Chapter 16A

Morok.

Smoking Morok.

More, smoking more -- broken, coronary crowns of smoke.

For Tamar the smoke is a portal.  As it obscures the walls, the escutcheons and fleurs de lis of the wallpaper, hides the grate from which a feeble heat is rising, the lamps, even the antediluvial wardrobes of the Pensión Madrid, the tired fumes bring to light a passage into a broken, imperial element, the element of Morok.

Who could map the place that the exhausted clouds reveal?  Who could trace its streets, its cobblestones made of a single human hair, to their origin, a beginning commanded and inscribed in the Book of Alacla which takes root inside Tamar's smallest fingernail?  Is it ... could it have been that despite every escape, despite the systematic journeys beyond all systems, her farthest imaginable goal could only be the street outside this cold window that is now befogged with her obsessions?  Might it someday have been true that no matter how far she ran, how many forests she burned or sowed in her path, no matter how long she devoted herself, night after starless night, to Nirvana -- that she would awake to find herself at this window, about to look at the empty Calle de Arenal, seventeen feet below?

Alacla.

Alacla is.

Cluesome, untamed, sulked in byzantic magnitudes.  Alacla.

From the other end of the weevil's silk (which is the same as this end, terminus of the Ouroboros, all say, and say again) the Imperial Consort (She of the breasts of limestone, the tongue of marble) gazed at encyclopedic certainties (they say it is all written in the entrails of the gnat; it is said that if the gnat's entrails were laid out from end to end, one could read in them the history of one's great-grandchildren in their dotage), certainties (of course, you have to find the right gnat) that shimmered in the luminescence of Her bath (ablutions of the Queen Bee in the month of fasting): and from that point she could read (the priestly blood shows always, interpreters of sacred ruins) how a woman wandered alone along the long avenues of a faded capital (medieval plazas predating symmetry, forgotten names of dark passages, boulevards illuminated by the gas of Enlightenment), a woman, nobody's mistress, consorting with none, receiving the stares of passers-by (men: is she a whore enriched, or a countess reduced to poverty?), reaching the doors of a pensión that asked no questions and kept opinions secret (she flees, she returns, she cannot mean well, she is some heroine), entering a faded room, opening a gilded case (adorned with emerald inlay, gift of an admirer or corruption's peddler), inhaling its burning contents to tend a tenuous telegraph to Morokian mirrors.