The
Samru
And I walked on as a mighty army, for I felt
myself in the company of all those who walked in me. I was
surrounded by a numerous guard; and I was the guard about the
person of the monarch. There were women in my ranks, smiling and
grim, and children who ran and laughed and, daring Erebus and
Abaia, hurled seashells into the sea.
In half a day I came to the mouth of
Gyoll, so wide that the farther shore was lost in distance.
Three-sided isles lay in it, and through them vessels with
billowing sails picked their way like clouds among the peaks of the
mountains. I hailed one passing the point on which I stood and
asked for passage to Nessus. A wild figure I must have appeared,
with my scarred face and tattered cloak and every rib
showing.
Her captain sent a boat for me
nonetheless, a kindness I have not forgotten. I saw fear and awe in
the eyes of the rowers. Perhaps it was only at the sight of my
half-healed wounds; but they were men who had seen many wounds, and
I recalled how I had felt when I first saw the face of the Autarch
in the House Azure, though he was not a tall man, or even a man,
truly.
Twenty days and nights the Samru made her way up Gyoll. We sailed when we could,
and rowed, a dozen sweeps to a side, when we could not. It was a
hard passage for the sailors, for though the current is almost
imperceptibly slow, it runs day and night, and so long and so wide
are the meanders of the channel that an oarsman often sees at
evening the spot from which he labored when the beating of the drum
first roused the watch.
For me it was as pleasant as a yachting
expedition. Although I offered to make sail and row with the rest,
they would not permit it. Then I told the captain, a sly-faced man
who looked as though he lived by bargaining as much as by sailing,
that I would pay him well when we reached Nessus; but he would not
hear of it, and insisted (pulling at his mustache, which he did
whenever he wished to show the greatest sincerity) that my presence
was reward enough for him and his crew. I do not believe they
guessed I was their Autarch, and for fear of such as Vodalus had
been I was careful to drop no hints to them; but from my eyes and
manner they seemed to feel I was an adept.
The incident of the captain’s sword
must have strengthened their superstition. It was a craquemarte,
the heaviest of the sea swords, with a blade as wide as my palm,
sharply curved and graven with stars and suns and other things the
captain did not understand. He wore it when we were close enough to
a riverbank village or another ship to make him feel the occasion
demanded dignity; but for the most part he left it lying on the
little quarterdeck. I found it there, and having nothing else to do
but watch sticks and fruit skins bob in the green water, I took out
my half stone and sharpened it. After a time he saw me testing the
edge with my thumb and began to boast of his swordsmanship. Since
the craquemarte was at least two-thirds the weight of Terminus Est, with a short grip, it was amusing to hear
him; I listened with delight for half a watch or so. As it happened
there was a hempen cable about the thickness of my wrist coiled
nearby, and when he began to lose interest in his own inventions, I
had him and the mate hold up three cubits or so between them. The
craquemarte severed it like a hair; then before either of them
could recover breath, I threw it flashing toward the sun and caught
it by the hilt.
As I fear that incident shows too well,
I was beginning to feel better. There is nothing to enthrall the
reader in rest, fresh air, and plain food; but they can work
wonders against wounds and exhaustion.
The captain would have given me his
cabin if I had let him, but I slept on deck rolled in my cloak, and
on our one night of rain found shelter under the boat, which was
stowed bottom-up amidships. As I learned on board, it is the nature
of breezes to die when Urth turns her back to the sun; so I went to
sleep, on most nights, with the chant of the rowers in my ears. In
the morning I woke to the rattle of the anchor chain.
Sometimes, though, I woke before
morning, when we lay close to shore with only a sleepy lookout on
deck. And sometimes the moonlight roused me to find us gliding
forward under reefed sails, with the mate steering and the watch
asleep beside the halyards. On one such night, shortly after we had
passed through the Wall, I went aft and saw the phosphorescence of
our wake like cold fire on the dark water and thought for a moment
that the man-apes of the mine were coming to be cured by the Claw,
or to gain an old revenge. That, of course, was not truly
strange—only the foolish error of a mind still half in dream. What
happened the next morning was not truly strange either, but it
affected me deeply.
The oarsmen were rowing a slow beat to
get us around a leagues-long bend to a point where we could catch
what little wind there was. The sound of the drum and the hissing
of the water falling from the long blades of the sweeps are
hypnotic, I think because they are so similar to the beating of
one’s own heart in sleep and the sound the blood makes as it moves
past the inner ear on its way to the brain.
I was standing by the rail looking at
the shore, still marshy here where the plains of old have been
flooded by silt-choked Gyoll; and it seemed to me that I saw forms
in the hillocks and hummocks, as though all that vast, soft
wilderness had a geometrical soul (as certain pictures do) that
vanished
when I stared at it, then reappeared when I took my eyes away. The
captain came to stand beside me, and I told him I had heard that
the ruins of the city extended far downriver and asked when we
would sight them. He laughed and explained that we had been among
them for the past two days, and loaned me his glass so I could see
that what I had taken for a stump was in actuality a broken and
tilted column covered with moss.
At once everything—walls, streets,
monuments—seemed to spring from hiding, just as the stone town had
reconstructed itself while we watched from the tomb roof with the
two witches. No change had occurred outside my own mind, but I had
been transported, far faster than Master Malrubius’s ship could
have taken me, from the desolate countryside to the midst of an
ancient and immense ruin.
Even now I cannot help but wonder how much any
of us see of what is before us. For weeks my friend Jonas had
seemed to me only a man with a prosthetic hand, and when I was with
Baldanders and Dr. Talos, I had overlooked a hundred clues that
should have told me Baldanders was master. How impressed I was
outside the Piteous Gate because Baldanders did not escape the
doctor when he could.
As the day wore on, the ruins became plainer
and plainer still. At each loop of the river, the green walls rose
higher, from ever firmer ground. When I woke the next morning, some
of the stronger buildings retained their upper stories. Not long
afterward, I saw a little boat, newly built, tied to an ancient
pier. I pointed it out to the captain, who smiled at my naivety and
said, “There are families who live, grandson following grandsire,
by sifting these ruins.”
“So I’ve been told, but that cannot be
one of their boats. It’s too small to take much loot away
in.”
“Jewelry or coins. No one else goes
ashore here. There’s no law—the pillagers murder each other, and
anyone else who lands.”
“I must go there. Will you wait for
me?”
He stared at me as though I were mad.
“How long?”
“Until noon. No later.”
“Look,” he said, and pointed. “Ahead is
the last big bend. Leave us here and meet us there, where the
channel bows around again. It will be afternoon before we get
there.”
I agreed, and he had the Samru’s boat put into the water for me, and told four
men to row me ashore. As we were about to cast off, he unbelted his
craquemarte and handed it to me, saying solemnly, “It has stood by
me in many a grim fight. Go for their heads, but be careful not to
knick the edge on their belt buckles.”
I accepted his sword with thanks, and
told him I had always favored the neck. “That’s good,” he said, “if
you don’t have shipmates by that might be hurt when you swing it
flat,” and he pulled his mustache.
Sitting in the stern, I had ample
opportunity to observe the faces of my
rowers, and it was plain they were nearly as frightened of the
shore as they were of me. They laid us alongside the small boat,
then nearly capsized their own in their haste to be away. After
determining that what I had seen from the rail was in fact what I
had taken it to be, a wilted scarlet poppy left lying on the single
seat, I watched them row back to the Samru
and saw that though a light wind now favored the billowing mains’l,
the sweeps had been brought out and were beating a quick-stroke.
Presumably the captain planned to round the long meander as swiftly
as he could; if I were not at the spot he had pointed out, he could
proceed without me, telling himself (and others, should others
inquire) that it was I who had failed our appointment and not he.
By parting with the craquemarte he had further salved his
conscience.
Stone steps very like those I had swum
from as a boy had been cut into the sides of the pier. Its top was
empty, nearly as lush as a lawn with the grass that had rooted
between its stones. The ruined city, my own city of Nessus though
it was the Nessus of a time now long past, lay quiet before me. A
few birds wheeled overhead, but they were as silent as the
sundimmed stars. Gyoll, whispering to itself in midstream, already
seemed detached from me and the empty hulks of buildings among
which I limped. As soon as I was out of sight of its waters, it
fell silent, like some uncertain visitor who ceases to speak when
we step into another room.
It seemed that this could hardly be the
quarter from which (as Dorcas had told me) furniture and utensils
were taken. At first I looked in often at doors and windows, but
nothing had been left within but wrack and a few yellow leaves,
drifted already from the young trees that were overturning the
paving blocks. Nor did I see any sign of human pillagers, although
there were animal droppings and a few feathers and scattered
bones.
I do not know how far inland I walked.
It seemed a league, though it may have been much less. Losing the
transportation of the Samru did not much
bother me. I had walked from Nessus most of the way to the mountain
war, and although my steps were uneven still, my bare feet had been
toughened on the deck. Because I had never really become accustomed
to carrying a sword at my waist, I drew the craquemarte and put it
on my shoulder, as I had often borne Terminus Est. The summer sunshine held that special,
luxurious warmth it gains when a suggestion of chill has crept into
the morning air. I enjoyed it, and would have enjoyed it more, and
the silence and solitude too, if I had not been thinking of what I
would say to Dorcas, if I found her, and what she might say to
me.
Had I only known, I might have saved
myself that concern; I came upon her sooner than I could reasonably
have expected, and I did not speak to her—nor did she speak to me,
or so far as I could judge, even see me.
The buildings, which had been large and
solid near the river, had long since given way to lesser, fallen-in
structures that must once have been houses and shops. I do not know
what guided me to hers. There was no sound of weeping, though there
may have been some small, unconscious noise, the creaking of a
hinge or the scrape of a shoe. Perhaps it was no
more than the perfume of the blossom she wore, because when I saw
her she had an arum, freckled white and sweet as Dorcas herself had
always been, thrust into her hair. No doubt she had brought it
there for that purpose, and had taken out the wilted poppy and cast
it down when she had tied up her boat. (But I have gotten ahead of
my story.)
I tried to enter the building from the
front, but the rotting floor was falling into the foundation in
places as the arches under it collapsed. The storeroom at the rear
was less open; the silent, shadowed walk, green with ferns, had
been a dangerous alley once, and shopkeepers had put small windows
there or none. Still, I found a narrow door hidden under ivy, a
door whose iron had been eaten like sugar by the rain, whose oak
was falling into mould. Stairs nearly sound led to the floor
above.
She was kneeling with her back to me.
She had always been slender; now her shoulders made me think of a
wooden chair with a woman’s jupe hung over it. Her hair, like the
palest gold, was the same—unchanged since I had seen her first in
the Garden of Endless Sleep. The body of the old man who had poled
the skiff there lay on a bier before her, his back so straight, his
face, in death, so youthful, that I hardly knew him. On the floor
near her was a basket—not small yet not large either, and a corked
water jar.
I said nothing, and when I had watched
her for a time I went away. If she had been there long, I would
have called to her and embraced her. But she had just arrived, and
I saw that it was impossible. All the time I had spent in
journeying from Thrax to Lake Diuturna, and from the lake to the
war, and all the time I had spent as a prisoner of Vodalus, and in
sailing up Gyoll, she had spent in returning here to her place,
where she had lived forty years ago or more though it had now
fallen into decay.
As I had myself, an ancient buzzing
with antiquity as a corpse with flies. Not that the minds of Thecla
and the old Autarch, or the hundred contained in his, had made me
old. It was not their memories but my own that aged me, as I
thought of Dorcas shivering beside me on the brown track of
floating sedge, both of us cold and dripping, drinking together
from Hildegrin’s flask like two infants, which in fact we had
been.
I paid no heed to where I walked after
that. I went straight down a long street alive with silence, and
when it ended at last I turned at random. After a time I reached
Gyoll, and looking downstream saw the Samru
riding at anchor at the meeting place. A basilosaur swimming up
from the open sea would not have astounded me more.
In a few moments I was mobbed by
smiling sailors. The captain wrung my hand, saying, “I was afraid
we’d come too late. In my mind’s eye I could see you struggling for
your life in sight of the river, and us still half a league
off.”
The mate, a man so abysmally stupid
that he thought the captain a leader, clapped me on the back and
shouted, “He’d have given ’em a good fight!”