Table Of ContentHieronymus Bosch’s Apprentice
by Rudy Rucker
Story Copyright (C) 2007,Rudy Rucker.
Original images Copyright (C) 2007, Rudy Rucker.
6,200 Words.
Once inside the town wall, Azaroth swung the boat into a little canal that
wended its way through the
town, passing under round-arched bridges and along back yards verdant with
vegetables. Bosch’s house
wasn’t far.
Azaroth moored his boat beside a tiny dinghy tied up by a garden. He put a
likely offering of fish into a
smaller basket, tossed a cloth over the remainder, then led Jayjay and Thuy
through the garden of turnips
and carrots, past a cellar door, and up three steps into Jeroen Bosch’s kitchen.
It was a large room, the ceiling and three of the walls covered with smooth white
plaster. The inner brick
wall held a fireplace adorned with stone carvings of skinny dogs with needle
teeth and bat wings. The
dogs’ long tails branched into curling ferns that held up a mantelpiece upon
dogs’ long tails branched into curling ferns that held up a mantelpiece upon
which a freshly roasted
chicken cooled.
Dark-varnished planks of wood made up the floor. The ceiling was painted with
an elaborately twining
squash vine adorned with birds and beasties peeping from behind each flower
and leaf. Counters and
cupboards lined the walls, with a sturdy wooden table beside a window.
Two women sat at the table: a plump servant girl peeling carrots and turnips, and
a lean, gray-haired
woman wearing a white linen cap and a bright yellow silk dress. Her air of self-
possession made it clear
that she was Bosch’s wife and the lady of house.
“Good day, Mevrouw Aleid,” said Azaroth with a bow to her. “I have a fine fat
fish for you, also a tasty
eel. ” Thuy and Jayjay stood behind Azaroth, peeping out. He drew the dogfish
from his basket and held
it up. “And I’ve brought this fellow to model for the master.”
“That’s very good of you, Azaroth,” said Aleid, with a cool smile. “But we
didn’t know you’d be
delivering fish. We’ve already cooked for tonight.”
“Eat my catch tonight,” suggested Azaroth. “Have the chicken cold tomorrow.”
Just then Aleid’s eyes picked out Jayjay and Thuy. Abruptly she crossed herself.
“Get the knife,
Kathelijn!” she cried.
The red-cheeked young maid sprang to her feet, ran back towards the hearth and
snatched up a long,
skinny boning knife. Aleid, too, hastened to the far side of the room and turned,
watching for a move
from the strangers.
“These are just my cousins from the Garden of Eden,” said Azaroth nudging
them into the open. “Jayjay
and Thuy. Fortunately they speak good Brabants.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Thuy in her sweetest Dutch. She even curtsied.
Seeing this, Kathelijn
lowered her knife and let out a shrill, nervous giggle.
“Perhaps Mijnheer Bosch would like to paint us,” said Jayjay. “Or we could
assist in the studio or about
the house. Being new to your beautiful town, we’re open for any position of
service.”
“We should welcome dwarves?” said Aleid, incredulous. “Creation’s cast-offs?”
“We’re not dwarves,” said Jayjay firmly. “We’re little people, clever and strong.
If you permit…” He
stepped forward, grabbed one of the chairs’ legs with both hands, and lifted it
into the air. Although the
chair was three times his height, relative to his dense Lobrane body it felt like
balsa wood, with a net
weight no greater than a normal chair.
But the feat of strength only frightened the women. The fact that Jayjay and
Thuy could move six times as
fast as the Hibraners made them rather uncanny. Aleid found a knife of her own.
Kathelijn crouched and
pointed hers at Jayjay. He clattered the chair to the floor and backed away.
“Are you baptized?” asked Aleid, tapping the flat of her knife against her palm.
“I am,” said Jayjay, whose mother was a knee-jerk Catholic.
“Me too,” said Thuy, who’d had a brief Christian period in grade school, thanks
to her born-again aunt.
to her born-again aunt.
“Has Jeroen finished painting my harp?” asked Azaroth, trying to turn the tide of
the conversation.
“Go ask him yourself,” said Aleid. “Be warned that he’s in a bad mood. A
beggar keeps playing his
bagpipe right out front. Can you hear it?” Indeed, shrill, frantic squeals were
filtering in. “We give him a
copper to go away, and he always comes back for more. Show Jeroen the
dogfish and the little people.
They might very well amuse him.”
“We admire your husband’s paintings,” said Jayjay.
“You’re so cosmopolitan in the New World?” said Aleid, surprised. “I had no
idea.” She paused,
re-evaluating the situation. “Were my husband to want you to stay, you should
know that you’d receive
no pay. You would sleep in our cellar. It doesn’t actually connect to the house,
there’s an entrance from
the garden. It would be like your own apartment. And you could eat the scraps
from our table—we
don’t happen to own a pig just now. I don’t suppose you eat much.” Clearly
Aleid was a tough
negotiator.
negotiator.
“We eat as much a regular people,” said Thuy. “In fact, we’re hungry right
now.”
“But we don’t eat brown bread,” added Jayjay, not ready for a repeat of the
fierce hallucinations he’d
had from eating ergot-tainted brown bread with the limbless beggars behind the
Hospice of Saint
Anthony last night.
“Neither do we,” said Aleid, undermining Jayjay’s half-formed theory about
how Bosch was getting his
visions. “We eat white bread,” she continued. “Brown bread is for the lower
classes. Are you nobles?”
“In a way,” said Thuy. “We’re known far and wide in our home land.”
“Can I feed them some carrots?” Kathelijn asked Aleid, sweetening her voice.
“They’re so cute. Like
dolls.”
Aleid nodded, and the maid gave each of them a raw June carrot, crunchy and
sweet.
“How about a couple of chicken legs, too,” said Jayjay. “We’re famished from
the trip.”
Aleid raised her eyebrows, but gave Kathelijn the go-ahead. Jayjay and Thuy
made short work of the big
drumsticks. Relative to their dense Lobrane jaws, the meat was spongy and easy
to wolf down. It tasted
wonderful. The women laughed to see the little people eat so heartily and so fast.
Then Kathelijn gave
Thuy a white bakery roll the size of Thuy’s head, and she gobbled it down,
provoking further expressions
of wonder.
“Go see Jeroen,” reiterated Aleid when the eating was done.
Jayjay and Thuy followed Azaroth up a staircase to a sunny studio in the front of
the house. As it
happened, the windows gave directly onto the great triangular marketplace and
its articulated hubbub.
The room sounded with a hundred conversations, with vendor’s cries, the scuff
of shoes and the clack of
hooves—all this overlaid by the vile drone of an incompetently played bagpipe.
A cluttered work table sat in the middle of the studio, and beyond that was
Jeroen Bosch, standing
Jeroen Bosch, standing
before the window, brush in hand, the light falling over his shoulder onto a large,
square oak panel.
“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Azaroth brings fresh wonders.” His face was lined and
quizzical; his eyes were
brown with flecks of yellow and green. His mouth and eyebrows flickered with
the shadows of his
fleeting moods. He looked to be in his mid forties.
“These are my cousins, Jayjay and Thuy,” said Azaroth. “They’re from the
Garden of Eden.”
Bosch tightened his lips, clearly doubting this.
“Your wife says they might stay here and work for you,” added Azaroth.
“What!”
Azaroth held up his hand. “We’ll talk about that in a minute. How goes the
progress on my harp?” The
instrument was nowhere to be seen.
Jayjay was looking around the studio, fascinated. The work table held seashells
Jayjay was looking around the studio, fascinated. The work table held seashells
and eggshells, drawings
of cripples, a bowl of gooseberries, a peacock feather in a cloudy glass jar, and a
variety of dried
gourds. Upon the wall were a cow skull and a lute. A stuffed heron and owl
perched upon shelves. Two
nearly completed paintings leaned against the wall, panels half the width of the
big square that Bosch was
working on, and easily four times Jayjay’s height. Each panel was a mottled
microcosm, brimming with
incident and life.
“I’m nearly done decorating the harp,” said Jeroen. “But she’s locked up in the
attic. She’s too valuable
to uncover with so many people about.” He made a gesture towards the bustling
marketplace.
“Conjurors, charlatans, jugglers.”
“I can’t see the harp?” said Azaroth, incredulous.
The painter set down his brush and walked over to them, keeping an eye on
Jayjay and Thuy. He
accepted the dogfish from Azaroth, set it on his work table and propped its
mouth open with a porcupine
quill. “Hello,” he said to the dogfish, making his voice thin. “Do you bring a
message from the King of
Hell?”
Bosch was playing—seeking inspiration by enacting a little scene that he might
paint. To ingratiate
himself, Jayjay responded as if speaking for the fish, flopping his tongue to
make his words soft and
slimy. “The pitchfork wants to strum the harp,” he said, nothing better popping
into his head. “The harp
and the pitchfork are God.” He reached out with is hand and waggled the fish’s
gelatinous brown tail.
Bosch nodded, appreciating the mummery, if not taking the words seriously. He
was studying the singular
objects on his table, nudging them this way and that with the tip of his delicate,
ochre-stained finger—as if
composing a scene. “Would it be heresy to say all things have souls?” he said,
suddenly fixing his eyes on
Jayjay.
“Where I come from, it’s obvious that everything is alive,” said Jayjay, feeling a
closeness to Bosch that
was nearly telepathic. He slowed down his voice to seem less strange. “Nobody
debates it. It’s a fact of
nature, not an insult to God. We talk to our objects and they talk back. That shell
there, it might be
