A Far Sunset

SEVEN

Poul Mer Lo was given a small thatched house that stood on short stilts just outside the sacred city, the noia with whom he had spent his imprisonment, and sixty-four copper rings. He did not know the value of the ring money; but Mylai Tui calculated that if he did not receive any further benefits from the god-king he could still live for nearly three hundred days without having to hunt or work for himself.

Poul Mer Lo thought the god-king had been more than generous, for he had provided the stranger with enough money to last his own lifetime. Wisely, perhaps, Enka Ne had not shown too much favour. He had made sure that Enka Ne the 610th would not be embarrassed by the munificence of his predecessor.

The little finger on each hand had been struck off expertly, the scars had healed and the only pain that remained was from tiny fragments of bone working their way slowly to the surface. Sometimes, when the weather was heavy, Poul Mer Lo was conscious of a throbbing. But, for the most part he had adjusted to the loss very well. It was quite remarkable how easily one could perform with only four fingers the tasks that had formerly required five.

For many days after he had received what amounted to the royal pardon, Poul Mer Lo spent his time doing nothing but learning. He walked abroad in the streets of Baya Nor and was surprised to find that he was, for the most part, ignored by the ordinary citizens. When he engaged them in conversation, his questions were answered politely; but none asked questions in return. The fate of a pygmy in the streets of London, he reflected, would very likely have been somewhat different. The fate of an extra-terrestrial in the streets of any terrestrial city would have been markedly different. Police would have been required to control the crowds—and, perhaps, disperse the lynch mobs. The more he learned, the more, he realized, he had to learn.

The population of Baya Nor, a city set in the midst of the forest, consisted of less than twenty thousand people. Of these nearly a third were farmers and craftsmen and rather more than a third were hunters and soldiers. Of the remainder, about five thousand priests maintained the temples and the waterways and about one thousand priest/lawyer/civil servants ran the city’s administration. The god-king, Enka Ne, supported by a city council and an hereditary female oracle, reigned with all the powers of a despot for one year of four hundred days—at the end of which time he was sacrificed in the Temple of the Weeping Sun while the new god-king was simultaneously ordained.

Baya Nor itself was a city of water and stone—like a great Gothic lido, thought Poul Mer Lo, dropped crazily in the middle of the wilderness. The Bayani worshipped water, perhaps because water was the very fluid of life. There were reservoirs, pools and fountains everywhere. The main thoroughfares were broad waterways, so broad that they must have taken generations to construct. In each of the four main reservoirs, temples shaped curiously like pyramids rose hazily behind a wall of fountains to the blue sky. The temples, too, were not such as could have been raised by a population of twenty thousand in less than a century. They looked very old, and they looked also as if they would endure longer than the race that built them.

In a literal and a symbolic sense Baya Nor was two cities— one within the other. The sacred city occupied a large island in the lake that was called the Mirror of Oruri. It was connected to the outer city by four narrow causeways, on each side of which were identical carvings representing all the god-kings since time immemorial.

If Baya Nor was not strong in science, it was certainly strong in art; for the generations of sculptors and masons who had carved the city out of dark warm sandstone had left behind them monuments of grandeur and classic line. Disdaining a written language, they had composed their common testament eloquently in a language of form and composition. They had married water to stone and had produced a living mobile poetry of fountains and sunlight and shadow and sandstone that was a song of joy to the greater glory of Oruri.

Poul Mer Lo knew litde of the religion of the Bayani. But as he surveyed its outward forms, he could feel himself coming under its spell, could sense the mystery that bound a people together in the undoubted knowledge that their ideas, their philosophy and their way of life were the most perfect expression of the mystery of existence.

At times, Poul Mer Lo was frightened; knowing that if he were to live and remain sane he would have to assume to some extent the role of serpent in this sophisticated yet oddly static Eden. He would have to be himself—no longer an Earth man, and not a man of Baya Nor. But a man poised dreadfully between two worlds. A man chastened by light-years, whipped by memories, haunted by knowledge. A man pinned by circumstances to a speck erf cosmic dust from that other speck he had once called home. A man who, above all, needed to talk, to make confession. A man with a dual purpose—to create and to destroy.

At times he revelled in his purpose. At times he was ashamed. At times, also, he remembered someone who had once been called Paul Marlowe. He remembered the prejudices and convictions and compulsions that this strange person had held. He remembered his arrogance and his certainty—his burning ambition to journey out to the stars.

Paul Marlowe had fulfilled that ambition, but in fulfilling it he had died. Alas for Paul Marlowe, who had never realized that it was possible to pay a greater price for private luxuries than either death or pain.

Paul Marlowe, native of Earth, had accomplished more than Eric the Red, Marco Polo, Columbus or even Darwin. But it was Poul Mer Lo, grace and favour subject of Enka Ne, who paid the price for his achievement.

And the price was absolute loneliness.