On the
March
Today, this being the last before I am to
leave the House Absolute, I participated in a solemn religious
ceremony. Such rituals are divided into seven orders according to
their importance, or as the heptarchs say, their “transcendence”
—something I was quite ignorant of at the time of which I was
writing a moment ago. At the lowest level, that of Aspiration, are
the private pieties, including prayers pronounced privately, the
casting of a stone upon a cairn, and so forth. The gatherings and
public petitionings that I, as a boy, thought constituted the whole
of organized religion, are actually at the second level, which is
that of Integration. What we did today belonged to the seventh and
highest, the level of Assimilation.
In accordance with the principle of
circularity, most of the accretions gathered in the progression
through the first six were now dispensed with. There was no music,
and the rich vestments of Assurance were replaced by starched robes
whose sculptural folds gave all of us something of the air of
icons. It is no longer possible for us to carry out the ceremony,
as once we did, wrapped in the shining belt of the galaxy; but to
achieve the effect as nearly as possible, Urth’s attractive field
was excluded from the basilica. It was a novel sensation for me,
and though I was unafraid, I was reminded again of that night I
spent among the mountains when I felt myself on the point of
falling off the world—something I will undergo in sober earnest
tomorrow. At times the ceiling seemed a floor, or (what was to me
far more disturbing) a wall became the ceiling, so that one looked
upward through its open windows to see a mountainside of grass that
lifted itself forever into the sky. Startling as it was, this
vision was no less true than that we commonly see.
Each of us became a sun; the circling,
ivory skulls were our planets. I said we had dispensed with music,
yet that was not entirely true, for as they swung about us there
came a faint, sweet humming and whistling, caused by the flow of
air through their eye sockets and teeth; those in nearly circular
orbits maintained an almost steady note, varying only slightly as
they rotated on their axes; the songs of those in elliptical orbits
waxed and waned, rising as they approached me, sinking to a moan as
they receded.
How foolish we are to see in those
hollow eyes and marble calottes only
death. How many friends are among them! The brown book, which I
carried so far, the only one of the possessions I took from the
Matachin Tower that still remains with me, was sewn and printed and
composed by men and women with those bony faces; and we, engulfed
by their voices, now on behalf of those who are the past, offered
ourselves and the present to the fulgurant light of the New
Sun.
Yet at that moment, surrounded by the
most meaningful and magnificent symbolism, I could not but think
how different the actuality had been when we had left the ziggurat
on the day after my interview with Vodalus and had marched (I under
the guard of six women, who were sometimes forced to carry me) for
what must have been a week or more through pestilential jungle. I
did not know—and still do not know—whether we were fleeing the
armies of the Commonwealth or the Ascians who had been Vodalus’s
allies. Perhaps we were merely seeking to rejoin the major part of
the insurgent force. My guards complained of the moisture that
dripped from the trees to eat at their weapons and armor like acid,
and of suffocating heat; I felt nothing of either. I remember
looking down once at my thigh and noticing with surprise that the
flesh had fallen away so that the muscles there stood out like
cords and I could see the sliding parts of my knee as one sees the
wheels and shafts of a mill.
The old leech was with us, and now
visited me two or three times each day. At first he tried to keep
dry bandages on my face; when he saw the effort was futile, he
removed them all and contented himself with plastering the wounds
there with his salve. After that, some of my women guards refused
to look at me, and if they had reason to speak to me did so with
downcast eyes. Others seemed to take pride in their ability to
confront my torn face, standing straddle-legged (a pose they
appeared to consider warlike) and resting their left hands upon the
hilts of their weapons with studied casualness.
I talked with them as often as I could.
Not because I desired them—the illness that had come with my wounds
had taken all such desire from me—but because in the midst of the
straggling column I was lonely in a way I had never been when I was
alone in the war-torn north or even when I had been locked in my
ancient, mold-streaked cell in the ziggurat, and because in some
absurd corner of my mind I still hoped to escape. I questioned them
about every subject of which they might conceivably have knowledge,
and I was endlessly amazed to find how few were the points on which
our minds coincided. Not one of the six had joined Vodalus because
of an appreciation of the difference between the restoration of
progress he sought to represent and the stagnation of the
Commonwealth. Three had merely followed some man into the ranks;
two had come in the hope of gaining revenge for some personal
injustice, and one because she had been fleeing from a detested
stepfather. All but the last now wished they had not joined. None
knew with any precision where we had been or had the slightest idea
where we were going.
For guides our column had three
savages: a pair of young men who
might have been brothers or even twins, and a much older one,
twisted, I thought, by deformities as well as age, who perpetually
wore a grotesque mask. Though the first two were younger and the
third much older, all three of them recalled to me the naked man I
had once seen in the Jungle Garden. They were as naked as he and
had the same dark, metallic-looking skin and straight hair. The
younger two carried cerbotanas longer than their outstretched arms
and dart bags hand-knotted of wild cotton and dyed a burnt umber,
doubtless with the juice of some plant. The old man had a staff as
crooked as himself, topped with the dried head of a
monkey.
A covered palanquin whose place in the
column was considerably more advanced than my own bore the Autarch,
whom my leech gave me to understand was still alive; and one night
when my guards were chattering among themselves and I sat crouched
over our little fire, I saw the old guide (his bent figure and the
impression of an immense head conferred by his mask were
unmistakable) approach this palanquin and slip beneath it. Some
time passed before he scuttled away. This old man was said to be an
uturuncu, a shaman capable of assuming the
form of a tiger.
Within a few days of our leaving the ziggurat,
without encountering anything that might be called a road or even a
path, we struck a trail of corpses. They were Ascians, and they had
been stripped of their clothing and equipment, so that their
starved bodies seemed to have dropped from the air to the places
where they lay. To me, they appeared to be about a week dead; but
no doubt decay had been accelerated by the dampness and heat, and
the actual time was much less. The cause of death was seldom
apparent.
Until then we had seen few animals
larger than the grotesque beetles that buzzed about our fires by
night. Such birds as called from the treetops remained largely
invisible, and if the blood-bats visited us, their inky wings were
lost in the smothering dark. Now we moved, as it seemed, through an
army of beasts drawn to the corpse trail as flies are to a dead
sumpter. Hardly a watch passed without our hearing the sound of
bones crushed by great jaws, and by night green and scarlet eyes,
some of them two spans apart, shone outside our little circles of
firelight. Though it was preposterous to suppose these
carrion-gorged predators would molest us, my guards doubled their
sentries; those who slept did so in their corslets, with curtelaxes
in their hands.
With each new day the bodies were
fresher, until at last not all were dead. A madwoman with cropped
hair and staring eyes stumbled into the column just ahead of our
party, shouted words no one could understand, and fled among the
trees. We heard cries for help, screams, and ravings, but Vodalus
permitted no one to turn aside, and on the afternoon of that day we
plunged—much in the same sense we might earlier have been said to
have plunged into the jungle—into the Ascian horde.
Our column consisted of the women and
supplies, Vodalus himself and his household, and a few of his aides
with their retinues. In all it surely amounted to no more than a
fifth of his force; but if every insurgent he
could have called to his banner had been there, and every fighter
become a hundred, they would still have been among that multitude
as a cupful of water in Gyoll.
Those we encountered first were
infantry. I recalled that the Autarch had told me their weapons
were kept from them until the time of battle; but if it were so,
their officers must have thought that time to be at hand, or
nearly. I saw thousands armed with the ransieur, so that at length
I came to believe that all their infantry was equipped in that way;
then, as night was falling, we overtook thousands more carrying
demilunes.
Because we marched faster than they, we
moved more deeply into their force; but we camped sooner than they
(if they camped at all) and all that night, until at last I fell
asleep, I heard their hoarse cries and the shuffling of their feet.
In the morning we were again among their dead and dying, and it was
a watch or more before we overtook the stumbling
ranks.
These Ascian soldiers had a rigidity, a
will-less attachment to order, that I have never seen elsewhere,
and that appeared to me to have no roots in either spirit or
discipline as I understand them. They seemed to obey because they
could not conceive of any other course of action. Our soldiers
nearly always carry several arms—at the very least an energy weapon
and a long knife (among the schiavoni I was exceptional in not
possessing such a knife in addition to my falchion). But I never
saw an Ascian with more than one, and most of their officers bore
no weapon at all, as if they regarded actual fighting with
contempt.