FLIGHT FROM
 NEVÈRŸON
 Samuel R. Delany
   For
   Frank Romeo,
   and
   Robert Bravard, Camilla Decarnin,
   Mike Elkins, Gregory Frux, Robert
   Morales, & Michael Peplow, and,
   of course,
   Iva,
   who printed up file “i”




There is no such thing as an absolutely
proper meaning of a word, which is not
made possible by the very impropriety of
metaphorical displacement it seeks to
exclude. The impropriety of displaceability
of meaning and of infinite openness of
syntactic    reference     beyond     that
circumscribed by proper meaning is a
material force. The imposition of a
conclusive, self-identical meaning that
  transcends the seriality of displacement is
  therefore metaphysical or idealist. Its
  political equivalent is the absolute state (be
  it dictatorial or liberal) that imposes order
  on the displaceability of power through
  sedition. The political equivalent of
  displacement—that force deconstruction
  foregrounds against absolutist philosophies
  of identity—is continuous and plural
  revolutions, the openness of material
  forces which exceeds the imposition of
  power.
                              —Michael Ryan
                    Marxism and Deconstruction




                       I

THE TALE OF FOG AND
     GRANITE
It can hardly be an accident that the debate proliferates around a
crime story—a robbery and its undoing. Somewhere in each of
these texts the economy of justice cannot be avoided. For in spite
of the absence of mastery, there is no lack of effects of power.


                                              —Barbara Johnson
                                              The Critical Difference




                                1

      Later, the big man slept—peacefully for a dozen breaths.
Then, under the moon, a drop, three drops, twenty drops broke on
his face. Inside the nostrils loud air snagged. Lashes shook. The
head rocked on stone. Dragging a heel back, he raised a hand, first
to rub at his cheek, then to drop at his chest. “Get away! One-eyed
beast! Get away, you little…” His hand rose again—to beat at
something. But the fingers caught in chain.
      Curled with his back against the big man’s side, the little
man—either because of the big one’s rocking or the neck chain’s
rattle or the barkings out of sleep like shouts from a full-flooded
cistern—rolled over and was on his knees.
     Green eyes beat open.
     The little man grabbed the great wrist, while heavy fingers,
untangling from brass, caught the small shoulders.
    “Calm yourself, master!” the little one whispered. “You are
my breath, my light, my—”
     “I was dreaming, Noyeed—”
     “—my love, my lord, and my life!”
     “No, Noyeed! I was only dreaming—”
     “Of what, master? What dream?”
     “I was dreaming of…”
     The little man’s skull blocked the moon, leaving only the
lunar halo by which farmers predict rain in three days—though one
out of five such predictions brings only overcast.
     “I was dreaming of you, Noyeed!”
     “Me, master?”
       “But I was where you are, now, leaning above me. And
you—a much younger you, a boy, Noyeed, with your blind eye and
your dirty hair—you lay on the ground where I am, like this,
terrified. And, with the others, I…”
     “Master?”
     “Noyeed—” Holding the man, no taller than a boy, up against
the night, Gorgik’s arms relaxed; the small face fell—“either you
know something I can never understand and you will not tell me.
Or I know something that, for all my struggles toward freedom,
I’m still terrified to say.”
      “Master…” Noyeed turned his forehead against Gorgik’s
chest.
     Gorgik’s fingers slid to the little man’s neck, touching iron.
“Just a moment.” He slipped his forefingers under the collar,
centimeters too big for the one-eyed man against him. “You
needn’t wear this any longer.” He pulled open the hinge. “It’s time
to give it back to me.”
     Noyeed grappled the heavy wrists. “No!” Through thin skin
and thick, bone felt bone.
     “What is it?” Gorgik moved his chin in Noyeed’s hair. It
smelled of dogs and wet leaves.
     “Don’t take it from me!”
     “Why?”
     “You told me you or I must wear it…?”
     “Yes. Here, yes.” The night was cool, dry. “But by day only I
need to, as a sign of the oppression throughout Nevèrÿon—”
     “Don’t!”
     Gorgik looked down, moving Noyeed to the side.
     The single eye blinked.
     A breeze crossed the moonlit roof, while a crisp leaf beat at
the balustrade as if, after an immense delay, it would topple the
stone onto someone below, who even now might be gazing up.
“Don’t what?”
      The little man thought: He looks at me as if he were hearing
all the others who have begged him for his collar.
     The big man thought: I could leap up, seize that leaf from the
wind, and wrest it from its endless, minuscule damages.
     Noyeed said: “Don’t encumber yourself with such ornaments,
master.” (The leaf turned, blew back, then up and over the wall.)
“Let me wear your collar! Let me be your lieutenant and the bearer
of your standard! And this…?” Noyeed reached across Gorgik’s
chest to rattle the chain on which hung a verdigris astrolabe. “You
go to meet with Lord Krodar tomorrow at the High Court. Why
wear something like this?” He reached down to touch the knife at
the Gorgik’s side. “Or this. Go naked, master. Your bare body will
serve much better than armor or ornament to speak of who you
are.”
     “Why do you say—?”
     “Look, master!” The little man rolled to his belly. “Look!”
     Turning to his side, Gorgik pushed up on an elbow.
     Part of the crenelation near their heads had fallen. Between
broken stones, by craning, they could see down into the yard. Near
an outbuilding armed and unarmed figures stood at a small,
flapping fire.
     “Here we are on the roof of your headquarters. There are
your supporters. You are only a shadow away from being the most
powerful man in all Nevèrÿon.”
       “No, Noyeed.” Gorgik chuckled. “No. My power is nothing
in Kolhari, in Nevèrÿon. I would be the most unfortunate of rebels
if I let such delusion take hold.”
      “But you may become the most powerful man in all Nevèrÿon.
And if you would, to further your cause, someone—perhaps
me—must think it possible. Go naked, master. Let your
fearlessness be your protection. In the meantime, let me carry
your—no, let me be your sign!”
     “Noyeed, I don’t understand.”
      “Look, master.” The little man elbowed forward, staring
through the break. “Just look!” He pointed, not at the milling
people below but at the horizon’s hills black under moon-dusted
dark. “Already you can see fog gathering in the mountain peaks
outside the city. By dawn it will roll down over all Kolhari, where it
will lie till sunlight burns it off. Naked, you will ascend into that
fog, meet it, become one with it. Abandon the signs by which men
and women know you, and you will become invisible—or at least
as insubstantial to them as that mist. Your power—now small, but
growing—will, at whatever degree, be marked at no limit. Without
clear site, it will seem everywhere at once. That’s what such
invisibility can gain you. That’s what you can win if you shrug off
all signs. You will be able to move into, out of, and through the
cities of empire like fog, without hindrance, while I—”
      “What nonsense, Noyeed!” Gorgik laughed. “Has your
harried childhood and hunted youth wounded you to where you
can only babble—”
      “Not babble, master! Listen! Unencumbered, you can be as
the all-pervasive fog. And if you need now or again to be at a
specific place and time, use me! Wearing your collar as the mark of
your anger and authority, I can stand on the city’s stones wherever
you would place me, leaving you free for greater movement, while
I serve you, visible to all, your incorporated will. Oh, among slaves
the collar will make me invisible to their masters as it has already
made you. Among nobles, it will make me at least as much a
reminder of injustice as you were. And among the good men and
women who do their daily work it will transform me into that
oddity and outrage intruding on them the reality of evils they
would rather forget. Though, master—” and Noyeed
laughed—“with my missing eye and skulking ways have I ever
been anything else? You wear the collar because you were once a
slave. Well, so was I. You require the collar to motivate the engines
of desire. Well, as you have seen, for me it’s the same. We are
much alike, master. Why not let me stand in your place? Why not
move me as you would move a piece in the game of power and
time, sending me here and there, your servant and marked spy? Let
me be your manifestation in the granite streets of the cities, leaving
you free for all unencumbered missions. I will be your mark. You
will be my meaning. I will be your sign. You will be my
signification. You will be the freer, relieved of the mark I carry, to
move more fully, further, faster.”
    “Noyeed, I’m afraid to—because I know what I know, and
you are in ignorance of it. Or because you know what you
know—and I am the deceived.”
      “Oh, master, I will always be your finger and your foot, your
belt and your blade, your word and your wisdom, made real in the
open avenue and the closed courtyard. Only I beg you, let me do it
wearing your sign—”
     “I say no, Noyeed! I say nonsense!”
     “As you have seen how I love your body, master, your hand,
your mouth, your ear, your eye, your knee, your foot, what I speak
is a bandit’s, a wanderer’s, a one-eyed murderer’s long-thought
wisdom—”
     “You babble! And yet… as I visit the court tomorrow,
perhaps there’s something in what you say about the way I should
go. Perhaps for just a little I might…”
      And still later, when the big man and the one-eyed man came
from the dark mansion into the yard among the men and women at
the fire, Noyeed still wore the collar, while Gorgik no longer wore
either the chain with the astrolabe, nor any sword, nor clout, nor
dagger—as if all had been discarded or given away during the
descent through the empty building.




                                2

     Some years later, at the ear of his ox, ahead of his half-empty
provisions cart, a young smuggler walked through the outer streets
of Kolhari.
     A gibbous moon still showne.
     Call him stocky rather than thin. At some angles he looked
even loutish: there’d been little enough in his life to refine him
since he’d first run away from the farm for the city. At others,
however, he was passably handsome, if you ignored the healed-over
pockmarks from an acne that, though now long finished with, had
been more severe than most and whose traces still roughened his
forehead and marred his cheeks above the thinner hairs edging his
beard. Peasant or prince could have had that face as easily, but the
hard hands, the cracked feet, and the cloth bound low on a belly
already showing its beer were unstable signs, in those days, he was
not the latter.
      The cart wheels rumbled onto the road generally considered
the division between Sallese, a neighborhood of wealthy merchants
and successful importers, lucky businessmen and skillful
entrepreneurs, and Neveryóna, a neighborhood of titled estates and
hereditary nobles with settled connections—though lately the
boundary had become blurred. Today there were any number of
business families who’d dwelt in the same mansion for three
generations, some of whom had even acquired a title or two by deft
marriage of this youngest daughter to that eldest son; and more
than one noble family had been forced by the times to involve itself
in entrepreneurial speculation.
     The young smuggler squinted.
      Moonlight leached all green from the leaves, all brown from
the trunks.
     Was it two hours till dawn?
     Something moved by an estate wall’s turning, way along the
crossroad. Something pale, something slow, something huge as a
dragon coiled the suburban avenue.
       Overspilling the hills above the city, fog had crawled down
through wide streets and narrow alleys, till, across the whole town,
it kissed the sea with an autumn kiss.
     The cart rolled; the smuggler looked left.
      Certainly the last time he’d come to Neveryóna by moonlight,
he’d been able to see three times as many mansion roofs, even to
the High Court of Eagles. Ordinarily such a moon would light the
black peaks, which till an hour ago had held back the mist. But now
both mansions and mountains were over-pearled, moon-dusted,
veiled.
     The cart rolled; the smuggler looked right.
      More fog had moved in, as if, rippling up from the waterfront
to the road’s end there, a phantom ocean collapsed toward him.
      He looked over his shoulder. The young smuggler had
traveled many roads, you understand, and had often looked back at
the way winding to the horizon, while he’d thought: Is it possible I’ve
come so far? both fearful at, and proud with, his ignorance of the
distance a moment before. Behind him, however, the pavement
looked less like a road than like a yard—say one from the inner city
with a neighborhood cistern sunk in it and closed round by haze.
As fog cut away the distance ahead and behind, so it cut away pride
and fear, or any other feeling of accomplishment in his journey.
What was left him was dull, small, and isolate.
     His bare foot squashed damp leaves.
     He looked forward.
     Visible above the wall, its crenelations irregular in moon-mist,
the mansion he neared now slowed his gait. Not his destination, it
was, he knew, deserted—as were several walled estates near here.
But there was a story to this one, and he angled away to see better
where tiles had fallen from the facade, and terra-cotta castings had
dropped from the cornice to crash—how many years
before?—onto the lawns, behind silent stone.
     The mansion had once been a lesser town house of a southern
baron, Lord Aldamir, who, as his power had eroded in the south,
had leased this home in the north to a series of minor nobles. They
had not treated it well, had finally abandoned it. And the political
upstart, Gorgik the Liberator, had rented the building as
headquarters for his campaign to abolish slavery throughout
Nevèrÿon. The Liberator’s armed men had patrolled its roof and
stood guard at its deep-set gate. Horses had cantered to the
studded entrance, their riders bawling messages for the leader
within.
      The Liberator was a giant of a man, so people said, and had
once been a slave himself in the empress’s obsidian mines at the
foot of the Faltha Mountains. Gaining his freedom, he’d continued
to wear his slave collar, declaring it would stay round his neck till,
whether by armed force or political mandate, slavery itself was
obliterated from the land.
     Later, people noted that it was not the radicalness of his
program that had so upset the country, for, in truth, slavery as an
economic reality had been falling away from Nevèrÿon ever since
the Dragon had been expelled from the High Court twenty-five
years before, when the Eagle—or her manifestation in the Child
Empress Ynelgo—had commenced her just and generous reign.
Rather it was the radicalness of his appearance that had bothered
the nobles, merchants, and their conservative employees—not the
Liberator’s practice so much as his potential; for appearances are
signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what
appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.
      Several armed and surprise attacks on the Liberator had been
financed from various sources. Gorgik had repelled them. But once
a rabble of unemployed and impoverished workers, supplemented
by soldiers from the private guard of nobles close to the court
(despite their aid, the contributors had managed to remain as
nameless as the gods), gathered on a misty night in the month of
the Weasel, when the fog lapped late over the mountains and rolled
down through the moonlight to obscure the city’s corners and
crevices.
     They’d stormed the Liberator’s house.
       Here, however, the story crumbled into conflicting versions.
Some said that, on hearing the approaching horde, the Liberator
had fled with his supporters to the hills around Kolhari and up into
the Falthas. Others said, no, that was impossible. The gang had
been too stealthy, too quick. It was far more likely that, in the fog,
they had simply raided the wrong mansion and the Liberator,
hearing of it a mansion or two away, had had time to escape. Still
others claimed they’d got the proper house all right—the very
building that rose behind the wall before the smuggler now—but
the information that this was the Liberator’s headquarters had been,
itself, misdirection. The home here had never belonged to the
Liberator at all; the true headquarters were a close and careful
secret.
      But one thing all agreed on: the building they’d broken into
that night was empty. No guards stood at the gate. No soldiers
strolled the roof. No furniture stood in the rooms. No garbage
moldered in the great pots, three broken, behind the kitchen
midden. Oh, perhaps a vagrant now and again had climbed the wall
to build a brief fire by one or another outbuilding—but the charred
sticks in the makeshift rings of stone were as likely to be years as
months or weeks old. How could a powerful political leader, and
his secretaries, and his courtiers, and his armed garrisons, and his
plans, and his records, and his recruiting forces, and his provisions,
aides and officers vanish from a walled estate with, at most, an
hour’s warning (more likely minutes’), leaving no certain sign?
      Not that the story ended here. But now the various versions
multiplied more. The Liberator was still at work thoughout
Nevèrÿon, now in the south, claimed some, now in the north. The
Liberator was no more, claimed others—indeed had never been.
Or at least had never been other than an eccentric freeman, wearing
a slave collar for his own eccentric purposes, wandering the Old
Market of the Spur and talking too much in the taverns about
fanciful political schemes. Now some said not only was this the
false headquarters of the Liberator, but, though all had thought
him that fabled man, the collared giant himself was only a ruse or,
indeed, a lieutenant, or one of many lieutenants to the true
Liberator, who was actually a wiry, one-eyed man, once a cunning
bandit (who may or may not have been a former slave) and who
was, for perverse and powerful reasons (that is, sexual), the true
wearer of the collar. No, said others, it was the giant who was the
Liberator, and the one-eyed man was his lieutenant. Each wore the
collar, declared others who said they’d seen them. Both wore the
collar at different times for different reasons, reasoned others who
claimed such reason was only common sense, given the confusion
among those who ought to know. There was no one-eyed man, the
smuggler heard from a drunken soldier who’d declared he’d fought
under Gorgik when, collarless, the Liberator had spent time as an
officer in the empress’s Imperial Army: “That was just a dream he
sometimes had. I remember it as clearly as I remember my
mother’s hearth. We’d be standing night guard outside his tent and
hear him within, mumbling in his sleep over such a one-eyed
apparition. It was only bad dreams.” There was no scarred giant, he
heard from a crippled cutpurse who swore he’d run with the
one-eyed man when his gang had holed up in the Makalata Caves.
“One time at night as we all squatted by the fire, he talked of a
great foreman with a scar down his face who’d been kind to him
when, for a few months as a boy, he told us, he’d been taken by
slavers. But that was only campfire talk.” Still, whatever the
version, or whatever the various versions’ relation to the ineluctable
truth they mirrored, masked, manifested, or distorted, all agreed, as
they agreed the mansion ravaged that foggy night had been empty,
that it was on such nights as this, when all boundary lines and
limits were thrown into question, that the Liberator could be
counted on to do his most pointed work—if, indeed, there was, or
had ever been, such a man.
      The oxcart halted beside the smuggler, who turned now to
slap the beast’s red haunch.
     Ox and man walked again through the fog, the cart trundling.
     The smuggler knew, yes, more of these conflicting stories
than might be expected of someone with either his past history or
present position. Had he been able to write and read of what he
knew, we might even call him a student of such tales—though he
was an illiterate in a largely illiterate age.
       A youth quick to smile, easy of gesture, and slow in speech,
his usual talk stayed with genial anecdotes dramatizing
(exaggerations, to be sure) his comic incompetence at all callings.
Passing acquaintances found him easy to enjoy and easier to forget,
and few remembered the way his questions could grow quiet,
intelligent, continuous, and committed. Fewer still would have
marked him, thick-wristed, beer-bellied, and haft-fingered as he
was, as a young man obsessed.
      But many times, in the taverns and markets of Kolhari and
other towns, in back-country inns and desert oases, he’d listened
for mention of the Liberator; and when a story touching on Gorgik
began at the counter of some winter’s mountain inn or around
some summer’s seaside beach-fire, he was ready with measured,
attentive questions, based on his own assessments, collations, and
orderings of the tales he’d heard so far. On three occasions now,
he’d found himself having to argue hotly that he was not a spy for
the High Court, seeking to traduce an Imperial usurper. One night
he’d actually had to run from a much louder and less rational
argument that started at a forest resting place in the eastern Avila
with a dough-bellied man, who, it turned out, had once sold slaves
himself and had lost a brother and a friend to the swords of a huge,
city-voiced bandit and his barbarian accomplice. (“A yellow-haired
dog of a boy with—I tell you, by all the gods of craft—both his
eyes! They certainly called themselves Liberators—though they
were nothing but the scum of all slave stealers!”) Another than our
smuggler might have let such violences dissuade him from his
research. His dubious profession led him, however, to expect
trouble anyway, though time had proved him not prone to it: these
inconveniences were not too great a price for information.
      The situations that resulted in troubles had only impressed on
him, finally, that the object of his obsession was not some innocent
and indifferent fable, but rather a system of hugely conflicting
possibilities and immensely turbulent values. And whether the
Liberator was actually that great a concern to the High Court itself,
as some maintained, the smuggler had, by now, as much evidence
to refute as to confirm.
     The origin of his interest had been, as least as far as he could
reconstruct it, the most innocent of happenstance. Perhaps that
innocence was what justified the intensity of his pursuit.
     There had been a girl.
       A lively little partridge, she’d come on one of his early trips to
the south, with him and a friend—a walleyed city boy, born in the
gutters of the Spur, a raucous Kolhari twang in his crude and
constant chatter the young smuggler had, at times, found comic in
its licentiousness and, at others, comforting on those vastly still,
ponderously deserted back forest trails, just for the noise. The two
youths had been paid by a Kolhari market vendor to run a
shipment of magical implements to a merchant in the Garth who
knew of certain southerners who would pay handsomely for the
marvelously empowered trinkets—but not as handsomely as the
price you’d have to charge if you absorbed the exorbitant tax the
Child Empress’s customs inspectors would impose.
       By now he’d forgotten the girl’s name among the names of
several such girls he’d taken on several such trips. (At what friend’s
house had he met her? She’d been in some kind of trouble and had
wanted to leave the city. But the details were gone from memory.)
Once they’d begun, there’d been bad feelings between her and his
foulmouthed friend. Eventually one morning, somewhere south of
Enoch, while he lay dozing in the blankets beside their burnt-out
fire, she’d bent over him to tell him she was off for water. (Though
he’d been half asleep, he remembered that.) His friend had found
the empty water pot, a dozen steps from the campsite, set carefully
on a stump. They’d looked for her a bit, waited a bit more, had
speculated on accident, on passing slavers. But then, she’d run off
from them once already, his friend had pointed out.
     They’d do better with her gone.
     They’d gone on.
     He never saw her again.
    Indeed, today, had he run into her on the streets of Able-ani
or Ka’hesh, he might not have recognized her. What he
remembered, however, was something she had said.
     On the first day of their journey they’d halted the cart just
beyond the Kolhari gates. Sitting on a fallen log, the girl had toyed
with a chain around her neck from which hung some odd piece of
jewelry, chased round its rim with barbaric markings. (Though he
could not recall her face, he could bring back her brown fingers on
the bronze pendant fixed to its neck chain. That was
jaw-clenchingly clear.) And she had said:
      “I met a man, while I was in the city—a wonderful man! His
friends called him the Liberator. He walked with me for an
afternoon in the Old Market—he knew all about the market, all
about Kolhari, all about the world! I mustn’t tell you too much of
him. That would be dangerous. But I went to visit him again, in his
headquarters—a big old mansion he’d rented out in Neveryóna.
Oh, you’d think he was wonderful, too. I know you would. He was
brave, gentle, and handsome—like you! Though he had a scar
down one side of his face. He gave me…”
      But here recollection blurred. Thinking about it since, he’d
completed her statement many ways. Did she say he’d given her the
knife she always wore in her sash, hidden under her bloused out
shift? Or the shift itself? Or the necklace? Or the tiny cache of iron
coins, which, like the parsimonious mountain girl she was, she’d
always been so chary of spending? But she’d talked a lot, and he’d
seldom listened, as she’d soon grown used to not getting back
much in the line of answers. (His friend and the girl, both had
loved to chatter. Silly to have expected them to get along. It took a
quiet person, like himself, to go so easily with such. He hadn’t seen
his friend in a year.) Months later, when the girl was gone and the
storming of the Liberator’s mansion was discussed from Ellamon
to Adami, the smuggler’s numberless encounters with the name
Gorgik the Liberator had brought back the girl’s memory and made
her words from that morning the core of an obsession. (“…
wonderful!… He was brave, gentle, and handsome—like you!… He
gave me…” But how could he have listened more when he’d been
so surprised she’d felt that way about him at all?) And whenever,
later, the Liberator was discussed, her chance mention seemed to
have given him a tad more knowledge than the others had. (“… He
walked with me for an afternoon in the Old Market… his
headquarters, a big old mansion he rented out in Neveryóna…”)
Though he seldom spilled much of it into words, that extra
knowledge was supremely pleasurable; and he cherished that
pleasure, nourishing it with continued inquiry. Sometimes while
considering less likely versions, he had to relegate the girl’s remarks
temporarily to the same dubious order as other conflicting
accounts. (“… a scar down one side of his face…” Well, some said
he was scarred; some said he was one-eyed; some mentioned both.
And some mentioned neither.) But because hers had come first,
most of the time it was easy enough to let her statements stand as
the fixed truth around which he organized the other narrative bits
into their several narrative systems, thence to organize the systems
themselves as to most probable likelihood—while another part of
his mind, the acquisitive part, the part that went poking and
prodding in other people’s memories for any and all fragments, no
matter how preposterous (memories failing with time and boredom
or inflated with imagination and self-aggrandizement), that part
could claim, just as truthfully as the part that privileged a forgotten
girl’s chance remark, to be equally interested, or as passionately
disinterested, in them all.
     There’d been other women in his life more recently, three of
them actually (and not that recent—), one younger and two older
than he. Only the youngest had been able to pretend any tolerance
at all to his speculations on the Liberator; and even her pretense
had lasted only awhile. Could that be, finally, why it had been so
easy to leave them?
      Would that long-vanished mountain girl have been able to
sustain her interest in the Liberator, he wondered, in the face of
what his had become?
     He turned by another wall.
     Behind him the house that may or may not have once been
the Liberator’s moved into mist.




                                  3

    Minutes later, off through fog, the smuggler made out a gate.
Odd, he thought, as his cart rolled by mortared stones, for all these
moonlight visits he was still not sure which lord’s estate he went
to—but then, he was not working for the lord.
     He squinted to see if he could make out guards, only
decorative in any case here in the city. Ahead he saw what might be
a spear leaning from a far niche—
     “Pssst!” from the door beside him.
     He halted his ox.
     Through a view hole in the planks, a lamp glimmered with
butter-colored light.
    “Well!” came through muffling boards. “You’re here, then.
Good!”
      Wick flickering in its snout, the clay tub slid onto the small
shelf, its base scraping sandy wood. The small moon, instead of
holding a halo to the door, cleared the near air.
     Metal scraped plank. Plank scraped stone. A board beside the
one with the hole moved back in the rock.
     He grunted at his stopped ox, as if to stop her again.
      The old woman said: “Uhhh! This fog, I don’t like it one bit!”
She pulled away another board and set it back by the first. Tied up,
the daytime leather hangings were bunched above. “Bad things
happen in such weather. I’ve seen enough of this mist, and I know.
Though it’s all the better for the likes of you, isn’t it? Well, I hope it
follows you south and leaves some clear suns and moons with us
here in the city. Boy!” she called back by her hip. “You could at
least lend a hand with these. No, never mind. I’ve done them
already. Bring that bag here. Be quiet! Do you want to wake the
new kitchen girl we hired yesterday? She doesn’t need to know of
our doings. Oh, no. Not her, yet.” Someone behind her scrambled
over something (“Quiet!” the woman hissed), picked it up, moved
with it. She reached behind, then swung forward a cloth sack.
“Here, take it, now. And go on. Go on, I say! You have your
instructions. They’re the same as last time. You’ve done it before.
Do the same again. Deliver it to the same place. You’ll get the
same reward when you arrive. And the same when you return. Now
be off—”
     “I go out now, grandma?” a boy shrilled behind her in a heavy
barbarian accent. “I go out?”
     The servant woman swayed into the glow, her hood putting a
shadow on her deeply seamed cheek, which, in the haze, was the
darkest thing about. The accent meant there was no possibility of
blood between them. The smuggler looked at her brown, creviced,
northern face.
     “No one see me,” the little barbarian went on behind her. “I
hide in the fog and be back before—”
     “Not on your life!” the woman shot back. “You think I’d let
you go off in this miasma? Bad men are out in the city on nights
like this, believe me: thieves, smugglers, murderers, and
worse—like this one here!” She gestured at the smuggler, and her
face wrinkled more—yes, smiling, he realized now. “Here, I say.
Take it.”
     He took the bag from fingers almost as large-knuckled as his
own. “Yes, ma’am.” What she’d lugged in one hand was heavy
enough for him to hold in two. “I’ve got it.” He hefted the sack
against his chest, turned to the cart, and dropped it, clanking and
changing shape, as it slid over what was already there. He pushed it
under a cluster of old-fashioned three-legged pots, bound together
by their handles and only a month back declared, by official edict
from the High Court, incapable of holding magic as long as they
were unsealed, and therefore—when unsealed—untaxable. Behind
him he heard one board and another scrape into place; then the bar.

    “Come away, now, boy.” The voice was muffled again. “Give
me your hand I say…”
     He looked back to see the luminous hemisphere this side of
the opening shrink, then vanish. The buttery flame wavered behind
the hole, grew small, was gone.
      Where the haloed moon had hung was a pearly smear.
Holding the canvas cover in blunt fists, the young smuggler yanked
its edge down more firmly. Stepping to the ox’s cheek, he grasped
the harness, clicked his tongue against his mouth’s roof with an
indrawn breath, and tugged the heavy-shouldered beast around on
the return road.
     Walking ahead of his loud cart, he smiled. Now, he thought,
I’m a smuggler again. A bad man about in the streets. (Whatever
was in the bag had been metal and in many flat pieces. He’d felt
their round edges. Which was odd, though not remarkable.) Once
again he was taking a contraband load to the south, carrying from
people he didn’t know to other people he didn’t know. Nor, save
for the metal makeup and disk-like shapes that had come to him
over a few moments through the canvas, was he sure what he
carried.
      Years back when the smuggler had begun smuggling, at one
point or another he’d look to find out what was in his sack: salt,
silver, jewelry, magic fetishes, or sometimes even the sealed bullae
in which clinked the mysterious contract tokens that signed, in
those primitive times, a certain level of commerce. But it was
common lore among smuggling men and women that the less one
knew of what one carried, the better things were both for the client
and, finally, for oneself. He’d accommodated such lore by putting
off his look each trip till nearer and nearer its end. Finally,
somehow, three, then seven, then numberless trips had passed
when he’d forgotten to look at all. Now the thought only returned
to him as the memory of a juvenile risk he’d used to take. (And am
I really that young anymore? the smuggler wondered. Now and
again it seemed to him he’d been smuggling an awfully long time.)
Perhaps his meticulous inquisitiveness over anything and
everything concerning the Liberator came from having to deflect
natural curiosity from where, naturally, it was wanted. He’d thought
that often. But this was the third time now he’d gone south at the
behest of the old woman at the estate wall’s secondary door. He’d
first gotten the commission from another thief (“… Follow these
turnings. Be there with your cart at this time…”) and could
honestly say he did not know her name, nor the name of the family
she was servant to, nor whether she worked for her own gain, her
master’s, or someone else’s. I know nothing of you; but then (he
spoke along to himself, on the road back into the city) you know
nothing of me, old woman. You have no notion you’re talking to a
man with a passion and a purpose. Only a small stone’s heave from
here is the Liberator’s house, but you’ve no idea that I may know
more tales of that fabled home and hero than any else save
probably his one-eyed lieutenant—more, possibly, than anyone in
Nevèrÿon, if some of my conjectures are true.
      And why should that be anything to me? laughed the seamed
servant of the mind he carried with him. (Her words were as clear
as if she sat atop his cart.) Will that help you finish your job the
faster? Will it make you braver, quicker, more cautious, more clever
in carrying out your task?
     To which the smuggler laughed back, answering: Ah,
grandma, how much you and your kind miss, who judge the rest of
us only by how well we can do your work. But you’re one of those
who thinks there’s no more to life than that, aren’t you?
     His lips moved in the mist.
      As the old woman began to defend her position and denigrate
his, he ambled along the damp avenue, now posing one argument,
now posing another, now revising his own polemic, now revising
hers, this time toward anger, that time toward submission, now
with the barbarian boy adding his comment, now with the
long-vanished mountain girl giving hers.
     … a man with a passion and a purpose as great, in its way, I’d
guess, as the Liberator’s, or perhaps even greater, for it covers all
the Liberator does and has done, yet has none of the emotions that
drive him now to error, that trip him now in defeat, a passion and
purpose that, for all its committed disinterest, has nothing to do
with this scheming and scuffling, this cheating and wheedling that
make up the daily lives of you and me.
     But here he was, already turning onto the Sallese road.
     Neveryóna was behind.
     He looked back for the Liberator’s mansion. But while he’d
been wrangling with his imaginary companions about the worth of
his commitment to this bit of myth and history, he’d managed to
wander, without noticing, past the myth’s major historical
manifestation. Perhaps the fog had grown so thick it had
swallowed the empty house?
     No. He’d been too busy talking to himself.
     Momentarily he considered going back to scale the wall and,
tonight, exploring it, adding some firsthand knowledge to all his
hearsay, seeing for himself the floors and windows and empty
chambers that may (or may not) have been the Liberator’s.
      … make you braver, quicker, more cautious, more clever in
carrying out your task? (Believe it, she was still going on!) No,
certainly this was not the night to trespass on fabled grounds,
leaving a cart of contraband outside. What might he expect to find
of the Liberator in such a place anyway, years after it had been
ransacked by angry marauders? (He walked through vapor.) He’d
be back in Kolhari in a few weeks.
     There’d be more foggy mornings.




                               4

     He walked; and the city drew in to him.
     Either side the street, sandstone walls and planked-over
doorways closed out mist. Moon-glimmer on wet flags spoke of
recent rain, though no drops had tickled his shoulders.
     A large basket on his back, strapped with raffia rope to his
forehead, an old man came from an alley, crossed before the ox,
and trudged behind a cistern into more mist.
     Later, down another street, he saw a door open and three
people rush out, followed in a moment by two more. One held up
a lamp filled with the cheap oil that burned red. Some moments’
mumbling, and they went back in—except one woman who ran
away along the alley, while, from inside, with one hand high on the
jamb, a man leaned out to call: “Yes! Yes! Tell him they sent me up
here to get…” He missed the object—probably medicinal and
certainly magical. “I’ll be down with it in a minute! Now run!” Fog
and darkness obscured the hems and collars that might have placed
them for socially. The man’s voice sounded foreign, however, and
better bred than might be expected in this neighborhood.
       He passed the incident he would, no doubt, never know more
of than this. Certainly it hinted at stories as complex as any he
could tell of the Liberator. But he knew them only as inarticulate
surmises; and would forget them, he knew too, in moments amidst
the voices playing in his mind, would absorb them among the
myriad forgettables that were the encounter, over any hour, dark or
light, with the city.
     Cart wheels wobbled on cobbles.
      He turned his ox off Black Avenue onto the Pavç, which
sloped down to the Spur. Fog and moonlight grayed the building
walls. Planning to leave Kolhari by one of the little southern roads,
rather than the northern connection with the great north-south
highway, he’d wanted to move out with the earliest market delivery
carts so as to have, at least for the opening of the journey, the
safety and anonymity of the more traveled backroads below the
city.
      An hour or so before sunup, the market porters set torches
here at the bridge mouth for predawn traffic. This morning the
flare at the far wall had already snuffed to a black brand touched
with coals. Sickly and silver, the near flame licked and wagged
under smoke.
     As he crossed the quayside, firelight feeble on the pitted
bridge wall showed only how much denser the mist had
become—and a few incomprehensible graffiti. Something to be
thankful to the fog for: it was harder to see the scrawls and
scratches that, day by day, appeared—more and more of them—on
the bridge’s walls and stanchions or on the houses nearby. The first
writings he’d seen, more than a year ago, had been long and
intricate. They had been put up (for writing was what they were) by
the students who now and again came into town from their
suburban schools out near Sallese. But as the old messages washed
out or were rubbed off and new ones were written, soon a few
signs among them seemed to take predominance, till today they
were about the only ones you saw. And he’d caught both barbarians
and baronets, as well as students, marking them with a lump of red
clay or a bit of burnt wood, believing, as they did so at dawn or
sunset, that they were unobserved. The smuggler had it on the
authority of his foulmouthed friend (who of course had mastered
them immediately and had once spent an afternoon actually trying
to teach them to the smuggler, who simply had not been able to
remember a one, till both had become angry and frustrated; they’d
seen each other a few times since, but that had really been the end
of their friendship) that these particular signs transcribed the varied
and eccentric curses of the city’s itinerant camel drivers, which
combined in eccentric ways various terms for women’s genitalia,
men’s excreta, and cooking implements.
      Unable to read even as much of them as the scamps who
wrote them and could read nothing more, the smuggler had finally
trained himself to ignore them; they were marrings to be
overlooked while the eye was out for other, more meaningful
detail.
     Usually when the moon lingered toward the day the torches
were not set out, and he’d be able to see all the way across the
bridge, into the market square, to the glimmer on the water that
plashed in the fountain at the square’s center—as long as the stalls
and vending stands were not yet up.
    But tonight, to fight the fog that now and again closed out the
moon completely, the torches had, indeed, been lit. As the cart
rolled onto the bridge, waist-high walls at either side and clotted
shallows beneath, the weak fire showed the crockery shapes under
the lashed canvas; then firelight slid away, leaving them black. And
the bridge thrust three meters into dim pearl—and vanished.
      He cuffed the ox’s shoulder to hurry her, confident that the
old structure was the same stone, bank to bank, as it had been by
day or by other nights. Still, images of breaks and unexplained
fallings drifted about him.
     The cart rolled loudly forward.
     The haze kept quiet distance.
     Somewhere just beyond the flares, the Child Empress’s
couriers came at noon to cry out news to the people crossing. Was
it marked by a raised paving stone? He hadn’t caught a courier in
months.
     He walked.
     Mist retreated.
     Bridge flags floated out of it.
      Ahead he saw a boy by the wall, head down, pulling and
pulling at a lank lock. One sandal was missing; the broken straps
were still bound around his muddy calf. The other was held by only
one of its thongs, so that the sole dragged behind.
     The boy pulled.
     The fog rolled.
     As his cart passed, the smuggler looked away from the mad
youth—and into more mist.
     During the afternoon and evening, the bridge served not only
as entranceway into the Old Market of the Spur, but also as
workplace for most of Kolhari’s prostitutes. Once the market that
made it profitable to pursue such sexual enterprise shut down,
however, the women and men and boys and girls listlessly or
vigorously hawking their bodies lingered on the bridge only an
hour or so past sunset, when the market’s mummers and
bear-tamers and acrobats and street musicians also left for the
night. (Were they not all, so said a mummer with whom the young
smuggler had once been friends, merely purveyors of
entertainments at different orders of intimacy?) When the last
rowdy youngster ceased calling across the walkway after his or her
friends, when the last middle-aged man, unsteady with too many
mixed mugs of cider and beer, gave up his search for known, if not
knowledgeable, flesh, when the last and oldest prostitutes fell in
with one another, shoulder to shoulder, to walk tiredly back to the
Spur, for a while the bridge might seem empty. But soon you
noticed the sparse population remaining—there during the day,
certainly, but absorbed, then, by the traffic coming and going.
Now, made prominent by isolation and darkness, they became
distressingly visible: the mad, the displaced, the sleepless, the
disturbed.
     At the bridge’s market terminus, people leaving the city could
gather with their bundles before sunrise and pay a few iron coins to
the wagon drivers in from the provinces for a return trip out to this
or that near county. Certain wagoners carried more people than
produce; the custom had become so established that, off the
market end, the Child Empress had recently rebuilt the shelter,
with awning, more flares, and split-log benches, where, wet
mornings, passengers could wait for rides.
     He glanced up for the moon. A quarter of the sky was blurrily
bright, but that was its only sign.
      The triple facts of sex, madness, and travel lent their certain
intrigues here. Though each had its hours of the night or day when
it was most in evidence, the young smuggler had crossed the bridge
enough times, and at enough variety of times, to know that none
was ever really absent if you looked. With his smuggling cart, he
himself was now heir to the travel; in earlier years he’d first come
as part of the sexual provender—and at least once he’d spent three
whole weeks here, during which, if he had not been properly mad,
he’d been near enough. As he walked, memories flickered: an
argument he’d once had with the mummer before they’d gone to a
fine supper on the waterfront; the taste of grit on a parsnip he’d
picked up from the pavement here and eaten; a conversation he’d
overheard near the wall years back about the kind of boys some
lord or other used to proposition on these same flags; the memory
of a girl he’d watched pull water from a cistern not far away, her
red hair, her freckled arms.
     Walking beside his cart, the smuggler thought clearly and
firmly, as if his own inner voice could drown the others out:
      I probably know details and incidents about the Liberator’s
history that even he has forgotten. Yet who around me knows I
have such knowledge? Not the madmen swaying in the night, nor
the schemers behind their planked-up doors, nor the lazy whores
and hustlers working here in daylight.
      Nearing the market, he first heard, then made out, the naked
barbarian boys by the steps that led down under. (Beyond, making
minuscule moons in the fog, torches burned by the passenger
shelter.) One was running up, then down the steps, leaning heavily
on the rail.
      The young smuggler slowed his cart to watch with suspended
amusement. A young woman and an older man, who till now must
have been walking somewhat behind him, moved ahead. The
woman carried a bundle against her side. They were going toward
the shelter.
     A barbarian about fourteen ran across the bridge to squat
beside them and, fists and buttocks bouncing above wet stone,
cooed: “Where you going? Now come on, tell me! Where you fine
folks going?” He cocked his head, blond hair gone silver in dim
deceiving light. “You won’t tell me where you heading? I won’t
follow you! I won’t rob you! I won’t hurt you! You city folks don’t
need to be afraid of me now!” He laughed.
     The dark couple trudged on.
     The smuggler pulled his cart up to the stair and walked
around his ox to pat the hard ridge between her stubby horns.
     Blinking black eyes in blurred-over moonlight, the beast
stepped back.
     Traces creaked.
      Leaving his cart among milling boys, the young smuggler
started down the bowed steps. (Strange, thought the smuggler. No
one but cutpurses steal in a crowd. And his cart was not a purse.)
At their foot a rock shelf extended from the stanchion. Troughs
had been cut in it, sloped to the running water. Here men came to
relieve themselves. (Women used the stair at the other side, which
led to a similar arrangement, visible along the shelf.) The smuggler
reached the bottom with a memory of other moonlit nights, when
the bridge above had laid sharp shadow on the grooved stone. Most
nights when he’d stayed on the bridge, he’d slept down here, his
back against the graffiti-marred wall.
      Tonight there was no shadow, and the gray light misted
halfway under. Several women were busily doing something on the
far side. More barbarians lounged here, most notably younger or
older than those above. One of the oldest folded his arms and, as
the smuggler stepped by, actually said to the shortest: “All right.
Tell me: what’s a kid like you doing out at this hour?”
     “I told you already,” the blond boy said, “I’m not a kid.”
     “Yeah,” said another, probably younger. “He knows his way
around!”
     The smuggler stepped to one of the troughs, and, with the
growing heat behind his groin at coming urine, moved his clout
aside with one hand and with the other guided his heavy splatter
over the rock.
     Another barbarian stood a-straddle the trough three away, this
one in a loincloth, pulled back now. He held himself, as though
he’d either finished or not yet begun to make water. The smuggler
noted that he wore his pale hair in a clublike braid over one ear.
You saw such braids frequently enough in Kolhari, though usually
not on barbarians, since it was a style left from the old Imperial
Army, who, years ago, had devastated the lands from which, today,
the blond southerners came, in greater and greater numbers.
      Beyond the barbarian, just out of the diminished light, a shape
moved slowly against the stanchion wall—likely two people in
sexual embrace, though whether they were two women, two men,
or one of each, was anybody’s guess. The smuggler hoped it was
one combination, assumed it was another (from what he knew of
the bridge) and, had anyone asked, would have stated the third—if
only to appease the times’ prejudices; though quickly he’d add, with
a self-deprecating laugh, that, given his luck, all three probably
made out better than he.
      Finishing, he shook himself, pinched and pulled his foreskin
free of water, shook again with wet fingers, then tugged the cloth
back between his legs. (Since he’d been a child, all bodily secretions
had given him an odd comfort. Puberty had simply added another.
Privately, he admitted, his heavy hands enjoyed them all.) Skirting
naked loiterers, he started up.
      At the top he heard: “Where you think you going, fine Kolhari
man? Come on, tell me. Tell me, now! Afraid I’ll follow you?
Afraid I’ll rob you? Afraid I’ll beat you? You don’t have to be
afraid of me, city man!”
      In a white tunic with dark ribbon woven round its sleeves, a
tall man walked along the bridge toward the shelter, ignoring the
boy cavorting by him. He was dressed like someone who should
have had a private wagon. That he was here, sack on hip, to engage
a public cart suggested to the smuggler he belonged to his toga no
more than the boy below belonged to his braid.
     “Hey, barbarian,” an older boy called from the wall, “why do
you talk like such a fool? Hey—” now the second barbarian strode
into the central walkway—“barbarian! Why—”
    The first danced back, grinning. “I’m just asking these fine
Kolhari men and women why they—”
     “—do you talk like such a fool?” Suddenly the second
grappled the first in a headlock.
      “Hey! Let go of me!” His mouth muffled by a forearm, the
first giggled. “Let me go… you crazy barbarian!” He was dragged
past the young smuggler and down the stairs.
     The smuggler clicked his tongue. His cart began to roll.
      From the far stairs at the women’s side, four girls, followed
by a fifth, ran up, talking intently. Also barbarians, they struck the
smuggler as youngsters who had been in the city a goodly time.
Chattering in the sibilant southern tongue, they hurried off the
bridge. “Hey, look at all the big boys, out so late!” the one trailing
called. She laughed and caught up to the group, while a boy
shouted something in their own language after them. At which
point—probably unrelated to the baiting—one of the girls
remembered something forgotten below and turned back to the
stairs, the others turning, running up, chattering after her.
      Back against the bridge’s newel, another girl squatted beside a
bundle corded with vine rope. She was fifteen or sixteen. Her
shift’s shoulder was torn. In moon-blur the smuggler could see a
smudge—or a bruise—on her jaw. She was just clean enough so he
could not tell if she were a passenger or a derelict. If derelict, he
thought, she’d probably struggled with her attire to bring it up to
this ambiguous state.
     Wandering by, a mumbling crone dragged her sack, which
would contain (for several times on Kolhari streets the smuggler
had seen such women’s bags tear open) bits of cloth, broken pots, a
wooden hairpin, a cheap leather necklace from a province the
woman herself had never visited.
     The man in the toga passed, paying no more attention to her
than he had to the barbarian taunts.
     Spitting, whispering, the crone moved to the bridge’s rail,
searching for something not there.
     The seated girl looked away—the sight too painful, too
predictive, or both.
      The togaed man turned toward the flares at the passenger
shelter.
     The young smuggler guided his cart off the bridge and into
the market.
     Under an orange torch, people sat on split-log benches.
Nearby, carts had already pulled up. Some of the drivers talked
together. Others had wandered off to the warehouses in the
adjoining alleys.
     By the shelter’s wall, a man slept on the brick, head against
the wood. One drawn up on the other’s soiled ankle, his feet were
wrapped in the thong-bound skins a worker would wear laboring
on the splintered rock at some city demolition site. By torch-glow
and moon-mist, the smuggler could see, however, that the soles
were hardly scuffed, as though they’d not yet been worn to work,
while the cloth around his loins was threadbare, torn, and dirt-stiff.
The thong that held it tight on a belly that creased above it was
broken and retied many places.
     Was he a derelict, the smuggler wondered, or a laborer passed
out with drink?
     The smuggler headed his cart toward a group of other
wagons, as a morning porter tossed water from a ceramic bucket.
Water sluiced near the sleeper’s head. The porter set down his pail,
took up his wide broom, and, with shove after shove, sent rills
across the brick.
     If one rill wet the sleeper, the smuggler did not see. But
suddenly the man pushed up, got his feet under him, and, one arm
straight out, staggered to a bench to collapse on it. His head fell
back, firelight showing a dirty neck below a neatly trimmed beard.
      What, the smuggler wondered, were the stories that would
hold the anomalous details of the togaed gentleman taking a public
cart, the squatting girl, or the sleeping man to some lucid and
coherent truth, rather than making everyone appear simply another
counterfeit, barbarian, citizen, or bum?
     Stalls and kiosks had not yet been dragged out.
      Near the side alley below a flare, wheels crushing dung, cart
followed ox in among parked wagons. Did his appear an ordinary
delivery vehicle? So much the better. He would leave it with the
others for an hour or so, then be off among the first carts returning
to the provinces. (He should be neither the first nor the last to go.)
There were enough wagons and drivers about so that, even with its
contraband, his could stay unattended awhile.
      He tied the reins to the peg on the side of the driver’s bench,
pulled out the feed bag, put in more hay from the sack under the
seat, then notched it to the bridle. The ox licked his fingers. Wiping
his hand on the hip of his clout, while his beast munched and
munched and munched, the young smuggler turned back to the
square. He’d thought vaguely to sit in the shelter awhile among the
passengers. But it might be better not to stay so long in one place,
where he could be seen, observed, remembered.
      Better to stroll back and forth a time or two over the water.
From this end also, the bridge was still truncated by gray. He
wandered onto it. Again he heard, then saw, the barbarians. Thirty
steps on, and their argument and laughter (“Barbarian, why you go
on acting such a fool…?”) dissolved in fog behind.
     Ahead, someone sat on the wall.
                                5

     For the next few steps the young smuggler was not sure if it
were woman or man, adult or child.
     The shoulders were narrow. The knees angled wide. The feet
were back against the stone.
     His next step, the young smuggler saw several things at once:
      The gaunt face was looking at him. An eye in it blinked.
Across the other was a rag. The cloth strip was tied at the side of
the small head. Some hair had caught in the knot. Around the
man’s neck—now the smuggler saw it was a man—was an iron
collar.
     “Morning.” The man nodded. “What are you doing out on the
bridge at this hour?”
      The smuggler slowed, shrugged, smiled. “Walking.” He’d
known men to wear such collars before. Slaves were, of course,
almost unknown in Kolhari. If you saw a real one it was likely to be
in the retinue of some visiting provincial family. But the sexual
tastes of such men were assumed, on the bridge, to be odd and
unpredictable. “What’s it to you?” He stopped; he still smiled.
     “The market vendors aren’t out yet.” The good eye
glimmered as though full of tears. “You should be home in bed,
cuddling your girl out of her dreams and into morning.”
     “My girl just got a job as a kitchen maid—in a big old
mansion, out in Neveryóna.” The lie came complete and natural;
he’d often marveled at the way elements from life so easily joined
to make falsehoods—the same way, he’d noticed, they sometimes
fused to form dreams. “So I don’t see as much of her as I used to.”
      On the stone either side of him, the man’s hands were
wrapped with leather strips, recalling a custom in some province
that, though the smuggler had passed through it once, he could no
longer name. “Then what are you doing for sex?” the man asked,
bluntly.
     The three female faces drifted before the smuggler, one
younger than he by half and almost black, the other two a decade
or more older and pleasingly brown. After a sexually bleak year,
they had suddenly filled six weeks of his life (almost three months
in the case of the eldest) with sensual riches and emotional
complexity that had been, frankly, too much. (Oh, yes. For certain,
rather a kitchen girl out in the suburbs.) But he hadn’t seen any of
them for a month. He pushed them out of his mind.
    “Just about anyone—” The young smuggler measured his
admission—“and everyone I can.”
      The single eye questioned. “You want to come with me,
then?” The man’s insteps, back against the wall, were
leather-bound too, which, yes, was the way they wore them in that
province. He pushed from the rail to the ground.
       Obvious thoughts often take longer to form in response to
life than to letters. And the young smuggler had no letters. Also he
was just now considering precisely that which would prevent the
connection that has no doubt occurred to you and me. He’d
encountered men before with the perversion of the collar; it was,
after all, fairly common in Nevèrÿon—as all who’d ever worked the
bridge soon learned. Indeed, he’d learned also in those early
encounters, the collar was a sign for any number of sexual stances.
It’s only consistent meaning was that the most common two or
three sexual exchanges were not likely to be among the most
important for those who wore it. And even that was no more
certain than a farmer’s prediction of rain at a haloed moon. Also,
the young smuggler knew from his time on the bridge, the maimed,
deformed, and blind had needs as strong as anyone’s, and a
paraplegic’s or a deaf-mute’s desires could be as complex as a
judge’s or a general’s. Those among them who could afford
it—including the blind or half-blind—were as likely to buy here as
anyone. There was nothing to keep a one-eyed bandit—for the little
man surely looked a bandit—from the bridge.
     Then he remembered:
      The Liberator sometimes wore such a collar and was, some
said, a one-eyed man, or at any rate was sometimes represented by
one.
     “All right,” the young smuggler said. “I’ll go with you, if
you’ve got a place not too far from here. Even if you don’t, below
the bridge we could—”
      “For coin or for free?” The man cocked his head. “There’s a
barbarian with a braid over his ear, standing at the pee-troughs.
He’s been down there more than an hour. If I wanted to give away
iron tonight, I’d take him with me.” He snorted. “But I don’t.”
      The smuggler felt his humor balance on a more distressed
feeling, having to do with his own, recently much self-questioned
age. But he grinned it down in the three-quarter dark. “You won’t
give me anything? You know, last week I was hauling barrels over
at the docks. The week before I was trying to make some money
along here. And the week before that I was up in the mountains,
cleaning out the cellar for some tavern keeper. I didn’t make much
at any of them. Sometimes, you know, I wonder which job I’m the
worst at.” He chuckled; the three weeks’ work were as much
invention as his Neveryóna kitchen girl. “Still there’re some who’ll
give me a few coins, here on the bridge. But I haven’t spoken to
many people lately.” That happened to be true. “Kolhari is a lonely
city. I’ll go with you for the company, and you can give me what
you want. How’s that?”
     The little man considered a moment. “If ‘what you want’
means nothing—” The unsymmetrical face looked grave, turning
away—“then come.”
     “Hey, now…!” The young smuggler fell in beside the man,
who’d started toward the market end. “Don’t be like that. You
make up your mind later what I’m worth. I know it won’t be much.
That’s not what I’m asking. But something. Say, where’ve you
come from anyway, to be walking these wet stones?”
      Striding his quicker stride on his shorter legs, the little man
glanced up. “You ask questions like that on a night like this on
such a bridge as we cross now?” His single eye held amusement,
also disbelief.
      It was the kind of look, the smuggler thought, you might give
a fifteen-year-old barbarian whore declaring drunkenly she was a
noble virgin.
      The smuggler rubbed his earlobe between thumb and thick
forefinger, looking down at his naked feet hitting fog-wet rock. His
grin mimed a shyness he did not feel. “Well, now, I suppose if you
had a few extra pieces of gold—”
      “Gold? Ha!” the man barked. “No, I’m afraid you’re just not
that young!”
      “… a few iron coins,” the smuggler said, as if repeating
himself, “that you could help me out with, afterwards; well, I’d
appreciate it. I’m not working now,” he went on, “and my girl can’t
see me so often anymore. There’re days, I guess, she doesn’t think
I’m the best lover in the world. Maybe I do better with the men. At
least I give it a try, hey?” He raised his face a little, glancing at the
one-eyed man, and thought: I may not be that young, little man,
but then, neither are you that you can afford to haggle. “My girl,
she doesn’t know I come down here and fool around on the bridge.
But she doesn’t need to know of our doings. Oh, no. Not her.” Yet
he remembered that almost every woman he’d been to bed with
since his sixteenth year he’d told about his homosexual
adventuring; all had been fascinated. If anything, it seemed to
smooth the sexual preliminaries. Only if some other male might
overhear it would he hesitate to tell a woman he wanted to pleasure
of these masculine explorations. The three so recent (yet so quickly
receding) faces returned. He had told them: and hadn’t they all
praised him for his gentleness and lovemaking virtuosity? Hadn’t
all three wanted him to stay? As inducement, the youngest had
offered him her body in what she took to be all sorts of wild and
wonderful positions. The eldest (who did all that the youngest did
sexually and with much less to-do about it) had also offered him
money. At first he’d taken great offense. Then he’d taken the
money. (Had that, he wondered now, put the bridge back into
mind?) Then he’d taken his leave, anyway—when it had all become
too complicated. The third, also older than he, he’d liked the most.
But she’d had children and a great deal to do and, really, had
considered him in every way—save sexually—a nuisance. No,
though she’d been polite enough about it, she hadn’t really wanted
him around. Well, the truth was, none of the three had freckles. And
that, for him (as he’d found himself telling himself with the
growing belligerence of the mightily deprived), left sex with women
not much better than what he might do with animals or men.
    Though the intensity of the women’s desires had allowed him
to make his precipitate exit feeling (animally) well pleased with
himself, still they were gone.
     One had found out about the others, of course.
       The shoutings! The tears! The accusations of crimes enough
to make a provincial bailiff start to oil his whip! The youngest had
been engagingly stupid. The one with the children had been
distressingly sharp. And all three had been, well… He missed them.
But here he was, running on with this old story about his sexual
secrecy as though it displayed or hid some terribly important truth.
“I’ll go with you,” the smuggler repeated. “Now I don’t do this a
lot. And I don’t claim to be much good at it. But as long as my girl
don’t find out, it can’t hurt her. And she’s in Neveryóna, not here.
You’ll see what you can do for me.” He dropped both hands to his
legs. “Afterwards.”
     The little man, who wore leather about his loins, strode ahead,
past the squabbling barbarians, as though abandoning the
smuggler. (A woman passenger, herself a barbarian, was asking:
“Well, where do I go…?” A blond boy pointed to the stairs at the
other side of the bridge.) The smuggler watched the little man
move three steps, six steps, nine steps ahead.
     Then he took a breath and hurried after him, off the bridge
and onto brick. Fog had retreated enough to see the fountain, a
rock in the square’s center, with a basin carved in it to catch what
gushed from its top—before the spill ran over into the ring of
drains. From a cart near it, several women in desert robes were
taking down folded screens and awnings for their stalls. One held
up a torch for the others to see. As they helped each other open,
unload, and unfold, firelight lit wet brick, flashed on the jewelry
one wore at her neck.
      “You know—” The smuggler caught up—“a few years back,
I met someone here. He wore a collar. Like yours. He was a
southerner. A barbarian—no older than me. He liked me, you see.
So I went with him. Like I’m going with you. He told me he’d been
a prince in his own land, off to the south. We got to talking: and he
told me he’d been taken a slave—a real slave, once. Before he came
here. He said he’d been captured from his home in the south, taken
north, and sold up in Ellamon. He told me that he’d been set free
by the Liberator—you know, the one everyone talks about? Gorgik
the Liberator? The one trying to end slavery? He said he and the
Liberator had fought together against slavers in the west.”
Purposefully he did not look for the little man’s reaction. “So I told
him, I said: ‘You must think the Liberator is a really fine man.’ And
you know what he said? He said: ‘I hate him!’ He said: ‘The
Liberator freed me from slavery, but he didn’t free me from this!’
He meant the collar, you see? ‘And for doing only half the job, I’d
kill him if I could!’” Now the smuggler looked over. “That’s
something, hey? What do you think of that?”
     The man paid no more attention than a brown citizen to
blond barbarian jibes.
     They crossed the square.
      Over the years, the smuggler had indeed talked to a number
of barbarians, also a number of men in collars, a handful of slaves,
and several slavers. From these conversations, from hearsay, from
observations, and from any number of story fragments about such
men, such collars, such slaves, and the Liberator, the Liberator’s
one-time barbarian friend-turned-enemy had come together for
him along with the conviction that, given one tale and another, he
was very close to some historical truth that he wanted to try out on
someone who might confirm it—though, as they passed between
the fountain and the women, it occurred to him that, after all, the
construction of this barbarian adversary was not much different
from that of any other lie or dream. “I haven’t seen him here for a
while,” he added. “The barbarian in the collar, I mean.” (Certainly,
he reflected, he’d never met him.) “Maybe something happened to
him. You know, they say: ‘Not to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire
again is to die as soon as you leave it.’ Well, maybe something
happened to him. Maybe he got killed. I heard once that the
Liberator killed a barbarian prince who led an attack against him,
somewhere in the Spur. Though with all the tales and stories you
hear, who could know which to believe.”
     The little man remained silent.
     So, still walking, the smuggler said once more: “I haven’t seen
him in a long time. Years. The barbarian.” Then, on an impulse, he
asked: “What do you think of the Liberator?”
     With that same amusement, that same disbelief, the single eye
glanced up. “What do you think of him?”
    Dwelling on the ease of lies, the young smuggler found
himself—surprisingly—a word from truth. Why not say it, he
thought: and felt tightness take his throat. As he tried to swallow it
away, his heart pounded, and, swinging dry against his sides, his
arms felt his flanks grow slippery with a sweat as chill as if he’d
splashed into a wet grave—what, he noted with amusement, he
might feel the moment he made up his mind to speak to some dark
and freckled summer girl, leaning with her bucket on a cistern wall,
whose contempt, whose harsh word, whose rejection, he was sure,
would strike him dead upon the yard’s paving as surely as the fiat
of any nameless god. Yet in his trips to the bridge, in his trips from
it, he’d learned that to turn from such a feeling was to declare
oneself subservient to terror, to name terror itself one’s master. To
shirk such inner challenge was to admit passion impossible in this
world as the nameless gods had crafted it and purpose nonexistent.
“I think the Liberator is—” He drew a breath—“is the greatest
man in all Nevèrÿon. For me—and I know I am only one and
certainly no representative—the Liberator, Gorgik, may be greater,
even, than the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is…” He
searched for something singular, but came up with only the most
sedimented saw—“is just and generous.”
      “You think, then, that if this Liberator were ruler of all
Nevèrÿon, he would be more generous and more just than the
empress?” The little man snorted, then looked up sharply with his
single eye beside the slant rag. “And do you think there’s a chance
that I am he—that I am this Liberator of yours? Or his one-eyed
accomplice?”
     “No—!” the smuggler protested. But the man’s correctness
gave him an odd relief.
      “You think, perhaps, if you say the Liberator is great and I
happen to be your man’s lieutenant, then you’re more likely to get
yourself a coin or two for the night? Well, you wouldn’t be the first
to think such rot. But it won’t do you any good—not tonight,
believe me.” The man stopped walking.
     The smuggler stopped too.
     They’d reached some littered yard in the Spur, by a cistern’s
low wall.
     The smuggler thought: Which way did we come? How did we
get here?
      “Other folk than you have mistaken me for your Liberator.
We might pretend that I was him, and that you were only some
miserable slave, waiting for his freedom.” The one-eyed man
chuckled hoarsely. “But that’s not my pleasure. Not tonight. Not
with you. Me, a Liberator? No, tonight let us think of me as the
slave—the lowest of the slaves in, say, the Empress’s obsidian
mines, north at the foot of the Falthas, where once, so they tell it,
your Liberator himself toiled in the iron collar. Suppose I was the
dirtiest, most miserable half-blind pit slave. What do you say to
that?” Sitting on the cistern wall, the little man leaned forward as
mist tore apart under the moon.
      The eye and one shoulder, above and below black iron,
silvered. “What would you do with me, then? If I were the weakest,
foulest, sickest of slaves, too frightened to resist any attack, any
brutalization, any abuse visited on me by my guards, by my
foreman, or by the other slaves about me? Think of me loaded with
chains and irons, so that I couldn’t resist your assaults, even if I
were strong enough.” He reached up and put his hand on the
smuggler’s arm. “I know—they don’t use such chains in the mines
now, except when they transport the workers from location to
location. Such horrors still occur only with the slavers in the west.
But you can imagine it, can’t you?”
      No, it was not a response either to the man’s touch or his tale.
What the young smuggler felt now he’d felt enough times before to
know that, having a moment ago triumphed over a personal terror,
having expressed one tiny inexpressible truth, the bodily sign of
terror vanquished was a prickling like rain on the small of his back,
his belly, his thighs. And because that terror’s object, the man
before him, had, on its vanquishment, moved toward him rather
than away, the focus somehow became sexual: his cock, rolling
forward in its foreskin, dragged on cloth.
      “Follow me down!” the one-eyed man whispered, dropping
his hand to the smuggler’s chest. He turned and swung one leg over
the wall. “Down into the cistern!” He paused, then frowned.
“Don’t worry. There’re staples along the wall, so you can make
your way to the bottom.”
      A year and a half back, the last legitimate work the smuggler’d
done was three months with a filthy crew who’d drained cisterns
and cleaned them of the potsherds and children’s balls and bits of
waterlogged furniture and general muck that collected on their
floors. He’d labored hard, done the job at first with energy and
soon with skill; he’d liked the men he worked with, had often been
praised by the crew boss: “Sure, you joke about what a clumsy lout
you are all the time. But I say you’re a good and honest laborer, if
not the best of them.” In his last week, he’d even been promised
more money—and a day later had not shown up. He’d never gone
back. Now he never mentioned it. But he knew there were staples
on the inner walls of all the city’s cisterns.
     “Come with me!” The little man swung his other leg over,
reached in, stood on the inside rung, and stepped down. “This
one’s been empty for years.”
     “Sure. Go on.” Leaning on the wet ledge, looking at the man’s
head, with its knot of rag and hair lowering below him, the
smuggler felt the pride any laborer in the sexual services knows
when he or she realizes: I can show this one a good time! “I’m right
behind you!” He started over.
     Climbing down the staples, the smuggler looked up at the
moon. (Below him, a rung had broken; missing the step, he felt one
end scrape his calf, but so lightly he didn’t look.) Would the banked
fog collapse over the stained shield of bone the loud and unnamed
god of war arts had hung on the sky? He did not fancy being at the
bottom of an empty cistern in pitch dark with anyone—even a
miserable pit slave.
     His lower foot dropped into water—but as he swung out
from the staple he was holding by one hand above his head, the
other out and waving, he felt rock a quarter of an inch below it. He
turned, both feet now on the water-filmed floor.
      Yes, most of the water was out. But three-quarters of the
cistern’s bottom was still under half an inch. Over it, the reflected
wall cut across night, while rills rushed out and back, raddling
mirrored fog.
      By an irregular section of stone that had come away from the
wall, the one-eyed man crouched on dry rock. His leather skirt was
gone—there, it lay a meter from his hand, with which, squatting, he
supported himself. “Look—” and the single eye looked down from
the young smuggler—“you’re free now to do anything you want to
your slave. Kick him, beat him, molest his body in any way…”
With the echo, the voice seemed not to come from the little man
but rather from the drenched air, as if the city around them, and
not the man before him, gave the permission, the instruction, the
exhortation.
      The smuggler splashed onto drier flooring. The sexual
impulse that had begun moments before, instead of being lowered
by the cold water and the cistern’s fetid smell, was, if anything,
heightened. He tugged his cloth aside, felt it fall, so pulled it fully
away and tossed it down. It’s the voice, he thought with the endless
run of thinking that never ceased regardless. What had always
damped his performance in his rare encounters with the collared
before had been the chidings, the directions, the continuous
corrections from the self-elected slave, till, after the delays and
displays and hesitations that finally, more than anything, seemed to
comprise the act, he’d usually packed his half-flaccid cock back in
his clout and, unsatisfied, gone off to face the world, convinced
once more that this perversion was just not his to pursue. But now,
with this vocal displacement, the words carried no hectoring
critique from a new and demanding lover, male or female, accusing
him with ignorance of, and inadequacy at, his sexual task. Rather it
was a pronouncement of license from the otherwise mute deity of
lust’s intriguing and intricate craft, as enticing in its deitic
dislocation as, in its too-human immediacy, it could be off-putting.

      “This is for you!” He kicked the crouching man in the thigh
(but not hard enough to hurt his own bare foot), raised his leg
again and brought his heel down on the man’s buttocks so that he
had to catch himself with his hand against the cistern wall. Then he
dropped to a squat. “And this is for me…!” Momentarily awkward,
he positioned himself, one hand on the knobby back, to push
forward. His knee hit the cold rock as warmth bloomed about him.
The pushings, proddings, and pokings, the bodily resistance only a
step away from emotional rejection, had often sapped buggery of
all pleasure. But, lubricated with whatever oils for the night or
from whatever previous encounters, the body before the young
smuggler received him easily within its astounding fire, and the
discrepancy between the cold under foot and knee and the warmth
inner flesh raised in friction with outer was, rather than an
impediment to erotic amazement, amazement’s confirmation. The
heat and vulnerability within the body of another, whether he felt it
with finger or penis or tongue or toe was always new, always
astonishing, always more intense than memory. And wasn’t the
memory of that intensity when the sensation itself had been
forgotten (the smuggler thought without a break in stroke), the
desire all frequenters of the bridge, buyers or vendors or seekers
after free fare, searched for—the desire, always lost when not
alight, that named those stones? His implant in this humid flesh
ran to depths in his own body that, as they were surprised into
excitation, he knew were equally unrememberable. And wasn’t that,
when desire was lost, why it troubled so profoundly, why it lay so
deep?
     The little man pushed back, not in a single thrust, but with a
pressure timed to the smuggler’s thrusting, a rhythm that, when the
smuggler slowed, slowed and, when the smuggler hurried, hurried,
till the smuggler thought, with as much surprise as the always
renewed surprise of pleasure itself: He wants me to enjoy it! While
one enjoyed it nevertheless, it was a feeling rare in such encounters.
And, yes, it excited him, so that when the man hissed, “What are
you? The fifth? The ninth? The seventeenth to cover me since
moonrise?” the echoing question seemed so far outside their
juncture that, like a god’s, the voice was devoid of all threat and
comparison, all solace and praise.
      “… if not the best of them!” The smuggler pushed back, with
no idea whether his words or the man’s reported a fact or
continued a fantasy. And for the moment he did not care. Among
the five, or nine, or seventeen ghosts their echoing breaths filled
the cistern with, the young smuggler was, despite his assertion,
outside the hierarchy of recrimination and easy in a community of
lust. He lay his beard on the little man’s cold shoulder. As he
thrust, spit trickled his jaw.
       The little man twisted around, becoming a face and, moments
later, a voice—“You’re hot! Yes, you’re hot in me! It’s good! Yes,
it’s…!”—as near and intimate as before it had been distant and
disembodied. One hand on the ground beside the man’s, the
smuggler swung, hips and shoulders hunching and hunching at
each end of his bent back to make a cave for the creature beneath
him, as protected and safe and steady in its contractions as a heart.
     Then the little man moved forward, disengaging. “Wait…!”
He spun on the rock.
     For a moment the two crouched, facing, the man, one-eyed
and breathless, the smuggler, on knees and hands, surprised with
the cold at belly, groin, and thigh as if, with the motion, rather than
simply removing himself the little man had substituted a corpse in
which, under his half-masked stare, the smuggler was now impaled.
       “Come…” the man hissed, pushing to his feet. “This way.
It’ll be better, you’ll see.” He moved to the break in the stone,
hand, back, and elbow momentarily in moonlight; they disappeared
within.
      Wheeling to his feet, the young smuggler followed. He’d
assumed the dark blot was simply a place where the stones had
fallen or, at most, some shadowed niche. But, as he stumbled
inside, a hand on either wall, he realized it was a tunnel—through
which no doubt the water had run off.
      “Follow me…” the smuggler heard, breathy in the distance.
      As he moved awkwardly and uneasily in the dark, the narrow
space grew crowded with breath. Breath echoed around him,
echoed before him. He was a minute along the corridor before he
realized the exhalations, with their loud halts and hastenings, were
not from the little man meters ahead. They were his own. Missing a
step down, he staggered, almost falling. Yet through it, his body
was locked in its lust. He groped forward, persistently hard.
     Wetting his hand with crumblings from the wall, stinging his
heel on some sandy edge, and breathing, breathing about him, the
tunnel thrust him through dark turns.
      A sense of distance, yes; but little sense of time. For despite
the five or seven kinesthetic memories he took from the passage,
the truth was he ran through it very fast.
      The light was dim and surprising. Something was piled before
it.
      Sacks?
      Feeling his way by gritty cloth, he heard metal clink metal:
links rattled. He stepped around knotted corners.
       From two rock niches, torches spilled their glimmerings. The
little man crouched by the wall, fastening chained iron at his ankle.
He glanced up at the young smuggler. The rag across his eye
suggested one color and another under bronze flicker: green,
maroon, blue. The smuggler knew from moonlight it was grit gray.
     Dragging links over the rock floor, the man stood, turned his
back to the smuggler, spread his legs, and leaned his hands on the
stone. Jangling against the wall, chain swung. A length lay across
the buttocks. Another was wrapped around one leg. The man was
breathing hard. His back rose and fell: shadows at nobby vertebrae
shrank and lengthened.
     The smuggler came forward, was on him, was in him. Fire
caught between their cold bodies. But flesh, chill as it was, was still
warmer than the metal pressed between thigh and thigh, buttock
and belly.
     Links swung against the smuggler’s leg as he pushed and
recovered.
      His chin was against his chest. A drop started on his cheek;
another rolled down his shoulder. The one on his face, to his
hunchings, moved along his cheekbone, through his moustache,
stalled at his upper lip, quivered, then rolled over. Tasting it, he was
almost surprised at its salt.
     The heat between them built.
     Then, once more, the little man twisted away, disengaging.
     The young smuggler said, “Wait! No, I was just about to—”
      The little man glanced back. “Follow me…!” His hoarse
entreaty stopped the smuggler. With the chains he’d just donned
clattering about him, he made for the arch across from the stacked
sacks and through its hangings. Hides swung. Beyond them, the
clinking muffled and, after moments, quieted over greater distance.

     Drying perspiration cooled the smuggler’s thighs and chest.
Hairs tickled, lifting. Scratching at leg and shoulder, he walked
forward. At the hides he hesitated, wondering at these pastimes,
then pushed through.
     The room beyond was bigger. One brand in its niche lit
several benches and, as the young smuggler walked in, little else.
Some of the benches, up on end, leaned against the wall. The
smuggler stepped around them. The little man was not behind
them. The hangings at the room’s far arch swayed.
      He walked forward, thinking that this stroll across the ill-lit
room was the opposite of his dash in the black tunnel: there
darkness had held both his lust and any speculation on it in
suspension, while the flickering in this tenantless space, where he’d
expected, if not desire’s object, at least a quick relief from
horniness, kept pushing him to think, remember, speculate on the
fact that, after all, neither men nor this miming of submission and
domination was his own pleasure. This was borrowed passion.
     That was, indeed, his thinking.
     But the feeling was that he’d loaned out something that had
gone ahead with the little man; and he wanted it back—though he
couldn’t have said what it was; or why.
      With this uneasiness, lust ebbed, so that he lingered in the
chamber perhaps a minute, breathing loudly, thinking clearly:
Should I go on? What might I get from him? What does he want of
me? What might I learn about the Liberator, and is it worth all
this? He pushed the next hanging aside.
      First he thought it was a slate slab inches ahead. Then,
blinking away the moment’s disorientation, he saw wide steps
down into vast darkness.
      A dozen brands burned along a distant wall. And in such
space, at such distance, a dozen brands gave little light. Somewhere,
water gushed. Here and there he could make out balconies around
the hall—and a flickering near one torch: water fell between squat
columns, rushed along the wide conduit crossing the partially tiled
floor, and swept under two bridges that twice blocked the torrent’s
glimmer.
     A giant brazier stood beyond the water. Across its coals,
flames scuttled.
      At the hall’s far end, between leaning torches, a stone seat
rose from a stepped pedestal, its ornate back carved into some
beast—eagle? dragon?—which, in the play of shadow, he could not
identify.
     Approaching the throne in his chains, the little man stumbled
to one knee, pushed back on his feet, and continued toward the
vacant chair. He held most of the chains over one arm. Chain
dragged behind him on the tiles. Steps restrained by the links
between his shins, he moved awkwardly across mosaic, turned a
moment to look over his shoulder, and went on.
      Can he see me up here in this darkness? the young smuggler
wondered. He let the hide fall behind him and started down the
steps, glancing up at the roof, where ropes and grapples looped
below beams. The stones under foot were bowed, worn at their
centers. Fifty years’ footsteps? Five hundred? The odor recalled
night on a winter beach down from the city; at the same time, the
echoing water suggested high, summer valleys between widely
separated peaks. Yet, overwhelmingly, he felt hugely underground.
The conflicting senses of place, with dimnesses and distances,
further dissolved the sexual surety that, moments back, had been so
absolute.
     Cool air moved in the high hall, though the fog had not come
within.
      What, he wondered, am I doing with this collared creature?
But as his blood withdrew into its secret sinks and cisterns, its
retreat left belly, back, and buttocks, shoulders, thighs, and arms
a-tingle—with desire, yes; though, again, not for the man or his
chains, but for the state the smuggler had, moments ago, slipped
from. The feeling was both less localized and more intense than
normal lust.
       Reaching the steps’ bottom, he started over the dirt floor. It
was darker here than at the stairs’ top. Like steam, the light seemed
to have collected higher in the hall, leaving the floor pitchy. Twenty
steps on, his bare foot went from earth to wood as he stepped onto
the little bridge.
     Froth whispered below.
     Beyond the brazier’s black wall, he could see the little man in
chains at the bottom step before the throne. There were heaps of
something—hides? pelts?—one side of the chair.
      And if he is the Liberator, or connected with him, the
smuggler thought in a moment’s passing lucidity, what questions
should I ask?
      Which is the exact month of your birth? Some say the month
of the Badger; some say the month of the Dog. Though a birth
month you only knew by report anyway, and reports could always
be wrong. (He remembered his mother and his aunt, arguing once
under a plum tree, whether his own birth had come with the
Badger or the Bat.) Well, then, which of the three versions of your
departure from the obsidian mines for the army is right? And was
that before or after you lost the eye? (He stepped from damp wood
to dusty tile, trying to imagine the man in chains as an Imperial
officer.) And if you’re only the Liberator’s lieutenant, which is it:
You and the Liberator have been together half a dozen years? Or
you’ve been together intimately since your time together in the
mines?
      Above him, the brazier’s rim was burnished with the small
flames behind it. As he neared black metal, he felt heat through the
darkness. The curved wall itself was, doubtless, hot enough to char
flesh should you stumble against it. Ahead, chains dropped, then
dragged, on stone.
     He looked down.
     Before the seat, the little man knelt at the steps’ foot. Hides
hung over the chair’s arm.
     After a moment, the young smuggler walked from the
brazier’s wash of warmth. Cool retouched his shoulders.
     Ahead, the man lay down before the bottom step, one fist
near his cheek. In firelight, his calloused heel was dirt black, with
some cleaner skin before the leather under the instep; then more
clean skin, before the cracked ball took up walking’s dirt. The foot
dragged on the mosaic; the tiles’ colors were indistinguishable. A
chain fell from one stair to the stair below.
     The young smuggler walked up and stepped over the man’s
leg with its ankle iron. (The leg moved; a loose confusion of links
dragged out to become more chain.) The smuggler put one foot on
the step and looked back down at the little man, who was…
writhing!
     Fingers opened and closed on the step’s lip. The spine arched;
vertebrae were sharp, shifting knobs. An arm moved so that a
shoulder blade rose, then fell, among small muscles. Cheek sliding
on gritty stone, the man whispered, “Free me…”
      The smuggler climbed the next step, a laugh in his throat
struggling with his tongue. Then chills started behind his shoulders
to cascade his back, pour over his buttocks, and trickle his thighs.
“No…” he whispered, trying to ignore both the laugh and the
tingle: flat and emotionless, the word sounded like something
mumbled by a new mummer on a market-wagon platform, its
blandness and softness conveying only the new performer’s fear,
alone before a hundred eyes. “No…!” There, at least he could
recognize his own voice in the echo. The tingling came on. He
stepped up another step. “Me, free a foul, filthy, and wretched slave
like you? Ha!” All in a syllable, the laugh burst out with mummerly
conviction. “No!”
     “Free me, master… You can do anything to me, lord. Abuse
me, ravish me, keep me a slave forever or cast me loose. You have
the power! For you it’s all the same…”
      Was it the great brazier, the smuggler wondered as he stepped
to the next step, that kept the fog from seeping within this crypt? “I
know what you want, you low and lustful slave!” (Declaring it with
all the intensity he could muster, he still could not have said
precisely what that was.) “You’ve done nothing to deserve anything
from me! You’re low as the garbage tossed in the gutters of the
Spur! You’re low as the refuse the muck crew picks up from the
floors of polluted cisterns! You’re low as the deepest and darkest
hole in the Empress’s obsidian pits!” Speaking, he took a huge step
onto the seat itself, to stand on it, naked, moving one hand
impersonally to his genitals at the return of impersonal lust, as if
his body, even to his cock’s reengorgement, now began to mime
desire as a last resort before the loss of what he’d felt before.
     He turned on the stone seat and looked down at the man
prone at the steps’ bottom.
      The small shoulders flexed. The buttocks tightened and
relaxed. A muscle defined itself, now in an arm, now in a leg. “Free
me, master. You have the power. You’ve always had it. For all
eternity. You stand above me. I lie below you. You only have to use
it on my miserable, suffering, enchained body…”
     Chains racketing, the little man rolled to his back.
      The stomach muscles grew rigid in the firelight as he lifted
his knees to his chest. Wrinkled, vegetative, half-embedded in black
moss, the man’s penis was soft, which surprised the smuggler. Did
the traditional mark of passion’s absence mean (centered in a body
whose twitches and jerks spoke of all sane limits’ passionate
transgression) age? Did it mean debauchery run beyond function?
Perhaps it meant the transgression itself was somehow a mime,
and those quiverings and shakings were actually centered about
some invisible control. Did it mean that he had not gone beyond a
limit but, rather, knew everything he was doing? He’s placed me
here, the young smuggler thought. Then it struck: And he would do
anything for me now! As if in some displacement of the inner
dialogue, the little man raised his chin above his corded neck and
whispered: “… anything, anything, master… you can do
anything…” Dragging chains around his raised thighs, the man
reached through his legs to probe between his buttocks, with
leather-bound hands. The single eye held both the smuggler’s,
while the face twisted with the breathing, the reaching. The
forehead creased above the slant rag hiding the wounded socket.
Knees rocked. In his hand, the young smuggler became aware of
the hardness, which, as his two forefingers lifted under his glans,
thrust from its half-obliterated sleeve, became even harder, the skin
along the side to which it curved hurting a little, which it
sometimes did when he was very excited. Tearing and straining, the
eye below would not blink. In the mouth the wet tongue twitched.
The lips moved about a moist exhortation: “Master…?”
     The smuggler came.
      It was as surprising as that. During the fifteen or twenty
seconds of it, a heat started below his knees as if some fire he
stood near abruptly flared. The sensation mounted his thighs, his
body’s trunk, till, within the flame he’d somehow become, a fist of
muscle, contracting, propelled his mucus forward. Unsteady
between painful gasps, his heart blocking his ears with its thuds, his
right leg quivered, near to buckling. A muscle in one flank strained
to true pain. His first articulate thought was that, in the course of it,
there had been none of the sub-vocal awareness (It’s beginning.
Yes, it’s… Now, it’s beyond halting. This one’s not so good…? No,
this one is really fine!) which usually made orgasm bearable.
      The pleasure—if something so intense, so unconnected with
words, could be pointed to with a word—rolled away like water off
beveled sand, leaving the beach still saturated. (He took another
breath. Pain caught again in his side. He looked about, to see how
to climb down.) What lay beneath was fear. Was it simply the
surprise of ejaculation coupled with his pounding heart, together
miming terror? One hand unsteady on a gritty hide over the
throne’s arm, he jumped.
     His leg would not stop shaking!
     As he came on down the steps, the little man grasped the
smuggler’s ankle, which twisted in hard fingers, wet from one or
the other of them. “Free me…!”
     The young smuggler pulled loose, nearly fell, and rushed
across the tile, the floor going from mosaic to dirt.
     As he neared the brazier, he realized the hall was not empty.
      Off by the wall a flame moved sideways, raised, and went on
to ignite another. The twin fires lit what one had been too dim for:
the head, arm, and shoulder of a yellow-haired barbarian, carrying
his brand from niche to niche.
      As the smuggler neared the brazier, he heard falling gravel.
Someone had wheeled up a stilted ladder. At the top, her chin
aflicker, a woman tossed in a pailful of coal.
     She glanced down. The smuggler almost ran.
      Still panting, he hurried over the bridge toward the wide
stairs. By a fitful torch, two youngsters, boy and girl, shook out a
hide with thudding snaps. Dust rose between the smuggler and the
flame. The boy, who was black, coughed.
      Had any of them seen him? Heard him? He looked back. Had
they realized what he was doing as he stood a-top the throne? (His
back tingled.) At least the little man had been on the floor. But he,
standing high in firelight… Why did that happen to me? he
wondered. What is that supposed to mean about me? He pushed
those thoughts out of his head with the immediate practicality:
Return? Might the man need help to carry away his chains?
Certainly he was some morning cleaner or porter, who, among
these others, had thought to get here before the rest and avail
himself of the empty space until his coworkers arrived.
     He must have known what he was doing…
      The young smuggler started up, leaving behind the
subterranean matutinal preparations. (He could not imagine the
hall’s use.) Possibly they had not been observed or, if observed, his
action had not been recognized for what it was. (Do you see
something like that unless you’re looking for it?) He pushed
through the hangings, thinking that though such sexual sensation
was among the most intense he’d ever felt, easily he—
     “Excuse me,” the woman in the middle of the room said. She
lowered the bench from those stacked up. “Aren’t you supposed to
be down helping them clean out the—”
      “No!” He looked about sharply, stepping back. Swinging hide
brushed his buttocks and shoulders. “Yes. No…! They sent me up
here to get…” He pointed beyond her to the hangings in the far
arch. “In there! I’ll be down with it in just a minute.” Then, without
waiting for her to speak, he dashed by her through the far hangings
into the next room.
     And into blackness.
      The torches that had burned in the niches before were out. As
his hand found stone, his foot clinked some chain still on the floor.
Feeling along the wall, he looked back, but the woman had not
pushed aside the hangings to follow or spy. He stepped, reached
out again, stepped, reached out: as his hand felt sackcloth, he
thought:
      I’m glad I’m not as young as all that! Such sensations as he’d
just had, encountered early enough, could become the object of all
sexual searching. No, for all its intensity, wonder, pleasure, he
could easily live his life without experiencing that again.
     Sacks were gone. Stone was under hand. A stubbed toe on a
step up confirmed that he was, indeed, somewhere within the
tunnel.
      That’s the kind of feeling, he thought, stumbling in the dark,
one could kill to regain. But he had known a truth. (He staggered
on, surrounded by the echo of his breath.) The truth of the throne
of power, the truth of the secret center, the truth of the hidden
crypt, the lie of the limit to pleasure. Or had he? He stumbled
again. He had told a truth before, to the one-eyed man: about his
feelings for the Liberator. The Liberator was the greatest man is all
Nevèrÿon. The Liberator—
     He halted, as if he’d become aware of someone with him in
the tunnel. But it was not the Liberator he imagined breathing
beside him in blackness; nor the one-eyed man. It was the
Liberator’s barbarian adversary of rumor, conjecture, and surmise.
       For he knew, with the same certainty by which he knew his
own name, that the barbarian who had died fighting the Liberator
in some sexual crusade was a lie. The kind of pleasure one might
kill to regain? Yes. But for just that reason—because, whatever
pain accompanied it, it was pleasure, not pain—no one would kill to
release himself from it. If there had been such a barbarian as rumor
and fable told of, his situation had certainly been more complicated
than that which the smuggler, with his care, study, and collation,
had assembled from these rumors and fables to speak of so easily
in the market. Again, as had happened so many times over the
duration of his obsession, he realized he knew something about the
Liberator, about the collar, if not his one-eyed lieutenant who also
sometimes wore it. Indeed, the smuggler thought, the wonder is
that I know.
     Though how the known differed from the lies, distortions,
and displacements that wove together language’s dream of meaning
he could not, as he felt his way again through the dark, make clear.
     And why, now, did his judgment of the Liberator’s greatness
seem so trivial? (No, his thought did not halt just because it had
crossed a certainty.) Could it be that, in the heat of lust’s extremity,
the very concept of truth had come unstuck from his initial
utterance to the one-eyed man and, in its molten state, fused now
to this new notion, so that his new “truth” was finally just as much
an assemblage, a dream, a lie as all his other stories?
      He staggered on, around one corner, around another, and was
just wondering if perhaps he had missed a turnoff or, even more
likely, had wandered into some side tunnel that would lead him on
aimlessly and endlessly through the dark with only his own breath
for company, when, ahead, he saw light glimmer on the wet wall.
     Seconds later, he stepped onto the cistern’s sheeted floor.
     He looked up.
      Gray morning had wiped away night. Five long logs lay across
the cistern top, some ropes still lashed to them—none of which
he’d seen earlier.
     He looked down.
      The little man’s leather kilt lay on dry stone. Across it was the
smuggler’s clout-cloth. He stepped over to it, squatted, and lifted it.
“Ahh!” He’d tried to toss it toward the dryer rock; one end, of
course, had fallen in the water. Leave it? (Above him, he heard
female shouts, one over here, then, moments later, one over there.)
No. Though he was not above going about the streets like a
barbarian, cloth was not so common you abandoned a length of it,
until it was soiled beyond washing and worn beyond patching.
(“Ayeee!” and “Ya-ha!” Then, “Ha!” and, moments later, “Aye!”
above.) He picked it up: wet, it turned out, not only at the end but
in half a dozen other spots along it. He rung it, stood, doubled it
over his shoulder, and walked to the staples. He fingered the edge
of the broken one. Another sagged till it looked as if it might pull
free with the next hand or foot set to it.
     He climbed.
     It didn’t under either.
     As his head rose above the cistern wall, he looked about the
yard.
      His first thought was that both were about the age at which
he’d first run away for Kolhari: two young women were throwing a
child’s black ball back and forth from one corner of the yard to the
other. Both wore the same sort of clout whose end clung so coldly
now to the smuggler’s back.
     With her yellow hair cropped for vanishing summer, the
barbarian whipped the ball into the air with a snap of her
arm—“Aaiii!”—that shook her tanned breasts.
      A dark Kolhari girl, her hair bound back in a puffy bush with
a leather thong, the other ran across the yard, leapt with both hands
high, caught it, and swung her arms down and around her till her
fists    almost brushed the pavement, then                    snapped
it—“Ya-hey!”—into the air, while the barbarian, staring up, ran a
step in one direction, two in another, then raced off in a third to
catch it, to cry out, to fling it high again.
      Wondering if they saw him, the young smuggler climbed
from the cistern. He watched for three breaths, walked a little way
off, then turned back to look through four more shouts and tosses.
The fog had left only a ghost of dampness in the air. Though the
morning was clear and the yellow sun lit the wall across from an
eastern alley, down a northern street mist still put the sheerest veil
over the houses.
     “Ay-yahaaa!” The barbarian stumbled on her throw: the ball
shot almost straight up.
     “Oh! Hey…!” Her companion ran across the yard, stopped a
few steps from her friend, who sat now on the stone with her
hands behind her, one of her shoulders and one of her breasts and
one of her knees in sunlight. With delight, the smuggler saw the
copper freckles speckling all three.
     The dark girl put her fingers over her mouth, laughing,
stepping about, shaking her head, moving from sunlight to shadow
to sunlight. In an unexpected and astonishing gift, the smuggler
saw her back, so much the darker, was freckled too—with those
even rarer points of patinaed bronze that made him want to put his
eye an inch away from one, then, suddenly, thrust out his tongue as
if it might hold some marvelous taste other than the skin’s faint
salt.
     The barbarian rocked forward, swaying in a torrent of giggles.

    Between her fingers the Kolhari one asked: “Are you hurt? I
mean…”
      The other managed: “Yes, yes, it’s all right. I mean, no. I’m all
right!” Finally she said: “The ball—did you see where it went?”
      Catching her breath, the dark one pointed across the yard: “In
there, I think.”
     “Oh, no…!” The barbarian began to laugh again.
     Both looked toward the cistern.
     “I heard it go in,” the smuggler called. “It bounced on the
back wall and splashed down on the bottom.”
      He could not have said, later, if the feeling had come before
he’d spoken and therefore had impelled him to speech, or if it were
the detritus of speech, composed of the leftover heart pounding
from his bravery in speaking at all. But he waited to see if their
look, if their laugh, if some word from them would include him.
     They looked.
     They smiled.
     One of them (“You said you… heard it go in?”) spoke.
     But through the intensity of his gaze, though he nodded, tried
to smile, and realized he was only staring, he lost the specificity of
the exchange in the dazzle of the sun-swath that tipped the
standing one’s brown and spotted shoulder, that bronzed the dotted
shin, breast, and cheek of the one sitting. The answer? The truth?
For a moment everything reeled in a fiery gust (from the far sun?
from the distant sea?), while the sky cracked.
     Pieces of the day balanced, gray and yellow.
     “Well, there’s no water in it.” The barbarian pulled her feet
under her, reached about to push herself erect. “I can climb down
and get—”
      “Don’t you dare!” declared the other. “You’re going to go
down into some old empty cistern? You don’t know what you’ll find
in there—!” They laughed again.
      Across the yard, he tried, tried again, tried a third time to
make some joke, to comment, to volunteer climbing down for
them—but all three left no visible trace on the two youngsters, one
a yellow-haired barbarian whore (really, he doubted it; but he
hoped she was, like himself, a whore), one a brown and respectable
Kolhari girl. His throat muscles had moved, but not his lips or
tongue. Certainly, he thought, in the pursuit of such eccentric
pleasure it could be no easier to whisper, “Master…!” for the first
time than to speak to a woman whose body and bearing moved you
in desire’s more familiar paths. He started across the yard for the
sunny alley from which, as best he could remember, he’d entered
the yard in darkness.
      Walking naked over dust, he glanced at them again: They are
beautiful, he thought simply, bluntly, truthfully. Why use men’s
bodies when there are such as these in the city? But as, from the
alley’s end, their laughter swirled his nakedness, he knew what he’d
learned of the Liberator as he’d stood on the throne, whether
fog-blurred dream or granite truth, had only secondarily to do with
bodies.
                                 6

      Certainly these were more primitive times than ours, when
public nudity was a sign neither of madness, rebellion, nor art.
Along with the ceramic-hard soul and the wood-rough palm, it
meant rather, in both men and women, a certain level of income, a
certain order of labor. Since the smuggler’s gains, when smuggling
went well, were modestly above that level and the physical work
needed to survive at it had been, of late, somewhat below it, he
could take a certain joy in the deception as he
wandered—naked—toward the market in the dawn’s near empty
streets. The few he shared them with, women and men, were most
of them naked too.
     Several times he had to stop and go back a turning when
some alley deposited him on a corso where, if the sun were really
over there, meant the market was not in the direction he was
walking.
      Clout still over his shoulder, he finally came out in the old
square; three quarters of the stalls were already up on the worn
brick. More were being set out. Vendors called to one another, and
the earliest shoppers already wandered between counters and under
awnings, carrying baskets and bags.
      Certainly at this time crime was among those callings
conducted more primitively than today: it did not seem overly
imprudent to a smuggler of his age and experience to leave his cart
unattended for an hour (the encounter in the crypt had taken
somewhat less) among the others parked by the market’s side. At
any time, the empress’s inspectors might be wandering here and
there, observing, reporting, fining. But, because of the several new
markets that had, in recent years, opened up closer to the
waterfront, inspectors were becoming less and less efficient at their
never very well defined tasks.
     Across the square he could see other wagons rolling up.
Having finished deliveries, a few were pulling out. An hour, yes, the
smuggler thought. But much more than that was pushing even
primitive prudence.
      He walked by stalls of cheap jewelry, exotic vegetables, farm
tools, and cooking implements, till he reached the donkeys and
oxen and ponies standing before their various carts. His own
red-flanked beast swung her head and blinked her eyes’ black
marbles over her feed bag. Unhooking it, he glanced toward the
shelter. Most of the passengers from before sunup had already
gotten their rides. More recent arrivals sat, waiting. The drunken
workman (if he were not a bum) still sprawled over half his bench.
     A youngster, naked as the smuggler, walked toward him as he
tugged the feed bag away. (The beast swung her head to follow it.)
“Excuse me. You’ve finished your deliveries…?” the boy asked. “If
you’re going south, maybe I can get a ride with you for a few iron
coins?”
       “Sure.” The smuggler put the bag up under the driver’s
bench. “For a few stades, that should be all right.” He’s a student,
the smuggler thought, and felt, behind his smile, oddly
uncomfortable with his own nakedness before this younger,
slimmer nudity. So, just as though it had nothing to do with the
boy before him, he pulled his clout from his shoulder, bound it
about his hips, ran it between his legs, and tucked it in at his waist:
still damp. As he bound it, he thought: And how do I know he’s a
student? For his morning’s adventures had left him feeling
analytical.
     Well, for one thing, he goes about naked like the poorest
barbarian laborer when he clearly isn’t one. His black hair is in the
side-braid that goes with the military, while equally clearly he is no
more a soldier than the barbarian who’d stood below the bridge. At
the same time, for all his nakedness, on his feet he wears the
leather coverings of some working man who toils on broken stone.
But it’s all for the potential rocks he might, as a student, tread,
rather than for any daily encountered hardship. (The boy’s beard
was much less neatly trimmed than that of the man sleeping it off
over in the shelter.) And this one, the smuggler noted, wears the
same bindings around his palms as the one-eyed man had
earlier—though on this youth they’re probably not from his place
of origin, but rather from some custom observed in passing and
imitated for its quaintness. Probably the student would be able to
tell more of their use and history than the one-eyed man, who,
whatever his sexual eccentricity, most likely had been born to them.
Making up his mind not to ask more about them, the smuggler put
his thick hand between the ox’s horns to rub. “You study with one
of the masters out near Sallese?”
      No doubt having thought his nudity had stripped him of all
identifying signs, the student grinned down at the brick. “I’m just
an apprentice. Right now I run and fetch, wax boards, and make
tablets for the older ones. I won’t take up my own field of study till
spring, when my reading has gotten stronger.”
     The smuggler looked past the student at the shelter; the
student glanced too.
     Still sleeping, the drunken man seemed moments from
toppling off the bench.
      “You notice,” the smuggler said with a considered sigh, “how
there’re more people out around the bridge, drunk, mad, or just
exhausted, who look like they might have been working three
weeks ago?”
     The student nodded. “That’s what my master says. Out at the
school, everyone argues that these are hard times in Kolhari.”
     And the young smuggler, who hadn’t heard any more people
than usual say such a thing, laughed and clapped the student’s
shoulder. “Up on the cart with you, and we’ll see if we can’t at least
get you started on your trip!” for basically he was a friendly follow,
and he did not want the student to think his remark somehow
chided the student’s calling, for youths who took up formal studies
were often the butt of jokes from the city’s laboring classes, if not
of direct hostility. With no gods of their own, the saying ran about
Kolhari, were the students not out to give names to everyone
else’s? “I’m not the best driver. But if we break down—” he gave
the boy a grin—“I’ll get you to help me push.”
     Grinning back, the boy grasped the cart’s side and pulled
himself up while the smuggler walked once around to see if
everything was in place. (The booty sack was still wedged firmly
under canvas behind the lashed pots.) Coming round to the other
side of the bench, he climbed up and took the reins in his hands.
“Hieee!” he called, then clicked a bit, looking out over the moving
heads and stationary awnings that filled the market. Half standing
beside the student, the smuggler, as they started, sat down, hard, on
the bench.
      Three carts rolled ahead of them. Moving through the women
and men with their baskets and barrows, the boys and girls with
their sacks and sledges, he heard others—an elderly woman driver
halloed shrilly for another cart to move—start behind.
     His departure was exactly as he’d wished it.
      But as he rolled through the morning traffic he glanced at the
youngster with his forearms on his knees beside him. Regarding
this commercial bustle with an enthusiasm silent as the smuggler’s,
the youth, whose nakedness did not sign barbarism, whose braid
did not sign the military, whose bagged feet did not sign labor on
dangerous stones, and whose bound hands did not sign distant
origin, sat there, observing all with a student interest (freckles on
his forearms, too, the smuggler now noticed: and freckles on a
male were as physically repulsive to him as they were attractive on
women), a collection of appropriated signs, as if he himself were a
living lie, an embodied dream—
      Reining the beast right, the smuggler saw the little man
ambling between a stall of bladed tools and another of painted
bowls. He still wore his collar, the bindings on his hands and feet,
and the rag over his eye. He’s a tired man, the smuggler thought.
Whatever had made him bolt the crypt had stilled in him now; and
the little man seemed only a diminutive stranger, up the night and
making (again, most probably) for the bridge to complete the
debauch that had, no doubt, been nowhere near as surprising or
satisfying or educational for him as for the smuggler.
      Suddenly the smuggler grinned. “Hey there, one-eye!” he
called above the market’s noise, for he had never been one to
pretend next day that the night before had not happened, with
either women or men. “You still don’t have a coin for me?”
     The one-eyed man turned.
      Then he did something quite as astonishing as anything the
smuggler had seen since he’d first come to Kolhari: he reached up,
pulled the rag from his head, yanked it from his hair, and stood
blinking two perfectly fine eyes in the autumnal morning, while
porters and shoppers and vendors stepped around him. There was
recognition on his face but no particular humor.
     “You mean you’re not…!” The smuggler sat back on the
bench and laughed. “Well!” he called, suddenly glad he was on a
moving cart and the little man was not. “Maybe I’ll see you next
time I cross the bridge! And maybe you’ll see me!” Laughing, he
shook the reins over his ox, who moved heavily on. The little man
turned to walk away. “Now would you think—” the smuggler
elbowed the student beside him—“I mean, I’d thought he might
be—” But what did this student know of the smuggler’s
researches? “For someone who manages to get by, I can think
some dumber things than anyone I know!”
     “You know him?” the student asked.
     Recovering from his laugh, the smuggler shrugged. “He…
owes me a little money. Yeah, he’s someone I know.”
     “He’s a slave.” The student nodded knowingly.
    The smuggler chuckled. “Well—” He shrugged again. “You
know…”
     “Oh,” the student said. “He’s one of those.”
      The student didn’t say any more for a while, and the young
smuggler soon found himself explaining silently to the student of
the mind beside him: Ah, you study with your wise master out in
Sallese, but you’ve no idea of some of the things I’ve learned right
on the stones of the bridge back there. Those stones could
probably teach even you a few things.
     To which the student (of the mind) replied: You think you’re
the only one who knows of such? Certainly, then, you know that
more than one student, down on his luck, has come to the bridge to
earn the odd coin or two and learn something of life in the
process—though usually we disguise ourselves, for the buyers of
Kolhari don’t like us when we come in our ordinary attire, as I
wear now.
      The smuggler glanced at the boy. Would he be that kind? (Tell
me, are you that kind?) No, thought the smuggler. (No, said the
student. No, I’d never do something like that. Look at me. I don’t
look like that sort, do I? Of course I wouldn’t!) Though what the
signs were that told him so were anybody’s guess.
      The silent dialogue ran on as the cart moved between the
stalls and out of the market. Without speaking they rode through
the wakening city, toward the southern gate.




                                7
      Though he’d taken a passenger to make his wagon seem more
like an honest delivery cart, the smuggler had only planned to keep
the student till that night, when he would find some excuse to put
him down and let him catch some other southbound wagoner. (The
boy’s name was Kentog. But how long will I remember that? the
smuggler wondered.) Out on a three-day journey south, however,
the youth proved companionable and, that evening, laughed loudly
at the smuggler’s story of how he’d been fired from a lumber crew
when he’d been found sleeping beyond the lunch break, and how
he’d been chased out of an abandoned barn he’d once decided to
rest in by an irate farmer, even as he protested his willingness to
work for his stay, and how he’d been cursed down a Kolhari alley
by a potter for whom he’d been unpacking loads of imported clay
because he’d dropped three of them in a row and they’d broken
open on the street—all of which had occurred three to five years
back, but which the smuggler related as if they’d happened only
weeks ago.
      Perhaps, he thought, I might take him on for two of his three
days’ journey.
      The next afternoon, when the smuggler’s tales of his own
fallible labors began to run down, he found the student, so silent
before, now full of his own talk. (Once the smuggler had asked him
if he had any thoughts on the Liberator, Gorgik, to which the
student frowned and said, “Gorgi? I’ve heard the word. It’s a
foreign term, from the Ulvayn Islands, no?” which, by now, was an
answer the smuggler had gotten enough times so that, for him, it
was the sign that more questions would be pointless about his
chosen topic. Today, he never pursued his inquiries beyond such an
answer.) And it became easy just to listen to the young man run on
about this and that; now and again the smuggler grunted to sign
that he was listening—precisely when his attention was the furthest
away.
     But the noise was a comfort.
      The boy had not questioned any of the back trails they’d
taken, and he’d happily gotten down several times, to pull loose a
root that had stuck in the wheel, to guide the cart over the round
stones of a stream. Could it be, the smuggler wondered on the
second evening when they made camp over a fire where the student
had volunteered to cook a respectable pot of stew from some dried
cod and roots the smuggler had brought along under the canvas (he
did such things, he explained, for the others out at the school), that
he’s so careful with his questions because he knows I carry
contraband, and he thinks all this is a kind of adventure? Well,
then, his reticence is to be valued as much as his chatter; he’s not
such a bad sort after all.
      So the student stayed with the smuggler’s wagon six hours
into the third day’s ride, till he said: “This is where I was telling you
about. Right here,” and got down before a house which, he
explained for the third time, was an inn run by an aunt of his. After
a few moments, standing in the road, the student said: “You’re not
like a lot of the others, you know?” The boy looked up at the
smuggler on the driver’s bench. “I’ve heard them—” and he drew
his shoulders up “ ‘I wouldn’t be one of them students for
anything. I’m glad I’m a good and honest laborer.’”
      From the cart seat, the smuggler grinned down at the
youngster, naked in the road and looking up in leaf-dappled light.
He, of course, had heard it too. But this was the second time the
student had said it. The first had been two days ago at the
beginning of their trip, though no doubt the boy had thought the
smuggler had misunderstood him or had been thinking of
something else right then, for the smuggler had not said anything
back. “Well,” the smuggler said, “I’m not a good and honest
laborer.” He’d thought about saying that before, too. But as he’d
remained silent, the student was repeating it now. The smuggler
toyed with the words, I’m a good and honest smuggler. Should he add
that? No, it would only be a stupid and witless thing to blurt now.
So he just kept grinning at the youngster grinning up at him from
the road.
     “Why don’t you come inside?” the student asked, suddenly.
“You can stay over for the night. My aunt’ll feed you, if I say you’re
my friend. It won’t cost you anything—and we’ll call it an even
exchange for the ride.” The pale brown eyes blinked above the
adolescent beard.
      Remembering the “one-eyed” man, so stingy with his coins,
the smuggler said: “I didn’t carry your aunt down here. I carried
you. So you pay me the three iron coins we agreed on; it’s less than
half what anyone else would’ve charged you. But I’m that kind of a
fool, and I know it. Pay me. Then, if you want to invite me in to a
free meal just for friendship, that’s up to you.”
     “Oh, well. Yes,” the student said. “Sure. I see.” He dropped
to one knee on the grassy ridge between the road rats and untied
one of his baggy shoes with his bound hands. “That’s fair enough. I
mean, it’s what we agreed.”
     The smuggler had already decided the loose boots were where
the youth kept his meager moneys.
      Handing up the three coins, the leather still a-flap about his
foot, the student, standing, said: “Actually, you know, I have to
walk on another stade to the west before I reach my mother’s
house. It’s just my father’s sister who lives here. So, maybe it’d be
better if you didn’t stop here at my aunt’s… I mean, I’m just going
in to say hello, anyway, really, before I go on—”
      “Good journey to you, then, Kentog.” The smuggler bent to
put the coins in the shadow under the bench, sat up, and flicked the
reins. The cart rolled forward.
     Stepping awkwardly back, one shoe tied and one loose, the
student called, “Thanks. And good journey!”
     The smuggler’s cart rolled on among huts, by a pile of
baskets, past a broken loom in an overgrown yard. (I’m a good and
honest smuggler. Yes, I’m a very good and a very honest smuggler.
Rehearsing it to himself, he smiled and shook his head. Someday,
sometime, believe me, my young student, I’ll say it to someone. But,
oh, he thought, what a decent, law-abiding boy like you won’t do to
get away with a few coins from a good and honest criminal like
me!) The road was empty; a chicken pecked lazily at his left, and, as
his cart rounded a curve, to the right and curled under a bush, a
sleeping dog swished its tail once, shivered below the leaves, and
stilled. But the smuggler was beyond the enclave before he had any
picture of its products or processes, the work of its quiet days or
evenings.
     Leaves pulled their shadow over the road to break up sunlight
on the beast’s back, to shatter it on the smuggler’s knees and
shoulders. An hour later, he paused in his dialogue, still rambling
on with the imagined student: between the leaves the sky had
confounded to one gray. The air was cooler, thicker, heavier.
Glancing at a break left by a fallen tree, he saw that the
sun-saturated blue had given over to tarnished cloud, like silver
lapped about with hammer marks.
      Out of sight, lightning flared. As his cart rolled under
branches he heard drops batter leaves. Leaves shook, shivered,
and—seconds later—splattered down on him. The ox moved her
head left, right, looked up, then plodded on as the road became
pocked mud about her hooves. The smuggler leaned forward to
take the rain on his back. Water ran from his hair, dripped off his
eyebrows.
      All right, he admitted to the phantom Kentog (who, because
of his incorporeality, could still sit tall on the bench despite the
peppering), do you want me to say it, then, young student? There’re
some things you do know better than I! (He jumped down from the
cart to walk beside it along this sloppy stretch, laughing aloud in
the rain.) Yes, and I’ll say this too: I’d give you your three coins
back for your aunt’s roof, a bowl of hot soup, and a pallet to stretch
out on for the night. Good and honest smuggler that I am, I must
still be the kind of fool I’m always saying, for not taking up your
offer. Well, then; I’ve said it.
     Are you satisfied?
      Apparently he was; for after that, pulling his bare feet from
the mud beside the creaking wheel, the young smuggler walked his
cart through the torrent more or less alone.
     Once the rain stopped for twenty minutes.
     Once it stopped for ten.
      Once the smuggler (back on the driver’s bench, for here the
road was irregularly paved, its slight slope keeping it moderately
free of water) looked up to see the trees to the left had given way to
rock. Here and there to the right he glimpsed a storm-lashed valley.
But rain obscured distances, distorted boulders and pines—it was
hard to look up long with the drops beating eyes and cheeks and
lips. By now the smuggler was unsure if he were still on the right
back road. Perhaps the last town had put him on a side path. He
should be going due south, but there was no finding the sun for
confirmation.
      When the rain stopped again, the trees had closed him round.
The smallest breeze splattered his arms and knees so that, by now,
it was debatable whether rain really fell or the leaves only shed their
leftovers (and an old woman, a young girl, and some elderly
farmers whose names he had forgotten years ago debated it). You
are lost on a side road that has detoured you into the unrectored
chaos where anything may happen and any lie, falsehood, illusion,
or reality is game, he said to himself. And a god, who, though she
has no name as you have, is still as concerned with smuggling as
you are, will find any play of yes and no prey to attach herself to all
entire. He countered himself: You are on the right road, headed
south, only wet, cold, and uncomfortable. How many times have
you prayed, ‘All the dear gods, please make something happen’? As
he answered back, ‘Not many,’ lightning flashed again behind
leaves.
     It was raining.
     The cart rolled.
      Foot propped on a slant trunk, and sword drawn; that’s What
he saw first, when the voice barked, harsher and louder than the
falling water: “Hey, pretty man! Give a tired traveler a ride…?”
      Looking up, he thought to ask for iron. But rain splattered his
face. Looking down again, he called: “Come on! Climb up! You
going far?” Calling, it occurred to him the figure vaulting the log to
slog up the sloppy shoulder might be a bandit. There’d been
something odd about the blade—which slid back into its soaked
scabbard. But water blurred all, made him blink. The figure came
on with swinging arms, behind wet veils, which, as the smuggler
turned away, thickened.
      A rough hand grasped the seat beside him. The cart rocked.
The other hand grasped his shoulder (which was how he knew the
first was rough). The traveler (or bandit) rose with a snort and a
chuckle. “Get your ox going! Curse this weather!”
      Still hunching, he flicked the reins. A warm interruption in the
streaming cold as he rocked forward, the hard hand stayed high on
his arm; his new companion’s side hit his, swayed away, hit him
again. “Where’re you traveling?” The smuggler glanced over.
      There was something tied across his seat companion’s face: a
rag through whose two holes, even in this shadowed splatter, he
saw blue eyes. A bandit? Behind the rag mask, affably enough she…
well, grinned.
      He’d been trying to see those breasts as the muscles
developed over the chest of some swaggering country man,
distorted by blown water; but here, with her sitting up close and
leering against the torrent (still holding his shoulder), behind her
mask she was, he realized once and for all as he blinked in falling
water, a woman.
     He started to speak, but an indrawn breath as a gust blew
drops into his mouth made him cough—which only saved him
embarrassment, he decided. He had nothing to say. Wiping his face
with his wrist, he turned to his beast.
     They rocked through the rain.
      Perhaps the seventh rock jarred her hand loose. He glanced
up. With both, now, she grasped the bench by skirted hips, leaning
forward to gaze through masking cloth, pelting drops, raging
leaves. Half an hour later, when the rain stopped again, she was still
silent.
      Decisively (though the reasons for the decision he could not
have spoken), he looked at the brush and rubble on both sides of
the road before he said: “You from around here?”
      “Do I look like a native of this wet and woebegone land?”
She snorted with an expression below her mask that, on a man, he
would have known was a laugh. “And where do you come from?
You look like you might be bringing your cart down from Kolhari.
What are you hauling? No—” She leaned away from him. Within
the frayed holes, her lids dropped halfway down ceramic blue eyes.
“You don’t really want to tell me about what you carry, do you? I
don’t blame you—though I could give you some advice on how to
ease your load along its way. You’re probably in a profession I
know more than a little about.” She laughed again. “My name’s
Raven.” She put out her hand.
     He dropped one rein and reached across to shake.
      “What are you called? But no…” She held his in a hard grip,
her small fingers more callused than his own, fleshy and
thick-knuckled. “You pretty men of this country, the ones with
enough meat on you to make it look as if you might be
comfortable to cuddle after sunset, you’re too modest to tell every
wandering woman your name. Well, that’s as it should be, even in a
land like this, where the men act as odd as you do—and the women
are too beaten down to be believable.” She pulled her hand from
his and looked around at streaming pines, at leaves all droplet
struck.
      A black-haired, blue-eyed, be-masked woman, as far as he
could tell she didn’t have a freckle on her. Tell her my name…?
And having committed himself to withholding it, he felt a sudden
surge of camaraderie. “You’re a foreigner, yes? I couldn’t say for
sure, and foreigners—I admit it—are nothing I know much about,
but you look as if you find the most ordinary thing we do here in
Nevèrÿon odd.” He grinned. “Is that it?”
      “My home is in the Western Crevasse. Now, what I find odd,”
the little woman said, all grave behind her mask, “is that the
terribly odd things you do here all the time, most of you find so
hard to laugh at.”
      “What do you find laughable here?” He was prepared to
chuckle at whatever serene normality she might cite under the
salting drops.
      “Well,” she said, serious as the rain, “now you surely look like
a young man on his way to fight beside the Liberator, whose cause
is noble and necessary. He’s assembled his forces just east of here.
Well, myself, I’ve fought at the Liberator’s side three months now.
And I’ve grown tired of his campaign—noble as it is—and have
decided to rejoin the sane and sensible women of my homeland
and to pursue our sane and sensible ends.” She paused, drawing
back. (He thought she was about to narrow her eyes again, but
under and through her mask she gave him a great, sampaku grin.)
Above, the trees roared. Rain redoubled. “Now you see, I would
have expected a man of my own country to find a speculation such
as that worthy of a chuckle at least. But you sit on your bench,
staring at me with your eyes wide between wet lashes and your
mouth hung half open, and not a giggle anywhere in your pretty
beard. Of course—” and here she assumed a lighter tone—“in my
country, sometimes it seems that the men can do nothing but
giggle. They laugh at everything and anything, morning and night,
as if they believed nothing in the world worth a true thought. Well,
perhaps they’re right. Our philosophers are always saying so.
People say men don’t have to think for the same reason they don’t
have to have babies. But though one doesn’t want to insult you
with the point, you have to admit it’s reasonable, yes? Still, lost in
this strange and terrible land, sometimes a woman wants to see a
man with a little flesh on him act just a bit silly, once in a while…?
Say, I bet you’ve been driving that ox in this downpour all
afternoon. You look tired to death. Here, give me the reins and
rest.” She leaned forward, reaching out as if he’d directly ordered
her to take the ox’s leads.
      The smuggler snatched them aside, so that she looked at him
with the puzzlement she no doubt turned on all this gray-green
country. “The Liberator…” he said. “You mean the
Liberator—Gorgik the Liberator—is fighting near here? To the
east?”
      “I’ve been with his forces three months.” She pursed her lips
and nodded. “His troops are assembled on the Princess Elyne’s
ancestral lands. She allows him to use her ancient halls for his
headquarters. From it, sometimes with his one-eyed lieutenant,
Noyeed, sometimes with his most trusted followers, and
sometimes totally alone he scouts the land about here, making
maps, marking out trails to forage against the earls and barons who
still maintain their slave pens. He’s a very clever man, this
Liberator. When the evil lords expect an attack from his massed
troops, he sends in only a single spy to provoke internal upset. And
when the lords have doubled and quadrupled their vigil on their
own households and have sent their own spies among their own
laborers and infiltrated their own enterprises with invisible ears and
silent eyes, paid to report by whisper and writing any and all
sedition, driving themselves and all who work for them mad under
the anxiety that circles like a kite over the house where betrayal is
hunted, then the Liberator’s troops descend on the demoralized
estate. Oh, he is a very clever man. But—” (Her frown, the
smuggler saw, was actually a strained smile, showing small teeth
behind dark lips.) “—I grow uneasy with your Liberator. Certainly
he’s a moral and meritorious man. And his cause is reasonable and
right. But I do not like fighting for a man among men.
      “You must understand—” She laid a hand on the smuggler’s
forearm, where his muscles moved as he moved the reins—“this is
not the misandry of some fledgling warrior whose breasts are no
bigger than two handfuls of sand one teasing boy might spill on the
chest of another asleep on his back at the beach. ‘No man can
wield a blade; no man can be as strong, as agile, as honest, or as
brave as a woman.’” She laughed. “Well, when the little hawks have
never flown further than the horizon of some fussy father’s eye,
what more can you expect of them? I say, if a man can fight like a
woman, respect him as a woman. And I admit: I’ve met more than
one in this tortured and terrible country whose single blade I’d
think twice about crossing my own honed twins with—though that
admission would get me only laughter in the warrior barracks of
my home.” (Her accent, he began to hear, was not the slurred
elisions and apocopations that, as he moved further and further
south, became the barbarian tongue. Apparently, he had been
imposing barbaric expectations on an accent that, as he listened to
it, began to distinguish itself on his ear.) “No, that’s not what
bothers me.” She let her knees fall wide and ran her hands out on
her wet thighs. “Once all that’s accepted—that a man can be the
equal of a woman in war—you still find yourself uncomfortable
fighting amidst a bunch of them, relying on them, knowing your life
depends on their bravery, commitment, honor, and skill. And always
in the off-hours around the cook-fire or in whatever quarters we
can commandeer for ourselves on the march, there are the
jealousies and minuscule hostilities, over which they laugh and try
to mask under the warriors’ bluster they all wear so uneasily. But
one can sense in them the same male sulks and uncertainties you
find in the men of my own land—where, at least, those
uncertainties and sulks can come out honestly and openly and
speak their own names, and the men do not have to disguise them
as displays of reason and rational right. Now you must know, I’ve
fought alongside men in this country who were true fighters and
soldiers, yes. But a woman among them always has the feeling that,
for all the well-fitted skills they may have been practicing for
months or even years, still they haven’t been real warriors for more
than a week, so that one begins to realize their laughter and
horseplay is to hide the fact that, under all, they remain true sons of
Eih’f, still carrying Eih’f’s shame. Oh, the Liberator’s cause is
joyous and just. I respect it (and I respect him!) as much as
anyone’s (or anyone) I’ve found in this odd and eccentric country.
      “I first met him many years ago. It was on a clear spring
night, with not a trace of halo about the moon. And his plans and
ambition were clear and sharp as the moon-shot dark. I was
sympathetic, certainly. Still, I only trust such clarity about such
basically muddled matters just so far. But as the years went, and in
my own travels I heard more and more of him, nothing
contradicted what I thought was most valid in what he’d said that
night. So, finally, some months back, I came to him to offer my
fighting services.” She grunted. “I don’t think he even remembered
me. But that’s no matter. Still, it’s been rain and fog and mist for
the whole time, I tell you!
     “Well, he’s still as fine a fighter as a woman. What’s more, he
has something more than dragon droppings between his ears. And
I fought my best for him when I was with him.
     “But rumor came by, three days ago, that women of my own
country have been sighted traveling through this part of Nevèrÿon.
And I grow tired of foreign foibles and failings, and long for
familiar ones. I’ve decided to seek the rumor’s source and join
them. They say that they were seen in Vinelet. That’s where I’m
headed.”
      The young smuggler heard this with a controlled and guarded
bemusement not much different from yours and mine. It was
much the feeling that a point was being put too bluntly, at too great
a length—not at all in a ladylike way. But because, for all his
disparagement of students, he was not really so far from a student
himself, he said: “If you want to find your friends, better not go to
Vinelet. Not if the rumor’s been about for three days. I’m no
certain judge of these parts, and I’d think twice about anything the
likes of me said; and I do. But would they likely be traveling north
or south? Three days south of Vinelet is the Argini. Three days
north is the port of Sarness,” for in the past two years he’d
delivered sacks in all those places.
     The masked woman, who was not tall, leaned away from him
with an appraising eye. (Just then the rain really stopped.) “For
such a pretty man, you have a pretty mind. That’s as rare in your
country as it is in mine.” Below her mask, her lips’ set told him he
should feel complimented. And because he was a friendly sort, the
young smuggler smiled. Me? he thought. Pretty? Well, I wouldn’t
go to bed with one like her if she paid me. Unless of course (and
found himself wondering what in her unsettling presence he might
be responding to) she really would pay. But it was hard enough to
pry coin from the men on the bridge. How did one even ask it from
such a manly woman, and a foreigner at that, on the road? Still, he
pondered, it would be interesting, probably, and different, certainly.

     Would that she had a speckle or five.
     Raven said: “This time of year, they’d be coming north of
course. And by now, you’re right, they’d be at the port of Sarness.
That’s no more than three hours’ ride from here.”
     “Is it?” He would have thought it a town for the next day’s
stopover. But one always mistook distances in this geography
whose organization, if not its very existence, invariably came from
the hearsay of strangers. And this masked woman was certainly
among the strangest.
       “But you know this part of Nevèrÿon,” she said with
certainty. “When we reach the high crossroad, we’ll point out the
sights and wonders of Sarness to each other. With the boats set
along its waterfront and its houses spread on both sides of the
Dragon’s Way, the town is beautiful from the hillcrest at sunset.
It’s a sight to tell your granddaughters about.” The woman grinned
wickedly. “And I’ll find my landswomen there.”
      Laughing, the smuggler shook his reins—though the red
beast’s gait stayed the same.
     They rolled on.
      Thrice in the past five summers he’d looked down on
Sarness’s collection of seaside huts and warehouses. Twice, he’d
actually taken his cart into the sleepy port and driven along its
somnolent waterfront, looking to buy beer. Under a shoreside
canopy at a long wooden table with several landbound fishermen,
he’d drunk up four or six or ten mugs of it, while the waters
flickered brighter than lightning between the knocking dories.
Then, with a light head and a bloated belly, he’d let his ox pull him
and the cart back up across the main highway to the side-path,
which then, as now, he’d been traveling.
     No, it probably wasn’t far.
      “Well!” the masked woman said, three hours later when the
cart had halted on the ridge, and the two of them stood beside the
wheel sunk in the soggy earth. “It really is a pretty town… But
now, I’m afraid, between the fog and the twilight, you wouldn’t
know a town was there, much less that the sea lay beyond it.”
                                  8

      Having drunk in the rain, the rocks and scrub had, over the
intervening ride, breathed out a palpable mist, and the crossway
they’d halted at seemed some tiny, fallow garden, furrowed by cart
wheels.
     They stood by the wagon in the fog.
     “But I guess,” Raven said, her hand up on the bench by her
shoulder, “after you’ve looked down on Kolhari, Sarness isn’t
much. Still, it’s a city with a history. Some of it might interest you.”

      “Oh?” The smuggler moved one foot and the other in the
earth, which, once you stepped on it, was rather comfortable, if
cold.
     “You’d been asking me about the Liberator…?”
     The young smuggler looked up.
     “It’s too bad the weather has made it impossible to see the
Dragon’s Way from here; it’s the easiest thing to orient yourself by.
But then, you must remember it if you’ve been there before.”
      What answered was the faintest memory of a wide, dusty
road—the royal north-south highway that ran, here, near the coast
and on which, so seldom, he’d traveled, with the city on one side,
and, on the other, an astonishing drop below which you could see a
few waterside warehouse roofs, fishermen’s homes, taverns; and
the sea.
     He stared into fog.
     “There was a time, you know, when dragons roamed wild
over all Nevèrÿon,” Raven went on. “Before Sarness was built, the
ledge along which the main highway runs served the beasts as a
perch from which to soar out over the ocean, where they would
turn above the waves and glide back to land—or so at least the
fables run. Myself, I think that’s just a story, for I’ve never found a
dragon smart enough, once aloft, to find her way back to the ledge
she left from. They’re stupid beasts. Nowadays, you only see wild
dragons high in the Falthas.”
     Fragments of half-attended tales about eagles, about dragons,
and their supposed habitats returned to the smuggler. He’d only
seen pottery stencils of either beast. Both, he thought, were
probably imaginary.
      “When we last came through Sarness to requisition supplies,
the Liberator pointed out a warehouse toward the lower end of the
Way, where, he told us, years ago when he’d made his living for a
while by smuggling, the back window had been left loose, and he’d
climbed in by moonlight to spend ten minutes in the shadowy
storage room, hesitating between a load of metal-headed mallets
destined for some shipyard in the Ulvayn Islands and a collection
of magic figurines, supposed to go to the quarrymen of Enoch, to
protect them from falls on the rock face.” She snorted. “He told us
that, today, he doesn’t remember which he actually chose to make
off with. All he remembers is that he stood there, caught in
indecision—and, of course, the warehouse’s location: between the
bakery’s outdoor ovens and the hostelry’s side gate. Both were still
there last month. Though he says that the hostelry used to be twice
as big as now. They’ve torn down some of its outbuildings.”
     “If he was just an ordinary smuggler,” the smuggler said,
“once he made his choice, he probably tried to put the whole thing
from his mind. With his load in his wagon, he probably never
looked at it again.”
      “If what I know of smuggling is true—” Raven
considered—“you may be right. Just along the Way, where it rises
high above the water, to reenter the rocky stretch, Mad Queen
Olin, so local fables tell, once warned General Babàra, then leading
a fleet of sailors from the Ulvayns, who’d come in their boats from
the islands to hear her proclamation, to be on the lookout for some
mysterious sign or other involving a tree and a bird.” She dropped
her hand from the cart and reached round to scratch an elbow.
“Odd how fables are. I had a friend once: knew all the stories from
the islands, she did.” Raven recited loudly into fog:


            “And the eagle sighed and the serpent cried
            For all Mad Olin’s warning!”


      When nothing emerged from it in answer, she laughed.
“Because of the rhyme that the children of Kolhari bounce their
balls to, every child in that city’s streets knows something of that
particular tale—whether they know they know it or not. But my
friend assured me that this one never became part of the islands’
lore, though it involved so many of their sailors and boats. But
what history remembers here, it forgets there.”
      “And what it forgets there,” said the smuggler, who liked the
roll of the phrase, “it remembers here.”
      “Only sometimes,” said the masked woman, upsetting what
had seemed as pleasant a symmetry of thought as of sound. “That’s
if we’re lucky. Even further along the Way, at the far end of the
town, where the road turns among the crags, so Gorgik’s one-eyed
lieutenant told us, when he was a boy and the slavers who’d stolen
him from his home only a hundred stades inland from here first
brought him north, it was just over those rocks that they pushed his
wounded brother to his death—or at any rate, he said, it was just
after they’d passed through a town where the sea sounded the same
on its shingle, as did the crying and laughing of its children, and the
bickerings and braggings of its skilled artisans and lazy loafers.
He’d been completely blind at the time, he explained, sight having
not yet returned to his good eye. But though he’d asked the city’s
name when they passed through, one day a few years back he woke
up to realize he could no longer bring it to mind. But if Sarness
were not it, he said, it was a town very like it, and somewhere on
the Royal Road.” She looked into the mist before them, as if it had
just revealed some immense secret. “Fables…”
     The young smuggler said: “You’re among those who say the
Liberator is the one who carries the scar, while his lieutenant,
Noyeed, bears the single eye…?”
      Raven frowned. “The Liberator, Gorgik, is a giant of a man,
scarred down his left cheek; and his lieutenant, the singular and
subtle Noyeed, has only half his earthly sight—though I’d wager
that what he sees by unearthly means more than makes up for the
loss of that eye.” She let the mist question him.
     He answered it with his laughter. “I’ve known some before
who’ve said it was the other way around.”
     “I’ve been with the Liberator for the three months now.” She
frowned through her mask: that clearly was her answer. “I was
among his most trusted scouts.”
      “And now you’ve left him.” The smuggler shrugged. “Not
that either means much. My own memory is often weak about
details of things I just did yesterday. And you can’t expect someone
to recall every word spoken or each bit of clothing worn by
someone else, when they didn’t know anyone else would ever ask
about it…”
     She looked at him oddly. No, he thought. She’s not the kind
to take such excuses. But he’d had conflicting tales from more
ordinary people than she who’d made far stranger claims.
     They stood, silent.
     Then she laughed, harshly, shrilly. “So serious, all you pretty
men! So serious!” though he would have sworn he’d been speaking
with a fair suggestion of levity. Her laugh went on, long and
barking. She clapped him on the arm. “It’s the plump and pretty
ones who always want to contradict an honest woman at any and
every turn. Well, they say in my country, the wiles of wise men are
an asset to their beauty.
     “So, Wise and Pretty, here’s some advice:
       “A hundred stades along, this back road joins the Dragons’
Way, which, as we both know, swarms with Imperial customs
inspectors. Now I have no reason to think someone like yourself
should have any wish to avoid those diverse and devious fellows,
for you show not the smallest sign by which one might judge you
other than an ordinary wagoner traveling from town market to
town market—save that you travel on a road smugglers frequently
travel, looking so much like an ordinary wagoner…” (For a
moment, the smuggler thought, her eyes in their frayed holes
glittered.) “Yet if, and whyever, you’d as soon bypass those
inconvenient men in the pay of the Child Empress, whose reign, all
say, is both sane and sensible, you might cut across the lands of the
princess Elyne and, on the other side, pick up the little road that
runs along the border of the Garth. A gaggle of those inspectors set
out every evening in five directions from Sarness to catch those
who chance the roads round here, hoping that night’s cover will
protect them. If you were what you clearly are not, my warning
might save you some bother—if not your pretty neck. Heed me,
and you may have a better chance of ending up where you want to.
No—!” She pushed out her hand as if to halt him. “Don’t protest
your innocence. Nothing I have said has put it in question. I speak
with no more direction and intention than the fog blowing here and
there about us. A mere stade from here, down from the left side of
this road, is a good spot where a woman—or a man—might take a
wagon over easy rocks and among wide-spaced trees, till she came
to a naturally protected clearing, where you could make camp. At
least half a dozen times in the last three months, since I’ve been
scouting the area, I have seen Her Majesty’s inspectors ride right by
it. The Liberator himself first showed it to me: he used it as a
stopping place back in his own smuggling days. You only have to
turn your cart from the road after the grove of tall cypresses on the
right and just before the rocky outcrop. But that’s assuming a wise
and pretty man like yourself might need such protection—” again
her laugh barked in the mist—“when of course that’s absurd!”
      She started away from the wagon, taking wide steps in the
soft dirt. Skirting a bush bobbing in the breeze, she grew vaguer,
less distinct and, finally, vanished on the slope toward the hidden
seaside town.
     Frowning at her memory, the young smuggler turned back to
his ox, clicked his tongue; again the beast lugged forward. He
walked beside the racketing cart in the fog.
     As man and cart made their way through twilight, the road
seemed no longer than it was wide; they might as easily have been
wandering some fogbound plain as traveling a straited path. Now
and again, the mist smothered all sense of motion, and the
smuggler felt he remained in one spot while the earth shifted under
him, compensating his steps.
     An inner voice chanted some children’s rhyme he’d used to
hear in Kolhari. Why ponder that now? But, then, Raven had
declaimed its closing couplet. Remembering that, he felt a
moment’s temporal disorientation to match the spatial. Had he
been running over those rhyming lines five minutes now? Or fifty
minutes—
     The tall shadows to the right had to be cypresses. He paused.
The cart kept moving; as the tailgate passed him, he started walking
again. Yes, that was an outcrop of ribbed rock ahead.
     “Hiii…!” He halted his ox and walked to the road’s edge.
      Yes, the cart could turn off here. He looked about, wondering
how the place might appear to someone who knew the area—not
that Imperial customs inspectors were usually native to the lands
they patrolled. Perhaps in such a fog an inspector would not be too
thorough. He went back to his wagon, led the beast over and off.
Some meters along, he halted his ox again, returned to the
road—on the way he pulled loose a branch—and swept out cart
and hoof tracks for ten meters. Then, backing up, he obliterated his
footprints as they emerged under him, till they turned over the
road’s edge. Tossing the branch away, he walked down to his
wagon. Since beginning his sweep, the sky had gone from gray to
purple.
     The beast lowed.
     They started walking.
     The way went round rock and under more trees.
      The smuggler saw the glow off between bushes, like
ground-level moonlight. As he stepped through underbrush, it
became pale orange. Leaves hung between it and him, sharply black
as ashes. A boundaryless fire, the fog itself seemed to burn.
      The young smuggler halted his cart with a hand heavy on the
beast’s shoulder and a few clicks, took seven deep breaths, and
walked on. Ten steps, and of course it was a campfire with stones
around it. A man squatted by it, he and the fire misty.
      The smuggler moved behind a damp trunk. A twig scraped
his calf. Leaves tickled his shoulder.
      The man was big, with a thick belly and a beard growing high
on his cheeks. Rough hair thinned over his forehead. Shoulders,
back, and buttocks were hairy. Behind him stood a cart, much like
the smuggler’s. A siding of covered poles leaned against it, making
a shelter.
     Tethered to a tree, a donkey swished its tail—which is why
the smuggler saw it; it munched in its bag.
      A four-legged pot sat over the fire. Steam whipped from it,
joining smoke and fog: unlike the ones in his own cart, the
smuggler reflected, those could still hold magic.
     The man held out a stick.
     On both arms he wore bronze bands; around one ankle leaned
carved and cast rings, wood and metal. About his neck hung chains
and thongs. A carved peg pierced one ear.
     Skewered on his stick’s fork, meat broiled.
     Juice dripped, to bubble on the rock.
     The young smuggler watched, trying to breathe softly,
speculating, remembering.
      Two men had shared possible paternity for the young
smuggler. One had been generally loud, usually angry, and, during
the smuggler’s childhood, had intermittently descended on his
mother’s cottage, often drunk, demanding food, money, or a place
to sleep—had disrupted his and his mother’s life till, by the time
the smuggler was seven, he’d wholly hated the man. The other had
lived a farm away but frequently rode his mule by the fields where
his aunt and mother were employed. Now and again he’d stopped
to play with the youngster who may or may not have been his son,
to joke with him, to give him a ride or, when the boy was older,
take him, with his mother’s permission, on short trips to a
neighboring village—a genial and woods-wise fellow, whose only
fault was that he always left unexpectedly, staying away for months.
The smuggler had soon learned it was the existence of both that
kept either from living permanently at his mother’s shack. But
some of his strongest childhood memories (and childhood was a
vague and misty time the smuggler did not usually ponder) were of
standing at a distance and watching now one of them, working
halfway across a field, now the other, sitting and eating beneath a
tree, now one, standing in the sun by the farm wall, or the other,
sleeping on a scatter of chaff by another farm’s barn. Watching, the
young smuggler could feel both delight in the one and displeasure
at the other leaving him, while the thought replacing the feeling (no
matter which possible father he observed), the thought filling his
head, the thought pouring from his eyes and nostrils and ears to
flood the sun-drenched day was: He’s so big! And the bigness
would grow bigger, and bigger, till it filled not just the day but all
nights and days before and after it, till he was light-headed before
such bigness and was sure he was smaller himself than a pissant
struggling in the grass at his toes.
     Half hidden by the tree and the cool fog, the smuggler felt
moments of the same light-headedness as he watched the man at
the fire. Ignoring the memories that came with it, he thought:
Perhaps I’m hungry… his roast and his pot look good.
     Just then, without glancing up, the man said: “Why are you
standing off there in the dark? Come, into the firelight where I can
see you.”
      Chills started behind his shoulders to cascade down his back,
pour over his buttocks… It’s only the surprise, he told himself.
(His foot caught under some ground-creeper, so that, stepping out,
he staggered.) Chills trickled his thighs. The earth was spongy
under small plants. “That’s a good fire you’ve got there.” He
recovered his balance, recalling that when he’d thought of fire
before, he’d decided not even to try one in this damp.
      The man turned his stick one way, then back. “If you bring
your cart on down, you can squat here a bit and share it with me.”
Reaching out, he gestured in a way the smuggler, moving forward,
assumed meant ‘come here’—though it could as easily have meant
‘go on.’ The hand was missing most of its third finger, and the
man’s lower lip looked as if it had been cut through and awkwardly
healed. A scar slanted over one eyebrow; the ends of others gouged
above his beard. Firelight gleamed on a milky blot over half his
right iris. Firelight on his hairy side lit three ropy welts around
from his back—which meant, as slave or criminal, one time or
another he’d been flogged. The hand dropped. “Now bring that
loud ox of yours along.”
     The smuggler turned to hurry back into what, by now, had
become true darkness. With damp leaves beating his cheek, with
twigs hitting his hip, he thought:
     Now could that possibly be…?
     But, no.
     Though she’d said he sometimes scouted alone…
      The smuggler pushed back a branch—which scraped the
cart’s side. By his wagon, he felt along for his animal, who, at his
hand, stepped forward. He caught the bridle and pulled back.
     The ox lowed again.
     The cart rolled.
      Leaves about him blotted flame-lit mist. Leading his beast
back into the light, the smuggler grinned. “Now, I bet I’m wrong
about you.” The ox glanced at the fire, at the donkey. “But you
look like you know the land about here well.” Tugging the bridle,
he felt his feet slip on wet ground.
     “Just because I know this clearing every smuggler between
Enoch and the Avila has been telling every other about for twenty
years now?” The squatting man humphed—and pushed down a
piece of meat on a second forked stick he’d prepared while the
smuggler had been off in the trees.
     The young smuggler laughed. “Now you see, I didn’t know it.
At least not before a very odd traveling lady told me of it just a
while back.”
      Beside the squatting man sat a dish in which red meat, some
pelt still on it, glistened at the rim. Across it leaned a broad knife as
long as the man’s thigh.
      The smuggler tied his ox’s reins to a thin tree growing from
the same bole out of which grew the one the donkey’s
sweat-blackened thongs were knotted to. “You look like a man who
carries a bit of authority with him.” He turned to walk back
between the animals to the fire.
     “Because I have a few more years than you?” The man held
out the second stick. “Or do you think I’m some customs
inspector, waiting here to feed any young thief and bandit who
comes along in the night?”
     The smuggler took the stick from the three knotted fingers
and thick thumb grasping it. “No, you don’t look like a customs
inspector.” He squatted at the far side of the fire. Smoke rolled
from between them to join the fog. He extended the loaded stick
into the flame beside the other hanging roast. After a while he
asked: “Do you see with that eye?”
     The man grinned across the fire. Two teeth to the side of his
mouth were gone and the one forward of the gap was badly rotted.
He leaned his head to the side, as if he were not used to the
question. “I see well enough. You want to stay on my good side,
don’t try any sudden movements to the right. This eye can tell night
from day, a shadow from a light, and—if you’re close enough—a
smile from a frown. And the other, believe me, misses nothing.”
He gave another quick, gappy grin. “Why do you need to know?”
    The smuggler rotated the stick. “I’d just guess a lot of folks
who meet you think that eye is blind. Do some call you ‘One-eye’?”

      “Yes. Sometimes.” The man grunted. “I don’t mind it. I knew
a dwarf once, in the K’haki: everyone called him Runt. Another
fellow who rode the Venarra Canyon was half again my height,
with arms and thighs thick as slop pails and a chest and belly like
beer kegs sitting sideways on one another. We all called him the
Hog. No one meant anything by it. They don’t mean any more by
what they call me.”
     “What I meant was—” the smuggler turned the stick
back—“you say you have some sight in that eye. So those who only
knew you from afar might call you ‘One-eye.’ But those who know
you better might not.” Then he said: “And there’s other kinds of
authority besides the empress’s,” and added: “whose reign is
fulsome and fecund.”
      “And whose customs inspectors are a nuisance, at least to the
likes of us, eh?” The man took his stick from the fire, examined the
meat, and sniffed at it with nostrils that sounded clogged. He
looked up again. “Why these questions…? You must think I’m a
customs inspector. Well, it’s wise to keep some doubt with offers
of friendship from strangers on the road. But believe me, only
smugglers come here. Anyone could tell you that. What do you
say?”
      “That perhaps you were… once a smuggler?” The young
smuggler narrowed his eyes as a shift in the air made the smoke
plume rise, then fall away, between them. “Did you wear the
collar?”
     The man frowned. “What collar?”
      “The one that went with those whip welts.” The smuggler
nodded toward the man’s flank. “The iron collar slaves wear by
law.”
     The man sunk his teeth, good and bad, into his meat, tore off
a hunk, and chewed, loudly, with glistening chin, his mouth open a
good deal of the time. Finally he said: “You know Kolhari?”
     The smuggler nodded.
     “I bet you do. You sound like you’ve spent some time there.
You know that bridge that goes over into the old part of the city,
the part they call the Spur?” He spoke with his mouth half full.
“With the market in it?”
     The smuggler nodded again.
      “When I was as young as you—” the man gestured with
greasy knuckles—“or even younger, and I’d just got to the city for
the first time, I was already carrying these scars from an Imperial
whip.” He thumbed toward his side. “I was a wild boy in my
hometown, even before I started to wander. And the whip is all
they had to calm you down, whether you were slave or laboring
peasant. But one day when I was crossing the bridge—now you
know what goes on, back and forth, across that bridge, don’t
you…?”
     The smuggler nodded a third time.
      “I met a man there. He was probably as old as I am now. A
fine looking man, too. To meet him and talk to him, you’d have
thought he wasn’t any different from you and me, you know what I
mean? But he wanted me to come home with him. Lived in a fine
house, too, out near the Sallese. Had his own cart and a couple of
horses and a paid servant to drive him—though he didn’t use his
driver to take him down to the bridge, you can be sure. Oh, no. He
didn’t want anyone to know what it was he was up to there. He
kept a collar, you see: a forged collar of iron, like they lock round
the necks of slaves. And he would have me wear it—or sometimes
he would put it on. And we…” The man cocked his head the other
way, as if considering whether to say more. “But you know what I
mean. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked, right? I made good
money off him, too. No less than a handful of iron coins—every
time I saw him. Oh, and often a gold one! He said my welts for
honest punishment made me look like a real slave.” He grunted.
“But that’s a long while back. It never meant anything to me. And I
wouldn’t do it today. You ever meet anyone like that?”
     “A few,” the young smuggler said.
     “Everyone does on that overground sewer.” The man took
another bite. “Oh, I bet you met them, too. Now, they say, since
the Liberator’s been about, they walk back and forth across the
bridge and all around the city, wearing their collars right out for the
world to see, as if they had nothing to be ashamed of…” The man
bit again, chewed a long time, watching the smuggler. “The
Liberator himself is one of them, they say. That’s something, ‘ey?”
     So the smuggler said: “But you yourself were never a real
slave…?”
     The man wiped his chin with his forefingers. “And if I was,
what of it?” He pointed to the smuggler’s stick. “Go on, eat it.
Cook it too much, and the flavor goes.”
      The smuggler raised his stick to examine the seared meat.
Juice rolled down against the skin between his thumb and
forefinger, making him angle it sharply away—not from heat so
much as surprise.
     The man chuckled. “If a man’s a slave, then he’s not a man. If
he was once a slave, well then, the better man he is for rising above
it. Wouldn’t you say?”
     “A man that I believe is one of the greatest in Nevèrÿon was
once a slave.” Saying it this time did not have the same effect on
him as it had when he’d last announced it. For a moment he
wondered if it were no longer quite as true. “His soldiers are
somewhere not too far from here. Over east, I heard.”
     “The Liberator…? Is he now?” The man nodded. “Yes, well,
some folks say he’s one-eyed. And some folks say he’s scarred. Like
me. Is that right? Well, what’s it to you, if what they say is true?”
The man looked down at his meat, examining the wreckage from
his uneven teeth. “You ever seen him? Would you know what he
looked like if you ran into him?”
      “I’ve been told he’s brave, gentle, handsome—like you, eh?”
The smuggler chuckled. “Or like me—for all our scars and
pockmarks and your single eye. At least that’s what some have
said.”
      “And what do you say? Just that he’s a great hero, right?” The
man chuckled too; then, after a few more moments, he said: “I was
once a slave. In the Imperial mines below the Faltha Mountains.
That’s where I caught these lashes. Now I’m free.” He glanced up
at the smuggler. “And I fight to bring that freedom to all other
slaves. That’s what I’m doing here.” He hesitated a moment. “So
now that you know who I am, what will you do for me?”
      The pleasure the smuggler felt was like a heat rising through
his body, as if he’d taken the flame from between them within
himself. He felt a great smile battling out on his face, while a
memory returned of a subterranean hall, where the little man stood
naked on a throne in flickering torchlight above an indistinct figure
groveling on the steps. The young smuggler made some inner
gesture to push away the image, for he knew that the one thing he
had no desire to do was to serve or service anyone again on either
side of such a sexual split. To his surprise, the image vanished, as
the pleasure of recognition, strong as relief, rose, filling him,
obscuring all doubt and discomfort. “They say you wear the
collar—I mean, that you’ve worn it on the bridge in Kolhari. But
you said you only—”
      “Well—” the man pursed his lips—“it’s not a thing you’re
going to admit right off to any stranger, is it?” (The young
smuggler shook his head quickly.) “Not that what I told you wasn’t
true. Sometimes what you play with as a youngster returns to
plague you as a man? How does that sound?”
     The smuggler nodded. “And your forces. They’re housed in
the princess Elyne’s castle, not far off…?”
      “Oh, well, now.” The man leaned back a moment. “Some of
them are there. Some of them are here. I mean, all around us. A
man like me doesn’t wander out in the countryside alone—it would
be too risky, you see what I mean? I have some of my men up
there—” he pointed over the smuggler’s shoulder toward the
rocks—“and over there, and back there. Right now. They’re
watching us. I want you to know that. Telling you is only fair.
We’re watched, and watched carefully, you and me. That’s how I
knew you were there. My men saw you and signaled. I only employ
the best men, too. They’d lay down their lives for me at any
moment. So don’t think there’s some trick you can try against me
and get away with. If you were some spy, say, from one of the
slave-holding barons, there wouldn’t be anything you could do to
me now.”
     “Or if I was a customs inspector?” The smuggler glanced
about the foggy trees, grinning.
      The man frowned. “You’re too young to be a customs
inspector. You think I believe the empress would send someone
like you after… after a full-grown man?” He shook his head. “No,
you’re a smart-aleck hustler from up in Kolhari, running a
wagon-load of contraband down to the south.” He still looked
dubious. “That’s all.”
      The smuggler glanced at the trees. He was thinking that those
watching them could not be more than twenty meters off in any
direction, or the fire would be invisible in this dense mist. “I’d like
to join your soldiers and fight for you—of course, I could only do
it for a while,” the smuggler said. “I’m not much of a fighter, I
don’t guess. And I have to be somewhere south of here pretty soon.
Though, in this fog, for all I know, I could as easily be rolling
north, west, or east. That’d be like me too. But I’d still like to fight
for you awhile—just to see what it was like. Though I’d be pretty
surprised if you needed or wanted me. You want people as
committed to the ending of slavery as you are, people who know its
evils from the way its scarred their own lives, who’ll stand to the
death against it. Myself, I’ve seen old barracks where slaves were
once housed. I’ve seen rows of stone benches with the iron rings
sunk along their tops, out in the sun at the edge of an overgrown
field, where five hundred were once chained while they ate their
gruel in the rain. But there were no slaves left when I went past,
and even the manacles on the whipping post were rusted through.
I’ve talked to some old men and women, come to the city with
scars like yours, who remember slavery. And I’ve talked to a few
young ones, too, more recently escaped from the west—and mad
they were! If you told me slavery makes you mad, I’d believe it.
And when I was a boy, on the farm where my aunt and mother
worked, we’d see a line of fifteen or twenty scrawny wretches
passing on the road, chained to a plank they carried on their
shoulders by day, that they dropped between them to eat off at the
evening meal, the bunch of them led along by some
leather-aproned men, one with red eyes, one with a harelip, and one
with a cough worse than any of his charges—and we’d tell tales of
slavers for days, and the grown-ups would threaten us with stories
of how, were any of us ever to leave the farm or the fields, we’d be
taken by such men, prowling around the country, and put in chains
within the hour. And the tales would go on for weeks, for months.
And maybe a year later, we’d see another such gang pass.” The
smuggler began to eat his roast, which was hot and tastier than he’d
expected. “But you see, I don’t know slavery the way you do. I’m
committed to the idea of you—and, believe me, to eat with you,
here, tonight, to be able to say I’ve seen you and sat with you,
talked with you while you rested from your journey and I rested
from mine—well, I’ll be able to boast of nothing better, sitting and
nodding in the sun in front of some thatched shack, when and if I
reach my dotage. But in the same way I’m committed to you, I’m
not really committed to your ideas. I mean: I don’t know what you
know of slavery to make it real. I only know… well, this little part
of you.”
      “So for you—” the man snorted—“the slave pits of the
Thane of Varhesh are not real—because twelve of them have been
filled in, and three of them are empty? True, he doesn’t have the
nine hundred slaves his father owned. But I’ll tell you: the one pit
now open, in which he nightly locks eighty or ninety men and
women, still smells so foul you’d puke if you got within thirty feet
of it.” He nodded. “I puked. And I didn’t think I would. You say
slavers only came by your farm once a year? Then you’ve never
ridden through some southern clutch of huts and yam fields, off in
the forest where they only babble in the barbarian tongue and in
that so badly even the fifty words you know of the language hardly
make you understood; but the slavers have been by only a night
before. And you watch the fathers wandering about, crying for their
stolen sons and daughters, stopping now and again to beat their
faces bloody against sharp-barked palms or on the slant rocks,
while the women throw handfuls of sand into the evening’s
cooking pot, tearful and silent, for the grieving meals they’ll eat for
a week after such a raid. And I tell you, now: the last time I rode by
such wasn’t a year, or five years, or fifteen years back. It was only
four months by, not a hundred stades west of here. And it made
me as sick to my heart as the stench of the Varhesh pit made me to
my stomach when I worked on… when I rode by it, six years ago.”
The man ripped off another piece in teeth the smuggler was sure
would soon come loose at such violence.
       With the next bite of his own roast, juice tickled the
smuggler’s chin; he turned to wipe it on his shoulder. “Oh, I know
slavery’s real.” He chewed, swallowed, bit again; wiped again. “It’s
real when you tell me. Anything that was real to you, I would fight
to know its reality! I don’t think slavery is good. I don’t support it.
If anyone asked my opinion, I’d tell them what you said seven years
ago, in your audience with Lord Krodar that so outraged him:
‘Slavery is the evil that makes a mockery of any man or woman
who stands in the sun, breathes in the air, and dares to think that
freedom, love, or their right to will is untainted by it—or hopes,
even for a moment, that bodily tortures, cuts, and brandings wait
more than an hour or a week or a year ahead in some government
dungeon because of the horror that would make any man or
woman turn from its evil as soon as fight it.’ They spoke of it
through all the markets of Nevèrÿon; they repeated what you said,
and many said it wrong. But I asked and inquired of many more,
till I’d finally put the right version together—that’s what you must
have said! And I haven’t forgotten it. How could anyone forget
who’s seen real slaves, or even those in their real collars on the
Bridge of Lost Desire—much less gone with them? I know about it.
I only say I do not know it. Not as you once knew it. A few times
I’ve helped ex-slaves that I didn’t have to, doddering women and
doltish boys, hugely brave and hopelessly naive, all confused by the
city, come to Kolhari, lonely and lost. For that confusion and the
city that creates it I do know. A few times I’ve avoided helping
those men in rural parts who were seeking to profit from what
remains of slavery. To say I know what I know—and, indeed, what
I don’t know—is only to say that I’ve listened to all of them, and I
know what I’ve done is not the same as bearing arms among your
troops, as marching by your side, one of your most trusted scouts,
as knocking the links loose from the hasp that held them. Well, the
truth is, someone like you couldn’t trust the likes of me. And you’d
be right not to.”
      “But you’ve helped some slaves and hindered some slavers?
No doubt you have. It’s more than I’ve done…” The man frowned
again. “I mean it’s more than, at times in my life, I’ve felt I was…
able to do.” Suddenly he grinned again. “Perhaps when the customs
inspectors become as hard on smugglers as the lords of Nevèrÿon
have been on their slaves, then you’ll start to fight, ‘ey?”
      The smuggler laughed, bit, and nodded all at once. “And what
I know you’ve done for the cause of slaves will brace me in every
battle.” Once more he looked up and about at the trees. “Your men
are watching us? Here we are, at the center, then—of five, fifty, a
hundred-fifty eyes?” He shrugged, still smiling, thinking that there
could be no more than… seventeen men at most in the woods
about them. “I’ve always wondered what I would say if I met you.
I’d always figured my tongue would stall in my mouth like a cart
whose axle tangles in some underwater root halfway over the
stream, or the way it does when I want to tell some specially
freckled girl who makes me want her more than I want the words
to tell her so, and the fear of those words, as she says she doesn’t
want me, becomes as large as the stone that, when the cart jounces
across it, breaks the old axle. But here I am, talking to you. And
believe me, what I say, now, it’s… well, it’s what I think. It’s what I
feel. The truth? No, I wouldn’t call it that. But it’s as close as a
thief, a liar, and a bad man out in the night is likely to get—now
that was said of me by an old woman who knew me, really, no
better than I know you. Yet she was right in her way. And if she
can be on so little personal knowledge, then so can I!”
     “I bet you’re a real bad man too.” The man laughed.
      But the smuggler was going on. “You know that sign with the
two lines that cut each other? It’s the only one I can recognize—a
friend told me it was also the sign for illiterates like us. The
students call it an ‘X’ and use it to mark the maps on which they
plot the stories they call history: I’ve seen them together, examining
one, in the taverns they frequent down in the Spur—because they
can’t afford the prices out in Sallese where they study. Sometimes
I’ve seen it among the marks on the wall of the bridge stanchion
down at the piss-trough, where the barbarians have gone and
marked over it with their own meaningless scribble, like the ones
you see carved all over the ruined walls and monuments in the
south. Well, that’s the mark we make, you and I: my journey, your
journey, here where they cross. And from our meeting you’ll go on
in your fight for what you believe, and I will go on with my
smuggling, hustling, and scheming. Neither one of us will have
changed, really. Yet I can’t imagine a greater changing force in my
own life than you, than such a meeting with you!”
     “You sound like some babbling student yourself!” The man
laughed again.
      “But it’s nothing to you,” the smuggler went on. “And it
shouldn’t be. Look, here: you’ve given me food, offered me a
moment of safety, protection, and company in this fog-riddled
night. I’ve never expected that from anyone, much less from you.
That you’re the one who gave it to me is the only thing anyone
could ever remember me for. There’re thirty, forty—or maybe
fifteen, if I’m honest—men and women I remember because
they’ve gotten even less from you than I have. Someone who
fought for you told me you sometimes stopped here—and that’s
why I came here; and that’s why I’ll remember her, above all her
foreign ways! Her name was Raven—”
     “Sure, I remember her!” the man declared.
     “It’s silly and foolish, but you can’t imagine the pleasure of
it!” Once more he looked about the flame-hollowed dark,
wondering what the listeners might be thinking of his outpouring,
which only made him laugh out loud. “The pleasure of it! That’s
the most important thing. Meeting you, like this, knowing that at
last I’ve encountered the person who’s meant more to me than
anyone else, what greater pleasure could I possibly have? What
more could I ever—”
      “Hold up there, now.” Carefully, the man pushed his stick’s
end into the ground, letting the wand bend over a near rock; the
remaining meat hung above the lowered flame. Reaching toward
the dish beside him, he grasped the knife handle. “What are you
carrying in your cart? Come on. Tell me.”
    The young smuggler frowned. “Carrying? What do you
mean…?”
     “I mean you’re a smuggler running contraband from Kolhari
down into the Garth. What have you got in your cursed oxcart? I
want to know, now!”
     “But what’s that to—?”
      “Look!” The man lowered one knee to the ground and drew
in a long breath. The knife handle lifted above the leaves. Firelight
slid the blade. “You think running around and freeing slaves is
cheap? I need all I can get for my campaign. All right, then. What
have you got?”
       The young smuggler pushed back on the wet ground with his
fists and heels. Twigs and pebbles scraped his buttocks.
     “Come on. The way you feel, you should be proud to
contribute to my cause. Tell me what you’re hauling!”
    “I don’t know!” As much from the truth as from fear, the
smuggler pushed back once more.
     In the young smuggler’s wagon, under the canvas, along with
the pots and the sack, there were blades both shorter and longer
than the one the man across the fire held; there were two clubs, one
with metal points inset on the end, one without, and a short bow
and a quiver holding nine arrows, each fixed with chipped,
sharpened, and weighted flints, then five more wrapped at their tips
with wadding, which, soaked in expensive oil, would burn strong
enough to speed through air without extinguishing; there were five
slate knives, and three of various metals, only one of which, despite
its regular oilings, had begun to rust; but he had long since taken to
leaving them in his cart until some emergency grew, not over
minutes, but over hours—at about the time he’d ceased looking in
his sack.
      The man went from one knee to both feet, solidly as an ox
rising from its haunches.
     The smuggler tried to push back again; his heels gouged
ground.
      Then the man sprang across the fire, his blade high. Anklets
clattered. Smoke spun under his heels.
     The smuggler went down on his back in wet leaves, as the
man landed, one foot either side of him.
      “Come on! Get yourself up! Let’s see what you got!” The man
reached down and grabbed the smuggler’s arm, yanked it; and it
hurt. “Go on! Get to your cart!” The flat of the knife blade slapped
the smuggler’s chin, hard. It pressed his head back against the
ground.
     The smuggler dug his fingers into the earth.
     “Obey me, or I’ll cut your stupid throat!”
      Above him, the man’s face was dark. Behind, mist glowed. In
it, here and there, a pine branch bobbed. Light over the hairy
shoulder under-lit the bearded jaw, so that one half of that lip
gleamed—precisely to the cut.
     The peg shook in the distended lobe.
     “Now—sure!” the smuggler declared. “Whatever you want!
You take it! You can have it!” He tried to separate two images. But
they muddled each other, neither clear enough for him to be certain
what it was. “Why would I want to keep anything I had from you?
I tell you, you’ve… been my hero for years! Here, let me up. Yes,
I’m taking a sack from Kolhari down into the Garth!” The blade
jarred his chin: “… don’t do that!” He forced a laugh. “You think I
care if you get it? The kind of witless fool I am, I’m surprised I got
this far!” One image was some vague idea of what towns, neither
his Garth destination nor Kolhari, he might go to for a year or so if
he got out of this with his skin: betrayed clients could turn vicious
in these pointed and primitive times. “I’m honored to give anything
I can to your cause. Anything I have. Believe me!” The other had to
do with the Liberator, his men planted about the clearing, waiting
for some smuggler to come by. The masked woman! She had
suggested he come here! (No doubt, he thought on hopelessly,
frantically, all she’d told him of the scar, the eye, the history had
been lies!) Of course, she still worked for this ‘Liberator’—
      “Get up, now! Show me your booty sack! My men’ll be in
here to skewer you six ways to seven if you try anything!”
     “Yes—” But the blade joggled his jaw.
     “Up slow.”
     It retreated an inch.
     As the smuggler got his feet under him, the point stayed just
out of sight below his chin, now and again touching his throat.
     The man leaned forward and, grabbing the smuggler’s arm
again—“There!—” spun him, pulling it up behind his back; at the
same time the smuggler felt metal jab low beside his spine, hard
enough to hurt if not cut. “Let’s get to your cart and see what you
have.” The man pushed him forward.
     One of the smaller knives, the smuggler thought. Perhaps he
could reach in and grab it; then, with a lunge… “See,” he said.
“Right in there. I’ll get—” He reached over the cart’s edge with his
free hand, then snatched it back. The blade that had been behind
him swung down before him to hack the wagon’s sideboard. His
arm was jerked up painfully.
     “If you want to keep either of your hands, let them be still!
You think you’ll pull out some sword or club? I’m already missing
one finger from such a mistake. Don’t you think I know what
you’ve got in there?” He snorted. “I’ve been doing what you’re
doing, boy, more years than you’ve been alive. Let’s reach in slowly.
No quick moves; no tricks; and… yes, go on now.”
     One arm still pulled tight behind, the smuggler reached
forward for the canvas cover, tugged it aside, and dragged the sack
up from behind the pots. “Here it is! I told you I’d give it—Ow!”
His arm was yanked again. The man shoved him roughly away
from the cart, and, as the smuggler staggered off, grasped the sack
himself in his free hand, strode around the donkey’s hind end
(from inside the feed bag, the beast gave three braying honks),
stepped toward the fire, and hacked at the cloth with his sword.
“Let’s see what we’ve got!”
       They fell from the slash, clashing and clattering. The disks
were as big as a man’s palm. As they clanked to the ground by the
fire, the smuggler saw that the rims were deeply embossed with
barbaric markings, holding strange curls and curves within. Bolts
fixed the centers as if, with each one, there might be several layers
together.
      Other images contending in the smuggler’s mind pulled clear
of each other. The same way he could hold separate the conflicting
tales of the Liberator, he now began to separate two tales of his
own fate within the next moments.
     The first ran quite simply: the man before him was, in fact,
the Liberator, with or without his surrounding men, and what the
smuggler had been told over the years by the most cynical of the
Liberator’s detractors—that he was, indeed, little more than a
bandit, an outlaw, and self-serving villain, whatever his personal
lusts or personal politics might be—was true. In which case most
likely, the smuggler realized, he would be dead within minutes;
because bandits did not rob you on the road, then let you live to
seek recompense or revenge.
      The second was almost as simple: the man before him was, in
fact, no Liberator at all but only a smuggler too, who had gone
along with the young smuggler’s own ravings—ravings whose
preposterousness, no doubt, had decided him to try this bit of
banditry in the first place, and which preposterousness, equally
doubtless, was the only reason the smuggler was still alive. There
were no accomplices off in the trees. But, for the same reasons as
before, if not in moments then in minutes, the man would realize
he must dispense with him.
      What both tales had in common was the smuggler’s own
imminent slaughter. Where they differed was that in one, there
probably were men about them to help with it; in the other, there
probably were not. The young smuggler was as unsure of which
tale was correct as he was of any other conflicting facts he’d ever
collected about his Liberator.
      But it was neither bravery nor fear, therefore, that made him
turn to flee; merely, rather, the realization that to stay meant
certain, while to flee meant only probable, death. And even to be
alive this long meant that he was very lucky or had found a very
inexperienced bandit, whether the man was the true Liberator or
not.
     He turned and crouched in a motion, leg muscles bunched to
hurl himself into gray that would be black ten steps on.
     As he did so, a man stepped out of fire-lit fog with drawn
sword: so now, halfway through his first step, with perfect
knowledge of which tale was the ineluctable truth, the smuggler
veered aside, seeing, here and there, still others coming from the
trees—and slipped, and went down; and rolled, falling, to his back,
because he wanted to see what came, even if it was only the blade
that ended his life.
     Behind him, the Liberator/bandit shouted: “No, you—”
     And the stranger, who stepped over him now, became a
woman and said, in a familiar voice: “That’s no way to treat a wise
and pretty man!” She merely lifted the point of her sword across
the bandit’s/Liberator’s face.
     There was something about her blade…
      The man didn’t scream. He made some great and horrid gasp,
dropping the sack from one hand, the knife from the other, and
grabbed for his eyes. As he staggered back, blood rolled between
his fingers, thickest where the one was missing.
       Raven said to him, as he crouched, blind with blood and
shaking, before her: “You see this blade I have? It’s doubled, not
like yours at all. It’s as sharp on the inner sides as it is on the outer,
all the way down to its fork. Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things I
could catch in it and cut. Let me see. First I’m going to slip your
balls between the tines and whack them off—snick, snick!—first
one then the other. Then I’ll cut your nose off with an upward
swipe; perhaps after that an ear. And while you’re listening for it to
fall, I’ll take your penis in my hand, slip my blade around it, and
hack it loose below the hair. Then I’ll pinch your tiny nipples, tug
them forward, and bring my forked blade up around them and cut
them free—Oh, believe me, I’ll open up all the scars of Eih’f and
make them run red again!
      “Or,” she went on, “do you think you’d rather flee…?
There’re six good women here.” The others that had stepped out of
the encircling mist were also women. “Six double blades, out and
waiting, all around you. And believe me, my friends are much
rougher and meaner than I. True beasts, each with her own
twinned sword, and far more skilled with it than I am. That one
there? Anything I cut off you, she’ll probably eat it—and none too
neatly, either! And that one—ah…!” Raven made a disgusted
grimace. “I can’t bear to tell you the horrors I’ve seen her
perpetrate on a man’s body, not even with her blade but with her
dirty fingernails. And she’s got ten of those!” Leaning forward, she
hissed: “And she likes her men fat, weak, and conniving—like
you!” On his back, the smuggler looked around, blinking at the
women who stood, in a ring, about the fire. Only five had swords,
he saw. Hanging back a little, a sixth, with lighter hair, had no
weapon out at all. Flames and blades flickered. “Do you want to
run?” the masked woman asked.
      Raven was the only one in a mask—though they were all
bare-breasted, hearty creatures; Raven, the smuggler also saw, was
the shortest.
        “If I were you,” she continued, “I’d run. You may get cut a
little, as we follow you. But if you stay, the pain, not to mention the
humiliation to your male honor, as we move you on your way to
death (and death is surely yours if you stay, for we are not likely to
let you go to seek recompense or revenge), is such that the notion
of civilization as woman conceives it will be defiled beyond
redemption. Believe me: a fate worse than death awaits you if you
linger.” Then she snarled: “Though you defile civilization yourself,
with every breath you take! A finger first? Or a toe? Or a testicle?
Or a nostril? Each is worth as little, on you!” Here she reached out
the blade, and only laid it against his hip, no more heavily than the
bandit, moments ago, had laid his under the smuggler’s chin.
      The smuggler was sure the man, hands over his face and
reeling, had not even heard Raven’s excoriation. But at the touch of
metal, he turned, still blind, and barreled toward the trees, passing
between two of the women, who, here, uttered throat-ripping roars,
leaped into the air with swords high, to swing them viciously
down—clearly and intentionally missing him by a foot!
     The fleeing man’s shoulder struck a tree. He stumbled to one
knee, bloody hands coming away from his face to grab at the
ground; he tried to get, and slipped, and tried again, and finally got,
his feet under him.
     First the two who’d swung at him, then—as he fell again, and
was up again, lumbering off in fog and brush—the other women,
began to laugh, covering his crashings away with their shrill
barkings.
     Raven walked back to the young smuggler, stepped across
him with one foot and looked down. Her sword, which he finally
saw was split into two parallel blades, its twin points only an inch
or so apart, was aimed more or less at his ear. She extended her
other hand. “Let me help you up, pretty man!”
     Again he pushed at the ground with his heels. Again, they
gained no purchase in the soil. He shook his head a little. “That
was the Liberator…?” He spoke with a despair that, as he heard it,
he knew she could not understand. He lifted a hand, thinking to
push hers or her blade away.
       Raven seized his big fingers in her small, hard ones and,
looking to her side, raised her sword to thrust its twin points into
its hairy scabbard. “Him?” She frowned again at the smuggler,
giving his arm a small tug. “That evil, ugly bandit? Him? The
Liberator? That cut bit of earthworm, wiggling here in the mud?”
She snorted. “Though I’ll wager that when and if his wound heals,
he’ll look a bit more like the Liberator than he did before!” and the
smuggler, whose thoughts were leaping from moments of muddle
to moments of lunar-bright precision, found himself wondering,
still on his back: Is that because of the scar that will remain, or
because her sword points had crushed his half-blind eye
completely, like an egg? “Oh, my foreign friend,” Raven declared,
“it is truly said in my land, ‘Men must not trust other men!’ They
wait for one another, smiling face to face, supporting every lie and
self-deceit one can offer the other, yet always ready to distract with
flattery or falsehood—and the moment the innocent turns away,
the other is ready to claw his back as soon as a back is offered…
Him? The Liberator?” She gave a disgusted grunt. “He was no
more than any yellow-headed boy you’d find prostituting himself
about the Old Market of Kolhari. A thief! Less than a thief! The
vilest of highwaymen!” Now she shrugged. “Perhaps even a
smuggler…? No! No smuggler or prostitute could be that low!” She
smiled down with small teeth. “A smuggler, perhaps? We shall look
in his cart and see! You might find something to take along with
you! Come. Can you stand?”
     His arm shook in her grip—not with fear, he realized, but
with the detritus of a terror worse than any he’d ever known before.

     “Come, pretty man. Up with you, now. Don’t you want to see
what you’ve won from that old and ugly reprobate?” She tugged
again.
      Again he tried to stand. Again he slipped—the heel of his
hand, as he reached behind to push erect, no more successful in the
muddy earth than the heel of his foot had been. “You should have
killed him…!” he got out, looking around at the others.
      Half with blades sheathed, half with doubled tines still against
their thighs, they grinned at him in firelight.
     “If he comes back—?”
      “Oh, don’t worry about him.” Raven tugged once more,
harder this time, and the young smuggler in her grip was so weak
he nearly fell. For some reason, he felt he was about to cry. The
thought of tears before these odd and alien women put him in a
panic that, on experiencing it in full, he realized had been with him
in miniature since his ride with her on the road, but which, till now,
had been hidden, as if under the fog which had obliterated the day.
With an expression that, even in this quarter-light, he recognized as
patient, desiring, and containing all he could know of tenderness
and goodwill, Raven looked down at him. “Don’t worry. I have
saved you. You are safe. Get up.”
     Had she announced with rage and snarls that he would be
tortured and humiliated as thoroughly as, minutes before, she had
threatened his attacker, he could not have been more surprised by
the moment’s terror that pulsed and, a second later,
vanished—because he could not bear it? By an act of will not much
different from the one that, in the Kolhari crypt, had allowed what
had happened there, he forbade what might happen now if he
accepted the extremity of emotion toward which, and beyond
which, he seemed to be rushing. Sitting on the ground, he
shivered—and       kept     shivering,     as     moments       became
minutes—while, with the same solicitude, Raven tugged, really, so
gently and urged, really, so fondly and, finally, lifted him to his feet
with the patience of someone who must have done this (once?
many times?) before with men who had acted, he was sure, just as
he was acting now.
     Well, whatever he’d suppressed, the effort, as he stood,
unsteadily, against her, left him all but paralyzed.
      “You’re all right!” she insisted, supporting him, while he
realized, clearly, that he wasn’t. “You’re safe. Don’t worry.”
     The young smuggler looked about the circle of her friends.
Raven seemed so small! Surely she hadn’t been that small when
she’d first ridden in his cart.
      “Oh, yes,” she went on, beaming at him. “You’ve been
through quite an experience.” Now and again she would say
something to those around her in her own language. Sometimes
they’d laugh. (At him? he wondered, and didn’t care.) Sometimes
they just answered in their shrill, flat voices.
      “You should have killed him!” he said again, when he felt
steadier; because that was the long-thought wisdom of such
situations in such primitive times, concerning men like his attacker,
like himself. “You threatened to. Why didn’t you do it?”
     One of the older women said something harsh. (About the
natural viciousness of men, he was sure.) For a moment, he
thought, she must have understood him.
       Raven answered with something equally harsh, then said to
him in her gentlest tone, “Do you think we are barbarians that we
go around killing any man on the road we see? That’s not how
civilized women act.”
      Standing a little way from the fire, having picked up one of
the sticks to examine the remainder of the roast meat, the
lighter-haired one with no weapon said: “He won’t come back.
Don’t worry. He’s too frightened. He’s too hurt. Besides, there’re
more of us than there are of him.”
      Her accent was not theirs. Certainly she was a woman from
the Ulvayn Islands. Recognizing a more familiar foreigner, he took
a deep breath and made himself stand straighter, fighting what in
the last minutes had become a lassitude that, among these strange
women, unsettling as it was, still had its blurrily sensuous comfort.
      “Why didn’t we kill him!” Raven declared. “Kill him? What a
strange man you are. Do you think women can go around killing
just any and all men, like that? What monsters would do such a
thing?” she went on in a voice so preposterously secure in its right
to be heard. “Though, truly, in this strange and terrible land where
men aspire to woman’s place, sometimes you must make a pretense
of knowing how it’s done by those spiders, mantises, and other
vermin who, from time to time, do.”
     “But then…” He stepped away from her, while she stood
back herself and regarded him from her mask. “But… why did you
come here? For me…?”
      Again her grin. “Why? You want to know? Well! You are just
a very pretty man! When I met my friends—” she gestured toward
the others—“in Sarness, I said to them: ‘Ah, you would not believe
the one who, just moments ago, gave me a ride on the rain-lashed
road. Come, come! Come, if you want to see beauty beyond that of
all the sons of Eih’f!’”
      The one whom, before, he’d thought might understand his
language gave a loud humph and turned away, to survey the foggy
dark, as if she expected something unpleasant to creep, tentatively
and momentarily, out of it.
     “They’re all true women, the lot of them. What woman
wouldn’t come with such an enticement?”
    Another, who’d gone off in the dark, reappeared now and said
something that carried anger.
      Raven’s response was ribald. At least the others all grinned.
“Of course when we found your cart tracks gave out just a few
meters before the turn off I’d mentioned to you,” she went on,
“immediately I knew where you must have gone. Here! To this
lousy den where every thief and cutthroat highwayman, fearful of
the Sarness inspectors, seeks respite from the road between Enoch
and Varhesh. Well, I said to them: Let’s go in and take a look at
where he’s made his camp.” She glanced down, now, almost shyly.
“Only, you were here with another man—pretty enough I suppose,
in his way; though not so pretty as you. And we hung back in the
darkness, like the lustful girls that linger, I suppose, within all
women. We wanted to hear what you might say to one another
when there was none of us about to intimidate you into silence.
Who knows? Perhaps I even hoped to hear you mention me to your
treacherous companion… But like all the men in this land, you had
only words for the Liberator. Well, I suppose you’re not that much
different from the rest—”
     “Raven,” said the island woman, “perhaps we should go on.
There’s no reason to stay here.”
       But the masked woman made a dismissing gesture. “Soon, as
we listened, we realized your new friend was not a good man. Not
at all. Not like you, who would give a wet and tired woman a ride
and a smile, out of no more than the sweet and natural goodness of
a wise and pretty heart.” Here, smiling herself, she reached out her
small, hard fingers to touch his cheek. He looked at her eyes, in the
frayed mask holes. In this light they might have been black.
     One of the women dropped another log on the fire.
     Sparks spun up into the dark.
     In Raven’s hair, for a moment he saw a glint of blue.
     Flames settled again.
     Another, in her own language, most likely told the one who
had dropped the log that it was a waste of time and that they should
be on their way. That, at least, was what her gesture suggested.
     The idea of moving off in the fog alone appalled him; but the
prospect of staying here with these women drained him.
     Hating both feelings, he turned from her to walk aimlessly
about the campsite, unable to do anything to free himself of either.




                                9

      The actual leaving, of course, took quite awhile—as if, he
decided, darkness with a circle of trees about it confined more
effectively than any wall or barred door.
     They lingered there a good hour.
     He wanted to be on his way, but he had no clear idea of the
severity of the bandit’s wound and he did not want to run into the
man again, alone on the foggy road, with whatever reinforcements,
weapons, or friends he might have picked up in the nearby town.
     So he waited with them.
     The delay seemed to be some low-key altercation between a
barrel-chested woman whose breasts hung flat, low, and far apart,
and one, younger, gaunter, the staves of whose ribs bore high only
the shallowest nippled cones.
     Whatever the argument, from time to time Raven or one of
the others would toss in a joke, which would be answered with a
snap from one or the other agonists.
      The island woman stood off from the others, near the
tethered donkey, which now and again glanced over the feed bag’s
rim; but it had made no sound since the bandit had approached the
smuggler’s cart. Her lighter hair, he realized, was probably red.
Redheads often had freckles. He walked over toward her, just to
see.
      He’d assumed she was his own age, but as he came closer he
saw a certain roughness to the skin about her eyes, and a looseness
in that at her shoulders. The firelight had confused two colors in
her hair; one was red, yes, but the other was probably gray. She was
at least a decade his senior. And if she had freckles, they were pale
enough so that mist and flickerings lost them in the shadows
playing on her breasts, her clavicles, her cheekbones. To say
something, he asked, quietly and suddenly: “Who are they…?”
     She looked at him, frowning.
     “Who are these women?” He nodded toward the others.
      “They’re my friends,” she said, shortly. “At least that one is.”
She inclined her head toward Raven, who stood at the other side of
the fire, her back to them. She had taken out her double sword
again and, with one foot on a stone, polished and polished it with a
bit of chamois.
     She’d been doing it now ten minutes.
     “She’s your friend…?” His repetition sounded inane. But
somehow he could not focus on anything he should be saying,
should be doing.
      “Well, right through here—” The redhead smiled—“she’s
only interested in you. Will be, no doubt, for a while. But we go
back a long ways, Raven and I. I’ve been looking for her almost
five years now. When I met her fellow landswomen a few weeks
back, I thought that traveling with them for a while would be the
best way to find her—or for her to find me. And it worked. Only
since we met this evening, she’s been full of nothing but the wise
and pretty man who gave her a ride on the back road.” The wryness
left her smile. “It’s good for you we came along with her!”
      The young smuggler looked across the fire at the small,
muscular back, at the head bent over the blade—yes, those were
blue stone beads in her hair—at the twin tines turning and running
on kidskin. He’d had no sense at all of any particular relationship
between Raven and the redhead—no more than there seemed at
this point (even though she had saved his life!) any relation between
Raven and himself.
     Is that, he wondered, a woman obsessed?
      But with the notion that he himself might be the center of
that obsession, the whole idea crumbled and became impossible to
hold in his mind. For he had been rendered by the whole evening a
nothing, a vacancy, an absence in the foggy night. How could she
be obsessed with nothing?
     “And the others…?” he asked, turning back to the redhead.
      “Actually,” she said, “they’re rather horrible. At least I find
them so. I keep trying not to, telling myself they’re simply from
another land, wher things are done differently. But then, just when
I’ve convinced myself they’re really good sorts underneath, one of
them will turn around and do something that… well, I suppose
they find me strange and terrible too.” She gave a little shudder.
     “Then why don’t you leave them?”
    She looked around at the damp night. “Certainly I’ve done
enough traveling on my own in Nevèrÿon. Yet, somehow, when
you have a bit of protection, you’re not so quick to give it up. With
all this fog—” She glanced around again—“I think I’m afraid to.
Besides, I’ve only just found my friend. She won’t stay with them
too long.” Again the redhead indicated Raven. “That I know. She
never does. Oh, she gets lonely for them when they’re not here. But
soon she’ll grow restless. And we’ll be off on our own once more,
the two of us. At least we will if five years ago is any sign of
today.”
      The argument on the other side of the fire reerupted. Then
the thick-set one he’d suspected might understand his own tongue
said something loudly and angrily in hers and threw down a piece
of branch from which she’d been restlessly stripping the bark. She
stalked around the fireplace and came over to where the redhead
and the smuggler stood.
     The ox stepped back, hooves squishing and sucking in mud in
moist leaves. The donkey turned his long face away and went on
chewing.
      Planting herself before the young smuggler, the big woman
said, brokenly, her impatience edged with anger: “Please! You
come now? Please? To the bandit’s cart. Take your share! Now!
Quick! So we can take ours. You let us go? Now? Please?” She
took his arm and led him firmly forward, as the smuggler realized
that, somehow, they’d been waiting for him. His own inaction had
been the center of the women’s alien bickerings all along.
      As she steered him across the clearing, twice he started to
speak, to protest. Everything in him yearned to blurt some
appeasing anecdote about how, the last time somebody had been
talking about him, it had taken him even longer to realize they’d
meant him—about how much trouble it had gotten him into. And
that, even, had been in his own language. “You know, I remember
once…” But only Raven and the redhead seemed to understand his
tongue enough for such a tale as he sought to invent now from bits
and pieces of the real, the feigned. Also, the fact was, right now he
could remember almost nothing. The story he wanted to tell would
not coalesce. His companionable strategies had all shattered before
these strangers from the mist.
      The woman pulled the poles with their sagging cover away
from the side of the bandit’s cart. For a moment they seemed to
balance. Then they crashed over, revealing a fur blanket, another
pot, a large knife stuck in the ground, and bits of cord—all with the
sour smell the smuggler remembered from his own bedding after
some particularly exhausting trip where the detours had extended
things by weeks.
      One sandal on the fur, she reached over the edge, grabbed the
cart cover (of impressively tooled leather, full of shadowed, arcane
designs), and yanked.
     Two of the thongs holding it popped.
     Three didn’t.
     So she yanked again.
     And broke two more.
     She made a movement of tossing it away, but it only dropped,
mostly rough-out, to hang, by the remaining tie, down over the
back wheel.
      The young smuggler had expected to see beneath the leather
something much like what was under his own canvas. As he gazed
into the shadowed wagon, however, a sudden memory struck:
     The crone dragging her bag about the bridge.
     The pots and furs and rope and—yes—the weapons he made
out in the dark below him seemed the mad spillage from such
sacks.
   “This!” the woman demanded, reaching down and bringing it
up—it was a pot. And badly chipped. “For you?”
     The smuggler shook his head. “No…” The word was flat and
emotionless.
     Disgustedly, she grunted—“For nobody!”—and flung it over
her shoulder. “Or this?” (Behind her, the pot shattered on stone.)
What she drew out now was an ornately worked blade, perhaps a
foot and a halflong, the bone handle intricately carved and, here
and there, banded with metal that might have been precious, with
complex chasing. The woman grunted again. “Stupid,” she
declared. “A blade like this? Stupid. The swords of this country. All
outside. No inside. No…” She paused for a word. “No two blades.
No good. Just stupid man sword. Unity. Like a silly penis. Nothing.
Not even balls.” She thrust it toward him. “You?”
    “No!” He said that loud enough to hear his own voice
somewhere in the denial.
     She leaned over and began to rummage. “This junk. What you
want? We see.”
      “No,” he said again, turning from the cart. “No, I have to
get…” What, he wondered, was he trying to convince them of? He
felt like some new mummer on a wagon platform in the town
market, who, in the midst of the skit, had suddenly lost all sense of
the part he was supposed to be playing.
     Behind him, she said: “Or this, yes?” He did not even look at
what she held up now.
     His sack lay just off from the fireplace. Squatting to pick it
up, he reached for one of the fallen metal disks.
     He wanted to put it in the bag without looking at it. He
wanted to see what it was.
     The eyes of the woman at the cart—which, he realized as she
went on taking out one thing after the other, would not look at
him—generated in him all the anxiety of a disapproving parent.
    He stuffed the metal through the tear and picked up two
more.
      As his clumsy hand carried them through the firelight, he saw
each was actually several disks of metal, layered and bolted
together, the top one just a rim with a crossbar, the one below that
a strange cutout of curlicues with little prick-holes in the points;
the disk below was scored with maplike markings that the other
two turned over. The rim markings were the sort he’d seen in the
barbarian lands. Yes, he remembered, as, with the memory of some
young habit, he looked at it: sailors used these. It had something to
do with the stars… the word astrolabe came back to him. That’s
what they were called. Someone—perhaps his mummer
friend—had pointed one out to him, hanging around the neck of
some waterfront seaman. (It was one of these, he remembered,
suddenly and with astonishing clarity, that the long-gone mountain
girl had toyed with on her chain that day!) But their specific use
was still mysterious to him, so that the meaning or magic they
contained was unknown.
     A shadow darkened the disk in his hand.
     He looked up as Raven dropped to a squat before him, her
face in shadow, firelit fog behind. “Here! I’ll help you!” She
reached about for the fallen astrolabes and handed them to him.
He took them from her, thrusting them through the tear.
     Between his knees the sack grew heavier with each clank.
     Picking them up here and there, Raven said: “So this is what
you’re carrying to the south. It’s pretty work—barbarian craft. One
wonders what it was doing in the north, yes? Well, that’s not our
concern, is it. What will you be carrying with you when you return
to Kolhari?”
     He took more disks from her, put them in—clink!—and
frowned. “Nothing.”
     “You mean you make the trip back empty-handed?”
     “They pay me well. For the trip I make south…”
     “But there’re things you could take north. Before you leave,
ask around. It won’t be hard for you to find something profitable
to return with. Your northern masters won’t punish you if you
make a little extra.”
     Another time, he would have explained: If I get stopped by an
inspector on my way north and my cart is wholly innocent, I have a
much better chance, on my next trip south, of being waved on if I
meet the same inspector. But for now he only nodded. “I’ll
remember.” He took the next handful.
     “And remember, too, what I told you about the lands of the
Princess Elyne.”
     He took another handful.
      From the bandit’s cart, waving half a dozen implements in her
grip, the woman barked something down.
     Raven barked something back. Then she looked again at the
young smuggler. “You don’t really want anything out of there, do
you?”
    What he wanted was the tooled cart-cover. But even to say it
seemed exhausting. “No.” Oh, why do you go on acting such a fool!
More clinks. “This is all…”
     Raven looked up, speaking in her own language.
     The woman at the cart said something gruff and, obviously,
uncomplimentary. But it brought the other women over to the
bandit’s wagon, laughing. They fell to pulling out this and that.
     Looking about to see if any more of the astrolabes had rolled
away beside or behind, he stood up with his torn bag.
      “Here. Let me help you,” and, somehow, it was away from
him and up in Raven’s arms. He followed her to his cart, protests
weak under his tongue, while she dropped it, clattering, over the
edge, and shoved it down, pulling up the cover, pushing it out of
sight, stuffing back inside those that had fallen again through the
tear. She turned to him, a great smile on her face that asked for
nothing but complete gratitude and total approval.
      Then why, he thought, can’t I give it? Why does she make me
feel empty—as though I no longer had anything to give?
     “Thank you.” He managed a smile. “Thank you. But I have to
go. Really, we should be on our way.”
     “Come with us,” Raven said, suddenly, brightly, “on our
journey. We can offer you protection, companionship, even,
perhaps, amusement…?”
     “Where are you going?” he asked.
      “Oh, now,” said the masked woman. “That shouldn’t concern
the likes of you. Such things are not the business of a wise and
pretty man.”
     “What is your business?”
     “Now, there,” said Raven, “you’re at it again; asking after
things that are not your concern.”
      “But I can’t come!” he blurted. “I mean… I can’t come with
you!” He blinked at her, while she questioned with masked eyes.
“Thank you—for wanting me. Certainly, for saving me. I mean,
I’m pretty much of a loser; I can stumble into more trouble than
any three men you’ll meet. I know it. It’s true, I’ve always been like
that. I could be flogged for it, and it wouldn’t change, believe me. I
could use your protection, I know. And I’m grateful to you for
offering it—”
     The masked women beamed.
     “But I’ve got… my own task to do—”
    At which Raven (and one of the others passing by) let a
knowing chuckle.
      “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I just don’t… well, I don’t feel safe
here! Not with that bandit about in the bushes.” But what was
there to be frightened of, he thought with hopeless illogic (realizing
the lack of coherence as he thought it), in another man? “Really, it’s
dumb of me.” It’s them, he thought; it’s them I’m terrified of! I
know it. (Ask her for the cover…!) But why, when they’re the ones
who saved me? “But I… well, I want to go! Please, you have to let
me go. Now. I’m sorry. Please!”
     “Please?” No longer smiling, the little woman dropped her
eyes and bowed her head in a manner that spoke of total
acquiescence. “Come with us…?”
      The smuggler was suddenly frightened all over; and angry;
and hurt. Because he would have to say, again, no. And because,
with all three women he had been sleeping with back in Kolhari,
he’d often felt the same, suddenly and naturally he did what he’d
done with them when he felt this way, though he experienced less
desire now for this hard little woman than he’d felt for any man
who, from time to time, he’d indulged on the bridge:
      He took her small face in his big hands (her eyes beat, in their
mask, lifting, surprised) and pulled her to him. Only (as had the
others, toward the angry, unhappy ends) she stiffened and would
not come. So he came to her, with his heavy body, and let his hands
go down her neck to her shoulders, then behind them, and across
them; and he hugged her. Like them, it was like hugging some
stone or tree that would not give. He remembered the last woman
he’d put his arms around—the little, stupid one. And yes, just as
rigid, just as stiff. (Are all the women in all the world, he wondered,
really alike, no matter the seeming difference…?) Holding her, he
tried again to remember her getting onto his cart bench in the rain.
When he’d offered her the ride, the signs she’d displayed of
aspiring to some masculine power had surely masked, at least for
him, something unquestionably and quintessentially feminine, so
that the signs of aspiration themselves had been eccentric, amusing,
playful; and she’d seemed merely a playful and amusing, if
eccentric, creature. But now, with the advent of her friends, it was
clear that she no longer aspired to that power; it was—and had
been all along—hers. Whatever had been quintessentially feminine
was an illusion (in her? in all women?). Certainly he’d had enough
experience with the women and men of his country to recognize
that the signs she displayed toward him now all spoke of a certain
masculine weakness. (He looked down, brushing her forehead,
almost inadvertently, with his lips.) Yet they were all saturated with
that same astonishing, displaced, and dispossessing power, so that,
as he had not with the others, he released her more hurriedly than
he had them and stepped back, his heart beating a bit more rapidly
than he’d expected, his breath coming a bit faster than it had
before. (That, he knew, was simple fear!) How many women of his
own land, he wondered, had stepped too quickly back from their
saviors, granting them only a half measure of what they needed
above all things to go on? Where, he wondered, had she, had
they—he looked about the clearing at her friends—seized such
power? But because there was nothing in the whole of his primitive
life from which to construct the lie, from me (as there would have
been with any who’d ever before questioned the sources of his own
strength), he felt as uncomfortable, as unsettled, as discommoded
as a girl.
     As had all the others, she smiled.
     “I’m going…” he whispered. “I have to—”
      “Hooop-ah!” one woman cried as, having finished with the
spoils, two others lifted the bandit’s cart, racketing loudly, to
overturn it. Its remaining contents crashed out on leaves.
     Startled, the smuggler looked back at the wrecked campsite. It
wasn’t just the cart: stones about the fireplace had been kicked
away. The cooking pot had overturned. And the dish from which
the bandit had prepared the smuggler’s roast had been broken and
the meat stepped on in the wanderings back and forth.
     The others walked over. The barrel-chested women who’d
taken him before to the cart said, not to him: “We go now? Yes?”
     The smuggler stepped to his ox’s shoulder; looking at the tree
with the donkey’s and the ox’s reins, for a moment he was unsure
which set went to which beast. “The donkey,” he said, at last
deciphering the twisted lines; he began to untie his ox. “What are
we going to do with him?”
      The barrel-chested woman said: “We leave it here, yes? For
him. If he come back, he want it? He need it! It be good for him.
Right?” Then, in a movement, she turned, pulled out her twin
blades, raised them high over her head, and hacked, breath-jarringly
hard, at the donkey’s flat neck. It took her down into a crouch, as
she tugged on through the broad neck muscles. The head didn’t
sever at the blow, though the smuggler expected to see it fall free.
The animal gave a breathless gargle, staggered to the side, went
down on its forelegs, got up again—staggered into the ox, into the
woman (who stood now, breathing hard), stumbled out to the end
of his reins, spurting and splattering; its mouth working wildly
inside the bag, lost its hind footing, lost its fore-footing again—and
fell over. The ribs heaved for three loud, clotted roars, then stilled.
     “There.” The woman put her sword away. “We leave it for
him. He find it.”
      In the canvas feed bag, the donkey suddenly snorted; it
kicked, quivered, gasped again—then, over a few more seconds,
died.
     The ox stepped about.
     Where he’d been splashed, blood dribbled the smuggler’s calf.
He didn’t even reach down to wipe it.
      His heart hammered; this surround of terror was as pervasive
as the fog.
     Raven had gone off again.
     Looking about, he saw that the redhead was watching him. He
blinked, questioning, confused—in the middle of it, he realized he
wasn’t breathing, sucked in a great gasp (harsh enough to make
Raven glance back over at him) and, with it, the sweetish smell of
slaughter. His ox was lowing, steadily, loudly, and not looking at
the carcass. Catching her bridle up short, the smuggler freed her
reins and led her away. Her lowing and the creaking cart behind
covered the mutterings with which he tried to quiet her.
     The women, including Raven, were talking rapidly in their
language.
       The gaunt one took a long stick and plunged it in a pot they’d
pulled from the bandit’s wagon, raised the dripping end, and thrust
it in the fire. It splutterted, as flame contended between the damp
wood and the easy oil she’d soaked it with.
     Then it flared red.
    With the bright brand high, she kicked apart the fireplace,
damping coals with sandalfuls of earth.
     As the woman stamped about in the ashes, the smuggler
looked back at his ox. Its shoulder and flank were matted with
donkey blood.
      Still talking, the others moved off into the trees, the mist. The
smuggler took his cart along behind. Leaves got between him and
the flare the gaunt woman carried aloft. Then, at the spot he’d first
left his cart, red flame caught in an equine eye, on a dappled
shoulder; there was neighing and the sound of hooves in brush.
     They’d left horses tethered in the darkness!
     One and another of them mounted, while he stopped his cart
again, wondering would they just ride off and leave him in the
pitchy woods. Hooves smashed about in the undergrowth toward
him; blackness blocked the brand; and Raven’s voice came down at
him from what—since he could not see her at all, really—might
have been some tree’s upper branches. “Don’t worry. We’ll go
slowly. So you can follow.”
     They did, for a while—long enough, anyway, for him to get
the cart on the road. Two more flares had been lit from the first;
there were three brands now. Among the half-dozen riders
cantering before him in the black, red flames smoked from cheap
oil.
      Once alone and twice with a companion, once holding up one
of the torches, then twice in the dark, Raven rode back to him.
     “Where will you go?” he asked her the last time, walking
along by his animal.
      “To the Cravasse!” Some jollity had begun among the women
ahead, and, stamping and cantering, Raven had carried it back with
her. “The Western Cravasse! We are leaving Nevèrÿon at last!”
      Ahead, one of her landwomen shouted something into the
night, waving her brand—the one who’d slain the donkey.
      “There,” Raven explained to him in her most reasonable tone,
“all will be well. The lips of the Cravasse are shaped as the inner
blades of a sword. Once we ride within them—” and here she
clapped her hands over her horse’s head—“we will again be in a
land where sanity and civilization reign. And the madness of this
nation, with its slaves and liberators, this land that boasts an
empress but is really governed by scheming men whom you can
never find when you look for them, will be behind us for good!
Will you come with me, wise and pretty man?”
     “I can’t…!”
     Raven rode round his cart once, then, without acknowledging
she’d heard him, galloped ahead, leaving him plodding in black.
      He wondered if the judgment of the redhead (who rode her
horse up with the others) about her friend, would turn out to be
true.
     A stade or two along, he stopped his cart to climb up on the
bench, now feeling behind him for this, now checking under the
seat for that. Should he take out one of his weapons, just to have it
beside him? But the resolve ran from him even as he considered it.
He let himself slouch forward, sucking in long, moist breaths from
the cricketless night. The cart rattled on beneath him. When he
looked up, the brands were only a pink, wobbling blur, through
mist. Now and again he could hear the women’s shouts, their
laughter.
      As the distance between them increased he thought to call
out. What wouldn’t I do, he wondered, to have them continue this
frightening protection?
     He felt truly abandoned.
       Just to see what happened, the smuggler tried to imagine
himself in the Kolhari crypt, standing on the throne in torchlight,
with Raven in chains at the foot. Or perhaps the other way
around…? Varying the pictures in his mind, he waited for desire’s
stirring that might reveal to him where all the night’s anxiety had
lain.
      But the wells of his body remained silent, offering up not the
faintest quiver of confirmation, so that, in the dark, he could
believe for a moment that the wells themselves were not there.
      No; that, he thought, considering the absurd and fading fancy,
is just what we could never do. It’s too close to something real
(and, like all unexamined reality, therefore truly unknown) for me
to trust myself or her in such chains before the other.
     Let them go ahead, he thought. Let her go…
      With the wagon’s shaking in the darkness, did he drift off…?
Because now, though the cart still jogged and the beast still
followed whatever ruts, there was no light ahead. The women had
finally ridden off, as if they’d never stepped from the fog.
     He was surrounded by black.
     The smuggler held the reins, which now and again shook over
his knuckles—though, in truth, if they led to an actual ox or if
she’d been replaced during some moment of inattention by a
winged beast who now crawled with him across the sky or over the
sea or through towering clouds, he could not have said for certain.
     Should he stop?
      Perhaps he should curl up in the cart itself, waiting for
sunlight (or a scabbed and bleeding face…!) to peer over its edge?
     Should he try to sit where he was, wakeful, while they
wandered on the road or off the road, to what dark destination he
could not possibly imagine, in wait for light?
       For the moment, even to form the question in the rattling
dark was exhausting, so that all he could do was return to the
dialogue that had been running on beside him. Yes, he repeated to
the grizzled smuggler of the mind, you wouldn’t believe how much
of my time, of my life I’ve spent following the Liberator, like some
fool looking for a hero to give his life meaning. I went around as if
he were my passion and my purpose! Then, one night, just like this,
riding through the south in my cart, I finally ran into him. It was at
a campsite, just down from the road. Him, a hero? He was only a
bandit! As soon as he’d thrown me off my guard with a pretense of
friendship, by offering me food, he turned around and tried to kill
me! Even wanted to steal my wagon load—said it was for his
cause! Oh, it was definitely him. I’d met one of his women—no,
one of his men. She told me the place where I might find him. I
mean, he told me. The man had his scars, all right. But it turns out
the single eye they talk of is only a half-milky iris. I escaped with
my life. Usually, you know, he has his men with him—if not right
there, then stationed in the woods around him, waiting to come to
his rescue at a call. I was just lucky that this time he’d chosen to go
on a scouting mission alone. Not that he didn’t try to lie about it.
But I fugured he was bluffing. With one of the blades I keep in my
cart, I gave him a cut across the face—perhaps I lost him his other
eye! He didn’t stay to let me see, but ran off. I overturned his cart
and killed his donkey. I should have gone through the cart for
spoils, but I wouldn’t touch a thing in it—it had a handsome
tooled-leather cart cover. I should have taken that, at least. But I
wouldn’t touch it. Well, that’s the sort of fool I am! He must have
been too scared or too hurt to follow me.
     You just hope he doesn’t run into you again some day, opined
his phantom companion. I know these highway murderers… And
the young smuggler looked about in the blackness.
      Oh, I managed to get my cart away, and struck out on the
dark road in fog thick enough to blot all moon and stars, if not the
sun itself! You’d think, wouldn’t you, a man like that with all the
trust and faith people have in him throughout Nevèrÿon—and I
know they do, for I’ve talked to many of them and, indeed, once
had it myself—would feel some obligation to honesty and right
behavior. Imagine such a man, sneaking up behind you in the dark,
leaping on you from the back, trying to stab you like some thief in
an old Kolhari alley—
     Is that what he did to you…?
      No. No, the young smuggler explained, taking a great breath
and looking about again. But he would have if he’d had the chance.
For now, since I met him, I know the kind of man he is. He only
exploits for his own ends the faith that fools like me have in him.
Believe me, I know that now, from firsthand experience. I mean:
Can you imagine it, Gorgik the Liberator, the man everyone talks
of, only a common cutthroat? Fool that I was, I thought he was a
great man, committed to the relief of human suffering, when all he
does is lurk about at every campsite and crossroad, at every—
     With a shudder, the smuggler blinked, staring into black as if
it were a slate wall inches or feet ahead. The truth! he thought,
desperate in the dark. The truth! Is that the kind of fool you are?
The wise men and teachers of Nevèrÿon who talked of truth as if it
were some glowing and generous light? The truth was a blackness
into which anyone might be reasonably terrified to enter alone; any
and every horror, he knew, could wait there.
      And what is the truth? (He moved a little on the bench.) You
are a frightened, ignorant man on a foggy, moonless night.
     The young smuggler began to cry.
     He did not make much sound doing it.
      The companionable voice running on beside him certainly
didn’t notice. I’ve heard many people, it confided, gruff and
fatherly, who don’t approve of the Liberator at all. They say he’s
out for himself like everyone else. And you must admit that in
these harsh and hazardous times that’s a reasonable assumption for
anyone to make.
      Crying quietly, the young smuggler answered: Well, believe
me, I can say from what I know: he’s a liar and a murderer and a
self-serving thief, no better than you, no better than me. Believe it:
if only because I know me, I now know him…
      No, I’ll never tell that story, the smuggler thought. Tears still
rolled his cheeks. I’ll never tell it to anyone!
    First of all (he snuffled, then spat to the side in the black; a
wheel jarred over a root or rock), it’s a stupid tale. Anyone who
knows anything about the Liberator at all could catch me out in a
minute. A fool I am, yes; but not that big a fool…
     Taking another breath, he shivered. But, as his cart rolled
through black fog, he went on telling it to himself.




                                 10

     Barefoot, two carried the trunk across uneven stone, the tall
one grunting more than the heavy one. A look, a word, a jerked
chin to coordinate their toss: the wood crashed into the fireplace
wider side to side than the length of both, laid head to foot.
     Gorgik looked up from the goatskin map on the plank table
as sparks rose before small flames.
     In billowing smoke, the soldiers danced back, grinning and
beating bark bits from their hands, one against hairy thighs, one
against bald ones.
     The heavy barbarian was a woman.
     Gorgik nodded to them.
     Saluting, backing away, then turning, they ambled off.
      A year or a hundred years ago a roof beam had broken, one of
its ends crashing down to the floor’s center, the other still lodged at
the ceiling’s corner. The soldiers stepped around it to join the
others.
      Between the six beams remaining, the sooty inlay had not
even sagged. But since the fall, torch holders had been bolted to the
slant beam’s side, weapon hooks and woven hangings had been
fixed to its bottom, so that, however awkwardly, as if awaiting
some never begun repair, it was, today, part of the hall’s
architecture.
     Beyond it, a soldier stood up from among the others, to turn
his sword, examining it in torchlight. Were there two blades rising
from its hilt—
      But that, Gorgik thought, would be a trick of the fire; or a
trick of the beer he’d decided he would not drink and had anyway.
     Squatting on the table’s end in his iron collar, arms locked
round his knees, Noyeed stared, not at the flame, but at the joined
stones beside it.
     “I dream…” The little princess swayed on the split-log bench.
“If you only knew my dreams, my one-eyed monkey, my great
Liberator…”
      In firelight, her face was lightly lined; her hair was thin
enough so that, in full sun, you could see much of her scalp
through it. Strands shone with dressing. The princess sat close to
the fire, a position of her own choosing. Her face was bright with
sweat, though the soldiers, seated before them, now mumbling,
now laughing sharply, now falling into altercation hot enough to
notice, yet too distant to detail, would soon be complaining of the
chill on this damp night.
      It’s having women among them, Gorgik thought. They give
their all to the cause, certainly, as much as the men or more. They
come and go, sometimes. But that was true of them all. Yet often it
seemed to him just the fact of their being there led to
problems—or at least to misunderstandings among the men who
were still nine out of ten of his soldiers.
      Leaning back in her stiff gown and blinking, the princess
moved her hand—blemished, freckled, and liver-spotted—toward
the heavy goblet of an estate cider hard as applejack; her fingers
missed the stem. “I dream,” crooned the princess Elyne, “of the
time when you and I, Gorgik, were children, lost together in the
halls of the High Court of Eagles, trying to find our way
about—like children following some trail of crumbs to the
treasure, starving peasant children in some summer, country fable.”

     “We were never children together, my princess.” Gorgik
chuckled, feeling little humor. “Our childhoods were very different.
Nor did you ever starve when you were at the High Court.”
     The princess Elyne reached her goblet, got its edge to her lips,
and drank. “But how do you know, my Liberator? Certainly—”
Cider dripped to the table as she leaned forward—“certainly you did
not starve, there or before. Real slaves don’t have the kind of
muscle you carried so handsomely about the palace—which made
it rather easy to question the whole slavery story. Noyeed is a bit
more what I’d expect an ex-slave to look like.”
      One end of the new log was wet, and the flames, already low
at that side of the fireplace, began to hiss and sputter at it, as if
castigating the wood for the sappy tears rolling its gleaming grain
where the bark had come away.
     Gorgik looked back at the map. His blunt forefinger          had
traced the route with only half his concentration; now it         was
following an irrelevant path, as if, during his inattention, it   had
wandered onto an improper turnoff like a traveler lost in         the
autumnal night. “Noyeed,” he said, “what are you staring at?”
     Noyeed jerked about, long hair dragging his shoulder. “The
stones, master. You see the stones, beside the fireplace? I was
thinking, master, I was wondering—”
     “He was thinking—” cider splashed the rim to wet the
princess’s spotty knuckles—“he was planning, he was speculating,
while I, you understand, I was dreaming…”
      “Between the stones.” Noyeed released his knees to point. On
his arm, muscle and bone made knots of equal seeming hardness.
“See—where the wall’s rocks are set together? A mist drifts from
them, into the hall here. I was curious if that was moisture caught
between them, heated to steam by the fire beside them; or if it was
fog from the outside, leaking in from the night.”
      “Ask her. It’s her castle. Ah—!” Some wrangling among the
soldiers made him look up. “What are they arguing about now?
These barbarians I have for soldiers. Is it the women among them
or the men, I can’t tell. Well, they must learn to support one
another, not turn on each other at every little failing.”
     “Support, you say?” The princess chuckled. “Consider, my
Liberator. It is only my being free not to support you that allows
me to support you as I do. Yes, while you’ve been here, I’ve
financed your cause, fed and paid your troops for you, welcomed
them into my home. Proudly. Oh, so proudly! A man may learn a
lot by losing the support of a woman. Ask any of your barbarians,
and they will explain. But often I’m afraid that’s just what you,
above all, will never learn. It is my castle, you know. This is the new
wing, too. Look up! It has a roof! I lodge you—and me and your
lieutenant—and your soldiers and scouts in the little chambers dug
in the walls of the old, roofless great hall—”
      “But why not inside?” Noyeed spun on thin buttocks. “If it
rains, we need a roof. Don’t you think so, mistress?”
      “Rain?” asked the little princess. “But it doesn’t rain. Not at
this time of year, my monkey. Not in Nevèrÿon. Now there’s only
fog.” She waved the goblet, spilling more cider, her speech more
unsteady. “Be still, or I shall order you roasted. On a spit! And I
shall eat you up, as Mad Olin once ordered her own sons so served,
when, indeed, it did rain with such torrential fury that—”
    “Master!” Noyeed was up on his knees on the table. “Master,
when we quit this castle to move on to some other—”
      But the princess was chuckling to herself, over her drink. “I
dream…” she repeated. “I dream, here on the border of Nevèrÿon.
In my old, cold castle, I dream of nobility and grandeur and truth. I
dream of using my meager hoard to finance a great man in his
humane and wondrous cause, which I know is benevolent and
brave. His truth and commitment will reintroduce purpose,
passion, excitement, and wonder among these ancient stones. I will
love and revere him in his commitment to his truth. He will respect
and cherish me in my commitment to him. Oh, I dream…” As she
smiled, firelight burnished her drab collar, her goblet. “If I escape
this dream with my life—” she sipped again—“I will be satisfied.
With less, and I won’t complain. If I escape with my life in any way
enriched, well then, I shall count myself the luckiest of women.
Oh, I’m old enough to know that dreams have their own
beginnings, their own climaxes, their own ends—that, when a
wandering tale-teller imposes such orderings on her stories, it
makes those chaotic compilations so much less like life, yet so
much more exciting. No, when I began this dream, one of the
things I was determined to do was dream it to its end, if only to see
what such a dream might leave me with. Life, I sometimes
think—like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you
will—is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had
best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk
never finding its secret. If you must leave my dream, my great
Liberator, my one-eyed lieutenant, to follow yours, you must leave.
I can stand being left again with mine.”
      Beyond the beam, the soldiers’ noise rose, with clattering
arms and laughter. An officer with a sheaf of parchments ducked in
through the far hanging, now pausing to call something to one
soldier, now making his way through several others in comradely
converse.
     Gorgik raised a bushy eyebrow.
    On the table edge, Noyeed grasped his knees once more.
“And how did you learn to dream such wise dreams, my mistress?”

     But the little princess was gazing into her cider.
     Reaching the table, the officer dropped his bunched
parchments on the map. “You might look at these, my Liberator, if
you’re still making plans to depart…?”
     “Leaving me,” mumbled the princess. “Yes, here on the
border of Nevèrÿon, you’re already making plans to leave, to go on.
But where are you going?”
      Noyeed turned toward her on the table. “My princess, the
further we get from the center, the better the fighting. Haven’t you
said so yourself? And so, we plan, we dream of going on, going
further, going beyond…”
     Gorgik picked up one and another parchment, putting this
one aside, handing that one back, gazing at the next and nodding.
“It’s going well.” Most stayed on the table; Gorgik looked at
Noyeed, at the princess. “Reinforcements for us have come from
friends both to the east and the west. But the empress’s troops are
still new here and unaquainted with the territory. When we started,
I didn’t think it could be done. But we’re holding off the small
forces that the local brewers and less powerful nobles have been
able to muster. They have no trained fighters among them, other
than those the Child Empress has been able to send them. How
many of them can read a map, much less make one?”
     The officer lingered. “My Liberator…?”
     Gorgik looked up.
     “The guard told me to tell you he’s caught another smuggler.
Outside the castle, he was trying to sneak his cart across the
princess’s grounds.”
     “A smuggler?” The princess put down her goblet. “A
smuggler, you say? No! What would a smuggler be doing on my
lands? I allow no smuggler on my grounds—”
      “He may be a spy, master…” Noyeed remarked, softly and
intensely. “Soon, they will be sending even more spies than they do
already.”
      Gorgik looked up. “We’ve had enough experience with spies
by now to know how best to take precautions. Bring him up,”
Gorgik said to the officer and, turning, to the others, “so that we
can ponder on, can interpret, can interrogate this smuggler, this
spy… But first—” Gorgik stood up behind the table—“clear the
hall!” This was a bellowed order.
      Soldiers began to stand, as if they were used to such
directives.
     “Clear the hall, now!” Gorgik looked down. “You too, little
princess. Retire now, and leave the hall to me.”
     “But why, my Liberator…?” She was clearly annoyed at
having to move.
     “If he is a spy,” said Gorgik, “I would rather he not know
who I am.”
     She rose from the bench, taking her goblet. “I don’t
understand all this secrecy. This is not the way my father or my
uncle would have conducted such a campaign from these halls.”
      “I’m a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning
is the web of signs I publicly inhabit. Thus, I would appear to our
visitor as close to naked, unarmed, and without ornament as I can.”

     “But—”
      “We do not have many soldiers. Those we have are so few
they can vanish easily among the corridors and chambers of your
great castle here, or into the lands around them if they have to. I
have few—and our smuggler will leave here thinking I have none.
Or, at any rate, he will think I have no more than the guard who
captured him. Later, if he meets someone who has fought against
our brave handful, that one will say I have many—while he will
declare I do not. And what will happen in the course of their
altercation? Believe me, the number of fighters I have will double,
treble, quadruple by the end of their argument on one side—while,
on the other, even the guard who took this smuggler will, no doubt,
vanish completely as this smuggler insists I carry on my campaign
entirely alone. Princess, I have made a point never to be fully
present within the central crypts of power where I’m reputed to
reside—at least never in the full force, true complexity, and
complete organization by which most hope to know me. It is a
strategy I learned many years ago when I worked for Lord Aldamir
in the south. Such subterfuge has laid about me a fog of confusion
and misinformation that has often aided me—”
     “But then, master,” stated Noyeed, “you are seldom fully
absent either.”
     The Liberator chuckled. “And that I learned simply from the
exigencies of the times.” The chuckle—“Now go, my princess—”
as he looked about, again became a bellow: “And clear the hall!
Quickly! Clear it!” He glanced at the one-eyed man. “You stay,
Noyeed.”
     “Yes, master!”


     The dripping roof brushed his hair and made him crouch
again, as he clutched the sack to his chest.
     “Get in, now!” The guard shoved the small of his back, hard,
so that, staggering, he reached out with one hand to steady himself
against the wall that crumbled under his fingers like dried mud.
Behind him: “Get in!”
      He rushed toward the hanging, thinking to find blackness,
pushed through, ducking under a sagging lintel, to hear the echo of
his breath change timbre. He stopped and stood, slowly, in the
flickering room. A beam slanted through it, ceiling to floor.
Beyond, a plank table stood by a wide fire.
     A man sat behind it.
     Another squatted on the table itself among mugs, goblets, and
parchments.
     When the young smuggler had realized the guard who’d
accosted him was taking him to the Liberator, he’d thought pretty
much everything he’d thought before, felt pretty much everything
he’d felt before, when he’d met the man on the bridge or, again,
when he’d found the man in the clearing. There was curiosity and
pleasure and wonder. There was fear and disbelief and—as the
guard had shoved him through the corridor—outrage at betrayal.
      Because of his two earlier encounters, for all he’d felt, for all
he’d thought, he said none of the things he’d said before.
      But as he stood in the flicker, however, he began to think and
feel something new:
     I have just become one of those people who, from now on,
must say: There are two of them, not one. There’s a big one, with a
scar down his cheek. And there’s a little one, with one blind eye,
who goes about in a slave collar. And, for all my researches, that is
not who I was only moments ago…
      Or have I become that…? (The smuggler narrowed his eyes,
for the feeling of disorientation was different from the other times:
it was smaller, clearer, more precise.) In this ill light, have I really
seen them? Or am I only putting that upon the shadowed faces
before me, like a student come down to write his unreadable
profanities on some wall in the Spur? Be clear. Be certain. Be
careful with this truth. Because I am better equipped to see it than
most, I above all must not let my equipment itself fool me.
     The big man stood up at his bench, walked to the table’s end,
and came around it.
     The young smuggler edged forward, hugging his sack.
      The big man was naked, with only some leather web pouching
his genitals. At one ear, his hair was braided with a bit of thong.
     On the table, the little man rested a sharp chin on his knees.
      The smuggler squinted, trying to clear both faces in the
flames’ light. But, looking back and forth between them, trying to
hold on to the full and heavy features or the small and acute ones,
the fire and his attention itself seemed to distort vision.
      On the cheek of the big one standing—a veritable giant—that
could have been a scar…
     The little one squatting blinked one eye. His other was
sunken; or sealed; or perhaps was only in shadow…
     “Are you…” the young smuggler hazarded.
     “—the Liberator?” The big man laughed. “What do you
think? What do you see around me?”
      The young smuggler shook his head, bewildered, and hugged
his sack higher.
      “Do you see here all the Liberator’s hundreds of troops?” He
gestured about the empty hall. “His dozens of secretaries, aides,
and orderlies? his spies and provocateurs? the whole elaboration of
the fighting forces with which, carrying on his campaign, he has
freed thousands of slaves throughout the nation and has made even
the Child Empress herself and all her ministers quake in the High
Court? Or do you see, perhaps, a single man with a guard or two in
an all but abandoned castle?”
     The smuggler frowned at the man on the table, who laughed,
sharply and shortly.
      “Or, perhaps—” The little man spoke in an accent very
different from the big one’s clear, Kolhari diction—“you think you
see two men…?” Pushing parchments with his hip, he moved to the
table edge to drop one ankle over. “You don’t, you know.” Yes, a
metal collar, nearly black, hung on his scrawny neck. “You don’t
even see one. No human forms stand or sit before you. You face
only some illusion that mimics the form of men as, without names,
the gods do. No real castle of granite and fitted stone stands
around you. Think, rather, that as the night fog drifted and formed
about you, making one shape after another, as the night sounds
rose and fell, twittered and cheeped, at some unfixable point in
your journey they came together for a moment in the suggestion of
the man and his shadow some have called the Liberator, as well as
this castle about him, and the guard who your memory says
brought you here. Realize that, there and here, those wisps and
chitterings have played on your imagination to suggest even me
and the words I speak, now, here. Wandering in the mists, you
merely think you’ve come into the presence of the Liberator, when
actually it’s the fog-filled night’s autumnal sorcery—”
     The Liberator raised his hand. (The little man silenced.)
“What questions do you have for me? Do you want to know who I
am? Or where you are? Or what I intend to do with you now that
I’ve had you brought here? Talk.” The big man actually smiled.
“You’ll find we autumnal night wisps are not that frightening.”
       The younger smuggler took a breath and, with one hand,
released his sack and pointed to the table. “Those…?” Because that
was all he could think of now: they were the only thing that seemed
solid.
       Frowning, Gorgik glanced back; Noyeed looked down beside
him.
     “Those skins,” the smuggler said. “They have writing on
them, don’t they…?”
       Gorgik nodded.
       (A scar? A shadow…?)
       “Can you read?”
       Glancing back again, the big man frowned at the little one.
       The little man hazarded: “I can’t. But he can. Can you?”
       The young smuggler shook his head quickly. “Oh, no!”
     “You can’t? Not at all?” The big man stepped closer,
observing. “Oh, I bet you know the signs for…” The green eyes
narrowed in the flickering light—“women’s genitals, men’s excreta,
and cooking implements, in all their combinations, the curses that
are forever scratched and scrawled on walls up in the city—you
sound is if you’ve spent some time in Kolhari. Am I right?”
      “Oh, yes. Those writings, yes,” the smuggler lied. “I can read
those.” Momentarily he was back in that hot afternoon when his
Kolhari friend had labored with a stick over a stretch of mud down
at the edge of the Khora, ineffectually trying to teach him the
written forms of profanation.
      “Like everyone in this country,” the big man commented over
his shoulder to the smaller, “slowly he is learning to read and write.
Take a lesson there, Noyeed.”
       “But what do… you use it for?” (Noyeed! Then that was the
little one’s name! Then the big one must be… No, he must wait.)
“The writing, I mean?”
      “I use it to remember. To remember, clearly and accurately,
what I have, what I need, what I’ve done, what I must do, where
I’ve been, where I must go, what I’ve seen, and what I must still
look for. Memory often plays tricks on you even minutes after your
thoughts have settled somewhere else.”
     “Oh, I know!” The smuggler nodded.
      “With writing, you are free to use your thinking in other ways.
I can observe clearly and carefully what I have to—but do not have
to worry about recalling it later if it is written down. It’s an
interesting system, the one that actually puts down words
themselves. Myself, though, I use an older, commercial script, from
before the current system made its way to Nevèrÿon from the
Ulvayns. It’s one my father used back in Kolhari, when he worked
on the waterfront.”
     Kolhari, thought the smuggler. And his father (story
fragments moved up in his mind. Other fragments receded), on the
waterfront…?
      “Why do you ask all this?” The big man frowned. “If you
can’t read and write anything save wall scratchings, what difference
does it make to you if I do? But tell me, what does someone like
you think of this new writing?”
     Was it fear? The smuggler blurted: “I hate it! The students,
they use it all the time. They started all that scratch and scrawl.
When I first saw it, I used to think they were putting up messages
to each other—putting them right out there on the walls, too, just
because the rest of us wouldn’t know what they meant! Because
they can pass them out in the open like that, they think they’re
better than we are. I hate students, and I hate their writing!” What
was the name of the boy he’d given the ride to, down from
Kolhari? Many did feel that way about the students and their script.
But why, he wondered, was he saying, here, when questioned, that
he did? Still, once started, he could not stop. “I wouldn’t be a
student for anything! I’m glad I’m a good and—”
     “—honest laborer?” the Liberator finished for him.
     The smuggler swallowed.
      “Or, perhaps,” said the Liberator, uncannily, “you were about
to say, smuggler…?”
     The smuggler blinked.
      “My guard caught you trying to take your cart across the
princess’s land here—to escape the Imperial customs inspectors of
Sarness, no doubt. I know them well. They’re no friends of mine,
either.” He stepped forward. “Too bad you couldn’t admit you
were a smuggler. We might have had more to say to each other,
then. But we don’t. Cutpurse or potter’s boy, that’s still the kind of
honesty I look for in the young of our nation—and so seldom find.
But that you are like so many in Nevèrÿon is not anything I can
hold against you.”
      The smuggler thought: When I came in, this room seemed so
big, its roof so high. But his head comes just beneath the ceiling
beams he passes under.
      “You’re a youth of your times, like so many others. Who’d
blame you for being the victim of those times? Who could chide
you for trying, in whatever misguided way the times provide you
with, to master them? What are you carrying there?” He reached
out a hand. “Here. Let me see.”
     The young smuggler glanced left and right and, holding the
sack still tighter, pulled back.
       The Liberator snorted—yes, it was a chuckle. “Come. Show
me now. Tell me, are you taking your contraband up to the north
or are you traveling down to the south with it? Speak; now!” The
Liberator grasped the sack in the young smuggler’s arms with his
great fingers at the same time as he stepped up, blocking the
firelight.
     The young smuggler blurted: “South! I’m going
south—running contraband from Kolhari down into the Garth.
I’m the most foolish, the clumsiest, the most incompetent of
smugglers. But you know that! You saw it! I needn’t tell you. But I
know running around and freeing slaves isn’t cheap. I know you
need all you can get. All right, then—”
      The great hand tugged; the sack fell away from the smuggler’s
chest. As the Liberator turned to the fire, the light fell on his heavy
features clearly enough to show the scar that dropped across one
eye and down the broad cheek. The two green eyes looked over at
the smuggler. The heavy lips thinned. “You think I want to steal
your haul from you?” He yanked at the cord binding it closed. A
tear of some sort had been recently sewn with rough vine. The tie
pulled loose. Holding the neck with one hand, the Liberator looked
in and reached inside.
     What he pulled out was a small, round ball. He frowned at it,
frowned at the smuggler, reached in again. Now he drew out a
whole handful of balls. “You’re taking these… south?” One by one
he dropped the black spheres back in the bag.
     One caught on the neck, fell to the floor, and rolled. Noyeed
was off the table to retrieve it. “Here!” He thrust it over the man’s
arm and in.
    The scarred giant pushed the sack with its tie-cord at the
smuggler. “Here, take it, now. And go on. Go on, I say!”
      The smuggler grabbed up the sack, cradling the neck against
his shoulder to keep the toy balls from spilling over the floor; he
grasped at the cord, trying too quickly and too clumsily to bind the
neck closed. “I’m only the poorest, most careless, most clumsy—”
He glanced up again; the little man in his iron collar waited beside
the Liberator, like the big man’s foreshortened shadow. Yes, one
eye was definitely missing. The flesh had sealed within the socket,
leaving only the scar lid and lashes made within a depression deep
and round as if it had been rolled into the sharp face by one of the
balls.
     The smuggler whispered:
     “Master…?”
     “Out of here,” the big one said, “before I change my mind!”
      The smuggler swallowed, turned, and rushed under the low
beam, through the hangings, and into the hallway. He’d expected to
find the guard who had led him up here. But the man had gone.
     He hurried with the sack along the corridor. Under torchlight
here and there, he tried to recall the brief interview with the
Liberator and his one-eyed lieutenant—unless the great one
speaking to him had been the lieutenant and little Noyeed was,
indeed, the Liberator…?
     And the scar?
     And the single eye?
      He’d seen them now, yes? Unless, of course, that had been a
trick of firelight, or even the detritus of the terrors from out in the
mist that, even now, drifted before the torches in their wall
niches—the fog that seeped through the walls about him as if the
stone itself were stream. Could he trust his memory? Or anything
else? Why had he lied to the Liberator’s questions about his
direction, about his ability to read? “Master,” he’d called him! By
all the nameless gods, had he uttered a word of truth? Could it be,
he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because
of his own desires, researches, expectations?
     The Liberator was certainly no murdering highwayman.
     One had certainly worn the collar.
    But then, he’d known that since the night how long ago on the
Kolhari bridge.
      The real and solid meeting in this foggy night had left him the
same entanglement of suppositions with which he’d begun his
journey—oh, slightly adjusted, slightly shifted, but in ways almost
too subtle to name. The illuminating and major change he might
have hoped for in an encounter with the real, taking him from
night to day, had, equally certainly, not occurred. Just as before, he
still carried with him, unknown and untaxable, the intricate,
frightening, many-times questioned and faulty certainties called, at
the behest of what ill-understood forces, truth.
     That was all.
       Now pausing, now hurrying again, now making his way
hesitantly, his sack mercifully safe in his arms, he rushed through
castle corridors, down steps, and out the door where his cart waited
for it in the fog.


      At the turning of a corridor under a guttering torch in its iron
cage, they encountered each other later.
     Feeling along the cold wall, the little princess walked
unsteadily in her stiff gown, humming to herself.
     “Well, master—” Noyeed laughed, for, in truth, both men
thought that she would simply wander tipsily by without seeing
them—“it seems that my plan—”
     “Your dream, little monkey?” The princess chuckled. She
stopped. She swayed—but she did not look at them.
      “—my plan has worked, master!” (It was well she did not
look, for with the torchlight above, both the one-eyed man and the
scarred giant looked truly demonic in the dark hall.) “We’ve been
able to move you and your forces out to a part of the nation where
slavery is a reality and real force is needed to end it! Here, master,
you and I—and you—” The princess might have thought from
their conversation they ignored her as she appeared to ignore them,
but the little man reached out to seize her wrist, gaunter than his
own—“we’ve been able to turn revolution into reality!”
     Gorgik nodded in the dark hallway.
    The princess did not appear to realize her arm was in
Noyeed’s grip.
     “Only sometimes,” Gorgik said, “I wonder if my own
dreamings—”
      “Your plans,” said the princess, like a mother correcting a
child’s diction.
      “—if my dreams are that real, after all. You and I have
observed slavery as slaves and as free men, Noyeed. You have
observed it as the daughter of a slaveholder, my princess. All three
of us, together and apart, have debated and interrogated and argued
about it through a thousand firelit nights and on into the fatiguing
glare of dawn. We all know what drives slavery from the land: a
new farming technique, a more efficient yam stick, the spread of
minted coin, some imperceptible warming of the very earth itself
over fifty years, or an equally unpredictable increase in the rainfall,
yielding the greater affluence that makes slavery impracticable and
paid labor more profitable. Yet somewhere, through all this
experience, observation, and speculation the object must remain
intact: slavery. But where is it? Unless we can truly locate it, what
can the likes of us do, really, to affect such a thing?”
     She turned to peer at the shadowed faces, one above hers, one
below. “Yet what are necessary to move a country from slavery to
freedom are insight, energy, and commitment,” declared the little
woman, clearly and most undrunkenly, as though the conversation
had strayed into an area with which she was totally familiar, totally
at ease. “Men and women caught in one set of habits do not shift
so easily into another merely because the sun shines and the rains
fall, my Liberator. You have brought your passion and your
purpose here to serve your nation, your times. Could anything be
nobler?”
      “The idea that a man is a slave to the times may be just as
much a dream as the idea that a man can be a master of them—or
less than a dream, my princess. A lie, if we know ourselves to be
dreaming.” Gorgik turned to wander a few steps up the hall.
“Perhaps, the times notwithstanding, I am only here because of a
dream, just as much as the empress’s troops, which, true, would
not fight me in Kolhari and its environs, but which her minsters
send, with their dreams of victory, to fight me at the borderland.”
      “We must fight here, master!” Noyeed released the princess’s
wrist, to look after Gorgik, who’d wandered some steps by the
stony wall. “And we must triumph here. Then we must move on,
beyond Nevèrÿon. We are at the border now. And we must move
even further. Do you think that the evils we fight to eradicate here
end with the ill-defined boundary of this nation? What we fight is
the nightmare of oppression and lies. Where we come, we wake
men and women to the light of freedom and truth!”
       “Ah, yes,” said the princess. “I still recognize it. That was,
indeed, my dream. Yet just as I recognize it, am about to reach it,
just listen to you, my one-eyed monkey; already you are dreaming of
leaving!”
     The one-eyed man turned back. “No, my mistress—!”
       “—leaving me, leaving Nevèrÿon itself, for whatever chaos no
civilized person can say. No, do not protest. If that must be part of
my dream too, then let it.”
     “My mistress, I did not want to suggest that—”
     But the princess was walking away again—was indeed beyond
them in the dark. Once more they heard her, in the dark, humming.




                               11

      The two men walked together through corridors, up turning
steps, and under narrow arches, to come out on the castle roof, just
as the moon cleared through a tear in the fog, which, wider and
wider, wavering and billowing, ripped across the night: for minutes,
abutments and balustrades silvered.
      Gorgik stepped to the edge to gaze between the crenellations.
A sea of fog surrounded them, so that the castle seemed to float in
it with, here and there, a treetop bobbing, nor many of those. “I
dream…” the Liberator whispered.
      Behind him, chuckling, Noyeed dropped to a squat on the
chill stones, forearms balanced on his knees. “What do you dream,
Master?”
      “My dreams? Sometimes I wonder how I can know for sure.
When I was at the mines, Noyeed—when we were slaves together
at the mines—I abused you like some master might abuse a slave;
and, sated from that abuse, I lay my head down on my straw pallet,
and I dreamed. I dreamed of freedom. I dreamed of struggling
toward it. I dreamed of the ways to secure it. I dreamed of having
the power to grant that freedom to the slaves around me, even
you—even to you, Noyeed. They were dreams that, today, strike
me as not far from the princess’s, however more intense mine
might have been. And you were part of my dream even then. Only
none of the other slaves around me knew of them. I could not tell
it to any of you. I could not even speak of it clearly to myself. I
could only dream. The language had not yet been given to me. But
then, soon, somehow, I was free; I was able to struggle for more
freedom. I was able to secure it by that struggle. I was able to seize
and nourish enough power to grant it to others. Thus I became a
liberator. But all through my freedom, through its growth and
coming to power, from the very moment that it began, I have been
troubled with other dreams, with dark and violent dreams, dreams
of that initial abuse that I and six other miners—slaves, guards, and
I, a foreman among them—visited on you when you were a sick
and helpless child. And that abuse, you tell me, now, you do not
remember. It is as if, somehow, once again, I cannot make you
know my dreams.”
      “And so, you sometimes think, we abuse each other only to
make me remember whatever truth it is that I’ve forgotten? A
truth, you call it, that I cannot believe is true if only from what I
know, what I remember, of my time in the mine with you, master?”

     Gorgik turned from the wall and stood with his back to the
stone in moonlight. “You are not a forgiving man, Noyeed.”
     “I can be a very vengeful man, master.”
    “And you took no secret pleasure in the violation we
miners—slaves, guards, and a foreman—visited on your body.”
     “It was agony and terror beyond humiliation, master. Believe
me, master.”
    “Then aren’t you a fool, Noyeed, to love and support
someone who openly admits he was among their number—even
more, to mime again and again, night after night, now as master,
now as slave, the very abuse you suffered?”
     “Master, I cannot fight all the evils in the world. Therefore I
must fight the ones I have known, the ones I can recall.” Noyeed
shook his head. “What occurred that night in the slave barracks
below the Falthas so many years ago was not written down. No spy
lurked there in the darkness, taking notes and noting names. What’s
left today is dreams, memories—yours, mine. Well: that you have
such dreams means only that you are human. But you are a fool,
master, to be a slave to them.” Noyeed cocked his head in the
silver light. “I remember the abuse, master.” He said it tiredly, as if
he’d said this many times before in response to what he had,
indeed, heard many times. “How could I forget it? But it was years
ago. Many, many years. And I have no specific memory of you
among my abusers. In truth, the more we talk, the more I wonder
if I would recognize any of their faces if I encountered them
again—even if time had not scrawled over their features with age
the way you mark out some miswritten sign on one of your
parchments. It was dark that night. And I was ill. Perhaps it was
another boy, at another time, you fell on, master, and
misremembered as little Noyeed. Or perhaps you confused the
time you received your scar with some other incident concerning
me. You say it was not the first time you committed such abuse.
My memories of you at the mine, master, are only of your
kindnesses to me, time after time after time. Now, perhaps the
foreman with the scar, called Gorgik, whom I remember saving my
life again and again was not really you but some other. Perhaps I
misremember…? Oh, master, I let you have your memories! Let
me have mine!”
     Standing at the wall and squatting on the stone, the two
watched one another, till finally Noyeed turned his single eye away.

     “I have not forgiven you your cruelty, master. I have
forgotten it. And that, for you, has been a cruel forgetting.”
      “And suppose, Noyeed, someday you remember. Suppose,
someday, it comes to you—the way the name of a street you once
lived in for a month, which, a decade later, you cannot recall,
suddenly returns in the night to wake you sharply from half-sleep.
Suppose, some moonlit night like this, as you watch my face,
laboring and sweating above yours, suddenly you recall my scar
from years ago—”
    “Years ago,” Noyeed said, “I was on my belly, not my
back—”
     “But what if—”
     “It’s the game we play, master.” Noyeed blinked his eye. “If I
remember, then I may, indeed, forgive you. Or I may strike you
dead. It’s an interesting game, master. But till that happens, what
can I do? What can you?” He leaned forward. “This forgetfulness
of mine, it plagues you, doesn’t it?”
     “Yes, Noyeed.”
      “Then my forgetfulness is my revenge.” Sitting back, Noyeed
looked up in the moonlight. “You see, master, I am not a forgiving
man. Even to one I love. If I were a forgiving man, I would lie, say
I remember—and forgive you.” Noyeed suddenly reached up to
grasp the iron collar at his neck, pulled it, creaking, open, and
placed it—open—on the stone before him. His hands came back to
his knees. “What we do together, you and I, we do very much
awake. How you take it apart and put the fragments back together
again to make those monstrous dreams, and your memories of
those dreams, and your waking talk of those memories—master,
that is your affair. I can listen. But I cannot forgive… because I
cannot judge.” At the wall, the Liberator was still, till after a time
the one-eyed Noyeed said, “South…”
     And Gorgik, as if released by the word, stepped forward
across the roof, laughing.
     “He lied, didn’t he, master!” Noyeed laughed too. “That
smuggler we took? Oh, but you caught him out! You knew he
could read a few signs. He was a smuggler, and yet, master, you
forgave him! You let him go! But now, master, as he goes on his
way through the land, he goes knowing your power!”
     “South?” Grunting, Gorgik dropped to squat before Noyeed.
“No one smuggles such trifles into the south! Of course, he’s on his
way back to Kolhari. But that kind has not a true word in him. I
wouldn’t be surprised if everything he said were a lie. Such as he
lies as he breathes. Truth is something he’s never even learned to
speak.”
    “But you knew the truth about him, master! Didn’t you? You
knew the truth of his lies. And the truth is the source of your
power!”
     “Ah!” The Liberator chuckled again. “What power, Noyeed?
Believe me, I have no power with his sort. That’s why I sent him
on his way. A better, more honest man, and I might have asked
him to join us. But him…? The kind of fight we engage in here
would mean nothing to him.”
      “But your fight means more and more!” Noyeed declared.
“And to more and more people! Master, the last time I was in
Kolhari at your behest, I met one not so different. It was on the
Bridge of Lost Desire—yes, it was! And as we talked, he spoke
your name—I didn’t mention it. He spoke it first. But he thought
with my one eye I might even be you, master! Imagine! But you
were his hero. He had searched out all he could of you. For him,
you were the greatest man in all Nevèrÿon! Greater, even, than the
empress! Oh, I suppose he was not really a youth like this one. He
was sharp and intelligent and talked like a student. But I would
wager there are many such in Kolhari, in Sarness—all over
Nevèrÿon! You do not hear of so many because, as they go about
this fearful, fogbound land, they meet too many counterfeits, too
many imposters, too many who only mimic the gestures of those
with true purpose, true passion, true power, from whom they learn
nothing about truth. But then, master, when they hear another fable
of your exploits, when they hear something of the truth of your
deeds and doings, their vision is cleared—”
     “Now is that the truth?” From his squat, Gorgik made a
dismissive gesture. “No, Noyeed, you only say this to please me.
Nor is it necessary. Certainly when you were last in Kolhari, you
met some boy. You probably met many. And one told you this, and
one told you that, and one you didn’t meet but only heard of may
have said something like it to another friend who, to flatter you,
repeated some distorted version of it. And from them all, you’ve
put together this little tale. But if I let such delusions take hold,
believe it, I’d be the most unfortunate of…” But here he stopped.
“It’s too easy to put together such lies, Noyeed. I’ve put together
too many myself. South…?”
     They faced each other across the few feet of stone, on which
the collar lay, both of them grinning as the light about them
brightened and dimmed.
     Fog blew across the moon.
     “Yes, you know his sort well, master.”
     “Sadly, I know him as well as I know myself, for once I was
such—perhaps am only an accident or two away from being such
now.”
      “Ah, master, you say that of all you meet. You say it of every
thief and whore and smuggler. You say it of every merchant and
princess and minister—then you tell me it is the source of all true
power!”
     Gorgik began to laugh.
     “What dreams you have, master! What a dream of power!”
The little man grinned. “Where do the pieces of such a dream
come from? How do you put them together, master? Where does
one learn to dream like that? No, master, we cannot stay here. Soon
we must go. We must leave the princess, leave Nevèrÿon, and take
your dream, your knowledge, your power beyond this ill-bounded
land and truly right the wrongs of the world!”
     But as fog closed out the chill moon, for a while the two men
squatted together on the roof, with their dreams, laughing in
darkness.
                  —New York
                  January 1984




            II

    THE MUMMER’S TALE
The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever
density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were
absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be
pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and
shadows. But can the limit have a life of its own outside of the
act that gloriously passes through it and negates it?… For its part,
does transgression not exhaust its nature when it crosses the
limit, knowing no life beyond this point in time?…
Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white,
the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the
open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather their
relation takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can
exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which,
from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to
the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside,
from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of
its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity…


                                               —Michel Foucault
                                              Preface to Transgression




                                1

       So, that’s done! Come in, come in. Myself, I thought I was
brilliant. Step over that, my young friend. Oh, not so young
anymore, you say? Well. You’ve still got twenty years on me.
Always had. Always will. No, around this way! Don’t mind the
clutter. A bit hot for you? Here, let me open the trap in the wagon’s
roof. That will give us both air and light.
     There!
     Sit now, on that shelf with the pretty weave over it, just under
the monster’s wing—yes, it’s the same beast the Hero slew out on
the platform. But since that was at the very beginning of the skit,
they just toss it in here during the second scene while the Baron
and the Peasants are singing that awful song about the
Unconquerable Sea, when everybody down in the audience—and
up on the stage—feels so insufferably noble. If it creaks and
crashes while we’re back here putting it away, you’re supposed to
assume out front it’s just the wind on the rocks.
      Now look at that sword, hanging on the wall. Split practically
in two! In here it seems like nothing more than the painted wood it
is. But I’ve seen our Leading Lady snatch it from the Hero’s
scabbard to plunge it into her heart, and I’ve heard grown men off
from the platform cry out, “No! No, don’t do it!” till that great
lummox dashes it from her hand and plants a kiss on her breast
instead, begging her to forgive his unfaithfulness.
     From the platform we always hear the market girls, crowded
together down front, start to weep.
      No, that’s true: they didn’t today. But Kolhari is a
sophisticated city; the audience demands more. Really, I was
speaking of the way they receive us in the provincial markets. Here,
they’re much more likely to appreciate my—
     No!
      I won’t endure either your praise or your carping. You took
time off from running your school to come all the way in from
Sallese and see our opening afternoon performance. What greater
compliment could you pay me? Oh, it’s funny…
     Now, lean close, because I don’t want any of the others
loading things outside or scrambling over our roof to hear. But
we’ve been friends for years, you and I. I know you were born a
prince in Neveryóna; and I also know that well before you set up
your school, you dropped your title so that people would deal with
you as they would with any ordinary citizen. Believe me, it’s a
gesture that, in the eyes of us who know you, makes you
extraordinary indeed!
      But about a season back, the oddest gentlemen joined our
troop while we were off somewhere to the south. What talent our
Director saw in him, I’ll never know, for he was older than I and
had never acted before in his life. Wouldn’t you guess, after a few
days the rumor went round among us that this odd old man was
actually a great southern lord, out of favor with the ministers about
our Child Empress, whose reign is proud and prudent. There he
was, running about the countryside and cavorting on the platform
with a drum and a lot of feathers, just like the rest of us. But that’s
not the funny part. He left us very soon. Oh, off the platform, he
was pleasant enough, and though I sometimes felt his onstage
shenanigans rather overlapped my own, nevertheless, just as a
fellow artist, I was sorry to see him go.
      Well, don’t you know a day later, the little flute player, whom
you saw open our performance this afternoon and who doubles as
a driver when we’re on the road, told everyone that she, too, was
actually a deposed lady of some status. Then, the young man who
plays the comic servant confessed, one night after much cider, that,
though he didn’t really have a title himself, he had been brought up
as the companion to a northern earl and could, indeed, ape all the
manners of a lord if he chose—perhaps the Director might
consider spreading the rumor that another aristocrat was part of
the troop…? And that otherwise sane and sensible man consented!
     Within the month, I tell you, it all became too preposterous.
Our horseboy became a duke. The three rather bosomy young
things who play the witches in the morning skits and the lost
peasant girls in the evening had all been, they assured us, ladies in
waiting to various titled dames. And the Leading Lady herself was
suddenly a distant relation of our empress—a duchess one week, a
countess the next. She could never keep it straight. Oh, my friend, I
tell you! Out there in the Nevèrÿon countryside, titles broke out
among our company like sores among the plague-ridden! And the
height of it was that, one night as I lay right on my pallet
there—yes, you’re sitting on it—with all the false beasts and birds
and weapons and armor you see around us now, just a-clattering as
we jounced toward some tiny town on the coast, I actually thought
of… you!
     And of your discarded title, my friend!
     I wondered: since he has no use for it, would he really mind if
I took it up… for just a while.
     Yes, I’m glad you think it’s funny!
       I’m welcome to it, you say? Oh, you’re only humoring an old
artist! You might not have felt so if it had gotten back to you I was
using it, now. We must retain some sense of propriety about these
things.
      I came to my senses, you understand, even before the next
performance. After all, I told myself, as I put the blue paint on my
eyes and the gold about my lips: If my Neveryóna friend has cast it
aside, why should I take it on? Let those who have never been
within the walls of a lord’s estate dream and scheme to be
something better than they are! I have the friendship and esteem of
a true prince of Nevèrÿon. I have lunched with you in your garden;
I have performed my mimes for your family and friends. You have
come to sit in my cluttered quarters, the two of us grinning at one
another like tickled boys with mutual admiration. You have even
lectured on the fine points of my art to the young men and women
whose educations have been entrusted to you by the better-off
merchants of Kolhari and its environs. Oh, how good you’ve been
to me, from the beginning! It makes me weep. I have need of
nothing more from you than your good opinion.
     And I shall not keep that, I told myself out there in the
boondocks, if I sink to this theatrical madness for appropriated
nobility.
      Now, tell me I was wonderful, thrilling, amazing this
afternoon! No—
     Let me stop!
     Your good opinion, yes. I enjoy praise as much as anyone.
But just as you don’t need my advice on how to educate the sons
and daughters of your ambitious tradesmen and artisans, I don’t
need your advice on how to move an audience to laughter, tears,
and the recognitions supporting both—though I know you well
and also know how anxious you are to give some.
      But I saw you, out there among the others, only smile—yes,
at the end of the third scene—when those around you roared. You
and I both know the joke I’d just told was one of my most
vulgar—merely a concession to what our Director thinks will
please the most insensitive spectators, and worth no more than a
smile, no matter how the other onlookers hooted and clutched their
sides. Well, I also heard your laughter come, full, rich, and flowing,
at that little business with my goblet in the penultimate part, while
the Heroine’s Father is asking for more wine…? Even though half
the audience missed it and the half who noticed gave it no more
than a titter, you must still know: I have been working on that
gesture for months! (Did you recognize the eastern count on whom
my original observation was based? But no. My art lies in its
universality, not in its specificity.) To appreciate that turn of my
hand as I glanced down with that complex expression of
befuddlement (which my makeup is, you can still see here if you
examine my face, designed entirely to enhance) is to appreciate
what I really do.
     And you appreciated—I heard you.
     And applauded loud as anyone, at least at the end.
     So you see, I’ve already had your critique. For us to sit here,
then, face to face, while I go on to beg you for more and more
empty plaudits only demeans us both.
    Yes, they all seemed to have liked it—the whole thing—pretty
much.
      Oh, you mean the one with the thinning hair and thickening
belly who stood a little off from the others, laughing and clapping
heatedly at everything I did? He liked it particularly, you say? Ah,
then, you noticed him.
     His is the kind of critique I prefer most?
      Oh, you are unkind to an aging actor! But the truth is, he too
is a friend. He comes to see all my performances in the city, when
he’s here. And, yes: unlike you and the general audience, critical for
your separate reasons, everything we do delights him. Once or
twice, when there were new and inexperienced mummers recently
joined with our cast, and everyone was badly rehearsed, and the
audience, sensing it, hardly raised a smile, I’ve seen him applaud
just as thunderously as he did today, even scowling at the others as
he stalked off afterward—unnoticed, in most cases, by all but me.
But those are the days when I think he is perhaps our most perfect
spectator and that we need no other. Indeed, I’ve known him
almost as long as I’ve known you. And that must be fifteen years
now—or is it twenty? Why, I believe it is twenty, if not a little
longer!
      But the way I’ve been honored by your friendship, I fancy he’s
been honored by mine. And though it doesn’t make me enjoy his
applause one whit the less, you will understand: honor is the
motivation for his delight far more than any critical capacity. And
he honors himself by never having claimed otherwise. He’s known
one of the actors personally—me—and for that he will clap the
calluses off his hard hands. In a sense, he applauds himself for
knowing me at all. Or, perhaps, more generously to us both, he
applauds our friendship—more truthfully, he applauds what our
friendship once was. And I will also say this (for it particularly
pleases me to recall it on those days when he is the only one who
claps): though I’ve often found him charmingly naive, for a man of
his class and caliber he is not stupid. And you yourself have said it
within my hearing many times: Ignorance is never a sin; only
stupidity. He was really just a year or two too old to be called a
boy—as were you—when I met him.
     How?
     He was born on a farm some stades to the west of the city. At
seventeen or eighteen, he ran away, here to the great port. A few
months later, I found him where one finds such boys, loitering on
the Bridge of Lost Desire, beside the Old Market outside.
     Yes, many—boys and girls both—get there much younger.
      My supposition as to why he took so long? I don’t know if
you got a close look at his face, but you can see by the roughness
there that, as a child, the pimples, pustules, and angry pocks that so
often mar the cheeks of the young must have been, on him,
particularly severe. By the time he came to Kolhari, they were more
or less healed over; but from observing their traces I’ve suspected
since the day we met that in full flower they could not have been
very prepossessing. I’ve just assumed they had something to do
with why he stayed at home as long as he did.
      Traditionally handsome? No. Even as a boy, he was on the
stocky side, though there’s always been a good bit of muscle in
with it. Once in the city, he took to beer like a fly to honey—I use
the many-times repeated phrase because nothing is new in his story
there. Often during the first year of our friendship, I suspected
that, like so many others, he would end a drunkard or a derelict.
Not to mention all the petty illegalities that can catch the young
and, in these variegated and violent times, kill. More than once,
when, in later years, he would be some months away, I’d imagine
that the next time I saw him he’d be carrying the welts of some
Imperial whip and with them the story of his year or three at hard
labor on some prison detail—that’s if I didn’t just learn that on
some chill night he’d died in a doorway or in a back alley, too cold,
too wet, too long exposed to the elements.
     But, as you’ve seen, it didn’t happen thus.
       I may have even had something to do with that—though life
is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the
little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom
we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able
to do with our own.
      Certainly it would be more generous, if not more accurate, to
say that he gave me quite a bit of pleasure, at least for a time.
Truly, he was then and is now the most genial of men, if somewhat
self-deprecating. And the goodwill he maintains to this day allows
me to remember that pleasure and continue to call our relation
friendship, if only as my memorial to the friendship it was.
     What does he do?
      Your interest makes me suspect you might like to meet him,
in which case I’ll tell you only what he, certainly, would wish me to
say, leaving him, in due time, to say more, if and when it pleases
him.
     Frankly, he doesn’t do much.
     He lives as best he can, sometimes in Kolhari, sometimes
away from it, now and again taking up menial work, though seldom
steadily or for any length.
     Oh, you don’t want to meet him?
     Well, then: He’s a smuggler.
     Has been for years.
     Yes, that’s my friend, as you saw him there. Though after he
quit the bridge—trading one dishonorable profession for
another—our friendship reduced to smiles, nods, a few words
exchanged on the street or in the market. They were warm and
sincere enough words. But on the whole it’s been little else. Oh yes,
by then he was coming regularly to see me perform. And he’d
always stand a bit off—and clap and cheer the loudest. In that he
did no differently then from what he does now.
      That he still does it, I assume, is his own memorial—if not
habit.
     I’d say once a year or so—though, more recently, it’s been
more like once every eighteen months (and believe me, sometimes
more than two years have elapsed between)—he waits around after
the show to meet me. It happens so infrequently, I always invite
him in. He sits where you sit now, leaning forward with his heavy
hands hung between his knees. We talk. He smiles. I tell him a little
of my life. He tells me a little of his.
     I say it’s been twenty years?
      A thousand times we’ve waved and nodded when both of us
have shared the city (and in his profession he is away from it as
much as I), but within that same period we’ve actually sat together
for serious conversation less than ten.
      In the early days, when I still thought of him as a youngster,
on a few of his visits he had his arm around some girl’s
shoulder—on one occasion two at once. Beaming, he introduced
them, showing them off to me, me off to them: his old friend, the
wonderful, talented, much applauded, madly and marvelously
magical mummer. I found it amusing; and, politely, he didn’t stay
long, so that in the end it was harmless.
     Was it five years ago? Ah, more likely seven! Sitting where
you sit now, he told me he’d been living with a widow, just outside
Kolhari, by whom he’d had two children. It only made me realize
how long it had been since I’d seen him.
     I remember glimpsing him out in the audience a few times
after that, once with some terribly young and frizzy-haired
barbarian tucked under his arm, as freckled as a quail’s egg and
who, I’m certain, was not his widow at all but the grubbiest of
prostitutes from the bridge across the market.
     They didn’t come in to see me.
     I confess I was relieved.
      Once, when he dropped by and we went down to the
waterfront, where, rather uncharacteristically, he bought me a mug
of cider while he had a few beers, I learned, in the course of our
talk, that he’d collected a wealth of information about the
Liberator—you remember, that political upstart everyone in the
country was talking of ten years back or so, when his headquarters
were raided out by your uncle’s? Well, he knew every battle and
skirmish and story and rumor, every fact and surmise about the
man. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, but he’d been
collecting these tales for years, keeping them all in his head. And
only once had he met him, he said. But it confirmed for me what
I’d dreamily suspected from the beginning: there really had been
something unusual about him—though no doubt it would never
come to anything that brought him reward in the socially managed
markets, old or new, of need and necessity. What makes a boy
interesting does not make a man interesting. Yet the interesting boy
had become an interesting man: it would be the rare student from
your school who could give you so rich and so textured an account
of his field of study as that man you saw today could give of his
perfectly pointless and obsessive pursuit.
     Oh? Fifteen years back, you say was the raid on the Liberator’s
mansion? Well, you should know. It was right out there in your
neighborhood.
      The last time he dropped in, when I asked after his family, he
told me that, oh, he hadn’t seen the widow in almost a year—nor
his children; nor hers.
      I believe that was when it struck me: by no stretch could I
think of him as a youngster anymore. What in his youth I’d been
able to look on as a handsome solidity had, in the man, run simply
and brutally to fat. You saw—and I think you’ll admit, though I’m
twenty years his senior, too—I’ve kept my figure a bit better than
he. Also, he’s losing his hair. Mine, miraculously, has only thinned.
Yes, he’s very much a man and is today as close to middle aged as I
am to being simply and brutally old.
      No, I don’t really think he’s been doing as well of late as he
once did. It pains me to admit it of one who, for so long, I thought
of as a child, but his decline is just another of those little shocks by
which the nameless gods remind us of death.
      Thank them all, whoever they are, that I can still mime,
however clumsily, can still sing, however reedily, can still dance,
however stiffly, and can skew each to the other in a parody of age’s
failings artfully enough to make an audience laugh.
      Why, yes. I suppose you could say that. In a sense, my
friendship with him has gone more or less the way of my friendship
with you. But whatever the cares and concerns in your various
undertakings—not to mention my own—you are both doing well
enough, in twenty-plus years, to come here to the market on the
first day of our return from our triumphant provincial tour and
catch our opening performance.
    Which is only my too self-centered manner of saying, I
suppose, that, in my different ways, I really do value you both and
know you value me.
      Yes, I suppose I too am surprised you haven’t seen him
before. But then, your lives and concerns have really been quite
different, don’t you think? After all, you are a prince, a teacher, a
philosopher—while he’s little more than a thief!
     Indeed, I’m sure you’re right: many people wouldn’t be
surprised in the least.
     Tell you more about him? Well, all right.




                                2

      No doubt that stolid man you saw today came to the city as a
boy like many—to the bridge, where such boys come—with the
dream of selling his sexual services to some fabulously connected
countess, who would take him off to her private rooms at the High
Court, where he’d be presented to various nobles at various
intimate but elegant suppers. His rough, country charms would be
made much of as he amused the lords and ladies with his
anecdotes of common life, for he was seldom more than three
beers away from being a good, comic raconteur: he had that fine
sense of self-mockery that is the social point from which we begin
all later self-criticism, without which none survives long on the
very bumpy road. No doubt in the palace his rough, if scarred,
good looks would cause (he dreamed) a few noble ladies to catch
their breath; and perhaps even once, at some great party, into which
he’d wandered only by accident, he’d exchange a few lines of banter
with the Child Empress herself, whose reign is glittering and
glorious, causing waves of jealousy and ire among the lords
gathered at the affair, so that, after a month or six of such
dalliance, his patroness (who, by this time, hopefully, would have
taken up another lover, perhaps a young nobleman whose arrogant
ways would make her fondly recall her nights and noons with him)
would finally secure him an officer’s commission in the Imperial
Army, at some fascinating outpost in some exotic mountain hold,
sending him on to who-know-what great and gainful adventures…
      But with what seemed then, even to him as he looked back on
it after only a few months, idiot slowness, he soon accepted in
practice if not in theory that such dreams were as insubstantial as
moon-flicker on the shallows down below the bridge rail.
      In his first days on the Bridge of Lost Desire, so he told me
later with a laugh, one man took him home to make love to a
perfumed, sultry woman he claimed was his new, young wife. As
such work went, he liked that a lot. But it didn’t happen again for
another three months: next time an older man picked him up,
describing his handsome, noble-born mistress, who, he said, was
forty—my age, incidentally, when I met him.
      Well, he’d always been partial to older women. But when they
arrived at the gentleman’s large and well-appointed mansion, the
woman was out. They waited, sipping wine together and talking for
several hours. Then the man apologized to him, paid him half the
agreed-on fee, and sent him back.
   These two incidents exhausted his professional contacts with
women during those first months.
      What he actually did when he looked up from the
garbage-clotted shallows—what he’d done in the few days before
the first of these encounters, what he did in the many days between
them, and what he did daily after—was to sell his services, often
for distressingly little money and more times than not simply for a
meal and a place to sleep, to a succession of artisans and clerks and
laborers and merchants and army officers and market vendors and
wagon drivers and still others who did not want anyone to know
what they did, all of them men.
      Though very occasionally they passed across it, with their
parasols and paramours, their secretaries and serving maids, in
search of some rare item rumored by an acquaintance to have been
sighted in the market beyond, titled ladies did not, as a rule, stop on
the bridge to purchase pleasures—not in this part of Nevèrÿon.
     I had been with the traveling troop here only a few years, and
you probably recall that, in those days before my current comic
eminence, mostly I played for the other dancers and actors who
worked on our portable platform, coaching them in rehearsals and
helping to devise the skits.
     Our actual meeting?
       No doubt as I passed across the bridge from the Spur to the
more commercial neighborhoods of the city, I’d seen him among
the loitering hustlers of both sexes, now sharing beer with one of
the other boys, now calling to one of the women: “—Hey, little
gillyflower, I see how you’re looking at me!”
       And I’d thought what a man such as I was would likely think
(of him and, indeed, many others): One time I would find him
rather attractive in a vulgar sort of way. (Should I approach him…)
At another, I’d decide: No, he was not my type at all… It would be
silly even to smile. And at least once I saw an elderly grain-seller
stop to talk with him, and heard him call the man “Papa.”
      Clearly he had gone with that mercantile gentleman before;
though if “Papa” were a nickname of his own devising or part of
his client’s previous personal instruction, I never did have the
temerity to ask—though at that moment I convinced myself I had
really been about to speak, that given my preferences he was,
certainly, the most attractive young man on the bridge. What a fool
I’d been, my momentary jealousy told me, to hesitate this long in
making my interest known!
      Those who never browse in the commercial markets of sex
assume that we, who do, shop there in order to escape the wounds,
self-recriminations, and hurts to the soul associated with timidity,
opportunities missed through hesitation, and the simple pains from
rejection that plague those who limit sex purely to the results of
social encounter. They feel a moral superiority through the
sufferings that they have agreed to bear and which they are sure we
avoid by barter, convinced their social courtship agonies chasten
them in ways we can never know and—like youngsters’ plunges
into cold mountain streams—harden them to life. They do not
know commercial possibilities in no way abolish such pains and
hurts, but rather add to them a certain sting that, if anything, makes
them the more excruciating, the more gnawing. The commercial
only multiplies the opportunities to risk such hurts again.
      Oh, yes! A day after I saw him with his gray-haired old man, I
passed him once more, only to realize that it was he when I was a
step beyond—by now my mind was that deeply on other things!
     But one evening when the clouds were high and yellow and
the sun was like a copper gong half-hidden among them—for
some reason, there were only a third as many people out on the
bridge as usual—as I was crossing I saw him, naked, leaning back
against the wall, an elbow either side of him on the ledge, a
drinking skin on the stone beside him, one foot up on the wall
below.
     I looked.
     He smiled.
     I thought to look away and didn’t.
     As I passed, still looking, suddenly he thrust out his hard farm
laborer’s hand to me and said, simply:
     —Hello! How you doing?
     We shook.
      I stayed to tell him; to ask him the same, while he took his
skin down and offered me warm beer; and I, who markedly prefer
cider, accepted.
      Oh, first there was a bit of small talk as we leaned together
against the wall. I know now he did not think himself handsome
and took a boyish delight when anyone stopped for him at all. But
the sexual worker who can evince sincere pleasure at the coming of
a customer seasons his or her fare with a rare spice! Five or ten
sentences into our exchange, and I brought out some frank and
specific questions as to money and positions. (If I were taken at all,
I wanted to be taken as a serious customer.) About both he gave
reasonable, frank, and specific answers.
     That settled, I offered to refill his skin with drink.
     About that he was grateful.
      Since then I have known boys years younger, soliciting years
longer, who merely wanted to do the deed, take their pay, and go.
Today, I would not fault them. But the fact is, a mere five years
before that warm afternoon, I would have sworn to anyone who
asked that I would never pay for sex! In my own way I was as new
to buying as he was to selling. Oh, we had both bought and sold
before. That is not the level of innocence I am trying to establish.
The surprise to me now, however, was that he was not so
experienced that he took my offer of a little sociability mixed in
with our transaction as a sign of what, eventually, we would both
learn it was: in terms of any continuing monetary relation, I would
be a rather poor-paying customer.
       But perhaps another observer, knowledgeable in the ways of
sexual commerce, might say that our friendship, if I can call it that,
began with a little more promise than most. I’d recently gotten a
small windfall; from what private party, where I’d performed
brilliantly, I no longer remember—was it yours?
      Now, at that point it would have to have been. Ah, you must
be right! I’d completely forgotten.
     I’m embarrassed to go on and let you know where the moneys
your uncle so generously—
    Oh, of course! Of course, I understand—after all this time,
how could it mean anything to you?
     Well, then! From your family’s most generous fees I not only
brought him his few mugs of beer that evening and fed him, but I
gave him some coins for himself and paid a week’s rent on a cheap
room where I let him stay.
      After I’d enjoyed him, I returned to pass the rest of the night
in the wagon.
    Mornings I would show up at his door and knock. Sleepily he
would call me in. There, sitting on the bed, we would talk.
      Or I would talk—for the morning hours were not his most
communicative, though he was always certain to make me promise
to come see him again the next day, as if the simple sound of my
nattering on about this and that, if not the physical exchange
between us, comforted him. He would listen to me or, at any rate,
pretend to listen.
      And the truth was, whatever he thought of our sex, he liked
me: it was the first time in months he’d slept three nights running
under the same roof.
      I brought him to visit our wagons. To give you some idea
how provincial he was: though he knew the bridge to twenty meters
around it at each end, until he came to see us perform he’d never
walked farther than the fountain at the middle of the market. He
did not even know that on the other side of the square we have
traditionally set up our wagons since we began to call at this city!
        Once I let him watch our skits from the privacy of the prop
cart.
        Ah, and after that he talked!
     At some point during the performance, he’d glanced aside to
see one of our dragons leering at him from the clutter—like the
one you’re sitting under…?
        Oh, it startled him!
    Well, with his great grin, if he told me about it once, he told
me about it twenty times over the next week.
      —What a fool I am, he’d say, to be scared by such a toy. But
from his smile as he said it, you knew he’d never known a happier
fright.
     I often asked him about his sexual history—indeed, I told
him tales of mine. Yes, he had his own sexual quirks. I believe it
was summer women with—
      But then I have quirks too, about which he was always
obliging. (—No, come on. You like it. You said so. Do it! You see,
I want you to have a good time! I did not know then just how rarely
I might expect to hear that from such a young man, and so, in my
way, I took him for granted quite as much as he took me.) Also
there were several times when I was sure my particular peculiarities
had become common knowledge from one end of the bridge to the
other, thanks to his banter with the other hustlers—only to
discover it had never even occurred to him to mention them, from
nothing more than a natural reticence which would have done
honor to someone far more nobly born. Therefore I see no need to
detail the particularities of his tastes. Suffice it to say, they were
harmless, even charming, and I was touched that he chose to
confide them to me.
      At the time, you understand, he’d only gone to bed with seven
women in his life—the first six of whom were sundry country
lasses and ladies, and the last of whom had been the wife of that
early customer on the bridge. When we were talking of this in his
room one morning, I declared:
     —What a coincidence! That’s the same number of women I
myself have bedded in my forty-odd years! And here I’m more than
twice your age.
     Like so many youths who drift from country to city, when not
thinking of some titled lady (or lord) to keep him in lackadaisical
luxury, he would daydream, now and again, of a son and a wife—in
that order—and perhaps several adoring daughters with them.
That, he would explain, is what he needed to settle down. All of
them would live together on some small farm that he would
manage to own, a miniature, I finally came to believe, of the one on
which he’d lived and labored so thanklessly before he’d come to
Kolhari.
     At which point I would quip:
      —Then all you’ll need is a job that will take you away from it
at least eight months of the year; and all your problems’ll be solved.

     He would laugh. But I wonder if, later, with his country
widow, he remembered my advice; for certainly, those many years
on, he seemed to have taken it.
     Oh, in those days with me he had his bouts of homesickness.
They troubled him greatly; I listened as sympathetically as a man
with other concerns could, till finally I suggested:
     —Then why not simply go home? At least for a visit.
     —Oh, no. My home is much too far away. It took me four
days of steady walking to come from there to the city.
     How would he ever cross such a distance again?
      I pointed out that what one can walk in four days, one can
ride in an oxcart in a day and a half. Also, though I had never
visited his village, I’d heard its name before and knew that it simply
was not that far off. If it had taken him four days to walk, that was
because he’d probably been lost at least a third of the time. But
supporting him for a week, I was beginning to feel responsible for
him, a feeling that, first, I did not enjoy and, second (not to slight
your uncle’s occasional early munificence), I could not afford on
my ordinary mummer’s earnings from spectators’ donations at our
day-to-day fare.
      On the night before his week’s rent was to run out, therefore,
I proposed to call for him before sunup next day, take him to the
market end of the Bridge of Lost Desire, find a wagoner finished
with his morning deliveries who was returning west, and pay an
iron coin or so for his day-and-a-half’s ride home. Just to show you
how naive he was, he hadn’t even known you could do that. Today,
of course, it’s an established institution, but at the time I don’t
believe the empress had yet set up the passenger shelter that’s been
rebuilt twice in the last decade. You just had to go and ask around
till you found a wagon going where you wanted—though enough
folks did it, anyway.
     Anyway.
      The next dawn I got myself up from my cluttered bed, went
to his room, rolled him sleepily out, and we walked to the market.
The second driver I asked pointed us to a third, who hailed us
heartily as we strolled up. A pleasant and blustery fellow, in my
memory, he was then the spit of my erstwhile friend today. Sure,
he’d take the young man to his village. His journey passed right by
it.
      —Good. I said, as my friend climbed up into the cart to grip
the back and sides, blinking about at the market square still dim in
the summer dawn. You’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon, I called
as I handed two coins to the driver.
      —Tomorrow? the driver demanded. We’ll be there by tonight!
and returned me a coin. You’ve overpaid me, and I’m a good and
honest laborer! It made me smile and I wondered how this further
comfirmation of the physical nearness of his home struck my
young friend, who blinked, still red-eyed, in the back of the wagon,
as they rolled off by the fountain where the first of the stalls was
only then being set out.
      His room, of course, was paid for till sundown and supper
that day—a custom I miss in these times when innkeepers expect
you out and off by noon. If I recall, I was back there an hour later
with another… friend. This one was a little older, a little more
experienced. At the time I thought myself far more attached to him
than the young man I’d just sent off to the country. We carried on
lubriciously till I realized I was late for my performance—a sin I
have committed only three times in my life. And today, though I
have tried many times, I cannot recall the name—much less the
face—for whom, then, I committed it.




                                     3

      He was gone some three or four weeks. However or whenever
he came back I’m not sure, for he had the tact and good sense not
to look me up immediately on his return. He had interpreted my
sending him off, however friendly I’d been about it, in the terminal
sense I had intended it, a sensitivity, I confess, I admired him for,
and which no doubt eventually influenced me to see him again.
Was it a month later that I glimpsed with some surprise someone I
thought was he turning onto the bridge? A day or two after that, as
I was crossing, I nearly bumped into him—though he was deep in
conversation with a barbarian youngster and an older man who, no
doubt, wanted them both; he didn’t see me, or pretended he didn’t.
        I thought it politic not to interrupt.
     A few days later, I was on my way to join my fellow
mummers at a street carnival in another neighborhood where we
were to perform. Some had left with the wagons in the morning to
set up. I was to join them that afternoon. I recall, I didn’t have to
cross the Bridge of Lost Desire to get there; I could have gone the
few streets north to the perfectly unexceptional overpass that leads
to those ethnic enclaves in the city where, on carnival days, our
theatrical talents are so in demand. It was just habit, sedimented no
doubt by past pleasures, that took me over the bridge.
        He was leaning there in what I’d come to think of as His
Spot.
        We smiled; and while I was wondering if I should stop to talk,
I found myself slowing.
     —Hello! How you doing?
     For a moment I wondered if he actually remembered me:
     —Fine. How did your trip go?
     —Fine. Fine…! It was great! Fine!
      He’d seen his aunt. Yes, he knew who I was. No, his mother
hadn’t been as pleased to see him as he’d hoped. There’d been
some problems before he’d left that, though he’d mentioned some
of them to me before, he’d all but forgotten till, really, the cart had
pulled up by those familiar fields. Still, he’d had a couple of good,
or at least interesting, evenings with his village friends. But as he
talked, every now and again he would glance at me curiously. Did
we discuss it that afternoon, or did I only have the strong feeling
that it was now known? Today I couldn’t say for sure. But from
somewhere I gained the conviction that it was clear to him that the
vast distance to his home over which he had tramped for four
aimless days to reach Kolhari was not that of stade after stade;
rather it was a distance of mind, of temperament, created by his
urban education even in so vulgar a version as he had received it
during his handful of months on the bridge. And that was far
vaster than the one he’d imagined he’d crossed by foot or by
wagon. In comparison, save by some machinations of the unnamed
gods beyond both his powers and mine to conceive, the true
distance could not be retraversed.
     That was why he was back.
     —Where you going, today? he asked as I was about to leave.
     I explained about the street fair.
      —Take me with you? he asked. After all (and he stepped from
the wall to look down at himself, naked on the bridge flags in the
warm autumn evening), how long can I hang around here, shaking
this old turkey neck, hoping some guy with bad breath and no teeth
is hungry enough to buy my turkey milk.
     —I have work to do there.
     —Oh, come on, he said. Take me. I won’t be in the way.
      —Well, I suppose you can come. But I made it clear, as he
fell in beside me, that there would be nothing monetary in it for
him. He made it equally clear: he’d heard of the various Kolhari
festivals since before he’d come to the city, but he’d been afraid to
go to any of them by himself. If he had a friend, like me, he
wouldn’t be scared. And he couldn’t pass up the chance to go with
somebody actually part of the festivities.
      When we reached the crowded streets with their colorful
revelers, the grills set out on the corners with their spitted lambs,
the drunken singers, the arguing parents, the racing children, the
colored hangings roped below the windows, he stayed very close to
me. The neighborhood (to him) was full of foreigners; and
foreigners were what, at home, he’d been taught to fear.
      Once we reached our wagons, for the first minutes he simply
stood by the back corner, blinking and staring a lot. Of course there
was still more setting up to do, and I turned to lend a hand.
Minutes later, I looked up to see him suddenly let go of the wheel
whose rim he stood clutching and throw himself into our
preparations as if he were one of our troop, now asking some
groom, now one of the propmen, what he could carry here or there,
what he might fetch, what he might hold, and even the Leading
Lady if there was anything he might go bring her—with a blown
kiss she sent him running off after something or other, which, in
only a little longer than one might have assumed, he returned with.
      I admit I was somewhat wary of all this, but the others
seemed to take to him, and soon they were sending him there and
here, with this load or that.
     His labors clearly left him braver. Now, as the day wore on,
he would actually go off by himself for a while, and an hour later I
would see him, from the platform, as I played my gongs and
cymbals, threading through the crowd, munching on this or that bit
of carnival fare, given him by whom or pilfered from where, I
would not presume to guess.
     Eating, watching, grinning, he would wink at me.
     And, indeed, I would grin down at him—and go on playing.
      That night when the flares burned low and it was time to
dismantle the platform and take down the lamps and lanterns,
again he threw himself in with our work. Once I saw him nearly
slip with a plank of wood balanced on his shoulder. A little later, I
saw him unsteady with a load of masks in his arms. Somehow in
the course of the evening he had managed to get satisfactorily
drunk—but then, in such conviviality where strangers offer you
drink practically at every corner, that was not surprising. And it
certainly had not dampened his energy.
      He stayed with me that night in my wagon, the two little
dancers with whom I then shared it having found some sailors
after the performance who wanted to take them to see their ship on
the waterfront by the moon. (They didn’t get back till two days later
and received quite a dressing down from the Director.) We had
rather drunken sex in the littered dark. One or the other of us, I
suspect, fell asleep in the midst of it.
     Once, in the wagon, he woke up, somewhat disoriented, and
made me lead him, unsteadily, outside into the surprising
moonlight. He kept on repeating, still drunk, that he’d heard
something. Then, with his head down, his feet wide, and his hand
against the crumbling daub of some dilapidated wall, he began to
urinate—in amazing quantities, with astonishing force—wetting
his feet, my feet, splattering his knees, soaking his own hands,
making almost as much of a mess of himself as if he had never left
the bed.
     The next morning he was up, however, standing out in the
quiet morning, only a little squint-eyed.
     We saw the wagons off, on their way back to the market.
Then we walked together, the long way, toward the bridge. Halfway
across I told him:
     —I must cut you loose here. It’s been fun. And I don’t have
too much of a headache.
      —I do. He grinned at me, his young beard, unbrushed that
morning, looking as grizzled below his rough cheeks as one of his
elderly client’s. I’m going down under the bridge and sleep for a
while in the shade, he told me. (I was planning to crawl right into
bed as soon as I reached the wagons back in the market square.)
Hey, how about letting me hold a couple of coins? Oh, I don’t
mean for last night. I wouldn’t charge you for that. That’s free. But
just for all the work I did? For you, and everybody?
     What could I say?
      —We get together soon? he called after me, as I left him,
standing there with the iron in his hand. The bridge was quiet that
morning, and I had the momentary feeling that his voice, with its
all too expected proposition, echoed not only from end to end but
throughout the entire city.
     —Yes, of course!
     I believe I also called back some tentative time for meeting
him the next day (—I’ll see you at about…), an appointment that
one or the other of us didn’t keep.
     Of course.
      And whose party was it a week later? No, not yours that
time—because I recall distinctly I rehearsed with that marvelous,
messy woman who composed the wonderful music that made me,
finally, decide to give up tootling to become a serious mimic. And
we never performed together in your gardens. Yes, that’s right. It
was for your friend, the baronine. You were present at that elegant
afternoon affair? Well, that’s certainly possible.
     At any rate, it was probably that same evening, when I was
returning from Neveryóna to the market, over the bridge:
     —Hello! How you doing?
     A few more beers. A few more coins. Another room. In
another inn, which another boy had told me was somewhat
cheaper. And as I sat at the edge of his bed over the next few days,
our conversations ranged back over pretty much the same topics as
they had the last time.
     The son.
     The wife.
     The farm.
      —I was married, I decided to tell him one evening. Once. For
almost eight years, actually. Before I became a mummer. Or, at
least before I permanently joined the troop. I had two sons and a
daughter. Ah, what a good father I was! I’ve never worked harder at
any role in my life. Well, that’s finished with now, and though it
may be my finest performance, I wouldn’t give a minute more to it,
that I tell you.
     He laughed with me; but he was curious:
     —What about your fooling around? Did you do it back then?
With men, I mean?
       —Certainly. Probably a good deal more than I do now. After
all, I was young. About your age, actually. At least when I married
her.
     —Did she know? I mean about you and… men?
     —Of course!
     —You told her?
     —Well before we were married. What sane man would ally
himself with a woman and not let her know something about
himself as serious as that?
     —How did she feel about it?
     —At first it rather excited her. (From the way he grinned, I
knew that even with his seven women he’d already learned that
anomalous truth about the complex engine of sexual interaction.)
After the children came, I suspect the topic began to bore her.
     —Did the kids know?
      —Toward the unnecessarily ugly end, the two who were old
enough must have suspected. A lot of things were yelled that had
nothing to do with anything save how deeply they could wound.
You know, my wife was quite talented herself. Still lives out in
Yenla’h. At least I think she does; it’s not on our summer itinerary.
Oh, she could make anything: houses, pots, stage sets. Also, she
was rather an adventurous, if moody, woman. But I was fond of
her; and most of the time I treated her as such. With me, that
involves a certain amount of honesty. I suspect it does with most.
     —Then why aren’t you together?
      The most difficult part to understand for him, I think, was
that the reasons for our separation (Oh, final happiness!) were
simply those that split any pair who each finds that the company
and habits of the other reduces her or him to a sniveling, furious,
pitiable, and paralyzed beast no longer capable of acting like
anyone’s notion of a reasonable man or woman as the gods first
formed and molded us.
     —How many women have you been to bed with? he asked.
     And before I could answer, he begun to tell me a clearly
preposterous story about a sexual triumph he’d had with a beautiful
woman he’d slipped off with for a while that night at the carnival.
He hadn’t told me before, you see, for fear I might be jealous. But
he hadn’t drunk that much, yet. So of course once he’d gotten her
down in a pile of leaves behind some old shack away from the
merrymakers, he’d come too fast and—In the middle of his tale,
however, it was as if he suddenly remembered we too had entered
into a certain arena of honesty, and he halted. Well, actually, he
said, he’d seen a woman in passing, older than he, ordinary enough
in other respects, but with a certain… Well, she was just leaning
against a wall and eating from a netted sack of fruit at one of the
crowded corners. Standing across the busy way from her, he’d
considered going up and trying to talk with her, hoping possibly to
bring her to the wagon, where he’d intended to ask me to let him
fuck her while I stood guard outside.
     That’s why he’d come back and worked so hard!
     He had left her and returned to look at her several times.
She’d apparently stood there quite awhile, as though she were
waiting for something. (—Almost as though she were listening for
something, I believe is what he said with a moment of poetry to his
pensive look that now and again would illuminate his most
work-a-day accountings.) But he still had not been able to bring
himself to speak. Eventually, on the fifth or sixth time he returned,
she was gone—alone or off with someone else, he did not know.
     —Like the fool I am, he told me, shaking his head, I couldn’t
say anything.
     For both of us, then, the answer was still seven.
      I don’t remember which of us asked the next obvious
question: Well, how many men have you slept with? (Oh, it must
have been me!) We sat on his bed in the tiny room with the bare
walls and sloping thatch, trying to figure. Twenty-five? Fifty? (Did
I throw such absurdly low numbers out only to tease?) Well, he’d
come to Kolhari with half a dozen from his childhood play on the
farm, and he’d seen a hundred go by months ago: he remembered
passing the twenty-five mark in his first week on the bridge.
     Laughing, we agreed that for both of us it was certainly high
in the hundreds. I was forty. He was not yet twenty. I wonder why I
felt obliged to tease:
     —Well, then, you’re just like me. Obviously you like men’s
bodies better than you like women’s. I certainly do! Always have.
Always will.
     —No! he protested. I like women’s bodies far more than I like
men’s. Men’s bodies? That’s only a kind of play. I don’t take them
seriously. I only go with them when women aren’t around. And I
want to get paid for it when I do.
     —Well! and I had to laugh. I thought such things once myself,
though I never really felt them. When I sleep with a woman, it’s
only thinking about a man that allows me to enjoy myself. Which
thinking I did very well, thank you, twice a week for eight years. Of
course, too often when one does go to bed with a man, one has to
think of another man. Really, it does go on. What do you think about
when you sleep with a woman? Or a man—me—for that matter?
     —Nothing, he said a little wonderingly.
     —To be sure, I said, he doesn’t think of anything.
     —Well, sometimes, he admitted at last, a man and a woman
doing it together… but while you were married, you still did it with
men?
      —Who do you think I was thinking about that let me enjoy
my wife? My young friend, I say it, and I mean if. I like men’s
bodies for the inspiration, stimulation, and relief of lust far more
than I like women’s. And going through the proper nuptial rituals
with a woman, as your village prescribes them, will not change that
if that is, indeed, your case. Also (and here I frowned askance at
him with one lowered brow), for two who feel so differently, don’t
you think it’s odd that what we’ve done is so much the same?
     That only made him protest the more. Indeed, as he argued
with me over the next quarter hour he got quite angry. Now and
again he actually threatened me. I only pooh-poohed him the more.
Finally, I declared:
      —Well, whatever you do, and like, and feel, and think, you
must learn to accept them all and live with whatever contradictions
between them the nameless gods have overlooked in your making,
like cracks in an imperfect bit of ceramic still pleasing in its overall
shape. Certain strains, certain tasks, certain uses one does not
impose upon such pieces. But everyone has them. Learning what
they are is, no doubt, why we were put here.
     Though by now I suppose I had a somewhat worried look, for
he’d already overturned the bed during one outburst and had
several times struck the wall with his fist.
     —That’s the only thing that matters, I went on. Calm down,
now. Our wagons leave the city tomorrow. Let me buy you a
farewell meal tonight.
      I took him to eat at a waterfront inn where tables were set on
finely broken shells and lamps hung from the poles overhead and
you could look down the docks at men walking through the
evening, some holding up flares, some rolling barrows in from the
side streets, some loading bales off the boats:
     —Have you ever been here before?
      —No… His eyes were big with the waterside wonders, and
he clutched his mug in both hands.
     —Well, then, it’s about time.
       We ate a meal and drank a lot. It was the first in all his time
here he’d even seen the docks—in our port city so famous for its
waterfront. The ships and the confusion around us scared him a
bit, I think; and excited him; and made him grin.
      The argument earlier, back at the inn, seemed forgotten.
Everything here spoke of travel, with its commercial support not so
vividly contaminated by lust and madness as it was in his part of
the city. It gave the waterfront an excitement, a purity he’d never
known in the infamous quarter that had been till now, for him,
almost all of Kolhari. In some ways, however, I’m sure that
realization of the greater vastness to this city, which had already
educated him well beyond anything he’d even dreamed of knowing
on his village farm, deeply unsettled him.
     That night in his room I left him, sprawled on his bed, as
drunk as I’d ever seen him.
      That, and perhaps something unsettling I’d felt myself, put all
thoughts of any farewell intimacies from my mind; although, for a
moment, I think, as he swayed in his dark room, demonic in the
light from the clay lamp I had just set on the rickety corner table,
blinking and bleary-eyed, he expected it or even wanted it (do I
flatter myself?)—before he closed his eyes, slowly, to collapse, half
on the floor and half on the bed, where I gave him a few tugs to
straighten him.
     I blew out the lamp and left.
      The next day, of course, our parti-colored wagons rattled
away from the city. He was certainly not up to see us off. With the
kind of hangover such a drunk leaves, I’m sure he spent that day
sick in his room. The day after that, his rent ran out at the inn. So
he must have returned to the bridge.
       But somewhere between the time I left him and the time he
was back on that walled stone walk above the water, so I learned
later, my friend went mad.
     Yes, just like that.
     It was a quiet, inward sort of madness. Most of the first day
he ambled from one end of the bridge to the other and back. The
only way his actions differed from before was that, now, when the
other hustlers spoke to him, to call hello, or to suggest they go
there or here together on this or that mildly questionable pursuit,
he walked by them, not speaking, sometimes with an angry, startled
look. When men glanced at him, he did not grin and step up to
begin talking with a hand on their shoulder, nor stop to lean beside
them at the wall, with a comment about a passing whore. He
walked to the end of the bridge.
     He turned.
     He walked back.
      Mistaking him for a potential customer, some tired prostitute
called:
      —Come on, darling. We’ll go out tonight! (They always say
“tonight,” even when they accost you at ten in the morning.) But he
did not fall into the usual banter, about how she should pay him
since his services were clearly superior.
     He walked on.
     He walked the bridge most of the night.
      Toward morning, he stopped for a minute, then, a few steps
on, stopped some minutes more. Finally he sat down with his back
against the stone rail, his mouth wide for breath, sometimes closing
his eyes tightly, sometimes opening them in the dark.
      He woke to the day’s traffic raging about him. Getting to his
feet, aching and unsteady, he began to walk again. The usual bridge
voices—wagoners cursing, pedestrians chattering, pimps and
prostitutes shouting to one another—had been joined by tens,
hundreds, thousands of others. It seemed he could now hear every
voice in Kolhari reverberating along this stone strip. Angry voices,
cooing voices, wheedling voices, greedy voices, bewildered voices,
cajoling voices all knitted and nattered in argument and antiphon, a
tangle of altercation and contention, haggling over commerce, lust,
madness, travel, as if there were no other topics in the city, all of
them centering on this bridge, all of them on him on it, as he
walked from one end to the other.
     He saw an apple an ox’s or a camel’s hoof had squashed a
section of, before it had rolled or been kicked against the wall. He
picked that up and ate it. Later a parsnip fell from the tailgate of a
wagon as a wheel jarred on loose paving. When it was still on the
ground at his fifth trip back and forth, he picked it up and, with the
gutter dirt and all that had darkened one side, ate that too. He
didn’t eat too much else because there was little else lying around,
and because the sound of his own teeth and jaws and saliva and the
food bits sloshing and grinding as he chewed and swallowed nearly
obliterated the voices. And he was sure by now that at the core of
this contestatory hubbub some secret was being discussed that, if
he could only overhear it, would net him untold wealth, power, and
fame—enough to make the empress and all her ministers at the
High Court of Eagles grovel before him.
     He ate little.
     He slept little.
      For much of the time he did not look very different from any
other madman you might see ambling over the Bridge of Lost
Desire. Sometimes, in his effort to listen, to keep his step in
rhythm with the voices, he would clench his jaw so tightly that his
face and shoulders would shake. His steps became, then, staggers.
When he bumped into someone, he turned and stared, astonished,
bewildered, and furious at them for distracting him from his
infinitely important task; sometimes he would curse them through
gritted teeth—at least in the first days. Later, when he bumped
someone (which happened more and more rarely, as people
avoided him more and more widely), he did not notice.
      What this madness was, or where it came from, or what lay at
its center only the nameless gods can know. Certainly not I.
Possibly it had no cause save the exhaustions of his life, myself a
part of them, my former efforts at friendship and my various
moments of selfishness all equal in that they had only helped to
wear away whatever in him had till then been able to endure. What
I can say, however, just as I can say it began: after fifteen, or
twenty, or twenty-five days, the madness stopped.
     Naked on the ground by the bridge rail, he woke for the fifth
time in fifteen minutes—or five hours.
      Three men stood talking beside him. One with a shaved head
had dark wings of paint around his eyes and wore jewels at his ears.
One could have been some tall, merchant’s clerk, with his short,
drab tunic, his long, thin hands. The third was a squat workman, a
hammer hanging from a noose on his belt the way a soldier might
wear a sword. His brown hands and naked feet were gray with rock
dust.
    —Do you remember, cried the bald one with the makeup,
how Vanar used to come to the bridge here, to pick up the boys?
     —Sure, declared the workman. I used to see him all the time!
People talked about him down here. Why didn’t he take me, I
always wondered. But he never did.
      —Oh, there’s the kind he liked. Like that. The bald one pointed
at the young man sitting against the wall. I tell you, the filthier, the
crazier they were, the more he wanted them. Just let one of those
wander, dirty and deranged, onto the bridge, and he’d be off with
him in a minute—
      —No! countered the workman. That wasn’t what he was
after. His eyes were all for the yellow-headed barbarian scamps
hustling down at the market end. (The workman’s own hair was
black as raw oil, bubbling up from some swampy spill.) Oh, he
might take a poor beggar like this one here for a meal or a drink, or
maybe help him to a doorway out of the rain—I’ve seen him do
that. But he only wanted the little yellow-haired southerners. I saw
him with enough of them, going and coming.
      —At least once I saw him take a plump little moutain girl off
from here, said the clerk; though he didn’t look southern, his accent
was, somewhat surprisingly, barbaric. (Still slumped against the
wall, my friend glanced up—but only with his eyes.) He was a fine
man, Vanar. A character, yes. But I’ve always thought that must be
the real taste of such a man. Perhaps he took a boy now and then.
But I’m sure he only did it either to make people talk—or because
he truly wanted to help. Everyone speaks of him as a good man.
It’s a sad comment, I know. But he wouldn’t have the reputation he
does, unless he liked his girls. And there’re more than enough of
them out here. The boys are always about, but they’re a very small
part of the business.
     —Oh, no, my dears, declared the bald man in the eye
makeup. I remember both of you, and you were only visitors to the
bridge in those days. I was a daily denizen and a fully paid-up guild
member in the sisterhood. I saw more of this overground cesspool
than either of you. And I know what he went after, believe me.
     The workman chuckled and said:
     —The way Vanar would carry on down here used to make me
laugh. I knew he was rich, sure. But you could have sat me down
and picked me up when I learned he was a count.
     —A count, my dear? the made-up one declared. That man
was in line to be a suzerain! “Count,” you say? You must have
heard people call her “The Countess.” The way she went on here
was a terror, as if there were no Neveryóna waiting for her back
home!
    —Well, observed the clerk, when you are as rich as Lord
Vanar was, there are some things you don’t have to worry about.
      —This bridge has seen it all, declared the bald one, touching
ringed fingers to both jeweled ears. And it has seen more than I’ll
ever tell you. Do you remember…
     But, walking again, they were out of earshot.
      That was when my friend, sitting against the bridge wall,
realized he had heard only the three of them. He had no idea, nor
would he ever know, who this “Vanar” was. (Though it’s good to
see you smile at his name. Indeed, it might have been Vanar they
spoke of back then; but it could have been any number of others
who would have made you smile as broadly.) They had made sense;
he had heard them. Save a donkey cart, trundling by across the
walkway, it was quiet. Whatever great secret he’d been listening for,
it had been uttered.
      Oh, it had turned out some profoundly trivial, self-evident
homily like: You are only yourself, with your name, and nothing more.
No… that wasn’t it. (When he tried to tell me later, he actually
seemed surprised that he still couldn’t remember it, as if his whole
reason for recounting the occurrence to me had been to prompt its
full return.) It was much simpler. It was so simple that, once heard,
even with having forgotten it, there was little pull to think about it
any longer. But at its utterance, the extraneous babble had ceased.
      He raised his hand from where his fingertips touched his
shins. His knuckles were black with dirt. He turned his arm over.
His palms were only slightly lighter, and their crevices bore black
lines as if someone who could write had inked them.
      He touched his cheek. Dry skin against dry skin—a foul
dryness, too. It let him know his face was probably as dirty as his
hands. In the filth over his calf he saw several small sores—and a
larger one on his ankle where, he remembered vaguely, a day or so
back someone had pushed him against a cart wheel, and he’d
scraped himself to the bone.
       He got slowly to his feet, hips aching, shoulders sore, knees
stiff. One nostril was raw inside. As he gained his balance, loose
mucus trickled into the hairs on his upper lip. Limping a little, he
walked to the bridge’s end—and kept walking, into the loud
market.
                                4

     Most people hurrying around him did not look. But now and
again, one or another at a distance would stare till he looked back.
By the nameless gods, he thought, what kind of half-beast,
half-man have I become? And grinned; and walked on, making for
the public fountain.
     A man-high stone in the market’s center, the fountain spewed
water chattering from the natural cleft at the top, down into a
carved basin—and how many times have you yourself, and how
many others, stopped to drink there, if only on your way to, or on
your return from, our performance?
     He took his place in a line of five. In front of him a young
woman with a green rag bound on her unevenly cropped hair
glanced back and pulled forward, shrinking the distance between
herself and the tarry-handed sewer-worker before her, while the fig
vendor joining the line behind, his basket near empty and strung
round his neck to rest on his hip, hung back, not actually staring.
     He closed his eyes a moment, took a breath, and grinned
again.
     The woman in the head-rag drank hurriedly, left quickly.
       He stepped up to the basin, plunged his hands into the spring
water, and doused his hair and face. His naked flesh drew into
bumps, as if feathers there had been plucked from pullet skin. He
sloshed water under his armpits, rubbing the hair there with his
fists. He sluiced freezing water over his arms, turning them this
way and that, working at the black and wrinkled nut of his elbow, at
the thick and scaly knob of his wrist. He splashed his neck, his
chest, his chin. He rubbed his groin, his hips, his buttocks.
     His legs were streaked with mud.
     Brick swirled with dirty wash.
     Once he glanced behind. The fig vendor, two more women,
and another man still waited for him, nervously. Behind them, a fat
market porter muttered something bitter, turned, and stalked off
with his brooms over his shoulder, to disappear between the stalls
of garden implements and spices on the left, cooking utensils and
honeys to the right.
     He went on washing.
      Finally he leaned his buttocks against the rock and, with his
wet forefinger, first on his left foot, then on his right, scrubbed
between one toe and another, now and again scooping out another
handful of water that ran down his leg as he cleaned off the
ligaments of his feet. (The fig vendor gave up and went; one of the
braver women behind moved in to take her drink and, when he’d
started to reach in the bowl, gave him a harsh look so that he
pulled his hand back and waited for her to finish.) Wet, shivering,
he stood up and splashed through the muddy puddle he’d left
before the fountain where the brick has worn down to gray-green
stone around the inefficient drains. He walked to the market’s edge
and loped twice about the whole square, sometimes flapping his
elbows to let his flanks and underarms dry.
     Then he walked onto the bridge.
      Two youngsters, one a barbarian with whom he’d once traded
tricks, called to him:
     —Hey!
      He nodded, waved back to them—struck by a sudden and
ungainly sense of the community in this awkward spot, where all
the city’s fragments jammed together without quite filling the
space, so that a certain play in the engine of the port was apparent
here, a shock, a shiver that was doubtless felt from the real and
resounding waterfront to the elegant and unimaginable High Court.

     —Hello, there! That was the grain-seller, who always took
him to the warehouse five streets off, where the late sun fell
through the roof chinks onto the loft’s scattered straw.
     He swung around, grinning, went up to the old man, who
regarded him strangely, and put his hand on the shoulder of the
brown tunic:
    —You’ll be around for a while? he asked. I’ll be back in a few
minutes, Papa. You stay here, I’ll be back, now—
     —Well, I don’t know… the grain-seller said. What was the
matter with you last week, anyway? I came by here and I saw
you—at least I think it was you…
      —You wait for me, Papa! He pressed the grain-seller’s arm.
You wait for me, now. I know I don’t look too good right through
here. But I’ll be back. Papa, let me hold a couple of coins—no,
don’t give me anything! (The elderly man had started to move
away.) You just wait for me. We’ll have a good time. Down where
you used to take me. In the warehouse, right? I’ll be back! He
turned and sprinted toward the bridge’s far end.
     —Where you hurrying, darling?
      He looked around at the listless voice to see a thin woman,
her eyes winged with paint and a colored scarf wound high on her
ribs just under her darkly aureoled breasts.
     —You want some fun tonight? she went on, not even looking.

     —Sure, little gillyflower! He stepped up to her. How much do
you want to give me for the best piece you’ll ever have?
      —You? The woman frowned nearsightedly at him. Me, give
you anything? I’m not even talking to you! I’m not even thinking of
you! I was addressing another gentleman entirely.
     —Think about me, little flower. Think about me and weep! I
may not look like much, but I could give you a time to tell your
grandchildren about. No, and he narrowed an eye at her, you
couldn’t afford my prices.
     The woman made a sound between a laugh and snuffle and
turned to call to another man passing:
     —Hello, darling? How you doing?
     Shaking his head and pleased with himself, he hurried to the
other end of the bridge.
       A few streets down the Pavç was a yard with a cistern, where,
with ropes still attached, a few ceramic buckets were always left
near the wall. Though he’d taken off the surface grime, the dirt felt
as if it had somehow worked into, if not through, his whole body;
as determined as he was to be rid of it, he was not sure if water
could wash it away.
       At the cistern’s wall, he chose a chipped pail, lowered it, felt it
hit, then bob on the slack; he waved the rope wide till the lopsided
container filled and sank. Then he hauled it, sloshing, up beside the
iron staples, caught the bucket’s bottom with one hand, hefted it
high, and dumped cold water over his head.
     It seemed even colder than the fountain’s gush—because he
was already half dry.
     He hauled up another bucket.
     And another.
     Somewhere around the fifth, with his mouth wide and water
running into it from his moustache, drops falling from his lashes to
his cheeks, trickles from his beard running down his chest, he
paused.
      At the other side of the cistern, a heavy girl, with her wet jar
dripping onto the cistern wall, was just looking away from him
with a serious expression. She wore a rough robe. Her arms were
lightly freckled. Shaking water from her fingertips, she pushed a
wisp of hair aside, where it stayed, moist, against her temple.
      In a house behind, an old woman pulled back a raffia curtain
to call shrilly:
     —Get in the house! Get in the house, now! You have work!
Get in!
     The girl turned from the cistern, her jar on her hip, to amble
away, her arm out and waving, gently as some gull’s wing, for
balance.
     Women’s bodies?
     He looked in the bucket, still half full, lifted it again, and
dashed it over himself.
     Men’s bodies?
      No, he preferred women’s bodies. And however many men he
went with, however few women, and whatever contradiction
anyone might see in it, he had to accept that too. And if, in two
years, or ten years, his preferences changed, that would simply be
something more to accept—though if they hadn’t changed in these
few months (he started to shiver in the faintest of breeze), he
doubted they would!
      He watched her go, her arm with its light speckling still
waving, beckoning him on, beyond the cistern, beyond the yard,
beyond the bridge, beyond Kolhari, till it seemed suddenly to
indicate a border to the entire country that, truly, he had never even
thought of before, a border that, simply because, however
uncertainly, it must exist, he now realized, as the girl with her jar
turned stolidly into another alley, if only because the city had
taught him that such borders were not endings so much as
transitions, he now knew he might someday flee across, down
whatever street, across whatever bridge, along whatever road,
through whatever tangled wilderness, into whenever and wherever,
the possibilities vaster than the seeable, endless as the sayable.
     To flee beyond Nevèrÿon itself was no more impossible than
his flight across the unknown to Kolhari, his flight across whatever
madness to this new sanity.
     He went back to the bridge.
     The grain seller was gone—probably with some barbarian.
But the warm weather, he could see as he stood there, looking now
up, now down the walkway, had brought out other men.
       Was it three weeks, or three months later? While he lay on his
back in the warehouse loft with a chink of sunlight falling through
the roof into his left eye, he glanced down at the gray head on his
belly:
      —Hey, Papa. You can give me something to do besides this,
can’t you?
     —What do you mean, the elderly man asked sleepily.
     —Give me some work. Reaching down to rough the man’s
sparse hair, he chuckled. I can’t spend my whole life on the bridge,
Papa, waving this half-peeled goose gullet at hungry men who want
to go off tumble about as though we were boys behind a barn! I’m
a good worker. I can work hard.
     —You’re a good drinker. The man laughed.
     The young man blinked up at the chink. No, Papa. I don’t
drink that much anymore. You haven’t seen me drunk in a month.
     —I can’t give you any work here, the sparse-haired
grain-seller said. I have some drivers taking some carts for me
down to the Vinelet market… but I couldn’t hire you. It wouldn’t
look right. I mean if someone in town recognized you. No, I—
     —I can handle oxen. The young man gazed up at the beams
across the ceiling. You got oxen to pull your carts? Oxen don’t give
me any trouble. I’ve been thinking of going south.
     —Of course, said the man, who’d been doing his own
thinking, there’s one cart that I have to send along… it will carry
grain, certainly. I have an ox for it. But there might be something
else in it too, you see? Whoever drives it would have to take it
mostly down the back roads. Certain customs inspectors—for this
cart—I’d just as soon avoid.
     —I could take it down any roads you want.
     —You’ve always struck me as pretty trustworthy; and anyone
seeing you would just think you were some country farmhand.
      —Me? asked the young man. But that’s what I am, Papa! Not
too clever, not too wild, not too talkative, hey? A friendly fool,
that’s me, isn’t it? Just look at me. What could be in a cart someone
like me drove besides grain? Come on, let’s go have a beer. I could
take an oxcart of grain down to… wherever you wanted me to,
deliver it to whoever you wanted.
      —Well, perhaps you could. I wouldn’t send any of my regular
drivers. Some of them are family men, you see. If the gods do only
their customary job as they work at the world, all should go well
with the trip; nevertheless there might be some danger attached to
it.
     —I’ll take your cart down. Hey, and I’ll bring it back too! I
need to get out of the city. I won’t go back to the farm. Don’t
worry, Papa. Just tell me when you want me to leave.
      And so he made the transition from hustler to smuggler as
easily as he had made any of the others that had split his life into
its various befores and afters. Possibly the last one had been violent
enough so that the others in wait along the roads for him held little
terror. I’ve often wondered who it was, in the intervening
days—another hustler with a bit more experience than he, or
perhaps a world-wise client—who told him some of the real
dangers of his new undertaking. Did he ponder the fact that for the
grain-seller to entrust such a mission to him was far more a sign
that the elderly gentleman considered him particularly expendable
rather than particularly dependable?
     No matter. He did the task. And several more like it.
       It was some weeks after our return from the provinces that, at
the end of an afternoon’s skit, I saw him, at the edge of the
audience, clapping and shouting so loudly, so enthusiastically, with
that look of special knowledge, of intimate privilege, of personal
connection with the wonder, the magic, if not the very madness of
our performance. As we began to tear down the platform, I
motioned him up, and, with a grin, he vaulted onto the stage and
walked with me among the other actors and musicians and dancers
still in our makeup and bright attire, nodding now to the Leading
Lady, waving at the groom he’d helped back on carnival night, here
to my wagon, where he told me… well, some of what I’ve told you.
      No doubt I made much of him, aghast at the depths he’d
fallen to, and as delighted at his newfound success as some
merchant when his child brings home a particularly fine report
from your own bright institution. His attitude both to the madness
and to the fortune that had followed it was the sensible gratitude of
the spared. Oh, I’m sure that the deeds of that dim period of
unexplained derangement, while they seemed behind him, still were
able to frighten him at those moments when the chaos of the city
around him would momentarily join the inner voices with which,
truly, all of us spend so much of our lives in dialogue. If he did not,
here with me, seem wracked by the fear of madness’s return, I
suspect it was because he was, finally, very brave. In no way
denying that bravery, I also felt, as he sat on my bed, telling me of
all this, he truly saw himself as too insignificant to be visited by
such an experience more than that once—as long as he kept his
drinking down. His pleasure was to be part of the city, to know an
actor in the play, to have an interesting tale of inner and outer
adventure to tell, when he was called backstage as a sign of his
privilege.
     My own response to all this?
     It was of the lowest. I kept wondering, while he sat there,
what would happen if I enjoined him to stay with me a little longer,
perhaps, than he’d planned—oh, certainly for his usual fee, while
we did, oh, only some of the things we’d done before. Yet, I was
also honored enough by his confidence to fear that he might be
offended if I suggested it. I fancied that part of his reason for
attending the performance, for clapping, for coming back to talk
with me, was because he somehow felt I had had some part in the
whole incomprehensible transition.
       Unlike his scare from the prop dragon, however, after he told
me once of his mad moment, the tale dropped from among his
anecdotes. Yet, over our next few encounters, it lingered for me
under the various comic mishaps he would recount, now in the
spring, now in the fall, about his new nefarious activities. I even
wondered if he didn’t see the glimmering and gaudy characters we
gave voice to, as they untangled the mystery of each other’s
plottings and schemings, out on our sunlit or lantern-lit platform,
as some controlled image of his own many-voiced days of disorder:
that, indeed, he saw me, us, our whole theatrical company as living
constantly with and within the polylogue chaos he had traversed so
surprisingly and unexpectedly, and that his applause acknowledged
in us a certain bravery, which, he felt, we now shared. But whatever
you say of them, finally I had to dismiss such notions as the
ratiocinations desire can entangle about the most sensible of us.
      After he left that afternoon, I went walking across the market,
to wander back and forth over the bridge, curious if his new
success as a full-fledged petty criminal hadn’t been somewhat
exaggerated; wondering if, indeed, he mightn’t have stopped to
loiter, in his usual place, hoping for a coin or two, where, if I saw
him, I would have no compunction asking from him what I had
been too diffident to request in the wagon. On my third trip back
and forth, after searching His Spot and many others, when I
realized that, no, he was really no longer there, I told myself I was
simply horny and, certainly, one of the other boys out could satisfy
me.
      Still, I came back to the genial and boisterous supper at the
communal actors’ table behind our wagons, alone. And thus we
both made another transition: to friend and friend. But, by the hem
of your royal cousin, whose reign is enigmatic and eternal, that is
really all I can tell you about him that I didn’t tell you before.




                                 5

      Yes, what a fine idea to quit that stuffed and stuffy wagon for
a stroll out here. Mind you, we must not stray too far from the
market; I have to be back for the evening performance. Will you be
staying?
     Of course, I understand.
      You have responsibilities waiting at the school. It is already
beyond amazement that you’ve managed to get away to see our
entertainment, or to talk with me, at all. It would be base
ingratitude to demand, to expect, even to think of more.
      But after all this discussion of my meeting with your erstwhile
contemporary, I can’t help wonder: do you recall when we met,
young man? And don’t protest that you’re now forty. It’s still the
right of a sixty-year-old to call you young if he likes.
     Yes, no doubt I was among the more interesting guests at the
to-do your uncle threw for you, out in Neveryóna, in honor of your
return from your youthful, year-long trip across our magnificent
and mysterious land.
     That’s where you think we met?
     But how in the world would I have received my invitation?
      I knew no one in your circle, then, to bring me along to the
party.
     Yes, it was from you. You yourself.
     You really don’t remember inviting me?
     Truly, I suspect the gods have crafted a different city for each
of us, specified not only by our different points of view in it, but
also by the random and irrational discontinuities into which our
hopelessly faulty recalls endlessly cast and recast our diverse and
separate lives.
      It was on a little street, not far from here. For me it’s all quite
clear and sharp. A harness mender used to have her shop there, oh,
perhaps three alleys over from where we walk now. She was a
firm-voiced, hard-armed little woman, with a look in her eyes not
unlike my abandoned wife’s—though their personalities were quite
distinct. (I always felt her laugh was larger than she was.) Those
who patronized her business were fond of her, for she was an
evenhanded worker and a fair-minded dealer with them all; but her
life was harder than most women’s because she had an idiot son,
whom, now that he was almost grown and her husband dead, she
would sit outside her shop on a bench in good weather.
Pear-shaped, soft-shouldered, bean-headed, and often drooling, he
had a spindle, a piece of wood that hung on a cord, which he would
hold in one stubby hand, spinning the weight with the other, hour
after hour, examining it, cooing over it, batting it now one way,
now batting it back.
     Ah, you do remember the idiot.
      Well, I used to go there mornings simply to observe him, her,
her customers. For wagoners, harness makers, smugglers,
idiots—all of them figured from time to time in our skits, and you
know I have always liked to observe from life what I interpret up
on the platform. One morning when the sky was limpid and
sun-drenched but the clouds down at the seaside were piled like
metal shavings, I came there, as I often did in those days, just to
watch; and while I was watching, I noticed a young man standing a
ways off, clearly doing much the same as I. His tunic was
simple—but far too clean for anyone to think him native to any
near neighborhood. Did that fine, dark face hold a full two decades
behind its youthful beard?
      I decided to include him in my observations, which have
always been of the active sort. Approaching him, I asked what he
was doing on that fair morning, and how did he like the weather of
late? Do you recall what he said—for, in truth, he was you.
      Now, you say, you begin to have the faintest recollection? I
can only wonder what my smuggling friend remembers of our first
meeting, what words, images, impressions, or even
misremembrances he retains from it, if any. Given his homeless
state, the daily pressures of his life—the amount of beer he drank
in those days!—I might expect such vagueness from him. But
really, my friend! From you?
     —What do you do? I asked. How odd. Followed by, “And
how much do you charge to do it?” that was my first frank and
specific question to my friend on the bridge… (I won’t bother you
with the particularities of his answer, generally liberal forward,
admittedly limited behind.) You said to me:
      —I am struggling to become a wise man, and some say I’ve
even made a stride or two in that direction. But sometimes I’m
afraid my knowledge is wholly dependent on my ability to watch
for minutes at a time the quivering of a single leaf, deep green on
its upper face, olive gray under, with yellow veins all through—and
a bit of brown at one edge, scalloped by some caterpillar. It’s a
quality, I’m afraid, I share with that creature drooling in front of
the tackshop. So it probably doesn’t mean very much, whatever
others make of it.
     Oh, I see I have tickled you. Look at you laughing there.
     Yes, that really is what you said.
     Well, you were the kind of young man who went around saying
things like that. Believe me, I was no less impressed with your
answer than with his. People made much of you in those days, I
was soon to learn—even as they do now. That you were able to
keep any humility about you at all was an accomplishment.
     The arrogance and presumption of it, you say?
      The measured and honest insight of it, I would say rather.
That’s certainly what struck me at the time. But I suppose that only
means your liberalities and limitations fit comfortably with my own
interests and needs. We talked for quite a while, there in the street.
You had recently returned from your year-long trip, in which you
had traveled all about Nevèrÿon, searching out this or that
monument, looking for the site of that or the other fable. Because
I, in the ordinary course of things, just happened to have visited
many of those same places, and many more you hadn’t, and had
heard a few of the fables myself, as well as some that were new to
you—not very astonishing given that I had spent most of forty
years doing what you had done in one—you decided I was clever.
Also, I think you found the idea of an actor interesting.
     That’s when you told me your uncle was throwing a party for
you, out on his estate. It was to be the next day. Why didn’t I
come…? And later that evening, much to my surprise, your servant
came down to the market to present a formal invitation at my
wagon door—which rather impressed my fellow mummers.
       You say, now, you have the vaguest memory of something
like it, but, really, you only assent to it because I have said it?
Oddly that’s the way I recall the multi-voiced derangement of my
smuggler friend. From his really very bare account, from my own
observations of other madmen, and from the little flights and
flirtations I’ve had—yes, I confess it—with madness on my own, I
suppose I’ve decorated my tale.
      The result is very like a memory of something that never
really happened—at least not to me.
     The party itself—that you’d thought was our meeting? For
me that’s really quite vague. As I wasn’t performing, I suspect I
found it a bore. A moment after I arrived, however, I recall you
came by the gate—looking as though you didn’t remember me
even then, I might add. But all at once you smiled, and we strolled
in among the others, the two of us talking together, though of what
I couldn’t tell you. Oh, you’d invited quite a collection, somewhat
to your relatives’ dismay. It was not that I didn’t feel at home in
such opulence, for a few times in my then forty years I’d been
within comparable gates; but it was intriguing to observe the
endless ways in which everyone—with the possible exception of
you—seemed to feel equally uncomfortable with all those, well,
oddballs you’d gathered about.
      Ah, I’m glad accounts of your youthful manner can still
amuse you. I found you amusing too. Also touching. For all the
distance between us, I saw a bit of myself in you.
       Several times we ended up in conversation. There was talk of
my entertaining at some future gathering—a plan which, over the
next few months, on several occasions blossomed. (You were, and
still are I know, a generous man.) If it hadn’t I might have missed
out my friend at the bridge. But the rest you certainly remember, at
least in outline. And unlike my bridge-bound infatuation I
recounted to you this afternoon, our friendship—yours and
mine—without the sexual element, grew and deepened over a
much longer period before it eased to its present amiable stasis.
     But you must recall, in later days, going with me various
places about the city to observe, if not the idiot and the world of
wagoners and harness menders that moved about his oblivious
head, then other denizens of Kolhari, now in one neighborhood,
now in another.
     Well, I’m glad you do!
     You must also recall that wonderful, frustrating, endless
argument we had back then, which I thought would occupy us as
obsessively as money occupies the working men and women on the
bridge or off it.
      You claimed that the habits and mannerisms, which I
collected in our travels to decorate the characters I played or
coached in our platform skits to make them more real and
recognizable to our audience, were ultimately invalid because I
would embroil those same carefully and colorfully constructed
barrow-pushers and counts and wagoners and cutpurses in
perfectly preposterous actions, during the course of which each
would declare with great eloquence things that no count or
cutpurse would ever possibly say. And if any ever even thought that
he or she felt such things, you maintained, it was only from having
been taken in by our skits in the first place.
      And this much was certainly true: I’d play the most eloquent
of idiots, while both of us knew that, whatever leaf he observed, the
poor creature slobbering on Netmenders’ Row had little to do with
the carefully organized carryings-on with which I so delighted the
market strollers, however accurately I let the spit spill down my
chin or spun my bit of wood.
     In the same way, I suppose, you could say that I informed the
young man I told you of this afternoon with a voice, or voices, not
his—that, indeed, however cleverly I decorated them from
whatever experiences of my own, on any sort of reflection one of
your perspicacity must see that, finally, they could not be his; even if,
hearing me tell it, he himself thought he recognized those voices
and applauded my performance, as heatedly as is his wont.
     —It is as if, you would have said back then, you are
presenting on your platform not people, but rather the nameless
gods on whom all are modeled; then you sully them with human
names.
     My argument to you, during our same observational forays,
was that what you collected, studied, and catalogued—the same
habits and mannerisms as did I—were only the various silences of
these same poor slaves and masters, workers and wastrels; and until
you pried some voice out of them, alone or in concert, whether the
voice of their secret fears and desires as you suspected them or
even some desire or fear of your own, unless you gave them a
meaning that was significant to you, what you observed was only
silence. It spoke to no one; even its meaning for yourself was
muffled, and it could have no other for either gods or the faulty
humans they model, regardless of what names either humans or
gods were or were not called by.
     You remember our endless colloquy?
     Well, I’m glad you nod your head to something.
      In the interim between then and your present visit, I must tell
you, however, I have thought of a much better answer for you: the
voices I give, however decorated with observations and
interpretations of the other, are, nevertheless and certainly, very
much my own.
      But they do not speak for the other—and therefore speak
falsely.
      They speak rather to the other: the other in me, the other in
you, the other in my other friend—assuming he would not finally
and for the first time turn at this particular outrage to the real we
call “his story” and laugh with undisguised derision at my
preposterous fancy with no relation at all to his life, his madness,
his city—instead of giving out with his usual applause. They speak
against the other. They speak always in dialogue with, in contest to,
in protest of the real. They are always calling out to the other
across the bridge on whose wild span madness and desire endlessly
trade places, creating a wilderness at their center as palpably
dangerous as that observed at any ill-mapped border. The
monologue of art must be reinterpreted as the many-voiced
argument of the artist with life, with life’s images—indeed, as the
wrangle between the articulate and everything else, with desire
never fully possessed by any party, but endlessly at play between.
     Oh, of course. I know, you must be on your way.
     I have tried your patience much too long in the name of our
eloquent friendship. And there I was, I see it now, daring to
encroach on grounds that should be wholly yours. But you know
how an old man—or even one not so old—can babble on. You
must be off?
     So must I. So must I. The evening performance is at hand.
     What?
       You plan soon to send your students again to see us, just as
you did last spring? Oh, you are too kind to an aging artist! You say
it is their most pleasurable assignment? Really, you say too much.
      But let me repeat it: I’ve known you for a while, and you have
done this before, so this is not a complete surprise. Thus, I have
something of a—though not a complete—surprise for you! We’re
preparing a new skit, back at the wagons, largely under my
direction. Certainly it will be ready by the time your students troop
down to join our common audience.
      In it, they will see students like themselves, idiots, actors,
barmaids, businessmen, teachers, tradesmen, harness menders,
housewives, philosophers, philanderers, prostitutes, and
princesses—all of them pursuing each other with mayhem and
hilarity, song and dance, now through the halls of a school out in
Sallese, now through the Old Market of the city. You can be sure
that on our platform each of them will have more to say to, and
more to do with, each other than any of them ever might be
expected to in life. Oh, you have no idea how carefully I have been
observing. Their eloquence will be unbelievable! Their significance
will be overpowering. You have no notion what wonders I shall
give voices to! The plot, I think, will turn on the theft of something
magical, smuggled away before dawn—something, anyway, of
incomparable worth. We know, of course, who is hired to carry it
off at the bottom of his grain cart. But who was the original
perpetrator of the crime?
     Now that is the mystery!
     It’s the part, of course, I haven’t figured out. But all my
spectators, even you (deny it, now, I dare you), love to see a
mystery solved, the hero applauded, the villain flogged—
     To the bridge?
      Oh, you can go the short way that turns onto the quay. It’s
right through there. That will take you to it. But I’m going down
here, as I want to get back to the other side of the market as
quickly as I can. Oh, forgive me if I laugh a little now.
     But was my tale this afternoon so powerful as that? Well, it’s
good for an old reprobate like me to know that even a young man
as high-minded as you can consider looking in that common lane
for some loud and hearty wench just up from the country, some
rude and boisterous boy just down from the hills—
      But you frown more deeply. Oh, forgive me, young master! I
certainly did not mean—
     It was only a joke!
     We are old friends!
     But see, I have transgressed some limit of politeness I never
dreamed would offend you.
     When I was off in that provincial wilderness, beset with all
temptation, would I appropriate your noble name? (The nameless
gods alone can hear what voice in you I’ve momentarily called up
to contest your usually most decorous behavior!) Could you then
suspect—?
     Might I even think that this afternoon’s performance would
lead you to appropriate my own low practices and preferences,
grown from an evil upbringing and a licentious existence on the
periphery of all society, in the wilderness between far provinces, at
the sordid center of our city?
     Please, do not take offense at an aging actor’s jest!
      I merely meant to say that it lies there, on the way from the
Spur to Sallese—a bit of madness one must cross to get from here
to there.
                                                        —New York
                                                       February 1984




                               III




                       Appendix A:

         THE TALE OF PLAGUES AND
               CARNIVALS,
or: Some Informal Remarks toward the
      Modular Calculus, Part Five




    Ours, too, is an age of allegoresis…


                         —Allen Mandelbaum
                           Inferno, Introduction




   “If you believe that,” the tutor remarked,
   “you’d believe anything! No, it wasn’t like
   that at all!…”


                                —Joanna Russ
                          Extra(Ordinary) People
            Does this amount to saying that the
            master’s place remains empty, it is not so
            much the result of his own passing as that
            of a growing obliteration of the meaning of
            his work? To convince ourselves of this we
            have only to ascertain what is going on in
            the place he vacated.


                                        —Jacques Lacan
                 The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis




      1. On –th Street, just beyond Ninth Avenue, the bridge runs
across sunken tracks. Really, it’s just an extension of the street. (In
a car, you might not notice you’d crossed an overpass.) The stone
walls are a little higher than my waist. Slouching comfortably, you
can lean back against them, an elbow either side, or you can hoist
yourself up to sit.
     There’re no real walkways.
     The paving is potholed.
      The walls are cracked here, broken there. At least three places
the concrete has crumbled from iron supports: rust has washed
down over the pebbled exterior. Except for this twentieth-century
detail, it has the air of a prehistoric structure.
     At various times over the last half-dozen years, I’ve walked
across it, now in the day, now at night. Somehow I never remember
passing another person on it.
     It’s the proper width.
     You’d have to double its length, though.
     Give it the pedestrians you get a few blocks over on Eighth
Avenue, just above what a musician friend of mine used to call
“Forty-Douche” Street: kids selling their black beauties, their
Valiums, their loose joints, the prostitutes and hustlers, the working
men and women. Then put the market I saw on the Italian trip to
L’Aquila at one end, and any East Side business district on the
other, and you have a contemporary Bridge of Lost Desire.
      It’s the bridge Joey told me he was under that sweltering night
last July when, beside the towering garbage pile beneath it, he
smelled the first of the corpses.


     2.1 She pushed her old hands into the dough, which pulled
away, still too moist, leaving yeasty bits inside the crock. Outside
the high kitchen window, one of the maids was beating a rug. The
thwacking echoed over some garden bird’s complaint.
      Just then the new kitchen girl, whose name was Larla, swept
down the steps and through the arch, wiping her hands on a brown
cloth, moving toward the open fire on whose slate hearth the
morning rolls, hot and gilded, waited on a brazen tray.
     “Should I take these up to Lord Vanar?”
      “He’s not going to eat them,” the woman said. Her face was
deeply seamed. “Bring some water with them. His stool’s too loose
for milk, though he’ll ask you for it. Give it to him only if he
insists. He won’t take much of that either.”
     The rolls were up, out the arch, and gone.
     The servant woman fell again to her kneading.
      2.2 Diseases should not become social metaphors, Sontag
informed us in Illness as Metaphor. (I’ve already seen her analysis of
cancer-as-social-model quoted in a discussion of AIDS [Acquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome].) When diseases generate such
metaphors, the host of misconceptions and downright superstitions
that come from taking them literally (misconceptions that, indeed,
often determine the metaphors themselves in a system of
reciprocal stabilization) make it impossible, both psychologically
and socially—both in terms of how you feel and how others, with
their feelings, treat you—to “have the disease” in a “healthy”
manner.
     “Dis-ease.” Non-easiness. Difficulty.
    “Health.” Via the Old English “hæ ¯ from the Old High
                                       lp,”
German, “heilida”: whole, or complete.
     Metaphors fight each other. They also adjust one another.
     Can a person who is “whole” also be “dis-eased”?
       The answer, “Yes,” would seem to be what modern medicine
is all about.
     But consider a variant of the same question: “Can a whole
person be diseased?”
     To answer, “Yes,” is to give one answer to two questions with
nearly diametric meanings. That the common form of the question
can be deconstructed in this manner is the sign of our dis-ease
before anything that might bear “disease” as its proper designation.



      2.3 Sitting in his ground-floor study at his school in Sallese,
just back from seeing Toplin in the rooms set aside for the school
infirmary, the Master looked at the dusty bars of light slanting
through the shutters to put their evening grill on the pale stone. He
fingered the wooden chair arm. There was no hope for it. The boy
would have to be returned to his mother.
     These things spread.
     An interesting boy, he mused.
     A troublesome boy upon occasion.
     A bright boy and a fine athlete, also: Toplin, bosom friend of
students, Quetti and Bozar, of teachers, Kentog and Gisnik.
Always talking, Toplin, with those two shy, brilliant girls just up to
study from the Avila, Larni and Callee.
      Toplin had a spirit, the Master had said, which, when he
bridles it and learns to ride, will take him far.
    But now he was feverish, with swellings in his neck, groin,
and armpits. Infirmities that announced themselves with such
symptoms, the Master knew, could kill.
     A handsome boy, the Master mused…
      The previous term there had been that embarrassing incident.
Someone had told someone who’d mentioned it to someone else
who’d whispered it to the Master: Toplin had been seen selling
himself to men in the city! The Master was not an unworldly man.
He was aware of the sexual play that went with adolescence; he
could even see its healthy side as long as it did not go too far. But
this was not a rumor the school could tolerate.
     He’d called Toplin in.
     On presentation of the accusation—delicately enough, the
Master felt—the youngster had been embarrassed, seemed
confused, and denied such a thing had occurred; yet his distress
spoke not only of embarrassment but of guilt. Thus it had gone till
the Master said: “If you need money, you must talk to your mother.
She’s a sensible woman, and I’m sure she will arrange an adequate
allowance. But we cannot have our students running about the
Bridge of Lost Desire like a bunch of barbarian ragamuffins, doing
things even a barbarian would hestiate over!”
      At that point, something had seemed to lift itself from the
boy’s confusion. Standing red-faced before the Master’s chair,
Toplin had drawn himself up and declared: “If I were going to sell
myself, why would I go there? Look, I don’t sell myself! And don’t
you know that there are other markets for such things in this
licentious city?”
      It was a brazen answer, and so out of keeping with what he’d
expected, so at odds with the way the boy had been acting thus far
into the interview, that, indeed, it was easier to ignore. (When he
thought of it later, he would mutter: “… spirit.”) “This is only a
rumor, Top. And rumors must not be confused with truth. That
would demean me as well as you. Still, I must not hear anything like
this again!” he had declared. “Or you will be in serious trouble!”
     “Well, you won’t hear anything like it!” Toplin had declared,
surprisingly, back.
     Thus it had ended.
     The Master sat in the darkening room. There were student
voices on the lawn, and little light. Laughter surged by in the hall.
Pondering questions of magic, disease, and power, the Master sat
alone.


       2.4 Without a virus, in a sense AIDS is not a disease. It’s a
mysterious and so far (February 23rd, 1984) microbically unagented
 failure to fight disease. It is connected with sex—“perverted” sex. It
is connected with blood—“blood products,” as they say. Suddenly
the body gives up, refuses to heal, will not become whole. This is
the aspect of the “illness” that is ravenous for metaphors to stifle
its unsettled shift, its insistent uneasiness, its conceptual
turbulence.


     2.5 This past summer, when one of the aging street people
was suspected of having AIDS (because he’d lost perhaps forty
pounds in a month) and the hustlers and dope dealers rallied to get
the man to the hospital, Joey, talking about it with me in the Fiesta,
said: “AIDS, that’s where your body just stops healing, and even an
infection from a little cut, or a cold, can kill you…?” There was the
faintest interrogation at the end of his pronouncement that a
question mark distorts. Still, he seemed to be waiting for my
confirmation.
     How do I explain that this questioning is what we share—not
what either of us can relieve for the other.
    This is the absence that will be filled, one way or the other, by
metaphors, his, mine, or someone else’s.
     The man, of course, turned out not to have AIDS, but lung
cancer.


      3. Perhaps the job is to find a better metaphor and elaborate it
well enough to help stabilize those thoughts, images, or patterns
that, in the long run, are useful—useful to those with the disease, to
those who care for them, or even to those who only know about
them. (Needless to say, what is useful in the long run is not,
necessarily, in the short.) What is most useful in the long run is
what destabilizes short-run strategies, the quick glyphs, the clichés,
the easy responses history has sedimented.


      3.1 AIDS is like unto a flower in the sunlight, beautiful to all
graced creatures, a glory and a wonder. (Most recently, I think it
was: “We must consider AIDS an opportunity for consciousness
raising, rather than a disease.”) “Bull,” answers a person with
AIDS. “Communication, fellow support, and shared insights may
provide a little consciousness about AIDS. But AIDS itself provides
you with shit. Expensive, painful, mortal shit!”
     AIDS is like unto a Scourge of Satan, the Wrath of Khan, and
the most awfullest thing that can happen not only to the sniveling
faggot (whose unthinking phrase was that…?), who, doubtless,
deserves it, but to the whole lax, doomed, and immoral nation,
which, evil as it is, doesn’t deserve a fatal disease just yet! (Over how
many radio talk shows have I heard that one?) A frustrated voice
takes another breath and says in the levelest tone it can muster:
“Since it obviously isn’t, why say it is?”
      But that’s why metaphors stuck on this good-bad scale won’t
do. What is needed is a metaphor or metaphor system in which
restraint of judgment as well as a certain order of complexity are
part of what is metaphorically suggested.
    AIDS is the sparkplug in a social machine of which we are
all—people with, and people without, AIDS—a part, including the
metaphor maker.
     A step in the right direction? It only turns out to be so if
you’re willing to step much further.
      The criticism of this one is harder but just as real: engines
break down into their parts, basic and superfluous, central and
peripheral, whole and diseased, good and bad. And in this kind of
engine, the parts are simple metaphors, on that old scale; the
“complexity” of the metaphor masks a notion of structuralist
simplicity. But I am truly interested to discover—and am as willing
to accept no as I am yes for an answer—if there is anything among
these fancies that might be useful in thinking about what was first
dubbed “the gay plague.”


       3.2 A new illness, AIDS, began to infiltrate the larger cities.
Some saw it as a metaphor for the license, corruption, and decay
that is the general urban condition. (Well, after all, “metaphor”—a
transfer, something that carries something else, after it—is as much a
metaphor as is “disease.”) More interesting to the more interested
citizens were, however, the strategies people used to avoid thinking
of the illness. Certainly the relation between the facts of the
infirmity and these strategies—as many noticed and several
said—was anything but metaphorical.


     4. She fled between counters piled with leather, counters piled
with cloth, sunlight striking between awnings at her, the news
bubbling behind her eyes, bursting her ears from within as the
vendors’ shouts and halloos battered them from without. Half a
sentence squirmed on her tongue, fighting toward completion, as
the words bumping one another between her running breaths
awaited her voice.
     He     caught     her    shoulders    before    she    saw
him—“Nari…!”—and swung her around in sun, not meaning to
hurt her arms with his fingers, while he grinned at her with his
bronze, barbaric grin, above his rough brown beard, below his
rough yellow hair.
      Shoulders drawn up between his hands, Nari blurted: “Oh,
Zadyuk, he’s so sick! I didn’t know… We didn’t know…!” And
where was the rest of it? She watched Zadyuk’s smile fall apart,
leaving bewilderment.
     He said:
     “… Pheron?”
     “You asked about him this morning…? We hadn’t seen him
this week, and the last time, he said he was feeling so tired, and
looked so… awful? After you left today, I went by his workshop. It
was all closed up, and the man in the shop next door said no one
had seen him in Crescent Alley for days! So then I went to his
room—he couldn’t even answer the door, Zadyuk!”
    Bewilderment crumbled, leaving fragmentary expressions
moving among Zadyuk’s features, impossible to say where, among
hurt, anger, and fear, they would settle.
     One hand dropped from her arm.
     The other’s grip, in three stages, loosened, before it fell.
      “He’s so thin—he must weigh only half of what he did when
we saw him! His joints and his neck are all swollen. There’re
terrible sores on his leg and his side! His eyes are red and runny.
And he’s… sick! He can’t even put his arms down. Underneath
hurts too much!”
     “But what’s wrong with—?”
     Nari looked aside.
     Zadyuk blinked, then looked too.
     She’d been speaking excitedly, and the two men passing arm
in arm watched with the curiosity one gives to any street encounter.
The older man’s head was shaved. Both had dark wings of paint
around their eyes, which emphasized astonishingly the pale lashes
and gray irises of the younger. As they turned away, walked away,
Nari looked back at Zadyuk, knowing he, too, remembered how
Pheron would fasten on the colorful swatches he wove and dyed
himself in his workshop and, in the same eye-paint, with a cider jar
hooked on his forefinger, and already a bit tipsy, would visit their
rooms after work. “Parading about the streets like that!” Zadyuk
would declare. “People will think you’re some prostitute from the
Bridge of Lost Desire!” and Pheron would mime a show of great
surprise, and exclaim, “But, my dear, I never go anywhere near it!
There’re too many other places in the city to get what I’m after!”
Then he would show Nari the hard, bright colors and the metallic
threads he’d worked into his fabrics, while at the table Zadyuk
would pry the cork from the wine jar with his sandal knife.
    Nari shook her head a little, as if already answering a no or an
unknown to what Zadyuk was about to say.
     “What’s… the matter with him?” Zadyuk asked anyway.
     “The island woman who lives in the room next to his, she’s
been in to take him water and things and help him clean
himself—I met her outside, as I was leaving…” Nari tried to
compress her voice the way, moments back, Zadyuk had
compressed her arms. What happened was that voicing itself
dropped from her speech, leaving not even a true whisper, but a
gesture at words, which Zadyuk, narrowing his eyes, read from the
movement of her lips and tongue rather than heard:
     “She says it’s plague! She says she’s seen it—” Nari caught her
breath, shivered once, and spoke out again: “She’s seen it before,
she said, in the islands. When she was a girl. It killed—!”
     “Nari…!”
     They looked at each other.
      But around them, complex and glittering like some choice
weave Pheron might swirl above his head in Zadyuk’s and Nari’s
small, second-floor, stone-walled room, lay the New Market, to its
east the waterfront, down the side streets between the recently
completed warehouses and storage buildings, to its south the
artisans’ shops, their dull storefronts and colorful displays at the
sides of badly paved alleys with names like Potters’ Lane and
Netmenders’ Row, to its west Her Imperial Majesty’s Public Park,
where mothers brought their children and students brought their
studies and where Nari had often brought her fancies to tell
Zadyuk (and sometimes Pheron) as they walked there after work
on summer evenings, and to its north the vigorous business district
about Black Avenue and the ethnic enclaves beyond it, the trade
and traffic constant among them, the movement back and between
them endless, from the Spur with its reeks and wailing barbarian
babies to the palm-lined avenues of Neveryóna and Sallese, with
their dark-skinned, dark-robed nobles and their anxious, amiable
merchants, ambling by the falls and fountains in their walled
estates.
      4.1 Twenty-three years old, Nari was born in the autumnal
month of the Badger, off in Adami. Both her parents came to
Kolhari when she was two, a few years after the ascension of the
Child Empress Ynelgo. Nari was an only child, rather a rarity in
that time, that place.
       When she was seventeen and beginning to “experiment with
sex” (as another epoch would put it), Nari’d wanted a son
passionately—in that age with no birth control. But she knew with
a definiteness that sometimes astonished her, she did not want a
daughter. Indeed, her deepest and most secret desire was for a
little, yellow-haired, barbarian boy—something of an impossibility,
as she was a small, brown girl with thick, black hair, whom many
people complimented by telling her she could easily be taken for
some aristocratic daughter of the nobility.
      “If I got pregnant,” she said once to a girlfriend (other young
women her age were getting pregnant and having little girls and
boys all around her), “and it turned out a girl, I think I’d kill
myself!” Her friend laughed, but Nari was worried by the strength
of her own feelings. “I’d give her to another mother,” she corrected
herself, “and then I’d… kill myself—” which, as she said it, seemed
neither wise nor probable, if, after all, the unwanted daughter had
already been got rid of.
     One could try again.
      Her very best friend was an older barbarian named Meise, with
three sons of her own, all by different men, who was now pregnant
for the fourth time by some vanished yellow-haired ne’er-do-well
and was anxious for a girl. Meise was one-third owner of the
Kraken (where, as far as Nari could tell, Meise did all the work),
just off the Alley of Gulls. Nari herself sometimes helped in the
kitchen.
     One evening, when rain pelted the street and chattered on the
tavern roof, and the younger woman and the older woman leaned
on opposite sides of the counter, each with a half-finished mug of
beer, lazily wiping out one crock after another and moving them
from the dripping ones on the left to the dry ones on the right,
Nari got Meise to promise that if Meise’s new baby was a boy, and
if Nari herself should get pregnant and have a girl within the year,
they’d trade.
      A day later, Nari was sure that Meise had forgotten the whole,
giggling exchange. Or at least she pretended she had.
     That bothered her, too.
     Nari had several barbarian boyfriends in those years; and a
good number of chances to get pregnant.
     Yet she didn’t.
     At nineteen, when she met, and again, at twenty, when she
began to live with, Zadyuk, her parents, out of despair, and Meise,
out of real delight at her nice young friend’s nice young man,
decided they liked him. He was certainly an improvement on Tarig,
Kudyuk, and Bedog—Nari’s last three barbarians. For one thing,
Zadyuk looked a great deal more like what Nari thought a real
barbarian ought to and acted a good deal less like what even she
had begun to think must go with such looks at this age and epoch.
     But though she had not talked about it with anyone, including
Meise, she’d also begun to wonder if she were one of those women
who just wasn’t going to have a child.
      After the first year with Zadyuk, he suspected it too. They
talked. Nari was not all that surprised when Zadyuk didn’t think it
was so awful.
     “You know,” she had said, speaking almost into his armpit in
the room lit only by moonlight through the back window, “I’d
always thought I wanted a nice, yellow-haired son. I mean, with the
kind of life I was leading, I always thought, soon, I’d have a child,
whether I wanted to or not. Since I had to, that’s the one I
wanted.” She snuggled into him; they were lying on the bed.
(Pheron had visited earlier in the evening; they were happy.) “But I
don’t really like children, Zadyuk. Boys or girls. Oh, they’re nice
enough when you don’t have to take care of them. But Meise’s new
brat, whom I used to think I’d even trade for, drives me crazy when
I’m over there! And he’s the cutest looking little barbarian I
know—besides you!”
     Zadyuk chuckled into her dark hair.
      “I think the baby is why I stopped working there,” she went
on. “Just so I didn’t have to help.”
      Nari had occasionally worked as a laundress among barbarian
women in the Spur; but for the last year and a half now, she’d been
managing her own group of washerwomen, with two young drivers
(one girl, one boy) who went out to collect washing even as far as
Sallese. (They did all the students’ laundry for at least one of the
schools on the near edge of the city’s merchant neighborhood.) She
was becoming rather successful in her business.


      4.11 If a mid-twentieth-century orthodox Freudian could
return to Kolhari and present Nari with the theory of “penis envy”
(to explain her girlish desire for a son) and “sublimation” (to
explain her new success in her work), though myself I think the
analysis would be false, Nari, a primitive woman in a superstitious
time, would probably find the notion intriguing, even plausible.
     There were a number of such fables about in that land in
those days—especially among the barbarians.


      4.2 Twenty-five years old, Zadyuk was the middle of three
brothers. (Kudyuk—a different Kudyuk from Nari’s former
petty-thief boyfriend—two years older than Zadyuk, had been gone
from Kolhari six years now and had more than likely come to a bad
end; he was seldom mentioned in his family. Namyuk, a year
younger, had had a string of not terribly good jobs and a few times
actually had got himself in trouble. He lived in the Spur, was going
from bad to worse, and didn’t seem to care.) All three boys had
been born in Kolhari, Zadyuk in the month of the Finch. Their
father was a barbarian from the south. Their mother, half
barbarian, was herself actually born in the city. Zadyuk’s parents’
life in Kolhari predated the coming of the Child Empress to the
High Court of Eagles, and they clearly had mixed feelings about
the most recent influx of southerners.
       Zadyuk worked as a sandal maker at one of the leather stalls
in the New Market, where, last year, he’d had an interesting bit of
luck. The sandals he made were popular with the students out in
Sallese. One evening, when he’d taken a wagon load of laundry out
to the school for Nari (she was between drivers), in the yard among
the school’s three buildings he saw a student wearing not the usual
sole-with-straps (or, more usual, going barefoot), but rather the
full, somewhat baggy leather foot-coverings that workers on rough
and stone-filled construction sites used around the city.
     Just then another boy recognized him from town as a sandal
maker and approached: “Do you make shoes like that?” the boy
asked.
       Zadyuk said: “Sure. Do you like them?” Then he grinned.
“Come on down to our stall. In the New Market. You know where
it is.” The next morning he went into the leather stall early and
made two pair by opening: they took more leather but were simpler
to make than the interweave of straps and buckles that were the
stylish sandals of that day.
     Toplin was in for his the hour the market opened.
     Over the next three months Zadyuk sold over a hundred pairs
of “work shoes” to students. Zadyuk had begun that month as a
worker at the stall of an aging boss who seldom came in. By the
end of it, he was foreman of a stall of his own, employing three
more leather-crafting artisans. And had been since.
     But at Zadyuk’s counter, the youngsters did not have to put
up with the teasing and, occasionally, outright hostility they met
with when they purchased their work shoes from the usual
workmen’s shoemaker.


     4.21 Zadyuk carried a deep, if now settled, resentment toward
his parents for giving him and, indeed, his two brothers the three
most common male barbaric names in Nevèrÿon. Performing in
their wagons in the city markets, the mummers, when they
portrayed a barbarian character in their skits, always named him
Kudyuk or Zadyuk. And at least once, when Zadyuk was sixteen,
he’d actually seen a show in which there were three barbarian
brothers named, yes, Kudyuk, Zadyuk, and Namyuk—big,
brawling, brutal fellows, so stupid they could not even keep their
own names straight; and there was a running joke about a
nonexistent fourth brother, “Yuk-yuk.” While the rest of the
audience laughed and applauded, Zadyuk had watched with
pursed-lipped fascination, his fists in sweaty knots that cooled
when, suddenly, now and again, he would force them open. Indeed,
he was never sure when people called him “Kudyuk” if they were
honestly mistaking him for his brother, or if they just felt one
barbarian monicker was as good as any other.
      Back when he’d been sixteen, he’d tried to change his name to
something nice, northern, and innocuous. Yes, “Pheron” was what
he’d picked. What an impossible three weeks! His friends,
yellow-haired barbarians and brown respectable folks alike, kidded
him endlessly. Everybody seemed to realize immediately what his
motivations were and teased him mercilessly. There was nothing
but to give it up. Well, Zadyuk was a good barbarian name; and
Nari, whenever he grumbled about it, said she wouldn’t want him
called anything else.


     4.22 Six months after he and Nari began living together they
met Pheron.
     Nari started a conversation with the thin, green-eyed,
brown-skinned youth one day in the market when he came in with
an armful of his fabrics. She brought him to Zadyuk’s leather stall,
where the three of them began to talk; then a woman buying a pair
of sandals decided she also wanted to purchase one of Pheron’s
pieces for a scarf. It was a great joke when they told her where, if
she ever wanted to, she could have it laundered…
    The three young people marveled at how little time it took
them to become the closest of friends.
     But, though he’d started to a couple of times with Nari,
Zadyuk never told either Pheron or Nari directly about the
attempted name change nine years before. Especially not after he
decided that Pheron really was his closest friend in Kolhari.


      4.231 If a mid-twentieth-century orthodox Freudian could
return to Kolhari and present Zadyuk with the theory of “repressed
homosexuality” (as the basic force behind civilization)—though
myself I think the analysis would be false—Zadyuk, a primitive
man in a superstitious time, would probably find the notion
intriguing and even plausible.
     There were a number of such fables about in that land in
those days, especially among the established classes of Kolhari.


     4.3 Pheron? Where does he come from, with his nice,
northern, innocuous name…?
      His workshop was not far from       the New Market. With a
shifting string of young assistants, he   worked harder than both
Nari and Zadyuk over any given week,      sold to a clientele slightly
higher socially, to make somewhat less    money than the laundress
and shoemaker together.
     Pheron’s father had worked on the New Market when it was
being built. (It had been completed five years ago, after three years
of labor.) Seven years back, Pheron would sometimes bring his
father his dinner in the afternoon to the construction site.
    Watching men dig and roll barrows about the site, Pheron had
sometimes thought: “There is nothing, nothing, nothing I could do
here—except, perhaps, carry a slop bucket for the workers.”
       His mother, whom he’d always considered a terribly
interesting woman, with her songs and jokes and eccentric opinions
and furious energy, had died, after a brief illness, when he was
fourteen. He’d missed her desperately. But two things soon grew
clear.
     His relationship with his father became much better than it
had been—for his parents had always argued over him. As Pheron
himself took over the cleaning and cooking and general household
duties, rather as if he had been (and he and his father both joked
about it) a daughter, a kind of friendship took over between father
and son. At one point, as he recalled some of his parents’
wrangling, it suddenly struck him: it was not him they had
disapproved of, but only of how each other had treated him.
      And with one of them gone, unfair though it still seemed that
it had taken his mother’s death to bring it about, the conflict had
ceased.


     4.31 If a mid-twentieth-century orthodox Freudian were to
present Pheron with the theory of “penis envy” and “sublimation,”
he would probably have said:
     “The only thing is, I envy them too. And I’ve got one. Nor is it
small. And heaven knows, I don’t sublimate. I go right for it!”
      And if the orthodox Freudian went on to present the theory
of “repressed homosexuality” as the basic force behind civilization,
Pheron’s comment would most likely have been:
        “But what makes you think it’s repressed?”


       4.32 There is something incomplete about Pheron. (Since
there is no Pheron, since he exists only as words, their sounds and
associated meanings, be certain of it: I have left it out.) My job is,
then, in the course of this experiment, to find this incompleteness,
to fill it in, to make him whole.
     But at this point, however, there’s a real question where to
look for the material: in the past? in the future? on the roaring
shore where imagination swells and breaks? in the pale, hot sands
of intellection? in the evanescent construct of the here and
now—that reality always gone in a blink that is nevertheless forever
making history?


      4.4 The lintel’s shadow pulled away, and he narrowed his eyes
in the sun spilling on the grass between the buildings. A younger
man, the Master wondered, did I squint as much, stepping out of
doors? How odd one can close one’s eyes to such light but not
one’s ears to such noise.
        The students shouted and tossed their balls and roamed the
lawn.
    He stood with his lids near met, smiling. Because, walking out
among his students, he smiled.
        Toplin would have been in the thick of their ball tossing…
      Can I hear his absence through their games? Eyes all but shut,
the Master caught the shadow of three dashing by his left indoors
and, a moment later, one sauntering out on his right. With a tiny
joy, he (who claimed to know all his children by their footsteps,
even around corners) recognized none of them. Then, as if in
reaction to the joy, there was…
    Nothing, he thought. An absence. But it’s an absence in me.
What will I fill it with?
      Work? Fear of the illness? Mistaken notions? Brilliant
speculation? Care and concern for the ailing Toplin, whose
distraught, angry mother had taken him away only an hour ago,
back to her somewhat pretentious house in its somewhat
unfashionable neighborhood?
     That he truly did not know was the absence. He opened his
eyes to the sun and stalked among the young women and young
men laughing and loitering in the light—certainly—of his
knowledge.


     4.41 If a mid-twentieth-century theorist of any sort could
return to Kolhari and present the Master with just about any
modern notion, say Freud’s concepts of “the unconscious,”
“transference,” “repression,” or “infantile sexuality” (I believe
these theories to be basically correct), the Master would probably
not put much stock by them—even though there were a number of
such fables about in the land in those days.
      The Master has too many carefully worked up theories of his
own, however—and even a few small, but clear, hopes that they are
coherent and rich enough to interest people into days well beyond
ours, however foggily (powerfully?) he conceives “the future.” But
he is a primitive man in a superstitious time, and though he has a
surprisingly sophisticated intuition of this, it is precisely when his
theories turn to grapple this most important problem of his day
that they became truly incomprehensible to those coming after him
even by a generation, much less millennia.


     4.5 The nameless old servant—the crevices broken into her
cheeks and forehead are what medicine will eventually call
Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome—stopped beside the leather
hanging over the scullery doorway, in the dawn’s cool and rustle.
She’d not yet gone to wake the new kitchen girl. (That, indeed,
Larla needed to be awakened quite so many mornings did not
speak well for her first month at the estate. Still, she didn’t mind
working on at a house with a lord gone suddenly and so
distressingly ill. There were some who wouldn’t stay for that.) She
thought of Lord Vanar and, as an aged woman might at that time,
pondered magic, disease, power, and felt…
     An absence? She noted somehow it was hers. No. It’s not. It
has been inflicted on you by…
     That’s me, of course, protesting ineffectually across the ages.
But my inability to reach her on that morning, millennia ago, only
confronts me with my own failings, incompletions, absences.
      I content myself with noting, then, that she does not much
resemble our housekeeper when I was a child, Mrs. Bembry. (Her
face was round, brown, and lineless.) Mrs. Bembry, who cooked,
cleaned, and baby-sat for us, lived at home with Mr. Bembry and
was, indeed, Mrs. Bembry from the first time my father introduced
my sister and me to her when I was four and my sister just beyond
two. But this was because we were a black family hiring a black
maid in the forties:
     My Father (while my mother looked on): What is your name?
     Mrs. Bembry: Cora.
     My Father: What is your name?
     Mrs. Bembry: Cora…?
     My Father: What is your full name?
     Mrs. Bembry: Cora. Mrs. Cora Bembry.
      My Father: Sam, Peggy, this is Mrs. Bembry. She’ll be helping
us in the house and sometimes taking care of you.
     Mrs. Bembry: Oh, you all can call me Cora…
     My Father: We’ll call you Mrs. Bembry.
     And for a dozen years we did. I think Mrs. Bembry and the
nameless servant both believed in magic. But at this remove, I
couldn’t say which believed in magic more.


       4.51 I hesitate before any notion about the reception of theory
for this prehistoric woman. (In both our urban and rural
landscapes, so overwhelmingly based on service rather than
production, the nineteenth-century “house servant” or “body
servant” is a very weak model for modern maids and housekeepers,
cooks and gardeners, mail carriers and delivery men and women,
wait-persons and counter people, supers and maintenance folk,
civil servants and secretaries, not to mention live-in baby-sitters.
Still, what draws us to it and what makes us hesitate before it are
both historical—that is, composed as much of nostalgia as of
curiosity.) Only the most minor character in what is to follow, her
minority masks an incompleteness (a dis-ease in the writer) clear
and close to that which makes Pheron so uncomfortable.


      4.6 Six-thirty in the morning, and I have been up since
five-twenty-three, sitting in the living room, drinking coffee,
reading     desultorily    at    the    Mandelstams—Osip      and
Nadezhda—Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, preparing for the big plunge,
two weeks hence, into the Russian Yeats, Ana Ahkmatova:
generally putting off the rewrite on “The Tale of Fog and Granite”
with an eye (and an urgency) to handing it in on Monday.
     It’s Saturday, January 14th, 1984, my daughter’s tenth
birthday. (Through childhood she ran around with her sunny
crew-cut till, three years ago, she put her foot down and, since, has
developed Long Blond Hair.) She will be up in an hour, if not in
minutes.
     Last night she and I sat, where I sit now (writing this),
watching a TV Charlie Brown special. Then, the shutters were
open. Now they’re closed against predawn black. Morning traffic is
cut by a fire siren; I can hear the slush under the tires from the last
days’ snow. The vacuum cleaner sits, as it does all too usually, by
the jamb of the double doorway between the living room and the
dining room, half on the red rug, half on the green.
     Last night.
    My arm around her, I joked: “This is the last time I can watch
TV with my nine-year-old,” and, a minute later, took another trip
to my word processor in the office—checking for corrections,
formatting this, that, and the other.
      “You know,” she told me suddenly, when I came back and we
sat again together, “I remember my seventh birthday!”
     I raised an eyebrow and looked down.
      “It was after my party…? All the paper from the presents was
lying on the floor, and I remember standing there and thinking:
Finally! I’m seven! I didn’t think I was ever going to be seven!”
      I smiled. “Was that here or at your mother’s?” I just wanted a
better picture of it.
     “I think it was here,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”
      And though I could write twenty pages detailing her fifth, I
realize that I have no memory of her seventh birthday at all!
     It gave me an astonishing sense that this marvelous
micro-person, who has been so much a part of me for a decade,
has her own inner life—a life which I’ve always known was there,
wanted to be there, but, as a parent, I so rarely catch the signs of.
      Hingley’s Nightingale Fever, some notebooks, Zhivago, Clarence
Brown’s Mandelstam (among the volumes of translated poems) are
scattered on the tweedy couch-cover. Soon she’ll be up and off to
her horseback riding lesson, the day’s presents—the actual party
will be a sleep-over with a handful of her friends. The great change
marked by ten? Well, as I remember it:
     No more writing down your age with one numeral!
     Odd, after all these years, to be catching up on the Russians.
       Odd, too, that this sort of moment (in its domestic, not its
literary, aspect) is something I’ve decided to deny to Zadyuk and
Nari by an offstage quirk of biology. (But then, offstage biological
quirks are what this whole tale is about.) Odd also that, ten years
ago, just before my daughter’s birth, when I began the Nevèrÿon
series, I wouldn’t have thought it odd in the least.


      5. “… including Lord Vanar?” The minister lifted a palm,
leaving his fingertips on stone. “That is a great many people in the
city to have such a singular and serious illness. Already six others
have died of it, you say; and none has recovered…?” The small
window of the council room was high and deeply beveled; a bird
beat by outside, its shadow flicking the stone table. “It would not
be a lot of people for headache, or stomach distress, or a cold. But
certainly any number over fifty is an unconscionable amount for
fevers, pains, incapacitations, and fatal swellings. We must observe
this carefully and be prepared to act…”


      5.1 Joey is a Boston-Irish hustler and heroin addict (when he
can get it) who lives mainly on the street. Of his four brothers, one
killed himself in a drug-induced depression when Joey was out at
the store. At twenty-one or twenty-two, they were trying to kick
together. His brother wasn’t doing very well. Joey came back from
the grocery carrying a paper bag with a quart of milk and a pack of
cigarettes in it to find his brother hanging by an old jumper cable
from the kitchen light fixture above an overturned chair. A year
later he watched another brother get pushed out of a third-story
window to impale himself on a spike fence below. (Revenge for
money owed on drugs: “Sometimes, afterwards, I’d see the fuckers
who did it on the street. They’d say ‘Hi.’ I’d say, ‘Hi.’ That was all I
could do.”) The two other brothers also died violently. So Joey left
his mother in the hospital (“What the hell she need with
me—though I like to go see her, sometimes. She’s still there”) to
come to New York.
     The quality of street dope, he says, is better in New York than
in Boston.
       Joey says he used to lift weights. (“I was up to a hundred and
ninety-eight pounds, and all muscle! I was doing tournaments and
getting third, second place. Can you imagine me that strong?”
Today he seldom weighs in at over a hundred-thirty.) At twelve he
got a job washing dishes in a Boston diner, thanks to an affair with
the twenty-five-year-old man who’d inherited the place: that lasted
till he was eighteen—when his drug involvement and the owner’s
interest in younger boys ended it. Briefly, when he was nineteen, a
woman a few years older than he married him for a couple of years.
(“That’s when I was lifting weights. She thought I was cute.”) They
had a daughter. Drugs again. Another male lover, this one another
weight lifter. Joey drove an ice cream truck for a while—managed a
fleet of trucks, he sometimes says. By the time he was twenty-five,
it had all gone bust: marriage, lover, job. And someone had blown
up the truck(s?), which he’d used to move drugs and illegal money
around between whorehouses, anyway. At twenty-seven he came
more or less permanently to New York. (Just before he made the
change, someone hit him in the mouth with a baseball bat,
knocking away most of his upper teeth; the broken ones have
rotted out by now, helped by a couple of trips to the dentist, a year
or so apart, to remove a few of the stubs.) Living on the street, he
says, is easier in New York than in Boston.
      Among the stories Joey has told me, he says he thinks about
this one a lot. It’s from his first months here in the city.
     A drug friend of his had taken over an abandoned apartment
in some half-burned building in Hell’s Kitchen. No heat or
electricity in the place. But as Joey was outside that winter, he
considered his friend lucky and—compared to him—prosperous.
Joey went to see him one cold morning, hoping he might get some
dope. There was never any lock on the door. Joey just pushed in.
With his works out beside him, the man sat shirtless on a mattress
on the floor of the chilly tenement kitchen.
     “Hey!” Joey said. “How you doin’?”
     The man looked up and said, matter-of-factly: “Oh, you’re
here? I was just gonna kill myself.”
     “Yeah? How?” Joey squatted down before the mattress to
watch.
      You gotta understand, Joey told me, I thought he was joking.
I was livin’ in my clothes and sleeping out, which means I wasn’t
sleeping much. I was pretty sick, so I wasn’t too alert, and I was
trying to act nice—you know what I mean? And this guy had a
place to stay, sometimes drugs, and sometimes food—I never
thought anything could be wrong with him!
      The man jabbed an empty hypodermic in his arm. “Air,” he
told Joey.
     If he’d said “bubble,” Joey told me, I would’ve known what
he meant and done something. (“A bubble to the ticker” is the
usual drug slang for this.)
     “It ain’t supposed to hurt much.” He pushed the plunger in.
     Nothing happened.
     Joey thought he’d just interrupted his friend’s shooting up.
     “Sometimes you need two or three,” the man said, sliding the
needle loose, pulling out the plunger, and injecting himself again.
     “Hey…!” Joey said, “That’s kind of dangerous—”
    “No,” the man said. “It’s what I wanna do.” He pulled the
hypodermic free again, again filled it with air, stuck it back in his
arm a third time, and thumbed down the plunger.
      He didn’t even get the needle out, Joey said. Suddenly he sat
up straight, like someone hit him with a hammer in the small of his
back, and he falls over on the mattress.
     I hadn’t been in there thirty-five seconds!
      I stayed around for another five minutes, to see if I could do
anything. I tried to give him mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration.
(And doing that with somebody you know is a corpse already is
weird!) There was no breath, no heartbeat, no nothing. So I left him
there with the needle still hangin’ off his arm.
     But he’d just decided it was time to go.
      In the almost three years I’ve known him, I’ve seen Joey
dragging through the retarded slough of pain that is his biweekly
bout of heroine deprivation sickness. I’ve seen him with his arm in
bandages, shoulder to wrist, because the night before he’d rushed
into the parking lot to help a woman who was being mugged and
got his arm and hand knifed open for the effort. And—most
recently, after not running into him for three and a half
months—I’ve seen him in clean clothes, with a fresh haircut and
weighing thirty pounds more than I’d ever seen him before,
showing off arms that have doubled their diameter from a vigorous
exercise program. He’s been off the street three months, he says,
and swears he’s touched no heroin since just after I last saw him.
      “I ain’t sayin’ I don’t take a snort of coke if somebody offers
it. But you ain’t gonna get me near that other shit again. I mean,
look at me. I’m the best lookin’ guy in here—” and he grins about
the Fiesta—“long as I don’t smile at nobody.”


     5.21 At nineteen, the Master explained, I took stock of my
prospects (did some work to find out which of my titled relatives
would get what) and realized, by the end, my title would get me
little.
          Well, not too long ago such things got you killed.
          So I abandoned mine.
     That simple act of unnaming started something of a fable,
which still grows and moves and develops in the city and its
suburbs, quite apart from me.
      Oh, there’ve been moments when my reputation seemed a
light rippling out into darkness, myself its central flame. More
often, however, it’s some gnarled, preposterous monster, inhabiting
my city with me, whom I’ve never met, but whom, for
incomprehensible reasons, people who should know better still
mistake for me. It goes about, parodying me with misquotation,
mocking me with stupidities and homilies, giving my actions false
motives—oh, doing things somewhat as I would do them, yet
always for absurd reasons, and finally doing them differently
enough that I don’t recognize them when the reports come back.
      Of course the misunderstandings brought about by this
malignant entity are all laid at my door. I wonder if it isn’t the main
reason why, when I decided to open my school, it never occurred
to me to settle it in any of the available Neveryóna estates (though
I had enough connections there) but rather here, at the far edge of
Sallesse, where it becomes one with the District of Successful
Artisans: here where, nearly ten years ago, in the three adjacent
buildings with the yard between, I began to interview, house, and
instruct the young people whose parents sent them from all over
the city and beyond.
     The monster often comes close, but it refuses to confront me
personally: I must wait for people to tell me about it. Yet I’m
astonished how boldly it trespasses on my personal circle. (Again
and again, I meet those who find the monster acceptable—its most
disconcerting aspect!) But the doorsteps of Neveryóna, my real
home, I now suspect, were what I wanted to protect from the
grotesquerie all knowledge becomes when it moves too far from
the knower.


     5.211 In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,”
Walter Benjamin quotes the first modern poet of the city: “The
time is not distant when it will be understood that a literature
which refuses to make its way in brotherly concord with science
and philosophy is a murderous, suicidal literature.” This notion
was expressed, of course, by various other people besides
Baudelaire at various times and places throughout the nineteenth
century.


      5.22 Youths of my titled class traditionally visit the High
Court of Eagles between our fifteenth and twentieth year, the Master
said, sponsored by one or another relative already in residence
there. We stay between three months and—those of us destined for
government work—three years.
     There’s a story about me, though it was never told till after I
gave up my meaningless honorific:
     When my invitation from court arrived (I was seventeen, so
runs the tale), I refused to go, declaring that I would seek my
education from the land rather than in those gloomy and official
chambers. So instead of my Courtly visit, I took off on a trip from
one end of Nevèrÿon to the other. That’s the story.
     No, I never went to court.
    Yes, I took a year-plus trip around the country, departing a
few months before my eighteenth birthday and returning a few
months after my nineteenth.
     The distortion, then?
     Let me say, rather, when I heard the tale’s first inkling.
      I don’t recall how many months after I’d gotten back from
my trip. But while I stood in a fountained garden of Sallese, filled
with matrons and merchants congregating in honor of someone
not me (a party, somehow, I’d felt obliged to attend), a tall,
soft-voiced countess (suffering regally the same obligation) with
green stones on a leather braid about her somewhat hairy forearm,
to whom I’d been outlining some of my immediate plans and past
adventures, bent her head to the side and exlaimed: “I see what you
did now! In place of your traditional time at court, you sought out
your education in the world! How wonderful! The empress herself,
whose reign is luminous and lively, should encourage the same of
all the bright and imaginative young people in Nevèrÿon!”
      I thought: What an interesting—and complimentary!—way of
stating what I’d done. Was it factual? That didn’t occur to me. Nor,
I doubt, to her. Rather the words seemed much like those some
traveling tale-teller sometimes tosses out: an extraordinary phrase
for the most ordinary occurrence, which, from then on, makes both
occurrence and phrase hold in memory. I smiled. We went on
talking. And I had no idea of the story I’d just heard the beginning
of.
      Perhaps a year later, I first heard the tale complete, in its
more or less final form: I’d been asked to speak at another party—a
gathering of some of our interested citizens, back when I first had
thoughts of running a series of exploratory programs for intelligent
young people. (A decade more, and these programs would become
the school I now head.) While the smoking brands kept away the
insects, a gentleman introduced me to the people sitting on the
benches or standing near the tables filled with drink and food
about the lawn:
      “… and when he was presented with the traditional invitation
to court in his seventeenth year, he declared to his parents that he
would not accept it, and demanded that he be sent, instead, on a
journey about the land, where he would learn many more things of
interest and importance than he might ever glean within court
walls. His wise parents consented, no doubt proud to have such an
intelligent and resourceful son…”
     But here, as it hadn’t that afternoon in the other garden, the
pressure of fact assailed me:
      No such interview ever took place between me and either my
mother or my father. Mother died suddenly when I was nine, while
she was away visiting relatives in the Avila. Father’s long and
drawn-out illness through my sixteenth year, till at last in
murmuring delirium he died, was no doubt one among many
reasons that, in the confusions his terminal sickness wreaked on all
his affairs, the topic of my official visit to court was indefinitely
postponed. I’m sure when he saw me off in my caravan, my
mother’s brother, who generously housed me in the months after
my father’s death and who, indeed, sponsored my trip, was glad to
see me go.
     But when I was making plans to leave, I never thought of
court. I don’t believe my uncle did either.
      There on the lawn, however, as I heard this gentleman refer to
that fabulous parental encounter, I remembered the countess;
somehow, in my failure to nip the rumor, which had no doubt
budded back in that other garden, I saw now that I’d indulged a
dishonesty that had returned as this outright false fact. But as the
man went on, I also heard his tone of voice: he was speaking not as
someone informing strangers of new happenings and new ideas.
Rather he was reminding his friends, many of whom were my
friends also, of things they already knew.
     In thanking him for his generous words, I made only the
most modest correction of what still seemed the exaggerations of
someone only overanxious to speak well of me. The man
considered himself my supporter—my friend. There was no need to
make him out before his peers as either a liar or a fool. (Among
those who knew me and my family, surely some recalled my age at
my parents’ deaths.) But even the modesty of my corrections soon
joined the tale itself: many times over the next years, I would hear
that, though as a youth I had, indeed, confronted my parents with
such an ultimatum, I was too self-effacing to admit it—another
sign of my high character.
     It was only the most minor annoyance.
      But to repeat: my parents were dead by the time of my trip.
And I received no invitation to court, nor was I really expecting
one. Why? Well, I lived in Kolhari, in Neveryóna, not in the
country: I have, and have had, many relatives at the court all my
life. Even by my fifteenth year, I’d been through the great Eagle
Gates many times, now to stay for a weekend with one earl, now
for two weeks with another duchess, now to visit this young,
provincial cousin in for his own official visit, now to attend a party
honoring that one; I had gone riding and picnicking on the royal
grounds more times than I and my two younger sisters had fingers
and toes among us; and I’d already spent more time with, or at
least within sight of, my third cousin twice removed (whose reign is
awesome and adamantine) than many folk have who’ve lived at
court for years. I’d already gained most of the experiences and
benefits provincial nobles must travel to the city for. To skip my
officially sponsored stay deprived me of very little. And by the time
I was seventeen, everyone at court and pretty much everyone in my
family simply assumed that, for all practical purposes, I had been.
     Indeed, I’m sure that is what my uncle assumed.
     As a practicing wise man, I’m concerned with mastering truth.
To insist on such petty details, however, about what is, after all,
only one’s own personality seems to discredit the enterprise. Isn’t it
unseemly to dwell with such intensity on so minor a misprision of
my personal history—especially one to my benefit?
     Yet, annoy me it did.
      A decade later, the school was becoming real; and various of
the city’s finer men and women who supported me from time to
time would come to consult with me about my plans. One day I
found myself in conversation with an intelligent young man from a
successful merchant family. My noble friends still had their
reservations about these alliances of mine within the world of
trade, and my friends among merchants and tradesmen were aware
of the nobles’ misgiving. Yet I felt, finally, both sides respected me
for trying to bridge the gap between the classes, whatever their
personal reservations.
      The young man and I had gotten down from his wagon to
stroll a bit along the palm-lined avenue that runs between
Neveryóna and Sallese. It was a warm spring evening. Behind the
palms the wall of the old Aldamir Estate was topped with coppery
light beneath a sky smeared over in the west with gray and violet
clouds. A tall brown fellow, who’d done much traveling for his
father, the young man wanted to identify his adult travels with my
youthful ones; and I was happy to let him. As we ambled along the
orange dust of the shoulder beside mud-mortared flags, he said to
me with the pleasantest smile: “Years ago I heard a story from a
friend of mine that, as a boy, when the time came for you to make
the noble’s traditional visit to court, you told your parents that you
refused, and proposed instead that you go traveling. Were they
really as pleased with your decision as people say?” He smiled at
me, his green eyes in that earth-dark face suggesting relatives three
or four generations back from the Ulvayn Islands, which he
himself, no doubt, had never known by name. “There was no
prospect of court in a childhood such as mine,” he added. “Still,
my father is such a stickler for tradition, I’m sure that if there had
been, he would never have put up with such a suggestion from me!”

      I looked at this intelligent, merchant’s son. I remember I had
a very strong sense of what, I thought, he wanted to hear from me:
some speculation on the contrasting personalities of the aristocrats
and tradesmen of Nevèrÿon. Doubtless, he both romanticized the
nobility some—and disdained us. But that particular evening he
was ready for some aristocratic speculation about how, perhaps, we
nobles were sometimes more liberal with our children than his own
hardheaded and practical relatives. And I also thought, while I
walked with him: What nonsense! He’s far too smart a boy really to
want that kind of drivel—even if, this evening, he thinks he does. I
also thought: He’s not of my class. He’s encumbered with none of
the fables that weigh down the Nevèrÿon nobility like sinkers on a
fishnet. Speak the truth to him directly, simply, firmly. What better
ears than his to hear it! “I’ve even heard the story myself,” I told
him, chuckling. “Alas, there’s nothing to it. There was never any
talk of my going to court. With young nobles who actually live here
in Kolhari, this is sometimes the case. My parents were dead by the
time I was of age for my official court sojourn—and my uncle,
who’d taken me in at my father’s death, had too many of his own
problems to think about such things. When I proposed my trip
about the country to him, I saw it as a chance to get out of his way;
and, though I’m sure he liked me well enough, I suspect that’s how
he saw it too and was at least a little grateful to me for wanting to
leave just then. I took my trip. And I did not officially visit
court—though I’d visited it unofficially many times. But the story
of that brave and intelligent youth who conscientiously replaced
one with the other by a concerted declaration of intent to his
parents—parents who were, after all, in my case, quite dead at the
time—is only a fable. I simply do not deserve the praise usually
heaped on that so astute, so well deserving, but finally nonexistent
lad.”
     There was no flicker in my young companion’s green-eyed
smile—no sign he’d misunderstood, or disbelieved. We talked
about the new school’s location (it was his father who’d just
volunteered to sell me two of the Sallese buildings and to speak on
my behalf to the owner of the third, as well as to supervise the
necessary renovations); we discussed the benefits of travel to
students, the nature of intellectual inquiry, the necessity of
theoretical knowledge in practical matters.
        And we returned to his cart, where he drove me back to my
gate.
      Some three days later, my secretary rushed in to halt before
my chair. Light fell in slant lines through the shutters over his
agitated face: “Master, people are saying the most appalling things
about you! Now it’s been decided that the school buildings are
definitely to be located not in Neveryóna but in the artisans’
district, it’s rumored you’ve been telling the merchants that you
completely deny your noble connections. They even say you’ve
been spreading falsehoods about your parentage, saying they were
not really of the noble class! The other nobles who have been
sponsoring you have heard of this and, of course, resent your
pandering to the merchants’ prejudices; and the merchants
themselves think you are trying to play them for fools!”
     I was, of course, bewildered, and tried to figure what, indeed,
could be the basis of such a tale. It took me three days of careful
inquiry among both merchants and nobles to learn what had
happened.
      The tale had gone around that I’d told some merchant youth
that, as a child, I had not been allowed to go to court because my
parents were dead! This, I had explained to the trusting young man
(according to the rumor), was some sort of tradition among local
nobles! But the next person to whom this youth—clearly the
merchant’s son with whom I’d been talking that evening on the
avenue—recounted his version of my story happened to be a noble
himself, who knew (quite rightly) there had never been any such
tradition among noblemen of Nevèrÿon and that I was of no such
disempowered class: in much consternation, he’d explained all this
to the young man, while decrying my falsehoods. And the two of
them had gone on to speculate on what my motives could possibly
be for such outlandish prevarication!
      Though among a few people with whom it mattered I was
able to set things more or less aright, the incident still remains for
me a sign of the pressure toward misunderstanding that haunts all
social communion:
      For in this city there is still a monster all expect me to speak
of as “I.”
     “I” was a youth who, at his invitation to court, refused to go
and proposed to his parents (some say his uncle!) a trip across the
country instead.
     Sometimes, today, “I” am too modest to talk of this
essentially admirable act.
     At others, however, “I” simply deny it for my own
exploitative ends.
     And it is “I,” they think, who lives in this city, runs this
school, teaches these children, and is respected or criticized for it
by the populace.


      5.221 Placing Benjamin’s quotation from Baudelaire in a
fantasy context produces a very different effect from placing the
same quotation in an SF context. And both effects are distinct
from that which would result from placing it within an example of
the literary genre Todorov called “the Fantastic”—or, indeed,
placing it in a piece of “scientific” literary naturalism, e.g., Zola, or
Sinclair Lewis.
      In both paraliterary contexts, the Baudelaire dialogizes
heatedly with the text. In both literary contexts, the Baudelaire
merely approves or condemns the specific narrative tropes that
evince what is usually called “the plot.” To create true dialogue
there, beyond this near-mute judgment, would require real critical
violence.


      5.23 My detractors in Neveryóna (many, after all, my relatives)
say that by situating the school where I have, I’ve made both the
pursuit and dissemination of knowledge a craft or trade, the Master
explained. They see this as debased and appalling in these so
unaristocratic times. But suppose I had located the school in one of
the available Neveryóna estates? Would it have been any better to
have made the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge an
aristrocratic accomplishment?


     5.3 “Now let me restate what you have said.” The minister
pulled his hands to the edge of the stone table. “First you tell me
that of the hundred-thirty-seven persons who have so far been
reported to have the disease, all are male…? Then you cast your
eyes down, become nervous, and tell me, well, they are not all
male…? Lord Vanar I am, of course, personally aquainted with.
Should I assume, then, that this is a way of saying that those men
with the disease are men who, in the eyes of many, might be
considered less than male…? If that is the case, then it is a truly
astonishing illness!” Outside the small, high window, the sky was
hot silver. “Our position does not, however, afford us such
coyness. We must observe this carefully and be prepared to act…”


      6. with a thumbnail, nudged and nipped the dark, beneath
bark’s brown the yellow wood beneath green, copper under oil the
ashy slate
      stepped into hip-high troughs with hides floating, nudged
them with poles while the gray gunk you waded in took the hairs
off the leather later on the sandy ledge examined his newly hairless
thigh
     Zadyuk had never worked in the tanning troughs but he had
six months at seventeen
     Nari her hem hiked up and dripping among her tubs, the yard
she worked her women in awash with lye shrill shouts
      something else to scrape away apparent color loved color
because it appeared wove wires in the warp stretched thin, beat flat
as foil threw it away if they broke (once) put it up after that and
sold it cheaper this pain poled through and poked by his arm’s
prod, his knee’s pole, under pain only more would make it different
from everything else and he didn’t believe that comfortable
positions when you’re sick as rare as beauty when you’re not
working well his workshop
     was it necessary to feel a little superior to friends to love them

     that anxiety he wished the workshop hide hanging behind the
planks in wait for summer to be at the shop not opened wasn’t
closed
     nothing superior now
      resting on his bed and not entirely there, he skidded about a
circle of words surrounding a fire finger brushing its char on the
side of some terra-cotta pot when he was six, skimmed years and
alleys and facts that fell in a turbulence that was more its swing and
rhythm than its settle )when he was seventeen( and stop
      watching the small furious woman who had been his mother
die, as a fourteen-year-old he’d thought the happiest death would
be one like hers at the end where you were too exhausted by the
facts of dying, the hour by hour bargain with pain, the moment by
moment barter for breath, bargains and barters you always came
out on the short end of, to fear
     fear of death was something you indulged if you were healthy,
perceptive, alert dying took up too much of your diminished
strength
     afraid before, among so many weeks of illness, what once had
been fear now only rose to annoyance
     sunlight wedged in the window corner lay on jamb and sill
like a lock of hair from a certain lively afternoon hour pausing
outside to catch her breath, where voices talked of traffic, boiled
grain and pepper smell, of what was happening across the street
he’d always thought cluttered, convenient, and picturesque
     to lie here in his room was to be sick but not that sick
     when he was that sick he was usually someplace else


      6.01 “Shannon decided that English is about 50 percent
redundant when we consider samples of eight letters at a time. If
the length of the sample is increased, the redundancy is much
greater. For sequences of up to 100 letters it rises to approximately
75 percent. The figure is even higher in the case of whole pages or
chapters, where the reader is able to get an idea of the long-range
statistics of a text, including its theme and literary style. This
means, Shannon said, that much of what we write is dictated by the
structure of the language and is more or less forced upon us. Only
what little is left is of our own free choosing.”
                                                —Jeremy Campbell
                                                    Grammatical Man


     6.1 On the raised paving stone beyond the mouth of the
Bridge of Lost Desire, on the speakers’ platform at both old and
new markets, at corners in the business district along Black
Avenue, on the waterfront and in the central squares of the ethnic
neighborhoods, Imperial criers, wearing the sign of the Royal Eagle
on breast and back, shouted:
      “There is danger in Kolhari of plague. To date there have
been seventy-nine probable deaths—and of the several hundred
who have contracted it, no one has yet recovered. We advise care,
caution, and cleanliness, and Her Majesty, whose reign is brave and
beneficent, discourages the indiscriminate gathering of crowds.
This is not an emergency! No, this is not an emergency! But it is a
situation Her Majesty feels might develop into one.”
     And on the bridge and in the market and on the street corners
and in the yards, people gathered, heard, glanced at their neighbors,
and dispersed quickly.


      6.11 “Once the plague is established in the city, the regular
forms collapse. There is no maintenance of roads and sewers, no
army, no police, no municipal administration. Pyres are lit at
random to burn the dead, with whatever means are available. Each
family wants to have its own. Then wood, space, and flame itself
growing rare, there are family feuds around the pyres, soon
followed by a general fight, for the corpses are too numerous. The
dead already clog the streets in ragged pyramids gnawed at by
animals around the edges. The stench rises in the air like a flame.
Entire streets are clogged by the piles of dead. Then the houses
open and the delirious victims, their minds crowded with hideous
visions, spread howling through the streets. The disease that
ferments in their viscera and circulates throughout their entire
organism discharges itself in tremendous cerebral explosions.
Other victims, without buboes, delirium, pain, or rash, examine
themselves proudly in the mirror, in splendid health, as they think,
and then fall dead with their shaving mugs in their hands, full of
scorn for other victims.
      “Over the poisonous, thick, bloody streams (color of agony
and opium) which gush out of the corpses, strange personages
pass, dressed in wax, with noses long as sausages and eyes of glass,
mounted on a kind of Japanese sandal made of double wooden
tablets, one horizontal, in the form of a sole, the other vertical, to
keep them from the contaminated fluids, chanting absurd litanies
that cannot prevent them from sinking into the furnace in their
turn. These ignorant doctors betray only their fear and their
childishness.
      “The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their
frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know
will serve no purpose or profit… The last of the living are in a
frenzy: the obedient and virtuous son kills his father; the chaste
man performs sodomy upon his neighbors. The lecher becomes
pure. The miser throws his gold in handfuls out the window. The
warrior-hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save. The
dandy decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades
before the charnel house. Neither the idea of an absence of
sanctions nor that of imminent death suffices to motivate acts so
gratuitously absurd on the part of men who did not believe death
could end anything. And how explain the surge of erotic fever
among the recovered victims who, instead of fleeing the city,
remain where they are, trying to wrench a criminal pleasure from
the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses
where chance has lodged them…”


      6.12 Artaud’s bit of feuilletonage noire about the plague (above)
is basically the image Ken Russell mounted so vividly in his film
The Devils.
     This “plague” has the same politically reactionary relation to
the reality of present-day urban epidemics that Elias Canetti’s
description of the violent, hostile, mindless mob in Crowds and
Power has to the two most common manifestations of the
contemporary urban crowd: the Audience and the Protest.


     6.2 “You mean to tell me—” and the minister placed his
hands on his brocaded lap beneath the stone table—“that among
the more than three-hundred-fifty persons with the disease so far
reported by our inspectors, which till now we assumed were all
males, and homosexual males at that, there are at least seven
women? and five children under the age of four?” Outside the high
small window, the evening had fallen into a brilliant cobalt. “So far,
there have been seventy-five deaths and, to date, no recoveries. I
am afraid we are past the time of preparation and observation. We
must act.” The minister turned to the head of the table. “Your
Highness, let me propose…”


      6.3 “It’s interesting about its social patterns,” Peter mused.
“There I am, working at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis three days a
week, interviewing people with AIDS every day, and yet I don’t
know anyone in my personal circle who’s come down with it. On
the other hand, I know of people who have eight, nine, ten friends
who have it.” White wine stood in three cut crystal glasses. A
fringed cloth covered the round oak table. “The thing you have to
remember with AIDS is that all these statistics about the average
number of sexual contacts a year for the average person with
AIDS—sixty a year, three hundred a year—are very skewed. And
the range those averages are drawn from is immense. There’re guys
with it who claim only one or two contacts for a lifetime, the last of
which was a couple of years before they came down with it. And
there’re some who claim truly astronomical numbers of contacts,
three or four thousand per year. And with a subject as touchy as
this, both could be exaggerating in either direction for any number
of reasons.” It’s July 1983. Peter has been doing volunteer work for
AIDS in New York City for six months now.
      “Peter,” I said, “you know what three hundred contacts a year
can mean.” I said: “You go out to the right movie theater with
some action in the back balcony for an hour and a half on Tuesday
night, and on your way home from work Friday you stop into the
right public john for twenty minutes. You can easily have three
contacts involving semen in each. With only two hours a week
devoted to it, that’s six contacts a week; and that’s three hundred
and twelve for the year. You know as well as I do, you can keep up
an eight-hour-a-day job, an active social life, have your three
hundred contacts, and not even be late for dinner. Thousands of
men in this city live that way.” (I pondered the dozen-plus years I
did it myself, with a wife who was agreeable to it, which is how I
managed to combine married life and a child with an active gay life
that continues more than half a dozen years after our divorce.)
“And that’s without ever going to the baths or a bar with a back
room—where you can up that by a factor of two, three, or more
without really trying. The fact is, the straight people who’re dealing
with AIDS—say the ones in the media—simply have no notion of
the amount of sexual activity that’s available to a gay male in this
city!” I said: “Most straights, Peter, don’t realize, when they’re
putting together these statistics, that a moderately good looking gay
man in his twenties or thirties can have two or three contacts while
he’s in the subway on his way to the doctor’s to see if he has
AIDS…” I was surprised at my outburst. I think the two other
people at the table were too.
       Peter said: “We also know that there’re many, many gay
people—probably many more thousands—who can count the
number of sexual contacts they have a year on one or two hands,
Chip.” (That’s my nickname that replaced “Sam” when I was ten.)
“Still, the people with AIDS I’ve been working with—” He speared
a fried potato from his plate and held it a moment on his
fork—“have really been living life in the fast lane. But we still don’t
have any reliable statistical prototype for sexual behavior. In my
own experience, I see a leaning toward IV-needles and passive anal.
But that’s what they’re calling anecdotal evidence, these days. And
everyone’s got some, and it’s all different.”
      Slightly pinkened, reflecting from the stained-glass window,
open this July morning, sunlight gouged slivers in the
stainless-steel-ware.


     6.31 In Nevèrÿon there is, of course, a model for the outbreak
of the disease: some years before, an epidemic struck the outlying
Ulvayn Islands, during which the empress, whose reign has been,
on occasion, both caring and compassionate, sent ships and
physicians to help evacuate those who were still healthy and who
wished to come to the mainland.
      The leaders of Nevèrÿon’s capital and port, Kolhari—most
modern, most sophisticated, most progressive of primitive cities—,
have some sense of the conservative nature of the Artaudian
plague, even if, without Artaud’s text, they carry that sense on a
more primitive level than we do. Thanks to reports from the
islands, they know that that is what their city must never come to
look like.


      6.4 Once, that night, Pheron, who was twenty-four (a fact
that, several times in the midst of all this, had astonished him),
woke in darkness, feeling better. Well, that had happened before; he
did not consider miraculous cures.
     Lying on soft straw and under a cover he had given its
luminous oranges and ceruleans, he turned to his side (his lower
back throbbed, distracting him from the queasiness pulsing in his
throat), thought about his father, and smiled.
     He had been seventeen, working out at the tanning troughs.
    His father had been laboring at the construction site of the
New Market.
      One day in every twelve his father had off, coming home late
that night and sleeping far into the next morning.
     Pheron had two days off in every ten.
      His third off-time coincided with one of his father’s, to both
their surprise; the evening before, they sat in the dark room with
the lamp on the table Pheron had lit from the cook-fire coals.
      His father leaned his arm in front of his bowl. Lamplight
doubled the number of hairs over blocky forearm strung with high
veins, putting a shadow hair beside each real one on the brown
skin.
     The lamp flame wavered.
     Half the hairs moved.
     With a wooden paddle in his other hand, his father ate noisily
from the grain, peppers, and fat Pheron had stewed together.
“Maybe then, tomorrow,” his father said, “we’ll go someplace. You
and me.” He gestured with the paddle. “Together.”
     “Sure,” Pheron said, unsure what he meant.
     Then both went to bed, Pheron sleeping with his heel wedged
back between the big toe and the toe over of his other foot, fists
curled in straw by his face, fingers smelling of garlic and the new
barbaric spice, cinnamon (one of his recent enthusiasms his father
put up with), and the acid from the bark that soaked in the stone
troughs, their tides and ripplings littoral to his day.
     Lingering at the mouth of the Bridge of Lost Desire, his
father pulled at his earlobe, where gray hairs grew, with heavy
workman’s fingers and said in flat tones that signed a kind of
nervousness (as a boy, Pheron had feared those tones because often
they presaged punsishment): “You ever come here before…?”
     Certainly Pheron had crossed the bridge to the Old Market.
As certainly, he knew that that was not what his father meant. But
“No” would be easy and appeasing.
     Perhaps because the tanning work meant he was grown, or
because being grown meant you stayed tired enough that the
appeasements you’d once indulged you didn’t have the energy for
now, he said, anyway: “No…” Then, louder: “I mean, yes. I’ve
been here. Yes. Before.”
      His father smiled a little. “I thought it was about time I took
you to get yourself a woman. After your mother died, I came here
enough—more than I should have. I don’t too much now. But we
may still meet some lady who remembers me.” His father rubbed
his ear again. “Only now you tell me you’ve already beat me. That
means, I guess, I do neglect you—more than a father should. Well,
then, you know how it’s done.”
     With the veil of exhaustion that lay, these days, over both
working and nonworking time, blatant confession seemed as out of
keeping as blatant denial. “Why don’t you find yourself a woman,”
Pheron said, “and I’ll meet you back here in a few hours?”
     “No,” his father said. “Come on. We’ll go together, you and
me. Besides, if we both use the same room, it’ll be cheaper.”
     They began to walk across.
     “Go on,” his father said. “Tell me which ones you like the
most.”
     A strangeness in it all—it was his father—made him want to
smile. And, very deeply, dark discomfort streamed through. The
strangest thing, however, was how ordinary it all—humor and
discomfort—seemed. Father and son? he thought. Two workmen,
an older and a younger, come to the bridge for sex? It was a pattern
someone must have fit in the very stones of the bridge itself. “I
guess…” Pheron shrugged. “Well, that one’s cute—”
     “Ah, you like them young!” His father chuckled. “Not me!
Even when I was your age. I always thought the older ones would
give me a better time. And I’m right, too. Your mother was four
years older than I was—and if she’d been fourteen years older, it
wouldn’t have been so bad.”
      “Father,” Pheron said, suddenly, recklessly: “I don’t want a
woman.” Then: “If I was going to buy anyone here, it would be a
man. And besides: when I come here, men pay me!” And added:
“Sometimes.” Because he’d only done that three times anyway, and
that at the instigation of an outrageous friend he didn’t see much of
now.
      He walked with his father half a dozen more steps. He felt
light-headed, silly, brave. (He imagined some tangle of shuttle and
warp quickly, agressively, finally unknotted.) Yes, his heart was
beating faster. But the tiredness was gone. The soles of his feet
tingled in his sandals; so did his palms.
     His father stopped.
      The sky was clear. Under Pheron’s jaw and on the back of his
arm, where sun did not touch, were cool. Across the walkway, a
redheaded boy herded ahead half a dozen goats. They lifted
bearded muzzles to glance about, yellow eyes slit with black,
bleating and bleating. One raised a short tail, spilling black pellets
from a puckered sphincter, only to get pushed on by three others.
Two older women at the far wall laughted—though whether at the
goats or the goatherd, Pheron couldn’t tell. A donkey cart passed in
the opposite direction.
     “Then your mother was right,” his father said, finally.
    Pheron thought, He must be furious, and waited for the loud
words, for the recriminations, for the distance glimmering between
them to be struck away by anger.
     “I suppose I knew she was. But I always said it was
something you’d grow out of. Now, there! See, maybe you will grow
out of it.”
     “I’m seventeen, father. It’s just the way I am. I don’t…” He
shrugged. “I don’t want to grow out of it!”
     His father started walking again; so Pheron walked too.
     His father said: “You should try a woman. You might be
surprised. You can find nice ones, here. I don’t mean just pretty. I
mean ones who’re fun, even kind. Someone like you, you see: you
need one who’s kind, patient—that’s because you’re sensitive,
young, unsure of yourself. I should have brought you here before. I
know that, now.”
     “I’ve tried it,” Pheron said. “Before. With a few women.”
Well, one, he thought. And there’d been another boy with them. “I
didn’t like it that much. Not like with men. That’s better. For me, I
mean…” His father was getting ahead, so Pheron hurried. “You
like women. Suppose someone told you to grow out of that?”
     “Ha!” his father said. “No. No, I guess there’s not much
chance of that!”
      Pheron laughed. “Then what do you want to do? You get a
woman, I’ll get a man?” (For some reason, that morning there were
no male hustlers in sight, though there were many girls and women
about.) “And we’ll both share a room? Maybe you should try a man!”
He laughed again, feeling nervous. Not his father’s nervousness,
either. It was all his. “Men are cheaper than women, here. Did you
know that? It’s true. Some people go with either. If you were one
of those who could do that, you could save yourself some
money—”
     “Oh, no!” his father said, still a step ahead. He waved his
hand behind. “No—”
     Then he stopped again.
     The sound he made was not a shout:
     “Ahhhii—!”
     A grown man might make it at sudden pain: a sigh with much
too much voice to it, perhaps a quarter of the sound a full shout
might carry.
     Pheron stopped too.
     His father looked back. “You don’t want this? With me? Go
on then!”
     “Maybe—”
     “Go on home,” his father said. “You don’t need to be here
with me, for this. Go on, I say!” He looked back. “What do I want
you here with me for? Get out of here—now!”
     Ahead, goats bleated.
     Their arms around each other’s shoulders, two prostitutes
walked by with a third chattering after them.
      Pheron turned back toward the bridge mouth. By the time he
came off, he was trembling and angry. Halfway home, wrestling the
anger silently, he felt the tiredness again. He walked half a dozen
streets he wouldn’t have ordinarily taken—a long route home.
When he reached the door to their dark rooms, set back in the
shoulder-wide alley between the stable and the brickyard, he was
mumbling: “I’m too tired to be angry. I’m too tired…” It was
something his mother had occasionally said. Usually she hadn’t
meant it either.
      Under his bed frame was a handloom. When he got inside he
pulled it out and sat in front of it cross-legged on the earthen floor.
The strip he’d been weaving was wide as the length of his forearm
laid across it. The finished material was rolled in a bundle on the
loom’s back bar. Currently he was in the midst of a ten shuttle
pattern, at least for this part, for he’d varied his design along the
three meters he’d done so far, now using yarns of different
thicknesses, now of different colors, now varying the pattern itself,
sometimes using a knotted weave, sometimes a plain one, the
whole an endless experiment.
     He wove furiously till the window dimmed.
      Then he got out the jar of expensive oil and filled and lit three
lamps from the banked coals under the ashes in the fireplace. He
set two lamps on the corners of the table and one down on the
floor at his side—waiting for the moon.
      A running argument with his father went: “If you’re going to
work after dark, Pheron, don’t waste expensive oil. Take it up on
the roof and work by moonlight!” which Pheron always said he
would do, only—“I’m just using the lamps till the moon comes
out, anyway, father.” But often, once started, he would weave by
lamplight half the night, while the full moon came, went away
again, and he, refilling the lamps half a dozen times, never even
looked out the window to see. “Pheron, I told you—”
     He wove again.
     He got up and went to look out the window; for the moon
should be full or near so. But it wasn’t out yet. So he sat back down
on the floor.
     He wove some more.
     The hanging across the door whispered. He heard his father
push through and didn’t look up.
     His father moved around the room and, after a while, said:
     “Here. You like this stuff.”
     So he glanced over.
     “I got you something.”
      The yarn bundles dropped on the table. One rolled between
the lamps and fell to the floor, spinning in the air on dark string.
     By the lamplight, he could only make out the brighter hues.
    “Oh.” He put the shuttles down. “Hey…!” He pushed
himself up to his knees.
     “In the Old Market,” his father said. He stood by the table,
beard all under-lit, his arms still bent with the ghost of their gift. “I
don’t know whether they’re colors you want. But I figured, you
could use them. For something.” He reached up to pull his ear.
“Some of that stuff is expensive, you know?” Now he picked up
one and another of the skeins, frowning. “I just thought…”
      Pheron stood, his back stiff, his thighs aching from crouching
so long on the floor. “Thanks…” He tried to think of something
else to say. “You want something to eat? I’ll stop and fix some—”
     “No,” his father said. “No, I ate. You fix for yourself if you
want. Not me. I got something while I was out.”
     His father, Pheron realized, was slightly drunk.
     “Is this stuff something you can use? You like it?”
     “Yeah,” Pheron said. “Yes. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
     “You go on,” his father said. “You go on working. I just
thought you might like, might use… some of these.”
     “No,” Pheron said. “I’ll stop for a little.” Then he asked,
because there just didn’t seem any way not to: “Did you find a
woman?”
     His father pretended not to have heard.
     The two of them sat at the table together awhile.
     Some of the skeins had come undone.
      Several times his father buried the fingers of one hand in the
yarns to lift a tangle from the table in the lamplight, blinking
through the strands as if to determine the color in the inadequate
glow.
      His father said, finally: “I didn’t get a woman. I didn’t want
one. I got you this. See? Instead.”
     Pheron thought: This isn’t the kind of apology I wanted. I
wanted him to have his woman and I wanted him to say, too, “I
thought about it, Pheron, and I was wrong. I’m sorry. You’re my
son. And I want you to be my son any way you are. Any way. You
have your way. I have mine. But whoever you are, it’s fine with me.
Do you forgive me?” (How many times while he’d woven had he
rehearsed what his father should tell him?) But, as he leaned his
elbows on the table, he thought: That’s just not who he is. That’s
just not what he can give. And I’m too tired to ask for it, or
even—he realized after a while—to want it that much.
     Through raised strands, his father blinked. “What’s the matter
with you?” He put his tangled hand down.
     Sitting back on the bench. Pheron rubbed his wet eyes with
two forefingers which were growing rougher with each day at the
troughs. “Nothing.”
    “The moon’s out,” his father said. “You want to work, I
know. Take it up to the roof. So you don’t waste good oil.”
      “No,” he said. “I… Well—yeah. Maybe. All right.” He stood
up, looking at the dark yarn piled on the table. “Thanks for all this
stuff. Thanks.” He picked one of the skeins to take with him,
though he wasn’t sure what color it was.
     His father grunted.
     Pheron turned and picked up his handloom. Shuttles swung
and clicked. “You all right?” he asked.
     His father nodded. “Don’t stay up too long, though.”
     “I won’t,” Pheron said.
      Behind him, his father blew out first one, then the other lamp,
so that the only light came from the one still on the floor, below
the table.
     Pheron lay in the dark (seven years later), not thinking of his
father’s death three years before, but of this; and of squatting
before his handloom on the roof, moonlight bleaching the colors
from his design’s intricacies, while he wove on into night.


     7. A woman writes from the Northwest:
      “What really angers me about the AIDS business is that
women, we, find ourselves again in the position of helping men. Out
of the goodness of our hearts… Where were they when we were
fighting the health-care system because of what it routinely did to
women? Nowhere, that’s where… It pisses me off to find myself in
the Helpmeet Business again, especially since the whole situation is
so bad—the right wing screeching, ‘God hates gays!’—so that, in
all conscience, really, I can’t do anything but be appalled by the
disease itself and the homophobic capital being made out of it.
      “What we must do, politically, is make it clear that the bigotry
that sees AIDS as a sinner’s punishment (or merely assumes that
gay men’s lives are expendable or trivial or not important) is the
same bigotry that hates and fears women and wants to keep us in
our place, i.e., squashed. This is the same ideology that allows most
people, of both sexes and all sexual persuasions, to swallow a
government that is spending more and more billions on war toys
and lining somebody’s pockets thereby… I’m afraid that only the
usual radicals are making this connection (but they always made
it)…
       “Of course the epidemic is a terrible thing—and the
satisfaction with which so many Americans regard it as God’s
fulfillment of their own extremely disgusting system of values and
fantasies is worse. I HATE the antisexual use of AIDS even more
than its use against homosexuality per se. To be morally upset about
how other people take their sexual pleasures is surely the weirdest
human quirk ever. It is utterly silly, especially when one knows
nothing but myth anyway. (Here the usual voices come in, “But
violence—” Of course I don’t approve of rape or murder!)
     “People are biologically so constituted that they not only like
being sexually aroused and satisfied, but they tend to get antsy or
cranky when none or far too little of this is happening. This seems
to me quite simple and totally amoral.”


     7.1 Conferments in the High Council Chamber; conferments
before and after that in several lower ones.
     Discussions in the throne room. (In still another room
someone declared: “Oh, she will stamp her small foot, but Lord
Krodar will have his way.” No foot was stamped, however, and the
conference with the Child Empress Ynelgo lasted a third the time
the most sanguine courtier had predicted. Later, however, the
Empress called her aged vizerine to her to meet privately.) Details,
pronouncements, instructions made their way through the High
Court; messengers were dispatched—finally a messenger returned;
so that on a balmy morning in the month of the Ferret, Imperial
couriers shouted from every street corner—indeed, the
announcement was first made at dawn but was repeated
throughout the day and the city, both by proclamation and rumor,
till, that evening, few did not know it:
      “Her Royal Highness, the Child Empress Ynelgo, in a reign
both greathearted and gracious, has sent an Imperial deposition to
the very borders of her empire to confer with the man known to
the people as Gorgik the Liberator, with an invitation to come to
the capital, Kolhari, and assume the post of minister at the High
Court of Eagles, where he shall work with the empress and her
other ministers and employ his talents for the betterment of the
nation and the alleviation of the suffering of all classes, high and
low, slave and freeman.
     “He has consented.
     “In honor of this joyous occasion, a week of Carnival will
shortly be declared throughout Kolhari, at which time all
employers must cut their work to half-time for five days, so that no
one labors more than six hours consecutively, followed by an entire
day of leisure and license. The city and the nation will officially
celebrate with carnival the coming of the Liberator to the High
Court of Eagles!”


      7.11 And that, said the minister, should get their minds off
this unbearable plague!


      7.2 For several years she had traveled with her cart about the
land, telling stories—now in the great houses scattered over the
country, now in the markets of outlying cities, now to strangers
who stopped by her evening camp. Her rewards had been as varied
as her tales: sometimes food, lodging, and entertainment;
sometimes money; sometimes the simple satisfaction of a grin
from a young girl or a smile from an old man whom she had
brought to some affective understanding of the taking of joy or
sorrow or wonder. Sometimes it was introductions, verbal or
written, to other great houses, other markets, where there would be
more food, more money, more children and oldsters, and more
introductions.
     It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists, and
Nevèrÿon was not rare. Norema had suffered its abuse, but she had
come through it with a minimum of bitterness, a maximum of
goodwill, and a little money saved—with which, on returning to
Kolhari, she had rented a small room for a while, planning to relax,
recuperate, think.
      Recently a friend whom she’d found after long searching had
gone off again—this time probably for good. But then, after she’d
been in the city only three days, while walking in the Old Market of
the Spur, she’d run into another friend she’d thought lost to her
forever—a wealthy merchant woman who lived in her walled estate
in Sallese and for whom Norema had once worked as secretary
years before. The woman had welcomed her warmly and had been
materially helpful to her several times since, so that, once more, for
both better and worse, life had again gone against expectations.
      But the man who lived in the room beside her—talking to
him a few times when she’d first moved in, she’d decided she liked
him—was very ill. When she went out for her own water to the
cistern in the back, she had taken to filling one of the chipped jars
to bring back for him. Now and again she went in to help him
clean himself or to bring him food from the market.
    As the evening put bright copper along the edge of her
window, and the air outside fell into dark blue, in her room
Norema sat on the bench by the clay wall and thought—
      7.3 CMV, ASFV, HTLV, Hepatitis-B model, retroviruses,
LAV, the multiple agent theory, the “poppers” theory, the
double-virus theory, the genetic disposition theory (the eternal
Government Plot theory!), the two-population theory; and I just
learned today that the average person with AIDS is in his upper
thirties, rather than in his mid-twenties, as I’d thought—that is,
he’s much closer to my age than, say, to some of the more sexually
active people I know. To date (March 1984) there are 19 cases
under 20; 831 between 20 and 30; 1,762 between 30 and 40; 813
between 40 and 50; and 330 over 49, with another 19 cases where
the age is unknown.
      A hundred-fifty-eight of these are women; and because the
women with AIDS are, so insistently, both socially (most are IV
drug users and/or the sexual partners of men who are) and
statistically marginal, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they are
getting the truly shitty end of an already inhumanly shitty stick.
Should I change Toplin, Pheron, or Lord Vanar, then, to make
them more characteristic…?
     Should I modify them as to age, sex, or class to make them
even less so…?
     To tell any tale in such a situation is to have press in on you
the hundreds, the thousands (the most recent headline: GUESS
WHAT HITS FOUR THOUSAND?) you aren’t telling.
     I could write a small pamphlet on every one of the above
acronyms—as could, I guess, just about every nontechnophobe gay
male in New York City at this time.
      The CMV theory still makes good sense, but I put a lot of
hope in the two-population theory (a comparatively small,
vulnerable population, a comparatively large immune one) if only
to preserve sanity—though I am highly interested in the LAV work
(as is everyone this month—along with the “too good to be true”
Dapsone treatment for KS, with its entailed “variably acid-fast”
mycobacterium theory), as we wait for the release of a report by the
Atlanta CDC that’s expected later this month from the French
Institute Pasteur—officially confirming LAV as the agent—in
hopes that it will begin to consign this period to the past of
historical nightmare, from which we can start to shake ourselves
awake. It’s much the same sort of excitement, however, as we had
about ASFV six months ago.
     What was the old Chinese curse?
     “May you live in interesting times!”
     This kind of entry, incidentally, is just what makes a great
book like John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World all but
unreadable to a later generation.
     Still, no one will understand this period who does not gain
some insight into these acronyms and retrieve some understanding
of how they must obsess us today, as possible keys to life, the
possibility of living humanely, and death.


      7.4 It is not that easy to flee, Norema thought. When I was
younger, the world was a series of loud and foaming oceans. One
after the other, I launched out into each, with as much excitement
as fear. Today it is a sequence of badly tended fields, each to be
struggled across, the waves and the cities as difficult as the woods.
Someone ran by outside, banging a ceramic drum, shouting. The mention of
Carnival, and they act as if, finally and at last, they’ve trapped their
Liberator, hauled him back from what moment of flight, and fixed
him in one of their empty halls, like a beast or a prisoner chained in
some void cistern. Will he be strong enough to act from within
court walls, to make himself heard through the granite that, from
now on, surrounds him? Will he be able to thrust his arm through
the fog of protocol, tradition, habit, the very constitution of power
with which he now becomes one? Will he be powerful? What is
possible from within the paralyzing citadel? She looked about the
darkening room, at wooden statues by the fire, at ornamental jars on the table,
the parchments beside them on which she kept notes for her tales. Some were
piled at the corner, some—the most recent—were spread on the table itself.
What an array of aids to memory! There’s the small, glazed jar of
rinds and spices given me by that old dear in Ka’hesh. Open it in a
room where all real filth has been cleared away, and it will cleanse
the remaining mustiness from the air inside an hour. Opening it
here three months ago, pungently I recalled the giver. (Polished
bone rings on her earth-stained fingers…) Sitting on high rocks by
the sea, I inked my skins with notions for “The Tale of Time and
Pain”: Lean-masted ships sailed into the sun-shot harbor… among dark
bushes children muttered magical rhymes… that morning the Queen ordered the
captured slave-girl to dress herself as a count. That parchment’s on the
table now. Looking at it this morning, what did I recall? (What do I
recall I recalled…) Perhaps the question is: Who is the giver in
such situations? Myself? The sea? The rocks I sat on? Time? Or the
nameless god of language skills, who is at once so niggardly and so
profligate with the blessings she holds back from living song to
bestow on silent record?
      Twice as I roamed this country, I’ve been set on by bandits.
Both times I was lucky and escaped. (Both times they thought me a
smuggler.) Both times, when they found my cart contained nothing
of salable value, but rather the old marked-on skins where I work
out my tales, they let me go with only the most perfunctory threats.

      It happened once, and I moved on through the forest after it
in a transport of self-congratulation and gratitude. Six months later,
it happened again; this time when the scarred criminal who set
upon me recognized what I carried was writing, he became furious
as he pulled the vella out and threw them in the leaves, now ripping
this, now crumpling that. Indeed, he ruined many of them, while I
stanched all urge to plead with him that he cease, lest he think his
ravages did me more harm than they did, leading him on to destroy
systematically what he now ruined at random. When I finally got to
go on my way through the dappled wood, I was nowhere near as
joyful as before—and chose my routes more carefully.
      Another parchment there on the table bears the sentence I
wrote about the second of those two outrages, hoping at some
point to use it in a tale: “The peg shook in the distended lobe.”
How long have I spent looking at it, rereading it, rewriting it now
this way, now that. Should “distended” be there, or not? “… in the
lobe” hangs from the sentence’s end as the lobe of that rough
man’s ear hung from the curvital cartilage, as he stood above me
after he’d pushed me to the ground. “Distended,” then, distends
the phrase that gives the experience, miming it: two dancers make
two identical gestures in one dance. That doubling bespeaks the art
that belies the improvisatory quality of their practice. But we have
all seen those carved pegs such men thrust through their ears; we
know their forefinger thickness, their intricate scrimshaw. Perhaps,
then, I want the words to move against the experience, to tug in
tension with the reality, like a dancer moving away from himself in
a mirror. (Drop “distended” then…?) Certainly that’s no less artful.
But which verbal gesture do I want? Support or opposition? And
does Pheron ever weave and unweave at a single row as much?
     What to think about, instead of that man’s pain?
      Once, some weeks after his illness began, I sat in his room
and watched him weave three hours. I drank a tea, chatting with
him while he worked. Work, he says. Work is what makes him feel
human, those days at a time he can do it. Now, I’ve watched
women weave before. Did his slow, bright pattern bring it to mind,
then? As his shuttles went in and out and under, carrying color
over, dropping one hue beneath another, I thought: That is what I
do when I make a tale! Whatever god oversees the making of webs
and nets and fabrics must also oversee the construction of stories.
Oh, putting them together is so very different from the assemblage
of the words and phrases, the joining of hearsay to hoped-for by
which common workers and wastrels make up the speeches they
tell some laboring girl to aggrandize themselves in her blinking and
distracted eyes, speeches in which truths and lies trip over each
other the night long. More singing outside in the street broke up into
laughter. One woman began to sing again. When I was younger, there was
a plague in the islands. I will not rehearse what I lost there. They
dare this merriment here only because the illness is so limited—to
men, though I’ve heard otherwise, and, at least in the general mind,
to men like Pheron.
    But what must such laughter say when it rings beyond the
windows of those, women or men, who are sick to their death?
       When I was a child on my marginal island that I thought,
then, was the world, inland tribes sometimes held festive navens,
where everyone dressed up in everyone else’s clothes, the chief
hunters and the head wives pretending they were beggars and
outcasts, while the social pariahs were obeyed like queens and kings
for the day. Women pretended to be men; men dressed as women.
Parents made obeisance to their children, and children strutted like
adults. It was a wonderfully healing practice. In the midst of it life
itself became a wonder-studded tale with endless lessons for later
use woven through with delight. I am truly pleased at this carnival
time in Kolhari. Some go, rather, to a monstrous calling—not I. I
will walk out in the streets, singing among the festival’s celebrants.
     For the Liberator has come to Kolhari…
      Still, when I think of what those songs, that laughter must
mean to those who are excluded from it, I want to flee this city,
this country, this land ready to think of anything but the pain
within it. Only considering what lies on the other side of such
flight stops me. And when I consider, I imagine in place of my
personal exile, some text, a tale I might weave together, here, now,
in this room at the end of this Kolhari alley, a luminous fabric that
leaps from the loom of language for a monstrous, phthartic flight,
soaring, habromanic, glorious as song and happy as summer, till
finally it sinks into the savage and incicurable complexities of its
own telling, to be torn apart by what impelled it: angry criminals
fall to ravage a cartful of parchments.
     This will be a fine celebration.
     This will be a dark carnival.


      7.5 Historically the official reaction to plague in Europe was
the one described by Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722):
“The government… appointed public prayers and days of fasting
and humiliation, [and encouraged the more serious inhabitants] to
make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to
avert the dreadful judgment which hung over their heads… All the
plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court,
had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to
act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses,
which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people,
were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings,
merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such like-doings,
which had bewitched the people, shut up their shops, finding
indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with
other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat
upon the countenance even of the common people. Death was
before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their Grave, not
of mirth and diversion.”
      Defoe’s last few lines may betray that this is the official
interpretation of the response as well as the official proscription: if
there was, indeed, “no trade,” why would these merrymakings need
to be “forbid,” “shut-up,” and “suppressed”? At any rate, even in
Artaud’s conservative schema, once “official theater” is banished
during the plague, the reemergence, here and there, of spontaneous
theatrical gestures in the demoralized populace at large throughout
the city represents, for him, the birth of true and valid
art/theater/spectacle.
      Though not burdened with a modern theory of germs—not
obsessed with acronyms—Nevèrÿon certainly has some intuitive
knowledge of contagion. And despite (or because of) the
inhabitants’ suspicions of its officially sanctioned carnival and its
official invitation to the Liberator to take part in its cabinet, this
unusual response has opened a marginal space for a certain radical
gesture.
     Do I, however, know what it is?


      7.6 That morning Pheron sat at the table, sore at groin, back,
and flank, not thinking as much as possible between moments of
yearning after his workshop. But his walk to the end of the block
and back, which he’d been forcing himself to take (almost) every
morning, had again confirmed that he was not strong enough to go
the three quarters of a mile through the busy city and return.
       Where was the scamp who’d helped him out at the workshop
the week before the illness had forced him home? Not that he
expected to see him again. Oh, definitely a girl next time. No more
boys. Not in the shop at any rate. The girls appreciated his wit,
were impressed with the stream of (impressive) clients in and out,
fell in love with him a little, and worked dreadfully hard because of
it. With the boys, however, even the ugly awkward ones he’d
offered jobs only out of compassion, sure he could never feel
anything but pity for them, it was always he who began to fall a
little in love (or into too great a pity). He grew lax. They grew lazy.
No, definitely a girl—
     A chill moment caught him up as if a wind had come through
the window: because he was not getting better, he knew. He was
only teaching himself to live with the decayings, failings,
breakdowns in the body that marked an inexorable deterioration.
      Hung in a fringe across his window, yarns were black with the
sunlit blaze beyond.
     Somewhere outside a wagon stopped.
      Two of the three planks still leaned in the door frame, but the
leather curtain hung in front of them. When leather moved, he
thought it was Norema come with more water.
     Backed by sunlight, the figure swayed.
     Pheron sat up—not as quickly as he might—and blinked.
      The boy—it was a boy’s voice and a boy’s body outlined by
the sun—put his hand on the side of the door and leaned.
     Further out in the sunlight stood an older man. His brocaded
robe suggested that he was a lord. There were others as well—
    The boy said: “Excuse me. You’re Pheron, the dyer and
weaver?”
     Pheron nodded.
     “You are very sick…?”
     Pheron squinted.
     “So am I,” the boy said. “I… so are we. My name is Toplin.
I’m a student from one of the acadamies near Sallese. At least I
used to be before they sent me back to my mother’s. And this is
Lord Vanar, with me. May we come in and talk with you?”
      “I’m not very…” Pheron began. Then he said: “Yes. Please.
Please, come inside! Sit on something—yes, there. Please…”


      8. There was another hustler, twenty-four or twenty-five and
maybe six-foot-three, very thin, very blond (very curly), who’d also
had his top teeth knocked out at one time or another, so that when
he smiled, his canine fangs hung either side of his grin. Like Joey,
he lived on the street and used to sit on the stoop next to the
drycleaners or hang out with his hands in his pockets in front of
the comic-book store, sometimes asking you to go into some
grocery and purchase something for him if he gave you the
money—beer, a sandwich—as he was (like Joey) usually too dirty
and too disheveled to get served.
     Sometimes I used to tease Joey: “You have to work hard
when you’re out here, man. You think you’re the only toothless
junky hustling? Your competition’s right over there.”
     Toward the end of last July, about ten o’clock one hot
morning, as I was coming up Eighth Avenue I saw Joey wandering
down the street. Fingertips under the waist of his shorts and
wearing a grubby maroon tank-top, he came over to me: “Hey,
Chip, is there any way you can get me a room somewhere? I really
don’t wanna be sleepin’ on the street for a while!”
      Occasionally I’d given Joey a few dollars. On his more
presentable days, I’d take him into the Fiesta for a beer. In the first
few months I’d known him, when a cold snap got me worried
about him, I’d rented him a cheap room for a week. But such needs
as his are endless, and to remain friends with him, I’d known from
the first I would have to disentangle myself from his
survival—which, for a couple of years now I had. “I can’t spend
that kind of money,” I told him.
     “Please,” he said. “It’s really weird out here.”
     “What’s weird?” I asked.
    “You remember that kid you always used to say was my
‘competition’? The other one with no teeth?”
     “Yeah, what about him?”
     “He got killed.”
     I looked surprised.
     “Last night. And he’s the fifth!”
     “What in the world happened?”
     “Oh, man,” Joey said, “It’s been crazy out here for the past
few weeks. You ain’t been down here. But some guy’s running
around the streets at night killin’ people. And it’s gruesome, too.
When they’re asleep, in doorways and places. About three weeks
back one night—” we walked past the comic-book store and the
boarded-up windows of the old Haymarket, along that stretch
called by only a very few people, for reasons I’ve never learned, the
Minnesota Strip; in this neighborhood, most of the stores and
shops that are going to open up, are open by now. The others are
permanently shut—“I went over by the waterfront to shoot up, by
the tracks under the bridge, where there’s this big garbage pile; and
while I was going under there, I smelled something, man. You ever
smell a dead body? I mean, after it’s been there a few days. In heat
like we’ve been having too.”
     “Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
     “Well, that’s what it was. I didn’t even take my works out. I
mean over there. Then. I just got out. I didn’t want to even see it,
you know?”
     “You didn’t report it?”
      “Naw. But two days later, I heard they found it. Some girl got
cut up and dumped over the bridge, right on top of the garbage
pile. But the same night I went under there, a guy got sliced open
down on Thirty-eighth Street, sleepin’ in a doorway. We all heard
about that one the next day. Then, a few nights later, two kids got
killed, a boy and a girl together. They were sleepin’ with their
knapsacks under some steps. He left a note on them: ‘Death to the
Street People!’ But he doesn’t just kill ‘em, man! He really cuts ‘em
up! That why they think it’s all the same person doing it. The guy I
told you about—my ‘competition’—that got killed last night? It
was right around on Forty-sixth Street, over there. Right near to
that restaurant where all them young actors go.” He thumbed
toward Restaurant Row. “Him and his partner went over there to
sleep under the steps. About four o’clock in the morning, his
partner woke up and said he was goin’ for some breakfast. The
toothless kid said he was gonna stay there and sleep, you know?
And an hour later, his partner come back—and the kid’s stabbed to
death. And hacked up, too. His nuts were cut off. And his stomach
was split open and his heart was pulled out! But that’s the kind of
stuff this weirdo’s been doing. People all up and down here are
scared to go to sleep!”
     “Jesus!” I said.
     “The others were like that too,” Joey said. “Can you imagine,
doing something like that to someone?”
    “That’s a pretty messy thing to do,” I said. “How do you get
home through the streets after you’ve done something like that?”
      Joey shrugged. “Well, he’s done it five times now—if the first
girl was done by the same person. She was cut up pretty bad, but
not quite as bad as the others.”
      A few minutes later, after Joey had wandered off somewhere
else, I walked across Forty-sixth Street. A section had been roped
off along the south side. A few policemen still stood around. The
remains had been removed, but apparently the forensic crew hadn’t
yet (or had just) finished.


     8.1 The conversations were muted in the high council room:
     “… not what we were prepared for, with this Carnival…”
     “… I am afraid so, yes, that every sedition…”
    “… certainly in the streets, but I have heard that beneath
them…”
     People left the room, with sweeping robes. Others entered
and swept by still others bending to clean and straighten up after
the meeting.
   Near the door to the antechamber, a minister approached a
woman in a white dress, her dark hair cornrowed severely over her
head. He moved his hand toward her arm, not quite touching her; it
was only because she chose to glance at him that he actually spoke.
      “The Liberator is coming; yes, this we’ve all agreed to, Your
Highness,” the minister said softly in unaccustomed agitation. “But
are you aware that certain elements come, not with him, but no
doubt because of him. Certain subversive and dangerous elements
have arrived to exploit the days of merry-making entirely in terms
of this accursed plague that the carnival you have declared and the
man it honors was called precisely to distract them from. How
does one say this to such a noble presence as yourself? But our
customs inspectors have found a wealth of magic fetishes being
smuggled into the city of late—and rumors of a terrible Wizard
descend upon us; oh, and in one cart of contraband, when the
tooled-leather cover was pulled back, what was there but a
miniature model in exquisite detail of Kolhari herself, with all her
avenues and alleys, her secret sinks and cisterns, from the Spur
unto the High Court—like some hugely outsized garden
maintenance maquette! This is not right. There is rumor that a
woman cooked a two-headed goat and sold it for barbecue from a
cart in the Old Market, that bloodred ships have drawn up to the
old docks along the port where the fog refuses to leave the streets,
and that certain children with green eyes and coppery hair have
added strangely improvised nonsense names to their gaming chants
as they play ball by the cisterns of the inner city: names that make
even the wisest of our sages, who pass them in the sunlight,
suddenly chill from their unspeakable implications. We do not talk
of this in the council, Your Highness. But are you aware that these
unmentionable things are all anyone mentions—and with grave
trepidiation—going to and from it?”
      To which the Child Empress, who was soon to be forty-seven
and had her own annual carnival in the month of the Rat, when her
birthday was combined with the anniversary of her ascension for a
similar week of celebration during the winter days of short-light,
answered crisply. “Yes. I am aware of all things in my land,” and
started ahead to join her maids and servants, who turned to her
now in a flurry of forehead knocking, with lowered faces and raised
fists, ready to depart for the royal suite.
      Before she joined them, however, she turned back. “Have you
heard, as I have, that there are plans and plots afoot in the city to
call up the old named gods and ancient powers: Hellwart, Gauine,
The Thrine Sejcenning; Oning har’Jotheet, the Amnewor, and
Ropig Crigsbeny; possibly even Dliaballoha, and Doonic
Yenednis…?”
      The minister’s silence went out to all corners of the room like
cords from some tangled knot at the center; here and there a
servant or another minister glanced over. Yet it did not rope in the
entire space, for the conversations and motions that halted here
and there began again at other places. The minister drew up his
arms within the long sleeves of his robe, and said at last: “Your
Highness is well aware that these names have not been spoken
within the walls of court since—”
       “—since eternity’s dawn, when the nameless god of count and
accounting sorted the night into her left hand and day into her right
and began to juggle the two.” The empress did not smile. “They
have not been mentioned within these walls since I came to live
among them, Lord Krodar. And as they were not gods local to this
part of the country, they have never been mentioned much
outside.” She paused a moment, lifting her hand to touch her low
collar. “Or were Dliaballoha, Gauine, or the Amnewor, some of
the ‘nonsense names’ that the children have been gaming with?
You know, when I was a very little girl, before I came here, those
names would terrify me. Then, when I arrived in the north, to be
given a whole new gallery of nameless gods and the promise that
they would protect us from those awful, ancient demons, I was
terrified all over again. Do the old or the new gods terrify you
now?” Suddenly she smiled and took the minister’s arm. “Look
about you, Lord Krodar. Suppose I had mentioned these same evil
entities ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, toward the beginning of my
reign. The whole room would have dropped into a stunned
paralysis as palpable as the stone walls themselves. But look.
Listen. Many of these around us now were born here. They live in
precisely the world we once hoped to create: a world where such
gods as once terrorized a third the nation now sound, indeed, as
silly as the nonsense children babble in the streets in time to their
ball bouncing. The nameless gods have created a barrier of silence
that has imprisoned these malignant and alien deities and demons
till their callings have been stripped of terror.” She looked at the
floor, considering. “We feel, Lord Krodar, that we can indulge a
certain flexibility—indeed, must indulge it, if our reign is not to be
fragile and friable. I have been conferring with my good vizerine.
She reminded me that my grandfather’s mother—her own
great-great-grandaunt, you no doubt recall—whose reputation is
glorious in the south and somewhat… awkward in the north,
nevertheless put the northern dragons under her Imperial
protection, to the glory of Ellamon. I think that we in Kolhari can
afford to have a similar attitude to these ancient and endangered
monsters. Who knows. It may even win for us a similar glory. At
least in carnival time.”


      8.2 A friend since my high-school days, Queenie works the
night shift as a registrar in the emergency room at a better New
York hospital. She called me up for a breakfast date, and in a
Columbus Avenue coffee shop with tile-top tables and aspiring
actors for waiters, we ate overpriced fruit cup, toasted bagels, and
drank cinnamon shot coffee: “Chip, I see one, two, sometimes
three AIDS cases come in to the emergency room a night! I read
somewhere that for the whole city they’re coming in at the rate of
five or six a week, but we get more than that during the night shifts
where I am. Maybe that means it’s going up—Right now, I’m
about at the point where I can look at somebody across the desk
and tell if he’s got it—I mean, you’re very sick, and you’re not
pretty. Like I said, this is the night shift in the emergency room in a
hospital that doesn’t have that big an emergency service. And
someone who suspected that that’s what they had would probably
go down to St. Vincent’s anyway, where they have that special
AIDS clinic. It’s very scary. And I’m worried. About you.”
      I reassured her I’d put some sharp curtailments on sex
outside my main relationship. (When sex is as available as it is in
New York, monogamous gay relationships tend to be the
exception.) “The problem,” I told her, as we went on looking for a
waiter, which we’d both been doing almost ten minutes, “is that
since they still haven’t discovered what virus it is yet, there’s no way
to be sure of the incubation period. People are theorizing up to
thirty-six months. I’ve been being very careful since February of
eighty-two.” (This was spring of eighty-three.) “But how am I
supposed to know what I was doing three years ago, if I should
come down with it?”


      8.21 Personal knowledge of deaths from AIDS? Well, I note
that six months after Peter came to talk with us at my house, when
he said he personally knew no one with AIDS, other than the men
he worked with on a volunteer basis, he now reports than an
ex-therapist of his has since gotten AIDS and died. (I saw the
obituary myself a week later in the Native.) This is tax
month—which is how he found out last week that his accountant
had died from AIDS only a week before.
     He, a solid African black, she, an East Indian brown, the
couple who run the print shop where I get most of my manuscript
copying done told me a few months ago of a recent death from
AIDS in the neighborhood—the owner of a local boutique I often
passed, also a regular customer of theirs. Then, in letters, a San
Francisco friend tells me of her landlord with KS (Kaposi’s
Sarcoma), and AIDS opportunistic disease.
    The closest I get, I suppose, is George Harrison, Jr., who, for
some years, I knew only as “Hibiscus.”
      In 1967, when WBAI’s “Mind’s Eye Theater” produced my
radio play, “The Star Pit,” George’s then fifteen-year-old younger
brother was in the cast, with the double role of Ratlit/An—though
I didn’t make the connection till some years later.
       Around the beginning of 1970, as I entered my second year in
San Francisco, Link brought news that the new commune he was
living in had a number of fascinating people, including Hibiscus
and Scrumbley. Their interest was theatrical: flamboyant, colorful,
energetic—eclectic? No, that suggests a careful and measured
choosing here and there. They were inclusive and accepting, rather:
it was not that they would take from anything. They would take
everything, then transform it into rampant, lively theater.
     The group was called the Cockettes.
      Some of their shows I saw, between San Francisco and New
York: “Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz,” “Pearls over Shanghai,”
“Babes on Broadway.” On the stage of the sprawling San Francisco
movie house where they did their early shows, one night when the
audience was still mumbling to itself and wandering about in the
aisles, a scrawny young man dressed in a white slip, with a maroon
stole about his shoulders and collapsing basketball sneakers
showing beneath his hem, climbed unsteadily up on a gold drum,
lit a Fourth of July sparkler, and held it aloft like the lady at the
heads-out end of how many Columbia Pictures.
      The audience went wild—and, from that moment on, so did
the show, which flamed and flaunted itself over the next few hours,
ribald and energetic as a gaggle of baby tigers.
     “Whose idea was that wonderful Columbia colophon?” I
asked Link, later.
     “Hibiscus’s.”
     The only thing I know of that still remains of the Cockettes is
a rather sickly, sixteen-millimeter color film, Trisha’s Wedding, a
spoof on the nuptials of the daughter of our then president, with
some heavy-handed commentary on the Vietnam War. (In it, Link
makes a brief appearance as the reactionary Madame Nhu of South
Vietnam, who, through a barrage of pointed political questions, has
“Nothing to say.”) The Cockettes were a mad and marvelously
integrated improvisatory ensemble, full of beards and bangles.
Their aftertaste was, oddly, somewhat similar to that of the far
more austere and low-key, khaki and denim dancers of the Grand
Union Construction Company, that sublime collection of serious
artists who did so much to make New York livable, if not lovable,
a few years later. Trisha’s Wedding is a series of talking heads in
drag—and is, as such, in its basic effect, almost the opposite of the
company’s hot, noisy—now and again stalling on long, hysterically
awkward silences and stases—panache. Hacker’s poem, “Imaginary
Translation III” (Presentation Piece, Viking, 1974, p. 73) gives a
somewhat stylized account of a Cockettes’ performance. Rex Reed,
who came to one San Francisco show with—at least it was
rumored that night through the audience—Truman Capote,
published an article on the evening that did a surprisingly good job
of capturing the flavor, if not the intensity, of their carnivalesque
shenanigans.
      I met Hibiscus once (on some North Beach street?), with
Link and Scrumbley, who introduced me: a hefty, blond, bearded
St. Sebastian in his mid-twenties, he wore a blue robe, a gold collar,
and half a dozen daisies in his hair. His voice, when he spoke, was
just a little higher than I expected it to be.
     But by the time I’d decided that Hibiscus, one of the originary
masterminds behind the group, was a true theatrical genius, he had
abandoned the Cockettes as too commercial and, frankly, no longer
fun.
     I came back to New York and moved into the Albert Hotel
on West Tenth Street. A year or so later, so did the
Cockettes—taking over most of the eighth floor, so that now the
whole hotel, always colorful, for years a haven for rock groups,
ragamuffins, and the generally outrageous, stumbled up new crags
of chaos, with invasions of Hell’s Angels and admiring
cross-dressers from several states—Divine’s and Holly
Woodlawn’s visits were the talk of a month—and student leaders
of Gay Liberation university groups from Jersey trooping through
all day. I came down from my tenth floor room to visit Link (now
playing Madame Gin Sling in “Pearls over Shanghai”) in their suite
a few times, said hello to Scrumbley, took Link and his visiting
brother out to dinner at the Cedar Tavern across University Place
from the hotel.
      Over Rose Marie’s Hand Laundry within the high walls of the
Albert (where Abraham Lincoln had slept the night before he
delivered his Cooper Union Address), again and again I found
myself sharing the elevator with one or another six-foot-two,
football shouldered, teak-black prostitutes in miniskirts, with
mouths red as a Christmas ornament, some of whom, an operation
or so ago, had been men; and some of whom had not. During that
period I lost what till then I’d often suspected was genetically
ineradicable in the human brain (after all, it might have been a
species survival factor…): I stopped wondering what the sex of the
person standing next to me had once been. Saturday and Sunday
mornings—after Friday and Saturday nights—the same elevator’s
floor would be awash in urine, on which floated handfuls of glitter.
And once, on the elevator wall, someone wrote in lipstick:


                         For Good HEAD
                        Do NOT call Patti:
                             515-4136
                           I Am TIRED!


      The feel in the theatrical suite was colorful but, usually (like
Patti), tired after the energy output of their performances.
      For nightly, over at the old Anderson Theater on Second
Avenue, in a series of spectacularly uneven shows, the Cockettes
galvanized all in the city who could be galvanized. (I must have seen
them four times and dragged by how many friends…?) The Voice
started by panning them and returned, a week later, for a measured
rave.
     Yes, it was a strenuous, aleatory art that required an
education.
     But for years, deep among my inner organs, I was certain you
couldn’t really know what art was unless you’d seen frail, tone-deaf
Johnny, the eponymous hero of “Babes,” with his blond beard,
green eye-shadow, and silver lamé gown, belt out “Lullaby of
Broadway,” one and a quarter tones off-key and an inconstant beat
and a half ahead of, or behind, the accompaniment, while the
audience cheered and stomped and applauded, till, crying real tears,
he would call out, “Oh, I didn’t know it was going to be like this!
Thank you! Thank you, New York. Thank you all!” blowing kisses
and throwing glitter at the front rows, while the rest of the cast
pell-melled from the wings for a thunderous finale: “I’ll Build a
Stairway to Paradise,” inspired, no doubt, by the closing of Part
One of Camp Concentration—certainly through Link (writer of a
good bit of the material), always a great Disch enthusiast.
     The Jewel Box Review—while it had its own magic—was
never like this!
      It was an aesthetic experience that gave the illusion, at least
for a night, of being all form, yet devoid of content—specifically all
the forms of seduction, while wholly and refreshingly empty of
seduction’s matter, i.e., those moments or minutes of aesthetic
production that manage to maintain, through practiced skill or
artless intensity, the illusion that form and content are, indeed, one.

     Content, of course, must have some form. And form, of
course, creates its content/commentary. This is why their chimeras
have chased each other through moment after moment of history,
the intense perception of one or the other producing the
overwhelming effect: Art.
     But by now, no longer with them, Hibiscus was starting
another, equally innovative, group here in New York, The Angels
of Light.
      If Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are heirs to Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk, with its high seriousness and darkened auditoria,
then Hibiscus and his communal theaters represent all that stood
against the Wagnerian—all that was truly Dionysiac in the modern
that leads to the postmodern. (There were a couple of early San
Francisco performances where the houselights never did go
down—presumably because no one was sure how to work them.
But Hibiscus’s backstage, “Go on, anyway. Now!” transformed that
from a technical disaster into a field of light where art could be
observed the more carefully.) With Charles Ludlum before him and
Ethyl Eichenberger after, certainly he was not alone. But then,
community is what that kind of classical self-assurance and
dispassion is always about, anyway. We all have our personal
pantheons—there are no canons anymore. Well, along with María
Irene Fornes and Judith Malina, Hibiscus was a resident director in
the Great Delany Utopia Ltd. Theater of the Mind.
      Two years ago, the death from AIDS of the man whose hand
I shook once on a San Francisco Street—George Harrison,
Jr./Hibiscus—was reported in the Village Voice. Indeed, till that
particular article, all I’d read of was KS, the “gay cancer,” and it
was only with the report of Harrison’s death that I saw for the first
time mention of the more general problem of opportunistic
infections (Harrison died of pneumocystis carinii pneumonia) and
the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome of which they all were
revealed to be a part.


     8.3 “… said that the Liberator had almost reached—”
     Nari heard him stop and felt the clay wall’s evening chill
under her palm. She looked from the black window to her fingers
on the wall in dim red. “Zadyuk…?” She glanced back. “Are we
going to go?”
      He sat on the edge of the bed frame, leaning on his knees,
fists hung between. “You don’t mean the carnival, do you?”
      “You’ve heard them talking.” She turned from the wall. “You
have heard them, haven’t you?”
       “Who hasn’t.” He looked up. “Nari, it sounds… I don’t think
it’s right—”
     “It’s supposed to be for anyone with a loved one or a relative
who’s sick.”
     “Pheron’s not a relative.”
     “Oh, Zadyuk…!”
      He turned on the bed, drawing both feet up to face away, his
back curved toward her, flat and detailless before the lamp’s red
fire from the table corner. She looked for the mole just below his
right shoulder blade and the three small freckles scattered high on
his left. (They were so familiar to her. But did he know they were
ever there?) Vertebrae, blades, muscle, and the troughs between
were all flattened under a blood-colored glow. Zadyuk said: “I
don’t even know where it’s supposed to be.”
     “I heard from two of the old women who work in the yard
next to mine that,” and she stepped around the table, “it’s
somewhere in the Spur—”
     “Well, I’d heard that. I meant where in the Spur.”
     “They said there’s a tavern.” Standing before the lamp, her
shadow darkened Zadyuk’s back and the bed he sat on. “Under it,
an old cellar’s been dug out. Some ancient crypt, I think, that used
to be used for… well, I didn’t really understand that part. But so
many people are going—so many people are sick—we’ll find out
how to get there by the time the carnival starts tomorrow. Someone
will tell us. And I want to go, Zadyuk.”
      A man shrieked outside, followed by laughter—with four or
five other laughs joining. Clear light moved below their window.
(Zadyuk and Nari both looked back.) Yellow swung under the
ceiling’s thatch. Someone was passing below, holding high an
expensive brand whose butter-white flame bleached the red about
them to pink, before the deeper maroon refilled the room.
     When Nari looked back, Zadyuk had gotten up to stand
beside her. He blinked down at her with eyes a little too close-set
for his heavy features (but, she always said, she liked it), then
turned to lift the lamp. “We’ll go. If we can find out where.” He
blew it out. “And we will.”
      She reached for him in the dark, again, to be, as she had been
for years now, surprised by his body’s sheer size. She felt him set
the clay lamp back on the table. His arms went round her.


     8.4 A few weeks back, before going off to the laundry, Nari
had put out some apricots, pears, plums, and peaches on the stone
slab up on the roof, which the sun had already shriveled to a tart,
chewy sweetness. With the skin behind his ears still chill from the
cold water he’d splashed on his face at the roof trough, and
gnawing around a pit, Zadyuk stepped out on a street the color of
drab pear and, where the sun between the buildings across from
him hit the wall, dusty apricot.
      The little girl wandering down the dawnward alley was fat, no
more than five, and naked. She carried a stick like a staff. Someone
had taken a cat’s skull, run the shaft in the neck hole and out one
eye, whipping the yellowed bone to the upper end with half a dozen
loops of leather.
      At first he thought she was wearing a mask over her eyes, but
it was only a smear of charcoal or makeup.
       She looked odd and infinitely cute. As he grinned at her, the
notion seized him. “You’re going to the Carnival today?” he called.
“Wait a minute. I have something for you. Just a moment—” He
ducked back in the door, noticing that she hadn’t stopped at his
call, though her morning amble had no particular dispatch.
     Less than a minute later, he was back out the door, more
dried fruit in one hand and holding a piece of cloth in the other.
     She was still there. As he came across the street, she planted
her cat-skull staff in the dust and stopped, looking up at him with
dark and dark-banded eyes.
     “Here.” Zadyuk squatted before her. “These are for you. You
can take them to the carnival.” His hand was full of prunes and
dried peaches.
      From a thong around her neck, an astrolabe hung against her
round, brown chest. She was holding three toy balls against her
stomach with her other hand. She and Zadyuk looked back and
forth between the fruit he held out and the toys she clutched, both
realizing that she couldn’t possibly take them without abandoning
the balls or the staff. She said at last, nodding toward the fruit:
“Well, I don’t like those anyway. I’m not going to the Carnival.”
      “Oh,” Zadyuk said. “And… what about this?” He held out
the cloth.
     It was a black-and-orange remnant Pheron had decided he
was going to throw away, when Nari had rescued it—only to
decide herself that she thoroughly disliked it and could think of no
use for it.
      “I’ll tie it around your shoulders, like a cape. Would you like
that?” He stuffed the fruit into the leather sack at his own waist.
“For Carnival. Really, it’s very you,” which was what Pheron always
said when he brought him or Nari some little bit of this and that.
     After sucking her lower lip through half a minute’s
deliberation (while Zadyuk wondered if he should be squatting
here so long), she said: “All right. But I’m not going to the carnival.
I’m going to the Calling of the Amnewor.”
      Half a dozen loose cords hung off the swatch. Zadyuk flipped
it over her head while she ducked, blinking made-up eyes. Reaching
beside her staff, he caught up one cord, pulled it loosely around her
shoulder, and knotted it to another. “There.” He stood—
      And a surprising cramp knotted his right calf. Pain pulsed
hard enough to make him blink. He grunted but kept his smile.
(How, he wondered wildly, do you explain to a strange child you’ve
just given a present to that, inexplicably, you are now in crippling
agony…?) With it came a sudden fancy: whatever entity she’d
named was actually an ancient demon from before the reign of the
nameless gods, and her pronouncement of it had brought this
cramp down on him. (How idiotic! Zadyuk thought.) The air
flickered before his eyes.
      The little girl said: “You’re a barbarian, aren’t you?”
     “Yes…” The pain peaked, then slipped away. Zadyuk stepped
uneasily from one foot to the other.
      “Are you Kudyuk?”
      “Kudyuk’s my brother,” he said. “No, I’m not.”
     “You’re going to like the carnival,” the girl said, nodding. “My
father says the barbarians like Carnivals more than anything.”
      “Oh,” Zadyuk said, “well I’m not—” at which point the
sunlight falling on the back of his neck made him sneeze,
obliterating his: going to the carnival either. Still sore, his leg throbbed
again.
      The little girl blinked.
      “—you’ll like it too,” he managed to say.
      Then he turned and walked off along the street, feeling
extraordinarily silly. Overwhelmingly he wanted to turn back and
ask her, where it was she’d said she was going? (Surely that was not
to risk another cramp, or sneeze…?) But he had to check his stall,
then stop by the Crescent Alley to see if Pheron’s workshop were
tightly secured. Carnival time always created more than enough
mischief.
      On his way back he would stop by Pheron’s room, see how he
was, if he needed anything, talk with him a bit if he was up for it.
(Pheron had had one of his looms brought to his room. Sitting
with him, watching him thrust the shuttle through quivering strings
from shadow into sunlight, Zadyuk had thought: it’s as if his
thinned arms and narrow back have become, for me, work itself.
What has been pared away by the illness is all that’s in excess of
labor. Why do I have this feeling so much less when I watch Nari
lug wet cloth to lob it over the cart rail, or when I see my own stall
porter drag in hide bales by the twisted yellow vines? Why does it
vanish when I put knife or needle to leather?) He would leave
Pheron the dried fruit.
    But he was not going to tell him about the Calling of the…
whatever-it-was.


      8.5 “… you do not read Nabokov as a document of the
times,” writes Dillard on page 31 of Living by Fiction. I just wonder
how she read the first third of Lolita, Pnin, or the “Introduction” in
Pale Fire. The Nevèrÿon series is, from first tale to last, a document
of our times, thank you very much. And a carefully prepared one,
too.
     So.
     Some documentation on Joey:


     8.51 Last summer while we stood together talking, leaning
against the wall of McHale’s, next to the Fiesta, a heavy black
woman came past in a black coat with sequins. She held the hand
of a six- or seven-year-old girl in a pink dress, her rough hair
pigtailed and beribboned all over her head. They looked like a
mother and daughter going to church in Harlem thirty years before.
(I wondered if they had anything to do with any of the Broadway
theaters down the block.) The little girl pointed at Joey and looked
at her mother: “Momma, that’s Jesus Christ…?”
     The woman smiled, embarrassed. They passed on.
     Joey turned to me and gave me a big, disgusted grin. “Man,
that happens to me a lot! What is it, they all think Jesus Christ
looked like some toothless junky?”
      Once Joey volunteered to help put a roof on a church nearby
that aided local indigents; in Joey’s case, they paid him with food
and let him sleep on a cot in the basement. For much of that
summer, every time I’d see him, he would complain about the
money he’d have made if he’d done the work at standard
carpenter’s wages. “That was a two-thousand-dollar roofing job.
Two thousand dollars I could’ve got. But not me, man! Not fuckin’
Jesus Christ!”


     8.52 Another time he told me: “This guy takes me home with
him—he’s forty-one. After we make it together, he takes me in the
bathroom with him and tells me to look in the mirror with him.
‘Look at yourself,’ he says. ‘You’re thirty, and you look older than I
do. You look sixty.’ I don’t look like no fuckin’ sixty, do I?”
       Joey was thirty in July of ‘83. (I was forty-one that April!)
Whether he looks older than I do has never really struck me before.
But there is certainly an ageless quality to his bony face that doesn’t
fix itself easily to any year.
     8.53 This happened, as far as I can figure, about thirteen
hundred cases of AIDS ago (when the total was just under three
thousand): I was sitting in the Fiesta with Luis.
      Joey’s white-and-black checked wool hunting shirt lay over
the bar beside us. Joey had just ducked out to run after somebody
for something and was supposed to be back in a minute.
      Luis is twenty-three, thin, hard, and rough looking. He’s half
Irish and half Puerto Rican, with a story enough like Joey’s not to
have to repeat it in detail: hustling, drugs, a wife a couple of years
older than he is, somewhere in Brooklyn, who kicked him out
permanently about a year and a half back, and a kid. Luis is also
missing a handful of teeth, but he has a bridge, which, from time to
time, he flips loose with his tongue and plays with in his mouth.
Over the couple of years I’ve known him, he’s been Joey’s ‘partner’
about half that time. They trade johns, share drugs, hang out with
each other. I once asked him: “You two ever make it together?”
Luis shrugged: “I wouldn’t mind. But Joey don’t wanna. He’s got
rules or something about that.” They’re still fairly protective of
each other. Of course the other half of the time they’re on the outs,
speaking guardedly to one another, with tales to me and everyone
else about how one or the other of them tried to do the other one
in. To an outsider these changes, which may start from either one,
seem eccentric and unpredictable. While we sat there, waiting for
Joey to get back, I asked Luis: “Are you two worried about AIDS?
I mean, after all, both of you guys are working men.” (‘Working
men’ and ‘working women’—interestingly, not ‘working girls’—are
euphamisms on the strip for hustlers and hookers.) “And I know
you been working pretty hard, here, recently, too.”
      “AIDS,” Luis says. “What’s that, now…? That’s where you
get real sick…?”
     “You really haven’t heard of it?” I asked.
     “Sure, I’ve heard of it. But I don’t know nobody who’s got it.”
     “You should ask Joey about it,” I said. Joey and I have talked
about it a couple of times in the bar.
      Luis ran his tongue under his upper lip, securing his bridge.
“Yeah, well… you know, Joey’s got a lot of other things to worry
about, right through here. I don’t think he’s eatin’ too well, you
know. Does he look too skinny to you?” He shrugged. “Maybe he’s
got it?” Then he grins at me. “Naw, he just don’t eat enough.”
     “Probably.” I nodded.
     “Hey, have you heard about all the murders…?”
      There seems, indeed, to be a whole level of gay activity in
New York that goes on as if nothing has happened. (Anecdotal
evidence: AIDS is an almost exclusively middle class disease…
Yeah, sure.) And yet, on this same level, it’s certainly thought
about. You get odd examples of it here and there. In a
pornographic movie house about a block from the bar, there used
to be a very active Hispanic midget, who, when he came up for air,
would walk down from the back balcony to sit on the steps and
chat with the queens who hung out there. We always used to say
hello. A few months ago he disappeared, and somehow I got it into
my head that he’d probably gotten AIDS. I made up my mind to
ask, and finally inquired of a slender black Dominican with whom
I’d often seen him talking and whose nickname, as far as I’d been
able to make it out from overheard conversations, was Uruguay:
“Say, whatever happened to Shorty?” Adjusting a knitted skullcap
above a gold-toothed smile, Uruguay had told me in a heavy
accent: “He in Peru, now. Shorty get scared of all this AIDS shit,
and take off, man!”
     Luis and I looked up as, in his tank top and shabby jeans, Joey
came back into the bar. “Okay, man,” Joey said to Luis. “You’re on
my shit list again…”
     “Huh?” Luis says. “What do you mean? Aw, come on!” He
looked at me, shaking his head. “Twenty minutes ago, I’m his best
friend! Now I ain’t no more.” Luis got off the barstool and, still
muttering, still shaking, wandered toward the door.
     Joey sat down and put his tattooed forearms over
white-and-black wool. “You know what I just found out that little
bastard done…?” And he began to tell me.


     8.54 “I may be a junky, but I ain’t no thief,” Joey says
frequently. “I ain’t been arrested for nothin’ since I was thirteen!”
This may be the single line I have heard from him more than any
other.
      He’s certainly never stolen or pilfered anything from
me—sometimes there may have been loose change lying around on
a table or the bar counter: whenever there is, he always says: “Come
on, put that away now. Later, when you can’t find it, I don’t want
you thinkin’ I run off with it!” and once, when my passport fell out
of my pocket (the most resalable of commodities on the strip), he
came running up to return it to me.
      For part of the first winter I knew him, he managed to get
down to Florida for a month. I hung out with him the day he did
his pretravel laundry and saw him off on the bus; when, a few
months later, I ran into him after he got back, he told me that while
he was down there he’d been arrested for “prostitution”: “I’m in a
peep show in Miami, and this guy comes over to me and says, ‘I’ll
give you twenty dollars to suck your dick.’ And I say, ‘Fuck, yeah!’
And his partner, right next to us, arrests me!” He laughs. “I wished
the fuck he had sucked on it. I can’t get a hard-on no more anyway,
you know? I even come soft—when I come at all. It’s the fuckin’
dope, man! Anyway, I thought: imagine, this fuckin’ cop’s gonna
suck on a soft dick for twenty bucks? He really should have! Served
him right!” He scratched his head as we walked together up the
street. “I knew he wasn’t no cocksucker when he asked me, you
know? I knew it! He didn’t look like no cocksucker. Shit! He looked
like a cop is what he looked like!” But, since recounting the
happening (over which he spent thirty days in jail), he’s gone back
to his “ain’t been arrested since I was thirteen” line.


      8.55 How can one make a recognizable pattern that isn’t a
document of its times? Take the limiting case of, say, Kostelanetz’s
visual fiction Modulations (Assembling Press: Brooklyn, 1975):
without any words, pictures, or even numbers, a geometrical
configuration of black hairlines and circles shifts by an element or
two from small yellow page to small yellow page. Even if you don’t
take from it the strong suggestion of, if not reference to, an urban
sensibility as clear as in any Mondrian painting, isn’t it a document?

      At a certain time a certain artist was interested in a certain
pattern. Knowing the certainty, the specificity, the complex
meanings associated with any of the three (the time, the artist, the
pattern), or the associations between them, is only a matter of
reading.
      That a moderately sophisticated reader of current
experimental work, not specifically familiar with Kostelanetz,
would nevertheless recognize Modulations as a product of the
‘seventies (and would be generally sure it was not a dadaist work of
the ‘twenties, say, when similar aesthetic questions were being
asked) only confirms that the pattern is overcoded, recognizable,
readable, historical.
      If all human production (aesthetic or otherwise) has its
documentary aspect (i.e., it can be associated, by a knowledgeable
reader, with a time and place), does this endanger its aesthetic
aspects per se? It is the richness of the pattern that is aesthetically at
stake. How many art histories does it take to make us understand
that reference (a use context) and historicity are not the same?


     8.56 To the direct question, “Do you think of yourself as
gay?” Luis answered:
      “I don’t know. I like women… at least I used to. I ain’t been
to bed with one in about two years, though. And I’ll tell you, I
don’t miss it. But I like men too. I mean, in the last few years I
been to bed with a whole lotta you guys, and I sure as hell like what
I’m doin’. There’s some people I wouldn’t want to find out about
it, though. I mean even people down here, some of ‘em. You out
sellin’ Valiums and j’s and pills and stuff around the corner on
Forty-second, and they don’t wanna hear about no cocksucker down
there. But, shit, man, it’s nice to suck a dick—especially when you’re
high! I mean, even if you don’t get off on it, sometimes it just
makes you feel better. Know what I mean?” (I nodded.) “I bet you
do!” Luis chuckled. “And it’s real nice to get sucked, huh?” He
nudged me with his arm. I laughed. He snorted and looked forward
again, shrugging. “So, I don’t know. Maybe I am. But I don’t even
think about it, you know…?”
      To the same question at another time, Joey answered: “Sure
I’m gay! I been gay since I was fuckin’ twelve years ago. I told you
that, before!”


      8.61 I don’t even feel like writing out the ugly incident from a
couple of days ago, the model for the opening of the section below.
It began in a movie theater, when some effeminate Puerto Ricans
sat down a few seats away from a (presumably) straight guy, a little
man with the muscles of a laborer and glasses (and a down jacket
over his lap), who suddenly decided to get abusive—well, since I
don’t feel like it, I’m not; other than to say that when it was over, I
felt pretty proud of Our Guys.


     8.62 The first morning of Carnival, some dozen tanners were
walking together out through the half torn-up Avenue of Refuse
Carters for their first six-hour day (rather than the usual ten) at the
troughs. One was singing in a high, falsetto voice, making
exaggerated mummerly movements to his friends. In an early
gesture to the festivities, two—one a barbarian, for there were
several tan and sandy southerners among the slim dark men—had
tied long colored cords around their heads whose ends, now and
again, they tossed back to catch a breeze (and whip at those
behind). The women of Able-Ani traditionally wore such cords
about their heads in festival times. Two at the back of the group
were talking intensely about that—or something else—as they
made their way around the heaps of dirt piled at the edges of the
excavations that obstacled the avenue.
      Ahead, a sudden scuffle: a little man with the muscles of a
laborer, a beer belly, thinning hair and weak eyes had brushed by
one of the tanners as he came along in the opposite direction.
“You!” He stepped away, swinging an angry arm. “Don’t touch me,
I say! Get away! I don’t want your lousy diseases! I don’t want one
of you gettin’ anywhere near me. You’re sick. You’re all sick. I don’t
want to catch any of your sicknesses. Don’t touch me!”
      Two of the tanners grunted and barked and mimed his hostile
gestures back; and two more stepped up when he stepped forward;
so, finally, he went on.
     The high voice took up its song again. But the laughter and
chatter that had turned around it all along the warm morning
avenue was gone.
     A dozen steps behind them, on her way to her yard (for
everyone in Kolhari it seemed had a double load of linen in
preparation for the festivities), Nari watched the little man lope
away. She felt the heat of embarrassment momentarily bloom in
her cheeks for the young men making their way ahead. As she
turned off the avenue down the alley toward the Khora’s bank, she
remembered something Pheron had told them one afternoon when
she and Zadyuk had gone to visit him with cheeses and pickled
eggs and spiced meats.
     “Now you know,” Pheron had said, leaning on the wall at the
edge of his roof, where sometimes he wove in the evening and
where today they had all brought their lunch, “how certain
professions have more than—how shall I put it—their share of
high voices and happy hands? Mummers, tanners, and those big,
hearty wagon drivers that roll into the markets from the country at
dawn—”
      “Now that’s not true!” Zadyuk had said, turning from the
cider jar, where he’d been deviling the cork at knife-point. “You’re
not going to tell me that all those great, burly men I see each
morning rolling and rattling by my stall are—”
      But Pheron closed his eyes and fluttered his hands above his
ears (making them look their “happiest”) dismissing protest.
“Anyhow—” He slid his fingers under the sash around his waist,
settling his weight on his other foot—“when I was a kid and I first
went to work at the tannery, my father took to saying to his friends,
to my friends, to me: ‘Now don’t think that every tanner you see is
like that. People shouldn’t just go around thinking that because
someone works in the troughs, he has to be one of those.’ And you
know I didn’t think anything about it at first. That was just my old
man; it was the best he could do. After all, he was right. There
were, indeed, two fellows out there, working with us in all that
stench, who I’m perfectly sure had never been to bed with a man in
their lives, who were quite mad after the women, and just as nice as
they could be to the rest of us. (Frankly, I used to wonder what
they were doing there!) Well, after my father and I had our little
set-to on the bridge, and it was all out, at some point I heard him
say it to someone again: ‘Just because some guy’s a tanner doesn’t
mean he has to be like that.’ So I said—oh, I was a dreadful snot
back then; I’m sure he just thought he was protecting me—but I
said: ‘Look. There are, indeed, two guys out there with us who are
(probably) not “like that.” But why are you always defending them?
You haven’t even met them. What about me?’” Pheron raised a
hand to slap his chest with widespread fingers. “And you know, he
didn’t say it any more.” He paused a moment under a sky as blue as
any he could weave. “I do miss him. And, yes, I will have some of
that, when you get the cork out.” He stepped from the wall. “Want
some help, Zad?”
      Along the alley a heavy young woman raised her hand and
grinned, somewhat deferentially, toward Nari: the most recently
hired among her barbarian washerwomen—no doubt why she was
the first at work this morning. Nari nodded back. Employer and
worker made their way together toward the unusual wooden door
in the gate of the laundry yard.


      8.7 With a shaved head and an ornate turquoise ring,
somewhat gaunt Ronald runs a somewhat sprawling, somewhat
foundering antique emporium with his rotund partner, Roy. On
summer evenings, if the Closed sign is out but there’re still people
inside, you can come in for a vodka martini and find various
neighborhood characters sitting around, talking, drinking. “Well, I
had to do something!” Ronald said to the gathering some time ago:
“something” turned out to be going for weekends to do volunteer
work at a hospital with an AIDS clinic. Now, sitting beside a bit of
Bayreuth kitsch mounted on an easel (a framed color print of
Wagner at his piano in an elegant music room, pausing a moment
with one hand on the keys, while a grayish cloud emerges from
under the raised lid, among whose billows the artist has suggested
swans, knights, ravens, gnomes, dragons, armed goddesees in
winged helmets, an undraped Venus in the pose of the de Milo, a
one-eyed wanderer, and the odd storm-tossed ship), Ronald reared
back in his rocker ($290.00 on a white gummed label stuck to the
arm): “Now I work with almost seventy-five AIDS patients.” (He
has not switched to the more cumbersome “people with AIDS.”)
“And every single one of them has mainlined regularly! Now have
you ever seen anything like that in print, in either Time or the New
York Native?”
     More anecdotal evidence.


     8.8 “You’re not going to the carnival,” Larla said, suddenly and
accusingly. “You’re going to that awful thing they’re holding down
in the Spur, aren’t you? I’ve heard you mumbling about it all
week.” She turned to snatch up a mug, a bowl, a cloth, all clutched
clumsily in her heavy arms. “You’re going to that—that Calling of
the… oh, I can’t even pronounce it!”
     The old woman stood in the middle of the kitchen, wrapped
in dark brown, while the kitchen girl bustled unhappily about her.
She said: “The Amnewor. Yes, I’m going.”
      “That’s just terrible,” Larla said, moving here, there, picking
up that, putting down this. “That’s horrible. That’s no decent sort
of religion. Gods don’t have names. I’ve known that since I was a
child. And you know it too. What does someone like you know
about the Amnewor, anyway?”
      “I remember…” said the old woman. “A long time ago—a
very long time. Something about death. And time. Lots of time.
Real death, too. Human beings. You can’t appease it with dogs,
cats, and chickens, either. It has to be real, violent—”
      “Oh, don’t go on! Please. Not for my benefit. I don’t want to
hear about such things!” She reached awkwardly out with one hand
for a bowl (a knee up to keep held things from falling) to scratch at
its inside in case the spot were dirt. “Is that what they’re talking
about…?” She looked up at the ceiling. “All those poor, sick men
Lord Vanar brought back here to talk? He must have twenty-five of
them in there with him! And the two women. Are they really ill
with it too? Women aren’t supposed to get it. That’s what I heard,
anyway. That would be just horrible, if everybody could get it…”
      “Oh, no,” said the old woman. “They’re not concerned with
the Calling. Nor should they be. But they’re a few of us who think
that, perhaps, if we work very hard, we can concern the Amnewor
with them.” She released a breath and began to walk across the
kitchen, while Larla stood very still, hugging the things she’d
gathered as if she were afraid; then she blurted: “How did you find
out where it was going to be?” Everything clattered to the counter.
      The old woman stopped at the door. “When His Lordship
sent me to ask around the city for the homes of the other folks ill
like himself, I had to talk to lots of people. I learned many things in
those afternoons.”
      Larla looked up again. “Has he carried back every sick person
in the city here, then?”
    “Oh, no,” the old woman repeated. “There’re many more of
them than that. The ones here now are just a few of those still well
enough to travel when a comfortable wagon is sent.”
      “They must be talking about that monster who roams through
the city now, corrupting our carnival in honor of the Liberator. Oh,
it must come. Otherwise, you couldn’t call it. The one who’s Calling
you’re going to. Why else would they be here? I’ve heard it said that
a wizard is soon to—”
      “Oh, no,” said the old woman a third time. “They have their
own deaths to deal with. And the lives they’ve got to live till then.
The Calling of the Amnewor is for us.” She did not look back at
the kitchen girl as she went out the scullery door. “At least I think it
is…”


      8.9 Saw Joey again last night. He says there’ve been four more
hack-jobs on the street-sleepers, and the most recent victim bought
it the night before last. “I’m talkin’ to this guy, two o’clock in the
morning, over on Ninth Avenue?” he told me as we sat at the bar
of the almost deserted Fiesta, with its orange lights, old jukebox (“I
Am What I Am” silent for the first time that evening), and the
neon beer sign in its front window making the night beyond the
open blinds completely black. “And three hours later, the word
comes down he’s had his heart cut out in the goddamn park! That’s
five more in three weeks! Nine all together this summer. Every
single one of them hacked up like fuckin’ watermelons! And that
ain’t counting one derelict four Puerto Ricans came by, one night,
when he was sleepin’ on a park bench, and slit his throat. For the
fun of it, you know? They caught them right away—for a while they
thought maybe it was them, or some crazy kids gang that was out to
kill us all. But it ain’t, I guess. Man, I don’t sleep during the night
anymore. I sleep in the park in the daytime. I wake up now at five,
six o’clock in the evening, and the office girls sittin’ around talking
to each other after work all applaud when I get up.” Joey clapped
his wide hands at the end of his tattooed arms. “Yay! Yay! The
fucker’s up!”


      9. The first evening of Carnival, Toplin’s mother sat on the
side of his bed, supporting Top’s forehead with one hand, while he
vomited and vomited into a broad crock on the bed’s edge: thin,
frothy bile strung from his mouth. At the fifteenth or twentieth
spasm, nothing much came. Still, every thirty or forty-five seconds,
Toplin’s stomach clenched hard enough that she felt the shaking in
his whole body. She did not say, “I knew you shouldn’t have gone
out to the man’s estate today. You weren’t well enough. You’re very
sick. You have to stay in.” Actually she had said it before, just after
the wagon brought him home (though she’s forgotten that) and
there didn’t seem any point to it now. He’d begun to shiver
between spasms, and his sight had gone in a welter of darknesses
and little burning spots each time his stomach clutched on the wet
emptiness inside it.
      The barbarian woman who helped his mother with the house
stopped at the door. She’d come up to tell them that, out in the
street, the Liberator had reached the city and was momentarily
expected to ride by with his entourage. Maybe Toplin would like to
go to the window and watch? She would bring in a bench and get a
pillow for him… Just then, outside, the noise of gathering people
broke out in a cheer, usurping her news. So she just stood in the
door a few moments, looking at Toplin with the blanket twisted up
between his ankles, hunching and hunching as his mother held him
over the bile crock. Finally, she took a breath and went back down
to the kitchen.


     9.1 One afternoon Sarena dropped over, terribly upset. “I just
came from seeing Herb in the hospital. He has that AIDS…? He
looked just godawful, Chip. Like he’s already a corpse, or a ghost,
or something. I hadn’t seen him in three months. I didn’t know it
was so bad! You just don’t know how shaken I am!” Sarena is from
the South and uses words like “shaken” in conversation. “I mean,
I’m just not myself.” I’d never met Herb, though Sarena had
mentioned him to me before. A day later, she phoned in tears.
     Herb had died that morning.
      The next time Sarena came over, she said in passing: “It’s
awful. But I’m afraid to hug you, or even shake hands with you! I
really am! After Herb, it’s just…! Oh, I know it’s not supposed to
be that contagious. But suppose you had it…”
      And, for the next three weeks, she doesn’t—while I read
article after article about nurses in hospitals afraid to touch or serve
people with AIDS, about perfectly healthy gay men coming to their
friends’ houses for dinner to be served on paper plates, or reporting
to work to find themselves fired (along with Haitians) from their
jobs on the possibility that they might be ill, while the governor
general of the United States, after pointedly shaking hands with
several persons with AIDS on The Phil Donahue Show, declares:
“From what we know already, AIDS must be one of the least
communicable diseases we have ever had to deal with. There is no
evidence of AIDS being spread by casual contact, food, or water.
So far, the only method of infection we can speculate on is
repeated sexual contact or an exchange of blood products.” And
the conscientious New York Native reports that in cases of one of a
pair of lovers contracting AIDS, in only 10 percent of the cases has
the other lover come down with it.


      9.21 You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic,
miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed. I
make my music; sometimes my music makes people
happy—though more often, I suspect, it only makes people
remember some moment when music or something else gave them
a fine feeling, and they’re pleased for the reminder. Oh, when I was
a girl much younger than you, sometimes of an afternoon down in
Potters’ Lane I would see some unglazed amphora, set among
other to dry, whose curves and clean flares seemed, in the late sun
leaking into the alley, more magnificent than the lean or lounge of
any tree; or I would hear some particularly wondrous tale from a
teller that revealed in the pattern of its narration a fine and
fundamental organization in the real world it mirrored; or I would
see some mummer’s skit whose songs, dances, and the speeches
that came between modeled the entire active and lively flow of
living at an intensity, I swear, greater than life’s. These moments of
vision, prompted by some crafted work, people sometimes speak of
as “supernatural.” Yet, why should they be less natural than those
the nameless gods provide us at a child’s laugh, at a sunset seen
over great canyons, or at an oceanic storm watched from the shore?

      Well, we must get ready, my beliefs notwithstanding. The
pudgy barbarian just leaving as you came in—he smiled at you
when he went out? Well, that’s the Wizard who’s hired the
underground hall in which to hold the Calling. What did he want?
Why for us to make music at his subterranean ceremony. It won’t
be so bad, Pryn. I’ve known him ever so long, and he’s a good sort,
really. You have more credence in these things than I, I know. I
think it’s because you’ve traveled so much. (In a sense, my
provinciality protects me.) But it should be fun to watch him
perform his charlatanry from the inside, as it were. Come, gather
up our cymbals, drums, harps, and flutes. It’s time to go. We
should be there to set up, at least a few hours early.
     True, I don’t believe in it at all. But how could I refuse him?
He says my work is magic.


     9.22 At the bottom of the steps, Pryn set the bag down on the
dusty stone with a most unmusical clanking and looked at the
beamed ceiling immensely distant in smoky half-light.
      “Ah, my little partridge!” The Wizard who came up to her
was something of a partridge himself, with a blond beard and a
blue robe with a gold collar. The stems of three or four limp
daisies were stuck through his hair. “Where’s your mistress?”
     “Ah! She’ll be along.” Pryn glanced back at the wide steps.
“She wanted to get some rolls and sausage in the Old Market
before she came. She said she thought it would probably be a long
rehearsal.”
      “She knows me, doesn’t she?” The Wizard pulled his robes
around on the dusty floor. “Well, it’s wonderful of you both to
participate. It’s going to be just wonderful, I know. Come, then. I’ll
show you where to set up. Isn’t this a fabulous space?” He gestured
around at the hall. “What in the world do you suppose it was used
for?” He started walking as Pryn picked up the sack and hurried
along after. “Have you ever been here before?”
    “Once.” Pryn nodded. “Yes. A long time ago. When I first
came to the city…”
    Raising an eyebrow, the Wizard glanced at her. “Were you,
now?”
      Water fell from between high pilasters to stream across the
floor between stone banks. The Wizard led Pryn across the wooden
bridge with the loud waters beneath.
     Most of the people were on the far side. Some wheeled by
great frames, stretched over with dark skins, dim paintings on
them. Others carried poles wrapped around with rolls of cloth.
Ropes hung down overhead; two women were hauling up a great
sheet of something on which something was pictured, though Pryn
was not sure what, as the material flapped and wavered up out of
the light.
     At the end of the hall, the throne was in shadow. Not far
away, a few torches had been set up about the spot where some
men were digging, sunk to their shoulders, among piles of dirt.
       Perhaps because she was looking at it, the Wizard veered near
it, till he and Pryn stood at the pit’s lip, watching three naked
diggers toiling in the excavation. Pryn was about to ask what they
were doing, when one of the men saw something, tossed away his
pick, and dropped to his knees to scrape away at the loose dirt wall
with his hands.
     “What have you got?” the Wizard called down.
     The digger was scraping dirt and gravel loose with his fingers,
tugging with his other hand.
     Pryn ventured: “I wonder what it could—”
     It came out in a shower of small stones, leaving a dark niche.
Pryn saw them fall across the digger’s knee, saw him move a knee
on the earth. He stood, beating at it with his hand, and turned to
come to the pit’s rim holding up his find in the flickering
torchlight.
      It was a metal cylinder, uncommonly silvery and free of
tarnish for its time in the earth. It was somewhat tapered—an arm
gauntlet, she realized.
      The Wizard took it. Damascened with intricate symbols, there
were rings about it that, now, the Wizard tried to turn—and which,
astonishingly, did. “That’s it!” he called down. “We’ve got it! That’s
it!” Turning left and right, he beat about in his robes.
      Pryn had been watching the diggers, one of whom was heavily
scarred on one side with welts that must have come from a
flogging as a criminal or slave. When she looked back at the
Wizard, he had already slipped the gauntlet over his rather thin
arm—at least under the play of his blue sleeves she thought she
glimpsed it—and was feeling around in folds and slashes and
pockets for… something!
     What he pulled out was a disk of metal, perhaps the size of
his palm. It had been on some leather thong, bits of which hung
from it in two uneven lengths. “Here!”
      In the torchlight, as another digger reached up for it, Pryn saw
the barbaric markings around the edge, the cutouts on the upper
layer (for really, it was several disks pinioned together) and the
central bolt that held them.
     The digger—the scarred one—turned with the astrolabe,
crossed the basin, dropped with it to his knees, and thrust it into
the niche from which the gauntlet had been taken, packing it with
one and another handful of dirt.
     “I bet you’ve never seen one of those before,” the Wizard said,
looking about and not at her as his robes settled.
     “Oh, yes, I—”
     But the Wizard was calling: “All right, now! Fill it in! Let’s get
on with it. Fill it in, I say.”
      The two other diggers had vaulted to the lip and were already
shoving piles of dirt back inside with their hands. Scattered clods
hit the shoulder of the man inside still packing the wall. He looked
up, startled, saw falling earth and dodged away, to leap out and join
in the refilling.
      Just then a commotion began around them; Pryn saw people
looking up, and—just as a shovel and one of the pick axes went
into the hole to be half covered by the next dirt load—she looked
up herself.
     A rumbling sounded from the roof of the underground hall.
It was, Pryn realized, horses’ hooves, echoing and reechoing
overhead through the crypt.
     “What…?” she whispered.
     “No doubt it’s the Liberator’s party, passing. If you’d like, you
can go upstairs, out through the tavern, and watch at street level.”
And, indeed, small clusters of people were disappearing off into a
shadowed niche that certainly contained some stairwell leading
upward.
     “Will he be coming down here…?”
      “Oh, I don’t think so!” The Wizard blinked at the ceiling. “I
doubt he even knows this place exists. This is one of the most
secret and well-preserved centers of Nevèrÿon. No, he’s just riding
by, in the street—in perfect ignorance, I’m sure, of all we do down
here. For we are preparing for the Calling of the Great and Ancient
Amnewor. That’s not the kind of thing he’d be concerned with, you
can be sure.”
     “And this…?” Pryn looked at the hole, which, in seconds, had
been filled by almost a third.
      “Ah…!” The Wizard bent toward her to speak in a near
whisper. “That’s the grave where we found the prince! I paid dearly
for the information, believe me! We started digging over there, you
see,” and he gestured off into the darkness. “Oh, only a foot or so
down, we were coming upon bones and weapons and bits of
ancient leather armor—but before too long, it was perfectly clear
that all we’d unearthed was some kind of mass grave. Nothing but
ordinary soldiers, or less. Perhaps there’d been a fracas here at
some ancient time, and the victims had simply been tossed into a
common pit. But that wouldn’t do for our purposes, so we chose
the second most likely spot, according to the fable—and only a few
feet down we found him!” Here, he nodded toward the piles.
     Beyond the lowering dirt mounds, Pryn saw the shape
beneath the rough cloth.
      “Clearly, from his sword, his scant costume, and his meager
jewelry, you could tell: he was a real barbarian prince! The clean
parting of his ribs suggests some blade was thrust into his heart to
sever the gristle there. He couldn’t have been very old, either.
Doubtless he was murdered—how many centuries ago, now—not
more than a few feet from the foot of that throne… and buried
where he fell: or not far from it. It’s quite a portent, believe me. It
bodes extraordinary success for our Calling, tonight. Real death,
you know.” He shook his head and chuckled. “His corpse will be
among our most prestigious spectators this evening. It’s grisly, yes.
But it’s necessary if the kind of thing we’re engaged in is to have
the proper tone. The Amnewor concerns real death, not some silly
substitute.”
      There was a muffled cheer, sounding from the overhead
street, and more horses’ hooves.
      But the Wizard was going on: “The corpse will occupy the
throne, of course. I was thinking of sitting you and your mistress
on the steps below him. There’re some hides to make your seat
more comfortable. But everything considered, it might be
distracting. So I’ve decided to put you behind a screen
instead—where the sight of your playing won’t confuse the
congregation. Come along, now. Bring your bag of instruments. I’ll
show you where you can wait till the rehearsal gets under way.
Where was your mistress, again?” He turned from the lip of the
fast-filling grave. “I hope she gets back soon. We’ve got pretty
much all the preliminary rituals over with, and—if only so all the
primary participants can know what to expect—we really must get
started.”


    9.23 Have a bit of sausage, Pryn, and hand me that flute.
What? You don’t want any? Why, dear girl, you’re trembling! Don’t
tell me all his mumbo jumbo, his bits of carved bone and ancient
mummies’ fingers—buried for no more than a year, I can assure
you—have got you into a state. Honestly, Pryn, it astonishes me.
Here you are, a grown woman, who’s traveled on her own from
Ellamon to the depths of the Garth and back, with adventures
under your sash that, when you recount them, cause me to quiver
in my sandals: you’ve flown wild dragons, freed slaves, can read
and write and kill, I gather, when you have to—an almost perfectly
civilized woman, by my own city-bound account! While here am I,
fat, forty, and hardly ever having been outside the city gates, and
I’m still more or less comfortable amidst these arcane goings-on.
That you came to me, seeking to assist me with my art, well… I
take that to be simply another step in your self-education and a
confirmation of the success you’ve had with it to date. But
sometimes I think that the range of your experiences allows every
little thing about you to take on resonances and vibrations—to
become some endlessly shimmering sign, whose clear and concise
meaning in the weave and play of meanings is merely terrifying
rather than illuminative. I’ve always felt your sensitivity made you
the perfect audience for my playing; has it made you, also, the
perfect audience for his? Could it be ignorance that protects me
from such terror? Really, Pryn, the magic we do here is harmless,
and possibly deeply consoling to those too troubled or too cynical
to respond to the political positivism celebrating in the streets.
There, dear girl, stay your trembling and hold the drum thus, so
that I may rattle on it after I pull an ecstatic glissando from the
harp strings. And lay out the flutes for me from high to low as you
always have, so that, in this half-light, I may know which one I am
picking up to play on, just by feel and habit—those greatest aids to
art, which those without them call taste, whether good or bad.


     9.3 Ran into Joey a few days ago. Basically the police’s
response to this maniac has been to start a sweep of their own over
the whole area, arresting as many of the street people as possible
on drug charges or whatever. (If you put them all in jail, they’re less
likely to be murdered…?) Some two hundred people have been
arrested in the neighborhood in the last week. The kids on the
street are really going crazy. Lots of them are pooling their dope
money to get rooms, and crashing eight, nine, ten together inside
on the floor. Between the maniac at night and the police during the
day, they don’t know where to shit. Sitting around in the kitchen of
one of these ersatz crash-pads one afternoon, while Joey was out
“taking care of business,” on the permanently out-of-focus
black-and-white TV I watched some bizarre rerun of Ironside, in
which a policeman, who’d been mugged, robbed, and dumped by a
road, decides to let himself be treated as an ordinary citizen
without identification.
      In the midst of all of it, various junkies came running in and
out, looking for each other: now a guy with a chain through a hole
pierced through one pectoral (a big hole too; no tit-ring, this) under
his tattoos; now a gaunt couple, he named Mike (thin and sunken
chested), she named Karen (with a waist-length hank of black hair),
who darted into the bathroom to shoot up, then came out, giving
me an enthusiastic disquisition, the two of them, on the size of
Mike’s equipment and the pornographic modeling session he was
to have later that afternoon. (Karen had gotten him the work, and
was anxious to be known as someone who could get you that kind
of job if you had the Right Stuff.) When Joey came back, he
showed me an article cut from the Times with a large picture of the
cops involved in the sweep—the forty or fifty plainclothesmen and
plainclotheswomen—who had been masquerading as street people
themselves, pretending to be asleep in doorways at night with
portable radios or suitcases nearby to tempt the kids to snatch
them; at which point other officers, staked out to observe, would
move in and arrest whoever fell victim to the temptation. In the
picture, the faces of the disguised policemen were particularly clear,
and the street people were passing copies around in hope that they
might recognize them when they came across them.
     Clear, but not that clear. It struck me as kind of quixotic.
     There was no mention of the maniac in the paper (there were
a few brief page-two and page-three accounts of “nighttime
stabbings”), but perhaps the police thought that, in the process of
sweeping the area, they’d catch him too…?
     So far not.


       9.4 They’d set out flares all along the Bridge of Lost Desire,
though the sky was still a deepening blue. Some brands burned red.
Some burned white. Their light fell on the colorful groups who
surged one way laughing, then broke up to run back the other, as
still others hurried around them.
      Rumors     of    the   approach     of    the   Liberator’s
entourage—someone had just seen them in the Spur, making their
way toward the Old Market—swept new crowds toward the bridge
mouth, some of whom jumped up to see over the heads of those
crowded in front; other men and women turned to the person next
to them: Now, who was it exactly supposed to come by?
     One man moved distractedly at the crowd’s edges. Haft held
short in his hand, he carried a stoneworker’s hammer. The hair had
gone from the top of his head, with the rest in the stubby
side-braid of a veteran from the Imperial Army—though his legs
were badly bowed. (He could not have put up with those many-day
marches.) The muscles on his long arms and bent thighs, however,
said he’d worked some years with his mallet. His expression was
dazed, drunken, even deranged. He walked by the wall, stopped,
turned back a few steps, turned unsteadily again, walked
again—bumping more people than most in the boisterous crowd.
     As mounted figures rode out into the market square, people
cheered. People ran off the bridge to gather at the fountain. The
man with the hammer stopped to face the waist-high wall that was
the bridge’s railing. Taking the handle in both hands, he swung the
hammer back over his shoulder, then struck the stone.
     He reared back, then struck again.
     On the third strike a crack shot through the wall.
     At the fourth and fifth, rock splinters fell to the walk.
     Some running toward the crowd truly did not see him. A few
others saw and sensed in his violence some unmentionable rage
and passed on as if they did not see.
      The first to take active notice was a sixty-year-old mummer
with gold paint still on his eyelids and blue dye darkening his lips.
Though a spry old man, he did not look overly strong. He had just
finished his skits in the market and was off to join the mummers’
wagon, gone by another route to another neighborhood where their
performance was wanted to enrich the revelry.
      “… excuse me,” he said, not terribly loudly. (The white flame
set nearest shook at the blow.) Then, perhaps, because he saw
something in the unsteadiness between the hammer strikes that,
with his years, he recognized and that reassured him, he spoke out
in a resonant tone that stopped even some of the passersby. “Come
now, you can’t do that!” He stepped up and took the man’s
shoulder.
     The man shook the actor’s hand away with a convulsion of
his whole body—but he stopped hammering; and looked at the old,
made-up face.
      “What do you think you’re doing?” the mummer said. “That’s
not right, battering like that at public property!”
      Blinking, the man looked angry and confused. “I’m tearing it
down, breaking it up—this overground sewer! This is where you all
come! You can be sure, here is where you give it to one another,
like a deadly secret you whisper in the dark from this one to that.
Can’t you see it? This is where it comes from, the plague!”
     The mummer’s lips tightened. “Look, friend.” He took the
hard shoulder in his hand again. “You—simply—have no right. It’s
not for you to take it upon yourself to do this.”
     “No right?” Again the man tried to shrug away the actor’s
hand; the hammer swung between them. “To protect myself and
the other good people of this city from this sickness that kills all
who catch it? What rights do I need! What rights must I have?
Aren’t I doing you fools a favor in the bargain, those too stupid
and indifferent to take up a mallet beside me?” He tried to pull
away.
      “Listen to me.” The actor pulled him back. “Rights, you say?
You’re not going to get the plague. You know that as well as I do!
Me and my kind, we’re the ones in danger. And do you think for a
minute if I thought there was any right, reason, or efficacy to be
gained by tearing down this bridge, I wouldn’t have been here days
ago with a hammer myself? But that’s for us to decide. Not you—”
The actor paused, because, from the bandy-legged worker’s eyes,
two very fat tears, first as glimmerings along his lower lids, then as
irregular spills in the torchlight, moved down his dark cheeks
toward his beard. “You can’t take that on yourself,” the mummer
went on, “to protect us from whatever foolishness you think we
indulge, no matter how deadly.” Seeing the tears, the actor spoke
more gently. “Now what is it? You have some happy-handed
acquaintance who’s ill, dying, or dead of the plague? And now you
want to destroy the bridge, to assuage your own fears of a most
unlikely contagion?” Behind the mummer the mounted entourage
clattered by. People shouted and cheered. More ran about them
now. The actor’s articulated voice cut through: “Is that what it is?
Or perhaps a cousin, a brother. Even a son…?”
      More cheers rose at the horses behind them. People
stumbling into them pushed the two men closer, the crowd’s noise
covering the stoneworker’s answer. But it was easy enough for the
mummer to read his lips. The man blinked; he shook his head; he
said: “… I have a lover. Not much more than a boy—a student,
out at the school. And he’s…!”
     Two or three people trying to see the passing Liberator jarred
against one or the other of them, so that they were thrown to hold
each other, supporting one another in mutual surprise—till the
stoneworker pulled away, flinging his hammer a last time against
the wall (that it did not strike someone or fall on someone’s foot
was a wonder), and reeled away in the crowd.


     9.41 Two men had observed the encounter. Indeed, both
heard the exchange as we have written it, up until the actor’s final
question—even as they had missed the stoneworker’s final answer.
      On his way from the Spur after seeking out Namyuk to ask
him if he knew anything about where this Calling of the Amnewor
would be held (it was the kind of shady thing his brother would
certainly know), crossing the Bridge of Lost Desire, Zadyuk had
halted to watch the madman with his hammer banging at the
bridge wall and the old queen trying to stop him.
      With a single eye, a strip of rag tied around his head to slant
across the sunken socket and a metal slave collar around his neck, a
short, lank-haired man had been pushed from the crowd and, on
recovering his balance, had paused to watch the hammering vandal
and the old man in makeup. The one-eyed man had entered
Kolhari with the Liberator’s party—indeed, had been associated
with that great man for some time. But today he’d chosen to walk
beside his master’s horse rather than to ride. Several times the
crowd’s pushings and peerings and jumpings about the Liberator’s
mount had jostled Noyeed away. In the surge of people at the
bridge, it had happened again. Once more he had been left behind
as the Liberator rode on through the city.


     9.42 Not only did Noyeed and Zadyuk both see the incident,
they saw each other—were, indeed, left looking at one another
when the mummer and the stoneworker had finally moved off
from between them in their different directions.


       9.43 Zadyuk thought: He’s one of those in the collars who
roams the bridge looking for violent sex—so, though he’s not like
my friend, Pheron, he’s one of them. No doubt the way he watches
me with his good eye, he thinks I’m one too. I wish he didn’t. I
don’t mean there’s anything wrong with it… after all, I want to
help them. Still, I want to be known for who I am. Not mistaken
for… well, for anything! That, I suppose, is the worst part: to be
among them at all means that, to any man or woman who looks at
you, you must be one. Otherwise, why would you be there at all?
It’s like some appalling contagion that dwarfs the plague itself. I
love Pheron, and would help him in any way I could. Yet, I cannot
shake off this sense of contamination. I want to get back soon and
tell Nari where we go to find the Calling of this new-named
monster.


       9.44 Noyeed thought… well, it’s hard to say what Noyeed
thought. To wear the iron collar, even for the Liberator, was to
masquerade as a certain kind of monster, a masquerade whose
rules Noyeed had chosen to live by long enough so that we would
be ill-advised to specify which were merely theater and which were
really him, which he had profoundly changed himself to
accommodate, and which he only nodded to in their indifferent
observance. He looked at Zadyuk. (Zadyuk saw that.) He looked at
the hammer fallen among the stone chips by the cracked wall. He
looked after the Liberator, riding away by the torches—the fabled
figure was almost invisible now for the crowds about.


     9.441 Zadyuk started again through the Carnival throng.
     9.442 Noyeed, even disliking the torchlight, lingered on the
bridge.


     9.45 Some of the things Ted told me:
     He met an old trick in a movie house, a tall black guy he’d
done some S/M with half a dozen years ago. They were talking
vaguely about getting together again, when the black guy
mentioned his lover had died about a year or so back.
     “Did he die of AIDS?” Ted had asked. You hear about
anybody our age who’s gay, dying (Ted said), and it’s just the first
thing I think of, whatever it turns out to be.
     The guy looked very surprised. “Well, actually, yes. I was—”
      Ted was freaked. “Look, you’ve got to tell people that before
you set something up with them!” he said. And cut out. He was
making it on and off with some concert pianist, who let drop that
his lover had made it with someone who’d had AIDS and who’d
recently appeared on a TV special about the disease—a day before
he’d died. Ted had seen the special. He cut out once more. And in
still another movie house, where he’d been going to cruise
regularly, he found written in red paint on the john wall:


               AIDS PATIENTS CRUISE HERE!


      That one, on top of all the others (he told me), just made me
crazy! I kept turning it over in my mind—like one of those
three-sided rulers. It could have been someone who knew
something and was trying to warn people. It could have been
somebody who just wanted to stop the cruising. Or it could have
been somebody who didn’t get what he wanted there sexually and
was just bitching. But any way you read it, I didn’t want to be there.
      9.46 And so, Ted explained, that evening I went walking up
somewhere around –th Street, just beyond Ninth Avenue. I was
crossing this bridge…? There was some kind of carnival going on,
maybe one of the Italian street festivals. Only the costumes people
were wearing, I’d never seen anything like them before! And there
were a whole lot of people running around, men and women, with
not too much on at all! They’d set up torches all along the bridge
walls. I was looking around and feeling strange, when I noticed this
guy cruising me, hard, too. A little guy. Our age. He didn’t have a
shirt on or anything, and he was wearing this slave collar. When I
looked at him directly, I realized he only had one eye! That was
really weird. When he finally came over, I just had to ask him:
“Aren’t you worried about the plague? I mean, this is very serious.”
(I know you’re supposed to call it an epidemic. But I swear, almost
every time I ask anybody what they think about AIDS, they look at
me and say: “Age? What do you mean, ‘age’?” That’s happened to
me three times now!) He just watched me. “Look,” I said. “I mean,
I’m horny too, but there’re too many people around here, now.
We’ll never find a place. Why don’t you come with me. I’m going
to this… well, it’s like a ceremony. Or a program. For people
who’re concerned about it. The Calling,” I told him. “It’s the
Calling of the Amnewor…”
     Now is that the weirdest thing? I don’t even know where the
words came from. You tell me I was dreaming, and I won’t even
argue. But that’s what I said. It sounds like something out of one
of your stories, Chip. It isn’t, is it? (Nope, I said. Not yet.) I
couldn’t tell you what I thought I was talking about when I said it.
But I asked him, “You want to go there with me?”
     He nodded.
     I started across the bridge.
    And he followed me. We pushed through the crowd—only,
somehow, I must have lost him. Or he changed his mind. Or
maybe he knew what I was talking about, and I didn’t. I remember I
got free of the people, crossed the street, and looked back—and,
Chip, you know? There wasn’t anybody on the bridge at all! No
torches. No carnival. It was just one of those walled overpasses
that runs across the train tracks, with the tall, bright streetlights at
either end. And empty.
     Do you know what I mean?
     (Yeah, I told him.)
     And nobody on it.
    I’ll tell you, Chip. I’m not doing anything with anybody
anymore. This AIDS has got me really upset!


       9.5 Last February I came down with flu. Two days after I got
it, I was in bed with a 102° fever. I stayed in bed for four days, got
up—still with a fever—and nearly collapsed when I tried to go to
the store. I went back to bed for another week. (I haven’t been in
bed for two weeks with anything since I had pneumonia when I was
twenty-one.) At the end of that time, I felt much stronger, but my
fever was still between a hundred and a hundred one. I put my
clothes on, took it easy, but I felt I had to do some work around the
house, or make the odd trip out. Slowly, I got back to a more or
less normal schedule. But a week later, my temperature was still
over a hundred. Now and again there would be periods of
persistent aching in one or both my armpits, though no apparent
swelling. Once, coming home from downtown, I realized my groin
was so sore that walking was painful. I went back to bed for two
days. Some people get swollen lymph nodes if they go near
someone with a cold. Save for the swollen glands under my jaw
I’ve gotten every spring since I was seven, I don’t. Next morning, I
was up—still with a temperature; I decided I was long overdue to
see a doctor.
     Had I thought about AIDS?
     Hour by hour, since I’d first gotten sick.
      From a handbook specializing in gay services (The Gay Yellow
Pages), I got the name of a doctor, himself gay, who specialized in
sexually related diseases usually transmitted by homosexual
contact. I called. Apparently he was very busy, but I got an
appointment for some six days later.
      I did not have any sexual contacts in the subway on my way to
his office—though I could have had, twice.
     That office? Neat, well-equipped, efficient, and reassuring.
These was a pile of pamphlets concerning AIDS on the white
formica-covered table in the waiting room. (I took one, and its very
sensible suggestions have been my sexual guidelines since.) In a
small examining room, a nurse took my temperature. It was still
over a hundred—five weeks and three days after the onset of
whatever.
      A tall, pleasant man in his late thirties, the doctor came in. I
detailed my symptoms and history. (“How many sexual contacts
would you say you have in a year? I mean with different people, of
course.” “Till now,” I said, “maybe three hundred on the average.
That’s not counting my steady relationship, which can vary from
three times a week to once every two weeks. We’re not
monogamous.” He said: “Mmmm.”) My underarms and neck and
groin were prodded to the point of pain in a (happily, futile) search
for swellings.
       After the more usual examination procedure, as well as a set
of blood tests, the doctor said, “Well. You don’t have either
syndromal or prodromal AIDS.” (That’s the formal way of saying
you don’t appear to have AIDS or a pre-AIDS condition that
should be watched.) “So I wouldn’t worry. What it seems like is a
very tenacious bout of this year’s flu. A number of people have been
hanging on to this one for a month or more. Now I have a number
of patients who do have AIDS; something to remember about
AIDS, if you’re worried about it, is this: it isn’t a disease you wonder
whether you have. If you get it, you will be very sick. Did you take
one of our folders there in the waiting room…?”
     Three days later my fever went.


     9.6 An entertaining man, the Mummer said, I’ve made a few
wise men smile, and more than my share of fools howl with
laughter. I’ve fancied that to do it I must know something both of
wisdom and foolishness—not that I claim much of either. Really,
aside from my mimic talents and my ability to declaim a line or
time a fall, I’m a very ordinary man.
     Wise men and fools?
     Aristocrats and cutpurses?
      Well, I’ve counted all sorts among my friends. I’ve always
seen myself as able to speak to high and low, and to not a few
whom others would simply dismiss as mad—like that poor man on
the bridge. Certainly Carnival encourages unlikely interchanges. But
in my profession, the air of carnival hangs over even the ordinary
work-a-day happenings. Certainly among my most interesting and
oldest acquaintances is the Master of the academy near the edge of
Sallese.
      (Odd, that at this particular moment, when, one might think,
the general populace joins in the atmosphere I strive to create the
year round, my own thoughts wander to such things as they do…)
      At his school, you know, he promulgates a doctrine of
transformation, change, endless impermanence, the evanescence of
the visible. Oh, I don’t denigrate the precariousness of the
intellectual adventure he has undertaken. One must be truly brave
to dare such uneasy waters, never stepping in the same stream
twice, going with the flow, and all that. Still, he was born into one
of the most solid families in the nation—economic rocks, every
one!
      Fire, flood, earthquake? (With constant reports from my
friends of the sickness, I fear to mention plague.) Oh, he’s got to
worry about those as much as any of us.
     But somehow we don’t, very much.
     I doubt he does either.
       I think he got tired of my producing skits about him in the
marketplace during which I poked fun at all I took to be his little
failings. Oh, he observed my efforts with great good grace,
diligently sending his students down to see the enchantments I
mounted at his expense, at theirs, indeed at everybody else’s. Then,
back at the school, he would dutifully draw out the wisdom of it
all, even from places I thought they were only clever. (I have never
been able to resist a good line. I suspect he has the same failing.)
But the truth is, he can afford a sense of humor. Mine is won by
labor.
      About a year back, he began writing a series of dialogues, with
ratty old me as the main character! He has his students read the
various parts—often playing characters with their own names,
when they’re not taking turns at being yours truly.
     Exercises in argument, he calls them.
      Recently he invited me out to a day-long performance. (They
do go on!) I went. Good manners said I could do nothing else.
Some of his students, who have grown fond of my market fare, had
with great glee given me some warning of what was to come. I
expected to see a few well-intentioned gibes, now at my eccentric
clothing, now at my manner of speech, perhaps a few cuts at the
sexual eccentricities of my youth (or, indeed, of my age), or at the
general infirmities time gives to one of my years—the sort I myself
mock out on the wagon platform. But what I saw performed in this
untitled prince’s merchant’s imitation of an aristocrat’s courtyard
(his uncle, I know, still deplores that a lord of Nevèrÿon should
gain his living in such a neighborhood) was truly insidious.
     With her false beard and scruffy tunic the little girl supposed
to be me spouted one and another brilliantly reasoned and
beautifully rational diatribes, devastating the callow boys loitering
about her and asking one dumb question after the next, egged
along in their eager absurdities by her/my eloquence.
     But were they my arguments?
     You must understand, when I was young and the Master
younger, we argued, argued, argued! We would wander back and
forth across the Old Market often fifty times in a day, one of us
always talking.
      Yet somehow I never assumed he was arguing for anything.
(By all the nameless gods, in those days he was too young to have
opinions!) I assumed he was arguing against me for the fun of
it—because I was a man and he was a boy—and I gloried in our
altercations as a chance to exercise my own rational faculties.
      Exercises, yes. That’s even what I called them. And from his
brightened eyes and quickened breath at their end, I would assume
that, as exercises go, they’d been as exhilarating for him as for me.
      What I saw his students perform, however, out on his lawn
between the smart buildings, was, yes, very much a version of our
arguments from twenty years before, but with the imaginative
fancy added that he had somehow won them all—when I had
considered them a draw! It was as if he had come to believe in the
interim that, somehow, he had, actually, back then, convinced me, so
that there I was, in travesty, spouting the exact opposite of what I
believed to various interlocutors—and spouting it far more
eloquently than he had as a youth.
     And do you think there was one character in the lot with his
name? (I’ve never failed to put actors playing actors—and playing
bad actors at that—on my stage!) Not on your life.
     A day of it, and, believe me, the effect was quite disturbing.
     But there we were at the end, with all these girls and boys
standing about and waiting for my compliments, sure they had all
performed quite wonderfully.
     And they had! They had!
     I hugged them and praised them and clapped like a
madman—all the while trying to figure some strategy to counter
what, yes, I saw it coming to.
      Later, with the clay lamps glimmering on their tripods in the
room’s four corners as we dined alone in his study—and, yes, no
doubt I had been just as equivocal about his production as he can
be about mine—I finally chose my tack. (To mime direction by
indirection is one of my most successful aesthetic ploys.) I said:
       —Now, look. I’m absolutely in accord with what I take, or
mistake (for we both know both are possible), to be your basic aim.
Still, I see some problems. For one thing, you never bring out that
I am a theatrical personage. I am the one who puts on shows and
spectacles for the general public. I think it’s a fact that, if it were
presented early and clearly, would illuminate your entire effect in a
far more subtle light.
      —But the point is (we sipped pale cider from old crystal; and
he always serves the best), save for the odd note a hired scribe can
make, you never write your speeches down. Now my dialogues are
transcribed, word for word, in the Ulvayn Island system. By
comparison, your performances are spontaneous, free, improvised.
They’re not fixed forever like some unreadable barbaric script
incised on stone. They have the play of interpretation built into
them! If, in my texts, I were to give you more authority than I
already have, that lifelike quality to your utterances, which I can
only catch by pinning exact wordings to parchment, would be lost.
As it is, I think it comes across.
     What could I say?
     I said:
      —And another thing. Half your students are girls—more than
half, actually. Why are all the people you have me talking to, played
indiscriminately by maidens and ephebes, boys?
      —But you like boys! he protested, with that wide-eyed
surprise that betokens true bemusement. You’ve never made a
secret of it.
      —Oh, really! I said. Of course I like boys. But three-quarters of
my friends are women. Always have been. Always will be. You
know that. And besides, I don’t—as a rule—like the kind of boys
you have here; and that, in your plays, you have me going on to,
endlessly. I haven’t made a secret of that either. You know as well
as I do, my tastes are far more, well… trashy.
     —You liked me, he declared, almost petulantly. Besides, not
everybody is an expert in the particular set of nastinesses you
indulge in down atn the bridge. I’m certainly not!
      —All right, I said. Why, for instance, do you have a girl play
me?
      —Your voice, he said, is rather high.
      —I am an actor, an artist, I declared. A high voice carries,
clear and comprehensible, half again as far across the market as
some fuzzy, booming basso. I have trained my voice to be thus,
through many years of practice. And unlike some who are born
with it naturally, mine did not start off that way. Tenors and
sopranos will be our heroes for a long, long time, my friend. Get
used to it!
      And this very wise man gave me a surprised look that
declared he’d never considered before this basic fact that has fixed
the careers of generals, admirals, and politicians as well as actors
and singers since time’s dawn—a fact I must explain to three out
of five aspiring hopefuls of either sex who come to our wagons for
work.
       —Oh, come on! he said placatingly. What’s to the point isn’t
that I’m not an expert in your wild and marginal ways, but that the
young people whose educations have been entrusted to me, and for
whom these pieces are written, are not. I dare say some of them
will be. No doubt they’ll go on to point out all my failings as
sharply and as cruelly as you have—no, not cruelly. I can say that.
You are, and always have been, a very kind man. That’s why I love
you. But what I’m trying to tell you is… these productions of mine
are not expressions of the real. They are in dialogue with it. “What
if?” That’s the game’s name! You told me yourself, that’s what all
speculation is about. What if you hadn’t abandoned your wife years
ago? I’m sure she’d be just as I portrayed her—like the wives of all
thinking men: shrill, resentful, obsessively there, and awful. I admit
it, in those parts I’m talking about why I’m not married, not about
why or how you once were. (That aspect of it had, I confess, struck
me as so “off the wall,” as the young people say, I had not even
retained it in memory to critique!) Suppose you did lavish all your
wit, wisdom, and affection on the best young men of Nevèrÿon
instead of the half-wits, hustlers, and ne’er-do-wells, the silly
actresses, simpering market girls, and sly old countesses that you
do—
     —You are not a half-wit, I said. But you even admit it: all you
have presented, in my name, are your fancies.
       —The voice, he said (with the naïveté, incomprehension, and
sense of total rightness at any and every appropriation that always
terrifies me from one of his class and caliber), is, nevertheless and
certainly, my own.
      I returned to our wagons here in the market the next
morning—of course, he wouldn’t hear of my walking back that
night. I shouldn’t worry about all this, you know, but his dialogues
are written down. He’s quite proud of them—justly too. For they
are beautiful compositions. And he has been having copies made
and distributing them to people who can read and write, among
both the aristocracy and tradesmen, and even to a few workers I
hear, who’ve mastered the skill—for in practice he’s very
egalitarian. The details and mannerisms he had taken from me to
decorate, as it were, “his” voices are clear enough so that, in a city
as diminished in size by writing as Kolhari, I am clearly
recognizable. After all, I am something of a public figure, with my
minimal dollop of fame.
     Yesterday, in the Old Market, during our performance, when
I was in the midst of what I’ve always considered my most
innocent depiction of the failings and foibles of our most aged and
mindless minister of state, some young man in the audience
suddenly shouted:
     —Fools! You fools—the lot of you! Every single one of
you—duped fools! Don’t you know that he is the one who has been
out with the teachers of Sallese, corrupting our best young men
with his disrespect and insidious argumentation—which, here in its
vulgar form, you go on to laugh at? Haven’t you read the accounts
of his lectures to the young, taken down by the Master? Do not
laugh and applaud. Drive him off the stage, rather! Stone him! Kill
him!
      It brought the performance to a halt. And it left an old actor
almost too shaken to go on. The audience itself was discommoded
and, finally, reduced by a third. My performance was not at its best
for the rest of the day. When the show was over, only an old friend
who happened to be there, an unremarkable and even disreputable
man in many ways, applauded with any vigor—and, I fancy, some
real anger at the interruption. I was grateful to him, but still
disheartened. And even he did not come back to see me afterward.
     But the fact is, and it takes an old man to say it:
     The reign of our empress is violent and vigilant.
     It is too easy in our day to see such tendencies getting out of
hand, leading, who knows, even to my death—about which, no
doubt, my young Master will write a moving and eloquent account,
where my screams and protests, my nose thumbings, farts, and
insults—and the curses and violences against me they elicit from
violent men—will be reduced to, if not replaced by, some cascade
of calm and reasoned rhetoric.
      Perhaps a Carnival will be in progress outside the prison,
where the children and lovers (in all combinations) wandering
through the market will be asking: Where is the old mummer who
used to make us laugh and cry so? Will the shouts and music in the
streets drown out my screams? But you can be sure, that’s another
thing he will simply omit. (This Calling of the Amnewor? No, I do
not intend to go anywhere near it, I tell you. I have seen it all
before, and besides: I have more than enough work of my own to
do!) No doubt, I will have my calm moments during it all.
      Still, it is not his style to be as flamboyant, or, indeed, as
outrageous, as I. But, then, it is not my style to be as persistently
rational as he in the face of unjust madness—a human failing I am
now old enough to have seen in all too great amounts.
     Oh, there will be bits and pieces of me in his dialogues that I
or anyone else would recognize—the details with which he will
decorate his text. But there will also be much that only I could give
the lie to. And over everything, what his account will not
encompass in any way is my real death at their hands.
     (His writing has made of me a monster!)
      Though he is a prince, and I am an old actor, he will have me
die in his dialogues as he would die himself, could he, by any jest
of the nameless gods, be calumniated, accused, apprehended, and
executed in the same mode and manner as he may so innocently
cause me to be. I think on some terribly personal level he sincerely
feels his writings have cured me of all my abhorrent opinions,
while I fear that, with them, he has put me in as grave a danger as
if, instead of cider that evening, he had offered me a goblet of
bitter, vegetative poisons.
      9.7 Got a flyer from Temple University about a symposium,
“Post Barthes/Post Bakhtin.” I was familiar with—and greatly
admired—the work of over half the participants: Michael Holquist,
Carol Emerson, Barbara Johnson, Samuel Weber. I had a layman’s
familiarity with Barthes and had read Bahktin’s The Dialogic
Imagination in the Holquist and Emerson translation. Two years
before, at the “Innovation/Renovation” conference at Wingspread,
I’d first sketched out a Nevèrÿon story, “The Tale of Plagues and
Carnivals,” after a presentation on Bahktin’s notion of “the
carnivalesque” as an initiator of critical dialogue. I decided to treat
myself to a trip down to Philadelphia, then, and attend.
      The conference began at nine on Saturday morning, so at
four, I was up and, by four-thirty, on my way through the foggy
November black, darkness, and the glimmer of not-quite-rain,
struck through by New York’s street lights, to the Port Authority
Bus Terminal.
     The terminal has a strange kind of life at that hour.
      Joey, Jimmy, Johnny, Jamal, and José among the street people
have all mentioned to me using the station to sleep in, and I was on
the lookout for somebody I knew. But I didn’t see anyone.
     All the concessions were still closed, but as I walked through
the broad glass doors and across the deserted concourse, I passed a
shutdown news kiosk, beside which stood a boy about sixteen or
seventeen. His jeans were baggy, dirt-blackened, and torn. One of
his sneakers had come off and lay on the floor about ten inches
from a very dirty foot. He had no coat and just a T-shirt on that
was too big, ripped at the neck and yellow from wear. Head bent
forward, with a very dirty hand he pulled and pulled and pulled at a
lock of black, longish hair.
    I went on downstairs to the Greyhound gates. As I came
down the steps, half a dozen black kids, boys about fourteen or
fifteen, were horsing around on the stairs. One leaned heavily on
the banister, running now up, now down. A few standing at the
foot watched him—one smoking—laughing at his antics.
     As I turned to sit on a waiting room chair, I looked back up
the steps. A middle-aged white couple, who must have been
walking only steps behind me, but whom I hadn’t seen till then,
came down. The woman carried their bags. The man looked
possibly infirm.
     The kid on the steps let go of the banister and turned: “Hey,
white folks!” he called. “Where you goin’?”
     The couple ignored him and continued down.
     “Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna hurt you!” The kid continued
beside them, squatting on each step. “You don’t have to be afraid
of me.”
      The couple looked like they might have been exhausted at
that hour. They didn’t look very frightened.
     “What’s a matter? You afraid I’m gonna rob you? I’m gonna
mug you?” At the stairs’ bottom, he laughed and bounced in a
squat, looking at the couple, then at the other boys, some of whom
were giggling, some not.
     The couple just walked over to the seats as if they hadn’t
heard.
     Leaving my briefcase on the black plastic chair between some
passengers, I went into the men’s room. There were half a dozen
other black kids inside, and a few Puerto Ricans, most of them
older or younger than the ones fooling around on the steps.
      Just as I came in, a tall black guy with glasses, who may have
even been twenty, folded his arms, reared back, and actually said to
a boy who couldn’t have been more than thirteen: “Hey, what’s a
kid like you doin’ up this late?”
     The boy folded his arms indignantly and declared: “I told you
before, I ain’t no kid!”
     “Yeah,” declared his even younger companion: “He knows
his way around!”
     Stifling a laugh, I went to the urinals.
     At the far end stood a particularly good looking black guy in a
gray Confederate cap; he seemed to be there pretty permanently.
     A minute later, I came out to see the kid who’d been horsing
around outside look up the steps again, where a tall, rather refined
looking white man, with silver hair and an expensive gray suit, his
overcoat over one arm and carrying an attaché case, was starting
down.
     The kid dashed up the steps. “Hey, white man!” he
demanded. “Where you goin’? You afraid of me? You afraid I’m
gonna follow you where you goin’, I’m gonna beat you up, I’m
gonna rob you? Now, you don’t have to be afraid of that!” As the
boy came on down the steps beside him, calling out his taunts, the
man paid as little attention to him as had the couple.
      At the bottom of the steps, among the other boys, an older
black kid, maybe seventeen, suddenly called up: “Nigger, why you
acting like such a fool!”
     The boy clowning on the steps didn’t even glance back: “Now
you don’t have to be afraid of me. I ain’t gonna hurt you, white
man!”
     As the first kid reached the bottom the second kid stepped up
on the stair: “Hey, nigger! Why—”
     The first boy danced back, grinning. “I’m just askin’ these
white folks where’re they—”
   Suddenly the second grappled the first boy in a headlock.
“—do you talk like such a fool!”
     “Hey! Let go of me!” The first, his mouth muffled by a
forearm, giggled—“Let me go, you… crazy nigger!—” while
others, who’d been watching and chuckling themselves, turned
away as the kid was dragged off.
     I was still standing almost inside the men’s room door. As I
stepped away, a nondescript, middle-class black woman in a brown
coat and hat absently wandered in. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said,
turning back. “That’s the men’s room.”
     “Oh, it is?” she said. “Well, where is the lady’s room?”
     “About three yards down the hall, ma’am,” said a Puerto
Rican boy from inside, loitering by the basins.
    I got my briefcase again and for a while strolled about the
Greyhound departure area.
      Wearing a ratty thermal vest and looking disheveled and
unwashed enough so that it was moot if she were a passenger
waiting on a bus or a bum in to keep warm, one teenaged white girl
sat by the wall near her knapsack, bound closed with dirty twine. (If
she were a derelict, she’d probably taken pains to achieve the
ambiguity.) In a cloth coat and a knitted cap, a shopping-bag lady
wandered along the far gates with her bundled sacks of paper and
cloth, muttering to herself, occasionally spitting, now and again
snapping out some curse.
      At one point, as the woman passed almost directly in front of
her, the girl looked sharply away.
      A man perhaps thirty slept on the floor, wedged into the
corner by the transparent plastic wall of the north-end waiting area.
New black work shoes. Stained and ancient workman’s grays. A
middling old pea-jacket fallen open over a shirt with some name
stitched in yellow thread, soiled and worn to unreadability, across
the torn pocket. His black beard was more or less neatly shaven; his
hair was fairly short. When the great cleaning machine, pushed by a
black attendant, sudsed over the floor, its spinning brush
dangerously close to his face, he sat up suddenly, lurched to his
feet, and, one hand out before him, staggered into the waiting area
and collapsed on a row of black plastic seats without—as far as I
could tell—even opening his eyes.
      A bunch of tough Puerto Rican girls in very thick makeup and
blue down coats, none over sixteen, kept moving in and out of the
ladies room, sometimes razzing and sometimes being razzed by the
black and Puerto Rican boys lounging about, but more often just in
their own, harsh, serious little world.
      I hadn’t been in a bus station at that hour for over a year. A
clear difference from the last time, however, was the increased
number of people sleeping on the seats, floor, or benches who
looked as if, three weeks or three months ago, they might have
been working—a very different population from the eternal
indigents (still there of course) who wander about such places year
in and year out.
      On line behind me for the Philadelphia bus was a bearded
college student on his way to visit friends and family at home. His
calculated casualness and studied disarray strangely reflected what
ambled and stumbled all round us: his beard and long hair worn
that way because he liked it, not because he couldn’t afford to cut
it; the clean, pink shirt left out of his old, white corduroy pants
because it felt comfortable that way, not because he’d forgotten it
was possible to affect your appearance by the exertion of such
small energies; the old sneakers worn because they were
comfortable, not because he’d found them in a trash can after
spending four days with no shoes at all. His wire-framed glasses
were clean. His watch was on time—at one point I asked him what
time it was, and the next thing you know we were having an astute
enough conversation about economic conditions in the country and
how they were reflected in what passed around us.
     He sat in the seat ahead of me on the bus, listening to the
earphones of his silent Walkman, while we rolled through breaking
dawn, down to Philadelphia.
    Another journal entry, based on notes made that morning in
November and written out more fully a day or so later.
    Another (very minor) reason the Nevèrÿon series is a
document.


      9.81 How did I find out where it was? It was rather easy, the
Master explained. In every group, no matter how carefully you select
them, one or two are always more disreputable than the rest. Even
in this school, we have ours. So I went to one and told him: “Look,
I want to know where they’re holding the Calling of the
Amnewor.” My voice let him know that, while I was serious, I
wasn’t accusing him of anything. When he told me, of course, I
knew I’d had my suspicions all along.
     Where else in Kolhari could they have held it?
      By late afternoon, most of the students had gone off for
Carnival. At five o’clock, I went out, pausing on the lawn while a
cricket, who’d somehow found her way into town, chirrupped in
urban isolation and despair. I looked at the infirmary. Another
student was laid up, all sad-faced at not being able to attend the
merry-making, but—bless her—she’d only sprained an ankle.
(Earlier, when I’d visited, she’d made noises about using the time
to study.) Walking out toward the Pavç, I turned down the slope
between the sycamores, some of which I’d replanted and some of
which my neighbors had brought in, after my example.
       Well, I asked myself, why are you going to this uncivilized
affair? Is it for Toplin? Is it for the ill, the harried, the worried, the
ground down? But with only the silent street about me, I could not
answer a strict yes. Pure curiosity? But I’m of an age to know that
little if nothing in this strange and terrible land is pure.
     The problem with these practices—and I’ve attended enough,
both inside the city and out—is that I frequently know more about
them than the benighted jungle bunny hopping up and down
performing them.
     Doughty old servants when I was a child—with the family
how many generations and forbidden to talk of such things—oh,
they delighted in terrifying spoiled aristocratic brats, whining for an
hour before bedtime, with the very tales and terrors aristocratic
parents had fled long ago and wherever.
      In the south, of course, it’s Gauine: a great dragon of jewels
and gold, long as the land, with a wingspread wide as the sky. She’s
supposed to guard some town that doesn’t exist any more—though
I looked for it long enough when I visited the area.
      Up north it’s Ropig Crigsbeny: a boar the size of a mountain,
who gobbles whole tribes at a mouthful and shits man-high piles of
skulls. But there’ve been enough wars around there—and enough
hacked-off heads—to understand why nobody wants to talk about
him much.
      I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the
name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it
did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more
intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless,
pointless death. But which of them isn’t? I recall—


       9.811 The problem with the “suspension of disbelief” theory
of fiction in general and of F&SF in particular is that it makes art
(however willingly) a kind of cheat. People who want to preserve
art’s privilege of subversion (and of, yes, shock) have said: “Fine,
let it be a cheat!” e.g., Picasso: “Art is the lie that makes the truth
bearable.” But certainly this is not an enterprise where I want to
cheat at all.
     As did writers from Flaubert and Baudelaire (who vacillated)
to Pater and Wilde, I believe art is wholly a formal enterprise,
encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century
spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth
century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?)
How, then, to reconcile that belief with all this topicality.
      I think the answer lies in that the writer is always generating
meanings (and not organizing references), even the most topical
meanings. Reference, after all, is only a particularly limited sort (or
better, use) of meaning in a particularly limited context: and that is
neither the subject-dominated literary text nor the object-dominated
paraliterary text.
     (To refer to reference always requires a frame, and is always
therefore an act of meaning…)


     9.82 Journeying through the city, what I recall (and I always
do, whenever I go any place where the street noise lowers enough
for me to hear myself think, the Master said) is my journey through
Nevèrÿon when I was seventeen.
     For that was when truly I first learned of monsters.
     Nevèrÿon.
     Officially, I was crossing it.
     What I wanted to do, of course, was flee it—though I
couldn’t tell my uncle that.
     I could hardly tell myself. But that was my secret plan.
     My overt object and itinerary as I presented it to my uncle
was, however, of the highest moral and intellectual order. I
wanted—I told him—to seek out all the works, monuments, and
remaining memorials of the barbarian inventor, Belham. There
were enough traces of his handiwork here in Kolhari to excite any
boy with a like penchant for invention. Born in southern lands, he’d
come up to lay out some of our city’s finest avenues and estates;
then he went north…
     But his architectural innovations preserve the High Court and
make it livable to this day.
     Coinpress? Corridor?
     He was responsible for both.
     And there are a dozen gardens, both in Sallese and
Neveryóna, where his fountains still plash among the greenery and
flowers. Moving about the city, you think of his as a wholly urban
sensibility. But the traditions are clear. He was not born here; he
did not die here.
     He came from somewhere else.
     He left for somewhere else.
     And at seventeen, my adolescent obsession, my first mission,
my purpose and passion was to reconstruct that journey, that life,
from origin to end; for the wonders left in Kolhari alone suggested
the most marvelous and misty cross-section among complex
endeavors that covered the country.
      In preparation for the journey, for almost eight months—a
long time for sustained effort from someone seventeen—besides
visiting every architectural structure in Kolhari that boasted
Belham’s hand, I’d met with every relative I could, resident in the
city or visiting, to get information about him as well as a list of
locations for whatever of his projects might remain in our nation.
(Some, of course, had vanished in small time, but an impressive
number endured.) In this wise, I’d constructed a map and with it,
made notes, from which I seriously considered writing a detailed
account of Belham’s life and works, like those that various
councilors were forever proposing to put together about some of
our queens and kings, to have them carved on certain walls at the
court—and never getting round to it. You must understand that
this was before the writing system from the Ulvayns came to the
mainland: that fixes specific words to parchment, stone, or papyrus.
But in those days, we had only the various commercial scripts, with
their signs for amounts, products, ideas, names, and injunctions,
and it was in the two of these languages I’d mastered that I
intended to write this work.
      The ease with which you could write it today makes my
adolescent ambition seem a grandiose dream verging on the
preposterous. Contemplating it in the light of the newer writing, I
am only more impressed than ever with that early and ambitious
foolishness.
      What do you take on a journey if you are a seventeen-year-old
prince who expects to be gone a year? Money, of course. And tents.
And provisions; and tools to set them up. Of course a chest of
sumptuous gifts for the noble houses at which, from time to time,
you will be a guest. And another of bright trinkets for commoners
who aid you and require recompense. And two closed carriages to
carry it all in. And six armed soldiers, skilled with spear, sword, and
bow, to protect you from bandits. And three men to rotate as
drivers and general grooms (though they, too, should have weapon
experience). And a body servant—some soft souls say two, three,
or more. And a caravan steward to coordinate it all. My uncle
assured me I would need a companion of my own class and
interests, as well. I made noises about stopping off to pick up a
young cousin of mine from some castle or other in the west—a
move, once we started, I had no intention of making. Very few of
my class have my interests; and among those who do, that cousin
was not one.
      The night before we left, my uncle held a party for me—to
which I arrived late: I’d finally gotten a chance to visit a merchant
woman in Sallese whose gardens boasted a set of Belham’s finest
fountains. The spewing jets played at the four corners of a bridge
across the stream at the bottom of the falls foaming behind her
house. As I recall, she was quite anxious to show me something
else, kept up in a maintenance shack at the top of the garden rise.
She said it held Belham’s own garden maquette—but I had seen
many like it before—as well as something created by another
inventor, a contemporary of, or an assistant to, Belham, when he’d
worked there for her father.
     She wouldn’t tell me what it was.
     But Belham alone was my Great Man, my Hero, and my only
Passion—also I was late.
     So I thanked her, declined her invitation, examined her
handsome fountains and their ingenious tributary pools on the
gardens’ upper level; and left for home.
      Next morning our caravan pulled out of my uncle’s gates,
while the gatekeeper, up later than I at the night’s revels, planted
the end of the crossbeam in the dust to lean on it, yawning, as the
sky’s deep blue lightened moment by moment toward a gray that
threatened rain.
     It didn’t break, as I recall, till our third day out from the city.
      The outlines of Belham’s story are widely known: born in the
south and distinguishing himself there by his mathematical and
architectural ability, he soon came to the attention of local nobles,
who encouraged him to work at various holds about the land.
Finally he was summoned by Queen Olin to Kolhari, and later
worked here for various lords and wealthy merchant families. But
he was a drinker, a womanizer, and a commoner to boot, as well as
a ranging and restless spirit. After Olin was deposed, he traveled
even further north, where he finally died from falling down a cliff,
while drunk, one cold and rainy evening, near a village just beyond
Ellamon.
      The map I’d made indicated forts, temples, bridges, roads,
and fountains all over Nevèrÿon that Belham’s name was
connected with. How did I intend to reconstruct the journey from
south to north that was his life? I joined each point on my map by
a single line to the point nearest. Certainly that was the most logical
path he would have traveled. And one drizzly afternoon, perhaps a
week beyond our departure, I sat under a tarpaulin that had been
put up for me at our camp. A hickory fire burned near me, from
logs that my caravan steward, suspecting rain, had put by in our
wagon the day before. I unrolled the map from arm to arm of my
lounging chair, now and again sipping a berry drink through a brass
straw. The liqueur was local to the town just above which we’d
stopped, and my man, Cadmir, born there and boasting of it half
the day before, had run down and back to purchase a jar and bring
it up for my enjoyment.
      Three of my soldiers squatted by a wagon wheel, tossing
bones with one of my drivers—for the sprinkle was not so fierce as
to distract them from their gambling.
     Suddenly they laughed.
      The driver had told them, I realized, the perfectly foul joke
that, after some deliberation as to whether or not it was meet for
one of my station, I’d told to him that morning as we’d sat together
on the carriage’s rocking bench. (“And make sure you tell it to
Terek,” I’d suggested, for the dark, lanky soldier had already struck
me as the most sullen among my men, though sometimes he could
give out with a startling smile.) I glanced up, to see first Terek (of
the dark skin and broken nose), then the others, grin in my
direction. I grinned back: of course, the driver had told them what
I’d said about Terek as well. But none seemed to have taken
offense. Feeling supremely well liked, I went on looking at my
map. I still recall the pride I felt, that cool afternoon as I moved a
forefinger over the vellum. Clearly this was the opening of my
Great Work. The logic, the order, the sheer reasonableness of it, in
the lines that crossed the geographical signs for mountains and
rivers and forests, was as beautiful as—I thought then—truth must
always be.
     There was Belham’s life!
     I sat gazing on the totality out of which all Belham’s creations
had grown.
     Had it occurred to me that perhaps one or two of his marvels
had missed my notation? Yes, I knew for a fact I had left out at
least two, because though I had their descriptions from several
people, no one knew exactly what towns they were in. Did I suspect
that perhaps he had not gone quite so directly, now and again,
between proximate locations? From stories I’d already gotten from
various noble cousins, I was sure there were three places from
which he’d gone on to some far place to build before returning to a
nearer town to build again. Had it occurred to me that a few of the
works bearing his name had probably not been built by him at all,
but were imitations by others in his style? I had down three such
for certain, since, despite the name, others remembered the true
builder. But these bits of special knowledge were what gave me the
expert’s sense that spiced my general pleasure.
    What did I think, then, of all these mistakes and exceptions?
What did they mean for my serpentine pattern winding Nevèrÿon?
      I was convinced, as only youth can be, that if new wonders by
Belham were reported to me that day, that if new forgeries were at
that very moment unmasked, the revisions would surely lie so close
to the lines I already had down—that any corrections to be made in
such an astute picture as mine must be so minuscule—that, were
he looking over my shoulder, Belham himself would praise my
method and take it for his own, astonished at how precisely any
addition he might make already lay within the general curve and
contour of his life as I had sketched it.
      Somewhat eccentrically, my quest’s first goal was the town, in
the Faltha mountains, of Belham’s death. I wanted to stand atop
the ledge where he had stood, had staggered… and had, drunkenly,
slipped down. Indeed, I wanted to climb to that ledge’s bottom and
stand at—even lie upon—the place where he had lain, with his
broken legs, to die. I wanted to see if, in my youth, gazing on the
rocks and trees he’d gazed on, I could intuit from them the final
thoughts of the aged and injured genius. And I was determined not
to stop off at any of the other monuments on my map until I’d had
this moment of terminal empathy.
      From his dying place I’d planned to move back, then, along
the line I’d laid out, to his last accomplishments at Ellamon—the
landscaping and fountains of my cousin’s gardens at the Vanara
Hold. Then, wonder by wonder, I would follow that line (skirting
only Kolhari), till, sinking into the south, I reached his place of
birth. Thus at each station, I could contemplate the marvels there
in terms of all that had lain ahead for him, which I would now
know, though it was unknown to him. What more reasonable way,
I thought, was there to comprehend the great and sweeping pattern
of a great man’s sweeping life?
      As we drew deeper into the Falthas, of course it
rained—rained as though the gods’ own cistern had cracked open
to spill endlessly over the woody, rocky slopes we rode: it rained
for the whole three days we approached Ellamon.
     The road grew treacherous.
      Soon my balding and heavy-lipped caravan steward climbed
into my wagon to confer with me, his robes drenched, his bushy
eyebrows water jeweled, and an edge in his voice betraying his
impatience with my impractical notion of bypassing the fabled
High Hold: Could the young master see his way to stopping first at
Ellamon proper and importuning some hospitality from his fabled
relatives—enough to wait out this bad weather?
      I was, of course, as wet and as cold as any of my men, for
several times I’d had to leave my wagon when we crossed a
particularly narrow stretch. As we rolled, with the steward sitting
beside me, I looked through the wagon’s forward window, between
the driver’s legs: our horses went unsteadily on the branch-strewn,
runneled path. While we joggled, damp and cold, the wagon slid
about.
      “Of course,” I told him; “we’ll stop at Ellamon first,” and
saw my orderly dream, like an overloaded wagon slipping from a
muddy mountain path, go smashing over the rocks at the roadway’s
edge.
      At Ellamon an aged cousin—whom I’d never met till
then—took us into his great house with much goodwill and
solicitousness, putting my servant with his in the scullery and
placing my soldiers first in his empty barracks, then bringing them
in to dine with us—at my egalitarian suggestion. For when I learned
they would be served the same food as we, prepared in the same
kitchen, there seemed no need for such a lonely meal with only the
two of us in that long, echoing chamber.
     My cousin was honestly pleased with the suggestion and
seemed to enjoy the resultant jokes, laughter, battle tales, and
pleasantries, while we ate his parsnips and roast mutton and the
windows, flaring with lightning, dripped on the western wall.
      The next morning the rain had stopped. Once there, however,
I had to stay the day. I’d told my cousin of my interest in Belham.
He was a well of information. As he took me out to show me
Belham’s fountains in his own gardens he gave me instructions on
how to get to the town nearest Belham’s demise, down to the
specific landmarks and the turns I would have to take at them to
reach, first, the town, then the ledge outside it, where the Great
Man had fallen. (Could we have gotten there without him?) He told
me of the inn, long since come down, where Belham had drunk his
last mugs of hard cider before wandering off into the evening; he
told of a half-witted, fourteen-year-old goatherd, who’d glimpsed
the Great Man, still alive, struggling at the cliff’s bottom on two
consecutive days, but who later confessed she’d been too
frightened to help him or tell anyone, since someone had told her
that the barbarian stranger was a wizard who could move great
rocks at will. And he told me of the quarrymen who, a day later,
came upon him and brought him up—barely breathing by the time
they found him and dead when they got him back to the inn. In
short, he made the whole harrowing and horrid incident live.
     After his tale, I said I planned to locate the inn by its
foundations and follow Belham’s path straight from it to the fatal
ledge.
      “Well,” he said, “that might be difficult, as the whole town
has moved over at least two stades to the east, even since my
childhood. Also, one must remember, Belham was very drunk.” My
cousin smiled. “And a drunken man does not necessarily walk the
straightest line.”
      I think my laughter surprised him. “Of course!” I declared.
“And Belham was not only drunk with cider, he was drunk with
genius!” Did he suspect how sure I was that my own cleverness
could untangle any and all mysteries about Belham or his life?
“Well,” he said, “not only has the town itself moved, it’s perhaps
half its former size—really, it’s just some houses going by the same
name. But did you know,” he went on, “that there’s a peasant
woman today, who lives not very far off, on the outskirts of
Ellamon itself, with whom Belham lived awhile, here in the High
Hold? Why not visit her? She’s in her sixties now—possibly even
her seventies—and is supposed to be quite a character in her own
right. Certainly she’ll share her memories of the transient architect
and inventor.”
     But didn’t he stay here, at the Vanara Castle, when he was
working on the gardens…?
      “Well—” my cousin smiled again—“the story has it that
Belham was a rather difficult man. I believe my uncle, for whom
the fountains were actually built, then Suzerain of Vanar, put him
out at one point!”
     I was appalled—at my late uncle!
     But my cousin seemed impressed with my commitment to
the memory of the Great Man, and wished me luck. The next
morning my carriages rolled off for that tiny, mountain hold.
     An hour on, again it poured.
     Early that evening, drops still hammering the carriage roofs,
we rolled in among some hovels of sopping thatch, all brown and
hide patched, which were—probably—the village my cousin had
told me of. But at least once, when I’d been up with my driver on
the bench, I’d inadvertently had him go right when we’d been
supposed to go left—and probably, at another point, had gone left
instead of right.
      In the downpour, no one seemed about; no work-hardened
hand pushed back a leather hanging to let creased eyes blink out at
us through the rain as we rode past the huts. (One had fallen half in
and was obviously abandoned.) As I looked out the carriage’s
dripping window, we clattered and splashed over what may or may
not have been a road between them.
       Beside me, Cadmir wanted to know: “Should we stop to ask if
this is—”
     “No!” I declared. “No. We have our directions. Drive on!”
      Looking out, I tried to imagine among the ancestors of those
impoverished dwellings—two stades to the east—one that might
have once served as an inn, or even as a drinking establishment
where a man such as Belham could have entered, seated himself,
and found enough conviviality to reach the necessary drunkenness
to bring about his evening’s wandering—and death.
     It was very hard.
       Fifteen minutes or so beyond the enclave, we rolled out onto
a long ledge from which—along parts of it—a man might have
fallen. I leaned out the window in the rain to look down on the
uneven ground at what, scattered among the rocks and leaves, my
driver called back to assure me was wild dragon spore. But by then,
I was sneezing regularly, and so told myself that the two mistakes
(if, indeed, we’d made two) surely canceled each other out.
      At last I climbed from the carriage, hunching in the
downpour, to walk along the precipice in the peppering drops and
gaze off at other mountains, wrapped half-round with mists. Going
on a little further, staring over into the dripping undergrowth, I
realized there would be no climbing down. Indeed, minutes later at
a less steep place, clambering over those wet stones, my sandal
missed its footing and I slipped and slid some six feet to an
outcrop below, landing in leaves and twigs, scraping my thigh and
wrenching one arm. Breath knocked out of me, I lay there with my
face full of leaf dirt, a speck of something in one eye, gasping and
astonished, while a branch jabbed at my leg.
     I blinked and grunted in the rain.
     My first thought was that, in moments, someone would be
running up to help.
     But do you know, not one of my servants, soldiers, or drivers
saw me go over? They were all inside the carriages to keep dry, no
doubt convinced that their young master, off slogging about in the
wet, was quite out of his mind.
     I climbed back up on my own.
       But as I stood once more atop the ledge, sore, scraped, and
still sneezing in the torrent, I knew that, in such weather, there was
also no possibility of “quiet contemplation” of the last thoughts
and hours of the Great Man.
     It was raining too hard.
       Minutes later, back at the carriage, I did not even mention my
fall, though Cadmir asked as I climbed up inside if there were
something wrong. No. No, I said. No, I was just wet and
leaf-stained. As we jarred and joggled back through the town—if
town you could call it—I told myself that, whether or not I’d stood
on the ledge from which the drunken genius had fallen, whether or
not I’d gazed down at where he’d lain for three days until he died,
I’d surely been close enough to it, if not in space, then in kind, so
that I should be satisfied. Besides, even if I had fallen upon the
spot itself (for couldn’t an older man, landing just so, have broken
his legs in such a tumble?), in the time since, new trees would have
grown up and old ones must have come down, so that the actual
site would appear different, anyway, in just those details I’d hoped,
till then, to recapture by my presence: I had looked from a ledge on
a view near enough to the last Belham must have seen for me to be
content. And didn’t fable hold that the night of his fall had been
cold and wet? Belham had been drunk with cider and genius? I’d
been drunk with Belham! He’d fallen. And I…? Well, as I sat
sneezing in the carriage with Cadmir now and again pushing more
blankets up around me, I decided my experience of the ledge—the
severity of the fall excepted—was probably more like Belham’s
than I had bargained for!
      My revised plan had been, of course, to return to my cousin’s
at Ellamon. But an hour later, Cadmir took his hand away from my
forehead with a worried look to state that I felt feverish. The
caravan steward was called in from the other wagon (where he rode
with the soldiers). And I surprised everyone, including myself, by
suddenly ordering that we bypass the High Hold of fabled Ellamon
and continue to the next spot on my map.
      “But my young master must know that,” said the steward, “in
his condition and this weather, such action isn’t wise…”
     Cadmir even brought up that my cousin had promised to take
me out on my return to see the flying beasts from the corrals above
the High Hold that so many people talk of. Certainly Belham had
gone out to watch them up on the hillside, as did all tourists who
came through fabled Ellamon.
     Cadmir, of course, knew me better than the balding,
bushy-browed steward. At another time it might have worked.
     But I was persistent.
     (I was feverish and, in a word, unreasonable.)
     I’d not come to be a tourist, I declared. I’d come with a
purpose and a passion. I’d already seen Belham’s fountains in my
cousin’s garden. Now I’d seen his place of death. Thus my purpose,
in these parts, had been fulfilled. Also, I hadn’t seen them in the
order I’d intended. Now I wanted to go on—to repair my injured
plan by continuing with it as though nothing had gone amiss. And
that did not allow for going back!
     So that is more or less what we did.
     But, bundled in furs lest my indisposition turn into some
serious catarrh, as the wagon jounced through the evening along
the soaked mountainside, I knew why I did not want to return to
my cousin’s.
    I have never actually told anyone this, though it is simple
enough to say.
      Cadmir no doubt thought that it was because I did not want
my cousin to confirm as fact that we had, indeed, found the wrong
turning, the wrong town, and the wrong ledge. Had he dared say
that in the jostling carriage, sullenly I would have agreed.
     My real reason, however, was the same one that had
prevented me from dismounting to ask directions among those
poor, crumbling huts to verify the town, make sure of the ledge, or
even to help me find the old inn’s site.
     It was that peasant woman.
      A city lad, I had not spoken with many peasants before—and
certainly none who didn’t at least work for someone related to me.
I’d only just managed to quell, through dint of almost forcible
companionship on my part, an even then occasionally resurgent, if
unmotivated, embarrassment before my own soldiers and drivers.
And they, at least, I paid. Certainly I could demand of myself, in
those days, no more! The notion of speaking to such a person, an
ancient, dense, impoverished, and imperceptive crone, no doubt
half-senile in the bargain, seemed by turns preposterous,
impossible, and, even more so, terrifying. A peasant woman, I kept
repeating. A simple, stupid peasant. A seventy-year-old peasant.
And a “character” too, whatever that meant. Certainly I knew
Belham was, by birth, a peasant himself. But that he had been
ejected from a royal hall to go and live with a stupid, dirty
peasant…
      That I should be expected—for whether or not my cousin
expected it of me, I certainly expected it of myself—to confront
this aged wall of belligerent, senile dementia, to sit in some drafty
shack, trying to pry out from that unyielding common blankness a
few pebbles of truth, fact, and firsthand information, when the
earth and air itself already seemed to conspire around me to yield
only approximations of what I wanted, was simply too frightening
for someone so newly loose in our strange and terrible land.
     Later that night we made camp—
      But let me skip ten months, or eleven, or possibly even
thirteen, for I have calculated the time differently on several
occasions by several methods. Suffice it to say it was in the last
weeks of my trip.
     It was night.
     We made camp.
     Deep in the southern forests, our fire burned within the
makeshift ring of stones we’d pushed together earlier. Supper was
done. The three of us sat around the flame—
     Who—? you ask. What three—?
     Certainly the tired young man scraping charcoal away from
the burnt end of his empty roasting stick with his thumbnail was a
leaner, browner, and, I would guess, a more levelheaded fellow
than I’d been the night we pulled away from the Ellamon road. My
hands were harder, too.
      It had begun with that brazen and much sweated over
decision to eat among my own soldiers at my cousin’s court. But
between then and now many distinctions of class—at least, I like to
think so—had fallen away.
     My fear of peasants?
      Well, by now I’d had slept in my share of chill, smelly
peasants huts, and, in several more, had eaten my share of oddly
spiced meals (as well as some spectacularly tasteless ones). Here
and there three or four commoners, come to my rescue out of
simplest kindness and without a suspicion I was a prince (and most
I never told), I’d even called friends. In that time I’d managed
properly to bed my first woman, a peasant widow, four or five
years older than I. She, I confess, I told about my lineage in what
I’d call exaggerated detail. But though I don’t know whether, a day
later, she believed me, she seemed fascinated during the
account—though possibly only by the complexity of what she may
have taken to be some imaginative merchant’s son’s preposterous
dreaming. She smelled of cows, I remember, and knew all about
country remedies for ailments I’d never even heard of before,
though I was sure, after a few hours’ talk with her, that the country
witch could have cured my poor father, without a doubt. And a
night later, at a royal relative’s great granite home, I snuck through
some lightless stone corridor behind a frizzy-haired princess, three
years younger, and far more highly born, than I. She was the
orphaned ward of another noble cousin and wore a black gown,
bronze jewels, and carried a smoky brand high ahead. Finally, on
the dirt floor of the castle storage room I showed her some of what
I’d learned not a full day back in a common woman’s arms…
     I had no other woman for over a year—though the very range
of my encounters was enough to make me think myself at least as
much an expert on sex as I was on Belham, if not the final
authority on womankind itself.
      I’d also managed to learn the lesson easy for rural nobles but
hard for the heads of our urban upper classes to absorb: in the right
situation, peasant wisdom can outshine all others. In my case, one
of our carriages put a wheel over the road edge and, after we’d all
gotten out, in our effort to right it the whole wagon suddenly
toppled over the side, overturning at the bottom of a five-foot
slope with a great crash—just as five dirty, silent, and absolutely
unprepossessing bumpkins came wandering along, two women
among them, only to gape and giggle at us, I was sure. But I had
the good sense to be polite, and after five or six grunts with a
minute or two between and many, many, many shakes of their
heads, suddenly they went to hauling at limbs and uncoiling ropes,
barking brief and incomprehensible instructions, now to one
another, now to my wary soldiers, till, with this and that, they
managed to lever the carriage up, a bit at a time, propping it now
with this rock, now with that log, till it was again on the road with
only a snapped trace. And as I stood about in embarrassed
gratitude (no, they would take no money, but were happy for the
worked-metal jars and plates I gave them as gifts), I found myself
thinking that their method must be very near to one Belham
himself might have devised to move the incredibly heavy stones
from quarry to building site, how many decades ago.
     But my material losses in those months must be mentioned
along with my intellectual gains, or this is no true account.
     Cadmir was the first to go. My fever and sneezing had
vanished with a week’s cough and a somewhat raspy throat. But
soon it was Cadmir himself who was feverish, with a constant
hacking that alternated between painful dryness and bouts when he
would bring up phlegms, green and yellow—and sometimes even
blood.
     When we met another caravan, this one commercial, returning
to Kolhari, I paid them to take him back to my uncle’s in the city
where he might be better cared for in familiar surroundings.
      The soldiers? Well one, for instance, came to me to say we
were within stades of his home hamlet. Could he stop off for a
day’s visit? He knew our itinerary and promised he would catch up
to us within the week. Against my steward’s advice, I let the man
go—and have not seen him since. But a week after that, two more
soldiers took off, just on their own.
     “Comes of being lenient with the first one,” some said to me
with sympathy, some with censure.
     The two closed carriages were eventually lost:
      The first went one hot morning when the other trace snapped,
and two of my drivers simply walked away in disgust. But by then
I’d had two more caravan stewards since the first (whom I’d never
really gotten along with) had abandoned us to take on, I can only
assume, a more profitable and, certainly, more sensible job with yet
another commercial venture heading toward the desert; which he’d
heard of, so Terek later informed me, at our stopover in Varhesh.
Since we were low on soldiers, drivers, and provisions, we decided
to consolidate with the remaining carriage.
     Then, wouldn’t you know, we were attacked by bandits
somewhere in the western woods. I say bandits, but truly I think
they were two mounted guards from a noble house where only
hours before we’d been—oh, politely enough—refused any
hospitality at all and sent on our way:
     The master, they said, was not in.
      The three soldiers left had been inside the carriage with me
when we stopped outside the castle gate, and I think the guards
who decided to follow us wrongly assumed my single carriage
caravan had no soldiers at all. When they stopped us on the road
with a shout and an arrow through my driver’s arm, before I was
even sure what was happening, Terek took up his spear beside me
and thrust it mightily from the carriage window through the flank
of one of the bandit’s horses, felling her on top of her rider—I
almost lost a tooth when the spear’s end hit my jaw. Then we were
all out of the carriage, fighting the remaining rider. I really only
looked on as they ran down the second on his horse, cutting at his
legs, at the horses’s legs, until both went over all bloody and they
killed them. Then they came back and Terek put his sword through
the neck of the bandit who’d fallen first. His leg broken and pinned
under his horse, the man screamed horribly when, for the fifteen
seconds before it, he realized what the tall dark soldier with the
broken nose ambling leisurely toward him with his sword out was
about to do.
      We now had a wounded driver, and there was speculation
among the men as to whether we would have avoided the fray if
they had been walking along outside, visible, as was usual, where
the sight of them might have discouraged attack. Terek
commented, sensibly I thought, that if three soldiers and a steward
had been outside, the bandits, before pouncing, would simply have
picked them off from the cover of the trees with bows and arrows,
just as they’d shot the driver—who listened to it all leaning against
the wagon, a pained expression on his face and his arm now
bandaged in a piece of old cloth and a leather sling. We left him off
at the next city—where there was a particularly fine, circular
grain-sellers guild building, built by Belham.
      While I was out looking at it, two more of my soldiers made
up their minds to leave my employ, but they at least had the
courtesy to stay long enough to tell me, and even to help me sell
off the last carriage and horses to a merchant family there and
replace it with a sizable two-mule provision cart with a canopy over
its back half that could be taken down if needed; Terek and I could
manage it alone.
       “You know,” Terek told me as we were taking stores out of
the carriage and hoisting them up over the cart’s edge to pack them
under the cart cover, “we’ll have less trouble with bandits in this
thing than we would with that. A closed carriage on these roads
just looks like nobility, and if there’s not a sizable number of guards
in evidence, it cries out to be attacked.” That made sense, too.
     I became the driver.
      Sitting there, reining my mules before me, I was, in just about
equal measure, proud of my maturity and of my actual, physical
control of our destiny; I was also, yes, frightened lest some arrow
strike me from the trees.
       The morning after, my last, diminutive, redheaded steward
left me—with reasonable warning the night before: “This isn’t
really a caravan anymore, little master.” (I was more than a head
taller than he, and, though he was fifteen years my senior, this had
been his joke from the beginning.) “I’m a good caravan manager,
but there’s no one here for me to manage, now. By the same token,
I’m not a soldier. Why should you pay me a steward’s wages to tag
along behind your cart beside your young guard, there?” A little
later I called the lanky, still somewhat sullen Terek to me and sat
him down on a log across from me for a serious talk.
     “The truth is,” I told him, “you too should probably quit my
company. Certainly you’ll be better off making your way alone than
weighted down with worry about me. I’ll soon find another relative
in some great house, whom I intend to implore to get me back to
Kolhari—but this has been the most reckless and costly of trips.
And I must think of remedying it.”
      Terek was twenty-three then. Born somewhere off in the
country—precisely where, I never did learn—he’d managed to join
the army a year or two younger than was permissible. By sixteen or
seventeen, he’d seen combat and killed several men; by twenty he’d
been the last pupil of the great strategist Master Nabu, and had
been made a minor officer in the Imperial Army—where he’d
gotten his nose smashed and a scar down his thigh from a young
noble-born officer who’d grown jealous of him and, in an
argument, had slashed his leg. (He’d slashed back, I’d heard him
boast to the other soldiers; then, suddenly, he’d glanced at me,
realizing I was listening. I’d just nodded, as approvingly as I could.)
After that, he become a private mercenary, hiring out as a caravan
guard.
       Yes, while I was impressed with his bravery and fighting
skills, I was somewhat afraid of this dark, tall man, with the broken
nose, the slightly turned-in feet, and the wide hands on which the
nails were gnawed down almost to nothing—bitten worse, indeed,
than I’ve seen on anyone else in my life.
      As I talked to him, telling him he was free to leave me, Terek
sat on his log, sword, spear, and bow on the ground between us,
clutching his knees and listening as intently as (I imagined) he
might to some superior officer explaining a particularly complex
battle strategy. “You go too, Terek. It’s just not fair. I can manage
the wagon alone. There’ve been no bandits in this part of the forest.
And even if I eventually have to abandon the cart, well…” He was
growing, I could see, more and more uncomfortable, till he blurted:

      “Where should I go? You want to get rid of me, now? Where
do I go, then? What do I do without your damned wagon and your
damned mules? And what will you do without me? You’re a boy and
a fool! No!” He shook his head, violently. “No, you shouldn’t send
me off. It’s no good! What will happen? To me? To you? I won’t
go! No!”
      My till then controlled fear became simple surprise. But at
last, as I had given, somewhat reluctantly, that first soldier
permission to leave, I gave this last one permission to stay. My
discomfort? It was simply the realization that, from then on, we
were not Master and man any longer. We were simply a somewhat
quiet, though well-trained, twenty-three-year-old soldier and a
somewhat precocious, if slightly pigheaded, seventeen-year-old
prince. We were traveling together with the same mule wagon;
whether I liked it or not, I had a companion.
      Indeed, it was not long after, nor many villages away, that we
met crippled Arly, a barbarian outcast in his own village. One leg
was gone high at Arly’s thigh in a snarl of scarred, hard flesh from
some appalling fall as a five-year-old from the front of a runaway
stone cart beneath its loud and murderous wheels. Older than I,
younger than Terek, and certainly not long on intelligence, he
nevertheless had a good imagination, as well as that high humor
you sometimes find among the deeply injured; and he was willing
to do almost anything in order to come with us—then, indeed, to
stay. His arms were thicker than Terek’s—though he was shorter
than I was. And his remaining leg was strong. He spoke three
languages barbarically, where I could converse only in two. (Terek
had only one.) Bound round its length with hairy, mint-scented
barks, his single crutch was as nimble on rocks and roots as any of
the four feet Terek and I had between us; and, on his back, holding
it over his shoulder with one hand, he could carry a heavier sack
than I could with two. Nothing tied him to his village, where he
was usually just tolerated—and sometimes tormented—as a
drunkard and an idiot. (He behaved only intermittently like
either—and then, usually, with reason.) I suppose the fear and
ignorance he shared with his fellow villagers had kept him from
running away till now, though he told us he’d thought of little else
in the last few years. For his ignorance wasn’t so great that he
didn’t realize his own fear could probably be overcome simply by
staying close to someone, like myself, with less than he.
     Yes, please, he wanted to come!
      The reason I took him, however, was that he amused
Terek—for all through my good soldier’s sullenness, I could still
get a grin from him now and then with a dirty story. And to that
end I’m afraid I’d used up not only my peasant widow and
dark-robed princess, but their sisters and their serving maids, their
cousins and their mothers, all in a perfectly shameless manner.
Arly’s accounts of his one-legged exploits among the village
women (as much exaggerated, I’m sure, as my own) gave me at
least some respite as we made our way.
      With Arly I could become audience to the strings of
lascivious tales instead of actor.
      Terek’s weapon skills were joined with fair hunting ability.
Often he speared us rabbits, small pigs, and turkeys. Arly’s
infirmity seemed to have lent him a mania for physical
accomplishment. Already a decent shot with rock and sling, he
badgered Terek for spear-throwing lessons, which the young
soldier was happy enough to give; and through the weeks the
one-legged barbarian, with his crutch under one shoulder and
Terek’s spear held over the other, made a committed and
purposeful headway that often left me hot-cheeked as I watched,
real respect for him contending with real jealousy. Arly had an
extraordinary knowledge of edible leaves, roots, pods, nuts, and
fungi—passed to him by the same old woman who’d staunched his
severed leg and with whom he’d lived till she’d died, when he was
fourteen or so and from which time his pariah status in his village
dated. Oddly, then, as well as our driver, I became our company
cook with what the other two provided. And with only a few
culinary disasters (Arly sneezing at some over-peppered stew;
Terek frowning at some particularly pasty pudding I’d prepared
from Arly’s vague recipe, with what I’d thought were only some
simple, sensible corrections), it worked fairly well. Since then, I’ve
several times noticed that in such small groups as ours, whoever
prepares the food becomes the leader—or stops cooking.
    Despite my youth, you see, I still felt in charge of our
movements.
      And what had happened to my quest for Belham in all this?
Well, somehow, aside from these transformations in materials,
men, and methods, I’d still managed, before and after, to visit more
than half the locations on my map. Whether the true authority lay
in me, or in the piece of vellum, now rolled up and stuffed down
inside the wagon, I couldn’t say. Perhaps I only retained my
leadership because from time to time I could take our wagon into
the yard of some lowering castle and, after five minutes’
conversation with an upper servant, secure an audience with the
resident lord, and from there usually gain an offer of
hospitality—food, company, and more or less comfortable sleeping
accommodations for the three of us—for a day or three’s relief
from travel.
     Another interesting transformation:
     On the road, I really felt the three of us were simply friends.
      But as soon as we entered one stone gateway or another, Arly
would wordlessly become my most attentive, if preposterously
clumsy, servant. (His comic confusion in our first such visit,
getting lost here and there in the low-ceilinged halls, as he sprinted
off to get me water, washing cloths, a bowl of fruit, till I had to go
find him, is a tale in itself!) But, do you know, till after he’d taken
on the role three times during three such stops, we never discussed
it?
    At the same time as Arly became my comic man, Terek
would transform into my silent, loyal bodyguard.
      I don’t think they particularly relished being subservient, or
even—particularly—felt it. Yet somehow, without question, the
pressure of some noble’s (or even some noble’s servant’s) gaze
would force the three of us into this hierarchical order, me as well
as them—a hierarchy that would vanish minutes after we’d pulled
outside the gates. But these visits were rests, as well as social
adventures. (Though of a different order for me: in them I learned
more than I wanted to about the vulgarities, pretensions, and sheer
madness of the provincial rich.) Really, there was no other way for
us to negotiate them, and Arly and Terek could not have had them
without me. Perhaps, then, that was why, on our days in the forest,
mountain, or desert, when I took out my vellum, squinted up at the
sun, then pointed now here, now there on the much marked map,
unquestioningly we went where I said.
      Indeed, without more than the most passing mentions from
me, they even began to develop a kind of respect for Belham and
my quest—at least after they’d seen a few of his works, or sat in the
corner of some sooty-ceilinged hall, while I discussed him with this
heavy-robed duchess or that potbellied duke, with the same round
eyes and broad cheekbones as I.
     But despite my own commitment and my companions’
growing respect, the map itself had undergone as many changes as
I had; and while, my losses notwithstanding, I’d changed (I think)
for the better, the map, for practical purposes, was a mess. Oh, I
don’t mean that the parchment itself was in tatters. That was safe
enough—only worn a little at the edges where, from time to time,
I’d gripped it too tightly. But the stability of the object only fixed
the chaos that had come upon it. For though I had visited more
than half the locations marked, by no means had I visited them in
order. The confusion in my initial trip to Ellamon and the tiny
town beyond only hinted at the confusion my quest had met with
throughout the rest of Nevèrÿon:
      Buildings and bridges built by Belham and said to be at one
town or city had several times turned out to be at others, two or
three days away. The map itself had contained its own errors, with
villages supposedly situated on one side of a river turning out to be
a day or two’s ride from the other. What had been marked as a
stream turned out to be a wide river. And a goodly number of wide
and rocky streams—known as rivers locally—turned out not to
have been marked at all. On several occasions, when two of my
carefully noted cities were, indeed, physically close, some
unscalable mountain ridge or unclimbable chasm or unfordable
river—at least at that spot—lay between them, so that direct travel
from one to the other was all but impossible.
     At first I made myself the excuse that Belham, unlike me, as a
Great Man, would have been undaunted by the unclimbable, the
unfordable. But soon I had to admit that, to the extent he had been
a great traveler as well, he must have been an efficient one, and in
Nevèrÿon’s varied and variegated landscape, the shortest distance
on the map was not always the most practical one to pass across.
There were simply too many places where it was easier to go a
greater distance over easier terrain than a shorter one across the
impassable.
     Of course I’d tried to revise my map in the light of this new
geographical information. For hadn’t I learned from an elderly
woman of Able-Ani, who recalled working as a youngster for an
older Belham, hauling water for his workers building the stone
temple for which the town today is famous, that there was a bridge
in the town, already years old when she was a girl, which Belham
had also built across the river that divided it? For a fact, she knew
that he had architected the bridge years before when he was in his
twenties, and that he’d not been in Able-Ani for twenty years since
(he’d told her these things himself), and had now come back, in his
early fifties, to construct the temple at the local lord’s request. Now
Belham’s time and work in Kolhari had clearly been done after
both: the woman recalled his great excitement at receiving a
messenger from the High Court. That, she was sure, was the first
time he’d been summoned to the court by the queen, not only from
Belham’s own words to her as she’d poured out water for him at
the temple site, but from everyone else’s excitement over the new
commission. And she was sure he’d left from Able-Ani to travel
direct to the High Court at the queen’s command the very week the
temple was finished.
     All of this seemed proper from what I knew.
      But there was no line direct from Able-Ani to Kolhari on my
map; nor were there two lines to that small, elegant city marking
two separate visits, to build two separate monuments (one stone
bridge, one rock temple), twenty years apart. Sitting by my camp’s
burnt-out fireplace one chill morning, before anyone else was up,
I’d tried to draw in these revisions along with the dozens of other
geographical corrections I’d learned about, only to realize that, as I
worked with my brush at my bit of pumice-rubbed goatskin, that
where, before, I’d had supreme order, now I had incompleteness
and imprecision superimposed on inaccuracy and error.
      Another problem: many times by then I’d heard the name that
plagues any researcher into the late works of Belham: Venn. (How
I’d avoided it till now, I’ve often wondered since.) Here and
there—and almost always in tiny, provincial holds where the
inhabitants had forgotten all facts concerning Belham the man, so
that I clearly knew more than anyone there about the stretch of
road cut through impossible rocks, or the great stones of some
archway balanced impressively together—along with Belham’s
bridge or building, I’d find “Venn’s Stair” or “Venn’s Rock” or
“Venn’s Cut.” Someone, I don’t know who, said he thought Venn
was a woman Belham had…
       Lived with, like the old peasant at Ellamon I’d been afraid to
see?
       Been in love with?
       Been furious at?
       Both?
       Neither?
       Logic suggests the aging inventor, infatuated with some
young, pretty, scatterbrained thing, had begun to name some of his
minor works after her. But was she a superstitious peasant he’d
diddled behind a barn when she’d offered the old man a cup of
beer, or was she some prattling princess with whom, groping after
her in some castle chamber where he’d pursued her in the dark,
he’d managed (once more?) to disgrace himself? I did not know
then, and I do not know now. Perhaps it was some merchant who’d
financed him. Perhaps it was some noble friend he’d chosen to
honor. No one I happened to meet seemed to know—though at
Narnis I found an obviously manmade promenade, with great rock
steps cut down to the river; and at Aldanangx, near Makalata, we
were directed out to an immense cave that had clearly been cut
artificially into the mountain, huge and echoing, with carved
columns along its sides. Both bore only Venn’s name—both, truly,
greater than any work by Belham I’d seen.
      As we stood in the cave’s cool hollow, with his crutch end
tapping about on the stone floor and his eyes gazing at the distant
ceiling, Arly made the most preposterous suggestion yet: perhaps
she—if it was a she—was an inventor and architect herself,
comparable to, if not greater than, my Belham. In the columned,
echoing space, Terek and I howled and threw our arms around our
bellies and doubled over at that one. But the truth is, as we walked
out onto sunlit sand (teasing each other with japes about the
bandits we’d heard occasionally used the place for a stopover), as
we reached our wagon beside the scruffy desert bushes, I realized I
simply didn’t know. And in such a situation, the joking logic of a
one-legged barbarian counts no less, certainly, than the considered
reason of a Nevèrÿon prince. But I’d begun to learn how suspicious
were all products of logic. So that now, whenever I encountered
Venn’s name, it was not as a bit of revealing information but only a
frayed thread pulled loose from the weave and fallen from time’s
crowded and confused worktable.
      We had recently swung down and around into the lush and
forested south, till we were not far from the spot on my old and
marked-up map where Belham was supposed to have been born.
Certainly I’d given up on the pristine order of my early
plan—advice I’m sure, that, had I asked for it, my first and
long-gone caravan steward would have given me directly, that
feverish night in the Falthas.
      But as we’d come closer to what my map fixed as Belham’s
point of origin, benefactors both high and low, on hearing of my
goal, had told me that, while, yes, Belham was indeed rumored to
have been born in that particular little town, he also was rumored
to have been born in another as well—also in several others. And
each smiling prince or grinning peasant gave us his (or, in two
cases, her) own perfectly logical reason why, of course, this one,
that one, or another was, indeed, the most logical choice.
      By the morning we started out for the place itself, I had five
villages down, each with its claim to be the birthplace of Belham.
The five were not, indeed, far apart—or at least after the traveling
we’d been doing, they did not seem so. The three of us were able to
get our wagon from one to the other, with a few hours to explore at
each, within four days. Nor were we bothered by inclement
weather. And by now, trotting in after them among the chickens
and the dogs, I could stop any wizened old man or woman, any
big-eyed, bandy-legged boy or girl, give them a smile and a nod,
and, after the necessary moment of suspicion, usually get a smile
back and at least a gesture toward further information, if only the
name and whereabouts of someone else in town who might know
more about my question.
     Yet what I’d found in my five villages of his birth was in its
way as disconcerting as my experience of his dying place.
      For the first of the towns simply and wholly no longer
existed: we found its foundations, yes, some fallen walls—but not
one building still stood. There were signs of fire. We left our mule
wagon to tramp about the wreckage. While I speculated aloud as to
how many years ago this was likely to have occurred, with his spear
Terek turned up a bit of burnt board from the body of a cat, whose
wet loins, as he prodded it, spilled out a slough of maggots of
maggots!
      The destruction was only days—no more than weeks—old, or
the carcass would have been all bone…
      But for all we looked about that afternoon, the three of us
whispering quietly, or searching about stealthily, skittish as to
lurking marauders or even, perhaps, slavers (none of whom
materialized), we could learn no more.
      The second barbarian enclave we found was normal
enough—though, for all of us, the destruction we’d seen the day
before returned and returned to mind, the way sun, flashing on a
stream, repeats and repeats in the eye after you’ve moved off into
the woods. Yes, the yellow-headed, sun-browned inhabitants knew
that Belham had been born there. (They pronounced his name just
differently enough to leave a suspicion that we were not talking
about the same man, but I’d already learned to put such doubts
straight out of mind.) Well, then, did anyone know precisely where?
Did his parents’ house, perhaps, still stand? Did relatives still live
here who could tell stories that might have come down through the
family about what was supposed to be, after all, a most prodigious
childhood?
      That drew great laughter from the barbarians who’d gathered
to gape at Arly’s crutch, dropping to the dust in place of his leg, or
to poke and point at the spear Terek, in his kilt and stained leather
chest-guard, leaned on like a staff, or simply to blink at me (at my
dark, noble, northern features, I presumed), or our wagon, or our
mules. From their lapping chatter I learned that this forest village,
like the mountain town he’d died near, had also moved about a bit
over the years.
     Well, where had it moved from?
      Astonished, I watched this one point in that direction, while
another contradicted him, explaining that the other was thinking of
a much more recent time, while an aged woman on a stick pushed
ahead of them all to tell us that, no, most of the houses used to be
down there, drowning out a gap-toothed boy who had just been
saying earnestly, a moment back, how his old grandfather had
clearly told him, years before, that over there…
     Terek, Arly, and I looked at each other.
     None of the barbarians truly knew.
      Or, if one did, none of us three could learn from
listening—or from any of our further questions through the
day—who was right.
     The third town we came to, larger and far more settled
looking (perhaps it was the odd stone building, or the wooden
fence along one side of a small, partially paved, market area),
produced just as many barbarians claiming just as surely that
Belham had been born here (part of his family had come from
another town, you see; but that emigrant relative had been enough
to make the other village—not among my five—try to appropriate
his birth). This time my question as to where, then, specifically,
young Belham’s home or hut had been led us, after much barbaric
chatter, to an elderly man with a cloth wrapped in a kind of turban
around his head, who volunteered to walk with us awhile. He
would explain.
     He walked.
     We walked with him.
     Other barbarians kept a respectful distance.
      For distressing minutes our man was silent, and I thought
either Arly or Terek would soon grow bored and start some jest,
for though they had developed a certain respect, neither—when the
other was there to clown about with—had developed much
patience.
     But finally he spoke.
      “You understand,” he told us, in a shrill, measured voice, as
we walked among the huts and houses, “none of what you see,
stone cabin or thatched hovel, has been here more than twenty-five
years. Is that your age, boy?” he asked Terek, who nodded, even
though he was less. “Sometimes it’s been slavers who’ve devastated
the land. Other times, it’s been soldiers who’ve marched through,
killing, burning, destroying. Villages don’t survive that sort of thing.
When I was a child, I can remember even earlier slavers, worse
than the Imperial soldiers—indeed, in the early days I used to think
they were one and the same. They came with the same metal
swords, the same leather armor—” He glanced toward tall Terek’s
spear and gear—“and dealt out much the same destruction. The
only difference was that one took prisoners and the other left all as
corpses. But I was only six or seven back then. Belham? I’ve heard
of him. I’ve heard that he was born here. But I’ve heard that he was
born in practically every village in the south—even in some I know
for a fact have existed less years than the youngest of you has been
alive.” He glanced at Arly; and I felt proud that I looked so mature.
“But we have little left to boast of here, my noble visitor.” He
nodded toward me. “So you mustn’t be surprised if our various
villages share the little we have.”
      Somehow the next two towns we stopped in, looking for the
birth of Belham, seemed to offer even less than the first three in
terms of certainty. But among them all, at the last of the five,
though I did not say it to either Terek or Arly, what I was most
struck by was that, in their limited, brutish, and impoverished life,
just as I had not been able to imagine a proper inn in the town of
his dying, I could not imagine what, here, some hundred years ago,
might have inspired a barbarian boy to the discoveries about
numbers, circles, triangles, rock cutting, levers, pulleys, and the
motions of water and wind that had been attributed to him by the
time he left it at the behest of some local noble not much more
advanced, I suspected by now (judging by the few who had recently
given us shelter), in anything save their brutish power over these
common folk who had been their subjects, than the commoners
themselves. Yet somehow between then and now, I’d become
humble enough to see this lack of imagination as my failure, my
want of a comparable genius, the uncrossable distance at which I
stood from the accomplishments of the Great Man.
      Despite the failings I’d learned existed in me, however, along
with what strengths I’d found as well, I’d learned that Belham’s
birth, only a little lifetime before his dying, had somehow become
even less specific, even more generalized, than the tenuous fact of
his death. Yet now I knew also that, while at (or near) his dying
spot I’d seen one town and been able to tell myself, wrong or not, it
was probably characteristic of the right one, here at these several
places of birth and better trained to observe by my travels, I’d taken
from these five possibilities—though all were southern, barbaric,
and small—only a set of extreme and fascinating differences;
differences which overturned all certainty that, how long ago now,
some haphazard huts I’d stumbled on in the mountains (or in the
desert or the forest for that matter) could be truly “characteristic”
of any others. All towns were individual. Each was unique. And
Belham’s ability to create wonders of abstraction and stone design
from what he’d seen in them was just not the same as my little
ability to re-create what even then I was becoming more and more
wary of calling his “life.”
     It was only days after we had left the last of these villages—
     But I have already said:
     We made camp.
      The three of us sat by the fire, in our shell of leafy dark, my
most recent meal (rabbit and small wild tubers) not much in the
past, sleep not far in the future. Terek had just declined a game of
bones with Arly, who sat now, both hands holding his knee,
looking about us for (I suspect) the demons of darkness ceded him,
along with her knowledge of edible plants, by the crone who’d
staunched his stump. Suppose either one of them, I thought, my
“servant” or my “soldier,” were asked to reconstruct even this little
hour of our history, even as the three of us were enmeshed in it,
here and now (there and then). Suppose they were asked to recall
what we’d eaten, to guess at the order of our bedding down? Would
either of their accounts be accurate? Would two tales from any of
three of us be recognizably the same? How then could I presume
to retrieve the true tale of Belham, as my own story was congruent
with his neither in time nor in space?
      For in those old commercial scripts I had to work with, one
could write: “I saw…” or “She was…” or “He did…” But those
useful and efficient marks gave us little or no way to write: “I
might have seen something somewhat like…” or “Maybe
somebody had been near someplace more or less similar to…” or
“It’s conceivable that perhaps somebody who was almost the same
as…” But as far as Belham’s life was concerned, that was the only
tale I had. In general, writing is precise and speech is imprecise.
But what the unknown genius of the Ulvayns has given us is a tool
to render precisely speech’s imprecision. To be a boy in Nevèrÿon
before that genius sent his system abroad to us, however, was to
have no such tool, and thus to experience precision and
imprecision as separated by some uncrossable chasm which
Belham could not bridge from his side nor I, I’d finally come to
admit, from mine. What came to mind, then, with that firelit
realization?
     Do you remember my secret plan?
      As I sat by the fireplace that night, contemplating all the ways
that time and the land had smeared my vision of order, the
articulation of my wish to move beyond everything about me that
confined me silently returned.
      Contemplating what I took to be the wreckage of my quest, I
realized I could not make that wreck clear to my two
friends—which made them now seem less than friends, but rather
some overpowering responsibility I could no longer carry. For
while Terek had once called me a boy and a fool, he’d nevertheless
assumed from the beginning that I was at least master of the
information I’d sought, found, and sifted. And each bit of
contradictory confusion Arly had watched me arrive at, he’d simply
assumed was what I’d been looking for all along.
     Well, I’d found nothing save a bunch of buildings, roads, and
rocks, some of which were where they were supposed to be and
some of which weren’t.
      And because I could not tell them I had found nothing, for
fear I would lose the little authority I had, I only wished to be free
of them.
      As my thoughts came back from the hard peaks, the tangled
forests, and the glaring deserts of my own ignorance, this was the
fact I returned to. Yet, oddly enough, right here, at this place, on
this evening, I felt as if I might also be face to face with something
new, something in no way involved with Belham, something not
called Nevèrÿon, something wondrous I might see or feel if only I
was free, of them, of it. For here was also the possibility of leaving
behind all the tangles of humanity and history Nevèrÿon herself
seemed to have made hopelessly problematic in these last months:
     Our country is not, you understand, mapped to a precise
border the way some of our central counties have recently been
marked out by Imperial surveyors. Still, we were at the
southernmost edge of what is called Nevèrÿon.
     I knew it:
     We were at the southernmost edge of my map.
     And that map was Nevèrÿon.
     I had come as close to the points of Belham’s birth and death
as I was able. It was not that I had seen all, or so much, or even
enough of the life between to abandon my quest. Rather I knew
how that “life” was no longer there to be known, so that my quest
was not so much over, or sufficiently completed, or even
reasonably begun. Rather, it had been revealed as an impracticality
and an impossibility at once.
     On the map a rocky river, which we’d been following for a
day between the last two villages, ran off the bottom. If I followed
its watery murmur, soon and somewhere, I would be beyond
Nevèrÿon.
       The most logical way to go on was, of course, simply to wait
till next morning. Then, once we were all up, I could take out my
map and announce we would now travel even further south. But
somehow I had begun to have suspicions that the authority did not
really lie with me, but in the quest itself; and though, with the
fiasco of Belham’s ‘birth,’ I knew something terribly important in
that quest had irreparably fallen to pieces, my companions didn’t. I
wanted to shake myself free of the whole thing the way, I fancied,
any of my soldiers who had so long ago deserted me must have felt
when they, for whatever reasons, suspected things were not going
well with my long-lost caravan.
     Suddenly I stood up, walked away from the fire—at the edge
of the bushes I looked to see, sitting back by the provision cart’s
wide wheel, Terek glanced up at me with only the slightest
questioning, then look again at the flame. Certainly he thought I
was going off into the woods to relieve myself, or masturbate—as
more than once I caught him off doing. Arly yawned at the fire and
did not even look. I pushed into the darkening underbrush,
stepping slowly, feeling beside and ahead of me. After ten steps it
was black enough so that I might have been moving through the
trees in a blindfold. Now a branch hit my face, my chest. Now I
nearly walked into a tree. I felt my way around a rough trunk. Now
my shin came up against a fallen log, and I climbed slowly over,
reaching for the ground with my foot and wondering if I weren’t
about to go over some slope as steep as the cliff where
Belham—or I—had fallen.
     Thirty steps, forty steps, fifty steps on I came out into some
bushy clearing.
     There was no moon. But the wide and lucid night was salted
with stars as thickly as I’d ever seen. The dusty river of the Milky
Way slanted through those cold sparks. I looked down to see that I
was at the edge of some field-wide clearing, scattered with brush
and near the river. To my right, I could make out rocks and the
foam breaking round them. The air was hugely still. The water
whispered like wind.
      Because the nameless gods of craft we nod to in Nevèrÿon
are so much like ourselves, no one ever pictures them. It would be
redundant. Still, not only servants, but barbarians and even the odd
nobleman had, by now, mentioned to me some of the names of
those other, older entities—and a few had even taken me out, on
the odd evening, to explain how some of their ancestors had
pictured this one or that one among those stellar points. That night,
standing there, I had a sudden fancy that, so many stars were out,
there were now, hanging above me, pictures of all the gods there’d
ever been, as well as all the gods there ever would be, named and
unnamed, alike and overlapping, all looking down at me, as I made
my way across that little meadow, seeking to flee—my gait slow for
the night—beyond our odd and undefinable border.
     I tried to mark in the river’s foam-shot black the current’s
thrust, to aid my direction when I’d once more entered the woods.
      Another thirty steps, and tickling leaves and prodding twigs
received me. I would keep the river’s sound constant by me, I
decided, as I moved, slow step by slow step. I wondered whether
exhaustion or sunlight would find me first. I felt at once idiotically
foolish and amazingly brave. My body seemed to glitter blackly in
the midst of this transgression of a boundary all but inarticulable.
But not for a second did I think of turning back.
       Now I have told you of the monster I live with, today, here in
Kolhari—my “reputation” as a teacher and a wise man. Well, at
that time I had little sense of the reality of the process by which
such monsters form, at least as one was to form about me. But in
my search for Belham, I had already begun to learn something of
the process in the abstract: for all men—famous, infamous, or
most extraordinarily ordinary—have such monsters. Didn’t Arly
and I sometimes speak of Terek when he was off hunting? Didn’t
Terek and I sometimes joke over Arly’s antics when he was not
there? No doubt the two of them were talking of me now: making
monsters! But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster
left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster
called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was
precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such
monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation,
impossibility, and ignorance. Well, for nearly a year—a long time
for sustained effort from one of eighteen—like some fabled hero
the mummers might mime on their wagon stage, I had not only
pursued this “Belham” monster, but I had fought it and hacked at
it, and cut it apart, and pulled it to pieces, and, finally, had tossed
away its disparate limbs, till, on that very night, it was truly
dispersed, vanquished, gone—all, that is, except the ineluctable
force that had first held it together. All that was left was what ever
had sought and sucked and gathered and contorted all the
fragmentary “facts,” was whatever had bound them into that
monumentally resistant coherence I had begun my journey with,
that coherence which, indeed, I had begun by seeking to confirm.
     That force still traveled with me as I stepped into the darkness
that night—a force which, now naked, was doubtless even more
powerful for what had been yanked apart from it, stripped free, and
hurled away.
      As I inched forward, moving among black trees, I heard it, I
think, on my left—high up too—like the smallest change in the
river’s susurrus. A night bird, perhaps? But almost immediately, I
heard it again, not so much as something that had moved closer, but
as though another part or limb of it had moved, which was closer.
     I halted.
     Save the river’s whisper, it was very still.
     I started walking once more, hoping my own movement
through the brush would be more frightening than attractive to
whatever it was.
     Three steps on, again I heard it—now near the ground.
     Had it dropped from the branches?
       Then, while I definitely wasn’t moving, it moved. I swallowed
and pulled back, hitting my shoulder against a trunk. Part of it was
high, and part of it was on the ground. Whatever it was was simply
very large.
     At first I didn’t hear it, but above me a handful of stars
between two branches went out as something moved in front of
them. Then, slowly, it bent down in the dark and… touched me!
    Reaching for me, it brushed against my arm, wet and
crumbling as some rain-soaked mountain slope. At the same time
some change in the night breeze came about, so that I smelled
something rotten as a week-old cat carcass, its immense body no
doubt starred with the same white, wriggling grubs.
    Whatever it was was immense, moving, and dead as Belham
himself!
      I didn’t scream, but I gasped in a fetid stench, pulled away,
and ran. With ten steps my foot caught something, and I fell,
rolling in leaves—and heard its foot fall on the earth behind me,
loud and large as my whole body. Pushing to my knees, I hurled
myself on in the dark, while it breathed, hoarsely, wetly, above me.
      I ran, stumbling, scraping myself, hitting myself, hurting my
ankle on a rock, my hand on a tree; somehow I tore into that starlit
meadow. But five running steps among the ghostly brush, I heard a
thundering behind me loud as a tree crashing down through leaves
and branches. Then, over the length of an indrawn breath, the
starlight on the brushes and ground wiped away, as something huge
and cold moved above me and under the night—as I crashed into
the trees.
       I tripped. I fell on some small slope that would never have
felled me in daylight. I practically crawled over some large log.
Then, again, I ran. My eyes, blinking and tearing open, filled with
firelight as I crashed through more leaves—
     Terek looked up from the flame, frowned at me—then
scrambled to his feet in a crouch, snatching his spear up over his
shoulder with one hand, pulling loose his sword with the other.
Arly looked around, then levered up on his crutch in a motion,
beginning to take small, hopping steps back.
       I looked over my shoulder at the branches quivering in
firelight. A breeze had come from somewhere. The forest shook,
and the campfire burned high within it. Turning around before the
fireplace, I backed away from the trees.
     My own shadow grew huge on the shaking leaves.
     Still crouching, Terek asked: “Is it bandits…?”
     Arly whispered: “Some animal…?”
    Terek stepped forward now, hefting his spear threateningly.
Without looking at me, he said: “Is it slavers out there…?”
      I could only gasp for breath and shake my head. But as they
glanced over at my scraped and dirty face, my bleeding hands and
legs, they too began to realize it was no natural thing I’d come on
in the leaf-canopied and star-pricked night. For I had met some
monster god who roamed our borders, preventing such defections
as I had foolishly hoped for. Nameless? Certainly not. But I
suspect from what I’ve learned in my travels since that I was
fortunate not to have previously encountered some local witch or
shaman who might have told me the entity’s name. For had I called
it to me by its proper appellation as it stalked the forest night,
hearing me it simply would have devoured me in its immense,
rotten mouth.
      I wouldn’t let Terek put out the fire that night—not that he
really wanted to after I blurted my first protest. Soon we were all
sitting practically with our buttocks against the hot stones and our
shoulders by one another’s. Now and again one or the other of us
would get up for a new piece of wood, till the wood within sight
was pretty much gone. Once Terek proposed arranging an
organized watch, but somehow we never got to it. (There would
have been no point against that deity.) Later, I suddenly came
awake when one or the other of them fell, asleep at last, against me,
and I blinked, surprised, with stifled breath and only the coals’
glow behind me for light. Then, morning sun was flaking among
the branches, falling on my scratched knees, as first Terek, then I,
and at last Arly pushed to our feet, stiff, chill, and all of us feeling
as though we’d had no sleep at all.
     The cart cover was undisturbed over the provisions wagon.
Save for a few more fallen leaves, our camp was as it had been
before darkness fell.
     We had been spared.
     And so, as I had done many mornings before, I reached over
the cart’s side, slipped my hand, despite its scratches, down
between the wood and the money sack, till I could finger up the
scroll of goatskin. I unrolled it—the edges were truly frayed
now—to examine the confusion of lines and marks and
corrections.
     A lapwing called shrilly through the morning twitter and
warble, over the nearby river’s hiss and whisper.
      “I guess,” I said, as Arly turned on his crutch to listen and
Terek paused in wiping his sword blade free of speckling dew,
“we’ve seen just about everything we can of Belham. I’ve visited
the place he died. We’ve been to the place he was born. And I’ve
looked at just about every spot he worked at in between. I have
more than enough information for anything I might want to do
with it. And I’ve been traveling a long time now. What’s proper at
this point would be to return to Kolhari.”
      So we swung the cart to the north, riding or walking through
the morning, till, by mutual consent, we stopped beneath a
protective overhang hard by a cliff wall, took out blankets, and
slept a few hours to make up for what sleep we’d missed.
     After that we fed the mules and ate.
      Then we walked on beside the wagon several hours through
the rest of the day till, toward sundown, we made camp for the
night.
     Monsters are real.


     9.821 What are the SF (or fantasy) models for this
enterprise—which is, after all, not SF but sword-and-sorcery?
Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, Russ’s Female Man, Malzberg’s Galaxies,
Disch’s “334,” Ellison’s “Deathbird”…
     In what sense are their problems the same as mine?
     More important, in what specific ways are they different?
    And how much, right at this moment, do I believe in the
monstrous specificity of my own solutions…?


     9.83 The Bridge of Lost Desire is not my favorite city
passage, the Master explained. Its libidinous atmosphere does not
make me comfortable. Several libidinous friends have suggested
that what disturbs me about it is its too-great sense of life, its
suggestion of control always a breath away from animal abandon.
     That’s nonsense.
      I feel life when man and woman, together or apart, labor and
ponder to nurture, console, or entertain a child, a friend, or some
aged body. But there’s no particular vital excess where a vicious,
bored, fifteen-year-old and undernourished barbarian sells herself
for a quarter of an hour to some forty-year-old warehouse loader
with enough beer in his belly so that he will remember neither her
face nor her name when he ambles by on his next day off—the girl
having rushed away moments after their over-quick exchange to
swab between her legs with volatile, noxious liquids, while fear of
conception nags nevertheless over the twenty-eight days between
moons.
       Still, at Carnival time that feeling of distress, so intense on the
bridge (life? Isn’t it, rather, high frustration? It’s certainly not
rampant satisfaction that gives the place its air), is dispersed
throughout the several celebrant neighborhoods. At the same time,
the bridge becomes more populous with people who never go there
normally, so that the air of life, frustration, or whatever (why not
call it lust?) is somewhat mitigated, and its crowded flags seem like
any other city thoroughfare, for all the high spirits passing across it.

     I passed across.
      Flares burned along both sides. Now and again, I overheard
in this conversation or that: the Liberator and his entourage had
ridden over only a bit before I came by.
       As I made my way between raucous revelers still thronging
the Old Market of the Spur, I thought about that boyhood trip, and
I wondered, as I had, many times since (and many times upon the
trip itself): suppose, in the same way as I had sought Belham,
someone else came along, seeking me—oh, not the whole of my
life, certainly, pieced out some impossible hundred years hence.
But suppose somebody, today, hearing of my journey with all the
inaccuracies entailed—the interview with my parents, and
such—decided to reconstruct only that year’s wandering, setting
out to find only what that journey had meant for me. What traces
of it would be left?
     Suppose they did not ask me, but—however honestly—only
researched the monster?
     Suppose they asked my uncle?
      He could tell approximately when I left and when I
returned—though several times of late I note he’s mistaken the
year.
     What would some of my relatives say at whose great houses
we stopped? What of my visit would they remember?
     What would some of the peasants who aided us recall of my
passing?
     What of my big, bald steward?
     What of my little redheaded one?
     What tale would the soldiers who deserted me tell?
     What about Arly and Terek?
     What of the princess or the peasant widow?
     Ten years ago I got a partial chance to find out.
     The school, you see, had finished its first year successfully. At
the beginning of the second, I declared a six-week spring recess so
that the students could return home awhile. And I took the same
time to visit a friend in a town a day’s cart-ride west of Kolhari,
which had recently made much economic progress; as well, it had
begun to support its own barbarian community as some of those
southern-born workers grew disgruntled with the big port city and
moved on.
      I had been at my friend’s house three days and, on the first
truly hot afternoon of the year, had tried to take a nap as the rest of
the family did; but a restlessness came over me, and so I went out
to walk in the warm streets and explore a little.
      Ambling along a sun-filled alley, I suddenly saw a powerfully
built barbarian with one leg, helping himself along with a single
crutch.
      Such severe and singular infirmities are rare in Nevèrÿon; I
thought of Arly immediately. I stopped, but he didn’t seem to
notice me and went into a daubed building through a crooked
door-frame with no hanging. On impulse I hurried after him,
stepping into a shadowed storeroom. From chinks and outright
holes in the roof a dozen beams of sunlight lanced through floating
dust.
     “Excuse me,” I said, “but you’re not…?”
       In one of these beams, the man on the crutch turned,
frowning. (Wasn’t he both too short and too thick to be my old
barbarian friend?) What I first saw were all the differences in that
barbaric face from Arly’s: the broader cheeks, the slacker lips, the
receding hair at the forehead—while the hair on the chest was far
heavier than I remembered, with half of it grizzled white. Then,
suddenly, the frown became a grin. And the face simply…
transformed into Arly’s! “You…!” he said. “You? No! What are you
doing here? Is it my young nobleman? No…! But why have you
come? After all these years! What has happened with you? Why in
the world do you come to see me like this? Here? Now? No! But
it’s really you!” Arly came forward, grinning, to clap a broad hand to
my shoulder while, with a grin as large, I shook him happily by
both of his, so that he swayed on his bark bound stick; and I
thought, after all, if I’d changed as little as he, the more than
twice-seven years since we’d seen each other had indeed been
generous to us both.
      Arly now worked swabbing resin over the insides of barrels,
he told me. His hands were foul with the stuff all the way to his
elbows, and his bare foot was stained with it to the knee. Oh, he’d
been in this town for years, he explained. He’d just stopped off in
the storage building here to pick up a sack of something he had to
take to someone else. But come along with him. Yes, come along! I
must visit his home and sit with him—if I would so honor
him—and we would drink and talk of the old days. That is, if I
could spare the time for an old friend…? If I could pass an hour
with a cripple such as he…? If I could see my way to talk with a
poor, one-legged barbarian…?
       He got his sack, hoisted it around over his shoulder—the bag
still twice as heavy, I’m sure, as any I could carry—and I followed
him out into the street. He bent a little more and went a little
slower than I remember, under such burdens. But three streets
away he left his load with an old, taciturn oil-seller, and we started
off through the town in a direction I’d never been, till we were
among some thatched shacks that brought back to me nothing so
much as that clutch of mountain hovels where Belham (may have)
died.
     These, at least, were sunlit and dry.
     Before one a woman with dark, sweaty hair worked at a stone
washtub, with two near-grown girls helping her and three or four
youngsters crawling naked in the spilled water that made mud
about the trough.
     Arly went up to her, calling out: “Hey, you must see who I’ve
brought!” As he put his arm around her shoulder, the woman
looked up, surprised and shy—she had a harelip, wouldn’t you
know. Hopping on his crutch, Arly herded her toward me while the
big children blinked and the little ones ignored all, and the woman
looked down at her dripping arms and shriveled hands. I smiled,
spoke to her, thinking she must be Arly’s woman. Certainly some
of the children looked as though they might have been his. But she
knew who I was, Arly prompted. She knew all about me! Hadn’t
Arly told her the story of our travels together, years ago? Didn’t she
remember? Of course she did! I was the nobleman who had given
him the money to come here! He’d told her that. Yes, of course she
knew of me.
      Whether she did or not, I don’t know. But I was struck with a
memory absent for years. When we’d reached Kolhari, I’d paid Arly
a servant’s wages for the three or four months he’d traveled with
me—no great amount, but more than the young barbarian had ever
held at one time before. Three days later, he’d disappeared from
the servants’ quarters of my uncle’s home. For a few weeks, I
recall, I’d wondered if he had come to harm in the city, for he’d
never turned up again. Could he have caught some market wagon
directly here and settled down, to live all those intervening years?
      But now he released her to lead me on further among the
huts. His woman? No, she was only a good friend. A fine figure in
the neighborhood. She’d helped him many times—as she’d helped
many others here; he’d wanted her to meet his noble visitor. For, he
explained, she was as good and fine a person of her class as I was
of mine.
      Several huts away, he pointed out his. It was smaller and in
worse repair than most of those around it, and on the very edge of
the enclave, with scattered branches and bits of refuse lying about:
a split-log bench with two legs broken off so no one could sit on it,
the wheel from some sort of wagon, its rim split.
     We didn’t even go inside.
     I was thankful, for the whole neighborhood had that smell
I’ve always assumed comes from continually cooking in pots never
thoroughly washed. What that would become within the shack I
didn’t want to imagine.
      Arly sat me on a firm, overturned basket near his door,
ducked within the ragged hanging, then came out, the handles of
two unglazed clay cups hooked on the stained fingers of one hand
and a jar in the crook of his arm. He lowered himself by his crutch
to a rock to sit before me, then let the crutch fall to the worn grass.
Leaning forward he poured out a liquid clear as water. Then he sat
back, the jar held up at his right shoulder in both hands, waiting for
me to taste mine before he poured his own—the way, indeed, I’d
instructed him to pour at table so many years before!
      As we grinned at each other, I picked the cup up from the
ground and sipped: it was not water. It was sharp and went along
the throat with all the aspects of fire save heat. At the same time,
there was a strong feeling that, had it gone at only a slightly
different angle, it would have slid in as coolly as a mountain ice
chip. What he’d served me, I realized, was one of the strong Avila
rums.
     I said once that Arly had the unearned reputation of a
drunkard in the tiny barbarian village where we found him. Well, I
began to realize, over the years he’d hobbled a few steps along
toward earning it.
     There are many who claim the drink is poisonous.
     But I will say, after he had poured his own, and I had taken
several sips more, it lent a warmth of spirit to the already hot day.
And I was not about to judge my old traveling companion in what
was after all only his hospitality toward me.
      As we talked of this and that, his life, mine, then, now, and
the time between, I asked him: “Tell me, Arly, what did you think
of that whole trip? What’s the part you remember best?”
     He look at me slyly. “You know which part I remember.” He
jabbed a stained finger at me with a complicitous grin.
      “I know which parts I remember,” I told him. “But you must
tell me for yourself.”
     “That time,” he prompted me, “you know. In the castle. Of
one of your cousins.”
      I smiled, nodding, thinking he meant his first visit to a royal
house with me, when he’d gotten lost and I’d had to go searching
for him. Indeed, I’d told that story with numerous embellishments,
many times since. But Arly went on:
    “You know. The one where your noble cousin had killed
himself.”
     I frowned, suddenly lost.
      “You remember,” Arly said. “We took the wagon through all
those broad, endless orchards of fruit trees. And finally, when we
came up to the stone gate, the woman you told me later was a
slave, though she wore her iron collar under a jeweled neck-piece,
said to us that the baron was dead—they had found him only that
morning in the gardens, where he had eaten many, many of the
small, poisonous petals of the white ini flower…?”
      I must have still frowned, though a memory was beginning to
flicker; because Arly frowned a moment at me, before he went on:
     “When we went inside, the whole castle was in confusion.
They could only give us a single room to stay in for the night—”
      “Of course!” I exclaimed. “The Baron Inige!” I didn’t
remember the orchards. But now I began to picture a servant
(slave?) standing at a half-opened gateway between two high, stone
newels, telling me that we could not be received within because
there had been a great tragedy in the house. The baron was dead,
and by his own hand. “But we didn’t go in,” I protested. “Did we?”
The whole incident would never have come up in any spontaneous
account from me. As it was, I could only recall that moment at the
entrance. “Certainly we went on somewhere else, Arly. We
wouldn’t have gone inside after that.”
      “Oh, yes!” Arly nodded. “We did! I was very frightened, and I
didn’t want to. That soldier with us—what was his name?”
     “Terek.”
      “Yes, that soldier stood by me, while we waited behind the
wagon. He knew I was frightened, too. He nudged me with his arm.
I was so frightened—and he thought it was funny! You were at the
gate, talking with the slave. Oh, so gently and persuasively, with
such smiles, you went on—you told her just how you and the dead
man were related, and how terrible it must be for all in the castle,
and that perhaps we could be of some help, and that you
understood how upset everyone must be, and, no, you wouldn’t
think of intruding, but we had traveled so far, your guard and your
servant were so tired, and we would not be any trouble, so that
perhaps if they could find rooms for us simply for a night and—”
     “Arly—” I laughed—“I have no memory of any of this!”
      “—finally they let us in,” he finished. “We brought the wagon
right inside, through the gates of the dead man’s house. You knew I
was scared too!” he added, accusingly. “You looked at me when the
mules went by the big stone posts and grinned!” Then, smiling
down into his cup, he shifted on his rock. His scarred stump
moved in a kind of sweeping motion that would have placed the
missing limb at no particular position, save possibly kicking into
the air. And I thought, how many hundreds of times have I seen it
do that? Yet, I’d never thought of it once in all these years. “They
told us to take a single little room on the castle’s top floor, up some
old, steep, stone stairs. And you got very angry afterwards, because
it meant all three of us would have to sleep in the same chamber,
and you said you didn’t want to have to sleep in the same room
with a smelly barbarian and a dirty soldier—”
     I started to protest. “Surely I’d only meant it wouldn’t look
proper to the great house’s remaining servants…” My picture of
myself for that period was (and still is) wholly egalitarian—more,
perhaps, than was even wise. But the truth is, once within the
baron’s gates, I had no memory at all. Till that moment, had you
asked me if I’d ever been inside the home of my tragic relative, the
Baron Inige, I’d have answered, “No,” convinced I spoke the truth.

     I said: “Terek could let himself get rather dirty, couldn’t he?”
      “I wanted to stay in the room, because I was scared to walk
around in the halls and corridors where the dead man had walked.
But when it got dark, you and the soldier—Terek? Was that his
name?—decided to play a trick on me and took me up on the
castle’s roof. I didn’t want to go. But you made me!”
      “Now how did we get you to go anywhere that you didn’t want
to?” For I had a few solid memories of Arly’s stubbornness—an all
too fabled barbarian trait.
      “You went,” Arly said. “I wasn’t going to stay in there alone!”
He drank more rum. “There wasn’t any wall around the roof,
either. And there were lots of stone things—like stone huts and
places where windows stuck up and things. Part of the roof was
sloped, too, right down to the edge.” Certainly I knew the kind of
castle roof he meant. But equally certainly I had no memory of
ever being out on one with Arly. “It had been raining, and the roof
slates were still wet. And you know this—” he bent to slap his hand
against the flattened and frayed end of his crutch—“doesn’t hold
so well on wet stone as this—” and he swung his soiled hand back
against the cracked and blackened sole of his foot. “The clouds
were blowing fast, now over the moon, now free of it. One minute
it was dark as pitch. The next it was light. The two of you ran away
and hid from me, and began to make strange noises, and pretend to
be demons and monsters and strange beasts, and chase me around
and hide from me again.”
     “But you must have known it was only us…?”
     “Ahhh!” Arly’s voice rose, with his chin, in dismissal of my
protest. “I knew it was you. But in such a house, perhaps the
demons that haunted the place actually now possessed you. That’s
why you played such pranks. That’s why I was so afraid. In such a
house, with such a death only that morning, it was a reasonable
fear—at least from the way you carried on! Once, when I was
running from you, the soldier stuck the end of his spear out from
behind some stone abutment and tripped me, so that I fell.”
      “Arly—!” Though even as I spoke, memories returned of
moments when Terek’s teasing (if not my own) of the one-legged
youth had probably gone too far. What came back even more
strongly, however, were those chases and games of tag where all of
us contended that Arly on his crutch was a fast and agile as either
of us—which was, indeed, almost true. Some of those chases were
at night, even in the moonlight—but surely not on the roof of my
dead cousin’s house. “Arly, I just don’t think we—”
     “Then you ran right out into me.” He put his cup down and
clapped his blackened hands together. “And knocked me over.
Then you laughed, while I rolled down the slope toward the edge
of the roof. Oh, I knew, then, that monsters chased me, and that I
would now fall to my death!”
    I swallowed another mouthful of rum. “But didn’t we catch
you…?”
      “No!” Arly declared, an astonished questioning to it even
greater than the exclamation, as if there was no reason in the world
to think we might have. He said: “I just didn’t roll that far. I hurt
my leg real bad, too, when you pushed me down.” He reached
forward to rub his calf, as if memory brought back the pain. “Then
the soldier came out and stood there and laughed at me because I
was such a frightened fool. But I was afraid to say how much it
hurt, because I thought you might start in again and say you would
leave me behind to be a slave in that haunted and frightening
castle.”
      “But—” As I started to protest again, the faintest memory
returned, however: Terek standing with his spear, in light dim
enough to have come from a beclouded moon, laughing over a
seated, unhappy Arly, who had just slipped or fallen across his
crutch, while I looked on. Could that have been atop the castle
roof? Could my purposeful push have been the cause of the fall?
The memory was no clearer than that of the servant woman at the
gate. And even had I recalled the two faint recollections on my
own, I never would have remembered that they were from the
morning and evening of the same day, or what Arly claimed lay
between.
      Arly sat, rubbed, smiled. “We had some good times, then,
didn’t we? I went a lot of places with you, saw a lot of things.”
      “Yes,” I said. I was still trying to think: Could I have been a
partner in torment of a lame, ignorant youth—and forgotten it?
“We did.” But the topic itself seemed too complicated to pursue
through the warmth of the day and the glow of the rum. “Well, tell
me: did you ever learn any more of Belham or Venn, after our trip?
I’ve often wondered how all that struck you.”
     Arly looked at me and frowned. “Belham?” he said. “And that
other name? Were they some peasants we let ride in the wagon
once?”
       “No, Arly!” I was both astonished and amused—happily so,
as it drove away some of my discomfort. “Don’t you remember—?”

      But he had reached out for the jar to pour himself another
cupful. “Belham, that’s a barbarian name. But not the other. ‘Venn,’
it was? It sounds like a name from far away. Maybe from the
islands or someplace…”
      Somewhere a crutch tapped on the rock floor; barbaric eyes
lifted toward the cave ceiling…
     We talked about many other things that day. Oh, I mustn’t
suggest that we had no memories in common. We talked a lot of
Terek, and even though Arly had not remembered his name, we
were still soon mustering new opinions about him, as if our friend
were only off for a walk in the woods and was expected back in
minutes—though neither of us had seen him in more than a
decade.
     I supposed we helped to elaborate his monster.
      Although with each cup of rum he drank, Arly would again
declare how fine a time we’d had together, in general his memories
were not as pleasant as mine. But then, neither had his life been as
pleasant, before or since. Also, I thought later, he had the
recollections one might expect from a man who, with great bravery,
had traveled only once—and that in order to get from the village
where he’d been born to the town where, in all probability, he
would die. Through the afternoon, somehow I never brought up
my own (nor questioned Arly’s) reminiscences of the border god
who’d terrified us the night I’d tried my futile flight. It just did not
seem the proper time to speak much more of monsters.
      Yes, I met Terek once, too—a little over a year after my
afternoon with Arly. It was high summer in Kolhari; a day off from
the school, and I’d gone to visit a merchant friend, a man of some
travel himself. I was to meet him not at his home but at one of the
caravan yards among the store buildings adjoining the New Market.
Indeed, I’d known he’d been awaiting the arrival of a large
commercial caravan for some weeks now: it had been gone seven
months and was expected any day.
      The half-dozen closed carriages and several high-piled
wagons must just have pulled into the yard minutes before I
strolled up. The drivers and grooms were joking with one another
around the horses. The loaders had not been given their
instructions yet and lounged by the warehouse wall. And the
caravan soldiers sat about the yard in little clusters, playing bones,
or stood leaning on their spears and watching.
     My first thought was that my merchant friend would probably
not be able to go to lunch with me now as we had planned. I did
not see him in the yard. No doubt he was within, conferring with
Her Majesty’s inspectors. But as I made my way toward the
lashed-back hanging over the wide door, I saw a soldier standing by
the wall, leaning on his spear before him, rubbing his chin on his
forearm.
     I frowned.
     Could it possibly…?
     I walked toward him. Tall, dark, lanky, yes, the man had a
once-broken nose. As I neared, he let go his spear with one hand to
reach up and rub his cheek. The same gnawed pits of broken and
scabby horn were sunk on his fingertips, well back from the
crowns. I glanced below his leather kilt, for the scar on his leg.
     It was there.
     “Terek…?” I said.
     He didn’t turn.
     “Terek…!” I stepped before him.
      His eyes blinked in a gaunt, weathered face that, save the
nose, I must say did not seem overly familiar, now that I was
closer.
     “Your name’s Terek, isn’t it?”
     The soldier gave the smallest nod—and waited. Clearly, he
did not recognize me.
     I smiled. “Do you remember me? You were a guard on a
caravan of mine, oh—more than ten years ago now!”
     Among his sullen features, a smile only threatened his mouth
and eyes—but not of recognition; it was the one you give a stranger
who’s made some well-intentioned mistake. For all his identifying
marks, he looked less and less familiar, so that, again, I asked:
“Your name is Terek…?”
     “Yes…?” He waited for some explanation.
      “Well, you were a guard. On a caravan of mine. It was a
rough one too. It wasn’t as big as this. But we lost both our
carriages. We traveled most of the last months with just a wagon,
and only the three of us—you, me, and a barbarian called Arly. He
had only one—”
      “You mean—” shifting position, he said suddenly—“when
we went through the Menyat? Where the stores ran out and half the
guards mutinied? I had to stick my blade in the gut of three of my
best friends on that one! Then we were stuck down in the canyon,
and all there were was berries and cactus pith, for four months,
caught down in those rocks!” (The sudden outburst in the sullen
demeanor was Terek—the Terek I remembered. It made me
smile—and perhaps he thought, from that, I recognized his
account.) “We didn’t dare come up, because of the bandits…”
      While I smiled, at first I wondered if this were simply another
incident he recalled that I’d forgotten. But no; neither my carriages
nor my cart had gone as far west as the Menyat Canyon. “How long
ago was that?” I asked.
     (What my own memories brought back as I had struggled a
moment with his was a young, broken-nosed man on a leafy road
thrusting his blade through the neck of a shrieking brigand.)
      “Four years.” Terek considered. “Maybe five years back. I was
out almost two whole years on that one.”
     “No,” I said. “What I was talking about was over ten years
ago. And I don’t think it was that rough.”
     He reached up to rub his neck again. “More than ten years,”
he said. “That’s a long time ago. Were you the steward?” He
sounded doubtful.
     “No.” Still smiling, I shook my head. “We knew each other.
You told me all about how you got that scar. The young officer in
the army—” I pointed to his leg. (He glanced down then looked up
with a raised eyebrow like someone who’d forgotten a scar was
there.) “We were friends, you and I. I was practically a boy. You
stayed on when the others left me. In the end, it was just three of
us and a wagon: you, me, and a crippled barbarian—he lives off to
the west of the city, now. I saw him just last year. It was… my
caravan.” I really felt odd saying that, for I truly treasured the
memory of what I’d still thought was a three-way friendship among
equals, even with Arly’s additions. “You don’t remember?”
    He gave a shrug I want to think was so small because he
might have been embarrassed. “Maybe,” he said. He pursed his lips
a moment. “I don’t think so.”
      “Well, ten years…” I shrugged too. “That is a long time. But
it was you.”
     “Maybe,” he repeated.
      I watched him, remembering the strange transformations of
recognition in those moments meeting Arly. This lack of
recognition was, in its way, almost as interesting. Terek had not
grown particularly bald or fat, nor had he gone through any other
great bodily change. Where before he’d been a young soldier, now
he was a middle-aged one. He’d guarded caravans before mine;
clearly he’d guarded them since. The trip with me had simply not
been that memorable. I thought of trying to identify it further for
him—tripping Arly on the castle roof? The terror at the border?
Perhaps with a drink or two he might have been prompted to
recall…
    But many men simply do not set much store in memory.
They are just not interested in what happened more than three
months back, and then they only retain the incidents about those
who are currently their friends.
     I put my hand on his shoulder. “Well, it’s good to see you
again, Terek. Good luck.”
      He looked at my hand (rather as though it didn’t belong
there), looked back at me with narrowed eyes, still wondering,
perhaps, if he had known me.
     I nodded to him, dropped my hand, and left to go look for my
merchant friend. Indeed, I had to go in and out of the warehouse
several times to find him. Each time, I glanced at the soldier
standing by the wall.
      He looked at me only once—and I had the sudden notion that
he did not even remember our conversation from minutes before,
or, at any rate, was by now quite convinced that I had been
mistaken.
      I found my merchant friend. Yes, he could slip off for a quick
bite at a tavern close by. I remember all through our meal I was on
the verge of telling him about my encounter with his caravan
guard. And didn’t. But now that I think of it, I never mentioned my
encounter with Arly to my hosts in that town I was visiting, back
the year before, either.
      I crossed the Old Market square that carnival night
remembering memories of Arly and Terek—my memories,
theirs… From that play of the recalled and the forgotten (my
forgetfulness, theirs), with whatever distortions lie between,
monsters are formed, whether they be gods or great men, or even
very ordinary boys, sick unto death with a plague that has much of
the monstrous about it.
     Yes, I learned about monsters on that trip. And I learned
about them in these encounters afterward:
     First, monsters are real.
     Second, they are us.
     I turned down one street where only a few people held up
torches.
     I cut across a yard to skirt a cistern wall as the half-moon
edged its light above a roof.
      A few more turnings down a few more streets: I crossed some
filled with revelers and some near empty. I went with shoulders
hunched through a narrow alley, an arch at its end, and breathed
deeply along another street, with only the usual rare night-strollers.
      Through the shutters of the old inn, I saw the flicker of
lamps. I waited a minute across from the door, to see if anyone
entered. Certainly I’d found the proper building. I could have been
late or early, of course. Waiting seems to be a part of such
disreputable activity. From down the street came voices; red
torches moved out from the corner. Someone in the group was
playing a reedy flute. So I crossed, pushed back the creaking
leather, and slipped inside.
      Once within the low-ceilinged tavern, I knew I’d found the
place. The way people stood or sat was just not the way people
ordinarily stood or sat in a tavern at Carnival time. For one thing,
no one spoke. There was an air of waiting. In the light of the lamps
hanging by chains from the ceiling beams, I recognized a
dark-haired woman at a table with a big barbarian—both looked up
at me. It was the woman who handled the school laundry and the
shoemaker she lived with, who sometimes used to drive her
laundry cart.
     I nodded.
     They did the same, looking quickly away.
      And I felt as much as they that further talk would be out of
place, right here, right now.
      I wondered should I go purchase a drink, or simply take a
seat, as some had done, or—as had some others—go stand by the
wall and wait. As I walked among the benches and tables I heard
the hide creak again behind me. I glanced back as an old woman
with a brown hood pulled forward about a deeply seamed face
stepped tentatively in, peered about, obviously nervous and feeling
out of place.
     Outside, boisterous revelers passed, singing and laughing.
      Through a door near the side of the counter, a yellow-haired
man with some limp flowers in his hair, a gold collar, and a blue
robe suddenly stepped forward, surveyed the room, clapped his
hands before his chest and announced: “Well, there’re enough of us
to start. You’re all concerned about the plague, I know. No one is
more concerned about it than we are, here, believe me. We’re so
happy you could come. We’ll take contributions only on your way
out. I’m your Wizard for the—” Someone coughed, and he turned
with a raised eyebrow. “You’re here, of course, for the Calling…?”
     Someone said: “… of the Amnewor.”
     Some looked at one another as though that had been a
dangerous name to speak.
     Nobody answered with an audible ‘Yes.’ But a few nodded. A
few others pushed back from their tables, ready to rise.
     “Very good. Very good,” the man said. “If you’ll all just
follow me, right through this way. There’re steps down. It’s narrow
and rather steep. So please don’t crowd. Just go carefully.”
     People began to follow him through the door.
     Somehow, in a motion that suggested she was afraid she
might be left behind, the hooded old woman slipped ahead of me.
She glanced back at me. I smiled. She looked embarrassed and
turned away. We followed the crowd.
     Over the heads of those before me, I could see that the walls
beyond the doorway were rough rock. From somewhere below, I
heard an ethereal music. The voice of the Amnewor, I said to
myself, and wondered, indeed, what monster the night would bring.

     As I went through the low doorway, ahead I saw the yellow
hair of the big shoemaker. He paused, looked down, then, from the
way his head lowered, he must have begun to descend the steps.
     I moved forward, with the others.


     9.84 People who did not attend the Calling of the Amnewor:
Arly, Gorgik, Joey, Larla, Meise, the old mummer, Norema,
Pheron, Radiant Jade, Samuel Delany (Chip), Terek, Toplin,
Toplin’s mother, Toplin’s lover, and, in general, many, many more,
of course, than who did.


      9.85 “Failure signs our beginning,” the Wizard began in the
dark, “for where else can we start, save from weakness, fear, and a
crushing incapacity before a purity so rich it sometimes seduces us
into thinking our own consciousness is at one with it? Failure will
sign our end. Our first step into the darkness here is a realization of
that failure—if only the failure to remember what must be
remembered if civilization is to persist, our failure to forget what
must be forgotten if, personally, we are to endure in it. Harps and
cymbals tinkle with rising anticipation. Bring the first brand.
     “There!
      “Gasp, if you will. But seated on the throne, ribs thrust
through the chest’s tattered leather, long teeth loose in that nude
jaw, it leans, lopsided in firelight, a trace of the life now negated in
its brown bones and dried gristle, imbued not with life but with
meaning by what passes in positive glory over our heads: the
Liberator who is subsumed on this day of Carnival by the true seat
of power—which is not here.
     “Look!
      “Was it lighter in life than the master it fell before? Not likely,
in the larger scheme. But it lived once; and, dead, it lingers beneath
our unholy torches.
     “How can we start from any place else before this monstrous
and murderous dying, dying, dying which plagues us?
     “Amnewor!
     “Amnewor!
     “Amnewor!
     “Drums and reeds echo us. But the Calling is not one we
make to the monster, through the medium of this desiccated
corpse. The Calling of the Amnewor is, rather, the call that the
barely believable monster herself will make to this symbol of our
mortality that we have enthroned for the night—a Calling that
animates it, however marginally.
     “Do not look behind!
      “Her several eyes, from the size of a minnow’s to the size of
the full moon low on the horizon and clustered only in odd
numbers, open, now here, now there, at your back, across her vast
flesh slimed with oceanic slough and filth. The heat of her warms
your nape, the joints of your knees. Above you, her many mouths
erupt in the loose, liquescent skin, some so small you could not
push one finger into their tiny, sucking slits, some so huge and
slobbering that the tongue within is sliced to bloody strips by
broken teeth (more than a hundred, ragged in the several rows of
gum, and each as large as your hand), while others are all soft cheek
and uvula and lip—spitting, hissing, sucking—some supported by
internal bone, however distorted from traditional jaw and beak,
others dangling in immense and flaccid flaps, fluttering and
flatulent with the fetid airs, rumbling out here, gushing in there.
     “Listen!
     “Above the tambourine and sistrum, you can hear her, huge
as a merchant’s three-story house on fire, breathing behind you…
Do not look, I say! Do not! High in the suppurating and pulsing
meat of her brow, a single jewel, blood red, with ninety-seven flat
and glimmering surfaces across it and the size of a baby’s head, is
sunk in a circlet of iron and gold, bolted to the bone beneath. Once
you see it, you cannot look away. (I know! I watch it now!) What
does an Amnewor eat?
     “Human eyes!
     “Human tongues!
     “And the hot jelly of human brains! She sucks them through
the ear, after piercing the drum and small bones within, using her
knobby fingers, all narrow as sapling twigs, from which thin claws
grow, six and seven inches. Oh, once you look, once you are
hypnotized by the red jewel, she will hold you rigid in her muscular
tentacles, while, with her tiny hands, she tears you to pieces…
      “Why else have we chosen a decayed corpse for a champion?
(Little bells tinkle. The flute flutters eerily.) Eyeless, tongueless,
earless, it alone can face the Amnewor from vanquishing distance.
It alone can answer her call.
    “Do you hear it, now? The music has momentarily halted.
Look at the throne!
     “Bring another brand!
     “And another!
     “There, did you see?
     “The dead hand moved!
      “It slid an inch on the stone beside the skewed boat of bone.
Now, yes, the slack jaw pulls shut, rattling its remaining teeth, and
the knee swings wide as the foot slips dry tarsal and metatarsal over
the hide on the top step.
      “See how weakly it tries to stand! What strength it takes to
vanquish the little bit of death that, so long ago, killed it! Blind,
deaf, dumb, yet it hears the call. We must give it a guide.
     “There, rush to it, little girl!
      “She takes up her cat-skull staff to run and stand before the
steps. Someone has drawn a mask across her face, though it’s only
makeup, and her clear eyes blink above her full, healthy cheeks.
That health, that innocence (that mask) will protect her from the
gaze of the Amnewor waiting in the shadow behind you, looking
over your heads, as terrible as the gods who, were they there in
your place, might be mistaken for you yourselves.
     “Someone has tied a bit of black and orange cloth in a
cunning cape around the girl’s shoulders.
      “Beneath it the two ends of a leather thong hang on her chest,
their raddled tips telling of some fetish snatched violently free.
What doom or victory might it have guided her to? It’s gone. We’ll
never know. She has become merely the guide of our victory,
who—stiffly, unsteadily—manages to rise, now, from the throne.
     “Gongs echo through the crypt.
      “It stands on the top stair, as the fat little girl, holding her
staff high, steps back.
     “The skeletal foot falls to the step below, and the whole
frame shakes and shivers, dropping dried skin and cartilage
crumbs; a rib falls loose, to click on the stone, rocking. One toe
bone is left on the step above. One finger remains behind on the
seat. Will our champion crumble entirely before true
confrontation?
      “But the immense, glimmering monster behind you has
already begun to quiver, heave, and show signs that, certainly, were
you to see them, you’d take for anger and fear, as the mortal
remains of our prince skitter and clatter to the step’s bottom. For
haven’t we all suspected, all along, that human beings are
sometimes more godlike than the gods; certainly their deaths are
more absolute than the death of any god, named or unnamed,
we’ve ever storied. And as certainly, decay, which is what the
Amnewor after all is, cannot feed on the already and absolutely
dead. Is that small distinction between the dying and the dead
where hope for victory lies?
      “The Amnewor is, you know, a god of edges, borders, and
boundaries. You may even have encountered her, reeking and
putrid on some overhung night, as you tried to get from here to
there, all at once too intensely aware of what the separation
between them meant. But we have called her, to serve us
now—though by this displacement to the center she has not so
much changed her nature; for no matter how Nevèrÿon expands,
even as it reaches out to encompass death and the stars, she’ll still
prowl and linger along its rim.
       “ ‘She?’ I already hear some of you repeat it, with a note of
ironic censure, a moment before turning from me in a positive
distinction that will lose you all hope with the return of what we
call the real. Stay! Again I say: do not avert your eyes, for many of
us know of, and some of us here have even visited, a land that is
not Nevèrÿon, but where a similar ritual must be held with a male
monster, the corpse of a princess, and a little boy for guide.
Though the names might be different, the same, or absent, can’t we
recognize one monster here, common to us all, prowling the border
between one and another, or even between us and a land more
different still from ours? I assure you, these are as real as the
monster that guards what is, after all, the other’s boundary as much
as it is ours. For she does not care what distinctions she guards, or
how we sex her in a homage to the concept of distinction itself. She
only cares that distinctions exist.
     “Once more the little girl raises her staff.
     “Suddenly there’s a sound—
     “Keep calm!
     “No, please, keep calm!
     “Whatever happens, don’t look away!
       “On the canvas sheet that just unrolled at our little guide’s
sign, flapping and roaring from the darkness above, like a wind
from the edge of forever, you can see a mammoth beast so grossly
painted it is difficult to tell whether it is a dragon or an eagle; it
wavers there, ambiguous as the stone carving over the gates to the
grounds of the High Court itself. What gazes out through its
hollow eyes? Lust? Pride? Avarice? Ignorance? Want? The guide
leads the skeleton past, and though he quivers, shakes, and seems
fit to fall completely to pieces, he vanquishes all representations of
the enemy by that technique I would urge on you, at least tonight
with regards to the monster behind you: not looking at it.
       “There, another canvas falls open, roaring like pain itself,
among whose folds and shadows a raging landscape glimmers.
Wave or mountain, forest or desert, what is important here is that
the lack of a human figure pictured upon it signs the whole range
of human desolations living men and women can endure, at least a
moment, before they die. And he? He vanquishes those wastes
simply by moving, with his clumsy and awkward step, across it,
appearing—just managing to appear at all—a human form against
it, for all his death and desecration, an irreducibly social trace.
      “Somewhere in that part of our city most separated, most
distant, and, indeed, most protected from the general populace, the
Liberator, already beyond the ambiguous gates, approaches the
castle, a gray wall coming toward him, towering over him, about to
fall on him in some infinitely delayed topple… till a door swallows
him, and he moves forward through wide corridors, cheering
behind him, well-wishers on both sides, as he strolls closer and
closer to the seat of power that has summoned him here…
      “But here? In this oldest, central section of our city, the corpse
moves on, limping and staggering, shedding flesh and mold, till,
only inches before you, its dead fingers reach to your left while its
skull drops hugely right, its dry hands stretch to the right while its
skull lolls left, as if it would determine which way it must go to
continue toward the power that has called.
      “The music resounds and pounds with military insistence.
      “He reels… for you are the border he must pass, transgress,
obliterate with some terminal motion to become one with what
animates him.
      “Oh, again I tell you: do not look away from the empty eyes
backed with black bone. For if you are seduced into turning for a
moment by the monster that breathes and hisses at your back, that
heats your shoulders to sweat—that, indeed, guards you—he will
slip past.
      “You will be defeated.
      “But see: still making your nostrils pinch with the expectation
of a putrefaction he’s too long dead to reek of, his scentless joints
falter, and he falls, slips, at last clatters to the dusty floor as lifeless
as—finally—we always knew him to be, vanquished at your feet.
      “That he fails (again, and again, and again) to transgress the
boundary you represent, between the possible and the probable, the
imprecise and the precise, the dying and the dead, the surmised and
the certain, that (once more) he does not join with the absolute
outside which, you are sure though you have never seen her,
controls you unto life and death, means, somehow, at the High
Court, the Liberator may, at least in part, succeed; that our
champion may not have been thoroughly subsumed by the power
that called him back from the border.
      “It means there is some hope that we need not close forever
and absolutely with the power of our own despair, that some
informative contradiction remains to be untangled, which may
define the distance between our lives and the plague. And both
those of us with, and those of us without, the disease can at least
believe we understand the same fact, no matter how monstrous
further contradiction proves that belief, that boundary between us,
actually to have been.
      “The little girl with her cat-skull staff? Ah, while our gaze
dispersed the apparition as any group disperses the information
that falls into it, she slipped by our legs and passed us—to be
caught and devoured by the Amnewor? An innocent, awful
sacrifice? So fast and absolute we did not hear her scream? Who
can tell.
     “We certainly can suspect, though.
     “That is very likely the reality of the monster, still invisible
behind, as well as the meaning of what lies before, crumbled to
dust on dirty tile.
     “Only we must admit this final contradiction over the
absence at our feet: the skeleton has not really moved from its
throne at all, in the course of all this glorious music.
       “It leans there, silent, accusing us with void sockets of this
last self-deception. Harps and drums! Flutes and cymbals! Friends,
when you return to the full, confusing, and fallible world above,
speak to others of how you saw, at least, a bony finger twitch, a dry
foot slide across the cowhide, how certainly you perceived that
little motion in death that must be what life means; for only by that
response can you affirm that the Amnewor has called.
      “Some of you will even say, as truthfully, that you saw the
skeleton sit up, stand, stagger down the steps, reel across the tile
and dirt as far, or farther, than I have described.
      “But remember, as you speak, it is the discrepancy, the
contradiction, the gap between what you recall and what you can
say (even as you strive for accuracy and articulation) that vouches
safe our hope, that indicates the possibility of something more, just
as, at this end, its total articulation (the complete knowledge that
one lies) signs, again, our failure.”


     9.86 People who attended the Calling of the Amnewor: the
barbarian woman who helped Toplin’s mother, Madame Keyne,
Kentog, the Master, Nari, Namyuk (Zadyuk’s younger brother),
Noyeed, the old servant woman, Lord Vanar, a once young
smuggler, Zadyuk, and many, many others, though less, of course,
than attended the celebration at the High Court in honor of the
Liberator.


       10. “I’m sorry, Leslie, but that’s precisely what he doesn’t do!”
Kermit sat with his knees wide and his arms over them, dangling
the paperback from one hand. “He doesn’t capture—or
‘document,’ to use his word—the feel of the gay community
between eighty-two and eighty-four, when he was apparently
writing his story and the AIDS coverage was at its height. And he
certainly doesn’t document the feel of… well, of the day-to-day life
of the ancient people who once lived here, in this city—” He
gestured at the chopped up landscape. A few tents stood about
among the diggings and, in a few places, a palm—“or in the towns
and villages that we’ll presumably find around it. He’s just playing
at their lives, anachronisms all over the place; and his rituals and
gods are obviously phony to the core! I mean, even in terms of his
own allegory, just look at what he’s done. He starts off promising
us a story about various and sundry little people, trying to deal with
a medical catastrophe, but slowly and inexorably the Discourse of
the Master displaces everyone else’s, until, finally, it completely
takes over. Soon, it’s even speaking for the little people—at least
those the Master himself wants to consider. In this case that’s the
military, a soldier who moves from loyalty to forgetfulness (if not
total muteness!) in a very suspicious way, and a lumpen laborer,
whom he just chooses to present, here, as a comic and a cripple!
But at the same time, the Master’s Discourse is seducing us with its
rhetoric, its insight, its professions of honesty, fallibility, and
personal doubt, while he ignores whomever he chooses. In this
case (as I can’t believe you, a mathematician and linguist, as well as
a self-professed feminist, didn’t notice), that’s women and
homosexuals—until, Leslie, in a move that dates back to the time
the first Mesopotamian warlord financed the first temple in honor
of Marduk or whomever, the worldly discourse of the Master is
replaced by the transcendental rhetoric of the Priest—our
barbarian Wizard with the daisies—saying more or less the same
thing the Master said, only in absolute terms, lest we dare question
it. But it’s precisely what we heard before, a little muffled, from the
mouth of the Master himself: in our failure lies our salvation! And
there’s even a never-never land, where the low shall be made high
and the high made low, off in the Western Cravasse. Well, whose
failure, I’d like to ask. The Master’s? Oh, yes. Do tell me another
one! You can be sure anywhere he’s failed, he doesn’t have an
inkling. Failure, failure, wonderful failure…? Just suppose the
people who isolated the virus and who’re developing the vaccine
took that tack? For God’s sake, Leslie, he’s even published a roster
of who did and didn’t attend services! No, I’m afraid Delany’s
Kolhari is very smalltown. It’s an old, old, old, old story. And for all
his marginal numbers, his Benjaminesque montage, or his
Bakhtinian polylogue, or whatever, there’s not a new—much less
radical—thing in it! And I don’t like it one bit. Nor can I see why
you do. Only for some reason you’ve traveled many, many
thousands of miles to bring me a copy (with an enthusiasm that, I
assure you, is wholly unwarranted) to ask me what I think. Well,
there! I’ve read it—or skimmed it, at any rate. Certainly I’ve read as
much as I need to. And I’ve told you!”
      “Kermi—” Leslie looked around to brush at the dust beside
her that they sat on—“six months ago, you had no idea you’d be
working here. No one knew for sure that there was a here here. In
the Culhar’, there’s mention of a sickness, and there is clearly
something odd about it. But Delany certainly couldn’t have known,
when he wrote it, that a real city would turn up with the same
name, so to speak—not to mention a similar epidemic—as the one
in his stories. He was going by the same things you folks were: a
few suggestions in my book on the translation of the Culhar’. And
as far as the allegory, well… you have to read the textual shape as
just the kind of conservative reification you do, but at the same
time opposing it with a vigorous deconstruction of—”
      “Leslie, I don’t understand a word you’re saying. What’s more
I don’t believe you do either. And even if the kind of reading you’re
talking about did exist, somewhere or other, I don’t think any…
text—” Kermit turned up the paperback and squinted at its cover
in the late sunlight blazing copper from under a cord of blue-black
cloud—“that goes out into the world with an initial printing
of—what? A hundred-fifty thousand copies?—can really look
forward to it, assuming it is possible.”
      “Certainly not if you skim, Kermi.” Leslie sighed. “You
know, sometimes when you make pronouncements like that, you
sound like you’re the one who’s appropriated the Master’s
Discourse, and in its most authoritarian and conservative mode
too—you know: good, old-fashioned, never-to-be-argued-with
common sense! That’s the language the Masters speak most of the
time, you know. That’s the most effective one for keeping things as
they are. Though I suppose maybe that’s the point: that we all close
with that masterly discourse, from time to time, in pursuit of our
‘liberation,’ whether we like it or not.”
     “What do you mean, ‘we,’ white man?”
      “Kermit,” Leslie said, “you are the white man. I am a black
woman—and your friend for a good many years too. Also I’m a
thirty-six-year-old, substantially overweight black woman, with an
awful overbite. And you piss me off. I mean, Kermi—” she turned
suddenly on the dusty slope—“if the masses knew what you were
really saying about them when you come out with something like
that—”
     “—they’d absorb it, disperse it, and live with it as they do
every other piece of real information or horrendous abuse our
cultural masters, at whatever level, inflict on them. No doubt that’s
the way they—we, if you prefer—survive. I’m not a liberal, Leslie.
And you know it.”
     Leslie sighed again.
      Kermit sighed louder and threw up his hands—though the
book did not go flying over the dug up earth. He held it, looking out
across it. “Of course, it couldn’t have turned out better for him. I
mean, really—here we discover an ancient city, which, if it wasn’t
the capital port of a land some Mycenean Greek called ‘Telepote,’ it
might as well have been. And they had some sort of epidemic
that—at least when we apply your translation techniques to the
texts we found here at the site—seems to have been sexually linked.
Though I gather these things have turned up on and off for some
time now. Somewhere in Romans doesn’t it talk about one of these
sexually linked diseases?”
       “Also between homosexual men. The Moral Majority quotes
it all the time.”
     “Oh.” Kermit shook his head. “Well that’s what comes of
spending so much time off the beaten paths. One loses touch with
these things. Still, it’s the sexual linkage I think is awful.”
     “Of course,” Leslie said, “I have no way of knowing whether
the epidemic here was limited to men or to women—much less if it
was limited to homosexual men. We just know it’s associated with
a gender particle, but it’s fifty-fifty whether it’s the masculine or
feminine one.”
      “That’s what I think is awful.” Kermit looked over where two
or three workers were moving among the excavations. “But that’s
the game your Delany seems to think he’s playing. Ten years ago,
Leslie, in that initial paper (and no matter what I’ve said, I think it
was a very good paper, too), you wrote, quite accurately, ‘We have
not found the names of any gods in the Culhar’ Fragment, nor in
any of the texts related to it by the most ancient of these
fragmentary scripts.’ And three pages later, you noted, ‘There
seems to be a high concern with craft among these people.’ And
what does Delany do with this in his stories? He invents a whole
gallery of nameless gods—all craftsmen, to be sure—who’ve
replaced a deposed set of named ones! Then he puts them all in the
service of a worldview so modern I just assume he’s kidding.
Leslie, that’s just not responsible historical fiction. I mean, how can
 you, who did the original work, countenance that sort of thing?
Your translation of the Culhar’ Fragment was quite ingenious,
when all was said and done. But your friend—”
      “He’s not my friend, Kermi.” Across the wide, wide sky the
gibbous moon, a mottled ivory disk, had risen, huge at the horizon,
over the ruins opposite the sunset spectacle. “I’ve never met him.
We’ve only corresponded a few times. I just like some of what he
writes. But you’ve got to be the first person I’ve ever met to think
sword-and-sorcery was supposed to be ‘responsible historical
fiction’! It’s just fun—to sort of play with, in your mind.”
      “Your privilege.” Kermit reached up to scratch an ear. “At
any rate, your—metaphorically speaking—friend here writes a
book ostensibly based on your findings… writes three books,
actually. Of which this is, I gather—” he closed the raddled
pages—“the third. And I’ve actually spent an afternoon reading it.
Well, he can’t capture the feel of the material lives these people lead
in zitz-thousand B.C. (Really, all his medical details are
opportunistic infection symptoms with an advanced medical
technology busily at work to waylay almost immediate death—the
only way you live with AIDS even for six months is because we do
have advanced medicine!) But I suppose I can forgive him that. I
don’t know all that much about what people’s life here was like
either.” Kermit looked at the book again, then out at the
excavation. “At this point in our research, nobody does. But why does
he insist on calling the place Kolhari? That wasn’t even one of your
preferred guesses. That was a real outside shot, if I remember—”
      “I assume that’s because his whole series is an outside shot.”
Leslie moved one heavy hip then the other back on the sandy slope.
“Kermi, you and Wellman have only been digging here six
months—thanks to an appendix in my book; and you’ve been lucky
enough actually to find your city, in about the right place, from
about the right time. When Delany wrote that last story I showed
you, there was no way he could have known that there was a city on
this shore, much less that, for a while, it suffered under an
epidemic that, at least in some of its aspects, may have resembled
AIDS. As far as I can figure out from the dates, you were just
leaving to come here back when he was nearing the end of his tale.
That’s what makes the whole thing uncanny. That’s why I
brought—”
      “Leslie, you’ve come all the way out here to try to win me
over to something. And I don’t think I want to be won.”
      “I came because I was less than three hundred miles away
and I wanted to say hello and see what you guys were turning up.
And since, however inadvertently, you’ve written an appendix to two
of his books now, I thought you might find this third one
interesting.”
      “Someone’s paying attention to you, Leslie.” Kermit lifted the
book again. “And that’s flattering. Enjoy it. If it was good for you,
it’s good for me; I’m happy if it makes you happy. But we’ve been
friends for a long time. And you mustn’t ask me for more than
that.”
       “We are friends, Kermi. Angry as you make me. So you may
call it what it is: power. Ten years ago, I wrote some papers, which
eventually became a book. I worked on them—my translations and
the mathematics they were sunk in—very hard. And because of it,
someone I’ve never met but some of whose writing I kind of like
has written some stories of his own, three whole books of them.
Also, because of it, you are now third man down on the totem pole
of a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar excavation that’s actually
finding some interesting correspondences between what’s here and
what till recently was considered a minor fictive text—not
Delany’s, of course. The Culhar’. No doubt you and Wellman will
get a book or two out of it yourselves. Yes, I enjoy knowing my
hard work was initially responsible for all of that, for all of this.
Oh, and please, don’t you forget it when you write your book. But if I
did run into Delany, I’d certainly ask him what he thought of your
findings here. I assume he’d answer that they’re interesting, but that
since all his stories were written before your excavations began,
‘interesting’ is, finally, about all he could say. Well, that’s pretty
much all I’m asking you. What do you think about his work? But
I’m just surprised your answer is so different from the one I’d
expect from him.”
       “Oh, are you?” Kermit put the book down on the ground.
“Well, we might both surprise you. You say you want to know what
 I think, but I really wonder if you do want to know.”
     “But I do!”
     “Are you sure?”
     “Very.”
      “Well, unlike Wellman, who, when you showed the book to
him this morning, went on so about the publicity value for the dig
these stories would produce (and didn’t read a word!), I am gay. I’ve
never made any particular secret of it, at least from you. What
Delany is talking about strikes very close to home… Look, I was in
New York that summer, at the height of the media coverage of
AIDS. I was in my hotel room, waiting to get on a plane to start on
my way here, when I watched a Twenty/Twenty coverage of AIDS
where they interviewed a ‘living skeleton,’ who, like Delany’s ‘Herb’
the day after ‘Sarena’s’ visit, died one day after the film was
finished. Over a few afternoons, I had to make a couple of trips up
to Washington Heights to check on some equipment that was due
in; so while I was on the subway, I decided just to drop in on a
public john at the Seventy-ninth Street subway stop—a rather
active New York sexual congregating spot in those days—just to
see how all this was affecting things. Mind you, the johns are not
my usual stomping grounds, you understand. (Three hundred
contacts a year? Good Lord, if I’ve had three in the last five years,
I’d consider myself drowned in a surfeit of orgiastic pleasure!) But
with all the brouhaha, the scientist in me was curious. Well, would
you believe that, between the first and the second day I looked into
that shabby hole with its peeling walls and asbestos covered pipes,
the blue and ivory paint soiled almost to one hue, the filthy
incandescent bulbs in their wire cages from another era, and only
metal partitions between the stalls, someone came in and filled
both the commodes and the urinals with plaster of paris, which
hardened and bulged up over the porcelain rims, making the
facilities wholly unusable—except for the industrial-sized sink in
the corner, which, a day later, was fouled with urine, feces, and
soggy paper by the desperate.
      “Irate straights attempting to render inoperable a well-known
cruising spot? Social-minded gays trying to put the place out of
operation, assuming they were lowering the chances of AIDS
contact?
     “No, there’s no way to be sure. But from the men who still
stood around in it, it didn’t stop the cruising—nor, from the
condition of the floor and the sink, people using it for a toilet.
      “But a few days later, the inoperable bathroom was
permanently locked. Don’t tell me about mass murders. That’s what
New York felt like back then, to me. And that’s what I want to see
in his ‘carnivalesque’ portrait. And also—no, don’t stop me. You’ve
got me started, now!
      “Also: Why hasn’t he talked about the attempts to close the
gay bathhouses and the harassment of gay-owned businesses, not
to mention straight-owned gay bars? How many clients did this
dead therapist or gay accountant have during the six months or six
weeks or six days in which he could still work before he died, but
after it was known that he had AIDS? Not to mention Pheron’s
customers. That’s what I want to know. That’s the political
question. Certainly that little homily on the Bridge of Lost
Desire—what was it? ‘… I have a lover…’—wasn’t supposed to
cover that, now, was it? Well, I’m sorry. I have a lover, won’t do! I
mean, do you realize what was involved in the policing of the baths
in San Francisco, or the raiding of the Mine Shaft in New York?
These were all things in the gay press the same weeks I was there.
It was a complex political situation, with feelings running high
among thousands on thousands, if not millions, of gay men—not
to mention nongays—in both directions, with people writing
articles and letters debating both sides passionately, with most of
the gay papers—including some writers with lovers with
AIDS—vehemently against closing the baths, with the official
institutions using the confusion once again to step in and tell gay
men how we should and shouldn’t live. ‘Allegoresis,’ my ass! If he
wanted to allegorize what was actually going on, he should have
had a platoon of Imperial storm troopers arrive at the bridge and
just start tearing it down because of course it was the source of the
epidemic. Then watch the reactions of everyone else, from the
market vendors and shoppers with no way to get to their precious
Old Market, to the people who, yes, indeed wanted to be free to
choose whatever sexual style they—”
      “Kermi,” Leslie said, “maybe he wasn’t trying to allegorize a
political situation. Maybe he was trying to allegorize a feeling, a
feeling probably everybody has had about it at one time or another,
no matter what side they finally chose—politically, that is.”
     Kermit shook his head. “And I’m still sorry, Leslie. I don’t
know about this SF or this ‘sword-and-sorcery’ of yours; but I do
know a little about art, literature, and history. Flaubert said it: ‘All I
require from an artist is that he have the proper sensation.’ Well,
that goes particularly for political art. And in this case, the proper
sensation means having some intuition for what needs to be written
about. I don’t really care what he has to say about it. Or, at any rate,
I don’t care a lot. But if he’s going to present this ‘tale’ of his as
some sort of political meditation and he doesn’t talk about the
proper things, then it doesn’t cut the mustard!”
     Behind them were dark mountains.
     “Well, perhaps—” Leslie shrugged—“he doesn’t go to the
baths.”
     Before them was the sea.
     “Well, at least one of my most wonderful encounters, for
winter—1979, it was—was at the baths; in Cincinnati. (Three
hundred? Oh, I hate him! I hate him!) And believe me—” Kermit
sighed—“I would’t give that up for anything! But it’s true. I don’t
go to johns. Or movie houses. And there, I suppose, you have it.”
      Between, on the scarred and interrupted land, lay a kind of
partial map of what had once been a city.


       11.1 A single lamp burned in the tavern. The celebrants came
quietly from the doorway, a glow on their shoulders as they
stepped into the street. With Zadyuk’s arm around her, Nari
pushed aside the hanging. (Where his arm wasn’t seemed so very
chill.) Just then, from around the corner, half a dozen youngsters
ran, torches held high among them. As light swept the tavern wall,
Zadyuk looked aside to see the little girl who’d taken part in the
Calling, leaning there, quite like an adult, talking to an older,
broad-hipped woman. The girl still wore Pheron’s black and orange
remnant around her shoulders, although, as he turned to look at the
passing children, he also saw that the mask makeup had been
washed from her small, round face.
     Nari glanced up to see Zadyuk looking and looked too. The
torches swept by, dragging the light away and pulling darkness
behind it.


     11.2 The artist’s performance is always more or less aleatory.
     This image of Joey:
      He wore dark-blue dress slacks, in which he’d slept for a week
in the park. From his bare chest, minutes before, he’d shrugged a
beige T-shirt with ballooning, metallic letters across it proclaiming,
‘How can you be Humble when you’re as Great as I am?’ It hung
over the back of the kitchen chair he sat in. Toes reddened from a
summer of ill-fitting shoes given him by another derelict, instep
and ankles peppered with needle marks, his bare feet were a good
yard apart on the linoleum. Earlier that day, waking sick on some
park bench, he’d shit himself, but as the pants were all he owned,
he still wore them, ten hours later. Rolling up one leg to the thigh,
he bent way over. Brass-colored hair fell forward in matted hanks. I
watched him stick what looked like a toy hypodermic from a
Let’s-Play-Doctor kit again and again into his kneecap, his shin, his
thigh, trying for a hit, where, at a functioning vein, the black-red
blood would blip into the already pale-pink solute at the
hypodermic’s bottom. Blood drooled his arms and hands from
two-odd-dozen failed attempts in the minutes before, now in his
forearm, now between his knuckles, now on the inside of his
biceps, now on his wrist, three or four obliquely angled stabs at
each location, each time joggling the needle to try and break into
his body’s more and more well-guarded circulatory system. A
dribble over his elbow was thick and long as an earthworm; others
looked like red yarn down his arms, over his wrists, stringing his
infection swollen hand.
      Among the bottle caps and folded bits of wax paper on the
kitchen table were two blood-blotched paper towels from where
he’d twice wiped away the scarlet drool from his impalings.
       Drops of blood trickled his leg. He went on prodding a white,
inner thigh with his thick thumb, sliding the inch-long needle to its
hilt, out, and in again, lifting thin, inch-high tents of flesh…
      Under his hair, strained from his bent-over position, he
muttered: “Damned if I’m gonna blow this hit…!” (That’s missing
the vein and injecting under the skin, so that the liquid blows up a
dime-sized bubble, absorbed into the body too gradually for the
user to feel any effect.) But most of his accessible veins have
collapsed.
      Later, he stood up, wiping his arms off with another paper
towel, his pants’ leg still rolled up. “I look like a fuckin’ dartboard,
don’t I?” Forehead sweating with the first rush after his delayed
success, he grinned, showing long under teeth and naked upper
gum. “I was at the hospital a couple of months ago, and they’re
trying to do this blood test…? And I tell ‘em, please, please!
Lemme do it! Please! You gonna be pokin’ around in my arm for
an hour and you ain’t gonna get no blood.”
      Joey’s daughter, from his marriage when he was nineteen, is
one month younger than mine. In the occasional comparisons of
the dog-eared photo he had of her for a while and the school
picture I carry, it isn’t just projection: the two girls look uncannily
alike. Three times now, I’ve known him to get it together enough to
make a trip up to Boston to see her. “I only spend a couple of
hours with her,” he explained on his return. “I don’t want to be no
trouble for my old lady. Besides, I don’t want the kid to know her
old man is a fuckin’ junky, sleepin’ on the street and sellin’ his ass.”
It occurs to me that for anyone—even a ten-year-old—to spend
more than a few minutes with Joey is probably to suspect that his
situation can’t be too much else.
     The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.

     My accounts of Joey are only somewhat tightened up from
my journals for ‘82 and ‘83, about a hustler (whose name does not
begin with “J” nor was he born in Boston), some murders
(complete with the inaccuracies from “Joey’s” account), and a
police operation. While that may make them more historical, it does
not make them less fictive.


     11.3 Earlier tonight, on a cold, rainy Easter Monday, twenty
degrees below normal for the time of year (April 23rd, 1984), after
two days of hints in the papers and on TV, the six o’clock news
announced an AIDS breakthrough. On the same news program
were a few more details of Great Britain’s cutting off of diplomatic
relations with Libya over the embassy murder of a policewoman in
London; there was a minute and a half photographic retrospective
for the death of eighty-two-year-old landscape photographer, Ansel
Adams; judges called for harsher sentences for New York
criminals, despite the fact that our jails are holding 116 percent of
their capacity; Harlem dance teacher, Mary Bruce, is determined to
fight eviction from the second-floor dance studio she has run at
125th Street since the thirties.
      And Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute has
isolated a virus (HTLV-3—very similar to ordinary HTLV and
possibly much like, or even identical to, LAV, the virus the
Institute Pasteur has been studying), which, by reasonable
assessment, is possibly the causative agent of AIDS. Secretary of
Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler at a press
conference in Washington, with hair piled high, pale-framed
glasses, and a high-collared red dress, announced across a forest of
microphones that we are reasonably six months away from a
general test for the antibodies for the virus and two years away
from a vaccine—which will then be ready for another year of
testing, before it can be used.
     That is, of course, if this is the actual virus.
     Shortly, amidst the peeling walls of the office of the Gay
Men’s Health Crisis, a gaunt, huge-eyed man with AIDS explained
calmly to an interviewer that, while it is hopeful news, it doesn’t do
much good for the two-thousand-odd people still alive with AIDS
today, none of whom, in a word, are likely to survive that long. It’s
only his work and his will, he tells us, that have kept him alive.
(And there have been c. 880 new cases reported in the first three
months of this year, 1984.) Later, on Channel 2 there was a
remarkably responsible report about AIDS in the Navy, Air Force,
and Army. Basically the report says that there must be more cases
than the five the armed forces have admitted to so far; the news
commentator suggests that there are probably somewhat over
thirty.
      But our microbically unagented terror has, after four years
now and a toll of more than four thousand—possibly—developed
its microbe.


      11.4 Expand this scene to some six/eight pp.:
      While the last of the night’s carnival celebration goes on
outside in the street, Nari and Zadyuk get home from the Calling
of the Amnewor to their dark house, to find Pheron. (Wording:
Squatting in the dark before the firebox, Zadyuk swung back the
metal door. Coals glowed in the ashes. He picked out one of the
hardwood sticks and blew on it. Its end glowed above his fingers.
With his other hand he reached for the lamp on top, first
accidentally pushing it over a little, then getting it: he brought down
the warm clay, touched the stick’s end to the wick, which, after a
moment, flared red. In the doorway, Nari breathed in sharply.
Zadyuk looked at her, then at where she looked. A very, very thin
man sat at the bench alongside their table, head forward on his
arms. Zadyuk stood up; the lamp flame flickered wildly; red
wavered and wobbled in the room. And the man at the table moved
a long foot, then a thin hand, and finally lifted his head to blink at
them with large, dark eyes, whites showing all the way around. Nari
whispered: “Pheron…?” Clean up some. Work on the red light over the—
stone? wood? Omit or change: “accidentally,” “alongside,” “the way,”
“over a little,” “after a moment.” Possibly okay. But clean and clarify:
how Pheron got in, etc.) Pheron looked like a skeleton. (Wording: The
elbows seemed large interruptions along the thinnesses of his arms.
 Okay? Maybe.) He told them that he’d spent the evening with some
of the other people with the disease. (Where? At Lord Vanar’s? At his
own house?) The boy who’d first brought him to the group, Toplin,
had died earlier that day at his mother’s home. Top’s lover, a
stoneworker who lived out in the district of Successful Artisans
near the school, had come in to tell them, and had broken down in
the group. Everyone had been shaken. And Pheron had realized
that, besides the support of the group, he wanted to talk to his
friends. So he’d had the wagon drop him off here—“Look, I don’t
want to be any trouble. I don’t, but I just needed to—please, you
don’t mind…?”
      No, of course not. He was their friend; they were his. (Nari
went to sit beside him on the bench. Zadyuk put the lamp on the
table and sat on the other side of the table.) Really, they were glad
he’d come. Clearly, though, they feel discomfort. “Are you all
right?” Zadyuk asked. “I mean, do you want us to take you back
home…?”
     “No… No, please. I just wanted to talk. Let me stay, awhile.
I’m so… I’m frightened, Nari. I want somebody to do something
for me! But what can I ask them for?”
     Nari started to say that they’d gone to the Calling of the
Amnewor for him; but Zadyuk stopped her with a look.
Confronted with the reality of their friend, that, they both realized,
had been for them.
      “I’ve always tried to do things for other people,” Pheron went
on. (Wording: His voice was breathy, as though he spoke behind
cloth.) “I’ve always tried to help them—you, anybody I thought
needed it. Haven’t I? Isn’t that true? That’s not bragging, is it? And
now, I just want somebody to do something for me—only there’s
nothing anybody can do, is there? And that’s not fair. And it’s so
frightening. I can’t work anymore, Zad. I’m too weak; and I hurt
too much. And when I can’t work I get frightened. I’m not afraid
of dying. Not now. Not anymore. But I’m terrified of the next five
days, or five weeks, or fifteen months—with their last
minutes—I’ve still got to live through. Help me! Please, help me.
Somebody, Nari, Zad… Please, I’m so frightened…!”
      They went on talking, for a long while; then, sensing his
exhaustion and his illness as well, they helped him to lie down on
their bed, where, after a little, he fell asleep. Zadyuk sat for a while
on the bed’s edge; Nari stretched out beside Pheron. Finally
Zadyuk lay down too, till all of them were in the uneasy slumber of
three exhausted children, cowering in a forest, waiting for morning
or a monster. No. Can’t write it out. Not now. Partly because it touches too
many emotional things in me. And partly because, seven weeks beyond my
forty-second year, I’m cynical enough to wonder seriously if a young,
heterosexual, working couple would give up, for a gay friend (even if he were
dying), what amounts, after all, to a night’s sleep on the last day of carnival
before returning next morning to a full work schedule: ten, twelve hours for them
both. (They probably would have gotten him home, whether he wanted to go or
not, and left him there, feeling vaguely put out.) They cannot bear to think
about it directly anymore than can the Master. The relation of those two
feelings in me is, of course, the bottom-line political question for this particular
scene. Is the cynical response to protect myself from the emotions? Or: Does my
knowledge of a cynical truth make the emotions as painful as they are? Or:
Are the emotions and the cynicism two valid responses to the world as I’ve
known it at painful play within me, in no particularly contingent hierarchy?
Certainly this last is what I suspect. Question? If the whole scene above took
place not in the red glow of that particular oil, but in a brighter, butter-colored
(i.e., more expensive) light, would that suggest the necessary differences in
Zadyuk’s and Nari’s personalities/situation for me to believe the scene as
outlined? At any rate, to sketch out what I hope would happen seems fair. To
write out fully what I still can’t fully believe seems, however, to be cheating in
just the way I wrote of in 9.811. Well, for all those reasons, maybe in a
while…


       11.41 By now I’m willing to admit that perhaps narrative
fiction, in neither its literary nor its paraliterary mode, can propose
the radically successful metaphor. At best, what both modes can do
is break up, analyze, and dialogize the conservative, the historically
sedimented, letting the fragments argue with one another, letting
each display its own obsolescence, suggesting (not stating) where
still another retains the possibility of vivid, radical development.
But responding to those suggestions is, of course, the job of the
radical reader. (The “radical metaphor” is, after all, only an
interpretation of preextant words.) Creators, whatever their
polictics, only provide raw material—documents, if you will. In
terms of AIDS itself, there are all sorts of social practicalities one
can endorse: better research, better information, support groups for
people with AIDS, support groups for those around them. Yes, I
feel the urge to fictionalize these last two, more than the first.
(Pheron’s incompleteness, we now can be sure, is an
incompleteness of the text, not of a person.) I also feel, as I don’t
(yet) have AIDS myself, and have visited no such AIDS groups, I
wouldn’t know precisely how to—though my own experience with
the Gay Fathers’ support group certainly urges me to it, and even
suggests what to look for: the first hopes that the group will solve
all problems, then the disappointment when they don’t, finally the
real and solid help such groups give apart from both expectations
and disappointments, and, even, perhaps a measured realization that
this particular group may not be for you (while, indeed, another
may)—having nothing to do with expectations, disappointments, or
benefits. (One could make Pheron far more “whole” by thinking in
fictional terms precisely where he was among all these possibilities
that night with his particular support group, what precisely had
happened, and how. Go on, then, mon semblable,—nom frère!)


      12.1 When I was kid, my family had a country house. Down
the road from us a second or third cousin of mine used to come up
sometimes to visit his grandfather. He was about my age, he had a
younger brother, a dog, and played the saxophone.
     He’d been blind from birth.
      We were all very fond of him and his family. I was in and out
of his house and he was in and out of ours all the time.
      One afternoon when I was about twelve and upstairs in our
attic, working on the design for some electrical circuit in my
notebook and listening to the radio (the unfinished attic of our
country house was basically my room), some medical program
came on talking about eye injuries and blindness. Thinking of my
cousin, I perked up. The thing I’ve remembered from the program
ever since was one small part of the discussion: “… he lost one eye
through an injury in a car accident, and, two years later through
sympathetic ophthalmia, he lost the sight in the other…”
     Sympathetic ophthalmia?
      Always a lover of big words, I’d encountered both before, but
this was the first I’d heard them together. And the idea that, just
because you’d lost one eye, through a weakening of the muscles
and a failure of the nerves you risked losing the sight in the others
seemed the grossest biological injustice! In the thirty years since,
without really trying, I’ve had a couple of single-eyed friends or
acquaintances. I’ve always thought of them as people who’ve
managed to beat sympathetic ophthalmia. I don’t believe I’ve ever
mentioned it to any of them; still, their triumph seemed important
to me.


      12.2 Anecdotal evidence at work last week: In 108 cases of
AIDS tested, all 108 exhibited a certain intestinal amoeba. (Sarena
says that for three years before he came down with AIDS, Herb
spent a losing battle trying to shake these same intestinal parasites.)
Perhaps the parasite coupled with excessive use of drugs
(particularly amyl nitrite) weakens the system so that…
     Of course, what happens to the blood products theory?
      And for all the hope that the Easter Monday announcement
brings, we’re still two years away from a vaccine only ready for
testing.


     12.3 Here’s the ending as I got it to that “Jack the Ripper”
account. While walking up Eighth Avenue, I ran into Joey. He was
wearing a new set of clothes, including a new leather (more
probably plastic) jacket, and clearly feeling very chipper. He
grinned and greeted me happily. Obviously, at least for a couple of
days, things had been going well for him. I asked him if he was
staying anywhere.
     He shrugged a little shyly: “I was stayin’ with this guy for a
couple of weeks. But I’m back on the street now. Been in the Port
Authority bus station for the last three nights.” He examined the
sleeves of his jacket. “I don’t look in too bad shape, do I?”
      “You look pretty good,” I said, with the same phatic content
as the usual, I’m fine/how are you? “Did they ever catch that guy
who was going around killing people?” I asked.
     “Oh, yeah. Caught him two weeks ago.” In the midst of his
good humor, my question seemed to bother him.
     “Tell me what happened,” I urged. “Who was it?”
     “Just some guy. Some crazy guy who was goin’ around killing
people. They said he killed five people. But they caught him.”
     “I thought you said he killed nine…?”
     “Naw. Somebody else killed the other four.”
     “Does that mean somebody else was running around, doing
the others—”
     Joey put one hand on my shoulder. “Man, I’m on the street
again. I’m doin’ pretty well, too. For a while, anyway. They caught
him. It’s over with. He killed five guys; and I just got to the place
where I don’t have to think about it all the time. So let’s talk about
something pleasant, okay? Like cancer, or AIDS, or people starvin’
in China…? Now wouldn’t you think I’d be dead of AIDS by
now?” He laughed. “Heroin, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and
Haitians. Well, I suppose I could be a hemophiliac Haitian too.
Naw, if I had any kind of hemophilia, I’d be dead years ago, huh?
Hey, when you gonna break down and help me get another room. I
get some place to bring people and I can make a lot more
money…?” But he grins to let me know he’s not (as) serious.


     12.4 Ted’s been reading the Nevèrÿon tales practically since
they began coming out of my notebook. Once, last spring, when he
came in, he told me: “I made it with Gorgik today.”
    “What?” I asked, as we walked back into the living room.
“What do you mean?”
      “I was down at that movie on Third Avenue—you know. The
one where I first met you? And I saw your character, Gorgik. The
Liberator. Actually, I’ve seen him a few times. As far as I can make
out, he’s one of the Saturday afternoon regulars. It was all I could
do not to tell him: ‘Did you know you’re the exact image of a
character in some stories a friend of mine’s been writing?’ Really,
Chip, if you want to see one of your own characters come to life,
you should go down there! Christ, he was sensational!”
     Yes, the temptation was too great. Next Saturday, sitting in
the darkened balcony of what is reputedly the second-oldest theater
building in New York City, while for the afternoon its screen was
shared between a piece of commercial straight pornography and an
espionage rerun, I saw a man some rows to my right and in front
of me, pretty clearly the man Ted had gone on to describe: large,
hulking, blond(!?), most likely Polish. But no, it would never have
occurred to me to think he resembled my character. As I went down
the narrow stairs into the sunlit lobby, to leave the movie house, I
thought (and smiled): Well, to each his own Liberator.


      12.5 I was feeling rather down. In entry 5.1, I wrote that the
most recent time I’d seen Joey he was doing pretty well: off the
street, off drugs? I jotted that down in my notebook at five o’clock
the morning after I saw him.
      Two nights later, crossing Ninth Avenue at Forty-third, on
my way to an editorial meeting of the poetry magazine I’ve been
working on since October, I saw a bunch of young men surging
toward me, one of whom, as they broke around me, grinned—and
for a moment I thought something was terribly wrong with his
teeth. They were moving. And not all in the same direction.
      Then I remembered his bridge, just as he tongued it back up
into place.
     “Luis,” I said. “How you doing?”
     “Okay.” He shrugged, still smiling. “You seen your friend,
Joey?”
     “Yeah,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I saw him a couple of
nights back. He was looking pretty good.”
      Luis shook his head. (The guys with him had wandered on.)
“He got beat up last night. They caught him, man, and wiped up
the street with him!” He started forward again.
      With a raised eyebrow, I turned to ask for more details. But
Luis smiled apologetically, nodded after the others, who were
already at the far corner, shrugged, grinned good-bye, and loped on.

     Over the next couple of days, in the Fiesta and around it, I
asked a couple of people if they’d seen Joey. I was just curious.
Something had happened—though no one was sure what. And he’d
hitchhiked out of town. Some said he’d fled to Boston. Some said
to Washington.
      He showed up about a month later. Once I passed him on the
street when he didn’t see me. The next day I ran into him, angry,
sick, and strung out, running after some black guy down Tenth
Avenue as I was walking up, trying to get the guy to trust him “…
for the other ten bucks, man! Come on! Please!”
     In an ancient, funereal suit, the black guy tried to move away.
    “Come on, Chip! Tell this guy he can trust me on anything!
You know that! Tell him!”
      “Yeah,” I said. “He’s a good guy. You can trust him,” and
walked on, as Joey ran off after his recalcitrant connection. I doubt
it did much good.
      Still a couple of weeks later, while I was riding the M-104 bus
up Eighth Avenue, I glanced out the window to see him sitting on
the steps beside the comic-book store, with another friend, the two
of them laughing over something as if they were having the time of
their lives.
     What’s hardest, in the end, for me to accept is that none of
these emblematic images fixes Joey’s life. Rather, it’s the
movement between them that the text does not capture—or
document—a movement that may, at least in part, be as
bewildering to him as it is to me.


     13. That night I walked home through our unaccountably cold
wet spring. (The day of the Breakthrough announcement three
weeks ago, the windchill factor was twenty-three degrees.) Now
and again the weather had given way for a half a day or so to
something warmer, but always with a nip at either end.
      Somehow I found myself walking an almost deserted
Riverside Drive, on face-sized hexagonal pavings. Beside me over
the waist-high wall, Riverside Park was a shadowy darkness,
fronting the river. Above me, trees shattered the mercury-vapor
lamps under a theatrically black sky.
      Muggers? They’re too scared to wander in this part of the city
after sundown.
      Almost a block ahead, beyond the park wall, I could see a fire
flickering in among the bushes. I turned between the stone newels
and into the park itself, strolled past the brilliantly lit water
fountain and moved away from the playground. As I climbed the
brush and tree grown slope, the river cleared to my right and a
canyon face of apartment lights—many out now—rose with me at
my left above the trees.
      He’d built his fire up on the rocks, using some old crates,
fallen branches, and newspapers. Sitting on the log beside it, he was
waiting, I guess, for the police to come and make him put it out.
But the cops are almost as scared of this section of the park as the
muggers. He had on a thermal vest, torn over the stuffing at one
side, and no shirt under. The muscles on his arms and shoulders
were hard and defined. The fire burnished his small, sharp face,
much browner than I’d thought it would be.
      Around his upper arm he wore a studded leather strap, of the
sort that, five years ago, you’d have to buy in some specialty leather
shop but which, these days, you could find in any record store with
a reasonable punk selection; like his vest, it had probably come
from a trash basket. There was something dark around his neck. A
leather collar? But from what I could see of it under the vest, it was
the wrong color, the wrong texture. In the firelight I would have
sworn it was blackened iron.
     One eye gazed at the flame. Where the other should have
been was shadow. He was small enough so that, looking at him, I
thought about midgets, and tall enough so that after a moment I
forgot them. His hands hung over his knees—one pants’ leg was
torn from calf to cuff. He had the rough, thickened fingers of
someone who’d done mostly physical labor. Looking at them, you
kind of suspected maybe, with another life and another diet, he
might have been big; but as it was, his hands were all that had
reached full growth. The pants were a lot too large and rolled up so
they didn’t hang all over his shoes. At first, I thought they
(somebody’s discarded size twelve runners) were too large too, till I
saw his toes coming out a rip in the front. No, like his hands, his
feet were just big. He’d knotted a belt with no buckle around the
bunched material at his waist.
     Standing across the fire from him I finally asked, “How you
doing?”
     He looked up at me and, after a while, nodded a little.
     “You been here long?” I asked.
      He shook his head, with a gesture just as small. “No… No. I
just come, see? Not long.” (I’d been thinking Puerto Rican, or
Caribbean. But the accent recalled something Middle Eastern.)
“Couple of days.”
     I dropped down in a squat.
     He blinked at me with his single eye, curious, as fire flickered
between us. Raising one hand, he scrubbed the heel on his mouth.
     “Why did you… leave?” I asked.
      “I can’t stay there.” He shook his head, frowning. “He don’t
need me now, no more. Why I stay? I go away, I run—far. Very far.
Here, you see?” He looked down, considering a moment. Once he
moved his head to the side, reached for some rock or pebble and
flipped it away. “Naw, he don’t need me, now. He big man. He all
in there with those big… I can’t go in there, be like that. With him.
There. Now.” Hair, black, stringy, hung in greasy cords at the side
of his head. It would smell of dogs and wet leaves. “So I stay, see?
On the bridge. Have me some fun.” He glanced up, with a quick,
gappy grin. “You understand?”
     I nodded.
      “Then, on the bridge, somebody tell me about… and I go to
that…” Lost for the word, he gave a little shudder. “They try to
scare me there at…” Frowning again, he took his hand and mimed
pushing something down. He said: “Down. Under the ground, see?
When they make the… the bones. They walk around. And they try
to scare me.” Suddenly his hand came back against his chest. “I’m
a murderer, you know? I’m a bad man! I’m no good! The bones,
they move—like he still alive or something! I’m down there in the
dark! The bones, they go here, there, you know, comin’ at you, and
you can’t look back or turn, see? I’m gonna piss all over myself in a
minute, you know? I’m that scared! Only I think, Shit!” He grinned
again, over an assortment of rottings and holes. “But I move, real
quiet, to the side. And I see, there, behind this…” He ran his hand,
flat, up and down.
     “Screen…?” I offered.
       “Yeah! Behind this…” He made the gesture again—“I see
this woman. This woman, you know? She real big—here.” With
both hands he made curving gestures out from his hips—“and she
playin’ this drum, and this harp, and these…” With hands before
his face he mimed some fingered wind. “And this other one,
younger, she giving them to her, first this one, then that. So I think:
she’s there, playin’—nothin’ too bad gonna come.” He pursed his
lips tightly, then said: “Not to me. Though I still don’t look back,
you know?”
     I nodded again. “Then what happened?”
      He bent his head to the side. “I come here. Later. After it
finished with, see? I leave the…” He threw his hand out. “I leave, I
run away. From the…”
     “City?”
    “I leave the city. North. The next day. I go north, on a wagon.
And I…”
    After a few moments, I decided his thoughts had lost
themselves among memories. “But how did you get here?” I asked.
“From there?”
       “Here?” Grinning now, he jabbed at me with his forefinger
across the fire. “You wanna know? No, you don’t believe me. But
it’s true. I…” The grin dropped away. His little shoulders went
back. He looked up. “I fly! Yes. Flying, on a…” The eye came
down, the white stained and bloodshot, the rim of the iris not so
definite on the ivory. “You believe that? That hard, I know. For
you. But I fly.”
      I waited. The fire flapped.
      “I go to the north, and I fly on a…”
     This time when he stopped, I said: “Tell me in your own
language. Go on. I’ll understand.”
     He bent his head the other way, so that the blank skin, sealed
and sunken in the socket, filled with light.


        Three moist and silvery days I waited in the mountains for a wild one,
he explained over the fire in the softly singsong syllables of that
long-ago distant tongue, but the single beast I saw through overcast
summer green had wings as tattered on the spines as all the leaves around, a
ground-bound belly bloated with small deer, eyes rheumy as smashed clams; it
was a fair decade beyond flight. I climbed to the corral, then, wedged my nose
and eye in the finger width between the boards, and—phew! they grow musty
when they muster in groups of more than threes, fetid in fives, noxious in nines.
There, they were a gaggle to gag on. But one: I saw it spread, rear on its hind
haunches. Sweeping away its fellows with a scaly tail and swaying, he hawed
like a mule, as beautiful as the sky we both lusted after. Him! I said to myself,
or her—for I could see the egg troughs ranged beyond another fence (such little
fruits, with shells like wrinkled leather, to hatch them!)—I’ll have it! I climbed
inside that night. It’s rumored in the Makalata holes that some men long for
the small-breasted grooms that care for and curry the beasts, dormed now down
the slope. Some have broken in. Seldom have they come out. Monsters, say the
good and decent men, hearing of such horrors, meaning the men. Or the girls.
Believe it, they deserve whatever they get. But my own desires start at the
monstrous: I’m a little man and do not lust after what’s little. As I haltered
that green neck, jaded with the moon, however, as I beat that scaled side into
motion with the flat of my hand, as claws scrabbled on the moonlit dust and the
dragon craned to see who’d roped it, I felt, I confess, desire tumble among my
body’s centers. “Move, you winged worm!” I hissed. “Come on, you four-footed
serpent!” And smacked it again, as one might urge on the right sort of lover. It
was easy enough to lift the locking beam from its hook. I stuck a stick between
the boards and lifted—though when it fell loudly to the rock outside, I started,
waiting for guards to fall from all around. (They, no doubt, were elsewhere, busy
protecting their glorious store of delinquent virginity that could not have
interested me less.) Not even in a shed, but merely under a long, thatched
awning on wooden rails, the light, leather gear was ranged and racked. I stood
some time in the moonlight, my mount beside me, worrying how I might saddle
her for the night. But I’ve had a hand with horses. And after some moments I
simply stalked forward, pulled one set of stirrups free, returned with the saddle
and flung it over the sharp, high back, cinched the creature, pinched its cheeks
to get the bit back in its beaky gums—while it near hauled me off the ground,
tossing its head on a neck alone half as long again as a taller man than I. A
ledge! Where was a ledge to launch from? But it had already started forward,
as if, with its gear, it had put on the whole of its habitual flight pattern.
Holding on, I had to run after it, trying to haul myself up that heaving side, my
feet dragging on the rocks and ruts it made its way along. Yes, finally I got
myself on, my leg over, when, reaching forward for the reins, I saw the edge of
the world ahead. And moonlit mountains beyond, thrust among clouds. For the
whole corral, you see, was built along a ledge! We moved toward that precipice
with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our
death. “Halt!” some distant woman cried—a guard, certainly, strolling
between barracks on her midnight, moonlight watch. “Halt, I say!” Down
wherever she was, there was more confusion. Then something whizzed by,
behind my shoulders. A spear? An arrow? I only know that, inexorable as
that lumbering gait had seemed a moment back, it seemed now just as
unchangeably slow, as we made for the stony rim. I kicked, I clucked, I rattled
its reins, and, without hastening or hesitating, the maddening monster craned
her head around to see what I was up to! I looked aside at the incensed women
running toward us: the corral guards. Another spear hurtled before me.
Something hit my dragon’s leg, but at such an angle—fortunately—that the
arrow bounced free of the hide lapped with its little armors. I looked ahead
again—and realized that the rock we moved across was, now, the last between
us and the sky.
      We went over!
      The broad wings gathered and opened beside me, and in a roar of air we
were caught up on the night. The force of it nearly jarred me loose! I glanced
behind, to see the harridans, dancing and shouting on the brink, hurling spears
and shooting arrows, some of which I saw fall under us.
      Below dark Ellamon lay in moonlight.
       But now I turned forward. For with the night roaring at my ears and
rushing up my arms to beat my chest, with the beast’s wings laboring behind
my knees, I put my mind to my journey. How long, I wondered, could I glide
here aloft? The rumor was that the animals could fly only a stade or so, and
that in an upward draft. But I’ve never been a man to believe in limits, borders,
boundaries. I’ve lived beyond them all my life, and I swore I’d get us off now,
even if I had to throw the reins and beat my arms in air.
      The dragon labored.
      The night roared.
      I hardly dared breathe.
      And we rose awhile under the moon.
       Was it minutes? Was it hours? The beast’s head began to jerk. Fables
all over the land tell how such a motion signals the height of the glide. Well,
then you know, I truly began to urge us on. “Up, you low-bellied lizard! Up, I
say! Fly for the sun and morning! Don’t you dare go down on me yet!” I howled
out every curse I knew and then some. I kicked my heels against the wing
joints, again and again, to keep them flapping. I knuckled the neck and
jockeyed us on through cold air. And for a while, at least, we seemed to move
ahead. “You fly, I say! And keep on flying!” Did you know a man with one
eye can weep tears hot as a woman with two? Did we cross a desert? Did we
cross a sea? I wept and cursed and kicked. “Go on! Go on! Keep flying!” And,
believe me, we flew! Somewhere below, I know, we crossed a river. And there
were many little lights on both its shores: hundreds of lights, thousands of lights,
in orderly rows and lines! At first I thought there must be two vast armies
camped, with myriad fires each, on the opposing banks. We swooped, and
moonlight sheened the wide water. I pulled on the reins to make her head for
some dark among those little flames, where I thought there’d be trees and we
might hide from that immense, encircling war—for that is all I could think
such lights might mean. But I was exhausted, and once I’d fixed our course I
could only fall against the neck and hug it. We fell. I heard the upper twigs tear
at the wings. I remember it flapped and trumpeted, banking, back-beating like
a bird, attempting to break her flight. Then something struck me, struck at me
again, and finally knocked me, numb, from her.
       When I came to, in leaves and dirt, I had cuts and abrasions all along
one side…


      He sat up to hold back the vest’s torn edge, so that fire lit the
scratches and scabs on his ridged, brown flank. “The animal…? I
not find,” he said, again taking up infacile English. “I look. But she
gone, now.” He shrugged. “It not fly, now, anyway, no more.”
Shaking his head, he let the vest fall to and leaned again on his
knees. “The wings, now, be all…” He made a few tearing motions.
“But I… am here now. You see? Flying. All the way here. All the
way. I come from a far when…” He paused, lifting one hand to
indicate something vast and unexpressible. “A distant once…
across never…” Frowning, first he, then I looked toward the
Hudson, at Jersey’s massed, Imperial lights. “Across the river,” he
said, then looked back at me. “You believe that?”
      I smiled, shrugged, and shifted in my squat.
     We stayed a little longer, while the flames lowered among bits
of old board. He blinked his eye and joined his hands, waiting for
me to suggest we go somewhere, that I buy him something to eat,
perhaps, or that we stay, or whatever.
     “Tell me,” I said at last, “since you’ve only been here a little
while, how do you find our strange and terrible land? Have you
heard that we have plagues of our own?”
     Curious, he looked at me across the fire, turned to the river,
glanced at the city about us, then looked at me again.
     And I would have sworn, on that chill spring night, he no
longer understood me.
                                                                —New York,
                                                                     May 1984


       I beg my readers not to misread fiction as fact. “The Tale of Plagues and
Carnivals” is, of course, a work of imagination; and to the extent it is a
document, largely what it documents is misinformation, rumor and wholly
untested guesses at play through a limited social section of New York City
during 1982 and 1983, mostly before the April 23, 1984 announcement of the
discovery of a virus (human t-cell lymphotropic virus [HTLV-3] as the
overwhelmingly probable cause of AIDS.
       AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is a disease in which
the body’s immune system ceases to function, and the body becomes prey to
many opportunistic infections, including, among the most common,
pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an otherwise rare form of pneumonia, and
Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS), an otherwise rare form of skin cancer. In the last five
years, over six and a half thousand cases of AIDS have been reported. There
have been no recoveries, and forty-five percent of those to contract the syndrome
in these five years are now dead as a result.
       There is no evidence that AIDS is transmitted by casual contact (that is,
it is not spread by air, food, water, skin contact, sneezes, or the handling of
exposed clothing, bedding, or objects). The evidence is overwhelming, however,
that it can be spread by sexual contact in which bodily fluids or secretions
(semen, saliva, urine, feces, or blood) pass from partner to partner—though it
has not been determined how these secretions must enter the partner’s body for
infection to take place (that is, it is not known if lesions, tears, or small cuts
must be present in the mouth, body skin, rectum, or vagina for infection to
occur). To date, approximately seventy-two percent of those to get the disease
have been homosexual men. The great majority of the men to get it live in, or
frequently visit, large urban centers, with New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, and Chicago far in the lead. The next highest risk-group is
intravenous drug abusers: unsterilized and infected needles going directly into the
bloodstream are apparently an indisputable point of contagion. Approximately
four hundred women have gotten AIDS, the vast majority of whom are either
I-V drug abusers, or the sexual partners of men who are I-V drug abusers.
AIDS symptoms include unexplained loss of weight, unexplained bruises or
lesions on the body (particularly on the legs), swollen lymphnodes (particularly
in the neck), along with malaise and general weakness. At the onset of any of
these symptoms, singly or in combination, especially in someone in one of the
high-risk groups, medical attention should be sought immediately. To date, no
adults who have contracted the disease have lived with AIDS beyond three
years; and death may come as quickly as six weeks after the onset of symptoms,
depending on what opportunistic infections settle in and how they are treated.
      The above is some of what is known about AIDS to date (October,
1984), though what is known has been changing month to month for more
than a year and will no doubt continue to change until after a vaccine is
developed. (All these statistics will be tragically outdated by the time this book
is published.) What follows is generally considered reasonable speculation by the
informed, or is based on it.
       Various gay men’s groups have advised gay men to put a sharp
curtailment on their number of sexual contacts outside of monogamous
relationships, or to confine them within known circles, closed if possible. Given
the situation, total abstinence is a reasonable choice. Whatever adjustment one
makes, one must bear in mind that the social path of the disease is difficult to
trace, as the incubation period has been generally estimated at seven months;
and, in some cases, three years or more may have passed between infection and
the outbreak of symptoms. There is no hard-edged evidence as to when—or for
what length of time—someone can transmit the disease during incubation. The
possibility of carriers with no symptom is, therefore, highly likely.
       Those wishing further facts and guidelines should send their questions,
stated briefly, to:
            Gay Men’s Health Crisis
            P.O. Box 274
         132 West 24th Street
         New York, NY 10011


         AIDS Hotline: (212) 807-6655*
    * My warmest thanks go to Dr. Marc Rubenstein for helping
me with this final medical note.




                       Appendix B:

         CLOSURES AND OPENINGS
It is easy to see why Pasolini’s arguments could have been so
easily dismissed. He himself, only half jokingly, asked: “What
horrible sins are crouching in my philosophy?” and named the
“monstrous” juxtaposition of irrationalism and pragmatism,
religion and action, and other “fascist” aspects of our
civilization… Let me suggest, however, that an unconventional,
less literal or narrow reading of Pasolini’s pronouncements (for
such they undoubtedly were), one that would accept his
provocations and work on the contradictions of his “heretical
empiricism,” could be helpful in resisting, if not countering, the
more subtle seduction of a logico-semiotic humanism.


                                              —Teresa de Lauretis
                          Alice Doesn’t—Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema




      1. For readers who’ve followed the Nevèrÿon tales through
their three volumes, a minuscule gift: “Nevèrÿon” is pronounced
Ne-VER-y-on, i.e., four syllables with the accent on the second:
Flight from Nevèrÿon rhymes with “Octogenarian.” The old
aristocratic section of Kolhari that briefly lent its name to the
entire city is pronounced Ne-ver-y-O-na, i.e., five syllables with the
primary accent on the penultimate (and a secondary accent on the
ante-antepenult). Thus, Neveryóna rhymes with “I love Pemona.”


     2. I have every intention of making “The Tale of Plagues and
Carnivals” a farewell to my nearly ten-year sojourn in Nevèrÿon.
The form, however, admits to certain speculations, elaborations,
exfoliations. Origins, then?


      3. From the time that I became aware the Nevèrÿon tales
would become a series—from the time I became aware of a certain
dissatisfaction with the idea that a sequence of encounters with a
set of socially central institutions was constitutive of the “civilized”
subject (“The Tale of Gorgik”) and turned back to critique that
notion with the idea that a sequence of far more subjective
encounters with some far more marginal institutions could be
equally constitutive (“The Tale of Old Venn”)—I more or less
thought of these tales as a Child’s Garden of Semiotics.
      The five stories of volume one (Tales of Nevèrÿon) struggle
through the classical notion of the sign (Stoically divided into
signifier and signified), posited by the pre-Socratic Greeks and
persistent up through Saussure and Pierce, and the conservative
notion of social relations that this “classical” sign stabilizes. Under
such a program, semiotics becomes the study of the way in which
signs are organized.
      The sixth tale, the novel that fills most of the second volume (
Neveryóna), struggles toward a somewhat richer view of the sign,
shattering it into sign production (semiosis), sign function, and sign
vehicle—the schema that distinguishes Umberto Eco’s semiotics as
he adumbrated it in Opera Aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1962) and the
early essays in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), expressed it in A Theory of Semiotics
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), and (subsequently)
critiqued it from a historical point of view in Semiotics and the
Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984). This is certainly the most impressive account of semiosis
that allows sign systems to evolve, generate new signs, critique
themselves, reorganize themselves, and generally to change. In such
a view, semiotics becomes the study of the way in which signs are
generated.
      In this third and, I hope, final volume (Flight from Nevèrÿon),
the tales move away from semiotics to a more general semiology,
as Barthes described it in his “Inaugural Lecture” for the Chair of
Literary Semiology at the College de France, January 7, 1977: for
Barthes, semiology was “the labor that collects the impurity of
language, the wastes of linguistics, the immediate corruption of any
message: nothing less than the desires, fears, expressions,
intimidations, advances, blandishments, protests, excuses,
aggressions, and melodies of which active language is made.” This
idea of semiology as the excess, the leftover, the supplement of
linguistics brings us round to Jacques Derrida’s logic of the
supplement,      without     which      semiology    and,    indeed,
poststructuralism in general would be hugely impoverished.
      Language in its classical model begins as the grunt spilling
out alongside gesture, the excess to indication, the supplement of
ostension, the verbal signifier denoting reference. But eventually
the grunt, the excess, the supplement recomplicates into meaning, a
system so rich it reverses the hierarchy at precisely the point the
grunt becomes a spillage, an excess, a supplement to emotion,
need, desire (i.e., becomes itself a gesture indicating something
otherwise unseeable, that is: at the first infant cry). In its
recomplication it becomes a system able to create and to control
meaning on its own, developing in the process its own spillage,
excess, supplement—writing—which begins to recomplicate all
over again, again upsetting the power hierarchy, contouring it not
to its former value but toward a new one. Through its richnesses,
meaning has become power…


     4. In the traditional paraliterary story/novel series, each new
tale critiques the tale (or tales) before it. Is it belaboring the
obvious to point out that, in the Nevèrÿon series, earlier tales (e.g.,
“The Tale of Old Venn” and Neveryóna) dramatically critique later
ones (e.g., “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”) as well…?


     5. The Nevèrÿon series takes place at the edge of the shadow
of the late French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, from the slaves who
have vacated the collars in the first pages of the first story (gone to
what manumissions, executions, or other collars, the child Gorgik
never knows, though the rest of his life can be looked at as an
attempt to find out) to the series of vanished authorities, such as
Lord Aldamir: the Dead Father, the Absent Father, the Name of
the Law.
      At the same time, I have tried to keep a sharp vigil against the
muddling results of an essentialist sexuality. As Michel Foucault
warned us so pointedly in a lecture at Stanford a few years back:
“We must get rid of the Freudian schema… the schema of the
interiorization of the law through the medium of sex.” I deeply feel
that in our current social system, almost all claims of such an
interiorization are, today, signs of a potential terrorism, wherever
they are made, even by groups as seemingly diverse as orthodox or
radical psychiatry, or the Moral Majority, or feminist critics against
pornography.
      The material power of the present father is the material power
of any coercive aggressive individual, male or female, armed or
unarmed. But it is only the power to coerce that is in excess of
immediate bodily force—the power of the “absent father”—that
constitutes authority in our patriarchal culture as a day-to-day
social reality. And it is our habitual insistence on reading all such
absent-but-functioning authority as male (even when, as in the case
of the “absent father,” gender is, indeed, materially absent) and at
work, usually, on a feminine ground of “the natural,” that stabilizes
the socio-economic realities of patriarchal society. Social
power-relations, from the way embarking passengers wait at a
subway-car door for the former passengers to leave the train, to the
way a prisoner receives a sentence of incarceration or death from a
judge, are very much a language. They involve understood
meanings, always more or less accepted, always more or less
challenged, always in excess of bodily coercions—in excess of
striking body and rebounding body, i.e., of classical
mechanics—that contour appropriate or inappropriate behavior.
But as long as power, whether it goes with or against the law, is
named male, the law itself will be male—even if justice is a woman
blinded by men, with both her hands occupied maintaining a
passive and impossibly difficult balancing act.
      As language comes from all that is in excess of gesture (unto
containing gesture), so social power/authority comes from all that
is in excess of mechanical coercion (unto containing mechanical
coercion).
      The unconscious is structured, declared Lacan so famously in
Ecrits, as a language.
     Well, so is social power/authority.
      Indeed, the totality of social power/authority as it is
interiorized for better or for worse by each individual may just be
the structure of the unconscious.
      Do I believe, then, Michael Ryan’s assertion with which I
opened this volume, i.e., that the impossibility of individuating
meanings at the level of the word, which Derrida has so powerfully
demonstrated (or at the level of the sentence, which Quine has
demonstrated with equal power, though with less fanfare; or at the
level of any operationally rich, axiomatic system, which was
Gödel’s originary contribution—Derrida took the term
“undecidability” from Gödel), is a material force?
     Frankly, I don’t know.
      But I think the possibility must be seriously considered by
anyone interested in either language or power, not to mention their
frighteningly elusive, always allusive, and often illusive relations.
       6. Lacan, and at this point Lacan’s commentators even more
so, have led us back to a careful reconsideration of Freud’s texts
with a focus on language. (Our focus? Freud’s? The texts’? Often it
is as intriguingly undecidable as the terminal prepositional phrase’s
antecedent in the previous sentence.) These rereadings have been
scrupulously clarifying, profoundly exciting.
      The objection to Freud, however, remains. I do not, of
course, mean the problem of “vulgar Freudianism,” where
metonymies are interpreted as metaphors for their originary terms
and situations. The valid Freudian enterprise is rather to discern
the several social and psychological systems (clearly distinguishing
which is which) by which metonymies exfoliate. And Freud’s
discovery of the force of sex as it worked among the psychological
systems was a great one. The problem was, however, not that
Freud paid too much attention to sex, but that—paradoxically—he
paid too little attention to it. The nature of his inattention
manifested itself as a series of metaphors that exhausted sex by
purely social analogues. In the Oedipus Complex, for example, the
infantile sexual drive becomes wholly entailed with the emotions of
jealousy, aggression, and fear, which, after puberty, the sexual urge
can, indeed, sometimes evoke when frustrated—though by no
means necessarily so. Since the sexual drive is not an emotion, but
an appetite, this entailment wreaks untold confusions in a theory
that is supposed to be dealing with drives: in short, Freud does not
deal with the sexual drive as an autonomous function that may (or
may not) have its own working rules apart from the shifting
emotional calculus in which it is embedded.
      Freud’s often quoted statement, “There is only one libido,
and it is male,” is, in biological terms, as much nonsense as the
statements: “There is only one hunger, and it is male”; “There is
only one itch, and it is male”; “There is only one urge to sneeze,
and it is male.”
       There is only one libido and it is neither male nor female. If,
however, as a number of feminist commentaries on Lacan (most
available among them Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism,
and, with even more flair, Jane Gallop’s The Daughter’s Seduction)
suggest, Freud’s statement should be interpreted: There is only one
libido, but since the subject in order to exist at all must constitute
itself in a profoundly patriarchal culture, it is understandable that
sexual desire must insert itself into the symbolic (i.e., social) order
by the means that are historically set up to receive the signifier of
desire, i.e., the phallus, whether one is male or female…
      Well, if that is the argument, I feel at the very least it is open
to a range of profound and empirically based questions. And a
careful study of it will, I suspect, reveal that this is simply another
case of naming power male, and the arguments for that naming are
simply more circular rationalizations for what is nothing more (or
less) than social habit. Indeed, if this argument is not profoundly
questioned, it becomes a feminist defeatism of the silliest, if not
saddest, sort.
       The objection to Lacan—a paradox that mirrors our objection
to Freud—is that he does not pay enough attention to language. I
am not talking of Lacan’s famously recomplicated and allusive
style. Rather, in the range of his theoretical elaboration there is
little to suggest that, for all his brilliant speculation on the way
language works [in] the mind, he entertains any grasp of the
primary function of language, not only in the function and field of
psychoanalysis, but in the general cultural scheme of things.
      Language is first and foremost a stabilizer of behavior,
thought, and feeling, of human responses and reactions—both for
groups and for individuals. Its aid in intellectual analysis and
communication are (one) secondary and (two) wholly entailed with
its function as a stabilizing system. (It is precisely by its ability to
stabilize reactions at the level of the signified that language
creates—or “introduces the subject into”—the Symbolic.)
Language by itself can call up sexual responses in the absence of a
sexual object—and, sometimes, repress sexual responses in the
presence of one. Given the tasks we humans find, fixate on, and
imagine, again and again our responses must achieve a variety,
complexity, and accuracy surpassing those of other species by
enormous factors. If there were not an extensive stabilizing system,
that variety, complexity, and accuracy could never be achieved.
      When the world is projected through the hierarchical
oppositions available to the sensory and sensual body (e.g.,
dry/wet, light/dark, soft/hard, hot/cold, pleasurable/painful,
familiar/strange, easy/difficult, dangerous/safe, awake/asleep,
alive/dead), it produces a spectacularly unstable text, its objects
and locations metamorphosing between states hour by hour, day by
day, year by year—a text in desperate need of stabilization if we
would maneuver through it to find food, comfort, community, and
sexual gratification, much less if we would control it at all with the
more abstract hierarchies language lets us develop (e.g., good/bad,
right/wrong, efficient/inefficient, beautiful/ugly, etc.). To reduce
the world still further to the merely vaginal/phallic is, first, to make
a highly Symbolic elaboration the moment the concepts come
loose from the human (and/or animal) genitalia that answer the
call of desire, and, second, to make an already unstable text reach a
totally chaotic state, since everything has an inside and an outside
(the projection of vaginal/phallic), fruits, caves, honeycombs, and
streams. In the text of the world, various insides and outsides are
simply more or less available.
     Vaginal symbols can always be unpacked from phallic
symbols. Phallic symbols can always be unpacked from vaginal
symbols. This may be why this particularly riotous textual play is
among the first to be stabilized in most cultures, one way or the
other. But the question as to why it tends to be stabilized toward
the phallic cannot be answered by an uncritical appeal either to
Nature or the Imaginary (Lacan’s register of presocial, Symbolically
innocent image). To make the complex, multiple, and unequal
alignment penis/outside/something(presence)/desire on the one
hand and vagina/inside/nothing(absence) on the other, while it
may indeed be among the most fundamental conceptual
alignments of patriarchal thought and one of the most common in
the range of human cultures, is nonetheless a highly complex and
Symbolic operation. Indeed, it is at least as Symbolic as aligning
hot and cold with high and low (as we do on the temperature
scale), or as aligning familiar and strange respectively with safe and
dangerous (this last, an absolute necessity to patriarchal culture and
society, and even more common than the patriarchal
vaginal/phallic conceptual alignment—though by no means
universal). The Imaginary register might, indeed, cover the
alignment of penis with outside and vagina with inside. But as soon
as we get to the conceptual alignment of desire (much less presence
and absence), we are clearly on Symbolic grounds. There are too
many “natural” vaginal aspects of desire (e.g., wet, open), so that
exclusion of this whole vaginal complex of aspects from an
alignment with desire must be a Symbolic choice. Indeed, when we
look at the male genitalia in Symbolic terms, and the entailed
movement from flaccid (smaller, soft, more protected) to erect
(larger, hard, more vulnerable) and back, the real Symbolic
organization of patriarchal culture becomes remarkably clear: larger
and hard are Symbolically aligned with male and strength in a
single conceptual unit by the same Symbolic act with which the
vulnerability of the male genitalia during erection is omitted from
mention.
      And, sadly, along with vulnerability, desire remains outside
this particular fundamental, patriarchal Symbolic complex, which
should rightly be named “the phallus” in patriarchal, phallocentric
culture. And it is the fact that the phallus is the Symbolic unit that
conjoins the notions of masculinity, greater relative size, hardness,
and power in the same gesture with which it omits vulnerability and
desire is the real tragedy of the phallus. But when this Symbolic
unit is used as a “signifier of desire” (i.e., used to stabilize those
responses by which the desired may be possessed, controlled, and
exchanged) we are talking about social exploitation, and social
exploitation largely of women.
      The masculinist bias in the language of patriarchal society and
culture in general, and in psychoanalytic terminology in particular,
from “phallus,” “castration,” and “There is only one libido, and it
is male,” to “absent father” and the exemplary “he,” is not the
producer of the problem. But it most definitely stabilizes responses
and patterns of response to the problem—responses now of
individuals, now of groups.
      A European study of the 1970s has shown that Italian
mothers who breast-feed their infants wean their girl children 40
percent earlier, on the average, than they wean their sons. An
American study of the same decade has shown that the average
white-collar      American      father     physically    handles his
under-a-year-old infant of either sex less than five seconds a day.
Male children under five receive on the average more than five
times the amount of physical contact, both from their parents and
from other adults of both sexes, than do female children of the
same age. Infants handled primarily by one adult for their first
eighteen months tend to be frightened of strangers and less secure
as children than infants handled consistently by two or more adults
for their first eighteen months. These and a host of like facts may
just be among the strongest empirical causes for “patriarchal
culture.” As one collects more and more of them, one begins to
read from them a relative brutalization of the female body and the
female psyche in infancy and early childhood that manifests itself
in any general collection of male and female adults, in terms of
adult physicality, attitude, and behavior; and they may directly or
indirectly control both the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders well
before the infant grows into her or his stade du miroir—that is,
before the phallus (as opposed to the female genitalia or the male
genitalia) is perceived as a signifier or anything else.
     Language is a stabilizer among our responses to the world
and to our problems in it. When the stabilizing system is so
powerful and important as to make our responses as we recognize
them, for all practical purposes (whether they are good responses
or bad ones), possible, it is tempting to view the stabilizing system
itself as causative of the responses if the responses are judged
good, and causative of the problems themselves if the responses
are judged bad (i.e., if the responses exacerbate the problems or
just allow them to continue). But with the concept of stabilization
of response, we can accept the overlap in both these cases while
still avoiding its seductive confusions.
      To make real changes in patriarchal society and culture will
require complex, intricate, and accurate behavior. And things can be
done about the empirical problems if our responses are stabilized
by language.
      Lacan’s commentators in all of this, however, seem to have
forgotten the Saussurean ground rule on which the superstructure
of their theoretical elaboration is based: “The sign—the
signifier—is arbitrary.” It is terribly and terrifyingly easy to create
signifiers. If one wants a bowl, the letter “V,” the cunt, a twin-tined
sword, or, indeed, a macramé tea-cozy to be “a signifier of desire”
or anything else, one has merely to speak (write, or even gesture):
“Let it signify…”
     And it is so.
       Resistance to the process always comes from a signified,
initially constituted by social habit, which can finally be overcome
by social usefulness—at which point the useful (always adjusted by
society away from its initial theoretical formulation, sometimes for
the better, sometimes for the worse) becomes a new social habit
itself; but it is precisely within social sedimentation that these
battles must be fought. And the “anthropological” evidence that
there are “more phallic symbols than all other sorts put together” is
only to deny the overwhelming preponderance of pottery, baskets,
and containers in general among the tools, functional or symbolic,
of “man”-kind. Even for me to claim a masculinistly biased
reading at this point simply makes blatant how socially malliable
the process of reading (i.e., symbol interpretation) is—and to show
how much more of what Lacanians take to be “Imaginary” is, in
fact, like so much else, Symbolic. But when a goblet such as the
Holy Grail can be renamed “the phallus,” clearly there is nothing
“Imaginary” going on here. Such a naming is entirely Symbolic.
      To fix appropriate signifiers to appropriate powers, functions,
and artifacts is, certainly, no less a Symbolic alignment than any that
patriarchal society has used to stabilize itself. But that mutual
appropriateness must be determined by what one wants the
conjunction to stabilize in an always changing social field.
      Any two parallel lines create a vaginal symbol. Any two
intersecting lines create a vaginal symbol. Cups, containers, and
circles create vaginal symbols. In short, human cultures are
inundated with them. The question is not why there are “more
phallic symbols than all other sorts put together.” The question is:
Why have the plethora of vaginal symbols not been named? And
the answer is that the vast majority of cultures are patriarchal, and
patriarchy usually entails, among other things, leaving much that is
female outside of language.
     History does not exist without theory.
     Images do not exist without interpretation.
     But it is a very old demystification we undertake here. To
claim that what was considered Imaginary is, in fact, Symbolic, is
simply another case of claiming that what was once considered
Nature is, in fact, Culture. And I can only hope some of our more
sophisticated psychoanalytic theorists can recognize that claim for
what it is, can recall the history of such claims in our past, and can
admit what is at risk by cutting short their analysis where they do.
     I am not saying that there is no Imaginary register at all. I am
simply saying that it is much smaller than Lacanians traditionally
perceive it; as well, it is far more entailed in the Symbolic than, in
the case of all things libidinal, they traditionally read it. And when
we get to the point of calling grails and cunts “phalluses,” this is a
good sign that we are far away from the Imaginary and are, rather,
about as deeply enmired within the Symbolic—within the social—as
it is possible to be.
       Our earliest and originary Judeo-Christian myth tells us that
Adam alone had the right to name—that is, he had the triple right,
first, to divide up the world into the semantic units most useful for
him, second, to organize those units into the fictions that would
stabilize what was most useful to him to have stable, and, third, to
exclude from language whatever was most convenient for him to
leave unspoken. If we want a world where not only freedom of
speech, but freedom of social determination exists for both sexes,
women must seize this triple right to name, seize it violently and
hold to it tenaciously; and they must use it for something more
than simply retelling his old tales. For those tales were what
stabilized patriarchal society in the first place. But only if they seize
and use this right will they be able to stabilize reactions in both
men and women at a fine enough precision to bring about the
desired revolution in patriarchal society and culture. If women
commit this seizure, that revolution, however painful, may still be a
comparatively peaceful one.
     If they do not, it will be a bloody one. For, once again,
language is not the problem—only a tool to help with solutions.
      But at this point the historical battle to name the law and to
effect its constitution within an always-to-be-created society and
culture—already a with less patriarchal for sustaining the conflict
even the length of time it takes to name it—has always-already
begun. And certainly nothing I, a man, have written, write here, or
could write possibly represents or expresses its origin.


      7. If, as it turns to examine the interplay between the healthy
and the pathological, psychoanalysis would untangle specific
failures of the stabilizing system, or would examine ways in which
the stabilizing system itself is unstable or, indeed, would explore
response patterns stabilized in undesirable ways, all well and good.
But it must be prepared to find destabilizing systems,
counterstabilizing systems, and reactions and responses simply too
great to be stabilized by the systems available (reactions both social
and psychological), many if not most of them nonlinguistic. But
only with its object so clarified can psychoanalysis proceed on any
front with any lasting efficacy.


       8. The excerpt from Ryan’s preface that introduces this
volume ends with a footnote commending the reader to a number
of articles by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (from whose introduction
to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology I took the motto for
the first volume of these tales), among them: “Il faut en s’en prenant à
elles,” in Les fins de l’homme (Paris, 1981); “Revolutions that as Yet
Have No Model: Derrida’s ‘Limited Inc.,’” Diacritics 10, no. 4
(Winter 1980); “Finding Feminist Readings: Dante and Yeats,”
Social Texts 3 (Fall 1980); “Unmaking and Making in To the
Lighthouse,” in Women and Language in Literature and Society (New
York, 1980); “Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble,
Habermas,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 35, nos. 1 and 2
(Fall-Winter 1979-80); “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia,”
Humanities in Society 2, no. 3 (Summer 1979); “Displacement and the
Discourse of Women,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, edited by
Mark Krupnick, Indiana University Press (1983); “Sex and History
in The Prelude (1805): Books 9-13,” in Texas Studies in Language and
Literature; “Reading the World: Literary Studies in the 80s,” in
College English; and “French Feminism in an International Frame,”
Yale French Studies.
     Let me iterate Ryan’s commendation.
     In a sense, modern philosophy is a series of introductions to
introductions to introductions, the movement between them
controlled by the pro-te c/x tive play of forces about desire.
     9. Early on, it occurred to me that the relationship of the
Nevèrÿon series to semiotics/semiology might be, for better or for
worse, much like that of Van Vogt’s Null-A series to General
Semantics.
     I have tried to leave the odd sign of this in the text.


      10. Davenport plumbs Pausanias (Volume II, Penguin edition,
pp. 355-364) for souvenirs of Elis and its resident Skeptic; Mabbott
(or Julian Symons? That’s where I found it) for young Poe’s bogus
Russian romp; perhaps Maurois for Hugo’s visit, from his exile in
Jersey, to Guernsey. But that’s very different from the historical
enterprise of Nevèrÿon; different from the way I comb Braudel or,
for that matter, the Native’s D’Eramo.


     11. But origins are always constructs, always contouring
ideological agendas.
     What other kinds of origins, then, am I drawn to discuss?
     What other kinds or origins am I drawn to exclude?


      12. Childhood readings of Robert E. Howard, descriptions by
various friends over the years of Leiber’s Faffhrd and the Gray
Mouser, Moore’s Jeryl, Moorcock’s Elric? Finally, I suppose, Russ’s
 Alyx series and the introduction for its initial volume assemblage:
but those are public precursors for any reader to infer.
     I can remember others.
     The first Nevèrÿon story, for example, was never finished,
never titled; its two fragments, as far as I know, were lost.
     In London in 1973, while I was completing the first draft of
Triton and “Shadows,” waiting for my daughter to get born, this
image struck:
     To a sequestered corral, somewhere near the mountain hold
of fabled Ellamon, delinquent girls were sent for incarceration
from all over the prehistoric land. There they were put to work as
grooms and riders for a breed of flying dragon, local to the
mountains, which, for some generations now, had been under
Imperial protection.
     I made two written starts into this imaginary visitation, both
of which I thought might become one tale.
     One ran to perhaps a dozen typewritten pages:
     In a wagon caravan also carrying goods and stores for the
mountain hold, a girl of fifteen was being transported from a
primitive city, where she’d been convicted of stealing some coins,
to the mountain reformatory. Her overseer was a foreign,
Amazon-like woman named Raven, who wore a black rag mask
across her eyes and who was to work as a guard at the prison once
she had delivered her charge.
      In the midst the caravan journey through the forested slopes,
bandits attacked the wagons, and, with bow and arrow, Raven killed
their chief. (She was a crack shot.) During the attack, she gave the
girl some orders, but, more hypnotized than frightened by the
violence, the girl did not respond. She was so unused to taking
orders, especially from another woman, that it didn’t even occur to
her to obey—even to save her life and the lives of the others
around her. Raven was not so much angered or bewildered by the
girl’s paralysis as amused. She speculated that a time in the
reformatory with other young women criminals might do the girl
good. The bandits were driven off, but as the caravan resumed its
journey, the girl, who’d always thought of herself as an
adventurous, dangerous, and independant sort, was both fascinated
and repelled by this foreign woman who killed men for rational
reasons.
      The other, six-page fragment, written perhaps three weeks
earlier, detailed an incident that occurred some weeks later, with
the girl now having become an inmate at the dragon corral and
Raven having taken up her job among the guards.
       The corral had something of a reputation throughout that
primitive land, and from time to time men tried to break into it in
hope of the sex to be had there from the young criminals. Led by
an older inmate, a young woman possibly psychotic, a group of
girls (including the newcomer) had captured such an interloper that
morning. Binding his hands behind him, they hung him from a
wooden rack (was it built for the purpose…?) by one leg.
    Over a day and night, the delinquents tortured, maimed,
and—finally—killed him.
      Was there some question as to whether the man was a willing
victim, who’d let himself be captured and bound, under the
impression that the delinquent girls, after they had “enjoyed” him,
would set him free…?
     Raven learned from the other guards that such male invasions
happened two or three times a year—and always with the same
end. When men penetrated the mountain reformatory, the more
experienced women who guarded the youngsters looked the other
way and let them do as they would. At first, when Raven (like the
young man) thought the girls would “enjoy” him and let him go,
she’d even allowed some of the girls to sneak off to take part.
Later, when she accidentally came upon the actual torture,
however, she was deeply troubled—particularly by the participation
of the girl she’d brought to the compound. While Raven could
conceive of killing men (or women) for reasons of self-defense,
this Dionysiac slaughter was, to her, deranged—though,
unsettlingly, on discovering it, she could not bring herself to step in
and stop it, almost as if she suffered from the same paralysis as had
her young charge earlier.
     That evening Raven decided she would not remain there as a
guard but would leave the dragon corral the next morning and go
elsewhere…
      A third, unwritten scene was probably why the fragments
never joined in a single tale. For the strongest of my initial visions
was that, at the story’s end, the newly imprisoned girl would ride
gloriously through the air on the back of a flying dragon—


                     The Hanged Man from the
                   FitzGerald Tarot, drawn over
                     ‘67 and ‘68; Copyright ‘69


      I begin, a sentence lover, an SF writer; which means I am
stuck, willy-nilly, with a certain grammar, a certain logic. It seemed
important that my young prisoner not escape (or die!) at the
(potential) story’s end. (“Escape” was something only Raven, by
her decision, was free to do.) But the notion of all these young
criminals, grooming and riding their own means to freedom but
never actually using them, no matter what limitations they’d
internalized through whatever social pressures, no matter how
terrible the jungle or rock or desert they might have to struggle in
when their dragons landed, seemed an oddity that, finally, just
meant there was no story.
      Similarly, Raven’s inability to bring herself to stop the
slaughter of the young man seemed as unbelievable as the girl’s
inability to do anything to help when the caravan was attacked.
     Both finally lacked what T.S. Eliot’s generation called
“objective correlatives,” and mine, “psychological veracity.”
     These two moments of feminine paralysis on which
everything hinged were “literature” in its most degraded sense.
Neither reflected in any interesting way anything I’d known of
women or men in any real situation of material pressure, and both
reflected all too much the psychological clichés for heroines of
fifties’ action-adventure movies.
     I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a
grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.
     So the tale was put aside.
    In December 1974, just before Christmas, after a stay of
almost two years to the day, I returned from London to New York.
When various papers were sent after me, the fragments were not
among them.
     I haven’t seen them since.
      In some parallel world that tale may have been written, with
all its excesses, unbelievabilities, and contradictions—the
distortions that would make it “work” committed largely on the
personality of the foreign guard, on her young charges
     It’s not my world.
       Nevertheless, it remains in memory as one lost origin of
Nevèrÿon: those two fragments, with the unwritten third, were the
logical and grammatical violences against the real, torn apart,
recast, recontoured, critiqued, reformed, elaborated in all their
various atomika, and their atomika rejoined as this set of intricate
lies that have tethered me to this odd structure, the Nevèrÿon series
(built for what purpose…?), a decade now.


     13. “The history of thought is the history of its models,”
Fredric Jameson writes in the opening of his preface to The Prison
House of Language.


     14. The problem as some feminists have articulated it (most
recently and brilliantly, Teresa de Lauretis, in Alice Doesn’t—
Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Indiana University Press, 1984), is the
exclusion of woman as “historical subject” from an
overwhelmingly male discourse. This exclusion has been effected
by yet another logical contradiction of man: historically, woman
has been projected again and again as the subject side of man (i.e.,
as nature, mystery, the unknown, the site of absence of the social
constraints on which all society is grounded, the site of
uncontrolled desire) and at once the object of man (sign of male
social position, a source of cheap or unpaid labor, the desired
object, and the unitary exchange commodity that at once binds,
coheres,             and            generates            patriarchal
society-as-a-collection-of-bodies).
      I would suggest that, theoretically, this “exclusion of woman
as historical subject” is a false problem (i.e., a misreading); I would
further suggest that, within patriarchal society, the notion of
“historical subjects” itself stabilizes the contradiction and thus
encourages the exclusion. The real problem, as I see it, is not the
apparent contradiction between woman as subject and woman as
object and the exclusion it seems to achieve. It is rather the
obvious complicity between the denial, first, of woman as historical
object and the denial, second, of woman as transhistorical subject:
these twin denials, which have nothing contradictory about them,
are the real mechanism for the exclusion of women from a cultural
discourse, which, by that exclusion, stablizes their social,
psychological, and sexual exploitation—an exploitation largely
carried out in over-whelmingly economic terms. I truly believe that,
restated in this wise, the theoretical side of the problem is solved
much the way the goose is gotten out of the bottle in the famous
Zen koan. What is left for theory in practical terms, after this
theoretical revision, is the specific assertion of women as historical
object (research, history, speculation on where woman have been
and what they have done) and the assertion of the historical
constitution of women as transhistorical subject (how has it been
brought about). Lacan and Foucault both would seem to agree that
this is identical with the constitution of “man” as transhistorical
subject. Certainly there must be an overlap: men and women are
less than a chromosome apart. But the very existence of a feminist
critique, totally aside from any rightness or wrongness of any of its
elements, means that identity does not cover the case.
      What the pursuit of the false problem has unearthed that is
valid nevertheless can be easily represented under the theoretical
rubrics of the constitution of woman as transhistorical subject and
woman as historical object.
      But the truth embodied in the ideological strategy as I have
outlined it should be as axiomatic for the poststructuralists as the
earlier Saussurian postulate, “The sign is arbitrary,” was axiomatic
for the structuralist enterprise against which the array of
poststructuralist positions arose in dialogue: “The subject is
transhistorical.” For that is only another way of saying that the
subject is fallible: it can, and will, make mistakes.
      The transhistoricity of the subject is, of course, an illusion;
but it is an inescapable illusion, without which there is no subject.
(It is, indeed, the ego’s belief in itself.) To offer perhaps a
somewhat strained analogy: cinema is an illusion constituted of
successive frames of light projected on a screen. But without the
light or a screen, there is no cinema—no illusion. The subject is a
similar illusion, constituted of a sequence of historical responses
projected within the sentient body. But without either history or the
sentient body, there is no subject—no illusion. Needless to say, the
relation between “successive” historical responses is far more
complex than that between the frames of a film; and at that
syntactic level of complexity of relation and at the neurological
level of complexity of the body in which these relations register, we
have a human system quite complex enough for, and capable of,
true freedom. (Determinism or indeterminism? No, that is not
where the “illusion” lies.) The historical question is, then, what
makes women (or men) experience themselves as transhistorical at
one point in history; what makes them experience themselves as
transhistorical at another point. And the structure of oppression is as
constitutive of that illusion as the organization of strengths.
Historically, these things change for women, for men.
      To assert that the subject is always transhistorical (and thus
an illusion) is in no way one with the assertion that the historical
process of the subject’s constitution must (therefore) remain totally
opaque and beyond all research and theory. It is simply to say that
researchers and theoreticians alike must be careful—and on the
watch for errors.
      Nor do I mean that progress cannot (or has not) been made
under the theoretical program of “historical subjects”—which, in
this society, are traditionally male—and its inescapable implication
of a transhistorical object, always desired (by whom?), always
absent (from what?), an eternally missing factor from the male
dominated version of history save as the signifier of desire—the
phallus, which woman (supposedly) is, but by which she is, the
moment she threatens to appear in the Imaginary, displaced by and
replaced with a male image, which results in her repression from
the Symbolic order through a conspiracy of signs suspiciously
similar to, if not identical with, the program by which her
productions in society (imaginary, symbolic, and—pace
Lacan—real), as well as all their rewards, are appropriated by,
revalued by, and renamed by men, a program both men and
women can recognize as exploitative and oppressive. I mean,
rather, that such a verbal theoretical expression centering around
the retrieval of “historical subjects” does not stabilize the progress
made under its rubric. The progress is made—but it tends to be
forgotten very quickly, because it is already infiltrated by, and
therefore soon dispersed by, the subject myths of patriarchal
history with which, unless it remains insistently and
programmatically critical of the theory that stabilizes them, it is so
intimately entailed.
     Counterstabilization, at this point, is necessary.


     15. “What is the Modular Calculus?” a reader writes.
      The modular calculus began as a science fictional notion that
turns out to be somewhat related to the famous Finagle Factor
(that illusive constant sought by all researchers, by which the wrong
answer is adjusted to get the right one).
      Quine has talked about “fitting grammars” and “guiding
grammars.” In more informal terms, there can be perfectly
accurate descriptions of systems, of situations, or even of
machines, which, while they tell us what these systems, situations,
and machines look like, how they move, how they function (that is,
tell us how they might work) nevertheless do not indicate how they
do work. Similarly, there are explanations that tell us, accurately and
precisely, how something actually does work, so that we can both
recognize and (potentially) construct an object that works in the
same way—though often those explanations will not let us
recognize the initial object from which the grammar was derived (it
doesn’t necessarily tell us whether it was a green one or a red one,
if its being green or red is not part of its workings) should we
stumble over it in life. The first is, more or less, a Fitting grammar.
The second is, more or less, a guiding grammar. (And a description
rich in both fitting and guiding elements is what anthropologist
Clifford Geertz calls a “thick description.”)
      The modular calculus is an algorithm or set of algorithms (a
set of fixed operations) that can be applied to any fitting grammar
to adjust it into a guiding grammar.
      A limit case, however, strongly suggests such an algorithm is
a total fantasy:
      “There is a large red box with a button on one end and a light
on the other. When you press the button, sometimes the light goes
on; sometimes it does not.” The description might go on to include
a possible circuit that would cause the described switch-and-light
operations to occur. There is our fitting grammatical description of
an object.
     The modular calculus, if such a thing existed, would be a
fixed set of algorithms one could apply to this description that
would then produce a template of the actual circuitry inside the
box, i.e., would give the guiding grammar for the situation.
       Well, since there are an infinite number of “circuits” that
could bring about these results, some involving mechanical means,
some involving electrical means, some involving electronic means,
and many, many, many involving combinations of two or all three,
obviously no algorithm could specify which particular circuit was
necessarily inside the box from only our guiding description.
     We can push our limit case a step further: “There is a large
red box with a button on one end and a light on the other end.
When the botton is pushed, the light does not go on.”
      The modular calculus would, again, allow us to know from
only this much what is in the box.
      Since this box may contain nothing, or, indeed, any broken
circuit ever envisioned, or any number of working circuits that just
do other things, or a donkey, or a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the modular calculus seems again reduced to a fantasy at one with
a magic that not only lets you see through walls but also assures
that you will understand what you see when you do.
     If we allow a certain critical margin into the notion of the
modular calculus, however, we at least move back to the realm of
science fiction:
      Clearly descriptions that grow richer in certain directions
move closer to accurate functional explanation; certain descriptions
as they become enriched in certain ways take on explanatory force.
Also, certain descriptions seem to take on explanatory force that
they then don’t live up to. Others suggest explanations that turn
out simply to be wrong.
     Might there be an algorithm or set of algorithms that would
tell us how close or how far a given description is from
explanation, or that would tell us, from a given description, what
kind of explanations may eventually be possible from it, or where
the description might be further enriched to achieve explanation.
For a limited set of situations, such algorithms might be developed
and generalized.
     In short, the problem of the modular calculus is: How do we
know when we have a model of a situation; and how do we tell
what kind of model it is?


     16. Clearly the Nevèrÿon series is a model of late
twentieth-century (mostly urban) America. The question is, of
course: What kind of model is it?
     This is not the same question as: Is it accurate or is it
inaccurate? Rather: What sort of relation does it bear to the thing
modeled?
     Rich, eristic, and contestatory (as well as documentary), I hope.



     17. “Master, save thyself,” the well-traveled merchant who
had been to Asia and Portugal told his younger brother, the
London saddler and narrator of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague
Years (1722), before going off to join his wife and two children
whom he had already evacuated to Bedfordshire.
      Yet that strangely faceless, bachelor tradesman (Henry Foe,
uncle of Daniel, thirty-five when the Great Plague struck London
in 1665…? Daniel himself was five in the year of the plague and
“invented” his well-researched memoir only after news of
Marseille’s plague of 1720 reached London and he was over sixty)
stayed on in the city, despite his older brother’s advice, out of a
combination of self-interest, acedia, and an odd set of religious
scruples (that we, certainly, read as a rationalization, or at any rate a
stabilization, of the first two motives): while absently turning
through his Bible, his finger fell on the Ninety-first Psalm: “…
there shall no evil befall thee; neither shall any plague come nigh
thy dwelling.” I say odd, because it makes him cleave to a kind of
theological determinism (God has ordained all things) that is one
with the Asian religion he has been decrying in the account of his
brother only a page or so before.


      18. All novelistic narrative, at least from the
Richardson/Fielding dialogue on, takes place more or less against
the following grid: Imagine an equal number of male and female
characters. Now divide both into upper class, middle class, and
working class, an equal number of males and females in each.
Now, for each class and sex, divide your characters into children,
adults, and oldsters. For the more modern tale-teller, the grid can
be refined even more. Split each of the resultant groups into equal
numbers of heterosexuals and homosexuals. If working class,
middle class, and upper class is too gross a division, we can add
students, teachers, blue-collar, white-collar, management, manual,
service workers, civil servants, and artists, at all levels. A major
division must be made along racial lines: for the United States,
white, black, Amerindian, Oriental, and Hispanic, with most
certainly intermediate groups between all of them. If, similarly,
youth, maturity, and age seems too gross a set of divisions, they can
be further shattered into children, adolescents, young adults,
middle-agers, elderly, and aged. But this chart, this grid must
eventually specify every possible racial/social/age/gender/sexual
type, all of which become ideally equal through their ideal
accessibility on this fictive grid.
      Like the novel itself, this chart has nothing to do with the
statistical prevalence of any one group in our society. (The
Victorian novel would lead one to believe that most middle-class
unmarried women worked as governesses, while at the same time
there were almost no prostitutes in London—whereas in fact there
were remarkably few such governesses [probably under two
hundred in any one year] and possibly in excess of eighty thousand
prostitutes in the city.) It is an ideal chart of possibilities.
      Immediately on this imaginary chart we must be able to
locate the sixty-four-year-old upper-class homosexual Hispanic
woman comic-book artist as easily as the twenty-eight-year-old
heterosexual lower-middle-class white male private detective.
      Next, we must consider a set of novelistic relations:
Friendship; sexual love; enmity; economic antagonism; religious
approval; etc. Another generation of the grid must be set up where
any and all the “characters” can relate to any and all of the others
(including characters of their own type) by any one of the possible
novelistic relations.
     This, of course, only gives us beginning points and end points
in possible two-character subplots.
      Given any two characters, in any relation, that relation must
be seen as having the potential to change into any other. Again, the
modern storyteller may always want to complicate this grid further
by considering also possible relations between three, or even more,
characters, that, in the course of the story, change not between two
states, but move through three or more…
      That we can, however mistily, conceive of this grid (and I was
twenty when I first began to contemplate its multiple intricacies),
even as we acknowledge the impossibility of ever completing it in
the abstract, much less of actually writing the Great Novel that
portrays, with insight, accuracy, and invention, examples of all that
grid’s combinations and developments, that conception
nevertheless allows us to make some purely qualitative
observations about the wealth of bourgeois fictions that take place
against it, whether the individual novel privileges a single aging
working-class man fishing alone off Cuba in his boat, who barely
relates now and again to a young, working-class boy, as in
Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, or a single elderly working-class
woman fishing alone through an absolute chaos of social
interrelationships in Canada, as in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook.

      This grid—as various novelists begin to impose on it their
various economies, for their various conscious and unconscious
reasons, picking out this character for a hero, that relationship for
development, condensing some while blithely ignoring these, those,
and the others—supplies us with the ideological contours of the
individual novel as it is foregrounded against any historical or
statistical grouping of texts. (“Why, through the range of
post-World War II American fiction, are friendships between
women almost entirely absent until the 1960s?”) Yet it also allows
us to bracket that ideological weight momentarily because we can
at least be secure that every novel has one. (“Because the return of
the male work force from the army made possible the destruction
of female solidarity in an economy in which driving women out of
work and replacing them with male veterans could be fairly easily
stabilized by continuing and developing only slightly a preexistent
narrative/language tradition.” This is an ugly, wholly criticizable,
but historically accurate answer—at least in terms of a fitting
grammar.)
      This grid is what allows us to ask of any fiction: Precisely
what does it have to say in excess of its ideological reduction?
What does it say in excess of the location of its elements on this
grid and the subsequent revelation of vast and overdetermined
absences? The deconstructionists have led off this set of new
readings most energetically by asking of certain texts: “What do
they have to say that specifically undermines and subverts their
own ideological array?” As energetic as the deconstructionist foray
has been, we must remember that there are still going to be many
texts for which we can expect the answer: “Not much.”


     19. Basil Davenport’s fictions have given me more pleasure
than those of any single writer I’ve read in the past three years.
Initially I respond to them with complete emotional bewilderment
as to why anyone could want to write the particular tales he
does—why anyone would use what of the method as I can divine
beneath his web of allusions and reconstructions. (Is it
disingenuous of me to say I find tales such as “Apples and Pears”
and “O Gadjo Niglo” most interesting when they are at their least
homoerotic? Probably. What happens when “Het Erewhonisch
Sketsboek” reaches the 18th Brumaire?) Within what defines for me,
then, an arena of almost total dispassion, Davenport brings me
again and again to breath-lost awe at the beauties he manages to
construct in that lucid, glimmering language field.
     “Robot”
     “Dawn in Erewhon”
     “The Death of Picasso”
      These stories (with the greatest “content,” and thus the
greatest accessibility for the reader beginning to enter Davenport’s
worlds) are among the most carefully constructed art works I
know. (In “On Some Lines of Virgil” I only wish Jonquille could
have been anchored to parents, home, landscape, and material life
with the same precise, lush, and vivid calculus of writerly invention
he lavishes so effortlessly on his boys; but it is an old complaint, an
old exclusion.) In my personal pantheon they rank with “To Here
and the Easle,” La Princesse de Cleves, “The Graveyard Heart,” “The
Dead,” “The Second Inquisition,” “The Metamorphosis,” Le Bal du
Compte d’Orgel, “The Asian Shore,” or Nightwood. Yet, where one
goes after that, amidst Davenport’s constructions, delineates where
the unique pleasure of his envisionings will be found.
      The effect for me is totally aesthetic and awesomely
pleasurable—or, as I have taken to saying somewhat glibly to my
friends: Davenport’s tales are rich in everything I personally love
about fiction, and almost wholly devoid of what in fiction, today,
bores me.
      Frankly, I cannot imagine anyone having that initial response
of emotional bewilderment to the impetus behind any of the
Nevèrÿon tales, whatever one thinks of their execution. (In at least
one very important sense, its rhetorical urgencies make “The Tale
of Plagues and Carnivals” the least experimental of the series.) Yet I
can imagine a hugely changed world, not a hundred years away, but
only ten or twenty hence, where that, indeed, would be precisely the
response of the common reader to these stories. That world would
be, in many ways, the world I conceive of as a Utopia. In short, I
suppose, I write yearning for a world in which all these stories
might be merely “beautiful.”


     20. “What are ‘Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular
Calculus’?” another reader writes.
     They are a model of a system.
      “Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus”
includes, as Part One, the science fiction novel Triton and, as Part
Two, “Appendix B” of that novel, “Ashima Slade and the
Harbin-Y Lectures.” From its position in that book, it is
undecidable whether “Appendix A: From the Triton Journal” is or
is not a part of Part One. The “Informal Remarks” do not include
the first five tales in the Nevèrÿon series. The “Appendix” to the
first five tales, however, forms Part Three of the “Informal
Remarks.” The novel Neveryóna, or the Tale of Signs and Cities is Part
Four of the “Informal Remarks.” From their position in that book
it is undecidable whether or not “Appendix A: The Culhar’
Correspondance” or “Appendix B: Acknowledgments” is or is not
part of Part Four. The first two tales of this volume are not part of
the “Informal Remarks.” The first appendix and third tale,
“Appendix A: The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” constitutes Part
Five of the “Informal Remarks.” Again, from their position, it is
undecidable whether these concluding notes, constituting this
second appendix (“Appendix B: Openings and Closures”), are or
are not a part.


      21. Any series written over a period of years and published
piecemeal must support inconsistencies. The self-critical nature of
the serial form practically insures it; and Alexei Panshin, writer of
that most charming of SF series, the Villiers books, has even
argued that this is a good thing and claims to have inserted
inconsistencies on purpose, volume to volume. Nevertheless,
readers like coherence. And occasionally even the writer herself or
himself glances back at an earlier tale with a revisionary pang.
      I certainly would be happy if any of my readers would revise
the last section of the sixth paragraph on page eight of “The Tale
of Gorgik,” in Tales of Nevèrÿon (the second printing or later, that is,
with the delightful Rowena cover), to read: “The pit slave’s name
was Noyeed. He was fourteen. He had lost an eye three months
back: the wound had never been dressed and had not really healed.
He had a fever. He was shivering. Bleeding gums had left his
mouth scabby. Dirt had made his flesh scaly. He had been at the
mines two months and was not expected to last a third. Seeing this
as a reasonable excuse, seven men two nights ago had abused the
boy cruelly and repeatedly—hence the limp.”
      The changes there, in the first tale, largely in the lengths of
time connected with this first mention of Noyeed, seem today to
launch him through the subsequent eight at a better trajectory to
join with his final flight in the last.
      Similarly, on page 156 and again on page 159 of that first
volume, in “The Tale of Potters and Dragons,” if the reader will
lop five years from each of Madame Keyne’s mentions of her age,
some occurrences in the subsequent volume, Neveryóna, will make
more dramatic sense.
     Indeed, in that first volume, the careful reader will find
several inconsistencies in the spelling of the river “Khora” and the
suburb “Sallese.” Also, there, the accent on “Neveryóna” flops
from grave to acute with disarming irregularity. That book contains
the odd misspelling (boney for bony, scaley for scaly, velum for vellum,
mullet for millet, and verdigrised for verdigris) and the odd misplaced
apostrophe (4/7/4, 94/3/5) or comma (3/1/11, 130/1/3, and
135/2/3). But these I leave to the diligent reader’s marginal
markings.
      There are, however, a number of other writerly inelegances in
the first volume that I long to correct. I list those most painful to
me here. Both above and below, the numbers separated by virgules
indicate page/paragraph/line(s), followed by the line (or lines) as it
(or they) should properly read:


     2/2/13:
     shirts on bony shoulders, loose or tight around


     3/l/l&2:
     stringy or fleshy necks, and sometimes even hidden under
jeweled pieces of damasked cloth set with


     3/1/9:
     some two dozen, cross-legged on the gritty floor-


     17/6/3&4:
    small, low-ceilinged room with a slit window just behind her
own suite. The stones of the floor and


     17/6/8&9:
     the end of the first month, both the Vizerine and her steward
had all but lost interest in him. But several


     17/6/11&12:
     at various private suppers of seven to fourteen guests in the
several dining rooms of her suite, all


     22/2/7:
     grooved into the floors; dozens of small, lightless cells


     25/1/14:
     Gorgik might have been, had the play of power five


     72/1/12:
     at the edge of the net houses to peek at them strolling the


     107/2/12:
     her shoulders thin.


     111/1/5:
     short kilt of a cloth made all of interlocked metal


     111/4/12:
     to have more to do with her talents as a fisherwoman
    121/3/2&3:
     dark, blotched with fading embers), she turned and walked
back to the woods.


    130/3/3:
    the evening. Light slanted across dust, scaled like


    131/1/1:
    some reptile, with myriad lapping footprints; a spilled


    134/11/6:
    on the waterfront; but without guild protection. Got


    135/2/3:
    She spoke suddenly, in a sharp and shrill voice that


    136/2/9:
    narrow back, and wound it high on the other


    136/8/1:
    He wasn’t a good looking boy. His


    143/5/8&9:
    other.” Gorgik’s fingers on the barbarian’s shoulder tightened.
     146/5/2:
     dapplings, squatted too, folding her arms on her own


     156/2/4:
     Let’s sit out under one of those awnings in the front


     157/1/13:
     who, if we sit out under the awnings, will think their


      Any reader (or rereader) of the first volume of this series who
makes these adjustments will probably have a smoother narrative
ride across Nevèrÿon’s textual complexities.
        The mass-market (i.e., rack-size) edition of Neveryóna corrects
some two dozen similar infelicities from the initial, trade paperback
(i.e., large-size) edition. Still, some mistakes were missed. Thus, in
the rack-size Neveryóna, at 18/4/10, the word “pediment” should of
course be “pedestal.” On the same page, above, at the end of
18/10/3, the word “slowly” should simply be omitted. And on the
next page, at 19/1/6, the word “way” should be inserted after
“her” in the phrase “making her by broken walls.” (This omission
wasn’t in the trade paperback; and in the age of computer
typesetting, it can only make you wonder…) On the contents page
“Appendix A” has lost its “d.” For reasons that still confound me,
whoever was assigned to take care of corrections also took it upon
himself or herself to insert a wholly disfiguring “a” in the word
“scientifiction” at 438/2/11 and to drop a hyphen at the end of
427/1/21. On page 32 the first word of the last paragraph should
be “Then” and not “The.” At 109/6/4 the third word, “voiced,”
should of course be “voice.” And the line at 115/1/5 should begin:
“than it does.” (The first “for” should be omitted.)
     Readers with the previous two volumes are invited to make
these adjustments.
      The production folk at Bantam are a kind, careful, and
conscientious lot. If my readers, in searching out these errors
should find that some or (blessedly!) all of them have been
corrected in a printing beyond the second, then she or he should
smile and simply consider this note a glimpse into the effort
necessary, not only on my part but on theirs, to achieve a bit of
orthographic and stylistic punctilio in a set of sword-and-sorcery
tales set in the long-ago distant never.


     It would seem that any rich system tends to function through
an interchange between what is inside the system and what is
outside the system (with what is outside frequently fueling the
system proper): and there are always certain elements, such as this
appendix, which are undecidable as to whether they are inside or
outside—often, though not always, those parts that encourage
definition and revision.




      ABOUT THE AUTHOR
           Born in 1942, SAMUEL R. DELANY grew
           up in New York City. His science fiction
           novels include a trilogy generally known by
its collective title The Fall of the Towers
(1963-’64-’65), Babel-17 (1966), The Einstein
Intersection (1967), the last two of which won
Nebula Awards as best novels of their
respective years, and Nova (1968). His other
books include the bestselling Dhalgren
(1975), Triton (1976), the sword-and-sorcery
series, Tales of Nevèrÿon (1978), Neveryóna
(1983). His essays on SF are collected in two
volumes, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) and
Starboard Wine (1984). He has also written a
book-length semiotic study of the SF short
story “Angouleme” by Thomas Disch, The
American Shore (1978). After some years
living in Europe and San Francisco and
teaching in the Midwest, he again lives in
New York. His latest SF novel is Stars in My
Pocket Like Grains of Sand.