Return to the Whorl

3. JUSTICE AND GOOD ORDER

Nat has sent troopers from Dorp, who have arrested us. Dorp it appears has a standing horde (as Soldo did) which it calls its leger. There are three legermen and the sergeant. I gave him two silver cards, and although he will not let us go, it has put us on a friendly basis. I am paying for our rooms at this inn as well, one in which the sergeant, a legerman, and I are to sleep tonight, and another in which Jahlee is supposed to sleep, with Hide and the other two legermen.

Dinner and a bath! The sergeant-his name is Azijin-has been given money with which to buy provisions; I told him he might keep it, at least for tonight. He and his men, I said, could join us at dinner. There was wine, and food that seemed very good to Hide and me.

Nat is a person of importance in Dorp, it seems. We are likely to be fined and whipped. I have tried to convey to my daughter that it might be well for her to leave us, but I am not sure she understood. If she did, she may not agree; and if she tries to escape now, she may be shot.

I will not stand idly by and see her stripped, no matter what some judge in Dorp may say.

As I was writing, she came in to ask for a larger fire. The innkeeper wanted an additional payment for the extra wood, and we began to bargain over the amount. Sergeant Azijin told him to supply it, cursing him and pushing him into the corner. Jahlee got her fire and went away satisfied. I looked in on her just now, and her appearance has improved greatly.

During our argument, the innkeeper stated that he "always" made an extra charge for extra wood. I asked him how long his inn has stood here, and he said proudly, "For six years." We are so new to this whorl that we have not worn out the clothes we brought from the other, some of us; yet we talk and act as if it has been ours from time immemorial. Once I wept when I told Pig what the Neighbors had said. He must have thought me mad, but I was only tired and weak, and oppressed by the stifling darkness. A sorrow, too, pressed upon my heart. It is still there; I feel it, and must keep busy.

Azijin lets me write like this, which is a great relief to me. I have worried that he might read it, but he cannot read. So he says, and I think he is telling the truth. He seems ashamed of it, so I assured him that it is not difficult, and offered to teach him, making large letters on the same paper I took from the bandits and use for this journal.

The wounded bandit Jahlee drained told us we might take whatever we wanted if only we would spare him, which I rashly promised to do. I can see him still: his thin mouth below its thin mustache, and his large, frightened eyes. Jahlee said she had never killed before, but I know it is a lie-she killed for me when we fought Han. We flatter ourselves with our horror of them, but are we really much better?

Rereading that above, I was aghast at my candor. What if the judge in Dorp should read it? I might destroy it (perhaps I should) but what about the other two accounts? How much labor I expended on them, dreaming that someday Nettle might peruse them, as she yet may. I must hide them.

I have done what I could, but the best solution would be to see to it that our baggage is not examined. I must question the sergeant about legal procedures, and ask his men as well-for all I know, they may have more and better information, or be more willing to part with it. Although we chatted together at dinner, I do not recall their names.

Before I sleep I ought to record the notable fact that I have bathed, for which I-and all who come near me, no doubt-am most grateful. On Lizard we washed in summer in the millpond or the sea. In winter, as I washed myself here after dinner: by heating water in a copper kettle hung over the fire and scrubbing everything with soap and a rag.

When I was a boy in Viron, we had tubs for it like washtubs, but longer. Those of the poorest class were generally of wood, those of the middle class, such as my mother and I, of iron covered with enamel. In Ermine's and the Calde's Palace, and I suppose in the homes of the wealthy generally, they were stone, which seemed very grand. Still I have washed myself in them, and it is a finer thing to bathe in the millpond. I intend to pray for an hour or so when I lay down my quill. But if the Outsider were to grant my every wish, I would bathe always in our millpond; and whenever I wished to bathe, it would be summer.

Oreb is back! Drawing the whorls between this paragraph and the last makes it look as if a week at least had passed, I know. It was only a night, but a great deal has happened. News enough for a week, to say nothing of dreams. I will do my best to take everything in order.

I had asked for more firewood, curious to see whether the innkeeper would try to collect for it after what had passed between himself and Azijin. I got it without additional payment, this room became quite warm, and when the sergeant returned I asked him to open the window. He did, and came very near to receiving a cold, tired, and very hungry night chough full in the face. It was Oreb, of course; and he had come to present me with a ring set with a peculiar black gem. I will describe it in greater detail in a moment, if I am not interrupted.

Just now I said that the sergeant was nearly hit by Oreb, who had, I believe, been pecking at the shutter for some time, although I had failed to hear him above the crackling of the fire. I must add that it was snowing hard, myriads of tiny flakes flying before a whistling west wind. "Them at sea Scylla help," said Azijin.

I got a fine fresh fish and a cup of clean water for Oreb. He ate and flew into a corner near the chimney-there is a wooden brace for it there on which he perches-and has not moved from it since. Azijin and Legerman Vlug were dumbfounded, and asked more questions about him than I was able to answer. I expected them to demand the ring; so I suggested they might hold it for me until we reached Dorp, when I would explain the circumstances under which I had received it to the judge and ask that it be returned to me. They examined it very curiously but showed no desire to keep it for me.

It is too large for my fingers, so I put it in my pocket, thinking I would look through the jewelry when I could do so at leisure, find a chain, and wear it around my neck. I was afraid I would lose it, however; it is on the thumb of my left hand as I write this, which answers well.

There is a picture cut into the black stone. I took it to the window, and although the day is far from bright I was able to see that there are lines graven on it, a picture or writing. I suppose it is a seal ring, and the thing to do is to imprint it on wax so the seal may be read.

I talked about Oreb for some time, explaining that he is a pet, that he can speak after a fashion, and that he often goes away for purposes of his own. Before I could get to bed, I had to tell them a bit about Silk and the original Oreb, saying I supposed he must be dead. "On that you must not count, mysire," Azijin told me. "A parrot older than her my great aunt had, and ninety-one she was when on the lander we went. About the old bird often my mother tells." So perhaps this Oreb is the very Oreb that Silk owned after all. It is such an interesting idea that I am glad there is no way in which it can be tested. How disappointed I would be if I found it were not true!

After that I went to bed, as did the sergeant and Vlug. I can only guess how long I slept before I was awakened by a soft hand stroking my forehead-an hour, perhaps.

It was Jahlee. "My fire's dying, Rajan, and the room's getting colder and colder. Can't I come into bed so you can warm me for a minute? I don't dare get in with Hide, he's sound asleep and would kill me when he woke, and you wouldn't want me to get into the troopers' beds would you? But I'm freezing, and I'm afraid I'll freeze to death. Please, Rajan? I'm begging for my life!"

I consented, and it was a remarkable experience even before we went to Green. I put an arm over her and held her so that she could warm her back against my belly; and it was exactly as though I embraced an actual woman, one more slender than Nettle and less voluptuous than Hyacinth, but beyond question a young and attractive woman, soft, clean, and perfumed.

I have been trying to recall what it was like to sleep with Fava, there amid the stones and snow; and I was very conscious then that she was not at all what she pretended to be, that I was in fact embracing a reptile capable of changing its shape in the same way that the little lizards I caught in the borage outside my window or the honeysuckle along our fence could change color-that my position was not much different from that of a snake-charmer sleeping in a ditch, with his serpent coiled under his tunic.

I woke and sat up, determined to dress, wake Jahlee, and tell her she had to go. As I got to my feet, yawning and blinking, the room was transformed in a way I would have said was quite impossible. The shutters became a circular opening through which showed a sky of the most ethereal blue. The knife-scarred wooden walls mended themselves and petrified to soft gray stone. Jahlee rose and wrapped herself in one of the blankets, being careful to let me see that she was beyond doubt a slim human woman with flawless white skin, a slender waist, and hemispherical pink-tipped breasts I longed to caress from the moment I glimpsed them. She embraced me and I her, while within two steps of us Azijin and Viug slumbered on, sleeping on the same beds they use in this inn, and under the same rough blankets.

When we parted, I asked where we were.

"On Green. Can't you feel the warmth, and the dampness of the air? If I were the way I was the last time you saw me, they would feel wonderful to me. Here I am as I am." She paused to smile and let the blanket slip a trifle. "And they still feel wonderful. I exult in them!" Azijin's eyes opened. He blinked and seemed to stare about him in a dazed fashion; then he shut them again and slept once more.

I crossed the room to the window and looked out, expecting to see Green's jungles. Clouds such as I had not seen since Saba lowered us from her airship spread below me, not the black-tinged rain clouds that had oppressed us through unending months on Green, but pearlescent clouds shining in the sun, a sea greater and purer than the keels of men have ever parted, and a new whorl fairer even than Blue and more turbulent.

To drink it in, I leaned as far from the window as I could, and at last stood barefoot upon its gray stone sill, and grasping the inner edge of the opening with the fingers of one hand looked out and down, then up, and left, and right.

We were in a slender tower, standing in a niche in the face of an immense cliff of the dark red stone. Above, the red stone rose until it was lost in the glory of the sky, an infinite wall of congealed blood. To my left and right, it extended without limit, lined and eroded. Below stretched the tower, taller than the tallest I have seen on any of the three whorls, a sickening height that made me shut my eyes and step down again into the room in which Jahlee and I had awakened-but not before I had glimpsed its mighty base and the cliff below it falling away into the restless sea of cloud, sheer, black with damp, and dotted with splotches of the most brilliant green.

"I wanted to be a real woman again," Jahlee said softly, "a real woman for you and Hide, and for everyone else who wants me to be what I really am. It was why I joined you. You must have known that."

"I should have driven you away, but the bandits would have killed us both if I had."

"You foresaw that?"

I shook my head.

"Our bodies are asleep in that wretched little inn on your frozen whorl. If I were to die there… I've overheard you and your son talking about the other one, a woman like me he meets in dreams. He's afraid of her, but he wouldn't have to be afraid of me."

"Do you want me to kill you? I can't. My own body is sleeping, just as yours is. If I were to kill you here, you know what would happen. You saw Duko Rigoglio."

She went to the window and stood upon the sill as I had, and a wind rose that stirred her blanket and set her sorrel hair fluttering behind her. "If I could be like this forever, I would jump," she told the sky.

"Before you do, will you answer a question? You've been a good friend to my son and me, and I hesitate to put us further in debt to you; but I'm curious, and it may be important."

She stepped down and turned to face me.

"We've been to various places on Green, and to the Red Sun Whorl, to the very spot on which the Duko's house once stood."

"Yes." Her eyes were bright blue now, as though they were holes bored through her skull and I were seeing the sky behind her; for a moment I wondered whether she could control their color, and then if they had drunk so much of that sky that they had taken on its very hue.

"Most of the places to which I've gone have been places where I've already been, and the street of ruins in the city they called Nessus was certainly the street on which Rigoglio had lived. I very much doubt that either Azijin or Vlug have been to Green at all, and I have certainly never been to this strange tower in this mighty cliff. Have you?"

She nodded without speaking, and I asked her when.

"When I was very young. When I'd just learned to fly, and before I'd decided to hunt your frigid, hostile Blue."

"Before you came the first time?"

She did not answer. "I was not at all sure I could make the Crossing. We heard stories. How much strength was required, how much endurance. If you're not strong enough, not a strong enough flier, you fall back to Green a failure. If you lack endurance…" She shrugged. "Only your frozen corpse gets to Blue. It crosses the sky there, a little scratch of fire. No doubt you've seen them. I have."

I nodded.

"That little scratch of fire, and you're gone forever. I wanted to try just the same. We all do, even if some want it more than others and many never actually try. It's something we get from you, a need to become more and more like you, until we're as human as we can possibly be."

"We feel it too," I told her, "though not always as strongly as we should."

"So I was wondering whether I could, and whether I'd be brave enough to try. I wasn't flying all that well yet, and I knew I'd have to get a lot better to fly fast enough to leave Green. One day there was a break in the clouds. You've lived on Green, you said. You must know it happens now and then."

I nodded again.

"Burning light from the sun came streaming through, but I looked up anyway and saw this little streak of gray against the cliff, and I told myself I'd fly up to it someday to see what it was, and when I did I'd be a strong enough flier to Cross."

"You did, clearly."

"Yes. I tried to for years, and there were days when I couldn't even get up above the clouds. There are strong winds at this level, and the air is thin."

I filled my lungs with it, and said, "It certainly seems better to me than the sopping air down there."

"I suppose it would. Are you waiting for the end of my story? It's ended. The day came when I was able to fly up here. I knew by then that I had much more to learn, and that I had to be stronger before I tried Crossing. But I felt I'd come more than halfway, too, and I was right. There was a corroded metal hatch over that window then. I tore it off and let it fall. When I'd explored all the rooms on all the levels, I decided to clean this one out and make it a private place just for myself, my own room in my own tower in the sky. There were bones in here and some other things, but I threw them out that window and swept this floor with my hands. When everything was tidy, I told myself I'd come back and spend hours up here after I'd made the Return Crossing, just thinking about who I was and what I had done for my children. But I never did, till now."

"I'll try to leave you here," I promised her, "and take the troopers back with me. I don't know if it can be done, but I'll try." I shut my eyes, gathering the thoughts that had fled my mind soon after we arrived. "Whose bones were they?"

"You know. They were your friends. I doubt that you want to talk about it."

Blindly, I sat down again upon the bed that been hers and mine. I hated Green then as I have hated it so often, the whorl of teeming unclean life, of violent death and universal decay. In my heart I rejected it, I hope once and for all. "Were they the Neighbors'?" I asked. "The Vanished People's?"

Perhaps she nodded. "I think that when we'd destroyed them everywhere else, they held the tablelands against us. As places of final refuge, they must have built these towers in the cliffs, with windows like this one so that-"

She was gone.

I had recalled my body as she spoke, with all its well-remembered knobs and insufficiencies, the sagging face behind my beard and the ankle that ached in rainy weather, and ached abominably in any weather whenever I had to walk far… And realized with a sort of shock that I was no longer sitting on the bed, but lying in it. I opened my eyes and saw the smoke-blackened timbers that supported the roof of the inn.

"Master Incanto? Awake you are?"

It was Azijin; I asked him who had told him to call me that.

"Your son, mysire. Where he was, and you, of Master Incanto they speak, he says. About dreams you know? That also he says, Mysire Horn."

"Much less than he believes." I sat up, very conscious that Jahlee lay beside me still sound asleep.

Vlug sat up too. "Wah! Good Mysire Pas!"

I got out of bed and went to the fire. "I know what you must be thinking, Sergeant, seeing my daughter in bed with me. I can only say that nothing of the kind took place. She became frightened, as women sometimes do at night in strange places, and sought reassurance from her father."

Azijin joined me at the fire. He sleeps naked and was naked still, hairy and muscular. "Such things I never think, mysire. But me it was that the door barred. If anyone the bar took down, I would hear, I thought."

"We tried not to wake you, Sergeant. I suggest that we try not to wake my daughter as well."

"Right, mysire. Loud I will not speak."

Vlug came over wrapped in a blanket, and Azijin told him to get something for us to sit on. There are no chairs, but he carried over the mattress from his bed. He is a tall, fresh-faced boy with unhappy hair that is neither truly red nor truly yellow but brighter than either. "Morning now it is, I think," he said. "The pig who this inn keeps we wake, Sergeant?"

"Not yet," Azijin told him. "For Mysire Horn to unriddle a dream I wish."

"I too!"

"Always in my dreams I am awake, Master Horn," Azijin began. "Not like that it is, this dream of last night. Like real it is," he tapped the hearth before him. "Most real. Not like a dream at all it is."

"With me, the same it is!" Vlug exclaimed.

"In this dream asleep I am, in my bed lying. You and your daughter not sleeping like me are, but walking past, talking and talking while on I sleep. Wake I must, I think. What if you escape? Hard with me it will go when Judge Hamer hears! To wake I try, but I cannot. My eyes open. The room bright is, sunshine everywhere there is, and my bed on the wall like a picture hangs. There I sleep and do not fall, so all right it is. Here no one but me there is, so all right too that is. Only in a dream it is that the old magician, and the strange girl his daughter, and the boy who calls him Father I must guard. No one to escape there is."

He looked at me beseechingly. "Never before such a dream, mysire. For me this dream you will explain?"

Vlug started to speak, but Azijin silenced him.

"Boy talk," Oreb suggested from his high perch.

"I think Oreb's right," I told Azijin. "Vlug's dream may well illuminate yours-or yours illuminate his, as frequently happens. Vlug, tell us your dream before you forget it."

"This I never forget, Mysire Horn," Vlug began. "Never! When white my beard is, each smallest part I remember."

Momentarily he fell silent, his hands outspread with the palms down, and his wide eyes the color of blue china; but he was a born relater of tales, whose pauses and intonations came to him as its song does to a young thrush.

"As my sergeant says it is. I sleep, but asleep I am not. Up and down, up and down, a man and woman walk. Wise and kind he is, but stern. Unhappy, discontent she is. His counsel she wishes, and it he gives. No, no, not what he suggests she will do. Herself she will kill. Soon. Very soon."

Vlug spoke to Azijin. "Jahlee and her father perhaps it was, but why?

"Mysire, once around me I too looked. Your daughter before me stood. So beautiful!" He raised his pale eyebrows in tribute to her, when my old friend Inclito would have kissed his fingers.

"A great light behind her there was. A great wind also. A cloak she wore, very big and black. This cloak the wind blew." His hands suggested its fluttering motion. "Her hair also. So long her knees without such a wind it must reach. To lay hold of me with Scylla's hundred arms-"

Oreb squawked and fluttered, perturbed.

"At me it blows. So long really it is, mysire?"

I shook my head.

"In my dream it is." He shut his eyes, trying to recapture it. "So beautiful she is. A dream? So beautiful. Her lips, her eyes, her teeth. My spirit flamed. An angry goddess, your daughter Jahlee is, mysire, in my dream."

I asked whether he could recall how she had been dressed, other than the cloak.

"Not…" He glanced at Azijin. "Her gown I don't remember, mysire. No hat, or only a very small cap, it could be."

"Good girl." Oreb dropped from his perch to my shoulder.

"Really, Oreb? Usually you call her a bad thing."

"Good girl!" he insisted.

"Although you can't remember her gown, Legerman Vlug, she was in fact dressed?"

He glanced at Azijin, as before. "Oh, yes, mysire."

Azijin held up a stiff right forefinger, tapped it with his left, and said, "Young he is, mysire." I doubt that he is thirty himself.

"Silk talk," Oreb declared in a decided tone.

"I suppose he means that it is high time for me to interpret your dreams, and no doubt it is. A little additional thought might further the interpretation, however, and so might bacon and coffee. What do you say we rouse my son and your other troopers, and find out what this inn can offer in the way of breakfast? Jahlee has been tired and ill-no doubt you've noticed it. With your leave, I'll throw a few more sticks on the fire before we go, and give her a couple of extra blankets. If she wakes up before breakfast is ready, she can join us. If she doesn't, sleep may help her."

We got dressed and collected Hide and his guards, whom Azijin abused roundly for having allowed Jahlee to leave their room unnoticed, and went downstairs. Everything was dark and silent, but we opened the shutters-finding that it had snowed heavily during the night-and lit every candle in the place from the smoldering remains of the parlor fire. Azijin took it upon himself to wake up the innkeeper and his wife, but returned rubbing his knuckles and looking disgusted. "Sick they are, this they say. So it may be, I think. Our breakfast Vlug will prepare. If their food he wastes, on their own heads they brought it. You can cook, Vlug?"

Vlug swore that he could not.

"Then you I teach. A legerman must cook, and shoot too. Zwaar, Leeuw, to the horses you must see. Well do it! When we have eaten, I will inspect."

Hide said, "I'll take care of ours, Father. My father's a fine cook, Sergeant. I'm sure he'll help you in the kitchen, if you ask him."

I did, of course, warming a pastry of nuts and apples, approving the cheese (these people seem to relish cheese with every meal) and contriving hearth cakes while the sausages and a ground pork and cornmeal mixture were frying.

"Not good food it is," Azijin declared when everything was ready. "For good a kitchen like my mother's we need, and my mother to cook. But worse than this in an inn I have eaten. What is it in these little cakes for us you make, mysire?"

"Honey and poppyseed." I offered a scrap of the pork and cornmeal mixture to Oreb to see whether he would like it.

"Soda, too. Salt, and three kinds of flour. Those I saw you mix. If another I eat, dreams more mad than I have already will it give?"

"Not mad mine was," Vlug insisted. "The finest of my life it was, and more real than this." He speared another sausage; he had been in charge of them and seemed proud of them.

"In a bed on the wall to sleep, and the bedroom has no roof to see!" Azijin shook his head and forked more pickled cabbage onto his plate.

Hide's lips shaped the word where?

"You have asked me to explain your dreams," I began, after sampling the pork and cornmeal mixture for myself. "It would be easy for me to contrive some story for you, as I originally planned to do. It would also be dishonest, as I decided while we were coming downstairs. I am not speaking under duress. You have asked me to help you understand what has happened to you. I have said I will, and am therefore bound to do it faithfully. Are you aware that the spirit leaves the body at death?"

Two nodded. Leeuw said, "With gods to talk."

"Perhaps. In some cases, at least. I must now ask you to acceptto ask you, Sergeant Azijin, and you, Legerman Vlug, particularly-to accept the fact that it can, and does, leave it at other times as well."

I waited for their protests, but none came.

"Let me illustrate my point. A man has a house where he lives for some years with his wife. They are very happy, this man and his wife. They love each other, and whatever else may go amiss, they have each other. Then the man's wife dies, and he leaves the house in which he has had so much happiness. It has become abhorrent to him. Unless the Outsider, the God of gods, restores her to life, he has no wish to see that house ever again. Am I making myself clear?"

Vlug said, "So I think," and Azijin, "To me not."

"I am speaking of the spirit departing the body at death. The body is the house I mentioned, and life was the wife who made it a place of warmth and comfort."

Azijin nodded. "Ah."

"Perhaps her husband goes to the gods, as Legerman Leeuw suggested, perhaps only out into darkness. For the moment, it doesn't matter. My point is that he leaves the home she made for him, never to return."

"Bird go," Oreb declared. He had been hopping around the table, cadging bits of food. "Go Silk."

I told him, "If you mean you wish to die when I do, Oreb, I sincerely hope you don't. In Gaon they tell of dying men who kill some favorite animal, usually a horse or a dog, so it will accompany them in death; and under the Long Sun their rulers went so far as to have their favorite wives burned alive on their funeral pyres. When I die, I sincerely hope no friend or relative of mine will succumb to any such cruel foolishness."

Zwaar, who had been silent until then, said, "When the spirit goes a man dies, I think."

I shook my head. "He dies because you shot him through the heart. Or because he suffered some disease or was kicked by a horse, as a wise friend once suggested to me. But you bring up an important point-that the spirit is not life, nor is life the spirit. And another, that the two together are one. A husband is not his wife, no more than a wife is her husband; but the two in combination are one. What I was going to say was that though the man in my little story left his house once and for all when his wife died, he had left it many times previously. He had gone out to weed their garden, perhaps, or gone to the market to buy shoes. In those cases he left it to return."

Hide said helpfully, "The spirit can leave the same way, can't it, Father?"

"Exactly. We have all had daydreams. We imagine we're sailing the new boat we're in fact building, for example, or riding a prancing horse we don't actually possess. Most of the dreams we have at night are of the same kind, and `dreams' is the right name for them. There are others, however. Dreams-we call them that, at least-which are in fact memories returned to the sleeping body by the spirit, which left it for a while and went elsewhere."

Azijin was grinning, although he looked a bit uncomfortable; Vlug, Leeuw, and Zwaar heard me with wide eyes and open mouths.

"That is what befell you and Private Vlug," I told Azijin. "Your sprits departed while you slept, and went to sleep in another place. There Vlug's spirit-"

I rose. "Excuse me for a moment. I took off Oreb's ring while I was cooking and laid it on a shelf in the kitchen."

Before they could protest, I hurried out. The ring was where I had left it earlier when I decided I might require some such excuse. I put it on and went through the kitchen and into the private quarters of the innkeeper and his wife, finding him just struggling into his trousers.

"I heard you were ill," I said, "and thought it might be wise for someone to look in on you. If you and your wife would like a bite to eat, I would be happy to prepare something."

"So weak we are, mysire." He sat down upon the conjugal bed. "Thank you. Thank you. Anything."

I explained matters to Azijin and his troopers, and Hide and I looked after the innkeeper and his wife. As I feared, both have been bitten by Jahlee. They should recover, provided she does not return for a few days. She is still asleep at present, although it is well past noon. "Girl sleep," reports Oreb, who just flew up to our room to look; he and I are agreed that it is best to leave it so. I have arranged the blankets so that her face is scarcely visible, and of course the shutters are closed. Azijin and Vlug promise not to disturb her.

Azijin has decided not to travel today. "The cause of justice and good order," he says, "we serve as well in comfort here as by in this snow dying and the horses crippling." I second him in that with all my heart.

The ring will no longer fit my thumb, which seems very odd. I have been wearing it on the third finger.