The Author of Anatomies (part two) * * * The train moved: first, at a crawl from the crowded station…from its platform; and then, at clattering, serpentine speed, across village borders, town borders, and regions with poetic, alien names. Ilíás read as many names as he missed in blurry, accelerated succession. He wondered at the social nature of Halton, and the existential truth of Swinesgate. A smile stretched the corners of his mouth at such places with names like Ear and Hurt, Boland-Far, and Netherwhere. His breath caught—though only for a moment—at Hŭn, its written mark of accent recalling something nearly Mági’ár in origin. In the distance, he saw crop fields like zipper-furrowed veldt-land, and whole, verdant orchards. Anéa named them. There were citrus orchards: lemons, lemons, oranges, limes and still more lemons. There were fruits like ostrich eggs for their size. There were pines for nuts, and there were sullen, gnarly olive trees in shades of dusty, morose green. At the border of Kith, there were saltworks and tanneries, and ancient ruins that Anéa said were remnants of Sestria-Sestrián. He knew that half-mythical empire; he knew how it burned in the long night of a slave-revolt, and how the early Mági’ár fiefdoms took in bedraggled refugees. There were songs of that empire, embedded in his own history: laments and paeans of unrequited longing. There’d been a time—once—on another train, with other company. “Take off your shoes and your stockings,” Laetus said, pulling a pad of artist’s velum from within his carrying case. “I want to draw your feet.” And so, Ilíás sat with ankles crossed as Laetus captured shape, light and shadow with charcoal and smudges. He’d read the names of Mági’ár towns, villages, and historically-important principalities, each of them crowned with the ornate calligraphies of diacritic grammar. Such names, Laetus admitted, were a massive and hilarious confusion: a headache to read and tongue-twisters when spoken. Mág is a beautiful language, but it murders the non-Mágï tongue. Ang, Laetus’s own language, was—likewise—a cackled, nasal muddle to the Mági’ár ear. Ilíás closed his eyes, for a moment, and crossed his ankles. Something in the sound of the train and in the intensity of the memory, played with the warmth of his blood and he felt it surging in flagrant and bestial ways. He opened his eyes. Quickly. And shifted. His motion drew Anéa’s attention from the window, and she smiled at him from across the narrow space separating their face-to-face seats. “You think about him, a lot. Don’t you?” “Him?” “Laetus. It’s been years, but there are times when it seems as if he left, just yesterday.” Ilíás shrugged. “Sometimes.” Silence from Anéa. The train clattered through open country. Hills rose and dipped in the distance. “I rode on a train with him, from Püdá, to Ya. It was a ride as long as this one. I’d known Laetus for months. We were close and shared two small rooms within distance of our school. He wanted to see the countryside, and he wanted to draw what he’d seen there…and so we went. On the train, he’d asked me to sit for one of his anatomical drawings. My feet. Bare. “I never saw the drawing until long after our trip. I’d found it—by accident; I’d gone into his room to smell one of his tunics and rub it across my face in the hopes that I’d hold his scent there…right under my nose. He’d done more than simply draw my feet. He’d rendered all of me, naked and mythic in some bleak and idealized Saturnian land, he’d drawn my phallus as erect as an oak, and—at least subjectively—as large. I liked the drawing and I wished that he’d touched me rather than simply drew me. I stole it a few nights later. Weeks after that, he’d left. Unannounced. I thought it might have been because I’d stolen it…that drawing…I wanted it to be for that reason, because his departure would have made sense, then. But he never mentioned it, never reacted as if he knew I’d taken it. When he wrote to me, years later, and one year ago, he mentioned that trip, that moment of drawing my feet as if that’s all he did…but he never said whether he missed that drawing or not, whether I was childish for taking it.” Anéa drew a soft smile across her face, something wistful in her expression. “You still have it?” “Yes. I brought it with me.” “I should be jealous,” Anéa said. “He never drew me. I never stole anything from him.” “Did you love him?” Ilíás asked. Anéa closed her eyes. “That’s an impertinent question, don’t you think?” She grinned. “But yes…I loved him. Or at least, I thought I did.” “Did he ever speak of me?” “The skinny Mági’ár who asks personal questions while sitting on trains? Yes. He mentioned you a few times. In passing.” She watched as Ilíás nodded, and then sat forward, pinning him with her gaze. “Is it important that he spoke of you?” “I was simply curious.” Anéa nodded. “Yes.” And then, softly. “He spoke of you. He showed me the phototypes of you as the mythic Eértöš with the head of Öéös, cradled in the crook of your arm. He was so proud of that trio of images: all light and shadow, shadow and shape. I nearly stole one from him, but I stayed my hand. A month later, he was gone, and I’ve spent the years between then and now wondering if I should have stolen it, if he would have cared. But now, sitting here…with you…I wonder what that might really mean. Was it some part of him that I truly wanted…or a part of his vision. If it’s the former, then that makes sense, and it’s an easy comfort for me. But if it’s the latter, then I’m afraid of the implications. You are fundamental to his vision, I think—even now—and in stealing that phototype…the one of you in Eértöš drag—you were so handsome—and so…if I stole it, and then admitted to stealing it…to you—” Her voice stumbled into confused silence. She bit her lip and threw a gaze out of the window. And then: “You’re sitting here. Older. Just like any normal man and I can see Eértöš in your face. An ancient, mythic hero shouldn’t look like some random, Mági’ár biographer. But I still see Eértöš when I look at your face. I still see his vision, and from that, I can guess that he loved you…in his way. More than he might ever have loved me. Differently, at least. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he might have snuck into your room and sniffed your tunics as well.” Ilíás felt the warmth bleed from his fingers. “He never said that he loved me.” “And you wanted him to?” With eyes closed, Ilíás settled back in his seat. “I wanted him to.” “And…”—softly—“you still love him. Don’t you?” A lump fluttered in the pit of his throat. “I need to follow in his footsteps…I need to go where he’s gone and I need to see what he’s seen…what he’s captured with his camera when he lived among the gods on the barren slopes of Saturn or in the foothills. I see things in the phototypes he has published, and I need to know if…well…if he saw such beauty in me or if it’s simply something he created…using me until he found the real thing.” For a long moment, there was silence. Ilíás uncrossed his ankles, thankful that his erection was now dead. “You never told him that you love him, did you?” A shrug: “I was afraid. And I think it’s because he knew something that I didn’t. He knew—I think—that he was going to leave, and that I was too young, maybe, or too afraid to go with him.” “And now? You have no one at home, no one to stir your blood, the meat of your loins, and your romantic inclinations?” “No.” “And you’re following him in the hopes of finding…of kindling something.” Maybe it was a question. Maybe not. “I don’t know.” Anéa nodded. It was clear that she wanted to say something: that she had something to say. She kept it to herself and Ilíás felt gratitude for that and fear for what it might have been. He hadn’t expected to admit all that he’d just revealed, hadn’t expected it to follow so closely on thoughts/memories of a past as dead as the history of vanished empires. “I’m sorry, Ilíás,” she said, and it was almost a whisper. It was a surprising thing to hear. “Sorry?” “I remember that phototpye as if I saw it just yesterday: Eértöš In Mourning. It’s a glorious image, sacred and profane all at once. Love. Lust. Loss. It’s all there, and what you’ve just told me says a lot about the title he chose for it. I should have had the bravery you had: to become a thief, because in that way, there’d be some acknowledgement of what terrified each of you. But now, we’re on this train, heading into wild country, and all either of us will ever have to show for it is an experience with no physical marker. That’s a monstrous thing, Ilíás… …monstrous!” * * * Ööna, as Ilíás reckoned, was larger than any city he knew: larger—by at least a few miles—than the conjoined city-states of Mági’ár and Mági’árï, larger than Thress, and at least taller than Pešt. There were markets in Ööna: fruit markets and butcheries, dark with flies drawn to the promise of meat, though the meat itself was clean of insect invasion. There were whole floral labyrinths crowded with women and with the city’s noble rich. There were vendors of art and hawkers selling pots and utensils, hardware of inscrutable pedigree, and implements for the field, the garden, the kitchen, and the altar. Far from the central station, where trains belched gouts of smoke and steam, and close to the grand library—The Biblia—there were galleries and museums, and—as Ilíás expected—bookstores. There were minstrels and street poets, at least one religionist (or maybe two,) ranting their semen-and-brimstone prophesies, and there were whole scores of women, of men, and rampant and unruly armies of children. There were pedicabs and carriages drawn by graceful, antlered eohippai: they stamped their delicate hooves and snorted their irritation at the fumes of motor carriages as modern but more alien than the common vehicles of Mági’ár. Ilíás—exhausted—felt small. —Diffuse— —Insubstantial. Anéa, in what might have been a courtesy (or something selfish,) steered him into the silent, aromatic comfort of a bookstore, and inquired after the works of Laetus Cedem: there were three titles, two of which Ilíás recognized, and the third—a slim, and new volume—which surprised him. It cost ten liri: a reasonable expense as Anéa judged it. Ilíás bought a copy. Anéa bought one, and a copy—as well—of Cedem’s magnum opus: the very scientific anatomy that Ilíás had all but memorized. Their baggage had been sent to the inn ahead of them, and Anéa—with some knowledge of Ööna and its intimacies—saw it to make a slow journey in the growing night. “Laetus,” she explained, as they left the bookstore, “always judges a city by the books it sells.” “He’s been here?” Ilíás asked. “He lived here for a year. Learning what he could before venturing out into the foothills.” They rounded a corner and Anéa pointed to a line of neat, narrow townhouses. “He lived there,” she said, gesturing to one. “He rented a room and lived like a hermit when he wasn’t working as a portraitist. He made great coin. He made the citizens of Ööna immortal: at least on their own walls.” Now, in another rented bed, he replayed the day’s events: the confessions on one train, the tense silence on another, and the meandering, casual walk through the streets of an immense, intimidating city. The foothills, he knew, lay just beyond the city’s eastern flank, but he couldn’t see them for the buildings: the domes and the spires, the squat, cubical constructions, and the ornate, rococo temples. “We’ll head for the open land tomorrow,” Anéa said. “We’ll rent a sonograph, if you want. The gods when they speak to one another, make the most amazing structures with their voices, but only a sonograph might discern them.” “You learned sonography from Laetus?” he’d asked. “The rudiments to it,” Anéa confessed. “I was infatuated and I wanted to know everything he knew, so that—maybe—I could somehow get inside of him, and stay there.” She’d blushed as she said that, and Ilíás felt a chill. He’d wanted the same thing: once, more, and once again. It was as if she’d reached inside of him and stole that thought as quietly as he’d stolen a drawing from Laetus’s dog-eared folio, buried beneath a stack of others. He closed his eyes. He’d attempted to read some of Laetus’ Ruminations, but Anéa’s echoed words were too distracting. Her promise of what lay ahead was too strong a draw on his thoughts, and so Ruminations lay—unread—on the nightstand beside the bed. It was dark, now: long past the Hour of the Fox. Tomorrow, Ilíás thought, a chill dancing along his spine. He didn’t know whether to think of the word as a promise or a threat. Tomorrow. It was the beginning of what he’d come for: contact—however tenuous—with Laetus, even after so many years, and Anéa promised something more: a chance to see the language of the animals known (at least to the ancients) as gods. He knew the sonographs contained in Laetus’ book: he could visualize the graphed signatures of clicks, and whistles, and complex, cooing chortles. He understood—in at least the most rudimentary ways—how the odd flexing of tympanic membranes produced territorial booming. And he’d seen gods in zoos, domesticated, dwarf gods kept as pets by Mági’ár’s dyspeptic rich. Tomorrow, however, he’d see his first wild god. Tomorrow is a promise, he thought, inhaling. Tomorrow is a threat, he amended, exhaling. He inhaled again. Exhaled again. Thinking each time of promise or of threat. He made a game of it, breathing as he imagined a shaman might breathe, and deciding (before sleep came to him) that the last intonation (threat or promise…promise or threat) would be the thing to determine tomorrow’s ultimate shape. He lost himself in random thoughts, and then fell asleep, quietly so. * * * (…end of part two) …and yes, there is more to come, and as always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting. I hope you’ve enjoyed this dip into…well…into the world Ilíás. Part three, the conclusion of this tale, will be posted tomorrow.