Trivia Goat
Treats of Caprine Traversal
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“Oh for fortune’s sake! We’re behind even that fool Nuggets’ goat, let alone Candlehead’s. Just give the wrong answer and we’ll try a different question.”
Honeydew grabbed the stiff, sandy hackle hairs of an oversized mountain-goat monster. She sat at the front of the beast’s spine, near its human-faced head. Tom straddled the strong middle. Mr. Grey took the rear. Honeydew followed - with narrowed oily eyes - the leaps of other goat creatures as they carried Jodee’s partisans up a monumental cliff.
“Well?” Honeydew hissed at her fellow riders. Her eyes stuck fast to Candlehead’s high-leaping mount.
Mr. Grey’s eyes, and 60% of his attention, were on the toothy edges of the cliff section already beneath them. He said, “I’m just not quite sure. What if we say, ‘a chisel’? Maybe it’s a trick, and the question’s a riddle. With an odd answer: we’d say, ‘fire’ foinstance, or say, ‘opposable thumbs’.” He checked the rope fastening their luggage to the goat creature’s flanks for the 36th time.
Tom’s eyes, and almost all of his attention, were on the larkspur flowers blooming in the dark cracks of the cliff. He did manage to mumble, “Then we guess ‘mallets’.”
The goat creature slowly curved its long neck around. Like a hairy noodle. It presented to them the time-lined, fossil-haired, disappointed face of a grandmother whose grandson has just spit out a perfectly delicious piece of hard caramel candy.
“That answ-” began the goat grandmother.
“‘That-answer-is-incorrect-and-another-question-I-shall-ask’,” said Honeydew in a rush. “Yes. We know. Ask it!” She tugged the goat’s spine hair like a sled-driver mushing dogs.
“The answer was ‘enchantment’, just so you know,” said the goat grandmother. The creature stamped a hoof on the crooked ledge, sending loose stone thundering. “Enchantment was mankind’s first tool.”
“Just ask. The next. Question.”
“Which great fish is ruler of bubbles and flutes?” The goat grandmother turned her noodle neck and looked passively ahead.
Honeydew twisted her own neck back with a flick that flared her cornsilk hair. She looked at Tom and Mr. Grey. Tom was reaching for a laceration in the crusty cliff. He cradled the frond of a larkspur, leaned out, pushed it against his nose, and sniffled with a smile. Mr. Grey was looking down; down along the molars and canines and incisors of dry rock; down at the field of cottonfruit far below. That field had seemed so thick and puffy on their cart ride. Now, at this dizzy height, it seemed top-sheet thin.
Mr. Grey looked up when he heard Tom’s sniffle. He looked hard at the flower-of-foreign-odor in Tom’s hand and raised an objecting finger. He saw Honeydew’s angry expression. He dropped the finger. “Sorry about this,” he began, speaking to both Honeydew and the goat grandmother. “Could you repeat the question?”
Honeydew bounced in her spinal seat, clicked several times snappishly, and tracked with her eyes the progress of Candlehead. The goat grandmother repeated the question. Mr. Grey raised the same dry finger he’d brought up to interrupt Tom, now pensively to his lips. He said, “Well that’s hard to say. All the fish sound important; all these bubbles too.” He craned his neck near to 90 degrees and looked up, far past the cliffs, where the semi-translucent membrane of the bubble held back crushing tonnages of seawater. He went on, “I’m not sure it’s fair: saying any single fish - crucial as they are - holds all the power. After all without bubbles, everyone would-”
Honeydew cut in. “This is stupid. Can we pay you? And you get us to the top first?”
The goat grandmother twisted her noodle neck. “Pay me?” she said with an incredulous, sour look. “No, you cannot ‘pay me’. This great ridge of seabed separates those worthy of seeing old Antiquity from those unworthy. Only those who know their history may ascend and bask in Glory.”
The wrinkled goat straightened her neck again. But Honeydew beat a fist against the creature’s spine, and the head suddenly curled back. It’s neck hair bristled. “Do you enjoy beating on old women?” she asked with a rasp. “If you keep hitting me, I’ll hop back to the bottom.”
Honeydew ended her barrage, but still tugged viciously on the long fur. The grandmother face grumbled about ‘respecting elders’ but waited on their answer in sullen silence. Honeydew turned pursed lips and shiny-dark eyes on her fellow riders. “Just… pick… one…” she said.
Before Mr. Grey could venture a guess, Tom said, “Then we’ll guess the Betta Fish.” He brought his hand away from the asphodel frond and folded his arms confidently across his chest.
Honeydew groaned. “We’re going to be on this ledge forever…” The goat grandmother turned her neck and said her piece about wrong answers. Honeydew waited with surprising patience. When the old woman finished, however, Honeydew suddenly whirled on Tom. She said, “We haven’t seen or heard anything about betta fish. Couldn’t you at least guess a fish we know?”
Tom blinked at her for a moment, then scrunched his brow. He turned his eyes down and said, “I was just using logic…”
The old woman broke the angry silence. “The right answer was ‘the Rain Fish’,” she said. “The great manta ray that hugs the bubble and wets the cotton fields with condensation.”
Honeydew flicked her eyes between Candlehead and the other partisans riding far above. She wore a defeated look. Mr. Grey, though he struggled to keep his eyes and attention above ground-level, said, “Let's just hear the next question.”
Honeydew swung her eyes - no longer shining, still dark - to Mr. Grey. “Why not,” she said. She drew the small hand mirror from a pocket on her Glory-Days-styled robe. She straightened her hair.
The goat grandmother asked, “When was the first wheelhouse created?”
The question had hardly left her wrinkled lips - the goat grandmother’s sagging face hadn’t begun to turn away - when Honeydew’s hand mirror closed with a gunfire snap. Honeydew matched it with her answer, given as a bullet is shot. She blurted a date and time.
The grandmother craned her noodle neck and curled it into the shape of an ‘S’. She bent back her hind legs, lowered her haunches - forcing the three riders to clutch tight her spinal hair - and kicked. The porous shelf of dry undersea cliff rushed away. The Thick and Sweaty Wind must have scaled this cliff ahead of the trio; her gusts smacked them as they soared. Mr. Grey’s anchor shawl trailed out behind and wrapped him in a choke. Their luggage convulsed against the monster’s flanks. The goat ride put the flights of fowl to shame with the distance and speed of its single leap. Calcified coral, pristine fossils of colossal fish, and shadowy clefts dense with larkspurs, dropped - into and out of sight - in a micro-tock fraction.
The goat grandmother caught herself on bent forelegs as she reached a ledge far above the previous one. She landed opposite the way she’d taken off; with a slow, delicate touchdown. The monster shook her haunches, spooking her riders, and settled her hooves on the ledge.
They’d already been through three such jumps. But the jumps began so abruptly that the latest rattled the three the same as the first. Their fresh success got them past half-a-dozen partisans and their rides. But Nuggets’ ride, and Candlehead’s as well, still stood far above.
The grandmother curved her neck and puckered her face. “That answer is correct but more must I ask,” she said.
“We’re still so far,” said Honeydew. Her eyes shone once more on Candlehead. Mr. Grey looked at the field of cotton, farther below now, and couldn’t agree. “Next-question next-question next-question,” Honeydew went on, with Nuggets-like enthusiasm.
The goat grandmother asked, “Where do cowsowhorses come from?” She turned away her wrinkled face and waited.
Honeydew opened her mouth, closed it, frowned, thought. This last she did for a few tocks. Then she twisted around to Tom and Mr. Grey. “Any ideas?”
Mr. Grey shook his head slowly and steadily. He tried to keep it centered and thinking of the question, but the vast bubble-space to his left seemed to pull him ever sideways. Tom’s brow furrowed; like two fuzzy caterpillars trying to crawl into the same hole.
Honeydew said, “We’ll just have to guess then.”
But Tom’s caterpillars reached a sudden truce; his brow smoothed. With surety he said, “A union of beasts; cow and sow and horse.”
“TOM!” Honeydew yelled angrily. She didn’t reach her harangue. The goat crouched and leapt. Another dizzy span of cliff dropped by. Their ride lighted on a new ledge of still greater height. The three discovered they’d left several goats, including Nuggets’, in the Mesozoic zone.
“That answer is correct but more must I ask,” said the goat grandmother.
Mr. Grey added, “Simply said and well done, Tom,” Tom waved a hand as if it were no great matter, but a satisfied smile widened his face.
I must tell you; Tom’s answer - while correctly spoken - was not correctly intended. By ‘union of cow, sow, and horse’, Tom of course meant the coupling of these animals. The quizzing goat woman interpreted his words as the ‘unionization’ of the disparate species, and subsequent abolishing of distinction between them; one of the king’s laws enacted to ease culture-shock of visiting tourists. As neither realized the other’s intent, no communications issue arose.
To return to events; Honeydew gave the goat grandmother’s hair an impatient tug. The old face turned and asked, “Who created the bubbles?”
Tom opened his mouth but Honeydew spoke first, to herself it seemed. “That must be different from which fish rules the bubbles. So it isn’t the Rain fish,” Tom closed his mouth. Honeydew whisked a swipe across the spinal fur. “Don’t you have more questions on wheelhouses? Or something for him.” She nudged her head at Mr. Grey. “Something about visas or King’s Law?”
“ I might know this one in fact,” said Mr. Grey. Honeydew raised her brows doubly - with surprise and impatience - so that they vanished into her golden bangs. Mr. Grey went on, “At that Oracle’s temple, there were all those glass murals.”
“Mhm,” said Honeydew. She waved her hand in a hurrying circle.
“And one of those murals showed a falling star. Did you see that one? The light struck the glass like misting gold.”
“The point, please!”
“Well there was a scrawl over the mural, which said, ‘From the sky crashed a star into the sea; angry and hissing and bubbling and bright; and that star was the Sun Fish; and the four great…’”
“The Sun Fish,” said Honeydew with a quick turn to the goat grandmother.
Another crouch, another pounce, another distance skipped.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Honeydew with an excited double-click. They were close enough to see Candlehead’s wick fluttering in the gusts.
There followed, however, a long stretch of questions that none could answer right; intentionally or accidentally. “Who was the first oracle?” they didn’t know. “Which bubble grows the most cottonfruit?” Tom guessed ‘Tillage’, which wasn’t a bubble. “Who enacted the Odormoats?” Honeydew guessed the king; before Mr. Grey could intervene, and tell her that - by King’s Law - the Odormoats had never not-existed.
As the trio failed time after time, the partisans they’d passed caught up, and passed them in turn. Goat grandmothers hopped wildly all across the dry sea ledges. As pufferfrogs, when caught in a hailstorm, desperately jump from lilypad to lilypad; they leap desperately to avoid the existence-ending balls of ice; their legs fling out behind, arcing their bodies like arrows through a frigid air; just so did the grandmother goats hop. Candlehead’s goat soared out of reach, nearing the cliff’s plateau. All three saw that even with a rapid-fire string of perfect answers, they could not now catch the candle-domed man.
“I guess we lose,” said Honeydew. She folded her arms and stared vaguely out at the open space on their left.
Mr. Grey said, “I don’t understand. This isn’t a race, is it? We’ve just got a goal; make it to the top. With enough questions answered, eventually, we’ll still reach our goal.”
Honeydew said nothing. Tom sampled the nearest clutch of larkspurs. He said, “I agree with that; why rush by a splendid view?”
“It bothers me coming last,” said Honeydew. She continued staring into space.
“But we aren’t last yet.”
Honeydew shrugged. “We aren’t in the front.” No one responded, so she added, “Besides, the view’s not so grand. No treasure or effort built this place. It just happened by nature. There’s nothing special there. And who wants to ride a smelly goat all day?”
The old woman turned a sour look on Honeydew. Mr. Grey said nothing. Tom, after a moment of deciphering, said, “At least it’s not wet.”
Mr. Grey reeled his eyes back from the valley floor - very, very far down the broken-bone cliff - and met the ‘so-over-this’, deep-set, rectangular eyes of the goat-grandmother. He said, “Is there a shortcut question? One that goes straight up, right to the summit?” Honeydew added emphasis to the thought by whirling to stare into the old woman’s face.
The goat sighed raspily. “Sure. But if you answer wrong, I’ll put you back at the start. You can find a different grandma to lug you up the cliff.”
Honeydew said, “Done. Ask it.”
“Which is the greatest fish?”
Honeydew tilted her head back. She wasn’t looking at Candlehead as much as looking up in despair. Tom’s caterpillar brows resumed their feud.
Mr. Grey said, “Even the oracles debate at length on that question.” Honeydew groaned again.
The old grandmother gave Mr. Grey a new look. She said, “One who is grey with wisdom, it seems.”
The grandmother shot up, farther and faster than ever before.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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