The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXVII — The Return to Urth

I HAD NOT been ceratin Burgundofara and I would be lovers; but we were assigned a single cabin (one perhaps a tenth the size of the stateroom I had occupied on my final night aboard the ship), and when I embraced and disrobed her she did not object. I found her less skillful far than Gunnie, though of course no virgin. How strange to think that Gunnie and I had lain together only once.

Her younger self told me afterward that no man had treated her gently before, kissed me for it, and fell asleep in my arms. I had never thought myself a temperate lover; I lay awake for some time, meditating upon it and listening, as once I had promised myself I would, to the centuries dashed against the hull.

Or perhaps they were merely years, the years of my life. I had thought at first, when I felt my mended leg beneath me, and later when I had shaved my strange new face in the stateroom, that they had somehow been lifted from me, as Gunnie had hoped hers would be lifted from her. Now I understood that it was not so.

It was only that the damage done by some nameless Ascian’s spear, by Agia’s palmed claws and the blood bat’s teeth, had been undone; I was the man I would have been without those (and perhaps other) wounds, and thus it was that my face was the face of that strange being — for what being can be stranger than oneself, or act more inexplicably? I was Apu-Punchau, whom I had seen resurrected in the stone town. To me it had seemed youth, and it left me mourning for the years I might have had. Perhaps someday I will board Tzadkiel’s ship once more, to search for true youth as Gunnie has; but if I am carried to Yesod again, I will remain there if I am suffered to do so. In centuries, perhaps, that air might wash the years from me.

As I contemplated them and the few that came before them, it seemed to me that my acts toward women had depended not upon my will, but upon their attitude toward me. I had been brutal enough with the khaibit Thecla of the House Azure, then as mild and clumsy as any untouched boy with the real Thecla in her cell; fevered at first with Dorcas, quick and clumsy with Jolenta (whom I might have been said to have raped, though I believed then and believe still that she wished it). Of Valeria I have said too much already.

Yet it cannot be thus for all men, since many act in the same way toward all women; and it may not even be so for me.

I dozed, thinking of all these things — and woke to find myself upon my other side and Burgundofara no longer in my arms, dozed again, woke again, and rose, unable to sleep more and longing, though I could not have said why, for a glimpse of the White Fountain. As quietly as I could, I put on the necklace and made my way on deck.

The endless night of the void was almost vanquished. The shadows of the masts, and my own shadow too, seemed drawn upon the planks in the blackest paint, and the Old Sun had grown from a faint star to a disk as large as Lune. His light made the White Fountain appear farther and weaker than ever. Urth had ceased to streak across his crimson face, but hung just beyond the bowsprit, spinning like a top.

The officer of the watch came to speak to me, telling me I had better go below. Not, I think, because I was in any actual danger, but because it made him uneasy to have someone on deck who was not under his command. I told him I would, but that I wanted an interview with the captain of this vessel, and that my companion and I were hungry.

Burgundofara appeared while we were talking, saying that she had felt the same urge as I, though I think in her case it was in fact no more than a desire to look about and see the ship again before she left all such ships forever. She sprang up a mast, which so distracted the officer that I thought he might actually do her some harm. Had he not been a Hierodule, I would have laid hands on him; and as it was, I was forced to stand between them when a party of sailors had brought her down.

We argued with him until our air grew foul, mostly for the sport of it on my part (and hers too, I think), then went below docilely enough, found the galley, and ate like two children, laughing and recounting our adventures.

The captain — not another masked Hierodule, but a man who appeared to be an ordinary human being — visited us in our cabin a watch or so afterward. I told him I had talked to no one in authority since Tzadkiel had left me, and that I hoped to get instructions from him.

He shook his head. “I’ve none to give you. I feel sure Tzadkiel will have arranged for you to know all you need to.”

Burgundofara interjected, “He’s got to bring the New Sun!” adding when I glanced at her, “Gunnie told me.”

“Can you?” the captain asked.

I tried to explain that I did not know, that I could feel the White Fountain as if it were a part of me, and that I had been trying to bring it closer; but that it did not seem to move.

“What is it?” he asked. Then, seeing my expression, “No, I really don’t know. I was told nothing except that I was to take you and this woman to Urth and land you safely north of the ice.”

“It’s a star, I think, or something like one.”

“Then it’s too massive to move the way we do. When you’re on Urth, you’ll no longer be moving in the uranic sense. Perhaps then it will come for you.”

Burgundofara asked, “Won’t it take a long time for a star to get to Urth?”

He nodded. “Centuries at least. But I really understand nothing about it — a great deal less than your friend here must. If it’s part of him, he must feel it, as he tells us he does.”

“I do. I feel its distance.” As I spoke, I seemed to be standing again before the windows of Master Ash, looking out at the endless plains of ice; possibly in some sense I had never left them. I said, “Could it be that the New Sun will come only after our race is gone? Would Tzadkiel play such a trick on us?”

“No. Tzadkiel doesn’t play tricks, though she may seem to. Tricks are for solipsists, who think everything will pass away.” He stood. “You wanted to ask me questions. I don’t blame you, but I’ve no answers. Would you like to go on deck and watch us land? It’s the only real gift I can give you.”

Burgundofara looked bewildered and asked, “So soon?” I confess I felt so myself.

“Yes, pretty soon now. I’ve got a few supplies for you, mostly food. Will you want weapons besides your knives? I can give them to you, if you need them.”

I asked, “Do you advise it?”

“I don’t advise anything. You know what you have to do. I don’t.”

“Then I’ll take none,” I said. “Burgundofara may decide for herself.”

“No,” she said. “Neither will I.”

“Then come,” the captain told us, and this time it was a command and not an invitation. We put on the necklaces and followed him out onto the deck.

Our ship skimmed high above the clouds, which appeared to boil beneath us, yet I felt that we had arrived. Urth flashed from blue to black, then blue again. The rail was ice cold in my hands, and I searched for Urth’s ice caps; but we were too near, already too close for them to be visible. There was only the azure of her seas, glimpsed through the rents in her surging clouds, and occasionally a flash of land, brown or green.

“It is a lovely world,” I said. “Not as lovely as Yesod, perhaps, but beautiful nonetheless.”

The captain shrugged. “We could make it as good as Yesod if we wanted to.”

“We will,” I told him. I had not known I believed that until I said it. “We will when enough of us have left it and come back.”

The clouds grew calmer, as though some mage had whispered a spell or a woman had bared her breast to them. Our sails were furled already; the watch swarmed aloft, making certain all our hamper was secure and as well braced as it could be.

As they leaped down again, the first thin winds of Urth struck us, impalpable, but bringing back (like the single motion of a coryphaeus’s hand) the whole world of sound. The masts shrilled like rebecs while every strand of rigging sang.

A moment more, and the ship herself yawed, pitched, and went down at the stern until the sunlit clouds of Urth rose behind her quarterdeck and Burgundofara and I were left clinging to the railposts.

The captain, standing at ease with one hand on a halyard, grinned at us and shouted, “Why, I thought the girl was a sailor, anyway. Lift him up there, darling, or we’ll send you to help the cook.”

I would have aided Burgundofara if I could, and she tried to assist me as the captain had directed her; thus by clinging to each other we managed to stay erect on the deck (now steeper than many stairs, though it seemed as smooth as a dancing floor) and even to take a few cautious steps toward him.

“You’ve got to ship on a little ‘un before you’re a sailor,” he told us. “It’s a pity I’ve got to land you now. I might make proper seamen of you.”

I managed to say that our arrival on Yesod had not been so violent.

He turned serious. “You didn’t have much potential to lose there, you see. You’d used it up reaching the higher plane. We’ve come in without a rag to brake us, like we were falling into the star. Stay away from the railing for a bit. The wind there will broil the skin right off your arm.”

“Wouldn’t our necklaces preserve us from it?”

“They’ve got a good field; without them you’d fry like a crackling. But they can only put out so much, like any other device, and that wind…well, it’s too thin to breathe, but. if the keel weren’t taking the brunt, we’d be blown away.”

For a time the apostis glowed like a forge; gradually it dimmed and went out, and our ship resumed a more conventional position, though the wind still screamed in the rigging and the clouds scudded under us like flecks of foam in a mill race.

The captain climbed to his quarterdeck, and I went with him to ask whether we might not remove our necklaces. He shook his head and pointed at the rigging, which was now rimmed with ice, saying we could not stay on deck long without them and asking if I had not noticed my air freshening.

I admitted I had, but explained that I had thought myself deceived.

“There’s some mixing,” he told me. “When there’s no air, the amulet draws back any that gets to the edge of the field. But it can’t tell the difference between air it brought up from below and wind that’s penetrated its pressure zone.”

How the tender could have a wake above the clouds, I do not understand; but it left one, long and white, stretched across the sky behind us. I merely report what I saw.

Burgundofara said, “I wish I’d been on deck when we left Urth. Even when we got to the big ship, they made us stay below until we had some training.”

“You’d only have been in the way,” the captain told her. “We set all sail as soon as we’re free of the atmosphere, so that’s a busy time. Was it this vessel?”

“I think so.”

“And now you’re coming back somebody important, mentioned by name in Tzadkiel’s orders. Congratulations!”

Burgundofara shook her head, and I noticed that enough wind was penetrating now to make her dark ringlets dance. “I don’t even know how she came to know it.”

I said, “One usually doesn’t, with her,” reflecting that just as I was many in a single body, Tzadkiel was many bodies in a single person.

The captain pointed over the taffrail, where the sea of cloud seemed almost to wash the planking of the tender’s hull. “We’re about to go down into that. When we get under it, you can take off your amulets without freezing.”

For a time we were trapped in mist. In a brown book I took from Thecla’s cell, I have read that a region of mist separates the living from the dead, and that the forms we call ghosts are nothing more than the remnants of this barrier of mist clinging to their faces and their garments.

Whether that is true, I cannot say; but certainly Urth is separated from the void by such a region, and that seems strange to me. Possibly the four realms are but two, and we entered the void and left it at last just as specters visit the country of the living.