended breath, to almost within a net’s-length of its sun-perch. Abandoning caution, he sprang after it, making great sweeps of his cane-handled net, his heart glowing with stronger desire than ever of capture, for the butterfly seemed large almost as a bird, with wings wider and more brilliant than any he had seen before, flashing as though they were truly polished gold.
He pursued it across the avalanche-field, narrowly escaping a half-dozen falls at peril of ankle-sprain or wrist-fracture, and was drawn up the bare slope on the far side of the smothered valley, swinging his net at the furthest reach of his arms, but always just failing to catch the thing. To the head of the slope it tantalized him, then across a scree-plain dotted with lithophilous blue gamekh-flowers, and on up a subsidiary slope of the mountain whence the avalanche had rolled. The butterfly increased its lead here and even began to settle for sun-basking as he toiled after it, panting with the unwonted exertion and thinness of the mountain air. On he was drawn, wiping sweat from his eyes as he chased the dwindling flashes of lepidopteral gold, his net ever heavier in his hand. ¿But was the butterfly so much dwindling as dimming...? Aye, that was it: a mist had begin to inspissate around him, like a trickle of milk stirred into clear water.
He made a final effort to reach the butterfly, heart hammering in his chest as though a homunculus blacksmith labored there, but slipped on the increasing slope, now filmed with mist-dew, and crashed with a groan to his knees, dropping his net. When he pushed himself to his feet, a sharp pain uncoiled in his left knee like a venomous snakelet and he groaned again. ¿What hope had he, injured, of ever coming within stone’s-throw, let alone net’s-cast of the fugitive aos-mupta? Then he bent, with another groan for another fanging of pain in his knee, to pick up his fallen net. A third groan he now released, for the neck of the thing was snapped and hung useless. He turned to look down the slope, but the mist was thickening to a fog and he could no longer see the pale dot of his camel across the valley. It was hopeless anyhow: even if the camel had been close at hand and he could have pulled threads from its saddle-rug to bind around the snapped neck of his net, the butterfly would have long flitted away by the time he returned.
He shrugged. All he could do was return and repair his net in hope that the butterfly would find its way back to the avalanche field. He gave a last glance over his shoulder, back up the slope, and cried out with surprise. The mist was thickening yet faster up-slope but he could see that a narrow shaft of sunlight had penetrated it, glowing like a great spear of gold. ¿And what was that flickering in the sun-shaft, spiraling it in stately welcome and slowly climbing skyward? ¡Nothing but the aos-mupta! Almost forgetting the pain in his knee, he turned and set off back up the slope, heart glowing with the hope that even his snapped net would suffice to capture the sun-infatuated butterfly.
But when he arrived at the sun-shaft, the butterfly was tantalizingly out of reach, spiraling just too high for his broken net. ¡Oh, if he had not fallen then he could have captured it with ease! But the sun-shaft owed its existence to the mist, and it was the mist that had caused him to fall. Yet how curiously regular the sun-shaft pierced it, he thought, standing and staring upwards at the butterfly’s ascent, eyes narrowed against the barely blurred furnace-face of the sun that glared down the circular rent in the mist. He swayed a little, feeling dizzy as though looking upward had drained the blood from his head. The world was beginning to spin around him, and he grunted and tried to close his eyes. But the spinning was not so unpleasant now, and the sun was so warm and pleasant on his outstretched arms that he began to turn and turn in it, laughing a little, and even flapping his arms, till with a start he realized he was flying, climbing higher and higher, leaving the malodorous lump of his body on the mountain-side as he rose, an aos-mupta himself, to challenge the aos-mupta he had pursued as Muir-Bmysis. A human thought lingered a moment in his altering consciousness, just barely comprehensible to him: his champion’s reputation in Yihh would, owing to his mysterious disappearance, remain secure now, untainted by any defeat. Then, the thought dropping from his mind into oblivion like a dust-scale from his wings, he commenced his final lepidopteromachy, fighting now in propriâ personâ in the sun-shaft that pierced the chilly death-mist.