Take No Prisoners (18 page)

No. I lie. People, too, had a permanence – a permanence of soul, however much they changed superficially. People and presumably other sentient creatures – because I was now vain enough to describe myself as sentient. There was a difference, though, between us. I was aware of all the changes that were going on, but it seemed to me that my human counterparts were not. I would see the same person changing in costume, role, skin-color, age and sex – even from dead to alive and back again – all within the space of seconds. Sometimes people disappeared; sometimes they seemed to pop into existence out of nowhere yet be totally unsurprised by this event. It took me a long while to realize that their lack of concern came about because they had no cognizance of any such change: as the past altered, in detail and in total, so did their memories of it. The person who, in my unsouled perception, had abruptly changed from a priest to a harlot knew nothing of it, because in her/his own mind s/he had
always
been a harlot.

More than that, The World around that person had, so far as s/he was concerned, always been, if not identical to the way it was now, then at least
rationally
different: the myriad of altered versions of The World each came with an entirely self-consistent history, an
evolved
past. That was why, however much a person's appearance and past might vary with each second, the person was, at the most fundamental level – the level of the essence – unaffected.

Such inferences came to me some while after, because I was more preoccupied with the many changes that were going on in me. In giving me so great a deal of his soulstuff, my master had also given me much of his mannishness. Over a period of days my tail retracted into the base of my spine and my trotters forked into inelegant fingers and toes and hands and feet. My hind legs grew and swelled until I was walking upright on them. The coarse hairs all over my porcine body remained, so that even to this day I am bristled everywhere; my ears likewise stayed pointed and large, and the tusks of my lower jaw still thrust themselves erectly from the sides of my mouth. But my face flattened, my crudely molded snout became an almost bone-like beak, and curly hair grew over the dome of my head and around my chin. In a dim light I looked like a caricature of a man – but this was much more like a man than I had looked before, and so it satisfied me.

Not my eyes, though. The first time I looked at myself in a mirror I saw that they were still wild eyes – the eyes of a forest boar. I would have recoiled from the wayward ferocities I saw displayed in them were it not for the fact that they so much formed a part with the feelings that surged through me of strength and vitality and virility (I use that word advisedly). I had the appetite of ten in those early days, yet if anything I grew leaner: my body was a steel-ringed barrel rather than a flabby tub. And my rampant appetite was not solely directed towards food and drink: I wanted – I
had
– to gorge myself on every aspect of my new-found existence. I ran, I swam, I roared, I spoke (despite the protests of unwieldy vocal cords), I slew, I fucked ... oh, yes, there was a lot of fucking for me, because in my new form I found myself the proud possessor of a sprightly mannish phallus, by whose responses to sensual stimulation I was in turns fascinated and devoured. Women, men, creatures of farm and field: all became my partners in sexual congress during my modulation from swine to something manly. Days went by during which it seemed I scarce withdrew my tireless member from some damp receptacle or other before popping it blithely into the next.

The giddy times slowly ended. There was no moment of conscious decision – just a gradual realization that I could gain greater pleasure from talking with someone than tupping them ... or at least from talking with them beforehand. I fell in love with words – fleshlike words, spoken in my own rough voice. My vocabulary increased exponentially, both driven by and driving the ecstatic pleasure I discovered in creating complex artifacts out of verbs and nouns, sensually subjunctive forms and wilfully playful gerunds. They inspired my thoughts to greater and ceaselessly greater heights, and in return my thoughts drove my vocabulary ever outward into the as yet unexplored terrains of the language. The synergy of this generated more energy in me than I had ever imagined existed: I felt it as heat, as if my very being were aflame. Every sensation was an act of learning for me, something that could be classified and stored away and correlated with all the millions of others in the library of my mind. I had great, universe-weaving and universe-destroying notions which I built upwards and all around me in brightly flashing networks, only to discard each of these objects of beauty as insouciantly as if it had been a piece of colored wrapping-paper, crumpled through use and thereby deprived of its function.

In a way, I suppose that this orgy of words and ideas was really no different from the fleshly splurge in which I'd earlier indulged myself.

And it, too, came to its natural end.

With everything – or almost everything – in a state of perpetual flux and decay, the yen grew in me to find some rock of stability to which I could cling. I required there to be in my life some representation of human endeavor that would retain its form during the dissolution of The World. Like a child who can tolerate all sorts of changes in life, I needed something as omnipresent as a favorite rag doll to trail around behind me.

It was then that I thought of Starveling, which had always been the navel of The World. Once it had been my creator's palace – his and the cruel golden woman's – but with him dead and her presumably fled, then it seemed rightful to me that I should be the successor to the ownership of that vast pile. And who could contradict me? I was ripe with the sap and juices of my own virility; I seemed to be more thoroughly
present
than anyone else around me. I felt as if I had been stamped right into the core of The World; however much its gossamer peripheries and their denizens should be shredded away into nothingness, I would certainly ... remain. With
that
strength of mine, I had no conception that anyone might contest my desire to take up what I saw as my rightful inheritance: Starveling.

In the event, I was to be proven right about that. My error was in forgetting that it wasn't just the inhabitants of The World who were losing their own reality but also The World itself. I had conceived myself simply taking ship and horse to Starveling – a perhaps tedious journey, but an unexceptional one, and over ground that would be in essence familiar to me.

That wasn't to be the case. The World that its inhabitants had always known was being not just manipulated but destroyed – something so obvious that, to me in the middle of it all, it was easy at first not to realize it. The bulk of The World – both material and more importantly spiritual – was being sucked into a furnace, to be melted down and then reconstituted into something else entirely. What that could be, I had and have no knowledge: I think it's likely impossible I ever
could
have knowledge of it. But here and there in the disorganized shards being left behind could be found foci of stability: myself, for one, because my soulstuff was inextricably conjoined with my physical presence (or perhaps – as I sometimes think when too many bottles of booze have darkened my reflections – perhaps simply because I wasn't
clever
enough for my soul to be wanted as a part of whatever new thing the molten detritus of The World was becoming). It was my intuition – one that was to be borne out – that Starveling would prove to be another such focus, another seed around which the Dross could crystallize. On my journey to the site of Starveling there would be no familiar landscapes, no well trodden terrains, no fixed mountainslopes and long-eroded river paths. Instead I would find a new and fantasticated land, a land founded upon illogicalities and populated by well forgotten dreams, a scenario of transience that I, by my very passage through it, would witlessly make coagulate into reality. Had I had any control over this process – had I not been so stupid as always not to notice until immediately afterwards that this was what I was doing – I might have rightly thought of myself as a god. As it was, I saddled both the recrudescent Dross of The World – and, more pertinently, my continuing self – with a motley agglomeration of human folk-fancies, and much more. Much worse.

But, as I say, I was too stupid – too brute-stupid – to know what was going on.

~

Imagine the scene. I'd crossed the Sea of Hollows into Albion without much incident, save the lack of a ship: I had walked the waters, unknowingly turning that tract of choppy sea into, forever, a tract of choppy land; in Qazar I'd slept in the wraith of an inn, hearing the spectral cries of past seagulls as I pulled gossamer blankets over my head in the dawn, anxious for an hour's more sleep. I'd strolled along the old winding road, now a rippling bridge that disappeared underfoot behind me. I'd come into a nameless village and almost passed through it before realizing that there had been something different about it as I'd approached. I looked back down the single street, then forward along the ethereal bridge, then back again.

Yes – where all ahead of me was gray-limned, as if probable rather than actual, the hamlet had displayed, from the moment it had first appeared in my vision, a hard-edged
definition
. And the colors: they were
brighter
, like those seen through a raindrop. Near to me was a bush of green. A dog, yipping from one doorway to another, was marked in stark black and white. Over there was a wall of good red-brown brick, and projecting from it was an inn sign painted in all the colors of the rainbow but much more substantial than those. Greater contrast could hardly be imagined between this kaleidoscope and the subtle gradations of gray to which I'd become accustomed.

Intrigued, I retraced my steps.

I pushed open the tavern door, appreciating the splintery feel of its wood against my fingertips. The scent of spilled beer came to me – something that had lacked from the inn in Qazar. Sconced torches around the walls made the polished tables gleam. Behind a trestled bar an oaf in an apron beamed.

I gulped. A great thirst was upon me. Ale!

The oaf made no movement as I entered, nor as I ambled in his direction. Stooping, I scraped up a wayward shadow from the floor and squeezed it until it became a purseful of coins; then I leant against the bar.

"A jug of your best," I said. "And be snappy about it. I've a beastly dryness from the road's length."

Still he didn't move.

I raised an eyebrow, having learned this gambit from a dockside trollop in Llandeer.

Not a twitch from him. Still he leered doorward, as if anticipating some new entrant.

I reached out and shoved his shoulder. It was like pushing against a cliff-face.

"He's fixed," said a voice of warm beeswax behind me. "He's mine."

I turned to look at the speaker. It had been my impression that the oaf and I were alone in this place, but for some reason my eyes had glid past the table in the corner by the window.

"I made him," added the figure sitting there.

I was speechless. I had seen the beauty of the golden woman, which my own maker had believed to surpass all. My soul, inherited from him, had modified that judgement, but as yet not greatly: I thought I was more perceptive of beauty in other beings than he ever was, but then that is what we all believe of our own tastes. I had seen the loveliness, too, of mountains and skies – of musical notes and a graceful equation – yet I had experienced nothing that could be compared with the beauty of this ... being.

I cannot say "man" or "woman," for it was neither, and both; I cannot even say with full certainty that it was a human being, or a mortal at all. Instead it was a confluence of radiance into fleshly form, yet I sensed that the flesh would be of feather-lightness – like a cake that has lost the characteristics of its eggs and flour and become a fluffy thing with the will to float on the room's draft. In my first glance I observed the creature by means of all my senses, overloading them. And yet I cannot pinpoint the root of all this being's brilliant beauty. It is a truism to say that some sights are too fair to be captured in words, but the individual by the window was, I believe, too fair to be captured even in sight – certainly I can conjure up in my mind's eye not even one morsel of what made it lovely.

Yet I can still focus – as clearly as if I confronted it now – some of the being's attributes. The overwhelming sensuality, for example. That may appear an odd observation to make of something that was by its very nature asexual – indeed, in many ways seemingly aphysical. Even the experience itself was paradoxical: I found every cell of my body to be sexually vibrant, yet my member remained unaroused. And I can still see
bits
of the being, like its light-white face and the clear yellow-green of its feline eyes. Oh, yes, one more thing: its head was capped by a copper-colored fuzz, like a halo.

But all of this, so powerful as it may seem, was ephemeral beside one other thing. I've noted before that, in the times after the dissolution of The World, I felt myself to be more truly
present
than anything else in the Dross. Facing this luminous being, I knew that I was in the company at last of something else with that self-same property.

"Come and sit down," said the entity. "See, your ale is already set here for you."

And sure enough it was: a stoneware tankard topped with foam. The polished table had, I could have sworn, before been empty of anything save the being's reflection.

"We must talk," it said. "You and I. I have decided that it shall be so."

"Talk ..." I said with a tongue of cloth and teeth of rubber. "Us." I was sitting opposite my interlocutor, my beer halfway to my mouth; either I had been carried to my chair by ensorcellment or, as seems in retrospect more likely, I had been enchanted in a less magical fashion by the being's beauty.

"You have a name?" I continued, bringing myself under control. My past had, after all, taught me the importance of names.