Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-Six Theias’s Treasure

The envoy from Gond, Theias, did not come down from the crow’s nest that day. When Aguilar went aloft with his midday meal, Yama asked her to tell the envoy that he was eager to meet him. But when she descended—despite her bulk, she slid down a backstay with an acrobat’s casual grace—she told Yama that the envoy sent his apologies.

“He says he has a lot to think about,” Aguilar said. “He’s a holy man all right. He wanted only a little bread and salt to eat, and river water to drink.”

“He could stay up there for the whole voyage, brother,” Eliphas said. “They are a strange people, in Gond.” Later, Yama sat alone at the bow and thought again about what the book had shown him. Angel’s aspect had wanted him to understand her history, but how could he trust what he had been told? Angel’s story was more dangerous than most. It was a scream aimed straight at the most primitive part of the mind, where raw appetite dwelled like a toad at the bottom of a well. Seize the day!

Forget duty, forget responsibility, forget devotion to the Preservers, forget everything but personal gain.

There was no denying what she had discovered, but it did not mean that people should fear the Universe. Rather, Yama thought, they should celebrate its vast emptiness.

By accepting the Universe for all that it was, you became a true part of it and could never truly cease to exist until it also ceased to exist. It was not necessary to distinguish between being and nonbeing, between life and mere dead matter. It was all part of the same eternal braid. Only the Preservers had stepped outside of the Universe—an act of transcendence impossible for those who were not gods.

Although Angel feared the ultimate darkness of nonbeing—that was why she had been so quick to despair—Yama knew that it was nothing to fear, for it was nothing at all. The Puranas taught that just as there was no time before the beginning of the Universe, there was also no time after death, for in both cases there was no way to measure the passing of time. Death was a timeless interval before rebirth at the infinite moment at the end of all time.

Angel denied this. She did not trust what she could not understand. She trusted no one but her own self. She had no faith, except faith in herself, and she believed herself to be unique, entire, and circumscribed, so that a time when she was absent from the Universe was, to her, simply unthinkable. It was true that she had passed hundreds of years of shipboard time as a mere text, that she had died and risen again: many times. But these brief interregna were nothing compared to the billions of years of nonbeing between now and the end of the Universe, and the machineries which stored her self and gave her rebirth time and time again were real in a way that the Preservers were not. It did not need a leap of faith to believe in machines.

Yama thought about these things for a long time, while the Weazel stood before a fair wind and raced her own shadow across sunlit waters. The crew mended the staysails and tightened lanyards and stays through deadeyes; the joints of the deck were resealed with pitch and its planks were scrubbed until they shone as white as salt; a cradle was lowered over the side so that Phalerus could smooth and repaint places splintered and scraped by weather and passage through the floating forest. There had not been time to fully reprovision the ship, and the shoat, which had been pampered on scraps since the Weazel had left Ys, was led from its pen onto an oilcloth and soothed with song before the cook cut its throat. For a moment the shoat stood astonished as rich red blood pattered noisily into a blue plastic bucket held under its head; then it sighed and sat down and died.

Tamora helped with the butchery, and ate the shoat’s liver raw. The joints, ribs, head, tongue and heart were sealed in barrels of brine, and the intestines were cleaned and steamed with the lungs. After sunset, everyone feasted on fried plantain leaves and fritters of banana and minced pork. All except the envoy, who still had not shown himself. Yama was beginning to believe that he did not exist.

That night, Yama slept alone on the triangular bit of decking over the forecastle. He woke at dawn to find someone hanging upside down from a forestay above his head. A small, slightly built man, his flat face, the color of old parchment and framed by a fringe of fine hair, cocked at his shoulder so that he could stare straight down.

Yama realized with a shock that the envoy from Gond was of the some bloodline as the long-lost Commissioner of Sensch, Dreen.

The envoy smiled and said in a high, lilting voice, “You are not so much after all,” and swung the right way up.

“Wait,” Yama said, “I would like to—”

“I expected someone taller, with thunder on his brow, or a wreath of laurels. Perhaps you are not him, after all.”

Before Yama could reply, the envoy turned and ran off along the forestay. He swarmed up the mast as nimbly as any sailor and disappeared into the crow’s nest.

Toward midmorning, Yama saw a machine spinning above the waves half a league to starboard, a little thing with a decad of paired mica vanes that flashed and winked in the sunlight, and a tapered body that was mostly a sensor cluster. He brought it closer, and made it circle around and around the crow’s nest. It made a thin crackling sound like oil seething in a hot pan, and occasionally spat a fan of sparks that sputtered down the bellying slope of the sail’s rust-red canvas. Captain Lorquital watched from her sling chair, but said nothing.

At last, the envoy swung out of the crow’s nest and ran down the forestay, halting halfway and calling to Yama, “Am I supposed to be impressed? You are very foolish!”

Yama let the machine go. It shot away to starboard in a long falling arc that almost touched the river’s glassy swell before it abruptly changed direction in a twinkling of vanes, just like a dog shaking itself awake. In a moment, it was lost from sight.

The envoy descended to the end of the forestay. He wore a simple belted tunic which left his legs bare, and carried a leaf-shaped fan woven of raffia and painted with a stylized eye. His feet had long gripping toes. He thwacked Yama on top of the head with his fan, said, “That is for your impertinence, young man,” and leapt lightly onto the deck.

The sailors who had been watching grinned at this display. Tamora shook her head and turned away; Pandaras, sitting bare-chested and cross-legged in the shade of the awning at the far end of the main deck, looked up from the embroidery work he was doing on the collar of his shirt. In her sling chair on the quarterdeck, Captain Lorquital puffed imperturbably on her pipe. Eliphas sat beside her, his wide-brimmed straw hat casting his face into shadow.

The envoy said to Yama, “Here I am. What is your question?”

“I hoped we could talk, dominie.”

“But what will you talk about? Something important, I hope, unless you are even more foolish than you look.”

“Perhaps we should talk about my foolishness.”

“You assume that I am interested in it,” the envoy said. “Do you know who I am?”

“Theias, the envoy from Gond to the warring cities of the Dry Plains.”

“And you, Child of the River, should know that I was contemplating my mission when you sent that poor imitation of a dragonfly buzzing around my eyrie. I like it up there. I can see all that is going on without having to be an active part of it. I can see so far that I can spy into the future—there is trouble in it for you, young man, but why I am telling you I do not know.”

Yama thought that for a holy man of great age, of one of the oldest bloodlines on Confluence and from the second oldest city in the world, Theias had a remarkably short temper. But he bowed and said, “I have been rude. I am sorry. I see you know my true name, so I must presume you have some interest in me.”

“Your reputation preceded you, and I must say it was larger and more colorful than the truth.”

“I suppose your people keep doves,” Yama said.

Theias looked at Yama sharply. “Doves? There are all kinds of birds in Gond, but I do not pay much attention to them. Doves do not talk, in any event, or at least ours do not. No, I heard about you on the geophone, and then there is the heliograph, which I used to talk with this cockleshell before I boarded her. I heard that overnight you changed a whole tribe of indigenous squatters on the roof of the Palace of the Memory of the People, and that you started a war between the departments. Some say you are the harbinger of the return of the Preservers; some say that you are a mage in league with the antitheist heretics. I do not suppose you are either one. To look at you, I would say that you are a not particularly successful cateran off to try his luck in the wars.”

“I wish that I was. It may sound strange, but that was once my ambition. But I do not know what I am, except that I am not what people want me to be.”

“Is that so? I would say that is the root of your trouble. Does the stick know it is a hoe?”

“If it is used as a hoe, then I suppose it would.”

The envoy swatted Yama’s shoulder with his fan. “No no no. A stick does not have to ask itself stupid questions. It accepts its nature. If you tried to be more like a stick and less like a hero you would cause less trouble. What is that book you were reading? The Puranas, I would say, except no edition of the Puranas has pictures such as yours.”

“It is an old edition, and it has been added to since. One of your people was a part of the story. A man named Dreen. He was the Commissioner of Sensch.”

“I already know something of Dreen’s seduction,” Theias said. He scratched behind one of his large, translucent ears, then folded at the knees and sat down and patted the decking beside him. “Here. Sit with me. Perhaps you will show me the rest of the tale.”

They sat together on the forecastle deck, under the shifting shade of the sail, for a long time. Theias fluttered his fan under his chin and cursed the heat, and asked many questions about the pictures. Yama answered as best he could, and discovered that he knew more than he had realized. Pandaras brought food—unleavened bread and plain water for Theias, and bread, chickpea paste, slices of melon, and a basket of sweet white wine for Yama—and stayed to listen, sitting quietly and working on the embroidery of his shirt collar.

At the end of the story, Theias said, “Poor Dreen allowed himself to become what he was not. We still mourn him.”

“He is not dead, I think.”

Theias said sharply, “Even if he stood here before me I would say that he was not alive.”

“Because the Ancients of Days made him into their servant?”

“No no no,” Theias said impatiently. “You have much to learn.”

“I do want to learn. I am seeking the truth about myself, and I am trying to understand how I can train my mind so that I might hope to find it.”

“Foolish boy. There is no mind, so you cannot train it. There is no truth, so you cannot hope to reach it.”

“Yet I have heard that the men of Gond are great teachers. What do they teach, if not the truth? What do they train, if not minds?”

“We do not teach, because we do not have tongues. How can we tell others what to do without tongues?”

Theias said this with all seriousness, but Yama laughed at the absurdity. “I do not think you are telling me the truth! You play with me.”

“How can I lie when I have no tongue? You have not been listening, young man. I waste my time with you. Farewell.”

Theias swung onto the forestay and scampered up to the crow’s nest.

Pandaras bit off the end of a colored thread and said, “He’s a puzzle, master, isn’t he?”

“He is trying to make me think, but I am not sure what he wants me to think about.”

“I’m only your squire, master. I wouldn’t know about these higher matters. My people, we’ve always let others worry about hard questions. We prefer stories and songs for the pleasure of telling them and singing them, and let others worry about what they mean. Was this Angel in the story the same woman that appeared in the shrines?”

“At first I thought that the woman in the shrine was an aspect, but I think now that she was more like a reflection. The perfect image of a person, but without volition. Like a picture, if a picture could move or speak. In any case, the Angel of the story in my book was not the same as the one who first set out on the long voyage. She was copied many times, and the copies changed so much that sometimes they warred with each other.”

“I used to quarrel with my brothers and sisters,” Pandaras said, “often in the very worst way. Sometimes, I swear, we all wanted to kill each other. It’s always the way when someone is close to you, it’s either love or hate and nothing in between.”

Theias came down from the crow’s nest late in the afternoon. He sat in front of Yama and Pandaras and said at once, “What is the difference between Angel and yourself?”

Yama had been thinking about this, and the question did not surprise him. He said, “She would not accept her nature, but I do not know mine.”

“You are not as stupid as you pretend to be,” Theias said, “but you are not as clever as you believe. I am not talking about small distinctions of intent, but of actions. Both of you have meddled in the destinies of other bloodlines. Therefore, which of you is worse?”

“I did it only because I was asked. Angel did it because she wanted to make an army of followers.”

Theias looked at Yama intently. “Is that a sufficient difference?”

“In my case, I do not understand how it was done. It is one of the many things I do not understand.”

Theias smiled. “Then perhaps there is some hope for you.”

“I want to understand these things. You are pleased that I have no control over my powers, but I am frightened for the same reason.”

“And I would be frightened if you did have control over them.”

“I have been able to save myself from my enemies, but often with consequences that seem worse than the danger I faced.”

Theias said, “If it is in your nature to resist your enemies, then that is what you must do. But I thought that you did not understand your nature.”

“Angel wanted to rule the world. I do not want that. Even if others wanted it, I would refuse.” Yama smiled. “I am amazed that I am even speaking of such things. The world belongs to no one but the Preservers.”

“False humility is worse than pride. If you refuse to accept the burden of your destiny, then you are denying your nature.”

“Your bloodline is old, dominie. Does it remember mine?”

“Some say you are of the bloodline of the Builders, but I do not see it myself. They were gone long before any of the Shaped were brought to Confluence, and left only their works behind. Perhaps the Builders never really existed—have you thought of that? People reason that servants of the Preservers must have constructed the world, and so they invent a mythical bloodline and give them all the attributes they imagine world-builders might possess. But perhaps the world created itself, once the Preservers had willed it. For if the Preservers are gods, then they can speak true words, words so true that they are no different from the thing they stand for.”

Yama remembered the slate he had been shown in the City of the Dead, which had shown a man of his own bloodline with a starry sky behind him. But perhaps the slate had shown only a story. Perhaps everything was a story. He said, “Words are not truth, are they?”

Theias slapped Yama about the head with his fan. “You have been reading in the Puranas. There are many stories in the Puranas that reveal the nature of the world, although it is only by deep thought and contemplation that one can truly understand their importance. The stories are not lessons in themselves, but act upon the receptive mind to bring it into a state by which one can obtain enlightenment. Words cannot represent anything but themselves, no more than things can be anything but what they are. And so words can teach nothing.”

“For one without a tongue, you are a good teacher.”

Once again Theias battered Yama about the head with his fan. Yama endured it. Pandaras looked to his sewing and tried to hide a smile.

“Foolish boy,” the envoy said. “If you need a teacher, then you are unable to learn.” He held his fan a handspan before Yama’s face. “If you call this a fan, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a fan, you ignore the fact. Now, what do you wish to call this?”

Yama took the fan from Theias’s unresisting fingers, fanned himself, and handed it back.

Pandaras sang softly, as if to himself:

Theias smiled. “Your servant knows the Puranas, at least. You might learn from him.”

“I have not read in them,” Pandaras said, “but your riddle reminded me of a game my people play amongst themselves.”

Theias pulled at the long hairs that fringed his chin and said, “Then your people are wiser than me, for I take these riddles seriously. I must go now. I will leave for the cities of the Dry Plains in a few hours.”

Yama said, “It will take longer than that to make landfall, I think.”

“Not at all. You see only what you want to see, and ignore the obvious. But at least you have made a beginning. Study the Puranas if you must, although you would do better to listen to your servant’s jokes. Now, you may ask me one more question.”

Yama thought hard. He had so many questions that he could not even begin to decide which was the most important, and many required specific answers which Theias, although he was wise, might not know. At last, he said, “I will ask you this, dominie. Is there a teaching no master has ever taught before?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then what is it?”

Theias put his hands on top of his head. His fan hung down, covering his eyes. He said, “I have answered your question.”

“You have told me that you can answer it, dominie, and I know you are an honorable man.”

“It is not mind, it is not the Preservers, it is not things.” Theias said this very quickly and immediately swung onto the forestay and scampered away to the crow’s nest.

There was a brief commotion up there, and then something fluttered over the rail. It hit the slope of the sail and slid down and fell to the deck.

It was Theias’s fan. Even as Pandaras ran to retrieve it, the envoy rose above the crow’s nest. He was standing on a gleaming disc which slid away through the air at an increasing speed toward the nearside shore, vanishing from sight in less than a minute.

Yama was astonished. He said, “He did not need to travel on the ship. He came only because he wanted to see me.”

Pandaras held up the fan and sang: