Two ponies pulled a sledge piled with gutted animals, and when he saw it, the barbarian spat, and touched his nose with the heel of his hand, and ducked his face down into his armpit. It is your ritual of hatred; seeing it for the first time, standing in the snow, I found it funny. My brother had climbed up onto the mule, and he was kicking his boots into its ribs, while I kicked its backside. “Look how he hates death,” sang my brother, as the barbarian muttered and prayed. “He hates the sight of it.” A strutwing goose trailed its beak along the snow from the back of the sledge, its feathers dripping blood. “He hates it,” sang my brother.

* * *

My lords, how hard it is for me to tell you this. To tell a story in the mode of truth from beginning to end, a man is chained like a slave. We were a free people then. This means nothing to you, I know. To me it means my memories from this time are wordless. The beast on the mountain, what is in its mind but music? Chained, it understands each link. It fingers them, it memorizes the feel. Barbarians have their prayers, their work, their things, their names, their families to think of. But we had nothing. No names for ourselves. No words for so many things. No future and no past. Good—here, now, I can be proud of that. But it makes it difficult to begin. Difficult to remember a whole world. But I remember the death of this barbarian; he was a scholar. He was studying a place familiar to us all, unnamed in our tongue, Baat—or Paat—Cairn, something like that, in his: an empty city high up between the mountain’s knees, where the river runs out. I used to go so often. And of all the places of my childhood I remember it the best, because I know that now, right now as I speak, it is there unchanged—the great stone walls and staircases, the fallen columns and carved figures many times my height—unchanged, just as I remember it, in that eternal snow. We were a transient people then, dancers, musicians, hunters on horseback, sloppy builders. We were in love with things that disappear: the last note of the flute, the single flutter of the dancer’s hands. And in that old barbarian city, people had lived and disappeared. They would never be back.

The scholar went there every day. And at night he stayed in our town and studied us, stayed in our houses, took up no room, made no trouble. He played with his books and papers, his camera and tapes.

He had brought his own food, dried vegetables and fruits. Real food disgusted him. And at first my sisters were careful where they slept and how they dressed when he was by, for they had heard barbarians were sensitive to human women, and they had no wish to kill him. But nothing came of that; he slept heavily on the mats and rugs we gave him. And by nightfall he was always drunk. Every evening he would find a corner in the longhouse, and watch and drink until his eyes burned. And I paid close attention. I said to him, “Stranger.”