Jo Walton - Or What You Will

S he wont let me tell all the stories. She says itll make them all sound the same. Shes had too much of my tricks and artfulness, she says. I have been inspiration, but now she is done with me. So I am trapped inside this cave of bone, this hollow of skull, this narrow and limited point of view that is all I am allowed, like a single shaft from a dark lantern. She has all the power. But sometimes she needs me. Sometimes I get out.

I have been is a very Celtic way to begin a self introduction. (I have been a Celt.) Its as if the best way to present yourself is with an interlocking set of riddles, a negotiation of images and history and shared knowledge, creating a relationship between us where instead of information being imparted from me to you, you are instead asked to invoke your own wisdom and cunning and information stores to involve yourself in a guess. I have been in those long Celtic poems often gives way to I am more riddles, often boasting, phrased as sets of opposite qualities.

I have been too many things to count. I have been a dragon with a boy on his back. I have been a scholar, a warrior, a lover, and a thief. I have been dream and dreamer. I have been a god. I have stood by the wind-wracked orchard, near the storm coast. I have been guardian of the good water. I am wise, but sometimes reckless. I am famed for my fast answers, but I would never proclaim that I am witty. You see, I am not modest. The sun my brother will never catch me napping, nor the lazy sunbeam warm my pillow. I am friend to monsters, companion to bees. I have been a stormbringer and a stormtamer. My silver tongue runs up and down, on and back, oh yes, I have been a poet. My prison now is the skull of a poet. I am deathless, but I have spent time on deaths many paths. (Yes, time can be currency, especially now that I have so much of it that I can be profligate.) I have been a boy with a book, burning, burning. I have been a shepherd, and a fierce bearded goat looking down from a high path.

What am I? What am I? Figment, fakement, fragment, furious fancy-free form. I have been the spark that ignites in a cold winter. I have been the swell of a warm penis in the darkness. I have been laughter at daybreak, and tears before bedtime. I have been a quick backanswer. I have been too clever for my own good.

Especially that last.

I have been a character, and I have been a narrator, but now I dont know what I am.

She doesnt want to let me out again, thats the problem. I think she may be afraid, but she doesnt say that. She says shes used me too much and wants a change. When I say I can change, that I can be whatever she wants (I have been the roar of a lion. I have been a weaver, and torn cobweb blowing in the wind, and moonbeams enlightening a chink in a wall, and summer fields full of sprouting mustard seed) then she says she needs to make up the world first. Imagine that power, to make worlds! I can make and shape and take no worlds. I slide myself into the worlds I am given and find myself, frame myself, tame myself into the space there where I can see to be me. I slither like quicksilver, fast flowing to fill up the form. But now she says she doesnt want me to. So I dont know what to do. Im lonely. I miss you.

There are other people in here, so I am not quite solitary, but unless she will open for me the door into worlds, I am beating the bounds of a prison of bone, contemplating all I have been.

I have been a word on the tongue. I have been a word on the page. And I hope I will be again.

She says she is afraid she is going mad, talking to me. She says she used to do both sides of the conversation, but not anymore. She does, however, still talk to me. I take consolation in that. If she didnt, if she left me in the dark in the bone cage for long enough without light, then might I in time dissolve back into the grey mist? I have seen it happen to others.

That mist is one of the oldest things in her head, one of the oldest things she ever thought of, when she was a child. She walks into it when she wants a character, and it swirls around her. Just make one up, just make me up! the mist voices plead, and as she listens the tendrils thicken and solidify and take form and colour and follow her out into such solidity as she chooses to set them. I might have come from that mist, long ago, though that is not how either of us remember my origin. Still, I avoid the place where the mist pools, for fear of being lost and forgotten, for fear of drowning, or dissolving into the stuff of subcreation. There were others here with me before, almost as solid as I am, who are now only shadows and murmurs, ones who surged like the sea in spate who are only a whisper of waves on the distant shore. It would take a lot to invoke them now, a full-blooded sacrifice to call back no more than their hollow moth-voices. She has half-forgotten them, and I dare not summon them forth. I husband such power as I have. Though I know enough to be aware it is wrong to be selfish, still I have to protect myself. I must fasten my own oxygen mask before attempting to assist others.

I have been a runner quivering on the instant. I have been an imaginary friend. And a real friend, that too! I have been bound here, waiting, ready to do service.

She asks if thats really how Im going to describe it, the deepest most numinous part of her head, the wellspring of everything? It isnt just mist, she says, grumpily. Its a place, a place swirling with potentiality. Its huge, and though you cant ever see far you feel that if the twining tendrils of mist thinned you might find unexpected vistas opening before you. Its the source, the foundation, the origin. Its the valley of the shadow, and the dreamcrossed twilight. Its Ginnungagap, where nothing is and all things start. (I have been a thief of words and so has she, though she might not as readily admit it.) The mist that is the essence of creation is of all colours and densities of grey and silver, from dark stormcloud to blown breath on a bright winter morning. It never stops moving, eddying, surging, and nobody can tell what is mist and what is shadow, not until shadow and mist transform and are shaped to become solid and walk beside you. She has been there many times but it has never become tame, there is always a risk, going in, of becoming lost, losing your way out, losing your very self into those drifts of being and becoming. There are cliffs, she says, huge cliffs, shaping the bounds of the space. When she goes into the mist she is always aware of walking between cliffs, and that is the way she comes out again, between the cliffs, but now in company. If you go too deep, she says, you might find yourself on the top of those cliffs, and drawing too close to the edge.