I have had a very restful and yet sociable weekend.

This is a lovely combinertation in my view.

(Excerpt from The Warlord’s Cook)

I had this story from my mother.  She said it was from a book that was burned, but she read the book many times before she was fifteen and swears this is how it went.

Once upon a time, there was a man seeking employment speaking gibberish.  He could have gone into guild politics, and it would have been easier yet to go into religion.  He was an honest speaker of gibberish, nothing more, and he asked only that he be given an opportunity to practice his trade.

It was his job to hang around a certain rich man (actually, it was a group of rich guys who took him on as a kind of time share court jester but that only becomes relevant in a different story)- and while he was hanging around a certain rich guy, he was brought into the company of those who, for whatever reason, the rich guy wanted to mock and bewilder and otherwise mentally mess about with.

In those days – which weren’t that long ago, truth be told, although how far away it seems now for those of us too young to have been there – the rich man would have business meetings and the man who spoke gibberish would sit in a corner of the room, out of the way, and occasionally say something quietly but clearly in gibberish, and the rich man would pause, and say, “I will definitely have to consider that.”  The negotiations, of whatever form, would stagger along for a few moments and then there would be another outburst from the corner.  The rich man would pause, and say something soothing again. The fourth time this happened the rich man looked at him and paused long enough to eat a whole nut, and then said,

“Now Blib, you’re disturbing the work we’re doing. You’ve given me enough advice for tonight.”

Glaring (he had a ghost white face and big googly eyes) Blib would leave the room, looking like he was ready to kill someone.

“I hope he doesn’t mean to come back,” the rich man would say and then only the strongest minded individual would be able to continue along the path he had set for himself prior to the meeting.

Blib had similar sorts of jobs with other rich men, and he would sometimes pretend to be a soup-spilling waiter who also spoke gibberish, which caused no end of hijinks.

Abruptly one day the rich men all decided they wanted to spend the same amount of money for different things.  Blib had no work. One by one each of them turned to paying someone else to amuse them.  One preferred sex with men, one sex with women, one took up exotic drugs, one consumed more alcohol, and the last became depraved in the company of sheep. The moral of this story is very simple.

Depending on rich people is like building on sand.

If I think the warlord is being an ass I tell him one of my mother’s Blib stories.  She had a lot of them and they all ended the same way, hell for Blib.  He always managed to get another job though; Blib had a facility for survival that I always admired.