“You must be tired,” she went on, dropping her hand. “You have come a long way. I will give you food, rest; moreover, I shall display for you our real treasure. Would you like that?”
Clikit’s back teeth almost always pained him, and he had noticed just that morning that another of his front ones (next to the space left from the one that had fallen out by itself a month ago) was loose enough to move with his tongue. He set his jaw hard, swallowed, and opened his mouth again. “That’s…kind of you,” he said, laying two fingers against his knotted jaw muscle, eyes tearing with the pain. “I hope I have the talents to appreciate it.”
“Then follow.” She turned away with a smile he desperately wanted to see again—to see whether it was taunting him or shining at him. What he remembered of it, as he trotted after her, had lain in the maddeningly ambiguous between.
Then he glanced down at her footprints. Fear shivered in him. Alabaster toe and pink heel had peeked at him from under her shift. But the prints on the white sand were not of a fleshed foot. He stared at the drawn lines—was it some great bird’s claw? No, it was bone! A skeleton’s print!
Stooping over the clawlike impression, Clikit thought quickly and futilely. If he went to search along the walls for pebbles and stones and fallen chunks of plaster, she would surely see. At once he swept up one, another, and a third handful of sand into his cloak; then he stood, gathering the edges together, twisting the cloak into a club—which he thrust behind him. At another arch the woman turned, motioning him to follow: he was shaking so much he didn’t see if she smiled or not. Clikit hurried forward, hands at his back, clutching the sandy weight.
As he crossed the high threshold, he wondered what good such a bludgeon would do if she were really a ghost or a witch.
Another brazier lit the hall they entered with blue flame. He went on quickly, deciding that at least he must try. But as he reached her, without stopping she looked over her shoulder. “The real treasure of this temple is not its jewels. They are as worthless as the sands that strew the tile. Before the true prize hidden in these halls, you will hardly think of them.” Her expression had no smile in it at all. Rather, it was intense entreaty. The blue light made her eyes luminous. “Tell me, Clikit—tell me, little thief—what would you like more than all the jewels in the world?” At a turn in the passage, the light took on a reddish cast. “What would you like more than money, good food, fine clothes, a castle with slaves?”
Clikit managed a gappy grin. “There’s very little I prefer over good food, Lady!”—one of his most frequent prevarications. There were few foods he could chew without commencing minutes of agony, and it had been that way so long that the whole notion of eating was for him now irritating, inevitable, and awful.
A hint of that smile. “Are you really so hungry, Clikit?”
True. With the coming of his fear, his appetite, always unwelcome, had gone. “I’m hungry enough to eat a bear,” he lied, clutching the sand-filled cloak. She looked away….
He was about to swing, but she turned through another arch, looking back.
Clikit stumbled after. His knees felt as though the joints had come strangely loose. In this odd yellow light her face looked older. The lines of character were more like lines of age.
“The treasure—the real treasure—of this temple is something eternal, deadly, and deathless, something that many have sought, that few have ever found.”
“Eh…what is it?”
“Love,” she said, and the smile, a moment before he could decide its motivation, crumbled on her face into laughter. Again she turned from him. Again he remembered he ought to bring his bundle of sand up over his own balding head and down on the back of hers—but she was descending narrow steps. “Follow me down.”
And she was again just too far ahead.
Tripods on the landings flared green, then red, then white—all with that unmoving glow. The descent, long and turning and long again, was hypnotic.
She moved out into an amber-lit hall. “This way.”
“What do you mean—love?” Clikit thought to call after her.
When she looked back, Clikit wondered: was it this light, or did her skin simply keep its yellowish hue from the light they had passed through above?
“I mean something that few signify by the word, though it hides behind all that men seek when they pursue it. I mean a state that is eternal, unchangeable, imperturbable even by death…” Her last word did not really end. Its suspiration, rather, became one with the sound of rain hissing through a broken roof in some upper corridor.
Now! thought Clikit. Now! Or I shall never find my way out! But she turned through another arch, and again his resolve fled. She was near him. She was away from him. She was facing him. She faced away. Clikit stumbled through a narrow tunnel low of ceiling and almost lightless. Then there was green somewhere….
A flood of green light…
Again she turned. “What would you do with such a treasure? Think of it, all around you, within you, without you, like a touch that at first seemed so painful you thought it would sear the flesh from your bones but that soon, you realized, after years and years of it, was the first you had ever known of an existence without pain.”
The green light made her look…older, much older. The smile had become a caricature. Where before her lips had parted faintly, now they shriveled from her teeth.
“Imagine”—and her voice made him think of sand ground in old cloth—“a union with a woman so all-knowing she can make your mind sink toward perfect fulfillment, perfect peace. Imagine drifting together down the halls of night, toward the shadowy heart of time, where pure fire will cradle you in its dark arms, where life is a memory of evil at once not even a memory.” She turned away, her hair over her gaunt shoulders like black threads over stone. “She will lead you down halls of sorrow, where there is no human hunger, no human hurt, only the endless desolation of a single cry, without source or cessation. She will be your beginning and your end; and you will share an intimacy more perfect than the mind or body can endure….”
Clikit remembered the burden clutched behind him. Was it lighter? He felt lighter. His brain floated in his skull, now and again bumping against the portals of perception at eye or ear. And they were turning. She was turning.
“…leading toward perfect comprehension in the heart of chaos, a woman so old she need never consider pain or concision or life….”
The word pierced him like a mouse fang.
Clikit pulled his cloak from behind him and swung it up over his shoulder with cramped forearms. But at that instant she turned to face him. Face? No face! In the blue light, black sockets gaped from bald bone. Tattered veils dropped from empty ribs. She reached for him, gently taking an edge of his rags between small bone and bone. Empty?
His waving cloak was empty! The sand had all trickled through some hole in the cloth.
Struggling to the surface of his senses, Clikit whirled, pulled away, and fled along the hall. Laughter skittered after him, glancing from the damp rock about him.
“Come back, my little thief. You will never escape. I have almost wrapped my fingers around your heart. You have come too far…too far into the center.” Turning a corner, Clikit staggered into a tripod that overturned, clattering. The steady light began to flicker. “You will come back to me.” He threw himself against the wall, and because for some reason his legs would not move the way he wanted, he pulled himself along the rocks with his hands. And there was rain or laughter.
And the flickering dimmed.
—
A tall old woman found him huddled beside her shack door next day at dawn.
Wet and shivering, he sat, clutching his bare toes with thick, grubby fingers, now and again muttering about his sandal strap—it had broken somewhere along a stone corridor. From under a dirty, thinning tangle like corn silk, his gray gaze moved slowly to the tall woman.
First she told him to go away, sharply, several times. Then she bit her lower l
ip and just looked down at him awhile. Finally she went back into the shack and came out, minutes later, with a red crock bowl of broth. After he drank it, his talk grew more coherent. Once when he stopped suddenly, after a whole dozen sentences that had actually made a sort of sense to her, she ventured:
“The ruins of Kirke’s temple are an evil place. There are stories of lascivious priestesses walled up within the basement catacombs as punishment for their lusts. But that was hundreds of years ago. Nothing’s there now but mice and spiders.”
Clikit gazed down into the bowl between his thumbs.
“The old temple has been in ruin for over a century,” the woman went on. “This far out of the city, there’s no one to keep it up. Really, we tell the children to stay away from there. But every year or so some youngster falls through some unseen hole or weak spot into some crypt, to break an arm or leg.” Then she asked: “If you really wandered so far in, how did you find your way out?”
“The sand…” Clikit turned the crock, searching among the bits of barley and kale still on its bottom. “As I was stumbling through those corridors, I saw the trail of sand that had dribbled through my cloak. I made my way along the sandy line—sometimes I fell, sometimes I thought I had lost it—until I staggered into the room where I had first seen the…” His pale eyes lifted. “…the jewels!”
For the first time the old woman actually laughed. “Well, it’s too bad you didn’t stop and pick up some of that ‘worthless treasure’ on your way. But I suppose you were too happy just to have reached open air.”
“But I did!” The little man tugged his ragged cloak around into his lap, pulling and prodding at the knots in it. “I did gather some….” One knot came loose. “See!” He pulled loose another.
“See what?” The tall woman bent closer as Clikit poked in the folds.
In the creases was much fine sand. “But I—” Clikit pulled the cloth apart over his lap. More sand broke out and crumbled away as he ran his fingers over it. “I stopped long enough to put a handful of the smaller stones in. Of course, I could take nothing large. Nothing large at all. But there were diamonds, sapphires, and four or five gold lockets set with pearls. One of them had a great black one, right in”—he looked up again—“the middle.”
“No, it’s not a good place, those ruins.” Frowning, the woman bent closer. “Not a good place at all. I’d never go there, not by myself on a stormy summer night.”
“But I did have them,” Clikit repeated. “How did they…Where did they…?”
The woman started to stand but stopped because of a twinge along her back; she grimaced. “Perhaps your jewels trickled through the same hole by which you lost your sand.”
The man suddenly grasped her wrist with short, thick fingers. “Please take me into your house, Lady! You’ve given me food. If you could just give me a place to sleep for a while as well? I’m wet. And dirty. Let me stay with you long enough to dry. Let me sleep a bit, by your stove. Maybe some more soup? Perhaps you or one of your neighbors has an old cloak. One without so many holes? Please, Lady, let me come inside—”
“No.” The woman pulled her hand away smartly, stood slowly. “No. I’ve given you what I can. It’s time for you to be off.”
Inside the tall old woman’s shack, on a clean cloth over a hardwood table, lay small sharp knives for cutting away inflamed gums, picks for cracking away the deposits that built up on teeth around the roots, and tiny files—some flat, some circular—for cleaning out the rotten spots that sometimes pitted the enamel, for the woman’s position in that hamlet was akin to a dentist’s, an art at which, given the primitive times, she was very skilled. But her knives and picks and files were valuable, and she had already decided this strange little man was probably a wandering thief fallen on hard times—if not an outright bandit.
A kind woman she was, yes, but not a fool. “You go on now,” she said. “I don’t want you to come in. Just go.”
“If you let me stay with you a bit, I could go back. To the temple. I’d get the jewels. And I’d give you some. Lots of them. I would!”
“I’ve given you something to eat.” She folded her arms. “Now go on, I said. Did you hear me?”
Clikit pushed himself to his feet and started away—not like someone who’d been refused a request, the woman noted, but like someone who’d never made one.
She watched the barefooted little man hobble unsteadily over a stretch of path made mud by rain. As a girl, the old woman had been teased unmercifully by the other children for her height, and she wondered now if anyone had ever teased him for his shortness. A wretch like that, a bandit? she thought. Him? “You’ll be in Myetra in half a day if you stay on the main road,” she called. “And keep away from those ruins. They’re not a good place at all.” She started to call something else. But then, if only from his smile and the smell when she’d bent over his cloak, those teeth, she knew, were beyond even her art.
She watched him a minute longer. He did not turn back. In the trees behind her shack a crow cawed three times, then flapped up and off through the branches. She picked up the red bowl, overturned on the wet grass, and stepped across the sand, drying in the sun, to go back inside and wait for whichever of the townsfolk would be the first of the day’s clients.
New York
1962
return to çiron
When he was an old man and the Calvicon historian sought him out in his hut outside the fishing village, with the sea below gnawing at the stones, one evening after they’d gone over yet again the organization and exploits of the Myetran army, he began to speak of something unmentioned in their previous conversations.
—
When I left him there, my prince and leader, dead in the old peasant woman’s shack, I had the strangest feeling—as though I…were not I at all. Ah, I wish I could find some trace of the I I was then. You understand, there are moments when it seems it would solve so many problems today. But that old self has been all but squeezed out of existence, between my total absence of self at the time and my own voice and consciousness exploring the ashy detritus of that time now—I don’t know: can you put yourself in my place? Not my place today, the place I occupied then. I had seen my executioner revealed as my savior and, only a breath of time on, had watched my mentor—who had been, of course, my real executioner—die. Well, as I left him in the stifling, peasant’s hovel, to step into the light and air, I thought again that I must return to our camp and make one more try to get an idea of the damages, if only in terms of names.
But the last time I’d been taken from the camp to the execution site, I’d been bound, it had been dark; nor had my mind really been on the route we followed. Thus the village was for me a wholly unknown landscape. At one point I turned from an alley to step through some trees I thought must put me out at the Myetran camp after only thirty or forty paces—and after eighty or a hundred, about convinced I was lost, came out at the edge of a field, covered with charred patches, like ashy lakes, several of them joined to one another. On the far side, I saw a scattering of what had to be, from the carrion birds swirling above them, corpses: at this distance, they were the size of flies. A wagon stood among them. To one side, between some trees, were the burnt ruins of a shack.
Near me, on the grass, where I’d emerged, the first thing I saw was a vine web—like the one that had saved us on the town common. This one was staked out at one edge along the ground. Then it slanted upward toward a branch of gnarled oak. Bales of that vine webbing lay about, higher than my waist. Against another tree, one of their gliders leaned. Two others sat on the ground.
On the branch where the net went, a Winged One perched. Another squatted on the ground, wings sloping out across the green and ashy stubble. As I stood, a third flew down into the web, caught the vines, pulled in those great sails, and turned back to stare at me—then laughed, with the most shrill and astonishing Screeee!
I had no idea if they’d attack or let me pass. But the one on the ground suddenly
looked up and cried: “Play a game with us, groundling! Play a game!”
The one on the branch mewed distractedly, glancing at the sky: “We are here to play with the hero!”
“But the hero is away, playing a hero’s games, with the prisoners and the victorious villagers!” declared the one who’d arrived at the net. “Perhaps you will let us play with you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What…sort of game?”
“A game of desire,” said the one clinging.
Knowingly, the one perched looked down. “A sexual game.”
The one squatting said, “Climb on my back! Let me fly with you just a little ways—just a short flight…just enough!”
I’d seen my friend take off and land, on the back of Handsman Vortcir. Who, so seeing, could not covet such flight!
Also, I suppose, I was afraid not to. For they were so strong—they’d just vanquished the whole of a Myetran brigade!
These particular three, you understand—well, I was not even sure if they were females; though now I assume so. But it was hard to tell. Certainly they were younger members of their tribe. And clearly they brought an enthusiasm, if not an avidity, to their play.
I bent to take the back of the one who squatted.
The wings pulled in, rose, opened, and fell—and I was borne up, grabbing at the great shoulders.
And what was the game?
Now—now, in the air, I was to transfer to the back of one of the others! But how in the world—
Just do it!
First, one came close. I threw my arms around the neck of one flying so near their four wings beat each other’s. And I was pulled away to hang till, at a certain maneuver, we flew upside down—and I lay with my carrier, belly to belly, looking at that strange smile, just under mine!
Then again, when I was not really holding, I was rolled loose and actually fell, my heart blocking my throat with its beats, as if my head were back on the block, to land on the back of the third—and I scrambled over to grasp and hold the shoulders while we sagged down with my added weight and recovered, while the others, flying just above, mewed caressive reassurances. Now I was urged to leap from the one I rode to one who flew just under us, and rather than be thrown again, in a perfect panic I leaped and was caught between those billowing leathers. They passed me among them, while, between the wings of one and the wings of another, the village lay hundreds of feet below. Next time I looked, the stubbled field passing back beneath was so near—not a full two feet under us, every daisy and grass blade and burnt twig speeding clearly—I was sure we’d wreck ourselves on the smallest rise. We lifted again. Somehow I was tossed again for a last time—and caught in the net, on my back.
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