The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XLIX — Apu-Punchau

THE WATERS were no longer black with night, but darkly green; in them it seemed I glimpsed innumerable strands of weed, standing upright and swaying in the current. Hunger filled my mind with the memory of Juturna’s fish; yet I watched Ocean wane, becoming thinner and lighter, each minute droplet separating itself from its fellows until what remained was merely mist.

I drew breath, and it was of air and not water. I stamped, and I stood upon solid ground.

What had been the flood was a pampa of waist-high grass, a sea of grass whose shore was lost in swirling white, as though a rout of ghosts danced there swiftly, silently, and somberly. The caress of the mist failed to horrify me, but it was as mucid as that of any specter in a midnight tale. Hoping to find food and to warm myself, I began to walk.

It is said that they who wander in darkness, and still more they who do so in a mist, merely scribe circles across the plain. Perhaps it was so for me, but I do not believe it. A faint wind stirred the mist, and I kept that wind ever at my back.

Once I had strode grinning along the Water Way and imagined myself unlucky, and I had been ecstatic in my misfortune. Now I knew that I had then begun the journey that was to make me Urth’s executioner; and although my task was done, I felt I could never be happy again — although after a watch or two I would have been happy enough, I suppose, if only my warm journeyman’s cloak had been returned to me.

At last Urth’s old sun rose behind me, and rose in glory crowned with gold. The specters fled before it; I beheld the spreading pampa, an endless, whisperous green Ocean, across which raced a thousand waves. Endless, that is, except in the east, where mountains lifted haughty fastnesses not yet stamped with the human form.

I continued westward, and it came to me as I walked that I, who had been the New Sun, would hide myself behind the horizon if I could. Perhaps he who had been the Old Sun had felt the same. There had been such an Old Sun, after all, in Dr. Tabs’s Eschatology and Genesis, and although our performance remained forever incomplete, Dr. Tabs, who had himself become a wanderer in western lands, had once intended to take the part.

Long-legged birds stalked the pampa but fled when I drew too near. Once, just after the sun appeared, I saw a spotted cat; but it was full fed and slunk away. Condors and eagles wheeled overhead, black specks against the brilliant blue sky. I was as famished as they; and though there could be none in such a place, from time to time I imagined the odor of frying fish, misled no doubt by the memory of the shabby inn where I had first encountered Baldanders and Dr. Tabs.

A client in a cell can endure three days or more without water, so Master Palaemon had taught us; but for one who must labor under the sun, the time is much less. I would have died that day, I believe, if I had not found it — as I did when my shadow stretched long behind me. It was only a narrow stream, scarcely broader than the brook beyond Briah had seemed in my sight, and so deeply sunk into the pampa that it was invisible until I had nearly tumbled into its ravine.

I scrambled down the rocky sides as readily as any monkey and sated my thirst with sun-warmed water that tasted of mud to one who had drunk of the clean sea. Had you been with me then, reader, and insisted I walk farther with you, I think I would have taken your life. I sank down among the stones, too weary to go another step, and slept before I closed my eyes.

But not, I think, for long. Nearby a big cat coughed, and I woke shaking with a fear older than the first human dwelling. When I was a boy sleeping beside the other apprentices in the Matachin Tower , I had often heard that cough from the Bear Tower and had not been frightened. It is the presence or absence of walls that makes the difference, I think. I had known then that walls enclosed me, and that others imprisoned the smilodons and atroxes. I knew now that there were none, and I gathered stones by starlight, stacking them, as I told myself, for missiles — but in fact (as I now believe) to build a wall.

How strange it was! When I had swum and walked far beneath the flood, I had fancied myself a godling, or at least something more than a man; now I felt myself something less. Yet it seems to me upon reflection to be not so strange after all. In this place I was, perhaps, at a time far earlier than that at which Zak had done whatever he had done aboard the ship of Tzadkiel. Here the Old Sun had not yet dimmed, and even those influences that cast shadows behind them as long as mine when I walked to the ravine might fail to reach me.

Dawn came at last. The sun of the preceding day had left me reddened and tender; I stayed in the ravine, where there was at times a little shade, and made my way through the stream or beside it, finding the body of a peccary killed when it had come to drink. I tore a bit of meat away, chewed it, and washed it down with muddy water.

It was about nones when I came in sight of the first pump. The ravine was nearly seven ells deep, but the autochthons had built a series of little dams like the steps of a stair, piling up the river stones. A wheel hung with leathern buckets reached thirstily down for the water, turned by two squat, mummy-colored men who grunted with satisfaction each time a bucketful splashed into their clay trough.

They shouted to me in a tongue I did not know, but did not try to stop me. I waved to them and walked on, wondering to see them watering their fields, for among the constellations of the previous night had been the crotali, the winter stars that bring the rattle of ice-sheathed branches.

I passed a score of similar wheels before I reached the town, where a stone stair led up from the water. Women came there to wash clothes and fill jugs, and remained to gossip. They stared at me; and I displayed my hands so they could see I was unarmed, though my nakedness must have made that clear enough without the gesture.

The women talked among themselves in some lilting language. I pointed to my mouth to show I was hungry, and a gaunt woman a trifle taller than the rest gave me a strip of old, coarse cloth to tie around my waist, women being much the same in every place.

Like the men I had seen, these women had small eyes, narrow mouths, and broad, flat cheeks. It was a month or more before I understood why these seemed so different from the autochthons I had seen at Saltus Fair, in the market of Thrax, and elsewhere, though it was only that these people had pride and were far less inclined to violence.

The ravine was wide at the stair and gave no shade. When I saw that none of the women meant to feed me, I climbed the steps and sat on the ground in the shadow of one of the stone houses. I am tempted to insert here all sorts of musings, things that I actually thought of later in my stay in the stone town; but the truth is that I thought then of nothing. I was very tired and very hungry, and in some pain. It was a relief to get out of the sun, and not to walk, and that was all.

Later the tall woman brought me a flat cake and a jar of water, setting them three cubits beyond my reach and hurrying off. I ate the cake and drank the water, and slept that night in the dust of the street.

Next morning I wandered about the town. Its houses were built of river stones laid with a mortar of mud. Their roofs were nearly flat, of meager logs covered with more mud mixed with straw, husks, and stalks. At one door, a woman gave me half a blackened meal cake. The men I saw ignored me. Later, when I had come to know the people better, I understood that this was because they had to be able to explain anything they saw; because they had no notion who I was or where I had come from, they pretended they had not seen me.

That evening I sat in the same place as before, but when the tall woman came again, putting my cake and jar a bit nearer this time, I picked them up and followed her back to her house, one of the oldest and smallest. She was afraid when I pushed aside the tattered matting that formed her door, but I sat in a corner while I ate and drank, and tried to show her by my looks that I meant no harm. That night it was warmer beside her tiny fire than it had been outside.

I set to work repairing the house by taking down parts of the walls that seemed ready to fall and restacking them. The woman watched me for a time before she went into the town. She did not return until late afternoon.

The next day I followed her and discovered she went to a larger house where she ground maize in a quern, washed clothes, and swept. By then I had mastered the names of a few simple objects, and I helped her whenever I understood her work.

The master of that house was a shaman. He served a god whose frightful image was set up just beyond the town to the east. After I had labored for his family for a few days, I learned that his principal act of worship had been completed each morning before I arrived. After that I rose earlier and carried the sticks to the altar where he burned meal and oil, and at the midsummer feast slit the throat of a coypu to the slap of dancing feet and the thudding of little drums. Thus I lived among these people, sharing as much of their lives as I could.

Wood was very precious. Trees would not grow on the pampa, and they could give up only the edges of their fields to them. The tall woman’s fire, like all the rest, was of stalks, cobs, and husks, mixed with sun-dried dung. At times stalks appeared even in the fire the shaman kindled new each day when, singing and chanting, he caught the Old Sun’s rays in his sacred bowl.

Though I had rebuilt the walls of the tall woman’s house, there seemed little I could do about the roof. The poles were small and old, and several were badly cracked. For a time, I considered erecting a stone column to shore it up, but such a column would have left the house very cramped.

After some thought, I tore down the whole sagging structure and replaced it with intersecting arches like those I remembered from the shepherd’s bothy where I had once left a shawl of the Pelerines, all of loose-laid river stones, all meeting over the center of the house. I used more stones, pounded earth, and the poles from the roof for the scaffolding needed until each arch was whole, and strengthened the walls to bear the outward thrust with yet more stones I carried from the river. The woman and I had to sleep outside while the construction was in progress; but she did so without complaint, and when everything was complete and I had plastered the beehive roof with mud and matted grass as before, she had a new dwelling, high and sturdy.

When I started to work, tearing away the old roof, no one paid much attention to me; but when that was done and I began to lay up my arches, men came from the fields to watch, and some helped me. While I was dismantling the last scaffolding, the shaman himself appeared, bringing the hetman of the town.

For some time, they walked around and around the house; but when it became clear that the scaffolding was no longer holding up the roof, they carried torches inside. And at last, when all my work was finished, they made me sit down and questioned me about it, using many gestures because I still knew so little of their tongue.

I told them all I could, piling chips of flat stone to show how it was done. Then they asked me about myself: where I had come from and why I lived among them. It had been so long since I had been able to talk with anyone other than the woman that as much of my tale came stumbling forth as I could give form to. I did not expect them to believe me; it was enough that they — that someone — had been told.

At last, when I stepped outside to point toward the sun, I found that evening had come while I had stammered and scratched my crude pictures in the dirt floor. The tall woman sat beside the door, her black hair whipped by a fresh, cold wind from the pampas. The shaman and the hetman came out too, carrying their guttering torches, and I saw that she was very frightened.

I asked what the trouble was, but the shaman began a long speech before she could reply, a speech of which I grasped no more than every tenth word. When he had finished, the hetman spoke in the same way. What they said drew men from the houses around us, some with hunting spears (for these were not warlike people), some with adzes or knives. I turned back to the woman and asked what was happening.

She whispered furiously in return, telling me the shaman and the hetman had said that I had said I brought the day and walked through the sky. Now we would have to remain where we were till day came without my bringing it; when that happened, we would die. She wept. Perhaps tears rolled down her gaunt cheeks; if so, I could not see them by the flickering light of the torches. It struck me that I had never seen one of these people cry, not even little children. Her dry, rattling sobs moved me more than any tears I have ever seen.

We waited before her house for a long while. Fresh torches arrived, and fuel and live embers carried from the houses nearby gave us several small fires. Despite them, my legs became stiff from the cold that seeped from the earth.

Our only hope appeared to lie in outlasting these people, in drawing taut their nerves. But when I studied their faces, faces that might have been so many wooden masks smeared with ocher clay, I felt that they would outwear the year, far less a short summer’s night.

If only I could speak their tongue fluently, I thought, I might be able to wake fear enough in them, or at least explain what I had actually meant. The words — words not, alas, in their tongue but in my own — reechoed through my mind, so that I fell to speculating about them. Did I myself know what those words meant? Those or any others? Surely not.

Desperate, and driven by the same unquenchable impulse to sterile self-expression that has led me to write and revise the history I sent to molder and drown in Master Ultan’s library and soon after flung into the void, I began to gesticulate, to tell my story once again, as well as I could, this time without the use of words. My own arms cradled the infant I had been, thrashed helplessly in Gyoll until the undine saved me. No one moved to stop me, and after some time I stood up so that I might use my legs as well as my arms, walking pantomime down the empty, cluttered corridors of the House Absolute, and galloping for the destrier that had died beneath me at the Third Battle of Orithyia.

It seemed I heard music; and some later time I heard it indeed, for many of the men who had come when they heard the speeches of the hetman and the shaman were humming, beating a solemn cadence upon the ground with the butts of stone-tipped spears and antler-headed adzes; one played a nose flute. Its piping notes swarmed about me like bees.

In time I saw that some of the men were looking toward the sky and nudging one another. Thinking they detected the first gray radiance of dawn, I looked too; but I saw rising only the cross and the unicorn, the stars of summer. Then the shaman and the hetman prostrated themselves before me. At that instant, by the most marvelous good fortune, Urth looked upon the sun. My shadow fell across them.