foreheads wrinkled like newploughed fields? I do,
however—
to everyone’s astonishment. ‘We in fact may have misjudged this creature,’ they say, and look very
solemn, and listen
with ears well-cocked henceforth — and they get their
money’s worth!
I have theories to baffle the wisest sages!” He leered,
looked sheepish,
snatched up a winebowl, drank. “I’ve a theory that
Time’s reversed,”
he said then, rolling his coy, dark eyes at Pyripta.
She blushed.
“A stunning opinion, you’ll admit, though somewhat
absurd, of course.”
He shrugged, slid his glance to the king. When he
winked, old Kreon smiled.
“Then again, I know all the ancient tales of the scribes,
and can tell them
hour on hour for a year without ever repeating myself, tale unfolding from tale like petals from a rosebud,
linked
so slyly that no man alive can seize the floor from me, caught in my web of adventures (ladies, ensorcelled
princes,
demons whose doors are the roots of trees) …
A womanish skill,
you’ll say — and I grant it: a skill more fit for a harem
eunuch;
nevertheless, a skill I happen to possess — such is my foolishness, or the restlessness of my clowning mind.
“ ‘How,’ you must surely be asking, ‘can this rank
lunatic
have power befitting a god’s — the rule of a kingdom
as wide
as Indus was, in the old days?’ ” He sighed and shook
his head,
deeply apologetic. “I must tell you the bitter truth. All my art, my theology, my metaphysics have earned me nothing! I could weep! I could tear out
my hair!” He became
the soul of woe. “I reason, I cajole, I confound the
wisest
with holy conundrums like these: ‘If Zeus is absolute
order,
or pure intellect, and the Lord of Death is essential
confusion
(that is to say, Chaos), what, if anything, connects the
two,
and how can each know the other exists? If Zeus can
muse
on all that exists, does Zeus exist?’ —But at last my
enemies
are convinced (ah, woe!) by mere trivia.” Suddenly he bent, grinning, and with only his teeth, raised up an
oak chair
large as a throne — it was carved from end to end
with figures—
and, fat neck swelling, he lifted it over his head. With
fists
like steel, he cracked and snapped off, one by one, its
thick
clawed feet. He laid them on the table like spoons.
Then, taking the seat
of stone in his hands, he snapped it like kindling. He
spat out the rest
— the back and the cumbersome arms — and then, most
amazing of all,
he sucked in breath, belched fire from his mouth like a
gasoline torch,
snatching the legs up and lighting them one by one,
then hurling them
high in the air, a four-spoked wheel of flame. It turned faster and faster. Mouths gaping, we saw that he no
longer touched them—
the fire-wheel spinning on its own, high over the
trestle-tables.
Even the three goddesses, I thought, were baffled by
the trick.
Quick as the blink of an eye, the fire-wheel vanished.
There was
no sound in the darkened hall.
Then all the sea-kings roared,
applauding, beating the flagstone floor with their staffs
and shouting,
some crying out for another such trick, while some
demanded
that he do that same one again, so that people could
watch it more closely;
nothing’s more pleasant than discovering the secret
rules of things.
How strangely he smiled! — but immediately covered
his mouth with his hand.
Then, grinning mournfully, lifting his eyes like a man
much grieved
but eternally patient, Koprophoros said, “No more
tricks yet.
Dramatic illustration, merely, dear friends. For such is
the tiresome
base of my power and wealth. I grant, it’s more
interesting
to men like ourselves, that Time is reversed.” He smiled,
his dark
and luminous eyes full of scorn for us all. “But the
world is the world.”
He sighed profoundly, fat head tipped like a praying
priest’s,
his fat little hands with their hairless fingers pressed
together
at his chest. “I thank the gods,” he said, “for my
marvelous gifts—
my innate sense of justice, my vast learning, my
qualities of soul.
But those, alas, are at last mere private benefits. The one firm way a man can be sure of his time for
thought
is his talent for breaking skulls — the art of punching
people,
or getting one’s army to. Here below, I’m grieved to say, the power for good and the power for evil are identical. The idea of the moral erodes all ethics. Here (though
of course
we hope it’s otherwise elsewhere) gentle old Zeus is
the boss
of the Hades and Hekate gang.” Now the mournful
smile was back.
“I am, let me hasten to add, a profoundly peaceable
man.
Inside this enormous hulk blooms the heart of a lilac!—
However,
tyrants don’t listen to, so to speak, rime or reason.
What is it
to tyrants that hope and soap are mysteriously linked?
One gets
one’s throne the other way. Well-a-day! Alack!” He
smiled,
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
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