wanted so much to weep. My throat was sore from the tears that choked it. Oh, how brilliant is the Dreamer that lives in us all, how witty, and how well it uses the events of a day for its purposes. What an apt depiction of my situation. Standing there in the half-dark I saw again how each of my old comrades and my young self turned to send me the fleeting, half-mocking goodbye smile and then - out, gone. And DeRod. There was something in that dream of him that said to me: Pay attention. I am telling you something. It was not contempt that he was using, when he urinated almost on the grave of an old friend, no, it was carelessness. You could say indifference. It did not matter to him, that was the point. That was the point. And what a contrast between how we all had been seeing him, talking of him, wondering, speculating: he had come to assume in our eyes the demeanour, the stature, of something not far from that old fabled Whip, who had been so cruel. We had spoken of him more and more as a tyrant, a monster of a ruler, deliberately destroying everything that was good. But the DeRod of my dream was not like that, commonplace, he was; someone you’d not look at twice. A pleasant fellow. Matching him with our years- long deliberations - such complicated and sometimes far-fetched explanations we had found for his behaviour - we had even laughed at ourselves. They nearly always focused on arrogance, on the distortions of sense that come from the loneliness of power. And there was always something that did not fit our thoughts of him. We knew that he lived as simply as his mother had done, that his children were not more privileged than anyone else’s, and that he occupied himself with … and that is what I must now record.
When I was able to move comfortably, I found my clothes too damp for comfort, and imagined I must have wet them with my tears. Though I had not wept, I had been thinking too hard about DeRod. I kept seeing him, indifferent, careless: and now to my memory of the dream I added something else, his smile at me as he turned to go, almost embarrassed, almost irritated, as if at someone importunate, demanding too much. How painful, and how informative that dream had been, and my thoughts about it afterwards.
I walked through the trees and down the hill into the thinly scattered lights of the city which stopped on the edge of the dark of the ocean. I went past the pool, which was still full of youngsters. All around it flared the torches which we, The Twelve, had ordered to be kept always burning. We had imagined, when the infants and the little children and the women who attended to them had gone off to bed, how the flames from the torches would move and shine on the water that was never still, or would sometimes drip fire on a windy night, so that it would be hard to tell if the little waves on the pool were fire or water. Now it was a noisy drunken scene, and it was easy to walk past in the half dark, unnoticed. The girl who had asked about my garment was lying half in, half out of the water, one of a group who it seemed were all copulating together like a tangle of snakes in spring.
A youth on the other side of the pool was trying to grab a girl: she was very young, not more than a child. He was shouting at her, half-singing it, ‘New girl in the pool, fears the push and fears the shove, Come to me, I’ll give you love; …’ I was able to recognise this as a debased version of
New lamb on the hill fears the snow and fears the storm, Put it down and keep it warm, Mend the cracks in barn and shed, The lamb will pine without the ewe The ewe without its lamb pine too, keep them warm and keep them fed …
These days when the wind blows cold across our lulls no one brings the lambs and ewes down for safety, and the white patches that are dead lambs look like the last shreds of snow on the grass, or like white flowers spattered everywhere.
I came into my house in the dark and sat in the dark, alone. My house? It is a long time since I could think of this spreading house as mine. In the middle of my life, half a century - almost - ago, my sou Bora came to me and said that he had a wife and three children and needed more space than he had, in a smallish house in one of the cities from the old time, which meant, in a rough area. There was much more to this than simple practicality. I would not say we were estranged, but for a long time we had not had much to say to each other. My house - poor Shusha had died - is in the part of The Cities where the elite live. I put it like that, simply, without evasions or the usual justifications, because, well, I am too old for all that. I, The Twelve, were a governing elite, but for a long time we have not been. People like my son went in for a lot of vilification and even when The Cities were doing very well indeed. ‘The powerful oligarchy which rules us, ‘That kind of thing. But young people vociferous in this way usually end up standing where the vilified elders stood. For him to move up here, to this house, was a statement to all concerned and we both knew it. A wing of four rooms was built on, and here I moved, the house servants easily accommodating themselves to balancing my meagre wants with the family’s. Our relations were cordial enough. We didn’t see each other sometimes for weeks. And then in his turn my son Bora found he was being faced with - in his case - a daughter-in-law; saying, You don’t need all that room. And he built a wing on the other Side of the house, to let my grandson and his wife and children move in. They were prominent in DeRod’s circles and I would have liked to joke with someone about this new elite - but these days I have no one to enjoy jokes with.
And now i must record the worst thing that happened to us, the most unexpected, and still the most puzzling. A message came from DeRod that he was abolishing The College of Storytellers and The College of Songmakers. It was not possible to console ourselves by saying it must be a mistake. DeRod’s agents had requisitioned the two buildings. This was not long before Shusha died and my son moved in. Shusha was beside herself. She was responsible for the education of the young and the two colleges were what she relied on. For a while we sat together, doing what so often resulted from an order from DeRod: we were trying to understand how he was thinking, why he did what he did.
For a good while after Destra’s death and DeRod’s accession The Cities were at a height of brilliance. A golden age. Our festivals of storytelling, our song festivals, our entertainments, followed each other through that cycle of the sun from a grand climax on the day when it is coldest, but we know it will get wanner, until the generous blaze of the day when we know that from now it will get colder, and that was the other big festival. Mid-Light. People were coming from faraway cities all over the peninsula. People still do come, but they are different people and bring with them strife and disturbance, and their enjoyment is expressed m a raw jeering laughter that was never heard in our time.
DeRod did not take part in these festivities, or not much. Always affable and obliging, he might appear at a festival, but it was as if what was after all the pulse and beat of our communal life did not touch him, had nothing to do with him. He preferred his armies. He had even made up a song for them, catchy, full of a patriotic fervour we had not associated with The Cities until then. It was popular, and sung not only by the soldiers. Just how far this army song was in spirit from our music was shown when it was sung by a young aspirant at a song competition. The audience laughed at it - at the song, not the singer; in those days to mock a performer would have been thought unkind.
The festivals were held not in one place, but in several, in public places everywhere: we were still trying to make sure ancient rivalries were not being fostered. For several days, at these times, you could not walk down a street or enter a garden without finding yourself part of singing, dancing, or some enactment, which might be the joining of the old towns at the time of the birth of The Cities, or perhaps the short reign of The Cruel Whip, But we discouraged the kind of music he introduced, the violence and the crudity of it, though we could not deny it attracted crowds. From small seeds big trees may grow. As we often say but perhaps we do not
think often enough about the meaning. The Cruel Whips effusions and effluences, discouraged by Destra and then by us, have grown into a nasty poisonous flood.
The message from DeRod, ending our prosperity - though at the time we had no idea how thoroughly and soon the end would come - arrived at the height of our happy festival culture.
Shusha said she would go and see him, and went off then and there. After all, her brother, whom she had
