Part 10 (1/2)

”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 G.o.d and is my friend.”

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

She embraced him, swabbing his beard with kisses at the same moment that the s.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 t.w.a.t were a cornucopia, spilling forth meat puddings, hot wines, and sweets of every description: unending (sh.e.l.lfish) inexhaustible (peaches) infinite (mush- rooms) 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 whiffi”, that 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 pet.i.tion 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 n.o.ble 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 ma.s.saged 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 polis.h.i.+ng themselves inside the lapidary of his tunic. His beard was trimmed after the Byzantine fas.h.i.+on, 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 p.r.o.nounced b.a.l.l.s 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 a match for you as any homer girl you had ever piped into a pasture. Of course, you, yourself, Mr. h.o.r.n.y, 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. m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, Mr. Ewebangi, 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 G.o.d, after all, with a G.o.d'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 c.o.c.kiness and elan, was somehow the result of Alobar's successful pet.i.tion against death, and, more than anyone else, the beleaguered G.o.d 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, s.h.i.+va, 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, s.n.a.t.c.hes it away? Surely, the human race committed some heinous atavistic crime for the G.o.ds 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 relations.h.i.+p with his G.o.ds. 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 appet.i.tes. 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 suns.h.i.+ne, l.u.s.t, 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. s.h.a.ggy; they wanted you to reach into their secret hearts and remove the hard, k.n.o.bby 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 G.o.d'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 sn.i.g.g.e.ring 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+t) 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-encompa.s.sing 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 gra.s.s-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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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 s.h.i.+p, and he commenced to sniff at his extremities, as if he were wildly in love with himself. A kind of disorienta-tion 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds have always known that, known it even better than thee. We G.o.ds 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.”