第 21 页

The forest face was forbidding and enormously high. It was so squarely turned to the sea that it looked as though it had been planed by tools. Maskull strode along in the shade of the trees, but kept his head constantly turned away from them, toward the sea - there it was more cheerful. The creek, when he reached it, proved to be broad and flat-banked. It was not a river, but an arm of the sea. Its still, dark green water curved around a bend out of sight, into the forest. The trees on both banks overhung the water, so that it was completely in shadow.

He went as far as the bend, beyond which another short reach appeared. A man was sitting on a narrow shelf of bank, with his feet in the water. He was clothed in a coarse, rough hide, which left his limbs bare. He was short, thick, and sturdy, with short legs and a long, powerful arms, terminating in hands of an extraordinary size. He was oldish. His face was plain, slablike, and expressionless; it was full of wrinkles, and walnut-coloured. Both face and head were bald, and his skin was tough and leathery. He seemed to be some sort of peasant, or fisherman; there was no trace in his face of thought for others, or delicacy of feeling. He possessed three eyes, of different colors - jade-green, blue, and ulfire.

In front of him, riding on the water, moored to the bank, was an elementary raft, consisting of the branches of trees, clumsily corded together.

Maskull addressed him. "Are you another of the wise men of the Wombflash Forest?"

The man answered him in a gruff, husky voice, looking up as he did so. "I'm a fisherman. I know nothing about wisdom."

"What name do you go by?"

"Polecrab. What's yours?"

"Maskull. If you're a fisherman, you ought to have fish. I'm famishing."

Polecrab grunted, and paused a minute before answering.

"There's fish enough. My dinner is cooking in the sands now. It's easy enough to get you some more."

Maskull found this a pleasant speech.

"But how long will it take?" he asked.

The man slid the palms of his hands together, producing a shrill, screeching noise. He lifted his feet from the water, and clambered onto the bank. In a minute or two a curious little beast came crawling up to his feet, turning its face and eyes up affectionately, like a dog. It was about two feet long, and somewhat resembled a small seal, but had six legs, ending in strong claws.

"Arg, go fish!" said Polecrab hoarsely.

The animal immediately tumbled off the bank into the water. It swam gracefully to the middle of the creek and made a pivotal dive beneath the surface, where it remained a great while.

"Simple fishing," remarked Maskull. "But what's the raft for?"

"To go to sea with. The best fish are out at sea. These are eatable."

"That arg seems a highly intelligent creature."

Polecrab grunted again. "I've trained close on a hundred of them. The bigheads learn best, but they're slow swimmers. The narrowheads swim like eels, but can't be taught. Now I've started interbreeding them - he's one of them."

"Do you live here alone?"

"No, I've got a wife and three boys. My wife's sleeping somewhere, but where the lads are, Shaping knows."

Maskull began to feel very much at home with this unsophisticated being.

"The raft's all crazy," he remarked, staring at it. "If you go far out in that, you've got more pluck than I have."

"I've been to Matterplay on it," said Polecrab.

The arg reappeared and started swimming to shore, but this time clumsily, as if it were bearing a heavy weight under the surface. When it landed at its master's feet, they saw that each set of claws was clutching a fish - six in all. Polecrab took them from it. He proceeded to cut off the heads and tails with a sharp-edged stone which he picked up; these he threw to the arg, which devoured them without any fuss.

Polecrab beckoned to Maskull to follow him and, carrying the fish, walked toward the open shore, by the same way that he had come. When they reached the sands, he sliced the fish, removed the entrails, and digging a shallow hole in a patch of violet sand, placed the remainder of the carcasses in it, and covered them over again. Then he dug up his own dinner. Maskull's nostrils quivered at the savoury smell, but he was not yet to dine.

Polecrab, turning to go with the cooked fish in his hands, said, "These are mine, not yours. When yours are done, you can come back and join me, supposing you want company."

"How soon will that be?"

"About twenty minutes," replied the fisherman, over his shoulder.

Maskull sheltered himself in the shadows of the forest, and waited. When the time had approximately elapsed, he disinterred his meal, scorching his fingers in the operation, although it was only the surface of the sand which was so intensely hot. Then he returned to Polecrab.

In the warm, still air and cheerful shade of the inlet, they munched in silence, looking from their food to the sluggish water, and back again. With every mouthful Maskull felt his strength returning. He finished before Polecrab, who ate like a man for whom time has no value. When he had done, he stood up.

"Come and drink," he said, in his husky voice.

Maskull looked at him inquiringly.

The man led him a little way into the forest, and walked straight up to a certain tree. At a convenient height in its trunk a hole had been tapped and plugged. Polecrab removed the plug and put his mouth to the aperture, sucking for quite a long time, like. a child at its mother's breast. Maskull, watching him, imagined that he saw his eyes growing brighter.

When his own turn came to drink, he found the juice of the tree somewhat like coconut milk in flavour, but intoxicating. It was a new sort of intoxication, however, for neither his will not his emotions were excited, but only his intellect - and that only in a certain way. His thoughts and images were not freed and loosened, but on the contrary kept labouring and swelling painfully, until they reached the full beauty of an aper?u, which would then flame up in his consciousness, burst, and vanish. After that, the whole process started over again. But there was never a moment when he was not perfectly cool, and master of his senses. When each had drunk twice, Polecrab replugged the hole, and they returned to their bank.

"Is it Blodsombre yet?" asked Maskull, sprawling on the ground, well content.

Polecrab resumed his old upright sitting posture, with his feet in the water. "Just beginning," was his hoarse response.

"Then I must stay here till it's over.... Shall we talk?"

"We can," said the other, without enthusiasm.

Maskull glanced at him through half-closed lids, wondering if he were exactly what he seemed to be. In his eyes he thought he detected a wise light.

"Have you travelled much, Polecrab?"

"Not what you would call travelling."

"You tell me you've been to Matterplay - what kind of country is that?"

"I don't know. I went there to pick up flints."

"What countries lie beyond it?"

"Threal comes next, as you go north. They say it's a land of mystics... I don't know."

"Mystics?"

"So I'm told.... Still farther north there's Lichstorm."

"Now we're going far afield."

"There are mountains there - and altogether it must be a very dangerous place, especially for a full-blooded man like you. Take care of yourself."

"This is rather premature, Polecrab. How do you know I'm going there?"

"As you've come from the south, I suppose you'll go north."

"Well, that's right enough," said Maskull, staring hard at him. "But how do you know I've come from the south?"

"Well, then, perhaps you haven't - but there's a look of Ifdawn about you."

"What kind of look?"

"A tragical look," said Polecrab. He never even glanced at Maskull, but was gazing at a fixed spot on the water with unblinking eyes.

"What lies beyond Lichstorm?" asked Maskull, after a minute or two.

"Barey, where you have two suns instead of one - but beyond that fact I know nothing about it.... Then comes the ocean."

"And what's on the other side of the ocean?"

"That you must find out for yourself, for I doubt if anybody has ever crossed it and come back."

Maskull was silent f or a little while.

"How is it that your people are so unadventurous? I seem to be the only one travelling from curiosity."

"What do you mean by 'your people'?"

"True - you don't know that I don't belong to your planet at all. I've come from another world, Polecrab."

"What to find?"

"I came here with Krag and Nightspore - to follow Surtur. I must have fainted the moment I arrived. When I sat up, it was night and the others had - vanished. Since then I've been travelling at random."

Polecrab scratched his nose. "You haven't found Surtur yet?"

"I've heard his drum taps frequently. In the forest this morning I came quite close to him. Then two days ago, in the Lusion Plain, I saw a vision - a being in man's shape, who called himself Surtur."

"Well, maybe it was Surtur."

"No, that's impossible," replied Maskull reflectively. "It was Crystalman. And it isn't a question of my suspecting it - I know it."

"How?"

"Because this is Crystalman's world, and Surtur's world is something quite differently

"That's queer, then," said Polecrab.

"Since I've come out of that forest," proceeded Maskull, talking half to himself, "a change has come over me, and I see things differently. Everything here looks much more solid and real in my eyes than in other places so much so that I can't entertain the least doubt of its existence. It not only looks real, it is real - and on that I would stake my life.... But at the same time that it's real, it is false."

"Like a dream?"

"No - not at all like a dream, and that's just what I want to explain. This world of yours - and perhaps of mine too, for that matter - doesn't give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort. I know it's really here at this moment, and it's exactly as we're seeing it, you and I. Yet it's false. It's false in this sense, Polecrab. Side by side with it another world exists, and that. other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core. And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing."

"Perhaps there is such another world," said Polecrab huskily. "But did that vision also seem real and false to you?"

"Very real, but not false then, for then I didn't understand all this. But just because it was real, it couldn't have been Surtur, who has no connection with reality."

"Didn't those drum taps sound real to you?"

"I had to hear them with my ears, and so they sounded real to me. Still, they were somehow different, and they certainly came from Surtur. If I didn't hear them correctly, that was my fault and not his."

Polecrab growled a little. "If Surtur chooses to speak to you in that fashion, it appears he's trying to say something."

"What else can I think? But, Polecrab, what's your opinion - is he calling me to the life after death?"

The old man stirred uneasily. "I'm a fisherman," he said, after a minute or two. "I live by killing, and so does everybody. This life seems to me all wrong. So maybe life of any kind is wrong, and Surtur's world is not life at all, but something else."

"Yes, but will death lead me to it, whatever it is?"

"Ask the dead," said Polecrab, "and not a living man."

Maskull continued. "In the forest I heard music and saw a light, which could not have belonged to this world. They were too strong for my senses, and I must have fainted for a long time. There was a vision as well, in which I saw myself killed, while Nightspore walked on toward the light, alone."

Polecrab uttered his grunt. "You have enough to think over."

A short silence ensued, which was broken by Maskull.

"So strong is my sense of the untruth of this present life, that it may come to my putting an end to myself." The fisherman remained quiet and immobile.

Maskull lay on his stomach, propped his face on his hands, and stared at him. "What do you think, Polecrab? Is it possible for any man, while in the body, to gain a closer view of that other world than I have done?"

"I am an ignorant man, stranger, so I can't say. Perhaps there are many others like you who would gladly know."

"Where? I should like to meet them."

"Do you think you were made of one stuff, and the rest of mankind of another stuff?"

"I can't be so presumptuous. Possibly all men are reaching out toward Muspel, in most cases without being aware of it."

"In the wrong direction," said Polecrab.

Maskull gave him a strange look. "How so?"

"I don't speak from my own wisdom," said Polecrab, "for I have none; but I have just now recalled what Broodviol once told me, when I was a young man, and he was an old one. He said that Crystalman tries to turn all things into one, and that whichever way his shapes march, in order to escape from him, they find themselves again face to face with Crystalman, and are changed into new crystals. But that this marching of shapes (which we call 'forking') springs from the unconscious desire to find Surtur, but is in the opposite direction to the right one. For Surtur's world does not lie on this side of the one, which was the beginning of life, but on the other side; and to get to it we must repass through the one. But this can only be by renouncing our self-life, and reuniting ourselves to the whole of Crystalman's world. And when this has been done, it is only the first stage of the journey; though many good men imagine it to be the whole journey.... As far as I can remember, that is what Broodviol said, but perhaps, as I was then a young and ignorant man, I may have left out words which would explain his meaning better."