Jitterbug Perfume

Part III. PROMISE HER ANYTHING BUT GIVE HER K23

THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF LOVE is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion.

Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married. Descartes, architect of the Age of Reason, fled Paris, the City of Romance, in 1628 to “escape its distractions.” He settled in Holland, where, surrounded by disciples and supported by patrons, he studied and wrote about mathematics and logic. Late in the year of 1649, he was invited to visit Stockholm to instruct Queen Christina in philosophy. Descartes accepted at once. Perhaps the pay was good. There would have been a reason.

Queen Christina took her lessons lying down. Frequently she was nude. That is hardly the worst of it. The court of Sweden, like everyplace else in seventeenth-century Europe, was infested with fleas. Christina had had her craftsmen fashion for her a tiny cannon of silver and gold. As she lay about on her cushions, she fired the little cannon at the fleas on her body. That was why she was nude. It is said she was a fair to good shot.

The daily sight of Her Majesty thus amusing herself, while he, Descartes, in dark Dutch britches, undertook to explain the underlying perfection of an indubitable sphere of Being, was more than his rational bias could bear. He grew rapidly nervous and pale. On February 11, 1650, only a few months after his arrival in Stockholm, Descartes, fifty-four, fell dead. Christina lived thirty-nine years longer and knocked off a good many more fleas.

In 1666—little harm love could do him then — Descartes's body was taken to Paris for reburial. At the funeral, a disagreeable odor filled the churchyard. “It was as if a goatherd had driven his flock through our midst,” said one of Descartes's followers. No logical explanation was offered.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship. To precipitate such a quarrel, the sweaty kimono of sexual jealousy is usually dragged out of the hamper, although almost any excuse will do. Only rarely is the spat rooted in the beet-deep soil of serious issue, but when it is, a special sadness attends it, for the mind is slower to heal than the heart, and such quarrels can doom a union, even one that has prospered for a very long time.

The quarrel of Kudra and Alobar lasted far into the night. Jarred by their words, things fell apart in the flat: flowerpots tottered on the windowsills, feathers flew out of pillows, and the teapot sang, though there was no fire beneath it and it was not a cozy song. As if it had long fingernails, their argument reached out into the street and scratched the cobblestones, the chestnut blossoms, the blackboard of the sky.

“A pox on squabbling lovers,” muttered Pan. Pan needed to get to sleep. He'd been in bed for hours, but instead of dreams, what came to him were harsh voices through the wall. Pan tossed and turned and cursed a bit, although the irony of the situation (gods have ears for irony) was not lost on him: Alobar and Kudra were fighting over immortality, whereas Pan was craving sleep because he planned to get up early to attend a funeral.

Pan tossed and turned, turned and tossed. An eye at the keyhole would have been amazed. It would have spied a bed in turmoil, iron bedstead rattling, wool blankets thrashing, but not a soul in the covers.

The year was 1666 and poor Pan was completely invisible.

At seven o'clock in the morning, the door of the incense shop that had been established at 21, rue Quelle Blague opened and closed, although nobody was seen to enter or leave. A transparent mist of musk moved slowly eastward along the left bank of the Seine. At the rue St. Jacques, the acrid cloud turned to the south, insulting every snout, human or equine, by which it floated. After about eight blocks, it began traveling eastward again, creeping up the slope of a steep hill, at the top of which sat the crumbly old Gothic abbey church of Ste. Geneviève-du-Mont.

“This temple (gasp) art as tired and (wheeze) rundown as I,” panted Pan, and, indeed, though the professional virgin, Geneviève, was regarded with much paradoxical affection in the City of Romance, the church would be razed in less than a century to make way for a fine new building in the neoclassic style. In 1817 the well-traveled bones of Descartes would be transferred from its yard to St. Germain-des-Pres, but on this spring morning they were to be planted in the mossy cemetery where Geneviève's own saintly remains had a thousand years been lying.

In his more vital days, Descartes had included in his philosophical treatises enough scientific fact to displease the bishops, so except for the cleric whose Latin platitudes were to be rained on his deaf skull, the Church was without representation at his interment. However, among those who were obeisant to the new religion of science, which was in its husky infancy at this time, Descartes was increasingly revered, and they attended the rite in fair number. Pan rested upon a burial vault at a far end of the yard and watched their carriages arrive.

Some of the professors and physicians were rather shabby; they were men too clothed in ideas to pay much heed to grooming. Many others, however, including the provost of the University of Paris, the president of the guilds, the designer of the Observatoire, which was about to be built, and the chairman of the mathematical society were decked out in black silks and powdered wigs. The sight of those wigs gave Pan an idea. Earlier in the century, wigs had been worn exclusively by the nobility, but now they had become popular with the bourgeoisie. If Alobar were to sport a wig, thought Pan, it might solve his current problem and put a stop to his bickering with Kudra. “No small blessing, that,” he said. He rubbed his bleary eyes and yawned.

About then a small brass band struck up a dirgeful tune, and Pan, who fancied himself a musician, listened critically. “In all of Arkadia, there be not a single sheep who wouldst dance to such noise,” he complained. But once the speechmaking commenced, he was sorry the music had ended.

Aristotle had dealt Pan an enervating blow. Then, Jesus Christ had practically belted his horns off. Now, word was out that Descartes had applied the coup de grace. What little remained of Pan's ancient power was destined to evaporate in the Age of Reason, that's what the experts said. Pan, weary and indistinct, could not dispute them. When he learned of Descartes's funeral, some morbid (or goatish) curiosity drew him, sore of hoof, to Ste. Geneviève-du-Mont.

Like jugged bees, the funeral orations droned on. One intellectual honored Descartes's Discourse on Method, another convinced every moss-backed headstone in the churchyard of the departed's contribution to the theory of equations, while a third, more bombastic than the rest, rattled in its vault the untested pelvis of good Saint Geneviève with his praise of the new rationale. Just as the university provost was uncorking his monotone, the spring breeze suddenly shifted direction, and the funeral party found itself downwind from Pan.

The crowd grew inattentive. Out of the corner of his eye, the provost checked the environs for animal life. Those who owned handkerchiefs soon had them to their nostrils (a passerby might have assumed that they were weeping). Among those who had no handkerchiefs was the priest. “This is what the Almighty thinks of science,” he mumbled, then immediately crossed himself, begging forgiveness for having attributed to God a scent that obviously was Satan's.

Of course, the group was lucky. Pan's reek was actually mild compared to what it had been in the good old days. Nevertheless, a certain waggish mathematician provoked some scorn and much stifled laughter when, in a stage whisper, he paraphrased Descartes's most famous dictum.

“I stink, therefore I am,” he said, nodding toward the Swedish walnut coffin.

“Ever thus.” Pan sighed. Where was the profit in invisibility if one's odor gave one away? He creaked to his feet and, on legs of wobbly wool, threaded through the crowd toward the stone gate. Halfway there, he remembered his idea about a wig and, in passing, snatched the hairpiece off a prominent man of learning. Assuming that the wind had taken it, other bewigged guests grabbed at their own adornments, anchoring them to their noggins. There the French intelligentsia stood, one hand to its hair, the other to its noses, as the god and the wig bobbed out of Saint Geneviève's decaying churchyard and down the hill to the Seine. It was the first fun Pan had had all week.

Upon reaching the riverbank, Pan stopped for a breather. He uprooted a clump of turf and hid the wig beneath it so that no passing bargeman might mistake it for a relic of an aristocratic romp in the grass. An invisible learned early that his possessions and trappings did not borrow his ability, which meant that he must go always empty-handed. Pan could not even carry his pipes.

That was a shame, because a breezy April morning such as that one was meant for a tune. On similar mornings in the old days, the golden days, Pan's mischievous piping on the outskirts of a village would be the signal for the village men to lock up their wives and daughters. Those who failed to secure their women would lose them that day to the pastures, from where they would return after dusk, tangle-haired, grass-stained, and stinking of the rut. Pan grinned at the memory. “Methinks I could pipe Maria Theresa right out of the palace,” he mused, referring to Louis XIV's young bride.

It was encouraging that he would mention a contemporary female, for Pan had begun to live in his memories, an unhealthy symptom in anyone, suggesting as it does that life has peaked. Every daydream that involves the past sports in its hatband a ticket to the grave. Yet, what did the neglected god have to look foward to? To ambrosia, to Maria Theresa, to a monthly pension, a flock of his own? No, only the ministrations of Alobar and Kudra kept him going, and as their recent quarreling intimated, the couple had other things to worry about.

As he warmed his horns on the sunny riverbank, watching the wind-torn chestnut blossoms drift by like melted nymph flesh on the tide, Pan dismissed Descartes and his prideful ambition to force nature under human control, and thought instead of Alobar and Kudra, how they had come to Arkadia, drunk on eternal knowledge, seeking him out and laughing. .

Presumably, their “eternal knowledge” was derived from the Bandaloop, albeit indirectly. No documents, no artifacts, no graffiti were left behind by the Bandaloop, but as Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy of the Last Laugh Foundation has written, “Physical immortality is primarily a matter of vibration,” and the caves certainly were resonant with the vibrations of their former occupants.

Alobar and Kudra lived in those caves, amidst those vibrations, for seven years, during which time they learned many of the secrets of life everlasting. Alobar believed they should have stayed longer and learned more, and this belief kept surfacing like a lungfish in the hot surf of their seventeenth-century quarrels. Way back then, however, six hundred years further back, when the cream was still thick and yellow on the magic milk and the marble egg of logic laid by the Greek philosophers had yet to hatch, Alobar was simply too happy to protest at length.

Kudra was as thrilled as he with their Bandaloop education, yet she had been yearning since childhood, since that formative merchandising trip, to go out into the wider world, and now, tingling as she was with vitality and confidence, she was impatient to plunge into far cities and countrysides. “Take me to the lands where the sun sets,” she implored. “We can do our immortality work wherever we are.” That was basically true, for, and here we quote Wiggs Dannyboy again, “Physical immortality is not an end result, a condition to be arrived at in the future, but an ongoing discipline, an attitude, a way of life to be practiced in the present, day by day.” Nevertheless, Alobar was convinced that there were serious holes in their knowledge that could best be filled in the caves of the Bandaloop. He made a sincere effort to persuade Kudra to linger; then, having failed at that, jumped with her, lighthearted and eager, into the meandering mainstream of medieval life.

Alobar signed on as a guard with a spice caravan, and they traveled by camel to Constantinople, humpbacking out of the sandy wings of the east onto that golden stage where Emperor Basil II was directing, under the auspices of Byzantine Christianity, a long-running drama of expansion and wealth. Suspecting that immortality might be fostered more by comfort than by asceticism, but having lived hand to mouth during all of their time together, the couple elected to settle temporarily in Constantinople and sample its luxury.

Neither of them had ever resided in a large city before, and Constantinople, a major trading center, a cosmopolitan link between East and West, a mosaic-tiled hive of commercial and religious honey, woke them daily with an excited nudge from its gilt elbow. Aided by Kudra, whose understanding of raw materials was studiously passed on to him, Alobar rose rapidly from stevedore to manager of Basil's spice warehouses, a position whose salary afforded them a smart house overlooking the Bosporus, a silver tea service, and carpets thicker and more colorful than the ones that had disappeared from the caves with the Bandaloop. Upon those rugs (dyed in some cases with beet juice), they sipped mint tea, munched spinach pies and melons, made love in ways that emphasized the utra in Kama Sutra, and perfected the breathing techniques that apparently are indispensable to extreme longevity.

Bathing techniques also are important, and, fortunately, in Constantinople they were easy to practice. As Alobar was well aware, most of Europe's two-legged mammals thought of water as an element only slightly more suitable for external application than fire. The unpopularity of the bath was both widespread and persistent (in Louis XIV's incomparably elegant Versailles, there was not a single vessel designed for bathing, a fact that one day would lead Kudra to regard the Sun King's court a potential market for her incense; late in the twentieth century, there were still great numbers of Europeans who refused to wash their bodies lest they remove some quality — corporeal or incorporeal — deemed essential to their image of themselves). As a result of its constant intercourse with the Far East, Constantinople had acquired an appreciation of the protracted hot bath, for the purpose of which a network of stone aqueducts channeled water into the city from reservoirs in the nearby hills. So that they might bathe together, a practice forbidden in the sexually segregated public baths, Alobar and Kudra tapped into the aqueduct system and built a tile-roofed, waist-deep tub at the rear of their house, between the rosebushes and the pistachio tree. Kudra spoke fluent amphibian, but Alobar, conditioned by the European aversion, frequently had to be coaxed into the tub by a reminder that ritualistic bathing enhances longevity, or by a suggestion that a soak might add some unusual slippery dimension to the coital functioning of his or his companion's organs.

“Nowhere under yon setting sun will you meet water meant for bathing in,” Alobar would caution Kudra whenever she grew antsy, and if that did not lull her restlessness, he would add, “No perfumes will you meet, either.”

He was correct, there was no perfume west of the Bosporus. In the modern sense, there was no perfume anywhere, for the process by which a flower's fumes are extracted and preserved using alcohol distillation was not to be discovered for another hundred years, when Avicenna, the Arabian alchemist, hit upon it while trying to isolate for Islam the soul of its holy rose. In eleventh-century Constantinople, however, aromatics were as popular as they were in Kudra's India, and, as in India, they came mostly in the form of thick resins and gooey gums. Each morning, a servant would bring Basil II a small cedar box filled with resinous frankincense and gummy myrrh, whereupon the emperor would smash the box over his own head, allowing its contents to trickle down his neck and beard. As time passed, Basil began to act rather punchy from all the box breaking, and frequently his eyes were sealed half shut from the gum. He smelled great, though, and when he died in 1025, his successor, wishing to exude an even larger glory, took to breaking two boxes over his head every day. Perhaps it was because of their vigorous application of scent that neither of the emperors was sufficiently alert to notice that their spice manager stayed constant in appearance even as they aged — although others in Constantinople noticed well enough: in the court and in the church, gossip rustled its leathery wings.

“The emperor, the bishop, the camels at the marketplace, the olive trees on the hillsides, the ships in the harbor, every and each grow older. This Alobar and Kudra do not.”

“They are always in good humor and health, yet they never attend devotion.”

“They bathe together.”

“They smile too much.”

“She anoints herself with sweet unguents as though a man.”

“Nobody knows whence they came.”

“They are often at the act of love, as their noisy demonstrations attest, but produce not a child.”

“It is whispered that they eat their children as soon as they are born.”

“Aye. Eating babies is what keeps them young.”

“Dark, she is.”

“Haughty is he.”

“Nonbelievers.”

“Supernatural.”

“Agents of the Evil One.”

“Our children are in peril.”

Rumor by rumor, suspicion of them intensified, until—"Did you hear? A small boy disappeared yesterday at play on the Bosporus" — one night they found themselves fleeing Constantinople just ahead of a mob. Alobar bribed a Greek captain to hide them among the stacks of ivory tusks lashed to his deck, and it was from that vantage that they witnessed their home of nearly thirty years burning to the ground.

“Hold back your sobs,” Alobar consoled, squeezing one of Kudra's dolphin thighs. “We have learned from this experience two important things. First of all, our Bandaloop experiment is successful; we have slowed, if not turned away, the wrinkle-carving, silver-sowing herald of death. About that we can rejoice. Second, we now are aware that a display of undue longevity creates problems in a community conditioned to age and die. In the future, we must take that cautiously into account.”

He pointed to their burning house, which by then was but a glowing ember on the horizon. “We have lost a roof over our heads, a fine teapot, an overrated bath, and some carpets stained by our love. Let them go. We have aliveness, instead. And on this entire world, which I know for fact to be as round as a beet, there is no other pair like you and me.”

Through her tears Kudra grinned. “I'm certain that we shall find other rugs to stain,” said she. “But even you will miss our bath, wait and see. As for the teapot. .” With a flourish, she produced it from beneath her cloak.

Gathering her to him, teapot and all, Alobar pretended to search under her wraps. “For what I know, you may have hid our bath in there, as well. Ah, I thought so! I feel something hot and wet.”

“You may well wish it were a bath, before too long. Oh, what is my poor large nose going to think of a people who neither bathe nor wear perfumes?”

“Well,” said Alobar, “my scheme is to condition you straightaway by introducing you to Pan. Of all who stink in the western lands, none stinks in such grand capacity as he. Pan is a god and is my friend.”

“Only you, Alobar. Only you among men could claim a god for a friend. And naturally it would be a god unwashed and smelly.”

She embraced him, swabbing his beard with kisses at the same moment that the ship plunged its black, wooden tongue into the murmuring mouth of the outer waters, knocking salt teeth loose in every direction; and as the lash lines shuddered from the recoil of that ancient kiss, as the mast pole tilted its neck like a voyeur for a better view, and the mainsail, with a raucous, swift gesture, shook a skyful of stars out of its folds and creases, Kudra and Alobar were carried off to Greece — uncertain, intrepid, possibly immortal, decidedly in love. .

Pan remembered the breezy way they had crossed his pasture, fairly skipping as they walked, although that pasture, like all pastures in Arkadia, was weighted down with toe-stubbing rocks; and she had said, “It is so quiet out here I can hear my ears,” and he had shot back, “If your nose were your ears, the noise would be deafening.” Vaudeville was not dead. It wasn't born yet.

Spying on them from a bushy crag, Pan had to admit that they were as agreeable a pair of homers as he'd ever laid eyes upon ("homers” was what the surviving Greek gods secretly called mortals, a disparaging term taken from the name of the so-called bard who had spread so many lies about them). Pan admired the bounce in their step, the fun in their voice, the way they paused every fifty yards or so to fondle one another; Pan was curious about the silver pot that the female homer cradled against her round mooey breasts as if it were a babe, and Pan was amused when the male homer, when invited to inspect one of the woman's silk slippers (meant for padding about upon carpets and now ripped and frazzled by stones), had rolled it up and smoked it.

Oh, there was an air about them, all right, but it wasn't until they were directly beneath his perch that Pan, whose gaze had become fixed upon the prosperous sweep of the woman's hips — if ever a twat were a cornucopia, spilling forth meat puddings, hot wines, and sweets of every description: unending (shellfish) inexhaustible (peaches) infinite (mushrooms) feta feta feta forever, surely it was hers — it wasn't until her companion suddenly pinched his nostrils together and cried, “He's close by! I have got a whiff!", than Pan made the identification. Why, it was ex-King Whatsizname, that brash upstart from the north, the mad fellow who had gone off — was it fifty, sixty homer years ago? — to spike a petition on death's door. From the looks of him, death had considered his complaint. Well, well. .

Alobar was then one hundred and two, yet looked half his age, and the vigorous half at that. White hairs continued to populate his noble head, as if they were the familiars, the pale shadows of the chestnut filaments, which continued to dwell there, as well; but the phantoms, impotent, infertile in their ghost sheets, had failed to multiply and seemed content to just hang on, haunting the original inhabitants, who though they once might have quaked, had ceased to be afraid. Alobar had put on a few pounds and no longer carried himself like a warrior — Samye meditations had massaged the tension from his spine, Bandaloop transmissions had turned his spear-arm into a gaily waving thing — but pity the foolish young bully who noticed not the muscles turning and polishing themselves inside the lapidary of his tunic. His beard was trimmed after the Byzantine fashion, his various flashes of scar tissue had taken on a plum's brilliance, his sleet blue eyes looked out upon the world with a cub's curiosity and a papa bear's cunning. He blew playful puffs of slipper smoke through his nose.

Speaking of noses, his consort sported a grandiose banana that was almost musical in the way it curved. Upon a more angular woman it might have been ridiculous, but this dark creature was such a walking barrage of burpy bulges and bending lines that her nose blended perfectly into her contours. From the thick parabolas of her eyelids to the pronounced balls of her now bare feet, she was nonstop curve, three nymphs' worth of curve, a foreign contradiction to Greek geometry. The drool that rained from Pan's lips as he spied on her would have frozen in mid-drip had a reliable source informed him that she was as old as the grandmothers who milked the goats in nearby valleys, toothless skeletons (this one had a mouthful of pearly brights) whose only curves were in backs bent double over walking sticks. Kudra was sixty-six, Pan, and as you were to learn, as much as match for you as any homer girl you had ever piped into a pasture. Of course, you, yourself, Mr. Horny, were long past your prime. .

Yes, Mr. Goat Foot, despite the angry split between Rome and Constantinople, the tide of Christianity had not receded, but rather continued its slow, soupy flow into every nook and cranny of the land, until there was scarcely a pagan left whose heart and brain had not been lapped by it, lapped so long in many cases that old beliefs had been eroded, if not washed away, and you, Mr. Charmer, Mr. Irrational, Mr. Instinct, Mr. Gypsy Hoof, Mr. Clown; you, Mr. Body Odor, Mr. Animal Mystery, Mr. Nightmare, Mr. Lie in Wait, Mr. Panic, Mr. Bark at the Moon; yes, you, Mr. Rape, Mr. Masturbate, Mr. Ewe-bangi, Mr. Internal Wilderness, Mr. Startle Reaction, Mr. Wayward Force, Mr. Insolence, Mr. Nature Knows Best, you had been steadily losing your hold on the peasants and were now even weaker in flesh and spirit than when Alobar had seen you last. You were fading, and it was not a pretty sight, for you were a god, after all, with a god's strength; born, laughing and prancing, in the high golden circle where great and terrifying decisions are made. It hurt you to experience your popularity waning, it might have driven you to the wineskin were not the wineskin already, Mr. Sensual License, your lifelong friend; and it added to your misery to observe the effects of estrangement upon your former followers. In losing you, they were losing their body wisdom, their moon wisdom, their mountain wisdom, they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross. They weren't as much fun, anymore, the poor homers; they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address. That's why you were attracted to this unlikely couple that came skipping into your meadow, the woman in clear communion with the booming bells of her meat, the man unafraid of appearing frivolous in the eyes of Christ as he caressed a poppy while puffing on a shoe. You would have admired them even had they not been sniffing you out, which, of course, they were.

Pan suspected, and rightly so, that the couple's gaiety, their cockiness and élan, was somehow the result of Alobar's successful petition against death, and, more than anyone else, the beleaguered god probably could have imagined the anguished expression minted into the other side of the immortalist coin.

To witness Kudra then, giggling and barefoot among the poppies, it would have been hard for anyone to picture her on her knees in a Constantinople pantry, weeping and wailing, shaking like the shuttle in an overachiever's loom, begging Shakti, Shiva, Kali, and Krishna to forgive her for rebelling against divine authority. (And it is divine authority, is it not, that insists that we must die? That grants us consciousness for a few decades, then, no matter how gloriously we have used it, snatches it away? Surely, the human race committed some heinous atavistic crime for the gods to inflict it with mortality, as they have; and isn't it a worsening of our crime, a compounding of our guilt, to try to escape our just punishment?) Even after absorbing the Bandaloop legacy (or part of it, at least), Kudra could never quite overcome the feeling that, in defying death, she was doing something wrong and would be made to pay for it in some prolonged and unspeakably excruciating way. When in Alobar's company, when meditating or bathing, she could exult in a body that remained firm and juicy while thousands about her withered away, but alone in the frottage of twilight, awaiting Alobar's return from the spice docks, fear would ooze out of the brown pit of her chin dimple, and, whimpering, she would turn from one deity to another, even bizarre Ganesh, with his elephant head, pleading for mercy for not having submitted to a widow's death in the rope yard.

Now Alobar had grown up in a more intimate relationship with his gods. His snored in magic tree trunks and twinkled in the constellations, frequently emerging, mossy-haired or moon-burned, to fraternize with humanity, sharing human foibles and appetites. As a king in the forests of what would one day be called Bohemia, Alobar, himself, had been deemed half divine. Still, he, too, felt odd and uncomfortable at times, felt a gulf widening between himself and his fellows who went uncomplaining to the grave. “Am I clinging to my individual being only to have it grow inhuman and strange?” he would agonize. “Am I inviting a revenge worse than simple annihilation?”

On a day such as that one, however, a day popping its seams with sunshine, lust, and adventure, it was difficult for him — or Kudra — to conceive of anything worse than annihilation. So, they advanced in the lavender mountain haze like chatty autograph-seekers closing in on a celebrity's hideaway, but in their secret hearts they wanted something other than your scrawl, Mr. Shaggy; they wanted you to reach into their secret hearts and remove the hard, knobby doggy bone of doubt that their apparent victory over time had buried there.

“We have been living in Constantinople among the Christians,” explained Alobar.

“The Christians doth be everywhere,” said Pan.

“Not in my homeland,” said Kudra.

“They will be,” said Pan. A wave of faintness and nausea broke over him. He ignored it to concentrate on Kudra's mounds.

“Prior to that,” said Alobar, “we lived in a cave far away in the East. Have you ever heard of the Bandaloop doctors?”

“No,” said Pan. “Don't be stupid.”

Alobar reddened. “You've been around a while. I thought someone might have mentioned Bandaloop to you.”

“I am Pan,” said Pan. “People do not mention things to me.”

“Your point is well taken,” said Kudra. Pan grinned at her lasciviously. Alobar glowered.

“I will play for thee,” said Pan, producing his reeds.

“We wished to talk to you about immortality,” protested Alobar.

“Thou art too late,” said Pan. He blew a few weak notes on his pipes.

“Too late for talk or too late for immortality?” asked Kudra.

Pan's instrument made a sound, high and thin.

“Too late for us or too late for you?” asked Alobar. He had noted the god's physical decline.

“Thou art interested in the immortal, this be immortal,” said Pan, and he commenced to pipe in earnest.

“But—” objected Alobar.

“Your point is well taken,” said Kudra.

Alobar glowered.

Before she met him, before they flushed him from his thickets, Kudra had imagined Pan to be a giant, a winged monster with fire-blackened hooves and more arms than necessary for the discharge of polite duties; imagined him smoldering, hissing, uprooting trees and spitting hailstones, instructing humanity in a thunderous tone. She was frankly disappointed when he proved to be slighter in stature than her Alobar, and she could barely keep from sniggering at his foul tangles of wool and his silly tail. Even his stench failed to measure up to Alobar's description of it, striking her as more locally naughty than universally nasty. It wasn't until he began to pipe that Kudra got some sense of Who (or What) He Really Was.

At first, his playing, too, seemed slight; it was so simple, careless, and primitive that one had to sympathize with Timolus, who, judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day. Had Timolus not hooked Pan off the stage so quickly, had he possessed the — the what? the honesty? the humility? (Timolus, after all, couldn't play shit) the nerve? to actually listen to Pan, to respond with something more genuine than his preconceptions, he might have been affected, as Kudra began to be affected, once she stopped smirking at his obvious lack of formal training and quit comparing him unfavorably with the flutist, Lord Krishna. Pan's song, because it served no purpose, because, indeed, it transcended the human yoke of purposes, was, above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out). To Kudra it was the aural equivalent of the rope trick: a giddy ascent up a shaky coil, to arrive in a place of mystery, where the sense of all-encompassing oneness with the natural world and the sense of the absolute aloneness of the individual coexist and commingle. There was a sort of hippity-hoppity bunny rabbit quality to Pan's erratic melody, but also a roaming goatish quality, stubborn, rough, and lean. If at one instance it sounded tender and idyllic, at another, threatening and brutal, perhaps that was because Pan's song was the inner animal's songs, all of them, summed into one seemingly random epiphany. Kudra felt that at Pan's concert she was on less than solid ground, yet, as unsteady as that ground might be, she was driven to dance upon it. (Maybe there is no proper way to react to the inner animal's tunes but dance to them.)

Kudra found herself swaying rhythmically and wiggling her grass-stained toes. She turned to Alobar to find him executing a little shuffle, snapping the fingers of his left hand while with the right he defined a tempo by shaking the charred remains of her half-smoked shoe. Kudra was amused by Alobar's tentative polka until her eyes fell upon the tumescent protrusion dancing with him. Disgusting, she thought. An erection is just inappropriate. Then she realized with a shock that she was so wet that children could have sailed toy boats in her underpants.

The next thing she knew, she and Alobar were dancing up the hillside, following the Charmer's pipes through thistle bushes and over jagged rocks; and while panic fear erupted with a roar from her deepest places and while she overheard Alobar plaintively asking, “Doesn't it matter to you that she is my wife?” she was incapable of turning back.

The refined erotic engineering taught by the Kama Sutra had not prepared Kudra for that night of priapism, but the following morning, after she had sponged her chafed parts in the grotto pool and smeared them repeatedly with the aromatics that she lugged about in the teapot (even so, the goat smell was to cling to her for weeks), she found that she and Alobar could face one another without shame, and she nodded in total agreement when Alobar ventured, “I feel somehow that his lechery was secondary, although to what I cannot say.”

For breakfast, Pan served them olives, tomatoes, and cheese, which they ate in the nude without a trace of self-consciousness. Throughout the meal, the sleepy-eyed god kept testing the air, more like a hare than a goat, until at last Alobar inquired what he might be sniffing.

“Flowers, methinks, but unlike any flowers that bloom in these parts. Most strange. Dost thou smell them, too?”

“You are smelling my perfumes,” said Kudra, and when Pan looked puzzled, she thrust her shoulder under his nose. His bewilderment increased. “Thou didst not smell like that last night,” he said.

Alobar made a move to produce the perfume jars, but Kudra caught his wrist and bade him wait. “We puny homers, as you call us, have some magic of our own,” she said. “Tell me, do you find the aroma unpleasant?”

“It be quite pleasing — from a blossom. A woman shouldst smell as thou didst last night.”

“Bah! You Western males are all alike, whether you call yourselves gods or men. You've had your noses in too many battles and too many hunts. Alobar used to hate perfumes, but when he came home from the warehouse every evening accidentally smelling of nutmeg and cinnamon and tumeric, he grew accustomed to the idea that flesh is more appealing when not left to marinate in its own rank juices. Here. Close your eyes for a minute. Just for a minute. Go ahead. Trust me.”

Reluctantly, Pan lowered his big monkey lids, whereupon Kudra doused him with enough patchouli to stampede a herd of elephants. His eyes flew open like the hatch covers on an exploding ship, and he commenced to sniff at his extremities, as if he were wildly in love with himself. A kind of disorientation seemed to seize him, causing him to walk in circles, repeatedly crossing his own path. The nymphs, who had entertained Alobar during the night while Kudra was being entertained by Pan, laughed nervously from their mossy lounge across the pool. One of the nymphs sidled up to the god and pulled his tail with a petal-picking gesture, only to be flung violently to the ground. At last, Pan sat down between Kudra and Alobar, still inhaling drafts of himself with expressions of disbelief, and began to speak in the most subdued tones Alobar had yet heard him employ.

“'Tis true, thou homers do have magic of thine own, the gods have always known that, known it even better than thee. We gods know how to use our powers, but most men and women do not know how, that be the difference between us and thee. Sniff sniff.”

“Forgive me,” said Alobar, “but the important difference between men and gods is that gods are immortal and men are not. Is this a result of we men not knowing how to correctly use our powers?”

Pan ran his rather squashed nose along his patchouli-contaminated arm. “Once, a long time ago, when the earth had a flat dark face and a belly of fire, back before the hills had grown so tall that they pushed the moon away, mankind was given a choice between life and death and through trickery or misinformation or something else, made the wrong choice. That is all there is to it.”

“But what if,” asked Kudra, shooting Alobar a meaningful glance, “but what if we decided now to choose life?”

“Then choose it,” said Pan.

Again, Kudra and Alobar exchanged glances. “But would not that anger the gods?” Kudra asked.

“Ha ha ha!” The laughter burst out of Pan like the barking of some obscene dog. “Anger the gods? The gods, those that art still around, wouldst congratulate thee for finally catching on.”

“You mean. .?”

“I mean that the gods do not limit men. Men limit men.”

“We are,” asked Kudra, “as deserving of immortality as the gods?”

“Thou hast not deserved immortality because thou hast been too puny in thy mind and heart and soul. Sniff.”

“But we can change that?” Kudra's voice was hopeful. “We can expand our minds, and enlarge our souls, and choose life over death?”

“Sniff sniff. Thou hast that potential.”

Alobar was nodding his head excitedly, and Kudra wore a smile that you could mail a letter in. An eleventh-century letter, written on parchment, rolled into a cylinder and tied with thongs. The Charmer was still cruising the patchouli patches.

“Great Pan,” said Alobar, with a degree of reverence, “I used to be king over a state, but now I am king over myself.”

“Dearest Pan,” said Kudra, with more than a degree of intimacy (in the preceding night, after all, she and the god had left no sexual stone unturned), “I used to weave rope, but now I weave my world.”

“Methinks thou doth speak from freedom not from vanity,” said Pan, “and I lift my wineskin to thee, for thou art rare among humans. Sniff.” He squirted a stream of wine into his ugly, yet sensual, mouth. Red rivulets ran into his beard to disappear there, sopped up, perhaps, by whorls of thirsty wool. “Ah, but Alobar, doth thou not recall my telling thee that gods art immortal for only so long as the world believes in them? Thou hast only to look at me to see how a god dwindles when belief in him dwindles. Immortality has its conditions. Immortality has its limits. And immortality has its dangers. Whatever thou hast learned about death from thy wise men in the East, thou wouldst do well to remember. .”

“Yes? Go on,” urged Alobar.

“What, Pan? Remember what?” asked Kudra.

It was no use. Pan had finished speaking and would say no more. Nor would he sniff at himself again, for, incredibly, his native odor had peeled away the perfume that masked it; had slowly burned through the potent excess of patchouli like a sun-ray blazing its way through a purple fog, and now, after less than an hour of suppression, the goat gas — that chloride compound of barnyard and bedroom — was boiling again, filling the grotto with a sleazy vapor, a steam to press a rooster's pants.

With the return of Pan's stink, there came renewed mischief in his eyes. When he scampered to the cave to fetch his pipes, Kudra and Alobar began hastily to dress. “We have a long journey ahead of us,” they explained, and with a curious mixture of relief and regret, they bade their divine host a fast farewell.

Neither of them spoke until they reached the pasture, where they stopped to catch their breath after the rigorous descent. There, sitting against the base of the cliff, sequins of sweat sewn to their brows, they regarded one another as pilgrims — or survivors — do. Kudra folded her hands over her uterus, where some very strange little swimmers had recently drowned. Alobar issued a sigh that was shaped like a funnel: a full quart of beet juice could have been poured through it.

“We shan't forget him for a time,” said Alobar.

“We shan't forget him, ever.”

“Then you weren't disappointed?”

“You mean disappointed that he wasn't more like Krishna? Not in the end, I wasn't.” If Kudra was aware of her pun, she failed to betray it. “The only disappointment I feel is in his reticence to advise us.”

“He is Pan. He doth not give advice.” At that, Kudra jumped, and so did Alobar, for it was a third party that had said it. The voice, which came from the bushes just above them, was soft and nonthreatening, and in a moment the branches parted, revealing a woman, as bare-assed as butter. Alobar recognized her as the elder — perhaps the leader — of the nymphs; the one who had addressed him on serious matters the last time he was in that neck of the woods.

“Pardon me, my lady, my gentleman, for following thee.”

“Pardon granted,” said Alobar, “although you did give us a start. Kudra, may I present. .”

“Lalo,” she said, “sister of Echo whose voice, alas, thou hearest repeating thee in all hollow places. Lalo. I only wanted to thank thee for thy visit to Pan. It brought him cheer at a time when his cheer is in short supply.”

“Really?” asked Kudra. “From the way he greeted us at the beginning and dismissed us at parting, he did not strike me as overjoyed by our presence.”

“He is Pan,” said Lalo rather sharply. “Didst thou expect him to bow and kiss thy hand?”

Kudra blushed. Alobar extended his arm to assist Lalo down onto flat ground. The nymph was not quite as nimble as she once had been. “How grave is Pan's condition?” asked Alobar. “Surely he shan't succumb. Pan is in this land, in its crags, in its cataracts, its winds, its meadows, its hidden places, he can never go from the land, he will be here always, as long as the land is.”

“Two things I wouldst say to thee on that account,” responded Lalo. “First, the conclusion that a wise homer — forgive the expression, sir — wouldst draw from Pan's admission that he lives only so long as men believe in him, is that men control the destiny of their gods. Thou mightst even say that men create their gods, as much as gods create men, for as I, untutored or read that I be, understand it, it is a mutual thing. Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.”

A whistle escaped Kudra's lips. “Could such a thing be? Yes, if lack of man's belief is what is ailing Pan, it must be true.”

“A warning!” snapped Lalo, who at that moment sounded more like a Fury than a nymph. “Thou must never wax smug or arrogant about they influence upon the divine. If thou didst create gods, it was because thou needest them. The need must have been very great indeed, to inspire such a complex, difficult, and magnificent undertaking. Now, many art the men who think they no longer needeth Pan. They have created new gods, this Jesus Christ and his alleged papa, and they think that their new creations will suffice, but let me assurest thee that Christ and his father, as important as they may be, are no substitutes for Pan. The need for Pan is still great in humanity, and thou ignoreth it at thy peril.

“That bringeth me to the second thing,” Lalo continued. Her deep-set eyes were burning, her wine-red nipples were as erect as toy soldiers. “Thou art correct, Pan doth be in the land, he and the wildwoods art a part of one another, but thou art mistaken when thou implieth that the land doth last eternal. There be a time coming when the land itself be threatened with destruction; the groves, the streams, the very sky, not merely here in Arkadia but wildwoods the world over. .”

“Inconceivable,” muttered Alobar.

“If Pan be alloweth to die, if belief in him totally decomposes, then the land, too, wilt die. It wilt be murdered by disrespect, just as Pan is murdered.”

Alobar looked around him. In every direction as far as he could see, fierce outcroppings of gray stone, green curves of pasture, uncompromising slopes, spiny shrubs and delicate poppies (unlikely partners in a fling ordered by a reckless breeze), mountains teeming with invisible springs, clouds lying like oatcakes upon the blue tablecloth of sky, all of this seemed so inviolable that he could not entertain the notion of its vulnerability, and he said as much to Lalo.

“Just the same,” the nymph answered, “shouldst thee continue to be successful in thy pursuit of long life, thou wilt see it transpire before thine eyes. Thus, I urge thee to protect Pan's dominions and reputations wherever thou mightst go. It be especially thy duty, not merely as a subject of Pan, but because thou, Alobar, art a prime practitioner of individualism, and it wilt be this new idea of individuality that leadeth many future men astray, causing them to feel superior to Pan, and thus to the land, which they wilt set upon to rape and spoil.”

A ripple of annoyance like the shock wave from a splat of buzzard guano, zigzagged along Alobar's forehead. “Nymph,” he said, puffing himself up like a pigeon, “I do not know if I enjoy you telling me what my duty is.”

“Alobar. .” Kudra's tone was meant to be conciliatory.

“Nor would I describe myself as a subject of Pan's. As for your attack on individualism. .”

“Good sir, I do not attack thy philosophy. I only warn that it be a dangerous instrument in the unfeeling hands of the foolish and corrupt.”

“Please inform me, then,” said Alobar sarcastically, holding his stuffy pose, “by what authority a cunt-of-the-woods issues warnings concerning the future. Among your more obvious talents—”

“Alobar!” This time, Kudra's voice was prickly with disapproval.

“—do you harbor the gift of prophecy?”

“Alas, I cannot make that claim for myself, sir, but ere I romped in Arkadia, I lived for years at Delphi, where I was intimate with the priests and priestesses who served the Oracle, and where I was privy to much oracular prognosis. Now I can sense that the boldness of my speech hast ruffled thy feathers, nevertheless thou must hear yet another prophetic plea. Certainly thou dost recollect Pan's words to the effect that mankind hast been too puny in his mind and heart and soul to deserve immortality. Yea? And certainly, also, to have conquered age to the extent that thou hast, thou must have done good strengthening work in thine own mind and heart and soul. Someday, however, a thousand years from today, there wilt be men who seek to defeat death by intelligence alone. They wilt combat age and death with potions and the like, medical weapons that their minds have invented, and age and death will shrink back from them and their medicines. Alas, because they fight with reason only, making no advance in the area of soul and heart, true immortality wilst be denied them. However, they must not be allowed to attain even the false immortality that their mental facility doth gain for them, for huge evil will be conducted if they shouldst. Thus, thou must vow upon this day that shouldst thou be living still when these events transpire, that thou willst battle them and refuseth prosperity to any immortalist thrust that doth not rise from man's soul and heart as well as his mind. Do promise me now.”

“I am sorry,” said Alobar, “but I cannot do that. Your intentions are good, so therefore I shall consider your request, but I do not make promises to just anyone about just anything.”

The nymph whirled, intent upon returning to the thickets, but Kudra detained her. “Lalo,” she called. “My husband claims, with some justification, to be king over himself, yet this morning he has momentarily lost sovereignty over his masculine pride. While he struggles to regain government over that portion of his kingdom, I wish to offer you my own promise, for what it is worth. It is presumptuous to imagine myself alive a thousand years hence, but should that miracle occur, I will do what I can to satisfy your plea. I promise.”

“Thank thee, my lady, I thank thee well. If Pan were aware of these matters, I am sure he wouldst express his gratitude at great length.” She winked at Kudra. Kudra winked back. For a second, the two women, the one statuesque and umber, the other petite and rosy, smiled at one another knowingly. Then, as quick as a rabbit (a rabbit with a touch of arthritis), Lalo shot into the bushes and was gone.

Alobar made to speak, but Kudra hushed him. “Look up there,” she whispered. High above them, barely visible upon the very pinnacle of the mountain, illuminated in the most resplendent manner by noonday sun, heel and horn almost silver, almost holy; stance jaunty yet solemn, regal yet a bit ridiculous; bearded head held at an angle suggestive both of an affection for the variety of life 'round about it and a suffering as primeval and sharp as the peak itself, stood Pan, reeds to lips, and though they scarcely could hear his tune, they felt it in the greasy stirring of the poppies and the mute breath of the snake that sunned itself on a nearby ledge. They watched him in silence for a while, inexplicable tears in their eyes; then Alobar, assisted, it seems, by sister Echo, yelled up the slope, “Lalo! Lalo! I promise, also! I promise! You have my word word ord ord.”

Kudra gave him a sloppy kiss. She took his hand. She clasped the teapot. Off they went, over the pastures, breathing in the circular Bandaloop way, locked in a silence finally broken by Kudra's laughter when Alobar lit up her other shoe.

If wild animals could talk, would they talk like cartoons? Would the dismal swamp resound with shrill, befuddled, childlike voices; a cute choir of cuddly Kermits delivering gentle froggy inanities?

Or would beasts converse in the style of Hemingway, in sentences short, brave, and clear; each word a smooth pebble damp with blood; aboriginal speech, he-man speech, an economy of language borrowed by Gary Cooper from frontiersmen who borrowed it from Apache and Ute?

We ask, “Did you see two people pass this way, a man and a woman, walking north?”

The stag shakes its antlers. “Nope,” he says.

“The woman was dark with a ripe body, the man had white in his hair. Sure you didn't spot them?”

“Yep.”

“Well, how about you?” we ask a fox. “Have you seen a couple in Byzantine garb heading in the direction of Bohemia?”

The fox is slow to speak. “Tonight I dined on loon at the pond,” he says. “It was a good meal. Food has an excellent place in my values. Quiet has an excellent place in my values. The forest has been quiet tonight. It is a good thing being a fox when the forest is quiet.”

“We apologize for disturbing your peace, but we're searching for a husband and wife, racially mixed, who may be in sort of a daze because they recently had an audience with Pan — you know what that means — and are either wandering aimlessly through the woodlands trying to figure out what to do next, or else are making their way by the stars to Bohemia, where the man at one time — longer ago than you might imagine — had an important job and a large family. They may have passed this way.” We pause hopefully.

“The hunt was good,” says the fox. “The moon was right. There was a fresh breeze. A man and a woman would have spooked the loon. What a good thing the forest is when it is left to the fox and the loon.”

Is that the way animals would talk?

As it turned out, Alobar and Kudra did pass through that forest, before or after the fox's dinner; did hike, guided by constellations, northward across Serbia, Croatia, and the Kingdom of Hungary, arriving in the summer of 1032 (or thereabouts) in that area where the feudal state of Bohemia bordered the Slavic territories. There was no trace of Alobar's former citadel. It had burned, like much of the ancient world, in the medieval furnace, its ashes swept under the rolling carpet of civilization. Compared to Western Europe, Bohemia and the Slavic territories were still wild and thinly populated, offering many a fox a place to linger over a bit of loon, like some remote animal ancestor of Ernest Hemingway, but even there in the Eastern backwash, the gold-dust twins, Christianity and Commerce, had set up their crooked wheel of fortune.

Kudra had the odd feeling that she had been there before. Alobar stared into the lacquered grapes of her eyes and asked if the name “Wren” meant anything to her. “Nothing,” she insisted. They didn't speak of it again, but the déjà kept right on vuing. Once, Alobar saw a huge hound at a distance. “Mik!” he cried, running after it. The dog turned on him and might have chewed off some of his best parts had not its owner intervened. Ghosts are good for short-term thrills, in the long run they're boring. Alobar and Kudra departed for Aelfric, but not before purchasing a sack of beets.

Aelfric was four or five times its previous size. It had a wall around it. “Why do you wish to enter here?” asked a soldier at the gate where orchards used to stand. Alobar peeked in at the narrow, crooked streets, deep in garbage, flowing with sewage; dark shadows enlivened by the chirping of rats. If this is what people must resort to in order to operate their shops and worship their Jesus, perhaps they should return to the hunt and the morning star, thought Alobar. “State your business,” demanded the guard. By then, Alobar had lost considerable interest in searching for his progeny. “Bandaloop business,” he said brightly. The guard scowled, but his feet executed an abrupt and completely involuntary dance step, leaving the soldier staring at his own boots, as if he might arrest them for lewd conduct, or, at least, insubordination. Alobar and Kudra hurried away only to pause a short while later near the place where the shaman had lived.

“Why are we stopping in this field?” asked Kudra.

“I have to replace a door,” replied Alobar, but what he did was build a fire and roast beets.

“I take it we are not to explore Aelfric,” said Kudra.

“Wasn't a glimpse enough? If your grandchildren were citizens of Aelfric, would you be anxious to meet them?”

“Maybe. Out of curiosity.”

“My curiosity does not extend to dung beetles, even if they crawled out of my family tree. Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others.”

“Then pass me a beet,” said Kudra. And he did.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

In the pit of that vast stomach — sloshing with dark and vinegary juices, kindled by a thousand-year heartburn — major figures stimulated acute contractions, only to be eventually digested, adding to the bloat. Clovis, Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Rurik the Viking, Pope Leo, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gutenberg, and a platter of other renowned generals, kings, philosophers, and popes fermented and dissolved in that mammoth maw. Our little couple, however, our Alobar and Kudra, remained intact and indigestible, like the hard octopus beaks that sicken the stomachs of whales, causing them to vomit the ambergris that bonds the bouquet in great perfumes. Like octopus beaks, our couple. Or maraschino cherries.

More than a decade after his death, Nikolai Lenin's body was removed from its sepulcher in the Kremlin and a belated autopsy performed. Four maraschino cherries were found in Lenin's colon. Perfectly preserved, as whole and candy red as the day (or days) that he swallowed them, the cherries were in better shape than Lenin himself. It is rumored that maraschino cherries are prepared with a chemical resembling formaldehyde, thus can neither be assimilated nor eliminated but must ride in the baggage rack of the bowels for a lifetime, like the seabags of the Flying Dutchman. If that is the case, and one is prepared to believe the worst of maraschino cherries, looking, as they do, as if they were picked in the orchards of Pluto; as if they were carved out of spoiled neon; as if they were vegetable visitors from the twenty-third century, beamed here to make us appreciate our old-fashioned beets; if it is true, then we could say that Alobar and Kudra were maraschino cherries lodged in the tubes of history's paunch.

On the other hand, octopus beaks, pointing to the birth of future fragrances, might be a more accurate and lyrical analogy.

At any rate, Alobar and Kudra survived wars, robbers, fires, pillages, plagues (including the Black Death of 1347–1350) and the intolerances of the Church; survived freezing winters, famines, Gothic art, and uncomfortable furniture; survived, most importantly, the “natural” process of aging, which, according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it — neither nature nor God would stoop so low.

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats, and the couple's victory over aging created as many problems for them as did witch-hunts and feudal strife. Nowhere could they remain for more than a decade or two. In those rough times, people aged even faster than we do today, making it all the more noticeable when Kudra's and Alobar's gums remained a-bristle with teeth. They did their best to maintain a low profile, but, let's face it, they weren't the most inconspicuous pair to mosey down the medieval pike. For one thing, they were obviously frying with love and lust for one another in an age when romance simply did not exist within the bounds of matrimony. Virtually all marriages in the Middle Ages were arranged between strangers, and the Church disallowed divorce. Therefore, romantic love was almost exclusively a function of adultery. It was for adulterers that troubadours sang their courtly ballads, it was for the attention of another fellow's wife that the jouster risked the lance. When Alobar and Kudra refused to participate in the continental pastime (in their centuries together, Alobar was cuckolded only by Pan, and that was not precisely cuckoldry, that was. . something else), it escalated the suspicions already aroused by her exotic coloration and his regal manner, by their funny way of breathing and their tendency to wash. So they were obliged to keep moving. A few years in Heidelberg, a few near Rome; green seasons in Flanders, dry seasons on Crete. Fortunately, they subscribed to no magazines. The post office would have gone nuts.

Early in the 1300s, attending the fair at Beaucaire in the south of France, they encountered a group of people whose proclivity for travel made Kudra and Alobar seem as though they were chained to a stump. These nomads rumbled from town to town, fair to fair, in brightly colored wagons. Variously called Logipciens, Bohemians, or Gypsies, they were ostensibly itinerant metalworkers, but music and magic were their true vocations. Although the Gypsies were new to Europe, Kudra had known them in India and could converse in their dialect. Moreover, her pigmentation was the same shade as theirs. Their chief invited her to join them. Reluctantly, he agreed to include Alobar.

For the next half-century (time flies when you're having fun), they lived as Gypsies, bumping over the quasi-roads of the continent in a red and orange donkey cart, sleeping in a tent of woven fabrics kept precariously in place by stones, warming themselves with tezek, that charming fuel made of cow dung and straw. They indulged in some serious horseshoeing and harness making, but more frequently their band earned its living amusing, and sometimes fleecing, visitors to holy sites, festivals, and fairs. The Gypsies danced, they sang and strummed, they navigated a pea beneath a walnut shell so slickly you'd wager your last sou that it was beneath the one next door. When they shook their tambourines and sistrums, in voluptuous poses, feudal barons found them irresistible, but that made them all the more hateful in the eyes of the pious and grave, a reaction that was for Alobar a source of endless delight. Kudra chided him for it mildly, but he was rarely happier than when savoring the fear and disgust that welled up in proper Christians at the sight of their rattling, tinkling troupe.

The opinion that “all good things must come to an end” is a confession of fatalism that the immortalist hand of Alobar would never sign. Nonetheless, he realized his days as a Gypsy were numbered when he surprised several of the chief's sons ransacking his and Kudra's belongings, searching for their presumed “elixir of youth.” As a matter of fact, their tent and wagon had been broken into thrice before, but Alobar had written it off to routine Gypsy thievery and to the Gypsies' insistence on treating them as second-class citizens. Claiming to be the direct descendants of the biblical Cain, the Gypsies considered themselves a race elite. It was obvious that their ethnocentricity would never allow complete acceptance of outsiders, no matter how compatible. They not only stole from Kudra and Alobar, but they also served them last at communal meals and required them to perform occasional menial chores. For example, on Saturdays Kudra was expected to clean the chief's wagon and launder his many brilliant scarves.

It was while she was sweeping out the executive cart one day that she noticed that the chief's wife's famous crystal ball had been left uncovered. For a while Kudra managed to ignore the naked sphere, but at last curiosity got the best of her and she peered into it, shyly at first, then so piercingly that the chief's laundry could have been hung out to dry on her gaze. She saw nothing in the ball. There was nothing to see. It was, after all, a mere lump of polished glass. As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed. There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey, and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness. When Kudra shut her eyes to rest them after their intense probing of the crystal innards, a vivid scene unfolded in her mind. She saw Alobar and herself, bound with rope, in the process of being tortured by the Gypsies, who were demanding a map to the fountain of youth.

When she returned to their tent, Kudra told Alobar of her vision. “That settles it,” he said. That night, when the moon had set, they stole away. As they disappeared into the woods, they glanced back to see shadowy figures advancing on their tent.

In the excitement of their escape, Kudra had neglected to inform Alobar that she had consulted the crystal ball a second time ere she left the chief's wagon that Saturday. A finely detailed scene had again flashed before her mind's eye as she rested after examining the crystal. This second vision seemed far less urgent, which is why she put it aside, but it was stranger, more difficult to interpret. In it, a tall black man, blacker by several shades than she, was beckoning to her, laughing all the while. The black man wore the oddest clothes she had ever seen, and the oddest item in his wardrobe was his cap. It turned out to be not a cap at all, but a swarm of bees.

Although finished with Gypsies, per se, Alobar and Kudra retained their vagabond life-style, working the European fair circuit on their own. Alongside booths overflowing with cotton, furs, metals, wine, tea, Venetian glass, meat, produce, and livestock, they sold or traded aromatics to a populace that was beginning to appreciate pretty fragrances, despite — or because of — the fact that it had yet to accept the concept of the bath. When business was poor, Kudra slipped into her Gypsy skirt and danced the dodole, Alobar accompanying her on tambourine. Less than approving of the leers his wife's dancing elicited from fairgoers of masculine gender, it nonetheless amused Alobar to meditate upon her real birthdate as she undulated those secretly ancient hips and loins; and, of course, it invariably elevated his mood when the priests came by to consign them to hell for their detestable display.

Actually, the priests proved to be good customers after Kudra decided to start manufacturing combustible cones from the raw aromatics in which she customarily dealt. Influenced by the Byzantines, the Western Church had become increasingly fond of the ritualistic burning of incense, ostensibly as an evocation of the sweet oxygens of heaven, but more likely a way of combating the concentrated funk of sweaty congregations. It appeared as if incense might become a rage in the cathedrals of Paris, so Alobar was not overly surprised when Kudra announced one morning that she wished to settle in the French capital and open a permanent shop.

“A shop might be a smart idea,” agreed Alobar, “but when you say 'permanent,' you mean, of course, permanent compared to our usual knocking about.” They had been on the road for several centuries.

“No,” said Kudra. “I mean permanent.”

“I needn't remind you of the troubles in store should we hang around long enough to flaunt our perpetual freshness before the envious eyes of our steadily decaying fellow citizens. Ahem. We can realistically expect fifteen, maybe twenty years as Parisian incense merchants. But that will be a welcome change, a nice recess, and when the time comes, we shall move on.”

“I am not moving on. I am finished with moving on. I want a shop, I want a home, and I want to stay there.”

“Stay,” repeated Alobar. “How long, exactly, do you intend to stay?”

“As long as. . I don't know. As long as it damn well pleases me.”

“Well, it better not please you beyond fifteen years or so, because when it dawns on the neighbors that we aren't aging—”

“But maybe I will age.”

"What?"

Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, pricked him like the knife that does the spreading. “We are capable of aging, if we want to. We stopped the aging process and we can start it again. Haven't we fallen into a rut, being the same age for over five — or is it six — hundred years? I don't know about you, but I am a little fed up with it. I really wouldn't mind aging again.”

Alobar couldn't believe how calmly, serenely even, she had spoken the unspeakable. Icy fingers tickled the harpsichord keys of his vertebrae. “You — you don't know what you're saying. Here, let me pour you some tea. You aren't awake yet, that's your problem.”

“I am awake, darling. I have been awake most of the night. And the night before. I have thought about this through more sleepless nights than you could shake a tambourine at. And I am ready, willing, and actually eager to settle down in one place like normal people, and grow older like normal people. I am.”

Alobar held back, refusing to speak until his vocal cords could be trusted not to quiver. Alas, he waited too long, overshot the mark, and heard his voice go well beyond evenness into petrification. The finest stone carver in France would have been proud to chisel his mark on any word in the following sentence: “Aging seems a high price to pay for normalcy.”

“I do not care. I am willing to pay it. Besides, if I do not like getting older, I can always stop.”

“Can you?” Simple little question chipped from solid basalt. “How do you know for sure?” Six words weighing in at a ton, not including punctuation. “We believe that we can start it and stop it at will, but the fact is, we have never tried. What if you cannot stop it, what if you just keep on growing older until, until. .” The voice had become so rigid that it cracked. That's how molecules behave today, and that's how they behaved back then, though in those days nobody blamed molecules for brittleness any more than they credited them for plasticity.

“Until what? Until I die? First of all, Alobar, neither you nor I is convinced that aging has to automatically lead to death. We have talked about that many times. Where is the courage of your convictions? It is not aging that leads to death, it is the belief that aging leads to death that leads to death. Do I speak rightly or wrongly?”

“You are probably right,” squeaked Alobar, in his newly broken voice. “We do not know for certain.”

“There is only one way to find out.”

“But what if—”

“What if I die? Then, by Shiva, I die! Dying does not strike me as such a horrible fate anymore.”

“I cannot believe you are saying this. You are reverting. You are regressing. You are—”

“I am facing the truth,” Kudra interrupted, “and the truth is, there is nothing so almighty wonderful about this long life of ours.” He recoiled as if she'd spit on him. She took his hand, kissing each spear-nicked finger in turn. “Darling,” she said, “look at us. We are a couple of Gypsies, running from the dogs of authority. From town to town we go, fair to fair, sleeping in fields, eating those awful mangel-wurzels, selling pretty smells to hypocrites, and hard-ons to yeomen. Where is the value in that? What is the purpose of—”

“We are alive!” shouted Alobar. “And there—”

“And there is not another couple like us on this whole round planet. Well, so what? Our uniqueness doesn't make the ground softer or give the beets flavor. It doesn't improve feudal conditions or reduce violence or contribute to the welfare of the people. What important thing have we accomplished in all these past six hundred years?”

“We have beaten death,” said Alobar, and his tone was as firm and even as it had ever been. More than that, it was proud. “We have beaten death. What everyone who has ever been born since the beginning of time has longed to do, we have done. What could be greater than that?”

“To what end have we beaten death? We can't teach others how to beat it, or else the Church would come down on us and wipe us out, and those we taught in the bargain. We can't sell this grand knowledge, for the very same reasons. We are forced to hide our supreme accomplishment as if it were a shameful crime. Where is the glory in that? Our lives are selfish and covert and none too easy. Methinks that you had a greater life back when you were mortal. You were a kind then, Alobar, a leader of men, and every day, every hour, was charged with significance.”

“And threatened by the Reaper. Charged, but threatened, because to the Reaper a king is no less fodder than a slave. In my clan, a king was actually an easier harvest.”

“Threatened by death you may have been, but look what a life it was that was threatened! And look at it now, my ragged Gypsy—”

“We are about to move to Paris!”

“Yes. I to ply the incense maker's trade, you, noble warrior, to be my assistant.”

She paused. Together, they watched the sun break through the morning fog, coming back to the deserted fairgrounds like a dandy returning to the boulevard, prepared, when the moment was right, to strut some stuff. With a clover stem, Kudra traced the pathway of Alobar's veins, through which such endless tides of blood had run; she kissed the forehead that had been greeted by so many rising suns.

“For you,” she said, “longevity for longevity's sake is enough. That is no longer satisfactory to me. Is there a position in the Kama Sutra that we have not mastered, a recipe for mangel-wurzel that our cook pot hasn't memorized? Oh, darling, I know that life is good, and that it still holds surprises for me, but maybe death is good, too; certainly it offers some surprise. Relax, now, don't get upset. My destination is an incense shop, not a tomb. But if I must age to have a happier life, then I will. And should aging lead to death, then I shall explore the planet of death awhile. Certainly I have been on the terrestrial voyage a nice long while. Long enough, frankly, that despite my love for you I do grow bored.”

“I will wager that death be a million times more boring than life.”

“If so, I shall come back to life. If we are truly immortal, we ought to be able to travel back and forth between both sides.”

“Ha!” scoffed Alobar. “Yes, we ought to be able to. We ought to, all right, and if we had remained in the caves long enough, we probably could. We might have been able to dematerialize and rematerialize at will. But we cannot. At least, there is no hard evidence that we can. You talk about facing truth. The truth is, Kudra, we hardly know what we are doing. There is so much more to this immortality business, so much more we might have learned from the Bandaloop, but, no, you had to go and see the world, you could not wait, so here we are half-educated and half-assed, conducting the greatest experiment in human annals and not fully qualified to conduct it correctly, just groping in the dark like mice in a bin. Why, oh why, did I let you talk me into leaving the caves before we had all the answers? Well, I can tell you one thing, you are not going to talk me into aging. If you want to risk it, go ahead, but you are stupid.”

Kudra released his hand. “I may be stupid,” she said, “but I am not a coward.”

And the sun pulled a cloud down over its ears. And the wind set to whistling a distracting tune. And crows that had been breakfasting on fairgrounds crumbs glanced at some clock or other and realized that they were late for work. And the cookfire flames retreated into the soundproof cellar of ashes. And the tea in the teapot nearly broke its neck in its haste to evaporate.

There's an old axiom: “A couple's first quarrel is Cupid's laxative.”

The next worst thing to a quarrel is a compromise. They made one at once.

Since Alobar had been nearly forty chronological years older than Kudra from the start, it was agreed that Kudra could permit herself to age for four decades, more or less, stopping when she had “caught up” with her mate. If she could stop, that is. As for Alobar, he would cross his bridges as he came to them.

They did move to Paris, they did open an incense shop. It was located on the rue Quelle Blague, next door to a brewery and perfumery, across the street from a monastery and cathedral. It did all right. Their marriage (it is fair to call it a marriage, though no formal ceremony ever transpired) did all right, too, which is to say the champagne was far from flat, although there were fewer bubbles per sip than there had been before the arguing started. They argued always about the same thing. It's best that way. If lovers have to argue, they might as well specialize. And the arguments usually concluded with Alobar's complaint that they had left the academy of the Bandaloop before they had completed their course.

(Oddly enough, he refrained from pressuring her to return to the caves for additional study, perhaps because he was of the opinion that after so long a time there were no vibrations left to “study.” If Fosco of Samye could be believed, the Bandaloop had left the caves for good. Dance craze? Argenwhat?)

If they ever reached a point where they seriously considered separation, it would have been in the cruel winter of 1664, a season that no amount of firewood nor any variation on the Kama Sutra could quite warm. Yet right in the middle of the shivers and the shouts, something came along to bind them, a slapdash patch job by the mason of common cause.

Darkness arrived so abruptly that day it was as if a Gypsy had swept Paris under a walnut shell, good luck, ye gamblers, on guessing which one. By four o'clock, the street lamps were lit. Despite being called to work early, the lamps flickered dutifully, as though lighting a path for the snow. The snow would be along any minute. The clouds promised it and the lamps believed them. Alobar believed them, too. He also believed that there would be no more customers through the door that day, so he bolted it against thieves (a Gypsy who would steal daylight would surely steal incense) and the gales of January. He joined Kudra in the backroom.

Paying him little heed when he entered, Kudra remained bent over a large candle, heating some newly purchased storax resin in a metal cup. “It's cold in here,” Alobar said. “Umm,” she answered, without looking up. As it relaxed its grip on itself, the wad of storax caused the room to smell like the center of a chocolate cream. Sometimes when a stressful person relaxes, he or she will, in a similar fashion, perfume the air 'round about them. Alobar sat down and tried it.

The candle glow that held Kudra's head like an object in a showcase allowed Alobar to count five silver hairs in her mane. He hadn't noticed them until then. It was all he could do to keep from crying out. He wondered if she knew.

His thoughts flashed back to the afternoon that he met her, eight years old and sobbing, fleeing the funeral pyre. He thought of her in the Himalayas, dressed as a boy; the glossy black explosion her tresses had made when they tumbled from the turban. Then he thought of that fateful day when the concubines' mirror had shown him his own pale intruder. Such a chain of events that little fellow had set off!

So still for so long was Alobar that when he finally spoke, Kudra flinched. She must have forgotten he was there. The corona of candlelight and the vanilla halo of storax ringed her concentrically, as if she were twice blessed, a double madonna.

“Kudra,” he said, “I have a splendid idea.”

“And what splendid idea is that?” she asked, her head still bowed to the task.

“Let's sail to the New World.”

“The New World?”

“Yes, the New World, the land they stumbled upon when they finally caught on that the Earth is round, as I, ahem, was saying all along.”

“Only fortune hunters and Christian fanatics go to the New World. We are neither of those.”

“Fortune hunters, Christian fanatics, and misfits. That last category describes us rather accurately.”

“You may be a misfit, Alobar. I am not. Not any longer, at any rate.”

He leaped to his feet and with two swift yanks reduced her silver quintet to a trio. Dropping the strands into the resin cup in front of her, he said, “In the New World, you wouldn't have to sacrifice your beautiful black hair.”

Kudra stared at the hairs in the cup. She may have denied that there were tears in her eyes, but the reflection of candlelight upon tearwater proved otherwise.

“See those,” said Alobar. “Those are worms from the rot of the grave.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. A single teardrop broke through the barricades and made a run for it, only to lose its footing and topple into the cup with the resin and the hairs. Was that a finer place than it had been?

Alobar lay his hands on her shoulders and massaged them gently. “You don't have to go through this,” he said softly. “We can sail to the New World.”

Kudra shook her head. “We made our own new world,” she said, “but something has gone wrong with it. I guess new worlds grow old. Pan was right. Immortality has its limitations.”

“If only we had learned more in the caves!”

“Oh, shit,” said Kudra. “Not that again.”

“But, darling—”

“Alobar, I'd like to be alone for a while.”

“But—”

“Please, Alobar!” She picked the hairs from the storax and flicked them to the floor. The teardrop had vanished, whether absorbed by resin, evaporated by candle heat, or welcomed into some mystery dimension, we cannot determine. No reward was ever offered for its return. “Please. Let me be.”

So Alobar exchanged his slippers for boots that reached all the way to the hems of his knee breeches, pulled a woolen knee-length coat over his brocade waistcoat, tightened his lace collar until it pinched his Adam's apple, and went out into the night, where, by lamplight, the frosted cobblestone streets resembled marshmallow plantations at harvest time. Although he hadn't a destination in mind, he walked rapidly, soon finding himself in an obscene quarter of Paris, a squalid area without cobblestone or torch, an unpaved district whose frozen mud puddles reflected the shine of red lanterns. From every doorway, the lewd breath of prostitutes rose like hooks of smoke. Huddled against the cold, groups of them called to him as he passed, and he began to get ideas. A misunderstood husband usually is armed with a blunt instrument, its knob painted red like the face of a judge.

The prostitute he eventually approached was tall and blonde. As they discussed rates, her companion, a dumpy, aged woman whom Alobar had not even considered, moved ever closer until she had wormed her way between him and the blonde. She had a rude, animal odor and so many wrinkles she could screw her hat on. Alobar was about to nudge her aside when the blond slapped her with her muff, saying, “Get along, Lalo. This one's not desperate enough to want you.”

“Lalo?”

“Alobar! I thought that it be thee!”

They shared a tearful embrace, then and there, while the blonde jeered and the first flakes of snow began to sift through the scarlet lanternshine. Then, he escorted her to the incense shop, walking slowly now for Lalo was a nymph no longer, but an old tart who had quit the brothels of Athens when the demand for her services waned. It was said that in Paris no whore was too old or too ugly to survive.

Kudra was both saddened and delighted by the sight of her. She brought out their best cheese and served tea from the battered but cherished silver pot. Once Lalo was fed and warmed, they questioned her about Pan. The news was enough to sour the cheese.

Pan was a ghost, now, Lalo said; you could look straight through him. His heartbeat was no stronger than a sparrow's. His pipes could still cause the flocks to shuffle their feet, could still raise the fuzz on a peasant's neck, but he lacked the vigor or the will to play them very often. Pan continued to visit men, according to Lalo, perhaps he always would, but in the modern world he came to them not in person, in sunlight, direct and immediate, but in dreams — erotic nightmares — or in flashes of terror, the kind that cause crowds to stampede for no reason, that they could neither explain nor understand. Lacking a direct relationship with Pan, modern Europeans were estranged from their flocks and their crops, from the natural world and, indeed, from their own natural impulses. “Grieve not just for Pan,” said Lalo, in a voice as scratched as the teapot, “but for thyselves, as well.”

“And what of the nymphs?” asked Kudra.

“It has been more than a century since Pan last chased a nymph. Without him in pursuit, the nymphs lost their identity, grew thin and mad. Many took their own lives. Others, like me, became whores to homers, seeking in each sexual coupling to re-create the old seduction, the old magic, the old feeling of unity.” She sighed forlornly. “I don't know why I hold on, but I do.”

They put Lalo to bed in their flat upstairs. Then they took to their own bed, where, as the snow did its sums on the windowsill, they snuggled and talked, eventually formulating a plan of action: they would get Pan out of Europe.

The New World was vast and virgin. They would make a place for him there, beneath smokeless skies where primitive equalities prevailed. Far from any city, they would establish a new Arkadia, complete with flocks of goats; and the pagan Indians, so hounded now by Christian missionaries, could join with them in a free landscape in which the old gods and goddesses would be given their due. Why, they would teach the Indians what they knew of Bandaloop immortality, and, moreover, Kudra would throw away her pennyroyal, and she and Alobar would at last have children of their own. They would found a race of immortals, with Pan as their principal deity. Yes! Wasn't this the grand destiny that had been eluding them all along?! They grew drunk with the vision of it while the sober snow looked on.

When weather permitted, Alobar would strike out for Greece (Lalo could help Kudra with the business) to fetch Pan to Paris. They would nurse him back to health right there in the flat, while they saved and schemed for their passage across the Atlantic.

“How much money have we on hand?” asked Alobar. “Here, let us get up and count it. I cannot wait to get started.”

Kudra pulled him back down into the blankets. “We can count when it is daylight,” she said. “We have a new world to populate. I cannot wait to get started.”

Prior to his departure for Greece, Alobar filled Kudra to the brim. She was saturated. She launched squadrons of sperm every time she sneezed. They circled Paris like microscopic angels, looking for harp concerts in the snow. Wherever she went, she leaked, leaving snail trails, sticky and translucent, upon work stool, carpet, and carriage seat. Needless to say, there was Standing Room Only in her uterus. Nevertheless, she failed to conceive. That the topography of her tummy offered no challenge to his abilities as a climber was the first thing Alobar noticed when he returned from Greece to her embrace. The second thing he noticed, raising his disappointed gaze from the abdominal plane, was that there had been an exodus of gray from her hair and that the skin around her eyes, which had been cobwebbing with crinkles, was now as smooth as custard. In the eight months that he'd been away, she looked to have youthed a good eight years.

“Kudra, you did it! You reversed it!” So pleased was he that he forgot, for the moment, the vacancy in her womb. “Was it difficult? Did you have to labor at it? Will you promise me that you will never backslide again?”

She ignored his jabber and concentrated on Pan, if “concentrated” is the accurate verb. She could determine Pan's whereabouts in the room only by focusing her nostrils upon the epicenter of the caprine aroma that was causing her entire inventory of incense to cry “uncle” and edge toward the door.

“Greetings, Kudra,” said a familiar voice from the epicenter. “I thank thee for thy hospitality, puny and human though it be.”

“You are welcome, sir,” said Kudra. “I think.” She turned to Alobar. “It is rather perplexing talking to someone you cannot see.”

“Nonsense,” said Alobar. “Thousands of Christians do it every day. At least this god will talk back to you.” He shoved a wine flask into the eye of the stink storm. The flask tipped and pink Chablis commenced to gurgle out, though not a drop hit the floor. “I know what you mean, however. Traveling with an invisible who smells up the countryside is an ordeal I would hesitate to undertake again. I did not mind the stares and the insults and the occasional stone, but I have not enjoyed a warm meal or a decent night's rest since we left Arkadia. You would think rural innkeepers would be less particular.”

“I fear it shall present a problem in Paris, as well.”

“Indeed. He seems to have grown less observable and more pungent the further we journeyed from Greece. By the way, where's Lalo?”

Kudra hesitated. “Uh, Lalo. Yes, well, Lalo left. Ran off with a sailor from Brittany.”

“How inconsiderate. She was supposed to assist you in the shop.”

“Lalo is a nymph, not a shopkeeper,” said Pan. “She only did what she was meant to do.”

“Yes,” agreed Kudra. “And you are a god of the woods and fields. How will you fare in this environment?”

“Perhaps not well,” said Pan. “Art thou aware that I be the lone god who never hast had a temple built in his honor? 'Tis true, not a single one. Men have always worshiped me outdoors.”

Alobar retrieved the flask, now half empty. “Our shop shall be your temple for a time. As soon as we are able, we shall transport you to greener pastures and wilder company. Meanwhile, you'll have to make do. There are parks nearby where you may roam. We must, of course, contrive a disguise for your odor. Kudra and I shall attend to that right away. Now that she has come to her senses and stopped aging, I am confident she can provide a scent for you and a baby for me with equal ease. Eh, Kudra?”

Kudra nodded in tentative accord. Alas, the tasks assigned her proved about as easy as skinning a rhinoceros with a set of false teeth.

She knew from experience that patchouli wouldn't cut Pan's mustard. Frankincense and myrrh might have reodorized the diapers of sweet Baby Jesus, but they disappeared in the goat god's gulf of funk like rowboats in the Bermuda Triangle; and sandalwood, clean, gentle sandalwood, lasted as long, to the minute, as a snowball in hell. A resinoid of storax, fixed with tincture of labdanum (pressed from the fatty arteries of the rockrose), proved a sufficient camouflage for a walk around the block, but it had no more staying power than patchouli. As for civet, it only compounded Pan's indigenous musk, making his presence felt all the more strongly.

Within a fortnight, Kudra had exhausted her arsenal of aromatics. There was nothing to do but dip into their savings (the New World fund was growing very slowly) and purchase some perfumes from the monks next door. They would be unable to sail anyhow if they couldn't conceal from curious and repulsed noses their phantasmal friend.

What was required was a perfume penetrating enough to obscure the bouquet of rutting goat, yet not so overpowering that it called undue attention to itself: there was little to be gained by moving from one extreme to another on the olfactory scale. Ideally, moreover, the scent should have the capacity to linger, because a free spirit such as Pan could not be expected to go around dabbing at his wrists and neckbones every hour, as if he were a husband-hungry marquise at a Versailles ball.

There were critics who complained that at 23, rue Quelle Blague the beer tasted like lilac water and the perfumes smelled of hops. As to the quality of the beer we cannot testify — perhaps a taste of it today would leave us sadder Budweiser — but when it came to perfumery, the monks were not inexpert. They, in fact, laid the foundation for the French fragrance industry. The fragrance house of LeFever descended directly from their early operations. The Quelle Blague monks were among the principal suppliers to the court of Louis XIV, where enormous amounts of perfumes were consumed. At the height of Versailles, twenty to thirty perfume fountains were gushing rosewater night and day, and the men wore squirt rings loaded with patchouli — when their mistresses approached, they fumigated themselves and the air about them with a fine spray. Louis himself changed his scent every thousand miles. But all this excess failed to compensate for the fact that the royal sewage was disposed of inadequately and that there was not one bath in the court. A visiting English writer wrote of Louis that “all the odoriferous perfumes his courtiers could get him would not ease his nose and still he smelled a filthy stinke.” This was a century and a half before the emergence of the great master blenders, but despite the monks' inability to put the Sun King's unwashed nose at rest, the fragrances they distilled were far from Primitive. Could they lay the wreath on Pan?

Hardly. Their famous rosewater was no match for his glandular output, and, one by one, he sent lily, lilac, lavender, and linden whimpering off with their l's between their legs. It was a dark day for heliotrope when it was sprinkled upon the transparent god, and hyacinth was reduced to lowacinth in practically a flash. The monks' most expensive product was a recipe that mixed rose oil with cloves, cinnamon, mace, musk, ambergris, citron, and cedar. With some experimenting, Kudra probably could have duplicated it, but Pan was impatient and Alobar was worried, so they further fractured their finances and bought a vial. Expectantly, Kudra rubbed it into Pan's thigh wool, including in one of her passes the smooth underside of his scrotum, a swipe that gave him some pleasure and her some trepidation, for there is nothing quite like the intrusion of an invisible erection to thoroughly unnerve a woman. The old goat might have seized the moment — indeed, he reached for his pipes — had not Alobar threatened to address his private parts with a gesture appropriate to the preparation of eunuchs. So, Pan, richly anointed, departed for the grounds of the Louvre instead, only to return in a couple of hours, smelling all too familiar, and relating how his kibitzing, imperceptible to any eye, had disrupted a fashionable fête champêtre.

The most effective scent purchased from the monks proved to be an essence of jasmine. The raw flowers had come from the South of France, where to this day are grown the finest jasmine blossoms in the world (unless one counts the Bingo Pajama Jamaican variety, about which virtually nothing is known). Ah, yes, leave it to jasmine to soothe the savage beast, for jasmine in its delightful way performs an olfactory pantomime of glad animal movements from times gone by. A few other flowers may be as sweet, but jasmine is sweet without sentiment, sweet without effeteness, sweet without compromise; it is aggressively sweet, outrageously sweet: “I am sweet,” says the jasmine, “and if you don't like it, you can kiss my sweet ass.” Expansive, yet never cloying; romantic, yet seldom melancholy, jasmine has the poise of a wild creature, some elusive self-sufficient thing that croons like an organic saxophone in the tropical night. Pan's glands heard jasmine's sugary howl and were hypnotized into partially suspending secretion.

“Jasmine may stand us in good stead,” said Kudra. “Alone, however, it falls short of perfection. Like a grand orator, it requires a somewhat lesser voice to introduce it. I am positive that a qualified master of ceremonies can be recruited, and failing at that, it would not be ruinous should it be forced to introduce itself. But what is a great orator without a strong platform to stand upon, without an enveloping auditorium to hold his words? Do you follow me? Jasmine is longer-lasting by far than any floral we have tried, but we must find a theater to contain it, an anchor, if you will, to keep it in place, because to be efficient it needs to endure at least thrice as long as it does now.”

In other words, they could use a top note and absolutely required a fixative and a base.

Since they couldn't afford to commission such a blend from the monks, Kudra must develop it. She had worked with aromatics much of her long life — we are talking seniority here — but having had no experience with distillation, she was not in the true sense a perfumer. Fortunately, jasmine oil is obtained by extraction rather than distillation, and that she could manage. After a period of trial and error, she found lemony citron an acceptable top note; it gave the featured jasmine a brief but flattering introduction. As for fixative, ambergris was already in wide use, and while its detractors might deride it as “behemoth barf,” a finer fixative has yet to be discovered. In this case, however, ambergris failed to deliver total satisfaction. It nailed the bouquet to the perfume, all right, but it didn't nail the perfume to Pan — at least not for very long. Since ambergris couldn't be improved upon, what this meant was that the base note, in addition to its usual function as an accommodating and complementing “platform,” must also assist the fixative in prolonging the life of the aroma. A very special base note was called for. Kudra didn't find it right away. Months, in fact, dragged by as she experimented and researched.

In the meantime, a sardonic cuckoo was scrambling Alobar and Kudra's nest eggs, replacing them with obnoxious layings of its own.

At the appointed hour when courtiers of Louis XIV were finally to call at the shop to test its wares, Pan returned prematurely from a stroll in the park, his malodor at high mast due to exercise and the sappy influences of spring. The courtiers, three in number, arrived on his heels. “My goodness,” said the first courtier; “Snit,” said the second; “Phew,” said the third. Whatever credibility incense may have held for them was immediately lost. Lost, too, was the most profitable market to which Kudra had ever aspired.

Pan's lasting impression also cost her several smaller sales, and this at a time when expenses were on the rise. As the hunt for an effective base note went on, money was continually being invested in raw materials that were of no use in incense making. And, now, of course, there was another mouth on the premises, a mouth that, though it could not be seen, watered at mealtime nonetheless. They had a cash flow problem, and unless it was solved, they would never ankle up that gangplank in Marseilles.

In the midst of worrying about finances and Kudra's failure to conceive — none of his deposits seemed to earn interest — Alobar was stopped in the street one day by a neighborhood monk who inquired in the rude manner of children, policemen, and journalists if he and his wife employed heathen practices. The monk was no more specific than that, but Alobar instantly assumed the reference was to longevity. “You mean like that old Bandaloop, Methuselah?” he shot back, and as the Christian brother gargled the froth of his bewilderment, he hurried away in a chilly sweat to warn Kudra, rightly or wrongly, that they'd been found out once again.

For all the reaction he got from Kudra, he might as well have told her that the poodle gods were pooping on the paths of the Louvre. She was up to her elbows in a basket of bark, the leprous but fragrant epidermis of some African tree; unraveling its history, reading its fortune, learning its language, its vocabulary of botanical suffering; coaxing from its ancient sores an iridescent pus that smelled of rains and nests and yellow fruits squashed beneath the feet of heavy animals. “This could be it,” she confided, milking. A single bead of resin rolled out of an ulcer and was caught in a vial. Somewhere in Africa a tree stood naked. “This could be the one to support the jasmine.”

“Little good it will do if the monks set opinion against us.”

When she neglected to respond, he said, “Kudra, what is to be our next move?”

“Express the bouquet from the resin.”

“No, no, haven't you been listening? There may be trouble over—”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Well, Alobar, I have been thinking. . ” She held another anguished crust of bark over the candle flame, squeezing and pulling until its black boil popped and out bubbled the feverish exudation, hard pearls of honey glistening as if in a prolonged delirium brought on by the pestilence of time. “I have been thinking that the altogether smartest thing would be to dematerialize — and then rematerialize in the New World.”

Alobar looked stunned.

“Don't you see, that would save us money and time. We would not require a sou for passage nor would we be forced to bob about in the oceans with a horde of vomiting missionaries. Why, if Pan could dematerialize along with us — he is all but dematerialized already — we would not even need to complete his perfume. Locating the perfect base note may yet prove impossible.” She sniffed unconfidently at the wooden warts in her fingers.

“Kudra, we do not know how to de- and rematerialize!”

“Then it is time we learned! Have we lived seven hundred years for naught? Except for our longevity, we are no closer to the divine than ordinary folk. Our practices have kept us alive, but they have not revealed to us one divine secret nor one speck of the magic of the gods.” She laid down the ugly chips and faced him. He commenced to wring his hands.

“Kudra. .” he whined.

“But for his age, Alobar the great individualist is just like any common man.”

“Kudra! We don't know—”

“What happened to the bold adventurer who seduced me in more ways than one up on the roof of the world?”

“Kudra! You are talking death, I sense that you are.”

“There is no death. There are only different levels of life. You must know that by now.”

“You who ran away from the funeral pyre! How can you speak with such authority?”

Dealing the bark basket a blow, much as she'd once kicked a wicker of rope, Kudra sent it spinning, setting into motion a brief blizzard of scabious crumbs.

“Damn you, Alobar! By the blue piss of Kali, how you frustrate me! How could any man venture as far as you have and then be unwilling to go further? Is it a failure of imagination that has snipped off your curiosity, or a failure of nerve that leaves you so eager to settle for the one concession you have won from the fates?”

“One concession, eh? You make it sound so trivial. Let me tell you something, Kudra. Each and every morning when I awake, my eyes brim with tears at the realization that I am still here breathing when all who shared my natal day have for half a millennium been dust; each and every morning when first I see the dawn ray take your sleeping face tenderly in its tongs, I tremble in a kind of ecstasy that you and I continue to lie in love together, century after juicy century, while every other pair of lovers who have lived has had to helplessly watch their passion suffocate in the sags of their sickly flesh. Now that may strike you as some small, unworthy thing. .”

Kudra took his cheeks in her hands (he was clean shaven then, in the seventeenth-century style) and kissed him. She shook her head from side to side, blinking back a few tears of her own. “No, my darling, it strikes me as magnificent beyond description.” Again she kissed him. “But it happens not to be the end-and-all. If a person have a glass, does that mean he should refuse a bottle; if he have a bottle does it mean he should not want wine? Come now, darling, do not pull away, but hear me out. We have crossed the threshold of the house of divine knowledge, yet we linger in the anteroom admiring its wallpaper and shun the main chambers of the house. Why is it we resist exploring the mansion to which it has been our unique privilege to gain admission?”

“Because,” answered Alobar, “Death is the master of that house. My ambition has been to free myself from Death, not to visit him in his parlor and share tea.”

“Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them.”

Alobar righted the overturned basket and began to pick up pieces of bark. “Again, my little refugee from suttee, I must question your authority in such matters.”

Kudra wished then to tell him the truth about Lalo, that the nymph had not run off with a mariner while Alobar was in Greece but had died, peacefully, happily, in the bed where Pan now slept; that she had attended Lalo's demise and, indeed, had followed her out of her body, traveling with her for a ways into the white light of the Other Side, until a sudden thought of Alobar caused her to turn back. Her concept of death was altered thereafter, and she wished to tell Alobar about that, as well, but she had promised the nymph to keep secret her passing. “The world must not think of nymphs as aged or dying,” said Lalo, “for that runs counter to the girlish sexual things that we represent.” Perhaps Lalo was vain to the end, but it must be noted that she cared about the world, even the modern world (whose replacement of cosmic order with a riotous contest between would-be equals had helped to kill her).

“Listen,” said Kudra. “When we were in the caves, we learned by experimenting, by trial and error, guided by some intelligence, perhaps divine, that radiated from the minerals there. What harm would there be in experimenting with dematerialization here in our shop? It is a temple of Pan now, after all. I feel strongly that we will be guided once again. The divine energy doesn't limit itself to some caverns in India. It is everywhere if we are only open to it. Trust my intuition, Alobar. What harm to try?”

“Well, all right, I shall consider it,” grumbled Alobar. “Just so long as it does not involve aging.”

She thumped him with a look of iron. “Should the monks or any other folk start to trouble us before we have either discovered dematerialization or a base note for Pan's perfume, then I shall age fast and furiously, without hesitation, and you would be wise to follow suit.”

At that, their quarreling commenced all over again.

Their quarreling chewed through the curtains, pierced the casements, and rattled over the cobblestones outside. How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse.

Although the contention that matter can transcend, at will, its material character would have had Descartes spinning in one or the other of his graves, a person who can believe in physical immortality is merely a step away from believing in dematerialization. Kudra believed in it and was prepared to experiment. Alobar probably believed in it but was reluctant — frightened, honestly — to pursue it. Wiggs Dannyboy of the Last Laugh Foundation, trained in the tradition of Cartersian doubt (deliberate suspension of all interpretations of experience that are not absolutely certain), had, unlike Kudra, never witnessed the Indian rope trick, nor had he, unlike Alobar, ever been flabbergasted by Bandaloop, yet to him the notion of material transcendence was credible. Perhaps that was because he was Irish.

“Subatomic particles apparently de- and rematerialize fairly routinely,” Dr. Dannyboy has written. “Some of them actually can be in two places at once. Their freedom from the normal confines of the space-time continuum is thought to be the result of a weird electricity, an intelligent, creative, playful, and unpredictable interaction among oppositely charged entities in motion.” On at least one occasion, Dr. Dannyboy has described those energized particles as “fairies,” and, unfortunately, there is doubt that he was speaking metaphorically. But, again, he is Irish and, moreover, has swallowed in his day a lot of drugs.

At any rate, Dr. Dannyboy continued: “We ourselves are built of subatomic particles (and the spaces in between them), and our organisms are electrically as well as chemically powered. Our cells, or something that occupies our cells, transmit an electrical pulse. When we breathe, bathe, eat, make love, and think the way that Kudra and Alobar did, we alter the cellular amperage until we find ourselves vibrating at the frequency of the eternal: immortality.

“When interrogated about how they can walk through flames without being burned, 'primitives' have conveyed to anthropologists that they raise the vibratory level of their flesh to equal that of the fire. In like manner, then, an adept might raise — or lower — his or her vibratory rate to match that of another dimension, thereby disappearing from our customary universe and popping up in the other: dematerialization.”

From his vantage point in the twentieth century, Dannyboy was privileged to marshal a fair amount of scientific evidence that supposedly explains Alobar's and Kudra's accomplishments. No doubt, such data have their benefits, if for no other reason than that the couple's immortalist methodology often sounds too simplistic to be feasible: the result was far more dramatic than the process, even though, for all practical purposes, the result was the process.

Whether guided by a divine intelligence, as Kudra suggested, or inspired in some supranatural fashion by the absent Bandaloop doctors (maybe the Bandaloop were agents of a divine intelligence), or simply informed by their own intuition, she and Alobar devised, during their residency in the caves, a program based upon the four elements: air, water, earth, and fire. If encouraged, Wiggs Dannyboy will expound upon each element in turn, detailing how it legitimately manifested itself in Kudra and Alobar's program. Dr. Dannyboy is simply mad for the subject of immortality and will yak about it until the cows come home, although the precise time and date of bovine arrival has yet to be reckoned to his satisfaction.

At some later point, it might be rewarding to examine Dannyboy's arguments. For the moment, let it suffice to say that he has connected air to breath, water to bath, earth to food, and fire to sex, supplying a mixture of empirical fact and medical theory to support his case for the life-extending properties of this quartet, when ritualistically and resolutely embraced.

In addition, Dr. Dannyboy has suggested a fifth element: positive thought. Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining, and screwing brought Alobar and Kudra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is an organism disposed to continue, he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. Indeed, Dr. Dannyboy goes so far as to claim that ninety percent of all deaths are suicides. Persons, says Wiggs, who lack curiosity about life, who find minimal joy in existence, are all to willing, subconsciously, to cooperate with — and attract — disease, accident, and violence.

Enough for now. In urbanized, technologized society — that institutional home for the orphans of Pan — there may be few who can even relate anymore to the Four Elements. At least not in any primal sense. V'lu Jackson, for example, once inquired of Madame Devalier if the Four Elements weren't some Motown jive group, while Ricki the bartender has defined the Four Elements as cocaine, champagne, pussy, and chocolate.

Paris. April. Twilight. A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation with the approach of the private night. Or else the blossoms were being tickled by the sleepy insects that were entering them as if they were hotels. Stiff-legged corks squeaked loose from bottlenecks where they'd stood guard since noon. Stiff-legged nags, tiny harness bells jingling, dragged market carts toward the suburbs. At intervals along the boulevards, lamplighters set their gay fires. A wounded tongue licked the shine off cathedral domes. A bat broke loose from a belfry, a loaf broke loose from an oven, six chimes broke loose from a clock. Everywhere a huge, enveloping softness; soft as face powder, soft as petticoats, soft as the snuff in a courtesan's box.

Now, the clock chimed seven times. Nightfall was almost complete. The softness was suddenly interrupted by harsh hoofbeats, not four hooves, oddly enough, but two, striking a stone bridge — clink! clink! — upon which no beast could be seen to trod; and the peachy, powdery softness was further violated by a release of fumes so fetid it seemed almost evil. Clink! clink! Sparks were struck from cobblestones. Clink! clink! To the innocent nostrils of spring there was caterwauled a filthy serenade.

Pan had waited until dark to return home so that he might more stealthily transport the wig stolen from Descartes's redundant funeral. He'd not eaten since early morning, and to the scrape of his hooves (not meant for city streets) and the blast of his stench (meant for no place save the rutting grounds) were added stomach growls, terrible and rude. From grass, he had woven a short rope, which he tied to the wig so that he might pull it along behind him. In the dim light, those pedestrians who saw it scurrying up the street believed it to be blown along by the breeze. Several gave pursuit, only to have it yanked away each time they thought they had it in their grasp. One by one, they gave up. “It stinks, anyway,” said the last to quit the chase. And Pan arrived at the incense shop with wig in tow, having painted the gentle April gloaming with shades of Halloween.

Ceremoniously, Pan presented the wig, frescoed now with grit and offal, to Alobar. Were Alobar bewigged, Pan reasoned, he could hold the white hairs of age at bay for as long as he wished, and no outsider would be the wiser. With that pressure removed, maybe Alobar and Kudra would curtail their quarreling, maybe the household would be merry again.

As it turned out, Pan found his hosts in a quite congenial mood already. When, that afternoon, the latest candidate for a base note had fallen short of expectations, they had sat down over a flagon of wine and negotiated an agreement to dematerialize.

For a week, they fasted. They meditated for hours each day and bathed repeatedly. They made love between baths but resisted climax, holding the orgasmic cyclone inside themselves, channeling it up their spinal columns to their brains. Then, one afternoon, the green blush of April still upon the city, they closed the shop an hour earlier than usual and climbed the stairs, one of them for the last time.

The experiment was to be conducted in their small sitting room. After a brief discussion about whether or not they should disrobe, they concurred that nudity might distract Pan, who was to monitor the attempt, and they remained, but for their shoes, fully clothed. Upon the threadbare carpet, a far cry from the rugs that had purred to their buttocks in Constantinople, they sat cross-legged, facing one another. They closed their eyes and. .

Just then there was a commotion in the street. Excited voices were being raised outside their shop. Alobar asked Pan to investigate. “I be a god not an errand boy,” grumbled the old faun, but he hobbled downstairs nevertheless.

The ruckus was caused by the monks. For more than a year, ever since Pan moved into the neighborhood, things had not been right at the monastery. The good brothers had become increasingly plagued by erotic dreams. Dreams of a lascivious nature are fairly common among those of whom the church requires celibacy, but the frequency and intensity of the dreams on rue Quelle Blague had the confession booth smoking. Some monks had begun to resist sleep and walked about heavy-lidded and nervous. Others lived for bedtime and during the day appeared drained, weak, disinterested. Rome dispatched an exorcist to uproot their torment, but the sticky demons mocked his incantations: he, himself, was visited by a succubus of such seductive talent that upon awakening he packed his exorcisory tools and returned to the Vatican.

The abbot, too, was stricken. At least twice a week he was stiffened by creamy visions; the other nights, he told his confessor, he dreamed “of rabbits caught in snares, of snakes that swallow birds' eggs whole, of trailing vines that threaten to trip me up, of rockslides, ewes in foal, yammering hornets, belching vultures, yellow eyes that peer out from hollow trees, and all manner of disagreeable things such as Satan has strewn about God's perfect world, things such as I have not seen since my boyhood in rural Provence.”

The monks under his authority were subject to these “rural” nightmares as well. If they weren't being tortured by the rub of feminine thighs, they were being nauseated by the drool of he-bears eating their cubs. Late in the evening, a person afoot on rue Quelle Blague might, by the moans and shrieks and saccadic protests, have imagined themselves passing not a monastery but a hospital or a brothel or a combination of the two.

More and more, the monks came to suspect that the incense shop was the source of their collective possession. Despite the aromatic stuffs that were its stock in trade, there was often a gamey odor about the place, “a smell,” as the abbot put it, “of such wild meats as country rogues doth eat.” Never had the shop's owners been seen at Mass, there was a quality of physical wellbeing about them that was nearly supernatural, and the woman — the woman was perversely proportioned and jiggled shamelessly when she walked. Several monks claimed that she, specifically, haunted their cots of a night.

Still, the two shopkeepers were good customers of the perfumery and were known to cooperate in the acquisition of raw materials. Moreover, the dream epidemic had attacked the monastery but a year before, while the shop had been operating for well over a decade. The superiors urged restraint in placing blame, but accusations were whispered almost daily, and when, with the soft airs and fertile moistures of spring, the dreaming in the cubicles reached a hysterical pitch, small knots of agitated monks began to patrol the block, eager, it seemed, for something demonic to reveal itself.

It was just such a group that on that fateful afternoon descended on a young man who was timidly rattling the latch at the shop's locked door.

“What is your business here, boy?” asked one of the monks.

“I am making delivery, Father.”

“Delivery from whom?”

“From the glassblower. I am his apprentice.” This last, the boy said proudly.

“And what is in the package?”

“Why, glass, Father. A glass bottle.”

“A bottle of what?”

“A bottle of nothing.”

“Eh?”

“The bottle is empty. The woman of this shop commissioned it from my master. Someday I shall blow fine bottles and—”

“Hush! We shall have a look at this bottle.”

“But, your holiness—”

The monk cuffed the lad on the ear. It felt so good he cuffed him again. “We shall see the bottle!”

Confused, the boy drew away, clutching the package to his silica-caked apron. His ear was turning as red as a whore's lantern. The circle of monks closed around him. “The bottle! The bottle!” they demanded. They forced the package from the frightened boy's grasp and tore it open. A shaft of afternoon sunlight illuminated a bluish container, shaped like a perfume vessel, though three or four times larger. As if focusing, the sun ray narrowed its beam upon a finely wrought figure embossed on the glass. It was the monks' turn to pale.

For a moment or two, they were speechless, and there was much trembling of skullcap and rosary. “'Tis him,” one managed to whisper. “Him,” repeated another, somewhat louder. “The incense shop and him,” said a third. “'Tis what we thought all along. They are allied with Lucifer!”

The monk who was holding the dreadful object raised it, cocking his arm as if to dash it against the cobblestones, but, lo and behold, the bottle squirmed free from his fingers and floated away, flying under its own power — or so it seemed to the terrified monks — about five feet above the street. Slowly it bobbed down the block, rounded a corner, and disappeared. Only then, crossing themselves so furiously that it was a wonder no wrists were sprained, only then did the monks become fully aware of the vulgar aroma — naturally, they assumed it was sulfur or brimstone — that the bottle left in its wake.

Entering the shop from the rear (a familiar route for a Greek), Pan fetched the bottle up to the sitting room, where Kudra admired it at length. Normally, Alobar would have been too concerned about the monks to pay much attention to an oversize perfume bottle, but preparations for the dematerialization attempt had so tranquillized him that he brushed aside all thought of events in the street, concentrating, instead, on the pale fruit of the glassblower's rod.

“How exactly the fellow copied your design!”

“Yes,” said Kudra, “isn't it splendid? Pan, it is you on the side. What think you?”

Pan rarely replied to direct questions, but in this instance he did stampede a flock of little sighs, hairy and wistful: full udders and quick feet running over a cliff.

“The rendering flatters you, I daresay,” joked Alobar to Pan. Then, to Kudra he said, “It is a marvelous container for a potentially marvelous liquid, but, alas, it is all academic now. We still haven't the what-you-call-it, base note, and, besides, if the three of us can rematerialize ourselves in the New World, Pan shall not require a cover for his stink.”

“Oh, I would not be so sure of that. He might find a cover handy even in a wild and distant land. And should he need it not, well, still I want that base note, I want that perfume, I want this bottle filled with its intended contents. I want it for you and me, now, as much as for Pan.”

“But, why?”

Slowly, Kudra turned the bottle in her hands. Then, she sat it on the floor between them. It was about six inches tall, square-bottomed but rounded at the shoulders, with a short, flared neck tightly fitted with a glass stopper. There was a ridge down each side of the body, seams left by the wooden mold in which it was formed. The neck, lip, and stopper were seamless, having been formed by hand and added after the blowing. On the bottom of the bottle was a scar not unlike an umbilicus, where an iron pontil rod had held the hot, freshly blown bottle while its neck was being shaped. The cute little pontil scar measured one cubic centimeter, the same, on the average, as the human navel that it resembled. (A Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a 1000cc engine has room in its chamber for a thousand belly buttons, a piece of information that may or may not interest the Hell's Angels.) The bottle glass was clear but had a bluish tinge because of impurities, and it contained the odd bubble, ripple, and tiny bit of stone. One side of the body was embossed with an oval “frame,” within whose boundaries there was an image of none other than Mr. Goat Foot himself, in a jaunty stance, his horns freely displayed, his reeds pressed to his leer, a garland of weeds encircling his bushy brow.

The bottle was between them, and Kudra spoke over the top of it. “Suppose, just suppose, that we should become separated in our — our journeys into the Other Side. If we were marked by a unique scent, a fragrance all our own, we could always identify each other, even if the light was not clear, even if our vision was clouded or our shapes physically altered; we could find each other no matter if we were lost in the rooms of Death.”

That kind of talk was a bit spooky for Alobar's taste. He suggested that they get on with the experiment while he was still in the mood. So they shut their eyes again and reset their breaths upon a circular track. Kudra's plan was that they should slow themselves down until their “humors” buzzed at a rate below that of the visible world, then merge with the vibrations and broadcast themselves through a crack. Which crack? Why, the crack at the top of the Indian rope trick. Okay. Alobar would give it a whirl. After all, his goal always had been to be complete, and were he restricted to occupancy of this one world, as round and fully packed as it might be, he supposed he could not claim completion. He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists' picnic, but he bore down gently, intensifying his concentration, letting go of his attachment to gravity, applying the brakes to his bodily functions. Just before he abandoned himself to the process, however, he heard Kudra whisper, “The bottle must be filled.”

From corner to corner, silence webbed the room. Gradually, there commenced a ringing in Alobar's ears. The sound was produced, no doubt, by his central nervous system, though he imagined it the ringing of the spheres. Stars, in fact, had begun to colonize the darkness behind his lids. At first they were as faint and icy as the pimples on an albino's backside, but they grew in brilliance and size until a sewing basket of flaming buttons spilled on his head, and the Great Bear raked him with her sidereal paws.

Motionless, he sat inside himself as if in a planetarium. Neither a twitch nor a flicker, a pulse nor a discernible breath marred his smooth facade. His heart slowed until it seemed to have frozen in its burrow. His lungs were as immobile as sponges. The wheel rolled to a stop, and bubbles of oxygen slid off of it to skitter upon the surface of his stagnant blood like waterbugs attending to some dizzy business. He tingled, he sparked, and he rang. He felt light and loose and large. The more static his functions became, the more he seemed to expand, as if he had entered a state where there was progress without duration, advance without movement.

He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that — his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths — but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.

Then, suddenly, he was falling, not downward but outward, beyond the horizon — as if the earth had an edge after all. And with that thought, his life started to unreel before him. He saw himself as a babe, gnawing at the nipple of his great golden mother; as a child, rolling in pine needles; as a youth, swimming rivers. He witnessed himself in battle after battle, smoke winding 'round his helmet, his right sleeve stiff with gore. He occupied the throne, skinned a fox, drained a mead goblet, spread the yellow short-hairs of Alma, Ruba, and Frol. There, over the watchtower, was the winter moon in its ermine snood; here, in the harem mirror, was his good old beard, unsullied by silver; yonder was Noog sawing a chicken in half; here stood Wren, advice forming in her mouth like spittle; and — oh joy! — up bounded the huge hound, Mik, jowls a-drool and tail a-wag. Alobar embraced the dog and buried his face in its coat, only to be knocked back by an overpowering odor.

Upon first contact, the smell was acrid and offensive, but by the second or third whiff it was acceptable enough, and by the fourth or fifth, downright agreeable. A shock of olfactory recognition reverberated in Alobar, and he said to himself — his light, loose, large, and falling self—"Ah, 'tis late in summer and the dogs have been in the crops.”

The pageantry of his life continued to flash by, but he clung to the brief encounter with Mik, galvanized, somehow, by the familiar smell. And then it hit him. “That is it!” he cried. “That is it!” So deep was he in “his” time, so removed from exterior time, that he made no sound in the room, but he cried “Methinks I have found it!” with force enough that the breath wheel was jarred into motion again, a wild thump rattled his heart, and all at once his trajectory reversed itself and he came flying back, shedding stars like dandruff, gaining weight, contracting, shrinking, until he tumbled back over the edge into the shallow bowl of our reality, his plasma sluggish in the pump, his eyes pasted shut with some atomic glue, but voice finally audible in the little sitting room: “Kudra! I have got it.”

A beet, by and large, has little odor; its leaves, stalk, and famous red root are, to the nose, equally, relatively bland. Around August, however, when the plants go to seed, a pungent and singular aroma rises from them, like a gaseous wrench that gives the surrounding atmosphere a sharp turn to the left, twisting it into strange new configurations. When dogs run through August beet fields, the pollen dusts their coats, and they return to their masters so strongly scented that no scour brush, however vigorously wielded, will leave them fit to sleep in the house. As Alobar recalled, only time — days of it — would relieve the dogs of their odd olfactory burden, “odd” because once the nose was past the initial shock of it, it was not unpleasant; yet, unless substantially diluted, its pleasure was difficult to endure.

If the waft that streams from a freshly opened hive is intimate to the point of embarrassment (ask any sensitive beekeeper), so it is with beet pollen. There is something personal about it, and something primeval. If there is a comparable odor, it is, indeed, the moldly inner sanctum of some fermenting, bursting hive; but beet pollen is honey squared, royal jelly cubed, nectar raised to the nth power; the intensified secretions of the Earth's apiarian gland, reeking of ancient bridal chambers and intimacies half as old as time.

However, on Nature's cluttered dressing table, there is no scent to truly match it, not hashish, not ambergris, not decaying honey itself. Beet pollen, in its fascinating ambivalence, is the aroma of paradox, of yang and yin commingled, of life and death combined in vegetable absolute. And Alobar intuited that it was the missing link in the evolution of the perfect perfume. “Beet is our base note,” he said. “Why did I not think of it before?”

Maybe he was right. Beet pollen had the muscle, the stamina, the tenacity to both establish the jasmine and to stand up to its detractors. Like that rarity, the wise husband, it was strong enough to possess its mate, secure enough to allow her freedom. If Pan's musk was the dark and convulsive essence of animal behavior, then beet's musk was its floral counterbalance, the olfactory interface where the fuck of beast and the pollenization of plant became roughly equivalent. “Kudra, methinks I have found it!

“Kudra.

“Kudra?”

With effort, Alobar forced his lids apart. The light was piercing, but the pain passed quickly. He squinted, striving to focus. Slowly, the walls came into relief and, in turn, the fireplace, curtains, furniture, and empty bottle at his stockinged feet. Kudra, alas, was not to be seen. He blinked furiously and rubbed his eyes with his fists. His vision was back to normal. That wasn't the problem. The sun was setting, but the room was still adequately lit. That wasn't the problem. Kudra was gone.

Life is too small a container for certain individuals. Some of them, such as Alobar, huff and puff and try to expand the container. Others, such as Kudra, seek to pry the lid off and hop out.

“Both of thee wert going,” said Pan from his post in the corner. “Thou stopped and came back. She went.”

Naturally, Alobar was tempted to restart the experiment, to try to join her — wherever she might be. Upon reflection, however, he submitted to his truer nature and elected to wait for her return.

As darkness fell, he lit candle after candle in the sitting room, indifferent to what the monks might think of the concentrated brilliance. Should any tiny part of her wink on, he didn't want to miss it. When, by midnight, not so much as a chin dimple had shown up, he experienced alternate states of panic and relief; panic that her disappearance might be permanent, relief that he had not disappeared.

At dawn, he blew out the candles, which had come to resemble the fingers of careless mill workers, and continued the vigil by sunlight. Above Pan's cataractous snoring, he could hear carts creaking to market, birds blowing the bugs out of their pipes, and monks marching to and fro in front of the shop, but he couldn't hear a peep from the Other Side. There was simply nothing left of Kudra but a pair of empty shoes. In some kind of desperate attempt to get her attention, he set fire to the left shoe and smoked it.

He had just blown a ring about the size of her left breast when — how embarrassing! — the gendarmes arrived. They arrested Alobar, charging him with heresy, blasphemy, satanism, and witchcraft, and confiscated the new perfume bottle as evidence.

Breaking into the Bastille was as easy as falling off a ewe for the invisible Pan. Less than twenty-four hours after the arrest, before the whips and lashes had gotten limber, Pan had liberated Alobar, and the bottle as well, leaving nothing in their place but an awful smell.

Immediately, they made their way to the incense shop. It was boarded up, and a heavy wooden cross was propped against the front door. Prying boards loose from a rear window, they hurried upstairs. The sitting room was just as they had left it. Kudra's right shoe lay upturned on the thin carpet, like a boat washed up on a desolate shore.

It was barely four in the morning, but already candles were exercising their little flames, left, right, flicker, sputter, left, right, in the monastery halls across the street. Alobar knew he must get out of there, but first he bundled up as much fragrance equipment as he could carry, and left a note in Kudra's shoe telling her to look for him in the beet fields of Bohemia.

To Alobar's mind, there were several possible reasons why Kudra hadn't rematerialized. To wit:

(1) Once she had fallen over the edge (Alobar was assuming that her experience paralleled his own), she had just kept falling, growing lighter, looser, and larger until she became nothing — or everything — and was, therefore, in a rather grandiose way, “dead,” or, at least, irretrievable.

(2) In the world of the nonliving, she had been reunited with her parents, with Navin the Ropemaker, and with her abandoned children, about whom she felt, Alobar knew, continued remorse. (Alobar secretly blamed himself — no seventeenth-century male would publicly admit to such a shortcoming — for Kudra's failure to conceive in their recent efforts, but, of course, the fault lay with the pennyroyal that she had ingested for over seven hundred years and which had left a contraceptive residue that would bash sperm in the head for a long time to come.) In that case, she would choose not to rematerialize for a while, if ever.

(3) She had landed safely on the Other Side and was searching there for him. Since she had no way of knowing that his dematerialization had been aborted, perhaps she feared that he was lost.

(4) She had landed on the Other Side and become lost there, herself. Maybe she longed to come back but couldn't find her way.

(5) Since their practical objective in learning to dematerialize was to transport themselves across the Atlantic, it could be that Kudra had crossed directly and was waiting for Pan and him to join her in the New World.

In the event that it was reason number one that detained her, there was nothing Alobar could do but grieve. If it was number two, he could only carry a torch, as they say, and hope that his love would eventually draw her back to him. To deal with possibility three or four might or might not require him to dematerialize, but, in either case, he instinctively felt that their long-sought perfume would be the key to their finding one another again. For that matter, if it was number five that was correct, if she had taken advantage of a free and easy passage to the New World and was counting on Pan and him following her, the perfume would also be necessary, both as a mask for goat gas and as a signal in case their seeing one another directly was prevented by natural or supernatural obstructions.

Well, at least he could provide the perfume now. Or could he? That question — and a sack of beakers, tubes, crucibles, industrial-strength candles, citron, jasmine oil, and a five-ounce bottle with Pan on its side — weighed him down on the long trek to Bohemia.

The beet harvest was right on schedule. Toward the tail of July, peasants were in the fields from morning until night, ripping whiskered fetuses from the planetary mud. A steady parade of oxcarts wound toward the villages, bearing baskets of smokeless coals and sacks of idol eyes. Concealed in a hillside thicket, Alobar kept one eye on the harvest, one on the road to the west, down which he expected at any moment to see an hashish-colored woman jiggling and swaying: jumping beans in aspic, a satin ship rolling in a tide of licorice sauce.

The harvest petered out, the woman never appeared, but the Bohemian farmers, as they had done since Alobar could remember, left a few acres of beets undug so that they might complete their cycle and provide the seed for next year's crop. There was a patch of seed-beets here, a patch there, often miles apart. Alobar mapped the countryside, X-ing the fields where the treasure lay. He needn't have bothered. By mid-August, his nose could have led him blindfolded to the places where the pollen was congregating.

In the dark of night, Alobar and Pan collected the viscous powder from the plant tops, filling beakers that they stashed in a particularly dense thicket. Twigs and branches jabbed at their eyes, briers tore Pan's flesh and Alobar's clothing, but each dawn they kicked and shoved their way into the coppice, where they added another couple of beakers to the stash and lay down to sleep in a chaos of sweating vines, mucous leaves, and maggoty logs. Mistletoe dripped an unsavory liquid on them, a living confetti of spiders and earwigs dotted them from head to heel, curds of mushrooms and scrumbles of lichen soiled them to the bone, but Pan slept as if he were to that foul manor born, and Alobar was too desperate to care. His fitful dreams were all of Kudra, and when he lay awake in the rot and tangle, he sniffed at the contrasting clouds of musk that billowed from the god and the beakers of beet pollen, noting with immense satisfaction that they nearly cancelled one another out.

After a dozen containers had been filled, they hiked into the high hills, where smoke would not be noticed, and, while Pan lay on the humus, noodling his pipes (Alobar had fetched them in his sack, and they put the local fauna into a tizzy), Alobar constructed a crude laboratory. He boiled down the beet pollen into an extract, gray, gooey, and possessed of a basso profondo that could have brought the rafters down in the grand opera of smell.

When all the extract had been made, Alobar shook the wood lice out of his britches, washed his face in a creek, and set out for a large town on the Russian border, where he knew a vodka master to reside. Pan was left behind to guard their equipment. Without the feeble god to slow him, Alobar reached the town in a week. There, he approached the vodka maker, who, in return for the last of Alobar's French gold pieces, agreed to distill the beet pollen extract, an operation that, to Alobar's displeasure, consumed the better part of a month.

The job at last complete, Alobar tied a gallon jug of distillate to each end of a stout pole, rested the pole across both shoulders, and left the town at a trot. Were it not for the preciousness and weight of his cargo, he might have left at a gallop. He was anxious about Kudra, who could have returned in his absence, anxious about Pan, who could have strayed. In as much as his health would permit, Pan had cooperated in the venture to disguise his malodor and transport him to the New World, but he hardly could be rated enthusiastic. He was, in fact, so nonverbal, so distant, distracted, solitary, and, even in his invisibility, especially in his invisibility, charged with psychic shock, that nothing he might have done would really have surprised Alobar, who had little choice but to withhold trust. Stopping neither to eat nor sleep, his brain hot with imagined disasters, the man who once was a king in this land flapped through the countryside in his filthy rags, his boots falling away from his feet, his latest beard flying in the wind like a nauseated Chinaman losing his bird's nest soup.

Their camp proved blessedly intact, Pan present and accounted for, molesting a confused doe that he had attracted by his piping. As the poor deer sprang into the bushes, Alobar lifted the pole from his raw shoulders. “'Tis done,” he said, and lay down in the lean-to, falling immediately into a wife-infested slumber.

Twelve hours later, he awoke and set at once to mixing the beet pollen distillate with jasmine oil and citron essence, in varying proportions. After five days of experimenting, he hit upon what seemed the ideal mixture: one part beet to twenty parts jasmine to two parts citron, a ratio that inspired him to name the scent K23. The K was for Kudra.

Like a lobster with a pearl in its claw, the beet held the jasmine firmly without crushing or obscuring it. Beet lifted jasmine, the way a bullnecked partner lifts a ballerina, and the pair came on stage on citron's fluty cue. As if jasmine were a collection of beautiful paintings, beet hung it in the galleries of the nose, insured it against fire or theft, threw a party to celebrate it. Citron mailed the invitations.

If Alobar could trust his nose, K23 stopped Pan in his tracks. It seemed to throw a mantle — gossamer in places, heavily embroidered in others — over his funk, and however long and hard the goat musk might squirm beneath that cloak, it could not wriggle free. “I wonder if I am only imagining that it is so effective?” worried Alobar. “Perhaps it is wishful smelling.” There was nothing to do but submit it to objective testing.

Into a sack, Alobar packed a gallon jug of K23, what remained of the beet pollen distillate (the jasmine and citron were used up), the empty bottle that Kudra had designed, some roasted beets to munch on on the road, and his companion's innocent-looking reeds. Then, at Pan's pace — out there in the back country the peasants still secretly honored him, a fact that put a tad of pep in his step — they set off in the direction of France. In every village through which they passed, Pan — freshly sprinkled with K23—walked ahead, Alobar following at a distance of nine or ten yards. Directed by Alobar, Pan endeavored to brush as closely as possible to people in the street. From Bohemia to Paris, the results were invariably the same.

As the invisible Pan walked by, people's eyebrows would raise, their noses would tilt, and they would begin to turn toward the source of the scent, looks of expectation or ill-concealed delight forming on their faces. Halfway into the turn, however, that expression would be abruptly dislodged by a twitch of embarrassment, and, reddening slightly, the person would turn away, as if to look directly at the origin of such a fragrance might violate an intimacy sacred even to an unrefined yokel. Bemused smiles involuntarily parting their lips, they would continue on their way for a few yards, when, at a safe distance and no longer able to resist, they would stop and slowly look back, smiling all the while, only to find that the emanator of the aroma had — so they believed — turned a corner or disappeared through a doorway. Off they would go then, not really disappointed, some fantasy or other obviously drawing a grass blade lightly along the genitals of their minds.

Now Alobar was hardly expert, but he realized that he had concocted a unique and genuinely amazing perfume, a fragrance whose possibilities extended far beyond its worth — praise the morning star for that worth! — as a cover-up for the Horned One's fetid ooze. Kudra had predicted it, had she not? She had said, at least, that she wished the perfume for Alobar and her as much as for Pan.

On the outskirts of Paris, where they rested beneath a stone bridge, waiting for darkness before daring to enter the city, Alobar filled the bluish bottle to the brim with K23. He put its stopper in. He pressed it to his tear-wet cheeks.

It was late September, there were tambourines of frost in the air. Alobar and Pan crossed the great city, their breath always one step ahead of them. Man's breath and god's breath looked identical, congealed in the urban night. Their footsteps, on the other hand, were distinctly different — the bum flap of Alobar's boots, the blacksmith chisel of Pan's hooves — but they led to the same destination over the rigid effervescence of cobblestones.

The incense shop was just as they had left it, boarded up and blocked by a crude wooden cross. Apparently the monks were giving it a wide berth. Had Alobar stopped off at the neighboring brewery/perfumery, he would have caught the abbot discussing the sale of the business to an enterprising fragrance broker named Guy LeFever. At that very moment, LeFever was inquiring about the possibility of locating the owner of the incense shop and purchasing it as well, for he had heard that its inventory was quite valuable and in disuse, but the abbot, who was sleeping better those nights and taking no chances, wrung his lily hands and cried, “No, no, do not pursue it.”

As deftly as possible, Alobar pried open a rear window. He and Pan crawled in. Alobar's heart was beating more loudly than Pan's hoofbeats as they climbed the stairs. The door to the sitting room was opened with a creak. Alobar did not recall that it had ever creaked before.

It seems there should have been a harvest moon that night, but not a cuff link of moonlight was in evidence. Perhaps the moon was spending the evening at Versailles. In any case, Alobar didn't really require a moon to see that nothing in the room had changed. The pale reach of a streetlamp was sufficient to illuminate the sad tableau: his note, the single shoe, the balls of dust.

He avoided going inside, but, rather, leaned across the threshold just far enough to set down the bottle of K23, having first removed its stopper. He shut the door briskly, as if the breeze from the door might speed a waft of perfume toward the Other Side.

Upon the bed where he, a latecomer to kissing, had kissed so much of her, he lay the night, weeping, dozing, waking to weep once more. Throughout the morning he lay there, a pillow, which he imagined to bear some scent of her ebony hair, pasted to his face. It was past noon when he finally released himself from the twist of marriage-stained sheets. Lint in his beard, burrs of salt in the corners of his eyes, he padded barefoot to the sitting room to fetch the bottle. Pan was up and would be needing a fix.

As bait, K23 had failed — for the time being, at any rate. Alobar had heard no sound from the sitting room during the night, and now, creaking open the door, he saw that his note still lay there, beneath the forlorn shoe. But wait! Hadn't he tucked the note inside the shoe?! And hadn't the shoe been placed in the very center of the carpet, whereas it now lay somewhat off to the right, closer to the fireplace!?!

Shaking like a wedding announcement in a misogamist's fist, Alobar examined the shoe, unfolded and reread the note. He turned them over and over. He even sniffed them. There were no marks, no odors, nothing unusual in any way. Yet they had been moved, he was positive of that! The question was, had they been moved during the night — in which case, the perfume was a lure, after all — or sometime during the preceding five months? The light had been so dim, his emotions so swollen on the previous evening that he easily could have overlooked such a slight, though significant, displacement.

Unable to learn anything from the slipper or paper, he scrutinized the room itself, patrolling the carpet, inch by dusty inch. Nothing. The walls, too, were a tabula rasa. When his gaze settled on the fireplace, however, his spine was straightened by a fulminous jolt. On the mantelpiece, next to Kudra's beloved silver teapot, a word had been written in the dust!

Yes, someone, using a fingertip as implement, had plowed a grafitto on the surface of the marble, where the dust lay thick as fur. The script, while instantly familiar, was not Kudra's style, however, nor was the word in her single written language. When Kudra had finally become literate, it was French that she learned to read and write. The word on the mantelpiece was from the Slavo-Nordic tongue that his clan had used to speak of battles, bear hunts, beet harvests, and broken mirrors, and the handwriting was that of the only woman in his kingdom with the ability to write that language: Wren.

For a long time, Alobar just stood there, grasping the mantel ledge for support. So shocked was he by the implications of language and penmanship that he didn't even consider content. When at last he turned his attention to it, his bafflement only increased. The word was a transitive verb, an exclamation, a command, of which an exact English translation is impossible. The closest equivalent probably would be the phrase:

Lighten up!

Lighten up, indeed. Against his better judgment and to Pan's chagrin, Alobar remained in the flat for a week, subsisting on crusts of stale bread and flakes of moldy cheese. Each night he placed the open bottle of K23 in the sitting room, each morning he rushed in and searched for messages in the dust. There were none. That is, there was but one, the one and only: Erleichda. “Lighten up!”

Alobar watched the last grain of green cheese work its way down Pan's invisible gullet while some morbid hymn about the gore of Christ drifted over from across the street. He chewed a mouthful of dried blossoms from the shop's supply. They tasted like Grendel's underpants. He spat them out, wiped his beard with his sleeve, and asked, “What shall we cook for dinner? The drapes?” Had Guy LeFever, who was next door closing his deal with the abbot, overheard him, the businessman might have snapped, “Not drapes, you idiot, draperies. Drape is a verb.” LeFever did not overhear him, but Alobar knew that it was merely a matter of time before one of the monks did hear him, or spot him through a window (the upper ones were not boarded), a prospect that caused his empty stomach to rattle its chains.

He was sitting there in the universal slouch of hopelessness, the old droop of despair, when he felt the pressure of Pan's hand on his arm. The god had never touched him before, and Alobar had to confess that his first reaction was that he must defend himself against intended buggery. Pan simply squeezed him, however, and remarked, “Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth.” Then he walked away, his hooves beating a slow rat-a-tat on the floorboards, pausing to call over his presumed shoulder, “Puny homer.”

That must have done it. Alobar slumped there for another quarter-hour, then rose, bathed, shaved off his tear-encrusted beard, donned his finest clothes, polished his spare boots, pulled on and powdered the frazzled wig that Pan had dragged home from Descartes's funeral, and beckoning to the god, who may or may not have been smiling, slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon.

Packing the perfume, beet distillate, and little else, the pair made its way to Marseilles, where the last ship of the season was preparing to sail for New France.

For more than a decade, the French had dominated the Great Lakes region of what would eventually be called North America, but unlike the English and Spanish, the French tended to view the New World in terms of its spoils — furs, fish, Christian converts, and a possible westward route to the Indies — rather than as a place to build homes, towns, and a new life. Disease, attacks from hostile Iroquois, and a major earthquake in Quebec in 1663 had brought its fur-trading company to the brink of ruin and set weary settlers to crying “Back to France!” before Louis XIV stopped waltzing long enough to rectify matters. Rumors of a mighty and mysterious river flowing southward from the Great Lakes, perhaps as far as the Pacific, had reached King Louis, and, murmuring “Mississippi, Mississippi” into his scented hankie, he raised New France to the status of a royal province, secured it with a regiment of highly trained soldiers, and appointed a capable executive to oversee its internal affairs. Henceforth, Louis decreed, qualified settlers (those with skills) would take precedence over missionaries and trappers on the ships to Montreal.

When Alobar approached the captain of the Mississippi Poodle, he found that it had space for several more single male passengers — most families were waiting for spring before emigrating, not wishing to begin colonial life at the onset of a harsh northern winter — and were he deemed fit, he could not only travel free of charge, he would be paid a small bonus for his commitment. Alobar contended that he was an aristocrat who'd recently lost his fortune, and since he had a gentlemanly manner, and since there was another fellow aboard in an identical situation ("Sieur de La Salle by name, is he a friend of yours?") the captain believed him.

There was some worry about Alobar's age, however. “Just how old are you, sir?” inquired the chief immigration officer. Alobar didn't know what to say. He had no idea anymore what age he looked to be, and God knows he couldn't tell the truth. He stammered a bit, finally blurting out, “Forty-six,” a figure arrived at by doubling K23. “A hale and hardy forty-six, accustomed to leading men.”

Up the gangplank he went, aromatic liquids gurgling in his sack, suppressed laughter gurgling in his throat. Pan followed.

The Mississippi Poodle slid across the Mediterranean as slickly as an asparagus spear gliding through a serving of hollandaise sauce, but once past Gibraltar and into the open Atlantic, she ran headlong into a mass of cold air and choppy water. With each dark day, the waves grew more pugilistic. Passengers could imagine her hull turning blue from the chilling and the pounding.

It was routine sailing for that time of year, of course, and the seamen not only took it in stride, they seemed as content a crew as the captain had ever commanded. There was a curious sweet aroma aboard that, while it could neither be identified nor pinpointed, lifted everyone's spirits in a shy, private way, fostering the secret hope that some wonderful encounter waited just below deck (if one was above) or on deck (if one was below). Like habitual snuff users, the men sniffed as they went about their work. “This tub smells like a Bombay whore,” grumbled one old salt, but the younger men, who'd never seen Bombay, only grinned and, being sailors, lost little sleep over the pornographic nightmares that with increasing frequency invaded their hammocks. Homosexual impulses, which normally didn't surface until the men had been parted from their wives for several months, began to flicker a few days past Gibraltar, more to the amusement than disturbance of those so visited.

Alobar spent much of the voyage seated alone behind the bowsprit, enjoying the energy of the waves, refreshed by the salty sprays that needled him. For him, the blustery days provided calm introspection, a time for putting his long, strange life into some sort of perspective.

“Pan is right,” he thought. “Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing.” The sea hissed at him, but he didn't flinch. “If Kudra is dead, dead as all the others who have died, then I must refrain from driving myself mad by wishing her alive. I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case. If Kudra is dead like all the others, then it does me well to curtail my grief, lest my life become a deathly imitation through depression and sorrow.” He wiped a piece of foam from his eye and, without malice, flicked it back into the waves.

“Ah, but suppose she is dead in the manner of the Bandaloop, able to pass back and forth freely between This Side and the Other Side. Although six months have gone, that still is a reasonable speculation due to her unusual abilities and to the very significant fact that she did not leave behind a body to molder in the sod: she took it with her. Hopeful I am, yet to ride that hope each day from dawn to sleep the way this vessel rides the bucking ocean is also a kind of death. Certainly I sail to New France, with my lure of K23, intent upon meeting her there, but I should be prepared to thrive even if she fails to appear.”

On every side of him, the cold viridian waters stretched as far as he could see, and for every wave that reared and whinnied upon those waters, there was a question to rear and whinny in his mind. Did the Bandaloop really come and go as they pleased, with no regard to normal distinctions between “life” and “death"? Where was the proof? Who were the Bandaloop? Where were they now? Was Kudra with them? A swell of jealousy pitched him, as if he were a ship upon an autumn sea.

He had placed a lot of emphasis on the perfume, but what if its scent could never reach Kudra? Or, if it could, what if she was powerless to react, or, worse, what if perfume no longer mattered to her?

And, yes, what was the connection, if any, linking Kudra and Wren? Now there was a mystery. If Wren had written in the dust of the sitting room, wouldn't that mean that she, too, was alive behind that curtain that separates us from the Other Side? And since Wren knew nothing about dematerialization, since she regarded the notion of immortality as unnatural and vain, wouldn't her message on the mantelpiece mean that a person need not harbor immortalist ambitions in order to survive after death? Did the so-called Bandaloop practices merely provide a different brand of life — longer, healthier, more flexible — and have little or nothing to do with death per se? Suppose Kudra, not Wren, had written that word ("Erleichda!") employing Wren's language and handwriting, which she had somehow appropriated in the afterworld? Did a man's wives all blend into a single entity after their deaths? Would he blend with Navin the Ropemaker if and when he died? Was it wife soup and husband soup on the Other Side? Or was it simply soup?

At that moment, La Salle, the penniless young nobleman, approached the bow, intending to engage Alobar in genteel conversation, but Alobar's gaze was sweeping the Atlantic, and so absorbed was he in trying to imagine a soup as vast as that ocean that he heard not a word of the fellow's greeting. Miffed, La Salle walked away, his stride, despite the heaving of the deck, revealing the stubborn pride that a few years later would prevent him from admitting that he was lost in Texas when he was supposed to be exploring Louisiana (his frustrated men finally assassinated him, depriving him of the opportunity to found New Orleans, America's perfumed metropolis).

Alobar continued to survey the sea. Was that wave over there Kudra and this one Wren? Or was there a drop of Kudra, a drop of Wren in each and every wave that rose and fell? Wren. He had loved Kudra so long and so well that he'd almost forgotten how he'd once loved Wren. It had been Wren who comforted him when that first white hair slithered like a viper into his happy garden, Wren who had aided and abetted his subsequent subterfuge even though she'd been shocked by his crazy notions of personal identity and survival, Wren who had plucked him from the burial mound — and that very night spread her legs for his successor. Ah, women: the mystery of them sometimes seemed greater than the mystery of death.

One thing was certain, had it not been for Wren he wouldn't be here, seven hundred — yes, seven hundred! — years later, embarked upon the strangest adventure of his strange life. And now, after all that time, Wren had contacted him. To tell him what? Lighten up!

Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play — more than piety, more than charity or vigilance — was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.

Quite damp now from the spray, Alobar took no step to go below. He had made one promise in the teeth of the sea, and he would stay to make another. He thought that he would persist in his devotion to his individual consciousness. Perhaps it was selfish. Perhaps someday, despite his efforts, he would end up in the one big soup, anyhow. Yet, looking at his life and the life of the world from the vantage of seven continuous and well-traveled centuries, he would say this to anyone with ears brave enough to hear it: the spirit of one individual can supersede and dismiss the entire clockworks of history.

“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”

If there was any crack in his conviction, a seam opened, perhaps, by remembered teachings of the Buddhists at Samye, it closed when he turned his face from the stiff salt air and caught a whiff of K23.

Alobar was benefiting from the voyage, but for Pan it was a sea horse of a different color. It was, in fact, the most terrible experience of his life.

The old god had endured severe setbacks in the past: the disdain of Apollo and his snooty followers, the rise of cities, the hostility of the philosophers — from Aristotle to Descartes — with their smug contentions that man was reasonable and nature defective, and, most damaging of all, the concentrated efforts of the Christian church to discredit his authority by identifying him as Satan. The arrogant attacks, the dirty tricks, the indifference had rendered him weak and invisible, and might have destroyed him altogether had not an unreasonable affection for him persisted in isolated places: hidden valleys and distant mountain huts; and in the hearts of heretics, lusty women, madmen, and poets.

Recently, he'd been yanked from his indigenous crags and set down in an urban environment, a move that some might have thought would apply the coup de grace. Indeed, it was hard on him, but one cannot truly escape nature by paving streets and erecting buildings, and Pan found in Paris enough grass and trees in its parks and vacant lots, enough animal compulsions in the souls of its citizens, to sustain him. A ship, however, was a different matter.

Never had he felt so confined. The crowded hold, the unrelieved ocean. He was totally out of his realm, totally in weird Poseidon's. It was foreign and insubstantial. Were he free to play his pipes, he might set fish to jumping, might roust a mermaid from the deep (if mermaids had not died out like the nymphs). But he dare not pipe. He dare not move about or cause mischief. Even if he were free to do so, he was in no condition. He was seasick.

If that were only the worst of it. . The idea of an invisible leaning over a rail, broadcasting green bile from a stomach nobody could see, is almost comic. Alas, something more insidious than the rocking ship was sickening Pan. He was becoming emotionally ill, as well. And the cause was the perfume.

Pan had hit upon the perfect disguise, all right. He no longer knew who he was. The perfume separated him from him, dismantled his persona. Invisibility itself was alienating. When he drank from a spring, only waterbugs looked back at him, and whose body was that that itched, whose hand that did the scratching? In his invisibility he had become increasingly attached to his odor, occupying it as though it were a shell, a second body, familiar and orienting, home foul home. From the start, the various perfumes had had a confusing effect on him, but his native aroma made short work of them, generally, and it was seldom very long before he was cheerfully, securely stinking again like an old furnace stoked with gonads. K23 was a different matter. It obscured his house of smell the way a mist would sometimes erase his favorite crag; a cloud without pockets, drifting in the direction of the Void.

Ironically, he rather liked the new perfume. The jasmine blew like a soft wind from Egypt across the scruffy pastures of his mind, the beet thumped a dance drum with scrotum-tightening rhythms. Together, they dulled the ache that had pierced his breast since birth. But could it be that that ancient sadness was as necessary to his identity as his odor?

On dry land, he had managed to keep some bearings. The rocks and leaves had seen to that. At sea, however, he was lost. He retched and did not recognize who was retching. Twice a day, Alobar came to anoint him, sniffing him out at whatever rail he clung to or in whatever rope bin he lay groaning. Pan realized that each application of the scent only made him foggier, but, like a drug addict, he was already too foggy to resist further fogginess.

As the Mississippi Poodle approached New France, smelling sweeter by far than any ship ever had after a transatlantic crossing, its crew whistling as it worked, its mates hiding behind some barrels in tender embrace, Alobar on the bow facing the future with a silly grin, Pan was curled in pukey delirium close to dying.

What caused him to suddenly leap to his wobbly hooves? What burst of madness fired his motor? Two things, probably. A gull, the first they'd seen in weeks, swooped low over the mastpole, shrieking loudly. At that very instant, one of the few women aboard walked by the corner where Pan lay. She happened to be menstruating. Perhaps the smell of blood, dark and chthonian, at the precise moment that the bird screamed, awakened something deep and intrinsic in what remained of Pan's consciousness. Perhaps it would have spoken to something inside us, as well, were our barriers down, and perhaps we had just as soon not probe that primal pie. In any event, the god sprang up, possessed. Stumbling and reeling, he rushed through the bulkhead toward Alobar's hammock.

Pan snatched up Alobar's sack, threw it over his shoulder, and, not caring how the sight of a levitating bag might frighten the passengers, climbed the ladder to topside. Heading directly to the rail, over which he'd spewed every morsel Alobar had fed him since Gibraltar, he opened the sack and hurled the jug, the one and only jug, of K23 into the ocean.

Then, as Alobar looked on in horror, Pan pulled out the bottle. He held it aloft for a second or two, as if admiring (or puzzling over) the image of himself piping clownishly, mockingly, sensually, powerfully, in some forgotten time. A sunbeam struck the bluish glass and caromed off the weedy brow of the figure embossed there, the creature that seemed to be laughing, even as it piped a poignant tune; laughing at the puny endeavors of man. A second sunbeam bounced off its stopper. Then it fell.

Whereas the heavy jug had plummeted without hesitation to the bottom, Kudra's bottle, barely half full of perfume, bobbed to the surface. And stayed there. Clinging like lint to the blue serge shoulder of the sea.

Away it bobbed, swiftly out of range of net or hook, floating southward on the current, sparkling, scenting, bumping the occasional whisker or fin, destined to eventually loop the Floridian peninsula, where it would languish in waters well suited to its contents — until the night when hurricane tides would beach it. And bury it. In the Mississippi mud.