by John Grant
That wasn't to be the case. The World that its inhabitants had always known was being not just manipulated but destroyed – something so obvious that, to me in the middle of it all, it was easy at first not to realize it. The bulk of The World – both material and more importantly spiritual – was being sucked into a furnace, to be melted down and then reconstituted into something else entirely. What that could be, I had and have no knowledge: I think it's likely impossible I ever could have knowledge of it. But here and there in the disorganized shards being left behind could be found foci of stability: myself, for one, because my soulstuff was inextricably conjoined with my physical presence (or perhaps – as I sometimes think when too many bottles of booze have darkened my reflections – perhaps simply because I wasn't clever enough for my soul to be wanted as a part of whatever new thing the molten detritus of The World was becoming). It was my intuition – one that was to be borne out – that Starveling would prove to be another such focus, another seed around which the Dross could crystallize. On my journey to the site of Starveling there would be no familiar landscapes, no well trodden terrains, no fixed mountainslopes and long-eroded river paths. Instead I would find a new and fantasticated land, a land founded upon illogicalities and populated by well forgotten dreams, a scenario of transience that I, by my very passage through it, would witlessly make coagulate into reality. Had I had any control over this process – had I not been so stupid as always not to notice until immediately afterwards that this was what I was doing – I might have rightly thought of myself as a god. As it was, I saddled both the recrudescent Dross of The World – and, more pertinently, my continuing self – with a motley agglomeration of human folk-fancies, and much more. Much worse.
But, as I say, I was too stupid – too brute-stupid – to know what was going on.
~
Imagine the scene. I'd crossed the Sea of Hollows into Albion without much incident, save the lack of a ship: I had walked the waters, unknowingly turning that tract of choppy sea into, forever, a tract of choppy land; in Qazar I'd slept in the wraith of an inn, hearing the spectral cries of past seagulls as I pulled gossamer blankets over my head in the dawn, anxious for an hour's more sleep. I'd strolled along the old winding road, now a rippling bridge that disappeared underfoot behind me. I'd come into a nameless village and almost passed through it before realizing that there had been something different about it as I'd approached. I looked back down the single street, then forward along the ethereal bridge, then back again.
Yes – where all ahead of me was gray-limned, as if probable rather than actual, the hamlet had displayed, from the moment it had first appeared in my vision, a hard-edged definition. And the colors: they were brighter, like those seen through a raindrop. Near to me was a bush of green. A dog, yipping from one doorway to another, was marked in stark black and white. Over there was a wall of good red-brown brick, and projecting from it was an inn sign painted in all the colors of the rainbow but much more substantial than those. Greater contrast could hardly be imagined between this kaleidoscope and the subtle gradations of gray to which I'd become accustomed.
Intrigued, I retraced my steps.
I pushed open the tavern door, appreciating the splintery feel of its wood against my fingertips. The scent of spilled beer came to me – something that had lacked from the inn in Qazar. Sconced torches around the walls made the polished tables gleam. Behind a trestled bar an oaf in an apron beamed.
I gulped. A great thirst was upon me. Ale!
The oaf made no movement as I entered, nor as I ambled in his direction. Stooping, I scraped up a wayward shadow from the floor and squeezed it until it became a purseful of coins; then I leant against the bar.
"A jug of your best," I said. "And be snappy about it. I've a beastly dryness from the road's length."
Still he didn't move.
I raised an eyebrow, having learned this gambit from a dockside trollop in Llandeer.
Not a twitch from him. Still he leered doorward, as if anticipating some new entrant.
I reached out and shoved his shoulder. It was like pushing against a cliff-face.
"He's fixed," said a voice of warm beeswax behind me. "He's mine."
I turned to look at the speaker. It had been my impression that the oaf and I were alone in this place, but for some reason my eyes had glid past the table in the corner by the window.
"I made him," added the figure sitting there.
I was speechless. I had seen the beauty of the golden woman, which my own maker had believed to surpass all. My soul, inherited from him, had modified that judgement, but as yet not greatly: I thought I was more perceptive of beauty in other beings than he ever was, but then that is what we all believe of our own tastes. I had seen the loveliness, too, of mountains and skies – of musical notes and a graceful equation – yet I had experienced nothing that could be compared with the beauty of this ... being.
I cannot say "man" or "woman," for it was neither, and both; I cannot even say with full certainty that it was a human being, or a mortal at all. Instead it was a confluence of radiance into fleshly form, yet I sensed that the flesh would be of feather-lightness – like a cake that has lost the characteristics of its eggs and flour and become a fluffy thing with the will to float on the room's draft. In my first glance I observed the creature by means of all my senses, overloading them. And yet I cannot pinpoint the root of all this being's brilliant beauty. It is a truism to say that some sights are too fair to be captured in words, but the individual by the window was, I believe, too fair to be captured even in sight – certainly I can conjure up in my mind's eye not even one morsel of what made it lovely.
Yet I can still focus – as clearly as if I confronted it now – some of the being's attributes. The overwhelming sensuality, for example. That may appear an odd observation to make of something that was by its very nature asexual – indeed, in many ways seemingly aphysical. Even the experience itself was paradoxical: I found every cell of my body to be sexually vibrant, yet my member remained unaroused. And I can still see bits of the being, like its light-white face and the clear yellow-green of its feline eyes. Oh, yes, one more thing: its head was capped by a copper-colored fuzz, like a halo.
But all of this, so powerful as it may seem, was ephemeral beside one other thing. I've noted before that, in the times after the dissolution of The World, I felt myself to be more truly present than anything else in the Dross. Facing this luminous being, I knew that I was in the company at last of something else with that self-same property.
"Come and sit down," said the entity. "See, your ale is already set here for you."
And sure enough it was: a stoneware tankard topped with foam. The polished table had, I could have sworn, before been empty of anything save the being's reflection.
"We must talk," it said. "You and I. I have decided that it shall be so."
"Talk ..." I said with a tongue of cloth and teeth of rubber. "Us." I was sitting opposite my interlocutor, my beer halfway to my mouth; either I had been carried to my chair by ensorcellment or, as seems in retrospect more likely, I had been enchanted in a less magical fashion by the being's beauty.
"You have a name?" I continued, bringing myself under control. My past had, after all, taught me the importance of names.
She chuckled – the chuckle made me think of her as a "she," although in a way divorced from the surging sexuality in which her presence bathed me – she chuckled, I say, and eased back in her seat. "More names than your mind will hold," she assured me, unreassuringly.
"My mind is humble," I agreed, "though it will hold more than I've yet tried to put in it."
Again she laughed, though her laughter didn't hurt me. "Your own name is Piggy," she said, "a fact that I know because I know everything there is left to know here in the Dross."
The ale tasted as good as it looked. I had drunk half the tankard down, and still it was full.
"There was much more to know when The World was here," I said.
"So
wistful you are, Piggy," she said, reaching forward and taking my free hand in hers; her touch was like the soft underbelly fur of a kitten. It made me tremble. "There's no need to mourn the passing of The World, you know, or to look on the Dross as inferior just because it's been left behind. Both are as real as each other. The Dross's malleability is a quality that The World might envy, if it were so wise."
I found her words oddly unconvincing. It seemed plain to me – still does – that she was not of the Dross, but was saying all this merely to comfort me.
"But let us not talk on such things," she suddenly said, though in truth I had talked very little at all. She released my mitt and folded her fingers neatly, moving them covertly against her palms. "I have brought us together here so that we may play a wagering game – a game that'll determine not only the future of the Dross but also your role in it."
"I've never gambled," I said. "I wouldn't know how to begin."
"It's easy: I'll show you how."
She ceased whatever she had been doing with her fingers and unlaced her hands, spreading them out with their palms towards me.
"Here are the cards we'll play with," she said.
I could see no cards but, as she fanned her hands, I slowly began to realize that there were indeed cards there. Though no rectangles of pasteboard flew from one hand to the other, a flurry of sensations did. She stopped the flow, and deliberately laid out a single empty space on the table between us.
"You observe?" she said negligently.
And I did. The card portrayed a man being crucified. I felt the nails being hammered into my wrists and ankles – just as I'd felt them so long ago in the disordered period of my existence.
"And again?"
A constellation glistened in the night sky, its five main stars like punctures through into some fierier creation.
"And here, a last time."
A home burned as I watched it, the occupants' screams heavier even than the smoky air.
"Give me the cards," I said.
She sorted them quickly and passed the pack to me. My fingers closed around a handful of nothingness – but what nothingness! Here was the stuff of lifetimes. In a tidal wave of emotions, I was being all simultaneously birthed and slaughtered, the latter in several ingenious ways. I knew famine and plenty, gaiety and gloom, triumph and humiliation ... and hatred. There were also some passions that I knew nothing of; one of these was the emotion that had dumbfounded me on my first turning from the bar to espy the being who now sat facing me.
I put the deck down with a shudder. All this from holding merely the cards's edges.
"Your cards are too ... strong for me."
She smiled. "Only if you're touching them direct, dear Piggy. If I handle them on your behalf, you'll be all right."
She gestured toward the window beside us. Moments ago it had been mid-afternoon, but now it was just past sunset, the time when the deep-blue twilight seems to make the air thrum.
"The evening's the time for gambling," she said. "Not the day." There was a green eyeshade on her forehead that I'd not noticed before. A cigar curled blue smoke from a stone ashtray by her elbow.
She shuffled the cards and then spread them out rapidly in front of her, in four neat rows. I waved my hands above them to check my first impression – that they were, as it might be, face-down. True enough, no created emotions jangled through me.
"A simple game," she said, taking a draw on her cigar. "As simple as a game could be. All you must do is point at a card, and it becomes yours. I take the card immediately to its right – or from the left-hand end of the next row, should there be none to your card's right on its own row. Those are the rules."
"But what am I trying to achieve?" I said. "How will the winner be determined?" I leaned forward urgently, my elbow almost knocking my alejug over. "What are the stakes?"
"I'll tell you that after we play. Now come on, hurry up: I can't tarry here forever."
"But you could cheat!" I protested.
"D'you think I would?" She raised her eyes, and stared directly into mine. Hers were corridors leading to places I knew I'd never be able to go, yet yearned to. I knew, then, that if she indeed gulled me it would bring me greater delight than if any other adversary had played me fair.
The seconds passed.
"Well, that's settled, then," she said at length. "Now, my friend Piggy, waste no more time, but select your first card."
I pointed one out at random – I don't know how I knew where each one lay, but I did. She flipped it towards me, and it landed between my elbows, face-up.
I am a young woman. The enemies of my husband have pegged me out naked in the desert sand and hacked my breasts away. The biting insects have found the source of the warm sweet smell, and are feasting on the stumps; I can feel the tickling legs of thousands more hurrying up over my belly. The sky is full of men's faces, sweating as they jeer at my screams ...
I raised my head dizzily to look at her face. She smiled lightly. I felt sick. My coarse-haired chest throbbed.
"Whose pain did you feel?" she said.
"Hers. Hers, of course. Only, it's mine, now, as well."
"Only that?"
"Yes."
"Didn't you feel the pain of her tormentors?"
"No!" I slammed my hand on the table, so that my tankard danced. "I hated – hate – them."
"They were human beings. The cards tell no fictions. They were in pain. Have you no compassion for them?"
"No!"
She nodded, and picked up her own card. From the far side of the table I could catch only a whiff of it. A child was being ripped from its mother's stomach and dashed against a wall. This time I could not hold back: I turned away and retched. The vomit vanished before it reached the stone floor.
When I looked back at her she was regarding me impassively, squinting through the smoke from her cigar. Putting it down, she blew a couple of perfect smoke-rings.
"Your turn."
"Must I?"
"You must, to stay in the game. Surely you've realized that by now."
"Maybe humans can take this sort of stuff,' I said, 'but I'm not a human. I'm just a lowly beast."
"But your master's beast. He infected you with his humanness. You grow daily more human. It was humans who did these things – not once, but hundreds and thousands of times. Can't you rely on your human part enough to stomach it just the once? Come on, Piggy – give it one more try."
It was true, what she said: though I was merely a beast, a segment of me aspired to the mannishness of my master. I shrugged her my acquiescence.
The next card flittered to the tabletop in front of me.
They manhandle me, screaming and fighting as I am, through the narrow dusty streets to where a priest awaits me beside the leaping flames. I don't know which I dread more, his absolution of my sins or the searing, man-sized griddle they've erected over the fire, the air boiling above it. He doesn't look me in the face, but mumbles his words so low and fast that I can barely hear them through the logs' spits and the breaths of my captors: all I learn from him is that the Creator determined the colors of skins with some good purpose in mind, which it is not my prerogative to question; my love was a dirty and forbidden thing, best scorched from men's memories. Then they throw me on my naked back on the red-hot metal ...
My forehead was resting on my arms. I was weeping. The card had gone, though I had no knowledge of her having taken it away – perhaps, rather, those accursed cards just died when their function had been fulfilled. The still-lingering pain of my frying was a trivial inconvenience compared with the misery I'd felt when at last I'd recognized – truly recognized – the inevitability of the fact that these fellow-men of mine, fellows yet self-proclaimed forever-strangers to me, were going to cast me onto the griddle, and watch me cook.
"What do you feel for them?" she hissed at me.
I didn't raise my head. "I hate them with a hatred I didn't know I had," I said. "I want to treat them as they treated
me: I want to watch their flesh scorch as black as mine, before the fat runs off and the bones are revealed. And even then I want their agonies to continue. I want their dying memory to be of my pissing on their faces."
"Look at me, Piggy."
I obeyed, my neck creaking in protest. Her face, as pure as a babe's, shone clearly through my smeared vision.
"What of the priest?" she said.
"He most of all. The worst I would reserve for him."
"Didn't you pity him?"
I began to laugh, painfully, through my tears. It was answer enough.
"Piggy," she began, laying her hand on mine again – this time I shook it off.
"Your guise," I said, "is one of virtue, yet what your vile cards reveal of your imaginings shows you to be possessed of a greater evil than I've known exist."
"I told you before, Piggy, those are no imaginings of mine. The cards cannot invent, merely recall. Those are true memories of human deeds."
"They're fantasies!" I said, rearing back from the table. "They're your own nightmares – or, worse, maybe to you they're not nightmares at all."
"Believe what you will," she said blandly. She puffed her dead cigar back alight, then gazed down at the cards in front of her. She picked up the one to the right of the space where my last had been.
Again I was troubled by a leaking vestige from her card. A man was thrown into a bath of acid. Fumes rose angrily. He would take a time to die.
"True stories," she said, looking up after a while. "Human deeds."
"No!" I roared. "Fancies – sick fancies!"
"Can't you find memories like these amid your once-human soulstuff?" She frowned slightly, to show me that her inquiry was a sincere one. "Didn't your master hear of such things? Even witness them? Certainly he did."
I remembered yet again how the priestesses belonging to the golden lady had nailed me to their board. They had shown neither compassion nor compunction. But that was different: I had been only a beast, not a human. Surely they would not have ...
And then I saw, both through my own tangled memories and the clearer traces of my master's, some of the things that humans had inflicted on other humans, back when The World had been with us. But harshness of that kind was not possible in the Dross, not among the ghosts who were its people.