15.

The pancreatic morning breaks sickly and yellow.

Again, the thumping body, the hang-over from delirium. This, at least, holds to pattern, grinding millstones in my grisly head, scarlet shame frothing and gurgling like spoiled port, grapes trampled underfoot, stains of burst fruit spreading like sin. As I wake the Monkey is perched bird-like on my chest, picking expertly at my aquamarine hair, grooming me as he would a member of his troop.

"It is poisoning you, the Stone, cyanide in your pretty blue cells," he informed me with some cheer as he mussed with my curls. I answered sleepily. "It was just a rock. I escaped the Angel. How can it hurt me?"

"Hoo, hoo, Darlingblue! I escaped the Angel when I took it from you. You are still within Her. She wanted you mad and gibbering, and you are obliging. It is all going so well. You did not swallow it, so you could not master it. It licked at you like a grassfire. I took it so that you could not conquer it, so that you would follow the path that lunacy has laid out in such profound bricks. If you were your singular body, you could not follow me, tread so heavily this Road. Only the mad are Seekers-After. You are burning, girlchild. It is beautiful to see. The Stone is Doubt. It is Pernicious. You ought to pay more attention, you know. You have lost your eyes and are changing bodies like ball gowns. Were you so malleable and myriad before She came with Her swathes of ice?"

"Hic monstra delitescunt. But she cannot be the Villain. There is no Monster at the Center of the Labyrinth, no Minotaur, no Beast. I know it. That is not the meaning of this place. And why would she harm me? Why would you keep me from deliverance?" He nodded sagely. "This is Assassination. You have no choice. It is a game that has been played and played before. This is the Way. There is no Monster. But there are many monsters hereabout, as there are many Centers. You are a monster, I am a monster. She was, and a Center, too. You should have showed her your teeth. Instead she is poisoning you like mistletoe on an oak, because you thought she was beautiful and you let her. Hoo. Now you are very sick, and you will continue to spend your nights speaking in the breakwater tongues of the Labyrinth and clawing at the earth until your bones weather to white on the wide lanes of the Road. Or possibly light blue. As for howandwhy," he shrugged wheat-shaded shoulders. "She Devours. It is the Way. Can't you trust that the tale unfolds as it should?" He was contorting his graceful fingers rhythmically, tapping my body like a piano.

"No, I can't. And how is it you know so much, Beast? Who are you?"

A long, slow smile spread across his features, widening the wrinkled face to a glowing jack o' lantern. "I am myself and no other. But nothing here is precisely what it is."

"Ssst!" I snorted, grinning. "I know all that. Who are you?" He laid one finger alongside that squat little nose and uttered his syllable.

"Hoo." The air was suddenly filled with his wild laughter, leaping across the Road and careening off Walls, cavorting and thoroughly enjoying his joke. Catching his breath, he giggled, "Oh, Darlingblue, that was lovely. If you are very, very good and promise not to strangle me during your funny little fits, sometime soon I shall show you my name, then will you know. Until then, mum's the word."

The Monkey was off on another fit of hooting acrobatics. "But you," his voice calmed, became grave, "are in trouble. I would like to help you, very much, very much. But I can't. My Medicine is not for you."

And so I was falling again, lost in the newness-which-was-not, lost in waves of golden fur and shining eyes, winks of I-know-what-you-don't and shrugs of self-satisfaction. Lost, not just strange and Wandering, but diseased and poisoned, asps worming towards my great indigo heart that very, very moment. My voice cracked like a clay pitcher: "Is there nothing to be done?"

The Monkey flicked at a gnat on his saffron pelt. "Oh, please, woman. Of course there is or I would have stayed in my cozy little Temple and let you blather on your way. I merely said I cannot help you. Hoo! I can't do everything, you know. We must find Her again, the Angel. And you must be entirely mad before we do, wholly Devoured, or there will be nothing to give her."

"It is a Quest," I said doubtfully.

"No, it is a sequence of events. You will not defeat Her with some Vorpal Blade, or win anything at all from Her. It is not the End, nor can we truly Seek her, as the Labyrinth carries us where it wishes, if it can wish. Will has no meaning here, like everything else. There is no meaning. There is no pagination. There is no index, no glossary. There is no first edition, no reprinting, there is only this battered, dog-eared now. There is no gallery, there is no photographic record, there is no grand entrance or dramatic exit. There is only the great nowbody roasted in its sapphire hide, and your great seaside eyes, widening in ineffably slow understanding, rolling weakly into darkness as you are eaten, piece by piece.

It is not a Quest merely because it has a beginning with me and an ending with Her. You are not going to fight, or act, or plead. You can get nothing from Her. She may not heal you, and you cannot force Her. But you must make a circle. You may never find Her. A Quest is Heroic, you are not. You are selfish: you wish only to Survive and Devour. It will not change the Labyrinth, or the fate of a fair-armed damosel. You are the damsel and the dragon, you are the prince and the witch, you are the captain and the whale. 'Quest' has no meaning for you, who Seek only the delectable end of your own rattling tail. You are the Seeker-After, so get on with it and Seek." He folded his arms across his chest.

"It is, really. You are tricking me into it, but it is a Quest, a Journey. I do not want it."

"Nothing here is precisely what it is."

"And I shall die otherwise?"

"Yes. You may die, anyway."

"And it will be quite awful?"

"Yes."

"And there is no other Road but this?"

"Has there ever been another Road for you?"

I paused. "But we cannot Strike Out and hunt her."

"No."

"Then how do the Doors hunt me?"

Again the slow butter-spread of a smile. "So clever, Darlingblue, so precise. How indeed? They are not like us, not our kind."

"They Devour," I remarked.

"How would you know? Hoo! You, the great Labyrinth-Navigator, the great Walker, escaping every Door like bread from the oven! Yes, they do, but not like us. The Doors are part of the Maze, not within. They can hunt you, and me for that matter, because they are conscious of you as the Road is; you are within them/it/all. It is all one. Such the terrible instinct to run, suspecting darkness and dread on the other side. But if you will not believe in a Monster or a Castle, why do you cling to your faith in that terrifically humanological fear of fire and black on the windward side of the Door? You do not really engage the Maze at all."

"You do not go diving into Doors, you flee, too!" I protested.

"Yes, because I do not wish to be Devoured in any fashion, and I prefer a Singularity of Possibles. I run because I know their danger. You run because you do not, because you are good at being hunted. Perhaps the best. So good you have never been caught."

"You're being very serious."

"You're being very stupid. Afraid to save yourself." I bristled in indignation and frustration. He watched, bemused.

"I do not wish to die on her command. So I am forced. Will has no meaning," I sighed. "But how will we do this thing?"

The Monkey curled up next to me, long tail waving lazily, curving like a question mark. "We will be as clear as the rivers of Babylon, and the sun will shine through us as through a clear glass. We will plant our feet on this long highway and the Labyrinth's currents will take us where they must. Or they will not. You never know. But we are caught up in a sequence, and these things usually find their way. Make no mistake, Darlingblue, we are Highwaymen, in our blue velvet cloaks, we are Dashing and Brave. And we go out onto the Road to steal and Devour. Numinous, rapacious creatures are we, and when we stamp the moon quakes."

His tail wafted like a kite on the breeze, weaving into a figure-eight. "But now, by the sun and the fabled shores of the Gitche Gumee, it is time for tea. Boil the water, dear, whilst I go and hunt for the well-known and elusive beast, the ferocious butter-backed cucumber sandwich. Hoo!"

He scampered off, disappearing behind a low gorse bush, yellow on yellow, smooth butter of fur and flower. It is all falling apart, leaving me to strike the fire in the shelter of an overhanging Wall, crushing nettles and dried roses from the Hare's Garden into a mild tea, pouring like a wife into my little clay pot, waiting for the returning pads of little golden feet.

I was saddled suddenly with a Companion and a Quest, and the witch's brew bubble of pale green in my hands. I knew now how far I had slipped since I lay helpless beneath the Angel's potent form, how close her white fingers lay to my heart, how much more quickly it beat now, now that the hooded beauty of nihilist ideation, the certainty of emptiness, the comfort of a Search without End was slowly being stretched by red-faced inquisitors, limbs pulled like taffy, plucked like harp strings. My head fills with the whipping birch-switches of that music, my arms and legs strummed roughly, that old E minor chord over and over. I can smell the simmer of the oil, molten bronze waiting for them to dip my body like an altar candle, to raise up boils and blisters like love-bites, fill my mouth with a liquid scream, gurgle of churning gold coating tooth and tongue. I will not confess, recalcitrant I, that all I have known is false, and that this Monkey is the master of all. I will not confess that I am a child and must be taught as though I sat at a little desk with a ruler and fat pink eraser, the smell of chalk in my nose (and yet where does this image come from, the twin-braided child with a heart-shaped face, staring into the wild nirvana of a blank green board?) I will not confess, and whatever this is that grows inside me like a tumor shows me with boyish pride the rack and the thumbscrews, the eruption of nacreous fingernail and warm spurt of blood over knuckle, the melodious popping of joints on the merry wheel, crackling of bones like a winter fire. It is so beautiful to give in, it whispers, the voice of the Stone in my mind like a gilded priest, so simple and right, to let the welcoming arms of that promised madness enfold you, comfort you, nurse you like your own mother. Bend under the leather-handled whips, back like an ash bow, yield under the hooks and blades, allow us to come inside you and purify your soul.

It is pressing me, the Stone on my chest, the great slab crushing the ribcage of a relapsed witch, splinter of bone like rotted wood. I am losing, slowly, so that I do not even have the strength to resist this temptation, the temptation of Purpose again, floating like a blood blister before me, to resist the lead of the Monkey, the Trickster, drawing me into pursuing myself over a shapeless land. Too weak to stay my own course and continue in the velvet pleasures of Wandering alone and unfettered. I am losing myself, the self that is no other. If I knew my name, I could grip it like the edge of a cliff, drive my teeth into it and never let go. I could keep hold, and not slip. But it is hidden in the Book of the Hammer, and the inquisitors will not let me see. They are preparing a vat of acid, red as withered roses boiled for tea, sour as lime leaves. I can smell it, the mescaline-arsenic, the stabbing scent of metallic greasepaint and twelve-year scotch, and the pitch they will spread over my irisless eyes so that I will not see how they mutilate my breasts with mewling hands. It will have me, in the end, the Stone wide and bright in my mind's eye like a rotting moon, I will burn in the tincture that even now simmers in whale-skull vats.

Into my reverie bursts the Monkey, turning temple-creature with geometric arms full of sandwiches. Dainty white squares from what ingenious tree. But he grinds to a halt and widens his almond eyes to perfect zeros of surprise.

From scalp to sole my body had flushed to deep red; red palms, red ankles, red nipples, red hair to my waist.

And eyes, smooth and featureless, pools of blood-shade, red as roses.

16.

"Hoo! Aren't you a pretty little rose, now! Can't leave you alone for a minute!" He bustled about, preparing a ridiculously proper tea service on the mottled quartz Road, now reflecting in infinite dusky facets my crimson flesh, torso like a ruby breastplate, carnelian legs crossed gingerly, fire-toned, as though one knee might inflame the other. Fire-goddess, Kali-boned, body of Martian silicate crushed to liquid glass. I touched my face, warmed under the new skin, scald of red, the still-blank eyes wide, wild and creased with fear. The Path seems to blush as it holds my image to its chest.

"It is getting worse, isn't it?" Tears like blood welled up.

"Come now, Darlingred, it's very striking. Drink your tea. You must not succumb yet, there will be more of this before there is less. I have brought you cucumber sandwiches out of the Wild, why do you not smile?" His own brown face was covered in crumbs. I drank with sullen lips, the bloodstone color of the Sea-Walls.

With a sandwich in one hand, held up like a pale green mudra, full of salt and taste of a watery delta, I turned my face towards the sliding honey of a late afternoon sky, light illuminating the scarlet contours of my firebody, woman-shaped flame sitting zazen on the tatami of the wide Road, knee deep in the latticework of tea ceremony, a primal streak of red against the sky gold as a temple-creature's hide. I am the Monster and the Prey.

"I am dying, dying in a clutch of painted swords."

The Monkey shook his head at the earth. A flash of color caught my eye; in the warm black soil a little Grasshopper twitched her pale green legs.

"She talks too much, friend Monkey," the pretty insect whistled, her voice fiddle-high. The Monkey laughed and let the little creature crawl up onto the shelf of his tail. "Yes, but we must forgive her. She is only a small Beast."

"How long will you walk the Road with her? How long will you let her think that fur is yours? I have come far, on smaller feet, and I am not so worn as she. Who has been dancing in her, that the slippers of she are so tattered? She is not very pretty, even with all her paint." The Monkey did not answer, but stroked the top of my ruddy thigh with something like fondness.

"It's none of my nevermind, of course," the Grasshopper chirped, "have to take company as you can get it around here. Two's better than one with Doors about, eh? But she isn't well, not at all well. You don't want to catch it."

She waved her antennae at me thoughtfully.

"I won't, little one, I won't. There is some sandwich left, if you would like it."

"Oh, thank you, I haven't had the strength to climb the sandwich-trees lately. Getting on in years and all." The Grasshopper marched over to the crust I held in my hand and perched on the pad of muscle under my thumb, chewing daintily. After a time, she spoke again in her piping voice, this time to the monkey. "Poor little thing. Listen, and I will tell you something. We insects understand more than you, so big you miss nearly everything important. The Road does not end, everever. Count your steps and the sum will number redemption. Like me, walking on thread, you will learn; traversing a thing you Devour it, watching a thing you move it, conquering a thing you are eaten by it. Drink from a puddle, you are rain, grip a vine too tightly, you are a Monkey, crease the night with song, you are a cricket come morn. In another life I was a Wall, in another a Rabbit with organdy ears. It is all the same. I think I can recall that I liked having bricks for bellies." The Grasshopper stopped, her tone thickening.

"And you are being tracked by a very big Door. The leaves are shaking with his progress. This is the help I can offer you, from my warm soil-bed."

The Monkey frowned and gently lifted her from my hand. "I had heard his prowl, but I did not want to frighten her. Walk carefully, little sister, I have seen birds about," he warned. The Grasshopper flushed pale.

"Well enough, then. Goodbye, redwoman. Look down as you go, you will see more that way. Downdowndown."

She scurried away in a jitter of opalescence.

17.

The night swells up with visions, its regular chore.

Oh, golden Monkey, darlinggold, Companion though I would have none, can you see it? Walk beside me and guard me against the marauding Doors, (and say what you will, I shall not be caught) but can you see? The gold-skinned camels sluicing through the snow-crusted Road, their breath like pale puffing mushrooms in the grey air? Utterly confounded by the cold softness of this not-quite-sand, stamping in bewilderment and fear. Mercurial rivulets trickle from their wide footprints, and their muzzles crust over with a multitude of icicles. I can see, I can see them marching upwards, over the pass, packed with Bedouin blankets and tassels, humps swollen as for the first time they know water-plenty. Their trembling cries like blown glass, trying to be brave in the midst of all this terrifying whiteness. Poor animal, nothing is clear any longer, nowhere is home with beautiful gleaming dunes and a sky like liquefied diamonds. The heat that was your mother has fled and the idea of winter is slowly birthing Revelations of Ice in your chambered heart. The mirrored glacier is playing midwife to a shivering Apocrypha of Snow, written on your long scroll-tongue.

Is it a (vision), is it hereandnow? I could not say, I could not say. The men trudging beside their great woolly beasts, carrying woven leather leads covered in an elaborate wind chime of icicles. But in their left hands they hold a strange burden. Blue fingers drag in the snow, bruise the Road, covered in agate rings and hieroglyphics. Eyes show all whites, shimmering in perfection and exaltation, insensate and exalted, hecatombs rising in their lashes. They are carried by the rag-wrapped men, whose hands wrap tightly around the handles that protrude from bowed backs, black handles of painted glass, fused with flesh. Sublimity crackles in the places where slickness joins skin, that precious desert-mothered silicate sand scalded into clarity of form. Oh, where, where are they going?

They are women, women converted into carryon luggage, their curved handles as lovely as their curved hips, such symmetry and style, these ascended seraphs scrawled all from brow to womb with the Scripture of Hoar Frost, lifted to the frozen peaks to deliver their in-spired, in-breathed, in-gested prose, each in a separate language. The First in Romanian, the Second in Portuguese, the Third in Breton, the Fourth in Phoenician, the Fifth in Zulu, the Sixth in Maori, and the Seventh in English, the savage English of fire-tipped arrows and impenetrable forests. Will I find that I can speak that fire-English, that I can bear to hold it in my mouth?

The women are still bent, their noses brushing soft snow, voices swallowed by the mountain and the earth, words diving and arcing in the ground, wrapping the root of every tree in their rhythm? The camels leaping from the sharp heights into searing wind to carry the verses into the dark earth, loyal beasts carrying their burden to journey's end? Every glade and meadow that ever grows will speak with azure tongues in seven languages. Will I hear it? Will we be fortunate enough to come across the fields of violets and lingonberries that whisper of the Seventh Verse? Or will it be the yucca and agave of the Fifth, and lost to the shell of our ears that was formed only for the last and most subtle lines? Is this my Gospel, my false prophecy, the Myth of the Carried Women?

I must Walk By. Believe if I can that it was only the wind in your fur. Believe that it is only the madness coming on, a smattering of random and meaningless images firing in my brain, fading into un-reality and darkness. But how can I when I feel the oily leather of a handle breaking the skin rising from my back like the curve of a whale in the sea?

Can you see? Can you hear?

The Monkey's fletched eyes wrinkled nervously, flicking back and forth from my blood-skin to the empty Road. They, of course, are gone, and my flesh is whole. I cannot see where I am going, night waves like a rice field, the Road is a pavilion of ash. I am grateful for his dry, leathery palm in mine, after all. My humanity is difficult to coalesce among all these writhing phantasms, I am voiceless and paralyzed, visions of frostbitten camels trampling through my paved-over eyes, my breastplate of arctic hare, face of a spread-winged roc, laminate fire (-which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls upon your heads) Oh, but they were there, and I heard the voices like feet crushing clouds into blue wine, I saw their hair brush the snow and their mouths hanging open, vomiting light into the earth (-I have made you mad; And even with such-like valour) No, I will not believe it, I am still whole, I am still myself. They came to the mountain, the mountain accepted, I accept. The Verses came-staccato notes, and they spilled over the peaks like the ecstasy of caribou, they sand and spoke and it is only that you cannot hear (-Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices) But where do I achieve these slashing words, slantwise through my mind like a magician's swords into the magic box, terrible and alien-from what black place could they issue if there is no beforethis to remember and reanimate? I could not say, oh me, but I must be I the central I, the lodestone, the trinity, the tripartite division! I carry the Compass, I know north from northwest (north lies the head, the kingspiece, the red screech of brain; northwest lies the right hand which writes the left hand knows not, amphibious inscription on the bones of a homo erectus with arms full of flint, still etching the cave Wall overandoverandover- (-Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.) with a fatal buffalo, dressed in his finest brown and white) I know this, I see it, the body becomes the lodestone and I, oh, I, have become the Stone itself, turning in a grinding orbit around a flaming sun which is also myself, dying my skin with the blood of that beforetime hunting party, glutted out onto the slick glacier, around and around, faster and faster and something is breaking in me faster than it is being built, something is splintering, offbreaking, the vivisection of confession before their ravening altars, evisceration in the rays of that whistling sun, and, oh, the sky is opening and I am dying because it is growing so within, roots bursting out of my mouth, the thick rootandbranch of the Stone roars out in a beam of white, and I am breaking, breaking, breaking (-The clouds methought would open and show riches) Oh, what do you see in the sky, high up high where I cannot go, trapped am I here among the turn styles and empty way stations? Rice-fields planted by centaurs speaking all those scriptures I have heard as the caravan embraced the mountain? Are they there where you can touch their watery crop? The jasmine-blossom of the moon, fat and morose above me, eating the stars like escargot, popping each spinning pearl-shell into her milky mouth? What do you see that I cannot, I Possessed and ground under by those old smoking wheels within wheels bearing in their spear-spokes (-which Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I, all wound with adders who with cloven tongues do hiss me into) madness.

Oh, I and all under the gallery of twisting night, what is becoming me? I see your outline, the macaque-shape sliver of gold against the grey-lit Road, and you cannot help me, cannot give me the redemption of nothingness, the benediction of emptiness. You suffer near me, I suffer inside this woman-skin, the shade of fire-salamanders, and both of us dread the night when I am not precisely what I am. But here in the dark that brings delirium, I am open and beating, my whole body become seven-chambered heart, aorta like a rope of rubies, like a red, red Road. I can feel him coming, the Monstrum, hinge by jamb. And in terror I approach the Beauty that dances the steps of annihilation, the Maenad-self with the blood of cats dripping off her Rosicrucian lips so that- (-when I waked, I cried to dream again.)

18.

"Oh, Darlingred, what do you see when you are lost?"

Out of my skull I blearily watch the world detached and departed. I drink from a fountain with a Minotaur pouring water from a maiden's beheaded corpse, as though the Labyrinth were creating itself to taunt me. No comet-track of the frog-kicks of voices whispering from before, no sprinting ideation, no speck of camel-hair remains. We are moving, expecting to make time against the morphing Path, expecting impossible things and racing against the night which will bring only progress towards mania and fire-vertigo. I brush a long sheaf of burgundy hair from my face, and stare at the Road, in this region fashioned of polished cedar.

"I see wheels in the sky and my own body cracking like a tree's trunk. And strange whisperings tunnel through me like earthworms."

The Monkey scrambled up onto my shoulder and stroked my cheek with great concern.

"I am so sorry, beautiful, pitiful girlcreature," his voice was warm and kind. "It is so hard for you." Garnet tears sprung to my Grecian eyes, spilling like paint.

"I am afraid that I am not myself any longer. Even in the day I stare out of my body, I do not inhabit it. And I can hear the Door following us, shuffling and sliding."

"Yes," the Monkey sighed, "I was hoping you had not noticed. She told the truth: there is a Door, perhaps a few hours behind us. It is very stealthy and patient. But I am more clever. I snuck up on it, to see what sort it was." I waited, while he hopped from one foot to the other in agitation. "Oh, my dear, it is a great, black Door, oval and light-eating, with a bull's head knocker. It will not come before your next heartblink, but it will come." He patted my hair and fussed with his tail, softly murmuring, "We have time, little one, we have time. Hoo."

"I cannot think, Monkey. Tell me a story, or a riddle, or lecture me. But fill up my head, I am weary, I am growing old." He paused, seeming to ponder some great puzzle.

"I will tell you the storyriddle I think you need. I will tell you how I Devoured my name. Long was the time I lived young within the pretty stone arms of my Temple, and I was alone. I enjoyed alone, it enjoyed me. I swung from the thick red-berry vines, and felt their length firm and sure in my golden hands. I danced on the altar, I sang the songs of my birth-tree and my mother's strong fur in the choir, echoing all through the dome as though my brothers and sisters were all around me in the forest. Hoo! I was content. I did not think about the Center, I did not care."

"Once I was like that, too," I whispered sadly.

"We all are. And then there is a day when we are broken into, like a rich house, and rifled through. Everafter we look sidelong over alabaster shoulders and know that we will never be so pure again. Mine was a pleasant spring morning, the rain fell like a grey sweater unraveling, and I played in the yarn-drops as I was used. I was not myself then, just as you are not yourself, but empty and happy. But that day, and not another though it matters not which, a Snail crawled into my Temple to escape the wet. He was very beautiful, with a great, grey double-spiraled shell like mother-of-pearl, sparkling even in the dim stormlight. His body was like living oil, goldensilver, rustling and slippery, large eye-stalks waving gracefully, visiondancing.

I hooed in a more or less friendly manner, but he ignored me, moving within his ponderous shell towards the thickest and most delicious of my vines, slowly breakfasting on a fat leaf. I marched up to him and rapped imperiously on that iridescent shell, whereupon his oilskin rippled slightly and eye-stalks swiveled vaguely in my direction.

"Leathe me alone, thwiftfurry thing," the Snail yawned. "Of course, my Darlingred, I was indignant, began to hop mightily and grow purple-faced in a most unbecoming fashion. I insisted variously that he ought to be more respectful than to gobble up my vines without a word, that he ought to vacate the premises immediately, that he ought to know he was eating in my Temple. Again, my only answer was the bored motion of glistening eye-stalks."

"Lithen, mate. I needn't take orders from thome thilly primate who hathn't got a name."

"I don't need one, you lisping mollusk. My mother knows my smell well enough, and the Labyrinth has no use for names. Hoo! Now run along."

He munched thoughtfully on one of my red fruits. "Doethn't it though? If you hathn't got a name, you aren't much of anything. Thith Temple can't be yourth, you hathn't got thome thort of deed, and even if you have got a document of thome fathion, to whom would it be made out? Tho the vineth are ath much mine ath yourth. Leathe me alone."

I was at a loss, and covered in snail-spit. He seemed logical enough, if one forgot where one was. My pride, which in those days was great as the vaulting Road, was wounded. I growled at him and bared my yellow teeth, but the Snail snuffled further onto the emerald vine. "And I suppose you have a name, wretched slug?"

The great Snail drew himself up to what I assumed to be his full height, his damascene flesh rippling in opaline waves. Across his broad chest a word floated uncertainly, but clear as your red limbs. It was quite sloppy, for a Snail cannot be very good at letters, but in its oozing alphabet I read distinctly: CALIBAN. He rustled and reduced slimily, with a triumphant little smirk. I stamped and hooted.