This afternoon there was a slight flurry of snow on the sea and the island was indistinguishable from the slate-coloured water of the lagoon, which made it hard for her to focus her thoughts and send them there. She sat with her elbows on the stone window ledge and let her eyelids droop; she’d be able to see better with her eyes closed (there was a paradox for Doctor Nila’s collection) and her mind open. A little snow drifted in through the open window and flecked her face with moisture, like tears.
As a lifelong student of the Principle, Machaera had been taught various techniques for focusing her mind. Most of them were more tricks than anything else, ways of fooling herself into believing that she was in a heightened state of awareness and thereby more closely attuned to the Principle than usual; she found them annoying, because surely it was stupid to try and trick oneself. But there was one, a simple mental exercise, that she did sometimes find useful. It was basically just a way of clearing her mind of irrelevant thoughts, a room-tidying procedure, mental housework, but the fact that it was prosaic didn’t make it any less effective.
She screwed her eyes shut, as if forcing her eyelids together could some how wring out the recollection of what she’d been looking at and make them lightproof, then allowed the muscles of her face to relax. That part of the exercise alone always made her feel more at ease, less concerned with success or failure. She took a couple of deep breaths and began the job of locating the various parts of her body and relaxing them. After a few minutes she yawned, which was a sign that she was doing the exercise properly.
One by one she examined the thoughts and memories she found cluttering up the floor of her mind. She imagined that she was in a library, and that the floor and tables were covered with books, left open and abandoned. She imagined herself picking up each book in turn, dusting it off, winding it tightly and sliding it into its tube, slotting it back into its proper place on the shelf. Here, for example, was the book of trivial distractions, containing such things as the pair of sandals that had to be collected from the cobbler, the raw patch of skin on her elbow where she’d grazed it on the chipped rim of the well, the slight headache that always bothered her when there was snow in the air. All those she solemnly rolled up and filed away, then turned to the book of intrusive preoccupations-
(Choose a place at random and read before rolling it up: the war, the enemy; why must there be a war now, in my lifetime? Why now, it isn’t fair; I have so much to do, so much to learn, I’m only young for such a short time, why must the war descend on me like an obnoxious relative who comes visiting when you want to be alone and refuses to leave? So many things impractical, impossible because of the war – the chance to travel, to visit great libraries in other cities, to learn; Mazeus on active service, instead of here, to talk to and listen to when there’s something I’ve read or thought of that has to be discussed; roll up this book, it’s fatally distracting.)
One by one she rolled them up and put them back, even the bewitchingly tempting book of speculations, in which was written all her thoughts on theories and interpretations, everything she wanted the truth to be (that one especially; roll it up and put it on the top shelf) until the desk was clear and her mind was ready to receive a new book. She visualised it, lying on the polished wood in front of her. She imagined the burnished brass tube with the label pasted on it; pushing her first and middle fingers into the top and opening them, pulling back to slide out the rolled-up book, taking the slender wooden batten to which the top edge of the roll was pasted in one hand, easing back the rest of the roll with the other, nudging across her heavy wooden ruler to stop it coiling back, reading the first section, which was always the same-
The one Principle that pervades all things – the concept is nebulous and vague enough to deter all but the most determined. Sometimes the thread is so wide and clear that it seems mundane and obvious, therefore not worthy of study. At other times, the stream dwindles down into so slight a trickle that it appears to be a figment of the imagination, something one deludes oneself into perceiving because one desires it so urgently. Between the general and trite, the doubtful and the self-made evidence, there is a dangerous temptation to steer a middle course, to assume that the truth must be the average of the available alternatives; which is like trying to write history by taking a vote from a convention of historians, assuming that the majority opinion must be the truth. But in the pursuit of the Principle, there is no place for common sense, belief or democracy. The Principle cannot be amended or simplified or improved. The Principle is that which it is.
Dry, uncompromising words that all students were required to know by heart; not something to believe, since belief presupposes scope for doubt – rather something to accept, in the same way one accepts the fact of death, which does not need to be believed in. So much for the preface; she pictured herself bobbing an awkward curtsey before a stone image standing in front of an archway, waiting uncomfortably for a moment before being allowed to proceed.
And then she was through the gate and into the open air, with no roof or walls crowding around her; she always pictured the contemplation of the Principle as a garden (how foreigners laugh at the Shastel people for their obsession with little patches of organised nature, regimented grass and troops of well-drilled flowers that stand to attention and present petals at the word of command!) where she was free to sit or walk, to work for the benefit of the garden or to cut whatever she wanted without fear of spoiling the display. Sometimes she came here to weed out errors and false conclusions, to dig and mulch and flick out stones, to mow and prune and break off the dead heads of redundant enquiries. At other times she came with a basket over her arm to gather what she wanted and take it home, although it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that – the garden gave her what it wanted her to have…
She opened her eyes and saw a workshop. It reminded her of the cooper’s yard where her father used to work, because she could see a long bench with a heavy wooden vice clamped to it, and on the wall hung familiar-looking tools, the drawknife and the spokeshave and the boxwood plane, the H-framed bowsaw, the heavy rasp and the wooden blocks inset with pads of sandstone, the bundle of horsetail rushes, the chisels, the gouges, the hickory mallet and the small copper hammer. The floor was carpeted with curled white shavings, and on the crossbeams that braced the rafters of the roof rested billets of rough-sawn green timber, adding the sweet smell of sap to the more delicate scent of newly sawn cedarwood. Light slanted into the shop through an open shutter, and fell across the back of a man crouched over a billet clamped in the vice, which he was working down with a large block plane, his arms and shoulders moving with an oarsman’s rhythm. She could only see the back of his head; but the old man who was sitting just outside the light was facing her, although the shadows masked his features.
‘And then what happened?’ he said.
The other man stopped working and straightened his back with a little grunt of discomfort. ‘Oh, it was all anticlimax after that,’ he said. ‘It turned out that my confounded sister had sent the ship to pick me up – if I’d known that, I’d have taken my chances swimming. But I didn’t, and they delivered me here like a parcel, FOB as per the bill of lading, and I was marched up the hill to pay my respects and be properly grateful.’ The man picked up his plane and fiddled with the set of the blade for a few moments. ‘Kept me hanging about in her damned waiting room for best part of an hour, which didn’t improve my attitude.’