Alone.
It was clear that he could not go where all of them were summoned unless his desire were as strong as faith. But how could he desire another world than this one? He studied again and again the descriptions in the Architecture, but he found nowhere anything to convince him that There he would find a world anything like as rich, as deeply strange yet just as deeply familiar, as this one he lived in.
Always Spring there: but he wanted winter too, gray days and rain. He wanted it all, nothing left out; he wanted his fire, his long memories and what started them in his soul, his small comforts, his troubles even. He wanted the death he had often lately contemplated, and a place beside the others he had dug places for.
He looked up. Amid the constellation of the library’s lamps reflected in the windows the moon had risen. It was just crescent, fragile and white. When it was full, Midsummer Day, they would depart.
Paradise. A world elsewhere.
He didn’t really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn’t even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn’t want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn’t equal to. He didn’t want it to have taken his wife from him.
He didn’t want to be marched off to another world he couldn’t imagine; a little world that couldn’t be as big as this one.
Yet it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.
It couldn’t contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn’t contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.
But it does, said the breezes.
Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.
Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.
Smoky looked up. The drapes at the window moved. “Alice?” he said.
He got up, pushing the heavy book to the floor. He went to the tall window and looked out. The walled garden was a dark vestibule; the door open in the wall led to moonlit turf and misty evening.
She’s far, she’s there, a Little Breeze said.
“Alice?”
She’s near, she’s here, said another; but whatever it was that seemed to proceed toward him through the windy darkness and the garden, he didn’t recognize it. He stood a long time looking into the night as into a face, as though it might converse with him, and explain many things: he thought it could, but all he heard it say, or himself say, was a name.
The moon rose out of sight above the house. Smoky climbed slowly up to his bed. About the time the moon set, pale horns indicating the place where the sleepy sun would soon rise, Smoky awoke, feeling he hadn’t been asleep for a moment, as imsomniacs do; he dressed himself in an old frayed dressing gown with braided edges around the cuffs and pockets, and climbed up to the top of the house, turning on as he went the hall-sconces that some thoughtless person had left off.
Lit by planetshine and daybreak, the sleepless system didn’t seem to move, any more than the morning star outside the round window seemed to: and yet it did move. Smoky watched it, thinking of the night when by lamplight he had read out from the Ephemeris the degrees, minutes and seconds of the stars’ ascensions, and felt, when he had set the last moon of Jupiter, the infinitesimal shudder of its quickening. And heard the first steel croquet-ball fall otherwise unaided into the waiting hand of the absurd overbalancing wheel. Saved. He remembered the feeling.
He put his hand on the wheel’s black case, feeling it tick over far more steadily than his own heart; and more patient too, and a hardier thing altogether. He pushed open the round window, letting in a glad rush of birdsong, and looked out over the tiled roofs. Another nice day. What is so rare. You could see a long way south from this height, he noticed; you could see the steeple at Meadowbrook, the roofs of Plainfield. Amid them the greening clumps of woods were misty; beyond the towns the woods thickened into the great Wild Wood on whose edge Edgewood stood, which went on growing always deeper and thicker toward the South far farther than the eye could see.
Only the Brave
They came to the heart of the forest, but it was a deserted kingdom. They had come no closer to any Parliament, or any closer either to her whom Auberon sought, whose name he had forgotten.
“How far can you go into the woods?” Fred asked.
Auberon knew the answer to that. “Halfway,” he said. “Then you start coming back out again.”
“Not this woods though,” Fred said. His steps had slowed; he plucked up moss and wormy earth with every footstep. He put his feet down.
“Which way?” Auberon said. But from here all ways were one.
He had seen her: he had seen her more than once: had seen her far off, moving brightly amid the forest’s dark dangers, seeming at home there; once standing alone pensive in the tigery shade (he was sure, almost sure, it had been she), once hurrying away, a crowd of small beings at her feet, she hadn’t turned to see him though one of those with her had, sharp ears, yellow eyes, a beast’s unmeaning smile. Always she seemed to be headed elsewhere, purposefully; and when he followed she wasn’t where he went.
He would have called to her, if he hadn’t been unable to remember her name. He had sorted through the alphabet to jog his memory, but it had turned to wet leaves, to staghorn, snails’ shells, fauns’ feet; it all seemed to spell her, but gave him no name. And then she had escaped, not having noticed him, and he was only deeper in than before.
Now he was at the center, and she wasn’t there either, whatever her name was.
Brown breasts? Brown something. Laurel, or cobweb, something like that; bramble, or something that began with a bee, or a sea.
“Annaway,” Fred said. “This looks like as far as I go.” His poncho was stiff and tattered, his pant-legs all fray; his toes protruded from the mouths of his ruined galoshes. He tried to raise one foot from the ground, but it wouldn’t rise. His toes gripped earth.
“Wait,” said Auberon.
“No help for it,” Fred said. “Nest of robins in my hair. Nice. Okay.”
“But come on,” Auberon said. “I can’t go on without you.”
“Oh, I’m comin’,” said Fred, budding. “Still comin’, still guidin’. Oney not walkin’.” Between his great rooting toes a crowd of brown mushrooms had sprung up. Auberon looked up, up, up at him. His knuckles doubled, tripled, turned to hundreds. “Hey m’man,” he said. “Lookin’ at God all day, yunnastan. Gots to catch some rays, scuse me,” and his face tilted back disappearing into bole as he reached up toward the treetops with a thousand greening fingers. Auberon gripped his trunk.
“No,” he said. “Damn it now, don’t.”
He sat down, helpless, at Fred’s foot. Now he was lost for sure. What stupid, stupid madness of desire had propelled him here, here where she was not, this princedom of nobody’s where she had never been, where he was unable to remember anything of her but his desire for her. He put his head in his hands, despairing.