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, beyond 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—

  —I can handle oxen. The young man gazed up at the beams across the ceiling. You got oxen to pull your carts? Oxen don’t give me any trouble. I’ve been thinking of going south.

  —Of course, said the man, who’d been doing his own thinking, there’s one cart I have to send along…it will carry grain, certainly. I have an ox for it. But there might be something else in it too, you see? Whoever drives it would have to take it mostly down the back roads. Certain customs inspectors—for this cart—I’d just as soon avoid.

  —I could take it down any roads you want.

  You’ve always struck me as pretty trustworthy; and anyone seeing you would just think you were some country farmhand.

  —Me? asked the young man. But that’s what I am, Papa! Not too clever, not too wild, not too talkative, hey? A friendly fool, that’s me, isn’t it? Just look at me. What could be in a cart someone like me drove besides grain? Come on, let’s go have a beer. I could take an oxcart of grain down to…wherever you wanted me to, deliver it to whoever you wanted.

  —Well, perhaps you could. I wouldn’t send any of my regular drivers. Some of them are family men, you see. If the gods do only their customary job as they work at the world, all should go well with the trip; nevertheless there might be some danger attached to it.

  —I’ll take your cart down. Hey, and I’ll bring it back too! I need to get out of the city. I won’t go back to the farm. Don’t worry, Papa. Just tell me when you want me to leave.

  And so he made the transition from hustler to smuggler as easily as he had made any of the others that had split his life into its various befores and afters. Possibly the last one has been violent enough so that the others in wait along the roads for him held little terror. I’ve often wondered who it was, in the intervening days—another hustler with a bit more experience than he, or perhaps a world-wise client—who told him some of the real dangers of his new undertaking. Did he ponder the fact that for the grain-seller to entrust such a mission to him was far more a sign that the elderly gentleman considered him particularly expendable rather than particularly dependable?

  No matter. He did the task. And several more like it.

  It was some weeks after our return from the provinces that, at the end of an afternoon’s skit, I saw him, at the edge of the audience, clapping and shouting so loudly, so enthusiastically, with that look of special knowledge, of intimate privilege, of personal connection with the wonder, the magic, if not the very madness of our performance. As we began to tear down the platform, I motioned him up, and, with a grin, he vaulted onto the stage and walked with me among the other actors and musicians and dancers still in our make-up and bright attire, nodding now to the Leading Lady, waving at the groom he’d helped back on carnival night, here to my wagon, where he told me…well, some of what I’ve told you.

  No doubt I made much of him, aghast at the depths he’d fallen to, and as delighted at his newfound success as some merchant when his child brings home a particularly fine report from your own bright institution. His attitude both to the madness and to the fortune that had followed it was the sensible gratitude of the spared. Oh, I’m sure that the deeds of that dim period of unexplained derangement, while they seemed behind him, still were able to frighten him at those moments when the chaos of the city around him would momentarily join the inner voices with which, truly, all of us spend so much of our lives in antiphon. If he did not, here with me, seem racked by the fear of madness’s return, I suspect it was because he was, finally, very brave. In no way denying that bravery, I also felt, as he sat on my bed, telling me of all this, he truly saw himself as too insignificant to be visited by such an experience more than that once—as long as he kept his drinking down. His pleasure was to be part of the city, to know an actor in the play, to have an interesting tale of inner and outer adventure to tell, when he was called backstage as a sign of his privilege.

  My own response to all this?

  It was of the lowest. I kept wondering, while he sat there, what would happen if I enjoined him to stay with me a little longer, perhaps, than he’d planned—oh, certainly for his usual fee, while we did, oh, only some of the things we’d done before. Yet, I was also honored enough by his confidence to fear that he might be offended if I suggested it. I fancied that part of his reason for attending the performance, for clapping, for coming back to talk with me, was because he somehow felt I had had some part in the whole incomprehensible transition.

  Unlike his scare from the prop dragon, however, after he told me once of his mad moment, the tale dropped from among his anecdotes. Yet, over our next few encounters, it lingered for me under the various comic mishaps he would recount, now in the spring, now in the fall, about his new nefarious activities. I even wondered if he didn’t see the glimmering and gaudy characters we gave voice to, as they untangled the mystery of each other’s plottings and schemings, out on our sunlit or lantern-lit platform, as some controlled image of his own many-voiced days of disorder: that, indeed, he saw me, us, our whole theatrical company as living constantly with and within the polylogue chaos he had traversed so surprisingly and unexpectedly, and that his applause acknowledged in us a certain bravery, which, he felt, we now shared. But whatever you say of them, finally I had to dismiss such notions as the ratiocinations desire can entangle about the most reasonable of us.

  After he left that afternoon, I went walking across the market, to wander back and forth over the bridge, curious if his new success as a full-fledged petty criminal hadn’t been somewhat exaggerated; wondering if, indeed, he mightn’t have stopped to loiter, in his usual place, hoping for a coin or two, where, if I saw him, I would have no compunction asking from him what I had been too diffident to request in the wagon. On my third trip back and forth, after searching His Spot and many others, when I realized that, no, he was really no longer there, I told myself I was simply horny and, certainly, one of the other boys out could satisfy me.

  Still, I came back to the genial and boisterous supper at the communal actors’ table behind our wagons, alone. And thus we both made another transition: to friend and friend. But, by the hem of your royal cousin, whose reign is enigmatic and eternal, that is really all I can tell you about him that I didn’t tell you before.

  5

  YES, WHAT A FINE idea to quit that stuffed and stuffy wagon for a stroll out here. Mind you, we must not stray too far from the market; I have to be back for the evening performance. Will you be staying?

  Of course, I understand.

  You have responsibilities waiting at the school. It is already beyond amazement that you’ve managed to get away to see our entertainment, or to talk with me, at all. It would be base ingratitude to demand, to expect, even to think of more.

  But after all this discussion of my meeting with your erstwhile contemporary, I can’t help wonder: do you recall when we met, young man? And don’t protest that you’re now forty. It’s still the right of a sixty-year-old to call you young if he likes.

  Yes, no doubt I was among the more interesting guests at the to-do your uncle threw for you, out in Neveryóna, in honor of your return from your youthful, year-long trip across our magnificent and mysterious land.

  That’s where you think we met?

  But how in the world would I have received my invitation?

  I knew no one in your circle, then, to bring me along to the party.

  Yes, it was from you. You yourself.

  You really don’t remember inviting me?

  Truly, I suspect the gods have crafted a different city for each of us, specified not only by our different points of view in it, but also by the random and irrational discontinuities into which our hopelessly faulty recalls endlessly cast and recast our diverse and separate lives.

  It was on a little street, not far from here. For me it’s all quite clear and sharp. A harness mender used to have her shop there, oh, perhaps three alleys over from where we walk now. She was a firm-voiced, hard-armed little woman, with a look in her eyes not unlike my abandoned wife’s—though their personalities were quite distinct. (I always felt her laugh was larger than she was.) Those who patronized her business were fond of her, for she was an evenhanded worker and a fair-minded dealer with them all; but her life was harder than most women’s because she had an idiot son, whom, now that he was almost grown and her husband dead, she would sit outside her shop on a bench in good weather. Pear-shaped, soft-shouldered, bean-headed, and often drooling, he had a spindle, a piece of wood that hung on a cord, which he would hold in one stubby hand, spinning the weight with the other, hour after hour, examining it, cooing over it, batting it now one way, now batting it back.

  Ah, you do remember the idiot.

  Well, I used to go there mornings simply to observe him, her, her customers. For wagoners, harness makers, smugglers, idiots—all of them figured from time to time in our skits, and you know I have always liked to observe from life what I interpret up on the platform. One morning when the sky was limpid and sun-drenched but the clouds down at the seaside were piled like metal shavings, I came there, as I often did in those days, just to watch; and while I was watching, I noticed a young man standing a ways off, clearly doing much the same as I. His tunic was simple—but far too clean for anyone to think him native to any near neighborhood. Did that fine, dark face hold a full two decades behind its youthful beard?

  I decided to include him in my observations, which have always been of the active sort. Approaching him, I asked what he was doing on that fair morning, and how did he like the weather of late? Do you recall what he said—for, in truth, he was you.

  —Now, you say, you begin to have the faintest recollection? I can only wonder what my smuggling friend remembers of our first meeting, what words, images, impressions, or even misremembrances he retains from it, if any. Given his homeless state, the daily pressures of his life—the amount of beer he drank in those days!—I might expect such vagueness from him. But really, my friend! From you?

  —What do you do? I asked. How odd. Followed by, ‘And how much do you charge to do it?’ that was my first frank and specific question to my friend on the bridge…(I won’t bother you with the particularities of his answer, generally liberal forward, admittedly limited behind.) You said to me:

  —I am struggling to become a wise man, and some say I’ve even made a stride or two in that direction. But sometimes I’m afraid my knowledge is wholly dependent on my ability to watch for minutes at a time the quivering of a single leaf, deep green on its upper face, olive gray under, with yellow veins all through—and a bit of brown at one edge, scalloped by some caterpillar. It’s a quality, I’m afraid, I share with that creature drooling in front of the tackshop. So it probably doesn’t mean very much, whatever others make of it.

  Oh, I see I have tickled you! Look at you laughing there!

  Yes, that really is what you said.

  Well, you were the kind of young man who went around saying things like that. Believe me, I was no less impressed with your answer than with his. People made much of you in those days, I was soon to learn—even as they do now. That you were able to keep any humility about you at all was an accomplishment.

  The arrogance and presumption of it, you say?

  The measured and honest insight of it, I would say rather. That’s certainly what struck me at the time. But I suppose that only means your liberalities and limitations fit comfortably with my own interest and needs. We talked for quite a while, there in the street. You had recently returned from your year-long trip, in which you had traveled all about Nevèrÿon, searching out this or that monument, looking for the site of that or the other fable. Because I, in the ordinary course of things, just happened to have visited many of those same places, and many more you hadn’t, and had heard a few of the fables myself, as well as some that were new to you—not very astonishing given that I had spent most of forty years doing what you had done in one—you decided I was clever. Also, I think you found the idea of an actor interesting.

  That’s when you told me your uncle was throwing a party for you, out on his estate. It was to be the next day. Why didn’t I come…? And later that evening, much to my surprise, your servant came down to the market to present a formal invitation at my wagon door—which rather impressed my fellow mummers.

  You say, now, you have the vaguest memory of something like it, but, really, you only assent to it because I have said it? Oddly that’s the way I recall the multi-voiced derangement of my smuggler friend. From his really very bare account, from my own observations of other madmen, and from the little flights and flirtations I’ve had—yes, I confess it—with madness on my own, I suppose I’ve decorated my tale.

  The result is very like a memory of something that never really happened—at least not to me.

  The party itself—that you’d thought was our meeting? For me that’s really quite vague. As I wasn’t performing, I suspect I found it a bore. A moment after I arrived, however, I recall you came by the gate—looking as though you didn’t remember me even then, I might add. But all at once you smiled, and we strolled in among the others, the two of us talking together, though of what I couldn’t tell you. Oh, you’d invited quite a collection, somewhat to your relatives’ dismay. It was not that I didn’t feel at home in such opulence, for a few times in my then forty years I’d been within comparable gates; but it was intriguing to observe the endless ways in which everyone—with the possible exception of you—seemed to feel equally uncomfortable with all those, well, oddballs you’d gathered about.

  Ah, I’m glad accounts of your youthful manner can still amuse you. I found you amusing too. Also touching. For all the distance between us, I saw a bit of myself in you.

  Several times we ended up in conversation. There was talk of my entertaining at some future gathering—a plan which, over the next few months, on several occasions blossomed. (You were, and still are I know, a generous man.) If it hadn’t I might have missed out my friend at the bridge. But the rest you certainly remember, at least in outline. And unlike my bridge-bound infatuation I recounted to you this afternoon, our friendship—yours and mine—without the sexual element, grew and deepened over a much longer period before it eased to its present amiable stasis.