Free Secret Dreams by Keith Korman

breasts hung separate and alone, and they stared at him kindly. With such a pleasant, giving body, what did she weep for? For whom … ?
    Next came Marduk, a four-inch god of war; his face had smoothed with years, leaving his beard a few mere scratches. In one hand he once held a weapon no bigger than a matchstick, Yet his mouth was cruelly carved — the insatiable lips of Nebuchadnezzar, the bitter breath of battle fume and death. A tiny battle god like an outrider who precedes the main host. A blot on the horizon, yet the herald of doom. Rapine, ruin, and slaughter. He didn’t have to be big, just the right size to swing from your neck as your sword rose and fell and the blood ran down its hilt.
    In an alley shop in Siena he had found Astarte. And when he saw her he knew he must possess the little love goddess of fertility. The ancient days had seen so many of them, a score of lusty maids for a score of lovers. So many Astartes had been made from common clay, perhaps in honor of the sacred temple prostitutes of her name. Common clay-feet country girls, serving for a time in the big city, before being sent home pregnant, with a sack of coppers in their belt. This one, so shameless, so blatant — she made him covet her in an instant breath of lust. And yet a figure so old and weathered there was precious little left of her to admire.
    But what was left told all. The long-dead maker had concentrated on her woman’s parts. They were raised like a lozenge, as though meant to be adored. Swollen, impossible to overlook. And after millenniums his eyes were still drawn to the space between her thighs. So she was meant to be: a wanton, luscious thing, with taunting voluptuous parts and the heavy splayed feet of a barefoot country girl. So a sculptress made her. For it had to be a sculptress — so much self-love, self-adoration in the thing. The maker had to be a woman, and knowledgeable in the ways of men. Maybe a prostitute who thought herself a goddess. One of dozens who lived in a temple of fertility and love. A sacred precinct run by prostitute priestesses in a town full of soldiers and merchants: where outside the town walls the good wives kept their husbands at home, digging out crumbling furrows under the sun of Assyria.
    He would never know….

Chapter 6
The Wise Man Dies in Childhood
    The sun had shifted along the carpet, a bar of light warming Lün’s dark-brown nose. And the thrush had returned from the almond tree. The bird stood in the open garden doorstep, a foot or two from the sleeping chow. The old man looked down at the figures surrounding his green blotter. The blotter had been replaced twenty times since he had begun putting statues on his desk. This one was fresh and untouched. It mocked him, for he would never wear it out, never fray it with thoughtless scribbles and a pointed pen. They had put it on his desk to remind him of the old office. To make him more at home. But in trying to make these strange surroundings more familiar, they only made it more obvious that he had lost forever everything that came before. Another kind of death.
    His little tribe of gargoyles would pass into the future without him, as they had done with countless owners since their beginnings. The possessor of life died, and yet the mute stones remained; is that what people meant when they said the gods were immortal?
    He had saved them from the sack of Vienna — if a man could save a god. Stowing them about his person, even in his wife’s purse, smuggling them across the frontier like forbidden idols from a hostile land. His favorite, Pan, thumped heavily in his overcoat pocket. Keeping his coat on no matter what, in the June heat, in the sweaty waiting rooms and stuffy railway compartments. Even when he had to urinate in the spotless coach toilet,- it banged against the locked door as the train rocked him unsteadily from side to side. He missed the swaying toilet and wet his shoes. He didn’t