Part 30 (2/2)
They told her his name-it meant something like Second Child. An odd name. The way they said it suggested something rather das.h.i.+ng. Here in the lunar city, where children were scarce, perhaps it meant that he was lucky, or at least improbable. It carried connotations of a heavy and rare duty. A hero's name.
~ But who is he? What does he do? In their language, the words for doing were also words for going. The tutors started talking about great journeys, from which she understood that he was a sort of explorer.
~ I am of no great distinction, he said. None of us here are of great distinction. I was born on this grey moon, many hundreds of revolutions after the flight from Mars. We are not what we were.
Some of the tutors agreed with this sentiment, expressing what appeared to be quite conventional lamentations for their fallen state. A couple of the tutors patriotically objected on behalf of the lunar city, which, though falling far short of the lost glories of Mars, nevertheless prevailed, resolutely, against all adversity.
He turned to them for the first time, and interrupted before they could start to squabble. ~ I have seen the face of Mars, he said. I have cast my shadow on it. I have seen the ruins, and I know what we were, and what we lost.
Josephine said ~ You have seen Mars?
~ I am not clever, or beautiful, or learned, and I do not even say that I am especially brave. But my wings are strong. I fly well. Some say I fly the way we did when we flew over Mars. Once, long ago, our great-great-grandparents came here, across the dark. Now only a scattering of us are strong enough for that. We are not what we were. We have forgotten how to fly, because we have nowhere to go, except round and round in our little rooms, talking and talking.
The tutors took offence.
Josephine said ~ How?
~ There are ways. A better question is: how do I come back? I'm strong. One day I won't be strong enough, maybe.
~ Is it dangerous?
~ Yes. But we go only when our moon is closest to Mars. We go to learn the things that we have forgotten; to bring back what we can.
Privately she named him Orpheus.
The tutors interrupted to say that this fellow's work was of course very admirable, in a way that seemed to suggest that he answered to them, that he was a sort of go-fetch-it for the scholars of the lunar city, dispatched in their service to bring back fragments of the old world, sights and sounds and memories, curios and bits of old rock ...
Orpheus ignored them, and continued to stare at Josephine. ~ Is it dangerous? Yes. There are terrible things down there. Are you one of them?
~ I don't know what you mean.
~ The way you move is strange. The way you speak is strange. What are you? You are not her. She stopped, you started; moving in her body, but not her.
~ Who was she?
~ A dead woman. They haven't told you who she was? They should tell you. Did you ask? Is this a normal occurrence on the Blue Sphere?
~ Certainly not.
~ I would have forbidden it, if anyone had asked me.
~ Do they have to ask your permission?
~ No. But I would have stood in their path. You frighten me. I have survived sixteen crossings, there and back again, and I know when to be afraid.
~ What is it that you're frightened of? You come here and you jump in through the window and you tell me you're afraid of me-as if I asked to be here! And they keep me shut up here on the edge of the city and they won't tell me anything- ~ I hear that you wors.h.i.+p a ghost, you people in the Blue Sphere-that you have an invisible G.o.d, who watches from above and casts people into fire-a horrible thing!
~ No-you have it wrong.
~ You walked on the ground, and looked up at the stars, and made a G.o.d out of nothing. We looked down and saw the face of G.o.d beneath us. But now it is dead.
He hopped down from the window, scattering the tutors, and settled on the floor in the middle of the room. He began to tell a story.
A half-dozen generations had come and gone since the flight from the Countenance of Mars. They were long-lived, and slow to breed; slower, since their exile. On the Countenance, things had been very different.
There were no cities there. There were vast red plains and sharp, cloud-piercing mountains; there were black forests of tower-tall trees, whose roots fed on subterranean lakes a mile deep. You could sleep in the heights of those trees, curled up among the vines. You could lose yourself in a maze of mountain peaks and be alone with your thoughts for years at a time. The people of Mars crossed the red plains in flights, in flocks, in tribes and families and great s.h.i.+fting nations-on-the-move, their shadows streaming far beneath them. They flew, on sunlight and wind and aetheric currents.
(The tutors interjected, to debate the nature of aether all over again).
They were always in motion. They had no settled abodes, and needed none. Their nations had no borders. A nation of the people of Mars was not a place, but a route across the world, a pattern of migration. Each nation was an idea, an argument, a philosophy. The people came and went as they pleased. There were a hundred nations, a thousand flocks and tribes, uncounted millions of lives.
They built. They were nomads, but not primitives. They beautified the face of Mars. They made lodges, temples, libraries. They left signals, markers, border-stones, records of their constant travels. They built with their minds, with their hands, with clever tools and lost arts. A nation that migrated through the cold north built factories. The Nation of the Eye-migrants between the deserts of the equator and the great western mountain-carved stone, and carved the mountain-tops. The Nation of the Strong Lungs, who hunted through the forests of the south, worked trees and vines, roots and fungus.
The hundred nations of Mars made war-ceaselessly, joyfully, for sport or to settle philosophical differences. They were long-lived, restless, energetic, fearless. Airborne migrant nations clashed over the plains and the mountains, seizing prisoners and trophies. The Nation of the Three Questions fought the Nation of the Pinion for a thousand years, around and around the cool and windy southern pole. At first, they fought to resolve a difference of linguistics. Soon it became a matter of honour, and then something that defined them. Neither nation could win. Families, flocks, and tribes changed sides, learned new languages and ideas, switched colours, maintained the balance of power.
That was the world Orpheus' great-grandparents were born into. They had belonged to the Nation of the Pinion, and the Nation of the Breath, and the Nation of the Broken Claw, and other nations that no one now remembered. They had been warriors, thinkers, explorers, migrants, artists of flight. Some of them survived the flight; not all.
The tutors now began to show off, reciting their own hybrid and tangled ancestries, recalling the names of ancient Nations of Mars, like the Liars and the Hindwing and the Heart, and their attributes. It quickly became clear that there was hardly a single fact that they could all agree on, except that among all the nations of Mars, it was the Nation of the Eye that was most extraordinary. For example, the people of the Eye were the most jealous of their territory; the highest mountain of Mars was theirs. Their scholars cared little for philosophy and hardly at all for art, but instead studied the stars, watching the skies from their cold high peaks. It was their scholars, looking sunwards, who discovered the existence of the Blue Sphere; and whose investigations in the other direction, out into the dark, revealed the vast Purple Sphere, and beyond that the distant and dreadful Black Sphere.
What precisely was wrong with the Nation of the Eye? On that, the tutors and Orpheus couldn't quite agree. They diagnosed a variety of philosophical sicknesses-some of which Josephine thought she understood, and some of which would seem wicked only to a Martian. As Orpheus talked, she pictured the princes of the Eye, sometimes as a single one-eyed giant, and sometimes as if they were the grey sisters in the old fable, who shared one eye between them. They were scholars: they studied the spheres and wished to move as they did, in perfect revolutions about a still centre. They ceased their migration, settled on the peak of the great western mountain, and remained there for years. Those who would not settle were driven out-a wicked thing-or held prisoner-a wickeder thing-or killed, which on the whole the tutors seemed to consider the least wicked possibility.
They built fortifications. They closed the mountain to outsiders.
There was war, of course. This unnatural and depraved conduct aroused, as was right and proper, the outrage of other nations. The nations of the Pinion and the Three Questions came all the way across the red desert from the south to go to war over the foothills of the mountain.
In time, the war grew bitter. The Nation of the Eye could not be fought, could not be reasoned with. Their warriors had a terrible new strength. They had new weapons, new techniques, that could strike armies from the sky.
The great western mountain was the tallest thing on Mars by far, and because they held it for themselves, the Nation of the Eye declared themselves the natural rulers of Mars. They began to conquer. They made their scholars into generals, into princes. They destroyed the armies of the Pinion. They claimed authority to direct the migration of lesser nations. Something more than an insult; almost an atrocity. They razed the forests that were the hunting-grounds of the Strong Lungs. They seized the factories of the cold north.
They built prisons.
On the top of the great mountain, where the air was thin and the currents weak and only the strongest could fly, the Nation of the Eye built strange towering structures-temples, perhaps, or weapons, or devices for observing the night sky. Heroes of the nations of the Hand and the Pinion raided them, razed them; they were rebuilt.
What was the cause of this strange behaviour, this national sickness of soul? Some of the tutors attributed it to sin, or to an unfortunate side-effect of excessive study of the natural world, unleavened by spiritual pursuits. Two of the tutors attributed it to the influence of the stars, or unfriendly ent.i.ties that dwelled among them. Orpheus said it didn't matter.
How long did this war last? On that point, there was general disagreement, which quickly turned into a squabble. A matter of years, said Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon-things changed swiftly on Mars. Generations, said Silenus-the nations did not surrender easily to the Eye, and the Eye was not easily defeated. According to Hyacinth's mother's tradition, the decline of Mars had taken a thousand years.
What was the secret of the Eye's strength? On this point, the tutors were uncharacteristically close to agreement. The scholar-princes of the Eye had called down aid from the stars. Or perhaps it was better to say that they had called something up from the lower and darker spheres of the Cosmos-from the Purple Sphere, that vast world of storms and oceans and great proud beasts-or more likely from farther down in the Black Sphere-a world of cold and dark and howling ghosts-or perhaps from farther still, from indescribable and incomprehensible depths. In the fortresses of the Eye (so reported the heroes of the nations who'd escaped them) there were ghosts, darknesses that moved and whispered, chained shadows, freezing fogs, moods of sorrow and despair and hate that stalked the halls looking for a body to take hold of, rooms that held nothing but disembodied pain, thras.h.i.+ng at stone walls. All these dreadful things powered the Eye's engines of war. Who was master, and who was servant-the scholar-princes of the Eye, or the things they'd called up? It was hard to say. Perhaps the question had no meaning.
All the nations of Mars united against the Eye. All their disputes were set aside, for the first and last time in the history of Mars. In the end, they threw themselves in their millions at the mountain, and they drove the Eye back, and they destroyed the Eye's fortifications and temples, and they littered the mountain's slopes with ten thousand dead. Slowly-or quickly, depending on which of the tutors was right-the Eye's power faded. One by one the scholar-princes were hounded from their fortresses and put to death; and Mars died not long after.
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