"If I say I believe all that, will you let me hold the Claw?" I shook my head again.
Dorcas was not looking at me, but she must have seen the motion of my shadow; or perhaps it was only that her mental Severian on the ceiling shook his head as well. "You are right, then-I was going to destroy it if I could. Shall I tell you what I really believe? I believe I have been dead-not sleeping, but dead. That all my life took place a long, long time ago when I lived with my husband above a little shop, and took care of our child. That this Conciliator of yours who came so long ago was an adventurer from one of the ancient races who outlived the universal death." Her hands clutched the blanket.
"I ask you, Severian, when he comes again, isn"t he to be called the New Sun? Doesn"t that sound like it? And I believe that when he came he brought with him something that had the same power over time that Father Inire"s mirrors are said to have over distance. It is that gem of yours."
She stopped and turned her head to look at me defiantly; when I said nothing, she continued. "Severian, when you brought the uhlan back to life it was because the Claw twisted time for him to the point at which he still lived. When you half healed your friend"s wounds, it was because it bent the moment to one when they would be nearly healed. And when you fell into the fen in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it must have touched me or nearly touched me, and for me it became the time in which I had lived, so that I lived again. But I have been dead. For a long, long time I was dead, a shrunken corpse preserved in the brown water. And there is something in me that is dead still."
"There is something in all of us that has always been dead," I said.
"If only because we know that eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest children."
"I"m going to go back, Severian. I know that now, and that"s what I"ve been trying to tell you. I have to go back and find out who I was and where I lived and what happened to" me. I know you can"t go with me..." I nodded.
"And I"m not asking you to. I don"t even want you to. I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same. I don"t want to take death with me when I go to look for my life."
"I understand," I said.
"My child may still be alive-an old man, perhaps, but still alive. I have to know."
"Yes," I said. But I could not help adding, "There was a time when you told me I was not death. That I must not let others persuade me to think of myself in that way. It was behind the orchard on the grounds of the House Absolute. Do you remember?"
"You have been death to me," she said. "I have succ.u.mbed to the trap I warned you of, if you like. Perhaps you are not death, but you will remain what you are, a torturer and a carnifex, and your hands will run with blood. Since you remember that time at the House Absolute so well, perhaps you... I can"t say it. The Conciliator, or the Claw, or the Increate, has done this to me. Not you."
"What is it?" I asked.
"Dr. Talos gave us both money afterward, in the clearing. The money he had got from some court official for our play. When we were traveling, I gave everything to you. May I have it back? I"ll need it. If not all of it, at least some of it." I emptied the money in my sabretache onto the table. It was as much as I had received from her, or a trifle more.
"Thank you," she said. "You won"t need it?"
"Not as badly as you will. Besides, it is yours."
"I"m going to leave tomorrow, if I feel strong enough. The day after tomorrow whether I feel strong or not. I don"t suppose you know how often the boats put out, going downriver?"
"As often as you want them to. You push them in, and the river does the rest."
"That"s not like you, Severian, or at least not much. More the sort of thing your friend Jonas would have said, from what you"ve told me. Which reminds me that you"re not the first visitor I"ve had today. Our friend-your friend, at least- Hethor was here. That"s not funny to you, is it? I"m sorry, I just wanted to change the subject."
"He enjoys it. Enjoys watching me."
"Thousands of people do when you perform in public, and you enjoy doing it yourself."
"They come to be horrified, so they can congratulate themselves later on being alive. And because they like the excitement, and the suspense of not knowing whether the condemned will break down, or if some macabre accident will occur. I enjoy exercising my skill, the only real skill I have-enjoy making things go perfectly. Hethor wants something else."
"The pain?"
"Yes, the pain, but something more too." Dorcas said, "He worships you, you know. He talked with me for some time, and I think he would walk into a fire if you told him to." I must have winced at that, because she continued, "All this about Hethor is making you ill, isn"t it? One sick person is enough. Let"s speak of something else."
"Not ill as you are, no. But I can"t think of Hethor except as I saw him once from the scaffold, with his mouth open and his eyes..." She stirred uncomfortably. "Yes, those eyes-I saw them tonight. Dead eyes, though I suppose I shouldn"t be the one to say that. A corpse"s eyes. You have the feeling that if you touched them they would be as dry as stones, and never move under your finger."
"That isn"t it at all. When I was on the scaffold in Saltus and looked down and saw him, his eyes danced. You said, though, that the dull eyes he has at most times reminded you of a corpse"s. Haven"t you ever looked into the gla.s.s? Your own eyes are not the eyes of a dead woman."
"Perhaps not." Dorcas paused. "You used to say they were beautiful."
"Aren"t you glad to live? Even if your husband is dead, and your child is dead, and the house you once lived in is a ruin- if all those things are true-aren"t you full of joy because you are here again?
You"re not a ghost, not a revenant like those we saw in the ruined town. Look in the gla.s.s as I told you. Or if you won"t, look into my face or any man"s and see what you are."
Dorcas sat up even more slowly and painfully than she had risen to drink the wine, but this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and I saw that she was naked under the thin blanket. Before her illness Jolenta"s skin had been perfect, with the smoothness and softness of confectionery. Dorcas"s was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfection than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh. Conscious of how culpable it would be to force myself on her or even to persuade her to open to me now, when she was ill and I was on the point of leaving her, I still felt desire for her stir in me. However much I love a woman-or however little-I find I want her most when I can no longer have her. But what I felt for Dorcas was stronger than that, and more complex. She had been, though only for so brief a time, the closest friend I had known, and our possession of each other, from the frantic desire in our converted storeroom in Nessus to the long and lazy playing in the bedchamber of the Vincula, was the characteristic act of our friendship as well as our love. "You"re crying," I said. "Do you want me to leave?" She shook her head, and then, as though she could no longer contain the words that seemed to force themselves out, she whispered, "Oh, won"t you go too, Severian? I didn"t mean it. Won"t you come? Won"t you come with me?"
"I can"t."
She sank back into the narrow bed, smaller now and more childlike.
"I know. You have your duty to your guild. You can"t betray it again and face yourself, and I won"t ask you. It"s only that I never quite gave up hoping you might." I shook my head as I had before. "I have to flee the city-"
"Severian!"
"And to the north. You"ll be going south, and if I were with you, we would have courier boats full of soldiers after us."
"Severian, what happened?" Dorcas"s face was very calm, but her eyes were wide.
"I freed a woman. I was supposed to strangle her and throw her body into the Acis, and I could have done it-I didn"t feel anything for her, not really, and it should have been easy. But when I was alone with her, I thought of Thecla. We were in a little summerhouse screened with shrubbery, that stood at the edge of the water. I had my hands around her neck, and I thought of Thecla and how I had wanted to free her. I couldn"t find a way to do it. Have I ever told you?" Almost imperceptibly, Dorcas shook her head.
"There were brothers everywhere, five to pa.s.s by the shortest route, and all of them knew me and knew of her." (Thecla was shrieking now in some corner of my mind.) "All I really would have had to do would have been to tell them Master Gurloes had ordered me to bring her to him. But I would have had to go with her then, and I was still trying to devise some way by which I could stay in the guild. I did not love her enough."
"It"s past now," Dorcas said. "And, Severian, death is not the terrible thing you think it." We had reversed our roles, like lost children who comfort each other alternately.
I shrugged. The ghost I had eaten at Vodalus"s banquet was nearly calm again; I could feel her long, cool fingers on my brain, and though I could not turn inside my own skull to see her, I knew her deep and violet eyes were behind my own. It required an effort not to speak with her voice. "At any rate, I was there with the woman, in the summerhouse, and we were alone. Her name was Cyriaca. I knew or at least suspected that she knew where the Pelerines were- she had been one of them for a time. There are silent means of excruciation that require no equipment, and although they are not spectacular, they are quite effective. One reaches into the body, as it were, and manipulates the client"s nerves directly. I was going to use what we call Humbaba"s Stick, but before I had touched her she told me. The Pelerines are near the pa.s.s of Orithyia caring for the wounded. This woman had a letter, she said, only a week ago, from someone she had known in the order..."
CHAPTER TWELVE - FOLLOWING THE FLOOD.
THE SUMMERHOUSE HAD boasted a solid roof, but the sides were mere latticework, closed more by the tall forest ferns planted against them than by their slender laths. Moonbeams leaked through. More came in at the doorway, reflected from the rushing water outside. I could see the fear in Cyriaca"s face, and the knowledge that her only hope was that I retained some love for her; and I knew that she was thus without hope, for I felt nothing.
"At the Autarch"s camp," she repeated. "That was what Einhildis wrote. In Orithyia, near the springs of Gyoll. But you must be careful if you go there to return the book-she said too that cacogens had landed somewhere in the north." I stared at her, trying to determine whether she were lying.
"That"s what Einhildis told me. I suppose they must have wished to avoid the mirrors at theJHouse Absolute so they, could escape the eyes of the Autarch. He"s supposed to be their servitor, but sometimes he acts as if they were his."
I shook her. "Are you joking with me? The Autarch serves them?"
"Please! Oh, please..."
I dropped her.
"Everyone... Erebus! Pardon me." She sobbed, and though she lay in shadow I sensed that she was wiping her eyes and nose with the hem of her scarlet habit. "Everyone knows it except the peons, and the goodmen and the good women. All the armigers and even most of the optimates, and of course the exultants have always known. I"ve never seen the Autarch, but I"m told that he, the Viceroy of the New Sun, is scarcely taller than I am. Do you think our proud exultants would permit someone like that to rule if there weren"t a thousand cannon behind him?"
"I"ve seen him," I said, "and I wondered about that." I sought among Thecla"s memories for confirmation of what Cyriaca said, but I found only rumor.
"Would you tell me about him? Please, Severian, before-"
"No, not now. But why should the cacogens be a danger to me?"
"Because the Autarch will surely send scouts to locate them, and I suppose the archon here will too. Anyone found near them will be a.s.sumed to have been spying for them, or what"s worse, seeking them out in the hope of enlisting them in some plot against the Phoenix Throne."
"I understand."
"Severian, don"t kill me. I beg you. I"m not a good woman- I"ve never been a good woman, never since I left the Pelerines, and I can"t face dying now."
I asked her, "What have you done, anyway? Why does Abdiesus want you killed? Do you know?" It is simplicity itself to strangle an individual whose neck muscles are not strong, and I was already flexing my hands for the task; yet at the same time I wished it had been permissible for me to useTerminus Estinstead.
"Only loved too many men, men other than my husband." As if moved by the memory of those embraces, she rose and came toward me. Again the moonlight fell upon her face; her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
"He was cruel to me, so cruel, after our marriage... and so I took a lover, to spite him, and afterwards, another..." (Her voice dropped until I could hardly hear the words.) "And at last taking a new lover becomes a habit, a way of pushing back the days and showing yourself that all your life has not run between your fingers already, showing yourself that you are still young enough for men to bring gifts, young enough that men still want to stroke your hair. That was what I had left the Pelerines for, after all." She paused and seemed to gather her strength. "Do you know how old I am? Did I tell you?"
"No," I said.
"I won"t, then. But I might almost be your mother. If I had conceived within a year or two of the time it became possible for me. We were far in the south, where the great ice, all blue and white, sails on black seas. There was a little hill where I used to stand and watch, and I dreamed of putting on warm clothes and paddling out to the ice with food and a trained bird I never really had but only wanted to have, and so riding my own ice island north to an isle of palms, where I would discover the ruins of a castle built in the morning of the world. You would have been born then, perhaps, while I was alone on the ice. Why shouldn"t an imaginary child be born on an imaginary trip? You would have grown up fishing and swimming in water wanner than milk."
"No woman is killed for being unfaithful, except by her husband," I said.
Cyriaca sighed, and her dream fell from her. "Among the landed armigers hereabout, he is one of the few who support the archon. The others hope that by disobeying him as much as they dare and fomenting trouble among the eclectics they can persuade the Autarch to replace him. I have made my husband a laughing stock- and by extension his friends and the archon." Because Thecla was within me, I saw the country villa-half manor and half fort, full of rooms that had scarcely changed in two hundred years. I heard the t.i.ttering ladies and the stamping hunters, and the sound of the horn outside the windows, and the deep barking of the boarhounds. It was the world to which Thecla had hoped to retreat; and I felt pity for this woman, who had been forced into that retreat when she had never known any wider sphere. Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos"s play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present. At that counter I tendered Cyriaca"s life in payment for Thecla"s. When I led her from the summerhouse, she supposed, I know, that I intended to kill her at the edge of the water. Instead, I pointed to the river.
"This flows swiftly south until it meets the flood of Gyoll, which then runs more slowly to Nessus, and at last to the southern sea. No fugitive can be found in the maze of Nessus who does not wish it, for there are streets and courts and tenements there without number, and all the faces of all lands are seen a hundred times over. If you could go there, dressed as you are now, without friends or money, would you do so?"
She nodded, one pale hand at her throat.
"There is no barrier to boats yet at the Capulus; Abdiesus knows he need not fear any attack made against the current there until midsummer. But you will have to shoot the arches, and you may drown. Even if you reach Nessus, you will have to work for your bread-wash for others, perhaps, or cook."
"I can dress hair and sew. Severian, I have heard that sometimes, as the last and most terrible torture, you tell your prisoner she will be freed. If that is what you"re doing to me now, I beg you to stop. You"ve gone far enough."
"A caloyer does that, or some other religious functionary. No client would believe us. But I want to be certain there will be no foolishness of returning to your home or seeking a pardon from the archon."
"I am a fool," Cyriaca said. "But no. Not even such a fool as I am would do that, I swear."
We skirted the water"s edge until we came to the stairs where the sentries stood to admit the archon"s guests, and the little, brightly hued pleasure boats were moored. I told one of the soldiers we were going to try the river, and asked if we would have any difficulty hiring rowers to take us back upstream. He said we might leave the boat at the Capulus if we wished, and return in a fiacre. When he turned away to resume his conversation with his comrade, I pretended to inspect the boats, and slipped the painter of the one farthest from the torches of the guard post.
Dorcas said, "And so now you are going north as a fugitive, and I have taken your money."
"I won"t need much, and I will get more." I stood up.
"Take back half at least." When I shook my head, she said, "Then take back two chrisos. I can wh.o.r.e, if worst comes to worst, or steal."
"If you steal, your hand will be struck off. And it is better that I strike off hands for my dinner than that you give your hands for yours."
I started to go, but she sprang out of bed and held my cloak. "Be careful, Severian. There is something-Hethor called it a salamander -loose in the city. Whatever it is, it burns its victims." I told her I had much more to fear from the archon"s soldiers than from the salamander, and left before she could say more. But as I toiled up a narrow street on the western bank that my boatmen had a.s.sured me would lead to the cliff top, I wondered if I would not have more to fear from the cold of the mountains, and their wild beasts, than from either. I wondered too about Hethor, and how he had followed me so far into the north, and why. But more than I thought on any of those things, I thought about Dorcas, and what she had been to me, and I to her. It was to be a long time before I would so much as glimpse her again, and I believe that in some way I sensed that. Just as when I had first left the Citadel I had pulled up my hood so that the pa.s.sersby might not observe my smiles, so now I hid my face to conceal the tears running down my cheeks. I had seen the reservoir that supplied the Vincula twice before by day, but never by night. It had appeared small then, a rectangular pond no larger than the foundation of a house and no deeper than a grave. Under the waning moon it seemed almost a lake, and might have been as deep as the cistern below the Bell Tower. It lay no more than a hundred paces from the wall that defended the western margin of Thrax. There were towers on that wall-one quite near the reservoir-and no doubt the garrisons had by that time been ordered to apprehend me if I tried to escape from the city. At intervals, as I had walked along the cliff, I had glimpsed the sentries who patrolled the wall; their lances were unkindled, but their crested helms showed against the stars, and sometimes faintly caught the light.
Now I crouched, looking out over the city and relying on my fuligin cloak and hood to deceive their eyes. The barred iron portcullises of the arches of the Capulus had been lowered-I could detect the roiling of the Acis where it battered against them. That removed all doubt: Cyriaca had been stopped-or more probably, simply seen and reported. Abdiesus might or might not make strenuous efforts to capture her; it seemed most probable to me that he would allow her to vanish, and so avoid drawing attention to her. But he would surely apprehend me if he could, and execute me as the traitor to his rule that I was.
From the water I looked to water again, from the rushing Acis to the still reservoir. I had the word for the sluice gate, and I used it. The ancient mechanism ground up as though moved by phantom slaves, and then the still waters rushed too, rushed faster than the raging Acis at the Capulus. Far below, the prisoners would hear their roar, and those nearest the entrance would see the white foam of the flood. In a moment those who stood would be up to their ankles in water, and those who had slept would be scrambling to their feet. In another moment, all would be waist deep; but they were chained in their places, and the weaker would be supported by the stronger- none, I hoped, would drown. The clavigers at the entrance would leave their posts and hurry up the steep trail to the cliff top to see who had tampered with the reservoir there.
And as the last water drained away, I heard the stones dislodged by their feet rattling down the slope. I closed the sluice gate again and lowered myself into the slimy and nearly vertical pa.s.sage that the water had just traversed. Here my progress would have been far easier if I had not been carryingTerminus Est. To brace my back against one side of that crooked, chimneylike pipe, I had to unsling her; yet I could not spare a hand to hold her. I put her baldric around my neck, let her blade and sheath hang down, and managed her weight as well as I could. Twice I slipped, but each time I was saved by a turn of the narrowing sluice; and at last, after so long a time that I was certain the clavigers would have returned, I saw the gleam of red torchlight and drew forth the Claw.
I was never to see it flame so bright again. It was blinding, and I carrying it upraised down the long tunnel of the Vincula, could only wonder that my hand was not reduced to ashes. No prisoner, I think, sawme. The Claw fascinated them as a lantern by night does the deer of the forest; they stood motionless, their mouths open, their raddled, bearded faces uplifted, their shadows behind them as sharp as silhouettes cut in metal and dark as fuligin.
At the very end of the tunnel, where the water ran out into the long, sloping sewer that carried it below the Capulus, were the weakest and most diseased prisoners; and it was there that I saw most clearly the strength the Claw lent them all. Men and women who had not stood straight in the memory of the oldest claviger now seemed tall and strong. I waved in salute to them, though I am sure none of them observed it. Then I put the Claw of the Conciliator back into its little pouch, and we were plunged into a night beside which the night of the surface of Urth would be day.
The rush of water had swept the sewer clean, and it was easier to descend than the sluice had been, for though it was narrower, it was less steep, and I could crawl rapidly down headforemost. There was a grill at the bottom; but as I had noted on one of my inspection tours, it was nearly rusted through.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - INTO THE MOUNTAINS.
SPRING HAD ENDED and summer begun when I crept away from the Capulus in the gray light, but even so it was never warm in the high lands except when the sun was near the zenith. Yet I did not dare to go into the valleys where the villages huddled, and all day I walked up, into the mountains, with my cloak furled across one shoulder to make it look as nearly as possible like the garment of an eclectic. I also dismounted the blade ofTerminus Estand rea.s.sembled it without the guard, so that the sheathed sword seen from a distance would have the appearance of a staff. By noon the ground was all of stone, and so uneven that I did as much climbing as walking. Twice I saw the glint of armor far below me, and looking down beheld little parties of dimarchi cantering down trails most men could scarcely have persuaded themselves to walk, their scarlet military capes billowing behind them. I found no edible plants and sighted no game other than high soaring birds of prey. Had I seen any, I would have had no chance of taking it with my sword, and I possessed no other weapon.
All that sounds desperate enough, but the truth was that I was thrilled by the mountain views, the vast panorama of the empire of air. As children we have no appreciation of scenery because, having not yet stored similar scenes in our imagination, with their attendant emotions and circ.u.mstances, we perceive it without psychic depth. I now looked at the cloud-crowned summits with my view of Nessus from the nose cone of our Matachin Tower and my view of Thrax from the battlements of Acies Castle before me as well, and miserable though I was, I was ready to faint with pleasure. That night I spent huddled in the lee of a naked rock. I had not eaten since I had changed clothes in the Vincula, which now seemed weeks, if not years, before. In actuality, it had been only months since I had smuggled a worn kitchen knife to poor Thecla, and seen her blood seeping, a groping worm of crimson, from beneath her cell door.
I had chosen my stone well, at least. It blocked the wind, so that as long as I remained behind it I might almost have rested in the quiet, frigid air of some ice cave. A step or two to either side brought me into the full blast, so that I was chilled to the bone in a single frosty moment.
I slept for about a watch, I think, without any dreams that outlived my sleep, then woke with the impression-which was not a dream, but the sort of foundationless knowledge or pseudoknowledge that comes to us at times when we are weary and fearful-that Hethor was leaning over me. I seemed to feel his breath, stinking and icy cold, upon my face; his eyes, no longer dull, blazed into mine. When I was fully awake, I saw that the points of light I had taken for their pupils were in fact two stars, large and very bright in the thin, clean air.
I tried to sleep again, closing my eyes and forcing myself to remember the warmest and most comfortable places I had known: the journeyman"s quarters I had been given in our tower, which had then seemed so palatial with their privacy and soft blankets after the apprentices" dormitory; the bed I had once shared with Baldanders, into which his broad back had projected heat like a stove"s; Thecla"s apartments in the House Absolute; the snug room in Saltus where I had lodged with Jonas.
Nothing helped. I could not sleep again, and yet I dared not to try to walk farther for fear that I would fall over some precipice in the dark. I spent the remainder of the night staring at the stars; it was the first time I had ever really experienced the majesty of the constellations, of which Master Malrubius had taught us when I was the smallest of the apprentices. How strange it is that the sky, which by day is a stationary ground on which the clouds are seen to move, by night becomes the backdrop for Urth"s own motion, so that we feel her rolling beneath us as a sailor feels the running of the tide. That night the sense of this slow turning was so strong that I was almost giddy with its long, continued sweep.
Strong too was the feeling that the sky was a bottomless pit into which the universe might drop forever. I had heard people say that when they looked at the stars too long they grew terrified by the sensation of being drawn away. My own fear- and I felt fear-was not centered on the remote suns, but rather on the yawning void; and at times I grew so frightened that I gripped the rock with my freezing fingers, for it seemed to me that I must fall off Urth. No doubt everyone feels some touch of this, since it is said that there exists no climate so mild that people will consent to sleep in unroofed houses.
I have already described how I woke thinking that Hethor"s face (I suppose because Hethor had been much in my mind since I talked to Dorcas) was staring into mine, yet discovered when I opened my eyes that the face retained no detail except the two bright stars that had been its own. So it was with me at first when I tried to pick out the constellations, whose names I had often read, though I had only the most imperfect idea of the part of the sky in which each might be found. At first all the stars seemed a featureless ma.s.s of lights, however beautiful, like the sparks that fly upward from a fire. Soon, of course, I began to see that some were brighter than others, and that their colors were by no means uniform. Then, quite unexpectedly, when I had been staring at them for a long time, the shape of a peryton seemed to spring out as distinctly as if the bird"s whole body had been powdered with the dust ground from diamonds. In a moment it was gone again, but it soon returned, and with it other shapes, some corresponding to constellations of which I had heard, others that were, I am afraid, entirely of my own imagining. An amphisbaena, or snake with a head at either end, was particularly distinct.
When these celestial animals burst into view, I was awed by their beauty. But when they became so strongly evident (as they quickly did) that I could no longer dismiss them by an act of will, I began to feel as frightened of them as I was of falling into that midnight abyss over which they writhed; yet this was not a simple physical and instinctive fear like the other, but rather a sort of philosophical horror at the thought of a cosmos in which rude pictures of beasts and monsters had been painted with flaming suns.
After I covered my head with my cloak, which I was forced to do lest I go mad, I fell to thinking of the worlds that circled those suns. All of us know they exist, many being mere endless plains of rock, others spheres of ice or of tindery hills where lava rivers flow, as is alleged of Abaddon; but many others being worlds more or less fair, and inhabited by creatures either descended from the human stock or at least not wholly different from ourselves. At first I thought of green skies, blue gra.s.s, and all the rest of the childish exotica apt to inflict the mind that conceives of other than Urthly worlds. But in time I tired of those puerile ideas, and began in their place to think of societies and ways of thought wholly different from our own, worlds in which all the people, knowing themselves descended from a single pair of colonists, treated one another as brothers and sisters, worlds where there was no currency but honor, so that everyone worked in order that he might be ent.i.tled to a.s.sociate himself with some man or woman who had saved the community, worlds in which the long war between mankind and the beasts was pursued no more. With these thoughts came a hundred or more new ones-how justice might be meted out when all loved all, for example; how a beggar who retained nothing but his humanity might beg for honor, and the ways in which people who would kill no sentient animal might be shod and fed.
When I had first come to realize, as a boy, that the green circle of the moon was in fact a sort of island hung in the sky, whose color derived from forests, now immemorially old, planted in the earliest days of the race of Man, I had formed an intention of going there, and had added to it all the other worlds of the universe as I came in time to realize their existence. I had abandoned that wish as a part (I thought) of growing up, when I learned that only people whose positions in society appeared to me unattainably high ever succeeded in leaving Urth.
Now that old longing was rekindled again, and though it seemed to have grown more absurd still with the pa.s.sage of the years (for surely the little apprentice I had been had more chance of flashing between the stars at last than the hunted outcast I had become) it was immensely firmer and stronger because I had learned in the intervening time the folly of limiting desire to the possible. I would go, I was resolved. For the remainder of my life I would be sleeplessly alert for any opportunity, however slight. Already I had found myself once alone with the mirrors of Father Inire; then Jonas, wiser by far than I, had without hesitation cast himself on the tide of photons. Who could say that I would never find myself before those mirrors again?
With that thought, I s.n.a.t.c.hed my cloak away from my head, resolved to look upon the stars once more, and found that the sunlight had come lancing over the crowns of the mountains to dim them almost to insignificance. The t.i.tan faces that loomed above me now were only those of the long-dead rulers of Urth, haggard by time, their cheeks fallen away in avalanches.
I stood and stretched. It was clear that I could not spend the day without food, as I had spent the day before; and clearer still that I could not spend the next night as I had spent this, with no shelter but my cloak. Thus, though I did not dare yet go down into the peopled valleys, I shaped my path to take me to the high forest I could see marching over the slopes below me.