Jitterbug Perfume

Part I. THE HAIR AND THE BEAN

THE CITADEL WAS DARK, and the heroes were sleeping. When they breathed, it sounded as if they were testing the air for dragon smoke.

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

Blacksmiths hammered the Edge Serpent on the anvils of their closed eyelids. Wheelwrights rolled it, tail in mouth, down the cart roads of their slumber. Cooks roasted it in dream pits, seamstresses sewed it to the badger hides that covered them, the court necromancer traced its contours in the constellation of straw on which he tossed. Only the babes in the nursery lay peacefully, passive even to the fleas that supped on their tenderness.

King Alobar did not sleep at all. He was as awake as the guards at the gate. More awake, actually, for the guards mused dreamily about mead, boiled beets, and captive women as their eyes patroled the forested horizon, while the king was as conscious as an unsheathed knife; coldly conscious and warmly troubled.

Beside him, inside the ermine blankets, his great hound, Mik, and his wife, Alma, snoozed the night away, oblivious to their lord's distress. Well, let them snore, for neither the dog's tongue nor the wife's could lap the furrows from his brow, although he had sent for Alma that evening mainly because of her tongue. Alma's mouth, freshly outlined with beet paint, was capable of locking him in a carnal embrace that while it endured forbade any thought of the coils beyond the brink. Alas, it could endure but for so long, and no sooner was Alma hiccupping the mushroom scent of his spurt than he was regretting his choice. He should have summoned Wren, his favorite wife, for though Wren lacked Alma's special sexual skills, she knew his heart. He could confide in Wren without fear that his disclosures would be woven into common gossip on the concubines' looms.

Alobar's castle, which in fact was a simple fort of stone and wood surrounded by a fence of tree trunks, contained treasures, not the least of which was a slab of polished glass that had come all the way from Egypt to show the king his face. The concubines adored this magic glass, and Alober, whose face was so obscured by whiskers that its reflection offered a minimum of contemplative reward, was content to leave it in their quarters, where they would spend hours each day gazing at the wonders that it reproduced. Once, a very young concubine named Frol had dropped the mirror, breaking off a corner of it. The council had wanted to banish her into the forest, where wolves or warriors from a neighboring domain might suck her bones, but Alobar had intervened, limiting her punishment to thirty lashes. Later, when her wounds had healed, she bore him fine twin sons. From that time on, however, the king visited the harem each new moon to make certain that the looking glass had not lost its abilities.

Now, on this day, the new moon of the calendar part we know as September, when Alobar conducted his routine inspection, he looked into the mirror longer, more intently than usual. Something in the secrets and shadows of the imperfectly polished surface had caught his eye. He stared, and as he stared his pulse began to run away with itself. He carried the glass to an open window, where refracting sparks of sunshine enlivened its ground but refused to alter its message. “So soon?” he whispered, as he tilted the mirror. Another angle, the same result. Perhaps the glass is tricking me, he thought. Magic things are fond of deceptions.

Although the day was rather balmy, he pulled up the hood of his rough linen cloak and, blushing like blood's rich uncle, thrust the mirror into the hands of the nearest concubine, who happened to be Frol. The other women gasped. They rushed to relieve her of the precious object. Alobar left the room.

With some difficulty, for others tried to insist on accompanying him, the king excused himself from court and took the giant dog Mik for a romp outside the citadel gate. Circuitously, he made his way into the woods to a spring he knew. There, he fell to his knees and bent close to the water, as if to drink. Smothered under a swirl of cloudy mixtures, his reflection only spasmodically came into focus. Yet, among the bubbles, twigs, and jumbled particles of light and color, he saw it once more: a hair as white as the snow that a swan has flown over. It spiraled from his right temple.

Undirected — and unencumbered — by thought, King Alobar's hand shot out as if to ward off an enemy's blow. He yanked the hair from its mooring, examined it as one might examine a killed snake, and, after glancing over his shoulder to assure that none save Mik was his witness, flicked it into the spring, in whose waters it twisted and twirled for a long while before sinking out of sight.

Alma gnashed her semen-greased teeth in her sleep. Each distant owl note caused Mik to twitch. Between them, Alobar lay wide-eyed, his war-marked hands caressing the fur covers for comfort. It is with shame and fear that I rest tonight, thought the king. The way bewilderment lies upon me, I have no need of blanket.

In Alobar's kingdom, a minute city-state, a tribe, if you will, it was the custom to put the king to death at the first sign of old age. Kings were permitted to rule only so long as they retained their strength and vigor. Regarding its rulers as semidivine — god-men upon whom the course of nature depended — the clan believed wide-spread catastrophes would result from the gradual enfeeblement of the ruler and the final extinction of his powers in death. The only way to avert those calamities was to kill the king as soon as he showed symptoms of decay, so that his soul might be transferred to a vigorous young successor before it had been impaired. One of the fatal signals of fading power was the king's incapacity to satisfy the sexual passions of his wives. Another was the debut of wrinkles or gray hairs, with their indiscreet announcement of decline.

Heretofore, Alobar had not considered this tradition unfair. After all, were the king allowed to grow senile and ill, would not his weakness infect his domain, interfering with the multiplication of cattle, causing beet crops to rot in the fields, disabling the men in battle, and generally perpetuating disease, delirium, and infertility among those whom he ruled? And did not all intelligent peoples (which left out the Romans) hold this to be true? Why, in some nearby kingdoms, a slight blemish on the royal body such as the loss of a tooth was enough to bring about the death sentence. In Alobar's city, the execution was a ceremony of much dignity and aesthetic weight, the king's Number One wife bearing the responsibility for delivering to her husband's lips the poisoned egg. Among less civilized peoples in the region, the ruler was dispatched by the crude, though perfectly sufficient, process of being knocked on the head.

Heretofore, the ritual of putting the king to death had seemed to Alobar natural, inevitable, and just. But tonight. . tonight he cursed that cruelly traitorous strand, that hoary banderole of mortality that waved so thoughtlessly from an otherwise dark temple; that skinny, silver scroll upon which was written in letters bold enough for all of nature to read, an invitation to the burial mound. O most unwelcome hair!

From the lemony southern islands to the mountainous haunts of trolls, there was no honest person who could call King Alobar a coward. Numerous times he had risked his life in combat, exhilarant the cry of his charge. And why not, what was there in death to fear? Death was this world's tribute and the other world's bequest. To shun it was to cheat both sides. In yanking out the gray hair, he felt that he had betrayed his people, his gods — and himself. Himself? Self? What did that mean? Alobar pounded the pillow with his head, causing Mik to growl softly and Alma to flail both arms, although she did not surface from that sea without fish.

At first light, ere a rooster had reached the doodle part of his cock-a-doodle-doo, Alobar shook Alma awake, ordering her back to the harem and requesting that she send Wren in her stead.

“What are you grinning at?”

“My lord, I am merely happy to notice that you have regained your appetites.”

“What are you insinuating, woman?”

“Nothing, my lord.”

“What?” He seized her by her yellow braids.

“Don't be angry, sire. It is just that some of your wives grumble among themselves that you have neglected them of late.”

The king released her. Automatically, he raised his fist to the temple where the white hair had sprouted. Were another about to emerge, he would squash it in its follicle.

“Have they. . have they spoken of this to the council?”

“Oh, no, my lord! It has not come to that. To tell the truth, I think they are merely peevish because you spend your best seed in that clumsy little cunt, Frol.”

In the depths of his tangled beard, Alobar managed half a smile. Young Frol was pregnant again, and from the size of her belly, there developed therein a second set of twins.

Kissing had yet to be discovered in Europe, alas, so Alobar rubbed Alma's nose with his own. “My balls are so heavy I cannot leave the bed. Quickly, now. Fetch me Wren!”

As soon as she had gone, he arose and forced open the massive oak window. While Mik licked his feet, he uttered a succession of prayers to the rapidly diminishing sparkle of the morning star.

Those whom Alobar governed were a blond race, of such recent northern origin that snow-trolls and mystical red toadstools still figured in the tales the elders told around the fires, although the king himself, save for that morbid filament he had drowned in the spring, was on the dusky side. Wren, the daughter of a southern chieftain slain in battle by Alobar's predecessor, was even duskier. “The only dark meat in the king's larder,” some of the warriors joked. Her coloration was one reason he favored her. More importantly, however, he loved her good sense, although in that place in that time, “good sense” was considered no more a virtue in a wife than “love” in a king.

Alma's advance advertising must have been effective, for Wren arrived in the royal chamber already nude and lathered, wine in her cheeks. Thus, she was surprised to find her husband fully clothed, sitting with his hound on the great bear rug at the foot of his bed.

“I–I—I am sorry, my lord,” she stammered. The vintner in her veins pressed a more ruddy grape. “I was informed that you had summoned me.”

“That I did, dear Wren. Please come sit at my side.”

“Well, all right, of course. But first let me fetch my robe. I've left it in the anteroom.”

Smiling at her decorum, Alobar started to detain her. Even in his agitated mood, he could admire this walking flower of intelligent pink, this industry of honey and brine. But the image of the hair cast its shadow, and he allowed her to dress. He petted the dog.

“So, you plucked it,” she said, after he had related the events of the previous day.

“Yes, I did.”

“Plucked it?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I hoped that you could help me answer that.”

Wren shook her head of skunk-black curls. She appeared puzzled. “No, my lord, I think not. I have never met nor heard story of one who so resisted fate.”

“Surely I am not the first,” said Alobar. “If so, I must be madman as well as coward.”

“Oh, neither, my Alobar.”

“Then what?” He watched dispassionately while Mik got up, yawned, stretched, and lumbered to a far corner of the room to relieve himself. “Tell me, Wren, what do you believe awaits you after you die?”

“Awaits me? Me, Wren? I have never pondered what death might hold for this one person, born Wrenna of Pindus, now Wren, wife of Alobar. Death is not a personal matter, is it? It is the business of the clan. Our clan is responsible for maintaining the continuity of our race against the terrible whims of heavens and earth, and since the clan is weakened by the loss of one of its members, any death can be an ordeal for the whole.”

The king nodded. No gray hair nodded with him, though not having viewed himself that morning he could not be certain of that. “Which explains why our people hold such elaborate and energetic funerals. We entertain the immortals in order that they might be persuaded to help us recover the strength and unity stolen from us by death. However — and this occurred to me only last night as I lay abed undreaming — the clan usually succeeds in closing that breach death tore in its defenses, but what of the one who died? In some regions, they believe that he will pop up again in springtime like a crocus, but never have I observed such a blooming. In the past, I have thought: I shall entrust myself to whoever is more powerful in the next world, the gods or the demons. Yet now, my own speedy demise a rising possibility, I do not willingly submit to playing the part of prize in an other-worldly tug-of-war.”

“Is this blasphemy, my lord?”

“I think not. Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate future resistance in the heart they were abuilding.” Alobar looked at her hopefully. “Can you not agree?”

Wren placed her own soft hand upon Mik's coat. At her touch, the huge hound seemed almost to purr. “I can neither agree nor disagree. I came here this dawn a quarter asleep, expecting to have my furrow plowed, only to have you sow in my mind such strange ideas.” She gave her fingers to Mik so that he might affectionately wet them.

“Perhaps,” said Alobar, “I ought to turn to the necromancer for advice.”

“No, no, Alobar. Do not. Please do not.”

“Indeed, why?”

“This is hard for me to express, my lord, but I shall try. The kings of your ancestors have been celebrated around many a bonfire. But celebrated for cunning and for brawn. Wisdom, true knowledge, has been the province of the necromancer alone. You have changed all that, and Noog does not like it. You must forgive what I am about to say, for it is fact. There are men inside these city walls more powerfully built than you, Alobar; more adept with the spear. Men who can run faster, hurl a stone farther, face an awesome enemy with an equal absence of trembling, and pacify a harem with as sturdy a shaft. But you, well, while I cannot imagine how you acquired it, you have a brain. Time and time again, you have demonstrated your unusual ability to see inside of men and to interpret the silent pleas they aim at the stars. In the past, many kings have ruled this people. You have governed them.”

“Governed?”

“It is a Hellenic word—”

“Hellenic.” Alobar closed his eyes and thought of what he had heard of the Hellenic city-states far to the southeast, near the edge of the earth. How glorious they were rumored to have been, how wealthy and learned and proud of their arts. Long ago northern tribes, not unlike his ancestors, had sacked them. What good was righteous governing if rough people could come along at will and chop you up?

“—a Hellenic word, meaning to exercise a directing influence. That you have done. The heroics of past rulers only kept your kingdom in a state of agitation. You have calmed it. And Noog resents you for that, because as a result of your reasonable leadership, the necromancer is less necessary and less admired.”

“I am not surprised. There is a limit to the admiration we may hold for a man who spends his waking hours poking the contents of chickens with a stick.”

“Divination has its worth.”

“Yes, and so, perhaps, does the elimination of time-trapped kings. Yet, rebellion stirs within me this daybreak. I appreciate your warning about Noog. Were I to tell him what I am about to tell you, dear Wren, I would be dining on bitter egg ere the moon is ripe. I have seen kings bite that egg, watched them turn green as ivy leaves and flap about the yard like freshly beheaded fowl. And all the while the populace onlooking as if it were at a bear-and-dog match. Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched. Well, forgive me, perhaps the sap of that silver hair has made me drunk from inside my skull, but I am seized with desire to be something more. Something whose echo can drown out the rattle of death.”

As Wren blinked her bituminous lashes at his queer behavior, Alober stood, disrobed, and turned slowly around and around before her like prime merchandise at a slave market. Save for the occasional phosphorus mark where some blade had stung him, his body was smooth and tan, braided with muscle, supple, quick; neither as massive nor as hairy as many warriors who had marched behind him. His chestnut mane was chopped an inch below the ears, his beard was shaggy and full. Less prominent than her own southern model (maybe there is simply more to whiff in tropic climes), his nose was banded at the bridge with a ribbon of scar tissue. His eyes, bright as torches in an ice cave, were so blue they seemed on certain days to bleed into the sky. Alobar's mouth, what could be glimpsed of it through the whiskers, was thinner than the meaty mouths of his fellows, and at the same time less crude; it reminded Wren of her late father's mouth, and she admired it most of all. On several occasions in his company, she had come within a pucker of discovering kissing.

When he had completed his exhibition, he planted a palm against each of his jowls and said in a voice both defiant and shaky, “This man before you is part of the community, the race, and the species, yet is somehow separate from them. That notion shocks you, I can see. But, Wren, I cannot tolerate the passive obliteration of all that I am to myself. My deeds have not been so small that they will never be recalled around the fires, yet that fails to satisfy my longing. My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.” He slapped his thighs. “It is with difficulty that I imagine this familiar body gone cold. These limbs, this trunk, the heart that drums, they urge me, against all my training, to prevail over submission to the collective destiny.”

Wren's mouth opened as tentatively as a mollusk shell. “Vanity?” she asked. A wife, even in shock, she made certain that it was less an accusation than a query. “Vanity?”

“Vanity? I am unsure. It feels different from vanity. If I be but vain, then the demons will kick my ghost from pit to pit. In my defense, I can say only this: I have fought for my people and would fight for them again, let them name the foe. But I am not ready to have them place the crown on another's noggin, though his be as yellow as sulfur and mine whiter than any winter's drift.”

For a long while, Wren sat quietly, poised as if she were a blood-drop on the point of a dagger. Then she said, “You seem to value my opinion, my lord. This then I say to you: It would be painful for me to pass you the poison. I would ache should I find your body still and icy, even though it meant that our clan might easier endure. Your words puzzle me no end. But I trust you as I have trusted no other, save my father. If survival through deception be your wish, then I shall endeavor to support the deceit. Most assuredly, I shall refrain from any mention of it.”

“It is no major deceit. Unless my parents lied, I have lived through but thirty-seven Feasts of Feasts. I remain young and able, no matter what that treacherous hair did shout.” Again he slapped his thighs. Then, all at once, the bluster drained out of him. “Ah, but, Wren, you may not have long to guard our secret. I have observed the habits of hairs, and before many mornings there will arrive another as colorless as that last. And another and another, like doves at a roost. Every single day I would have to regard my head in the looking glass, yet I cannot retrieve the glass from the concubines without raising suspicion. You are more than loyal, but there is little use. . ” He slumped down on the fur beside her.

“I will be your mirror,” said Wren.

He understood and, in gratitude, embraced her until at length he felt his humor return. A slow smile bent back his foliage.

“I've a mind to lay you down and split you like a rack of mutton. What would you say to that?”

“You know very well what I would say. I would say those half-formed, half-crazed words the she-panther speaks when in the delirium of her seasonal heat she is mounted by her mate.”

Alobar moved to shut the window against the beginning buzz and bustle of the city day. Then he thought better of it and left it wide. It would be to his advantage, he reasoned, should the populace overhear she-panther yowls emanating from his chamber.

Days grew shorter. The citadel was hidden by morning fogs. Beets, resembling the hearts of gnomes, were piled in the storage cellars. Ducks lined up to buy their tickets to southern swamps. Mead was jugged. Blades and leathers oiled. Wolves made clouds when they sang at night. Maybe that was where the fogs came from. Everywhere there were sounds of husks cracking, virgins dancing, the rush of bees on last-minute shopping sprees, the roar of altars ablaze with some sacrifice.

King Alobar was likewise undergoing a season change. True to her word, Wren was his mirror, and approximately once a week she discovered a white settler aspiring to colonize the shady hirsute shores. She drove it promptly out of the neighborhood.

More pensive than ever, Alobar shared his thoughts with her. “I think that I am seeking something,” he confessed once as they stood alone in the western watchtower, overseeing, from a bloodless distance, the butchering of skinny beef. “What I seek is neither spoils nor territory, new wives nor new glory, nor, for that matter, merely a lengthened life. What I seek never was, not on land or sea.”

What he sought was to become something singular out of his singular experience — and labor as she might, Wren could not understand. If the notion of an individual resisting death for his own sake was foreign to her (as indeed, it would have been to anyone in that milieu), the concept of the uniqueness of a single human life was alien to the point of babble. Preferring the chaos down in the cattle pens to her husband's god-offending nonsense, she shut it out entirely and yelled encouragement to the butchers.

Yet, Wren served Alobar in ways beyond the call of duty. In an attempt to prove his stamina, the king set upon his harem like a starving rat let loose in a peach barrel. Night after night, he rooted, rolled, and reamed. He climbed delicately upon Frol's swollen belly. He left Juun and Helga complaining of soreness in their nether regions. He generated funky auroras around the bodies of Ruba and Mag. He gave Alma a taste of her own medicine. Each night, when he had done with one or the other of them, he would rub their noses, tug their blond braids, and send them back to their quarters to fetch Wren. While Alobar, exhausted, lay beside her panting and making imprudent comments, such as “Wives are wonderful, but why did I have to accumulate so many?", Wren would fake her lioness cries. Mornings, while he dreamed of the relative tranquillity of war, she would fake them again. In time, the subterfuge shamed them both so deeply they could scarcely bear to look at each other. It was actually a relief when it was brought to an end.

Noog the necromancer paid close attention to the king's activities. He had done so for years. He had chronicled Alobar's gradually declining sexual enthusiasm, so the desperation implicit in the sudden reversal was not lost on him. When he read verification of his suspicions in the intestinal texts of several hens, he decided to see for himself.

It so happened that on the morning that Noog stole up to the royal window, after bribing a guard with a glass bead, Alobar and Wren were actually making love. Her phony demonstrations had excited him that dawn. After all, he cared for her above any other. So he had touched her stomach with uncommon tenderness, and soon her groans were being uttered in earnest. Disappointed, Noog was about to turn away when the magpie that rode upon his shoulder abruptly took flight and swooped into the king's chamber. Undetected as yet by the copulating couple, a long, curly hair as bright as an icicle had unfurled during the night in Alobar's beard. The magpie flew directly to the hair, pulled it free with its beak, and delivered it into the gizzard-stained hands of the magician.

Following a full day of chanting, singing, and frenzied dancing by painted figures in animal suits, the execution took place at twilight.

Awaiting his mortal exit, Alobar sat on a bronze throne wearing for the last time a thick crown of hammered gold. In his lap, he held the sacred turtle shell. The shell and crown rivaled the Egyptian looking glass in the hierarchy of the city's treasure trove. At precisely the moment that the sun's eye winked behind the western hills, Wren stepped from a tiny hut of pine boughs, constructed for the occasion, carrying on an ermine pillow the smoking egg. Without missing a cue, as if she had rehearsed for days, she dance-stepped thrice around the bonfire, then up to the throne. Supposedly, the egg had been laid by a viper, although Alobar suspected it was the product of Noog's magpie.

In any case, Wren lifted it gracefully to Alobar's mouth, and as the singers fell silent and the dancers froze, he gulped it down. Presently he commenced to writhe. His face turned the color of the pine boughs. He toppled over and, green tongue lolling, thrashed about in the mud. Noog approached, recovered the crown that had spilled, and placed it upon the head of the young hero who had taken Alobar's place on the throne. Alobar kicked with both boots, then lay still.

The new king flicked a dab of green foam off the throne. He raised his spear and smiled. Cheering broke out in the city, but it was shortlived because Mik lunged for the bronze chair and would have chewed off the occupant's leg had he not been restrained. No sooner was the hound muzzled than a new snarling began. This time it came from Frol, the fourteen-year-old concubine, who horrified the crowd by pulling the magic mirror from inside her maternity gown and smashing it against the logs of the bonfire.

The burial mound was outside the city walls, in a field dotted with cow pies and large stones. The stones had been arranged geometrically in patterns that were supposed to mean something to the gods. Presumably, the cow pies had fallen at random, although then, as now, the division between what is random in nature and what is purposeful is extremely difficult to determine.

Warriors carried Alobar's body to the mound's summit, where a shallow indentation had been dug. After the body was laid in the hole, the councilmen covered it with dirt. They sprinkled mead on the grave. They chanted an incantation half as ancient as the stones in the field; words arranged, like the stones, in sensuous patterns; words that saber-toothed tigers may once have overheard. There were no tears, except the ones that Frol had shed back in the citadel yard. Death was not a weeping matter. The indentation in the mound-top represented the navel in the Great Belly. Alobar was back where he had begun. Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Alobar was back where he had begun. But not for long. As soon as the funeral procession had wound, imitating the undulations of the Serpent, back through the gates of the city, Wren ran from the shadow of an upright stone and started frantically to dig him out. Only two feet of earth lay over him, so he was soon uncovered. She had a vessel of mead concealed in her cloak, part of which she used to clean dirt out of his mouth and nostrils. The remainder she poured down his throat. A potent beverage, the mead gradually counteracted the effects of the nightshade belladonna that she had placed in the egg. Since belladonna, in small amounts, will slow heartbeat, it had helped Alobar feign death. Wren also had stuffed the egg with algae that she had scooped off the surface of a stagnant pond. It was the algae that had given the green cast to his skin.

There had been no fatal poison in the egg Alobar devoured. Following a plan they had devised in the week between Noog's discovery and the execution ritual, Wren had secreted Noog's death egg in her bodice while she waited in the hut, substituting an egg filled with the algae and a nonlethal dose of nightshade belladonna.

Alobar was considerably dazed, but as soon as he demonstrated to Wren's satisfaction that his breathing was of sufficient velocity to billow the sails of his soul, she left him. “I must return ere I am missed. I have to prepare myself to receive my new husband.” The last she said matter-of-factly, but she rubbed his nose poignantly before fleeing.

As dazed as he was, Alobar had the presence of mind to let his body roll down the slope of the burial mound, which was starting to be illuminated by a rising moon. He came to rest in shadow. He also came to rest in a more or less fresh cow pie — but he uttered no oath. I may be mad, he thought, but I prefer the shit of this world to whatever sweet ambrosias the next might offer.

East was good enough for the morning star, it would be good enough for Alobar. He should not travel westward, for the Romans, with whom his people had traditionally skirmished, controlled the westlands, and for a long time now the Romans had been increasingly under the spell of some borrowed god who sounded like particularly bad news. Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this Semitic deity was reputed to be jealous (who was there to be jealous of if there were no other gods?), vindictive, and altogether foul-tempered. If you didn't serve the nasty fellow, the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down. There was a long list of enjoyable things Christians could not do, however, including keeping more than one wife. “Come to think of it,” mused Alobar, “that might not be such a bad idea.”

Ah, but Christians were meddlers, and a man on the run from death, duty, and who knew what else? was a man who didn't need meddling with. It was possible that he had insulted quite a few deities of his own acquaintance, so he didn't relish some aggressive foreign hothead getting in the act. Christians populated the south as well as the west, while up north the pebbles lay with their faces already in snow, and Alobar had neither furs nor spear. It was settled. He would journey into that east whose pinchers had so recently released October's buoyant moon.

When the last spasm of nausea had subsided, when all traces of dirt and drug had washed away and his blood flowed melodious and clear, he stood, stretched, gathered his burial wraps about him, and set off at a trot toward the east — and the multiplying unknown.

As he trotted, he could hear in the distance the drunken din of the city, where his people simultaneously lamented the broken mirror and celebrated their rescue from feebleness and decay. Then he turned upwind, and the night was suddenly quiet. He paused to look back. The red glow of torches and bonfires caused the city to resemble a miniature sun a-setting. Let it set, he thought. A fresh one will rise in the east. Nevertheless, there were pangs in his heart. Mixed in that caldron of sound that had just faded might have been the feline wails of Wren, who, no doubt, lay with the new ruler beneath his ermine covers. Did Mik snore at the foot of the bed? he wondered. All of Alobar's wives belonged to his successor, if he wanted them, but Mik was eternally Alobar's and would have been buried with him had he not demanded, prior to his “execution,” that the hound be spared. “I would vow to retrieve you, Mik,” whispered the former king, “but as sorely as I miss you, I will not be back. Not one companion from my reign will I ever see again.”

He was quickly to be proven wrong.

He was now at the threshold of the dark forest. Unarmed, he dare not venture deep inside lest enterprising beasts process his flesh into sausage cakes and brew their winter's ale from his blood. Therefore, his plan was to lie down just inside the tree line and sleep until daybreak. At earliest light he would strike out, attempting to transverse the wood before it again grew black. Having a terrible thirst, however, a need to rinse his mouth of the accumulated residue of mead, mud and egg surprise, he decided to first go in as far as the spring and drink. Then he would retire to a resting place less convenient to the wolf kitchens.

The spring bubbled in a little glade, a clearing lit like an altar by the ever-ceremonious moon. So bright was the glade that Alobar could watch his shadow slide along the promenade of moss and kneel with him to drink. “Me and my shadow,” he said wistfully, anticipating the popular song by a thousand years. “Me and my—” What was that? His shadow had attracted a second, a companion, shadow, slightly smaller than itself though nonetheless human in shape. If his shadow was no longer alone, did that mean that he, too, enjoyed companionship? And if his shadow's shadow friend aimed a shadow spear, could Alobar conclude that a spear was pointed at him, as well?

Still on his knees, Alobar whirled and lunged at the place where the shadow had led him to expect he would find legs. Yes, those were legs he grabbed! He yanked them hard, hoping to upset the body they supported before it could shove a blade through one rack of his rib cage and out the other. He felt the spear point graze first his cheek and then his shoulder, as the being who wielded it crashed down on top of him. Alobar no longer knew how the shadows were behaving, but as for himself, there was an attacker straddling his head. Disgust mingled with fear as he labored to withdraw his face from his adversary's crotch. In the struggle, some part of him, most likely his nose, fired a message to his brain. The message contained a single word: female!

Alobar pulled himself free with such force that he fell backward into the spring. When he surfaced, spewing and sputtering, dead leaves and the addresses of a dozen hibernating frogs strewn throughout his beard, he found himself contemplating a spear tip again. This time, however, he could see the face of his assailant, and while he was no longer surprised that it was a woman, he was astonished that the woman was Frol.

Alobar's amazement was mild compared to Frol's. When she realized that she had tried to puncture her recently executed lord and husband, her young mind reeled at the potential redundancy, and she fainted straight away. Alobar revived her with water that he wrung from his clothing, and they spent a largely incoherent hour sorting things out.

Following her destruction of the prized mirror, only the intervention of the new king had prevented the clan from ripping Frol to shreds. It seemed the king desired to honor Alobar's precedence, desired to govern rather than merely rule (Alobar detected the influence of Wren), so he urged compassion, as he believed Alobar would have done, and reduced Frol's sentence to banishment. Moreover, as Frol was driven from the city in a blizzard of curses, his highness handed her his own spear, with which she might at least delay the dinner of the bears (Alobar could picture Wren whispering instructions in the freshly royal ear).

Five minutes or less was required by Frol to explain her presence in the forest. The remainder of the hour was taken up by Alobar's protests that he was not a specter. Slow to be convinced, Frol accepted Alobar's concreteness only after he produced the terminus of his urinary network and arced a stream in front of her. “Everyone knows that ghosts don't piss!” he exclaimed, and although she was unacquainted with that particular wisdom, it sounded too logical to be denied.

Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She (to persist in personifying the sensation as female) is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home. Alobar was presently in her arms, having made a sudden shift in direction due to Frol's heavy load — she was timed to give birth on the next full moon — and was now bearing west, after all, seeking a nearby haven where Frol might deliver, rather than the distant edge where he might test fate. On the surface, it seemed a less adventurous choice, yet the prospect of raising a family in Christiandom was far more challenging to Alobar than any potential combat with man or monster, and the very spontaneity of the decision inflated his humor. Thus, even though his back now was turned to the allure of the morning star, even though a stout breeze flattened his beard against his Adam's apple, even though his damp clothing clung to him like frost, he whistled from stump to rock as if he were a teakettle leading the pack in the annual pot-and-pan cross-country marathon.

Three days later, still whistling, pulling a stumble-footed Frol along, he entered the village of Aelfric. Abruptly the whistling stopped.

Aelfric was a huddle of hovels, an ugly little settlement of thatch and mud in which dwelt the peasants who farmed the manor of Lord Aelfric, whose imposing manor house loomed over the village, although it stood a quarter-mile away. Alobar's blue eyes scrutinized the rude peasant houses and the peasants themselves, bent and beat from a crowded calendar of toil; he examined the granite turrets of the manor house, surveyed the surrounding fields and woods. His toes curled nervously in his boots, but just when they were about to uncoil and propel him toward a scenic bypass of downtown Aelfric, his gaze settled on Frol's belly. He calmed his toes. He took Frol's hand. “Here we shall build our muddy nest,” he said.

The peasants received them warmly. Naturally, they were suspicious, but newly baptized, they were sensitive to the responsibilities of Christian charity. Recognizing in Alobar the mien of a warrior, they suggested that his proper employment would be as a vassal in the military service of Lord Aelfric. They were both amazed and gladdened when the stranger insisted on remaining among them. They could always use another strong back in the pitiless acres of Aelfric.

For his part, Alobar knew all too well how life would be in the manor house. He had been a mighty warrior, he had been an exalted king. Now it amused him to see what kind of serf he would make. Besides, for some reason — perhaps it was connected to the trauma of the white hair — he had grown tired of violence. “I sense that there are different sorts of battles to be fought,” he told Frol, “and I shall fight them for myself, not Lord Aelfric.”

Despite his reputation, Alobar had little fear of recognition. Aelfric was a mere forty miles west of his former castle, but there was not a single serf who had traveled more than ten miles from his or her birthplace. Once his beard was shaved, his hands callused, his body stooped to the processing of the harvest, not even the most cosmopolitan of the lord's knights would be able to identify him. Moreover, he was “dead.” “Long live death,” whistled Alobar as he winnowed grain from chaff.

To Frol, Aelfric presented a more difficult challenge. Pregnancy afforded a peasant woman no relief from work, not even in its final hours. Softened by the sables and scented pillows of the harem, Frol fainted two days in a row while pounding flax with heavy scrutchers. Thereafter, she was dispatched each dawn to the manor house, where she waited upon ladies. Ever spunky, Frol served without complaint, and the ladies soon learned not to trust her with breakables.

One night in bed, Alobar removed Frol's hands from his waist and lifted them temporarily above the rough blankets. Examining her stubby fingers, he said, “Here is where glassware comes to die.”

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

Among the observations made by Alobar during his first few weeks as a citizen of Aelfric were these:

(1) “Here the people bury their dead not in communal mounds but in individual graves. Now that I have come to regard death as a private challenge rather than as a social phenomenon to be exploited — once it has occurred — for the common good, as my clan regards it, I wonder if Christianity may not have something in its favor, after all.”

(2) “The priest of the manor reminds me to no end of Noog. He is absorbed with his position on the estate and manipulates everyone, lord, lady, and serf, alike, to better his station and to tighten the Church's grip on the society. There resides, however, in a hut of sticks beyond the fringe of the village, another kind of priest, a wise old man called a shaman. The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet, he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest. Perhaps that is why the priest despises him.”

(3) “The main vegetable consumed in Aelfric is the turnip. With my clan it was the beet. Could that explain why these people are so docile and mine so fierce?”

More than once during his first year in Aelfric did ex-king Alobar reconsider applying for a vassalic position with the lord of the manor. The life of the peasants was brutally hard. In return for the lord's protection, they had to work for a prescribed number of days a week on his lands. In the few remaining hours, they plowed, seeded, and harvested their own meager holdings and performed an endless succession of chores, such as chopping wood, butchering game, shearing sheep, digging ditches, drawing water, mending roads, carting manure, and building carts in which to cart still more. In the quiet ache of evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow, a sound that merged in his ear with the echo of the switch on the ox's hide.

By then, gray had overtaken one of every four hairs on his head, and some nights he would pluck those pale hairs as if they were petals, saying to Frol, “If I wasn't elderly when our clan decreed I was, I soon will be. Harsh labor pierces the rosy membrane of youth and lets the shriveling brine seep in.”

Nevertheless, the work-worn months held satisfactions. The novelty of one wife continued to fascinate Alobar. Frol remained as devoted as when he was her sovereign, and she showed signs of maturing into a woman as sexually adept as Alma and only slightly less intelligent than Wren. With her company he was content, and when she issued twins, one of each gender, that first November, a new dimension was added to his life. Back in his home city, his offspring had been raised communally in a nursery adjoining the harem. The nursery was a female province, as foreign to his bootsteps as the serpent-seared cliffs of the edge. Now he discovered children, and the discovery blew blasts of sugar into every chamber of his heart.

When Alobar had enough energy, he cataloged his experiences and observations and tried to profit from them, to what end he could not say. Because Christianity emphasized the value of the individual, in the Roman scheme every person had his or her place. In the frame of mind in which he'd been since first he was violated by the hair, this concept appealed to him, providing food for mental mastication.

The peasants were a dull lot, by and large, but they had exhibited extraordinary kindness in helping the strangers set up house-keeping in a flea-bitten cottage with a dirt floor. Their friendliness increased after first Frol (out of conviction) and then Alobar (as a strategic maneuver) agreed to be baptized in the name of their exclusive god. However, certain activities were conducted in the village from which Alobar and his family were barred. These activities seemed to be social in nature, generally merry, and coincided with seasonal observances.

The traditional winter festival, which among Alobar's folk as well as many other Europeans was celebrated during the twelve days that separated the end of the lunar year (353 days long) from the end of the longer solar year (365 days), and whose purpose it was to equalize the two different celestial years, had been appropriated by the Christians and transformed into a religious holiday called “Christmas.” As far as Alobar could determine, Christmas was the same winter festival of yore, except that the profound emotionalism annually precipitated by moon/sun influences, the priest here attributed to the natal anniversary of “Christ,” a Semitic man-god whose exact relationship to the One God, Alobar could never quite get straight.

On their first Christmas Day in Aelfric, Frol and Alobar were obliged to spend the entire morning in church, listening to sermons and hymns in a language they could barely understand. Later in the day, they tramped through the snow to the manor house, where the lord served up a mammoth meal for all his serfs. At dusk, Frol and Alobar returned to their cottage to sleep off the food and drink, but long after their candles had been extinguished, lights flickered in the homes of others, as well as in the community lodge, from which laughter and song poured most of the night. The songs that Alobar overheard were most unlike hymns, and the whoops and guffaws that mixed in the clear, frosty air were most unlike prayers, although for his part, Alobar deemed them every bit as godly. The revelry continued nightly until the sixth day of January, the termination of the twelve-day “lost” or supplementary month.

Since there were similar goings-on at the time of the old spring fertility festival — the priest called it “Easter" — and during the feast of the dead in late October—"All Saint's Day,” according to the Christians; since he and Frol, as newcomers, were never invited; and since the priest steered clear of the merrymaking while the shaman, in a horny mask, occasionally dropped by, Alobar was to conclude that for all their pious Christian convictions the peasants still clung to the pagan customs that were their archaic heritage.

His conclusion was correct, although a night was fast a-coming when he would wish he was mistaken.

His lips curled over the rim of a cider mug, Alobar sat before the hearth. Outdoors the snow was piled halfway to the Big Dipper, and the earth lay as passive as an eyeless potato. More snow was falling, and Alobar praised each and every flake. Onward, snow! The subdued landscape awaits your crystal victory! Although the peasant women busied themselves at the cookpot, the spinning wheel, and the loom, weather had curtailed their husbands' labors, and for this respite Alobar thanked the new god, the old gods, the morning star, and the snow itself, for the snow seemed energized and awake in a universe that slumbered like a cadaver.

In front of the crackling fire, Alobar dandled his babies on his knees and at last gave full attention to his lot. How he welcomed this opportunity for uninterrupted thought! Externally and internally, his life had changed dramatically since that silver hair had flagged him down, and though the next day was Christmas, it was not upon the pigs roasting in Lord Aelfric's ovens nor the epiphanies marinating in the prayer book of the priest that he dwelled, but upon his path from kingship to peasantry and upon what future twists that road might take. A life in progress. A thing to behold.

So lost in reverie was he that when there came a loud banging at the door, he let both his mug and his infants drop to the hearth. The mug rolled into the flames, but the twins, having slightly less rounded contours, stayed where they fell.

Frol unlatched the door, and out of the dark trooped a snow-dusted band of their neighbors, faces scarlet from cold and strong drink. The villagers embraced them both, not a little lasciviously, and placed wreaths of holly and cedar about their necks. They bade Alobar and Frol accompany them to the community lodge.

Frol was unnerved by the boisterousness of the peasants, normally so sober and staid, but Alobar whispered, “Let us join them. More than a year has passed. This is our second Christmas in Aelfric, and finally we've been judged trustworthy to participate in their seasonal fun. By the tone of it, we are about to be included in ceremonies more ancient, more unrestrained, and, I suspect, more heartfelt than any we will share on the morrow.”

The entrance to the hall was decorated to resemble the face of a beast, eyes bulging and burning (lanterns inside goat skins), teeth of thin wooden slats. They entered through the mouth of the creature, walking over blood-drenched hides that represented the great animal's tongue — and constituted, perhaps, the original red carpet. Inside, the low rafter beams were luxuriously festooned with coniferous boughs, holly, and running cedar, although damp logs smoldering in the fireplace had smoked up the place to the extent that details of the greenery were barely discernible. It didn't matter, for there could be no mistaking the kegs of cider that rose majestically in the smoke. Frol and Alobar let their cups be filled repeatedly, though in fact most of the liquid was speedily sloshed out by the jostling of fellow citizens as they coaxed the newcomers to join with them in bawdy songs. Frol strained to learn each lyrical indecency, but Alobar simply sang over and over again the only song he knew or had ever known, an epic about battles that were fought long, long ago, back before the morning star impregnated the She-Bear who gave birth to beets.

String and wind instruments were being played inexpertly. Soon, dancing commenced. Assisted by the chemistry of the cider, Alobar and Frol relaxed and slipped into the noisy spirit of things. Frol danced with every clodhopper who asked, while Alobar munched sausages and black puddings and played at dice and cards.

Shortly before midnight, as if by signal, the singing, dancing, and games suddenly stopped. Thinking the party over, Alobar and Frol made to gather their wraps and sleeping babies and go home, but they were told that if they left they would miss the highlight of the season. At that moment, two peasant women, decked out in their finest embroidery, emerged from the greenery that was piled behind the cider kegs. They were carrying a board upon which was balanced a many-layered cake. A table had been moved into the center of the lodge, and upon it the cake was set. The way the men moved in to surround the cake you would have thought a naked maiden was about to jump out of it, but that particular advancement in the baker's art was nine or ten centuries away.

One of the women took a knife from her fancy apron and began to slice the confection. When it was divided to her satisfaction, the other wife served. One piece at a time was passed out, to men only. When all the males, including Alobar, had been served, they began to eat their slices, chewing very slowly, watching carefully all the while the chew motions of their companions; the slow, muscular rise and fall of jaws. Except for the soft chewing, the hall had grown as silent as the gills of a fossil.

The cake was so moist and sweet that Alobar would have been inclined to compliment the chefs, would not the faintest tribute have resounded in the still of the lodge like a falling tree. When he bit into something small and hard, a something that sent a shock of pure hot pain vibrating along the length of a neural wire, he dared not cry out, because if a compliment must be suppressed, then doubly so a complaint. Not wishing to hurt the feelings of the bakers, Alobar removed the object from his mouth as inconspicuously as possible, a gesture doomed to failure, for every smoke-reddened eye in the room was upon him.

Upon examination, the object proved to be easily identifiable, and for all the temporary distress it caused his molar, rather unobjectionable. Since everyone was looking anyway, Alobar, somewhat colored by embarrassment, held it aloft for them to see. “Just a bean,” he said shyly. Before the word was fully spoken, a huge roar went up in the lodge. “The bean! The bean! The bean! The bean!” they cried, men and women together, and the villagers advanced on him, slapping his back, mussing his hair, hugging him, and squeezing his private parts. A wooden chair, a rickety imitation of a throne, was fetched and placed beneath a rack of antlers recently nailed to the wall. Alobar was led to the throne and made to sit on it, whereupon, amidst a deafening cacophony of whoops and hollers, belly laughs and sniggers, purposeful belches and equally intentional farts, a lopsided crown of mistletoe was laid atop his head.

When the crowd began addressing him as “king,” Alobar gasped. His heart swung off its pendulum, and his blue eyes stiffened like the ponds of December in a bowel-loosening, knee-locking, cider-evaporating attack of déjà vu.

“Viva Fabarum Rex!” he seemed to hear them shout, as if through curtains of snow and cake. “Viva Fabarum Rex! Long live the King of the Bean!”

According to custom, the King of the Bean had absolute license. For twelve days following his chance selection, he reigned supreme, ordering his fellows about and indulging his passions. He was allowed to wallow in every pleasure, however sinful. No door nor bed was barred to him. At any hour, he might enter another's house to eat and drink his fill. If he wanted a neighbor's wife, she was his; likewise any daughter. Obscene behavior, such as urinating on the altar of the church, not only was permitted, it was encouraged. Wherever he went, whatever he did, the Bean King was attended by a rowdy entourage, adjusting his mock crown (so that it always set askew), pulling at his mock robes (so that they revealed his buttocks), plying him with song and cider, cheering him, jeering him, egging him on.

When this was explained to Alobar, he thought, Well, if they desire a king, how fitting it be me. This kingship comes to me by sheer fortune, but I daresay none other is more experienced in the role. True, I had planned to give up these wintry days to contemplation, but it is festival time, and I could use some fun. Frol has satisfied me plenty, but I confess that there be three or four skirts hereabout I would not mind lifting. They wish a monarch, do they? Little do they realize that their bean, in its vegetable wisdom, has selected the one man suited for the job. Haw haw.

Then the peasants explained to him the rest of the custom. At the end of his twelve-day rule, on the Day of the Epiphany, the usual restraints of law and morality were abruptly restored. Still wearing his crooked crown, the King of the Bean was led to a certain meadow outside the village, where his throat was cut.

“Who's there?”

“Alobar. From the village. I must speak with you. Let me in.”

“Go away.”

“No! I cannot go away. I am the King of the Bean.”

Inside the hut there was a laugh, or the ancient animal ancestor of a laugh; a cackle wound like prickly yarn around the wild spindle in the throat of a fox. “You have strayed from your kingdom, Your Majesty. I am not subject to your authority. In fact, go frig yourself.”

Alobar leaned against the shaman's door. Never had he been so near to weeping. If only he had his beard back so that it might sop up the tears. “You don't understand. I am not playing games. I am not one of the peasants. I am a king.”

“So you informed me. King of the Bean. Go swill another cup of cider, Your Highness. And don't forget to ask the priest for forgiveness when you kneel in church on the morrow.”

Alobar bashed the door down with one furious lunge. He careened inside, sending broken sticks flying, and lifted the shaman from his mattress. Without a painted deer skull over his head, the old man did not seem so formidable. Alobar shook him until his various necklaces of various teeth chattered like a flock of enamel jays.

“All right, all right,” said the shaman. “What are you seeking, information or wisdom?”

“Er. . why. . uh. . wisdom!”

“In that case, you're out of luck. Wisdom takes a long time, and you're going to be dead in twelve days.”

Alobar threw the shaman onto his tick. “No, I am not!” he screamed, stamping his feet. “No, I am not!”

“Oh? You're not? But you are 'king' and thus condemned.” The shaman grinned like a weasel running errands for the moon.

“I am twice king and twice condemned — and I am sick and tired of it. First a hair and then a bean. If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his testicles; let him swing a scythe and make horrible noises, let him come for me in person, not send some hair, some fucking little black bean baked in a goody by mutton-butt peasant wives. Even then I might not go. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business.”

A glimmer of interest showed in the shaman's eyes. He raised himself on his knobby hips. He glanced at the snow that was sifting over the contents of his hut. “Do you feel a bit of a draft? Here, help me hang this skin over the door. Then I'll brew us some mushroom tea, and we can discuss your problem.”

While his host hunkered over the diminutive adobe hearth, Alobar sniffed at the various braids of dried vegetable matter that hung against the walls, each broadcasting a different version of internal conditions within the plant kingdom, and he fingered the bones, fangs, and snail shells that, like chimes to be rung by the shaman's heavy breathing, dangled from the ceiling. Each fragment of flora and fauna had been removed from its original context and juxtaposed incongruously, yet each seemed perfectly in place. The party in Alobar's head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged. Torn between showing this thought to the door or seating it in a place of honor, Alobar was relieved of the dilemma by a steaming teacup, shoved into his grasp.

The shaman sipped ritualistically. Alobar told his whole story. When only the dregs were left of the one's tea and the other's tale, the shaman took several short pieces of string from his pocket and began to knot them together, mumbling all the while. “In my net,” he mumbled, “I bind the sobs of the dark ice cracking. In my net I bind the ax's response to the pinecone. I bind the larva's curved belly. I bind the hole in the sky where the comets escape. I bind the roots of the rainbow and the flight of the alder.” He went on and on in that manner—"My net binds the hornet's deaf grandmother" — until Alobar was ready to grab him and give him another shaking.

Just as Alobar reached the end of his patience, the shaman unclasped his hands, revealing the pieces of string, which in the knotting, had turned into a delicate violet, its petals the color of love bites on a collarbone. Alobar reached for the flower, but it burst into flame and was consumed in the shaman's fingers without burning them. It was Alobar's turn to mumble. “In the future I shall be more careful about whose door I knock down,” he said, mopping up with his sleeve the tea he had spilled in his astonishment.

The shaman laughed. “Don't pay any attention to that old magic,” he said. “It used to be powerful, but now it is only the pastime of a few crazy old farts who remember how to talk with weeds.” Alobar sought to protest, but the shaman interrupted. “Man is turning away from the plants and animals,” he said. “Slowly he is breaking his bond with them. Someday he will have to reestablish contact, if the universe is to survive. For now, however, it is probably best that he set out on his own in his new direction.”

“How so?”

“A salamander can be only a salamander, an elk an elk, and a bush a bush. True, a bush is complete in its bushness, yet its limits, while not nearly so severe as some foolish men would believe, are fairly obvious. The peasants of Aelfric are like bushes, like salamanders. They were born one thing and will die one thing. But you. . you have already been a warrior, a king, and a serf, and from the looks of it, you aren't through yet. Thus, you have learned the secret of the new direction. That is: a man can be many things. Maybe anything.

“In the past, there was little separation between the lives of plants and animals and the lives of men. Nowadays, there are men who practice separation, not only from the creatures but from other men. The Romans with their Christianity have promoted the idea of the human individual. But you are neither Roman nor Christian, and you are no less smitten, so perhaps the spirit is in the air. The Romans encourage individualism, but they maintain rigid controls. Sooner or later, men will come along whose belief in the supremacy of the exceptional, extraordinary, isolated individual will cause them to declare themselves exempt from controls. In their uniqueness, they will not hesitate to defy accepted standards. Oh, these men will give Rome — and the Romes that shall follow Rome — a very large headache. You, Alobar, I suspect, are among the first of such men.

“No, no, do not object. I can tell that my words both delight and excite you.”

It was true. And in his delightment and excitement, Alobar had let his tea grow cold, so the shaman warmed his cup.

“Were you an ordinary peasant, I would dazzle you with another trick or two; I'd berate you and comfort you and send you back to Aelfric to face your death without alarm. Most of the peasants are content to die. For them, death means the cessation of toil. At last they can drop their soiled and battered bodies and enter the dimension of pure spirit. Plants and animals are even more comfortable with death. It is the natural end. But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.

“If you were an ordinary serf, I would send you back to Aelfricto assist your neighbors in the public purification they undergo at the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, to help them mock the things they love best in order that they might revere them the more. I'd send you back to wear the sacred mistletoe, to be King of the Bean, to be sacrificed to the good old goddess of agriculture. Instead, I encourage you to ride this strange wind that is blowing through you; to ride it to wherever it will carry you.”

“But which way shall I go?”

“That is between you and the wind. You seem to be searching for a kind of immortality. With that I cannot help you. In the realms that I inhabit, death is a companion. One does not quarrel with one's friend. If you desire to meet masters with power over death, I suggest you travel to the distant east.”

“As far as Hellas?”

“Far, far beyond Hellas.”

“To Egypt, then?” In Alobar's mind, Egypt, with its confounding mirrors, was the end of the trolley line.

“As far as Egypt is, you must go three times that far.”

“Three times farther than Egypt? Are you trying to trick me? I would fall over the edge of the earth!”

The shaman snorted with laughter. “Alobar. The earth does not have an edge.”

It was Alobar's turn to laugh. He thought he might be in the company of a crazy old fart, after all. “What utter nonsense,” he declared.

“You are a free and special man, Alobar. Therefore I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Listen. I converse regularly with the birds and the fish. And the birds and the fish have assured me many times that there isn't any edge. We live on a ball, Alobar. We do. Keep this quiet: the world is round.”

So heady was the idea that Alobar felt faint. He gulped his tea and gazed into the shaman's eyes — eyes as shiny and black as the bean in the cake — to ascertain that he was not being joshed. When he was convinced of the shaman's sincerity, he stood and gathered his hides about him. “I suppose I should be off then.”

“I suppose you should.”

“I surmise that several Feasts of Feasts will be consumed ere I am returned. However, I should be pleased to build you a strong new door when next I pass this way.”

“You plan to return, then?”

“If the world be round, I can scarcely help it.” He chuckled. “Someday, I should like to mingle with my clan again, even if I must disguise myself to do so.”

The shaman shook his head. “I have it on good authority that Lord Aelfric's men are going to attack your old citadel as soon as the roads are dry in spring. They will kill all who resist and baptize the remainder. Long before you return — if you return — the independent city you once ruled will be but another Roman outpost on the frontiers of the Holy Empire.”

Alobar smacked his palm with his fist. “Then I must warn the clan! I'll organize a defense! Maybe we'll attack first! By the golden whiskers of the morning star, we'll show those turnip eaters what battle's about! They'll need more than one god to save their asses ere I and my boys are through, blah blah blah. .”

“Too late, Alobar, too late.” As if to somehow illustrate his point, the shaman tore a badger mask from the wall and tossed it into the fire. “The foe is not merely Lord Aelfric but the whole of the empire. It is too large, too entrenched, has too much momentum. The world is changing, Alobar.” He gestured at the burning mask. “Don't waste your life trying to hold back the tides of history. History begot Rome, and history someday will bury it. In the meantime, you've other fish to fry. Have you forgotten? Are you to be an individual, a trespasser in territory none else has had the wit or nerve to explore, or just another troublesome mosquito to be swatted by the authorities? You're no longer king or warrior, remember, but something new. It will do your clansmen no good for you to be slain alongside them, but who can guess what benefits may result from a new life wholly led?”

“You are correct,” said Alobar. He sighed. “The clan, its lusty women and its noble hounds, lies behind me. It is forward I must go.”

After embracing the old man, he marched out into the snow. He aimed his boots at the east and forced his heels to follow his toes. Quickly, the little hut of the shaman was out of view. Out of sight, too, was the village and the manor.

Frol must suspect that I am taking swift advantage of my beanship, straddling another's thighs at this late hour, he thought. He sensed that he was causing her some pain, and that, in turn, hurt him. He would miss Frol and the babies, perhaps more intensely than he missed Wren and Mik. But there was a strange wind blowing through him, was there not? Was it not blowing him away?

The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur. The cry of an owl, brooding over its ruby appetites, cut through the frigid air like a vibrating pin. Then, all was silent except for the soft crunch, like ants chewing wax, of his boots upon the snow. His steps quickened. They took up a gay rhythm. He was very nearly dancing across the frozen fields.

“The world is round,” he sang, in tune with his footfalls.

“Existence can be rearranged. A man can be many things.

“I am special and free.

“And the world is round round round.”

A few weeks later, Alobar was awakened by a hot sun in his face and a hot stench in his nostrils. He sat up in the grass and rubbed his eyes. Don't ask where the rest of that dream went, Alobar. All dreams continue in the beyond.

The warm sunlight gave him a lazy, comfortable, lie-around-all-morning-and-scratch-your-armpits feeling, but inside his nose the cilia were waving, the turbinates were knocking, and the spheno-ethmoidal recess was on red alert: by Woden's honey pots, what a scent!

Nearby, a flock was grazing, and Alobar guessed the aroma must be its fault, but fie on wool and a pox on mutton if sheep were so rude to the proboscis. Perhaps in warm climates, sheep take on the odor of their cousins, thought Alobar, for surely it was the essence of goat that permeated his nasal passages, and rutting goat at that.

With a flock so close, there must be a shepherd in the vicinity. Maybe I can talk him out of a few crumbs of breakfast ere I get me to a prettier-smelling place. Alobar went to rise but something snagged his cloak and pulled him back down. Again he tried to stand, again he was yanked to the sod. He reached behind him to free himself from the branch or vine that held him, but he touched nothing. Scooting forward a few feet on his rump, he made another attempt at rising, and another and another, each with the same result. Angry and a little frightened, he drew his knife and, still sitting, whirled around. There was no one behind him. With all of the elastic in his leg muscles, he snapped himself upward. Thud! Down he went like a sack of meteorites addressed special delivery to gravity.

This time he just sat there, fingering his blade, giving every sheep on the hillside a good look at his expression of frustration, bewilderment, and humiliation. Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before, very slowly, centimeter by centimeter, sinew by sinew, he commenced cautiously to draw himself upright. And he made it! He was standing! He stretched, expelled a sigh of relief that fluttered the lashes of a ewe twenty yards away, and strode off, only in midstride to fall flat on his new growth of beard.

An outburst of wild, magnificent laughter resounded over the hillside and echoed from the crags in the distance; wild laughter because its notes were outside the range of the normal human voice and so uninhibited as to make the shaman's cackle seem fettered; magnificent laughter because it seemed huge in scope and rare in distribution; laughter that was simultaneously strange and familiar and that instilled in Alobar the fear of the unknown and the joy of self-recognition. It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon's ass.

The laughter evidently affected the sheep, for all at once they began to bleat and kick, the oldest rams in the flock cavorting as if they were lambs. A breeze suddenly raked the landscape, drawing from the grasses a dark murmuring, and setting the thistle bushes to chattering like thin teeth. Bees abandoned the gorse to fly in crazy circles a few feet above ground, while the birdsong that previously had gladdened the hillside lowered appreciably in volume, its capricious trills and whistles replaced by a consistent melodic line, almost reverent in tone. The unease that Alobar experienced was as piercing as a thorn, yet there was a pleasant tightening in his groin, and his limbs felt ticklish and kinetic, inspired beyond his control to join the flock in its awkward dance. The way he found himself moving horizontally through the grass made him wonder if he had not been seized by the Serpent Power, if there were not an edge, after all, and if he were not dangerously close to it.

“Hey!” a voice called out. “Why doth thy crawl about on thy belly? Art thou a man or a worm?”

Compelled by the voice, which was both dreadful and jolly, threatening and seductive, Alobar forgot his recent failures and scrambled to his feet. “Where are you?” he asked in a shaky falsetto. “Why are you laughing?”

“I am everywhere,” the voice boomed. “And why shouldn't a god laugh at the puny endeavors of man?”

It was then that Alobar's battle-trained vision focused on the leer in the leaves. At first, the leer was all that he could see, but then he caught sight of a shaggy tail and realized that it was connected to the leer. (The tail bone frequently is connected to the leer bone, although today that connection is illegal in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.) In a moment, the bushes parted and into the pasture pranced an unbelievable creature, all woolly and goatlike from its waist down to its hooves; human and masculine above. Or, to be precise, human above save for a pair of stubby horns thrusting like bronze-tipped beet-diggers in the bright mountain air.

“You — you are the — the Horned One,” stammered Alobar.

The creature gamboled closer, dispelling any doubts about the origin of the stench. “In some places they know me as that. Herebouts, they call me Pan.” He paused. “Those who still honor me, that is.” He paused again. “And who might thou be? And what is thy mission?”

“Alobar, once king, once serf, now individual — have you heard of individuals? — free and hungry, at your service. My mission? Well, frankly, I am running away from death.”

Pan's hooves, which had been pawing the turf in an almost drunken little fandango, became gradually immobile, and the leer slowly slid off his face as if some weak but persistent hand had shoved it. His thick lips dipped downward in a solemn arc, and in his goatish eyes woe replaced mischief. “I, too,” he said.

“What's that?” asked Alobar.

“Art thou so famished that thou cannot hear? I said that I, too, am running from death.”

“But that couldn't be! You are a god. Are not the gods immortal?”

“Not quite. True, we art immune to the chills and accidents that swallow up humanity, but gods can die. We live only so long as people believe in us.”

“Hmmm. I never thought of that,” said Alobar. “But certainly for the likes of you there is no shortage of believers.” Despite Pan's bedraggled curls and matted wool, despite the drool in the goatee and the manure on his hooves, he was by far the most impressive being Alobar had ever met.

“Ha! Where hath thou spent thy life, Alobar? In a pumpkin? Did thou just fall off a turnip cart?”

“I am an eater of beets,” proclaimed Alobar proudly.

“How could such an ignoramus ever hath been a king? Doth thy people reside so far back in the sticks that they never heard the famous voice crying out over the wine-dark sea, 'Great Pan is dead, Great Pan is dead'? Of course, that was nearly a millennium ago and as even a lout such as thou can see, I am still kicking. Nevertheless, with the birth of Christ, belief in me dwindled, and I have been scrambling for my life ever since.”

“Yes, now that you mention it, the priest in our church did often refer to you as one of the false deities. In fact, the way he described the devil — the silly man believes there is but one god and one demon — he could be your twin.”

“Thou art Christian?” Pan pronounced the word with such contempt that the flock stopped dancing and glared at Alobar, the bees buzzed angrily at him, and a passing butterfly shat upon him with remarkable accuracy.

“Oh, no, no,” said Alobar hurriedly, wiping the green butterfly poop from the corner of his eye. “Not really. I merely played along with my neighbors to assuage their suspicions. This fellow Christ is a bit namby-pamby for my taste. And now that I hear what he's done to you, why, I like him the less, even if he did favor individualism.”

“Thou ninny.”

“Sir, I will not have you calling me a nanny!”

“Ninny, not nanny! Doth thou think I would call thee after one of the things I love best?” Pan's heavy lids drooped momentarily as his thoughts strayed to other pastures on other days, days when the petal-pink genitals of the she-goats drew him down from the crags.

“Just the same. .” Alobar's fist was about his knife.

“If thou wouldst outdistance death, don't blow thy slender lead by challenging a god, neither Christ, who is not here to defend himself, nor I, who art much closer than I need be to smite a prideful gnat such as thee.” With a disagreeable thump, Alobar landed on his chin again. Pan had not moved a muscle. “Namby-pamby, huh? Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance or copulation, that he took 'right' and 'wrong' too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world, but for all his shortcomings, he was much superior to thou mortals who hath embraced him to further thine own ends.”

Although Alobar was no more fond of criticism than of being flung to the ground like a peach pit, he had learned from the shaman that the path to the marvelous is sometimes cleared by a sharp tongue, and when Pan began to move away, intimating that their conversation was done, Alobar hastened to draw him back. “Tell me, Horned One,” he called, “why do you defend Christ if he is threatening your hide?”

The god paused, assuming a haunchy stance, like a woman in high heels. Instead of replying, however, he produced reed pipes and blew through them in a manner that caused the sheep to skip again and the little clouds to wiggle in the sky. The music was high-pitched and playful, a frail, tremulous, silvery sound that unfurled in lazy spirals without a care in the world. So immense was the contrast between this lighthearted piping and Pan's demeanor, his crude, simian features, and great sad eyes, that Alobar was moved in spite of himself, and when at last the music ceased, he knocked away a tear with his knuckles and said, “For you, sir, may the jaws of death have cotton teeth.”

“For thee, as well,” answered Pan. “But how can we toast without strong wine to lift? And thou did announce thy hunger so emphatically that even the deaf roots took note. I'll wager thou be horny, into the bargain. Come with me, Alobar, for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.”

In a flash, Pan was across the pasture, Alobar at his heels, scaling the rugged rocks, oblivious to the thickets of violent thistles. Alobar was physically fit, hardened by his peasant labor and recent travels, but he could not keep pace with the god, and soon Pan was out of sight. That was no real problem, however, for Alobar simply followed the scent, that effluvium of goat glands that hung in the air like a salty mist and drew him ever higher up the craggy vertebrae. The higher Alobar climbed, the more piercing his unease, until he was in a literal state of panic. Just when this thrilling anxiety was at its zenith, tempting him with irrational impulses to throw himself from the cliffs, he heard girlish voices and the sound of splashing water. The panic completely vaporized as the Pan odor led him into a grotto, a ferny recess in the middle of which was a pellucid pool.

Enjoying the liquid pleasures of the pool were seven or eight unusual human females: short in stature, though full in contour, their bones packed into loaves of ivory and petunia; their tangled hair hanging like ropes of seaweed, nearly to their heels; their perfect nipples as red as guinea pig eyes, their squeals the kind that leave a glow in the dark; and not one of them older than the teenage Frol he'd left in Aelfric. Sweet genital sparks flew when they looked at Alobar, and he sensed himself in company most benevolent.

Directly across the pool, in the mouth of a shallow cave, hunkered Pan, a wineskin in one fist, an erection in the other. In a rough clay bowl at his feet, dangerously close to the sizzling bulb of his member, were olives, figs, and feta cheese. With a jerk of his head, the god beckoned. Alobar was famished, but in order to reach the food and drink, he had to wade through nymph-infested waters. Summoning his nerve, he plunged in. Brunch time in Arkadia.

The remainder of the day was spent in a luxurious, pastel stupor against which Alobar's northern temperament rebelled in vain. He had expected the nymphs to be quite wild in their demonstrations, imagined them biters, scratchers, and screamers, yet neither as king nor serf had he known such delicacy, and the softness in which the pleasures of the afternoon were couched made the hero in him a bit embarrassed. When he glanced about him in the pale twilight, however, he saw everywhere evidence of his participation: dried semen frosted the thighs of napping nymphs, clots of it floated in the shadowy waters like weaving wrenched loose from the looms of the trout, and upon the tips of bracken there glistened drops too milky to be dew. It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes. Besides, after an hour's eventful splash in the pool, Pan had crawled into the cave and fallen into a lengthy snooze from which the purring ecstasies of the nymphs were much too low to wake him.

“Pan is not well,” the nymphs confided.

“I watched him scale the rocks, I watched him set four of you to coming in a row,” said Alobar. “He seems fit enough to me.”

The nymphs released a chorus of dreamy sighs. “You should have seen him when he was in his prime. He's like a sick dove, nowadays, compared to the goat he used to be.”

“Is it Christ who is making him weak?”

“Not Christ but Christians. With every advance of Christianity, his powers recede,” said one nymph.

“It started long before Christ,” said a second.

“Yes, it did,” agreed the first. “It began with the rise of the cities. There simply was no place in the refined temples of Attica and Sparta for a mountain goat like Pan.”

A third nymph, who, with a wad of leaves, was scrubbing herself clean of caked secretions, joined in. “It was man's jealousy of woman that started it,” she said. “They wanted to drive the goddesses out of Olympus and replace them with male gods.”

“Is not Pan a male god?” asked Alobar.

“True, he is, but he is associated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

“And who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?”

Alobar felt a surge of beet-red temper. Violently, he shook his head. “The world is changing,” he said, “but there will always be a place in it for you. And for Pan.”

“Perhaps. Certainly, we wish the moderns no harm, though Pan plays roughly with them at times. And thou? Will thou escape the fate thy feareth?”

“You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”

“We suspect thou art as foolish as brave, Alobar. In fact, bravery may be naught but foolishness. Fear, like love, is a call into the wild — into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan.”

While Alobar was thinking that over, Pan awoke, stretched, and scampered into the thistles. When with the sun's setting he did not return, Alobar gave the nymphs a last squeeze and began his long, laborious descent, during which he several times heard thunderous laughter ring round about him and once thought he saw a moonbeam strike, high up in the crags, a fleeting horn.

Alone, with not so much as a sperm left to accompany him, Alobar again directed his steps toward the east. His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.

He was to continue in that fashion for an inappropriately long stretch of literary time, passing through more landscapes than there are keys on a typewriter, having more adventures than there are nibs for pens. Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more. And as he passed through one exotic environment after another, learning languages, wearing out boots, he sang his little song:

"I love the ground-o, ground-o

A ball beneath my feet

The world is round-o, round-o

Just like a frigging beet."

No, he would not be remembered as bard — nor, for that matter, as warrior or king. Life is fair, however, and in the fragrance industry, his name would one day become an accepted part of the nomenclature. According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an alobar is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which Old Spice after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.

SEATTLE

IT SEEMED LIKE THE WHOLE TOWN WAS at odds over the solar eclipse. A lot of people were of the opinion that since in Seattle one seldom saw the sun anyhow, there was nothing very special about not seeing it again. Monday morning would be only a shade darker than usual, they reasoned. The difference, according to others, perhaps the majority, was that Monday was forecast to be clear. With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck, the city, for the first time in memory, would have an unobstructed view of one of nature's most mystical spectacles.

“Did you walk up to Volunteer Park to watch the eclipse?” was the first thing Ricki said to Priscilla when she came by her apartment Monday noon.

“Nope. Didn't make it outdoors,” said Priscilla, yawning.

“You watched it on TV then?”

“No, I didn't.”

“You didn't see it at all?”

“I listened to it,” said Priscilla. “I listened to it on the radio. It sounded like bacon frying.”

“Shit, woman. Sometimes I don't believe you're for real.” Ricki looked about the room for a place to sit. The couch and the chair, the most logical contenders, were piled high with dirty clothes, clean clothes, clothes in transition, books, unopened mail, and laboratory equipment. There were also a couple of beets. Ricki elected to stand. “You'd better shift into your hurry-up offense,” she said. “The meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“I can shower on first down, make up on second, and dress on third. If I haven't put it over by then, I can always kick a field goal.”

“Unless you fumble.”

Priscilla slammed the bathroom door. Ricki had to steady a beaker of liquid to prevent a major spill.

The football repartee was the result of Ricki having talked Priscilla into spending the previous afternoon at the Kingdome, an outing that revealed to Priscilla what Ricki really liked about the Seahawks. It was the Seagals. “Fashions come and go, come and go,” said Ricki, “but the length of the cheerleader skirt remains constant, and it is upon that abbreviated standard that I base my currency of joy.”

Today (they each had Sundays and Mondays off), Ricki was taking Priscilla to a meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special, an organization of waitresses with university degrees. At least in the beginning all the members had had university degrees. The group had some time ago lowered its standards to accept waitresses with only two years of college. That was when Ricki was admitted, back when it was still called Sisters of the Daily Special. “Sisters” had come to sound too political. It suggested a feminine solidarity that the waitresses, in their honesty, considered not just inaccurate but inappropriate. “We're out to grab us some gusto, not cut anybody's nuts off,” was the way Ricki put it.

In Seattle, as in most other large cities, there were a fair number of women who had studied art, literature, philosophy, history, etc., only to find that their education and a dollar would buy them a glass of Perrier. True, they hadn't entered their respective fields with the idea of getting rich, but neither had they expected that a summa cum laude would take them about as far from campus as the nearest dry water hole. Unable to support themselves in the work of their choice, they turned to waitressing, for there they could earn the most money for the least investment. If it wasn't possible for them to do something meaningful and fulfilling, at least they could be well compensated for a minimum of moral compromise and an even barer minimum of vocational commitment.

The Daughters of the Daily Special, once they learned that they had too many individual differences to call themselves “Sisters,” had adopted a very clean and simple raison d'être: they planned to liberate each other, one at a time. They paid relatively stiff weekly dues, and they raised additional funds with such tried and true schemes as bikini car washes. Once or twice a year, depending upon how much was in their treasury, they awarded a grant that allowed a deserving member to lay down her tray and devote some time to her true calling. For example, they got Trixie Melodian out of the Salmon House and into the dance studio, where she choreographed her ballet based on the eruptions of Mount St. Helens; they bought Ellen Cherry Charles six months at her easel, where she completed a series of landscapes that was later hung in a restaurant ("I escaped, my paintings didn't,” she commented); and Sheila Gomez was able to quit totalling bar tabs at La Buznik and finish writing her master's thesis in mathematics, “some kind of Puerto Rican trigonometry,” according to Ricki.

Ricki was an unlikely candidate for a Daily Special grant, since she had majored in physical education so that she could take lots of showers with the other coeds, but she was sure Priscilla could land one, and that was why she was sponsoring Priscilla for membership. At first, Priscilla was reluctant. She was just not a joiner. “The only organization I ever joined in my life was the Columbia Record Club,” she declared, “and I had to get out of that because it was too disciplined.” The more Ricki talked about those big fat juicy grants, however, the better they sounded. She felt that she was close to a breakthrough in her experiments, but she as almost too tired to continue. If the Daughters could buy her a few uninterrupted months in her lab, she'd not only sign their roster, she'd kiss their behinds. “Starting with mine,” chirped Ricki.

Priscilla came out of the bathroom wearing tight jeans and a cable-knit, iguana-green pullover sweater that accentuated the red in her reddish-brown hair. For a change, she'd pinked her Cupid's bow mouth — tiny in comparison to Ricki's full Latino lips — and brushed on enough purple eye shadow to make Bela Lugosi look like a lifeguard. “Wow!” exclaimed Ricki. “You're the second most impressive thing I've seen today, the first being a total eclipse of the sun.”

“One would have thought a solar eclipse would have made a noise like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” said Priscilla, “but it really did sound like bacon frying.”

“You slept through it, you asshole.”

They drove downtown in Ricki's rusted-out VW bug. “I'm ashamed to be seen behind the wheel of this bedpan,” Ricki said. “It looks like it has a skin disease. Worse, it looks like a car you would drive.”

“When I perfect that formula, you're gonna see me driving a BMW or a Lincoln Continental,” said Priscilla. “Maybe both at the same time.”

“That's why we're enlisting you in the Daughters. Gonna get you out of that smelly studio and into a penthouse. I do hope you'll keep it tidier than your present digs. Which reminds me, Pris, what were those old dry beets doing in your armchair?”

“Somebody's been leaving them outside my door. To be perfectly frank, I thought it might be you.”

“Me? Why would I do an idiotic thing like that? I hate beets. In fact, I hate most vegetables.” She paused. “I must admit, though, that vegetarians taste better than heavy meat eaters. Smokers are the worst. You wouldn't think that you could detect it, you know, down there. But you can.” She made a face that caused the faint handlebar of hairs above her lip to bristle like the fuzz on an ostrich's cheek.

“Since I've been working at El Papa Muerta, nothing tastes good to me anymore,” Priscilla said.

The holocaustal effect that serving food for a living can have on one's appetite was a subject discussed at the meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special. “That's why it's preferable to wait cocktails,” somebody said. “No, that's worse,” responded Sheila Gomez. “Waiting cocktails kills your appetite for liquor.”

The meeting was held in the Spotted Necktie Room at the Old Spaghetti Factory. There were about forty women present, twice as many as Priscilla had expected. After they finished complaining about appetite loss, they complained about the neutron bomb that working nights had dropped on their social lives. Then they really got steamed up over having to be nice to people they couldn't stand. It wasn't the men who infuriated them, not even bottom-pinching men (some waitresses, a minority, actually enjoyed having their bottoms pinched), it was the women. “The most unbearable aspect of this job is waiting on rich, crabby, drunk ladies,” said one waitress. “Right on!” said another. “Except for the rare one who might have toted trays somewhere in her sordid past, they'll pick the tips up off the table as soon as their husbands' backs are turned.”

“How true. A wife is a waitress's public enemy number one.”

“Beware of blue hair and T-shirts that say 'World's Best Grandma.' They expect you to tip them.”

Next they compared notes on how much their feet hurt and the psychotic states of cooks. Evidently, all restaurant cooks were psychotic, some were just less violent than others. It was all rather depressing. But, then, they began to share stories of the odd mammoth tip they'd received the previous week, the odd offer of booze, cocaine, or a big house in the South of France; the odd, interesting customer, including local celebrities, who the celebrity dined with and what they ate; and before long, drinking Chianti all the while, they got off the subject of waitressing altogether and had a fine old time exchanging reviews and critiques of the solar eclipse.

The meeting was nearly over when they got around to considering Priscilla's application for membership. As Ricki had warned it might, it met with some opposition.

“It's irrelevant that she's had only one year of college,” Ricki told the assembly. “She's a genius.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“Ha ha.”

“You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.”

“Well, how about some proof.”

“Go ahead,” said Ricki, “test her. Ask her a question.”

“What's the capital of San Salvador?” asked Trixie Melodian.

“You call that a genius question?” Doris Newton responded. “I've seen retired air force sergeants answer harder questions than that on Tic Tac Dough.”

“Besides,” said Ellen Cherry Charles, “San Salvador is the capital. The country is El Salvador.”

“Are you positive?” asked Trixie. “Why would the city have a longer name than the country?”

“If she's such a genius, why is she working at El Papa Muerta? Everybody knows Mexican restaurants are the pits for tips.”

“El Papa Muerta is about as Mexican as Juneau.”

“Does El Papa Muerta mean The Dead Potato or The Dead Pope?”

“What's the difference?”

“I resent that,” said Sheila Gomez, glancing at the little crucifix that dangled its gold-skinned heels above her globes.

Priscilla cleared her throat. She spoke for the first time since the meeting began. Her voice was a trifle high and squeaky. “I've worked at five Mexican restaurants in three years. I'm searching for the perfect taco.”

That stopped them. Hell, maybe she was a genius.

Ricki stood again. “Little Priscilla here is a scientist. She's got her own laboratory. And is she onto something hot! I'm not at liberty to reveal what it is at this point in time, you understand, a slip of the lip can sink a ship, but when the moment comes. . well, you're all gonna feel like a slow boat to China for hemming and hawing over taking her in. Let me remind you of something. None of the grants that the Daughters have awarded so far have generated a dime of income for the program. Nothing personal, Sheila, I know Third World algebra is important, but it didn't do dogshit at the box office; and, Joan, that little book of poems you printed about driftwood and your mama's melanoma was real pretty, it brought big whopping tears to my eyes is what it did, but, honestly now, the GNP was unaffected. Ditto, Trixie's harmonic tremors. I don't want to sound crass, but Priscilla here is zoned commercial. She's got a million bucks by its long green tail, and if we help her hold on and haul it in, each and every one of us is gonna soak our weary feet in Dom Perignon. This is not the time to talk about funding her scientific research, we'll come to that a ways down the road, but this smart little goose may be prepared to lay us our first golden egg. All in favor of admitting her to the club say 'aye.'”

The ayes swept it, and out in the parking lot, Ricki looked at Priscilla and winked. “What's the capital of El Papa Muerta?” she asked. “San Papa Muerta?”

Priscilla grabbed Ricki and kissed her full and wet on the mouth, right in front of a great many waitresses who were pulling out of the lot in various rusted-out VW bugs. The rusted-out VW bug is the national bird of Waitressland. It was then and there that Priscilla made up her mind to go to bed with Ricki. But while her mind was convinced, her body needed encouragement, so they went to the Virginia Inn at First and Virginia and drank a gang of discount champagne. Still, Priscilla's endocrine system was lagging a few laps behind her resolve. “My pilot light has gone out and needs to be relit,” she said. Ricki suggested a porno movie. She hoped that a double bill of Starship Eros and Garage Girls would turn up the thermostat. Priscilla hoped so, too.

Once in the theater, however, the Chianti and champagne began to get to Ricki. They were sitting up close, in the third row, and all of those colossal in-and-outs and up-and-downs made her queasy. It was a classic case of motion sickness. She held her tummy and moaned. Priscilla turned to the row of baldheaded men behind them. “Would you mind not smoking,” she said. “This woman is having a religious experience.”

“If they jiggle one more time, I'm gonna spew,” said Ricki.

Priscilla helped her to her feet and led her down the aisle. A couple of the bald boys followed them. “My friend has a chronic allergy to heterosexuality,” Priscilla told them. “We brought her here in an attempt to activate her body's natural immune system, but it didn't work.” The men laughed kind of nervously. “Don't mock the afflicted!” Priscilla screamed at them. The Don Juans returned to their seats.

It had been a while since Priscilla had driven a car. She shifted gears jerkily. Ricki groaned. They had to make three pit stops between downtown and the Ballard district, a distance so slight that octogenarian Norwegian crones had been known to walk it, their shopping bags loaded with lutefisk. At Ricki's duplex, Priscilla washed the victim's face and tucked her in. She appeared to have passed out, but as Priscilla was tiptoeing to the door, she called in a weak voice, “It was wonderful, Pris.”

“What was, honey? The meeting? The champagne?”

“The eclipse,” said Ricki. “It was probably the most real thing I've ever seen, but it was also like a dream. You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.”

“That's how it is with dreams,” said Priscilla. “They're the perfect crime.” She thought then of the elusive exudate, the living emerald she hunted in the forests of olfactory memory, the dream she lived in her nose. She felt her laboratory pulling her like a tide, and it taxed her strength to resist.

With effort, she drove Ricki's car to the waterfront and sipped a cup of bivalve nectar at Ivar's Clam Bar (it was a walk-up, fast-fish stand where she needn't worry about being served by a waitress who might have been at the meeting that day). Then, having resolved on her last birthday to complete every task she began, she returned to the moviehouse and watched the ending of Starship Eros. Everything considered, it had been the most relaxing and entertaining two days off she'd enjoyed all year. “All work and no play makes Priscilla a dull genius,” she lectured herself on the way home.

It was after midnight when she arrived at her building. There was an odor in the hallway more funky than a cabbage pot, and on her doorsill there sat in certain firepluggian splendor, like a dropping from the eclipse, like a disembodied bulb that had been beamed to Earth from Starship Eros, another beet.

NEW ORLEANS

LOUISIANA IN SEPTEMBER was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.

The only way to hang up on the obscene caller was to install air conditioning. The Parfumerie Devalier never had been air-conditioned, however, and unless it lifted from its current economic slump, it probably never would be. As a consequence, both Madame Lily Devalier and her maid and assistant, V'lu Jackson, held old-fashioned lacquered paper fans, with which they stirred the humid respiration that Louisiana panted into the shop. They were sitting on the lime velvet love seat at the rear of the retail area, watching television and fanning away. On the six o'clock news there were scenes of a total eclipse of the sun as photographed from atop the Space Needle in Seattle and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the path of an eclipse is one hundred and sixty-seven miles wide, allowing Seattle to catch the southern edge of this one and Paris the northern edge: in New Orleans, the sun had burned on as was its habit, undimmed except by a late afternoon shower).

“Whooee!” exclaimed V'lu as she watched first Seattle and then Paris go from broad daylight to supernatural darkness in a matter of seconds. “Whooee! That done beats hurricane drops all to pieces.”

“I see it as an omen,” said Madame Devalier.

“Say whut?”

“An omen. A sign. Paris is eclipsed, New Orleans basks in light. The perfumes of Devalier have always been as good as any in France, and now they are going to be better. Parfumerie Devalier is going to prosper, and Paris — proud, arrogant, pompous Paris — is going to play second fiddle.” Madame touched the avalanche of her bosom with her fan, nodded three times, and smiled.

V'lu giggled. “Seattle, too, ma'am.”

“What about Seattle?”

“Seattle e-clipsed, too. So we don't have to worry none 'bout Seattle.”

“I wasn't worried in the least about Seattle. Why would I worry about Seattle, of all places?”

V'lu hesitated before replying. The young woman and the old woman stared at each other, fanning relentlessly. “She in Seattle, ma'am. Last anybody heard.”

“So? What difference does it make where 'she' is? Not that I don't have feelings for her, but her whereabouts has nothing to do with our business.”

Again V'lu hesitated. Her brown eyes opened as wide as the mouths of baby birds. “She got dee bottle,” V'lu said.

“The bottle! Bah! Poof! You and that bottle. Forget that bottle, it means nothing. Rien. Even if it had value, what on earth could she do with it?” Madame's fan whirred like a sewing machine. Her fan seemed to generate static electricity. A halo of heat lightning formed around it. “Even if that bottle is all you say it is, we don't need it. We have right here in this shop the most fabulous boof of jasmine the human nose has ever tasted—”

“Bingo Pajama!”

“I beg your pardon. Is that more vulgar slang from your vulgar generation?”

“Bingo Pajama, ma'am. That he name. He be back from dee island nex week wif mo' flowers.”

“And we haven't tamed the last batch yet! Tangerine seems to work okay as the top note. It aerates rather quickly, but it rides the jasmine and doesn't sink completely into it. With a middle note of the vigor of that Bingo Pajama jasmine — my Lord in heaven, girl, is that actually his name? — what we need is a base note with a floor of iron. It can't just sit there, though, it has to rise up subtly and unite the tangerine somehow with that bodacious jasmine theme. A very special base note is what you and I must find.” Madame Devalier's fan fluttered wildly, and V'lu fanned hard to keep up with her.

“But let us not put the barn door before the horse.”

“Ma'am?”

“We require a unique base note, and we will find one, if I have to turn my trick bag inside out to find it. Remember, I came up with hurricane drops long after the darkies said the recipe had been lost forever. Right?”

“You right.”

“First, however, we have a problem with overcook. It's not rank, but it's rank enough. We are shooting the moon on this boof, cher; we have got the raw product to make half of France whistle Dixie, and we are not going to blow it because we are too poor to pump or flash. So you know how we are going to handle it? Papa's fat!”

The good Madame was up to her bouffant in the backwater of boof biz. She had selected jasmine as the theme note of her comeback scent knowing that it was a blue-chip ingredient, a botanical platinum, a tried and tested floral champion whose performance in perfumery was rivaled only by the rose, yet knowing equally well that, like any prima donna, there were conditions under which it would refuse to sing. Jasmine (known in extreme cases as Jasminum officinale) simply will not tolerate the heat involved in steam distillation. Even boiling water is enough to murder the aroma principal of its flowers. Jasmine oil has to be extracted, not distilled, and efficient and effective extraction is not quite as easy as tying a loose tooth to a knob.

One begins by gently percolating fresh petals in a solvent — purified hexane, to be precise. That was what Madame and V'lu did to Bingo Pajama's flowers, with fine results. But then the solvent has to be removed. No woman of grace wishes to dab about her body with industrial hexane, however pure. If the Parfumerie Devalier had owned a flash evaporator or a vacuum pump, the hexane stink would have been off that jasmine oil faster than a Japanese commuter off the bullet train. Alas, the little shop on Royal Street could no more afford that kind of equipment than a Third World spider could afford designer webs and flies cordon bleu. Thus, Lily and V'lu steeped their extract in a vat of below-boil water, forced it through a filter tube, distilled it with alcohol, and hoped for the best.

When Lily Devalier maneuvered her midget submarine of a nose along dockside of the concentration crock, oh! a nocturnal warmth enveloped her brain, washing her in star waters, translucent cherub sperms, and the midnight blue syrups that tropical moths lick. The devouring delicacy of this jasmine swept her away, but she was not so smitten that she failed to detect a slight overcooked sensation and a faint, lingering off-note of solvent. It was then and there that she decided to resort to enfleurage, the old process, the method her Papa had used. In enfleurage, petals are laid out on trays of fat, where they are allowed to remain until the fat has absorbed most of the fragrance. When the flowers are exhausted, fresh ones are substituted. In time, the fat becomes saturated with the floral aromatic, which may then be sponged off the fat with baths of alcohol. It's all done by hand, and it's painstaking and slow; far, far too slow for the corporations of Paris and New York, but it would produce a truly superior oil, an essence worthy of the naked night creature that the Jamaican had captured for her, and worthy, too, of the rare base note that Madame had sworn to find to support it.

“It will be hard work, but we are going to go Papa's fat. Are you with me?”

“You right.”

“Pardon?”

“Ah wif you, ma'am. All dee way.”

The fan of Madame Devalier suddenly paused, as if her swollen, braceleted wrist had imagined it had heard the quitting whistle, then, poorer of some hopes but freer of some illusions, it resumed its hammering. “Let us have a bowl of gazpacho, cher. Then we shall nap for a couple of hours. By ten, it should be cool enough to resume our work in the lab.”

“Ah sure wish you git dee upstairs air-conkditioned.”

“Why, V'lu, a hardy plantation girl like you, you know you don't require air conditioning to sleep.”

“Ah not talking 'bout no sleep, ma'am. Ah be talking 'bout vegables. Vegables flying in through dee winda and landing on mah bed.”

“Oh, poof! Just some buck trying to attract your attention and not suave enough to send roses. Probably that crazy Jamaican.”

“Oh, no, ma'am. Bingo Pajama smell nice.”

“What do you mean, cher?”

“Nebber mind. Ah be dishing up dee cold soup now.”

“Merci. Thank you. Let us dine down here in the shop, it might be less oppressive.”

Hips swaying like mandolins on a gypsy wagon wall, V'lu climbed the narrow stairs, leaving her employer to fend off with her fan the lewd breath of Louisiana, as she awaited the seven o'clock news and yet another ominous view of the blacking out of Paris.

From the top step, V'lu called, “If Miz Priscilla not be doing nothin' wif dat bottle, how come she at dee perfumers' convention?”

There was no reply, but V'lu could tell somehow that the fanning had stopped.

PARIS

THE CARROT SYMBOLIZES financial success; a promised, often illusory reward. A carrot is a wish, a lie, a dream. In that sense, it has something in common with perfume. A beet, however. . a beet is proletarian, immediate, and, in a thoroughly unglamorous way, morbid. What is the message a beet bears to a perfumer? That his chic, elitist ways are doomed? That he might profit from a more natural, earthy, straightforward approach? This beet, this ember, this miner's bloodshot eye, this apple that an owl has pierced, is it a warning or friendly advice?

Those were the thoughts of Marcel LeFever as he stood staring out of his office window on the twenty-third floor. Marcel had been standing at the window for hours. Ever since the eclipse.

Claude LeFever, Marcel's cousin and lookalike, had watched the eclipse from his own office window. A practical man, Claude nevertheless had been moved. Paris is given to the dramatic at any time, yet, as daylight began ever more quickly to fade that morning and the great shadow rode out of the west, the city seemed to turn into a stage set, an eerily lit backdrop before which a drama surpassing even the talents of the French was about to unfold. As the strange twilight gathered, bands of alternating light and shadow began to ripple along the facade of the cathedral across the street, and when Claude glanced at the sky, he saw that the text of Les Miserables had been painted over by Salvador Dali. The sun was so round and glossy and black that had it a figure eight on it, well, it would have validated a lot of long-standing philosophical and theological complaints, underlining once and for all just where we earthlings sit on the cosmic pool table. A silver glow, like a blaze of molten escargot tongs, erupted from behind the ebony corona, and Claude felt himself trembling with a sort of euphoria.

When, after three awe-filled minutes, a blinding diamond crust of sun emerged from the lunar umbra, Claude heard others in the building applauding, and he, too, clapped his soft, manicured hands, albeit discreetly. The sun was back on the job, but for some reason, he did not feel like returning directly to work, so he went next-door to discuss the celestial spectacle with Marcel. Marcel would understand his oddly euphoric state. If anyone might explain why an eclipse of the sun could arouse in him such a profound sense of derealization, Marcel might. There were those who claimed that if it didn't smell, Marcel LeFever had no interest in it, but Claude knew better. Besides, since it was Marcel's gift to detect odors too faint to register in others' snouts, well, who was to say if in his cousin's world all things did not have their characteristic aromas? Claude recalled a night on the beach when Marcel had stated that the sea smelled differently at full moon than at new. They were younger then, in their twenties, and if he wasn't mistaken, they had smoked a little hashish, so perhaps it was a joke. But if there were lunar smells, there might be solar, also. What if an eclipse emitted a particular olfactory vibration picked up by animals, say, and a few sensitive humans, and what if this signal could be analyzed, reproduced, amplified, and bottled? Talk about a heady perfume! Anyone who caught a whiff might become as giddy as he was now. Claude felt a pang in his temples, and he winced. His mind simply was not accustomed to this kind of high-flying fancy.

Marcel was standing in his window, staring out as if transfixed, and Claude elected for the moment not to infringe on his reverie. Instead, he retreated to his own office, opened the elegantly creaky door of a Louis XVI cabinet and removed a bottle of Pernod. From the executive refrigerator, his secretary procured water and ice cubes. Claude splashed himself a healthy one, noticed how the Pernod turned from clear to milky with the addition of water, and wondered if that was analogous to the way the eclipse had affected his thinking — or had it just the opposite effect? He gulped one drink, sipped another, and an hour, nearly, passed before he again called on his cousin. Marcel remained at the window, only now he was wearing his whale mask.

All afternoon Marcel stood in the window, all afternoon Claude drank. At five, when the secretaries went home, Claude took what was left of the Pernod and moved to the receptionist's desk, from where he might watch Marcel through a door left slightly ajar. Claude would have denied that he was spying. Rather, he had a protective interest in his cousin, for business as well as familial reasons. In fact, old Luc LeFever, Claude's father, Marcel's uncle, and at seventy, very much president of the firm, personally had charged Claude with the responsibility of looking out for Marcel. “He's a bedbug,” Luc had said, “but you see to it that he's a safe and contended bedbug.”

Claude wasn't entirely sure that Marcel was buggy, and he was less sure that he was content, but he would do whatever necessary to insure his safety. For a long time now, Marcel had been critical of the manner in which the LeFever company was evolving. Marcel was a perfumer. He believed in perfume. Colognes, toilet waters, and bath oils were all right with him, since they were merely diluted perfumes, and he had not objected strongly when the scents he and his assistants created had been used to enhance soaps, powders, body lotions, hand creams, and shampoos. He loathed the very word deodorant, however, and once at a board meeting tried to force a fellow officer of the company to eat the antiperspirant stick LeFever was about to market. He had had to be physically restrained. Yet, that was minor compared to his reaction to the news that LeFever was going to supply a scent to be used in the manufacturing of toilet paper. “Welcome to the aroma chemical industry,” Claude had said. “We are now a full-fledged fragrance house.” “We are a factory!” Marcel had responded, with enough contempt in his voice to wither the blubber off a bishop, and he stormed off to the Louvre, where the smell of great art calmed him down until he came upon one of those paintings by Hieronymus Bosch in which a little person is shoving a bouquet of flowers up another little person's rectum, whereupon he commenced to yell, “No used-car salesman is going to wipe his ass with my perfume!” and the museum guards threw him into the street. It wasn't long before LeFever was supplying the fragrance compounds for cleaners, disinfectants, furniture polish, textiles, stationery, rubber bands, shark repellent, and scratch-n-sniff kiddie books, and the day Claude and Luc decided to introduce “space sprays” to reodorize public buildings and subways, Marcel screamed “Muzak for the nose!” and sailed for Tahiti. In a year he was back, and they welcomed him home without question, for without their “Bunny,” they were, indeed, just a factory.

It wasn't for his sexual habits that Marcel was called Bunny. Like those pious citizens who attend church every Sunday, then cheat and lie their way through the week, Marcel visited a brothel religiously on Saturday nights, then seemed to forget sex entirely for the next six days. Except for a recent encounter at a perfumers' convention in America, he had never been carnally involved with a woman who was not a professional, and then sparingly. No, his nickname came from his nose. A rabbit has been calculated to possess one-hundred-million olfactory receptors — small wonder its little schnozz is always twitching, it is trapped in an undulating blizzard of aromatic stimuli — and Marcel “Bunny” LeFever was reputed, with some exaggeration, to be the human equivalent of Peter Cottontail. In the laboratories of LeFever, there were spectrometers, gas liquid chromatographs, nuclear magnetic scanners, and other instruments, rapid and precise, with which to analyze and test aromatic substances, but since the worth of a fragrance depends upon its effect on the nose, scientific instrumentation could never hope to replace the sniffing snout of flesh as the final arbiter of fragrance value, and, by general agreement, Marcel's nose was the finest in the business. It could determine whether the balsam gum in a shipment from Peru had had too much rain, whether unscrupulous merchants in Madagascar had been adulterating the ylang-ylang oil again, or whether there was a “wobble” in the synthetic geraniol. Its greatest talent, however, was its ability to sniff out arrangements and combinations that could result in new perfumes. It functioned as a catalytic laser, oxidizing the passion that slept unaware in a violet, releasing the trade winds bottled up in orange peel; identifying by name and number the butterflies dissolved in chips of sandalwood and marrying them off, one by one, to the wealthy sons of musk.

As a manufacturer of aroma chemicals and fragrance compounds, LeFever was among the top twenty in the world. As a maker of fine perfumes, it was in the top five, and it was Marcel the Bunny who kept them there. The same Marcel who had been staring through a square foot of window glass for seven consecutive hours. Damn it, sensitive artist or no sensitive artist, pampered bedbug or no pampered bedbug, mystical eclipse or no mystical eclipse, it was time for somebody to throw a cigar at the smoke alarm.

“Pardon, Bunny, I didn't intend to startle you, but I'm afraid you're starting to get tangled up in the drapes.”

“Drapes? You mean draperies. Drape is a verb, the noun is drapery. One drapes a window when one hangs draperies. It is impossible for one to become entangled in drapes, so I assume you were referring to draperies.”

“Oh, yes. But drapes can be a convenient abbreviation when one has had too much to drink.”

“If one can't say draperies, perhaps one shouldn't drink.”

It must have been disconcerting to receive a grammar lesson through a whale mask, but, outwardly at least, Claude took it in stride. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I have drunk and drunk plenty. The eclipse made me do it. Wasn't it derealizing? Didn't it give you shivers? Didn't it transport you to another plane? Didn't it make your brown eyes blue?”

The whale head nodded.

“Is that what you were thinking about here at the window?”

Marcel did not dare reveal that his thoughts, when interrupted, were of carrots and beets, for Claude, sloshed as he was, would surely find a way to connect verbally those vegetables to his nickname and coin some bad joke about bunny rabbits. So Marcel said, “No, I was thinking about perfume,” which, given Marcel's perpetual obsession, wasn't a very large lie. “And I was thinking about V'lu.”

“Ah-ha!” exclaimed Claude. “You know, there's not much that can be done to heal the sting of a woman. As they say in her country, it's easier to scratch your ass than your heart.”

“You misunderstood me. Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand. For the past month I have spent most of my time down in the kitchen, perfecting the scent that we are calling New Wave. You are familiar with the rationale behind New Wave. We are predicting that for many people the fascination with nostalgia — with a past reputed to be more simple, more honest, more natural than the present — will soon subside. In the cities, there is a large, affluent, professional class that has already rejected the sweet, heavy, feminine, Oriental scents that the hippies ushered into favor in the sixties, as well as the clean, wholesome, fruity and herbal scents associated with the backpacker chic of the seventies. For this avant-garde, and for those who will flock to join it, LeFever is developing New Wave, a truly modern scent — sharp, hard-edged, assertive, unisexual, urbane, unromantic, nonmysterious, cool, light, elegant, and wholly synthetic—”

“I know all that, Marcel.”

“Yes, but what you don't know is how boring and, ultimately, frightening I am finding this scent. I slept last night with New Wave on my pillowcase, and my dreams were totalitarian nightmares. The boof is not unattractive, yet when I test it, I have somehow the feeling that I am smelling the sinister vapors of fascism.”

“Really, Bunny. Ha ha.”

“I am not joking.” Marcel removed the whale mask. His demeanor was serious, indeed. “I am not joking.”

“But, surely—”

“When I smell New Wave, I have the sensation that I am smelling control, conformity, domination. As I have said, it has a definite appeal. . ”

“Well, then—”

“There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all of us secretly attracted to violence.”

“A violent perfume? Ha ha. Remember that U.S. after-shave, Hai Karate?”

“Were I to add but a trace note of leather to New Wave, Claude, I would say that I had drawn on my canvas the olfactory silhouette of the Nazi.”

The word jolted Claude. He shuddered. The LeFever twins had been small boys during the Nazi occupation of Paris, but they recalled it as an adult recalls the breaking of a bone in childhood: the sickening crack, the fear, the pain, the sadness, the sudden ooze of blood that shows itself like the black blush of fairy-tale witches. It was a wound upon their memory, a thud of monster boots in a distant sandbox.

“New Wave is an intriguing perfume,” Marcel went on, “but I am growing to loathe it, and actually to fear its implications. Therefore, I have been thinking today about raw materials. The eclipse set me to wondering about those powerful and mysterious aspects of the natural world that the perfumer has not tapped yet. We moved into synthetics as natural raw materials became less available, more expensive. But there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of raw materials in different parts of the world that we haven't examined — consider the valley of the Amazon, consider the ocean, for God's sake — and there is history. . The recent love affair with the past was with a relatively recent past. Fifty years ago, a century at the most. But what of the fragrances of five thousand years ago, were they as primitive and unrefined and fundamental as we believe? History? What about the fragrances of prehistory?”

Marcel took a seat. He sighed. He was not an athletic man, and he'd been on his feet the whole strange day. “The eclipse also caused me to think of V'lu.”

“Yes, back to V'lu.” Claude grinned a sloppy Pernod grin. “Let me guess. This black face of the sun reminded you of her. Reminded you that her ancestors in the jungle used fragrances of which we know little—”

“Idiot. What I was reminded of, aside from things that are none of your business, was a remark she made. V'lu pointed out to me that the synthetics that predominate in perfumery today are practically all petroleum products. The price of crude oil is now subject to arbitrary decisions by the OPEC nations. V'lu suggested that since the Arabs are untrustworthy and since the future of the Mideast is uncertain, there is a strong possibility that petrochemicals will become even more scarce and expensive than natural materials. She suggested that we ought to be looking anew at the flowers.”

“That is elementary and quite sound,” agreed Claude. “It is an idea with some merit, I don't have to be sober to recognize that. Fuck the Arabs, anyhow. Hang them from the drapes! And the draperies, too; yes, Bunny? But what I can't imagine is how this shopgirl — out of the mouths of babes, uh? — communicated this to you; I mean how could you even understand her, speaking in southern Negro dialect and all?”

Marcel looked first at his cousin, then out the window again, focusing perhaps on that same invisible celestial footprint that had held his gaze all day. “I had no problem,” he said. “V'lu did not express this to me in English, you see. She spoke flawless French.”

Mangel-Wurzel, Mon Amour.