The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five
Page 37
Bhengarn searches in Noort’s mind for the meaning of that, finds something approximate, and says, “I make no such claim.”
“Good. Good. There are limits to my credulity. How far is this Crystal Pond?”
“We have covered most of the distance. If I proceed at a steady pace I will come shortly to the land of smoking holes, and not far beyond that is the approach to the Wall of Ice, which will demand a difficult but not impossible ascent, and just on the far side of that I will find the vale that contains Crystal Pond, where the beginning of the next phase of my life will occur.” They are walking now through a zone of sparkling rubbery cones of a bright vermilion color, from which small green Stangarones emerge in quick succession to chant their one-note melodies. The flavor of a heavy musk hangs in the air. Night is beginning to fall. Bhengarn says, “Are you tired?”
“Just a little.”
“It is not my custom to travel by night. Does this campsite suit you?” Bhengarn indicates a broad circular depression bordered by tiny volcanic fumaroles. The ground here is warm and spongy, moist, bare of vegetation. Bhengarn extends an excavator claw and pulls free a strip of it, which he hands to Noort, indicating that he should eat. Noort tentatively nibbles. Bhengarn helps himself to some also. Noort, kneeling, presses his knuckles against the ground, makes it yield, mutters to himself, shakes his head, rips off another strip and chews it in wonder. Bhengarn says, “You find the world much changed, do you not?”
“Beyond all understanding, in fact.”
“Our finest artists have worked on it since time immemorial, making it more lively, more diverting. We think it is a great success. Do you agree?”
Noort does not answer. He is staring bleakly at the sky, suddenly dark and jeweled with blazing stars. Bhengarn realizes that he is searching for patterns, navigators’ signs. Noort frowns, turns round and round to take in the full circuit of the heavens, bites his lip, finally lets out a low groaning sigh and says, “I recognize nothing. Nothing. This is not the northern sky, this is not the southern sky, this is not any sky I can understand.” Quietly he begins to weep. After a time he says somberly, “I was not the most adept of navigators, but I knew something, at least. And I look at this sky and I feel like a helpless babe. All the stars have changed places. Now I see how lost I am, how far from anything I ever knew, and once it gave me great pleasure to sail under strange skies, but not now, not here, because these skies frighten me and this land of demons offers me no peace. I have never wept, do you know that, creature, never, not once in my life! But Holland—my house, my tavern, my church, my sons, my pipe—where is Holland? Where is everything I knew? The skies above Magellan’s Strait were not the thousandth part so strange as this.” A harsh heavy sob escapes him, and he turns away, huddling into himself.
Compassion floods Bhengarn for this miserable wanderer. To ease Noort’s pain he summons fantasies for him, dredging images from the reservoirs of the ancient man’s spirit and hurling them against the sky, building a cathedral of fire in the heavens, and a royal palace, and a great armada of ships with bellying sails and the Dutch flag fluttering, and the watery boulevards of busy Amsterdam and the quiet streets of little Haarlem, and more. He paints for Noort the stars in their former courses, the Centaur, the Swan, the Bear, the Twins. He restores the fallen Moon to its place and by its cold light creates a landscape of time lost and gone, with avenues of heavy-boughed oaks and maples, and drifts of brilliant red and yellow tulips blaring beneath them, and golden roses arching in great bowers over the thick, newly mowed lawn. He creates fields of ripe wheat, and haystacks high as barns, and harvesters toiling in the hot sultry afternoon. He gives Noort the aroma of the Sunday feast and the scent of good Dutch gin and the sweet dense fumes of his long clay pipe. Noort nods and murmurs and clasps his hands, and gradually his sorrow ebbs and his weeping ceases, and he drifts off into a deep and easy slumber. The images fade. Bhengarn, who rarely sleeps, keeps watch until first light comes and a flock of fingerwinged birds passes overhead, shouting shrilly, jesting and swooping.
Noort is calm and quiet in the morning. He feeds again on the spongy soil and drinks from a clear emerald rivulet and they move onward toward Crystal Pond. Bhengarn is pleased to have his company. There is something crude and coarse about the Dutchman, perhaps even more so than another of his era might be, but Bhengarn finds that unimportant. He has always preferred companions of any sort to the solitary march, in his centuries of going to and fro upon the Earth. He has traveled with Skimmers and Destroyers, and once a ponderous Ruminant, and even on several occasions visitors from other worlds who have come to sample the wonders of Earth. At least twice Bhengarn has had as his traveling companion a castaway of the time-flux from some prehistoric era, though not so prehistoric as Noort’s. And now it has befallen him that he will go to the end of his journey with this rough hairy being from the dawn of humanity’s day. So be it. So be it.
Noort says, breaking a long silence as they cross a plateau of quivering gelatinous stuff, “Were you a man or a woman before the sorcery gave you this present shape?”
“I have always had this form.”
“No. Impossible. You say you are human, you speak my language—”
“Actually, you speak my language,” says Bhengarn.
“As you wish. If you are human you must once have looked like me. Can it be otherwise? Were you born a thing of silvery scales and many legs? I will not believe that.”
“Born?” says Bhengarn, puzzled.
“Is this word unknown to you?”
“Born,” the Traveler repeats. “I think I see the concept. To begin, to enter, to acquire one’s shape—”
“Born,” says Noort in exasperation. “To come from the womb. To hatch, to out, to drop. Everything alive has to be born!”
“No,” Bhengarn says mildly. “Not any longer.”
“You talk nonsense,” Noort snaps, and scours his throat angrily and spits. His spittle strikes a node of assonance and blossoms into a dazzling mound of green and scarlet jewels. “Rubies,” he murmurs. “Emeralds. I could puke pearls, I suppose.” He kicks at the pile of gems and scatters them; they dissolve into spurts of moist pink air. The Dutchman gives himself over to a sullen brooding. Bhengarn does not transgress on the other’s taciturnity; he is content to march forward in his steady plodding way, saying nothing.
Three Skimmers appear, prancing, leaping. They are heading to the south. The slender golden-green creatures salute the wayfarers with pulsations of their great red eyes. Noort, halting, glares at them and says hoarsely to Bhengarn, “These are human beings, too?”
“Indeed.”
“Natives of this realm?”
“Natives of this era,” says Bhengarn. “The latest form, the newest thing, graceful, supple, purposeless.” The Skimmers laugh and transform themselves into shining streaks of light and soar aloft like a trio of auroral rays. Bhengarn says, “Do they seem beautiful to you?”
“They seem like minions of Satan,” says the Dutchman sourly. He scowls. “When I awaken I pray I remember none of this. For if I do, I will tell the tale to Willem and Jan and Piet, and they will think I have lost my senses, and mock me. Tell me I dream, creature. Tell me I lie drunk in an inn in Amsterdam.”
“It is not so,” Bhengarn says gently.
“Very well. Very well. I have come to a land where every living thing is a demon or a monster. That is no worse, I suppose, than a land where everyone speaks Japanese and worships stones. It is a world of wonders, and I have seen more than my share. Tell me, creature, do you have cities in this land?”
“Not for millions of years.”
“Then where do the people live?”
“Why, they live where they find themselves! Last night we lived where the ground was food. Tonight we will settle by the Wall of Ice. And tomorrow—”
“Tomorrow,” Noort says, “we will have dinner with the Grand Diabolus and dance in the Witches’ Sabbath. I am prepared, just as I was prepared to sup
with the penguin-eating folk of the Cape, that stood six cubits high. I will be surprised by nothing.” He laughs. “I am hungry, creature. Shall I tear up the earth again and stuff it down?”
“Not here. Try those fruits.”
Luminous spheres dangle from a tree of golden limbs. Noort plucks one, tries it unhesitatingly, claps his hands, takes three more. Then he pulls a whole cluster free, and offers one to Bhengarn, who refuses.
“Not hungry?” the Dutchman asks.
“I take my food in other ways.”
“Yes, you breathe it in from flowers as you crawl along, eh? Tell me, Traveler: to what end is your journey? To discover new lands? To fulfill some pledge? To confound your enemies? I doubt it is any of these.”
“I travel out of simple necessity, because it is what my kind does, and for no special purpose.”
“A humble wanderer, then, like the mendicant monks who serve the Lord by taking to the highways?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you ever cease your wanderings?”
“Never yet. But cessation is coming. At Crystal Pond I will become my utter opposite, and enter the Awaiter tribe, and be made immobile and contemplative. I will root myself like a vegetable, after my metamorphosis.”
Noort offers no comment on that. After a time he says, “I knew a man of your kind once. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten of Haarlem, who roamed the world because the world was there to roam, and spent his years in the India of the Portugals and wrote it all down in a great vast book, and when he had done that went off to Novaya Zemlya with Barents to find the chilly way to the Indies, and I think would have sailed to the Moon if he could find the pilot to guide him. I spoke with him once. My own travels took me farther than Linschoten, do you know? I saw Borneo and Java and the world’s hinder side, and the thick Sargasso Sea. But I went with a purpose other than my own amusement or the gathering of strange lore, which was to buy pepper and cloves, and gather Spanish gold, and win my fame and comfort. Was that so wrong, Traveler? Was I so unworthy?” Noort chuckles. “Perhaps I was, for I brought home neither spices nor gold nor most of my men, but only the fame of having sailed around the world. I think I understand you, Traveler. The spices go into a cask of meat and are eaten and gone; the gold is only yellow metal; but so long as there are Dutchmen, no one will forget that Olivier van Noort, the tavernkeeper of Rotterdam, strung a line around the middle of the world. So long as there are Dutchmen.” He laughs. “It is folly to travel for profit. I will travel for wisdom from now on. What do you say, Traveler? Do you applaud me?”
“I think you are already on the proper path,” says Bhengarn. “But look, look there: the Wall of Ice.”
Noort gasps. They have come around a low headland and are confronted abruptly by a barrier of pure white light, as radiant as a mirror at noon, that spans the horizon from east to west and rises skyward like an enormous palisade filling half the heavens. Bhengarn studies it with respect and admiration. He has known for hundreds of years that he must ascend this wall if he is to reach Crystal Pond, and that the wall is formidable; but he has seen no need before now to contemplate the actualities of the problem, and now he sees that they are significant.
“Are we to ascend that?” Noort asks.
“I must. But here, I think, we shall have to part company.”
“The throne of Lucifer must lie beyond that icy rampart.”
“I know nothing of that,” says Bhengarn, “but certainly Crystal Pond is on the farther side, and there is no other way to reach it but to climb the wall. We will camp tonight at its base, and in the morning I will begin my climb.”
“Is such a climb possible?”
“It will have to be,” Bhengarn replies.
“Ah. You will turn yourself to a puff of light like those others we met, and shoot over the top like some meteor. Eh?”
“I must climb,” says Bhengarn, “using one limb after another, and taking care not to lose my grip. There is no magical way of making this ascent.” He sweeps aside fallen branches of a glowing blue-limbed shrub to make a campsite for them. To Noort he says, “Before I begin the ascent tomorrow I will instruct you in the perils of the world, for your protection on your future wanderings. I hold myself responsible for your presence here, and I would not have you harmed once you have left my side.”
Noort says, “I am not yet planning to leave your side. I mean to climb that wall alongside you, Traveler.”
“It will not be possible for you.”
“I will make it possible. That wall excites my spirit. I will conquer it as I conquered the storms of the Strait and the fevers of the Sargasso. I feel I should go with you to Crystal Pond, and pay my farewells to you there, for it will bring me luck to mark the beginning of my solitary journey by witnessing the end of yours. What do you say?”
“I say wait until the morning,” Bhengarn answers, “and see the wall at close range, before you commit yourself to such mighty resolutions.”
During the night a silent lightstorm plays overhead; twisting turbulent spears of blue and green and violet radiance clash in the throbbing sky, and an undulation of the atmosphere sends alternating waves of hot and cool air racing down from the Wall of Ice. The time-flux blows, and frantic figures out of forgotten eras are swept by now far aloft, limbs churning desperately, eyes rigid with astonishment. Noort sleeps through it all, though from time to time he stirs and mutters and clenches his fists. Bhengarn ponders his obligations to the Dutchman, and by the coming of the sharp blood-hued dawn he has arrived at an idea. Together they advance to the edge of the Wall; together they stare upward at that vast vertical field of shining whiteness, smooth as stone. Hesitantly Noort touches it with his fingertip, and hisses at the coldness of it. He turns his back to it, paces, folds and unfolds his arms.
He says finally, “No man or woman born could achieve the summit of that wall. But is there not some magic you could work, Traveler, that would enable me to make the ascent?”
“There is one. But I think you would not like it.”
“Speak.”
“I could transform you—for a short time, only a short time, no longer than the time it takes to climb the wall—into a being of the Traveler form. Thus we could ascend together.”
Noort’s eyes travel quickly over Bhengarn’s body—the long tubular serpentine thorax, the tapering tail, the multitude of powerful little legs—and a look of shock and dismay and loathing comes over his face for an instant, but just an instant. He frowns. He tugs at his heavy lower lip.
Bhengarn says, “I will take no offense if you refuse.”
“Do it.”
“You may be displeased.”
“Do it! The morning is growing old. We have much climbing to do. Change me, Traveler. Change me quickly.” A shadow of doubt crosses Noort’s features. “You will change me back, once we reach the top?”
“It will happen of its own accord. I have no power to make a permanent transformation.”
“Then do what you can, and do it now!”
“Very well,” says Bhengarn, and the Traveler, summoning his fullest force, drains metamorphic energies from the planets and the stars and a passing comet, and focuses them and hurls them at the Dutchman, and there is a buzzing and a droning and a shimmering and when it is done a second Traveler stands at the foot of the Wall of Ice.
Noort seems thunderstruck. He says nothing; he does not move; only after a long time does he carefully lift his frontmost left limb and swing it forward a short way and put it down. Then the one opposite it; then several of the middle limbs; then, growing more adept, he manages to move his entire body, adopting a curious wriggling style, and in another moment he appears to be in control. “This is passing strange,” he remarks at length. “And yet it is almost like being in my own body, except that everything has been changed. You are a mighty wizard, Traveler. Can you show me now how to make the ascent?”
“Are you ready so soon?”
“I am ready,” Noort says.
And so it is, for a time, and then it is less easy, for now they hang high above the valley and the midday sun has melted the surface of the wall just enough to make it slick and slippery, and a terrible cold from within the mass of ice seeps outward into the climbers, and even though a Traveler’s body is a wondrous machine fit to endure anything, this is close to the limit. Once Bhengarn loses his purchase, but Noort deftly claps a claw to the middle of his spine to hold him firmly until he has dug in again; and not much later the same happens to Noort, and Bhengarn grasps him. As the day wanes they are so far above the ground that they can barely make out the treetops below, and yet the top of the wall is too high to see. Together they excavate a ledge, burrowing inward to rest in a chilly nook, and at dawn they begin again, Bhengarn’s sinuous body winding upward over the rim of their little cave and Noort following with less agility. Upward and upward they climb, never pausing and saying little, through a day of warmth and soft perfumed breezes and through a night of storms and falling stars, and then through a day of turquoise rain, and through another day and a night and a day and then they are at the top, looking out across the broad unending field of ferns and bright blossoms that covers the summit’s flat surface, and as they move inward from the rim Noort lets out a cry and stumbles forward, for he has resumed his ancient form. He drops to his knees and sits there panting, stunned, looking in confusion at his fingernails, at his knuckles, at the hair on the backs of his hands, as though he has never seen such things before. “Passing strange,” he says softly.