“Governed?”
“It is a Hellenic word—”
“Hellenic.” Alobar closed his eyes and thought of what he had heard of the Hellenic city-states far to the southeast, near the edge of the earth. How glorious they were rumored to have been, how wealthy and learned and proud of their arts. Long ago northern tribes, not unlike his ancestors, had sacked them. What good was righteous governing if rough people could come along at will and chop you up?
“—a Hellenic word, meaning to exercise a directing influence. That you have done. The heroics of past rulers only kept your kingdom in a state of agitation. You have calmed it. And Noog resents you for that, because as a result of your reasonable leadership, the necromancer is less necessary and less admired.”
“I am not surprised. There is a limit to the admiration we may hold for a man who spends his waking hours poking the contents of chickens with a stick.”
“Divination has its worth.”
“Yes, and so, perhaps, does the elimination of time-trapped kings. Yet, rebellion stirs within me this daybreak. I appreciate your warning about Noog. Were I to tell him what I am about to tell you, dear Wren, I would be dining on bitter egg ere the moon is ripe. I have seen kings bite that egg, watched them turn green as ivy leaves and flap about the yard like freshly beheaded fowl. And all the while the populace onlooking as if it were at a bear-and-dog match. Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched. Well, forgive me, perhaps the sap of that silver hair has made me drunk from inside my skull, but I am seized with desire to be something more. Something whose echo can drown out the rattle of death.”
As Wren blinked her bituminous lashes at his queer behavior, Alober stood, disrobed, and turned slowly around and around before her like prime merchandise at a slave market. Save for the occasional phosphorus mark where some blade had stung him, his body was smooth and tan, braided with muscle, supple, quick; neither as massive nor as hairy as many warriors who had marched behind him. His chestnut mane was chopped an inch below the ears, his beard was shaggy and full. Less prominent than her own southern model (maybe there is simply more to whiff in tropic climes), his nose was banded at the bridge with a ribbon of scar tissue. His eyes, bright as torches in an ice cave, were so blue they seemed on certain days to bleed into the sky. Alobar's mouth, what could be glimpsed of it through the whiskers, was thinner than the meaty mouths of his fellows, and at the same time less crude; it reminded Wren of her late father's mouth, and she admired it most of all. On several occasions in his company, she had come within a pucker of discovering kissing.
When he had completed his exhibition, he planted a palm against each of his jowls and said in a voice both defiant and shaky, “This man before you is part of the community, the race, and the species, yet is somehow separate from them. That notion shocks you, I can see. But, Wren, I cannot tolerate the passive obliteration of all that I am to myself. My deeds have not been so small that they will never be recalled around the fires, yet that fails to satisfy my longing. My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.” He slapped his thighs. “It is with difficulty that I imagine this familiar body gone cold. These limbs, this trunk, the heart that drums, they urge me, against all my training, to prevail over submission to the collective destiny.”
Wren's mouth opened as tentatively as a mollusk shell. “Vanity?” she asked. A wife, even in shock, she made certain that it was less an accusation than a query. “Vanity?”
“Vanity? I am unsure. It feels different from vanity. If I be but vain, then the demons will kick my ghost from pit to pit. In my defense, I can say only this: I have fought for my people and would fight for them again, let them name the foe. But I am not ready to have them place the crown on another's noggin, though his be as yellow as sulfur and mine whiter than any winter's drift.”
For a long while, Wren sat quietly, poised as if she were a blood-drop on the point of a dagger. Then she said, “You seem to value my opinion, my lord. This then I say to you: It would be painful for me to pass you the poison. I would ache should I find your body still and icy, even though it meant that our clan might easier endure. Your words puzzle me no end. But I trust you as I have trusted no other, save my father. If survival through deception be your wish, then I shall endeavor to support the deceit. Most assuredly, I shall refrain from any mention of it.”
“It is no major deceit. Unless my parents lied, I have lived through but thirty-seven Feasts of Feasts. I remain young and able, no matter what that treacherous hair did shout.” Again he slapped his thighs. Then, all at once, the bluster drained out of him. “Ah, but, Wren, you may not have long to guard our secret. I have observed the habits of hairs, and before many mornings there will arrive another as colorless as that last. And another and another, like doves at a roost. Every single day I would have to regard my head in the looking glass, yet I cannot retrieve the glass from the concubines without raising suspicion. You are more than loyal, but there is little use. . . .” He slumped down on the fur beside her.
“I will be your mirror,” said Wren.
He understood and, in gratitude, embraced her until at length he felt his humor return. A slow smile bent back his foliage.
“I've a mind to lay you down and split you like a rack of mutton. What would you say to that?”
“You know very well what I would say. I would say those half-formed, half-crazed words the she-panther speaks when in the delirium of her seasonal heat she is mounted by her mate.”
Alobar moved to shut the window against the beginning buzz and bustle of the city day. Then he thought better of it and left it wide. It would be to his advantage, he reasoned, should the populace overhear she-panther yowls emanating from his chamber.
Days grew shorter. The citadel was hidden by morning fogs. Beets, resembling the hearts of gnomes, were piled in the storage cellars. Ducks lined up to buy their tickets to southern swamps. Mead was jugged. Blades and leathers oiled. Wolves made clouds when they sang at night. Maybe that was where the fogs came from. Everywhere there were sounds of husks cracking, virgins dancing, the rush of bees on last-minute shopping sprees, the roar of altars ablaze with some sacrifice.
King Alobar was likewise undergoing a season change. True to her word, Wren was his mirror, and approximately once a week she discovered a white settler aspiring to colonize the shady hirsute shores. She drove it promptly out of the neighborhood.
More pensive than ever, Alobar shared his thoughts with her. “I think that I am seeking something,” he confessed once as they stood alone in the western watchtower, overseeing, from a bloodless distance, the butchering of skinny beef. “What I seek is neither spoils nor territory, new wives nor new glory, nor, for that matter, merely a lengthened life. What I seek never was, not on land or sea.”
What he sought was to become something singular out of his singular experience—and labor as she might, Wren could not understand. If the notion of an individual resisting death for his own sake was foreign to her (as indeed, it would have been to anyone in that milieu), the concept of the uniqueness of a single human life was alien to the point of babble. Preferring the chaos down in the cattle pens to her husband's god-offending nonsense, she shut it out entirely and yelled encouragement to the butchers.
Yet, Wren served Alobar in ways beyond the call of duty. In an attempt to prove his stamina, the king set upon his harem like a starving rat let loose in a peach barrel. Night after night, he rooted, rolled, and reamed. He climbed delicately upon Frol's swollen belly. He left Juun and Helga complaining of soreness in their nether regions. He generated funky auroras around the bodies of Ruba and Mag. He gave Alma a taste of her own medicine. Each night, when he had done with one or the other of them, he would rub their noses, tug their blond braids, and send them back to their quarters to fetch Wren. While Alobar, exhausted, lay beside her panting and making imprudent comments, such as “Wives are wonderful, but why did I have
to accumulate so many?", Wren would fake her lioness cries. Mornings, while he dreamed of the relative tranquillity of war, she would fake them again. In time, the subterfuge shamed them both so deeply they could scarcely bear to look at each other. It was actually a relief when it was brought to an end.
Noog the necromancer paid close attention to the king's activities. He had done so for years. He had chronicled Alobar's gradually declining sexual enthusiasm, so the desperation implicit in the sudden reversal was not lost on him. When he read verification of his suspicions in the intestinal texts of several hens, he decided to see for himself.
It so happened that on the morning that Noog stole up to the royal window, after bribing a guard with a glass bead, Alobar and Wren were actually making love. Her phony demonstrations had excited him that dawn. After all, he cared for her above any other. So he had touched her stomach with uncommon tenderness, and soon her groans were being uttered in earnest. Disappointed, Noog was about to turn away when the magpie that rode upon his shoulder abruptly took flight and swooped into the king's chamber. Undetected as yet by the copulating couple, a long, curly hair as bright as an icicle had unfurled during the night in Alobar's beard. The magpie flew directly to the hair, pulled it free with its beak, and delivered it into the gizzard-stained hands of the magician.
Following a full day of chanting, singing, and frenzied dancing by painted figures in animal suits, the execution took place at twilight.
Awaiting his mortal exit, Alobar sat on a bronze throne wearing for the last time a thick crown of hammered gold. In his lap, he held the sacred turtle shell. The shell and crown rivaled the Egyptian looking glass in the hierarchy of the city's treasure trove. At precisely the moment that the sun's eye winked behind the western hills, Wren stepped from a tiny hut of pine boughs, constructed for the occasion, carrying on an ermine pillow the smoking egg. Without missing a cue, as if she had rehearsed for days, she dance-stepped thrice around the bonfire, then up to the throne. Supposedly, the egg had been laid by a viper, although Alobar suspected it was the product of Noog's magpie.
In any case, Wren lifted it gracefully to Alobar's mouth, and as the singers fell silent and the dancers froze, he gulped it down. Presently he commenced to writhe. His face turned the color of the pine boughs. He toppled over and, green tongue lolling, thrashed about in the mud. Noog approached, recovered the crown that had spilled, and placed it upon the head of the young hero who had taken Alobar's place on the throne. Alobar kicked with both boots, then lay still.
The new king flicked a dab of green foam off the throne. He raised his spear and smiled. Cheering broke out in the city, but it was shortlived because Mik lunged for the bronze chair and would have chewed off the occupant's leg had he not been restrained. No sooner was the hound muzzled than a new snarling began. This time it came from Frol, the fourteen-year-old concubine, who horrified the crowd by pulling the magic mirror from inside her maternity gown and smashing it against the logs of the bonfire.
The burial mound was outside the city walls, in a field dotted with cow pies and large stones. The stones had been arranged geometrically in patterns that were supposed to mean something to the gods. Presumably, the cow pies had fallen at random, although then, as now, the division between what is random in nature and what is purposeful is extremely difficult to determine.
Warriors carried Alobar's body to the mound's summit, where a shallow indentation had been dug. After the body was laid in the hole, the councilmen covered it with dirt. They sprinkled mead on the grave. They chanted an incantation half as ancient as the stones in the field; words arranged, like the stones, in sensuous patterns; words that saber-toothed tigers may once have overheard. There were no tears, except the ones that Frol had shed back in the citadel yard. Death was not a weeping matter. The indentation in the mound-top represented the navel in the Great Belly. Alobar was back where he had begun. Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Alobar was back where he had begun. But not for long. As soon as the funeral procession had wound, imitating the undulations of the Serpent, back through the gates of the city, Wren ran from the shadow of an upright stone and started frantically to dig him out. Only two feet of earth lay over him, so he was soon uncovered. She had a vessel of mead concealed in her cloak, part of which she used to clean dirt out of his mouth and nostrils. The remainder she poured down his throat. A potent beverage, the mead gradually counteracted the effects of the nightshade belladonna that she had placed in the egg. Since belladonna, in small amounts, will slow heartbeat, it had helped Alobar feign death. Wren also had stuffed the egg with algae that she had scooped off the surface of a stagnant pond. It was the algae that had given the green cast to his skin.
There had been no fatal poison in the egg Alobar devoured. Following a plan they had devised in the week between Noog's discovery and the execution ritual, Wren had secreted Noog's death egg in her bodice while she waited in the hut, substituting an egg filled with the algae and a nonlethal dose of nightshade belladonna.
Alobar was considerably dazed, but as soon as he demonstrated to Wren's satisfaction that his breathing was of sufficient velocity to billow the sails of his soul, she left him. “I must return ere I am missed. I have to prepare myself to receive my new husband.” The last she said matter-of-factly, but she rubbed his nose poignantly before fleeing.
As dazed as he was, Alobar had the presence of mind to let his body roll down the slope of the burial mound, which was starting to be illuminated by a rising moon. He came to rest in shadow. He also came to rest in a more or less fresh cow pie—but he uttered no oath. I may be mad, he thought, but I prefer the shit of this world to whatever sweet ambrosias the next might offer.
East was good enough for the morning star, it would be good enough for Alobar. He should not travel westward, for the Romans, with whom his people had traditionally skirmished, controlled the westlands, and for a long time now the Romans had been increasingly under the spell of some borrowed god who sounded like particularly bad news. Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this Semitic deity was reputed to be jealous (who was there to be jealous of if there were no other gods?), vindictive, and altogether foul-tempered. If you didn't serve the nasty fellow, the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down. There was a long list of enjoyable things Christians could not do, however, including keeping more than one wife. “Come to think of it,” mused Alobar, “that might not be such a bad idea.”
Ah, but Christians were meddlers, and a man on the run from death, duty, and who knew what else? was a man who didn't need meddling with. It was possible that he had insulted quite a few deities of his own acquaintance, so he didn't relish some aggressive foreign hothead getting in the act. Christians populated the south as well as the west, while up north the pebbles lay with their faces already in snow, and Alobar had neither furs nor spear. It was settled. He would journey into that east whose pinchers had so recently released October's buoyant moon.
When the last spasm of nausea had subsided, when all traces of dirt and drug had washed away and his blood flowed melodious and clear, he stood, stretched, gathered his burial wraps about him, and set off at a trot toward the east—and the multiplying unknown.
As he trotted, he could hear in the distance the drunken din of the city, where his people simultaneously lamented the broken mirror and celebrated their rescue from feebleness and decay. Then he turned upwind, and the night was suddenly quiet. He paused to look back. The red glow of torches and bonfires caused the city to resemble a miniature sun a-setting. Let it set, he thought. A fresh one will rise in the east. Nevertheless, there were pangs in his heart. Mixed in that caldron of sound that had just faded might have been the feline wails of Wren, who, no doubt, lay with the new ruler beneath his ermine covers. Did Mik snore at the foot of the bed? he wondered. All of Alobar's wives belonged to
his successor, if he wanted them, but Mik was eternally Alobar's and would have been buried with him had he not demanded, prior to his “execution,” that the hound be spared. “I would vow to retrieve you, Mik,” whispered the former king, “but as sorely as I miss you, I will not be back. Not one companion from my reign will I ever see again.”
He was quickly to be proven wrong.
He was now at the threshold of the dark forest. Unarmed, he dare not venture deep inside lest enterprising beasts process his flesh into sausage cakes and brew their winter's ale from his blood. Therefore, his plan was to lie down just inside the tree line and sleep until daybreak. At earliest light he would strike out, attempting to transverse the wood before it again grew black. Having a terrible thirst, however, a need to rinse his mouth of the accumulated residue of mead, mud and egg surprise, he decided to first go in as far as the spring and drink. Then he would retire to a resting place less convenient to the wolf kitchens.
The spring bubbled in a little glade, a clearing lit like an altar by the ever-ceremonious moon. So bright was the glade that Alobar could watch his shadow slide along the promenade of moss and kneel with him to drink. “Me and my shadow,” he said wistfully, anticipating the popular song by a thousand years. “Me and my—” What was that? His shadow had attracted a second, a companion, shadow, slightly smaller than itself though nonetheless human in shape. If his shadow was no longer alone, did that mean that he, too, enjoyed companionship? And if his shadow's shadow friend aimed a shadow spear, could Alobar conclude that a spear was pointed at him, as well?