The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  At least until I feel better.

  Then the leather thongs with their colored beads dragged around him.

  They stepped together into an upper room.

  The air was certainly fresher here—though there was still a hint of both the sour and the sweet.

  ‘How many corpses you got down there?’ The chamber looked like one Clodon had glimpsed through the shutters of the tax collector’s window at home. There was a chest, a table, some chairs. Statues stood on pedestals in the corners. Unfamiliar implements hung on the walls. The jambs beside the arched doors were carved plaster. Heavy moldings ran around the ceilings. Rugs lay over the red tiles. An oil lamp hung in the room’s center, a dozen yellow flames playing in various cups.

  ‘Quite enough for anything anyone could want to do with them.’

  Certainly there’d been more than a dozen tables down in the dark …?

  The man put the lamp, still burning, on a lacquered shelf and led Clodon through another door.

  The light, outside, was silvery and unreal—moonlight! Clodon looked up to see there was no roof. He looked back down. On either side of the tiled path, shrubs and ivy were thick, just as though the dirt went down directly to the true earth, without the crypt between.

  And there was a pool.

  It was smaller than the one in the eating hall, but a pool nevertheless. They were in an open air garden or inner roof court. Half a moon hung to the east, putting silver on a quarter of the water and throwing the shadows of carvings down onto ivory ripples. ‘You know’ the man went on, ‘years ago when this city was just a market here and the castle there, with a few fisherman’s huts huddled by the edge of the sea, the nobles used to come down to hold their funerals in the great subterranean Hall of Death. It’s supposed to be smack in what’s now the middle of town—though it was partly filled in years back. The rumor is that recently some folks have dug it out again and are using it for the oddest purposes. There’s a tavern built right on top of it today, they say. Given my profession, you’d think I’d go down and take a look—out of historical interest. But I’ve never been. It’s as though it’s not really a part of my city. Well, born here, raised here, I know there’re still sights every tourist comes to ogle I’ve just never seen. But that’s always the local irony, isn’t it?’

  Clodon had stopped again. From under one of the porches surrounding the court, a figure stepped out slowly in heavy veils.

  ‘ … Mother?’ The man turned. ‘You’re still up?’

  ‘I just wanted to see you were home safe—Oh, you have someone?’ (Her voice was elderly and nasal; Clodon caught the distance of disapproval in it.) ‘Good night, then.’

  She walked again into the shadows.

  However unpleasant they’d been, the fumes downstairs, in clearing, had cleared some of Clodon’s drunkenness.

  ‘Come.’ The man sounded more affable than he had for a while. ‘We’ve had a full and enjoyable afternoon and evening of each other’s company. I have some idea of the youth you are, of the child you were, of the man you’ll be.’ They walked around the pool and across the garden, to another door, another heavy hanging across it. ‘Almost your first words to me today were about how you wanted to make some money. My rooms are this way. Let me put a proposition to you.’

  6. Though fragments from this adolescent adventure had been part of Clodon’s earlier dream, it would be excessive to say he remembered it all—or that he even could have remembered it in such detail. Certainly while he stood in the Narnis inn yard, staring at the actress in the tavern window, we could write that such confusing and immature strayings from the centers of his own desire were precisely what he was not recalling then. Do the two times, therefore, present equal and opposite occurrences? Equal? No. Opposite? Well … But to the extent their objects mirror one another, certain instruction about what is to come may be gained if we turn from this to examine, say, the relation lust and desire had actually taken in Clodon’s life.

  For, in fact, we haven’t mentioned the one and have only indicated the other.

  7. In that age when no mechanical reproduction had standardized the beautiful, in much of his desire Clodon’s wants in women were largely the usual for a male of his epoch, class, and condition. Like most men in Nevèrÿon, he wanted a woman who was young. Like most men in Nevèrÿon, he wanted a woman who was strong. Many men in Nevèrÿon would talk of wanting a woman as well who was submissive. Frequently though these same men hoped that she might have some spirit. Often these men’s brothers would laugh and declare they wished for nothing but a woman with spirit—though, as often, they hoped for one who would bend a bit to masculine directive. Which is to say, as far as spirit or submission went, Clodon felt just as ambiguously as one might expect a man to in such a time, in such a place.

  But there were other details to Clodon’s ideal of pleasure that (Clodon was sure) set him aside from many. He could not, for example, say why or when he’d first developed his obsession with women’s hands. And not just the hands: it was something about their nails. You must understand that, in this long-ago distant land, the amount of labor rural life required from both men and women well up into what you and I would call the middle classes was not such as to encourage long nails on either gender. But even as a child, now and again Clodon would find himself watching some woman’s fingers, fascinated, when the nails simply grew forward enough to cover the crowns. Certainly the first woman whose hands had held his silent, if never-articulated, attention had been his cousin the bailiff’s wife. She’d been a shy, dark, gentle thing—and often ill. Clodon had been an intractable boy. But, in his early years, neighbors often noted how she could usually get him to do what she asked, when to his other relatives and friends he was simply and insistently recalcitrant. Clodon’s own treasured memory was, at age six or seven, sitting in her lap, under a tree, in the leafy shadow, playing with her fingers and touching the tips of his to the tips of hers, while she looked out over his head at the sunlight and told him stories of the nameless gods, which he paid no attention to but was happy. When puberty struck Clodon’s body with the hormones none in Nevèrÿon could have named, at eleven somehow the whole process expanded to include … feet! No, this had nothing to do with the nails.

  It was the hare-lipped girl’s slatternly aunt on whom he’d first noticed it.

  Clodon was loafing among some scrub on the sandy slope above the village, when he saw her come by, barefoot and a little stooped, carrying a basket on her hip with some shucks sticking up above it. As she passed, he found himself watching her naked ankles, and the way her feet, which were uncommonly narrow, with long toes and dusty at the arch, seemed to reach forward with each step, the toes spreading a little to dig into the dirt, to feel about in it, as though they could sense delicate things in the earth that would never register on her slack brown face with its rough black hair above it.

  What immediately he did was look up at her hands: thick fingered, clubby, clutching the wicker. How could a woman with such uninteresting fingers have such extraordinary toes? That was the way he thought about it—even as her heels were lifting from the sand beyond him, and she was gone.

  Minutes later, and for the third time that day, Clodon masturbated—only now he tried to think of a woman (young, strong, spirited—well, maybe not too) with hands like his cousin’s and feet like this woman’s …

  The experience was extraordinary.

  Soon Clodon had divided all the women of his village into two groups: the first contained about two-thirds of them, with ordinary feet of no particular interest. But the second—and he was surprised by and delighted at their number, once he began to look—was a privileged group whom he smiled at when he passed, whom he contrived to watch and to be near, whom he went out of his way to walk beside or behind, and who walked through his fantasies only pausing, now and again, to turn and, gently, touch him with hands that were—mostly—not theirs. Indeed, his first complaint about his town, had anyone asked (not that any admonis
hing and moralizing elder or eager equal in mischief ever did), was that his cousin’s wife, with her beautiful, aging fingers, simply did not have the feet to go with them.

  Clodon’s trip to Kolhari produced another addition to, revelation of, or recomplication in, desire—as well as a few educational turns to the inscription of what was already there. The first thing that surprised him on his arrival in the great port was that a quarter of the women walked the streets in one sort of shoe or another—which is to say, there was a whole class of women here, a few poor and a larger number well-off, whose toes, arches, and insteps, in the intricate mechanism of walking, were simply veiled to him in ugly leather or, sometimes (equally ugly to him), brocade, so that he could not even tell if they belonged to that group who were his central interest. As many others wore sandals, which teased him cruelly, as their straps and buckles seemed barely to withhold the freedom and motion that made a foot of concern, so that, now and again, he found himself paying more attention to these than to the feet of women who went barefoot and ill-clad, as he did. (Certainly the overwhelming majority of the city’s population, female and male, was too poor for footwear.) Within a week of coming to Kolhari, he made a connection, as cruel as his initial observation, that had escaped him till now at home: the particular hands he cherished were much more likely to occur on the better-off women of the city—cruel because they were precisely the women most likely to go shod.

  But the addition, revelation, or recomplication we spoke of had neither to do with women’s hands or feet. Rather it involved … eyes! He discovered it in his first month in the city while loitering on the Bridge of Lost Desire.

  The women and girls who worked the bridge as prostitutes—as well as some of the more effeminate men—wore dark wings of paint around their eyes, and affectation that, when Clodon first saw it, struck him not so much as sexual as it did a simple sign to signify what position you held in the endless chain of displacements, replacements, and exchanges, that made up life on the bridge as much as it did life in the market beyond. The masculinity Clodon treasured and that, yes, he would admit it, seemed so subtly compromised by the homosexual encounters that, despite his basic inclination, from time to time necessity forced him to take part in, at first seemed easier to secure by showing no sign at all. Yet those hustlers, usually older, whose self-presentation was a parody of that same masculinity, with great weapon belts and bits of armor worn over old rags and rude retorts to half the inquiries from potential clients and even more foul language than was customary on that most foul-tongued walkway, made themselves more masculine still by adopting a single wing of paint about a single eye: what was a sign of the womanly, when split, became a sign of the male.

  That he possessed this masculinity—for, yes, he’d always liked to have some weapon, even if it was just a stone hidden in his clout: yes, he’d always worn a leather band around his upper arm, though it was not really a custom of his village: and, yes, his talk had always been blunter than was acceptable to his elders—he only realized when these parodies passed.

  Several times, even as Clodon treasured his unmarked state, he adopted the single bit of eye make-up: he borrowed it from a girl who kept a small, waxy stone of blue-black tint wrapped in her waist cinch—and felt himself, at least for the day, closer to what he wanted to be by doing so. When, finally, he returned to the bare eyes that marked most of the more masculine hustlers, it was with a sense of failure and, indeed, some small but irrevocable slide toward the same ambiguity that, in this passage of sexual a-specificity, so troubled him.

  Often there was as much human traffic under the bridge as on it. Toward the market end, stairs at either edge went down to a set of pee-troughs at both sides of the stanchion. Boys were always charging up and down them; girls were always shouting from the rocks below to some friend hanging over the upper wall.

  Clodon had gone down, one afternoon, looking for the barbarian. (The rumor along the walkway above was that a nobleman’s corpse had been pulled from the water at dawn. Bodies—usually of beggars or soldiers—were sometimes thrown there in those brutal and barbaric times. But it had been carted away even before he’d arrived.) On a whim, Clodon decided to walk out over the stones that pushed above the shallows that rushed, like green smoke and froth, about a wagon wheel lying half out of the swirl, that broke on the bottom of a big, public vase wedged between uneven rocks, that flowed through some oily netting caught on a barkless branch, in which stuck some fruit rinds and a carved doll without head and one of its arms.

  Somewhere a soldier and a woman were arguing, while another woman laughed at them. Clodon couldn’t see where, though the echo under the arch made them sound as if they were beside or above him. He stepped across water to another rock, turning to see where the voices came from.

  A woman was kneeling three stones away, where a granite slab sloped from glass-green ripples. Behind her, one bare foot was propped on spread toes, the position from which, if he could move close enough, he might note best just what sort of foot she had. But the way the hollow lightened behind her ankle, and the way the harder skin stretched along her wet sole told him she was one whose toes would be a true pleasure. Women always thought you were looking at their breasts or buttocks. And though he liked breasts and buttocks as well as the next, he assumed women never thought you were looking at anything else: and that gave him, he imagined, the right to move as close as he wanted, as long as he kept his eyes low.

  Clodon stepped to the next rock, wondering if she were one of the women from up on the bridge. (He didn’t recognize her at all from this angle.) She looked up—

  She’d been washing her face. Hands and forearms, cheeks and chin were speckled with drops. Seeing him, she laughed, a smile underlying it that he recognized at once as both pleased and nervous. Had she been scrubbing make-up from her eyes?

  One moment he was sure of it; the next he doubted it completely.

  Shifting, she moved the foot that had been behind her in front. And Clodon saw:

  Her eyes were dark: or, rather, the skin around them was naturally shadowy, almost bruised, so that, without really being set deeply in her face, it threw white and iris into cinnamon and ivory relief. Her foot, as the long toes moved down to hold the rock’s edge, was, in all he’d ever imagined of a foot, perfect. Still cupped under her chin, her hands were tipped with oval nails that blushed with the blood beneath them, their ends, even on almost all, making small blades the color of the meaty part within a pumpkin seed, and clean because of her washing. Certainly, in terms of his own obsessions, they were the most breath-taking hands. And more striking than both of these, were her eyes: they were the most beautiful in the world.

  The conviction hit him baldly, blankly, and unquestionably.

  He’d never known eyes could have that effect because, he realized, in order to have it, the face about them had to be smiling.

  Or laughing.

  He knew this all without words or even, really, thinking—unless the contractions of the muscles at the back of his shoulders and the tightening of the ligaments behind his knees were, themselves, a kind of thought.

  He also realized what natural state the make-up he’d grown so used to on the women walking the bridge simulated—at the same time seeing that, to him, this, when on a smiling face, was enough to make his knees lock and the muscles above his scrotum tighten to pain and his whole belly want to pull itself over so that he might have collapsed, hugging himself, feeling monstrously warm and well-cared for and wonderful.

  Yet he did none of these.

  What Clodon did—Clodon who was a thief, and a bully, and a brawler in gutters, and who bore the marks of an adult criminal, and who would be remarked for high banditry when he’d less than doubled the age he had now—was smile.

  He smiled because if someone smiles at you, and you want them to go on smiling, you smile back; otherwise, they will frown, or look dour, or shake their head and turn away; and Clodon wanted this woman, kneeling on the rock, water
on her face and forearms, to go on smiling at him till the nameless gods balled up the desert with the sea and the mountains among them, in preparation for the recrafting of the world.

  8. But while Clodon smiled, he thought—indeed, for the first time, in a while—about the hare-lipped girl he’d brutalized again and again at home.

  She had had such eyes!

  They returned to him with astonishing shock.

  No, she had not had his cousin’s hands or even her own aunt’s feet.

  His initial interest in her had been because Imrog, the smith’s apprentice, slept with her from time to time.

  Methodically Clodon had pursued her, and, one evening, when she’d been tired enough to let him put his arm around her shoulder, violently he had brought her down, while a friend stood guard for him: through the act, he thought only of her aunt, of his cousin’s wife. And the next day he discovered, with an overpowering delight, that, as he’d suspected, he’d enraged the burly, older youth, who he was sure was as great a scoundrel as himself, but who, because Imrog would work a steady job, was heir to only a third the recriminations Clodon was.

  But she had such eyes. And they had never struck him, above her grotesque mouth, as these did: and that was because he’d never seen her laugh.

  This was the closest he ever felt to guilt over his sexual outrage—and, in its way, was far more effective in keeping him from ever repeating it.

  For—let me repeat it—we have been writing about the power of desire.

  What? You thought it was lust? No.

  And where does desire fit in the tale we’ve so far told? You must read it, as it grew and developed for Clodon to the point we’ve recounted, down the margin of every page we’ve written. It had been in his mind minutes before he stole the roast goat. It had rolled through his thoughts a dozen times as he hung from the corner of the grain building, waiting for his whipping. He’d thought about it as he went up to his cousin’s hut the night he fled his village; and he’d dwelled on it as he sat by the road next dawn, wanting to cry. It would be in his mind as he sat on the wall of the bridge the moment before the Kolhari mortician spoke to him. Indeed, it lies in every pause, between every sentence, in our story so far, as it will in all to come.