“Lie to me about one single thing,” he said, “and I’ll break your neck. You know we have a music for lying. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Let go!”

He released her, and she jumped up and stood facing him, hands to her neck. “What are you talking about? Why are you such a child?”

“Because I am.” He dropped his eyes humbly. “I don’t know anything about love. Barbarians know all about it.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He was right, he didn’t know anything about it. Later he fucked her with a kind of desperation, as if she held hidden inside her body some vital secret. He searched for it, his fingers locked around her tail, and fucked her until she was like a river inside, and he couldn’t even feel her anymore. She cried out, exhausted, but still he kept on and on, and the sweat made their bodies skid and slip. And then, still hard, he lay on his stomach on the saturated sheet, his eyes unfocused, reflecting nothing. She let him go. It was part of what fascinated her, that enormous capacity for nothingless which stilled his soul and took the place of Angkhdt. She lay with her cheek against his back, her fingers in the groove of muscle along his spine.

* * *

She was a beautiful woman, and not in the normal masklike way. In some women, beauty speaks of who they are. In her it spoke eloquently, the more so because her training as a priestess and a goddess had muted other voices. She had grown up practically alone. Her skin was the color of custard or sweet cake, of something edible and good to eat. She was not tall. Her hair was Starbridge black and fell in thick untidy curls around her face and shoulders.

His form too, the shape of his features and his enormous body, seemed the most expressive part of him.

Along with so much else, his race had rejected the idea that people differed, because they saw it as a way of chaining actions to reactions. So while they worshipped freedom, they rejected individuality. Free men and women resembled one another a great deal, it had turned out. They were arrogant, irrational, impulsive, humorless, ecstatic. And though this boy was trying to change, was eager to accept some shackles, still his body was the most expressive part of him, the only part he knew. He touched it often, scratching and rubbing, and he was always moving his arms and legs to stretch the muscles, and rotating his ankles and his wrists to hear the bones snap and realign.

He had been there for a week, living in secret in the bishop’s chamber, eating the food she brought him, before the old man found him. The bishop’s secretary limped up the stairs one night when they were half asleep. Devils and angels cavorted in his clothes, peeping with long-nosed faces out from his sleeves, hanging by their tails from his chain of office, playing hide and seek in his hair. They bounded past him up the spiral stairs, full of play. The old man reached the landing and stretched his hand out for the stone statue of the faun at the entrance to the bishop’s quarters, stroking it with withered pale fingers. Lamps burned bright here. And every angle of the corridor, every discoloration of the marble floor was known to him, illuminated by the lamp of memory for his blind eyes, for he had been a child here, a chaplain in the temple. But there was something unfamiliar now, an unfamiliar smell in this sacred place, something that made him pause, something that had brought him fumbling up the stairs from his own rooms, something. He smelled a faint, lingering smell of sin.