The Smell of Telescopes by Rhys Hughes

the grapeshot riddled his spleen and eloped with his leg to the pit.
    Why had Morgan, alone among the rovers, preserved his identity? His stocky, entrepreneurial character never changed, or changed like keys in an astronomical clock. The crew nurtured rumour, declaring that love for La Santa Roja, a female, had solidified his name in a house right at the base of the Cup, a theory backed by the ship’s carpenter, Lanolin Brows, who spied her on a balcony through a wooden telescope with lenses ground from pearls. She was wine, the reason for the attack. But Morgan refused to recognise love; he was Welsh, he insisted, and the grease of his diet had pasted his ego to his arteries.
    “Do you think I value a girl over jewels? In my village, compassion comes from diamonds; women are harder.”
    “You have torn your britches, sir. A knife.”
    “Make me a new pair, green and crimson. And why not replay the raid with rag dolls? Entertain the sailors.”
    The opportunity was too good to waste, though it meant intruding on ’Lin’s territory. The carpenter whittled automata in his spare time from driftwood and guano. His shiny figures, animated by little fires burning in their abdomens, were a delight to behold on the deck of long voyages. The men who could not read learned all about former campaigns and future barbarities from these shows: the capture of Puerto del Principe and the invasion of Maracaibo. Competing with ’Lin would not be easy, though the navigator, Omophagia Ankles, assisted him with yards of silk, tubs of rich buttons and perforated doubloons.
    Now he descended the peaks with a sigh. He felt he had coins in his gums but nowhere else. Oswald’s castle cooled rapidly at dusk; in a long field beyond the tiny church of San Silvester, a goat and rabbit nibbled nettles, facing each other like virgin duellists. Never cut out for a violent career, his sympathies were with them; killing and rape hung on him poorly, billowing around the waist of his conscience. Jabbing his stomach, he sounded the hull of his pseudonym. The insertion of a puppet there to steer his blood was one of the navigator’s ideas. ’Phagia never joked, so a cloth spleen must work.
    He reached Wolkenstein and entered his shop. A self reliant culture smothered his gables; the Ladini and Austrians were superstitious, quiet but rarely thirsty. They did not ignore him; he was too buoyant to drown in espresso neglect. Words came as infrequently as savours. From the far end of the varnished valley, where the lathes of Ortisèi span improbable camels for seasonal pilgrims, to the roughly hewn limits of Oswald’s own estate, he was liked in silence. Do pirates ever stop laying tables with cutlasses instead of spoons? He was doubted and welcomed for the wave in his hair. But no friendship sailed.
    “Who is the foreigner in the toyshop? He waits in the doorway as if to greet customers. One thigh is vintage.”
    “’Tology Spleen. A lateen soul who tacks images.”
    “Does he hope for Sassolungo to settle? The odds are rigged against his sales. He will shift no figures here.”
    The Ladini carvers were an equal to anyone at sea, however Swedish, and could fashion a pine-cone into a nativity scene with a toenail. This extreme skill with wood was the origin of their careful fascination with cloth. His own products, stuffed with napkins, were regarded as too wise for chisels, too soft for vices. His hands were slow with pins, and they chided his thumbs for not leaving home. They did not buy his work, which filled his shelves too well to be removed, but bludgeoned it with bread. They were looking for something horrid when they entered his shop, as if pumpernickel was a test for ghosts.
    He had stitched a thousand puppets in his career and was determined to shipwreck his blisters. He had never gazed deeply into water or glass and his possible age scared him; retirement is a time to dilute ambition with rum. He remembered the aftermath of the Panama massacre,