The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

"They couldn,t," Margon said in a small voice, looking at him. "I was their divine king."

Stuart was delighted with the answer. He couldn,t conceal his excitement.

This is so simple, Reuben was thinking. Stuart keeps asking all the questions to which I want the answers, and to which Laura probably wants answers. And the questions are indeed driving the flow of revelation, so why complain?

He could feel the hot oppressive sun of the Iraqi desert suddenly. He saw the dusty trenches of the archaeological dig on which he,d worked. He saw those tablets, those ancient cuneiform tablets, those precious fragments laid out on the table in the secret room.

He was so excited by this little bit of intelligence that he might have gone off, perplexed, pondering for a long time. It was like reading a wonderful sentence in a book, and not being able to continue because so many possibilities were crowding his mind.

Margon picked up the water, and tasted it, then drank it. And carefully he set it down again, staring at it as if fascinated by its bubbles, the play of light in the leaded-crystal glass.

He did not touch the bits of fruit on the small plate in front of him. But he drank the coffee, drank it while it was still smoking. And reached suddenly for the silver carafe.

Reuben filled the cup for him. Cupbearer for a king.

Felix and Thibault were gazing calmly at Margon. And Laura had turned in her chair, the better to see him, arms folded, comfortable as she waited.

Stuart was the only one who couldn,t wait.

"What city was it?" Stuart asked. "Come on, Margon, tell me!"

Felix gestured for him to be quiet, with a severe reprimanding look.

"Ah, it,s only natural for him to want to know," said Margon. "Remember, there have been those who weren,t curious at all, who wanted to know nothing of the past, and how did that serve them? Maybe it would have been better for them if they had had a history, an ancestry, even if it was nothing more than descriptive. Maybe we need this."

"I need it," whispered Stuart. "I need to hear everything."

"I,m not sure," said Margon gently, "that you,ve really heard what I have said so far."

That,s just it, thought Reuben, the very difficulty. How to hear that the man sitting here has been alive continuously since the beginning of recorded time? How do you hear that?

"Well, I will not be the chronicler of the Morphenkinder just now," said Margon, "and not ever perhaps. But I will tell you some things. It,s enough for you to know I was deposed, exiled. I wouldn,t claim to be the divine son of the fictive god who,d built the canals and the temples - venerable forerunner to Enlil, Enki, Marduk, Amun Ra. I sought for answers within ourselves. And believe me, this point of view was not so radical as you might think. It was common. But to express the point of view was not common at all."

"This was Uruk, wasn,t it?" Stuart asked breathlessly.

"Far older than Uruk," Margon shot back. "Far older than Eridu, Larsa, Jericho - any city you might name. The sands have never yielded the remains of my city. Perhaps they never will. I myself don,t know what happened to it, or my descendants, or what its full legacy proved to be for the cities springing up around it. I don,t know what happened to its trading outposts. Its trading posts trafficked in a way of life as well as in livestock and slaves and goods. Yet I don,t know what became of them, of that particular way of life. I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what,s happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might." His voice was now heated and running smoothly. "I had no view of myself as positioned by fate or happenstance at the birthplace of a continuity that would endure for millennia. How could I? I underestimated every single force that impinged on my existence. It couldn,t have been otherwise. It,s a mere accident that I survived. That,s why I don,t like to talk of it. Talk is suspect. When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie. I despise what is a lie!"

When he paused this time, no one spoke. Even Stuart was still.

"It,s enough to say I was deposed and exiled," said Margon. "My brother was behind it." He made a little gesture of disgust. "And why not? Truth is a risky proposition. It,s the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies - ."

Again he stopped.

He smiled suddenly at Stuart.

"That,s why you want the truth from me, isn,t it? Because people have taught you all your short life that lies are as vital to you as the air you breathe and you are hurtling full tilt into a life dependent upon the truth."

"Yes," said Stuart gravely. "That,s it, exactly." He hesitated, then said, "I,m a g*y boy. I,ve been taught ever since I can remember that there were excellent reasons for me to lie about it to everybody I knew."

"I understand," said Margon. "The architects of any society depend upon lies."

"So tell me what really happened."

"Doesn,t matter, all that about gods and goddesses or exiled princes," said Margon. "But let,s go back to the narrative in which we both want to find a bit of salvageable truth."

Stuart nodded.

"Fortunately for Margon the Godless, no one was going to shed the blood of the heretic king. Margon the Godless was put outside the walls, and left to go his way like a desert drifter, with a skin of water and a staff. It is enough to say I found myself in Africa, traveling down through Egypt, and along the coast and then to this strange island where a peaceful and much despised people lived.

"They were hardly what one would call human beings. No one in those days would have thought them human. But they were a human race, a species of human, and a cohesive tribe. They took me in, fed me, clothed me insofar as they wore clothes. They looked rather more like apes than men and women. But they had language, they knew and exchanged expressions of love.

"And when they told me their enemy, shore people, were coming, when they described the shore people to me, I thought we would all die.

"They themselves lived in complete harmony with one another. But the shore people were people like me. They were Homo sapiens sapiens - fierce, armed with throwing spears and crude stone axes, and ravenous to destroy a contemptible enemy for sheer sport."