Far off, great shapes loomed — things a hundred times larger than a man. Some seemed ships and some clouds; one was a living head without a body; another had a hundred heads. In time they were lost in the green haze, and I saw below me a plain of muck and silt, where stood a palace greater than our House Absolute, though it lay in ruins.

I knew then that I was dead, and that for me death held no release. A moment later I knew also that I was dreaming, that with the crowing of the cock (whose bright black eyes would not again be pierced by the magicians) I would wake to find myself sharing the bed with Baldanders. Dr. Tabs would beat him, and we would go forth in search of Agia and Jolenta. I gave myself to the dream; but almost, I think, I had rent the Veil of Maya, that glorious spinning of appearances hiding the last reality.

Then it was whole once more, though fluttering still in the icy winds that blow from Reality to Dream and carry us with them like so many leaves. The “palace” that had suggested the House Absolute was my city of Nessus . Vast as it had been, it seemed larger than ever now; many sections of the Wall had fallen like our Citadel wall, making it truly an infinite city. Many towers had fallen too, their walls of brick and stone crumbled like the rinds of so many rotten melons. Mackerel schooled where yearly the Curators had paced in solemn procession to the cathedral.

I tried to swim and discover that I was swimming already, my arms and legs stroking rhythmically without my willing it. I stopped, but I did not (as I had expected) float to the surface. Drifting torpidly in an unseen current, I discovered the channel of Gyoll stretched below me, crossed by its proud bridges still, but robbed of its river now that water was everywhere. Drowned things waited there, decayed and decked with green and streaming weeds: wrecked vessels and tumbled columns. I tried to expel the final breath from my lungs, that I might drown as well. Air indeed bubbled forth; but the chill water that rushed in did not bring with it the chill of death.

Still I sank, ever so slowly, until I stood where I had never thought to stand, in the mud and filth at the bottom of the river. It was like standing upon the deck of Tzadkiel’s ship, for there was scarcely pressure enough on the soles of my bare feet to hold me down. The current urged me to go with it, and I felt myself a ghost who might be dispersed with a puff of breath if only the breath muttered words of exorcism.

I walked — or rather, say that I half swam and feigned to walk. Each step raised a cloud of silt that drifted beside me like a living creature. When I paused and looked up, I beheld green Lune, a shapeless blur above the unseen waves.

When I looked down again, a yellowed skull lay at my feet, half-buried in the mud. I picked it up; the lower jaw was gone, but otherwise it was whole and showed no injury. From its size and unworn teeth, I guessed it to have been a boy’s or a young man’s. Some other, then, had drowned in Gyoll long ago, perhaps some apprentice who had died too long before my time for me to hear his short, sad tale, perhaps only a boy from the tenements that had crowded the filthy waters.

Or perhaps it was the skull of some poor woman, strangled and thrown into the river; so women and children, and men as well, had perished in Nessus every night. It came to me that when the Increate had chosen me his instrument to destroy the land, only babes and beasts had died in innocence.

And yet I felt that the skull had been a boy’s, and the boy had somehow died for me, the victim of Gyoll when Gyoll had been cheated of his due sacrifice. I took it by the eyes, shook out the mud, and carried it with me.

Long stairs of stone descended deep into the channel, mute testimony to the number of times its levees had been raised and its landings extended from above. I climbed them all, though I might have floated up nearly as readily.

The tenements had fallen, every one. I saw a mass of tiny fish, several hundred at least, clustered in the wreckage they scattered in sparks of argent fire at my approach revealing a bleached corpse partly devoured. After that I did not dismiss their schools again.

Doubtless there were many such dead in the city, which had once been so large as to excite the admiration of all the world; but what of me? Was I not another drifting corpse? My arm was cold to my own touch, and the weight of water burdened my lungs; even to myself, I seemed to walk in sleep. Yet I still moved or believed I moved against all currents, and my cold eyes saw.

The locked and rusted gate of the necropolis stood before me, wisps of mazed kelp threading its spikes like the mountain paths, the unchanged symbol of my old exile. I launched myself upward, swimming several strokes and thus flourishing the skull without intending it. Suddenly ashamed, I released it; but it appeared to follow me, propelled by the motion of my hand.

Before I had embarked upon the ship of the Hierodules that was to carry me to the ship of Tzadkiel, I had crouched in air, surrounded by circling, singing skulls. Here spread the reality this ceremony had foretold. I knew that; I understood it, and I was certain in my knowledge — the New Sun must do what I now did, going weightless through his drowned world, ringed by her dead. The loss of her ancient continents was the price Urth had paid; this journey was the price I had to pay, and I was paying it at this moment.

The skull settled softly upon the sodden earth in which the pailpers of Nessus had been laid, generation after generation. I picked it up again. What words had the lochage addressed to me in the bartizan?

The exultant Talarican, whose madness manifested itself as a consuming interest in the lowest aspects of human existence, claimed that the persons who live by devouring the garbage of others number two gross thousands — that if a pauper were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we should live forever, because Nessus breeds and breaks men faster than we respire.

They leap no longer, the water having leaped for them. Their misery, at least, is ended; and perhaps some survived.

When I reached the mausoleum where I had played as a boy, I found its long-jammed door shut, the force of the onrushing sea having completed a motion begun perhaps a century ago. I laid the skull on its threshold and swam hard for the surface, a surface that danced with golden light.

Chapter XLVIII — Old Lands and New

EATA’S BOAT was nowhere in sight. To write, as I must write, that I swam all that day and most of the following night seems preposterous, yet it was so. The water the others had called salt did not seem salt to me; I drank when I thirsted and was refreshed by it. I was seldom tired; when I was, I rested on the waves, floating.

I had already discarded all my clothes except my trousers, and now I slipped those off. From an old habit of prudence, I examined the pockets before I abandoned them; there were three small brass coins there, the gift of Ymar. Their legends, like their faces, had worn away; and they were dark with verdigris — in appearance precisely the ancient things they were. I let them slip from my fingers, with all Urth.

Twice I saw great fish, which were perhaps dangerous; but they appeared to pose no threat to me. Of the water women, of whom Idas had been, perhaps, the smallest, I saw nothing. Nor did I see Abaia, their master. Nor Erebus, nor any other such monstrous thing.

Night came with teeming stars in her train, and I floated on my back and gazed at them, rocked by the warm arms of Ocean. How many rich worlds flew above me then! Once when I had fled from Abdiesus, I had huddled in the lea of a boulder and stared at these same stars, trying to imagine their companions and how men might live upon them and lift cities that knew less of evil than ours. Now I knew how foolish all such dreams must be, for I had seen another world and found it stranger than anything I might have imagined. Nor could I have dreamed the heteroclite crewmen I had met aboard Tzadkiel’s ship, nor the jibers; and yet both had come from Briah, even as I; and Tzadkiel had not scrupled to take them into his service.