The Fairy & the Farm. Part VII: The Quest

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February 25th 2007

Published: February 25th 2007

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The Wonder Farm

Somewhere under the Rainbow.

The Flipperty Gibbets did what they knew best; giggled, then led the fairy into the kingdom. The road was a patchwork of donated tar, a scar tissue of asphalt.
On an open field to her right, a group of kids taught a crimson kite to fly by gently stretching its string with rhythmic pulls, then giving it some slack to try its own wings and rise above the silhouette of the Table Mountain and the tree pepper pots that now stood aligned on the slope of Devil’s Peak.
On the other side of the road a colourful kindergarten exhaled, exhausted after a full day of vehemently playing kids and admonishing adults.
A small dog with a straw and cream coloured fur came bouncing towards her.
“That’s Storm.” Said Madame Windbag as the dog reached them.
“Then I guess you’re the legitimate owner of this.” The fairy said and picked out the scarf from her magical bag. She bent down and as she tied the scarf around Storm’s neck, the dog grew to twice its original size and a vague glow appeared around her silky fur.
“Could you take me to the king?” The airy asked as she

Storm with the Scarf

Dogs are very soft, especially compared to fast cars. Something careless drivers often don't understand.

was done. The dog nodded.
“Then we think you’ll manage by yourself from her on.” Said the Flipperty Gibbets.
“Whenever you need a prompter.” Said Mr Ratchet Jaw before Madame Windbag continued:
“Or you want to get found when you’re lost! We will be there. Now we have a broken promise about a gift to sort out.”
“Apparently I’ve promised a broken gift.” Said Mr Ratchet Jaw.
“No, you broke your promise about the gift!”
“But a promise is a gift, so why can’t I just replace it then with a new one?”
“Because I like the first one?”
“About the broken gift?”
“No!”
They kept on arguing as they walked towards the kite-flying kids. As they rounded the goats’ pen, the fairy could no longer hear what they were saying.
“Come.” Said Storm and led her further into the kingdom.
At the side of a small hill stood a man in a mint green dressing gown, picking Christmas decorations out of his wild beard and carefully hanging them onto a nearby palm tree. From the pocket of the dressing-gown protruded a duck with a Lone Ranger-mask.
Storm walked up to the man and as the fairy

A feathered culprit

That disguise doesn’t work on me. The Al-Quacking network stretched all the way down to the duck pond.

followed she noticed that he wore no shoes. She stood watching him for a few seconds as he attached the last decoration - a gaudy coloured ostrich egg - to the trunk of the palm tree, then turned to her.
“You’re lucky you weren’t here last night,” he started.
“This duck, in collaboration with two guinea fowls had decorated Shalom - our Hebrew goat - with all our Christmas decorations and set fire to his back legs. I woke up with the goat screaming, Balagaaan!, running around in circles outside my house.”
“It took me quite some time to put out the fire.” The King explained.
“It all began a few weeks ago when he suddenly said he was a turkey and fooled two other ducks into blowing themselves up inside our old tin showers. All that’s left you can see over there.”
He pointed to a striped area on the ground, some 20 metres away.
“We call it Ground Zebra.” He gave the duck an angry look.
“Now I don’t know what to do with him. Should I send him to the abattoir to make halaal-nuggets out of him, give him back to the Chinese soup

King Proteus

The Shapeshifting king here seen in his human guise as Andre' Laubscher.

kitchen from where he was saved, or, forgive him for a second time.”
The duck tried to sink deeper into the pocket.
“Anyway.” He turned to the fairy and the anger in his eyes vanished.
“You must be the fairy of Viking folklore.” He exclaimed.
“I’ve heard about your adventures and of your predicament.”
“You have?” The fairy asked a bit hesitant.
“But of course!”
“So, are you perhaps the King of the Fynbos kingdom?
He smiled and combed his beard with his left hand.
“Some call me that, but I would prefer if you called me Andre’ instead. That’s what my friends call me. The whole King-thing feels a bit unnecessary. I was just as surprised when I was born as everybody else. He kept smiling, continuously stroking his beard.
“I see you look impatient about finding out what we can do about your wings.
The fairy nodded as enthusiastically as a hungry mongoose.
“There are five things I need from you. Five different ingredients that can all be found here on the farm. You will also need a homemade potjie-pot and find someone that can prepare the concoction for you.” The fairy still nodded.
“You need

Dowon's shed

Somewhere behind all the "Treasurable trash" Down's small house can be seen.

honey from the collective soul of the bees, milk from Daisy the holy cow, tears from the stone fish, the whisper of a ghost and a bottle of Klipdrift.”
The fairy memorized all the different ingredients.

“I suggest you have a word with Glen, our herbalist. He will probably give you some advice. If you excuse me now, I have to go and settle a grudge between Lazarus the sheep, and our five geese.” He said, and trudged away with the duck surveying her suspiciously from its vantage point, bouncing wildly in the king’s deep pocket.

She walked to the top of a small hill where a duck pond was situated, and had a look around. A few small houses rested on the slopes around. A small dried brook separated her from a big storehouse where two horses grazed.
At the other side of her, she had a magnificent view of Cape Town, the whole of Table Mountain, and - she noticed with grief - Devil’s Peak. Below her was a playhouse for kids, that was now occupied by a hotchpotch of animals and, next to the playhouse, there was a slow burning fireplace.
Looking

An Asian Angel

Dowon transcending. She is a semi-deity born from an egg and thus never eat omelet. She knows Chinese Confucianism which she learned during the Dynasty of the three kingdoms, the Samguk era.

back to where she and Storm had come from, she saw more outbuildings and, next to a small shed there was a large tree on which a few swings hung and, behind the tree was another steep hill. There were also huge amounts of mixed objects balanced in piles.
“Treasure or trash trove, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.” She thought as she walked down from the hill and through the towering piles of stuff. As she got to the shed on the other side, a girl with Asian features emerged.
“Hello!” The Asian girl said. She had jet-black straight hair, and multi-coloured pants.
“Hi!” Said the fairy.
“Do you live here?”
“Yes. My name is Dowon, I’m a ceramicist. I come from Korea,” she explained.
As the fairy explained about her new task, Dowon answered straight away that she would make her a potjie-pot. She would use a new material she’d discovered, she told her, before she excused herself and hurried away.

The fairy walked past the tree with the swings and up the road towards the huge storehouse. As she walked across an old bridge, she noticed another smaller bridge made of wood that

Roaming Gnomes

The Asian representatives for the Garden Gnome Liberation Front patrolled the farm day and night and had set up a shelter for abducted and abused gnomes in the Western Cape, called Gnomes Without Homes. It’s an NGO all made in terracotta.

led to yet another peculiar house, on her left hand side. Underneath the bridge a spindly woman sat, eating spiders with mayonnaise and making loud sounds with her mouth as she swallowed the spiders alive.
The fairy found the sight repulsive and hurried into a house in front of her.
It was dark inside.
When her eyes adjusted to the poor light, her attention fell onto an ash white dog, which stood looking at her from a doorway leading to a large room. As their eyes met, the dog slowly turned and disappeared into the room. The fairy followed.
Loose cloth paintings filled the room from floor to ceiling. Some of the paintings had layers of fine dust on them while others had a freshly painted touch to their surface. They were all abstract - to abstract for most people to comprehend - yet there was something very direct and convincing about them.
One had a vortex of energy emerging from a morphing being, another had a pattern floating in nothingness. On a third one the fairy saw a fish whispering something into the ear of a little girl - not dissimilar from herself, she noticed. A

A vision in UV

Buffy with one of his visions: A horned Elf-god quenching his thirst in a brook that cuts through a enchanted Birch forest.

dog - the same one she’d followed into the room - played chess against the moon, in the background of the painting.
“Her name is Moon-Tan.” A man suddenly stepped out of one of the paintings that hung in the far end of the room. She couldn’t see him clearly, but she could see that the painting he stepped out of, depicted a lone wolf in a dark forest.
“She’s a gift from the moon.” The owner of the voice approached her.
“It was a restless full moon night, when the moon couldn’t be seen, neither could the stars. I found her cornered by four big dogs.
She was only a puppy and her fur was as black as the overshadowing night sky.
After I’d chased the dogs away, I lifted her up. Then as I held her in my arms the moon slowly emerged from behind the Earth’s shadow, and at that time, she changed colour. First the tail and the hind legs, and, as the full moon was yet again visible, she was ash white from top to bottom.”
The dog lay curled up on a soft brown cushion.
“I’m Buffy.” He switched on

Buffy's Desert Portal

How did she get all the way out into the middle of the desert? Why did she bring a trolley with a small bowl of goldfish? Why didn’t the water evaporate or wall out of the bowl while she got there? And why is she now killing the goldfish with a sling-shot, aiming on a nailed plank? If there are any answers to this, those answers are dark.

a UV-light and all the paintings started to glow. So too, did their eyes, she noticed as she looked at Buffy. His eyes blazed intensely luminous and looked deep into hers. A stippled beard veiled his chin and cheeks and tattoos covered his bare torso and agile arms. He wore a wolf-grey hat that looked like a hood and was filled with thoughts, and his hands were flecked with paint.
“Are you a painter?” Was all that the fairy managed to say.
“At times.”
“Did you paint all these?” The fairy pointed to the surrounding walls.
“Yes, but they’re not just paintings, they’re visions.”
“So, can you see the future then?” The fairy looked at him curiously.
“I see a possible future,” Buffy explained.
“If you tell someone their future, they have no future. You take away their dreams, their expectations and their hope, and their lives would be meaningless. I see crossroads on people’s life paths but I never tell them which road to choose.”
He sipped on a Black Label he’d just opened.
“Where did you learn that?” The fairy asked him.
“I learned it in the land of Pende, whose inhabitants, the Tupende, learned it

Painful memories

A needle, a bit of colour and a willing person was all Buffy needed to inflict art on random bodies. Seen here doing an Adinkra (Traditional West African patterns such as: Gye Nyame, Akoma, Bin Nka Bi and Akoko Nan) This is the "So Be Bra" being transfered onto human skin.

from a strange people coming from beyond the saltwater.”
The fairy had no idea where the land of Pende was, nor did she know anything about the Tupende.
“So, what do you know about me then?”
“Well.” He turned around, went over to an old wooden chest, dug out a bottle and returned.
“I sure do know you’ll need this.” He gave her a bottle of Klipdrift.
“It’s rat-poison to me any way, and now I’ve seen a far better use for it.” The bottle was big and heavy until she stuffed it into her bag.
“For the rest of the ingredients you need, I believe it would be wise to talk to the herbalist.” Buffy had another long sip of his beer.
“Is he here in the house?” She asked while watching Moon-Tan trying to scratch herself on her back.
Buffy walked over to the dog and started to pat her.
“No, in this house it’s only me and Colin. He’s a tour guide for a safari company specialised in alien safaris. If you want to find the herbalist I believe you should look in the garden.”
“Ok, thanks Buffy.” She went for the door after having a

Rainbow Ambulance

This car was served as an ambulance in the Algerian war for independence (1954-1962) and was afterwards maneuvered through the African continent by two French soldiers. It has then waited until the 18:th of May 2007 to be decorated by a graffiti artist, namely Faith47. The pipe-maker is now trying to rebuild it into a huge communal water-pipe.

second look at the painting with the fish and the girl that looked like her.
“Do you know the woman under the wooden bridge outside your house?”
“Yes. It’s my neighbour, the unnamed woman. She’s not dangerous or anything, but unless you want to get invited for eight-legged cookies and caterpillar juice, keep some distance.” He said and finished his bottle of Black Label with an elongated gulp.

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