The reign of Istar

III

Something there is in the rudderless sailing, abandoning hope as the husk of desire, architectures of boat and body coalesce with the water and the disburdening wind.

In the south, the sails filled with words and the boat took wing above the denial of waters.

Softly the wind spoke under the pulse of the sails:

Come, Astralas, ride into prophecy:

I am the breath of a God,

the wind was saying, the source of dreams and the webwork of reason.

Astralas, open your arms:

I shall pass through your fingers as brindled light,

as a vision from the brows of a weary king.

Hasten to Istar, domed and templed,

where sunlight refracts on bronze and silver,

on crystal and burnished iron.

Ten visions there you shall read and interpret,

in that comfortable city where truth without pain governs the span of the hand,

glitters like moonlight over immovable waters.

But you, Astralas,

impressed for your terrible voyage,

cannot make truce with the wind and the water in the breath of your veins,

because they are with you forever.

The trees wept blood at my departure, staining the whiteness of birches and butternut, glittering dark on the maple and oak, blood that was falling like leaves in a thousand countries, greater than augury, sprung from prophetic wounds, as I sailed through the mouth of ancient Thon-Thalas like a prayer into endless ocean.

In the mazed and elaborate swirl of omens, of long prophecies, comes a time when you stand in the presence of oracles, but what they foretell is mirrors and smoke.

When I reached the Courrain

I was standing on deck, despair having moved to the country of faith, and slowly the coast took a shape and a name, as the forest dwindled to Silvanost, green on water on green.

At long last, to portside lay the watch fires of Balifor, the manhandling country of kender, of hoopak and flute and rifled treasuries.

The smoke from the coastline mingled with clouds from the mountains in the high air resolving to nebulous hammer and harp, to veiled constellations, as the shores of Balifor sighed with departures of gods.

North and west along the coast, cradled by pine-scented wind, by infusion of hemlock, the long plains climbed into mountainous green, and everywhere forest and ocean, ocean and forest twined with the westernmost haze of the damaged horizons, until the traveler's fancy supposes Silvanost rising again in dreams of retrieval, but instead it is priest-ridden Istar, sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense, the long smoke rising destroyed in its own celebrations.

There in the branching seas, in warm waters harmful and northern, the wind took me westward skirting a desolate land.