Free Otherwise by John Crowley

measured his growth in more subtle things: when he saw the King Red Senlin’s Son, his head low, sword across his lap, attention elsewhere, he felt still the strength in him, no less than on the field. It gave him an odd thrill of continuity, a pleasurable sense of understanding: the King on the battlefield or here at his ease is one King. When the Visitor tried to describe the experience to Learned Redhand, the Gray failed to grasp what was marvelous in it. He found it much more compelling that the Visitor could cause a stone thrown into the air to float slowly to his own hand rather than fall on its natural course. The Visitor in turn was embarrassed not to be able to understand the Gray’s explanation of why what he had done was impossible.
    An image of Doth: a man carrying a lamp or pot of fire, old and ragged, leaning on a staff.
    Learned Redhand’s head was beginning to ache. Perhaps he really hadn’t done it at all… This Visitor and the mystery of him grew quickly more exacerbating than intriguing, like an answerless riddle. Even in the bright winter light of the Harbor solarium, the Visitor made a kind of darkness, as though the thick ambiguity of the far past, leaking like a gas from the ancient writings he pored over, clouded him.
    “These images,” the Visitor said, marking his place with a careful finger before looking up, “they’re all of men or women. Why is that?”
    “Well,” Learned began, “the process of symbol-making…”
    “I mean, for the names of weeks, it would seem one at least would be, oh, a sheaf of wheat, a horse, a cloud…”
    “The ancient mind…”
    “Is it possible that these names were once truly the names of real men and women?”
    “Well… what men and women?” The Gray idea of the past, formulated like their simple, stern moral fables out of long experience with the rule of men’s minds, was simply that before a certain time there were no acts, men were too unformed or mindless to have performed any that could be memorialized, and that therefore, having left no monuments, the distant past was utterly unknowable. Time began, the Grays said, when men invented it, and left records to mark it by; before then, it didn’t exist. To attempt to probe that darkness, especially through pre-Gray manuscripts that claimed to articulate beginnings by unintelligible “first images” and “mottoes” and “shadows of first things,” was fruitless certainly, and probably heretical. “No,” he went on, “aids to memory I think merely, however foolishly elaborate.”
    The Visitor looked at Learned’s smooth, gracious face a moment, and returned to his reading.
    An image of Barnol carries this motto: Spread sails to catch the light of Suns.
    An image of Athenol carries this motto: Leviathan.
    “Leviathan,” the Visitor said softly.
    “An imaginary god or monster,” said Learned. To the rational Gray mind the two were one.
    Suddenly a servant stood in the solarium archway. The hall floors had been hushed with straw since Redhand had been brought home near dead; the servants moved like ghosts. “The Protector,” he whispered, indicating the Visitor, “wishes to see you.”
    Leviathan…
    The Visitor rose, nodded to Learned, went out behind the man and down twisting, straw-carpeted corridors.
    Leviathan. It was as though the name had taken his hand in a darkness where he had thought himself alone. Taken his hand, and then slipped away. Gently, blindly he probed his darkness, seeking for its fearful touch again.
    Redhand had grown older. He sat propped on pillows within a curtained bed; old, knowing servants made infusions and compresses, and the medicinal odor filled the high room. A large fire gave fierce heat, roaring steadily in the dim hush. Redhand’s dark-circled eyes found the Visitor and guided him to the bed; he patted the rich coverlet and the Visitor sat.
    “Do you have a name?” The Visitor could see in Redhand’s face the unreasoning fear he had first seen