The barbarian woman who helped his mother with the house stopped at the door. She’d come up to tell them that, out in the street, the Liberator had reached the city and was momentarily expected to ride by with his entourage. Maybe Toplin would like to go to the window and watch? She would bring in a bench and get a pillow for him…Just then, outside, the noise of gathering people broke out in a cheer, usurping her news. So she just stood in the door a few moments, looking at Toplin with the blanket twisted up between his ankles, hunching and hunching as his mother held him over the bile crock. Finally, she took a breath and went back down to the kitchen.
9.1 One afternoon Sarena dropped over, terribly upset. ‘I just came from seeing Herb in the hospital. He has that AIDS…? He looked just godawful, Chip. Like he’s already a corpse, or a ghost, or something. I hadn’t seen him in three months. I didn’t know it was so bad! You just don’t know how shaken I am!’ Sarena is from the South and uses words like ‘shaken’ in conversation. ‘I mean, I’m just not myself.’ I’d never met Herb, though Sarena had mentioned him to me before. A day later, she phoned in tears.
Herb had died that morning.
The next time Sarena came over, she said in passing: ‘It’s awful. But I’m afraid to hug you, or even shake hands with you! I really am! After Herb, it’s just…! Oh, I know it’s not supposed to be that contagious. But suppose you had it…’
And, for the next three weeks, she doesn’t—while I read article after article about nurses in hospitals afraid to touch or serve people with AIDS, about perfectly healthy gay men coming to their friends’ houses for dinner to be served on paper plates, or reporting to work to find themselves fired (along with Haitians) from their jobs on the possibility that they might be ill, while the governor general of the United States, after pointedly shaking hands with several persons with AIDS on The Phil Donahue Show, declares: ‘From what we know already, AIDS must be one of the least communicable diseases we have ever had to deal with. There is no evidence of AIDS being spread by casual contact, food, or water. So far, the only method of infection we can speculate on is repeated sexual contact or an exchange of blood products.’ And the conscientious New York Native reports that in cases of one of a pair of lovers contracting AIDS, in only 10 percent of the cases has the other lover come down with it.9.21 You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed. I make my music; sometimes my music makes people happy—though more often, I suspect, it only makes people remember some moment when music or something else gave them a fine feeling, and they’re pleased for the reminder. Oh, when I was a girl much younger than you, sometimes of an afternoon down in Potters’ Lane I would see some unglazed amphora, set among others to dry, whose curves and clean flares seemed, in the late sun leaking into the alley, more magnificent than the lean or lounge of any tree; or I would hear some particularly wondrous tale from a teller that revealed in the pattern of its narration a fine and fundamental organization in the real world it mimicked; or I would see some mummer’s skit whose songs, dances, and the speeches that came between modeled the entire active and lively flow of living at an intensity, I swear, greater than life’s. These moments of vision, prompted by some crafted work, people sometimes speak of as ‘supernatural.’ Yet, why should they be less natural than those the nameless gods provide us at a child’s laugh, at a sunset seen over great canyons, or at an oceanic storm watched from the shore?
Well, we must get ready, my beliefs notwithstanding. The pudgy barbarian just leaving as you came in—he smiled at you when he went out? Well, that’s the Wizard who’s hired the underground hall in which to hold the Calling. What did he want? Why for us to make music at his subterranean ceremony. It won’t be so bad, Pryn. I’ve known him ever so long, and he’s a good sort, really. You have more credence in these things than I, I know. I think it’s because you’ve traveled so much. (In a sense, my provinciality protects me.) But it should be fun to watch him perform his charlatanry from the inside, as it were. Come, gather up our cymbals, drums, harps, and flutes. It’s time to go. We should be there to set up, at least a few hours early.
True, I don’t believe in it at all. But how could I refuse him? He says my work is magic.
9.22 At the bottom of the steps, Pryn set the bag down on the dusty stone with a most unmusical clanking and looked at the beamed ceiling immensely distant in smoky half-light.
‘Ah, my little partridge!’ The Wizard who came up to her was something of a partridge himself, with a blond beard and a blue robe with a gold collar. The stems of three or four limp daisies were stuck through his hair. ‘Where’s your mistress?’
‘She’ll be along.’ Pryn glanced back at the wide steps. ‘She wanted to get some rolls and sausage in the Old Market before she came. She said she thought it would probably be a long rehearsal.’
‘She knows me, doesn’t she?’ The Wizard pulled his robes around over the dusty floor. ‘Well, it’s wonderful of you both to participate. It’s going to be just wonderful, I know. Come, then. I’ll show you where to set up. Isn’t this a fabulous space?’ He gestured around at the hall. ‘What in the world do you suppose it was used for?’ He started walking as Pryn picked up the sack and hurried along after. ‘Have you ever been here before?’
‘Once,’ Pryn nodded. ‘Yes. A long time ago. When I first came to the city…’
Raising an eyebrow, the Wizard glanced at her. ‘Were you, now?’
Water fell from between high pilasters to stream across the floor between stone banks. The Wizard led Pryn across the wooden bridge with the loud waters beneath.
Most of the people were on the far side. Some wheeled by great frames, stretched over with dark skins, dim paintings on them. Others carried poles wrapped around with rolls of cloth. Ropes hung down overhead; two women were hauling up a great sheet of something on which something was pictured, though Pryn was not sure what, as the material flapped and wavered up out of the light.
At the end of the hall, the throne was in shadow. Not far away, a few torches had been set up about the spot where some men were digging, sunk to their shoulders, among piles of dirt.
Perhaps because she was looking at it, the Wizard veered near it, till he and Pryn stood at the pit’s lip, watching three naked diggers toiling in the excavation. Pryn was about to ask what they were doing, when one of the men saw something, tossed away his pick, and dropped to his knees to scrape away at the loose dirt wall with his hands.
‘What have you got?’ the Wizard called down.
The digger was scraping dirt and gravel loose with his fingers, tugging with his other hand.
Pryn ventured: ‘I wonder what it could—’
It came out in a shower of small stones, leaving a dark niche. Pryn saw them fall across the digger’s knee, saw him move a knee on the earth. He stood, beating at it with his hand, and turned to come to the pit’s rim holding up his find in the flickering torchlight.
It was a metal cylinder, uncommonly silvery and free of tarnish for its time in the earth. It was somewhat tapered—an arm gauntlet, she realized.
The Wizard took it. Damascened with intricate symbols, there were rings about it that, now, the Wizard tried to turn—and which, astonishingly, did. ‘That’s it!’ he called down. ‘We’ve got it!’ Turning left and right, he beat about in his robes.
Pryn had been watching the diggers, one of whom was heavily scarred on his back with welts that must have come from a flogging as a criminal or slave. When she looked back at the Wizard, he had already slipped the gauntlet over his rather thin arm—at least under the play of his blue sleeves she thought she glimpsed it—and was feeling around in folds and slashes and pockets for…
What he pulled out was a disk of metal, perhaps the size of his palm. It had been on some leather thong, bits of which hung from it in two uneven lengths. ‘Here!’
In the torchlight, as another digger reached up for it, Pryn saw the barbaric markings around the edge, the
cutouts on the upper layer (for really, it was several disks pinioned together) and the central bolt that held them.
The digger—the scarred one—turned with the astrolabe, crossed the basin, dropped with it to his knees, and thrust it into the niche from which the gauntlet had been taken, packing it with one and another handful of dirt.
‘I bet you’ve never seen one of those before,’ the Wizard said, looking about and not at her as his robes settled.
‘Oh, yes, I—’
But the Wizard was calling: ‘All right now! Fill it in! Let’s get on with it. Fill it in, I say.’
The two other diggers had vaulted to the lip and were already shoving piles of dirt back inside with their hands. Scattered clods hit the shoulder of the man inside still packing the wall. He looked up, startled, saw falling earth and dodged away, to leap out and join in the refilling.
Just then a commotion began around them; Pryn saw people looking up, and—just as a shovel and one of the pick axes went into the hole to be half covered by the next dirt load—she looked up herself.
A rumbling sounded from the roof of the underground hall. It was, Pryn realized, horses’ hooves, echoing and reechoing overhead through the crypt.
‘What…?’ she whispered.
‘No doubt it’s the Liberator’s party, passing. If you’d like, you can go upstairs, out through the tavern, and watch at street level.’ And, indeed, small clusters of people were disappearing off into a shadowed niche that certainly contained some stairwell leading upward.
‘Will he be coming down here…?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so!’ The Wizard blinked at the ceiling. ‘I doubt he even knows this place exists. This is one of the most secret and well-preserved centers of Nevèrÿon. No, he’s just riding by, in the street—in perfect ignorance, I’m sure, of all we do down here. For we are preparing for the Calling of the Great and Ancient Amnewor. That’s not the kind of thing he’d be concerned with, you can be sure.’
‘And this…?’ Pryn looked at the hole, which, in seconds, had been filled by almost a third.
‘Ah…!’ The Wizard bent toward her to speak in a near whisper. ‘That’s the grave where we found the prince! I paid dearly for the information, believe me! We started digging over there, you see,’ and he gestured off into the darkness. ‘Oh, only a foot or so down, we were coming upon bones and weapons and bits of ancient leather armor—but before too long, it was perfectly clear that all we’d unearthed was some kind of mass grave. Nothing but ordinary soldiers, or less. Perhaps there’d been a fracas here at some ancient time, and the victims had simply been tossed into a common pit. But that wouldn’t do for our purposes, so we chose the second most likely spot, according to the fable—and only a few feet down we found him!’ Here, he nodded toward the piles.
Beyond the lowering dirt mounds, Pryn saw the shape beneath the rough cloth.
‘Clearly, from his sword, his scant costume, and his meager jewelry, you could tell: he was a real barbarian prince! The clean parting of his ribs suggests some blade was thrust into his heart to sever the gristle there. He couldn’t have been very old, either. Doubtless he was murdered—how many centuries ago, now—not more than a few feet from the foot of that throne…and buried where he fell: or not far from it. It’s quite a portent, believe me. It bodes extraordinary success for our Calling, tonight. Real death, you know.’ He shook his head and chuckled. ‘His corpse will be among our most prestigious spectators this evening. It’s grisly, yes. But it’s necessary if the kind of thing we’re engaged in is to have the proper tone. The Amnewor concerns real death, not some silly substitute.’
There was a muffled cheer, sounding from the overhead street, and more horses’ hooves.
But the Wizard was going on: ‘The corpse will occupy the throne, of course. I was thinking of sitting you and your mistress on the steps below him. There’re some hides to make your seat more comfortable. But everything considered, it might be distracting. So I’ve decided to put you behind a screen instead—where the sight of your playing won’t confuse the congregation. Come along, now. Bring your bag of instruments. I’ll show you where you can wait till the rehearsal gets under way. Where was your mistress, again?’ He turned from the lip of the fast-filling grave. ‘I hope she gets back soon. We’ve got pretty much all the preliminary rituals over with, and—if only so all the primary participants can know what to expect—we really must get started.’
9.23 Have a bit of sausage, Pryn, and hand me that flute. What? You don’t want any? Why, dear girl, you’re trembling! Don’t tell me all his mumbo jumbo, his bits of carved bone and ancient mummies’ fingers—buried for no more than a year, I can assure you—have got you into a state. Honestly, Pryn, it astonishes me. Here you are, a grown woman, who’s traveled on her own from Ellamon to the depths of the Garth and back, with adventures under your sash that, when you recount them, cause me to quiver in my sandals: you’ve flown wild dragons, freed slaves, can read and write and kill, I gather, when you have to—an almost perfectly civilized woman, by my own city-bound account! While here am I, fat, forty, and hardly ever been outside the city gates, and I’m still more or less comfortable amidst these arcane goings-on. That you came to me, seeking to assist me with my art, well…I take that to be simply another step in your self-education and a confirmation of the success you’ve had with it to date. But sometimes I think that the range of your experiences allows every little thing about you to take on resonances and vibrations—to become some endlessly shimmering sign, whose clear and concise meaning in the weave and play of meanings is merely terrifying rather than illuminative. I’ve always felt your sensitivity made you the perfect audience for my playing; has it made you, also, the perfect audience for his? Could it be ignorance that protects me from such terror? Really, Pryn, the magic we do here is harmless, and possibly deeply consoling to those too troubled or too cynical to respond to the political positivism celebrating above in the streets. There, dear girl, stay your trembling and hold the drum thus, so that I may rattle on it after I pull an ecstatic glissando from the harp strings. And lay out the flutes for me from high to low as you always have, so that, in this half-light, I may know which one I am picking up to play on, just by feel and habit—those greatest aids to art, which those without them call taste, whether good or bad.
9.3 Ran into Joey a few days ago. Basically the police’s response to this maniac has been to start a sweep of their own over the whole area, arresting as many of the street people as possible on drug charges or whatever. (If you put them all in jail, they’re less likely to be murdered…?) Some two hundred people have been arrested in the neighborhood in the last week. The kids on the street are really going crazy. Lots of them are pooling their dope money to get rooms, and crashing eight, nine, ten together inside on the floor. Between the maniac at night and the police during the day, they don’t know where to shit. Sitting around in the kitchen of one of these ersatz crash-pads one afternoon, while Joey was out ‘taking care of business,’ on the permanently out-of-focus black-and-white TV I watched some bizarre rerun of Ironside, in which a policeman, who’d been mugged, robbed, and dumped by a road, decides to let himself be treated as an ordinary citizen without identification.
In the midst of all of it, various junkies came running in and out, looking for each other now a guy with a chain through a hole pierced through one pectoral (a big hole too; no tit-ring, this) under his tattoos; now a gaunt couple, he named Mike (thin and sunken chested), she named Karen (with a waist-length hank of black hair), who darted into the bathroom to shoot up, then came out, giving me an enthusiastic disquisition, the two of them, on the size of Mike’s equipment and the pornographic modeling session he was to have later that afternoon. (Karen had gotten him the work, and was anxious to be known as someone who could get you that kind of job if you had the Right Stuff.) When Joey came back, he showed me an article cut from the Times with a large picture of the cops involved in the sweep—the forty or fifty plainclothesmen and
plainclotheswomen—who had been masquerading as street people themselves, pretending to be asleep in doorways at night with portable radios or suitcases nearby to tempt the kids to snatch them; at which point other officers, staked out to observe, would move in and arrest whoever fell victim to the temptation. In the picture, the faces of the disguised policemen were particularly clear, and the street people were passing copies around in hope that they might recognize them when they came across them.
Clear, but not that clear. It struck me as kind of quixotic.
There was no mention of the maniac in the paper (there were a few brief page-two and page-three accounts of ‘nighttime stabbings’), but perhaps the police thought that, in the process of sweeping the area, they’d catch him too…?
So far not.9.4 They’d set out flares all along the Bridge of Lost Desire, though the sky was still a deepening blue. Some brands burned red. Some burned white. Their light fell on the colorful groups who surged one way laughing, then broke up to run back the other, as still others hurried around them.
Rumors of the approach of the Liberator’s entourage—someone had just seen them in the Spur, making their way toward the Old Market—swept new crowds toward the bridge mouth, some of whom jumped up to see over the heads of those crowded in front; other men and women turned to the person next to them: Now, who was it exactly supposed to come by?
One man moved distractedly at the crowd’s edges. Haft held short in his hand, he carried a stoneworker’s hammer. The hair had gone from the top of his head, with the rest in the stubby side-braid of a veteran from the Imperial Army—though his legs were badly bowed. (He could not have put up with those many-day marches.) The muscles on his long arms and bent thighs, however, said he’d worked some years with his mallet. His expression was dazed, drunken, even deranged. He walked by the wall, stopped, turned back a few steps, turned unsteadily again, walked again—bumping more people than most in the boisterous crowd.