The chessboard flashed to the wallscreen at her back.
The pawn advanced one square.
IV
"Well, how many were there?" I ask, over supper.
"There might have been four."
"There was one," I say. " Annewas Warren too." blink in all innocence. "In a manner of speaking."
We sit together, speaking under the canned music. Art made into white noise, to divide us table from table in the dining hall. "Awful stuff, that music," I say. Then I have another thought:
"On the other hand—"
"There were four?"
"No. The music. The Greeks painted vases."
"What have Greek urns got to do with canned music?"
"Art. Do you know—" I hold up a spoon. "This is art."
"Come on. They stamp them out by the thousands."
"But an artist designed this. Its balance, its shape. An artist drew it and sculpted it, and another sort made the die. Then a workman ran it and collected his wage. Which he used to buy a tape. Do you know, we work most of our lives to afford two things: leisure and art."
"Even mass-produced art?"
"The Greeks mass-produced clay lamps. Now we call them antiquities. And we set them on little pedestals in museums. They painted their pots and their lamps. Rich Greeks had musicians at their banquets. Nowadays the poorest man can have a fine metal spoon and have music to listen to with his dinner. That's magical."
"Well, now the rest of us have got to put up with damned little die-stamped spoons."
"How many of us would have owneda spoon in those good old days?"
"Who needed them? Fingers worked."
"So did typhoid."
"What has typhoid to do with spoons?"
"Sanitation. Cities and civilizations diedfor want of spoons. And good drainage. It's all art. I've walked the streets of dead cities. It's an eerie thing, to read the graves and the ages. Very many children. Very many. And so many cities which just—died. Not in violence. Just of needs we take for granted. I tell you we are all kings and magicians. Our touch on a machine brings light, sound, musicians appear in thin air, pictures leap from world to world. Each of us singly wields the power output of a Mesopotamian empire—without ever thinking about it. We can affordit."
"We waste it."
I lift my hand toward the unseen stars. "Does the sun? I suppose that it does. But we gather what it throws away. And the universe doesn't lose it, except to entropy."
"A world has only so much."
"A solar system has too much ever to bring home. Look at the asteroids, the moons, the sun—No, the irresponsible thing is notto wield that power. To sit in a closed world and do nothing. To refuse to mass-produce. To deny some fellow his bit of art bought with his own labor. It's not economical to paint a pot. Or to make a vase for flowers. Or to grow flowers instead of cabbages."
"Cabbages," you recall, "have their importance in the cosmic system."
"Don't flowers? And isn't it better that a man has music with his dinner and a pot with a design on it?"
"You don't like the ancient world?"
"Let me tell you, mostof us didn't live well. Mostof us didn't make it past childhood. And not just villages vanished in some bitter winter. Whole towns did. Whole nations. There were no good old days."
"History again."
"That's why we make fantasies. Because it was too bad to remember."
"Cynic."
"I do write fantasies. Sometimes."
"And they're true?"
"True as those poor dead kids in Ephesus."
"Where's that?"
"See?" I sigh, thinking of dead stones and a child's game, etched forever in a dead street, near a conqueror's arch. "Let me tell you a story."
"A cheerful one."
"A cheerful one. Let me tell you a story about a story. Lin Carter and I were talking just exactly like this, about the wretchedness of the ancient world once upon a time—he was doing an anthology, and wanted me to write a story, a fantasy. And then Lin said a remarkable thing which I'm sure didn't come out quite the thing he was trying to say. I think what he meantto say was that the medieval age was not particularly chivalrous, that the open land was quite dangerous and that it was an age which quite well cast everyone into a series of dependencies—i.e., villein upon master, him upon his lord, lord upon baron, baron upon king, and king upon emperor, who relied on God and played politics with Him whenever he could. The way it came out was that no woman could possibly survive in the middle ages—
"I laughed. Lin took a curious look at his glass and amended the remark to say that it at least would not be the merry life of derring-do practiced by the males of fiction. I countered that the real-life rogues hardly had a merry time of it in real life either. You were more likely to mistake the aristocrats for the outlaws than vice versa.
"But immediately that became the orchard fence, the thou-shalt-not which of course was precisely the story I meant to do for Lin's anthology. Not only that, in my tale, the woman would be no princess, no abbess, no burgher's daughter with defensive advantages."
"Witch?"
"Well, take a very typical swash and buckle hero—illiterate, battling wizards, gods, and double-dealing princes, selling what can be sold and spending all the gain by sunrise—"
"—Who carries off the woman?"
"That isthe woman."
1981
A THIEF IN KORIANTH
1
The yliz river ran through Korianth, a sullen, muddy stream on its way to the nearby sea, with stone banks where it passed through the city. . . gray stone and yellow water, and gaudy ships which made a spider tangle of masts and riggings above the drab jumbled roofs of the dockside. In fact all Korianth was built on pilings and cut with canals more frequent than streets, the whole pattern of the lower town dictated by old islands and channels, so that buildings took whatever turns and bends the canals dictated, huddled against each other, jammed one up under the eaves of the next—faded paint, buildings like ancient crones remembering the brightness of their youths, decayed within from overmuch of wine and living, with dulled, shuttered eyes looking suspiciously on dim streets and scummed canals, where boat vendors and barge folk plied their craft, going to and fro from shabby warehouses. This was the Sink, which was indeed slowly subsiding into the River—but that took centuries, and the Sink used only the day, quick pleasures, momentary feast, customary famine. In spring rains the Yliz rose; tavern keepers mopped and dockmen and warehousers cursed and set merchandise up on blocks; then the town stank considerably. In summer heats the River sank, and the town stank worse.
There was a glittering world above this rhythm, the part of Korianth that had grown up later, inland, and beyond the zone of flood: palaces and town houses of hewn stone (which still sank, being too heavy for their foundations, and developed cracks, and whenever abandoned, decayed quickly). In this area too were temples. . . temples of gods and goddesses and whole pantheons local and foreign, ancient and modern, for Korianth was a trading city and offended no one permanently. The gods were transients, coming and going in favor like dukes and royal lovers. There was, more permanent than gods, a king in Korianth, Seithan XXIV, but Seithan was, if rumors might be believed, quite mad, having recovered after poisoning. At least he showed a certain bizarre turn of behavior, in which he played obscure and cruel jokes and took to strange religions, mostly such as promised sybaritic afterlives and conjured demons. And central to that zone between, where town and dockside met on the canals, lay a rather pleasant zone of mild decay, of modest townsmen and a few dilapidated palaces. In this web of muddy waterways a grand bazaar transferred the wealth of the Sink (whose dark warrens honest citizens avoided) into higher-priced commerce of the Market of Korianth. It was a profitable place for merchants, for proselytizing cults, for healers, interpreters of dreams, prostitutes of the better sort (two of the former palaces were brothels, and no few of the temples were), palm readers and sellers of drinks and sweetmeats, silver and fish, of caged birds and slaves, copper pots and amulets and minor sorceries. Even on a chill autumn day such as this, with the stench of hundreds of altars and the spices of the booths and the smokes of midtown, that of the River welled up. Humanity jostled shoulder to shoulder, armored guard against citizen, beggar against priest, and furnished ample opportunity for thieves.