The Seven Last Days - Volume II: The Wings of the Morning: The Seven Last Days, #2

By James David Audlin

Given the wild gift of scrying, Adam is subjugated to a mad emperor and slavers, meets the Prince of the Upper Air, runs from the Assassin's Guild, gets lost in an impassable desert, is overwhelmed by the maddening magic of the East, and finally finds his place among a people literally in the middle of nowhere.

Yet even there the rising tide of, ahem, civilization - of war and commercialism and rampant greed - threatens to inundate him and his adopted people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James David Audlin
• Release date: Nov 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466084490

James David Audlin

James David Audlin is an American author living in Panama, after previously living in France. A retired pastor, college professor, and newspaper opinion page editor, he is best known as the author of "The Circle of Life". He has written about a dozen novels, several full-length plays, several books of stories, a book of essays, a book of poetry, and a book about his adventures in Panama. Fluent in several languages, he has translated his novel "Rats Live on no Evil Star" into French ("Palindrome") and Spanish ("Palíndromo"). He also is a professional musician who composes, sings, and plays several instruments, though not usually at the same time. He is married to a Panamanian lady who doesn't read English and so is blissfully ignorant about his weirdly strange books. However his adult daughter and son, who live in Vermont, USA, are aware, and are wary, when a new book comes out.

Book preview

Seven Novels of the Last Days

Volume One

The Voice of Day

by James David Audlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by James David Audlin

Cover photo and design by the author

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This novel is based on several dreams that came to me in the 1970s and 1980s. The novel was written 1 June 1988 – 26 January 1990.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coïncidental.

DEDICATED

with constant love

to my son

John William Manthei Audlin

who as a child saw the fabled Blue City

in the distant hills of Connecticut.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the King James Version, or are translated, paraphrased, or parodied by the author. All materials quoted in translation are translated by the author except as noted. The following sources are referenced by part and paragraph numbers. Brief quotations for artistic purposes are gratefully acknowledged, noting that they fall within the fair use doctrine of American and world copyright laws.

GIMEL.2 - 85: lines from the Rubaïyat, by Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (First Edition).

GIMEL.2 - 112: a line from The Book of Sand, Utopia of a Tired Man, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, copyright © 1971, 1975, 1976, 1977 by Emécé Editores S. A. and Norman Thomas di Giovanni.

UR.1 - 84: lines from Y Hanes Taliesin, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest.

UR.1 - 103: lines from The Tragedy of King Lear, by William Shakespeare, III, i, 10ff.

UR.2 - 36: paraphrase of lines from the Talmud (Pirké d’Rabbi Eliezer na-Gadol).

UR.2 - 50: based on stories from the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan, Abbot).

UR.2 - 52: a phrase from Poems of Dylan Thomas, There was a Saviour, by Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1940 by Dylan Thomas.

UR.2 - 79: lines from The Ballad of the White Horse, by G. K. Chesterton, Book I, stanzas 50 and 51, copyright © 1911 by Dodd, Mead, & Co.

UR.3 - 75: a story based on Gaius Caligula, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, sections 22-24.

UR.3 - 99,100: lines from The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare, II, ii, 197-203 and 204-210, slightly altered.

UR.3 - 99: a line from De Isis et Osiris, by Plutarch.

UR.3 - 140: paraphrase of a line from St. Simeon Stylites, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

UR.4 - 28: a thought paraphrased from The Wisdom of Carmel.

UR.4 - 28: a thought attributed to Gautama Buddha.

UR.4 - 33: paraphrase from The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky.

UR.4 - 61ff: story elements have been suggested by a passage in Beowulf, lines 4427-4454.

UR.5 - 7,8: paraphrase of lines from Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, by Robert Browning, 182-184 and 193-194.

UR.5 - 10: a line from Taliessin Through Logres, Taliessin in the School of the Poets, by Charles Williams, copyright © 1938 by the Oxford University Press.

SUOCHE - 58: paraphrase from Amyntas, Mopsus, by André Gide.

DESERT.1 - 53: a line from The Hazards of Space Exploration, by James David Audlin.

DESERT.1 - 78: suggested by a passage in Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldūn, I, 60.

SHA-XAN - 2: story elements have been suggested by The Travels of Marco Polo, I, 5.

SHA-XAN - 15: a line from the Tao-te Ching, by Lao-tse, XLVII.

SHA-XAN - 19: a variation on a story of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch.

SHA-XAN - 29,30: traditional chants of Vajrayana Buddhism, from the Kalacakra.

SHA-XAN - 35: a thought attributed to Gautama Buddha.

SHA-XAN - PART V, XANADU: story elements have been suggested by, and paraphrases and quotations have been taken from, Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes, was helpful in developing my adaptation of Coleridge’s poem. Other story elements and paraphrases in this part come from The Travels of Marco Polo.

TRIBE.2 - 36: the discussion of runic lore and of the language of nature is based on The Words of the High One in The Elder Edda, Sigrdrifumal in Völsungasaga, and teachings of the Native American tradition. Lines on page 12 are quoted from Orbit, by James David Audlin.

TRIBE.3 - 82: a phrase from Devotions, XVII, by John Donne.

TRIBE.3 - 86: paraphrase of lines from The Eagle, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

TRIBE.4 - 64ff.: the exile from the tribe was suggested by passages in Watunna, the creation cycle of the Orinoco Nation, collected by Marc de Civrieux, edited and translated into English by David M. Guss, copyright © 1980 by Marc de Civrieux and David M. Guss.

TRIBE.4 - 98: paraphrase of a line from the Bhagavad-Gità, 2:52f.

TRIBE.4 - 120: It was Zen Master Nan-in who once taught a university professor to empty his mind by overfilling a teacup.

TRIBE.4 - 122: Jorge Luis Borges often said of his blindness in interviews, Yellow has never deserted me.

TRIBE.4 - 145: Quotation from a vision received by Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk), recorded in Black Elk Speaks, as told through John G. Neihardt, copyright © 1932, 1959 by John G. Neihardt; copyright © 1961 by the University of Nebraska Press.

TRIBE.4 – 146: Haiku by Bashō Matsuo.

TRIBE.4 - 148: Paraphrase of a line from Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness), by Yoshido Kenko.

* * *

Besides the above directly quoted sources, the author acknowledges a debt of kindred thinking to many authors, especially C. G. Jung, Robert Graves, and John Michell. To teachers of the Buddhist and Native ways a recognition of their invaluable wisdom is made in deepest appreciation, especially to the Rev. James Bowier, Zen Master Seung Sahn, Running Deer, Grandmother Alloday Gatoga, and Duncan Sings Alone. Thanks are given to those who critically read the manuscript, especially my father and brother, both named David John Audlin.

While I thought I was climbing,

I found myself descending,

Having lost my way.

Let me go up and down,

I have no other work to do.

– early Christian hymn

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Do not be deceived by anyone, and look within or without. You must kill anything that is in your way. Kill the Buddha if he is in your way. Kill an ancestor, kill a master, if he is in your way. Kill your parents or your family, if they are in your way. Only then will you be free, and not encumbered by finite things, truly free, truly at peace.

– Zen Master I-Hsuan

THE WINGS OF THE MORNING

PART I: GIMEL

They are ancient and worn, so battered by the seasons, so blurred and brindled by patches of moss and windswept leaves, that they are hardly visible at first. Then again, they are not sized for the human body. But though gigantic, stairs they unquestionably are. He puts his hand on the next step, about waist high, to wipe away the detritus. Yes, there can be no question. The grey stone is wet and cold beneath the slick leaves and decaying matter. He sweeps aside as well tiny tendrils of new flowers, infant shoots in the midst of this decay, some already lifting up their heads, delicate blue florets, toward the mottled green roof of the forest. An anonymous wind gusts momentarily as he is still bent toward the next step and he leans against it for support. Behind him is a huge cave opening, at the meeting point of two angled slopes thick with trees, out of which the stairway is born. The cave breathes a dark musty odor, the moisture which condenses on these steps.

Suddenly he realizes he does not know; has he been ascending these difficult stairs, or descending? The land around him he utterly fails to recognize, but he believes he must have been down those stairs to their incomprehensible bottom and that he must now be ascending. He must have been in that dark opening, throwing himself down from step to step, past regions of hells better left unimagined, deep beneath the bowels of the earth, infernos lit only by the glare or ever-brooding lava and dark nadirs more cold than a river of ice. He must have seen things that he is glad to forget before swinging his legs down the side of the last and lowest and hugest step onto an ancientness older than anything, the Land beneath the earth and all other worlds, the Land upon which the cosmos rests. He must not have strayed from the oceans of earth weighing down on it, the sea of stars pressing as well with all its celestial weight. No directions, no time, no being, no movement. All of these crushed out of existence by the relativity of existence bearing down on this eventual place.

He must have struggled up that massive monolith, fully as tall as he, and up each subsequent stair, to bring him at last to this place in a forest. Even as he hears echoing again in his mind the words, There were giants in the earth in those days, they are gone, and he looks up at the stairway ahead of him, flinging itself up the side of a hill and away.

Up to the next stone step he throws his body, panting with sudden waves of exhaustion. Somewhere a bell chimes softly. The world about him has changed, subtly, imperceptibly. It seems somehow the colors are different, or that he is observing a different landscape. Or, perhaps, it is that the light has changed, to tinge the leaves and mosses of this forest with a bare hint of something else. Unconcerned with these fine changes, and not even overly aware of them, he raises himself up to the next step. Again he hears the deep intonation of a bell, but this time somewhat higher, more airy. The edges of the leaves glisten now with a faint edging of electrum, the shimmer of silver intermixed with another, more golden glory. In his nostrils and lungs the air around him tastes sweeter, more alive with some forgotten being, just as does the clear, limpid atmosphere after a thunderstorm.

He hoists himself up another step, and this time there is no question in his mind, but that the world is changing with his ascent. All things seem now to be dipped in a fresh coat of color, making them appear not brighter, not louder to the eye, but more profound. Like the green of reeds nodding in watery depths, or the looming blue of an indefinite sky, these hues seem not to be painted on from without, but as if the deep spirit of each mundane object, long a dormant seed, now bursts into life.

The steps have become somewhat smaller as he ascends the hillside, and freer beneath his feet. Bells chime softly as he climbs them, less laboriously now. Indeed, he begins to feel impelled, pulled upward as if falling into the heavens, up these stairs. The steps beneath his feet seem too to have changed. Stone he knows they must still be, but they appear more like solidified bars of light. And the land around him is now flaming with light, transfigured into something less substantial and more celestial, the very essence of being that powers the stars from their central cores.

Almost like a ramp now, the steps have become tiny, and the bells rise beyond hearing as he joyfully rushes upward in an exultatory glissando. Wings seem outstretched above him at the head of this stairway, and he weeps to see what beauty awaits him ahead, in a region of pure light and energy, spirit freed from mortal clay, moving constantly, never stationary. Flying upward, flying, trying to reach that perfect holy goal before his mortal eyes open –

To see around him a black night so profound his mind fills the emptiness with the vanishing tendrils of that dream of light. But though the streamers floating about may be of bright material, the darkness tears them and swallows them away. What was the dream? It is gone now, and he is awake, out in a cold and silent night. He tries to go back to sleep and his pleasant dream, but nothing opens up to return him thither. So he lies on the cold ground, his eyes and ears unwillingly open to darkness and silence. After a while, in fact, he has lost the ability even to tell if his eyes are open or closed, for it is all the same either way.

But there is light. Motes of evanescent light dance before his eyes, appearing out of and vanishing into the nonexistence to which they are akin. When he looks at one directly he cannot see it, only then it appears again at the corner of his vision, or is that another? They swirl and flutter about, weaving some incomprehensible pattern in the silent air. At first he is quite sure he is only seeing some random electrical discharge in his optic nerve or the hungry synapses of his brain, as if they are trying to fill this bottomless well of darkness with islands of light. But then he notices the eerie light is coagulating around several huge, misshapen stones that circle him round. At first he thinks it must be the moon, but everything else around him is completely dark, not even glimmering with a bit of light reflecting from this place. The stones seem to breathe, as if living beings are crouching around him in a ring; but, no, he tells himself, it’s only this owlish light that makes them seem to be alive. Yet it is hard to shake off the odd notion that they are moving. He rubs his eyes, trying to clear away the mist. For it is as if they are moving just to stay in this place, as if they are rooted in some stillness beyond this fleeting point in time and space, and must move in harmony with the swinging of this planet around its star and its constant tumbling into the future. Then, among the tiny globes of light, appearing and disappearing, are tall slender silvery beings. So rarefied is the luminescence of these small wandering spheres that he only sees one of the figures when a sphere momentarily darts close. He lies still, his cold discomfort forgotten, hardly daring to breathe, striving with his eyes to pierce the thick curtains of night, and wondering if they see him lying here. Several of these strange persons dance silently all around him as if unaware of the mortal at their feet. There are male and female figures, turning slowly in a stately pavane as if to music only they can hear. Their torsos and limbs are long and sleek and light, as if they could float or fly away if they wished. In comparison he feels himself to be a gross being, heavy and thick, and laden with rank diurnal smells of meat and sweat. He looks at the men’s sleek chests and arching limbs, the roundness of the women’s smooth hips and breasts as they turn and turn again in some inchoate pattern. Beautiful they are, but so much more are they alien to everything human, everything he has ever known.

To what music are they dancing? His ears seek the tenuous wisps of melody that tatter away like smoke, shredding apart on the talons of the gentlest breeze. His ears, too weighted down with the heavy substance of a mortal earth, seem too clumsy as instruments to detect such celestial arias. Ah, but there: does he not hear a gentle phrase in that swirling tendril of air? He inwardly hums a cluster of tones harvested by the intricate canals of his ears before the moving air could snatch them out of reach. And there, in listening again, he picks up another motive, then another.

At last, I have it! he exultantly cries, and at the sound of his voice the dancing stops. He sings the song even as the fluttering balls of light quickly wink out one by one, like startled fireflies. His hands reach out and, more by accident than design, he finds they have captured one last of the silvery beings. It is a woman of their kind. She makes not a sound nor shows any fear. His hands grip tightly at her upper arm, but it has only minimal contact with her cool skin because of the moonbeam hair that tumbles over her shoulders like a waterfall. Large moist eyes, the eyes of a wild animal, look at him with some unreadable emotion, certainly not the terror he would have expected. The soft breasts rise and fall, but otherwise she makes no movement, no struggle to escape.

I have your song! he repeats, a little foolishly, for he has her as well. Feeling sure of himself, for he has read the old literature and knows for what to ask, he adds, Give me a gift. A magical gift. Words tumble from his lips as if this speech is necessitated by powers unknown to him. The dangerous gift, he goes on without conscious thought. The wild magic. Give me the gift of scrying. Hardly are the words gone from his mouth when so is the creature from his hands, as easily as if he had never really detained her at all, except by her own will. Wait! he calls after her, though there is no one to see. My gift! What about my gift?

But she is gone, as if she never was there at all. He feels no different; he does not sense within him the brooding presence of magical power. And the world around him, becoming slowly visible in the first faintly rising light of dawn, appears to him decidedly ordinary. In his mind, without any consideration, he puts it all down to a dream.

As day slowly rises he finds he slept the night in a depression of ground irregularly walled by seven oblong grey rocks that still clutch about them the darkness and damp of night. Although surrounded by pools of morning sun, no light touches their murky mass. Perhaps they really are bright and shimmering in the glowing haze, but still they seem only bent inward, into their own shadows. Overarched by the heavy boughs of sycamore ash and carpeted by soft pungent moss, this bower has the aspect of a secret, sacred place. From outside, looking down into it, it looks so very much like the footprint of a giant. This enchanted circle seems to lie outside the normal flow of time, as if he could spend years inside it and come out to find only a minute passed in the outer world, or a minute inside and find years gone by outside. Looking at these stones, even though they seem perfectly still and ordinary, he cannot repress the powerful impression that they are alive, and move whenever he is not looking at them. How did he find this place last night in the darkness? he wonders futilely, since he cannot remember how it was, after walking many miles downriver from the Wall, that he did at last cease his travel and lie down to sleep.

Only one way to go, and that is, as yesterday, away from the Wall. There can be no returning to all the life he has ever known. He goes on through the thin forest of spindly birches and spruce. The morning is still chilly, remembering winter recently departed, with a thin cloud cover dulling the sun and an insidious little breeze reaching cold fingers into his clothes. He keeps moving, keeping warm by not pausing to rest, scrambling through thorny bushes and over broken ground alongside the river. He does not look back, knowing the Wall long out of sight. Yesterday he saw the last of it. Once the final, unbreachable limit to his known universe, now it was seemingly as insubstantial as paper, shutting away those he loves and fears, respects and hates. He was always taught that here, outside the Wall, was an unthinkable sea of chaos, upon which one might not even look without risking madness: a sea in which could be found all the evils of nonexistence called into being by the primordial couple. Human beings need parameters, he was always told. As finite creatures they need boundaries to orient themselves in place and time; cast adrift into infinity inevitably must result in fearful panic. And the person so cast adrift will cease to exist, for eternity has no time or place in which finite things may exist, for finitude is asymptotic to nothingness, not infinitude. And now, here he is, in this outer universe, this world beyond the Wall, a world without limits, in which anything might happen.

As he walks downriver, trying to whistle in imitation of the birds’ calls he hears, though their makers remain unseen, he finds himself still thinking about whatever it was, dream or reality, that happened during the night. Such thinking at least takes his mind off the increasing pangs of hunger. The forest seems to be thinning; there is even a path now, coursing beside the river, which he takes because it affords swifter progress. Then there is a great deal of light up ahead, and he knows the trees will soon come to an end. He comes out into a wide expanse of low hummocks, carpeted by a rough dark blue-green grass broken by occasional patches of yellow sand. These rolling hummocks go down away from him to another field that goes on to the horizon, a field of blue flecked, in his myopic vision, with feathers of white. Somewhere distantly there is a slow roll as if of neverending thunder, and the air seems strangely charged with the taste of salt.

After so much forest to hem in his sight, his eyes now leap from their traces and skip joyfully about these ragged expanses of meadow. He finds they are not alone, that sheep and goats also wander around the hummocks, grazing on the coarse grasses. Once he has taken in all there is to see from this vantage-point, he steps away from the forest. In the moment of entering into it this wide world seems as a woman to him: vast and yet hidden beyond even the next small hill, the next turn in the path. Into this broad yet veiled world he now goes, not knowing which of her many paths he might some day take, but still joyfully seeking out her turns and curves. The path leads him through this pasturage, in which the grazing ruminants pay him little heed. Small berries grow amongst the clumps of grass, and he makes a desultory breakfast on these as he walks, even though they do nothing to assuage his bodily craving.

Coming around the corner of one small hill brings him back within view of the river, which near the periphery of the forest took a different course than the path. Downslope from him, not far away, are the farm buildings for this holding. There is a house, a barn, and several sheds, all cobbled together from stones gathered in clearing these fields, and thatched over with the field grasses. Suddenly the apathetic gnawing of hunger at his entrails is the biting and clawing of a vicious beast. In obedient answer to its insistent demands, he approaches the farmhouse and knocks at the door. It swings back to reveal a diminutive old woman with the quick sharp movements of a chipmunk. Cackling toothlessly at him, she sits him down at a wooden table in her whitewashed kitchen, and without his saying a word gives him a meal of cheese and bread and goats’ milk. She talks to him, her incomprehensible chatter liberally interspersed with chuckles and whistles of laughter, while he avidly consumes the food. Perhaps it is her lack of teeth, but he finds himself completely unable to understand her. This does not seem at all to discomfit her, for she goes on, gaily asking this stranger her incoherent questions and answering them herself.

As he eats, smiling back at the old woman in an effort to make up for his inability to respond, he thinks about his future. So easy to leave his homeland it finally turned out to be, but, having accomplished that goal, how is his life further to be shaped? He can imagine himself working on this farm, for instance, and earning his daily bread in that manner. But somehow he knows he does not want to abide here, even if this matron’s family, which must be off working in the fields, were to agree. He believes it would be terribly dull here for a young man his age, and, anyway, there is so much of the world yet to see – why should he remain in only the first place he finds outside the Wall?

So, with the last crumb of bread and the last drop of milk in the clay mug now within him, he is up and on his way. The old woman shakes both of his hands with both of hers and gives him what is clearly her blessing, and he is on the path again. Past the barn he picks up the trail again and takes it through fields of growing vegetables. In the distance to his right he can make out farm waggons, and two or three men working among rows of some tall standing grain.

But he presses on until he finds himself at the crest of a long downward grade. And there he stops, overcome by what he sees. At the bottom of this steeply sloping sward, past one or two other farms, there is a town. But what a town it is! Unlike the only one of any size he has ever known, the town gathered up like skirts around the high walls of the ancient castle where once he was to be king, this town, this town has in it literally hundreds of dwellings and, besides, innumerable buildings of manufacture and commerce. From it, like a constant exhalation of their collective breath, comes the heavy hazy heat and smell of its citizens’ industry, the intermingled scents of steam, smoke, sweat, and salt. Yet it is not this that so claims his sight. The river tumbles down from these heights not far to his left, rushing down in a fury of white foam, hardly pausing to irrigate these hillside farms, to what he sees now is its ultimate destination. To think that every drop of water that wells up from the spring beneath the castle, that flows underneath the Wall, ends up like this! For the river, in its pell-mell flight shoots for the town below him, bisects it, and empties immediately beyond it, into a gigantic lake. This is, of course, the field of blue he saw from the edge of the forest. It is a body of water that goes on, as far as his eyes can tell, forever, somewhere out there, beyond his ability to focus and discern properly, meeting the sky. Against all the laws of nature he learned in school, the kinetic energy of the river seems simply to stop as it reaches this endless water, all its momentum instantly naught. But, though the river progresses no further, there is movement out on that surface, of any number of boats, both large and small, near to the shore and far out upon these unending waters.

Is this it? he asks himself. Could this at last be it? The incomprehensible waters of the ocean of Chaos they told him were outside the Wall? It was said as he was growing up that the ancestors of his people had found the country in which he had grown up to be the only island in a sea of Chaos, and that they had built the Wall to keep their land safe. If this then at last is the Chaos, then surely it has receded since the days of his ancestors, no longer lapping against the stones of the Wall. But, shrunken now though it may be, it still is an impressive thing. Human habitations cling to the very edge of this Chaos, and human beings send out their fragile little vessels upon it, all as if they were unaware or unafraid of the dangers of this sea, its potential, so once he read in anciently forgotten literature, to render one nonexistent at the merest touch or even too lingering a regard of its evanescent waters. Despite these habitations and vessels, this ocean of Chaos remains free, like a wild animal easily shaking off a flimsy halter. No human, he sees already in this his first meeting with the ocean – and he does not even yet know the word for it, ocean – no human can rule this broad and endless plain. It may never be subdued or claimed, for, while it remains forever still, it endlessly sweeps all things away; such is the effortless but endless toil of the forces of Chaos.

Hemmed in by Chaos in three directions, the fourth being the untenable choice of shameful return to the Wall, it appears quite clear to him that he is looking at the end of his journey, the center of the rest of his life. He is done looking from this high, airy place. Down the slope on the snaking path he goes, almost as quickly as his companion, the river, but taking care lest he lose his balance and tumble wildly as it does. As he comes down toward the huge town, the sound of bells rises up like wings on the morning air. The little trail widens as it descends, becoming more substantial and marked with evidence of greater use. Eventually he finds rude steps, simple squared logs or flat rocks with dirt filled in up to the bottom of the next one higher. But at the last these give out, and the final downward slope is thirty feet of grassy incline, shorn, not grazed, by the scraping feet of pedestrians. For by now he has already passed several local people going up as he comes down. Not yet willing to call attention to himself as new to this corner of the world, he has settled on a polite nod and smile, which they often return. A number of them are clad in what can only be farmers’ garb, utilitarian if drab, but he has by now also seen quite a few, especially younger ones, dressed in bright, better cut garments such as those traders and their customers favor.

So at last down that final sweep of footworn slope, he joins the crowds heading into the town for the day. There is a wall here too, but broken by gates in which stand sentries. At first he thinks he will pass in unnoticed among the jostling folk, but he hears a sentry call out, You there! as it is his turn to enter the inner town. What are ye about? The man’s accent sounds rather odd.

I..., he responds, am new here..., I don’t know.

Looking for work, eh? And a place to abide?

He smiles and nods at the sentry, trying to seem as inconsequential as possible.

Try the Three Lions, there’s a good inn. And if it’s work you’ll be looking for, you can always get a job in the tower. And he laughs good-naturedly with the other sentry, and the boy passes on. Then he is in the town itself, standing still and looking up around him at the buildings, so like and unlike what he knew growing up. People jostle against him, hawkers shout out their wares, and the dirt street is flung with trash and filth. He walks on amidst the crowds, often feeling himself to be pulling along against the human current. The smells, both pleasant and not, the colors, the shouts and distant hurdy-gurdy sounds, the gay busy people – it seems like this whole town is one vast carnival.

He walks this main street, deciding to walk to its other end so he can get a sense of the town. Past shops displaying glassware and jewellery, past tall buildings of even five or six stories from the windows of which extend ropes burdened down with laundry, past beggars and eating places; he suddenly realizes that the street beneath his feet is dirt no longer but now made of long squarehewn logs sweating resinous tar, between which he can glimpse oily green filthy water. The buildings continue on, as before, built on piers, on this artificial wooden land extending out over the Chaos, even with side streets, down which he can see more buildings. But then, a few yards further, these buildings, mostly warehouses here, are no more. The street is now a rickety wooden causeway heading out for maybe a hundred feet more, to which boats of many sizes are tied, and other boats to those. He can see other such causeways extending into the water, presumably from other streets parallel to the one he walked, also with their complements of boats.

There is a man in one boat, leaning over the gunwale to scrape at the hull with a wide flat-bladed tool. His beard is as white as the hair that goes around the back of his otherwise bald head, giving the effect of two hemispheres joined by a ring of hair. For a moment the silly thought crosses his mind that the top hemisphere might lift right off.

Excuse me, sir, what is this liquid? It looks like water – is it?

Wha’d’ya expect it be? Olive oil? The old man briefly glances up to observe what crazy person asks such a question, then immediately bends back to his task.

Well, I mean, it’s not Chaos, is it?

Only when a storm comes up, or the Kraken comes, and threatens to capsize my Pleïades here. This time the man does not even bother to look up.

Where do you sail, then, on this lake?

"Lake? This be th’ ocean, ye damned fool! I sails wherever the fishes gather, for this be a trawler, as if ye couldn’a see that for y’self. If ye want ports o’ call, like Ur or Rama, ye gotta look on another pier for the really big sailing vessels."

He goes on to the end of the pier where, out of sight of the old man and his possibly continuing derision, he bends to dip his finger into this lake or ocean or whatever it is. Oh, stop being so foolish, he tells himself, and forces his hesitating finger into the fluid. It looks like water, it feels like water..., he lifts it out again to taste – and, to his amazement, it tastes not like water but salt. He really did not expect something so different. But he realizes upon reflection, it must be water, if heavily saline; his finger is still intact.

As he comes to his feet he notices something odd. The water goes on indefinitely straight ahead, as far as he can tell, to infinity. There is no horizon. The land cups this portion of the water right around the end of the river with two outstretched arms of earth, dotted with houses and grazing animals. Between them he can see this strange endless open sea, as if the firmament were left unfinished. At the very ends of these arms framing the harbor, on either side of a narrow watery entrance, are tall towers which even now in late morning are burnished with a bright light. It seems evident that these beacons serve to guide seagoing vessels in to the town here from far away, especially, he surmises, during night, storm, and fog. He begins to realize that though this is merely a body of salt water and not, properly speaking, Chaos, it has properties strangely unique to it, and if the rules which define its nature are not obeyed by those who venture out upon it then the sure result will be a certain chaos. Between and at some distance beyond these two arms of land, a final outpost before the endless water merging with the sky, rises a third tower. He sees no island upon which it is footed, but he presumes one to be there. This tower, unlike the others, is taller, narrower, and completely dark. Its purpose he cannot imagine, unless it is to guard the town and this cupped part of the sea against someone or something.

The sun is reaching its zenith, and the pangs of hunger forestalled some time ago by cheese and bread are now returning with redoubled fury. So he gets up and retraces his steps into the town proper. After asking for directions he soon finds his way to the one inn whose name he knows, the Three Lions. The sign board hanging above its door clearly marks it as such, picturing as it does three roaring lions’ heads on a blue field. Inside is a spacious common room with polished pine walls lined with wooden eating tables and a fire kept low for daytime in a hearth nearly as long as one wall, in which a large covered pot is kept at a simmer, suspended from a wrought iron hook. From it come the most provokingly tantalizing odors he has scented in days.

Eventually the innkeeper arrives, a surprisingly young man, balding, with a small beard, genial smile, and a white apron. How may I serve you? he asks. A room? A meal?

Both, if you please. But the latter before the former.

Very wise, honored sir, very wise. It is only the mid of the day, and there remain yet hours before nightfall. This innkeeper’s words are also pronounced with different shades and hues, as have everyone’s he has so far met in this place also been. The germ of a thought for later consideration is planted in his mind. The innkeeper places before him a bowl of stew from the pot over the fire, a hank of bread, and a flagon of some sort of ale.

There is the matter of remuneration, he hesitantly brings up to the innkeeper. How is such dealt with here?

An inconsequential trifle. Pray do not mention it again.

But I – He was about to say that he has no funds and, as yet, no employment therewith to derive funds, but the innkeeper’s hands, powdered white as if he was kneading dough when this guest arrived, waves him off. No, I pray you, let us refrain from embarking on such an uncouth subject, surely not the proper conversational terrain for gentlemen to traverse. The man partly pulls out a chair for himself and, saying a perfunctory May I?, he seats himself. Where are you from, sir, if I may inquire?

From up the river. There is a high Wall you may have heard of, from underneath which the river flows. Within that Wall is the land of my childhood. How distant in both time and place, like an evanescent dream he cannot quite grasp, it all seems upon reflection, how inconsequential in light of the fact he now knows that it is but a tiny part of the world, and a part that long ago chose to withdraw from the world.

You come from up the Burn? I cannot say I have ever heard of a walled country up that way, and I doubt if any of us in Gimel have. Though I mean no offense. You must understand, we are an oceangoing people. We know the several seas and the islands and fearsome shoals where a ship might founder. We know all the cities that point their faces out to sea: Tembek, Harappa, Ijil, and the queen of them all, lovely Ur herself.

Your queen’s name is Ur? he asks, confused. And who are all those other people who look out to sea; and he stumbles over the unfamiliar vocables, Tembek, Ijil, Gimel, and Burn? He pushes away the empty stew bowl after wiping it carefully with the last crust of the bread.

Ah, no, no, no, the innkeeper laughs with what he hopes are overtones not too scornful of such ignorance. I was, if you will pardon me, speaking metaphorically, anthropomorphically; those are the names of cities on the coast of the Central Sea. All, that is, except the Burn. That is what we call the river which flows into the sea here in our city, Gimel."

We just call it ‘the river’, where I come from. Why do you give it a name, the way people are named?

"Ah, honored guest. What is your name?"

Adam.

And I am Biké-An. Why do you suppose you are named Adam and I Biké-An? To differentiate us from each other and other people. If we had the same name, or no name at all, it would be rather confusing, would it not? Well, what if I were to tell you that the world has maybe dozens of rivers in it, all reaching the sea, just like your river? And cities, and lakes, and mountains. Tell you what I will do, honored sir. Come with me, if you please, to my private chamber.

In a small room just off the common room, whose walls are lined with shelves crammed with books and scrolls, Biké-An takes down one rather large scroll and spreads it out on the desk, weighting down the corners with books to prevent it from rolling up again. This is one of my most prized possessions: a map of the world. It is the only one in Gimel. He beckons his guest over behind the desk, and Adam sees on the scroll merely a tangle of intersecting lines and writing