Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online

village, another kind of priest, a wise old man called a shaman. The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet, he seems to connect the populace
    to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest. Perhaps that is why the priest despises him."
    (3) "The main vegetable consumed in Aelfric is the turnip. With my clan it was the beet. Could that explain why these people are so docile and mine so fierce?"

    More than once during his first year in Aelfric did ex-king Alobar reconsider applying for a vassalic position with the lord of the manor. The life of the peasants was brutally hard. In return for the lord's protection, they had to work for a prescribed number of days a week on his lands. In the few remaining hours, they plowed, seeded, and harvested their own meager holdings and performed an endless succession of chores, such as chopping wood, butchering game, shearing sheep, digging ditches, drawing water, mending roads, carting manure, and building carts in which to cart still more. In the quiet ache of evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow, a sound that merged in his ear with the echo of the switch on the ox's hide.
    By then, gray had overtaken one of every four hairs on his head, and some nights he would pluck those pale hairs as if they were petals, saying to Frol, "If I wasn't elderly when our clan decreed I was, I soon will be. Harsh labor pierces the rosy membrane of youth and lets the shriveling brine seep in."
    Nevertheless, the work-worn months held satisfactions. The novelty of one wife continued to fascinate Alobar. Frol remained as devoted as when he was her sovereign, and she showed signs of maturing into a woman as sexually adept as Alma and only slightly less intelligent than Wren. With her company he was content, and when she issued twins, one of each gender, that first November, a new dimension was added to his life. Back in his home city, his offspring had been raised communally in a nursery adjoining the harem. The nursery was a female province, as foreign to his bootsteps as the serpent-seared cliffy of the edge. Now he discovered children, and the discovery blew blasts of sugar into every chamber of his heart.
    When Alobar had enough energy, he cataloged his experiences and observations and tried to profit from them, to what end he could not say. Because Christianity emphasized the value of the individual, in the Roman scheme every person had his or her place. In the frame of mind in which he'd been since first he was violated by the hair, this concept appealed to him, providing food for mental mastication.
    The peasants were a dull lot, by and large, but they had exhibited extraordinary kindness in helping the strangers set up housekeeping in a flea-bitten cottage with a dirt floor. Their friendliness increased after first Frol (out of conviction) and then Alobar (as a strategic maneuver) agreed to be baptized in the name of their exclusive god. However, certain activities were conducted in the village from which Alobar and his family were barred. These activities seemed to be social in nature, generally merry, and coincided with seasonal observances.
    The traditional winter festival, which among Alobar 's folk as well as many other Europeans was celebrated during the twelve days that separated the end of the lunar year (353 days long) from the end of the longer solar year (365 days), and whose purpose it was to equalize the two different celestial years, had been appropriated by the Christians and transformed into a religious holiday called "Christmas." As far as Alobar could determine, Christmas was the same winter festival of yore, except that the profound emotionalism annually precipitated by moon/sun influences the priest here attributed to the natal anniversary of "Christ," a Semitic man-god whose exact relationship to the One God Alobar could never quite get straight.
    On their first Christmas Day in Aelfric, Frol and Alobar were obliged to