Note: Second vignette of two. Jan's turn.

'Adam Lay Ybunden..': The Serving Man's Tale

How many years was it? I don't know. The term has no meaning for me. Years, decades, centuries, even millennia- those words belong to the ones who are ruled by time. And I'm not. I was created. I live. I don't change. If the one who created me chooses to end my existence, my existence will end. If not, not.

So for countless numbers of what those who are bound by them call years, I lived with my creator in a place far far away. I became acquainted with the animals and plants and insects there, became a friend to each of them, and watched as each changed its shape and grew feeble and ceased to exist. There were one or two others, like me, who never changed: the ones who did change called them gods. I wasn't a god. I was a servant. But I never changed.

Because I was a servant I did what I was told to do, without question. I was sad, a little, to leave my island and go out into the ugly concrete world far away, where everything was different from home, where all the people are shaped like me on the outside but are completely different within. I was surprised by that, and to discover how unhappy they all are, as if that's the only feeling one can have out here. I thought I understood the cause: I was unhappy at myself, to be in the middle of such ugliness after the green beauty of the island. But it was necessary. Our enemy was moving- was growing greater- and had to be stopped before he could cause yet more misery.

It was all so simple, before.

I knew nothing, before. Before...

I was standing with the others. They called my name. I answered. In the corner of my eye something glinted, like the sunlight that filters through the vines overhead and falls in a glimmering net on the trunks of the trees below. I turned my head, just a little, to see. Pale yellow hair, long, the tendrils waving about a narrow face; colourless brows that slanted up; an alert blue glance that met mine for a moment, like a butterfly perching on a flower, and then was gone.

They have stories, out here, of people who are like me- undying, unhuman. They give us many names- faery, mermen, angels. In the stories, one like me falls in love with one of them, and always to our cost. The stories don't say, because those who make them don't know, what the true nature of the damage is. But I know. I learned it in that moment. We become caught in time.

In that instant I first experienced time and all its numberless tortures. Minutes, hours, days, and years, all put in a world where there is both a past and a present and, most hideously, a future. Time past, a vast sea of it. Time passing, every second: now, and now, and now. Worst of all, time to come: time until, time how long. How long until I can be alone with him? How long until our next afternoon off? How long until the next holiday? How long. How long. Until.

Living in time is like pouring water into a hole in the sand- buckets and buckets and, in the end, maybe a small cupful rises to the surface. For every five hours spent in class or drill, a furtive ten minutes together in the latrine. For every six and a half days lived in a group, two hours alone on Sunday afternoon in a cramped storage room. For every eleven months as one little unit of X squad in Y battalion, two weeks by ourselves, maybe, if we can manage it. I run through time like a six month foal trying to catch the swiftest member of the herd- always behind, always seeing it just about to vanish before me, always knowing I can never overtake it.

How much time. How long until. Like little thorns pricking my flesh, endlessly. How long can we kiss in back of the gym until the voices come to disturb us? How long do we have in the john, my fist around the head of his cock, jerking back and forth, faster, faster, before the next bell rings? How much time do we have to hold each other, out here in the fields, my cock buried between his legs, his calves pressing my back: my mouth tasting his smooth neck, his strong fingers digging into my hair, rocking together and moaning each other's names- how long until we have to break apart and go back for callover? How long do we have to fit ourselves together in his narrow bed, silent in the dark, all of me pressed against all of him, tongues in each other's mouths, not daring even to move in case the others hear- how long until the monitor comes round to check and I have to slip back to my own bed? Every day, every hour, the steady beat of my thought: How long how long how long...

...until he finds out what I am? How long until he finds out why I'm here? How long can I delay before I have to carry out my orders? How long until I betray him?

I'm ruled by time, my new master. I'm tied to the current, the flow of years. I change now- not outwardly, like the others, but inside. Things I never knew, things I never felt in all the no-time I lived in before, they fill my head like buzzing bees. I watch him change, inside and out. And out. He's taller than a year ago; his voice no longer goes high suddenly but keeps a steady pitch; he has a little more hair on his body, a fuzzy golden down that prickles me when I nuzzle an arm or a leg with my lips.

He's still young, as his race counts youth. He won't always be. He'll change yet more- grow lined, and weak, and sad. He isn't sad now. I see to that. But afterwards... I look at the faces around me- of our instructors, of our officers- and see the hardness, the indifference, the unhappiness: and wonder if that's what will happen to him. After he finds out. After I'm gone, if I can ever bear to go. After I've betrayed him, and left him.

But now he smiles, and laughs at me, and flares up in anger and yells, and throws a punch or a kick. We fight and he sometimes wins. Used to be, I always won; but that's changed too. When he loses he's mad, for five minutes or ten, and will only say a word or two when I speak to him; and then suddenly there's something he has to tell me, something the drill sergeant said or Takamatsu did, and the words come spilling out and we're friends again.

I love him. I love him. Sometimes I think it will kill me, I love him so much. I wasn't made to hold this much feeling. It tears me apart.

There's no way out of this. However long I delay, even if I could delay forever, the river of time still flows: and flows faster for him than for me. It will carry him away at last. Ahead, like a dark blurred shadow in the forest, is a time when he no longer exists. When I'm alone again, as I was before. I can see it clearly if I look. But I won't look.

How else can I live in this dark current of time, feeling myself borne helplessly along towards an inevitable ending? Only as I lived before. Back when each moment was as every other moment, I inhabited an eternal present. Now, I do the same, but wilfully, by choice. I live each minute as it comes. There is no past. There is no future. There's only now, the now that has him in it, and all the rest is a mirage, the unreal refraction of sun on the rushing water of the torrent.

MJJ January 96