by John Gardner
because
I knew the story—children murdered, Corinth in
flames—
that the game seemed to me suddenly ominous, a
conflict of demons?
Whatever the reason, I felt cold wind run down my
spine.
The fat man, harmless as he seemed, comically
clowning, filled me
with superstitious alarm.
“My noble lords,” Koprophoros
began, bowing profoundly, “alas, you see before you a fool. How dare I deny it?” He clenched his fists,
mock tragic,
and let out a terrible noise, an enormous sigh. He
winked—
winked as if someone had pulled some secret string
in his back.
“I do my best,” he said, and gave us a sheepish smile, “but you see how it is. The gods have, in their infinite
wisdom,
dealt me a belly like a whale’s, fat breasts like a
woman’s, a face
androgynous to say the least. I manage as I can!”
He chuckled.
He began to pace back and forth, above the seated
crowd,
shaking his head and wincing, making morose faces. Mechanically each footstep picked up his tonnage from
the last.
He stretched his arms in Pyripta’s direction and
shivered with woe.
“I labor for dignity. Alas! Sorrow! I seem, at best, some poor old goof who’s arrived at the wrong man’s
funeral
and hasn’t the courage to sneak to the house next door!
—Ah, well,
the gods know what they’re doing, I always say.”
He rolled
his eyes up almost out of sight, then leered, mischievous,
goatlike,
goatlike even to the horns, the folds of his turban.
He looked
like the whalish medieval demon-figure Beëlzebub, in brazen armor, sneeping out jokes at God. “It has advantages, my ludicrous condition. Who’d believe a lump like me could argue religion with priests, split
hairs
on metaphysics with men who make it their specialty— men of books, I mean, who make scratches on leaves
or hides
and read them later with knowing looks, appropriate
belches,
foreheads wrinkled like newploughed fields? I do,
however—
to everyone’s astonishment. ‘We in fact may have misjudged this creature,’ they say, and look very
solemn, and listen
with ears well-cocked henceforth—and they get their
money’s worth!
I have theories to baffle the wisest sages!” He leered,
looked sheepish,
snatched up a winebowl, drank. “I’ve a theory that
Time’s reversed,”
he said then, rolling his coy, dark eyes at Pyripta.
She blushed.
“A stunning opinion, you’ll admit, though somewhat
absurd, of course.”
He shrugged, slid his glance to the king. When he
winked, old Kreon smiled.
“Then again, I know all the ancient tales of the scribes,
and can tell them
hour on hour for a year without ever repeating myself, tale unfolding from tale like petals from a rosebud,
linked
so slyly that no man alive can seize the floor from me, caught in my web of adventures (ladies, ensorcelled
princes,
demons whose doors are the roots of trees) …
A womanish skill,
you’ll say—and I grant it: a skill more fit for a harem
eunuch;
nevertheless, a skill I happen to possess—such is my foolishness, or the restlessness of my clowning mind.
“ ‘How,’ you must surely be asking, ‘can this rank
lunatic
have power befitting a god’s—the rule of a kingdom
as wide
as Indus was, in the old days?’ ” He sighed and shook
his head,
deeply apologetic. “I must tell you the bitter truth. All my art, my theology, my metaphysics have earned me nothing! I could weep! I could tear out
my hair!” He became
the soul of woe. “I reason, I cajole, I confound the
wisest
with holy conundrums like these: ‘If Zeus is absolute
order,
or pure intellect, and the Lord of Death is essential
confusion
(that is to say, Chaos), what, if anything, connects the
two,
and how can each know the other exists? If Zeus can
muse
on all that exists, does Zeus exist?’ —But at last my
enemies
are convinced (ah, woe!) by mere trivia.” Suddenly he bent, grinning, and with only his teeth, raised up an
oak chair
large as a throne—it was carved from end to end
with figures—
and, fat neck swelling, he lifted it over his head. With
fists
like steel, he cracked and snapped off, one by one, its
thick
clawed feet. He laid them on the table like spoons.
Then, taking the seat
of stone in his hands, he snapped it like kindling. He
spat out the rest
—the back and the cumbersome arms—and then, most
amazing of all,
he sucked in breath, belched fire from his mouth like a
gasoline torch,
snatching the legs up and lighting them one by one,
then hurling them
high in the air, a four-spoked wheel of flame. It turned faster and faster. Mouths gaping, we saw that he no
longer touched them—
the fire-wheel spinning on its own, high over the
trestle-tables.
Even the three goddesses, I thought, were baffled by
the trick.
Quick as the blink of an eye, the fire-wheel vanished.
There was
no sound in the darkened hall.
Then all the sea-kings roared,
applauding, beating the flagstone floor with their staffs
and shouting,
some crying out for another such trick, while some
demanded
that he do that same one again, so that people could
watch it more closely;
nothing’s more pleasant than discovering the secret
rules of things.
How strangely he smiled!—but immediately covered
his mouth with his hand.
Then, grinning mournfully, lifting his eyes like a man
much grieved
but eternally patient, Koprophoros said, “No more
tricks yet.
Dramatic illustration, merely, dear friends. For such is
the tiresome
base of my power and wealth. I grant, it’s more
interesting
to men like ourselves, that Time is reversed.” He smiled,
his dark
and luminous eyes full of scorn for us all. “But the
world is the world.”
He sighed profoundly, fat head tipped like a praying
priest’s,
his fat little hands with their hairless fingers pressed
together
at his chest. “I thank the gods,” he said, “for my
marvelous gifts—
my innate sense of justice, my vast learning, my
qualities of soul.
But those, alas, are at last mere private benefits. The one firm way a man can be sure of his time for
thought
is his talent for breaking skulls—the art of punching
people,
or getti
ng one’s army to. Here below, I’m grieved to say, the power for good and the power for evil are identical. The idea of the moral erodes all ethics. Here (though
of course
we hope it’s otherwise elsewhere) gentle old Zeus is
the boss
of the Hades and Hekate gang.” Now the mournful
smile was back.
“I am, let me hasten to add, a profoundly peaceable
man.
Inside this enormous hulk blooms the heart of a lilac!—
However,
tyrants don’t listen to, so to speak, rime or reason.
What is it
to tyrants that hope and soap are mysteriously linked?
One gets
one’s throne the other way. Well-a-day! Alack!” He
smiled,
suddenly innocent as a girl except for those goathorn
folds,
and he bowed. The tables clapped. The king was
delighted, it was clear,
and so was Pyripta, smiling down at the tablecloth. I felt a minute, brief twinge of alarm about hope and
soap.
He was nobody’s fool, Koprophoros. He left no doubt that he knew how to handle a man as he’d handled the
chair, though he took
no special pleasure in violence—unless as art. He bowed and bowed, as neatly balanced as a dancer,
kissing
his fingertips, face sweating.
Then tall Paidoboron
stood up, the king of a silent land to the north, where
the gray
Atlantic half the year lay still as slate, and icebergs pressed imperceptibly, mournfully, groaning like weird
old beasts
on the dark roads of whales. It was a country known to Greeks as the Kingdom of Stone. Strange tales were
told of it:
a barren waste where no house boasted ornaments of gold or silver, and no one knew till Jason came of stains or dyes or of any color but the dim hues on the skins of animals there, or the grays and browns
in rocks.
The towns of that kingdom were few and far between,
as rare
as trees on those dim gray hills, and in the largest towns the houses kept, men said, no more than a hundred
souls—
bleak men bearded to the waist and dressed in
wolfskins; women
tall and stern and beautyless, like stiff, bare pines. The houses and barns, the streets, the walls along
country roads
were stone, as gloomy as the sea. They knew no culture
there
but raising sheeplike creatures—winged like eagles, but
shy,
as quick on their feet and as easily frightened as newts.
Yet they knew
the second world to the west, for the Hyperboreans
owned
great-bellied, stone-filled ships that could sail forever,
slow,
indestructible as the stone rings high in their hills. And
they knew
more surely than all other men, of the turning of
planets and stars:
geometers, learned astronomers, they spent their lives shifting and rearing enormous megaliths, age after
age,
the oldest kingdom in the world. They knew the
alchochoden
of every man and tree, knew the earthly after clap of all conjunctions, when to expect the irrumpent flash of crazily wandering comets, could tell the agonals of stars no longer lit, old planets shogged off course by accidents aeons old. They came themselves, they
claimed,
from the deeps of space, noctivagant beings shackled to
earth,
dark shadow of oaks and stones, for some guilt long
forgotten.
They waited and watched the heavens as a prisoner
stares at fields
beyond his cell’s square bars. They studied the wobbling
night,
and if some faraway star went wrong they sacrificed an eldest son to it, and made it right.
The king
spoke softly, as if some god were speaking out of him— a man no more made of flesh and blood than
Koprophoros, I’d swear:
stiff as a puppet, a figure in some old electrical game at the penny arcade, mindlessly obstructing—such was
the impression
the black king gave with his ponderous, vaguely
funereal manner;
and yet there was anger in his manner too, such
old-man fury
at all Koprophoros spoke, I could hardly believe it was
not
some hellish joke between them. Solemn as death, he
said:
“You advertise your talents, my bloated friend, as if you intended to put them on sale. No doubt you’d
soon find a buyer!”
He smiled, full of scorn for the listening crowd. “How
nice to think
-a man can outfox the fates by his clever wits, outbox the wind, outgrapple the fissures that open when
earthquakes strike!
Mere childish dreams. Forgive me for saying so. We’ve
stood—
my kingdom—a thousand years. We dreamed like you,
at first,
a thousand thousand years ago. But stone cliffs collapsed on us, seas overran us, monsters crawled from the deep and claimed our herds. And winds—
such violent winds
as you’ve never seen thus far in these playful hills—
so dark
they blanked out sun and moon for seven full years,
so thick
they snatched away all our breath like tons of earth
falling—
cliffs and seas, monsters from the deep, and those
terrible winds
taught us our power was not what we first supposed.
A man
can kill a man, if he will, or some beast less than a man, some beast that shares, in its own way, our
humanness—
hunger, the rage to rule, our pleasure in thought.
(I have seen
elderly wolves sit thinking, smiling to themselves.)
But a man
can tyrannize nothing beyond himself, his own frail
kind.
If you’ve smiled at bears who pompously, foolishly lord
it over
lesser bears but shake like mice at the tucket and boom of heaven, then smile at Koprophoros! How many storms have you tilted up like a chair and deprived of its legs?”
He laughed,
the cackle of an old, old man. The black of his hair was
dye,
I understood only now. His face was wrinkled like a
mummy’s.
Surely, I thought, the man’s long years past fathering
a child!—
yet here he stands, contending for a wife! (No one in
the hall,
or no one besides myself, it seemed, was amazed.)
He said:
“I shiver and shake at your leastmost leer, O dangerous
friend,
but the hills are cool to both of us, and the thunder
laughs.
You hold your throne by discreet and tasteful violence. As for me, I hold mine—apart. I sit in dreary silence no man envies, no man steals. What little I need to eat I plant myself and harvest alone. For talk, for the stimulation of other men’s minds, I have old
hymns
and a thousand years of figures carved in stone. I go on, and my race goes on, the prey of no one but the gods.
To a man
new to his glories, blind to the ghostly stelliscript, knowing not whence he comes or whither he goes—
immortal
as the asphodel, he thinks—that may seem a trifling
thing,
a man
full of hope, unaware of the gods’ deep scorn
of man,
a founder like you, Koprophoros.” He moved his gaze from table to table slowly. It came to rest at last on Kreon. The old man sat leaning forward, watching
intently,
waiting as if in alarm. Paidoboron smoothed his beard, as black and thick as the fur of a bear in winter. He
said:
“If I were, for instance, the last king in a doomed line, I’d run to the rim of the world, taking any child I had, and I’d house myself in stone, and I would propitiate the gods, my surest foe, with prayers and deodands.” His words died away to silence in the rafters of the hall.
The stillness
clung like a mist, as though the black-bearded
Northerner
had silenced the crowd by a spell.
Then fat Koprophoros spoke, rising from his seat, bowing, all grace, to the princess
and king.
The deep-red jewel on his forehead gleamed like fire
through wine.
Symbols of the soul those jewels, I remembered. But
the blood-red light
trapped inside fell away and away into nothingness like magnitude endlessly eating its shadow, consuming
all space.
“He speaks with feeling,” Koprophoros said, then
suddenly cackled.
“A man without interest in the throne of busy Corinth
and all
her wealth! Pray god we may all be as wise when we’re
all as poor
as Paidoboron!” He beamed, unable to hide his pleasure in his own sly play. The princess laughed too, the
innocent peal
of a child, and then all the great hall laughed till it
seemed that the very
walls would tumble from weakness. Paidoboron, grave,
said nothing.
His eyes were fierce. Yet his fury, it seemed to me
again, rang false.
I glanced at the goddesses, reclining at ease near Jason,
on the dais.
If the two kings were engaged in some treachery,
the goddesses too
were fooled by it.
The chief of the Argonauts watched the Northerner as though he had scarcely noticed Koprophoros’ trick.
He said
when the laughter in the hall died down, “Tell me,
Paidoboron,
why have you come? I knew you long ago, and I know your gloomy land. Koprophoros has his joke, but perhaps his nimble wits have betrayed him, this once. What
wealth can a man
bring down from a land like yours? And what can
Corinth offer
that you’d take even as a gift? I know you better,
I think,
than Koprophoros does. There’s no duplicity in you,
no greed
for anything Kreon can give. Yet there you stand.”
Paidoboron
bowed. “That’s true. Even so, I may have suitable gifts for a king.” He said no more, but smiled.
