by John Grant
And no scribe at the end of it to jot down my musings, with his crablike hand curled around his quill and his face all wrinkled with concentration and the tip of his tongue poking between his lips, and his reluctance to look up and gaze upon my face. In those days my thoughts weren't of much interest to anyone except myself – and even then, to be honest, still not much. It was only later, after things had changed, that people and all the other mortal beings of The World's Dross began to expect me to keep a diary of my doings, so that after my death a stuffy scholar can piece together the story of my life – changing it, in that very act, into something new, something that will be as much his as mine.
"After my death"?
I should be so lucky.
~
This is the time of day that I like the best: the early part of the night. The castle is quieting, the last pots have been jangled in the kitchens and emptied in the latrines, and the horses in their stables are silent except for occasional snickered equine confidences. Most of the guards are in their beds, their armor just a heap of empty metal shapes on the floor, so I won't have to listen to their mindless clanking until the morning. Sometimes there's a scream from the dungeons, but I try to discourage that sort of thing after dark. In an hour or so the vampire bats and the owls will be out and the dragon will be a-roar, warning off trespassers and benighted travelers, and the thunder-and-lightning spell will give its diurnal chuggety-chug as it gears itself up in readiness to split, if required, the ebon into a billion humming fragments; I hope in the nameless name of the Darkness that it won't be needed tonight. I wish, as I wish every time that I'm allowed to be on my own, that I could dispense with these appurtenances of evil and power but ... well, they're expected of me. They come with the job.
It's a bloody stupid place to build a castle, one would have thought, here beneath the looming slopes of Starveling-stage. Castles – especially castles for things like me – should be stark against the skyline, their grim, angular walls bleakly staring across all of the surrounding countryside, both a statement of unconquerable might and a reminder of the power of their lord's rule ... not to mention a defence against any who should ignore those unsubtle hints. But the builders of this castle – my castle, Starveling itself – must have been ignorant of the symbolism of tyranny, for they constructed its walls of white marble, and set the edifice in the middle of what, although now just a weed-strangled wreckage, was then a thriving city. When I realized their error, some time after I took up residence, I had my minions stain the walls dark with filth and blood, but I never got round to moving the castle as a whole to the top of Starveling-stage, which is surely where it belongs. Maybe one day ...
No. The Dross is accustomed to Starveling being where it is. So, more importantly, am I.
But from Starveling-stage's high plateau the views would be so breathtakingly good ...
~
A guard enters. His face looks white and nervous.
"Is there anything else that the Master requires before ... ?" he begins, his voice the thinnest twig on the branch as the mounting breeze warns of tempest.
"NO!" I bellow. The tapestries beat against the walls with the force of my shout. "I have told you all to leave me alone for the night!" The guard's face eases: by giving vent to my wrath I have fulfilled his expectations, reassuring him. But I give him more: "Do I have to cast you blockheads to the tormentors before you learn to heed my commands?"
The pretty pallor comes back to his cheeks. He salutes me with a limp hand and is gone.
I grin, though there's hot moisture pooling at the sides of my mouth. The threat was empty, as fundamentally he knew. If my power were less absolute I would not be at liberty to exercise it so sparingly as I do. Power brings with it the freedom to advise and cajole.
~
Solitude. Oh, yes.
Sometimes I wonder if it's perhaps, everything considered, all actually worth it for these precious times of solitude. Loneliness I'm inured to; solitude is my luxury.
I breathe a shroud of curling whiteness and put the first of the night's heady-smelling bottles to my lips.
It's funny how one's mind forgets some of the major details of the past and yet can conjure up the apparent trivia with such vividness, producing mental scenes so rich in every detail that it seems you're no longer just remembering them, you're reliving them. Perhaps there is some use in my having a scribe, after all: I could call for him now and order him to search all through the scribblings of his predecessor until he could calculate precisely which year it was, counting back from the present, that saw the change in me. But I'll leave him to his slumbers or his doxies or, if my suspicions are correct, his catamites. I don't want anyone with me now.
Besides, if my memory serves me right, the first thing I did after his predecessor died was to burn all that he'd written. It was as if I were casting off the burden of my past. Just for a moment, I felt like a new-born child all over again – which was a curious sensation for me to feel, come to think of it, because of course I'd never been a new-born child in the first place.
I wonder what it's like – being born. Perhaps I'll ask the inkfingers about it in the morning. The trouble is, him and the rest of them'll likely all be too tongue-tied with their terror to be able to give me a straight answer, for fear of incurring my wrath. The rack or the white heat of the tongs would make 'em describe it for me, of course, but I'd never know for certain if it was the truth they'd told or just some wild imagination babbled out to try to make the pain stop.
Stupid creatures, mortals. What makes them think that pain ever stops?
~
I can remember who brought me into being. He was a man who had been blinded at the behest of the cruel woman he loved – blinded already to her cruelty by his love for her, of course, but now she'd had her soldiers seize him and burn his eyes away. He was thrown naked out of this very castle, and sent to walk The World with nothing for his companion save his despondency and his sightlessness. He never spoke to me about what it was like, those first few weeks, begging people he could no longer see for rags with which to cover himself and food to put in his belly; but from the way his hands used to shake whenever he was not-talking about it I can guess it was misery. Must have been. And yet I can't, to be honest, feel any true pain on his behalf, because if it hadn't been for that distress then he might never, from the pits of his isolation, have created me.
I was closer to him than any human being had ever been – closer, indeed, than any human being could ever be to another. I was dearer to him than a lover, or even a child. Lovers often say that they are of one soul, but in our case it was actually true: we were of one soul. His soul. There was enough inside him of whatever fabric it is that souls are made of to fill not just himself but also my own clumsy, unspirited husk. He had conjured the conception of me from his own dreamings and the matter of me from the earth and the air around him, from the waters of rivers and the fire of sunsets, but a soul for me was not something that could be magicked into existence: he had to tap off some of his own soulstuff and pour it into me.
I was too stupid to be grateful.
In fact, in those days I was too stupid for anything much. It's easy enough to talk in the abstract of feeding off someone else's spirit – a gift gladly given, but a one-way flow of psychic nutrient however you choose to look at it. It's quite another business actually to live that way. Had it been possible for him to give me all the soulstuff I required in a single great dollop, and there an end to it, I might have found my own, independent wits far earlier. As it was, he was the primary and I the satellite, with the center of rotation being inside him. There was a constant flux of soulstuff through me, none of it ever seeming to stay still long enough for it to congeal in place and become me, my exclusive property.
Because of my soullessness, my master declined to give me a name – and, indeed, I had no name for myself. Some of the children we met called me "Piggy" because of my appearance; I answered to their calls of "Piggy"
but I didn't regard it as a name – merely as a descriptive tag, hung from me by string. I was just ... my master's beast.
I saw things in a haze, events rushing by outside me, rarely seeming to impinge upon me directly. I hadn't then learned the knack of ordering my perceptions to make events occur in a steady and logical progression: I hadn't discovered how to impose the arrow of time upon my experiences. Past, present and future were all interchangeable for me; I had no fixed present, no sensation of "now." It is an ignorance that I might often wish I still possessed.
I can remember some things from that period, however, although whether any of them hold or held any significance is something that I guess at rather than judge. Somewhen and somewhere I met the cruel golden woman who had blinded my master, and she tormented me, too – perhaps torture and slaughter were all that she ever did – so that pain filled my universe without beginning and without end. She had her minions nail me to a board and mutilate me until my body was so damaged that my master was forced to withdraw his soulstuff from it. Later – it must have been later – I was in my body again, knowing my identity only because of that fact, and I discovered that he had taken those mutilations, and all the agonies that came with them, to himself, rendering me whole once more.
I loved him sacred sevenfold for that act of love.
And then there was the time of his going. All of this was very muddled in my potpourri mind, you understand; but I can recall as my first moment of proper mental clarity the instant that the golden woman plunged a dagger into his throat, wounding him mortally. She left him for dead, but he wasn't yet quite dead. Enough of his soulstuff remained attached to his fleshly self for him to direct its departure. We were in the corridor of a lushly furnished hotel. (Don't ask me where the hotel – or even the idea of a hotel – came from. It was all wrong, except that it was only afterwards I realized this. At the time, as awareness seeped into me in perfect synchrony with the seepage of life out of the gash in my master's throat, the hotel was just another part of the jumble of my existence.)
He put part of his soulstuff into a flawed gem, a stone gewgaw, and the rest of it he donated in perpetuity to myself. Maybe I've got that the wrong way round – maybe I was the principal recipient of his essence, and the jewel merely took the overflow (because I was of course a much smaller receptacle for soulstuff than my master) – but I think it likely that what he gave me were the leftovers from the stuff he imparted to the gem. Certainly, as his eyes glazed, I got the impression that – however great the love he had for me, his solitary true companion – the stone was more important than I was. In my more cynical, self-hating moments – and there are a lot of those – I think that maybe he gave me only enough soulstuff to ensure the survival of the gem. Through bubbles of blood he told me where to take it, and I did so; only then did I start grieving for him.
The World was falling apart around then. Even as I left the emptied body of my master, lying sprawled and gruesome on the garishly carpeted corridor floor, even as I felt my own, independent consciousness settling into position, so that events around me were becoming ordered into a rationalized progression – even then I could see that this dissolution was happening. Great swathes of the past were fading away like ancient ink, and being written over in a fine strong hand, so that no trace of them remained. Wherever I looked, the artifacts of humankind were fragile and cloud-edged, their permanence eroded: their existence had become strictly provisional, so that at any moment a whim of the departing World might not only render them as if they had never been, but make that in fact the case. The only rule was constant change; the only thing of permanence was transitoriness.
No. I lie. People, too, had a permanence – a permanence of soul, however much they changed superficially. People and presumably other sentient creatures – because I was now vain enough to describe myself as sentient. There was a difference, though, between us. I was aware of all the changes that were going on, but it seemed to me that my human counterparts were not. I would see the same person changing in costume, role, skin-color, age and sex – even from dead to alive and back again – all within the space of seconds. Sometimes people disappeared; sometimes they seemed to pop into existence out of nowhere yet be totally unsurprised by this event. It took me a long while to realize that their lack of concern came about because they had no cognizance of any such change: as the past altered, in detail and in total, so did their memories of it. The person who, in my unsouled perception, had abruptly changed from a priest to a harlot knew nothing of it, because in her/his own mind s/he had always been a harlot.
More than that, The World around that person had, so far as s/he was concerned, always been, if not identical to the way it was now, then at least rationally different: the myriad of altered versions of The World each came with an entirely self-consistent history, an evolved past. That was why, however much a person's appearance and past might vary with each second, the person was, at the most fundamental level – the level of the essence – unaffected.
Such inferences came to me some while after, because I was more preoccupied with the many changes that were going on in me. In giving me so great a deal of his soulstuff, my master had also given me much of his mannishness. Over a period of days my tail retracted into the base of my spine and my trotters forked into inelegant fingers and toes and hands and feet. My hind legs grew and swelled until I was walking upright on them. The coarse hairs all over my porcine body remained, so that even to this day I am bristled everywhere; my ears likewise stayed pointed and large, and the tusks of my lower jaw still thrust themselves erectly from the sides of my mouth. But my face flattened, my crudely molded snout became an almost bone-like beak, and curly hair grew over the dome of my head and around my chin. In a dim light I looked like a caricature of a man – but this was much more like a man than I had looked before, and so it satisfied me.
Not my eyes, though. The first time I looked at myself in a mirror I saw that they were still wild eyes – the eyes of a forest boar. I would have recoiled from the wayward ferocities I saw displayed in them were it not for the fact that they so much formed a part with the feelings that surged through me of strength and vitality and virility (I use that word advisedly). I had the appetite of ten in those early days, yet if anything I grew leaner: my body was a steel-ringed barrel rather than a flabby tub. And my rampant appetite was not solely directed towards food and drink: I wanted – I had – to gorge myself on every aspect of my new-found existence. I ran, I swam, I roared, I spoke (despite the protests of unwieldy vocal cords), I slew, I fucked ... oh, yes, there was a lot of fucking for me, because in my new form I found myself the proud possessor of a sprightly mannish phallus, by whose responses to sensual stimulation I was in turns fascinated and devoured. Women, men, creatures of farm and field: all became my partners in sexual congress during my modulation from swine to something manly. Days went by during which it seemed I scarce withdrew my tireless member from some damp receptacle or other before popping it blithely into the next.
The giddy times slowly ended. There was no moment of conscious decision – just a gradual realization that I could gain greater pleasure from talking with someone than tupping them ... or at least from talking with them beforehand. I fell in love with words – fleshlike words, spoken in my own rough voice. My vocabulary increased exponentially, both driven by and driving the ecstatic pleasure I discovered in creating complex artifacts out of verbs and nouns, sensually subjunctive forms and wilfully playful gerunds. They inspired my thoughts to greater and ceaselessly greater heights, and in return my thoughts drove my vocabulary ever outward into the as yet unexplored terrains of the language. The synergy of this generated more energy in me than I had ever imagined existed: I felt it as heat, as if my very being were aflame. Every sensation was an act of learning for me, something that could be classified and stored away and correlated with all the millions of others in the library of my mind. I had great, universe-weaving and universe-destroying notions which I built upward
s and all around me in brightly flashing networks, only to discard each of these objects of beauty as insouciantly as if it had been a piece of colored wrapping-paper, crumpled through use and thereby deprived of its function.
In a way, I suppose that this orgy of words and ideas was really no different from the fleshly splurge in which I'd earlier indulged myself.
And it, too, came to its natural end.
With everything – or almost everything – in a state of perpetual flux and decay, the yen grew in me to find some rock of stability to which I could cling. I required there to be in my life some representation of human endeavor that would retain its form during the dissolution of The World. Like a child who can tolerate all sorts of changes in life, I needed something as omnipresent as a favorite rag doll to trail around behind me.
It was then that I thought of Starveling, which had always been the navel of The World. Once it had been my creator's palace – his and the cruel golden woman's – but with him dead and her presumably fled, then it seemed rightful to me that I should be the successor to the ownership of that vast pile. And who could contradict me? I was ripe with the sap and juices of my own virility; I seemed to be more thoroughly present than anyone else around me. I felt as if I had been stamped right into the core of The World; however much its gossamer peripheries and their denizens should be shredded away into nothingness, I would certainly ... remain. With that strength of mine, I had no conception that anyone might contest my desire to take up what I saw as my rightful inheritance: Starveling.
In the event, I was to be proven right about that. My error was in forgetting that it wasn't just the inhabitants of The World who were losing their own reality but also The World itself. I had conceived myself simply taking ship and horse to Starveling – a perhaps tedious journey, but an unexceptional one, and over ground that would be in essence familiar to me.