“Doesn’t the sovereign have the right to free himself from his power?”
“Certainly not!”
“In our lady’s law, is sovereignty a curse?”
“Sovereignty for the sovereign is a destiny, not a curse. Do you know who you are?”
“I? I, lady, am a wanderer.”
“Certainly not! You were a wanderer, master, before the fates shackled you with the oasis. You were a wanderer, master, before the spirit world fettered you with sovereignty. From today forward, you have no name besides sovereign, no homeland besides sovereignty, and no god besides sovereignty. You are the monarchy, and the monarchy is you. How can you abdicate a kingship the spirit world has granted you as a sacred trust without also abdicating your true nature? How can you renounce this trust without renouncing your self?”
“With what antidote, then, is the master of melancholy to be healed? By what antidote, then is the victim of longing to be cured?”
I did not hear her response. I did not hear it, because ecstasy had flooded my heart and longing had overflowed my spirit. The unidentified tune became ever louder in my ears. I was choked by a tear and found that my body was swaying to the right and left, in time with the beat. My tongue picked up the refrain right away. This was an anxious song that affected my muscles the way a prophecy affects the heart. I sang, and everyone sang with me, although the priestess declined the invitation. She stared at me with veiled curiosity. When I stopped to catch my breath, she leaned toward me to say, “Don’t be foolhardy.”
I did not know what she meant and began singing again. I sang and everyone resumed singing with me. I wept while I sang, and thus all the leaders wept with me. The inquisitive look in my priestess’ eyes turned threatening. She scolded me more harshly than she had ever before: “Stop that!”
My heart’s effusion, however, proved the more powerful impetus and the suzerainty of longing the stronger, because I have learned from my struggle that man’s exterior is a shadow, and his interior longing, a longing that stirs only when the spirit world dispatches it as a messenger to notify us of our true nature. Even so, we frequently lose sight of our true nature, because we do not listen carefully to the voice of our longing or sing the hymn of our longing properly. Our longing is precisely our identity, which we have forgotten how to discover and which we cannot find any stratagem to retrieve. Why can’t singing be that stratagem? Why shouldn’t tunes become our prophecy?
Nevertheless, the prophecy that the spirit world whispered to my heart differed from the one the priestess brandished at me when my song provoked her to fling the gauntlet in my face: “You’re making a big mistake!”
5 Evening
THE REALLY BIG MISTAKE I made was to toy with another doll beside my wife. My experience notwithstanding, I did not know that a woman is capable of forgiving her husband the foulest misdeeds and the gravest sins so long as he does not supplant her with a baby doll, since a woman is less threatened by a co-wife than by a doll, which forces her to face the fact that she too is a doll, shaken and exposed to the worst perils. Unfortunately, my yearning for amusement made me forget myself and neglect this secret truth about dolls until later. In the meantime there were some weighty developments. I announced my intentions — in a weakened state, without knowing what I was doing — that the nobles of each clan should play the role of Ragh’s descendents, whose duty it is to govern, provided that they eschew worldly vanities, as the law decreed. In my declaration I did not forget to append a proviso cautioning that their appointment was temporary — by the law of entertainment — and highlighting the future role of embryos fidgeting in the wombs. In this way I committed another offense, as I understood only later, for sovereignty is the only treasure that should not be meted out in jest and for entertainment. It is an elusive quality, and anyone with a natural talent for ruling will reject such an arrangement, for even sovereignty conferred in jest becomes a reality, no matter how fraudulent its origin.
In feverish longing I raised my voice and uttered a second proclamation to the effect that the nobles of the other tribes would assume the role of the goddess Yeth’s community, whom the law burdens with ownership of material goods. It would be their duty to select a descendant of Ragh to ascend the throne, someone devoid of desires for material possessions. Then longing swept through me as melodies wailed in my heart and I uttered the final words of the proclamation, declaring that the blacksmiths, who had slipped into the oasis one day from the east, would assume the role of Seth’s offspring, who excel in metalworking, mixing of alloys, and creating iron and other hard substances. Then a weakness of a type familiar to anyone who has felt the pains of longing overwhelmed me. So I lay down and drew a cover over my head, thinking I had said what I needed to say. I do not know how long I was unconscious, but when I awoke I found my slave Hur standing by my head. He said that two men, who were flinging accusations at each other and calling each other names, were waiting at my door, demanding to see me. I granted them permission to enter and found myself confronted by two fellows veiled with dark leather. Their eyes, which looked stern and stubborn, showed lingering anger. The men were similar enough to have been twins, except that they were of different heights. The taller one spoke. He said he had entrusted his friend with some gold dust on the understanding that it would be handed back once he returned from his voyage to the forest lands, but that the cunning strategist had betrayed him by molding the powder into a vile ingot, which he had created and refused to surrender. He asked me to settle their dispute with justice rather than let it be settled by the sword.
He fell silent, and I looked at his shorter companion, whom I asked bluntly, “Do you deny this?”
He shook his head “no.”
“Do you admit that the gold belongs to your companion?” I asked him.
He answered without any hesitation, “Certainly!”
“So why have you denied him what is rightfully his?”
“I don’t deny that the gold dust is rightfully his. I deny his right to what he refers to as a ‘vile ingot.’”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t deny that I owe him a handful of gold dust, but that doesn’t mean I owe him an ingot to which I entrusted my spirit as my hands created it.”
“If you don’t want to give him back the ingot you love, why don’t you return some gold dust?”
“Master, I’ve asked him to allow me more time to acquire some gold dust, but he wants to claim the ingot instead of the gold dust.”
“Did you ask his permission before you smelted his gold dust into your ingot?”
“How could I ask his permission, master, when he had traveled far away?”
“Did he not tell you when to expect him back?”
“Absolutely not!”
“But what gave you the right to violate a trust bestowed upon you?”
“Master, when I looked at the gold dust, I saw it was beautiful. When I gazed into my heart, I realized I was in love.”
“I really don’t understand.”
So the lover narrated the story of his infatuation as he gazed off into space: “I responded to an inner call, after I acquainted myself with the look of the gold dust, for I found its gleam seductive. Then I poured the powder into the furnace one night when an unfamiliar fever tormented me. I didn’t discover I had created an antidote for this fever until I shaped the powder and turned it into poetry. Yes, indeed, I created poetry from dirt, master.”