Ragnarok—The Final
Winter
It seemed strange to wake without a weapon,
though for some reason I cannot explain, that was the first morning
on which I had felt so. After the destruction of Terminus Est I had slept at the sacking of Baldanders’s
castle without fear, and later journeyed north without fear. Only
the night before, I had slept upon the bare rock of the cliff top
weaponless and—perhaps only because I had been so tired—had not
been afraid. I now think that during all those days, and indeed
during all the days since I had left Thrax, I had been putting the
guild behind me and coming to believe that I was what those who
encountered me took me for—the sort of would-be adventurer I had
mentioned the night before to Master Ash. As a torturer, I had not
so much considered my sword a weapon as a tool and a badge of
office. Now in retrospect it had become a weapon to me, and I had
no weapon.
I thought about that as I lay upon my
back on Master Ash’s comfortable mattress, my hands behind my head.
I would have to acquire another sword if I remained in the war-torn
lands, and it would be wise to have one even if I turned south
again. The question was whether to turn south or not. If I remained
where I was, I risked being drawn into the fighting, where I might
well be killed. But for me a return to the south would be even more
dangerous. Abdiesus, the archon of Thrax, had no doubt posted a
reward for my capture, and the guild would almost certainly procure
my assassination if they learned I was anywhere near
Nessus.
After vacillating over this decision
for some time, as one does when only half-awake, I recalled Winnoc
and what he had told me of the slaves of the Pelerines. Because it
is a disgrace to us if our clients die after torment, we are taught
a good deal of leech-craft in the guild; I thought I knew already
at least as much as they. When I had cured the girl in the jacal, I
had felt suddenly uplifted. The Chatelaine Mannea had a good
opinion of me already and would have a better one when I returned
with Master Ash.
A few moments before, I had been
disturbed because I lacked a weapon. Now I felt I had
one—resolution and a plan are better than a sword, because
a man whets his own edges on them. I threw off the blankets,
noticing then for the first time, I think, how soft they were. The
big room was cold but filled with sunlight; it was almost as though
there were suns on all four sides, as though all the walls were
east walls. I walked naked to the nearest window and saw that
undulating field of white I had vaguely noted the evening
before.
It was not a mass of cloud but a plain
of ice. The window would not open, or if it would, I could not
solve the puzzle of its mechanism; but I put my face close to the
glass and peered downward as well as I could. The Last House rose,
as I had seen before, from a high hill of rock. Now this hilltop
alone remained above the ice. I went from window to window, and the
view from each was the same. Going back to the bed that had been
mine, I pulled on my trousers and boots, and slung my cloak about
my shoulders, hardly knowing what it was I did.
Master Ash appeared just as I finished
dressing. “I hope I do not intrude,” he said. “I heard you walking
up here.”
I shook my head.
“I did not want you to become
disturbed.”
Without my willing it, my hands had
gone to my face. Now some foolish part of me became aware of my
bristling beard. I said, “I meant to shave before putting on my
cloak. That was stupid of me. I haven’t shaved since I left the
lazaret.” It was as though my mind were trudging across the ice,
leaving my tongue and lips to get along as best they
might.
“There is hot water here, and
soap.”
“That’s good,” I said. And then, “If I
go downstairs …”
That smile again. “Will it be the same?
The ice? No. You are the first to have guessed. May I ask how you
did it?”
“A long time ago—no, only a few months,
actually, though it seems like such a long time now—I went to the
Botanic Gardens in Nessus. There was a place called the Lake of
Birds, where the bodies of the dead seemed to remain fresh forever.
I was told it was some property of the water, but I wondered even
then that there should be so much power in water. There was another
place too, that they called the Jungle Garden, where the leaves
were greener than I have ever known leaves to be—not a bright green
but dark with greenness, as if the plants could never use all the
energy the sun poured down. The people there seemed not of our
time, though I could not say if they were of the past, or the
future, or some third thing that is neither. They had a little
house. It was much smaller than this, but this reminds me of it.
I’ve thought often of the Botanic Gardens since I left them, and
sometimes I’ve wondered if their secret were not that the time
never changed in the Lake of Birds, and that one moved forward or
backward—however it might be—when walking the path of the Jungle
Garden. Am I perhaps speaking overmuch?”
Master Ash shook his head.
“Then when I was coming here, I saw
your house at the top of this hill.
But when I climbed to it, it was gone, and the valley below was not
as I remembered it.” I did not know what else to say, and fell
silent.
“You are correct,” Master Ash told me.
“I have been put here to observe what you see about you now. The
lower stories of my home, however, reach into older periods, of
which yours is the oldest.”
“That seems a great
wonder.”
He shook his head. “It is almost more
wonderful that this spur of rock has been spared by the glaciers.
The tops of peaks far higher are submerged. It is sheltered by a
geographic pattern so subtle that it could only be achieved by
accident.”
“But it too will be covered at last?” I
asked.
“Yes.”
“And what then?”
“I shall leave. Or rather, I shall
leave some time before it occurs.”
I felt a surge of irrational anger, the
same emotion I had sometimes known as a boy when I could not make
Master Malrubius understand my questions. “I meant, what of
Urth?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. What you see is
the last glaciation. The surface of the sun is dull now; soon it
will grow bright with heat, but the sun itself will shrink, giving
less energy to its worlds. Eventually, should anyone come and stand
upon the ice, he will see it only as a bright star. The ice he
stands upon will not be that which you see but the atmosphere of
this world. And so it will remain for a very long time. Perhaps
until the close of the universal day.”
I went to another window and looked out
again on the expanse of ice. “Will this happen soon?”
“The scene you see is many thousands of
years in your future.”
“But before this, the ice must have
come from the south.”
Master Ash nodded. “And down from the
mountaintops. Come with me.”
We descended to the second level of the
house, which I had scarcely noticed when I had come upstairs the
night before. The windows were far fewer there, but Master Ash
placed chairs before one and indicated that we would sit and look
out. It was as he had said—ice, lovely in its purity, crept down
the mountainsides to war with the pines. I asked if this too were
far in the future, and he nodded once more. “You will not live to
see it again.”
“But so near that the life of a man
will nearly reach it?”
He twitched his shoulders and smiled
beneath his beard. “Let us say it is a thing of degree. You will
not see this. Nor will your children, nor theirs. But the process
has already begun. It began long before you were
born.”
I knew nothing of the south, but I
found myself thinking of the island people of Hallvard’s story, the
precious little sheltered places with a growing season, the hunting
of the seals. Those islands would not hold men and their families
much longer. The boats would scrape over their stony beaches for
the last time. “My wife, my children, my children,
my wife.”
“At this time, many of your people are
already gone,” Master Ash continued. “Those you call the cacogens
have mercifully carried them to fairer worlds. Many more will leave
before the final victory of the ice. I am myself, you see,
descended from those refugees.”
I asked if everyone would
escape.
He shook his head. “No, not everyone.
Some would not go, some could not be found. No home could be found
for others.”
For some time I sat looking out at the
beleaguered valley and trying to order my thoughts. At last I said,
“I have always found that men of religion tell comforting things
that are not true, while men of science recount hideous truths. The
Chatelaine Mannea said you were a holy man, but you appear to be a
man of science, and you said your people had sent you to our dead
Urth to study the ice.”
“The distinction you mention no longer
holds. Religion and science have always been matters of faith in
something. It is the same something. You are yourself what you call
a man of science, so I talk of science to you. If Mannea were here
with her priestesses, I would talk differently.”
I have so many memories that I often
become lost among them. Now as I looked at the pines, waving in a
wind I could not feel, I seemed to hear the beating of a drum. “I
met another man who said he was from the future once,” I said. “He
was green—nearly as green as those trees—and he told me that his
time was a time of brighter sun.”
Master Ash nodded. “No doubt he spoke
truly.”
“But you tell me that what I see now is
but a few lifetimes away, that it is part of a process already
begun, and that this will be the last glaciation. Either you are a
false prophet or he was.”
“I am not a prophet,” answered Master
Ash, “nor was he. No one can know the future. We are speaking of
the past.”
I was angry again. “You told me this
was only a few lifetimes away.”
“I did. But you, and this scene, are
past events for me.”
“I am not a thing of the past! I belong
to the present.”
“From your own viewpoint you are
correct. But you forget I cannot see you from your viewpoint. This
is my house. It is through my windows that you have looked. My
house strikes its roots into the past. Without that I should go mad
here. As it is, I read these old centuries like books. I hear the
voices of the long dead, yours among them. You think that time is a
single thread. It is a weaving, a tapestry that extends forever in
all directions. I follow a thread backward. You will trace a color
forward, what color I cannot know. White may lead you to me, green
to your green man.”
Not knowing what to say, I could only
mutter that I had conceived of time as a river.
“Yes—you came from Nessus, did you not?
And that was a city built about a river. But it was once a city by
the sea, and you would do better to think of time as a sea. The
waves ebb and flow, and currents run beneath them.”
“I would like to go downstairs,” I
said. “To return to my own time.”
Master Ash said, “I
understand.”
“I wonder if you do. Your time, if I
have heard you rightly, is that of this house’s highest story, and
you have a bed there, and other necessary things. Yet when you are
not overwhelmed by your labors you sleep here, according to what
you have told me. Yet you say this is nearer my time than your
own.”
He stood up. “I meant that I too flee
the ice. Shall we go? You will want food before you begin the long
trip back to Mannea.”
“We both will,” I said.
He turned to look at me before he
started down the stair. “I told you I could not go with you. You
have discovered for yourself how well hidden this house is. For all
who do not walk the path correctly, even the lowest story stands in
the future.”
I caught both his arms behind him in a
double lock and used my free hand to search him for weapons. There
were none, and though he was strong, he was not as strong as I had
feared he might be.
“You plan to carry me to Mannea. Is
that correct?”
“Yes, Master, and we’ll have a great
deal less trouble if you will go willingly. Tell me where I can
find some rope—I don’t want to have to use the belt of your
robe.”
“There is none,” he told
me.
I bound his hands with his cincture, as
I had first planned. “When we are some distance from here,” I said,
“I will loose you if you will give me your word to behave
well.”
“I made you welcome in my house. What
harm have I done you?”
“Quite a bit, but that doesn’t matter.
I like you, Master Ash, and I respect you. I hope that you won’t
hold what I am doing to you against me any more than I hold what
you have done to me against you. But the Pelerines sent me to fetch
you, and I find I am a certain sort of man, if you understand what
I mean. Now don’t go down the steps too fast. If you fall, you
won’t be able to catch yourself.”
I led him to the room to which he had
first taken me and got some of the hard bread and a package of
dried fruit. “I don’t think of myself as one anymore,” I continued,
“but I was brought up as—” It was at my lips to say torturer, but I realized (then, I think, for the first
time) that it was not quite the correct term for what the guild did
and used the official one instead. “—as a Seeker for Truth and
Penitence. We do what we have said we will do.”
“I have duties to perform. In the upper
level, where you slept.”
“I am afraid they must go
unperformed.”
He was silent as we went out the door
and onto the rocky hilltop. Then he said, “I will go with you, if I
can. I have often wished to walk out of this door and never
halt.”
I told him that if he would swear upon
his honor, I would untie him at once.
He shook his head. “You might think
that I betrayed you.”
I did not know what he
meant.
“Perhaps somewhere there is the woman I
have called Vine. But your world is your world. I can exist there
only if the probability of my existence is high.”
I said, “I existed in your house,
didn’t I?”
“Yes, but that was because your
probability was complete. You are a part of the past from which my
house and I have come. The question is whether I am the future to
which you go.”
I remembered the green man in Saltus,
who had been solid enough. “Will you vanish like a soap bubble
then?” I asked. “Or blow away like smoke?”
“I do not know,” he said. “I do not
know what will happen to me. Or where I will go when it does. I may
cease to exist in any time. That was why I never left of my own
will.”
I took him by one arm, I suppose
because I thought I could keep him with me in that way, and we
walked on. I followed the route Mannea had drawn for me, and the
Last House rose behind us as solidly as any other. My mind was busy
with all the things he had told me and showed me, so that for a
while, the space of twenty or thirty paces, perhaps, I did not look
around at him. At last his remark about the tapestry suggested
Valeria to me. The room where we had eaten cakes had been hung with
them, and what he had said about tracing threads suggested the maze
of tunnels through which I had run before encountering her. I
started to tell him of it, but he was gone. My hand grasped empty
air. For a moment I seemed to see the Last House afloat like a ship
upon its ocean of ice. Then it merged into the dark hilltop on
which it had stood; the ice was no more than what I had once taken
it to be—a bank of cloud.