The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XLVIII — Old Lands and New

EATA’S BOAT was nowhere in sight. To write, as I must write, that I swam all that day and most of the following night seems preposterous, yet it was so. The water the others had called salt did not seem salt to me; I drank when I thirsted and was refreshed by it. I was seldom tired; when I was, I rested on the waves, floating.

I had already discarded all my clothes except my trousers, and now I slipped those off. From an old habit of prudence, I examined the pockets before I abandoned them; there were three small brass coins there, the gift of Ymar. Their legends, like their faces, had worn away; and they were dark with verdigris — in appearance precisely the ancient things they were. I let them slip from my fingers, with all Urth.

Twice I saw great fish, which were perhaps dangerous; but they appeared to pose no threat to me. Of the water women, of whom Idas had been, perhaps, the smallest, I saw nothing. Nor did I see Abaia, their master. Nor Erebus, nor any other such monstrous thing.

Night came with teeming stars in her train, and I floated on my back and gazed at them, rocked by the warm arms of Ocean. How many rich worlds flew above me then! Once when I had fled from Abdiesus, I had huddled in the lea of a boulder and stared at these same stars, trying to imagine their companions and how men might live upon them and lift cities that knew less of evil than ours. Now I knew how foolish all such dreams must be, for I had seen another world and found it stranger than anything I might have imagined. Nor could I have dreamed the heteroclite crewmen I had met aboard Tzadkiel’s ship, nor the jibers; and yet both had come from Briah, even as I; and Tzadkiel had not scrupled to take them into his service.

But though I rejected all such dreams, I found that they came unbidden. About certain stars, though they appeared but embers wafted through the night, I seemed to see stars smaller still; and as I watched them, dim vistas took shape in my mind, lovely and terrifying. At last clouds came to blot the stars, and for a time I slept.

When morning came, I watched the night of Ushas fall from the face of the New Sun. No world of Briah could hold a sight more wonderful, nor had I seen a thing more marvelous on Yesod. The young king, bright with such gold as is not found in any mine, strode across the waves; and the glory of him was such that he who looked on it should never look upon another.

Waves danced for him and cast ten thousand drops to honor his feet, and he turned each to diamond. A great wave came — for the wind was rising — and I rode it as a swallow rides the spring air. At its crest I could stay for less than a breath, but from that summit I glimpsed his face; and I was not blinded, but knew his face for my own. It is a thing that has not happened since, and perhaps never will. Between us, five leagues or more away, an undine rose from the sea, lifting her hand to him in salute.

Then the wave subsided, and I with it. If I had waited, a second wave would have come, I think, raising me a second time; but for many things (of which that moment was for me the chief) there can be no second time. So that no inferior memory should obscure it, I sounded the sun-bright water, pushing ever deeper, eager to test the powers I had discovered only the night before.

They remained, although I no longer swam half in dream, and the urge to end my life had vanished. My world was now a place of palest, purest blue, floored with ocher and canopied in gold. The sun and I floated in space and smiled down upon our spheres.

When I had swum a while — how many breaths I cannot say, for I did not draw breath — I recalled the undine and set out to find her. I feared her still, but I had learned at last that such as she were not always to be feared; and though Abaia had conspired to prevent the coming of our New Sun, the age in which my death might have prevented it was past. Deeper I swam and deeper, for I soon learned how much easier it was to see a thing that moved against the bright surface.

Then all thoughts of the undine evaporated. Under me lay another city, one I did not know, a city that was never Nessus. Its towers sprawled along the floor of Ocean, where the stumps of a few yet stood; and ancient wrecks lay among them, who had been ancient already when the wrecks had been fair young ships launched to shouts of joy, with banners in their rigging and dancing on their forecastles.

Searching among the fallen towers I discovered treasures so noble they had withstood the passing of aeons — splendid gems and bright metals. But I did not find the things I sought — the name of the city and the name of the forgotten nation that had raised it, and had lost it to Ocean just as we had lost Nessus. With shards and shells, I scraped lintels and pedestals; there were many words written there, but in a character I could not read.

For several watches, I swam and searched among those ruins and never raised my eyes; but at last a huge shadow glided down the sand-strewn avenue before me, and I looked up to behold the undine, kraken-tressed and ship-bellied, pass swiftly overhead and vanish in a dazzle of sunfire.

At once I forgot the ruins. When I reached the air again, I blew out water and foggy breath like a manatee and threw back my head to toss my hair away from my eyes. For as I shot up, I had seen the shore: a low, brown coast from which I was barred by less water than had once divided the Botanic Gardens from the bank of Gyoll.

In hardly more time than I take to dip my pen, there was land beneath my feet. I waded out of the sea while loving it still, even as I had earlier dropped from the stars while loving them; and in truth there is no place in Briah that is not lovely when it no longer holds the threat of death, save for the places men have made so. But it was the land that I loved best, for it was to the land that I was born.

Yet what a terrible land it was! Not a blade of grass grew anywhere. Sand, a few stones, many shells, and thick, black mud that baked and cracked in the sun made up the whole of it. Some lines of Dr. Tabs’s play returned to torment me:

The continents themselves are old as raddled women, long since stripped of beauty and fertility. The New Sun comes, and he will send them crashing into the sea like foundered ships. And from the sea lift new — glittering with gold, silver, iron, and copper. With diamonds, rubies, turquoises, lands wallowing in the soil of a million millennia, so long ago washed down to the sea.

I, who boast of forgetting nothing, had forgotten that it was the demons who had spoken so.

A thousand times I was tempted and worse than tempted to return to Ocean; but I did not, trudging north along a strand that appeared to continue infinitely, unchanged, to north and south. Wreckage littered the beach, splintered building timbers and uprooted trees, all tossed there by the waves like so many jackstraws, with sometimes a rag or a stick of smashed furniture among them. Occasionally I found a broken branch so fresh that it still carried unwithered leaves, as if unaware that its very world had passed away. “Lift, oh, lift me to the fallen wood!” So Dorcas had sung to me when we had camped beside the ford, and so she had written upon the silvered glass in our chamber in the Vincula of Thrax. As ever, Dorcas had been wiser than either of us knew.

At length the shore bent inward to make a great bay, a bay so large that its innermost recesses were lost in the distance. Across a league of sparkling water I could see the bay’s farther lip. It would have been easy enough for me to swim to the other side, but I was reluctant to plunge in.

The New Sun had nearly vanished behind the rising shoulder of the world, and although it had been pleasant enough to sleep cradled by the waves, I had no desire to do it again, nor did I want to sleep wet ashore. I decided to camp where I was, build a fire if I could, and eat if I could find food; for the first time that day it occurred to me that I had not tasted food since the meager meal we had shared on the boat.

There was firewood enough for an army, but though I sifted it for the kegs and boxes Eata had hoped to find, they were not there; after two watches, a stoppered bottle half-full of rough red wine was the sole discovery I could boast, the wrack of some low tavern like that in which Maxellindis’s uncle had died. By striking stone upon stone and discarding those that seemed least promising, I eventually produced an occasional feeble spark; but nothing that would ignite the still-damp tinder I had collected. When the New Sun was hidden and my futile efforts were mocked by the silent fires of stars, I gave up and settled down to sleep, somewhat warmed by the wine.

I had thought never to behold Apheta again. In that I had been mistaken, for I saw her that night, looking down from the sky just as she had looked down at me when I had left Yesod with Burgundofara. I blinked and stared, but soon saw only the green disk of Lune.

It did not seem to me that I slept, but Valeria sat beside me weeping for drowned Urth; her sweet, warm tears pattered on my face. I woke and found I was hot and flushed, and that Lune was concealed behind clouds from which fell a gentle rain. Not far down the beach, a door without a doorway offered the shelter of a crude roof. I crept beneath it, buried my face in my arm, and slept once more, wishing never to wake.

Again green light drenched the beach. One of the flapping horrors that had snatched me from the wreck of the old Autarch’s flier fluttered mothlike between my eyes and Lune, waxing ever larger; for the first time I knew that notules were its wings. It landed clumsily among white wolves on the cracked mud.

Without memory of mounting, I was upon its back and slipping off. Moonlit waves closed about me, and I saw the Citadel below me. Fish as large as ships swam between the towers, which I had been wrong to think fallen; save for the water and their wreaths of weed, all stood as they had before. For a moment I trembled to think I might be impaled on their spires. The great gun that had fired at me when I had been taken to the Prefect Prisca now boomed again, its bolt cleaving Ocean with a roar of steam.

The bolt struck me, but it was not I who died — this drowned Citadel vanished like the dream it was, and I found that I was swimming through the gap in the curtain wall and into the real Citadel itself. The tops of its towers thrust above the waves; and Juturna sat among them, submerged to the neck, eating fish.

“You lived,” I called, and felt that this too was merely a dream.

She nodded. “You did not.”

I was weak with hunger and fear, but I asked, “Then am I dead? And have I come to a place of the dead?”

She shook her head. “You live.”

“I’m asleep.”

“No. You have…” She paused, chewing, her enormous face without expression.

When she spoke again, fish that were not the huge fish of my dream but silvery creatures no bigger than perch leaped from the water before her chin to snap at the fragments that dropped from her lips. “You have resigned your life, or endeavored to do so. To some extent you have succeeded.”

“I’m dreaming.”

“No. You no longer dream. Thus would you die, if you could.”

“It was because I couldn’t watch Thecla in torment, wasn’t it? Now I’ve seen Urth die like that, and I was Urth’s killer.”

“Who were you,” she asked me, “when you stood before the Hierogrammate’s Seat of Justice?”

“A man who had not yet destroyed everything he ever loved.”

“You were Urth, and thus Urth lives.”

I shouted, “This is Ushas!”

“If you say it. But Urth lives in Ushas and in you.”

“I must think,” I told her. “Go away and think.” I had not meant to plead, but when I heard my voice I knew it for a beggar’s.

“Then do so.”

I looked without hope at the half-submerged Citadel.

Juturna pointed like a village woman directing some lost traveler, her hands and arms extending in directions I had not seen until she indicated them. “That way the future, this way the past. There is the margin of the world, and beyond that, your sun’s other worlds and the worlds of other suns. Here is the stream that rises in Yesod and rushes to Briah.”

I did not hesitate.