The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter LI — The Urth of the New Sun

FOR ALL that remained of that day I sat in the dark and cursed myself for a fool. The White Fountain would shine in the night sky, I knew, and everything the Hierodules had said implied it; yet I had failed to understand it until they had gone.

A hundred times I relived the rain-swept night when I had descended from the roof of this very structure to aid Hildegrin. How near had I come to Apu-Punchau before I had merged with him? Five cubits? Three ells? I could not be sure. But surely it was no mystery that Famulimus had told me not to try to destroy him; if I were to come near enough to strike, we would merge — and he, having deeper roots in this universe, would overwhelm me just as I would overwhelm him in the unimaginably distant future when I would journey to this place with Jolenta and Dorcas.

Yet if I had longed for the mysterious (as I certainly did not), there was riddle enough. The White Fountain shone already, that seemed certain, for without it I would not have been able to come to this ancient place or heal the sick. Why, then, had I been unable to travel the Corridors of Time as I had from Mount Typhon ? Two explanations seemed likely.

The first was simply that on Mount Typhon my whole being had been spurred by fear. We are strongest in a crisis, and Typhon’s soldiers had been coming for me, doubtless to kill me. Yet I faced another crisis now, for Apu-Punchau might rise and come toward me at any moment.

The second was that such power as I had received from the White Fountain was diminished by distance just as its light was. It must have been far nearer Urth in Typhon’s time than in Apu Paunchau’s; but if it were indeed thus diminished, the passing of one day would scarcely make a difference, and a day at most was the longest for which I, could hope, with my other self alive again and so near. I would have to escape as soon as I could, and wait elsewhere.

It was the longest day of my life. If I had been merely awaiting nightfall, I could have wandered in memory, recalling that marvelous evening when I had walked up the Water Way , the tales told in the Pelerines’ lazaretto, or the brief holiday that Valeria and I had once enjoyed beside the sea. As it was, I dared not; and whenever I relaxed my guard, I found my mind turned of its own accord to dreadful things. Again I endured my imprisonment in the jungle ziggurat by Vodalus, the year I had spent among the Ascians, my flight from the white wolves in the Secret House; and a thousand similiar terrors, until at last it seemed to me that a demon desired that I surrender my miserable existence to Apu-Punchau, and that the demon was myself.

Slowly the noises of the stone town died away. The light, which earlier had come from the wall nearest me, now penetrated the wall beyond the altar on which Apu-Punchau lay, cutting the gloom with blades of hammered gold thrust between the crevices.

At last it faded. I rose, stiff in every joint, and began to probe the wall for weaknesses.

It had been built of cyclopean stones, with smaller stones driven between them by workmen swinging huge wooden mauls. The small stones were wedged so tightly that I tested fifty or more before finding one that could be pried loose; and I knew that I would have to remove one of the great stones to make an opening through which I could pass.

Even the small stone required a watch at least of tugging and prying. I used a jasper-bladed knife to scrape away the mud around it, then broke that knife and three others trying to get it out. Once I abandoned the task in disgust and mounted the wall like a spider, hoping that the roof would supply an easier road to freedom, as the thatch had in the hall of the magicians. But the vaulted ceiling was as solid as the walls, and I dropped to the floor again to bloody my fingers on the loose stone.

Suddenly, when it seemed certain it could never be freed, it slipped clattering to the floor. For five long breaths I waited paralyzed, fearing that Apu-Punchau would wake. As far as I could judge, he never stirred.

Yet something else was stirring. The immense stone above tilted ever so gently to the left. Dried mud cracked, sounding as loud as the breaking of river ice in the stillness, and came rattling down around me.

I stepped back. There was a grinding, as of a mill, and a second shower of mud. I moved to one side and the great stone fell with a crash, leaving behind it a rough black circle full of stars.

I looked at one and knew myself a pinprick of light nearly lost in the opaline haze of ten thousand more.

No doubt I should have waited — certainly it was possible that a dozen more great stones might follow the first. I did not. A leap carried me onto the fallen one, another into the aperture in the wall, and a third into the street. The noise had wakened the people, of course; I heard their angry voices, saw the faint red glow of their fires seep past their doors as wives puffed dying embers while husbands groped for spears and toothed wardubs.

I did not care. All about me stretched the Corridors of Time, waving meadows roofed with the lowering sky of Time and whisperous with the brooks that ripple from the most supernal universe of all to the least.

Bright-winged, the small Tzadkiel fluttered beside one. The green man raced beside another. I chose one that ran as lonely as I, and mounted to it. Behind me along a line that seldom exists, Apu-Punchau, the Head of Day, stepped from his house and squatted to eat the boiled maize and roast meat his people had left for him. I too hungered; I waved to him, then saw him no more.

When I returned to the world called Ushas, it was onto a sandy beach — the beach I had left when I dove into the sea in search of Juturna, and as near that place and time as I could make it.

A man carrying a wooden trencher heaped with smoking fish was walking the sea-wet sand fifty cubits or so in front of me. I followed him, and when we had gone twenty paces he reached a bower, dripping with sea spray yet draped in wildflowers. Here he set his trencher upon the sand, took two backward steps, and knelt.

Catching up, I asked in the speech of the Commonwealth who would eat his fish.

He looked around at me; I could see he was surprised to find me a stranger. “The Sleeper,” he said. “He who sleeps here and hungers.”

“Who is this Sleeper?” I asked.

“The lonely god. One feels him here, always sleeping, ever hungry. I bring the fish to show that we are his friends, so he will not devour us when he wakes.”

“Do you feel him now?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Sometimes it is stronger — so strong we see him by moonlight lying here, though he vanishes when we come near. Today I did not feel him at all.”

“Did not?”

“I do now,” he said. “Since you have come.”

I sat down on the sand and picked up a large piece of fish, motioning for him to join me. The fish was so hot it burned my fingers, so I knew it had been cooked close by. He sat too, but did not eat until I made a second gesture.

“Are you always the one?”

He nodded. “Each god has someone, a man for a man-god, a woman for a woman-god.”

“A priest or a priestess.”

He nodded again.

“There is no God but the Increate, all the rest being his creatures.” I was tempted to add, “Even Tzadkiel,” but I did not.

“Yes,” he said. And he turned his face away, not wishing, I think, to see my look if he offended me. “That is so for the gods, certainly. But for humble creatures like men, there are lesser gods, possibly. To poor, wretched men these lesser gods are very, very exalted. We strive to please them.”

I smiled to show I was not angry. “And what do such lesser gods do to help men?”

“Four gods there are.”

From his singsong, I knew he had recited the words many times, no doubt in the teaching of children.

“First and greatest is the Sleeper. He is a man-god. He is always hungry. Once he devoured the whole land, and he may do so again if he is not fed. Though the Sleeper has drowned, he cannot die — thus he sleeps here on the strand. Fish belong to the Sleeper — you must beg his leave before you fish. Silver fish I catch for him. Storms are his anger, calm his charity.”

I had become the Oannes of these people!

“The other man-god is Odilo. His are the lands beneath the sea. He loves learning and right conduct. Odilo taught men to speak and women to write. He is the judge of gods and men, but punishes no one who has not sinned thrice. Once he bore the cup of the Increate. Red wine is his. Wine his man brings him.”

It had taken a breath for me to recall just whom Odilo had been. Now I realized that the House Absolute and our court had become the frame for a vague picture of the Increate as Autarch. In retrospect, it seemed inevitable.

“There are two women-gods also. Pega is the day goddess. All beneath the sun is hers. Pega loves cleanness. She taught women to strike fire and to bake and weave. She mourns them in childbirth and comes to all at the moment of death. She is the comforter. Brown bread is the offering her woman brings her.”

I nodded approvingly.

“Thais is the night goddess. All below the moon is hers. She loves the words of lovers and lovers’ embraces. All who couple must beg her leave, speaking the words as one in the darkness. If they do not, Thais kindles a flame in a third heart and finds a knife for the hand. Aflame, she comes to children, announcing that they are to be children no longer. She is the seducer. Golden honey is the offering her woman brings her.”

I said, “It seems you have two good gods and two evil gods, and that the evil gods are Thais and the Sleeper.”

“Oh, no! All gods are very good, particularly the Sleeper! Without the Sleeper, so many would starve. The Sleeper is very, very great! And when Thais does not come, her place is taken by a demon.”

“So you have demons too.”

“Everyone has demons.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The trencher was nearly bare, and I had eaten my fill. The priest — my priest, I should write — had taken only a single small piece. I rose, picked up what was left, and tossed it into the sea, not knowing what else to do with it. “For Juturna,” I told him. “Do your people know Juturna?”

He had jumped to his feet as soon as I stood up. “No—” He hesitated, and I could see that he had almost spoken the name he had given me, but that he was afraid to do so.

“Then perhaps she is a demon to you. For most of my life I thought her a demon too; it may be that neither you nor I have made a great mistake.”

He bowed, and although he was a bit taller and by no means plump, I saw Odilo in that bow as clearly as if the man himself stood before me.

“Now you must take me to Odilo,” I said. “To the other man-god.”

We walked the beach together in the direction from which he had come. The hills, which had been barren mud when I had left, were covered with soft, green grass. Wildflowers bloomed there, and there were young trees.

I tried to estimate the time I had been gone, and to count the years I had lived among the autochthons in their stone town; and though I could not be sure of either figure, it seemed to me they must have been much the same. I marveled then to think of the green man, and how he had come for me in the jungles of the north at the very moment I required him. We both had walked the Corridors of Time, yet he had been a master while I was only an apprentice.

I asked my priest when it had been that the Sleeper had devoured the lands.

He was deeply tanned; even so, I saw the blood drain from his face. “Long ago,” he said. “Before men came to Ushas.”

“Then how do men know of it?”

“The god Odilo taught us. Are you angry?”

Odilo had overheard my conversation with Eata, then. I had supposed him sleeping. “No,” I said. “I only wish to hear what you know of it. Was it you who came to Ushas?”

He shook his head. “My father’s father and my mother’s mother. They fell from the sky, scattered like seeds by the hand of the God of all gods.”

I said, “Not knowing fire or anything else,” and as I spoke I recalled what the young officer had reported: that Hierodules had landed a man and woman on the grounds of the House Absolute. Remembering that, it was simple enough to guess who my priest’s forebears had been — the sailors routed by my memories had paid for their defeat with their pasts, just as I would have lost the future of my descendants had my own past been defeated.

It was not much farther to the village. A few unreliable — looking boats were beached there, unpainted boats built largely of gray driftwood, or so it seemed to me. On the shore, an eli or more above the high-tide mark, stood a square of huts formed by four perfectly straight lines. The square was Odilo’s doing, I felt sure; it exhibited the love of order for order’s sake so characteristic of an upper servant. Then I reflected that the ramshackle boats had probably been inspired by him as well; it was he, after all, who had built our raft.

Two women and a gaggle of children emerged from the square to watch us pass, and a man with a mallet stopped pounding dry grass into the seams of a boat to join them; my priest, walking half a step behind me, nodded toward me and made a gesture too swift for me to catch. The villagers fell to their knees.

Inspired by the sense of theater I have often been forced to cultivate, I raised my arms, spread my hands, and gave them my blessing, telling them to be kind to one another and as happy as they could. That is really all the blessing we godlings can ever give, though no doubt the Increate can do much more.

Ten strides put the village behind us, though not so far behind that I could not hear the boatwright begin his pounding again, or the children resume their play and their weeping. I asked how much farther it was to wherever Odilo lived.

“Not far,” my priest said, and pointed.

We were walking inland now, climbing a grassy little hill. From the crest we could see the crest of the next, and upon it three bowers side by side, decked as my own had been with twined lupine, purple loosestrife, and white meadow rue.

“There,” my priest told me. “There the other gods sleep.”