“And this power came from them?” asked Stuart.
“Yes,” said Margon, “through a very foolish man—or a wise man depending on one’s point of view—who sought to breed with them, and to acquire the power they had—to change from cooperative ape man to ravening wolf man when threatened.”
“And the man bred with them,” Stuart said.
“No. That was not successful,” said Margon. “He acquired the power by being severely and repeatedly bitten, but only after he’d been prepared by imbibing the fluids of the species—the urine, the blood—in whatever quantities he could acquire for two years. He had also invited playful bites from the tribe whenever he could. They had befriended him, and he was an outcast from his people—exiled from the only real city in the whole world.”
His voice had darkened as he said those words.
A silence fell over them all. They were all looking at Margon, who stared at the water in his glass. The expression on his face was deeply perplexing to Reuben, and obviously maddened Stuart, but Reuben sensed there was more to this remembering, this retelling, than simple weariness or distaste. Something troubled Margon about the telling of the tale.
“But how long ago was this?” Stuart asked. “What do you mean, the only real city in the world?” He was wildly stimulated, and obviously thrilled, his smile broadening as he repeated the words.
“Stuart, please …,” Reuben pleaded. “Let Margon tell it in his own way.”
After a long moment, Laura spoke up.
“You’re talking of yourself, aren’t you?” she said.
Margon nodded.
“Is it difficult to remember?” asked Reuben respectfully. He couldn’t fathom this man’s facial expressions. He appeared at once remote and then vital, at once totally absent from all around him and then again completely, openly engaged. But what was to be expected?
It was wondrous and shocking to contemplate, that this was an immortal man. And it was no more than Reuben had long suspected. Only the length of time shocked him. But the secret, that these beings were immortal? It felt like something revealed to him in his own blood by the Chrism. Something he couldn’t quite absorb yet could never forget. But even before the Chrism ever entered his veins, in his very first encounter with the photograph of the distinguished gentlemen in the library, he had sensed that an otherworldly knowledge bound the men together.
Stuart’s eyes were locked on Margon, scanning his face, his form, his hand that rested on the table—just feasting on all the little details of the man.
And what do they tell you? Reuben wondered. That so little has changed with us in thousands of years, that one so old can walk down the street in any city and go unnoticed really except for his unusual poise perhaps and the subtle, wise expression on his face? He was an imposing man, but why? He was commanding, but why? He was forthcoming and yet somehow utterly unyielding.
“Tell us what happened,” said Stuart as gently as he could. “Why were you exiled? What did you do?”
“Refuse to worship the gods,” said Margon, his words coming in a half murmur as he stared forward. “Refuse to sacrifice in the Temple to deities carved out of stone. Refuse to recite hymns to the monotonous beat of drums about the marriage of gods and goddesses who never existed and which never took place. Refuse to tell the people that if they did not worship, if they did not sacrifice, if they did not break their backs in the fields and digging the canals that watered them, that the gods would bring the cosmos to an end. Margon the Godless refused to tell lies.”
He raised his voice just a little. “No, I do not have trouble remembering,” he said. “But some deep emotional and visceral faith in the act of recounting it has long been lost.”
“Why didn’t they just execute you?” Stuart asked.
“They couldn’t,” Margon said in a small voice, looking at him. “I was their divine king.”
Stuart was delighted with the answer. He couldn’t conceal his excitement.
This is so simple, Reuben was thinking. Stuart keeps asking all the questions to which I want the answers, and to which Laura probably wants answers. And the questions are indeed driving the flow of revelation, so why complain?
He could feel the hot oppressive sun of the Iraqi desert suddenly. He saw the dusty trenches of the archaeological dig on which he’d worked. He saw those tablets, those ancient cuneiform tablets, those precious fragments laid out on the table in the secret room.
He was so excited by this little bit of intelligence that he might have gone off, perplexed, pondering for a long time. It was like reading a wonderful sentence in a book, and not being able to continue because so many possibilities were crowding his mind.
Margon picked up the water, and tasted it, then drank it. And carefully he set it down again, staring at it as if fascinated by its bubbles, the play of light in the leaded-crystal glass.
He did not touch the bits of fruit on the small plate in front of him. But he drank the coffee, drank it while it was still smoking. And reached suddenly for the silver carafe.
Reuben filled the cup for him. Cupbearer for a king.
Felix and Thibault were gazing calmly at Margon. And Laura had turned in her chair, the better to see him, arms folded, comfortable as she waited.
Stuart was the only one who couldn’t wait.
“What city was it?” Stuart asked. “Come on, Margon, tell me!”
Felix gestured for him to be quiet, with a severe reprimanding look.
“Ah, it’s only natural for him to want to know,” said Margon. “Remember, there have been those who weren’t curious at all, who wanted to know nothing of the past, and how did that serve them? Maybe it would have been better for them if they had had a history, an ancestry, even if it was nothing more than descriptive. Maybe we need this.”
“I need it,” whispered Stuart. “I need to hear everything.”
“I’m not sure,” said Margon gently, “that you’ve really heard what I have said so far.”
That’s just it, thought Reuben, the very difficulty. How to hear that the man sitting here has been alive continuously since the beginning of recorded time? How do you hear that?
“Well, I will not be the chronicler of the Morphenkinder just now,” said Margon, “and not ever perhaps. But I will tell you some things. It’s enough for you to know I was deposed, exiled. I wouldn’t claim to be the divine son of the fictive god who’d built the canals and the temples—venerable forerunner to Enlil, Enki, Marduk, Amun Ra. I sought for answers within ourselves. And believe me, this point of view was not so radical as you might think. It was common. But to express the point of view was not common at all.”
“This was Uruk, wasn’t it?” Stuart asked breathlessly.
“Far older than Uruk,” Margon shot back. “Far older than Eridu, Larsa, Jericho—any city you might name. The sands have never yielded the remains of my city. Perhaps they never will. I myself don’t know what happened to it, or my descendants, or what its full legacy proved to be for the cities springing up around it. I don’t know what happened to its trading outposts. Its trading posts trafficked in a way of life as well as in livestock and slaves and goods. Yet I don’t know what became of them, of that particular way of life. I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what’s happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might.” His voice was now heated and running smoothly. “I had no view of myself as positioned by fate or happenstance at the birthplace of a continuity that would endure for millennia. How could I? I underestimated every single force that impinged on my existence. It couldn’t have been otherwise. It’s a mere accident that I survived. That’s why I don’t like to talk of it. Talk is suspect. When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a c
ontinuity on them, and that continuity is a lie. I despise what is a lie!”
When he paused this time, no one spoke. Even Stuart was still.
“It’s enough to say I was deposed and exiled,” said Margon. “My brother was behind it.” He made a little gesture of disgust. “And why not? Truth is a risky proposition. It’s the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies—.”
Again he stopped.
He smiled suddenly at Stuart.
“That’s why you want the truth from me, isn’t it? Because people have taught you all your short life that lies are as vital to you as the air you breathe and you are hurtling full tilt into a life dependent upon the truth.”
“Yes,” said Stuart gravely. “That’s it, exactly.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m a gay boy. I’ve been taught ever since I can remember that there were excellent reasons for me to lie about it to everybody I knew.”
“I understand,” said Margon. “The architects of any society depend upon lies.”
“So tell me what really happened.”
“Doesn’t matter, all that about gods and goddesses or exiled princes,” said Margon. “But let’s go back to the narrative in which we both want to find a bit of salvageable truth.”
Stuart nodded.
“Fortunately for Margon the Godless, no one was going to shed the blood of the heretic king. Margon the Godless was put outside the walls, and left to go his way like a desert drifter, with a skin of water and a staff. It is enough to say I found myself in Africa, traveling down through Egypt, and along the coast and then to this strange island where a peaceful and much despised people lived.
“They were hardly what one would call human beings. No one in those days would have thought them human. But they were a human race, a species of human, and a cohesive tribe. They took me in, fed me, clothed me insofar as they wore clothes. They looked rather more like apes than men and women. But they had language, they knew and exchanged expressions of love.
“And when they told me their enemy, shore people, were coming, when they described the shore people to me, I thought we would all die.
“They themselves lived in complete harmony with one another. But the shore people were people like me. They were Homo sapiens sapiens—fierce, armed with throwing spears and crude stone axes, and ravenous to destroy a contemptible enemy for sheer sport.”
Stuart nodded.
“Well, I thought it was over as I said. The simple apelike creatures could never mount a defense against such a sophisticated and vicious invader. There was no time for me to teach them how to protect themselves.
“Well, I was wrong.
“ ‘You go and hide,’ they said to me. ‘We will know when their boats are coming.’ Then dancing wildly in circles as the shore people landed, they brought on the transformation. The elongated limbs, the fangs, the abundant wolfen hair—all you’ve seen yourselves, all you boys have experienced for yourselves. The tribe—male and female alike—were transformed into such monsters right before my eyes.
“They became a pack of howling, snarling dogs. I had never seen such a thing. They overwhelmed the enemy, driving the attackers into the ocean, devouring them, even demolishing their boats with their teeth and their claws, stalking every fugitive and consuming every morsel of enemy flesh.
“Then they reverted back to who they were before—apelike, peaceful, simple. They told me not to fear. They knew the enemy by his evil scent. They caught it on the wind before the boats ever appeared. They would never do such things as I had seen except to an enemy. It was the power given them by the gods long ago to defend themselves against others so evil that they would break the peace of their world for no reason at all.
“I lived with them for two years. I wanted that power. As I said, I drank their urine, their blood, their tears, whatever they would give to me. I didn’t care. I slept with their women. I took the semen of their men. I bought their precious secretions and their blood with bits of wisdom, cunning advice, clever little inventions of which they’d never dreamed, solutions to problems they couldn’t solve.
“Now there was one other case, an obvious one, for which the change could be induced: to punish a lawbreaker, usually a homicide—the most despised traitor to the peace.
“Again, they knew the criminal by his scent, and they’d surround him, dancing themselves into a frenzy until the change was fully upon them and they would devour the guilty man. To the best of my knowledge, they were never wrong in their judgment, and I saw more than one accused outlaw vindicated. They never abused the power at all. It seemed relatively simple to them. They could not shed innocent blood; their gods had given them the power only to eradicate evil, and they had no doubts on the matter, and they thought it very amusing that I should want the power or think that I could induce it in myself.
“Yet whenever the change was upon them, I did whatever I could to elicit small bites from them, which they thought was powerfully funny and a little indecent, but they were in awe of me, so they gave in.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, then opened his eyes again and stared forward as though lost.
“Were they mortal?” Laura asked. “Could they die?”
“Yes, indeed, they were mortal,” said Margon. “They were. They died all the time from simple things which my palace physicians could have easily cured. An abscessed tooth that could have been pulled, a broken leg improperly set and then infected. Yes, they were mortal. And they held me to be the most magical of persons because I could cure certain ailments and certain injuries, and that gave me great power in their eyes.”
He paused again.
Thibault, who had teasingly complained earlier of not wanting to hear Margon was listening now, fascinated, as if he’d never heard this part of Margon’s story before.
“Why did they turn on you?” he asked. “You’ve never said.”
“Oh same old story,” said Margon. “I’d learned enough of their rudimentary language after two years to tell them I did not believe in their gods. Remember I was very young at the time, perhaps three years older than Stuart is now. I wanted the power. The power did not come from the gods. I thought I should say so. In those days, I always told the truth.” He laughed under his breath. “Understand, theirs was no complex religion like that of the cities of fertile plains. It was no great system of temples and taxes and bloody altars. But they had their gods. And I thought I should tell them, as a matter of fact, that there were no gods at all.
“Now they had always been kind to me, and loved to learn the clever things that I could teach. They’d laughed at me for wanting their power, as I said, or more truly for thinking that I could acquire it. You cannot get what the gods will not give, they said. And the gods had given the power to them, not to others—like me.
“But now, when they came to understand the full extent of my denial of their gods, and the full heretical dimension of my insistence that I could acquire the power, they pronounced me a lawbreaker of the worst sort, and set a time for me to die.
“Such killing rituals always took place at dusk. Understand, they could easily transform into wolf people in the daytime if an enemy approached; but for executions they always waited until dusk.
“And so as darkness fell, they lighted their torches and formed a great circle, forcing me into the middle of it, and they began to dance to bring about the change.
“It wasn’t easy for them. They were not all a party to it. Some stood back. I had saved the lives of many of them, healed their sick children. I could see it there and then, the great disinclination in these crude beings to harm an innocent. Indeed, I am not sure what scent they caught from me at that time, and I’ll never know.
“But I know what scent I caught from them—a hideous, acrid scent, a scent of malice threatening my very life,
when they came down on me like wolves.
“Now if they’d torn me apart as they did the other enemies and lawbreakers, that would have been the end of the story. And my journey through time would have ended like that of any mortal man. But they did not. Something restrained them, some lingering respect or fascination, or distrust of themselves.
“And it is conceivable that from the playful bites I’d extracted, and from the fluids I’d imbibed, I had some great glandular immunity working in me, some powerful fount of healing that allowed me to survive their attack.
“Whatever the case, I suffered bites all over and I crawled on my belly towards the jungle to die. This was the worst torture I’d ever endured. I was angry—enraged that my life was ending in this fashion. And they were dancing back and forth all around me, on either side of me, and behind me. They were shifting back into their regular shape, and cursing me, then struggling into the wolfen form again, because I was not dead. But they could not bring themselves, obviously, to finish me off.
“And then I changed.
“Before their eyes, I changed.
“Maddened by the sounds and scents of their hatred for me, it was I who changed and attacked them.”
His eyes grew wide peering into something that only he could see. They all sat silent waiting. There came over Reuben a strong sense of Morgon’s demeanor, the way that he maintained an unspoken supremacy though not a single inveterate gesture of his was imposing and his voice was, even at its most heated, rolling steadily beneath the governance of a deeply private and disciplined man.
“They were no match for me at all,” he said with a shrug. “They had been like yapping puppies with milk teeth. I was a seething wolfen monster with a human being’s resolve and wounded pride. They didn’t have emotions like that! Nothing was so necessary to them, ever in all their lives, as killing them was then to me.”
Reuben smiled. This so beautifully touched on the lethal edge of the human species that he marveled.