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 was 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 Pave 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 and 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 week.
—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 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 has 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 make-up 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 antiphon. If he did not, here with me, seem racked 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 reasonable 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.