The World and Thorinn

10 How Thorinn entered a town of seven towers, and dissolved its enchantment by accident.

The Egg has a shell of stone which is coexistent and immensurable. All other substances spring from and return to this shell. The upper portion of the shell, or lucilacunar, is by turns bright, that men may see, and dark, that they may rest. The lower portion, or solum, is covered with a layer of earth, from which all rooted and crawling things arise; in which they are nourished in their season; and to which they return so that others may be engendered.

The Abiotic Period. In the Abiotic Period, which endured immensurably until the beginning of Eobiotic times, the Egg was empty, bare and dark. There was no life nor motion in it, nor was anylife or motion conceivable, possible or prefigurable.

The Eobiotic Period. At the opening of the Eobiotic Period, nine dozen great gross years before the present era, the smooth shell of the Egg became porous and pitted; this took six great gross years. Following this, the porous stone exuded vapors which became the air; this took eight great gross years. Next the stone crumbled and formed the solum, a process which took four great gross years; then angiosperms appeared both in the solum and in the lucilacunar; from these all other rooted and crawling things developed by anabasis and phylogeny. These processes consumed still another eight great gross years. In all, the Eobiotic Era lasted twenty-six great gross years.

The Paleobiotic Period. At the beginning of the Paleobiotic Period, the Egg was substantially as we know it, but there was no higher life. Higher life now emerged in the form of coelelminthes which perfused from the vesicles of the homunculolilium, or man-lily. According to tradition, one of these coelelminthes, a worm named Rambatnib, declared himself ruler of the Egg. Taking as his consort another worm named Dola, he reigned for two great gross years. Among his many descendants were the helminthes, the coelenterates, and the rodents, one of whom, Palak by name, slew and deposed Rambatnib in the year 14,361. Palak and his consort Eula are credited with introducing the arts of music and weaving; hence the term palqu't for a brief garment or clout, and Palak-Eulalian Mode for a kind of music no longer played. They reigned until 15,350,when one of Palak's grandsons, a water-vole named Cletus, gathered an army and laid siege to the palace. Palak, who loved luxury, was surprised and slain in his bath by Cletus, who thereupon assumed the throne and declared a Great Gross Year. It was during Cletus's reign that the Nine Books and Three Oracles were composed and the Cletian Games instituted. In 16,153 Cletus awarded himself an epithet, "the Golden, " by which he is still known in some chronicles, and in 16,790 he died under mysterious circumstances of which nothing is now known. After an interregnum, during which a flood carried away the treeposts of the Palace and its outworks, a convocation known as the Broad Meadow Assembly chose as their new monarchs a kingfisher called Wise and his wife, known as Yellow Hands.

The Archaeobiotic Period. After reigning for seven great gross years, Wise determined to become a man, and henceforward was called Lembepatkin. He begged Yellow Hands to become a woman and remain his wife, but she refused and went down into the bullrushes, where her descendants hunt fish to this day. Lembepatkin took another wife, and ruled for three great gross years. Heinstituted the art of writing, reformed the Four Directions, and founded the Great College. He was succeeded by his son, Tilvebegarengen.

The Historical Period. The first persons of whom authenticated written records have survived to the present day are two brothers named Om and Hem, who in the year 63,794 disputed the rulership of the entire Egg, Om being then the monarch of the East Kingdom and Hem of the West. For a time the struggle was equal, but Om had an artificer called Firebringer who made for him certain devices, one of which was said to be a flame-breathing bladder, and another an artificial mole, which tunneling under the enemy's outworks caused great destruction. Seeing that the contest went against him, Hem called on the services of another artificer, Redbird, who made for him comparable devices, and together the brothers and their armies wrought such devastation in the Egg that after their final battle, in the autumn of 63,797, both kings and all their captains lay slain and all their works leveled to the ground. After another interregnum, the survivors and their descendants agreed never to use such instruments again in war or peace. An early religious poem of this period, the Song of Closing, movingly depicts the moral earnestness of the survivors by means of an allegory in which they seal up the walls of the Egg forever. In 63,893 the Great College was reconstituted and the treeposts erected for the present corpus of knowledge. The names of the Masters of the Great College, from that day to this, are Lobeck, Morblen, Binton,Winsin, Tenwin, Ponsin, Tenlon, Mistwin, Benlob, Finmor, Kinten, Tabeck, Vennkin, Windesh,Remten, Benrosh, Bistfin, Sinpast, Roshkin, Pongass, Sinmar, Pastwin, Tetheck, Wishchin,Deshton, Gasstab, Mistmass, Rishten, Bretlob, Friteck, Blenkot, Findesh, Klanchet, Bretsin,Gassplan, Menchet, Lobnet, Niteck, Finplan, Pastchet, Sinzet, Mistklan, Votmass, Lesteck,Dretbrin, Remfret, Tremnet, Winchet, Deshfin, Eckrosh, Tethdret, Wetklan, Findesh, Brinsin,Findesh, Gasstlin, Netmist, Lestnet, Wishteth, Roshnet...

Thorinn crawled under a bush, untied his bundles with shaking fingers, and slept. When he awoke, it was full green dark; he was wet and cold, and the wind was shaking droplets of water from the bush onto his face. For a moment he thought himself back in the cave behind the cataract; then he remembered, and sat up, shivering. He tied his bundles around him and crawled out from under the bush. The green skylight was too faint for walking, and he climbed the nearest tree instead. From its tip, a hundred ells above the ground, he could make out the clustered towers not, far off in the bend of the river. They were dark and still.

As he watched, a sudden bar of gold appeared at the end of the cavern. It widened, swelled, grew paler; then it was sweeping overhead, and as it passed Thorinn glimpsed a brown bird wheeling above, head cocked, one bright black eye looking down. The skylight dazzled him, and when he could see again the bird was gone.

He followed the river bank eastward awhile, then climbed the slope and found himself in a plowed field. It had been planted to beans, or some other garden vegetable, and the young shoots were coming up half-covered by weeds. Nearer now, the towers were surrounded by a huddle of smaller buildings. As he approached, he could see that they were built around the trunks of young trees; they appeared to be made of withy, and sometimes the green branch of a tree peeped out to show that it was still there. Some of the curving walls were plastered with a substance like pale mud, others daubed with bright color in stripes and circles. Grasses and weeds were sprouting in the earth around the buildings; there were a few marks of hoofs and clawed feet, but none that looked recent, and none that were human. The byres were vacant, doors standing open.

The seven towers clustered in a crescent around a great courtyard overgrown with vines and grass. After the first two hundred ells or so each tower was capped with a conical roof, but from this roof sprang another, smaller tower, not from the peak of the roof but to one side of it, and sometimes the roof of this tower, too, sprouted still another tower. Buttresses joined the towers; some of these had windows or even balconies in them.

Thorinn went on into the empty courtyard. He listened: not a sound. From the balconies overhead hung vines with yellowed leaves; there was a sweetish smell of decay in the air. Among the litter between the buildings he found several jugs and drinking vessels, a tunic of red woven cloth, curiously made with bone fastenings at the sides; a broken framework of wood with some parchmentlike substance stretched over it; a mirror of polished silver in a bone frame; and a little idol or godlet made of soft cloth, with a gray button-eyed face and long naked wings like those of a wingmouse.

He sprang up to the first balcony and peered within. The floor was resilient, loosely woven of cords; there were a few low carved tables, but no chairs or beds. The ceiling seemed extraordinarily high; below it were rods that might have been perches for birds.

Beyond was a maze of other rooms, gloomy even by day. Thorinn found a light-box on the wall, divided into two compartments like his own, the moss in one compartment still feebly alight. He transferred a pinch of it to the other compartment and carried it into the next room, then set it down again; it made him uneasy to be surrounded by such a bubble of light with darkness beyond it. A few moments later, when he turned to look behind, he saw the translucent partition dully glowing. The rooms were arranged in a ring around a vast well in the center of the tower, thirty ells across and at least two hundred deep. Dim chinks of light, far up, illuminated it. The silence was murmurous. Thorinn retreated into the rooms again.

Litter was everywhere, but no more than you would expect to find in any household—clothing, scraps of this and that, things that might have been children's toys carved of wood. In closets and chests he found more clothing, all with the same curious side-fastenings, hanging neatly or carefully folded; also cabinets full of curious little wooden and bone implements, of whose use he had no notion. The feeling was strong on him that the people who lived here had only gone away for a while—but where could they have gone?

Over most of the valley, the tall trees grew toward the tops of the slopes, along the cavern walls; farther down there was scrub and then meadow, with a few coppices here and there. Occasionally he found a tangle of brush and vines, compacted into a single whorled mass with tunnels all through it, some of them large enough to admit a man. He ventured into one of these, and had crawled a dozen ells into a pleasant leafy gloom, when, as he pulled himself around a bend, he heard a "Whuff!" and found himself staring into a furry, big-eyed face almost as big as his own. He was too astonished to think of drawing his sword, even if there had been room in the tunnel; the beast turned and vanished, and Thorinn, with some difficulty and many scratches, backed out again.

Droppings were plentiful, from pellets the size of millet-grains to chalky lumps the size of his fist. In the soft turf of the meadows and along the river bank he found the prints of sharp hooves or claws, angled backward. One early morning he surprised a thing like a large hare, and knocked it over with a stone. It got up and leaped off into the bushes, but not before he had seen that its hind legs had blunt spiky claws, and that it leaped by thrusting its toes into the ground.

Birds' eggs there were in plenty, in the treetops and in the reeds along the river. The water birds mocked him with scornful honks, a few ells away in the stream, but when they went ashore with their webbed feet they were almost helpless; he lay in wait for them in the rushes, caught them, and wrung their necks. Three times more he climbed a tree just before dawn or nightfall, and three times he saw the same brown bird.

To pass the time, Thorinn let the box tell him more of its stories about how the world was made. There were little bits of matter, too small to see, and these bits themselves were made up of smaller bits, and so on. Then there were things that were not solid at all and could not be seen either, and with these things it was possible to keep time from passing in certain places, so that, for instance, the weight of the earth above a cavern in the Underworld could not crush it, and also the heat of the lower parts of the earth could be drawn off and kept until it was needed. For all these things the box had outlandish words of its own, and it always told the same stories concerning them, but it could not give any proof that they were true, and Thorinn could not see what use it was to know them.

As for the world itself, the box maintained that it was a great ball, the Midworld being its surface, with a sort of tent all around it to keep the air in. When Thorinn asked what was beyond that, the box replied that it was a vast space like a cavern with no walls, which nevertheless did not go on forever but had an end somewhere; and when Thorinn inquired what was beyond that, the box replied that the question was senseless.

The box further maintained that the world was pushing itself about in this enormous cavern by means of tubes which pierced the tent and from which invisible particles were expelled. Snorri's Pipe, it appeared, was one of these tubes, but just when Thorinn thought he had understood this, and asked why the tubes had only now begun to make the world go faster, the box replied that on the contrary, they were slowing it down.

He tried to teach the box a game of insults, which Withinga and Untha had often played in the evenings (though with them the game had never lasted long before one player lost his temper); but he could not seem to explain to the box what an insult was, and having to play both sides took the fun out of it. Weary of walking on his toes and crawling in the underbrush, he cut a piece of deadwood with a projecting stub, flattened it with his sword and tied it to one shoe so that the stub was angled backward under the ball of his foot. Now he could leap as the hares and other animals did, though he could never catch them.

After the first few days he grew tired of sleeping in the wet forest, and moved into one of the tower rooms, a small chamber directly under the peak of the roof, where, he reasoned, he would have the most warning if the owners came back; it had a window through which he could escape quickly into the trees if necessary. He slept poorly here, and had bad dreams.

He awoke one morning with the fantastic notion that there were cellars under the city, with hidden trap doors, and that the tower people with all their children and livestock were hiding below. The feeling was so strong that he went and looked at the floors of the central shaft, and the byres and workshops, but they were solid packed earth, as he had known before. Yet, if the people and their animals were still in the cavern, they must be hidden underground. He felt them there, by day and night, dumb eyeless presences.

He explored the valley, first downstream, then up. Twice he found small steadings tucked away between the forest and the meadows, but they were as deserted as the city. At the far end of the valley, the river turned into a labyrinth of more and more sluggish waterways. Wading with poles in the marsh, Thorinn found that the water flowed under the cliff through a slot too narrow for a man. For sport and to vary his diet, he took a bow and some arrows he had found in the city, and practiced shooting at a mark until he had lost all but two of the arrows in the brush. He had a tendency to shoot high, and supposed that was because the arrow, not being as heavy as it ought to be, fell too slowly in flight.

He fetched more arrows and continued to practice outdoors; he also hung a mark at the top of one of the inner wells in the city and shot at it from below. When he could hit this target more often than not, he threw it into the air and practiced shooting at it as it soared. He kept on, day after day, until he seldom lost an arrow, and could hit the target in flight nine times out of ten. Then one morning he got up before dawn and climbed a tree. Balancing himself on a limb just below the tip, he unbuckled his belt, passed it around the stem and refastened it. Now, leaning back against the belt, he could look upward without losing his balance or risking a sore neck.

In the treetops all around him, birds were making their morning noises. He waited. The golden bar appeared at the end of the cavern, and he found time to wonder where the light came from that turned the dark sky-moss bright—did the sky of one cavern join that of another, all around the Underworld? He took an arrow from his quiver, nocked it, drew the bowstring back. The light swept overhead, and in the instant of its passage he clearly saw the brown bird. He released the arrow; it vanished silently into the glare, but he knew it had been truly aimed. He put another arrow to the bow and squinted upward. There! A dark shape gliding down, turning, crippled. He let fly, missed, nocked another arrow, released it, and this time saw it strike. The bird was pinwheeling slowly into the trees. Thorinn marked the spot where it vanished and scrambled down.

A rhythmic thrashing in the underbrush led him to his quarry. Transfixed by two arrows, in the body and in the wing, it lay tangled in spiky bushes, still trying to fly. One wing was crippled; the other flapped, flapped, flapped.

Thorinn bent nearer. It was a large bird, bigger than a hawk, but having a short, straight bill. Its feathers were dark brown above, buff below. Its bright eye stared fixedly past him; the beating of its wing neither quickened nor faltered. Thorinn drew his sword and struck. The blade rebounded; the bird's neck was bent but not cut through, and there was no blood. The rhythmic flapping continued. Thorinn struck again, with no better result. Finally, conquering his revulsion, he pulled the thing out into a clear spot, where, holding it against a fallen log, he chopped with his sword until he had cut the neck half through and opened a gash in the body beneath the crippled wing. Cut feathers drifted away in the wind of his blows, but still the bird did not bleed. At last the flapping stopped. Inside the body Thorinn saw unfamiliar dry shapes, unlike the entrails of any bird or beast. He carried the carcass back to the clearing outside the city and there, on a flat stone, gutted and dismembered it. In all its outer parts, feathers, skin, eyes, talons, it was like a bird. Inside were bulging strands, some dun color, some yellowish, that were flexible and soft to the touch but so resistant that his Yen-metal sword could barely cut them; here were networks and skeins of red threads and blue; here clusters of white balls. "Box, what sort of bird is this?"

"It is not any sort of bird. It is an engine." Thorinn fingered a skein of blue threads. "I thought engines were made of metal, or wood."

"Engines can be made of anything, even flesh."

Thorinn absorbed this in silence; the box had told him so many fantastic things that he no longer thought it worthwhile to argue with it; but at length he said:

"Well, why would anybody want to make an engine that looks like a bird?"

"Perhaps to watch over you, Thorinn."

Thorinn dug a hole slowly with his sword, dropped the bird in and kicked dirt over it until the last dusty feather vanished. If the bird had been set to watch him by other engines, what would happen now that he had killed it?

He climbed to his tower room by leaping from one outside balcony to another, a quicker and more direct route than going up the well inside. He ate a chunk of dried meat and drank from the magic jug, then stretched himself on the floor with his hands over his head. Close to his ears there was a muted scrabbling and scratching, the sounds of the insects that lived on the false floor beneath the woven cords. He glimpsed them sometimes, gray and brown beetles, long colorless wrigglers. His eye fell on the wooden pole that spanned the peak of the roof over his head. These poles were everywhere in the city; they must be perches for birds that preyed on the insects. As for the people of the city, Thorinn imagined them as winged too—tall men with dazzling white feathers like an eagle's, women soft as doves.

Perhaps he drowsed; at any rate, he came to himself with a start. Under him the floor vibrated in a short, sharp jolt; a distant sound came up the well below.

Thorinn leaped up, saved himself from floating away by grasping the floor cords with one hand, then with his toes. In a moment he had slung his belongings over his shoulders, and in another he was out the window and into a tree.

He clung to the branch and listened. At first he heard nothing unusual. A waterfowl squawked somewhere; then there was a faint, distant bawling. These sounds and others grew in a few moments to a babble of voices; Thorinn had never heard anything like it.

The wooded area around him was deserted; from where he was, he could not see into the courtyard or the fields beyond. He leaped back to the roof of the tower he had just left; clinging to the smooth bark, he thrust his head over and looked down.

Below him, the courtyard was full of dust and confusion. Broad pink and gray backs of beasts, small as beetles from this height, plunged toward the exit from the courtyard; there were dozens of them, no, hundreds, and beside them, flapping along close to the ground, were gray birds; they were goading the animals along with sticks held somehow beneath them. Now here came a sudden explosion of fowl, all nodding heads and yellow feet, and then after that a cluster of white animals with curved horns, all driven by the gray flapping creatures; they all passed out between the towers, and still more came from one of the ground-floor exits.

Thorinn could bear no more; he turned and slid down the roof head-foremost, leaned in, grasped the windowframe, pulled himself inside. The only other exit was a hole in the floor through which he passed into another empty room, and so on until he reached the top of the larger tower below. Here he leaned over the low railing of a balcony and peered down into the hall. It was dark and silent. He swung himself over and dropped from one balcony to another, pausing often to listen, until he had reached the floor two hundred ells down. Skylight, entering through the broad courtyard doorway, was full of yellow dust-motes. Thorinn leaped to the wall at one side of the entrance and cautiously put his head out. In the courtyard, fat grunting beasts and squawking fowl were being herded by flapping gray things—not birds, but men and women with wings like those of wingmice. They were shorter than he, with broad chests and bandy legs. Their long arms ended in three-fingered hands; their wings, which were like gray cloaks when they were folded, became taut membranes when they flew. The sticks they used to goad the animals were clutched in their long toes.

Thorinn withdrew into the darkness and said in a low voice, "Box, are they men or demons?"

"Some are beasts and some are fowl."

"I mean the ones with the gray wings."

"They are engines, Thorinn."

"Engines too—like the bird? Wait a minute." The sounds outside had changed; there were squawkings, screeches, the flapping of wings. Bursting with curiosity, Thorinn put his head out again, and found himself staring straight into the face of a wingman who was pursuing half a dozen ducks escaped from the flock. The wingman's gray-furred face did not change; his dull eyes passed over Thorinn expressionlessly, and in a moment he was pursuing his ducks in the other direction. After a moment Thorinn stepped out into the doorway, exposing himself fully. No one paid the slightest attention to him, even when he began moving across the courtyard toward the doorway from which the beasts and fowl were still issuing. The herdsmen's bodies were covered with short gray fur; their skin was a darker gray, their eyes brown. Their nails, on both hands and feet, were curved and horny. They wore tunics, kirtles, and caps of knitted wool, some plain, others with vivid designs in red, ocher, and blue. Between their thighs was a gray membrane anchored by a short tail, and all their garments were made with slits to accommodate the tail and wings.

As Thorinn drew near the doorway, a last explosion of ducks and other fowl burst out of it, followed by two wingmen; now he could see the floor of the central well inside, and he hopped in that direction, thinking the procession was over; but another wingman appeared, then four more, then another four, leaping up in the dimness out of what Thorinn now perceived was a huge oblong hole in the floor, with a lid tilted above it. Some sprang toward the outer doorway and were gone; others went flapping upward. The great well was murmurous with their wings, but otherwise they made no sound. Thorinn knelt beside the opening and put his head down. For a moment he could not understand what he saw. On the floor of the chamber below, several ells back from the opening, were stacked bundles of silvery translucent material like those he had seen in the treasure cave. Wingmen were pulling these off the stacks, setting them upright, and then doing something to them which he could not make out, whereupon the silvery film vanished like water and another wingman sprang forth out of each. Wide as it was, the chamber was packed full of these bundles. The chamber itself was walled and floored with some glassy yellow-gray material that looked slippery but was not; the lid, which was held open at an angle in some way that Thorinn could not make out, was covered with the same stuff underneath but was packed dirt on the upper side.

The stacks were dwindling visibly, but still there was no end to them. To pass the time, Thorinn began counting the wingmen as they were revived; he got to five hundred and still they came; he had never imagined that there could be so many people in one place.

Now something new was happening. The wingmen and women as they were revived were not leaping to the exit but standing in a cluster as if waiting for something. Now he saw them stoop, and here came three or four of them in a line, each carrying a small bundle with exaggerated care. When they came near enough, he saw that each bundle was a child, sleeping or dead. They were perfect miniatures of the wingmen, with tiny gray-furred faces and closed eyelids as delicate as the ears of mice. Each was wrapped in a sort of pouch, with only its head exposed; the pouches were woven in bright geometric patterns. Each wingman leaped up out of the underground chamber with his burden, then grasped it with his toes, spread his wings, and went flapping up into the darkness.

"Box," said Thorinn in a whisper, "why are all the children asleep?"

"If the children were awake, they would know they are being brought into the cavern from another place."

"Well, and why not?"

"Then they would know there is another place when they grow up, and they might try to leave the cavern."

"But why not real men instead of engines? Or why not engines instead of children? It doesn't make any sense."

"There must be real children or it would make no sense to have engines which look like men. But there cannot be real men because they would remember another place. The children are too young to remember. When they are grown they will take the engines' place and will think men have always lived here."

Thorinn tried half-heartedly to puzzle this out, but his attention was distracted: the chamber was emptying rapidly. The last stacks were being taken down, and behind them he could see the rear wall of the chamber, but there was no sign of a tunnel opening yet. He waited with increasing impatience while the few remaining stacks were dismantled, denying to himself what he saw: the rear wall was unbroken.

"Thorinn, there is a danger to you unless you leave this place quickly." He turned and saw the last few wingmen crowding out through the opening. He followed them; they did something to the lid and it slowly descended, closing the chamber.

"Box," he said, "where is the tunnel?"

"There is no tunnel, Thorinn."

He had known it, he supposed, all the time.

While he was asleep they had all gone into the underground chamber to hide, and had set the bird to watch him. He would have lived out his life here, and then the bird would have told them he was dead (or rather, it would have stopped telling them he was alive), and they would have come out, just as they were doing now, to resume their existence—as if he had never been.