It did not seem to me that I slept, but Valeria sat beside me weeping for drowned Urth; her sweet, warm tears pattered on my face. I woke and found I was hot and flushed, and that Lune was concealed behind clouds from which fell a gentle rain. Not far down the beach, a door without a doorway offered the shelter of a crude roof. I crept beneath it, buried my face in my arm, and slept once more, wishing never to wake.
Again green light drenched the beach. One of the flapping horrors that had snatched me from the wreck of the old Autarch’s flier fluttered mothlike between my eyes and Lune, waxing ever larger; for the first time I knew that notules were its wings. It landed clumsily among white wolves on the cracked mud.
Without memory of mounting, I was upon its back and slipping off. Moonlit waves closed about me, and I saw the Citadel below me. Fish as large as ships swam between the towers, which I had been wrong to think fallen; save for the water and their wreaths of weed, all stood as they had before. For a moment I trembled to think I might be impaled on their spires. The great gun that had fired at me when I had been taken to the Prefect Prisca now boomed again, its bolt cleaving Ocean with a roar of steam.
The bolt struck me, but it was not I who died — this drowned Citadel vanished like the dream it was, and I found that I was swimming through the gap in the curtain wall and into the real Citadel itself. The tops of its towers thrust above the waves; and Juturna sat among them, submerged to the neck, eating fish.
“You lived,” I called, and felt that this too was merely a dream.
She nodded. “You did not.”
I was weak with hunger and fear, but I asked, “Then am I dead? And have I come to a place of the dead?”
She shook her head. “You live.”
“I’m asleep.”
“No. You have…” She paused, chewing, her enormous face without expression.
When she spoke again, fish that were not the huge fish of my dream but silvery creatures no bigger than perch leaped from the water before her chin to snap at the fragments that dropped from her lips. “You have resigned your life, or endeavored to do so. To some extent you have succeeded.”
“I’m dreaming.”
“No. You no longer dream. Thus would you die, if you could.”
“It was because I couldn’t watch Thecla in torment, wasn’t it? Now I’ve seen Urth die like that, and I was Urth’s killer.”
“Who were you,” she asked me, “when you stood before the Hierogrammate’s Seat of Justice?”
“A man who had not yet destroyed everything he ever loved.”
“You were Urth, and thus Urth lives.”
I shouted, “This is Ushas!”
“If you say it. But Urth lives in Ushas and in you.”
“I must think,” I told her. “Go away and think.” I had not meant to plead, but when I heard my voice I knew it for a beggar’s.
“Then do so.”
I looked without hope at the half-submerged Citadel.
Juturna pointed like a village woman directing some lost traveler, her hands and arms extending in directions I had not seen until she indicated them. “That way the future, this way the past. There is the margin of the world, and beyond that, your sun’s other worlds and the worlds of other suns. Here is the stream that rises in Yesod and rushes to Briah.”
I did not hesitate.
Chapter XLIX — Apu-Punchau
THE WATERS were no longer black with night, but darkly green; in them it seemed I glimpsed innumerable strands of weed, standing upright and swaying in the current. Hunger filled my mind with the memory of Juturna’s fish; yet I watched Ocean wane, becoming thinner and lighter, each minute droplet separating itself from its fellows until what remained was merely mist.
I drew breath, and it was of air and not water. I stamped, and I stood upon solid ground.
What had been the flood was a pampa of waist-high grass, a sea of grass whose shore was lost in swirling white, as though a rout of ghosts danced there swiftly, silently, and somberly. The caress of the mist failed to horrify me, but it was as mucid as that of any specter in a midnight tale. Hoping to find food and to warm myself, I began to walk.
It is said that they who wander in darkness, and still more they who do so in a mist, merely scribe circles across the plain. Perhaps it was so for me, but I do not believe it. A faint wind stirred the mist, and I kept that wind ever at my back.
Once I had strode grinning along the Water Way and imagined myself unlucky, and I had been ecstatic in my misfortune. Now I knew that I had then begun the journey that was to make me Urth’s executioner; and although my task was done, I felt I could never be happy again — although after a watch or two I would have been happy enough, I suppose, if only my warm journeyman’s cloak had been returned to me.
At last Urth’s old sun rose behind me, and rose in glory crowned with gold. The specters fled before it; I beheld the spreading pampa, an endless, whisperous green Ocean, across which raced a thousand waves. Endless, that is, except in the east, where mountains lifted haughty fastnesses not yet stamped with the human form.
I continued westward, and it came to me as I walked that I, who had been the New Sun, would hide myself behind the horizon if I could. Perhaps he who had been the Old Sun had felt the same. There had been such an Old Sun, after all, in Dr. Tabs’s Eschatology and Genesis, and although our performance remained forever incomplete, Dr. Tabs, who had himself become a wanderer in western lands, had once intended to take the part.
Long-legged birds stalked the pampa but fled when I drew too near. Once, just after the sun appeared, I saw a spotted cat; but it was full fed and slunk away. Condors and eagles wheeled overhead, black specks against the brilliant blue sky. I was as famished as they; and though there could be none in such a place, from time to time I imagined the odor of frying fish, misled no doubt by the memory of the shabby inn where I had first encountered Baldanders and Dr. Tabs.
A client in a cell can endure three days or more without water, so Master Palaemon had taught us; but for one who must labor under the sun, the time is much less. I would have died that day, I believe, if I had not found it — as I did when my shadow stretched long behind me. It was only a narrow stream, scarcely broader than the brook beyond Briah had seemed in my sight, and so deeply sunk into the pampa that it was invisible until I had nearly tumbled into its ravine.
I scrambled down the rocky sides as readily as any monkey and sated my thirst with sun-warmed water that tasted of mud to one who had drunk of the clean sea. Had you been with me then, reader, and insisted I walk farther with you, I think I would have taken your life. I sank down among the stones, too weary to go another step, and slept before I closed my eyes.
But not, I think, for long. Nearby a big cat coughed, and I woke shaking with a fear older than the first human dwelling. When I was a boy sleeping beside the other apprentices in the Matachin Tower , I had often heard that cough from the Bear Tower and had not been frightened. It is the presence or absence of walls that makes the difference, I think. I had known then that walls enclosed me, and that others imprisoned the smilodons and atroxes. I knew now that there were none, and I gathered stones by starlight, stacking them, as I told myself, for missiles — but in fact (as I now believe) to build a wall.
How strange it was! When I had swum and walked far beneath the flood, I had fancied myself a godling, or at least something more than a man; now I felt myself something less. Yet it seems to me upon reflection to be not so strange after all. In this place I was, perhaps, at a time far earlier than that at which Zak had done whatever he had done aboard the ship of Tzadkiel. Here the Old Sun had not yet dimmed, and even those influences that cast shadows behind them as long as mine when I walked to the ravine might fail to reach me.