The Eyes of the
World
Perhaps the boat was controlled by light-when
light flashed about us, it stopped at once. In the lap of the
mountain I had suffered from the cold, but that was nothing to what
I felt now. No wind blew, but it was colder than the bitterest
winter I could recall, and I grew dizzy with the effort of sitting
up.
Typhon sprang out. “It’s been a long
time since I was here last. Well, it’s good to be home
again.”
We were in an empty chamber hewn from
solid rock, a place as big as a ballroom. Two circular windows at
the far end admitted the light; Typhon hastened toward them. They
were perhaps a hundred paces apart, and each was some ten cubits
wide. I followed him until I noticed that his bare feet left
distinct, dark prints. Snow had drifted through the windows and
spilled upon the stone floor. I fell to my knees, scooped it up,
and stuffed my mouth with it.
I have never tasted anything so
delicious. The heat of my tongue seemed to melt it to nectar at
once; I truly felt that I could remain where I was all my life, on
my knees devouring the snow. Typhon turned back, and seeing me,
laughed. “I had forgotten how thirsty you were. Go ahead. We have
plenty of time. What I wanted to show you can wait.”
Piaton’s mouth moved too as it had
before, and I thought I caught an expression of sympathy on the
idiot face. That brought me to myself again, possibly only because
I had already gulped several mouthfuls of the melting snow. When I
had swallowed again, I remained where I was, scraping a new heap
together, but I said, “You told me about Piaton. Why can’t he
speak?”
“He can’t get his breath, poor fellow,”
Typhon said. Now I saw that he had an erection, which he nursed
with one hand. “As I told you, I control all the voluntary
functions—I will control the involuntary ones too, soon. So
although poor Piaton can still move his tongue and shape his lips,
he is like a musician who fingers the keys of a horn he cannot
blow. When you’ve had enough of that snow, tell me, and I’ll show
you where you can get something to eat.”
I filled my mouth again and swallowed.
“This is enough. Yes, I am very hungry.”
“Good,” he said, and turning away from
the windows went to the wall at one side of the chamber. When I
neared it, I saw that it, at least, was not (as I had thought)
plain stone. Instead, it seemed a kind of crystal, or thick, smoky
glass; through it I could see loaves and many strange dishes, as
still and perfect as food in a painting.
“You have a talisman of power,” Typhon
told me. “Now you must give it to me, so that we can open this
cupboard.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you
mean. Do you want my sword?”
“I want the thing you wear at your
neck,” he said, and stretched out a hand for it.
I stepped back. “There is no power in
it.”
“Then you lose nothing. Give it to me.”
As Typhon spoke, Piaton’s head moved almost imperceptibly from side
to side.
“It is only a curio,” I said. “Once I
thought it had great power, but when I tried to revive a beautiful
woman who was dying, it had no effect, and yesterday it could not
restore the boy who traveled with me. How did you know of
it?”
“I was watching you, of course. I
climbed high enough to see you well. When my ring killed the child
and you went to him, I saw the sacred fire. You don’t have to
actually put it in my hand if you don’t want to—just do what I tell
you.”
“You could have warned us, then,” I
said.
“Why should I? At that time you were
nothing to me. Do you want to eat or not?”
I took out the gem. After all, Dorcas
and Jonas had seen it, and I had heard the Pelerines had displayed
it in a monstrance on great occasions. It lay on my palm like a bit
of blue glass, all fire gone.
Typhon leaned over it curiously.
“Hardly impressive. Now kneel.”
I knelt.
“Repeat after me: I swear by all this
talisman represents that for the food I shall receive, I shall be
the creature of him I know as Typhon, evermore—”
A snare was closing beside which
Decuman’s net was a primitive first attempt. This one was so subtle
I scarcely knew it was there, and yet I sensed that every strand
was of hard-drawn steel.
“—rendering to him all I have and all I
shall be, what I own now and what I shall own in days to come,
living or dying at his pleasure.”
“I have broken oaths before,” I said.
“If I took it, I should break that one.”
“Then take it,” he said. “It is no more
than a form we must follow. Take it, and I can release you as soon
as you have finished eating.”
I stood instead. “You said you loved
truth. Now I see why—it is truth that binds men.” I put the Claw
away.
If I had not done so, it would have
been lost forever a moment later. Typhon seized me, pinning my arms
to my sides so I could not draw Terminus
Est, and ran with me to one of the windows. I struggled, but
it was as a puppy struggles in the hands of a strong
man.
As we approached it, the great size of
the window made it seem not a window at all; it was as though a
part of the outer world had intruded itself into the chamber, and
it was a part consisting not of the fields and trees at the
mountain’s base, which was what I had expected, but of mere
extension, a fragment of the sky. The chamber’s rock wall, less
than a cubit thick, floated backward at the corner of my vision
like the muddled line we see, swimming with open eyes, that is the
demarcation between the water and the air.
Then I was outside. Typhon’s hold had
shifted to my ankles, but whether because of the thickness of my
boots or merely because of my panic, for a moment I felt I was not
held at all. My back was to the mass of the mountain. The Claw, in
its soft bag, dangled below my head, held by my chin. I remember
feeling a sudden, absurd fear that Terminus
Est would slip from her sheath.
I pulled myself up with my belly
muscles, as a gymnast does when he hangs from the bar by his feet.
Typhon released one of my ankles to strike my mouth with his fist,
so that I fell back again. I cried out, and tried to wipe my eyes
clear of the blood trickling into them from my lips.
The temptation to draw my sword, raise
myself again, and strike with it was almost too great to resist.
Yet I knew that I could not do so without giving Typhon ample time
to see what I intended and let me fall. Even if I succeeded, I
would die.
“I urge you now …” Typhon’s voice came
above me, seeming distant in that golden immensity. “ … to require
of your talisman such help as it can provide you.”
He paused, and every moment seemed
Eternity itself.
“Can it aid you?”
I managed to call, “No.”
“Do you understand where you
are?”
“I saw. On the face. The mountain
autarch.”
“It is my face—did you see that? I was
the autarch. It is I who come again. You are at my eyes, and it is
the iris of my right eye that is to your back. Do you comprehend?
You are a tear, a single black tear I weep. In an instant, I may
let you fall away to stain my garment. Who can save you,
Talisman-bearer?”
“You. Typhon.”
“Only I?”
“Only Typhon.”
He pulled me back up, and I clung to
him as the boy had once clung to me, until we were well inside the
great chamber that was the cranial cavity of the
mountain.
“Now,” he said, “we will make one more
attempt. You must come with
me to the eye again, and this time you must go willingly. Perhaps
it will be easier for you if we go to the left eye instead of the
right.”
He took my arm. I suppose I could be
said to have gone by my own will, since I walked; but I think I
have never in my life walked with less heart. It was only the
memory of my recent humiliation that kept me from refusing. We did
not halt until we stood upon the very rim of the eye; then with a
gesture, Typhon forced me to look out. Below us lay an ocean of
undulating cloud, blue with shadow where it was not rose with
sunlight.
“Autarch,” I said, “how are we here,
when the vessel in which we rode plunged down so long a
tunnel?”
He shrugged my question aside. “Why
should gravity serve Urth, when it can serve Typhon? Yet Urth is
fair. Look! You see the robe of the world. Is it not
beautiful?”
“Very beautiful,” I
agreed.
“It can be your robe. I have told you
that I was autarch on many worlds. I shall be autarch again, and
this time on many more. This world, the most ancient of all, I made
my capital. That was an error, because I lingered too long when
disaster came. By the time I would have escaped, escape was no
longer open to me—those to whom I had given control of such ships
as could reach the stars had fled in them, and I was besieged on
this mountain. I shall not make that mistake again. My capital will
be elsewhere, and I will give this world to you, to rule as my
steward.”
I said, “I have done nothing to deserve
so exalted a position.”
“Talisman-bearer, no one, not even you,
can require me to justify my acts. Instead, view your
empire.”
Far below us, a wind was born as he
spoke. The clouds seethed under its lash and gathered themselves
like soldiers into serried ranks moving eastward. Beneath them I
saw mountains, and the coastal plains, and beyond the plains the
faint, blue line of the sea.
“Look!” Typhon pointed, and as he did
so, a pinprick of light appeared in the mountains to the northeast.
“Some great energy weapon has been used there,” he said. “Perhaps
by the ruler of this age, perhaps by his foes. Whichever it may be,
its location is revealed now, and it will be destroyed. The armies
of this age are weak. They will fly before our flails as chaff at
the harvest.”
“How can you know all this?” I asked.
“You were as dead, until my son and I came upon you.”
“Yes. But I have lived almost a day and
have sent my thought into far places. There are powers in the seas
now who would rule. They will become our slaves, and the hordes of
the north are theirs.”
“What of the people of Nessus?” I was
chilled to the bone; my legs trembled under me.
“Nessus shall be your capital, if you
wish it. From your throne in Nessus you will send me tribute of
fair women and boys, of the ancient devices and books, and all the
good things this world of Urth produces.”
He pointed again. I saw the gardens of
the House Absolute like a shawl
of green and gold cast upon a lawn, and beyond it the Wall of
Nessus, and the mighty city itself, the City Imperishable,
spreading for so many hundreds of leagues that even the towers of
the Citadel were lost in that endless expanse of roofs and winding
streets.
“No mountain is so high,” I said. “If
this one were the greatest in all the world, and if it stood upon
the crown of the second greatest, a man could never see as far as I
do now.”
Typhon took me by the shoulder. “This
mountain is as lofty as I wish it to be. Have you forgotten whose
face it bears?”
I could only stare at him.
“Fool,” he said. “You see through my
eyes. Now get out your talisman. I will have your oath upon
it.”
I drew forth the Claw-for the last
time, as I thought—from the leathern bag Dorcas had sewn for it. As
I did, there was some slight stirring far below me. The sight of
the world from out of the window of the chamber was still grand
beyond imagining, but it was only what a man might discern from a
mighty peak: the blue dish of Urth. Through the clouds below I
could glimpse the lap of the mountain, with many rectangular
buildings, the circular building in the center, and the
cataphracts. Slowly they were turning their faces away from the
sun, upward, to look at us.
“They honor me,” Typhon said. Piaton’s
mouth moved too, but not with his. This time I heeded
it.
“You were at the other eye,
previously,” I told Typhon, “and they did not honor you then. They
salute the Claw. Autarch, what of the New Sun, if at last he comes?
Will you be his enemy too, as you were the enemy of the
Conciliator?”
“Swear to me, and believe me, when he
comes I shall be his master, and he my most abject
slave.”
I struck then.
There is a way of smashing the nose
with the heel of one’s hand so that the splintered bone is driven
into the brain. One must be very quick, however, because without
the need for thought a man will lift his hands to protect his face
when he sees the blow. I was not so swift as Typhon, but it was his
own face his hands were thrown up to guard. I struck at Piaton, and
felt the small and terrible cracking that is the sigil of death.
The heart that had not served him for so many chiliads ceased to
beat.
After a moment, I pushed Typhon’s body
over the drop with my foot.