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AND THE
ODALISQUE
SING, OH, SING, OF THE GRACEFUL GASELLI! Nimble and fleet are their boot-black feet, and sweet are their whistling songs! No shepherd more steadfast than we, no firefly so quick on the wing, no melodies lighter, no lyrics brighter than ours—than ours!—on the sheep-spotted fields of home!
We are the bringers of grace, we are the players of the goat-horn flutes, we are the fire-tenders in fields where hay has been bundled and wheeled. But light up your camp and find us gathering near, stamping our hooves on the grassy ground, stamping our hooves to the beat of your drum, stamping our hooves to the sound of your wine-sped violas! But kindle a flame and see us creeping in from our sheep and our cattle, creeping in from our milk and our meat, creeping in from the dew and the damp and the pinwheeling, heart-reeling ergot on the rye, the wheat, the golden, gleaming grain!
And if in the morning you find your wife has gone missing, if in the morning you find your brother run off, if in the morning you find your number one or two less than the night before, it is not our fault, we are but animals, and follow our bestial nature, as you do, as you do, else there would be no fires and no wine, no songs to thresh the mind, no whirling, no wheeling, no slaughter-sheep bleating—and what would our lives be then? Yes, we take one or two, but what do we give you? Fire and wine and songs in the mind and whirling and wheeling and lovely girls bleating—we give as good as we take.
Yes, sing for the Gaselli. These are my people, and we are well sung. We hunt the campfires out in the low dells, and do we dance? Do we sing sweeter than any twanging country harp? Bet on it. Are we lissome and lithe, are our faces fair, do we kiss like poets imagine they do? And are there one or two gone in the morning? Bet on that, too. By our green you shall know us, our green coats and our green skirts, trailing behind us so that only those who know to look will see those boot-black hooves a-gleaming. And what befalls those lucky one or two, who in the damp, ashen dawn are nowhere to be found?
All creatures under the Stars must eat, my dears.
We are shepherds—to eat the sheep we tend would be an abomination, would it not? To eat cattle and goat would be obscene! How could you even suggest it? What perversion you describe! Be off with you, now, else you shall feel my hoof!
But wait. Perhaps there was a Gaselli with hungers like the ones you expound. Perhaps there was one who did not like the taste of girl, even less the taste of wiry Gypsy boy. Perhaps he thought lamb and roasted cow smoky and rich and sweet, perhaps he thought goat salty and soft to his neat, white teeth. Perhaps his name was Taglio, and perhaps he stands before you. And it is not impossible to imagine that after years of secret meals and pantomiming at the revels, pretending to gnaw a bone or lap a wound, he was caught gorging himself on a little lamb who had died of the cold. But this poor Gaselli begs forgiveness! What it was that caught me at my feast is hard and hard to believe.
It was a cow. This does not strain the mind, I am sure! But it was a cow the size of a barn, with eyes like the forked spaces between flames, depthless and black and glittering fair! Her flanks were dun-golden, smooth and muscled, showing girl white, sow white, wool white skin beneath. Her hooves were bronze, her udder full and firm as a moon, her nose flared trumpet-wise, the breadth of her chest enormous. Yet she moved, I swear it so, without sound over the grass, graceful as a trained horse, and her hooves burned the earth where she stepped, sending up sighs of steam.
There was a light about her, I tell you true. It was not a glow, but a light that hung within her, like the shape of a second cow. I fell before her, on my knees.
“O Great Heifer of Heaven!” I cried, for my poetry had not left me. “You have come to punish me for devouring your children! But they were sweet, and I am weak!”
She regarded me calmly. When she spoke her voice vibrated in my bones. “I
eat. Why should you not?”
“Because Gaselli eat dancers, not the flock. We are to eat drunkards who cannot find their way home through the mere—not a poor, defenseless cow who never knew where home was to begin with.”
“I know where home is.”
“I daresay you are not defenseless, either!”
“I have not my brother’s horns, but it has never been a worry to me. I have not my brother’s heart, either. I shed my hiding place to taste the salt-sweet grass and listen to the lowing of beasts, for these things are as cool water poured over my forelock when I have been cloistered in the stone and the dark for so long. He never cared for the grass.”
Sing for the Gaselli! But also sing to them—for we are beloved of tales, and they are beloved to us. I knew her then, and scolded myself that I had not known her before. Had I not myself told tales of Aukai, the Milk-Star, who makes oxen of bulls with a snap of her jaw? Had I not told of the mad castrati-monks to frighten the calves in their crèches? I fell to my knees, my own small, furry knees, below her great, shining face—beauty beyond any dancing girl with a red shawl and blue stockings. Her light filled me—I could hardly see for the glow of it!
Perhaps it is not right to explain how a man is moved. Perhaps he ought to keep the logics of light and blood and heaven locked tight within him, with a chain and a snapping dog before it. Perhaps it is enough to say that a man with graceful feet and a tongue more graceful still was struck dumb by the radiance of a cow, pierced with shame for all he had eaten in her image, cut through with adoration of the smallest shadow cast by the flick of her tail. How can even the most quick-fingered of minstrels convince his catgut harp to tell what ecstasy is? I am the most quick-fingered of minstrels, and I cannot.
What did I say to her? I swore things. I babbled like a lost sheep. I would join those who cut themselves in her honor, for her love. I would do the penance her brother refused. If she would but touch me I would die at her lowing. It is hard to recall now. Ecstasy slips the mind. But before she could reject me—might she? I could not let her!—I drew my sheep’s shears and did his penance and mine there on the long grass. My blood mixed with the blood of the flock, and with her light, her milk-light, lying on me like a forgiving hand. The pain was a ripping, a gouging, keener than horseshoe nails pounded into me, and my green trousers were a sudden red—but her light was with me, and filled me, and the silver singing in my head was greater than any shear, the silver, woolen singing which stopped up all but itself, the silver, wild, and woolen singing which I shall not forget for all my cart-drawn days.
Below her I lay in a sop of blood. She watched me, calm as a cloudless sky. She blinked.
“What sad, strange things you are.” She sighed, and lumbered away over the low hills, scalding the weeds as she walked.
Perhaps I was hasty. Perhaps I was foolish. But I never liked the Gypsy girls anyway. Faith is always embarrassing in the morning. The other Gaselli recoiled—if I had been a secret deviant before, I was unmasked. I left them with little remorse. Let them revel and eat and revel again. It did not interest me. But I found, in the wide world which does not smell entirely of wet sheepswool, cowhide, and goat-hair, that the opportunities for a eunuch are limited.
I did not wish to be a spy, which is the chief activity of my, if you’ll excuse the expression, breed. To be a spy is no better than to be endlessly dancing in the midst of a throng you intend to devour, and I had had enough of that. I had no patience for the intrigues of a chancellor or advisor to any sort of king or treasurer. And when it came to it, the chief activity of the monks of Aukai seemed to be to rattle their Absentia in little cedar boxes and brag about how long it had taken them to faint from the pain. That did not seem to me to be the most sacred of pastimes. It seemed logical enough, therefore, to choose what was left to me, and travel south through the orange-blossomed jungles to the lands ruled by those who kept harems. I had been a shepherd of flocks which looked and smelled far worse, after all.
And so I came to shepherd the Raja’s women, who were varied and beautiful as a herd of horses, swift and sleek, red and brown and black and golden, their hair dipped in frankincense and braided up in pearls, their skin kept firm with bamboo switches, and bound up in yellow silk, for this color marked them as the Raja’s, no less than a chair or a shoe. Of course, my clothes, too, were yellow, and I mourned my lost green, but I belonged to the Raja, too, down to my name and my boot-black hooves.
I was happy—I soothed the new ones when wars brought them trembling to my care, the older ones taught me to play cards and juggle, the ones in between told me tales I had never heard before. There were so many women, in truth, that the Raja could not possibly visit them all, and thus he was not much a part of our lives, a specter only, looming in the distance. And every night, there was lamb to eat, and chickens, and goat, and quail eggs, and deer flanks. No one even suggested that I might eat a girl.
Immacolata was not a concubine, or a wife, or even a war prize.
She was an odalisque, which made her like me. She was a virgin who served the harem. She did not guard them, but dipped their hair in frankincense and braided it up in pearls, hardened their skin with bamboo switches and bound them up in yellow silk. She painted their breasts with bronze paint when they were called up to the bedchamber, drying their tears and working the most wonderful calligraphy on their skin, like the tracks of jeweled spiders. Her own silks were red, red as the blood of my body that night under the Star, and she moved among the others like a scarlet ship in a golden sea. I will not say I did not watch her on those tides. I did not cut out my heart on that long grass.
One day she came to me—she came to me, a yellow-bound fool, to me!—and drew me aside, to a long golden couch, and sat me next to her. Her hair was a river of smoke, curling away from her stark brown eyes and amber skin. She was all the colors of expensive teas, dark and golden and burnished. There were no pearls in her braids.
