Nor was the ship lost; it was indeed so near that I could see a sailor here and there in the rigging. Perhaps we were still falling. Surely we must have been traveling with great velocity, because the ship herself must have been hurtling from world to world. Yet all such speed was invisible, as the wind vanishes when a swift xebec scuds before a tempest on the Ocean of Urth . We drifted so lazily that if I had not had faith in Apheta and the Hierarchs, I would have feared we would never reach the ship at all and be lost forever in that endless night.
It was not so. A sailor sighted us, and we watched him leap from one to another of his comrades, waving and pointing until he was close enough for their cloaks of air to touch, so that he could speak.
Then one who carried a burden climbed a mastnear us, rising in practiced leaps, until standing upon the topmost spar he took a bow and an arrow from his bundle, drew the bow, and sent the arrow hurtling toward us, trailing an interminable line of silver no thicker than a pack thread.
The arrow passed between Gunnie and me, and I despaired of catching the line; but Gunnie was more fortunate, and when she held it and had been pulled toward the ship some distance by the burly sailor, she cracked it as a drover snaps his whip, so that a long wave ran from her to me like a live thing and brought the line near enough for me to snatch.
I had not loved the ship when I had been a passenger and a seaman aboard her, but now the mere thought of returning to her filled me with pleasure. Consciously I knew, as I was reeled toward the mast, that my task was far from complete, that the New Sun would not come unless I brought it, and that in bringing it I would be responsible for the destruction it would cause as well as the renewal of Urth. Thus every common man who brings a son into the world must feel himself responsible for his woman’s labor and perhaps for her death, and with reason fears that the world will in the end condemn him with a million tongues.
Yet though I knew all this, my heart thought it was not so: that I, who had desired so desperately to succeed and had bent every effort toward success, had failed; and that I would now be permitted to reclaim the Phoenix Throne, as I had in the person of my predecessor — to reclaim it and enjoy all the authority and luxury it would bring, and most of all that pleasure in dealing justice and rewarding worth that is the final delight of power. All this while freed at last from the unquenchable desire for the flesh of women that has brought so much suffering to me and to them.
Thus my heart was wild with joy, and I descended to that titanic forest of masts and spars, those continents of silver sail, as any shipwrecked mariner would have clambered from the sea to some flower-decked coast with friendly hands helping him ashore, and, standing with Gunnie on the spar at last, embraced the sailor as I might Roche or Drotte, grinning I am sure like any fool, and leaped down from halyard to stay with him and his mates no more circumspectly than they, but as though all the wild elation I felt were centered not in my heart, but in my arms and legs.
It was only when my final leap carried me to the deck that I discovered such thoughts were no idle metaphors. My crippled leg, which had pained me so much when I had descended from the mast after casting away the leaden coffer that held the record of my earlier life, did not pain me at all but seemed as strong as the other. I ran my hands from thigh to knee (so that Gunnie and the sailors who had gathered around us believed I had injured it) and found the muscle there as abundant and firm as that of the other.
I leaped for joy then, and leaping left the deck and the others far below, and spun myself a dozen times as a gambler spins a coin. But I returned to the deck sobered, for as I spun I had beheld a star brighter than all the rest.
Chapter XXIV — The Captain
WE WERE soon taken below. To tell the truth, I was happy enough to go. It is difficult to explain — so much so that I am tempted to omit it altogether. Yet I think it would be easy if only you were as young as once you were.
An infant in its crib does not at first know that there is a distinction between its body and the wood that surrounds it or the rags upon which it lies. Or rather, its body seems as alien as all the rest. It discovers a foot and marvels to find so odd a thing a part of itself.
So with me. I had seen the star; and seeing it — immensely remote though it was — had known it a region of myself, absurd as the baby’s foot, mysterious as his genius is to one who has only just discovered it. I do not mean that my consciousness, or any consciousness, rested in the star; at that time, at least, it did not. Yet I was aware of existence at two points, like a man who stands waist deep in the sea, so that wave and wind are alike to him in that both are something less than the whole, the totality of his environment.
Thus I walked with Gunnie and the sailors cheerfully enough and held my head high. But I did not speak, or remember to take off my necklace until I observed that Gunnie and the sailors had removed theirs.
What a sad shock I felt then! The air of Yesod, to which I had in a day become accustomed, left me; and an atmosphere like — and yet unlike and inferior to — the atmosphere of Urth rushed to fill my lungs. The first fire must have been kindled in an age now inconceivably remote. At that instant, I felt as some ancient must toward the end of his lifetime, when none save the eldest recalled the pure winds of bygone mornings. I looked at Gunnie and saw that she was looking at me. Each knew what the other felt, though we did not speak of it, then or subsequently.
How far we threaded the ship’s mazed passages I cannot say. I was too wrapped in my own thoughts to count my strides; and it seemed to me that though time as it existed on that ship was not other than time as it existed upon Urth, yet time upon Yesod had been otherwise, stretched to the frontier of Forever yet over in a wink. Musing on that and the star, and a hundred further wonders, I plodded forward, knowing nothing of where I had been until I noticed that most of the sailors had gone, replaced by Hierodules masked as men. I had been so far lost amid chimeric speculations that for a while I supposed that those whom I had thought sailors had always been masked Hierodules, and had been recognized as such by Gunnie from the beginning; but when I cast back my mind to the moment we first stood upon the deck again, I found it was not so, though so charming a thought. In our mean universe of Briah, extravagance is but a weak recommendation of truth. The sailors had merely slipped away unnoticed by me, and the Hierodules — taller and far more formally arrayed — had taken their places.
I had only begun to study them when we halted before great doors of a shape recalling those through which Gunnie and I had passed with Apheta a watch before on Yesod. These, however, did not require my shoulder, but swung slowly and ponderously open of themselves, revealing a long vista of marmoreal arches — each at least a hundred cubits high — down which played such light as was never seen upon any world that circled a star, light silver, gold, and berylline by turns, flashing as though the air itself held splintered treasures.
Gunnie and the remaining hands recoiled in fear at all this and had to be driven through the doorway by the Hierodules with orders and even with blows; but I stepped inside readily enough, believing that from my years on the Phoenix Throne I recognized the pomps and wonders with which we sovereigns cow poor, ignorant people.
The doors shut behind us with a crash. I drew Gunnie to me, telling her as well as I could that there was nothing to fear, or at least that I thought there was nothing or little, and that if some danger arose, I would do anything I could to protect her. Overhearing me, the sailor who had shot the line to us (one of the few who remained with us) remarked, “Most that come here don’t come back. This is the skipper’s quarters.”