Clodon giggled now, shrugged, and caressed her hair.
‘Come,’ she urged him, with another kiss, ‘tell me the terrible things you like to do to women. Tell me. Maybe you could even show me.’
‘You like a man who’s rough, then?’
‘Oh, very rough!’ She beamed at him. And that began a silly game, out in the yard, where Clodon blindfolded her with a piece of old chamois, and sometimes hit her face with a small branch—and sometimes, when he said he was going to hit her, merely brushed the leaves across her cheek, and asked her ridiculous questions, then made her fellate him, or sometimes fingered or licked between her legs when he decided her answers, at random, were wrong. To all of which she squealed happily. Then the older one came out and got into the game. Finally the younger one, leaning drunkenly on the shoulder of the taller woman, came out. And wanted to play, too. Only, of course, he played too rough—though the plump girl only once seemed to mind, when he squeezed her breast too hard. Then there was another argument, mostly between the older man and the younger and that part of it was over.
Had the boy’s face carried the cuts from the pitcher at that point? Why, Clodon wondered, couldn’t he remember?
After that Clodon was fairly sure he and the tall girl had taken the cart into Vinelet to get more beer. (He wanted the plump one to come, but she refused. Then the tall one said she’d go.) On the way, he kept asking her: ‘You sure you want to come back? I’ll let you off anywhere you like. It’s all right. I’ll just say you wanted to leave.’
But she shook her head, and once took his arm. ‘I want to go back with you!’ she declared. Not that the tall one was very talkative otherwise: still, sometime during the ride, Clodon learned that the plump one back at the shack was in some very serious trouble, which was why she didn’t want to go into town. They were going to leave their home and go to the great city of Kolhari. ‘Are you?’ Clodon asked. ‘I used to live there when I was a younger man. Stayed there almost a year. That’s where I learned to play such blindfolded games.’ The tall girl told him about a neighbor woman, and a boyfriend who had, consecutively, betrayed them both, and a job the plump one had had taking care of the children of the owner of some fishing boats; and Clodon had begun to suspect a complexity to the lives of both women that made the goings-on of the past days seem as out of keeping for them as it was, really, for him.
Then, an hour later, they were back.
‘By all the nameless gods,’ demanded the boy, when they pulled up at the shack and he leaned to look over the wagon’s edge, ‘how much beer did you get?’
‘You’re never satisfied with anything,’ the older man said, shaking his head, ‘are you? If it’s not too little for you, then it’s too much.’
Surely the only scars about him then had been across his back.
Why, Clodon wondered, did this diversion in what was actually some truly satisfactory love-making—with both the plump one, and, later, the tall one—stay so clearly? But the thing about truly satisfactory sex was that it tended to complete itself in its own exertion and thus left little to memory.
For the last day Clodon was too drunk and too exhausted to have an orgasm. Sunk to his pubic bone inside one and the other, he faked several—and wondered how his companions, grunting in the shadows, were doing. Still, the memory that pleased him most came from that time:
Finally, disengaging, once more, from the plump one, he’d gone to the back door to piss. His stomach felt queazy and he wondered if he were going to throw up again.
He’d stood outside under the cool moon a long time, breathing slowly, to see if his stomach would settle—or just give up what was in it. When he felt a little better, he pushed back in.
Moonlight came through a window.
The two were kneeling together. Earlier, the tall one had found Clodon’s lump of make-up and put it on her eyes without his even saying anything. Now, watching her, he thought not that it looked alluring on her so much as charming. It made her seem even younger, as if she wore it, ineffectually, to make herself look older and more worldly. Beneath the window, they touched each other, now with fingers, now with lips, while the sweat stood out on the plump one’s breasts and on the tall one’s wrists.
The women, Clodon thought, were beautiful.
He pondered, a little surprised, that this beauty had nothing to do with hands or feet or the eyes that, he already knew, when he recalled this for private use, he would loan them.
The boy sat in a corner, head forward on his knees. As Clodon wondered at this loveliness amidst the confusion and drunkenness, he heard him mutter: ‘ … that’s not … two, see, not the right number … For us. It won’t work … It won’t. It should be more …’
This, he knew, was the one he should remember:
Was it dawn? Was it evening? The older man stood, holding back the hanging, half in and half out of the shack and growling at Clodon: ‘He’s a pig, I tell you! Hogging the two of them, both at once! And you’re not much better! I’ll kill him, if he says another word! I will!’
‘Come on,’ Clodon said. ‘He’s just a boy. He thinks he can fuck the sun out of the sky. Weren’t you like that when you were his age? I was. Look—like last time: when the fat one comes back to me, I’ll call you in—then I’ll get up and go somewhere, and you can have her awhile.’ It was a generosity he’d performed once to keep the peace, and he did not relish having to perform it once more. Indeed, perhaps he never got round to it. For he remembered the plump one, crawling across the floor to him, breathing like an exhausted animal, sliding down against him with her warm breath and her moist shoulders, snuggling into him, so that his hard fingers were full of the soft flesh of her breasts, and even though they were both too tired to do anything, she whispered, ‘Oh, yes, lover! Yes—yes! Oh, yes …’
Had it been because when next they woke—the fourth day? the fifth?—the women were gone?
So were the cart and the mule.
‘Of course they stole it, you beshitted pair of pig’s buttocks!’ the boy shouted.
Was that what began it—between the younger and the older? Though Clodon had shouted too. Still, mostly, while they’d argued he’d been looking for more beer.
There was a lot of yelling—Oh, certainly the younger one began it. He began everything. But it worried Clodon later that he couldn’t remember the act itself. What he remembered was trying to leave the shack, and the older one tugging at his arm. ‘No, no—you have to stay now! At least you have to help me bury him! You have to help me! What’ll I do? You can’t just go like that—
‘Why not?’ Clodon pushed the older man back against the jamb, realizing as he did so that this was the first he was sure that the boy was, this time, dead. ‘It’s your mess!’ Till then, he’d just assumed he’d been badly hurt. ‘You clean it up!’
He had the tooled leather cartcover with him. The women hadn’t taken that. In the yard he threw it around his shoulders to wear against any weather that came up.
As he tied the thongs, Clodon wondered: hadn’t he at least thrown a punch or two in the course of what had just happened? It had been inside the shack, certainly. But then, had he?
It must have been between the younger one and the older. Why else would the older have acted that way? The man had gone back inside, and Clodon had staggered off toward the road. Once he stopped to be sick among the roots of a thick tree, leaning on the trunk and heaving till only stringy mucus dripped from his beard. Then he went on. Finally, he’d rolled up in his make-shift cloak and gone to sleep. And lain sick a long time. But, over the next days, as he recovered, all reconstruction was futile. Had it been a stabbing? (He swung the empty beer pitcher into the boy’s face … ) Had it been a beating? Certainly it had been because some argument had finally erupted between the other two. It had to be that, didn’t it?
But the truth was, had Clodon been dragged before elders and threatened with death, he could not have said who was the actual murderer; nor how the act had been committed;
nor why.
Perhaps, he thought, waiting off the side road for the sound of some carter’s passing, lust itself—not such a bad thing when desire was unavailable—just ran from the beauty of that moonlit moment by the window to this evil too great to recall.
Clodon had committed other murders—murders as conscientious and cold-blooded as was possible, when, on a back road in the evening, loud with crickets, where the pine needles absorbed the sound and the packed leaves soaked the blood, one person slaughtered another. (Waiting in the underbrush, he wondered if he would soon commit one more.) But none had ever troubled him like the death of this lazy, quarrelsome boy, who, in so many ways seemed almost an extreme of his younger self. That he was not even sure if he was the murderer only added to the irony. But whatever had happened, it made Clodon feel, at once, wise, sad, and foolish.
Better, he decided, to stick to his right hand and the memory of desire. The boy had been a fool and out to get himself killed. Hadn’t Clodon said it a hundred times? No, it was too messy, too confusing, too dangerous.
Though we have written of Clodon’s encounters with lust, what we have not written of here is the shifting emotional calculus in which the appetite was embedded. Whatever sort of bedmate he might have been—and we have said he was a considerate one—he was certainly no good lover. With other women entirely separate from the ones we have written of, Clodon had already fathered three children he had never seen: he believed he had fathered a fourth, who was actually not his. And he had stolen money, food, pots, and knives from all their mothers before he’d abandoned them—only the smallest of his crimes.
Though we have written of the separation between them, we have also managed to say a little, I think, of the way desire tempered lust—even in the midst of a murderous, drunken orgy. Is there any way, we might now ask, in which lust tempered desire?
Well, ten years before, after he’d left the woman who lived at the desert town, the dark-eyed laughing creature of Clodon’s fantasy tended to laugh because she was a little mad. Ten years later, after the days of deadly debauchery, she laughed because she was involved in some plan and scheme beyond his intelligence to follow, though she wished to welcome him into it if only he would join her.
Though we have written of Clodon and lust at sixteen, at twenty-six, and again as a man in his thirties, what, you might reasonably ask, of lust and Clodon today?
For it was only a few years on.
In the five weeks he had been at Narnis, lust had more or less been limited to some vague speculations about Funig’s half-sister, Jara. Did she, Clodon had wondered, have any of the submissiveness of the woman in the desert? Or would a little drink bring out in her any of the spirit of the two women at the shack? (Though you and I wouldn’t have, Clodon certainly thought of it in these terms.) But the answer he’d come closer and closer to, without exactly stating it, was that whatever the answers were, it would just be too much bother.
For over the time we’ve written of, the world had changed around Clodon. One government had fallen and another taken its place; and a man had come to challenge the institution of slavery on which the economics of as much as a third of the nation had once been based. His last fifteen pounds he’d put on in less than five years. Yet these did not concern him; so we have largely elided them. Certainly, as he stood in the inn-yard, with Funig beside him, looking at a woman who smiled at him from the window, it was time to talk of other things.
But we have one more strand from the past to weave into our tale in order to reveal the smallest pattern in the present.
11. ‘What do you mean?’ With the roof behind them, they pushed through the hanging—
For a moment Clodon thought the whole room was on fire.
Not only did a many-flamed lamp hang from the ceiling’s center, others hung in all four corners. Burning tripods stood at each of the four walls.
‘What kind of proposition?’ Clodon squinted.
Thick rugs overlapped on the floor. Fat cushions lay about. There were ornate chairs and a great bed, heaped with pillows and bolsters. On small tables more lamps flickered.
‘Just a moment. I’ll show you.’ The mortician pointed to the wall. ‘Have you ever seen one of these?’
Clodon had thought it was an elaborately framed window—perhaps into another room. For lamps burned beyond it.
‘It’s a mirror,’ the man said. ‘Perhaps you’ve seen small ones traveling vendors sell in the provincial markets: pieces of polished metal in which, for a few months, you can see your face, till they go dark with tarnish. Seldom though will you find one this size. Stand in front of it, and, with only the smallest distortion, it will show you something few of us more than glimpse in a forest pool or in some street puddle minutes after rain. I mean, of course, yourself. Here. Step up. Take a look …’
Moving closer, Clodon stared into the metal that, in a moment, seemed a solid surface and, in another, something just not there. The figure inside, he only just comprehended, was he …
The man strode to the other side of the room.
‘Now, let’s see—’ He came back slowly.
When the second figure joined the first (and it was the man, Clodon saw), Clodon realized the first, indeed, showed not just him, but specifically how his eyes sat wide apart in his face, how his full mouth hung a little open, how he carried his shoulders sloped on broad collar bones—‘We’ll just add this. Here.’ The man held something, which he lifted—and placed around Clodon’s neck. A metallic clink—
Surprised, Clodon looked away from the flickering metal to the man beside him. Something heavy and cold clung to his throat. Clodon reached up to pull it away.
The man took his wrist. ‘It’s an iron slave collar I’ve put on you.’
Surprised, Clodon raised his other hand.
‘Wait—!’ The man’s voice was sharp, more commanding still; and the fumes below had not, after all, completely cleared. ‘The lock is broken … !’ he said with caressing reassurance. ‘It will hold together while you wear it. But you can remove it any time you want. All you have to do is pull it apart. I promise you!’
Again Clodon raised his hands to tug at the metal; and the lock, indeed, clicked open. He felt it come apart. But the man’s hands were there to snap it closed again.
In the mirror—and beside him—the man smiled.
‘Look. At your reflection, now. There, turn yourself left and right. And watch.’
Clodon turned while he tried to keep looking.
‘What do you see?’
‘What do you mean?’ Clodon was actually surprised there was only one voice, since, in the mirror, the lips moved too.
‘There: what is it that looks out at you? In his iron collar, with the whip marks scarring his strong, brown body, surely that’s no drunken country boy, in trouble because he’s stolen some silly tax collector’s supper. Look again. What do you see?’
Clodon said: ‘I don’t see any—’
‘Don’t you see a slave? And not just any slave, but an evil one—a slave who once rose up against his master, a slave who pulled down on his careless back all punishment and retribution, and who now carries the welts of his wickedness inscribed on his flesh like a message to all. Can’t you see him? Can’t you see a slave who has been marked, and in whose markings, there for all who can to read, lie his disdain for all authority, his contempt for all human law, and his loathing for the order of the nameless gods whom he would be the first to call chick and cabbage leaf, as he howls his laughter and disrespect!’
‘I’m no slave—!’ Clodon turned from the metal.
The man laughed and stepped back. ‘I know that very well!’ His voice, which had risen into a kind of chant, returned to the tones of conversation. ‘But between you and me, we have all the pieces from which to construct such a slave. At least I believe we do. And such a slave, created of craft, artifice, and crime, may be more valuable, finally, than one formed only by the accidents of society and nature. Certainly he may well m
ake more money.’
‘What do I have to …?’ Clodon began. Then he said: ‘I already told you, I don’t like to—’
‘Tell me,’ the man said, interrupting. ‘Have you ever pissed on anyone?’
Clodon said: ‘Huh?’
‘I said: have you ever pissed on another person?’
‘No! Why would I—’
‘Don’t answer too quickly. Think back, through the whole of your life. There’re not that many years in it to search over. So think. Ever, ever, ever, have you spilled urine on another human being?’
Frowning, Clodon moved his shoulders under the iron’s weight. ‘I guess … there was one time: when this old guy started hanging around our village. He wasn’t from there. He was just a beggar. And he was always drunk. So once, when we found him, passed out behind the smithy, Imrog dared me to do it. He didn’t think I would. But I did it. So he did it too! It was just a joke. That’s all. We thought it was funny, right in the drunken old man’s dirty beard and—’
But the man had raised his hand. ‘Have you ever bullied someone into doing something he didn’t want to do?’
‘What—?’
‘What do I mean? Well, I suppose I mean …’ Suddenly the man stepped, sharply, forward. His forearm came up, hard, under Clodon’s chin. ‘You’re going to do what I say now, aren’t you?’ His voice was an intense whisper. ‘You’re going to do it!’
Clodon went back against the wall, swallowing, blinking. ‘Hey—!’
‘Shut up!’ Sharply—and lightly—with his free hand, the man slapped Clodon’s cheek. ‘You’re going to do it?’ He slapped him again. ‘You’re going to do it!’
‘Hey, what are you—?’
When Clodon raised a hand, the man knocked it, hard, away.
And slapped him, lightly, again. ‘You’re going to do it, now, aren’t you?’
When Clodon tried to twist free, the forearm under his chin pushed his head back against the wall. ‘All right! Ow! Hey—!’