The Claw
That night the lake men ransacked the castle;
I did not join them, nor did I sleep inside its walls. In the
center of the grove of pines where we had held our council, I found
a spot so sheltered by the boughs that its carpet of fallen needles
was still dry. There, when my wounds had been washed and bandaged,
I lay down. The hilt of the sword that had been mine, and Master
Palaemon’s before me, lay beside me, so that I felt I slept with a
dead thing, but it brought me no dreams.
I woke with the fragrance of the pines
in my nostrils. Urth had turned almost her full face to the sun. My
body was sore, and the cuts I had received from the flying shards
of stone smarted and burned, but it was the warmest day I had
experienced since I had left Thrax and mounted into the high lands.
I walked out of the grove and saw Lake Diuturna sparkling in the
sun and fresh grass growing between the stones.
I sat down on a projecting rock, with
the wall of Baldanders’s castle rising behind me and the blue lake
spread at my feet, and for the last time removed the tang of the
ruined blade that had been Terminus
Est from the lovely hilt of silver and onyx.
It is the blade that is the sword, and Terminus
Est is no more; but I carried that hilt with me for the rest
of my journey, though I burned the manskin sheath. The hilt will
hold another blade someday, even if it cannot be as perfect and
will not be mine.
What remained of my blade I kissed and
cast into the water.
Then I began my search among the rocks.
I had only a vague idea of the direction in which Baldanders had
hurled the Claw, but I knew his throw had been toward the lake, and
though I had seen the gem clear the top of the wall, I felt that
even such an arm as his might have failed to send so small an
object far from shore.
I soon found, however, that if it had
gone into the lake at all, it was lost utterly, for the water was
many ells deep everywhere. Yet it still seemed possible that it had
not reached the lake and was lodged in a crevice where its radiance
was invisible.
And so I searched, afraid to ask the
lake men to assist me, and afraid also to give up the search to
rest or eat for fear someone else would take it up. Night came, and
the cry of the loon at the dying of the light, and the lake
men offered to take me to their islands, but I refused. They feared
that shore people would come, or that they were already organizing
an attack that would revenge Baldanders (I did not dare to tell
them that I suspected he was not dead, but remained alive beneath
the waters of the lake), and so at last, at my urging they left me
alone, still crawling among the sharpcornered rocks of the
promontory.
Eventually I grew too weary to hunt
more in the dark and settled myself upon a shelving slab to wait
for day. From time to time it seemed that I saw azure gleaming from
some crack near where I lay or from the waters below; but always
when I stretched out my hand to grasp it or tried to stand to walk
to the edge of the slab to look down at it, I woke with a start and
found I had been dreaming.
A hundred times I wondered if someone
else had not found the gem while I slept under the pine, which I
cursed myself for doing. A hundred times, also, I reminded myself
how much better it would be for it to be found by anyone than for
it to be lost forever.
Just as summer-killed meat draws flies,
so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who
remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain
them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and
(later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At
sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often
are, to their lectures on theogony, theodicy, and the like, and I
recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an
ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three
Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and
that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the
beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was)
there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who
have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not
exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it
is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the
beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the
theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of
them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who
knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no
connection at all between them.
May it not be, she asked (and even now
I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has
always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination,
they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones?
After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from
the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the
same goal.
I found (and find) this suggestion as
rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that
monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the
tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which
human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no
appeal to fact is possible.
As a fact the Claw was thus an
incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of
archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value
any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance
could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed,
a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen
shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense
the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling
in the dark.
I thought I had valued it highly in all
the days in which I had carried it, but as I sat there upon that
shelving stone overlooking the benighted waters of Lake Diuturna, I
realized what a fool I had been to carry it at all, through all my
wild scrapes and insane adventures, until I lost it at last. Just
before sunrise I vowed to take my own life if I did not find it
before the dark came again.
Whether or not I could have kept that vow I
cannot say. I have loved life so long as I can remember. (It was, I
believe, that love of life that gave me whatever skill I possessed
at my art, because I could not bear to see the flame I cherished
extinguished other than perfectly.) Surely I loved my own life, now
mingled with Thecla’s, as much as others. If I had broken that vow,
it would not have been the first.
There was no need to. About mid morning
of one of the most pleasant days I have ever experienced, when the
sunlight was a warm caress and the lapping of the water below a
gentle music, I found the gem—or what remained of it.
It had shattered on the rocks; there
were pieces large enough to adorn a tetrarchic ring and flecks no
bigger than the bright specks we see in mica, but nothing more.
Weeping, I gathered the fragments bit by bit, and when I knew them
to be as lifeless as the jewels miners delve up every day, the
plundered finery of the long dead, I carried them to the lake and
cast them in.
I made three of those climbs down to
the water’s edge with a tiny heap of bluish chips held in the
hollow of one hand, each time returning to the place where I had
found the broken gem to search for more; and after the third I
found, wedged deep between two stones so that I had, in the end, to
return to the pine grove to break twigs with which to free it and
fish it up, something that was neither azure nor a gem, but that
shone with an intense white light, like a star.
It was with curiosity rather than
reverence that I drew it out. It was so unlike the treasure I had
sought—or at least, unlike the broken bits of it I had been
finding—that it hardly occurred to me until I held it that the two
might be related. I cannot say how it is possible for an object in
itself black to give light, but this did. It might have been carved
in jet, so dark it was and so highly polished; yet it shone, a claw
as long as the last joint of my smallest finger, cruelly hooked and
needle-pointed, the reality of that dark core at the heart of the
gem, which must have been no more than a container for it, a
lipsanotheca or pyx.
For a long time I knelt with my back to
the castle, looking from this strange, gleaming treasure to the
waves and back again while I tried to
grasp its significance. Seeing it thus without its case of
sapphire, I felt profoundly an effect I had never noticed at all
during the days before it had been taken from me in the hetman’s
house. Whenever I looked at it, it seemed to erase thought. Not as
wine and certain drugs do, by rendering the mind unfit for it, but
by replacing it with a higher state for which I know no name. Again
and again I felt myself enter this state, rising always higher
until I feared I should never return to the mode of consciousness I
call normality ; and again and again I tore myself from it. Each
time emerged, I felt I had gained some inexpressible insight into
immense realities.
At last, after a long series of these
bold advances and fearful retreats, I came to understand that I
should never reach any real knowledge of the tiny thing I held, and
with that thought (for it was a thought) came a third state, one of
happy obedience to I knew not what, an obedience without reflection
because there was no longer anything to reflect upon, and without
the least tincture of rebellion. This state endured all that day
and a large part of the next, by which time I was already deep into
the hills.
Here I pause, having carried you, reader, from
fortress to fortress—from the walled city of Thrax, dominating the
upper Acis, to the castle of the giant, dominating the northern
shore of remote Lake Diuturna. Thrax was for me the gateway to the
wild mountains. So too, this lonely tower was to prove a
gateway—the very threshold of the war, of which a single far-flung
skirmish had taken place here. From that time to this, that war has
engaged my attention almost without cease.
Here I pause. If you have no desire to
plunge into the struggle beside me, reader, I do not condemn you.
It is no easy one.