Titania, despairing of the Herms male aspect, inserted a tentative forefinger in the female orifice. The Herm felt bored.

Distemperate weather! Its raining, its pouring; the earth is in estrangement from itself, the withering buds tumble out of the Queens apron and rot on the mulch, for Oberon has put a stop to reproduction. But still Titania hugs the Herm to her shrivelling bosoms and will not let her husband have the wee thing, not even for one minute. Did she not give a sacred promise to a friend?

The Herm continued to smile inscrutably, except when he sneezed.

The Herm removed his/her left foot from its snug nest in her/his crotch and placed it on the ground. With one single, fluent, gracile movement of transition, s/he shifted on to the other leg. The lotus and the snake, on either arm, stayed where they were.

In the dewy wood tinselled with bewildering moonlight, the bumbling, tumbling babies of the fairy crèche trip over the hem of her dress, which is no more nor less than the margin of the wood itself; they stumble in the tangled grass as they play with the coneys, the quick brown fox-cubs, the russet fieldmice and the wee scraps of grey voles, blind velvet Mole and striped Brock with his questing snout -- all the denizens of the woodland are her embroiderings, and the birds flutter round her head, settle on her shoulders and make their nests in her great abundance of disordered hair, in which are plaited poppies and the ears of wheat.

Just as your shadow can grow big and then shrink to almost nothing, and then swell up, again, so can these shadows, these insubstantial bubbles of the earth, these "beings" to whom the verb, "to be", may not be properly applied, since, in our sense, they are not. They cannot be; they cannot cast their own shadows, for who has seen the shadow of a shadow? Their existences are necessarily moot -- do you believe in fairies? Their lives lead always just teasingly almost out of the corners of the eyes of their observers, so it is possible they were only, all the time, a trick of the light. . . such half-being, with such a lack of public acknowledgement, is not conducive to any kind of visual consistency among them. So they may take what shapes they please.

His face, breast and thighs he has daubed with charcoal; Oberon, lord of night and silence, of the grave silence of endless night, Lord of Plutonic dark. His hair, long, it never saw scissors; but he ha

http://www.99lib.net

s this peculiarity -- no hair at all on either chop or chin, nor his shins, neither, but all his face bald as an egg except for the eyebrows, that meet in the middle.

The Herms golden skin is made of beaten gold but the flesh beneath it has been marinated in: black pepper, red chilli, yellow turmeric, cloves, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, ginger, mace, nutmeg, allspice, khuskhus, garlic, tamarind, coconut, candlenut, lemon grass, galangal and now and then you get -- phew! -- a whiff of asafoetida. Hot stuff! Were the Herm to be served piled up on a lordly platter and garnished with shreds of its own outer casing, s/he would then resemble that royal dish, moglai biriani, which is decorated with edible gold shavings in order, so they say, to aid digestion. Nothing so deliciously aromatic as the Herm has ever been scented before in Englands green and pleasant land, still labouring as it is at this point in time under its unrelieved late medieval diet of boiled cabbage. The Herm is hot and sweet as if drenched in sun and honey, but Oberon is the colour of ashes.

The Puck, pressed tight against Titanias magic, sighed heavily, stepped back a few paces and began energetically to play with himself. Have you seen fairy sperm? We mortals call it, cuckoo spit.

"Now, I do call my horned master, the Horn of Plenty, but as for my missus --" said the Puck, in his inimitable Worcestershire drawl.

Among the props of the Globe Theatre, along with the thunder-making machine and the bearskins, is listed a "robe for to go invisible". By his coat, you understand that Oberon is to remain unseen as he broods magisterial but impotent above the scarcely discernible quiverings among last years oak leaves that conceal his wife and the golden bone of contention that has come between the elemental lovers.

The draggled fairies obediently started in on a chorus of: "Ye spotted snakes with double tongue," but were all so afflicted by coughing and sneezing and rawness of the throat and rheumy eyes and gasping for breath and all the other symptoms of rampant influenza that their hoarse voices petered out before they reached the bit about the newts and after that the only sound in the entire wood was the pit-pattering of the rain on the leaves.

In his spare moments, when he was not off about his Masters various businesses, the Puck, wistfully lingering outside the Herms magic circle like an ur

www.99lib.net

chin outside a candy shop, concluded that, in order to take full advantage of the sexual facilities offered him by the Herm, should the barrier between them ever be removed -- and, unlikely as this eventuality might be, the Pucks motto was "Be Prepared"! -- if there was to be intercourse between himself and the Golden Herm, then the Herms partner would require a similar set of equipment to the Herm in order to effect maximally satisfactory congress.

And if you did chance to spy him/her, you would think the little yellow idol was a talisman dropped from a gypsy pocket, perhaps, or a charm fallen off a girls bracelet, or else the gift from inside a very expensive cracker.

Yet, if you picked up the beautiful object and held it on the palm of your hand, you would feel how warm it was, as if somebody had been holding it tight before you came and only just put it down.

What does the Herm want?

Like a Japanese water-flower dropped in a glass of water, Titania grows. . .

She is like a double bed; or, a table laid for a wedding breakfast; or, a fertility clinic.

And if he is not a creature of the dream, then surely you have forgotten your dreams.

"My husband shall not have you!" cried Titania. "He shant! I shall keep you!"

Oberon watched the oak leaves shiver and said nothing, for he was choked with balked longing for the golden, half and halfy thing with its salivatory perfume. He took off his invisible disguise and made himself gigantic and bulked up in the night sky over the wood, arms akimbo, blotting out the moon, naked but for his buskins and his great codpiece. The mossy antlers on his forehead arent the half of it, he wears a crown made out of yellowish vertebrae of unmentionable mammals, down from beneath which his black hair drops straight as light. Since he is in his malign aspect, he has put on, furthermore, a necklace of suggestively little skulls, which might be those of the babies he has plucked from human cradles -- do not forget, in German, they call him Erl-King.

The orchestra has laid down its instruments. The curtain rises. The play begins.

But the Queen stowed the tiny Herm safe away between her breasts as if s/he were a locket and herself diminished until she was a suitable size to enjoy her niece or nephew or nephew/niece à choix in the obscurity of an acorn-cup.

The Puck, too, yearning and thwarted as he was, found himself helplessly turning himself into t99lib.nethe thing he longed for, and, under the faintly twitching oak leaves, became yellow, metallic, double-sexed and extravagantly precious-looking. There the Puck stood on one leg, the living image of the Herm, and glittered.

High in the thick of a dripping hedge of honeysuckle, a wee creature was extracting a tritonic, numinous, luxuriantly perfumed melody from the pan-pipes of the wild woodbine. The tune broke off as the player convulsed with ugly coughing. He gobbed phlegm, that flew through the air until its trajectory was interrupted by a cowslip, to whose freckled ear the translucent pustule clung. The infinitesimal then took up his tootling again.

Atishoo!

But not this year. Frosts have blasted the fruit blossom, rain has rotted all the corn so her garland is not gold but greenish and phosphorescent with blight. The acres of the rye have been invaded with ergot and, this year, eating bread will make you mad. The floods broke down the Bridge of Ware. The beasts refuse to couple; the cow rejects the bull and the bull keeps himself to himself. Even the goats, hitherto synonymous with lechery, prefer to curl up with a good book. The very worms no longer agitate the humus with their undulating and complex embraces. In the wood, a chaste, conventual calm reigns over everything, as if the foul weather had put everybody off.

Correction: used to provoke.

Titania tenderly wiped the Herms nose with the edge of her petticoat, on which the flowers are all drooping, shedding embroidery stitches, the fruits are cankering and spotting and coming undone for, if Oberon is the Horn of Plenty, then Titania is the Cauldron of Generation and, unless he gives her a stir, now and then, with his great pot stick, the cauldron will go off the boil.

Except the lover of the Golden Herm.

The arrival of the Queen is announced by no fanfare of trumpets but the ash-soft lullaby of wood doves and the liquid coloratura blackbird. Moonlight falls like milk upon her naked breasts.

And, if you watched long enough, you would see the golden sequins of the eyelids move.

By the Pucks phallic orientation, you know him for a creature of King Oberons.

Then the Puck further concluded that the equipment of the Herms hypothetical partner would need, however, to be attached in reversed order to that of the Herm, in order to procure a perfect fit and no fumbling; the Puck, a constant inquisitive spy on mortal couples come to make the beast with two backs in wha99lib.nett they mistakenly believed to be privacy, had noticed there is a vexed question of handedness about caresses, so that all right-handed lovers truly require left-handed lovers during the preliminaries to the act, and Mother Nature, when she cast the human mould, took no account of foreplay, which alone distinguishes us from the beasts when we are being beastly.

"But she cannot put horns on her husband, for he is antlered, already," opined the Puck, changing back into himself and skipping across the glade to the heels of his master. For no roe-buck now raises his head behind that gorse bush to watch these goings on; Oberon is antlered like a ten-point stag.

Oberon saw him.

"I am unfamiliar with the concept of desire. I am the unique and perfect, paradigmatic Hermaphrodite, provoking on all sides desire yet myself transcendent, the unmoved mover, the still eye of the tempest, exemplary and self-sufficient, the beginning and the end."

The wonderful giantess manifested herself with an owl on her shoulder and an apron-full of roses and of babies so rosy the children could scarcely be distinguished from the flowers. She picked up her defunct friends child, the Herm. The Herm stood on one leg on the palm of Titanias hand and smiled the inscrutable, if manic, smile of the figures in Hindu erotic sculpture.

When Oberon cheers up a bit, he lets the sun come out and then hell hang little silver bells along his codpiece and they go jingle jangle jingle when he walks up and down and round about, the pretty chinking sounds suspended wriggling in the air like homunculi wherever he has passed.

Try, try as he might, try and try again, the Puck could not get it quite right, although, after strenuous effort, he at last succeeded in turning himself into a perfect simulacrum of the Herm and would, at odd moments, adopt the Herms form and posture and stand facing him in the wood, a living mirror of the living statue, except for the fierce erection the satyromaniac Puck could not subdue when in the presence of his love.

And no passing, clayey mortal, tramping through the wood on great, heavy feet, scattering the fairies who twitter like bats in their fright, just as such a mortal could never hear them, so he would never spot the unafraid Herm, sticking stock-still as a trance.

The Puck can turn himself into anything he likes: a three-legged stool, in order to perpetrate the celebrated trick ("Then slip I from her bum, dwww•99liｂ.ｎeｔown topples she") so beloved in the lower forms of grammar schools when the play is read aloud round the class because it is suitable for children because it is about fairies; a baby Fiat; a grand piano; anything!

Lie close and sleep, said Titania to the Herm. My fays shall lullaby you as we cuddle up on my mattress of dandelion down.

The Herm wants to know what "want" means.

Her very name, Titania, bears witness to her descent from the giant race of the Titans; and "descend" might seem apt enough, at first, to describe the declension when she manifests herself under her alias, Mab, or, in Wales, Mabh, and rules over the other diminutives, herself the size of the solitaire in an engagement ring, as infinitely little as her forebears were infinitely large.

The Puck, tormented for lack of the Herm, pulled up a mandrake and sunk his prodigious tool in the cleft of the reluctant root, which shrieked mournfully but to no avail as old shaggylugs had his way with it.

At which a wind of strangeness would rise and blow away the wood and all within it.

Oberon stooped down and picked up the Puck and stood him, a simulated Yogic tree, on his palm. A misty look came into Oberons eyes. The Puck knew he had no option but to go through with it.

In her eyes are babies. When she looks at you, you helplessly reduplicate. Her eyes provoke engendering.

Indeed, who in their right minds would trust a child to this man?

At that, thunder crashed, the heavens, which, for a brief moment, had sealed themselves up, now reopened again with redoubled fury, and all the drenched babies in Titanias pinafore coughed and sneezed. The worms in the rosebuds woke up at the clamour and began to gnaw.

But all of them can grow BIG! then shrink down to. . . the size of dots, of less than dots, again. Every last one of them is of such elastic -- since incorporeal -- substance. Consider the Queen of the Fairies.

Hairy Puck fell in love with Golden Herm and often came to frolic round the lovely living statue in the moonlit glade, although he could not, happily for the Herm, get near enough to touch because Titania forethoughtfully had thrown a magical cordon sanitaire around her lovely adoptive, so that s/he was, as it were, in an invisible glass case, such as s/he might find herself in, some centuries later, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Against this transparent, intangible barrier, the Puck often flattened still further his already snub nose.