Spring had always been a very unsure thing in those latitudes and in those times; but when the first floes of broken ice began to drift seaward from the frozen rivers to the west, he left the city and began traveling south along the old coastal roads.
Remarkably, there still was a coast road. It occurred to him that through all the massive upheavals and geographical changes which had twisted the earth, the coastline had remained substantially the same. He began to think about the Sea again, and was amazed that he should now regard its teeming life with the same odd sorrow he had felt for the city of Kilbrittin. His eye allowed him to see several more levels of life in the Sea: the pale green of lichens on the wings of manta-rays; when he switched filters he saw their cold life fade in contrast to the manta-rays, which now glowed a deep maroon. Shoals of fairy-shrimp looked like the night sky: only red instead of sapphire, in a sky of milk rather than jet.
He felt rather proud that none of this should have produced any insanity. It had been a full year since he had given himself any cause to doubt his senses. Van-Roark took all this to mean that he had reached some kind of armistice with the arm and eye. At times he caught himself admiring the arm, as fascinated by its numberless engravings as he had been when Cavandish first removed the cast.
The memory of the rim nations softened within him too: so much that neither the fortresses nor the seaplane at Kilbrittin could awaken the bitter fury which had once insured their survival in his mind.
I am old,
he thought.
* * *
There was a curving headland, like the one which circled the Burn, rising above the city on the north. An arm of these hills had extended into the Sea in earlier days, forming the roadstead to her great harbor. But now most of the rocks had been eaten away and the harbor was a walled garden of cypress trees and rushes; there were a few hulks of sailing ships set in the garden at random intervals like statuary put there to give the place a synthetic charm or novelty.
The city did not appear too far different from when he had left it; even so, VanRoark camped on the headlands that night, his eye probing the silent houses and the white line of the Avenue of Victories. He could see nothing against the Sea and the surrounding rocky lands, which retained the heat of the day; the city appeared as a blurred monotone, sometimes colored red, at other times white or black.
VanRoark awoke at dawn and ate a breakfast of dried fish he had brought from Kilbrittin. He rechecked his old pistol and made sure he could reach it quickly; there were only three full magazines left.
VanRoark entered through the little Chandlers' Gate on the northern side of the city, very close to where the Goerlin River had emptied into the harbor. Old Navy Dock ran out into the mud and dust now; the rusted hulls of the tugboats and sailing launches were still tied to the dock, covered in dirt and strangler vines.
He did not go to Admiralty Square and similarly avoided the old Thurber District. His house was reasonably intact, though it had probably been vacated at least two years ago. They had left calmly, with plenty of thought, as was their manner; nothing was left behind which could not have been conceivably taken on a long journey, given horses and a wagon. There was only a smashed windowpane in his room, and the frail skeleton of the gull that had done it rested on the bare floor; its blood had stained the boards a darker shade of mahogany beneath the dust.
VanRoark had hoped he might feel an entirely sane ruefulness at his former home; but although he remembered all the things he had done in it, he could feel nothing. A touch of the fits, he mused, would at least have shown some respect for his parents.
It was still early. VanRoark moved about the sections of the city he had known, around the waterfront districts and rows of chandleries that had been given up years before he had left for the Wars. He summoned up enough courage to venture into the Thurber; the fantastic architecture the dead envoys had brought with them was eroded into even more incredible shapes by the Sea and desert winds: spires and leaning minarets, miniature temples and forts that made the southerners feel at home on the North Sea's shore; soaring, towered embassies that had ended in broken stone and mortar, left behind by their excellencies from Iannarrow and Mountjoy.
Again nothing; he could not even remember her face.
By early afternoon VanRoark had toured most of the areas he had wanted to see. Those which had been missed would have failed to stir him anyway, so he began walking along the Avenue of Victories toward the Artillery Gate.
The cathedral was about a quarter of a mile beyond the gate; he wanted to see it again, for it reminded him of Brampton Hall. The old words of Tapp's drunken song drifted back to him for the first time in years.
Mosses had grown up between the stone slabs, bordering them with green and leaving only a little stained white in the middle. Small grasses and shrubs, saltbrush, had further split up the road. Around the steps of the cathedral the vegetation died out. Aside from some shattered panels in the rose window and the windows flanking it, the huge cross-shaped building appeared virtually unchanged.
VanRoark moved slowly up the broad sweep of steps, carefully searching himself for some small swellings of memory or feeling. There was only the old awe and wonder he had always felt for so vast and magnificent a creation, and the words of Tapp's song. The mosaics of colored glass and sea-shell still rose within the entrance arches of the church, their saints and angels and praying men brilliant and glittering in the indirect sunlight. He wondered what might have caused the abandonment of the town and the church. Certainly not war or raiders; the gold leaf was still on the domes of the transept wings and wound around the serpentine columns before him, though a little worn away by the weather. A single statue, he could not identify who it might represent, had shaken loose from the portico roof and lay broken off to his right. Its fellows, the compassionate popes and archangels, looked down upon it with their calm eyes of inlaid alabaster, opal and ebony, their scepters and shepherds' crooks pointed upward, their left hands gently extended downward to the smashed figure.
VanRoark felt something growing within him at last: the sorrow of Kilbrittin and her fortresses and flying boats.
He advanced into the shadowed silences, through the grills of wrought iron and to the great bronze doors, aswarm with saints and the damned. He was reminded of his arm, but there were no ships on the doors, no hunting parties or fair ladies, no dragons or knights.
Then he saw the ships again and wondered if he had suddenly slipped into one of his spells. He looked up to the vast roof of the cathedral and to the great dome, almost an eighth of a mile distant from where he stood; the whole cycle of birth, death, damnation and salvation, which was the living skin of the cathedral, was repeated, drawn together from its rambling exteriors and hidden chapels and magnified in grandeur a hundred times. All the Twelve Great Books were illustrated, the false-Armageddons from which so many saints had unwillingly walked away. There were horses, wild with the sight of battle and Heaven, running from the sacred fields, their brocaded hangings flying in a wind of amethyst and silver. There were tanks, blasted and destroyed, whose sense of defeat came from the artisans who had shaped them from pictures in old books, thinking them to have been as marvelously alive as the battle-horses, unicorns and gryphons that carried men in a spiraling path around the dome.
Part of the dome had either collapsed or been holed by a dud shell. The sunlight streamed down through it in dust so thick as to make it appear almost liquid. It joined other streams, colored from ruby to turquoise by the windows, and splashed down over the floor and rows of aircraft that sat parked upon it.
VanRoark believed all of it, until his eye got down to floor level where it should have been swept along the empty, geometrically patterned floor by the closing lines of pillars to the main altar. Instead, sitting with a peace and tranquility that was almost jarringly discordant with their appearance were three rows of big fighter aircraft; the dusty, silent torrents of colored light had turned their stained gray and olive battle paint into soft harlequins. Their high-set wings were tucked back against the hulls like sleeping birds. Now the sorrow descended on him without any madness or confusion. Again he saw a discordance, this time in the smooth, flowing contours of the ships, with the colors from the windows—they might have been poured and shaped from their molten substance—and how they contrasted with the baroque swirlings of men and nations racing across the ceiling.
Why?
Maybe they had been brought here by worshipers, but that made no sense; these were creations of such as the rim nations and therefore to be despised. Perhaps they had landed out of chance or plan in the stony summer-hard arm of the Greenbelt that passed near the city, and then taxied, their wings reverently folded and their bomb shackles briefly dipped in the holy water font, into the abandoned church for protection.
Until when for what?
There was nothing to answer any of this. They lifted above him as he walked forward, the first things he had ever seen that the cathedral could not overwhelm with either its size or beauty. He felt along their flanks, which were cool or warm depending upon whether they had been in shadows or colored light; he had not done that for years either.
VanRoark expected that his mind would speed up, awash and near drowning with this mystery; perversely, it slowed down and became frosted and softened with the dust of the ships.
There were no thoughts, not a single grand conception he could grasp here. He knew that a hunt for meanings or a sign would be wrong. The only fragment clear to him was just what he could see and feel.
And as he saw and touched, he could sense the menacing, thorn-armored memories of the rim nations become softened with the funereal dust, and speckled with the endless colors. Suddenly the system was not so brutal and demanding. It lost its triumphant bitterness; it only was.
The aircraft were pointed away from the altar; he was at the top of the ebon steps, his back to the great altar-block of carved crystal. The twin exhausts of each plane gaped back at him, the tops of the vertical stabilizers about level with his eyes.
VanRoark stood there, looking over their dolphin hulls as he had done with the aircraft at the Burn: the flowings of color moved across their wings, across the flattened, rotted rubber of their landing wheels.
Then he moved from the altar, over the crypt where his grandfather had been buried, and down the north aisle, between the planes and chapels. He had played in the dark, isolated chapels when a child. He would sit quietly off to the side, surrounded by cherubim or between the long, stone plaques that proclaimed the virtues of some dead bounder, and stare wonderingly at the people who would come there. They were different in his thought, for they scorned the high altar's magnificence, almost as if they wanted to pray to a lesser god than that which was represented there.
In one of the small chapels he saw the first evidence of looting; a small window had been removed and the gold inlays of the little altar had apparently been pried off.
The chapel had been built to contain a reliquary: THE HAND OF WOLFE, a plaque told him. The thieves must have been after the dust of the mummified hand because the reliquary case had been discarded under a bench.
Appropriately, the case had been shaped like a hand, but in all its other aspects it was quite unlike the ornate, usually overwrought candy boxes they used for the thigh bones and skulls of others. Maybe that was why he was able to touch it, pick it up and hold it up to the milky brown sunlight of the remaining alabaster windows, and think only briefly of the lizard and Enador; that madness had been lost among a hundred similar and a thousand more revolting ones.
The hand was hollow, to contain the saint's; its outer skin was outlined by the endless flowing strands of poured silver. It was as if someone had made a wax mold of a fine hand, strong but still suggestive of sensitivity and gentleness, and then carefully traced the molten silver over it, letting the interstices of strings melt into each other until the whole hand was not covered but defined by the spider's webbing, and the wax would have been melted away.
VanRoark noticed that while he admired it, he held it in his right hand. The reliquary hand was what the steel hand might have created if it was striving to approximate, but not duplicate, its own life—just as a man's hand had once tried to invest the steel arm with the qualities of his own.
He decided to put it into his backpack and examine it later; he walked back to the nave, ducking to miss the javelin noses of the planes.
VanRoark did not know exactly where he was going then, so he began drifting south again, along the coastal road he had traveled years ago. Then, he had been filled with a boiling, reasonably solid purpose. Now, he had only a vague conception of what he might do and where he might go, as if he could not quite reveal it to himself yet.
* * *
He left the Sea at Farnbrough Bay. There were few people along the way; a troop from Larine going to extract some tribute from what was left of New Svald was about the largest party he encountered. There were no young men seeking jeweled lizard hides.
Oddly, he found the Belt, or at least the southern portions of it, supporting some life beyond saltbrush and wolf-spiders. Small, stunted fruit trees, scarcely taller than himself, had sprung up at random intervals, where the infrequent rains had washed away enough poison to let them grow. They fed him as he crossed inland across the Belt. The perversity of the world's weather for once helped him, and an early freeze allowed him to cross the Shirka River and enter Svald.
It had taken him six years to find the Sea, but only two to find the train.
He was moving in a southeasterly direction, across the desolated Old Nations' lands, toward Blackwoods; Cavandish had said he was driving in that direction for fuel.