He turned.
He walked back.
Mistaking him for a potential customer, some tired prostitute called:
—Come on, darling. We’ll go out tonight! (They always say ‘tonight,’ even when they accost you at ten in the morning.) But he did not fall into the usual banter, about how she should pay him since his services were clearly superior.
He walked on.
He walked the bridge most of the night.
Toward morning, he stopped for a minute, then, a few steps on, stopped some minutes more. Finally he sat down with his back against the stone wall, his mouth wide for breath, sometimes closing his eyes tightly, sometimes opening them in the dark.
He woke to the day’s traffic raging about him. Getting to his feet, aching and unsteady, he began to walk again. The usual bridge voices—wagoners cursing, pedestrians chattering, pimps and prostitutes shouting to one another—had been joined by tens, hundreds, thousands of others. It seemed he could now hear every voice in Kolhari reverberating along this stone strip. Angry voices, cooing voices, wheedling voices, greedy voices, bewildered voices, cajoling voices all knitted and nattered in argument and antiphon, a tangle of altercation and contention, haggling over commerce, lust, madness, travel, as if there were no other topics in the city, all of them centering on this bridge, all of them on him on it, as he walked from one end to the other.
He saw an apple an ox’s or a camel’s hoof had squashed a section of, before it had rolled or been kicked against the wall. He picked that up and ate it. Later a parsnip fell from the tailgate of a wagon as a wheel jarred on loose paving. When it was still on the ground at his fifth trip back and forth, he picked it up and, with the gutter dirt and all that had darkened one side, ate that too. He didn’t eat too much else because there was little else lying around, and because the sound of his own teeth and jaws and saliva and the food bits sloshing and grinding as he chewed and swallowed nearly obliterated the voices. And he was sure by now that at the core of this contestatory hubbub some secret was being discussed that, if he could only overhear it, would net him untold wealth, power, and fame—enough to make the empress and all her ministers at the High Court of Eagles grovel before him.
He ate little.
He slept little.
For much of the time he did not look very different from any other madman you might see ambling the Bridge of Lost Desire. Sometimes, in his effort to listen, to keep his step in rhythm with the voices, he would clench his jaw so tightly that his face and shoulders would shake. His steps became, then, staggers. When he bumped into someone, he turned and stared, astonished, bewildered, and furious at them for distracting him from his infinitely important task; sometimes he would curse them through gritted teeth—at least in the first days. Later, when he bumped someone (which happened more and more rarely, as people avoided him more and more widely), he did not notice.
What this madness was, or where it came from, or what lay at its center only the nameless gods can know. Certainly not I. Possibly it had no cause save the exhaustions of his life, myself a part of them, my former efforts at friendship and my various moments of selfishness all equal in that they had only helped to wear away whatever in him had till then been able to endure. What I can say, however, just as I can say it began: after fifteen, or twenty, or twenty-five days, the madness stopped.
Naked on the ground by the bridge rail, he woke for the fifth time in fifteen minutes—or five hours.
Three men stood talking beside him. One with a shaved head had dark wings of paint around his eyes and wore jewels at his ears. One could have been some tall, merchant’s clerk, with his short, drab tunic, his long, thin hands. The third was a squat workman, a hammer hanging from a noose on his belt the way a soldier might wear a sword. His brown hands and naked feet were gray with rock dust.
—Do you remember, cried the bald one with the makeup, how Vanar used to come to the bridge here, to pick up the boys?
—Sure, declared the workman. I used to see him all the time! People talked about him down here. Why didn’t he take me, I always wondered. But he never did.
—Oh, there’s the kind he liked. Like that. The bald one pointed at the young man sitting against the wall. I tell you, the filthier, the crazier they were, the more he wanted them, first let one of those wander, dirty and deranged, onto the bridge, and he’d be off with him in a minute—
—No! countered the workman. That wasn’t what he was after. His eyes were all for the yellow-headed barbarian scamps hustling down at the market end. (The workman’s own hair was black as raw oil, bubbling up from some swampy spill.) Oh, he might take a poor beggar like this one here for a meal or a drink, or maybe help him to a doorway out of the rain—I’ve seen him do that. But he only wanted the little yellow-haired southerners. I saw him with enough of them, going and coming.
—At least once I saw him take a plump little mountain girl off from here, said the clerk; though he didn’t look southern, his accent was, somewhat surprisingly, barbaric. (Still slumped against the wall, my friend glanced up—but only with his eyes.) He was a fine man, Vanar. A character, yes. But I’ve always thought that must be the real taste of such men. Perhaps he took a boy now and then. But I’m sure he only did it either to make people talk—or because he truly wanted to help. Everyone speaks of him as a good man. It’s a sad comment, I know. But he wouldn’t have the reputation he does, unless he liked his girls. And there’re more than enough of them out here. The boys are always about, but they’re a very small part of the business.
—Oh, no, my dears, declared the bald man in the eye makeup. I remember both of you, and you were only visitors to the bridge in those days. I was a daily denizen and a fully paid-up guild member in the sisterhood. I saw more of this overground sewer than either of you. And I know what he went after, believe me.
The workman chuckled and said:
—The way Vanar would carry on down here used to make me laugh. I knew he was rich, sure. But you could have sat me down and picked me up when I learned he was a count.
—A count, my dear? the made-up one declared. That man was in line to be a suzerain! ‘Count,’ you say? You must have heard people call her ‘The Countess.’ The way she went on here was a terror, as if there were no Neveryóna waiting for her back home!
—Well, observed the clerk, when you are as rich as Lord Vanar was, there are some things you don’t have to worry about.
This bridge has seen it all, declared the bald one, touching ringed fingers to both jeweled ears. And it has seen more than I’ll ever tell you. Do you remember…
But, walking again, they were out of earshot.
That was when my friend, sitting against the bridge wall, realized he had heard only the three of them. He had no idea, nor would he ever now, who this Vanar’ was. (Though it’s good to see you smile at his name. Indeed, it might have been Vanar they spoke of back then; but it could have been any number of others who would have made you smile as broadly.) They had made sense; he had heard them. Save a donkey cart, trundling by across the walkway, it was quiet. Whatever great secret he’d been listening for, it had been uttered.
Oh, it had turned out some profoundly trivial, self-evident homily like: You are only yourself, with your name, and nothing more. No…that wasn’t it. (When he tried to tell me later, he actually seemed surprised that he still couldn’t remember it, as if his whole reason for recounting the occurrence to me had been to prompt its full return.) It was much simpler. It was so simple that, once heard, even with having forgotten it, there was little pull to think about it any longer. But at its utterance, the extraneous babble had ceased.
He raised his hand from where his fingertips touched his shins. His knuckles were black with dirt. He turned his arm over. His palms were only slightly lighter, and their crevices bore black lines as if someone who could write had inked them.
He touched his cheek. Dry skin against dry skin—a foul dryness, too. It let him know his face was probably as dirty as h
is hands. In the filth over his calf he saw several small sores—and a larger one on his ankle where, he remembered vaguely, a day or so back someone had pushed him against a cart wheel, and he’d scraped himself to the bone.
He got slowly to his feet, hips aching, shoulders sore, knees stiff. One nostril was raw inside. As he gained his balance, loose mucus trickled into his hairs on his upper lip. Limping a little, he walked to the bridge’s end—and kept walking, into the loud market.
4
MOST PEOPLE HURRYING AROUND him did not look. But now and again, one or another at a distance would stare till he looked back. By the nameless gods, he thought, what kind of half-beast, half-man have I become? And grinned; and walked on, making for the public fountain.
A man-high stone in the market’s center, the fountain spewed water, chattering from the natural cleft at the top, down into a carved basin—and how many times have you yourself, and how many others, stopped to drink there, if only on your way to, or on your return from, our performance?
He took his place in a line of five. In front of him a young woman with a green rag bound on her unevenly cropped hair glanced back and pulled forward, shrinking the distance between herself and the tarry-handed sewer-worker before her, while the fig vendor joining the line behind, his basket near empty and strung round his neck to rest on his hip, hung back, not actually staring.
He closed his eyes a moment, took a breath, and grinned again.
The woman in the head-rag drank hurriedly, left quickly.
He stepped up to the basin, plunged his hands into the spring water, and doused his hair and face. His naked flesh drew into bumps, as if feathers there had been plucked from pullet skin. He sloshed water under his armpits, rubbing the hair there with his fists. He sluiced freezing water over his arms, turning them this way and that, working at the black and wrinkled nut of his elbow, at the thick and scaly knob of his wrist. He splashed his neck, his chest, his chin. He rubbed his groin, his hips, his buttocks.
His legs were streaked with mud.
Brick swirled with dirty wash.
Once he glanced behind. The fig vendor, two more women, and another man still waited for him, nervously. Behind them, a fat market porter muttered something bitter, turned, and stalked off with his brooms over his shoulder, to disappear between the stalls of garden implements and spices on the left, cooking utensils and honeys to the right.
He went on washing.
Finally he leaned his buttocks against the rock and, with his wet forefinger, first on his left foot, then on his right, scrubbed between one toe and another, now and again scooping out another handful of water that ran down his leg as he cleaned off the ligaments of his feet. (The fig vendor gave up and went; one of the braver women behind moved in to take her drink and, when he’d started to reach in the bowl, gave him a harsh look so that he pulled his hand back and waited for her to finish.) Wet, shivering, he stood up and splashed through the muddy puddle he’d left before the fountain where the brick was worn down to gray-green stone around the inefficient drains. He walked to the market’s edge and loped twice about the whole square, sometimes flapping his elbows to let his flanks and underarms dry.
Then he walked onto the bridge.
Two youngsters, one a barbarian with whom he’d once traded tricks, called to him:
—Hey!
He nodded, waved back to them—struck by a sudden and ungainly sense of the community in this awkward spot, where all the city’s fragments jammed together without quite filling the space, so that a certain play in the engine of the port was apparent here, a shock, a shiver that was doubtless felt from the real and resounding waterfront to the elegant and unimaginable High Court.
—Hello, there! That was the grain-seller, who always took him to the warehouse five streets off, where the late sun fell through the roof chinks onto the loft’s scattered straw.
He swung around, grinning, went up to the old man, who regarded him strangely, and put his hand on the shoulder of the brown tunic:
—You’ll be around for a while? he asked. I’ll be back in a few minutes, Papa. You stay here, I’ll be back, now—
—Well, I don’t know…the grain-seller said. What was the matter with you last week, anyway? I came by here and I saw you—at least I think it was you…
—You wait for me, Papa! He pressed the grain-seller’s arm. You wait for me, now. I know I don’t look too good right through here. But I’ll be back. Papa let me hold a couple of coins—no, don’t give me anything! (The elderly man had started to move away.) You just wait for me. We’ll have a good time. Down where you used to take me. In the warehouse, right? I’ll be back! He turned and sprinted toward the bridge’s far end.
Where you hurrying, darling?
He looked around at the listless voice to see a thin woman, her eyes winged with paint and a colored scarf wound high on her ribs just under her darkly aureoled breasts.
—You want some fun tonight? she went on, not even looking.
—Sure, little gillyflower! He stepped up to her. How much do you want to give me for the best piece you’ll ever have?
You? The woman frowned nearsightedly at him. Me, give you anything? I’m not even talking to you! I’m not even thinking of you! I was addressing another gentleman entirely.
Think about me, little flower. Think about me and weep! I may not look like much, but I could give you a time to tell your grandchildren about. No, and he narrowed an eye at her, you couldn’t afford my prices.
The woman made a sound between a laugh and snuffle and turned to call to another man passing:
—Hello, darling? How you doing?
Shaking his head and pleased with himself, he hurried to the other end of the bridge.
A few streets down the Pave was a yard with a cistern, where, with ropes still attached, a few ceramic buckets were always left near the wall. Though he’d taken off the surface grime, the dirt felt as if it had somehow worked into, if not through, his whole body; as determined as he was to be rid of it, he was not sure if water could wash it away.
At the cistern’s wall, he chose a chipped pail, lowered it, felt it hit, then bob on the slack; he waved the rope wide till the lopsided container filled and sank. Then he hauled it, sloshing, up beside the iron staples, caught the bucket’s bottom with one hand, hefted it high, and dumped cold water over his head.
It seemed even colder than the fountain’s gush—because he was already half dry.
He hauled up another bucket.
And another.
Somewhere around the fifth, with his mouth wide and water running into it from his moustache, drops falling from his lashes to his cheeks, trickles from his beard running down his chest, he paused.
At the other side of the cistern, a heavy girl, with her wet jar dripping onto the cistern wall, was just looking away from him with a serious expression. She wore a rough robe. Her arms were lightly freckled. Shaking water from her fingertips, she pushed a wisp of hair aside, where it stayed, moist, against her temple.
In a house behind, an old woman pulled back a raffia curtain to call shrilly:
—Get in the house! Get in the house, now! You have work! Get in!
The girl turned from the cistern, her jar on her hip, to amble away, her arm out and waving, gently as some gull’s wing, for balance.
Women’s bodies?
He looked in the bucket, still half full, lifted it again, and dashed it over himself.
Men’s bodies?
No, he preferred women’s bodies. And however many men he went with, however few women, and whatever contradiction anyone might see in it, he had to accept that too. And if, in two years, or ten years, his preferences changed, that would simply be something more to accept—though if they hadn’t changed in these few months (he started to shiver in the faintest of breeze), he doubted they would!
He watched her go, her arm with its light speckling still waving, beckoning him on, beyond the cistern, beyond the yard, beyond the bridge, beyon
d Kolhari, till it seemed suddenly to indicate a border to the entire country that, truly, he had never even thought of before, a border that, simply because, however uncertainly, it must exist, he now realized, as the girl with her jar turned stolidly into another alley, if only because the city had taught him that such borders were not endings so much as transitions, he now knew he might someday flee across, down whatever street, across whatever bridge, along whatever road, through whatever tangled wilderness, into whenever and wherever, the possibilities vaster than the seeable, endless as the sayable.
To flee beyond Nevèrÿon itself was no more impossible than his flight across the unknown to Kolhari, his flight across whatever madness to this new sanity.
He went back to the bridge.
The grain-seller was gone—probably with some barbarian. But the warm weather, he could see as he stood there, looking now up, now down the walkway, had brought out other men.
Was it three weeks, or three months later? While he lay on his back in the warehouse loft with a chink of sunlight falling through the roof into his left eye, he glanced down at the gray head on his belly:
—Hey, Papa. You can give me something to do besides this, can’t you?
—What do you mean, the elderly man asked sleepily.
—Give me some work. Reaching down to rough the man’s sparse hair, he chuckled. I can’t spend my whole life on the bridge, Papa, waving this half-peeled goose gullet at hungry men who want to go off and tumble about as though we were boys behind a barn! I’m a good worker. I can work hard.
—You’re a good drinker. The man laughed.
The young man blinked up at the chink. No, Papa. I don’t drink that much anymore. You haven’t seen me drunk in a week.
—I can’t give you any work here, the sparse-haired grain-seller said. I have some drivers taking some carts for me down to the Vinelet market…but I couldn’t hire you. It wouldn’t look right. I mean if someone in town recognized you. No, I—
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