On High
Paths
The floating boat would not obey me, for I had
not the word for it. (I have often thought that its word may have
been among the things Piaton had tried to tell me, as he had told
me to take his life; and I wish I had come to heed him sooner.) In
the end, I was forced to climb from the right eye—the worst climb
of my life. In this overlong account of my adventures, I have said
often that I forget nothing; but I have forgotten much of that,
because I was so exhausted that I moved as though in sleep. When I
staggered at last into the silent, sealed town that stood among the
feet of the cataracts, it must have been nearly night, and I lay
down beside a wall that gave me shelter from the wind.
There is a terrible beauty in the mountains,
even when they bring one near to death; indeed, I think it is most
evident then, and that the hunters who enter the mountains well
clothed and well fed and leave them well fed and well clothed
seldom see them. There all the world can seem a natural basin of
clear water, still and icy cold.
I descended far that day, and found
high plains that stretched for leagues, plains filled with sweet
grass and such flowers as are never seen at lower altitudes,
flowers small and quick to bloom, perfect and pure as roses can
never be.
These plains were bordered as often as
not by cliffs. More than once I thought I could not go north
anymore and would have to retrace my steps; but I always found a
way in the end, up or down, and so pressed on. I saw no soldiers
riding or marching below me, and though that was in some sense a
relief—for I had been afraid the archon’s patrol might still be
tracking me—it was also unsettling, because it showed I was no
longer near the routes by which the army was supplied.
The memory of the alzabo returned to
haunt me; I knew that there must be many more of its kind in the
mountains. Then too, I could not feel certain it was truly dead.
Who could say what recuperative powers such a creature might
possess? Though I could forget it by daylight, forcing it, so to
speak, away from my consciousness with worries about the presence
or absence of soldiers, and the thousand lovely images of peak and
cataract
and swooping valley that assailed my eyes on every side, it
returned by night, when, huddled in my blanket and cloak and
burning with fever, I believed I heard the soft padding of its
feet, the scraping of its claws.
If as is often said, the world is
ordered to some plan (whether one formed prior to its creation or
one derived during the billion aeons of its existence by the
inexorable logic of order and growth makes no difference) then in
all things there must be both the miniature representation of
higher glories and the enhanced depiction of smaller matters. To
hold my circling attention from the recollection of its horror, I
tried sometimes to fix it on that facet of the nature of the alzabo
that permits it to incorporate the memories and wills of human
beings into its own. The parallel to smaller matters gave me little
difficulty. The alzabo might be likened to certain insects, that
cover their bodies with twigs and bits of grass, so that they will
not be discovered by their enemies. Seen in one way, there is no
deception—the twigs, the fragments of leaves are there and are
real. Yet the insect is within. So with the alzabo. When Becan,
speaking through the creature’s mouth, told me he wished his wife
and the boy with him, he believed himself to be describing his own
desires, and so he was; yet those desires would serve to feed the
alzabo, who was within, whose needs and consciousness hid behind
Becan’s voice.
Not surprisingly, the problem of
correlating the alzabo with some higher truth was more difficult;
but at last I decided that it might be likened to the absorption by
the material world of the thoughts and acts of human beings who,
though no longer living, have so imprinted it with activities that
in the wider sense we may call works of art, whether buildings,
songs, battles, or explorations, that for some time after their
demise it may be said to carry forward their lives. In just this
fashion the child Severa suggested to the alzabo that it might
shift the table in Casdoe’s house to reach the loft, though the
child Severa was no more.
I had Thecla, then, to advise me, and
though I had little hope when I called on her, and she little
advice to give, yet she had been warned often against the dangers
of the mountains, and she urged me up and onward, and down, always
down to lower lands and warmth, at the first light.
I hungered no longer, for hunger is a
thing that passes if one does not eat. Weakness came instead,
bringing with it a pristine clarity of mind. Then, in the evening
of the second day after I had climbed from the pupil of the right
eye, I came upon a shepherd’s bothy, a sort of beehive of stone,
and found in it a cooking pot and a quantity of ground
corn.
A mountain spring was only a dozen
steps away, but there was no fuel. I spent the evening collecting
the abandoned nests of birds from a rock face a half league
distant, and that night I struck fire from the tang of Terminus Est and boiled the coarse meal (which took a
long time to cook, because of the altitude) and ate it. It was, I
think, as good a dinner as I have ever tasted, and it had an
elusive yet unmistakable flavor of honey, as if the nectar of the
plant had been retained in the dry grains as the salt of seas that
only Urth herself recalls is held within the cores of certain
stones.
I was determined to pay for what I had
eaten, and went through my sabretache looking for something of at
least equal value that I might leave for the shepherd. Thecla’s
brown book I would not give up; I soothed my conscience by
reminding myself that it was unlikely the shepherd could read in
any case. Nor would I surrender my broken whetstone—both because it
recalled the green man, and because it would be only a tawdry gift
here, where stones nearly as good lay among the young grass on
every side. I had no money, having left every coin I had possessed
with Dorcas. At last I settled on the scarlet cape she and I had
found in the mud of the stone town, long before we reached Thrax.
It was stained and too thin to provide much warmth, but I hoped
that the tassels and bright color would please him who had fed
me.
I have never fully understood how it
came to be where we found it, or even whether the strange
individual who had called us to him so that he might have that
brief period of renewed life had left it behind intentionally or
accidentally when the rain dissolved him again to that dust he had
been for so long. The ancient sisterhood of priestesses beyond
question possesses powers it seldom or never uses, and it is not
absurd to suppose that such raising of the dead is among them. If
that is so, he may have called them to him as he called us, and the
cape may have been left behind by accident.
Yet even if that is so, some higher
authority may have been served. It is in such fashion most sages
explain the apparent paradox that though we freely choose to do
this or the other, commit some crime or by altruism steal the
sacred distinction of the Empyrian, still the Increate commands the
entirety and is served equally (that is, totally) by those who
would obey and those who would rebel.
Not only this. Some, whose arguments I
have read in the brown book and several times discussed with
Thecla, have pointed out that fluttering in the Presence there
abide a multitude of beings that though appearing minute—indeed,
infinitely small—by comparison are correspondingly vast in the eyes
of men, to whom their master is so gigantic as to be invisible. (By
this unlimited size he is rendered minute, so that we are in
relation to him like those who walk upon a continent but see only
forests, bogs, hills of sand, and so on, and though feeling,
perhaps, some tiny stones in their shoes, never reflect that the
land they have overlooked all their lives is there, walking with
them.)
There are other sages too, who doubting
the existence of that power these beings, who may be called the
amschaspands, are said to serve, nonetheless assert the fact of
their existence. Their assertions are based not on human
testimony—of which there is much and to which I add my own, for I
saw such a being in the mirror-paged book in the chambers of Father
Inire—but rather on irrefutable theory, for they say that if the
universe was not created (which they, for reasons not wholly
philosophical, find it convenient to disbelieve), then it must have
existed forever to this day. And if it has so existed, time itself
extends behind the present day without end, and in such a limitless
ocean of time, all things conceivable must of necessity
have come to pass. Such beings as the amschaspands are conceivable,
for they, and many others, have conceived of them. But if creatures
so mighty once entered existence, how should they be destroyed?
Therefore they are still extant.
Thus by the paradoxical nature of
knowledge, it is seen that though the existence of the Ylem, the
primordial source of all things, may be doubted, yet the existence
of his servants may not be doubted.
And as such beings certainly exist, may
it not be that they interfere (if it can be called interference) in
our affairs by such accidents as that of the scarlet cape I left in
the bothy? It does not require illimitable might to interfere with
the internal economy of a nest of ants—a child can stir it with a
stick. I know of no thought more terrible than this. (That of my
own death, which is popularly supposed to be so awful as to be
inconceivable, does not much trouble me; it is of my life that I
find, perhaps because of the perfection of my memory, that I cannot
think.)
Yet there is another explanation: It
may be that all those who seek to serve the Theophany, and perhaps
even all those who allege to serve him, though they appear to us to
differ so widely and indeed to wage a species of war upon one
another, are yet linked, like the marionettes of the boy and the
man of wood that I once saw in a dream, and who, although they
appeared to combat each other, were nevertheless under the control
of an unseen individual who operated the strings of both. If this
is the case, then the shaman we saw may have been the friend and
ally of those priestesses who range so widely in their civilization
across the same land where he, in primitive savagery, once
sacrificed with liturgical rigidity of drum and crotal in the small
temple of the stone town.
In the last light of the day after I slept in
the shepherd’s bothy, I came to the lake called Diuturna. It was
that, I think, and not the sea, that I had seen on the horizon
before my mind was enchained by Typhon’s—if indeed my encounter
with Typhon and Piaton was not a vision or a dream, from which I
awoke of necessity at the spot where I began it. Yet Lake Diuturna
is nearly a sea itself, for it is sufficiently vast to be
incomprehensible to the mind; and it is the mind, after all, that
creates the resonances summoned by that word—without the mind there
is only a fraction of Urth covered with brackish water. Though this
lake lies at an altitude substantially higher than that of the true
sea, I spent the greater part of the afternoon descending to its
shore.
The walk was a remarkable experience,
and one I treasure even now, perhaps the most beautiful I can
recall, though I now hold in my mind the experiences of so many men
and women, for as I descended I strode through the year. When I
left the bothy, I had above me, behind me, and to my right great
fields of snow and ice, through which showed dark crags colder even
than they, crags too windswept to retain the snow, which sifted
down to melt on the tender meadow grass I trod, the grass of
earliest spring. As I walked, the grass grew coarser, and of a more
virile green. The sounds of
insects, of which I am seldom conscious unless I have not heard
them in some time, resumed, with a noise that reminded me of the
tuning of the strings in the Blue Hall before the first cantilena
began, a noise I sometimes used to listen to when I lay on my
pallet near the open port of the apprentices’
dormitory.
Bushes, which for all their appearance
of wiry strength had not been able to endure the heights where the
tender grasses lived, appeared now; but when I examined them with
care, I found that they were not bushes at all, but plants I had
known as towering trees, stunted here by the shortness of the
summer and the savagery of the winter, and often split by that ill
use into severe straggling trunks. In one of these dwarfed trees, I
found a thrush upon a nest, the first bird I had seen in some time
except for the soaring raptors of the peaks. A league farther on,
and I heard the whistling of cavies, who had their holes among the
rocky outcrops, and who thrust up brindled heads with sharp black
eyes to warn their relatives of my coming.
A league farther on, and a rabbit went
skipping ahead of me in dread of the whirling astara I did not
possess. I was descending rapidly at this point, and I became aware
of how much strength I had lost, not only to hunger and illness,
but to the thinness of the air. It was as though I had been
afflicted with a second sickness, of which I had been unaware until
the return of trees and real shrubs brought its cure.
At this point, the lake was no longer a
line of misted blue; I could see it as a great and almost
featureless expanse of steely water, dotted by a few boats I was
later to learn were built for the most part of reeds, with a
perfect little village at the end of a bay only slightly to the
right of my present line of travel.
Just as I had not known my weakness,
until I saw the boats and the rounded curves of the thatched roofs
of the village I had not known how solitary I had been since the
boy died. It was more than mere loneliness, I think. I have never
had much need for companionship, unless it was the companionship of
someone I could call a friend. Certainly I have seldom wished the
conversation of strangers or the sight of strange faces. I believe
rather that when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my
individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had been not
Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone,
and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I
believe, because they enjoy playing that part. But I wanted to be a
particular person again, and so I sought the mirror of other
persons, which would show me that I was not as they
were.