Verras Vansen. 'Unit is my name, he reminded himsell here on the river he could almost feel it slipping away again as the mists streamed past. It had seemed so clear when the child said it, so true, and yet he knew he could lose it again as easily he had forgotten it in the forest of black trees.
How did I come to these lands? But that memory was even more lost than his name had been. He knew only that the child had said he did not come the way most men came-mischance, she had named it-and that was enough, somehow, to comfort him.
Something felt strange beneath his hands, under his feet. He looked down and saw that the boat was no longer made of gray wood, but of snakes- hundreds of dully shining shapes woven together like the twig mats old women made so their husbands and sons and grandsons could wipe the mud of the fields off their boots. But these were not twigs, they were serpents, alive and writhing. He lifted his feet and hands but it was no good: the en¬tire boat was made of snakes and there was nowhere to go to escape them.
Even as he stared in horrified surprise, the snake-boat began to unravel, those at the top and along the rails slithering free of their weave and drop¬ping like heavy ropes into the dark, quiet water. They kept peeling away, first in ones and twos and then more swiftly, until the water was coming in on all sides and he rode on nothing more solid than a blanket of cold, thrashing shapes.
He looked up, staring helplessly into the mists ahead in search of the far bank, a stone in the river, anything that might save him. The snakes fell away. The boat fell away. He tried to remember the names of the gods so he could pray but even those had been taken from him.
Vansen. I am Ferras Vansen. I am a soldier. I love a woman who does not love me, and could not if she would. I am Ferras Vansen!
And then he tumbled into the cold swells and swallowed all the blackness.
He was not in the river or on the shore, but in a twilight street. The lamps had been lit above the cobbles. They burned as fitfully as witchfire, glowing without much illuminating the ramshackle houses. It was not yet full dark but the streets seemed utterly empty.
What place is this? He thought he wondered silently, but someone heard him.
It is the City of the Sleepers. The voice of the girl-child who had given
him back his name was faint, as if she stood on the far side of the river he could no longer see. There is only one way through, Ferras Vansen, and that is always forward. Remember…!
And that was the last he heard of her. After that he could scarcely even recall how she looked, how she sounded. He stepped forward and his foot¬steps made no sound, though he could hear the noise of water dripping and a quiet wind rustling and whispering along the rooftops.
Most of the windows were dark, but a few were lit. When he looked in¬side he saw people. They were all asleep, even those who stood or moved about, their eyes closed, their movements slow and aimless. Some merely sat on stools or chairs or leaned against the walls of their drab, dusty chambers, motionless as stones or swaying like blind beggars. Some tried to stir pots under which no flame burned. Others tended children who lay like cloth dolls, limbs a-flop as their sleeping parents dressed or undressed them, small heads lolling, mouths gaping while their parents fed them with empty spoons.
After a while he stopped looking into the houses.
As he came to the center of town the streets began to fill with people, although these too moved like weary swimmers, staring into the bruised gray sky with unseeing eyes. Blind sleepers drove carts piled with shrouded bundles, and even the horses that drew the wagons slept, long jaws grind¬ing as they chewed at nothing. The crowds slowly drifted to and fro like fish at the bottom of a winter lake, standing rapt before spectacles they could not see, buying things they could not taste or use. Slumbering musi¬cians played dust-caked instruments, making unheard melodies, while sleeping clowns danced slow as snowmelt and did halting somersaults in the dirt, coming up smeared and draggled.
As he stared around him in fearful wonder, a young woman wandered toward him out of the crowd. She was pretty, or should have been. Her face was bloodlessly pale, with only the barest sliver of her eyes visible under her long lashes, but her mouth sagged like an idiot's, though she tried to curl her lips in a fetching smile. She lifted her hand to him, offering him a with¬ered flower, a reddish streak running the length of the white petals like a vein of blood. Asphodel, he remembered, the god's flower, although he did not know what god he meant.
Am I fair? she asked. Her lips did not seem to move enough for him to hear her voice so clearly.
Yes, he said, trying to be kind. He could see that she had been fair once,
and might be again, in some other place, under some bolder light.
You are sweet. Here, have my flower. She squeezed her lips together as if to keep them from trembling. It is very long since I have spoken to someone like you. It is lonely here.
Pitying her, he reached out his hand, but just before his fingers closed on the waxy stem he remembered another young woman, high and fair, to whom he owed something. His hand paused, and then he remembered what someone had told him so long ago: Accept no gift!
I cannot, he said. / am sorry.
Her face changed then, from that of a mortal woman into something older and much more hungry. Her body twisted and lengthened into a feral shape with achingly scrawny limbs and reaching claws. It snapped and flut¬tered before him like a scorched insect, writhed until his eyes blurred watching it, then smeared away into the twilight, leaving nothing behind but a thin shriek of misery and rage.
Shaken and sad, he walked on.
On the outskirts of the city, among the midden heaps and boneyards, where a few ragged sleepers huddled around flickering, smoky fires, he at last found the one he had glimpsed across the river, although that now seemed an entire lifetime ago. This sleeper was an old man, with hands that had been large and powerful now knotted with age, and shoulders that had been wide and a back that had been straight now coarsely bent, so that he had the shape of a bird huddling in its own feathers against the cold. Fer-ras Vansen could see the pale, slow shimmer of the fires through the man's substance, as if the old fellow were no more tangible than mist.
Father, he said, but he was suddenly unsure. Tati, he asked like a child, is it really you? Do you know me?
The old man looked at him, or at least turned blind eyes in the direc¬tion of the questions. His face was not merely translucent, it shifted like oil on rippling water.
/ am no one. How could I know you?
No. You are Pedar Vansen. I am your son, Ferras.
The old man shook his head. No. I am Perinos Eio, the great planet. I died and lay four days in a stone casket surrounded by darkness and distant stars. Then I awoke again into the light of what is true. He sighed and a tear escaped his tight-shut eye. But I have forgotten it all again, and now I am lost…
You died in your own bed, Tati. I didn't have the chance to say farewell. For a moment Ferras Vansen could feel tears stinging painfully in his own eyes, as if in this place to cry was to pierce the flesh and let out blood, not water. There was no stone coffin. We were poor people, and I did not come back in time to pay for even a wooden box, although 1 would have done so gladly. You were buried in a winding sheet. He hung his head. / am sorry, Tati. I was far away…
Help me. The old man reached out a hand, but where it touched him it was no more substantial than a tongue of fog, cool and slightly damp. Help me to find my way back, to learn the answers again so that I can pass on.
Anything. And in that moment, he meant it. This was a man whose im¬possible needs had pressed down on Ferras Vansen's childhood like the lid of the stone coflin he was prattling about, but the love was still stronger than any fear, any comfort. To do what his Tati asked he would break even those fading commandments, Eat no food, Accept no gifts, Remember your name! He would flaunt the gods themselves before their thrones.