Jitterbug Perfume Read Online Free PDF

aspiring to colonize the shady hirsute shores. She drove it promptly out of the neighborhood.
    More pensive than ever, Alobar shared his thoughts with her. "I think that I am seeking something," he confessed once as they stood alone in the western watchtower, overseeing, from a bloodless distance, the butchering of skinny beef. "What I seek is neither spoils nor territory, new wives nor new glory, nor, for that matter, merely a lengthened life. What I seek never was, not on land or sea."
    What he sought was to become something singular out of his singular experience—and labor as she might, Wren could not understand. If the notion of an individual resisting death for his own sake was foreign to her (as indeed, it would have been to anyone in that milieu), the concept of the uniqueness of a single human life was alien to the point of babble. Preferring the chaos down in the cattle pens to her husband's god-offending nonsense, she shut it out entirely and yelled encouragement to the butchers.
    Yet, Wren served Alobar in ways beyond the call of duty. In an attempt to prove his stamina, the king set upon his harem like a starving rat let loose in a peach barrel. Night after night, he rooted, rolled, and reamed. He climbed delicately upon Frol's swollen belly. He left Juun and Helga complaining of soreness in their nether regions. He generated funky auroras around the bodies of Ruba and Mag. He gave Alma a taste of her own medicine. Each night, when he had done with one or the other of them, he would rub their noses, tug their blond braids, and send them back to their quarters to fetch Wren. While Alobar, exhausted, lay beside her panting and making imprudent comments, such as "Wives are wonderful, but why did I have to accumulate so many?", Wren would fake her lioness cries. Mornings, while he dreamed of the relative tranquility of war, she would fake them again. In time, the subterfuge shamed them both so deeply they could scarcely bear to look at each other. It was actually a relief when it was brought to an end.

    Noog the necromancer paid close attention to the king's activities. He had done so for years. He had chronicled Alobar's gradually declining sexual enthusiasm, so the desperation implicit in the sudden reversal was not lost on him. When he read verification of his suspicions in the intestinal texts of several hens, he decided to see for himself.
    It so happened that on the morning that Noog stole up to the royal window, after bribing a guard with a glass bead, Alobar and Wren were actually making love. Her phony demonstrations had excited him that dawn. After all, he cared for her above any other. So he had touched her stomach with uncommon tenderness, and soon her groans were being uttered in earnest. Disappointed, Noog was about to turn away when the magpie that rode upon his shoulder abruptly took flight and swooped into the king's chamber. Undetected as yet by the copulating couple, a long, curly hair as bright as an icicle had unfurled during the night in Alobar's beard. The magpie flew directly to the hair, pulled it free with its beak, and delivered it into the gizzard-stained hands of the magician.

    Following a full day of chanting, singing, and frenzied dancing by painted figures in animal suits, the execution took place at twilight.
    Awaiting his mortal exit, Alobar sat on a bronze throne wearing for the last time a thick crown of hammered gold. In his lap, he held the sacred turtle shell. The shell and crown rivaled the Egyptian looking glass in the hierarchy of the city's treasure trove. At precisely the moment that the sun's eye winked behind the western hills, Wren stepped from a tiny hut of pine boughs, constructed for the occasion, carrying on an ermine pillow the smoking egg. Without missing a cue, as if she had rehearsed for days, she dance-stepped thrice around the bonfire, then up to the throne. Supposedly, the egg had been laid by a viper, although Alobar suspected it was the product of Noog's