nothing more.
I knew what to do from much experience. As my hand moved over the paper, I wrestled with the thing inside the girl. Soon I saw it more clearly, a frog-like king clad in robes of living marble. He had long, webbed claws like a beast, but his face bespoke vast intelligence and age. I understood him to be a creature from some earlier age of the Earth, trying to return now that the Goddess was dead. His eyes seemed to speak to me, saying, “Why should I not have this girl, and walk beneath the sky again?”
“You shall not have her,” I said in the language of the dream, and as I spoke, my hand completed the drawing. Then my body got to its feet, stood over the girl, and with a pair of tongs reached into her mouth, pulling out first my spirit, then the other. It was like flying up out of a mountain through a little hole in the top, into my own hand.
“Pandiphar Nen,” said my wife, and with the sound I came into myself. I was whole and fully awake. The white mist and the things in it were gone. The task should have been over. The second spirit I’d extracted should have melted into the air now that I had captured its image.
But the stone king was standing before us. Tamda screamed. It turned to stare into my eyes, and its gaze caught me as surely as any prey is ever charmed by a snake. I was helpless.
“Dadar,” it said. “Know that I was placed here to bring this message to you from worlds beyond the world. I am sent by your creator. Know that you are a dadar, a wizard’s shadow and not a man, a hollow thing like a serpent’s skin filled with wind, pretending to be a serpent, deluding itself. The master shall make himself known shortly, and then you shall be sent on the task for which he made you, his dadar.”
Then, howling, the creature went through the closed door of the house like a battering ram, scattering wood and screaming at the villagers outside.
I was in a daze, only half aware of anything.
“Let us get away from here,” Tamda was saying. “They’ll think we’re witches. Hurry, before they regain their courage. Forget about the payment.”
“I don’t understand,” was all I could say. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
She gathered our things and bundled me into the back of the wagon. No one interfered as she drove away from the village.
* * * *
The wagon rattled around me. Sunlight burned through the canvas cover. I lay in the stuffy heat, thinking.
The problem, and the reason I felt so much dread, was that I did understand what had happened. My spotty education was more than enough to include everything I needed to know. Some wizard had directed me, his dadar, into that village for his own ends. I knew full well what a dadar was. The world has never been thick with them, but they have been around since the very beginning. They are projections, like a shadow cast by a man standing before a campfire at night, but somehow the shadow is given flesh and breath and a semblance of consciousness. Hamdo, the First Man, made one. He had shaped with his hands the egg from which all mankind was to be born, but while he slept by the River of Life, a toad came along and swallowed it. Then a serpent swallowed the toad and a fox swallowed the serpent, and was in turn devoured by a lion, which fell prey to a bull, which 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,