He took up a string of words and ran his fingers over them like rosary beads. “On - ways - big - tithes - sent.” His fingers moved over them. Back and forth over the beads. “On - ways - big - tithes - sent.” Only “big” wasn’t quite the word that he was meaning to say. No, not quite. It was something else. He could identify it, feel the shape of it, but he lacked the name for it. It wasn’t “big.” No, not really. It was more like a giant in a story that does not exist. Big, but not big — because how could it be big if it doesn’t exist? Or, like a kernel or a seed, or like ashes — something that might be big, but not at this moment in time. Long ago or far in the future, maybe, but not now.
Still, without the word, he knew it, he could identify it, for he held it in his own very hand. And he rolled them, all the beads, back and forth, through his fingers, against his lips. Was this it? This string of nonsense? Was this that which he sought? The fish sent up, from far below, to be seized and swallowed?
All at once he heard a loud noise, which startled him. It came, violent and hurtling, like a meteor from the deep, forgotten space outside. The beads broke, the stones dropped from his mouth. The light and shadows melded, reconfigured. He was no longer walking on the wooden floorboards, in the corn-gold light. He was not in the house — in fact there was no longer any house at all, nor any wooded slope, nor any continent in the thick of which it stood.
From far within himself he had drifted upward. He had entered into the sight of his eyes, into the feel of his cheeks and thighs and fingers, and gradually he took over the responsibility of operating his body. He squinted to adjust to the light around him. He adjusted his logic, his bearings. To the information that he was receiving he applied the rules of space and distance, hardness and softness, height and balance, danger and safety.
He looked, and recognized where he was. He was in his studio, six blocks from his apartment. Fingers caked in clay. In his surprise he had crushed the vase that was spinning on the wheel before him. At his side rested the twelve bowls and two vases which he had already molded since the morning. He rose and walked to the window. Looking out he saw the source of the noise that had summoned him from his dreams’ deep. There, just outside, a boy, shrieking, curled upon the road, cupping one hand, broken, in his other.
Chapter V
“It’s the Maddened,” said Fert. “The sign of the Maddened.”
And he drew the last stroke of the sign with his pen. Held the page up for his others to see. “It’s a scorpion. Don’t you see it? The eight legs? The thorn?”
His others bumped their hands together, trying to trace the sketch with their own fingers.
“How do you know?” said Beyan.
“Know what?”
“That that’s their sign.”
“The day that they played those voices — you know? Two weeks ago? I followed the sound of it all the way down to the grate over the falls. It was so loud there, the voices had to be coming from close by. I looked all around. Then I heard something softer, something so soft it was like a whisper. I turned and walked toward it. And on the ground I found a paper with that sign.”
“Anyone could have dropped that paper.”
“No. Not anyone.”
“You should have kept looking,” said Parah. “You were scared.”
“You would be scared too of a scorpion!” said Fert and snatched his paper back.
“Do you know what’s scary about a scorpion?” said Lehlan, and his others grew silent before him. “The venom. And do you know what’s scary about venom? It spreads. It spreads just like fire. It spreads because nothing can resist it. Think about that. And then think about the thing you like the most. That you love, even. And start to fear it. Because love spreads the same way. It will change you. That’s the venom alright, the thing you love. The thing you can’t resist.”
His others stared, as if waiting to comprehend his words. Not yet finished, Lehlan turned to Beyan who, honey on his fingers, was peeling strips of a pumpkin seed bun and stuffing them in his mouth. “Look at you,” said Lehlan. “Chomping and slurping like nothing’s the matter. But who’s the real scorpion? With each bite you take it’s you you’re biting. And the venom only runs deeper.”
Beyan stopped eating and began to cry, though he didn’t know what Lehlan’s words meant.
“What?” said Lehlan. “Aren’t you sorry?”
With that Beyan let out a loud sob and turned to run home.
He still did not quite understand what Lehlan had said — but faced with the mockery in those eyes and the scorn in that voice, the meaning of the words was too much even to think about. All he could see now was Lehlan’s glare, and he could hear those words repeated again and again. “Like nothing’s the matter...Aren’t you sorry...?” He mouthed them with his own lips as he ran. “Aren’t you sorry...? It’s you you’re biting...”
And, as Beyan ran, the words changed, from Lehlan’s words to his own, as he pleaded for a chance to answer: “Why? I’m sorry! Why? I’m sorry!”
And, arriving at home, he opened the hall cabinet and climbed in with the spare linen to cry.
The words he murmured were a sweetness on his tongue. As long as he tasted them they urged him to taste further still...until, slowed by sleep, the words little by little slipped from his lips. The urgency passed, and the zeal; and with them passed the mercy they had given, of atoning.
But as he slowed he met a broader, calmer sadness, which he wore like a stupor, and which afforded him a different mercy, the mercy of sleep, and of dreams that slid like water over him.
Chapter VI
A soapy film of froth on top. And below one can imagine.
Even up to the sixteenth story it stank, the Crude Stream. Running, through its center, the length of the city. But high from his window Lhiar saw only the bubbles of its surface, specks of silver-purple, slowly swirling, creeping forward drudgingly. The stream crawled its way, spurred forward by jets of vapor that spewed from the sides of the banks.
And like fisheyes from underneath, peeping through the surface, round stones jutted.
Lhiar wiggled his window up and stepped out onto the ledge.
He hugged the pipe with his elbows and ankles and slid down, down sixteen stories, sliding for a full minute before his feet finally stopped him with a blow to his knees, cushioned only little by the mosses and lichens piled on the stones. The heavy warmth of the stream rose straight up past him, channeled to the sky between the two great tenement blocks on either side.
The air seemed to hold Lhiar, so thick it was, so warm and pungent. It shaped itself around him like a jelly, conformed to him, gently propped his spine straight, supported his legs, front and back, each time they bent and straightened, stepping.
The air a warmth, a stench, a thickness. The clamor, loud and ceaseless, of the vapor jets.
A ways downstream some men stood, harvesting the agar, their long staffs raking the surface.
Lhiar clambered onto a boulder at the stream’s edge and crawled over it, gripping the contours with his good hand’s fingertips, his bandaged hand stretched out and away for balance.
It was different, now that he was here, than how he had seen it from the window. He was quite certain that the two were not in fact the same place, that he had transformed the stream simply by approaching it, as one fogs a glass by holding it too near one’s mouth. Or, leaning over a calm pool, erases the glitter of sunlight twinkling across it, by casting a shadow.
As seen from up at the window, the stream had cut narrowly through the tenement buildings, a crystal purple band. Coursing, thin and wavering, through them, like the tongue in a serpent’s jaws. Here and there, the rocks had poked up, lonely. The sound a quiet hum.
But then Lhiar had slid down the gutter. Like a breath on glass. And he transformed all that had lain below him. With the breath not of his lungs but of his whole body he had altered it. With his nose, his ears, his eyes, his hands. And now the rushing did not hum, but roared. And the air wa
s as thick around him as the froth below; and each stone was not lonely, but a whole world, wide and strong and rough, bucking up from the stream.
From above so small, all of it; then larger, larger with his approach. And it was not, Lhiar thought, only a matter of perception, not only a matter of: “From far away it seems so...” For they had been small, surely they had, the stones and the bubbles. And now — just look, how big they were!
It made him think of candles, and of objects lit by candlelight. And how when candles light things from afar their shadows are so small, hardly discernible. But, with the candle’s approach, bigger and bigger the shadows grow behind them. And who would be the fool to say, “No, the shadows do not grow, really — they only seem to do so!”
So it was, he thought, his sliding down the pole. A candle’s approach. Drawing close, and feeding the shadows. For he was the candle, with his eyes and his mind. And if he was that, then these, the stones, the stream, the bubbles — they were the shadows. And so the objects, then — the objects that cast them — what were they?
Lhiar leaped from one stone to another. The air intensified. If he had thought about drinking, or eating, the stench from below might have sickened him. He would have doubled over.
But he did not think about drinking or eating. The offender stayed down in the stream, and sent up to his nostrils only a messenger of itself. Lhiar could tolerate that. The smell beat against him as tall grass swarms against one’s calves when trudging through a meadow — encompassing him, tickling him, incapable of being ignored — and yet inseparable from this new place’s strange, alluring character, and not altogether a nuisance.
He sat down on the stone. His journey from the window seemed already far behind him.
He heard the roar and smelled the stench of the stream, and he started to wonder where they went when they entered him — the sound and the stench. Where did they go?
He fingered his ears, then his nostrils. But his fingers were chubby and the channels of his skull were slim. He stuck his hand into his mouth, behind the teeth, reaching back, back — but before he could get far he gagged and found himself yanking his hand out, and he vomited a little on the stone.
Curiosity burned in him.
He tried to roll his eyes backwards, to see into his head. He prodded all over his body, his chest, and arms, and back, as one taps at a wall to find a secret chamber.
He sought the best point of entry.
Finally he came to the soft flesh of his thigh. Already infatuated, eager as if on the brink of climax, he gripped and tore a thin flake of stone from the boulder below him, breaking off a fingernail as he did; and with one clean motion he drove the shard into his thigh. First it made only a shallow cut, and Lhiar was stunned for a moment by the shock of the blow. But he judged the pain only a barrier to knowledge, and he raised the shard a second, and a third time, brought it down and further opened the gash in his leg.
Dropping the stone he wiggled his fingers into the wound he had made. He wiggled and dug. Groping. Seeking. But after a moment the burning of his infatuation abated, and his fingers slowed.
He looked up bewildered.
Chapter VII
Little ones need
Grown ones feed!
For Little ones’ sake
The Grown ones make!
Little ones speak and play and laugh
Grown ones tend with trough and staff!
The gown swept the tiles, side to side, slow and meandering, round twenty-nine little ones and one empty stool. Coming to the wall, the grown one looked here and there, searching from behind the mask, opaque and white like a tooth under the hood. Found brick H212. Removed it from the wall.
Into the room the voice swept, steady and even from far inside the chamber. Tireless it came, like a stone tumbling down a smooth slope:
Besk waited everyday on the tip
of the world’s tusk. Out, out
he waited by the deepest cave
and the tallest sky.
Waiting, watched the world transpire.
Each day the dew
coated him as it coats the street stones.
And it came to pass that a sweet cake
entered into his hands.
And, though he had never before
seen or felt such a thing,
he knew it to be intended for his eating.
So he ate.
So sweet it was
that when he had finished it
and ever afterward, he sat
without yearning, without waiting.
For it was enough
to know that such sweetness lived in the world.
The brick closed the hole, and the gown swept among the stools. The white mask like a tooth turned from little one to little one, and nodded, and blessed.
School finished, Fert stood outside with Beyan peeling strips off a cranberry tart.
“And what now then?”
Chapter VIII
Wrapped tight and immobile, achy and feverish, Lhiar could not leave his greeting room. He spent his hours trying to sleep through his restlessness. In moments of self-awareness he clenched his hand and groaned, and slapped the floor.
It was several days before he noticed the song of the tomtoads. And it was another day before he began to listen to it.
There are many stories about the tomtoads, though most people remember, more than any other, Brick H303:
Under the street stones they lived, the tomtoads. Dark and wet their world,
they tamed and bridled worms to clear roads.
Around hearths, in caverns far apart,
they lived clustered, and sang their shared vibration through the passageways.
And this murmuring sound filled and buttressed the world they had built.
But, through the caverns, one crack like a fungus spread
and all the tomtoads might have perished
had not the Old Stalwart barreled his voice mighty and low.
And his song upheld the tunnels until every tomtoad had escaped
to the world of light — every tomtoad but himself, the Old Stalwart,
whose breath ran out, and was buried.
Since then their race have lived in folk’s cabinets,
clearing dust and dirt, as once they did, in a different world.
And their soft and grateful song, still bounding from home to home, is,
like air wafting, fresh and gentle to the appetites of folk.
Like dust cascading through a lazy shaft of sunlight — like the deep, soft colors of lamp shades and carpets — like rain upon the roof — the song of the tomtoads lent a touch of rightness to a home. And folk were comforted by it as by a sheet’s thin weight while sleeping, or by the gentle draping on one’s body of casual clothes. A friend, and a buffer.
And maybe, on occasion, when one’s mind relented from its mad climb over “thought-stumps” and through “thickets of notions”, one fell backward, softly, into that gentle sound, and rested there, as on a forestbed of moss and tattered leaves.
Lhiar fell, but could not rest.
The touch, as of leaves, itched at him. Made him wrestle with the air. For a day he wrestled. He wondered why the tomtoads could not keep silent — or else screech and rip the world apart. One or the other, either one of the two, just to shatter the continuity.
But, after a day, he slept. And, on waking, it was the song of the tomtoads that drew him into the world, just as light often draws one into the world. First the light is as a dim presence. Then as a steady stream. And finally it introduces one to all the world’s sundry things — touches each of the objects all around, and bestows it with a unique shape and hue, the light worn by each in a manner all its own.
As one interprets the world, on waking, through the light, so did Lhiar that day interpret it through that gentle, pervading song.
Nested in a corner of himself, a corner so small and distant that his anger and restlessness had left it undisturbed, Lhiar watche
d the morning stream by like a river around him. It was outside him — yet he felt himself in it. And if the morning was a river, the song was its glimmering. Though, when he looked closely, the glimmering was not mere bustle and restless chatter. It was the dark green, the purple, the black, circles on the water’s surface, circles and ovals — shapes — growing, shrinking, arising, and transforming. He began to watch it, the song. To watch it with his ears.
In this way he began to do what few intend to do — what he himself had no intention of doing. To learn the song of the tomtoads.
Chapter IX
A dream: Rhoneh climbed over the surface of the world. Clambered, with his palms and his soles, his back to the sun. Rocks, ledges, roots — he grabbed and clung to them, traded one for the next.
He pushed himself away from the surface and floated up — back — into the air, and then collapsed down again — forward — to the surface. Shuffling over the world.
Again and again he tried to push himself away, only, again and again, to be drawn back. And he wondered what was the nature of the thing that drew him.
So he slipped down through a pore in the surface and dug a deep channel, down to the belly of the world. Down, down, the dark way he dug, until ahead of him he saw that the way opened into a spacious chamber, bright and alive like fire. He approached, and there, sitting outside of the chamber, tucked against the wall of the tunnel, amid gravel and shadow, he saw the boy, the one from the street with the broken hand.
Rhoneh stopped to look down on him, and to wonder at why he sat there, so deep down, and yet outside the threshold to the lowest room of light.
And then, suddenly, Rhoneh was not only himself, coming upon the boy, but was also the very walls of the cavern itself, who, silent and thoughtless, had encircled the boy for as long as he had been there, long before the man “Rhoneh" had ever descended to meet him.
And Rhoneh (only it was not Rhoneh — or not just) tried to think back, to remember when it was that the boy had first come. For if he could remember that, then maybe he could comprehend why it was that he was sitting there on the threshold. Neither above in the world nor ahead in the room of light.
He searched back through time, struggling through all the other irrelevant memories that appeared, as one, half-sleeping, kicks one’s legs to free them from the sheet, searching….