was eaten by a dragon, which in turn was swallowed by an Earth Thing for which there is no name, which before long found itself residing in the belly of a Sky Thing which remained similarly nameless. Therefore Hamdo climbed the mountain on which the sky turns, charmed the Sky Thing to sleep with his singing—for he was the greatest of all singers—and then, on the mountaintop, he made a dadar of himself, and put a feather in one of its hands and a burning torch in the other. He sent it inside the Sky Thing to make it regurgitate the Earth Thing, the dragon, the bull, the lion, and so forth. From inside the toad it cut itself free, rescuing the egg. Things were different in those days, I suspect. Animals don’t eat like that now. But the dadar was still a dadar, a reflection in the mirror of Hamdo.
More recently, the philosopher Telechronos spent so much time brooding among the ruins of the Old Places that he nearly went mad. He made a dadar for company. It became his leading disciple.
And a king of the Heshites was found to be a dadar. The priests gathered to break the link between the dadar and its master, lest some unseen, malevolent wizard lead the country to doom. The link was broken and the king crumbled into dust. A dadar is an unstable, insubstantial thing, like a collection of dust motes blown into shape by the wind.
Thus I feared every sound, every movement, every change in the direction of the wind, lest these be enough to unmake me. All the confidence I had gained in the years of my life ran away like water. I was nothing. An illusion, even to myself. A speck of dust drifting between the years.
I wept like a child abandoned in the cold and the dark.
And I argued: can an illusion weep? Can its tears make a blanket wet? But then, how could I, with the senses of a dadar, know the blanket to be real, or the wagon, or the tears?
I looked up front and saw only the horse nodding as it walked, and Tamda huddled at the reins. I did not speak to her, nor did she turn to speak to me. I think she was nearly as afraid as was I.
And I argued: But I have sired two sons. Two? One died when the cold of winter settled into him and spring did not drive it forth, but even in death he was real. He did not vanish like a burst bubble. And the other—he lives yet. Just this year he was called by a voice within him to journey south to the holy city of Ai Hanlo. I walked with him a long way, then wept when he passed from sight around a bend in the forest path. Does this not make me a man?
I was back to weeping. All roads of thought seemed to lead there.
I looked up again and saw that the sky was beginning to darken.
“Stop,” I said to Tamda, and she reined the horse. She was trembling as we made camp. We went through the motions of settling down to supper, but suddenly she was in my arms and sobbing.
“Please…don’t go away. Don’t leave me. I’m too old to learn to be without you.”
I was sobbing too. “I love you. Does that not make me a man? How can I prove it? Can a shadow feel such a thing?”
“I don’t know. What is going on? Are we both mad?”
“No, it isn’t that. I’m sure.”
“I wish it were. To be mad is to be filled with passion, and at least that’s real.”
Although both of us were tired and hungry, we made love there on the ground as the stars came out. But even as I did I was haunted by the thought that a shadow may make a shadow’s love and know nothing better.
Later, it was Tamda who put into words what I was groping for. She gave me a plan for action.
“You must find this wizard whose dadar you are,” she said, “and kill him. Then you’ll be free. You won’t fade away. I’m sure of it. We must go to him when he summons you.” She took a sheathed knife and put it inside my shirt. “When the time comes, surprise him.”
Then I got up and fetched my folio of drawing paper. I sat down beside her and paged through the book. I stopped to stare at the image of the frog king. I couldn’t help but admire the artistry. It was good work. When I wasn’t practicing my more esoteric skill, I simply drew. Sometimes I sold the pictures in towns we passed through. Sometimes I even sold the ones I’d made while healing, after the spirits were dispersed and we didn’t need them anymore.
I began to draw. I closed my eyes and let my hand drift. It didn’t seem to want to make any marks. I felt my hand slide along the page, the charcoal only touching paper seven—eight?—nine times?
Then I opened my eyes and saw that I’d made a fair outline of the Autumn Hunter, which vanishes from the southern sky as the year ends.
“We travel south,” I said.
* * * *
When first I looked over the plain by day, I thought of the fish from the deep ocean crags—now bursting out of the water altogether, into the air. As far as I could see, green and brown grasses rippled beneath the sun. Here and there stood a scrubby tree. A herd of antelopes grazed far away. Once we passed quite near to a green-scaled thing walking upright on thin legs, fluttering useless wings in annoyance at our presence. It stood twice as tall as a man, but looked harmless, even comical. I had heard of such creatures, half-shaped, still forming. They are said to emerge whenever one age ends and another begins. I had heard they were commoner in the south, as if the strangeness radiated from the holy city of Ai Hanlo, where the actual bones of the Goddess lay.
The journey was comforting. I relished every new experience more than I had any since I was a boy. But then the melancholy thought arose that it was only because I was about to lose these things, all sensations, all perception, even my very self, that they seemed more rare and exquisite.
Tamda slept in the back of the wagon while I drove. Horses are supposed to be able to detect supernatural creatures pretending to be men, but ours behaved normally for me.
The plain was divided by a winding silver line, which I knew to be the Endless River. It was said to engirdle the world. My son said he would follow it on the way to the holy city. I stopped by the bank to water the horse and to bathe. Tamda awoke and prepared a soup with river water. Later, I took up pen and paper and began to draw.
She watched me intently.
“Is it a message from our enemy?”
It wasn’t. A bird bobbing on a reed had caught my fancy, and I made a picture of it. It was a charming little sketch, the sort some rich lady would pay well for.
Later, in a town called Toradesh, by a bend in the river, a man came to us, begging that we rid his father of the spirit which possessed him. There were many people around, and I could not refuse. Tamda and I were shown into a basement room, where an old man was kept tied to a bed. His eyes were wide with his madness. He did not blink. There was foam at the corners of his mouth. He stank of filth.
The picture I drew was of a long flight of stairs, winding down into the darkness. Once I had departed from my body, I was on those sodden, wooden stairs, descending into a region of dampness and decay. At the bottom I waded knee-deep in mud until I came to a slime-covered door. I pulled on an iron ring to open it, but the wood was so soft that the metal came away in my hand. I kicked the hole thus begun until it was big enough for me to wriggle through.
On the other side something massive and hunched over, dark with glowing eyes, sat nearly buried in the muck.
“Begone!” I said. “I command you, leave this place. Be vomited up and leave this man.”
The thing turned to me and laughed. Its voice was that of a child, but hideous, as if the child had never grown up, but lost all innocence and wallowed in cruelty for a thousand years.
“Gladly would I leave, dadar, for the soul of this man is rotten and there is not much left of it. But you have no soul, so where would I go?”
“If I have no soul, what is this standing before you?”
“It is the dadar of a dadar, the image of an image, the rippling of water made by another wave. Dadar, Etash Wesa made you, and sends you as a present to his brother, Emdo Wesa.