by Paul Park
Of all that I knew nothing yet. But I heard the delirious conviction in the drunkard’s voice; it rang the rafters. This was the first song I had heard—I mean with words. Among us words were thought to muddy music, for the notes themselves can mean so much. That was not at issue here, in a language none of us could understand. But some could not endure even the sound of your religion, the vicious ecstasy, the sound of faith. I didn’t mind it. I thought they were jealous of a new thing. Anyone should be able to stand up and sing. But we had habits, though it hurts me to say it, for yes, that was slavery too, of a kind. You must understand, not all of us were gifted. But some sang every night, and their music and their pride was the only law we had. One of my brothers, a bully and a dancer, took the barbarian by the throat, and struck him down, and threw him out into the snow.
Late at night I got up from the sleeping room and went out. He was lying in a snowbank, breathing softly. I thought his body hair might keep him warm. There was no wind. The stars hung close. I had brought a bearskin, and hoped not to offend him, but I did. By morning he had thrown it off. He was a slave to his own faith, and I suppose he smelled the leather even in his sleep. By morning he was frozen dead.
* * *
The antinomial paused to spit into the darkness, and wipe his lips, and wipe each one of his enormous fingers on a rag before he picked his flute out of its case. He nodded to his guests He said:
My lords, our world must appear cruel and incomplete. We knew nothing about love. That is a barbarian lesson I learned later. But at that time we were a free people. We called each other brother and sister, but we were always alone. Because what is freedom more than that—the need to hear your own music always, even in a crowd? When the barbarian died, I felt stifled, watching the biters cut his tail off up on the high ground above the river, watching them cut his body into pieces, the vultures huddling in a circle. In the morning I took a pony and some skis, and rode out through the gates of our town, out over the hills, far out towards the abandoned city, where the barbarian had had a camp. I felt unhappy, but not for long. The snow stretched unbroken all around me, and in a little while I had forgotten. My mind felt empty as the snow, and I found myself humming and making little gestures with my hands, because I loved that journey. You rode in over a high span of stone, the river booming far below you at the bottom of a ragged gorge. Birds flew underneath the arch, and at the far side the remnants of a huge bird-headed statue broke the way. Its head lay in a rubble of chipped stone, as long as my body, intricately carved, its round eye staring upward. I had to lead my pony over it, and in through the shattered gateway where the bridge met the sheer cliff face, the clifftops high above me. I rode up through a steep defile cut into the rock, lined with broken columns in the shape of trees. Their stone branches mingled into arches, and I rode up through another gateway where the rough walls around me rushed away, and out into a great open space, where the wind pulled at my clothing and swept the stones as clean as ice. From here you could see the sun, rising as if behind a paper shield, the sky as white as paper. And in the middle of this stone expanse rose up an enormous pitchrock fountain, a giant in chains; that city must have been a great center of slavery, the stonework is so good. His hands and feet are chained behind him, his eyesockets are hollow. The water must have come from there and dribbled down from wounds cut in his chest and arms and thighs. In the old days, he must have stood in a pool of tears and blood.
I went on and entered streets of empty palaces, their insides open to the weather, their doorways blocked by drifting snow. I turned the corners randomly and wandered in and out of being lost, but the pony knew the way, slave to habit. So I dismounted, and left it sheltered in a ruined porch, and climbed up into an older section of the town, where massive pyramids and temples of an older, gentler design stood like a ring of snowy hills. And in an open space near the largest of these, a tumbled hill of masonry, I found the barbarian’s camp. He had discovered something, a hidden temple where the rock seemed solid, and he had come up every day to work on it, and come back every night to live with us and drink and sleep in our houses in the valley. He had kept maps and papers here, in a black tent standing in a ruck of fallen stones. He had kept a fire outside, the black smoke visible from far away. Once I had come to watch him work.
Now the fire was scattered, but there was a horse tethered outside. I had seen its footprints in the snow, and dog prints too. I could hear dogs barking, and in a little while they came running towards me over the snow, long-legged hunting dogs, but the tent was empty. I stood outside, the dogs jumping and cleaning my hands. I opened my coat to the white air and sucked the cold air through my teeth. I was so happy. I had no way of guessing then, my lords, that the future of my people lay in a barbarian city like that one had been, full of sweat and noise and slavery. Our tails would grow long, and we would never eat meat anymore. My lords, here in your hard streets, hunger forces me to make up answers to your questions and sell my memories for food. It is a biting habit to think about the past. But I have no pride left; it hurts me to say it, for humility was something far beyond my childlike imagination as I stood in that abandoned city in the snow. Then my heart was empty as the air. I stamped my feet and shook my arms, and saw as if for the first time where the barbarian had found a flaw in the gradual surface of the pyramid, and rubbed it with gasoline and blasted out a hole the size of a man.
He had discovered a rough passageway into the heart of the stone hill; I entered it, and stopped on the threshold of a round chamber. To my right and to my left around the wall stretched a row of statues in a ring, facing inward to the room. They sat and stood in lifelike poses, some stiff, some slouching, and some leaned together as if talking. Some were gesturing with open mouths, as if they had been cut off in the middle of a word. The one beside me touched his neighbor lightly on the arm, as if to draw his attention to something happening across the room. And they had all been carved by the same hand, that much was clear, a hand that took delight in complicated clothes and simple faces. For though some were old with stringy necks and some were young, they all had qualities in common. Their faces were unmixed. Each had hardened over a single mood—pride in one, stupidity in another, malice, innocence. An old man was biting on a coin. Another pulled a stone cork from a stone bottle, his face contorted in a drunken leer. Another hid the stiffness in his lap under a fold of cloth and scratched forever at a bleeding sore. For a free man, the joy of living comes from knowing that it won’t be long, that all flesh dies and disappears, but these barbarian kings and princes, it was as if the god they worshipped had turned them into stone. They would live forever, as doubtless they had begged him in their prayers.
A man stepped out across the room opposite from where I stood, a biter. I would have known him by his clean clothes even if I had not known his face. He had been a strong musician once, and I have memories of him standing in the torchlight of the hall, bent over his violin, my brothers and my sisters packed like slaves to hear him. Or even when he played alone, by himself in the high pastures, I remember children running out to find him, and they would sit around him in the snow. But by the time I speak of, that was past. A man had cut his hand off in a fight, I don’t know why, and he had given up and taken to biting in a house by himself. Let me explain. Our kind of life was not for everyone. Some found it hard to give up everything for freedom’s sake. They had things to occupy their minds. They were addicted to some work, or they had friends and children. We had given them a name. We called them betrayers, literally “biters” in our language, and we hated them. The pride of our race was so hard to sustain. The rest of us had sacrificed so much to music, to emptiness and long cold wandering, that we could only hate them. And we hated them the more because we needed them. The biters were our doctors, builders, makers, parents. It gave them happiness to do things for themselves and other people. Without that, life falls apart, no matter what your gifts. Babies die, houses fall down. We needed someone to preserve us, to preserve a sp
irit they themselves could never share, a spirit to fill us with hunger every morning as we broke snow on the mountains with our horses and our dogs, a spirit to fill us every night and every morning with reasons to be up and to be gone.
But I am wandering: that day, in that stone chamber when I was a child, a biter stood in the middle of a circle of statues, with a carbide lantern in his hand. He said, “Is that you?” He said “Is that you?” in an empty voice, and then something else. I didn’t understand him. Biters often know peculiar words. But the dead man, the barbarian scholar, had had a name and that was it. Mistaking me for him, the biter called me by his name, a word that referred to him as if he were a thing, fit to be used, like a blanket or a bed. My brothers and my sisters had no names.
I took up a loose piece of tile and skipped it across the floor. It made a circle round the biter’s feet. He laughed. “Little brother,” he said, and he came towards me. “Little brother, what are you doing here?” This was common biting, not worth a reply. I spat onto the floor and turned away. There was a statue in the center of the room, different from the rest—a stone table and the figure of a man astride it, his legs hanging down on either side. He had a dog’s head, dog’s teeth, dog’s eyes, and the hair ran down his back under his rich clothes. And from his groin rose up a stiff enormous phallus, which he held in front of him between his hands. It was so thick his fingers couldn’t close around it, and so tall it protruded to his chin. Along its naked sides long lines of words were cut into the stone, and single words into the spaces between his knuckles.
The biter stood behind me and reached out to touch its bulbous head, where it swelled out above the statue’s hands. “It is Angkhdt,” he said softly. “Prophet of God. The dog-headed master. It’s sad, isn’t it, that it would come to this?”
Questions, hard tenses, gods. I hated him. I hummed a few phrases of an anger song, a melody called “I’m warning you,” but the biter took no notice. “Where is the barbarian?” he asked.
I turned to face him, furious. How could he force me to remember? The man was dead, gone, vanished out of mind. Time had closed its hand. In those days we were in love with a lie, that objects could disappear into the air, that there was no past, no future, that people needed the touch of my hand in order to exist, the image in my eye.
It was a lie I cherished rather than believed. In fact, I remembered very well. And I wanted him to know what had happened. I wanted him to know the man was dead. And so, though I said nothing, through music I put a little death into the air, a song called “now it’s over,” but in a complicated rhythm because I could not cover in my voice a small regret.
The biter listened carefully, tilting his head. With his forefinger, he stroked the underlip of the stone phallus, and his face took on a strange gentle expression. “They murdered him,” he said. “Which one?”
How I hated him! Him and his past tense. Him and his questions. Yet there was a power in his hawklike face that made him difficult to resist, a keenness in his eye. I dropped my head and muttered part of a song, my brother’s music, the man who had first struck the scholar down.
He recognized it. It was a beautiful song, spare, strong, proud, like the man himself. At the second change, I heard the biter hum a part of it himself, as if in reverie, frowning. He brought his wrists together, and with his whole hand he caressed the angry stump where his other hand had been. “It is he,” he said softly. “It is always he. Little brother,” he said, and stretched his hand out to touch me, only I ducked away. “Little brother,” he continued. “Don’t you see how men like him can kill us all?”
I started away, my face full of disgust, but he smiled and called out to me: “I’m sorry. I apologize. No biting. Or at least, only a little. Because I am talking about the future. Don’t pretend you never think of it.”
I turned to face him, because I was pretending. He was right. He said: “I see you. You are different from the rest. I see you. Before. I saw you. The others cannot think. You can.”
I stood appalled. He was trying to seduce me, I could tell. It was the biter’s slough of reason, of cause and effect, so easy to fall into, so hard to climb back out. I could feel tears in my eyes, and I bent to pick up a loose stone.
The biter smiled. “I’m insulting you,” he said. “Listen. Use your mind. We are beginning to starve. There is no meat left in these mountains. Every day the hunters bring in less. There is none left.”
I listened, hardfaced. This made no sense to me.
“Don’t you understand?” he said. “We have to do it. Something. All together, for the first time. Not just alone. Together.”
I stared at him. This made no sense.
“South of here,” he said. “Way south, there is no snow. There are deer on the hill. Fish in the water. Listen—every day I talk to the barbarian. The dead barbarian. Every day I come here. I listen to his stories. He is teaching me so much. Now he is dead, yet it is still the truth. He was . . . He told me about it. There is food to eat.”
“I prefer to starve.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Yes,” I cried, furious. “But I am not a slave of my own mind. I am not. I prefer to die. My brothers and sisters are too proud.”
“But I don’t mean that,” he said. “We are not beggars. I mean to take what we want. Steal it. These barbarians are a race of hairy dwarves. Free men and women would burn through them like a fire. And I can make it happen. He was teaching me a trick. A way of singing—don’t you understand?”
Bored, I turned away. But there was a peculiar music in his words. He brought his fist crashing down on the tabletop. “But I can force you,” he shouted. “I can force you to follow me. There is a power in this room, if I knew how to use it. There is power in these empty gods.” He came towards me, grinning savagely, and I backed away. “I will do it,” he said. “I hate your stupidness. And I hate myself.”
He lied. His self-love rang in every word. His voice was like two instruments in conflict, one ferocious, one insinuating. He had been a strong musician, and this music was a storm in him. “Do not laugh at me!” he shouted, and shook the stump of his arm in my face as if it were a weapon. He was a little crazy, too, I thought, with his bony face, his eyebrows, his dark eyes. In the light of the carbide lantern his shadow made a giant on the wall, reeling drunkenly.
In those days I was easily bored. I knew so few words. And this biter was talking about something. He was using words as a kind of action, and that made me uncomfortable. So I left him, and outside it had begun to snow again. The sky was full of wordless snow. It blunted the edges of the mountains and the buildings, blunted everything, relaxed and calmed me. The dogs were stifled as I slogged away. It was very cold.
* * *
“What is he talking about?” whispered Thanakar Starbridge. “What did he call us, a race of hairy dwarves?”
Prince Abu wiped the sweat from his fat face. “It’s perfectly true,” he muttered, giggling. “At least in your case.” He was already drunk, staring down into the bottom of his winecup with unfocused eyes.
Thanakar stretched out his leg and looked around the dark interior of the warehouse. Shadows flickered among piles of cinderblocks and garbage. “It’s a bit much, him calling us barbarians,” he yawned, touching his wristwatch. Nearby, a woman squatted over the fire, feeding it with handfuls of dung.
“Shhh. Quiet!” whispered the prince. “He’s beginning again.”
The antinomial had dozed off momentarily, but now he roused himself. He sat for a while, nodding and fingering his flute, and then took up his recitation near the place where he had broken off. And when he started, he spoke in the guttural singsong which of all his modes was hardest to understand. He said:
My lords, that night a volcano burst up on the ridge somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I went up to see—nothing, as it turned out, nothing but smoke and steam. It rained, and in the valley you could hear the trees exploding like distant gunshots, like gunshots where
the hot stones spattered on the ice. The clouds reflected a dull glow from far away, that was all. We froze. I thought the night went on forever. That night I thought the world had changed, and perhaps it had, because in the morning the sun was late in coming, I could tell. It rose late out of a smelly mist, and we shivered and whispered, coming home over the ice. From far away we could see a fire burning in our town, and we laughed and ran down the last ridge, in through the gates, under the belltower, up past the longhouses and barns. In those days before the soldiers came, our town was built of logs and mud, among the ruins of an older place. The stone walls, the tower, the eternal well, all that was ancient barbarism. We had built our windowless, dark halls on their foundations.
Outside the dancing hall, the biter had made a great bonfire. With biter friends he had slaved together a wooden wagon with heavy wooden wheels and had pulled the stone table and Angkhdt’s statue from the mountainside, all the way down from the empty city. He had drawn his cart up to the bonfire, the open end facing outward, and the firelight shining through the braces and the wooden spokes. He stood in it as if on a stage, the fire at his back. Beneath him, my brothers and my sisters shambled around the stone table, and they admired its blunt surface and the lewd god astride it.
We heard the biter’s voice. He had been a great musician once, but now he used his voice to bite us. He used the thing that he had learned from the barbarian. He had combined barbarian magic with a new way of singing. He could make pictures in the air. And he was using them to bite us, for in those days nothing could bind my stupid family like fire, like dancing; he capered above them in a black flapping robe, his mutilated arm held crazily aloft, and they stood in the slush with their mouths open. At first I didn’t listen. For I was watching for the sunrise, and as I stood at the outskirt of the crowd, pushing towards the heat, I saw a little way in front of me the neck and shoulders of my sister, wedged in between some others. She was close enough to touch, almost, a girl almost ripe, older than I. I could only see part of her head, but I knew that it was she, because around her I always felt a sad mix of feelings, so I wriggled forward until I stood behind her. Her yellow hair ran down her back. My mind was full of it, full of the barbarian luxury of it. Yet even so the biter’s melody broke in, and I looked up to see him dancing and reeling. He was a powerful man. He could make pictures out of music. In his singing I could see the barbarian city on the mountain as it was when men still lived there, the paint still fresh on the buildings. His voice was full of holes. Yet even so, I saw that barbarian city so clearly, and a crowd of people standing in the square. I saw the colors of their clothes and the lines of their faces. In a central square of yellow stone, of high, flat buildings, lines of open windows, hanging balconies, a group of huntsmen dismounted. They were dressed in leather and rich clothes, red and brilliant green. A huge horse stood without a rider, and beside it, chained by one wrist to the empty stirrup, naked and dusty, his great dog’s head bent low, knelt the barbarian god. He had careful, yellow, dog’s eyes. Nearby, a pale boy, wounded in the chase perhaps, lay dead or dying on the stones, surrounded by slaves and sad old men. The sun burned, and the god waited, sweating in the dirty shade around the horse’s legs, until they brought a wooden cage and chained his hands and feet, and prodded him inside with long thin poles; he lay in one corner and licked along his arm.
