CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN.
JEFF VANDERMEER.
Praise for Jeff Vander Meer"s.
CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN.
Sf Site"s 2003 Book of the Year.
World Fantasy Award winner, best novella.
World Fantasy Award f inalist, best collection.
Voss Bender Memorial Award.
"["The Early History of Ambergris"] is the sort of thing that reminds us that while publishing modes, genres, literary schools and styles, and even the material matrices in which literature is encoded, come and go, there is a restorative impulse, a literary innocence, that transcends the maya thereof, that has not died yet, that remains eternal. Eternal because it generates literature that is written entirely for fun, without the slightest nod to the shrewdities of careerism . . . It restoreth the soul. It giveth hope." -Asimov"s SF Magazine "Beautifully written, virtually hallucinatory work . . . connoisseurs of the finest in postmodern fantasy will find it enormously rewarding."- Publishers Weekly, starred review "Jeff VanderMeer is one of the most remarkable pract.i.tioners of the literary fantastic in America today. His is a stylish, penetrating form of surrealism, with a deep emotional resonance; for all the elaborate formal tricks he plays, for all his flamboyant mastery of varied narrative voices, his work is profoundly felt throughout. He speaks from the inner recesses of the human mind and soul, and he speaks with uncommon power." -Locus "City of Saints balances the fantasist"s mesmerizing stare against the postmodernist"s knowing wink." -Rain Taxi Review of Books "A text of lethally hypnotic fascination . . . a masterpiece of ironic perversity [set in] a brilliantly-realized city." -New York Review of SF "Delightful fantasia." -The Washington Post "VanderMeer"s dark, sly, dreamlike, surrealist style defies easy description. One can point out literary influences, yet VanderMeer"s voice is still uniquely his own as he creates his textured, multi-dimensional city in story after story . . . highly recommended." -Year"s Best Fantasy & Horror "In his allusiveness, game-playing, and verbal manipulations, VanderMeer allies himself with literary modernism and postmodernism, with authors such as Nabokov, Borges, and Lem. Just as Borges and Lem are willing to draw on genre fiction to get somewhere quite different, so too is VanderMeer more interested in using genre as a springboard into a literary s.p.a.ce. The work here is often marvelously dark and grotesque, and VanderMeer"s creation of his world is complex and convincing." -The Review of Contemporary Fiction "Jeff VanderMeer"s Ambergris is one of the most brilliantly and vividly conceived places in all of fantasy fiction. VanderMeer"s writing is lyrical, romantic, and sometimes bitingly funny." -Scifi Dimensions "This is great stuff . . . if you"re a fan of the likes of Michael Moorc.o.c.k, China Mieville, Tim Powers, then you should order a copy . . . immediately. You won"t be disappointed." -Alien Online "Bawdy, sensual, profane and exhilarating, filled with clowns and demons, lovers and traitors, saints and madmen. If you cannot buy City of Saints and Madmen, chain yourself to the library steps until they bring in a copy for you, then steal it from the library. Loan it only to those over whom you have a sure hold. It is your guide to Ambergris, and you may just find that you live there." -SF Site "VanderMeer may well be the best fantasist working today. He slips past your defenses and seeds the hidden recesses of your imagination with spores that fruit in unexpected ways. You owe it to yourself to give him a try." -Revolution SF "This isn"t a book, it"s an experience. It"s not for everyone, but if you delight in running weird rabbit trails of thought, being dazzled by description, or simply picking out the strange flecks floating in the interstices of the mundane world, then this book is definitely for you." -Tangent Online "Examining VanderMeer one is reminded of the glories of Angkor and Anudhapura combined with the bustle and swagger of Captain Conrad"s Indonesia, the adventurous intrigues of Byzantium and Venice, the brutal Spice Wars of the Dutch. But sometimes it is as if Proust intrudes, incensed and reminiscent. VanderMeer describes a world so rich and exaggerated and full of mysterious life that it draws you away from any intended moral or pasquinade deep into the wealth of the world"s womb . . . we should admire the rare texture of the writing, the engaging vividness of his description and the quirks of his idiosyncratic mind which conducts its network of realities with celebratory panache. Make the most of the tapestry of tales and visions before you. It is a rare treasure, to be tasted with both relish and respect. It is the work of an original. It"s what you"ve been looking for." -Michael Moorc.o.c.k "I am enchanted and delighted by [the book"s] cohesive and consistent fantasy, its beautiful and sumptuous-yet rigorous-language, its mystery and evocation of all the dream cities one cherishes deepest in one"s heart, its fearless inventiveness and compelling strangeness." -Rikki Ducornet, author of The Jade Cabinet "Jeff VanderMeer"s City of Saints and Madmen is an invitation to wonder, a portal to a mind-altering experience, a catalyst for the imagination, a narrative whose intricate complexity clarifies instead of confuses, a fantasy that informs reality. I can"t think of any other recent book I am so certain will become a cla.s.sic." -Jeffrey Ford, author of Girl in the Gla.s.s "Somewhere at the intersection of pulp and surrealism, drawing on the very best of both traditions, is Jeff VanderMeer"s Ambergris. Unsettling, erudite, dark, shot through with unexpected humour, the stories engross and challenge endlessly. Ambergris is one of my favourite haunts in fiction." -China Mieville, author of Iron Council "Walking into Jeff VanderMeer"s Ambergris is like stepping inside of a surrealist painting by Leonora Carrington or Remedios Varo-an unsettling, haunting, fascinating experience. I recommend the journey to all travelers with a taste for the fantastic." -Terri Windling, editor, The Year"s Best Fantasy & Horror "If Franz Kafka had a son, and Jorge Luis Borges raised him with Jessica Amanda Salmonson, I imagine the result would look a lot like Jeff VanderMeer-someone who writes with dark dreamtime logic, Escher-like precision, and pure imaginative fire." -Lance Olsen, author of Hideous Beasties "A remarkable writer of highly original, utterly hilarious fiction, who continually pushes the boundaries of current literary fashion. "The Early History" and "Dradin, In Love" are literary tours de force, in which form and language stubbornly refuse relegation to instrumentality and rea.s.sert their irrepressible life. Few works I"ve read in recent years have given me such pure pleasure." -R. M. Berry, author of Leonardo"s Horse "A marvelous piece of work, artfully combining humour and horror to excellent effect. Its mosaic format works beautifully to emphasize and extend the uncertainties of the fragmentary narrative. The greatest challenge facing any modern author is to produce a tale quite unlike any that has ever been produced before, but [VanderMeer] has met that challenge head-on and answered it triumphantly." -Brian Stableford, author of The Omega Expedition.
"What can be said about Ambergris that has not already been said? Every minute section of the city, no matter how seemingly superfluous, has a complex, even devious, part to play in the communal life. And no matter how often I stroll down Alb.u.muth Boulevard.
, I never lose my sense of the city"s incomparable splendor- its love of ritual, its pa.s.sion for music, its infinite capacity for the beautiful cruelty."
-Voss Bender, Memoirs of a Composer, Vol. No. 1, page 558, Ministry of Whimsy Press.
For Ann, who means more to me than words.
THE REAL VANDERMEER.
AN INTRODUCTION.
"You"ll be familiar, of course, with VanderMeer." Schomberg"s fat red fingers fondled the notes he had counted. He placed them in his box and took a sideways look at me before pretending to hide it under the table. "Captain VanderMeer? First mate of The Shriek until she hit that reef. Master of The Frog when he next came back to the Islands."
"There was a woman involved, I take it?" I sipped my vortex water. It was locally made and suspiciously piquant.
"He knew Shriek himself and did his dirty work." Schomberg grimaced with his habitual distaste for every villainy and moral weakness not his own. The big fans overhead fluttered and rattled and stirred the thick, damp air. "Dradin did it to him. That"s the view round here. You can tell what happened. It"s all in the final story, if you"re not afraid to give it your full attention."
"So X was, after all, his muse, his love?"
Schomberg shrugged. It was clear he wanted me to leave. As I removed myself from his story, I heard him breathe heavily in relief. I would miss his earthy explanations, but my presence made him uneasy. I strolled back to my place and was again absorbed in VanderMeer . . .
-Josef Conrad, The Rescued, 1900 In those earlier years, to which we all look back with longing, there was no captain more respected than VanderMeer. He sailed the MirageIslands and the AmbergrisPeninsula. His memoirs had been eagerly awaited by the cognoscenti of the ports from Jannquork to San Francisco; but when they were published not everyone was satisfied the account was genuine. The methods he chose were often grotesque, baroque and fantastical, as if he strove to mirror in his writing style the visions he had witnessed. To be sure, this density of narrative was a little demanding to the reader used to the single sentimental plot which pa.s.ses for story in most modern tales, as if there were only one truth, and only one way of uttering it, one character of central interest, one view to which you should be sympathetic.
If our author"s response to his own experience was instinctively post-modern, this should be no reason for anyone"s surprise. As one of a remarkable group of contemporary captains who follow their own psychic maps, Captain VanderMeer is a master of keel and sail and at the wheel can take his vessel anywhere he chooses, whether skimming over rocky shallows or plunging her prow aggressively into the crowded waters of the Further Depths. For curiophilia, a wild curiosity and a love of exotic treasure, a fascination with complex architecture, a taste for the strangeness in the apparently ordinary, is what drives him on, carrying a peculiar miscellany of equipment into corners of the universe no intelligence has explored before and returning with remarkable rarities, so valuable they have yet to find their true price or, indeed, connoisseurs.
While we are inevitably reminded of Captain Smith"s Mercury or Ashton Smith"s Zothique, Jack Vance"s Dying Earth, "Crastinator Harrison"s Viriconium or Lady Brackett"s Old Mars or of the borderlands explored by the famous Hope Hodgson expedition, while Dunsany and even Love-craft can be used in respectful comparison, we perhaps find more useful similarities in those recent reporters from the imagination"s margins.
We recall Captain Aylett"s Beerlight and Pilot Etch.e.l.ls" Endland, whose mores and customs are at once so familiar and so strange to us. Since the great expansion, Captains DiFilippo, Constantine, Mieville, Gentle and Newman all return with alien currency from new worlds. Others with a taste for exotic geographies continue to seek the Unending Parallel. All have left accounts.
Yet of course few of these have the weighty grandeur of Ambergris , which is reminiscent more of Peake"s fine, almost-finished t.i.tus Alone. Here is the complex surreality of fresh-discovered history, only a shade or two inland from our most familiar harbors. It shares resonances with Sir David Britton"s monumental wasteland offered to us in the dark memories of Lord Horror and The Auschwitz of Oz. We are also reminded of labyrinthine Whittemore of the Sinai Tapestry and lands explored by the Welsh captains from Cowper Powys to Rhys Hughes and the strangely named Captain Taffy Sinclair. Robert Irwin, the Arabiste, has been another to draw his own maps and follow them. With VanderMeer, all are commanders of their chosen literary destinies, as courageous a company of psychic navigators as any you could hope to find.
Examining VanderMeer one is reminded of the glories of Angkor and Anudhapura combined with the bustle and swagger of Captain Conrad"s Indonesia, the adventurous intrigues of Byzantium and Venice, the brutal Spice Wars of the Dutch. But sometimes it is as if Proust intrudes, insensed and reminiscent. VanderMeer describes a world so rich and exaggerated and full of mysterious life that it draws you away from any intended moral or pasquinade deep into the wealth of the world"s womb. There is, I know, some suspicion he made over-free, even fictional, use of his material, perhaps to point an irony or two, even to present some kind of personal vision? Has this created a material change in his world? Would the Ambergris we next visit be anything like VanderMeer"s romantic version? And what of the rumor that there is a delicious tinge of an obscure heresy in these pages?
I believe I am not the only one to have calibrated the references to Giant Squid and detected emotional involvements more appropriate in a child to a mother than in man to cephalopod. But it isn"t our place or intention to a.n.a.lyze Captain VanderMeer"s character or predilections, such as he offers us in these pages. Rather we should admire the rare texture of the writing, the engaging vividness of his description and the quirks of his idiosyncratic mind which conducts its network of realities with celebratory panache.
Make the most of the tapestry of tales and visions before you. It is a rare treasure, to be tasted with both relish and respect. It is the work of an original. It"s what you"ve been looking for.
Michael Moorc.o.c.k.
Circle.
Squared Ranch.
Lost Pines, Texas.
Dradin, In Love.
I.
DRADIN, IN LOVE, BENEATH THE WINDOW of his love, staring up at her while crowds surge and seethe around him, b.u.mping and bruising him all unawares in their rough-clothed, bright-rouged thousands. For Dradin watches her, she taking dictation from a machine,an inscrutable block of gray from which sprout the earphones she wears over her delicate egg-shaped head. Dradin is struck dumb and dumber still by the seraphim blue of her eyes and the cascade of long and l.u.s.trous black hair over her shoulders, her pale face gloomy against the gla.s.s and masked by the reflection of the graying sky above. She is three stories up, ensconced in brick and mortar, almost a monument, her seat near the win dow just above the sign that reads "Hoegbotton & Sons, Distributors." Hoegbotton & Sons: the largest importer and exporter in all of lawless Ambergris, that oldest of cities named for the most valuable and secret part of the whale. Hoegbotton & Sons: boxes and boxes of depravities shipped for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the decadent from far, far Surphasia and the nether regions of the Occident, those places that moisten, ripen, and decay in a blink. And yet, Dradin surmises, she looks as if she comes from more contented stock, not a stay-at-home, but uncomfortable abroad, unless traveling on the arm of her lover. Does she have a lover? A husband? Are her parents yet living? Does she like the opera or the bawdy theatre shows put on down by the docks, where the creaking limbs of laborers load the crates of Hoegbotton & Sons onto barges that take the measure of the mighty River Moth as it flows, sludge-filled and torpid, down into the rapid swell of the sea? If she likes the theatre, I can at least afford her, Dradin thinks, gawping up at her. His long hair slides down into his face, but so struck is he that he does not care. The heat withers him this far from the river, but he ignores the noose of sweat round his neck.
Dradin, dressed in black with dusty white collar, dusty black shoes, and the demeanor of an out-of-work missionary (which indeed he is), had not meant to see the woman. Dradin had not meant to look up at all. He had been looking down to pick up the coins he had lost through a hole in his threadbare trousers, their seat torn by the lurching carriage ride from the docks into Ambergris, the carriage drawn by a horse bound for the glue factory, perhaps taken to the slaughter yards that very day-the day before the Festival of the Freshwater Squid as the carriage driver took pains to inform him, perhaps hoping Dradin would require his further services. But it was all Dradin could do to stay seated as they made their way to a hostel, deposited his baggage in a room, and returned once more to the merchant districts-to catch a bit of local color, a bite to eat-where he and the carriage driver parted company. The driver"s mangy beast had left its stale smell on Dradin, but it was a necessary beast nonetheless, for he could never have afforded a mechanized horse, a vehicle of smoke and oil. Not when he would soon be down to his last coins and in desperate need of a job, the job he had come to Ambergris to find, for his former teacher at the MorrowReligiousAcademy-a certain Cadimon Signal-preached from Ambergris" religious quarter, and surely, what with the festivities, there would be work?
But when Dradin picked up his coins, he regained his feet rather too jauntily, spun and rattled by a ragtag gang of jackanapes who ran past him, and his gaze had come up on the gray, rain-threatening sky, and swung through to the window he now watched with such intensity.
The woman had long, delicate fingers that typed to their own peculiar rhythms, so that she might as well have been playing Voss Bender"s Fifth, diving to the desperate lows and soaring to the magnificent highs that Voss Bender claimed as his territory. When her face became, for the moment, revealed to Dradin through the glare of gla.s.s-a slight forward motion to advance the tape, perhaps-he could see that her features, a match for her hands, were reserved, streamlined, artful. Nothing in her spoke of the rough rude world surrounding Dradin, nor of the great, unmapped southern jungles from which he had just returned; where the black panther and the blacker mamba waited with such malign intent; where he had been so consumed by fever and by doubt and by lack of converts to his religion that he had come back into the charted territory of laws and governments, where, sweet joy, there existed women like the creature in the window above him. Watching her, his blood simmering within him, Dradin wondered if he was dreaming her, she a haloed, burning vision of salvation, soon to disappear mirage-like, so that he might once more be coc.o.o.ned within his fever, in the jungle, in the darkness.
But it was not a dream and, of a sudden, Dradin broke from his reverie, knowing she might see him, so vulnerable, or that pa.s.sersby might guess at his intent and reveal it to her before he was ready. For the real world surrounded him, from the stink of vegetables in the drains to the sweet of half-gnawed ham hocks in the trash; the clip-clopstomp of horse and the rattled honk of motored vehicles; the rustle-whisper of mushroom dwellers disturbed from daily slumber and, from somewhere hidden, the sound of a baroque and lilting music, crackly as if played on a phonograph. People knocked into him, allowed him no s.p.a.ce to move: merchants and jugglers and knife salesmen and sidewalk barbers and tourists and prost.i.tutes and sailors on leave from their ships, even the odd pale-faced young tough, smiling a gangrenous smile.
Dradin realized he must act and yet he was too shy to approach her, to fling open the door to Hoegbotton & Sons, dash up the three flights of stairs and, unannounced (and perhaps unwanted) and unwashed, come before her dusty and smitten, a twelve o"clock shadow upon his chin. Obvious that he had come from the Great Beyond, for he still stank of the jungle rot and jungle excess. No, no. He must not thrust himself upon her.
But what, then, to do? Dradin"s thoughts tumbled one over the other like distraught clowns and he was close to panic, close to wringing his hands in the way his mother had disapproved of but that indicated nothing unusual in a missionary, when a thought came to him and left him speechless at his own ingenuity.
A bauble, of course. A present. A trifle, at his expense, to show his love for her. Dradin looked up and down the street, behind and below him for a shop that might hold a treasure to touch, intrigue, and, ultimately, keep her. Madame Lowery"s Crochets? The Lady"s Emporium? Jessible"s Jewelry Store? No, no, no. For what if she were a Modern, a woman who would not be kept or kept pregnant, but moved in the same circles as the artisans and writers, the actors and singers? What an insult such a gift would be to her then. What an insensitive man she would think him to be-and what an insensitive man he would be. Had all his months in the jungle peeled away his common sense, layer by layer, until he was as naked as an orangutan? No, it would not do. He could not buy clothing, chocolates, or even flowers, for these gifts were too forward, unsubtle, uncouth, and lacking in imagination. Besides, they- -and his roving gaze, touching on the ruined aqueduct that divided the two sides of the street like the giant fossilized spine of a long, lean shark, locked in on the distant opposite sh.o.r.e and the modern sign with the double curlicues and the bold lines of type that proclaimed Borges Bookstore, and right there, on Alb.u.muth Boulevard, the filthiest, most sublime, and richest thoroughfare in all of Ambergris, Dradin realized he had found the perfect gift. Nothing could be better than a book, or more mysterious, and nothing could draw her more perfectly to him.
Still dusty and alone in the swirl of the city-a voyeur amongst her skirts-Dradin set out toward the opposite side, threading himself between street players and pimps, card sharks and candy sellers, through the aqueduct, and, braving the snarl of twin stone lions atop a final archway, came at last to the Borges Bookstore. It had splendid antique windows, gilt embroidered, with letters that read: GIFTS FOR ANY OCCASION:.
* THE HISTORY OF THE RIVER MOTH *
* GAMBLING PRACTICES OF THE OUTLANDS *
* THE RELIGIOUS QUARTER ON 15 s. A DAY *
* SQUID POACHING *
* CORRUPTION IN THE MERCHANT DISTRICT *
* ARCHITECTURE OF.
ALb.u.mUTH BOULEVARD.
ALSO, The Hoegbotton Series of Guidebooks & Maps to the Festival, Safe Places, Hazards, and Blindfolds.
Book upon piled book mentioned in the silvery scrawl and beyond the gla.s.s the quiet, slow movements of bibliophiles, feasting upon the genuine articles. It made Dradin forget to breathe, and not simply because this place would have a gift for his dearest, his most beloved, the woman in the window, but because he had been away from the world for a year and, now back, he found the accoutrements of civilization comforted him. His father, that tortured soul, was still a great reader, between the bouts of drinking, despite the erosion of encroaching years, and Dradin could re member many a time that the man had, honking his red, red nose- a monstrosity of a nose, out of proportion to anything in the family line-read and wept at the sangfroid exploits of two poor debutantes named Juliette and Justine as they progressed from poverty to prost.i.tution, to the jungles and back again, weepy with joy as they rediscovered wealth and went on to have wonderful adventures up and down the length and breadth of the River Moth, until finally pristine Justine expired from the pressure of tragic pleasures wreaked upon her.
It made Dradin swell with pride to think that the woman at the window was more beautiful than either Juliette or Justine, far more beautiful, and likely more stalwart besides. (And yet, Dradin admitted, in the delicacy of her features, the pale gloss of her lips, he espied an innately breakable quality as well.) Thus thinking, Dradin pushed open the gla.s.s door, the lacquered oak frame a-creak, and a bell chimed once, twice, thrice. On the thrice chime, a clerk dressed all in dark greens, sleeves spiked with gold cufflinks, came forward, shoes soundless on the thick carpet, bowed, and asked, "How may I help you?"
To which Dradin explained that he sought a gift for a woman. "Not a woman I know," he said, "but a woman I should like to know."
The clerk, a rake of a lad with dirty brown hair and a face as subtle as mutton pie, winked wryly, smiled, and said, "I understand, sir, and I have precisely the book for you. It arrived a fortnight ago from the Ministry of Whimsy imprint-an Occidental publisher, sir. Please follow me."
The clerk led Dradin past mountainous shelves of history texts perused by shriveled prunes of men dressed in orange pantaloons-buffoons from university, no doubt, practicing for some baroque Voss Bender revival-and voluminous mantels of fictions and pastorals, ne glected except by a widow in black and a child of twelve with thick gla.s.ses, then exhaustive columns of philosophy on which the dust had settled thicker still, until finally they reached a corner hidden by "Funerals" ent.i.tled "Objects of Desire."
The clerk pulled out an elegant eight-by-eleven book lined with soft velvet and gold leaf. "It is called The Refractionof Light in a Prison and in it can be found the collected wisdom of the last of the Truffidian monks imprisoned in the Kalif"s dark towers. It was snuck out of those dark towers by an intrepid adventurer who-"
"Who was not a son of Hoegbotton, I hope," Dradin said, because it was well known that Hoegbotton & Sons dealt in all sorts of gimmickry and mimicry, and he did not like to think that he was giving his love an item she might have unpacked and catalogued herself.
"Hoegbotton & Sons? No, sir. Not a son of Hoegbotton. We do not deal with Hoegbotton & Sons (except inasmuch as we are contracted to carry their guidebooks), as their practices are . . . how shall I put it? . . . questionable.With neither Hoegbotton nor his sons do we deal. But where was I? The Truffidians.
"They are experts at the art of cataloguing pa.s.sion, with this grave distinction: that when I say to you, sir, "pa.s.sion," I mean the word in its most general sense, a sense that does not allow for intimacies of the kind that might strike the lady you wish to know better as too vulgar. It merely speaks to the general-the incorporeal, as one more highly witted than I might say. It shall not offend; rather, it shall lend to the gift-giver an aura of mystery that may prove permanently alluring."
The clerk proffered the book for inspection, but Dradin merely touched the svelte cover with his hand and said no, for he had had the most delightful thought: that he could explore those pages at the same time as his love. The thought made his hands tremble as they had not trembled since the fever ruled his body and he feared he might die. He imagined his hand atop hers as they turned the pages, her eyes caressing the same chapter and paragraph, the same line and word; thus could they learn of pa.s.sion together but separate.
"Excellent, excellent," Dradin said, and, after a tic of hesitation-for he was much closer to penniless than penniful-he added, "but I shall need two," and as the clerk"s eyebrows rose like the startled silhouettes of twin sea gulls upon finding that a fish within their grasp is actually a snark, he stuttered, "A-a-and a map. A map of the city. For the festival."
"Of course," said the clerk, as if to say, Converts all around, eh?
Dradin, dour-faced, said only, "Wrap this one and I will take the other unwrapped, along with the map," and stood stiff, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with urgency, as the clerk dawdled and digressed. He knew well the clerk"s thoughts: a rogue priest, unG.o.dly and unbound by any covenant made with G.o.d. And perhaps the clerk was right, but did not canonical law provide for the unforeseen and the estranged, for the combination of beauty and the bizarre of which the jungle was itself composed? How else could one encompa.s.s and explain the terrible grace of the Hull Peoples, who lived within the caves hewn by a waterfall, and who, when dispossessed by Dradin and sent to the missionary fort, complained of the silence, the silence of G.o.d, how G.o.d would not talk to them, for what else was the play of water upon the rocks but the voice of G.o.d? He had had to send them back to their waterfall, for he could not bear the haunted looks upon their faces, the disorientation blossoming in their eyes like a deadly and deadening flower.
Dradin had first taken a lover in the jungles: a sweaty woman priest whose kisses smothered and suffocated him even as they brought him back to the world of flesh. Had she infected his mission? No, for he had tried so very hard for conversions, despite their scarcity. Even confronted by savage beast, savage plant, and just plain savage he had persevered. Perhaps persevered for too long, in the face of too many obstacles, his hair proof of his tenacity-the stark black streaked with white or, in certain light, stark white shot through with black, each strand of white attributable to the jungle fever (so cold it burned, his skin glacial), each strand of black a testament to being alive afterwards.
Finally, the clerk tied a lime green bow around a bright red package: gaudy but serviceable. Dradin dropped the necessary coin on the marble counter, stuck the map in the unwrapped copy and, with a frown to the clerk, walked to the door.
Out in the gray glare of the street, the heat and the bustling confusion struck Dradin and he thought he was lost, lost in the jungles that he had only just fled, lost so he would never again find his lady. His breaths came ragged and he put a hand to his temple, for he felt faint yet giddy.
Gathering his strength, he plunged into the muddle of sweating flesh, sweating clothes, sweating cobblestones. He rushed past the twin lions, their a.s.ses waggling at him as if they knew very well what he was up to, the arches, and then a vanguard of mango sellers, followed by an army of elderly dowager women with br.i.m.m.i.n.g stomachs and deep-pouched ap.r.o.ns, determined to buy up every last fruit or legume; young pups in play nipped at his heels, and, lord help him, he was delivered pell-mell in a pile, delivered with a stum ble and a bruise to the opposite sidewalk, there to stare up once again at his lady love. Could any pa.s.sage be more perilous than that daylight pa.s.sage across Alb.u.muth Boulevard , unless it was to cross the Moth at flood time?
Undaunted, Dradin sprang to his feet, his two books secure, one under each arm, and smiled to himself.
The woman had not moved from her station on the third floor; Dradin could tell, for he stood exactly as he had previous, upon the same crack in the pavement, and she was exactly as before, down to the pattern of shadows across the gla.s.s. Her rigid bearing brought questions half-stumbling to his lips. Did they not give her time for lunch? Did they make a virtue out of vice and virtually imprison her, enslave her to a cruel schedule? What had the clerk said? That Hoegbotton practices were questionable? He wanted to march into the building and talk to her superior, be her hero, but his dilemma was of a more practical kind: he did not wish to reveal himself as yet and thus needed a messenger for his gift.
Dradin searched the babble of people and his vision blurred, the world simplified to a sea of walking clothes: cuffl inks and ragged trousers, blouses dancing with skirts, tall cotton hats and shoes with loose laces. How to distinguish? How to know whom to approach?
Fingers tugged at his shoulder and someone said, "Do you want to buy her?"
Buy her? Glancing down, Dradin found himself confronted by a singular man. This singular soul looked to be, it must be said, almost one muscle, a squat man with a low center of gravity, and yet a source of levity despite this: in short, a dwarf. How could one miss him? He wore a jacket and vest red as a freshly slaughtered carca.s.s and claribel pleated trousers dark as crusted blood and shoes tipped with steel. A permanent grin molded the sides of his mouth so rigidly that, on second glance, Dradin wondered if it might not be a grimace. Melon bald, the dwarf was tattooed from head to foot.