by Neil Gaiman
A week later Count Bertran and his retinue came to dine at the castle of Lord Raimon. Raimon was lavish in his hospitality, sparing neither meat nor drink. At the end of the meal the lord clapped, and a troupe of jugglers came out to perform.The jugglers threw knives and caps and apples. They grabbed the hat of one of Raimon's men and threw it back and forth over his head as he tried vainly to catch it. The men and women at the banquet laughed and applauded. One man, however, sat apart; he frowned and studied the jugglers as though presented with a difficult problem in Latin grammar. He had brown hair to his shoulders, brown eyes, a long narrow nose, and a small mouth. He would have been handsome if he had not looked so serious.
'That man," Raimon said, pointing him out to Desire. "He is clerk to Lord Bertran. His name is Aimeric. I want him to desire the countess."
Desire looked at him, and then at Carenza, Count Bertran's wife. She was old, in her forties at least, and worn out from childbearing. Her cheeks had the hollow look of someone with several teeth missing, and there were brown pouches under her eyes.
Desire smiled. "It is done," she said.
Slowly Aimeric looked away from the jugglers, toward the countess Carenza. His face still wore its studious expression, but as Raimon watched it changed, became softer. Once he frowned, as if returning to his senses, but then Carenza laughed and Aimeric surrendered wholly to his enchantment. For the rest of the evening he did not take his eyes off the countess, and when Bertran's party rose to leave he followed her closely, and once he even reached out his hand to touch her cloak.
"I think I have won the wager," Desire said.
"Wait, my lady," Raimon said.
Raimon and Desire became frequent visitors to Bertran's castle. They watched as Aimeric gazed after the countess, as he looked up in delight when she entered the banqueting hall. Raimon sought him out and spoke to him, and he noticed that the clerk took every opportunity to mention his beloved's name in conversation.
But Aimeric made no move to speak to her. At supper he kept to his place at a lower table. When he saw her coming toward him in one of the drafty corridors of the castle he hurried out of her way, and she and her ladies would pass by without glancing in his direction.
"I have won the wager, my lady," Raimon said when they had retired to the rooms Bertran had given them for the night. "His fear of the count, and his habit of obedience, are stronger than desire. He will never speak to her, let alone take her to his bed."
Desire said nothing, but went to the pitcher of water Bertran's servants had left for them. She poured water into a goblet, then breathed softly on the water.
"What are you doing?" Raimon asked.
"Hush," Desire said.
Raimon moved closer to her and looked into the goblet. As he watched a picture formed on the surface of the water. Aimeric sat at his desk, writing. Yellow candles burned profligately around him.
"Is he working on Bertran's accounts?" Raimon asked. "At this hour?"
"Hush," Desire said again.
The picture on the water changed. Now Raimon could read the words written on the page. "Poetry," he said, astonished.
"He has never written poetry before," Desire said. "Now it is all he does, even when he should be working for the count."
"Poetry is one thing. He will never approach her--he is too fearful."
"Do you think so?" Desire asked. She looked up at him, her eyes veiled by her lashes.
"Yes." Raimon laughed, delighted with her beyond words. "Why is it that I think you are planning something? Why do I imagine the game isn't over yet?"
"Wait," Desire said. "You'll see."
The next day, as they sat feasting at the banquet table, Desire pointed to Countess Carenza. Raimon watched, fascinated, as the countess looked up from her goblet of wine. Her eyes sought Aimeric's. She smiled at him, and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead.
"Unfair, my lady!" Raimon said, whispering so that the others could not overhear.
"Not at all," Desire said. She held out a piece of venison to one of Bertran's dogs, lifted it higher as the dog jumped for it. She laughed. "The wager was that desire is stronger than anything in the world. She will make excuses to her lord tonight and share his bed."
"And if she does not? Then will you marry me?"
"It will happen, tonight or some other night. You will have to look elsewhere for a wife."
"There is no one else I want, my lady. You know that."
"Nonetheless--"
"Look! Look there, my lady! Aimeric is leaving."
Desire frowned. The clerk had stood up from his place at a lower table and was leaving the banquet hall. "Why?" she asked.
"It is as I said, my lady. Fear and habit are stronger than desire."
"No. No, he will have her. You'll see."
"And if not? Will you marry me?"
But Desire frowned again and did not answer.
Over the next few weeks, as Raimon and Desire watched, the countess and Aimeric danced a complex measure. She would approach him, smiling, and he would find an excuse to leave. He would gaze at her in chapel or in the banqueting hall, but when she glanced up he would quickly look elsewhere. Raimon was amused to see that the countess Carenza grew more beautiful by the day: her expression had softened and the pouches under her eyes had disappeared. She carried herself confidently, secure in the knowledge that she was fascinating to one pair of eyes at least.
"You see," Desire said to Raimon when they were alone in their rooms. "Desire can turn foul women into fair ones. Tell me one other force in the world that can do that."
"He still has not come to her bed, my lady."
In answer Desire poured water into her goblet, breathed on it. Aimeric's room looked the same as it had the other nights they had observed him: the candles, the paper, the inkhorns and pens. The picture changed, and Raimon saw the page before Aimeric.
" 'Although I should be sad I am joyful,' " Aimeric wrote. " 'For my love loves me as I love her. And although we cannot be together--' "
A knock came at his door. Raimon and Desire, staring at the pictures in the goblet, heard it as clearly as Aimeric did. The clerk stood, began to pace back and forth. The knock came again.
Suddenly Aimeric seemed to make up his mind. He went toward the door and opened it. The countess Carenza stood there, wearing her finest dress.
"Now," Desire said. "Now it happens."
"My friend," Carenza said to Aimeric. "Something tells me that you feel for me as I feel for you. Please, please do not run from me anymore. It has taken all my courage to come to your room, to speak to you--"
"My lady," Aimeric said. "I love you more than I love my life. When I close my eyes at night it's your face that comes before me. When I see another woman I'm disappointed because she's not you. But I cannot--I cannot dishonor my lord this way--"
"Your lord! Your lord cares nothing for me. His parents and mine arranged our marriage in order to form an alliance between our families. There is nothing between us but policy."
"Even so, my lady--"
"Bertran used me to bear his children, his heirs. Now that my childbearing days are over, he has cast me aside. You have shown me that there is something more--something higher--"
"My lady." Aimeric reached out and took Carenza's hand. Raimon felt Desire grow tense beside him. Now it happens, he thought. "My dear lady, these things you tell me wound me deeply. It seems to me that Lord Bertran has thrown away the most precious jewel in his possession. Even so, I cannot dishonor your wedding vows, nor the oaths I swore to him when I entered his service."
"Why not? He has dishonored our vows twenty times over. We sleep apart, he takes a serving-woman into his bed--"
"I'm sorry, my love."
"So you will send me away," Carenza said. A tear fell down her cheek. "Send me away with nothing, not even my pride."
"Not at all," Aimeric said. For the first time Raimon saw him smile. "I will sing to you, my lady."
Aimeric took a lute from the corner of the room. He strummed it once or twice, tuning it, and then began to sing.
As Raimon and Desire listened, Aimeric sang of Carenza's beauty. He sang of the oaths he had given to his lord, the count Bertran, and of another oath, one that he had sworn to Countess Carenza in his heart. He would keep her at the forefront of his thoughts, he would cherish her forever. They would never satisfy their desire, never even kiss one another, but he would be faithful to her until he died.
As Aimeric sang, Raimon saw that his yearning for Carenza had become something different, something wholly new. He spoke of her as the priests spoke of God, or of the Virgin. He had transformed his love for God into his love for Carenza. Raimon nearly gasped at the daring of it.
"Love," he said. "Love is stronger than desire."
Desire laughed scornfully. "They are the same thing," she said.
In the days that followed Aimeric sang in the banquet hall after supper. He performed the song Raimon had heard and others as well. All had the same theme: constant love, love stronger than desire.
Several times Raimon looked at Bertran, but the count seemed unaware that it was his wife who was being addressed. But something of Aimeric's seriousness and passion communicated itself to the court; Bertran's vassals began to linger around Carenza, to flatter her, to vie for her attention. To Raimon's eyes she grew even lovelier, worthy of all of Aimeric's metaphors: she was a flower, a gazelle, a bird.
"I have won the wager," Raimon said. "Love is stronger than desire."
But Desire shook her head. 'They are the same thing," she said.
No one knows how the concept of romantic love began in western Europe. There are those who say that the Crusaders brought back Arabic songs and poetry from the East; those who argue, more prosaically, that the invention of the chimney allowed for more privacy and so created an atmosphere in which love could flourish. What is true is that before this time men and women, like Bertran and Carenza, were given in marriage by their families, and for reasons that had nothing to do with love: territory, titles, money.
It was Aimeric who changed everything; after he sang nothing could be the same again. Love became the fashion: men and women vied with each other to create songs like Aimeric's, extolling the virtues and graces of their loved ones. To keep the structure of their civilization intact, their love had to be adulterous, to have as its object someone not chosen by the family but by the lover, and therefore almost always unconsummated. They lived in a world of incredible tension. Love never faded because it went unresolved for years, sometimes even for life.
Some of the authors of these songs, the troubadours, traveled through the south of France and beyond, spreading their songs south into Spain and east into Italy. Other wandering performers, like the jugglers who entertained Lord Raimon and his court, picked up the songs of the troubadours and carried them even farther; they became known as jongleurs.
The tales grew longer, more elaborate. Every story of love in the Western world was called into being by the wager of Desire and her lover: Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet, Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty, Hollywood tearjerkers and Gothic novels. Lives were ennobled, and lives were ruined, because people tried to live up to an ideal that was invented hundreds of years before they were born. And for all this, too, Desire must bear the credit, or the blame.
Raimon was one of the few who understood how the world had changed. He saw that Aimeric, through his music, had transcended desire, had turned it into something completely new. He insisted that he had won the wager; daily he asked Desire to marry him, and daily she refused him. His arguments grew more cunning, more philosophical, but Desire remained unconvinced. "Desire and love," she said, "are the same thing."
As he listened to the songs of the troubadours and jongleurs Raimon became convinced that what he felt for Desire was love. He wondered how he and Desire could come together in passion every night without her feeling at least a little of what he felt for her, wondered how she could allow him every intimacy but that one.
A year after he and Desire had made their wager, he woke and saw that she had gone. He searched the castle for her, rode through the forest, sent out riders to every city and town within a hundred miles. No one ever found her.
His vassals were relieved. Now, at last, Lord Raimon would forget the strange woman who had obsessed him; he would marry and beget heirs. But Raimon never married. He hunted within the forest; he visited Count Bertran and his wife. People noticed that he spoke a great deal to Bertran's clerk, the man who sang such beautiful songs, but no one made anything of it. When he attended to the business of his household it seemed that his mind was elsewhere. His vassals whispered that late at night he wrote poetry.
Forty years after he met Desire in the forest Raimon lay dying. His vassals gathered around the bed he had once shared with Desire. "He should have married and had children," one of them said softly. "They say now that the castle and lands will go to a son of Count Bertran."
"No," Raimon said weakly.
His men looked at him in surprise; they had not thought that he could hear them, or that he was alert enough to speak. "What is it, my lord?"
"I could not have married. I stayed faithful to her all my life, even if she was not faithful to me. Love is the strongest thing in the world. You see," he said, closing his eyes, "I won the wager."
EACH DAMP THING
Barbara Hambly
Barbara Hambly bustles from place to place, like a hurricane with a sense of purpose. She is a fine and funny novelist, and I met her when we were Guests of Honor together at the British Easter Convention, some years ago. I kept introducing her to people. She returned the favor by naming a planet in a Star Wars book after me; as a result of which my twelve-year-old son Michael now thinks I may, possibly, be cool (although not as cool as I would be if I were to write a Star Wars novel myself).
Barbara was one of the few authors to write a Sandman story set mostly in the Dreaming. Sweet and sour it is, funny and scary too.
"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls."
--LEWIS CARROLL, "The Palace of Humbug"
It was Cain's fault, really.
After all the shouting was over, and the mess cleaned up, there was never any question about that.
Part of Cain's problem was that he was genuinely the cleverer of the two brothers. His mind was more complicated, and he was better at seeing beneath the surface of lies. Thus he knew that his mother had always cared for his younger brother more than him--and how not, when he had been her first experience of the humiliating sickness of pregnancy, the agony and travail of childbearing, and the pesky, persistent labor of looking after infant, toddler, No and Why! By the time Abel was born, she had gotten somewhat used to it, and was able to relax, and love.
Cain never forgave either of them.
Every time he killed his brother, reenacting that first glorious, furious, sickening rage, Cain was aware that whatever he did, even in death their mother would still love Abel best.
Thus in his heart, Cain was always looking for ways to manipulate the world around him, to gain an advantage, to hold an edge.
And thus in the long dun-colored chaos season when the Lord of Dreams was held prisoner by those who knew not what they did, and the palace of the Dreaming crumbled and withered in the winds of Otherwhere, Cain could not forbear a cautious investigation of the ruins.
He moved warily through the dense blocks of shadows, the fallen stone doorways, and miles of lightless stair and corridor, for he knew some, at least, of the things imprisoned in the crypts. It is true that the King of Dreams invents nightmares. But it is also true that he was put in charge of the Dreaming to control the nightmares that arise into being from human minds, nightmares so powerful that should they drink of the souls of their creators, and the souls of those wit
h whom those creators share them, they would grow until they devoured the world.
They say that King Morpheus is overconscientious, a workaholic, sacrificing all things to the proper performance of his duty.
He has to be.
It is why he, and not any of his brothers or sisters, was chosen for this particular job.
There was a doorway that had not only been locked, but bricked across, so that only its marble jambs and lintels stood out from the stone of the wall. But the brick and plaster that covered the door were crumbling, as the Dream King's strength was crumbling, ebbing, in his crystal prison. Bricks had fallen out, revealing hinges, and Cain found that if he thrust a lever--the world's most perfect cricket bat that one Humbert Knowlseley had dreamed about in 1881, lying stored for some reason in a nearby room full of the echoes of monstrous fish--if he thrust this behind the bricks, they fell out easily enough.
The wood around the hinges and lock had rotted away with the damp. Cain's foot made short work of it.
And for all that, there was nothing much in the room. A good deal of dust. Patches of something black on the plaster. A doorway in the opposite wall, likewise bricked over between marble lintels and jambs that had once been gilded--though the masonry held strong this time despite all Cain with his cricket bat could do.
And a mirror, lying on a table.
The mirror's glass was painted over black.
Cain took it home with him.
"Cuh-Cain, I think you should take it back."
"If you're trying to get credit for thinking, sponge-wit, you're not succeeding." The razor blade Cain was using made a horrible noise as he scraped at the paint. "Take it back and tell him what? That I just happen to have this hanging about, five years after his return? You know how he is about his crummy little bits of things."
"B-But he's away from home right now." Abel wrung his plump hands. Sweat stood out on his round face, not only because Cain's dark little basement workshop was hot with the flame of the gaslights Cain preferred. There were a lot of sharp objects down there. "I wuh-was talking to Matthew this afternoon up at the cave ..."
Cain slewed in his chair, pale hazel eyes glittering behind his spectacles as he looked up at his brother, and Abel stumbled back a pace, hand to his mouth in guilt. Cain knew Abel spent a good deal of time at the Raven Lady's cave, and didn't like it one bit. But he only said, "Why the hell do you think I'm cleaning this thing up now? Instead of last week when I dug it out when I was cleaning the attic? By the time he comes back I'll have finished with it. There."
He sat back, and held the mirror up. There was still black paint around the edges of the plain silver frame, but the circle of glass, a handspan broad, was clear.
It reflected only Cain's thin face, the aggressive jut of the reddish beard, the maniac spectacle-gleam.