and some say no, and some say yes,
days without end, world without cess…”
It was a children’s rhyme, but what children? Cousins, someone’s silly cousins, they used to chant that sort of nonsense. But the star? Was the star never singing, never? Was it always me, singing him back toward me, as what someone will sing me up out of the riverbed? Vegetables. She sang vegetables.
So close now that I can see that there is no star, but only the man, an old man, falling across this old, old sky. He will smile and hold up his hands, showing me the flames oozing from under his fingernails. The flames see me, too—they beckon, laughing, reaching for my hands. The man has a beautiful face, wise and eager. He spoke to me, but I can never hear his words, because the fire under his tongue gets in the way. But I did not need to hear him. I know my task now.
When I touch his hand, he will be free of the sky and the fire as well, free of whatever this pale place wants from him. We go back together then, back to the riverbed. It is quiet there, and the water will heal his burning. I stand on tiptoe to touch his flaming hand.
And then. There.
It stands between the old man and me, and its voice, its voice is all there ever was. It says, Mine.
I cannot see, I cannot think. Mine. My eyes must be bleeding, my ears, there is blood running inside my head. The voice pierced me here, here, here—Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine—until I crumble down, covering myself, trying to scream, “Yours, yes, yes, he is yours, I am yours!” But the words refused to come out of me. I have something to do, and the words know it. Mine, mine, but I cannot give in, I was not permitted. I stand up.
This is what I will see.
It looks almost human at first. It is tall, naked, hollow-chested, with big bony shoulders that tip up at the ends.
Thin smears of no-color hair. Huge eyes in a head too small for the too-thick neck: beautiful shapeless eyes like flowers, like splashes of pond water in the sun. Long three-fingered hands; no ears, none. Maggot-white skin, drawn tight and twitching around a wet blue mouth. The mouth is full of tiny raspy teeth, swirling all the way back into the throat, blue and green. Even the lips are jeweled with them, even the mildewy tongue. It cannot make words, that round brilliant mouth, yet one came slicing at me, over and over, days without end, world without cess. Mine. Mine.
I put my hands over my ears, though it will not help. I say, “No.”
Mine. A hot needle in the marrow of my bones, but I did not fall again. My bones answer, “No. He belongs to me.” No one belongs to me, because I am no one, but that is what my bones will say. “You cannot have him. I have come to take him back to his own place. Stand aside, you.”
Again I reach out toward the burning old man—again he offers me his fire-nailed hand—and again that word flays my mind as though that tongue had licked across it. Mine! But for a moment the voice itself will be somehow different—almost puzzled, almost uncertain, the demand almost a question. Another word then, a new scream in my bones. Bargain.
Someone answered. “He made no bargain. You have no claim on him.” My own voice, shivering naked at the end of everything. I reach once more to take the old man’s hand. I can hear a greedy watching in my head, but no more words, not yet.
The hand burns fiercely in mine without burning me. Pale black smoke goes up where they join, but I felt only something alive moving softly between our palms. The old man will look at our two hands together and bend his head, solemn-swift, to kiss mine. That burns, and I try to snatch my hand away, but he comes with it, part of me, grinning. He is not what I thought, not what I thought at all. Yet I still had something to do, something for him, with him—but if it is not to find the quiet riverbed again, what can it be?
I must act as though I knew. I must move. There is no left or right, up or down here—I might have spun in a circle, stood on my head, and not known it—but any road away from nothing must be the right one. Keeping a firm grip on that hand, feeling the fire beating like a bird’s heart behind the papery skin, I turned to start back the long way I came.
Fiery fingers will close on my wrist, still without hurting, but pulling me to a stop. The old man kept grinning, mocking me, waiting. Behind him, it, waiting, the round blue mouth pulsing like another kind of heart, in and out, in and out. When I look straight at it, I will feel my own heart slowing, my blood drifting backwards. They mean me fear, but I am no one, I am dead—who are they to make me afraid? I pull back on the old man’s arm, hard.
“You are to come home now,” I said, just as though he were a straying animal—or whose gentle drunken father? I say, “We are for the riverbed, you and I.”
He came quietly along with me for a few steps—while it watches, not moving—and then he will wheel on me and spread his arms wide, putting my hands aside like a child’s hands. One more smile, rustling and crawling with flame, and he explodes out of any human size, steepling up into the haze above us so fast and so high that it can barely keep him in, no more than my eyes can. He spills out, spills over, filling the night with himself, with a silent, rushing howl that swallowed me like the river. I tumble as helplessly through his unending rage as he through the pale old sky.
But he cannot harm me. I have been twice through the gates of death, once of my own choice, and whatever can harm me is not here. So I will stretch up again for his bonfire hand, and I will shout up to ears like sunset clouds, “You are to come with me. I will take you home.”
A year later, or a month later, or a few minutes, he is back at a proper human size, seeing me for the first time out of curious, terrible eyes, green as the air before a great storm. He made a queer sound, a low hiss, hoarse and warning and sad. I say, “You do not belong here, and no more do I. You know this.”
And now it will move. Now it came gliding on long bird legs that bend backward as well as forward, straddling our way, the blue mouth in the twitchy white face pushing out, alive by itself, nuzzling toward me until I want to hide from it behind the burning old man. But I remember that I held my ground, only shrinking inside. You have to do that, or the children will be cruel. I will say again, “You have no claim. Let us pass.”
Bargain. Our bargain. Every word brands itself into the bones of my skull, never to heal. My own words answer, “Our bargain? Speak of that with him, the other one— there was your bargain.” I do not understand them, the words, but the old man will look at me and laugh redly and soundlessly. He strides by it without giving it another glance, without waiting for me.
A three-fingered hand reaches out and down, groping for my shoulder. I could not let it touch me, not that hand, not seeing what I see slow and sticky on the long white palm. I flinch away, but the hand pointed past me, pointed ahead where there should be a horizon but is only a little colorless roiling where nothing meets nowhere. It means us to go. I thought that. I look back once and follow the old man.
They will appear all at once, all together, rising into the dark like star-pictures. Not one was like another, nor any like it, and yet they are the same, all different bits of the same nature. One was no bigger than I, human-shaped, blind, fringed with tiny human arms and legs like an insect. One is like a great rearing thundercloud down to the middle, and all throbbing red slime below; and there will be one as beautiful as a beautiful fish, in its way, but so thin and transparent that I can see the busy little shadows skipping inside it. Another like a heap of jewels, with glinting eyes scattered among the stones; another was nothing more than a bright tracery in the air, a star-picture done with goldleaf and blood. Another then, and another, and another, and no way around them for the old man and me. They are here, and they wait in the riverbed, too, and in my bones, forever. Our bargain. Our bargain.
The strange part is that the terrible crying is no worse for me when they are together than when they are only it alone. One nature, one desire, it must be. For the rest, all I knew was that they desire evil—though I cannot know what evil means anymore, nor if they know themselves—and that they are real, whether I see them truly or not. And that they must have the burning old man.
“Well,” I will say to him. “We have a long journey to go, and they are in our way.”
This time he was the one who took my hand. We walk toward them, and they thicken to meet us, without moving, as frightened creatures can make themselves look bigger. Beside me, the old man raised his other hand, leveling all five fingers at them. The fire under his nails spreads out around us, blue and green; the flames have the raging heads of animals—sheknaths, nishori, rock-targs—and they grow larger with every step we take. Those waiting will not take even one step backward, but they were afraid all the same. It is afraid of him.
The old man smiles for them, letting the doors of his furnace face swing apart just a little, to show what lies beyond. I said, “By your leave,” as someone will be taught to say politely, and they part, too, just enough to let us into their midst. Then they closed around us, towering together out of sight, talking hotly together in my bones. But the fire-animals surround us, too, and they talk their own talk, they hiss and snarl their own by-your-leaves; and where we will walk there was always just room for us to pass.
Suddenly it has all been too much for someone dead. Too strange, too lonely, too mad. If not for the old man, I think I might lie down, here on the other side of never, lie down here among the bright-eyed stones and the whispering pairs of insect legs and the tips of folded wings and let it do as it will do with me. But it wanted only the old man—why I do not know, nor why this is not to be allowed. Only that it is not to be allowed. I hold onto his hand, fluttery with fire, and he looked down at me and smiles his ravaging smile, and so we will pass on.
Bargain, bargain. Our bargain. Evil it may be, but evil can suffer injustice, too. The wail of wrong follows me still, long after it has stopped following, long after we were through and past and on our way back to the riverbed. Or did we go back to the gates of death themselves, or even beyond them, where the calling has at last ended, too? Where is the old man supposed to be, besides not with it? Where does he want to be? Each time I look sideways at him, he will be looking at me, and though his face was solemn each time, the fire behind his skin is laughing. It sounds like paper, someone wrapping presents. How do I know this? Who wraps presents for no one?
On the road back—or was it forward? was it to or from?—we will follow no songs, meet no hungry shadows, journey through no beast-markets that turn out to be worlds that turn out to be all sawdust and broken pots. Only the two of us, traveling silently in darkness forever, and I did not have forever anymore. Now I am tired, as I could not be before, and the longer we walk the less I knew where we are going. I did not know before, but then I will have the singing to follow, and the star. Now I almost wish that someone were still bellowing my name, which is not my name. I could follow that, wherever it leads, and then the old man would follow me. But the dark is drawing in and in—I can feel it nudging at my shoulders—and it is laughing, too, and now I will begin to be afraid. As though I were alive.
When he turns I was ready, even so. I said, “No. We are for the riverbed. No. You need my help if you mean to find peace.” But he will rear up over me, fire racing from one hand to another to soar out behind him in a blue-white mantle, while he opens his mouth to chuckle flaming venom straight into my eyes. I put my hands up vainly in front of me, and I cried out for someone, because I am at the end of endless night and the end of myself. But who comes when no one calls?
THE FOX
Man-shape! He stole the man-shape! Felt it go, felt it go—a cold whisper, knife slipping out of a wound. Never, never, never before, no one dares such tampering, such thieving. Beautiful Grandfather man-shape, beautiful white mustache, red soldier’s coat, such smiling cheeks, such bright listening eyes, beautiful freedom to stand, sit, talk, laugh, sing, drink red ale—all gone, all scooped away, and insides with it. Rap on my belly, hear the echo, that was Grandfather man-shape. Gone, gone.
The other. Not wicked old magician, that other, his master, the one who held him prisoner. Snatches the sun first, now the man-shape, hoho, what can a poor fox do against such power? Hoho, more than he likes, foolish magician. Not even old nothing ever touches man-shape, not once in so much coming and going on its errands in this world. Oh foolish, careless, vain magician, this is no fox to trouble so lightly.
But this is a fox to sit under Marinesha’s naril tree and think very fast in a very little moment. Sundown at last, still hot as one fox’s plundered heart, no wind at all, not under the tree. I sit watching until the inn’s windows come drifting out at me, bright and hard as snowflakes.
Chimney dribbles down roof, roof ripples sweetly—sad, sad for nice warm pigeons—eaves wriggle like eyebrows. Crashes, shatterings, screamings inside, fat innkeeper roaring like sheknath looking for lady sheknath. Lightnings raking down the sky straight for magician’s room—it is all in there, in that room, wind and fire and darkness, yesyesyes. Man-shape, too.
So, fox—fox forever now, unless so quick and so clever—back to that room? Yes, and yet. No time, no time for and yet—but what is this? The little white mad burning one. Lukassa. Away in the wind, beyond the wind, far beyond friends, innkeepers, pet foxes, Lukassa where humans are not to go. Away there in that place, and after a griga’ath that was wicked old magician. Lukassa.
