When it became impossible for Furvain to go any farther with his transcription he read it all back, astounded, even bemused. The style and general approach, the bizarre schemes of rhyme and metric apart, were beyond any doubt his own. He recognized familiar turns of phrase, similes of a kind that had always come readily to him, choices of rhyme that declared themselves plainly as the work of Aithin Furvain. But how, if not by direct intervention of the Divine, had anything so complicated and deep sprung from his own shallow mind? This was majestic poetry. There was no other word for it. He read it aloud to himself, reveling in the sonorities, the internal assonances, the sinewy strength of the line, the inevitability of each stanza’s form. He had never written anything remotely like this before. He had had the technique for it, very likely, but he could not imagine ever making so formidable a demand on that technique.
And also there were things in here about Stiamot’s campaign that Furvain did not in fact believe he had ever known. He had learned about Lord Stiamot from his tutors, of course. Everyone did; Stiamot was one of the great figures of Majipoor’s history. But Furvain’s schooling had taken place decades ago. Had he ever really heard the names of all these places — Milimorn, Hamifieu, Bizfern, Kattikawn? Were they genuine place-names, or his own inventions?
His inventions? Well, yes, anyone could make up names, he supposed. But there was too much here about military procedure, lines of supply and chains of command and order of march and such, that read like the work of some other hand, someone far more knowledgeable about such things than he had ever been. How, then, could he possibly claim this poem as his own? Yet where had it come from, if not from him? Was he truly the vehicle through which the Divine had chosen to bring this fragment into existence?
Furvain found his slender fund of religious feeling seriously taxed by such a notion. And yet— and yet—
Kasinibon saw at once that something out of the ordinary had happened. “You’ve begun to write, haven’t you?”
“I’ve begun a poem, yes,” said Furvain uneasily.
“Wonderful! When can I see it?”
The blaze of excitement in Kasinibon’s eyes was so fierce that Furvain had to back away a few steps.
“Not just yet, I think. This is much too soon to be showing it to anyone. At this point it would be extremely easy for me to lose my way. A casual word from someone else might be just the one that would deflect me from my path.”
“I swear that I’ll offer no comment at all. I simply would like to—”
“No. Please.” Furvain was surprised by the steely edge he heard in his own voice. “I’m not sure yet what this is a part of. I need to examine, to evaluate, to ponder. And that has to be done on my own. I tell you, Kasinibon, I’m afraid that I’ll lose it altogether if I reveal anything of it now. Please: let me be.”
Kasinibon seemed to understand that. He grew instantly solicitous. Almost unctuously he said, “Yes.
Yes, of course, it would be tragic if my blundering interference harmed the flow of your creation. I withdraw my request. But you will, I hope, grant me a look at it just as soon as you feel that the time has come when you—”
“Yes. Just as soon as the time has come,” said Furvain.
He retreated to his quarters and returned to work, not without trepidation. This was new to him, this business of settling down formally to work. In the past poems had always found him — taking a direct and immediate line from his mind to his fingertips. He had never needed to go searching for them. Now, though, Furvain self-consciously sat himself at his little bare table, he laid out two or three pens at his side, he tapped the edges of his stack of blank paper until every sheet was perfectly aligned, he closed his eyes and waited for the heat of inspiration.
Quickly he discovered that inspiration could not simply be invited to arrive, at least not when one was embarked on an enterprise such as this. His old methods no longer applied. For what he had to do now, one had to go out in quest of the material; one had to fix it in one’s gaze and seize it firmly; one had to compel it to do one’s bidding. He was writing, it seemed, a poem about Lord Stiamot. Very welclass="underline" he must focus every atom of his being on that long-ago monarch, must reach out across the ages and enter into a communion of a sort with him, must touch his soul and follow his path.
That was easy enough to say, not so easy to accomplish. The inadequacies of his historical knowledge troubled him. With nothing more than a schoolboy’s grasp of Stiamot’s life and career, and that knowledge, such as it ever had been, now blurred by so many years of forgetfulness, how could he presume to tell the tale of the epochal conflict that had ended for all time the aboriginal threat to the expansion of the human settlements on Majipoor?
Abashed at his own lack of learning, he prowled Kasinibon’s library, hoping to come upon some works of historical scholarship. But history, it seemed, was not a subject that held any great interest for his captor. Furvain found no texts of any consequence, just a brief history of the world, which seemed to be nothing more than a child’s book. From an inscription on its back cover he saw that it was in fact a relic of Kasinibon’s own childhood in Kekkinork. It contained very little that was usefuclass="underline" just a brief, highly simplified recapitulation of Lord Stiamot’s attempts to seek a negotiated peace with the Metamorphs, the failure of those attempts, and the Coronal’s ultimate decision to put an end once and for all to Metamorph depredations against the cities of the human settlers by defeating them in battle, expelling them from human-occupied territories, and confining them for all time in the rain forests of southern Zimroel. Which had, of course, entangled the world in a generation-long struggle that ended ultimately in success and made possible the explosive growth of civilization on Majipoor and prosperity everywhere on the giant world. Stiamot was one of the key figures of Majipoor’s history. But Kasinibon’s little history book told only the bare outlines of the story, the politics and the battles, not a word about Stiamot as a man, his inner thoughts and emotions, his physical appearance, anything of that sort.
Then Furvain realized that he had no real need to know those things. He was writing a poem, not an historical text or a work of biography. He was free to imagine any detail he liked, so long as he remained faithful to the broad outline of the tale. Whether the actual Lord Stiamot had been short or tall, plump or thin, cheerful of nature or a dyspeptic brooder, would make no serious difference to a poet intent only on recreating the Stiamot legend. Lord Stiamot, by now, had become a mythical figure. And myth, Furvain knew, has a power that transcends mere history. History could be as arbitrary as poetry, he told himself: what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different “truths.” Whereas myth digs deep into the fundamental reality of the spirit, into that infinite well that is the shared consciousness of the entire race, reaching the levels where truth is not an optional matter, but the inescapable foundation of all else. In that sense myth could be truer than history; by creating imaginative episodes that clove to the essence of the Stiamot story, a poet could reveal the truth of that story in a way that no historian could claim to do. And so Furvain resolved that his poem would deal with the myth of Stiamot, not with the historical man. He was free to invent as he pleased, so long as what he invented was faithful to the inner truth of the story.