robe came out. What seemed to be a living flame flickered in the outstretched palm of his hand. It was enough to illuminate his face, but I couldn’t see the rest of him clearly. He might have worn a fine gown, or rags.
Slowly he turned, from side to side, holding up his light, as if searching for something.
I crouched very still.
Then he spoke just a few words, which made me very much afraid and sent me scurrying away through the mud on my belly in a ridiculous attempt to avoid being seen. I wanted to cry out, but I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood, and remained silent, as if somehow in silence I could still deny what I had heard.
At the edge of the village I got up and started running. I arrived home screaming like the mad boy who had come before.
* * * *
That morning, everyone went to see the sorcerer’s house, but stood a safe distance away. I returned, holding my father’s hand. By daylight it was even more fearsome, its details visible, no longer an ill-defined shadow but a living mountain of wood and brick and stone. Peaked roofs rippled like waves on a wind-swept lake to form the heads of fabulous birds or horses or dragons, which opened their eyes and mouths and wriggled their shrieking wooden tongues. More windows revealed themselves, some filled with light, some dark, appearing and vanishing like foam in a swift current. Great masses of wood turned before our eyes, revolving slowly like wheels within wheels, a pattern endlessly shifting. Sometimes the house would extend itself, walls and roofs forming a covered way, reaching out like a limb, snaking across the earth, shutters and doors clattering as if trying to speak. The people scattered to avoid it, and the extension would suddenly collapse, fusing back into the body of the house.
Everyone wanted to know what this meant. My father, my uncles, the head men of the village all conferred, speaking among themselves in hushed tones, as if they didn’t want to be overheard by whoever was inside. A runner was sent to Thadistaphon for the priests. But he wouldn’t be back before nightfall at least.
So we stood and waited. Throughout the day the house shifted restlessly in the hot sun, sometimes seeming to crumble into ruin, then rising up again, more magnificent and strange than before, its facade sculpted into the shapes of leaves and sunbursts and impossible beasts, sometimes into human faces which belched black smoke, then were consumed by flames before they renewed themselves.
Always the people asked the elders: Who had come to us? Why?
The elders only shook their heads and pretended not to know. But they knew. I was certain of that.
I made a serious mistake, perhaps because I wanted to be a hero, or just because I wanted to help. On an impulse, I tugged on my father’s hand and said, “Papa, it is Evoragdou. I know it is.”
“What?”
Hadn’t anyone listened to the mad boy, who had warned us of this thing? Didn’t they remember? Why were they deliberately denying the obvious?
“In the house. It is Evoragdou.”
“How do you know? No one else is so certain.”
I pulled away, and stood hugging my still-muddy sides, swishing one toe back and forth in the dirt. I couldn’t meet my father’s gaze.
“I just do.”
My father seemed both sorrowful and afraid.
* * * *
When the priests arrived that evening, I was the center of attention. They took me into a shed and locked the door, then grabbed me by the arms and yanked me around and around, from one angry face to another, demanding what I truly knew. Had I gone inside the house? Didn’t I know that to speak a sorcerer’s name is to summon him? Had he sent me? Was I his creature, a demon shaped like a boy? What did he want here? I screamed. I wept. I couldn’t answer. I tried not to tell them anything at all. More than anything else, I wished I’d been able to keep my secret to myself. They beat me with sticks. They said they would lock me in a dark hole beneath the temple in the city and I’d have to stay there forever while the sorcerer spoke out of my mouth, as inevitably he must.
I screamed some more and finally said, “I knew who he was because he said he remembered!”
The priests let go. I fell to the floor and lay still, sobbing, somehow very certain that I had ruined my entire life, that nothing would ever be right for me again.
The priests whispered among themselves, glancing down at me, then whispering some more.
Somehow they were satisfied. They didn’t carry me off to the city. Instead, they filed out and left me alone in the shed, with the door unlocked. Much later, when the door opened again and my father and mother stood there, I thought I had won. I hadn’t confessed everything. I hadn’t told the priests that the sorcerer had known my name, that, as he held his tiny flame aloft in his bare palm and peered into the darkness, he had called out, “Pankere, I know you are out there, for I am Evoragdou, and I remember.”
But I had not won. It was Evoragdou who was victorious.
* * * *
Nothing further happened for a long time. The priests built a fence around the sorcerer’s house, painted all over with signs and sigils and strange writing. Not even they had ever dared to go inside.
Soon multitudes flocked to see this wonder, first more priests, then the rich and high-born from Thadistaphon and passengers off boats that passed along the river, even a few nobles from the City of the Delta. Our village prospered as the people sold bread, palm wine, embroidered cloth, and painted images to the travelers. No two images were ever the same, for the house of Evoragdou was never the same for two consecutive hours, let alone between one day and the next.
But in time, the flow of travelers diminished. The house merely remained as it was, forever assuming meaningless shapes, offering nothing, threatening no one. The sorcerer never emerged, nor did he speak again, through me or anyone else.
We all recited the legends of Evoragdou, some of them genuinely ancient, a lot more newly invented to amaze the foreigners and earn a coin: of his battles with monsters, his voyages to other worlds, and, most especially, how he ventured into time until his past and future were as confused as images in a house full of mirrors. He was the greatest of all sorcerers, we said, virtually a god. But secretly tellers and listeners and priests alike began to suspect that only the house remained, mindless, like a water wheel left turning when the miller has gone away, and that the sorcerer Evoragdou was dead.
The priests may have let me go, but certainly I was marked, singled out. Neighbors turned their faces from me. They made signs against me, to ward off bad luck. The other boys threw stones if I tried to come near. The girls ran away.
I think they all may even have been jealous, because I had actually seen what they and the travellers who had come so far longed to see. Certainly I felt so. I hated them for it.
But, when no miracles or demons manifested themselves around me, I was allowed to grow up. Two priests returned to our village to live. They took me aside, taught me letters, and probed, very delicately, for news of the sorcerer Evoragdou. Many times I disappointed them, but they never beat me, and I even came to take comfort in their company.
They wanted me to go away with them, to become a priest too, but I would not. Unfulfilled as I was, I heard no god calling me. In the end, the priests arranged a marriage for me with a girl from another town. My parents
