Many a blond, northern moonrise,like a muted reflection, will softlyremind me and remind me again and again.It will be my bride, my alter ego.An incentive to find myself. I myselfam the moonrise of the south. -Paul Klee, The Tunisian Diaries Prologue It was just past midday, not long before the third summons to prayer, that Ammar ibn Khairan passed through the Gate of the Bells and entered the palace of Al-Fontina in Silvenes to kill the last of the khalifs of Al-Rassan. Passing into the Court of Lions he came to the three sets of double doors and paused before those that led to the gardens. There were eunuchs guarding the doors. He knew them by name. They had been dealt with. One of th
SUMMERCHAPTER ONE GRADUALLY THE girl came to the conclusion that she was ill. It could not be anything else. She pushed her way across the pavement, stood with her back against a brick wall, felt the rough surface scraping her skin through her blouse and jeans. The brickwork seemed to move, like a piece of automatically operated emery paper. Up, down, up, down. Her groping fingers found a doorpost, gripped it; it was moving too. Up, down, up, down, gyrating. People pushed past her, bumped into her. A woman clutched at her, almost pulled her down, but somehow she held on. Everybody was rushing, a seething mass of hastening humanity as though everybody was ill, that they were hurr
IThe man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.The gunslinger walked stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag
PREFACE ... And behind the Northern Armies came another army of men. They came by the hundreds, yet each traveled alone. They came on foot, by mule, on horseback, on creaking wagons or riding in handsome chaises. They were of all shapes and sizes and descended from many nationalities. They wore dark suits, usually covered with the gray dust of travel, and dark, broad-brimmed hats to shield their white faces from the hot, unfamiliar sun. And on their back, or across their saddle, or on top of their wagon was the inevitable faded multicolored bag made of worn and ragged remnants of carpet into which they had crammed all their worldly possessions. It was from these bags that they got their n
Even before the events in the supermarket, Jim Ironheart should have known trouble was ing. During the night he dreamed of being pursued across a field by a flock of large blackbirds that shrieked around him in a turbulent flapping of wings and tore at him with hooked beaks as precisely honed as surgical scalpels. When he woke and was unable to breathe, he shuffled onto the balcony in his pajama bottoms to get some fresh air. At nine-thirty in the morning, the temperature, already ninety degrees, only contributed to the sense of suffocation with which he had awakened. A long shower and a shave refreshed him. The refrigerator contained only part of a moldering Sara Lee cake....
-SHELLY, Prometheus Unbound Part One TERRA INCOGNITA Hell is the place of those who have denied; They find there what they planted and what dug. A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing, And wander there and drift, and never cease Wailing for substance. -W.B. YEATS, The Hour Glass 1 The air was electric the day the thief crossed the city, certain that tonight, after so many weeks of frustration, he would finally locate the card-player. It was not an easy journey. Eighty-five percent of Warsaw had been leveled, either by the months of mortar bombardment that had preceded the Russian liberation of the city, or by the program of demolition the Nazis had undertaken before their
A NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY A Song of Ice and Fire is told through the eyes of characters who are sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles apart from one another. Some chapters cover a day, some only an hour; others might span a fortnight, a month, half a year. With such a structure, the narrative cannot be strictly sequential; sometimes important things are happening simultaneously, a thousand leagues apart. In the case of the volume now in hand, the reader should realize that the opening chapters of A Storm of Swords do not follow the closing chapters of A Clash of Kings so much as overlap them. I open with a look at some of the things that were happening on the Fist of the First Men, at
TO STAN, CHRISTOPHER AND MICHELE RICE TO SUZANNE SCOTT QUIROZ AND VICTORIA WILSON TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN PRESTON TO THE IRISH OF NEW ORLEANS WHO, IN THE 1850S, BUILT ON CONSTANCE STREET THE GREAT CHURCH OF ST. ALPHONSUS, WHILE PASSING ON TO US THROUGH FAITH, ARCHITECTURE AND ART A SPLENDID MONUMENT TO "THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE AND THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME" Of Mrs. Moore and the echo in the Marabar Caves: ...but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. ing at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur "Pathos, piety, courage - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value."...
I HAD BEEN making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me. At the north end of the island, near the tumbled remains of the slip where the handle of the rusty winch still creaks in an easterly wind, I had two Poles on the far face of the last dune. One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. I was just sticking one of the mouse heads back on when the birds went up into the evening air, kaw-calling and screaming, wheeling over the path through the dunes where it went near their nests. I made sure the head was secure, then clambered to the top
December 29th: A lone figure, hunched down against the howling winter wind, moved step by frozen step through the Colorado wilderness. He was ill clad for such a winter trek, wearing soft thin boots and a clinging mauve with-sparkles tunic. His only defenses against the cold were an engineer cap on his platinum-blond thin hair and a scarf made of an old piece of furniture fabric wrapped several times around his thin pale neck. The wanderer was nearly frozen to death, his cracked and bleeding gloveless hands shoved into small pockets lined with tissue paper. His pale face, buried in the fabric of the scarf, was likewise a mass of cracks. His reddish albino eyes were swollen. Anyone could t
Gentle reader, hear Poliphilo tell of his dreams, Dreams sent by the highest heaven. You will not waste your labour, nor will listening irk you, For this wonderful work abounds in so many things. If, grave and dour, you despise love-stories, Know, I pray, that things are well ordered herein. You refuse? But at least the style, with its novel language, Grave discourse and wisdom, mands attention. If you refuse this, too, note the geometry, The many ancient things expressed in Nilotic signs . . . Here you will see the perfect palaces of kings, The worship of nymphs, fountains and rich banquets. The guards dance, dressed in motley, and the whole Of human life is expressed in dark labyrinths.
On a Saturday morning in early August in 1969, a series of bizarre and inexplicable events occurred aboard the fifty-five-thousand-ton luxury liner S.S. Bretagne as it was preparing to sail from the Port of New York to Le Havre. Claude Dessard, chief purser of the Bretagne, a capable and meticulous man, ran, as he was fond of saying, a "tight ship". In the fifteen years Dessard had served aboard the Bretagne, he had never encountered a situation he had not been able to deal with efficiently and discreetly. Considering that the S.S. Bretagne was a French ship, this was high tribute, indeed. However, on this particular summer day it was as though a thousand devils were conspiring against him