It gives me great pleasure to announce the beginning of a New Sperberspeak novel, a story that spent several years germinating in that teeming jungle I call my mind, a dark and fecund place that a number of family and friends have sought to understand and explore, only to turn away exhausted, swatting mosquitoes, quietly trudging back to the civilized world, far from the secret heart of the wilderness they have dared traverse. And as they turn, weary but pensive, eyes searching the far off horizon for the comforting lights of civilization, they hear the drums, distant, faint, but unmistakable, sending forth their message from the darkness in an unknown cipher…
What is that message? I do not know myself. Yes, even I myself am an explorer of that jungle. I know only a few of its secrets, as many as you would expect a man to know of a place where he has spent the entirety of his life, exiled from the bright lights of the city, always wandering, always searching, never leaving. I have spent long years listening to the message of the drums, sometimes faint, barely discernible above the chatter of the birds and the monkeys (or are they lemurs? I would actually prefer lemurs as the dominant primate of my inner jungle), but at other times thundering, inescapable, shaking the air in my lungs, as if they are so close I could push back the leaves touching my face and see them, and their unknown players before me (maybe lemurs with big hands).
But alas, I have never laid eyes upon the drums or the players. I interact with the drums only as a sound, a message that I must somehow receive and transmit to the twinkling lights far away, the lights that are for me as unknown, unreachable and remote as the drums. What are the lights to the drums? The drums are eternal and indifferent, remote and unknowing, content to churn with their own weighty rhythms. But what are the drums to the lights? That, you the reader, twinkling amidst the city lights, and I, seeking to replicate what I have heard for you to judge, we shall decide together. Now listen, if you will, to What the drums have told me:
Excerpt 1 from the Quest for the Orange Dragon, a novel of Magic and Adventure by Frank Sperber:
The story begins with a man in a ragged cloak and a tattered shawl, hurrying through the cobbled streets of Lakeside, a desperately dirty collection of bricks and stone and fine wood on the coast of a vast bay that was originally called Ulfangs Panda by the Kawasakis, the original inhabitants of Sven’s Swamp, the greater area in which Lakeside was located. The Kawasaki had nothing to do with the founding of Lakeside. They hated the ocean and despised Ulfangs Panda in particular, and named it in spite, after the same Ulfang who served as the god of peaceful digestion for the Nermites, a non-violent tribe whom the Kawasaki had subjugated around the time of the founding of Lakeside by the People of the Sea, a jolly folk with a rich musical tradition who were devoted to trade in stolen goods and who founded Lakeside to entice the inland tribes to live closer to the ocean where the People of the Sea could swoop in at night on stealth boats and snatch their valuables. The People of the Sea also enjoyed a rich stealth boat building tradition and a rich craft tradition of fake building fronts and paper mache castles and dried mud temples that they could slap together in a hurry and conduct impressive ceremonies in with fabulous music that drew all the rubes and desperate people for miles in the hopes of finding shelter and a job in a fine town with a real castle and a temple and everything and at the festivities the People of the Sea would show off a few fancy trinkets and spices and fine cloths and iron weapons and tell the rubes that they would bringing a huge haul of them from The City Across the Lake in a month, and selling them all for cheap in Lakeside, and they would tell the rubes to bring everything they had to trade at the big sale, and the rubes would swarm out of the woods on Sale Day, and have a huge party at the Lakeside tavern, and that night the People of the Sea would swoop in and steal everything the rubes had and set the paper mache castle on fire, and all the false fronts in Lakeside would be ashes in the morning, but the mud temple would be intact. And the tavern, which was built of brick by the only legitimate businessmen that the People of the Sea ever produced.
The Sale Day holiday, with the traditional Burning of the Castle and solemn rituals around the Miracle of the Mud Temple, had persisted in Lakeside to the present day with little changes except for the amazing and intricate puppet show tradition that had emerged among the Nermite descendants who made up the majority of the Lakeside inhabitants. The puppet shows had thrived at festival time and become the pride of the Nermite nation, although the theatrical companies who produced the puppet shows and the Sale Day Festival and owned the taverns were all mostly People of the Sea descendants.
The man in the ragged cloak, who begins our story by hurrying through the dirty streets of Lakeside, had very little People of the Sea blood, as evidenced by his square Nermite face, with puzzled eyes and a cherry nobbed nose that a People of the Sea boat captain of yore would have recognized immediately and reached out and pinched with a cackle while holding the tip of his thumb with the nail hidden before the surprised eyes which the captain would search keenly for a positive result on what the People of the Sea of yore once called “The Rube Test”.
The man in the ragged cloak that he clutched tightly around his neck and face from the wind had had his nose pinched many times as a youthful apprentice in The Royal Puppeteers by his round faced and sharp eyed compadres who had become full Producers and Master Producers in the company in time for their years of loyal service and paying their dues and other terms that he had heard from the Associate Executive Producer that seemed in his ears to somehow feel worse than a good hard nose pinch because the Associate Executive Producer happened to be his longtime friend and onetime apprentice Jasper the Red who spoke these phrases whenever Kyle, our raggedy cloaked friend, asked to be promoted from Associate Producer to full Producer, his wife Kierke’s longtime dream. She had coached and prodded and hounded and cajoled Kyle through long years of the dues paying and loyal service and groveling flattery necessary to achieve his long delayed promotion from Scrivener to Associate Producer, but he had no sooner announced this promotion to what he hoped would be an appeased and contented and ecstatic wife than she had with a patient, smile patted him on his large head and produced her newly prepared scroll of actions necessary to achieve promotion to Full Producer, which involved enhanced groveling and a lot of delegating and a lot of sharp tricks to play on the other Associates and a tiny smudge on of actual production work, which she held to be as necessary for promotion but as little worthy of mental investment as daily bowel movements.
Now Kyle Knute, our unfortunate hero’s full name, hurried through the dark and bitterly cold night of Lakeside toward Jasper the Red’s unofficial office at Mama Lucerda’s Inn and Tavern on the docks of Lakeside where the powerful smells of Ulfangs Panda had been known to overwhelm any sober people foolish enough to wander so close to the water.
He had received an urgent message by surly courier from Jasper that Kierke had correctly smelled opportunity for promotion spattered all over and had virtually assaulted her husband out of bed to attend to at this late hour. So now he hurried in bleary misery, having smelled on the note a disconcerting mix of the promotion still bewitching Kierke’s alert nostrils and the sharp tang of an epic nose pinching.
Both smells proved out, it happened, Jasper the Red having hit upon a fortuitous solution to an internal crisis that had bedeviled the previous two weekly meetings of the Royal Puppeteers executive board, and being so enraptured with his idea, concocted over that first beer so stimulating to the mental processes of the Drinking Species, that he had sent Harmony to fetch her cousin to go fetch Kakanute out of bed at once.
The crisis had come about as a result of the mental deterioration of the oldest member of the board, the younger brother of the previous chairman and uncle of the current chairman, who treated him with the same respect and affection that newly grown men usually accord the cherished animal companion of their youth. The old man had become obsessed with Kawasaki religious relics as his mind had degraded, and the recent news that Kawasaki ruins had been discovered fifty leagues up the Dammed River, had instilled in him the hysterical spurt of manic energy that will randomly manifest at the end of life in minds previously defenestrated by age. He had passionately advocated at uncomfortable length to unhappy fellow board members that the company mount a full expedition to the ruins to locate the Breath of the Orange Dragon, a staggeringly ancient relic of the Kawasaki “High” period that was purported to bequeath eternal prosperity to Theatrical Performers who possessed it. His orations had begun to dominate the board meetings to such an extent that desperate physical amelioration had been bruited in whispered conversations amongst small groups of the board, action which the old man’s nephew and board chair had vehemently vetoed. Jasper, promoted to his exalted position for his abilities as a fixer and complete distaste for critically acclaimed theatre, had been approached by several intra-board groups, exhorting him to do something that they could deny ever having wanted to happen. The board chair had also approached him, threatening him with the eternal enmity of his family if a single hair on his addled uncles head was harmed. Jasper had several sleepless nights, searching his keenly nefarious mind for a solution, until this night, after the first few delectable tastes of Mama’s darkest Ale, he hit upon the realization that could only have arisen from the collective consciousness of the People of the Sea ancestors abiding eternally in every cell of his body; he needed a Rube
Sperberspeak 