The other man, Gerideau Smythe, was also a fanatic, or at least he tried to make one believe he was. But somehow his quiet, calm assertions of faith and belief and ain't-we-gonna-stick-it-to-ole-Satan-pass-the-Lordand-praise-the-ammunition simply could not come off with the same loud, utterly blind conviction with which Yarrow could fill them. Neither did he have the immovable but strangely shrouded convictions that seemed to be driving VanRoark to the Meadows.
He had been a librarian by profession—which meant that half the nations in the world had laws by which he could be legally murdered—first at the Black Library at Krysale Abbey and then at the more notorious one at Iriam. Thus he had grown up among the works which proved that this world had been preceded by another, and that by another, and so forth, until the old maps VanRoark had wondered at found histories to match their mountains and rivers. Of course, to be a librarian in those days only meant that one had to be reasonably literate; but there must have been a devotion in Smythe that tied him so closely to the books he could read but never fully understand.
At night when Yarrow had preached the dolphins into a sleepy stupor and Tapp had predictably passed out, Smythe would talk to VanRoark of the great, fortress-like libraries and recite fragments and pieces of histories and sciences that had randomly stuck in his mind; virtually all of the names were foreign to VanRoark, so many Republics Of and Unions Of. Not at all like the present, when nations drew their names from their dead founders—or their assassins.
It was not at all hard, when his mind was already awash with Tapp's magnificent blitherings, to listen to Smythe's cracked voice, for he was an old man now, and after a while the pious trappings would slough off and the wonder that the libraries had sheltered began to fearfully poke through. It would only be for a few minutes, a half hour at the most, before the guilt that stood behind the religious and moral slogans drove the glittering shapes back; but for the instant they lived.
In the darkness the dreadful state of the
Garnet
was invisible and, with the sordid mumblings of her crew ended for the day, there existed only VanRoark and the Sea and Smythe's voice. VanRoark learned of air ships from the old man, and how the steel ships were able to propel themselves without sails or paddle-wheels; how the old, vanished cities used to look, and how they died, quickly under the bombs, or slowly at their own hands as gangs of kids stuffed homemade guncotton and broken glass into oatmeal cans and let their parents bleed to death on sidewalks; he learned of asphalt roads that had once covered the world, and of the vehicles that had carried men upon them; ships that dived into the sea, and ships that had carried other men on some few faltering steps toward the stars, before there was no more time for such things.
It was, of course, for these things that the man was truly going to the Meadows; even VanRoark came to see that. But somehow, someone had convinced Smythe that the knowledge he had watched over was the very essence of evil, of the dark, power-ravening evil that man had allowed to grow within himself in his younger years. Now, as Yarrow believed, such things were behind him and all man needed was a clean heart and mind averted exclusively toward Heaven. Poor Smythe tried so desperately to ape Yarrow's florid statements of faith, but he was a bad liar and the libraries at Krysale Abbey and Iriam were still very much with him. He had burned Krysale, or rather had been forced to by a group heading for one of the Meadow's unending Wars.
It was in these conversations with Smythe that Van-Roark first began to question his own motives for going to the Meadows. The time of Timonias still had that beautifully rounded-off character that fairly screamed for completion, his head was still quite full of the things he had sensed at Admiralty Square, but now, as the stars above the horizon appeared as the running lights of great battle fleets, he finally admitted to himself an entirely heretical and apparently irrelevant love of the past in itself: the past, free from all the great Abstractions such as were now supposedly stalking the Meadows, peopled only by men such as himself and the machines they might fashion. A regular world, where one's sanity could always resort to certain fairly rigid standards whenever it was in danger of breaking; standing, as it were, on a good solid plain and not perched on the cliff's edge getting ready to jump.
But then Yarrow would come storming up, a hysterically laughing Tapp following in his wake, spouting damnation and Scripture, or else the crew would make itself known and the magic would be ended. Smythe would retreat back into his little, miserably defended stronghold of holy droppings and disavow any allegiance to Krysale Abbey or Iriam; all he wanted to do then was to go to the Meadows and Die like all those on the side of Right Ought to Do. Yarrow would pound him on the back, hurl some presumably encouraging chapter and verse at him; then Yarrow would always turn and toss some further bit of Scripture at the world. But all that VanRoark could see of the world was the Sea, shining with luminous fish and night creatures, ghost-osprey circling the ship and the stars. Then he was sick of Yarrow and the ship, but not with the terrified sickness he had caught from the insect on the Greenbelt. This was an immature, but still rather righteous sickness; by now VanRoark had begun to see his person becoming cluttered and filled up with vague, half-formed feelings and sensations, things that he had never even conceived of at his home city. Even now, less than three months away from Admiralty Square, he looked back upon himself in those days with the weary, bittersweet cynicism that is the fate of youth when it steps, or thinks it does, beyond its previous limits. A world was growing within him, one composed of bits and pieces of ocean, the fragmented histories of five hundred nations, prophets, dogma, time and dying men.
It was this last thing that prevented him from the nearly inevitable blunder of youth which, once having discovered the outlined world inside itself, wallows in it and mutters to itself, utterly convinced that its situation is unlike any other in all creation. They lose their humility in self-inflated bitterness, the young, and wear their self-inflicted scars like the wounds of real wars and sorrows. But the dying men, his association with their real sorrows and torments, those men who did not bother to examine and parade themselves, kept VanRoark's mind from dwelling too much upon itself and thus shutting out all else. It was hardly a love, nor was it any sort of awe, although both Tapp and Smythe inspired their own particular brands of admiration in VanRoark; it was more as if VanRoark, upon finding the gradually assembling fragments within himself, used this knowledge and feelings as a kind of lens through which he could glimpse, however briefly, the dreadfully complete worlds of the two men.
They were the ends of time, human wrecks crawling to their deaths, but leaving behind them a history, and in this perhaps even one or two works that might be worthy of being called just. It was only through men such as these, who had allowed themselves to sense the meaning of their agony, that the Wars could be fought; it was they who built and now would tear down.
In moments alone, VanRoark would muse upon Tapp and Smythe, considering them coldly and granting them ironic titles, which made them look even more pitiful and ridiculous than they were already: The Final Culmination of Human Evolution (when he saw Tapp reeling about the deck after dinner, his ulcer bleeding bright and clear in the setting sun), Protector of the Divine Plan of Creation (when he saw Smythe trying so very hard to explain Good and Right to their illiterate, malarial cabin boy). But then survivors are always more pitiable than the dead.
There was Yarrow, but he only had a walk-on in all this, VanRoark sagely concluded. He touched nothing, allowed nothing he did not approve of to touch him, and scarcely cared for anything save the sound of his own voice. VanRoark imagined a ship similar to their own, but now sailing north to the Meadows, loaded with men he would eventually be trying to kill; doubtlessly, on board there was a Yarrow, distinguishable from their own only in the name of the Great Abstraction with which he defined his own faith.
Then, with a dispassion that is also usually alien to youth, discovering that one had lived and would soon die, he tried to fit himself into this and found he could not. At times he was the avenging angel going to serve his God and his Plan, but despite Timonias, he could never feel quite as majestic as the phrase demanded; neither was he of the race of men that had built world after world and then left when their time had properly arrived; not yet, at least. This was no good; now he was nothing, going to a probable death for no reason at all. The Sea perhaps? That would be his heritage and his ally, he decided.
He supposed that once there had been those who had built the great ships and sailed upon them, those of the wanderer caste. The Meadow Wars again receded in his mind and the voyage virtually supplanted it in his immediate thoughts. He began to take up with the crew, not for any companionship but only to learn their arts.
Against the ocean there was usually the coast, always on the starboard side, for few vessels cared to venture out of sight of land if they could help it. The lands south of Enador were quite desolate, high rock cliff faces usually screening inland areas from the Sea most of the time. Gradually, though, the land dipped down to sea level. They were getting into warmer latitudes, where warm currents from the southeast fed the mangrove and cypress forests of the great Enstrich Marshes before they swirled out to Sea again, to touch lush Kyandra and some of the lesser of the Dresau Islands. The gray and sand colors of the coastal territories gave way to a flat line of green that turned to a solid carpet when viewed from the maintop. They sailed past the Marshes for almost a week; by day, VanRoark would borrow the captain's glass and survey the steaming wall, watching the huge snakes and lizards that lived there moving through the trees of the water, their heads awash like rotting logs, and the gold and pink birds that rose at their passing. At night, if the moon was bright enough, he could see the eyes and crystal hides of the reptiles weaving through the breathing darkness.
Tapp became more sober as they bordered the Marshes. VanRoark at first thought that the appearance of some kind of untarnished fertility still left on the land had lifted his spirits. But it was only that they were approaching Cynibal. Tapp grew hopeful and despairing by turn, knowing that if he actually landed there he would probably be hanged for treason, Bournmouth III's Curia having a very long memory; still, it was a home that he had not seen for quite a few years.
The swampy coastline died out, to be replaced by level sand beaches that shaded off into rolling hills covered with pale bayonet grass. Joshua trees and cottonwood broke up the monotony.
Tapp began drinking again; in his memories, the grass had been green and fair, like the Greenbelt was supposed to have been once. There were ruins too, the occasional hull of a gutted tank, half overgrown in the murderous grass, lying beside cottonwood groves. Then came the cities, the small ports that grew larger as they neared the entrance to Blackwoods Bay, the harbors silted up like VanRoark's home, the streets deserted and the walls already beginning to show the impact of the wind.
VanRoark had heard stories of this nation from the pilgrims who had come to the cathedral, of its power and beauty, how almost alone it still held itself together and worked its old sciences and arts. Great ships were supposed to have called at Blackwoods Bay, where pumps still brought oil up from the Sea's bed, where the towers still trickled out fuels and lubricants; then the ships would go back to their home nations at the edge of the world.
VanRoark wanted to ask Tapp about all this, and what had happened, even though he obviously did not know either; but by the time they sailed into the Bay Tapp had returned to his usual stupor, trying to keep himself unconscious so that he would never see his dead Cynibal.
So Smythe, when he could get away from Yarrow's undiminished ravings and chokings, fearfully climbed the maintop to VanRoark and offered what small things he still remembered. The northern shore of the Bay had been Cynibal's, the southern one having belonged to Ihetah-Incalam, and it was like a miles-long tangle of thorn bushes, wreckages of wells and refineries, oiling docks. Fires were burning amid the tangle and would keep burning, Smythe said, until the wells went dry, perhaps two hundred years from now.
VanRoark had lived with ruin long enough to be at home with these, but the immense scale of the fires made them something apart, as if they had just been destroyed and had yet to die utterly. The worst ones were the offshore wells, natural gas, according to Smythe; there the flame just burst from the Sea, as if giving birth to something vast and terrible, steam and boiling water ringing its pale blue and yellow base.
Where the fires lived on the land, in the iron shrubbery of fallen, cracking towers and distillation units, their constant heat had melted the steel so that the sharp outlines and angles softened and bowed down grotesquely near the flames.
Ships were there too, perhaps those of which the pilgrims had talked: tankers and merchant ships burned and blackened and melted by the fires, sunk at their docks with the dirty, oil-slicked water painting their sides in sickly rainbow diffractions.
Tapp would just sit on the bow, blind drunk and completely insensitive to the coast or to Yarrow's running commentary on the vanity that had called down such a fate on Cynibal. And then as Yarrow rose to some particularly emotional pitch, his lungs would reassert their presence and he would scuttle to the side, dribbling thin trails of blood and saliva down the side. The crew thought the passengers a most amusing collection of freaks and idiots.
They were bound for the western end of the Bay, to a port called Mount Soril, where they would provision for the uncertain journey south and then west. Predictably, Mount Soril was no less devastated than Cynibal; the city had been one of Ihetah-Incalam's most prosperous ports, but that nation had apparently suffered the same end as its northern sister. It had been the plague and its attendant madnesses at Mount Soril. It was still inhabited, now by maniacs and paranoiacs, people who worshiped the sun because they feared the night.