Outside on the low brown foothills of Monar lay the first snow of the season, drifted up against the stone intake walls and sheep enclosures. The pack animals were fractious, the wind bitter. They travelled slowly, but the dwarf, who had been sleeping in some straw, did not catch up with them until much later.
When he did, he said, “This ‘bloated ghost’ you speak of: he was the finest airboatman of them all.”
And that night, huddled by a dying fire in the hills above the distant city, he continued: “At Mingulay he flew one machine against eight. Cooking rats in the sun at noon we watched, my long-dead friends and I, from the beleagured city. His boat was old, his crew haggard; the drugs he took to stay awake had made him shake and stagger; but how that boat spun and turned, how it dropped like a hawk amid the violet bolts of the power cannon! How the brassy light of the South glanced off its crystal hull! Benedict Paucemanly: seven wrecks dotted the arid plain before the siege was lifted; the eighth he rammed afterwards, in an oversight.
“But war was never enough for Paucemanly. When the world was still young (and the Methven still casting their shadows across it) he flew round it. I know, for I was with him, a dwarf of few summers who fancied himself an adventurer. We crossed the oceans, Hornwrack, and all the broken continents! Deserts drifted beneath our hull, rapt in their millennial declining dream. At the poles, aurorae cascaded and roared above us like spectral rivers. We sampled the tropics; the equatorial air burned about us. That was Paucemanly’s first flight in the Heavy Star. But if war failed to satisfy him, so did the world. He grew bored. He grew melancholy and thin.
“He began to stare each night at the wan and sovereign moon.
“Oh, he yearned after that sad planet. His plan was to go there. ‘The mysterious navigators of the Afternoon,’ he reasoned, ‘had commerce with it daily, in just such boats as these. The space outside the earth was of no consequence to them. Perhaps,’ he persuaded himself, ‘the boats remember the way.’ We watched him leave on a black night, in that famous ship. She rose into the darkness, hunting like a compass needle. Old sense revived in her. She trembled in anticipation, and strange new lights glimmered at her stern.
“We never saw her again, any of us. The Heavy Star, the Heavy Star ! That was a hundred years ago-”
The old dwarf’s eyes were red and flat in the gloom, reflecting the firelight like the eyes of an animal.
“Hornwrack,” he whispered, “she knew her way. Don’t you see? This ‘bloated ghost’ you describe is Benedict Paucemanly returned to us. He has been a hundred years in the moon!”
Hornwrack stirred the embers with his boot.
“That is all very well,” he said a little cruelly (for he envied the dwarf these memories, with which he had nothing to compare). “But what has he brought with him past the gates of earth? And why is he a gibbering idiot?”
The dwarf looked at him thoughtfully.
Later, Cellur the Bird Lord was to describe their journey north in these terms:
“Among the stone crowns and aimless salients of the empty foothills we received hints of some state of being we could not imagine. The world was bleached of its old meanings even for those of us who had previously accepted them. (I do not count myself among these. How could I?) This happened immediately after we left the city. It was as if a protection had been removed from us. Mosaic eyes seemed to observe us from behind the dry-stone walls. In the outline of a ridge or a wayfarer’s tree might be contained the suggestion of quite another object-a folded wing, for instance, or the coiled tongue of a moth.
“Alstath Fulthor led the way. Some internal process held him rapt. He had begun, perhaps, to map the paths inside himself which led to the Past. This gave him an absentminded air, and an irritable one, as if by our presence we interrupted some private conversation-although had anyone suggested this he would have rejected it angrily. Attempting to live simultaneously in two worlds, he rode moodily ahead and seemed to see nothing-head bowed into the rain, blood-red armour pulsing like a beacon. If it was madness then it was only the madness that has infected all his people since their Rebirth. They will learn in the end that the journey they long for is impossible, and accept the world as it is.
“The unmarked journeys of the souclass="underline" as we descended the foothills, we came upon old roads lined with sagging yews and blunt formless stone beasts. Here there is little left to humanize the debased earth; this is the beginning of the end, where the empire wastes away with its own geography. On the narrow strip between the mountains and the coastal flats only the giant hemlock grows now, and among it the ruins of the Afternoon are rotting, cities made of bloody glass submerged beneath cold and muddy lagoons: the ancient Fen Cities, among whose broken towers now creep the black wherries of the Evening, tacking and creaking from staithe to staithe in pursuit of a bleak diminishing trade. Of the old roads none are whole. The wide fused highways of the Afternoon peter out into shattered flags or limestone cobbles laid in Borring’s day, eventually into sheep-trod, nettle, and smallholding.
“The best of them, though, skirting warily both salt marsh and massif, makes its way to Duirinish, that grey outpost of former kings which is gateway to the Great Brown Waste and to the old cities of the North; and along this we took ourselves, under the patronage of the hallucinatory pilot Benedict Paucemanly. Exhorting, demanding, mumbling eternally in its strange self-constructed language, vanishing at intervals only to return refreshed, his ghost (if indeed it was his) had haunted us for a hundred miles or more. Now it wallowed above us like a waterlogged tree; now hid like a girl among the fleshy etiolated hemlock stems; now muttered, ‘On the moon it was like white gardens. Pork.’ It would not answer Alstath Fulthor, which put him out of temper; nor would it speak to me; Tomb the Dwarf it actively avoided, as though embarrassed by his persistence, sidling away down the hemlock glades grinning and breaking wind apologetically. And if he spoke to it of the ‘old days’ it regarded him with wide panicky eyes and flapped deprecatingly its awkward great hands.
“Galen Hornwrack, however, it courted ardently, trying to capture his attention with a wink or a whistle. ‘Land ho, lad!’ it would cry, and, bobbing in the air before him, make an elaborate mime of discovering some terra incognita: shading its eyes with one hand while with the other it pointed north and west. (Fulthor made light of this mummery, arguing that the thing was mad if it could be said to exist at alclass="underline" yet after a few repetitions one felt a profound sense of urgency, as if some fading fragment of the original airboatman was struggling to act out or insinuate something he could no longer articulate.) Hornwrack’s response was characteristic. He hated to appear a fool. The more the thing wooed him the more he averted his gaze. And at night when he thought himself unobserved he stalked it patiently through the firelight, the partly healed scars on his cheeks burning like the ritual stigmata of some primitive hunter. Each failure to kill or confine it increased his anger: when the girl Fay Glass sang, ‘We are off to Vegys now,’ and smiled at him-which was some days her only human contact-he would not smile back, which made her fractious and difficult to manage in her turn.