7
The fox lies stretched out across the cave mouth, as though to define certain boundaries, or invent them, gnawing, ears perked, at the stag’s heart. Inside, the fabler squats in the dirt, his hump resting against the cavewall, gazing morosely at the dying lion, a much sorrier sight than he’d anticipated. “It stinks in here,” he says. The lion snorts sourly, cocks one rheumy eye above his paw. “Nothing’s so perfect,” he grumbles, “that it’s not subject to some pisant’s criticism.” In the old days he’d have simply stepped on him, popped the runt like a blister. Now he’s not even sure he sees him. “Misfortune stinks, crookback. Dying stinks. If you don’t like it, why do you wallow in it?”
“That’s not why I’m here.” He stares out past the fox at the dusky forest, which seems to have brightened slightly, as seen from within this dreary cave. An illusion, like hope itself. It’s darkening by the second out there. “How is it you’ve taken up with this miserable blot on creation?”
“Expediency.”
“I expected more from you.”
“Our expectations are often deceived.”
He accepts this continuous mockery though it pains him. Somewhere just below the hump, in fact. What is he doing here in this shithole, taking this kind of abuse? And from an old friend once honored above all others—even his shabby new alliance with the fox is a kind of taunt, a way of rubbing the fabler’s nose in his most craven cynicism, just when he needed something nobler than that. Courage, in a word. Proud example. “I’ve been condemned.”
The fox seems to snicker at this. The lion too would appear to have a grin on his face. The floor of the cave is rough and damp, reassuring in its rude discomfort, but somewhere water is dripping, echoing cavernously as though there might be a leak in the remote recesses of his own skull. He shudders as if to shake himself out of here, but he knows he can never leave again. They’ll have to come and kill him in this place. Mangy and decrepit as it’s become. Sometimes in the past he has managed to stay away from his forest for days on end, imagining himself a man like any other, yet even then these creatures had a way of haunting his consciousness, lingering just beneath it like stars behind the light of the sun, visible only from the bottom of a well. That well he’s always dumping them down as a cushion against his own clumsiness. His own attraction to abysses. “Which flap,” the lion rumbles wheezily, “were you wagging this time?”
He shrugs his hump. “Sin against Apollo.” This time the fox does snicker, standing to scratch a flea behind his ear, or pretending to. “Go have a fit and tumble in a hole,” the vicious schemer once said, all too prophetically. His fate now, by decree, he the fabler become his own goat. “I told them the truth, they called it sacrilege.”
“Same old story,” sighs the lion.
“Same old story.”
“Natures never change. You’re a meddlesome foul-mouthed stiff-necked exhibitionist. You remind me of that story of yours about the wild ass and the tame ass.”
“Well, but the real moral of that one was—”
“The real moral was they were both asses, just the same. What did you think you’d gain by taunting fools?”
“I don’t know. A laugh or two?” What does he have left, if not the truth? It has shaped, shaped by his misshapen body, his entire life. One thing about being a monster, it puts you in touch with the cosmos, biggest humpback of all. “I wanted to make the truth so transparent even these pigheaded provincials could see it, that’s all.” He liked to think of it as a kind of remembering, as though all men were animals in some way, or had been.
“Yes, and turtles want to fly, too,” the old king rumbles. “There’s only one truth, my friend. If you’ve forgotten what it is, come a little closer and let me give you a few pointed reminders.” A mere reflex. The old fellow hasn’t eaten the garbage he’s lying in. He laps his jowls with a tongue so dry it sounds like the spreading of sand on stone.
Anyway, it’s . . . “Impossible. There’s a barrier . . .” At least there was . . . Has it somehow been breached?
“If there’s a moral to be had, fabler, it can be done . . .”
He’d always thought of that distance between them as ontological and absolute, but now—he stirs uncomfortably. He’s rarely come this deep before. The fox seems to have let one, his own commentary on the truth no doubt. He bats the air irritably, his hump scraping the wall behind: “Filthy bastard!”
“He does that from time to time just to let me know he’s still here,” the lion grumbles drowsily. “You get used to it. Familiarity, as they say . . .”
Not they. He. The rich man and the tanner. Or better yet: the fox and the lion, almost forgot that one. Yet now, these words, too: only an echo . . . He realizes he hasn’t told many fables on the evanescence of truth, brain-rot as the universal achievement. The old lion snorts ruefully. He seems to be drifting off. The hunchback trembles. They’ll be here soon. He got away from them once, but they’ll find him. Even from inside the cave, he can hear the turbulence out at the edge. He squeezes shut his eyes. Sometimes it feels almost like a dream. As though he might still be back on Samos, living with that fatheaded philosopher and his lascivious slave-fucking wife, the one who liked to say that even her arse had eyes. Any minute, he thinks, I might wake up to a beating or a bath . . .
8
The tortoise, tumbling through the air, wags his arms frantically. If he just works at this hard enough, he knows, he can do it, persistence has paid off before, he’s famous for it. In order to try to free his mind from extraneous matters, such as the rising panic which is threatening to freeze him up entirely and stop his wings, as they should perhaps now be called, from functioning at all, he tries to concentrate on the splendid view he has from up here of the forest, a view few of its inhabitants have been privileged to enjoy, and one he himself will probably forego in the future, even if he does manage to get the hang of this flying thing on this one occasion. Like he told Zeus, meaning no offense, though unfortunately that’s how it was taken, there’s no place like home. If you don’t get there too fast. But his effort to concentrate is frustrated somewhat by the way the forest keeps looping around him, appearing over his head one moment, beneath his tail the next: probably this has something to do with his flying problem.
Why did he want to get up here in the first place? A question he might well ponder, since the second place, rushing up at him like the moral to a foreshortened fable, is all but imponderable. He always tries to judge every situation from its outcome, not its beginning, though each, as he knows, flapping wildly, contains the other, ambition being both goal and goad. But what was that ambition? Was it aesthetic? Philosophical? The pursuit of some sort of absolute worldview (already slipping away from him, he notes, as the forest loops by again, losing now in structural clarity what it is rapidly gaining in detail)? A moral imperative? The spirit of rivalry? A rebellion against boundaries? The desire for travel? Who knows? Why anything? Why is the pig’s belly bare or the magpie bald? Why does the crab have its eyes behind? Why does the lizard nod its head or the dying swan sing? Who gives a bloody shit? Should he be singing? Why are turtles dumb? Why are their heads flat and their shells hard? But not hard enough? Why has that goddamn eagle left him up here—flap! flap! flap!—all alone?
9
When Aesop opens his eyes, he finds himself lying under a tree in a green, peaceful field, where all kinds of flowers bloom amid the green grass and where a little stream wanders among the neighboring trees. The most savage thing in sight is a grazing cow. A gentle zephyr blows and the leaves of the trees around about are stirred and exhale a sweet and soothing breath: he draws in a deep lungful, as a great relief sweeps over him. What a terrible dream I was having, he thinks. Those shits were going to kill me! He still feels vaguely troubled (it seemed so real!), but the stream is whispering, the cicadas are humming from the branches, the song of birds of many kinds and many haunts can be heard, the nightingale prolongs her plaintive song, the branches murmur musically in a
sympathetic refrain, on the slenderest branch of a pine tree the stirring of the breeze mocks the blackbird’s call, and mingling with it all in harmony, Echo, the mother of mimesis, utters her answering cries, all of it resolving into a kind of rhythmic tinkle, reassuring in its simplicity like the drip of rainwater after a shower. Better a servant in safety, he reminds himself, than a master in danger, though at first this comes out, better a savory never than born a masker in a manger. Which doesn’t make much sense. Is it some kind of oracle? And why is that cow standing there with her teats in the fire and plucked crows in her antlers with meat in their beaks? The trees’ breath, he now notices, is not as sweet as he’d thought at first, and what the stream is whispering (how is it he fell asleep out here in this open field with his breeches off?) seems to be some suggestion about staying in line or alive, or playing the—
“What? What—?!” He starts up in alarm, opens his eyes a second time. Ah, it is the fox, that treacherous foulmouth, whispering something in his ear about flaying the lion and wearing his hide as a disguise. “Don’t wait until danger is at hand!” He turns his head away. He must have dozed off. But it seemed so real! “Fuck these useless shows of strength, humpback! Remember the fable of the hunting dog! Use your wits!”
Perhaps a third time, he thinks, straining to pop his eyes wider open. He uses his fingers to press his lids apart. But they are apart. Is he dreaming that he’s pressing his fingers to his lids? Alas . . . “It’s been tried,” he mumbles, trying his voice out.
“Only by asses. The morals of those stories are stay out of the wind and keep your mouth shut.”
Would it work? Not likely. He can already hear his pursuers. “We were told to get the one in the lionskin,” they’d be saying. “Why am I even listening to a doublecrossing liar like you?”
“Because we understand each other. I wouldn’t even be here without you, I know that, even if the others don’t. You think I’d want to shit you now? Anyway, it’s impossible. Think about it.”
“He’d betray himself if he could figure out how to do it and profit by it at the same time,” the lion growls from inside his paws. “Get back to your post, stinkbreath, before I decide to tear that red tail off at the root and sweep out this stinking boghouse with it!” He watches the miserable beggar slink, smirking no doubt (can’t see a damned thing), back to the cave mouth. The hunchback stands to piss against the wall, at least that’s what it sounds like. “And don’t be fooled, fabler. Wit will not get the better of strength. Ever. That’s just a fairytale for weaklings. Helps them die easier.”
“But I can’t outrun them and I can’t eat them,” the dwarf whines from the other side of his hump as he splashes against the wall. “What am I going to do?”
“What you can. There’s an inscription here . . .” The old lion knows, in the end, he is going to have to abide by it himself. If puffed-up toads and flying turtles are ridiculous, humble lions are worse. He shakes his mane. If he could just lift his jaws up off the floor. “. . . At the oracle . . .”
“I’ve seen it.” The hunchback is wiping that monstrous engine of his on his shirt. “But I don’t know who I am and I don’t know where to start.”
“You know more than you know,” the lion rumbles solemnly, and the fox snarls: “There he is!”
“What—?! Who?” squeaks the fabler, shrinking back against the wall he’s just fouled.
“It’s for me,” says the lion, rearing his head up at last. It sways a bit like an old drunk’s, but he holds it up there. This is not going to be easy, he thinks. But had he ever supposed it would be? “My herald, as you might say. My advice to you is to take a long walk.”
“But—!”
“GET OUT!” he roars, and the hunchback, in panic, goes lurching out on all fours, nipped mischievously in the tail by the fox as he scrambles past. “Now come here, slyboots, I want to show you something. We’re going to let you play the hero.”
10
A plaintive ascendant whine silences the unruly forest. Flappings, snortings, rustlings, scurryings cease. The black-hooded magpie, death’s acknowledged messenger, lowers his gaping beak and from his perch above the cave mouth shrieks: “The king is dying! The king is dying! Scrawk! Long live the king!” A kind of communal gasp sweeps through the forest like a sudden brief gust of wind, then dies away. The magpie hacks raucously as though trying to spit. “Miserable morsels—harck! tweet!—mortals who, like leaves, at one moment—whawk!—flame with life and at another weakly—prreet! caw!—perish down the drain of Eternity in the mighty whirl of dust, the hour of—wheep!—equal portions has ARRIVED!” A furtive scrabbling and fluttering ripples now through the forest like gathering applause, from the outside in, rushing toward the center as though beaters were assaulting the periphery. Though only the magpie is visible (even the fox has disappeared), the area around the cave mouth seems suddenly congested, aquiver with terror and anticipation. And appetite. “Cree! Cree! Creatures of a day, be quiet and have patience, not even the gods fright—purrr-wheet!—fight against the child within us! We go our—WARRCKK!—ways in the same honor already for—caw! caw!—forfeit!” The magpie’s long bright tail drops like a falling axe. Is it over? Is the tyrant already dead? Heads peek out from behind foliage. Insects hover nervously. Monkeys swing closer, swing back again. A snake uncoils from a limb. A boar in the underbrush snorts and paws the ground. A crab sallies forth, eyes to the rear. “Either death is a state of nothingness and utter—kwok!—or better never to have been born!” the oracular magpie cries, and parrots, cats, crickets and hermaphroditic hyenas scream their assent. The entire twilit forest is alive with beasts surging furtively toward the dying lion’s cave. “Must not all things be swallowed up in—shreek!—a single night? Just SO! Crrrr-AWKK!” As though in fear of being left behind, the animals at this signal burst from their hiding places and rush, squealing and bawling, toward the cave mouth—but just as suddenly pull up short. The old king stands there in the fading light, muscles rippling, fiery mane blowing in the breeze, eyes feverish with fury. With fierce deliberation, he steps forward, his teeth bared. Has this been a trap? “Only one!” shrieks the magpie. Ah. But a lion . . .
11
We found the fabulist at last in the Temple of the Muses, clearly deranged, howling about “death in the forest” and “the revenge of dungbeetles,” and bounding around arse-high with his nose to the stone floor like a toad looking for water. After having abused us earlier, while still in prison, with filthy tales about the rape of widows and children (“A man put it in me with a long sinewy red thing that ran in and out,” he’d leered: had he been trying to seduce us with these simpering obscenities?) as well as racist slurs, insults against our fathers, and seditious threats to revenge himself upon us, even after he was dead, this grotesque little Egyptian, or Babylonian, was now, in one of our own temples, berating us with sacrilege, shrieking something truly offensive about “God with shit in his eye!” It was almost, we thought, as though he’d come here to our city seeking to die.
He was not easy to catch or, once caught, to subdue. As we chased him about the temple, wrestling with him, losing him, catching him again, he kept making brutish noises, now squawking, now roaring, now barking or bleating or braying, as though he were all these beasts at once, or thought himself to be, and at times we did feel somewhat like Menelaus grappling with the inconstant and malodorous Proteus. His stunted limbs were too rubbery to hold, his pot too sleek—finally we caught him by the ears (his Achilles’ heel, as it were) and, twisting them, extracted from him a more human howl.
As we dragged him toward his site of execution, his madness took on a subtler, yet no less bizarre form. He grew suddenly serene, almost flaccid in our many-handed grip, and commenced to lecture us on the evils we were presumably bringing upon ourselves with this action. “Not much time will be gained, O Delphians,” he proclaimed shrilly, as his pointed head bounced along on the uneven ground, “in return for the evil name which you will get from the detractors
of the city, who will say that you killed Aesop, a wise man; for it will be said of me, that I never did any wrong, never gave any ill advice to any man; but that I labored all my life long to excite to virtue those who frequented me.” Such pomposities, emerging reedily from that twisted liver-lipped mouth with its scattered teeth, under the squashed-up nose and squinty eyes, neither of which ever seemed to be looking at the same thing at the same time, struck us as so ludicrous we were all driven to fits of convulsive laughter, and nearly lost our grip on him again. “Fancy such a warty little thing as you making such a big noise!” we hooted.
“I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than that you have inflicted on me will surely await you!” he squealed then, and we reminded him, laughing, that braggarts are easily silenced, as he was about to discover. “People who brag to those who know them must expect to be laughed at, gypsie, evil tricks don’t fool honest men! Such playacting has cost many a man his life, you will not be the first or last to perish of it!” We hauled the droll little monster up to the edge of the cliff and prepared to heave him over. Some of us had his arms, some his horny feet. “Destiny is not to be interfered with, melonhead—if you had any real wisdom you’d know that! A man should courageously face whatever is going to happen to him and not try to be clever, for he will—ha ha!—not escape it!”