suddenly innocent as a girl except for those goathorn
folds,
and he bowed. The tables clapped. The king was
delighted, it was clear,
and so was Pyripta, smiling down at the tablecloth. I felt a minute, brief twinge of alarm about hope and
soap.
He was nobody’s fool, Koprophoros. He left no doubt that he knew how to handle a man as he’d handled the
chair, though he took
no special pleasure in violence — unless as art. He bowed and bowed, as neatly balanced as a dancer,
kissing
his fingertips, face sweating.
Then tall Paidoboron
stood up, the king of a silent land to the north, where
the gray
Atlantic half the year lay still as slate, and icebergs pressed imperceptibly, mournfully, groaning like weird
old beasts
on the dark roads of whales. It was a country known to Greeks as the Kingdom of Stone. Strange tales were
told of it:
a barren waste where no house boasted ornaments of gold or silver, and no one knew till Jason came of stains or dyes or of any color but the dim hues on the skins of animals there, or the grays and browns
in rocks.
The towns of that kingdom were few and far between,
as rare
as trees on those dim gray hills, and in the largest towns the houses kept, men said, no more than a hundred
souls—
bleak men bearded to the waist and dressed in
wolfskins; women
tall and stern and beautyless, like stiff, bare pines. The houses and barns, the streets, the walls along
country roads
were stone, as gloomy as the sea. They knew no culture
there
but raising sheeplike creatures — winged like eagles, but
shy,
as quick on their feet and as easily frightened as newts.
Yet they knew
the second world to the west, for the Hyperboreans
owned
great-bellied, stone-filled ships that could sail forever,
slow,
indestructible as the stone rings high in their hills. And
they knew
more surely than all other men, of the turning of
planets and stars:
geometers, learned astronomers, they spent their lives shifting and rearing enormous megaliths, age after
age,
the oldest kingdom in the world. They knew the
alchochoden
of every man and tree, knew the earthly after clap of all conjunctions, when to expect the irrumpent flash of crazily wandering comets, could tell the agonals of stars no longer lit, old planets shogged off course by accidents aeons old. They came themselves, they
claimed,
from the deeps of space, noctivagant beings shackled to
earth,
dark shadow of oaks and stones, for some guilt long
forgotten.
They waited and watched the heavens as a prisoner
stares at fields
beyond his cell’s square bars. They studied the wobbling
night,
and if some faraway star went wrong they sacrificed an eldest son to it, and made it right.
The king
spoke softly, as if some god were speaking out of him— a man no more made of flesh and blood than
Koprophoros, I’d swear:
stiff as a puppet, a figure in some old electrical game at the penny arcade, mindlessly obstructing — such was
the impression
the black king gave with his ponderous, vaguely
funereal manner;
and yet there was anger in his manner too, such
old-man fury
at all Koprophoros spoke, I could hardly believe it was
not
some hellish joke between them. Solemn as death, he
said:
“You advertise your talents, my bloated friend, as if you intended to put them on sale. No doubt you’d
soon find a buyer!”
He smiled, full of scorn for the listening crowd. “How
nice to think
— a man can outfox the fates by his clever wits, outbox the wind, outgrapple the fissures that open when
earthquakes strike!
Mere childish dreams. Forgive me for saying so. We’ve
stood—
my kingdom — a thousand years. We dreamed like you,
at first,
a thousand thousand years ago. But stone cliffs collapsed on us, seas overran us, monsters crawled from the deep and claimed our herds. And winds—
such violent winds
as you’ve never seen thus far in these playful hills—
so dark
they blanked out sun and moon for seven full years,
so thick
they snatched away all our breath like tons of earth
falling—
cliffs and seas, monsters from the deep, and those
terrible winds
taught us our power was not what we first supposed.
A man
can kill a man, if he will, or some beast less than a man, some beast that shares, in its own way, our
humanness—
hunger, the rage to rule, our pleasure in thought.
(I have seen
elderly wolves sit thinking, smiling to themselves.)
But a man
can tyrannize nothing beyond himself, his own frail
kind.
If you’ve smiled at bears who pompously, foolishly lord
it over
lesser bears but shake like mice at the tucket and boom of heaven, then smile at Koprophoros! How many storms have you tilted up like a chair and deprived of its legs?”
He laughed,
the cackle of an old, old man. The black of his hair was
dye,
I understood only now. His face was wrinkled like a
mummy’s.
Surely, I thought, the man’s long years past fathering
a child!—
yet here he stands, contending for a wife! (No one in
the hall,
or no one besides myself, it seemed, was amazed.)
He said:
“I shiver and shake at your leastmost leer, O dangerous
friend,
but the hills are cool to both of us, and the thunder
laughs.
You hold your throne by discreet and tasteful violence. As for me, I hold mine — apart. I sit in dreary silence no man envies, no man steals. What little I need to eat I plant myself and harvest alone. For talk, for the stimulation of other men’s minds, I have old
hymns
and a thousand years of figures carved in stone. I go on, and my race goes on, the prey of no one but the gods.
To a man
new to his glories, blind to the ghostly stelliscript, knowing not whence he comes or whither he goes—
immortal
as the asphodel, he thinks — that may seem a trifling
thing,
a man full of hope, unaware of the gods’ deep scorn
of man,
a founder like you, Koprophoros.” He moved his gaze from table to table slowly. It came to rest at last on Kreon. The old man sat leaning forward, watching
intently,
waiting as if in alarm. Paidoboron smoothed his beard, as black and thick as the fur of a bear in winter. He
said:
“If I were, for instance, the last king in a doomed line, I’d run to the rim of the world, taking any child I had, and I’d house myself in stone, and I would propitiate the gods, my surest foe, with prayers and deodands.” His words died away to silence in the rafters of the hall.
The stillness
clung like a mist, as though the black-bearded
Northerner
had silenced the crowd by a spell.
Then fat Koprophoros spoke, rising from his seat, bowing, all grace, to the princess
and king.
The deep-red jewel on his forehead gleamed like fire
through wine.
Symbols of the soul those jewels, I remembered. But