And then a violent crack, like that of a severing lightning stroke or an immense displacement, and a thought came to mind that stilled his fears, or else it was the last of him and there was no fear left…the thought that it was all a dream, his dream, how he had run and felt joy, how he had leaped—sprawled, really, but that was close enough—and been borne aloft and now he was soaring, and the crack he had heard was the crack of his wings as they caught the air, and the roaring was the rush of first flight, and the light was the high holy sun, and soon he would see Magali and they would fly together along the pattern of their curving fate, with the child flying below them, above the green hill of their religion, and this was his reward, this transformation, this was the fulfillment of every promise, or else it was the lie of it.
THE TABORIN SCALE
Chapter One
If a man can be measured by the size of his obsessions, George Taborin might have been said to be a very small man, smaller even than the quarter-men rumored to inhabit the forests of Tasmania. He was a numismatist by trade, by avocation a lover of rare and ancient coins, and he spent his days cataloguing, cleaning, and in contemplation of such coins, picturing as he did the societies whose lifeblood they had emblematized. Rubbing the face of Ptolemy, for instance, on a silver drachma found in Alexandria, struck at the approximate time of the invasion of Cyprus by Demetrios Poliokortes (probably in Salamis, the last city to fall to the Besieger), would conjure not merely the historical context of the Roman empire and Ptolemaic Egypt, but brought visions so vivid that he imagined he felt the weight of an armored breastplate on his chest or caught the scent of naphtha from an arrow dipped in Greek fire smoldering in its victim’s flesh. It was as if the ball of his thumb stirred the energies of the coin, releasing some essence of the moments through which it had passed, and it had been thus ever since his sixth birthday when his uncle gave him a Phoenician copper as a present.
From this you might suppose George, in his fortieth year, to have been a fastidious, obsessive little man given to wool-gathering, with spectacles and a potbelly and few close friends, his minimal life partitioned into orderly sections like the trays whereon he displayed the best of his collection. You would have been correct in this assessment save for one thing: George Taborin was not little. He stood a hand’s breadth over six feet, more if you measured from the peak of his coarse black hair, which tended to arrange itself into spiky growths when left unwashed, causing it to be said that if George ran into you while walking with his head down (as was his habit), you would be fortunate to survive the encounter without a puncture or two. Thanks to his parents, a farm couple who had viewed him less as a beloved addition to the family than as child labor, he was powerfully built; his sedentary occupation had eroded his strengths and softened his mid-section, but not so much that he was often challenged – he had earned a schoolyard reputation for toughness and durability in a fight and that reputation clung to him yet. He had a slightly undershot chin, a straight nose whose only notable quality was that it was too big for his face, and a mouth through which he was prone to breathe due to a persistent sinus condition (for all that, his was a face that missed being handsome by an ounce here, a centimeter there, and might have passed muster had there been more self-confidence underlying it). These features conspired with his bulk to lend him a doltish aspect, like a gangling idiot boy thickened into a man. When gazing into a mirror, something he did as infrequently as possible, he would have the notion that his soul had not thickened commensurately and was rattling around inside its house, a poor fit for the flesh it animated, stunted and too small by half.
Pursuant to his family’s wishes (the thought being that if George didn’t marry young he would never find a woman), at the age of fifteen he wed Rosemary LeMaster, a chubby, sullen, unprepossessing girl who, over the course of a quarter-century, had matured into a flirtatious, Raphael-esque matron. They had not been blessed with children and, because George deeply desired a family, as did Rosemary (so she claimed, though he suspected her of taking steps to ensure her infertility), they still shared the marriage bed once a week, regular as clockwork; but now that George’s business (Taborin Coins & Antiquities) had prospered, providing them the wherewithal to hire servants, Rosemary, freed from domestic duties, wasted no time in making up for the period of youthful experimentation she’d never had, aligning herself with a clutch of upper-middle-class wives in Port Chantay who called their group the Whitestone Rangers (named for the district in which many of them lived) and considered themselves prettier, more sophisticated and fashionable than they in fact were. She veered into a social orbit of parties and trivial causes (the placing of planter boxes along the harbor, for one) that served as opportunities to meet the men with whom she and her sisters would share dalliances and affairs. Although troubled by his wife’s infidelities (he had no proof positive, yet he was aware of the Rangers’ liberal attitude toward the matrimonial bond), George did not complain. He and Rosemary led essentially separate lives and this latest separation had not created any disruption in the routines of the marriage. Then, too, he had no grounds for complaint since he was regularly unfaithful to Rosemary.
In the spring of each year, George would travel to Teocinte and pass the next three weeks sporting in the brothels of Morning shade, a district that never received the morning sun, tucked so close beneath the dragon Griaule’s1 monstrous shadow, his ribcage bulged out over a portion of the area like a green-and-gold sky.2 Apart from its brothels, Morningshade was known for its junk shops and stalls where you could find antiquities and relics of Griaule (mostly fakes) among the dragon-shaped pipes and pendants, his image adorning a variety of merchandise including plates, pennants, toys (wooden swords were a big seller), tablecloths, teaspoons, mugs, and maps purporting to divulge the location of his hoard.3 George would spend his afternoons combing through these shops, searching for old coins. One evening in May, after such an expedition, he took himself to Ali’s Eternal Reward (the crudely-lettered word ‘Hellish’ had been added and marked for insertion between Ali’s and Eternal), a brothel on the sunnier edge of Morningshade, there to examine his day’s treasures over a pint of bitters.
The common room of the tavern, lit by kerosene lamps and almost empty at that early hour, was shaped like a capital I and smelled of fried onions, stale beer, and several decades of grease. Pitch-covered beams quartered the ceiling, beneath which lay benches and boards, and whitewashed walls gone a splotchy gray from kitchen smoke and innumerable grimy touches, and a counter behind which a corpulent barman wearing a fez (not Ali, who was a purely fictive personage) stood lordly and watchful, punctuating the quiet with the occasional thwack of a flyswatter. Three young women in loosely belted dressing gowns sat at the center of the room, talking softly. Carts rattled by outside, and a vendor shrilled the virtues of her coconut sweets. To George, sitting at a window in a rear corner of the I, the conversations of passersby came as bursts of unintelligible words peppered with curses.
While inspecting the contents of a glass jar containing coins and buttons and tin badges that he had purchased as a lot, he unearthed a dark leathern chip stiff with age and grime, shaped like a thumbnail, though three times the size and much thicker. He opened his cleaning kit and dabbed at the chip with a cotton ball dipped in solvent, after some exercise clearing a speck of bluish green at the center. His interest enlisted, he put on the spectacles he used for close work, bent to the chip and rubbed at it vigorously with the cotton ball, widening the speck. The blue-green color held a gem-like luster. He fitted a jeweler’s loupe to his spectacles and held the chip to his eye.