The Poet
Part Two
POET GANAN,
BE PREPARED IN A TENDAY
Ganan tossed the scroll into one of the braziers on the balcony and watched the embers float off to die in the sky.
He looked down to where the red haired boy had stood the night before, staring up with vivid grey eyes. A feeling of excited curiosity buzzed in his mind about the boy.
He wandered into his chambers and climbed the spiralling stairway to the dome at the very top of his home. Sunlight blasted through the pale crystal of the dome, touching everything inside with blue fire. In this highest of all chambers was a grand library, a maze of skeletal shelves spilling with the scrolls, books and codices of ages past.
He found a giant desk at the epicentre of the encircling shelves; a cushioned throne stood before it. Scrolls, quills and ink (bottled or otherwise) covered it, and a human skull on a velvet cushion was positioned at the right hand of the throne.
As soon as the poet slumped into the seat, the skull made a sound as though it was drawing a hollow breath.
“So it’s time to call them,” it said with sepulchral amusement.
When it spoke, the skull was entirely motionless. Its voice, if it could even be called a voice, was a heavy whisper edged with deep gravity. It was like a thousand winds grinding together. Inside its black eye sockets was a living darkness. The oblivion of the afterlife could be seen in that darkness; and the torment of an entity unable to obtain it.
“A tenday from now,” the poet replied, groping diligently for quill and ink.
He struggled to write. His joints were red and swollen.
“Not long to compose the gods’ poetry,” it said, “you had better get started, hmm?”
Ganan wrote, reviewed and discarded countless lines before he sat staring into the chasms of nothingness that awed many an idle scholar. The skull, meanwhile, hummed a haunting tune.
“Tell me, skull, what pleases the gods?”
“Boy, if I knew the answer to that, do you think I would be a skull doomed to wait on a cushion in your empty library for days that are eternities? Do you know how dull it is to have the same point of view for years on end?”
“Surely when you were a poet you had some successes,” he probed.
The skull was silent for a moment before it spoke; though its tone was far from serious.
“I can tell you this, boy. The world is you and you are the world. We cannot live without others even if we want to. Sometimes, we are forced to live for others.”
The skull burst into maniacal laughter. Any man laughing that laugh would have had tears streaming down his face. He would have had pain and insanity in his eyes.
“Just follow yourself where you lead. Desires are what make the world dynamic, why shouldn’t it be the same with the gods? Use your desires to call them.”
Ganan shook his head and scanned the desk restlessly for answers. “My desires… What if I don’t know what my desires are?”
The skull made a choking noise, “I’m not a brazen head. I can’t answer every one of your questions.”
“It seems like you can’t answer any of them,” Ganan muttered.
He rubbed his temples, thinking suddenly of the boys outside. He imagined them playing with their sticks, ignorant of divine labours; seeing only splendour in that golden palace, seeing rampant joy in the world. He wondered what it was like to be one of them.
Ganan turned the skull so it faced another direction before he departed.
When the library was still, the living darkness of the skull’s eye sockets dissipated to inanimate shadow.
“What a wondrous world,” the skull said with caustic glee, “more bookcases.”
It exhaled a ghostly sigh.
