The People of the
Lake
Pia and I spent the night on one of the
floating islands, where I, who had entered Thecla so often when she
was unchained but a prisoner, now entered Pia when she was still
chained but free. She lay upon my chest afterward and wept for
joy—not so much the joy she had of me, I think, but the joy of her
freedom, though her kinsmen the islanders, who have no metal but
that they trade or loot from the people of the shore, had no smith
to strike off her shackles.
I have heard it said by men who have
known many women that at last they come to see resemblances in love
between certain ones, and now for the first time I found this to be
true in my own experience, for Pia with her hungry mouth and supple
body recalled Dorcas. But it was false too in some degree; Dorcas
and Pia were alike in love as the faces of sisters are sometimes
alike, but I would never have confused one with the
other.
I had been too exhausted when we
reached the island to fully appreciate the wonder of it, and night
had been nearly upon us. Even now, all I recall is dragging the
little boat to shore and going into a hut where one of our rescuers
kindled a tiny blaze of driftwood, and I oiled Terminus Est, which the islanders had taken from the
captured hetman and returned to me. But when Urth turned her face
to the sun again, it was a wondrous thing to stand with one hand on
the willow’s graceful trunk and feel the whole of the island rock
beneath me!
Our hosts cooked fish for our
breakfast; before we had finished them, a boat arrived bearing two
more islanders with more fish and root vegetables of a kind I had
never tasted before. We roasted these in the ashes and ate them
hot. The flavor was more like a chestnut’s than anything else I can
think of. Three more boats came, then an island with four trees and
bellying, square sails rigged in the branches of each, so that when
I saw it from a distance I thought it a flotilla. The captain was
an elderly man, the closest thing the islanders had to a chief. His
name was Llibio. When Pia introduced me to him, he embraced me as
fathers do their sons, something no one had ever done to me
previously.
After we separated, all the others, Pia
included, drew far enough away to permit us to speak privately if
we kept our voices low—some men going
into the hut, and the rest (there were now about ten in all) to the
farther side of the island.
“I have heard that you are a great
fighter, and a slayer of men,” Llibio began.
I told him that I was indeed a slayer
of men, but not great.
“That is so. Every man fights
backward—to kill others. Yet his victory comes not in the killing
of others but in the killing of certain parts of
himself.”
To show that I understood him, I said,
“You must have killed all the worst parts of your own being. Your
people love you.”
“That is also not to be trusted.” He
paused, looking out over the water. “We are poor and few, and had
the people listened to another in these years …” He shook his
head.
“I have traveled far, and I have
observed that poor people usually have more wit and more virtue
than rich ones.”
He smiled at that. “You are kind. But
our people have so much wit and virtue now that they may die. We
have never possessed great numbers, and many perished in the winter
just past, when much water froze.”
“I had not thought how difficult winter
must be for your people, without wool or furs. But I can see, now
that you have pointed it out to me, that it must be hard
indeed.”
The old man shook his head. “We grease
ourselves, which does much, and the seals give us finer cloaks than
the shore people have. But when the ice comes, our islands cannot
move, and the shore people need no boats to reach them, and so can
come against us with all their force. Each summer we fight them
when they come to take our fish. But each winter they kill us,
coming across the ice for slaves.”
I thought then of the Claw, which the
hetman had taken from me and sent to the castle, and I said, “The
land people obey the master of the castle. Perhaps if you made
peace with him, he would stop them from attacking
you.”
“Once, when I was a young man, these
quarrels took two or three lives in a year. Then the builder of the
castle came. Do you know the tale?”
I shook my head.
“He came from the south, whence, as I
am told, you come as well. He had many things the shore people
wanted, such as cloth, and silver, and many well-forged tools.
Under his direction they built his castle. Those were the fathers
and grandfathers of those who are the shore people now. They used
the tools for him, and as he had promised, he permitted them to
keep them when the work was done, and he gave them many other
things. My mother’s father went to them while they labored, and
asked if they did not see that they were setting up a ruler over
themselves, since the builder of the castle could do as he chose
with them, then retire behind the strong walls they had built for
him where no one could reach him. They laughed at my mother’s
father and said they were many, which was true, and the builder of
the castle only one, which was also true.”
I asked if he had ever seen the
builder, and if so what he looked like.
“Once. He stood on a rock talking to
shore people while I passed in my boat. I can tell you he was a
little man, a man who would not, had you been there, have reached
higher than your shoulder. Not such a man as inspires fear.” Llibio
paused again, his dim eyes seeing not the waters of his lake but
times long past. “Still, fear came. The outer wall was complete,
and the shore people returned to their hunting, their weirs and
their herds. Then their greatest man came to us and said we had
stolen beasts and children, and that they would destroy us if we
did not return them.”
Llibio stared into my face and gripped
my hand with his own, which was as hard as wood. Seeing him then, I
saw the vanished years as well. They must have seemed grim enough
at the time, though the future they had spawned—the future in which
I sat with him, my sword across my lap, hearing his story—was
grimmer than he could have known at the time. Yet there was joy in
those years for him; he had been a strong young man, and though he
was not, perhaps, thinking of that, his eyes
remembered.
“We told them we did not devour
children and had no need of slaves to fish for us, nor any
pasturage for beasts. Even then, they must have known it was not
we, because they did not come in war against us. But when our
islands neared the shore, we heard their women wailing through the
night.
“In those times, each day after the
full moon was a trading day, when those of us who wished came to
the shore for salt and knives. When the next trading day came, we
saw that the shore people knew where their children had gone, and
their beasts, and whispered it among themselves. Then we asked why
they did not go to the castle and carry it by storm, for they were
many. But they took our children instead, and men and women of all
ages, and chained them outside their doors so that their own people
might not be taken—or even marched them to the gates and bound them
there.”
I ventured to ask how long this had
gone on.
“For many years—since I was a young
man, as I told you. Sometimes the shore people fought. More often,
they did not. Twice warriors came from the south, sent by the proud
people of the tall houses of the southern shore. While they were
here, the fighting stopped, but what was said in the castle I do
not know. The builder, of whom I told you, was seen by no one once
his castle was complete.”
He waited for me to speak. I had the
feeling, which I have often had when talking with old people, that
the words he said and the words I heard were quite different, that
there was in his speech a hoard of hints, clues, and implications
as invisible to me as his breath, as though Time were a species of
white spirit who stood between us and with his trailing sleeves
wiped away before I had heard it the greater part of all that was
said. At last I ventured, “Perhaps he is dead.”
“An evil giant dwells there now, but no
one has seen him.”
I could hardly repress a smile. “Still,
I would think his presence must do a great deal to prevent the
shore people from attacking the place.”
“Five years past, and they swarmed over
it by night like the fingerlings
that crowd a dead man. They burned the castle, and slew those they
found there.”
“Do they continue to make war on you by
habit, then?”
Llibio shook his head. “After the
melting of the ice this year, the people of the castle returned.
Their hands were full of gifts—riches, and the strange weapons you
turned against the shore people. There are others who come there
too, but whether as servants or masters, we of the lake do not
know.”
“From the north or the
south?”
“From the sky,” he said, and pointed up
to where the faint stars hung dimmed by the majesty of the sun; but
I thought he meant only that the visitors had come in fliers, and
inquired no further.
All day the lake dwellers arrived. Many
were in such boats as had followed the hetman’s; but others chose
to sail their islands to join Llibio’s, until we were in the midst
of a floating continent. I was never asked directly to lead them
against the castle. Yet as the day wore on, I came to realize that
they wished it, and they to understand that I would so lead them.
In books, I think, these things are conventionally done with fiery
speeches; reality is sometimes otherwise. They admired my height
and my sword, and Pia told them I was the representative of the
Autarch, and that I had been sent to free them. Llibio said,
“Though it is we who suffer most, the shore people were able to
make the castle their own. They are stronger in war than we, but
not all they burned has been rebuilt, and they had no leader from
the south.” I questioned him and others about the lands near the
castle, and told them we should not attack until night made it
difficult for sentries on the walls to see our approach. Though I
did not say so, I also wanted to wait for darkness to make good
shooting impossible; if the master of the castle had given the
bullets of power to the hetman, it seemed probable that he had kept
much more effective weapons for himself.
When we sailed, I was at the head of about one
hundred warriors, though most of them had only spears pointed with
the shoulder bones of seals, pachos, or knives. It would swell my
self-esteem now to write that I had consented to lead this little
army out of a feeling of responsibility and concern for their
plight, but it would not be true. Neither did I go because I feared
what might be done to me if I refused, though I suspected that
unless I did so diplomatically, feigning to delay or to see some
benefit to the islanders in not fighting, it might have gone hard
with me.
The truth was that I felt a coercion
stronger than theirs. Llibio had worn a fish carved from a tooth
about his neck; and when I had asked him what it was, he had said
that it was Oannes, and covered it with his hand so that my eyes
could not profane it, for he knew that I did not believe in Oannes,
who must surely be the fish-god of these people.
I did not, yet I felt I knew everything
about Oannes that mattered. I knew that he must live in the darkest
deeps of the lake, but that he was seen leaping among the waves in
storms. I knew he was the shepherd of the deep, who filled the nets
of the islanders, and that murderers could not go on the
water without fear, lest Oannes appear alongside, with his eyes as
big as moons, and overturn the boat.
I did not believe in Oannes or fear
him. But I knew, I thought, whence he came—I knew that there is an
all-pervasive power in the universe of which every other is the
shadow. I knew that in the last analysis my conception of that
power was as laughable (and as serious) as Oannes. I knew that the
Claw was his, and I felt it was only of the Claw that I knew that,
only of the Claw among all the altars and vestments of the world. I
had held it in my hand many times, I had lifted it above my head in
the Vincula, I had touched the Autarch’s uhlan with it, and the
sick girl in the jacal in Thrax. I had possessed infinity, and I
had wielded its power; I was no longer certain I could turn it over
tamely to the Pelerines, if I ever found them, but I knew with
certainty that I would not lose it tamely to anyone
else.
Moreover, it seemed to me that I had
somehow been chosen to hold—if only for a brief time—that power. It
had been lost to the Pelerines through my irresponsibility in
allowing Agia to goad our driver into a race; and so it had been my
duty to care for it, and use it, and perhaps return it, and surely
my duty to rescue it from the hands, monstrous hands by all
accounts, into which it had now fallen through my
carelessness.
I had not thought, when I began this
record of my life, to reveal any of the secrets of our guild that
were imparted to me by Master Palaemon and Master Gurloes just
before I was elevated, at the feast of Holy Katharine, to the rank
of journeyman. But I will tell one now, because what I did that
night on Lake Diuturna cannot be understood without understanding
it. And the secret is only that we torturers obey. In all the lofty
order of the body politic, the pyramid of lives that is immensely
taller than any material tower, taller than the Bell Keep, taller
than the Wall of Nessus, taller than Mount Typhon, the pyramid that
stretches from the Autarch on the Phoenix Throne to the most humble
clerk grubbing for the most dishonorable trader—creature lower than
the lowest beggar—we are the only sound stone. No one truly obeys
unless he will do the unthinkable in obedience; no one will do the
unthinkable save we.
How could I refuse to the Increate what
I had willingly given the Autarch when I struck off Katharine’s
head?