"Indeed," Bhansaar ruled in his official finding, "that which is not forbidden must be permitted, for to find the opposite true implies that those who established the law were lacking in foresight."
And surely that was a more subversive notion than merely allowing the Reshtar of Galatna to sing his own songs! What more innocuous pursuit could a Reshtar indulge in than poetry, after all?
"He sings only of what can be had within Galatna: of scent, of storms, of sex," Bhansaar reported to his father and brother when he returned to Inbrokar. When they were amused, he insisted, "The poetry is superb. And it keeps him out of trouble."
Thus Hlavin Kitheri was permitted to sing, and in doing so he lured freedom to his prison. Hearing his concerts, staggered by his songs, even firsts and seconds were inspired to shake off the tyranny of genealogy and join him in sublime and scandalous exile, and Galatna Palace became the focus for the gathering of men who would never ordinarily have come together. With his poetry, the Reshtar of Galatna now redefined legal sterility as purity of mind; cleansing his life of the tainted past and forbidden future, he made it enviable. Others learned to live as he did—on the cusp of experience, existing entirely within moment after ephemeral moment of rarefied sexual artistry, unmuddied by considerations of dynasty. And among them were men who did not simply appreciate Kitheri’s poetry but who were capable themselves of composing songs of startling beauty. These were the children of his soul.
He meant no more than this: to be content, to live in the eternal present, triumphant over time: all elements in balance, all things stable, the chaos within him contained and controlled, like a woman in her chamber.
And yet, when he had, at last, achieved that very desire, the music began to die in him. Why? he asked, but there was no one to answer him.
He tried at first to fill the void with objects. He had always prized rarity, singularity. Now he sought and collected the finest and oldest, commissioned the most costly, the most highly decorated, the most complex. Each new treasure bought a holiday from hollowness, as he studied its intricacies and pored over its nuances, tried to find in it some quality that would summon the light, the flashing brilliance…. But then he would put the thing aside, the savor gone, the scent dissipated, the silence unbroken. He passed the days pacing and waiting, but nothing would come—nothing ignited any spark of song. His life had begun to seem not a poem but an incoherent collection of words, as random as a Runa domestic’s brainless chatter.
What he felt was beyond boredom. It was a dying of the soul. It was a conviction that there was nothing anywhere in his world that could cause him to breathe in a full measure of life again.
Into this night, like the gilding of first dawn, came a crystal flask of striking simplicity, containing seven small, brown kernels of extraordinary scent: sweetly camphoric, sugary, spiced—aldehydes and esters and pyrazines released in a sudden jolt of fragrance that rocked him as a volcano’s eruption rocks the ground, which he breathed in, first gasping, then crying out like an infant newly born. With the fragrance filling his head and chest came the knowledge that the world held something new. Something wonderful. Something that drew him back toward life.
There was more: syn’amon, the merchant Supaari VaGayjur called the next consignment. Klohv. Vanil’a. Yeest. Saydj. Ta’im. Koomen. Sohp. And with each astonishing delivery, a promise of the unimaginable: sweat, oil, infinitesimal fragments of skin. Not Jana’ata. Not Runa. Something else. Something other. Something that could not be purchased except in its own coin: life for life.
Here then was the complex dance of unprecedented scent and sound and sensation, the superb moment of agonizing sexual tension, the astonishment of unparalleled release. All his life he had sought inspiration in the despised, the unnoticed, the unique, the fleeting; all his life he’d believed that each experience, each object, each poem could be self-sufficient, perfect and entire. And yet, eyes still closed in climax, finishing with the foreigner that first time, he realized, Comparison is the source of all significance.
How could he have been deaf to this for so long?
Consider pleasure, he thought, as the foreigner was taken away. With a Runa concubine or a captive Jana’ata female, there was, inequality of a sort, certainly a basis for comparison, but it was obscured by the element of duty done. Consider power! To understand power, one had to observe powerlessness. Here, the foreigner was most instructive, even as the intoxicating scent of fear and blood began to dissipate. No claws, no tail, a laughable dentition, small, imprisoned. Defenseless. The foreigner was the most contemptible of conquests…
… the embodiment of Zero, the physical manifestation of the starting point of experience…
That night, Hlavin Kitheri lay still on his cushions, meditating on the absence of magnitude, on the cypher that separates positive from negative, on the nothing, on the No Thing. When such comparisons were made, orgasm became as inexhaustibly beautiful as mathematics, its gradations—its inequalities—sublimely arrayed for the highly trained aesthete to recognize and appreciate.
Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison, he realized.
He called for the foreigner again at first light. It was different the second time, and the third. He called together the best of the poets—the most talented, the most perceptive—and, using the foreigner to teach what he had learned, found that the experience was different for each of them. Now he listened with new understanding, and he was entranced by the variety and splendor of their songs. He was wrong about the possibility of pure experience—he knew that now! The individual was a lens through which the past looked on the moment, and changed the future. Even the foreigner was marked, changed, by each episode in a way that Runa concubines, that Jana’ata captives never had been.
In the heady days following that first encounter, Hlavin Kitheri produced a philosophy of beauty, a science of art and its creative sources, its forms and its effects. All life could be an epic poem, with each moment’s meaning thrown into relief by the slanting light of past and future, of dusk and dawn. There must be no isolation, no random experience or any singularity! To raise life to Art, one must classify, compare, rank—appreciate the inequalities so that the superb, the ordinary and the inferior may be known by their contrast.
After seasons of silence, the transcendent music of Hlavin Kitheri was heard again in an outpouring of artistic energy that washed over his society like a tidal wave. Even those who had ignored him previously, made uncomfortable by his outrageous interests and extraordinary notions, were now transfixed by the glory he seemed to shine upon unchanging verities.
"How beautiful!" men cried. "How true! Our entire society, all our history, can be understood as a faultless poem sung generation after generation, with nothing lost and nothing added!"
In the midst of this ferment, more foreigners came to the gate of Galatna Palace, with a young Runa interpreter named Askama, who said these were members of the foreigner’s family who had come to take him home.
Hlavin Kitheri had by that time nearly forgotten the small seed of this vast florescence, but when his secretary approached him, he thought, Let no one be mured up. Let no one be confined by another’s wish or need. "The only prison is our own limitations!" the Reshtar sang out, laughing.