Seven Novels of the Last Days
Volume Four
A Mirror Filled With Light
by James David Audlin
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by James David Audlin
Cover photo by Marijke Taffein
Cover design by the author
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This novel is based on several dreams that came to me in the 1970s. The novel was written 28 May 1974 – 1 September 1980.
A portion of this novel was published in an earlier draft in Venture, XXVII, 1, Spring 1977, copyright © 1977 by David May.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coïncidental.
IN MEMORIAM
David May
Il miglior fabbro
Beloved friend, you were by my side
bursting with inspiration and encouragement
as this novel was being written,
and I hope you are still somehow enjoying it in Heaven.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the King James Version, or are translated, paraphrased, or parodied by the author. All materials quoted in translation are translated by the author. The following sources are referenced by chapter and paragraph numbers.
“Shrove Tuesday”, 8: paraphrase from “The Hazards of Space Exploration”, by James David Audlin. Copyright © 1990 by James David Audlin. Used with permission of the author.
“First Sunday in Lent”, 107, and “Monday of I Lent”, 27-32: based on stories from the Fioretti and The Life of St. Clare.
“Monday of I Lent”, 19 and 21: a passage from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.
“Tuesday of I Lent”, 47: lines from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”, copyright © 1950 by the Macmillan Company.
“Tuesday of I Lent”, 47: lines from “pity this busy monster,manunkind”, by e. e. cummings. Copyright © 1944 by e. e. cummings.
“Tuesday of I Lent”, 48: parody of a passage from Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
“Tuesday of I Lent”, 135: the sonnet, “Or che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace”, by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch).
“Palm Sunday”, 23: lines from “The Hurt”, by David May. Copyright © 1975 by James Audlin and David May. Used with permission of the author.
“Palm Sunday”, 60: a fragment by Alkaios. Greek excerpt, slightly emended by James David Audlin, is from Greek Lyric, Volume I, translated and edited by D. A. Campbell. Copyright © 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
“Palm Sunday”, 63, 76, 77, 116; “Tuesday of Holy Week”, 70, 88; “Maundy Thursday”, 163; fragments by Sappho. Greek excerpts are from Greek Lyric, Volume I, translated and edited by D. A. Campbell. Copyright © 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
“Palm Sunday”, 78: line from Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Tyger”, by William Blake.
“Monday of Holy Week”, 103: parody of a text from The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 edition, page 81.
“Monday of Holy Week”, 185: the Shahadah.
“Monday of Holy Week”, 185: a passage from the Tao-te Ching, by Lao-tse, Chapter 1.
“Maundy Thursday”, 16: lines from Jerusalem, IV, 96, 26-27, by William Blake.
“Maundy Thursday”, 34: lines and paraphrase of lines from Les Fleurs du Mal, “Au Lecteur”, by Charles Baudelaire.
“Maundy Thursday”, 146: lines from Faust, I, 1339-1345, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
“Maundy Thursday”, 180: lines from The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, III, v, 1, 12, and 11, by William Shakespeare.
“Good Friday”, 107: Paraphrase of a verse from the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, 5:18.
Besides the above directly quoted sources, the author acknowledges a debt of kindred thinking to many authors, especially Robert Graves, C. G. Jung, and John Michell. Thanks must also be given to those who critically read the manuscript at various stages of its completion, especially Roger Hazelton, David May, Randolph Emerson, Allan Munroe, and my father and brother, both named David John Audlin.
Table of Contents
Tuesday of II Lent and Several Days Following
Fourth Sunday in Lent and the Two Weeks Following
A MIRROR FILLED WITH LIGHT
Shrove Tuesday
Ah, the light. It is warm, golden sunlight, and it feels very good, very deep and vital. He smiles as he looks up at the sun. It seems so close and large, with streams of warm light flowing down like the hair of a beautiful woman. He breathes in the soft air, moving farther and farther away from the ruin, slowly, wonderingly, almost as if this were the first time he had left it. The air is charged with warm electricity. His arms are out, palms upward, and his head and heart arch back beneath the sky that spans his world. The sunlight pools in his palms; without even moving he can feel the glistening of the light trickle between his fingers, tickling the hairs on the backs of his hands. He raises his arms upward, and the light pours down them. He catches the sunlight in his hands, he raises it to his face and smells the smell of it, he cups it in his hands arid tastes it, warm and salty, he splashes it across his brow and cheeks, and feels its strange power. He laughs. Ah, the light. He closes his eyes and sees red, and gold, and blue. He opens them and sees hazy yellow and green. He smiles to see the syllables of light, and, like a strangely overgrown child, he dances, and all the while fine strands of the light spin gold through the air.
There are flowers, not many, but a welcome sight. A patch of cowslips here, a lone Indian paintbrush there, even a tiny group of mushrooms, bright red with yellow spots. He rubs his hands together, rubs the thin, tight, spiderwebby feeling of dusty winter out of them. He feels a shuddering thrill of happiness. Although from his chest there comes only the unvarying metallic hummm of his artificial heart, his petalon, some imaginary heart in him is throbbing wildly with joy, expanding his arteries, rushing a freshening wind through his lungs, shaking off the dull deadness of winter.
Summer, summer at last. When he’d been a boy, it had meant baseball, swimming, ice cream. Now it means life, simply a life, to live in freedom, but it is the same gladness he had known years ago. Oh, the impossible blue of this sky. After a long moment he turns and looks back at the ruin. It crouches low and sodden before him on broken knees. Although it is surrounded by the pools of the sun, no light touches its grey masses. Perhaps it really is bright and shimmering in the glowing haze, but still it seems only bent inward, into its own shadows. Although it is what it is, a ruin, it seems to have only the essence of ruin, the mere esse of existence. Huge, very plain squarehewn rocks, now fallen from the instable human order they had once been forced to adjoin to, retain still a stubborn, fierce singleness of identity in the face of change. Shreds of wooden boards, rusted iron pipes, and sharp white sparks of glass have scratched jaggedly out of this unmoving, unfathomable tumble of menhirs. He looks at the ruin with an unblinking stare and a partly open mouth. It slowly gazes back at him with its heavy lidded eyes.
He lives in the ruin. He has lived in the ruin for a very long time now, and the ruin has loved and nurtured him, bent and tortured him. He saw it fall into ashes after standing for centuries as a country chapel, a relic from more faithful times. It saw him first go hungry and then learn to forage when the Soldiers ceased to come. By now they understand each other very well. Thus it is that both, he and the ruin, know what the coming of summer means. Not that time has any meaning for him, for when one is alone it cannot, but the sunlight nevertheless means a change. Indeed, the stone ruin, though sunken in a speckled black sea of his own past, remains yet the focus of his life and being. If he were to bother to try, he would remember times and events both before and after the ruin, but he rarely bothers. He might remember the cave in the garden, so like this ruin. He might remember the jail and the crucifix’s eyes. He might remember Sister Clare and her loving silences. He might remember the screaming of the war. He might even remember the beautiful Sappho, just now walking away from him, that he will marry her, that Kid and Limpid, and that – but no, it is not time now for dreaming, for imagining stories ... But somewhere at the center of it all, at the focus of his life, the eye of the hurricane, is this ruin. In this place there is no time, but around it, like a swirling wind, roar the seas of too much time. Here, in the center of his circular life, is the ruin, his shelter and his prison.
No one has come to him in a long while, such a long while that he has come to a dead, vague stillness. There is no caring, no worry, no ripples on the water. There is only stillness, and life blows through him as if he were a rock. There is the fact of his seeking out his own meat and plants, and, faintly behind that, the fainter of two superimposed images, the fact of a bowl of cold stew brought by the still, harsh Soldiers. He may be scarred by the burning atraumac rains that fall, with the craters of exploding neutrons burned deep in his flesh, but he is still alive, and if anything matters, that is it. Basic life needs no memory, and no concept of an unyielding time. Even the dragonflies have that much. Ah, the sunlight. He lies down in the long, sweet grass, and shuts his eyes.
(Sunlight, sunlight that pools on his temples and eyelids, great seas that glint with their rushing tides, rustling with the winds that whither across their ancient backs, alizarian spaces and fallows, dipping between the waves, upturnings, downturnings, and all the while the winds of light that curve in the arabesques of geomagnetic lines of force, until they take a new home, alighting softly, and the seas shudder and lie still again.)
The sun was a geyser of light. It sloped and slid, lost its balance, and started slipping down the sky. He rose so slowly he didn’t quite realize his eyes were already open. Through the flecks of long grasses he could see distant mountains and clouds. As sleep slowly drained its way out of him he looked at them, their strange contrast in depth to the grasses, and let the focus of his eyes shift slowly from near to far, seeing first mountains through blurred green, then grass with a faint grey-pink cast, feeling the distance between with almost physical force. The sun was low in the sky. He felt its fading warmth, autumn-colored, dancing faintly on his back. He got up slowly and breathed the watery blue evening air deep into his ashen lungs.
The evening was like a sea, an expanse of washing, cooling air, spread deeply around him in eddies and swirls, in deep banks, and eventual stratospheric waves breaking far overhead. The clouds, sinking into a deep orange and glowing violet, were like islands far above him, that looked, not down toward him, but upward to the stars, to the hidden suns and galaxies, to the intense fountains of light hidden, it was once said, in the footprint of the night. He was deep underwater, deep, and very deep under cool evening waters, very still, and very deep, in a white, cold sea of pale beauty.
He got up and slowly walked down toward the pond that bordered on the highway, through the dirt- and stone-choked gullies below the grasslands the ruin was in. There was a small path that went down from the ruin to the highway, but he rarely bothered to take it because it circled so wide just to avoid the broken ground. He crossed the wide band of highway, flat, smooth, still warm from the setting sun. It was a straight and empty road, cutting its way jaggedly through immense shapes of hills that rimmed the horizon.
There were not many plants in the sand past the highway. The long scrawny necks of a thrust of dieflowers stuck upward out of their portion of the sand, still and brittle in the pale evening light. Their blooms had long since withered, the last rain having been weeks before, in the last summer. But soon after the next rain, which would probably not be long now, they would be back, and he would have to be careful not to come too near them. The gritty sand was also dotted with a few meager hunches of oilbushes, with their unpleasant greasy leaves that looked like huge hairy dark green tongues. He urinated in one hunch, as had always been his habit, the plants being relegated to this service because of their appearance alone.
Thirst touched him softly as an empty need in his stomach. He went through the strip of sand to the quiet white shore of the pond. Pale trees struck crooked lines through it against the narrowing sky. He lowered himself down onto the rock where he always crouched, and dipped his hand in. Cold bitter water clenched his fingers, and he raised some up, where it tore into his mouth, leaving behind a cold numb feeling. Then he washed his face. He would perhaps have expected the water to wrench back from his moving hand, except for the fact that this water was still water: very still water that never moved toward or away, in or out. When he lifted some, it was as if he were not lifting it, that it only seemed to keep on touching his rising hands. For after the cold lashes had fallen from his hands, the pond was silent, and as still and frosted as it had always been. A pond, dead with the deadness of dry bones, looked up at the evening sky with its one huge unblinking dead eye. To his mind there came briefly a visual thought of the plane, a Locust LT-4 that had gone down in the hills to the southeast, and the two bodies he had visited daily, with the eyes that had stared at him until the acid rains finally burned their corpses into the empty earth.
He began walking back, past the sand-cloaked oilbushes, toward the ruin. Walking kept his mind quiet and untroubled; mental peace, he had found is very important to one who is always alone. His sandalled feet fell softly on the hard, torn pavement of the highway, where transports and landships still sometimes thrashed their intents onward toward a distant enemy. The road to them, he knew, was a thin, fast ribbon to grab and hold on to, deep in the lairs of their armored vehicles, screaming by thoughtless of the land traversed. But to him it was a very wide field of sunburnt tar, dry and cracking from the hot days and cold nights, with crooked lines of plants gnawing at its joints. The black treadmarks of the landships meant nothing to him: whether the rumbling behemoths had the Beastmark or the Sign of the Children, they were all the same. He stepped off the other side of the highway into rough gravel.
This gravel felt important and delicate to him in comparison to the road. Gravel partook of the earth, and had been there before the road, and was now somehow overcoming the road again: the cracks were just the first sign of entropy. The road seemed always to be screaming a thin sound of passing, even though it was not often now that something went by. The war was in another quarter of the earth for a time, and this land could afford to rest and know silence. The gravel was quiet, and so too was the grass around the ruin.
The ruin was now sheathed in darkness; the sun was falling behind the hills. It was a cold monument he came back to, not a home, but a familiar place where he could stay if he liked. He did not enter immediately, but slowly wandered about gathering plants to eat. For a few moments he wished he had bothered to catch a fish from the pond, but it didn’t really matter to him. Nor did it concern him that it was already too dark to read in his Bible. The thoughts left quickly.
The roots of the plants he had pulled up trailed behind him. This was a dry land, and plants had learned to dig deeply in order to find moisture. But the dryness also meant that they came up easily from the sandy loam. He was doing well, he thought. There were some wallworts, a clump of henflake, and some radishes. The evening was beginning to be rather cold. When he returned to the ruin, he went inside and took out his winter cloak and put it on. A little later he would have to start a fire, but for now he was still warm enough.
He chewed the wallworts solemnly while looking at the pinpointed sky. Darkness was trembling softly all around him, and he watched it as he would a strange new animal. The evening smelled of cold and damp, and the night felt thick and heavy on him, coagulating into white pocking lumps on his exposed skin. His flat bony teeth shredded the rest of the wallwort leaves. He threw the bare stalk into the darkness and started on the henflake. Dry pulp slid around his tongue, loose and thick. Henflake was altogether uninteresting as food, but it contributed to keeping him alive. After the Doctors and the Soldiers had stopped coming, after his hospital or prison (depending on which of those you asked) had fallen to its heavy grey knees, he had had to learn to supply his own food. It had been a slow process discovering which plants and animals were edible; sometimes he had become sick, but he always managed to stay alive. Even those things he had learned to trust still sometimes revolted in the tender recesses of his stomach, but at least he was still alive. It was strange that it was usually the uninteresting foods that were safe to eat. But the radishes he ate more slowly; they had a taste worthy of notice.
He lay back after finishing, and heard the distant hiss of a Locust LT-4. Looking up, he saw a flaring spot of brilliant white scrape a splintered path across the sky. Two followed it, then three more, forming a moving pattern across the sky, unreal in its perfection. That there were men in the aëroplanes he assumed, but it was still hard to comprehend the possibility of human life in those distant streaks. They were other, wholly other. In seconds they were gone over the northern horizon, leaving behind for faint moments the ruddy glow of their skytrails. Against the phosphorescence of these he could see the faint beginnings of a tenebrous roiling in the evening sky. There would be rains tomorrow, atraumac rains, and the dieflowers would bloom.
He went into his sleeping area in the ruin, a shelf of rock protected by an overhang. In another corner he had constructed a small fireplace with broken rock and metal. He made a small fire with his flint, and lay down on the rock shelf. For hours he sank and breathed low in dark, musklike waters.
The morning stole upon him dark and suddenly, riding swiftly over the plains like a gaunt and terrible horse. He could see a crack of sky beyond the overhang, and in it heavy rusty clouds turned in huge cylindrical shapes, sometimes breaking to show a scorched strip of the sickly yellow stratosphere above them. There would indeed be rains, and he would have to hide deeper in the ruin. The air was vibrating with a strange urgency. It would not be long now.
He gathered as many edible plants as he could carry and went back inside the ruin, taking them in to another part of the pile that was difficult to get to, but much more protected from the sky as well as on all four sides. It necessitated crawling through a short tunnel under a pile of fallen masonry, and so he usually didn’t go to the trouble of going into this one last untumbled room in the ruin. He went back out again and got his few belongings – a few clothes, utensils, and his Bible. In the room again, he turned to look out the small window. This window, oddly enough, still had most of its glass; small bits of colored glass held by lead strips. It had once been a picture, he thought, of one of the Apostles, perhaps even Saint John the Evangelist, but the number of missing pieces in the center of the window made it impossible to identify. Through this space in the glass he could see the sky roll overhead, a million earthen cylinders, each larger than the whole world.
Soon the rains would begin to fall, he knew, since the sky was turning silver and black with an immense sinking fog. A wind began to tear madly from the north, dragging its black nails across the land with a dark night of force. The ruin rumbled and sang a dark note from the changes in air pressure, and the pale brown leaves on the floor swirled in a rising spiral.
Lightning began to burn, searing furious holes in the sky. The wind knocked searching bolts of electric fire in all directions. They flared past the ruin, taking something of the form of mad comets. The leaves still swirled darkly where they were. He felt in some way rather blurred, as if he were not really all alone. The earth trembled slowly. A lightning bolt had hit somewhere, and the shock was the shock of a woman who has lost her child. Immediately thereupon the rains started screaming down, hot as tears. The sun was crying, the stars were crying, the sky was crying; hot tears touched the earth and instantly froze. He went up to the window, as close as he dared, to see better. There were some plants out there: some buzzam and a lot of milkweed and burdock. The rain touched the plants, stroked them hard as it scored the earth. They bent low to the ground, bending like weeping women. The rain burned and froze them, and slowly they turned a black deeper than the empty spaces in the night sky, and they burned with a cold blue-white flame for a few moments before disintegrating. The whole world was gathering around herself a dark faint ionospheric luminescence. The grass was burning. The pond and highway were glowing madly. The sky was burning fiercest of all and draining in little pieces down the edge of the horizon, raining on all the meadows and fields of the world, falling like the petals of spring, like the spells of fallen wizards, like the faces of dying children slept in the nightmare of their past; they, the rains, fell and shook coldly upon a world that had closed her eyes.
A drop of rain struck him on the wrist and he shouted in pain, scrambling back from the window. His shout was only silence among the screams of the storming sky. He looked at his wrist, at a blue spark that glowed fiercely into his skin. And he was not alone. Somehow, he was not alone. He was splitting, turning, falling apart into two equal halves. He was turning into his own opposite. Deep inside him something was moving and growing, becoming alive and aware, like a chrysalis, and wanting out, out.
He did not see the wind shift its pattern to wrest the globes of rain from their flight and fling them now to the west. He could not have seen how they struck the ruin on the side the window looked out of, and how they arranged themselves in intricate heaving sweating patterns on the glowing frozen flanks of the tomb he was in. He did not see the second gust of black wind, nor the rain on it. The drops struck him furiously, their desire to get at him unbridled in their madness, and the lashes of cold flames fell full on the face of his destiny. He looked up suddenly and thought he saw, standing in the field, a tall figure wreathed in blinding light. Another gust of wind, another lashing by the rain. He coughed, bewildered, groped through the window, and ran heavily out into the night.
* * *
JOHN: What are you looking for?
LUCIFER: Bring me light. I must have light.
(Globes of lightning wreath the figure.)
JOHN: Who are you?
LUCIFER: No matter who I am. Bring me light. I must have light.
JOHN: I am the Son of Thunder.
LUCIFER: You are darkness. I am light.
JOHN: I must live.
LUCIFER (Spoken gently as to a child.): I have come to kill you.
JOHN: I must live.
LUCIFER: And I must have light.
JOHN: Then why kill me?
LUCIFER: You must die so I may have light.
JOHN: Why must I die for you? I will die only for the Lord; I will only drink of his cup and no other. . .
LUCIFER: You must die to yourself; only then can you die for the Lord.
JOHN: And you?
LUCIFER: I am you. I must have light to live. You must die.
JOHN: I must live, I cannot die!
LUCIFER: You must die to live. Believe me, it is necessary.
(Whirlwinds of rain around the glowing figures, one bright white, one burning black.)
JOHN: But I must live!
LUCIFER: Go to Aholibah, and there die.
JOHN: But I must live! ...
(So the voices go on, until the storm drowns them out.)
The vague pale white of morning slipped down from the eastern hills and moved across the land. He woke sharply to this light, although still caught in the webs of sleep. The sound of the pond was a rustle like autumn grasses; the wind threaded through it, raising small needle waves that slowly crossed and recrossed each other. The pond was a studied combination of stillness and movement, and the clouds in the distant sky, transparent white, moved too in slow procession. He lay in the trembling sand at the pond’s edge, and saw an empty stillness filled partially by the white necrotic trees that reached crookedly from the pale water and the empty hills about a mile away. Over this vision was pasted the weariness of the sun, as a broken egg lying in the shards of its splintered clouds. As the distant source of a breath of cold rays, it glowed wanly, lying between his feet and between two hills that lay to the east. He was standing on the sun, he fantasized. He was standing on the sun, and it was going out. The sun stared slowly back at him from between his feet. He looked at it, and, he thought, he could see deep beneath the corona, to the point where he could imagine the blackness of the sun, a growing cancerous rot spreading outward some day to crack its surface into a million jagged red ruts.
Suddenly he did not want to look at the sun any more, and turned over onto his stomach, looking west. There was less drama in this direction: just the hunches of oilbushes, and the dieflowers he would have to get past to return to the ruin. Their blooms were large and sunny, smiling like the faces of children. They were very beautiful plants. Right now they weren’t calling to him. They knew he was going past them soon, and they were waiting, and looking very beautiful.
He looked down at his hands, leaning on his elbows to do so. From the tips of his fingers the last aging tendrils of blue fire were evaporating into the morning air. He could feel a slight agony in his fingers as they left, twisting up like the most rarefied gas, thin, veiled, dissipating into the air.
And in a moment it was gone; his hands were dark and solid, again those dirty tired hands he knew as his. They were stiff. He stretched them slowly in long, groping movements. His whole body was tired from lying as it had. But he got up and flung his arms about to loosen the joints. When he felt better he began the walk back toward the ruin.
He heard singing in his head, and knew the dieflowers had noticed him coming. Their beautiful heads were turned toward him, and they were smiling and laughing at him silently in his mind. Their petals rustled, and drops of the morning dew sparkled on them like diamonds. They wanted him to come near, but he didn’t. He could hear them singing to them from the back of his mind, and they looked very beautiful. After he had walked past them they kept singing for a while, but pretty soon they stopped. The withdrawal from his mind left him feeling empty, but free, as if with the feeling of a wind blowing across an empty plain.
He reached the edge of the highway and stopped. There was something different, something vitally changed. Whatever had changed was not obvious; it was hiding behind sameness the same way an owl hides her bitterness behind a stony face. The road was empty, blank as a strand of spiderweb, and the hills it spanned were as silent as always. Grasses here and there shifted intermittently with small, breathing rustles as the fingers of the wind stroked gently across them. When they moved he could see behind them the spiky heads of the buzzam.
He crossed the highway. His senses were awake; he smelled the dry, dusty air heated by the baking macadam, he felt the patches of pasty tar that dotted the customary roughness. He smelled the heavy ugly oil that the landships’ undersides dripped with, and his feet threaded through the deep parallel lines their treads knifed into the road.
When he had gone up the trail he sat in the grass outside the ruin. Today it was not as sunny and warm as it had been two days ago. Where before the storm the sunlight had rolled over him in waves, today heavy clouds were lining up in the sky, as if to attack and fight off the sun. One or two shapes in the sky were enough to lead him to imagining whole ranks and files of grim whiteclad men on grey and white horses standing together against the sun. The sun itself looked tired and weak, facing these warriors with little pride or courage. The clouds moved closer together, the men with grained, lined faces urged their muttering, cold-breathed steeds closer together until they stood with their panting, dirt stained flanks right up against each other. The sun was retreating; its light was getting fainter and farther away. It was already sinking through the sky toward the horizon. Today would not be a long day – not more than an hour or so.
The sun was gone. There was a chill in the air, and goosebumps went in waves up and down his tired arms. The thick white clouds stayed still, thinking. Then he saw small flakes like dust circling down from above, looking dark against the white of the clouds, tossing like lost children in the wind. He knew snow meant that most of the newly grown plants would die, and he hadn’t put any away, not expecting any more snow. The animals would still be around – at least some of them, rabbits, for instance – but they were rather difficult to catch in the winter. Water was little problem, but it might become one later. If it were cold enough, the pond might freeze.
He walked between the upright stones and into the ruin. The day was darkening, and again he would not be able to read in his Bible. It was his only possession of importance besides his clothes, his cup, the metal shards he used for tools and utensils, his flint, and the like. He lit a fire with some stored wood, and then took out his Bible anyway, holding it in his hands, feeling the rough binding worn smooth exactly where his hands were, the wrinkled pages beaten to a smooth limpness, and the flyleaf, torn loose ages ago. The smell of old paper drifted to him in the warmth of the fire, as he turned the pages. He had had this Bible for a very long time; he only vaguely remembered it as new (this memory, actually, more a memory of earlier rememberings), when it had replaced another, older Bible, all but completely adrift in the waters of his memory.
But he did not need to be able to see to read this Bible of his; he had read it for so long now that every page was bright in his mind. He could turn them by with his eyes shut: an endless procession of pages, silent words whispering deeply like distant bells at every turn. A spectrum of color the whole of the Bible in a moment – as if it were possible to read it in an instant, all the intricacies of light and dark strands in it, the beauties and uglinesses, life and death, in one piece of time. The pages were a river flowing before him, with eddies and currents – the book opened more easily and seemed to linger longer on pages with favorite passages, to sweep by the mummified lists of ancient kings, to tumble with a roar into the New Testament, to come at last, past lakes and rapids, to a certain solace in the last book of the Bible.
In that last book a verse caught his mental eye. It read as follows, and he had to read it more than once to grasp its full import. “And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” There were men who sought death, he knew – he had heard of the Bondmen, who covenanted together to jump in a strange joy off the broken cliffs and into the sea, and he had heard of the suicides who found happiness only in death. Was he one of these? He wondered.
He let his dream fill him, the dream in which he was named John, in which he was the one whom Jesus Christ had told would, with his brother James, drink of his cup and be baptized with his baptism – a strange little dream in which his brother, James, had died long ago, killed by Herod with a sword, leaving him, John, to linger on and on (Maranatha! Come, O Lord!; when comest thou?) until Jesus was to come again (“If it is my will that he stay until I come, what is that to you?”) – when comest thou, Lord, so that I may die?
Was he a suicide? Did he seek death only to have it flee from him? Jesus did say he should lose his life in order to save it, but that the same should not taste of death – how is this to be understood? – and that the greatest love is in dying for friends – how can this be so? – He did not understand, he did not understand. After all, even Jesus had been a suicide: he had sought death, he had wanted to die.
With a small amount of bitterness, he put the book back under its overhanging stone and turned around, very slowly, to look through the stones at the outside. The sky was completely dark now, the sun long gone from it, and through it sifted touches of snow, falling slowly, as the tears of tired angels are said to fall. The flecks floated down past the rocks, which framed the darkness as a picture. He got up and walked to the last rocks better to see the snow fall. It was an invisible presence. Except where the firelight breathed out from the ruin, a faint streaming out of heat and light, he could see no sign of whiteness in the air; he just sensed a presence of snow in the complete quietness. He looked up at the sky, but saw nothing. After a while he began to shiver, and he went inside again to roll up tightly in his blankets. The fire burned slowly down and out.
When the morning came he was very hungry. There were no plants for him to eat; just a few stiff pale stalks crooked up through the snow here and there, completely worthless as food. The animals had mostly gone to areas where there was still some summer, and the traps were all but empty. A rat had been in the first he had checked, and it had already been cast aside by another animal. The second one had only broken twigs from his screen, a gnawed string that had held the bait, and a feast of rabbit prints. Water, at least, had turned out to be no problem; it was plentiful if he broke through the surface ice that covered the pond. Earlier, when he had drunken some, his gums had contracted in pain, his teeth had ached with the cold, and his stomach still felt ringed with ice.
It was eminently clear that something besides the weather had changed. Something yet incomplete and inspecific had pierced the grey arctic day he lived in. The sky had about it a look of desperate energy; as he looked at it it seemed farther away, thin and clear, and rarefied, as if electricity shot through it unseen. From where he was, in the heights above the ruin, he could see the highway away below and beyond, mirroring that sky, with a sleeping energy in it that made him visualize it as a snake curling between the lines of hills on either horizon. The hills were dulled wrecks, the last defiance of the ghosts of long-gone mountains; whitened mounds of dust irradiated by the sun, with barely enough presence to break the distant empty horizons into pale curves that could catch the hazy morning light. The snake stretched lazily between the two horizons, sunning its shiny back in the sun, and turning in the light to mirror the slowly brightening sky on its soft underbelly. There was a lazy power in that snake, lying beneath the sun with its eyes shut. It was thinking of him, he imagined, thinking of him and telling him of strange cities. Somewhere indeed those cities glittered and gleamed with the colors of the snake’s eyes, the green, gold, and black that smoked in darkness under the scaled lids. The snake was not asleep: just its eyes were shut, and it was telling him things.
Down the hillside to the road he ran suddenly, toward the south, toward the sun, leaving the broken trap as it was. In the bright pale light of the sun on the road he had seen movement: a cloud behind a moving vehicle. He hardly noticed what usually filled him with surprise – the exhilaration of running downhill – because his whole mind was concentrating on that newcomer below him. He stopped running for a moment and tried to make out what it was. It was some kind of transport, that he was sure of, but of what kind he could not be sure. The transport slowly vanished into the farther hills, carrying with it its identifying insigniæ, and men of a city, men who had suddenly shattered his world by blindly passing through it on their journey to the south.
Across the last stretch of snow, out onto the road. He came to the tracks the transport had left: two deep ragged tears through the couple feet of snow, a double line of horizontal bars pushed into the snow by the transport’s treads. Each track was nearly as wide as an outstretched arm, and about sixteen feet apart. He kicked at one track, then turned and followed it south. Walking was relatively easy in the track compared to without; in the track he took, the right-hand one, the snow was nicely packed and the tread marks provided good traction. After a while, out of curiosity, and for the sake of variety, he stumbled over to the other track and walked in that. Even though he knew it was exactly the same, it felt different, strange somehow, and soon he returned to the right track. Miles processed from front to rear; a tree he saw far in front of him would suddenly be behind him, another barrier down. He was thinking about the sky, which fled far away in white-blue above. He was naked beneath it, walking toward a south where he had never been.
After about ten miles he came out of the hills, and found a vast plain pocked by craters. Evidently the war had done damage here there were no trees or buildings or living things for miles around him. He picked his way carefully among the craters, following the marks of the transport’s passing. Its driver evidently cared little for roadway; the transport had lurched and dipped over piles of rubble and through deep pits, all of which he found it necessary to skirt. There was no roadway in this bombed-out field anyway. He wondered briefly what had been here. It had been maybe a small town, with the bad luck of being in the wrong place, or perhaps a military installation. He had bombed many of both kinds in his own fighting days. Whatever it had been, it was now gone except for the square outcroppings of building stone and pale bowl-like depressions, all covered uniformly with the snow.
As he traversed the empty plain he considered the possibility that the bombing of this place had sent shock-waves that had made the ruin the destroyed place he had left. He saw in his mind’s eye briefly the chapel it had been once, before it was made his hospital and prison, and before one day when he had awakened, bleeding, in a mass of its wreckage. But he did not stop to think about the ruin. For him now it had ceased to exist except as an abstract memory; he carried with him all of it he would ever need again.
Near the far side of the plain he stepped on something hard and smooth. He reached down through the snow and found a piece of rusty metal. It was actually two joined pieces: a flat, triangular shape fastened to a long square pole. He suddenly realized it was a sign: the paint was gone, it was heavily rusted, and riddled with bullet holes, but he could make out the machine-pressed letters when he held it right. It said:
YIELD
He propped it up at the edge of the plain as if to say that the settlement that had been there had been named Yield.
Only a little beyond the plain, as he crossed a low hill, the road bent east and left the region of snow. Only patches of it were here and there in the soft green grasses that grew on either side of the road. The transport had left two small piles of snow in two lines as it passed, as if it were a wild beast shaking its sleek fur. He now walked on the bare tar between the tread marks.
The road went over a stream, from which he stopped to drink and to wash his face. It was becoming rather warm again. The sky glowed with a bright blue that had tinges of green in it. There was not a hint of cloud. The road led through a land of gentle hills covered with a grain that stood straight and yellow. A few apple trees dotted the landscape, and from one near the road he took several and put them in his cloak. As he walked he two or three, throwing the cores far into the grainfields, where they vanished soundlessly.
After a curve in the road, bringing him more east, he found a farmhouse on the right. It was old. Its roof was sagging, but it still had most of a pretty green paint. He looked inside after walking through the overgrown grass of the lawn. The house seemed empty, with only a few dead leaves and some newspaper scrap on the floors. He saw an automobile parked on the far side of the house and walked toward it. He passed by the front door, and saw a sign that said, “Plague. Quarantine.” The sign was yellow with age; it had been up for at least a year. The automobile was rusty. He looked in, fingered the steering wheel; he wished he could use this hulk somehow, but it was evidently far past that.
At the next curve the road crossed a four-lane highway. Beside the junction was a sign, which listed cities and mileages. Hub was straight ahead on the road he had been following. According to the sign it was one hundred and ninety miles ahead. Aholah was up the highway to the left, two hundred and forty-five miles. Aholibah, it said, was to the right, the south, one hundred and sixty-five miles down the highway. He remembered briefly the words of the vision during the storm, that he should go to Aholibah. After careful examination of the scorations in the tar, he realized that the transport had gone to the right, toward Aholibah. He decided to continue following it.
As the day went into afternoon, it became indeed very warm, and even hot. He took off his cloak and tied it about his waist. The road was sticky with a black oil that bled slowly out of the asphalt. Once he stepped in the melted tar, and his feet made pulling, snapping noises for a while. After that he took care to avoid the wet tar. This highway, unlike the road the ruin was on, was very serious about being a highway. It was not a lazy, self-satisfied snake. It was not a thin ribbon of tar laid on the land in jagged ruts torn through the hills. It was, rather, a part of the world. It was a vast field of blue-grey among the other fields of green and yellow. Nature had not cracked this highway into a million pieces because it, unlike that other road, was a part of nature. This highway he walked on was not merely a stretch of asphalt. It was a living being, lying, sweating, bleeding its heavy black blood under the burning sun, and, when the cold night descended, it would contract and shiver, and go off to sleep among the trees and fields.
The country became more hilly. In the distance to the left he sometimes caught glimpses of a lake, dark blue, bluer even than the deep bowl of the sky. The slopes of the hills in all directions had trees on them, trees that had intermingled with the fields, forming small islands of oak and birch, archipelagoes of cedar, and sometimes little peninsulas of spruce and pine reaching out an inquisitive finger into the oceans of fields. It was a world of quiet; there was only the infrequent call of a robin or a jay, and there was only once in a while the trembling of a breeze in the branches of trees. He drank from a brook that paralleled the road for a while, before going through a conduit and off to the northeast. He put on his cloak again while looking at the lowering sun. The crickets were beginning to sing, carolling the first hush of evening. He began to watch for a place to find something to eat in. There was a little pine woods down an incline to the right, past a field of hay that was a warm gold in the reddening sun.
He scuttled down the slope and started through the field. It turned out to be marshy, and he walked carefully from clump of hay to clump of hay. He found a few wallworts here and there which he pulled up, stripped, and chewed on as he walked. The woods were dark and silent, with a deep smell of pine sap and needles. The ground was a thick, spongy carpet of yesteryear’s needles, stuck with castoff branches and stray deciduous leaves. He could hear, once he was within the dark world of the woods, the tinkling of a stream, which sounded faint but near; he knew, however, that it was probably several yards away because pine forests have a peculiar sound-carrying quality.
It was cool in the forest, but still he felt strangely warm, as if the trees were watching him kindly in their silent way. The ground sloped up to a clearing where there was not the deep red of needles, but the vibrant green of rocks covered with moss and lichen. A small brown form scampered off at his approach, and he conceived the idea of having rabbit for supper.
He had, of course, left his tools for digging pits and sharpening sticks – his shards of glass and flat rocks – so he decided to fall back on a way of catching rabbit that he had used when the Soldiers had first ceased to come to the ruin with food. He tore off a vine from the trunk of a tree, stripped it of tendrils until he had a stiff but usable rope. Then he searched until he found a rabbit hole in the chink between two ground rocks. He took the end of the vine and tied it into a big circle with a slide knot. He put the circle over the rabbit hole and retreated softly.
This was a time-consuming way to catch rabbits, which is why he had, at the ruin, changed to digging traps, but results were still assured if one were only patient and nimble enough. And within fifteen minutes, a rather short time, he managed to snag a rabbit. It peeped its head out of the hole to see if the human intruder were gone, disappeared, then came up again only to be caught at once in a rope of vine.
The rabbit was kicking wildly with its hind feet when he caught it up in his hand. Within a few minutes he had gathered wood, lit it with his flint, and prepared the rabbit for roasting. Soon he smelled the good smell of roasting meat. He ate, hardly noticing how hot it was, tearing into the rabbit with his fingers. When it was eaten, he ate the best of the three apples in his shirt, and put the others away again.
While he had eaten night had descended. There fluttered in and out of the range of vision a moth, attracted by the firelight. A gentle breeze blew out of the black spaces around him, raising a delicious shudder, making him feel sleepily warm and good in front of his fire. But the fire was dying, and the day was long gone. When it had burned to embers he arranged a bed out of pine needles by taking out all the twigs and adding more needles to the spot. He dug himself in and closed his eyes. The bed of needles was warm and fragrant; soon he was asleep.
Once briefly in the night he woke, with a full moon pouring clear, cold light on him. He had been dreaming, he imagined, about a woman, a woman who was very important somehow. But he could not remember. He lay quietly looking at the face of the moon, remembering what she had looked like in the dream, and wondering. The fire was out, and the chunks of ash seemed to glow in the moonlight. An eddy of night breeze curled over his shoulders and he went back to sleep.
He woke to clouds. The world beneath the trees was a misty grey, and when he looked up through the branches of the pines, all he saw was white. He found the stream he had heard last night and washed his face in it. There were fish in the stream, long silent forms that moved against the dark greens and blacks of rocks and water plants, almost invisible in the halflight. He laid his shirt flat on the bottom of the stream, holding the sleeves and the bottom corners above the water. After the dust had settled, he waited for a fish, his mind silent and ready. At last a dark form slipped through the water above his shirt, and, without thinking, he pulled the cloth up. Water spilled out of the sides, leaving in the middle of the shirt, no less securely caught than by a net, a long green trout. It struggled and flopped madly, frantically struggling to return to its element, lost and hopeless without it, like a piece of metal pulled away from a magnet. He could barely hold on to it.
Within a few minutes the fire was going again and he broiled the fish. He put his shirt on a branch above the flames to dry out, keeping wrapped up in his cloak for warmth. While the fish cooked he looked again at the sky. The day was still too new to have clear signs, but everything he felt with his senses portended rain. The sky was a greying white. The air felt heavy, and the atmospheric pressure was changing: he felt it in his ears and in an odd tingle in his abdomen. The fish was done. He took the stick it was propped on out of the fire and broke it open and ate. It was dry and a bit tasteless, but hot and good. He was glad to eat it, and to sit by this warm fire, because he knew he would probably be wet soon in the rain. He ate slowly, picking bones out of each bite. It would probably be best, he decided, to walk as far as possible before it rained, keeping an eye out for shelter. There didn’t seem to be any around here; the trees would only be shelter enough for a few minutes. When he had done with his breakfast, he stood and felt his shirt to see if it was dry yet. It wasn’t, so he sat and fed the fire absently. Eventually it was; he put it on, enjoying the warmth baked into it, and stamped out the fire carefully.
When he had left the woods, he found that the world had a strange, mysterious quality all around him. At first everything seemed bright, but when his eyes adjusted he saw that this was only in comparison to the darkness under the pines. A faint fog had covered everything in sheets of grey. The sheets lifted as he crossed the marshy place and climbed the incline, and fell in behind until the trees were just trembling pools of grey which merged one with the other. The highway stretched ahead and behind into a watery colorlessness. Above him the sky was a faint pastel white. He walked quickly not just to get as far as he could before the rain, but also to keep warm. The air smelled cold and damp, a smell like that of cold metal. He shivered, feeling an unaccustomed loneliness in the hardness of the wind.
After a long, gradual curve there was a dirt road that crossed the highway, laid straight through the fields on either side, fields that had long lain fallow but that still had faint ordered lines to the grasses and weeds. In the field to the left past the dirt road, barely visible in the mist, was a skywatch tower, or, actually, only the firebombed remnants of one. Once he had seen the stump of a Beast soldier’s tongue that had been burned out when the Children had taken him captive. The skywatch tower looked like that: rough, blackened, only the jagged root of what had once been a tall tower of eloquent warning. Now its voice was silenced.
Memories floated back, thin watery memories of his long years fighting on the side of the Children, with the great Soldiers of the Atraumac, sixteen years of being put into landships and aëroplanes, strapped in so tightly his body couldn’t even move, wired and plugged in to the whole death-dealing animal: the aëroplane’s wings becoming his arms, the landship’s treads becoming his feet, the crafts’ metal armor plates becoming his skin; and seeing through their heat-sensors, listening greedily through their radio dish antennæ, sniffing for electrical currents; he looked, listened, and smelled because he was hungry, hungry for Beast metal and thirsty for Beast blood; feeling the rays and the charges fly from his splayed-out fingers, the exploding missiles roar from his mouth; feeling the death he dealt. ...
But now it was all over. Now its voice was silenced. The war had come, had burned it out, and moved on to another quarter of the earth. He had never worked in a skywatch tower, but he could imagine what it was like, watching land and sky for approaching enemy; he could well imagine because he had so often striven himself to silence such towers before they sang their notes of warning, before they struck chords on the timbrel and harp.