A man stepped out across the room opposite from where I stood, a biter. I would have known him by his clean clothes even if I had not known his face. He had been a strong musician once, and I have memories of him standing in the torchlight of the hall, bent over his violin, my brothers and my sisters packed like slaves to hear him. Or even when he played alone, by himself in the high pastures, I remember children running out to find him, and they would sit around him in the snow. But by the time I speak of, that was past. A man had cut his hand off in a fight, I don’t know why, and he had given up and taken to biting in a house by himself. Let me explain. Our kind of life was not for everyone. Some found it hard to give up everything for freedom’s sake. They had things to occupy their minds. They were addicted to some work, or they had friends and children. We had given them a name. We called them betrayers, literally “biters” in our language, and we hated them. The pride of our race was so hard to sustain. The rest of us had sacrificed so much to music, to emptiness and long cold wandering, that we could only hate them. And we hated them the more because we needed them. The biters were our doctors, builders, makers, parents. It gave them happiness to do things for themselves and other people.

Without that, life falls apart, no matter what your gifts. Babies die, houses fall down. We needed someone to preserve us, to preserve a spirit they themselves could never share, a spirit to fill us with hunger every morning as we broke snow on the mountains with our horses and our dogs, a spirit to fill us every night and every morning with reasons to be up and to be gone.

But I am wandering: that day, in that stone chamber when I was a child, a biter stood in the middle of a circle of statues, with a carbide lantern in his hand. He said, “Is that you?” He said “Is that you?” in an empty voice, and then something else. I didn’t understand him. Biters often know peculiar words. But the dead man, the barbarian scholar, had had a name and that was it. Mistaking me for him, the biter called me by his name, a word that referred to him as if he were a thing, fit to be used, like a blanket or a bed.

My brothers and my sisters had no names.

I took up a loose piece of tile and skipped it across the floor. It made a circle round the biter’s feet. He laughed. “Little brother,” he said, and he came towards me. “Little brother, what are you doing here?”

This was common biting, not worth a reply. I spat onto the floor and turned away. There was a statue in the center of the room, different from the rest—a stone table and the figure of a man astride it, his legs hanging down on either side. He had a dog’s head, dog’s teeth, dog’s eyes, and the hair ran down his back under his rich clothes. And from his groin rose up a stiff enormous phallus, which he held in front of him between his hands. It was so thick his fingers couldn’t close around it, and so tall it protruded to his chin. Along its naked sides long lines of words were cut into the stone, and single words into the spaces between his knuckles.