VanRoark purchased a brown leather eye patch at a village called Nine, and took to tying his arm against his body under his shirt.
He reached Enador's walls without discovering why her lands had come to such a deplorable state; either the people had not known or he had not gotten so far as to ask. The walls were deserted, very irregular in a city of her reputed wealth. When he saw the gates hanging open on the west wall, he correctly guessed that Enador had died quite some time ago. It was not war that had killed her, for the enemies would have been sure to have razed the city. It was not plague, for there were none of the usual sacrificial funeral pyres that would have been built outside the walls.
He could smell nothing, but this could mean that whatever had overtaken her had done its work more than a year ago; he could tell that from the condition of the surrounding lands.
It had been the lizards from the Enstrich, he finally learned. The great war between Cynibal and Ihetah-Incalam had eventually reached northward to the great swamp. The gases and explosives and fires of raiding bands, then completely beyond the original causes of the war, fighting simply because they had been fighting for years and saw no reason for stopping, had probably upset some delicate balance. Except for the Sea, the Marshes were the last great ecological system that still functioned on earth. VanRoark and Tapp had seen only the part which was still being kept alive by the Sea; inland, over the horizon, the Marshes had turned to sterile mud and dead greenery. With no more food, stopped on the south by the poisonous still-burning ruins of Cynibal and Blackwoods Bay, on the west by the equally poisonous lands of the Old Nations, most of the huge reptiles had been forced to move northward to find food. Apparently the great city of Enador had provided the reptiles with an adequate meal in the year or so since VanRoark had boarded the
Garnet
here.
There were not even the usual complement of vagrants living here now. Enador was just a depopulated ruin like Mount Soril, only a bit more grand. VanRoark walked through the city, down its few broad avenues whose fountains were now dry and commemorative pylons edged with moss, like those on the Avenue of Victories in his home city. It had not been an utter rout; a long siege and then infiltration through the sewage systems seemed most likely to VanRoark. And there had been little panic; the looting was obviously methodical and well thought out.
VanRoark sat on the steps of a temple, resting and trying to figure out what his next move should be. He was quite deep in this thought, with the usual overlay of rim world bitterness, and so did not hear the dragon stepping out of the temple and walking slowly down the broad steps toward him. He did not notice in the least until the sun flashed on the crystalline growths of its hide; even then he thought the prismatic diffractions at the limits of his vision were only caused by his right eye's rebelliousness.
It was only when it had fastened into his right arm that he really saw it. His first reaction, aside from the normal reflex of trying to jerk free, was to curse Cavan-dish for not endowing the arm with superhuman strength; after all, it was a machine, was it not? Why then had not the old bastard at least given him something truly exceptional?
It was no stronger than the original had been, and seemed at the moment to be capable only of conveying pain to his mind. VanRoark swung his free hand at it, but the creature only released the arm, snapped at his fist and then fastened on again.
The left hand did not report pain. VanRoark looked frantically down at it and saw that it was bleeding jewels like those which covered the lizard's hide; not entirely, though, for the priestly robes of its last meal, purple embroidered with jet and gold, were still wrapped around the creature. A
reliquary
! VanRoark thought madly, a reliquary such as those behind the altars at home, where the bones and mummified hands of saints were preserved for the faithful's veneration. It could only be that, so wondrous the creature appeared. He reached out again with his hand, but this time to caress the encrusted body and flat, armored head.
The lizard did not bother to let go this time, but slashed out with its forefeet. Small scars were dragged out along VanRoark's arm, and they too bled rubies and amethysts. More colors than had been possessed by the army ran from the treasury of his left arm and splashed over an even more fantastic array of twisting and shattering hues. Perversely, all the right arm could do was to continue to feel the pain.
But perhaps Cavandish's work had not been entirely useless; if his normal eye could see such enchantment, such incredibly crafted beauty, then his right eye might see infinitely more.
He closed his left eye and concentrated on the right, trying to force the various filters into revolving, one after the other, within the eye, trying to capture the entire spectrum in one instant.
It showed him only a lizard, about four or five feet long, not counting the barbed tail, ludicrously tangled up in some odd colored silk; the colors of its skin were dulled into a smoky, vegetable luminescence.
Angry and near tears with disgust at his artificial parts, VanRoark closed off the eye and looked at the murderous reliquary with his left. And then he thought,
Here is a fine resting place for my bones, where all the lizard-kings may come and worship the tiny, distorted images of my body that will shine in each of the jewels; just as Smythe once told me that an insect sees a thousand images, one for each of its thousand eyes. And I will rest in its belly. . . . No! I will not, because I will rot away and the reliquary will digest even my bones—and then all that will be left will be the arm and eye, and those who come to worship me will begin laughing.
He thought of the eye, with the frayed wires that had been spliced into his brain, looking back at the world through the thousand jewel-eyes; he imagined the arm, its engravings still clean in the lizard's stomach, with only a little bone around where it had been riveted and welded onto him, making obscene gestures at the lizard-kings.
With a grating, twisted sob, he stood up and, catching the creature off balance, brought its skull down upon the sharp marble steps; and then a second time and a third until its own jewel blood came bursting out. Studded with opal now, its brains spilled out and it began to dry in the hot sun. Then, it was only garbage.
VanRoark was instantly sickened and vomited his lunch into the lizard's twitching, torn-up body. Now the swimming filigree of color was complete for his reliquary.
He turned and ran down the steps, smearing his clothes in his own food, blood and that of the reptile. He was only dimly aware that he was mad, but the awareness grew and he came to a stop before the city's harbor, much like that of his home. The double turret of Enador's remaining river monitor could be seen to the west, her hull awash, and the great batteries trained to the north and west, waiting.
VanRoark collapsed with exhaustion and disgust with himself. Once, he could not keep a single system of values and guides intact within him. Now there was only the barbed and armored construction of the rim nations and the Sea, while the surrounding person had fragmented, his various parts gone screaming off into places he could not name. Pain was still flooding up to him from both arms; the left one no longer bled torrents of gem-sand, but only blood from scars edged with dirt and purple threads. The right arm hurt even more, the pulses surging along its length with the beating of his heart. He held it up and saw that the teeth had not even scratched it. The engravings were still as clean as he had thought they would be in the lizard's belly; the rocket still fled from the stars, and the dragon, so much grander than the one at the temple despite its lack of jewels, was still wrapped around his index finger. It was perfect, untouched, but it hurt, inexplicably, terribly.
"Oh, God!" he cried and clamped his head into his hands; the metallic click when the steel hand hit the steel eye startled him for a moment. In the rages that followed, he was too incoherent to call upon anyone, let alone God.
He began his wandering in earnest on that day; before, even from Admiralty Square, there had been things to run from: his home, Prager, the Burn, and then Cavan-dish and his dead men's arm. Not that there was no longer anything of sufficient malevolence from which to run, but rather that there was no longer anything that could be called "VanRoark" who could do the running. He could run from himself: his grand, spectral set of memories of the rim nations could run from the much too human eye and arm they had left to him; his fading thoughts of life before Admiralty Square could run from the compounded desolation that had settled upon the world.
The failure of the army seemed to have removed the last props of sanity from the world, and this only increased his fragmentation. He had once worried whether he could still tell nightmare from the real world, but had given up considering that a problem since the two were often virtually indistinguishable.
Days varied appreciably in length from one to the next. The sun itself began a slight pulsation, its energy output shifting from hour to hour; his new eye allowed him to see that this pulsing was duplicated in the ultraviolet, infrared, and radio bands. He used to watch these radiations with a filter over the eye, and when he forgot what their changes meant, he thought them beautiful, like lines of smoke, stitched together with insubstantial gauze veils, drawn progressively outward along the lines of magnetic force.
He collapsed utterly around the memory-system of the rim nations, hanging whatever he could save from his ruin on its spiked armor and letting that which no longer fit trail along as best it might. He felt like the smoky trailings of energy, without will and now deprived of predictable purpose, radiating out into space from a breathing sun that appeared black, when his eye was focused so.
The madnesses came upon him more frequently now and more easily; he was not fighting them anymore. Once, he had broken twice in the same week—although normally he could count on two and a half to three months of uninterrupted sanity. An empty snail's shell, its side eroded by the coastal winds to expose its spiral patterns, had set him off; another time he'd seen an ancient road sign, where there was no road, showing the way to Mount Soril.
VanRoark knew of his vulnerability, but cared little for it; anything he might do now, and there was no reason to do anything, would be futile and meaningless. The madness was, in its way, just as safe and productive as his normal, daily life of food grubbing and speculation upon the real nature of his arm and eye. He dropped this last activity, though, after he'd broken, thinking himself to be the arm and the eye speculating on the nature of the body to which they had been chained.
The seven years that he spent blundering around the world were wanderings of the highest order, for he was more or less lost for most of that time. The varying rotational axes of the earth and perverse actions of the sun allowed him to make only the most rudimentary guesses as to his directions of travel; the sky had been useless many years before he had left home. It took him seven years to find the Sea again after he had fled southwest from Enador.
The lands he had walked upon embarrassed him before the Sea, as if the mere thought of them should infect the life that still flourished there. The flying fish and seabirds, the glowing manta-rays, shoals of silversides, and clean sand beaches, the wondrous power had not been diminished in the least by the failure of the army. True, he no longer spotted any smoke trails below the horizon; and he could never be sure if the booming report and white chalk trails which marked aircraft might be subtle products of the madnesses he had allowed himself. But here, at least, the memory of the great ships and the reflection of the planes' underbellies were still clean and uncluttered by their own wreckages. All the world was a graveyard of ruined craft and men, but only the Sea now bothered to bury them. There was a town named Kilbrittin situated at the very end of a peninsula in the fragmented, northern coastline of the world. It had long held the key to the old North Cape Confederation's endless fjords and harbors, and even the few probing fingers of the Sea that worked down into the territories of Raud. Like Charhampton, it was a fortress town, but there was still reason for its guns and walls to be kept in operating order: things were different in these regions, perhaps because they were so infused with the Sea, and despite the colder weather, the land was more productive. Territories of the broken Confederacy and Raud's northernmost Houses were still coherently organized and carried on a limited trade among themselves.
VanRoark thought them closer to the rim nations for this—and for the sadness that pervaded these lands. The ruins were much more orderly here: what no longer could be used was respectfully buried or disassembled; what no longer could be understood was put away to wait. Kilbrittin was fully aware it was dying and made no attempt to hide that fact from itself.
He found a strange peace here, with the storied fortresses looming above the streets everywhere, their harsh and brutal outlines softened by the winter's snow. When a seaplane landed outside the harbor to the west of the city and moored there for several days, he could feel only that peaceful remorse, without any traces of madness. He could walk down along the quays and admire the low sweep of the seaplane's lines and wings with the engines set high atop them away from the sea spray, and not remember the bomber's crew he and Cavandish had buried. He could look at the gutted hulk of an ancient cruiser being dismantled to rearm the fortresses, and not think too much of the
W. Lane
or the capital ship moored off the Burn.
He found work again in a cartography shop. People at Kilbrittin had become used to men with strange things growing on them, and his arm and eye aroused no more than some idle questions across the tavern's bar. Kilbrittin was not fully of the world, but neither was she of the rim nations, and this she also knew. She was Kilbrittin and nothing more; it was enough.