Solem

by Clive S. Johnson

  Tom then looked down at Janeen. “My dear,” and he squatted before her. “Although we’ve yet to explain your…your—”

  “Stolen eyes!” she hissed at him.

  “The… The loss of your eyes, yes; but we’re agreed it’s now become imperative that you see…well, that you have described to you what we intended showing you this morning. Do you… Do you think you’d be up to that, Janeen? Taking a walk through the Fintweg? You need to know enough for when you meet with the Hartsghul, then we might be able to shed some light on the matter.”

  She lifted her face to him, her lips set to a firm line, finally blowing out an exasperated breath. “Is this why I don’t feel any pain? ‘Cos I’ve no eyes left to feel it with?”

  “I’m not sure,” Alice said. “Do you want to try outside?”

  “Outside?”

  Alice offered Janeen her hand, at which she mind-stared until finally huffing, grasping it and getting to her feet. “All right,” and she gripped her pain-guard tightly to her chest. “Let’s try it then, but I don’t see what difference it’s going to make.”

  Tom again opened the door and Craith helped her through. She stood beneath what to all but her was clearly a spotless blue morning sky, the Sun slanting its light through the trees of the square and flooding the wall of the building beyond. Its myriad windows glinted joyfully, but Janeen had already angled her face up to the heavens.

  “So bright,” she gasped. “So riven with beauty,” but then she squealed and finally yelped before snatching the guard to her missing eyes. With fumbling fingers, she hastily tied it in place, pain etched on what they could see of her face.

  At first she fell into Craith’s open arms, but then pushed herself away and stood rigid before him, her jaw set firm. “You know, you’re right, Craith; damned right. I may only be able to mind-see now, but what a seeing it is, what a true gift.” She embraced him, hugging him tightly.

  “Describe our new home to me, Craith,” she whispered in his ear. “Take me to its wonders and show me them all through your own eyes. Will you do that for me, my darling?”

  To Craith, her kiss felt delicate, considered, deep with an understanding that somehow unnerved him. She must have felt it herself, for she ran her fingers lightly over his closed eyelids.

  Quietly, so only he could hear, she told him, “Although it wasn’t said in words, I think I now understand some of what Solem meant when she last filled me with her voice. Together, Craith, you and me, we can be a whole far greater than either one of us alone. We’ve each in our own way trusted Solem, but now we must trust each other. I can see that now—eyes or no eyes.”

  When she kissed him again, it seemed to stretch out time, to halt their world’s turning, to stop the Sun in the heavens, and to still yet further the still air of the Fintweg. At its lingering conclusion, Janeen smiled warmly against Craith’s mouth, at which he became convinced he could see her long lashes lowering over glinting eyes.

  “Shall we go learn what this Fintweg is truly all about? Eh, Craith Waindrifa, shall we? Together, as one?”

  He smiled back then nodded before saying to Alice, “So, where to first, then?” and he took up Janeen’s hand in his own, squeezing it firmly.

  46 The Wisdom of Solem

  Alice drew their attention to the high reaching wall, bringing Craith to describe it in detail to Janeen. She angled her face, as though seeing what he saw. Alice, though, told them more, of what neither could see.

  “This wall is made of what was once termed ‘metal plate’; three inches thick.”

  “Metal,” Janeen barely breathed.

  “Yes, my dear, solid metal.”

  Craith blew a low whistle. “I don’t think I’ve seen as much in the whole of The Espousal as what must be in a square yard of this.” He pressed his palm against its cool surface.

  “No, you won’t have, Craith. It takes too much of Solem’s allowance these days to make much of it.”

  “Only buckets for dwelgefas, eh?” Janeen said, again quietly.

  “Amongst other things, but yes, those of Gryff have favoured access to such durable tools. We are so few, you see.”

  “How fortunate for me, then,” Janeen now more volubly said.

  “Precisely,” and Alice smiled at her. “And clearly why you could suffer no pain behind the wall’s protection; a protection it also affords The Espousal and the far flung Green; so our wonder cannot…well, as we’ve only recently deduced, so it cannot bewitch those beyond the Fintweg.”

  She went on to explain how the wall lined the inner side of the Gryffwilleal.

  “Eh? The what?” Craith grunted.

  Alice grinned. “When you approached Gryff, what you saw as a building is actually a deep wall that completely surrounds the Fintweg, one that houses those who administer our worlds: The Green, The Espousal and Gryffwilleal itself.”

  She again stared at Janeen’s pain-guard. “It seems,” Alice said, carefully, as though thinking aloud, “that we are indeed remiss of some ancient knowledge.”

  This perplexed Craith, for he remembered the eynputna waxing on about how “the Fintweg held all knowledge and was wise beyond wisdom”, but Alice was already beckoning them away from the wall.

  They re-crossed the square, but at a slant towards one end of the building in which they’d spent the night, where they came to a broad avenue. Abutting the trees down each side rose the tall ends of other buildings, long and closely spaced, but all devoid of windows. Glinting glass domes and high glazed ridges cluttered their rooftops, all of which Craith carefully described to Janeen.

  The prospect of death and its recent defeat had certainly sharpened Craith’s sight, given him a more immediate appreciation of how sweet life could be, how precious a thing it was. And so, he now relished detailing it all for Janeen, making it come alive in her own mind’s eye, and by it fostered a sense of wonder in himself that was fast becoming unquenchable.

  By this time Alice had brought them to a door in the end wall of the first building, the only feature in its blank expanse. Once inside and into a small vestibule, and after the outer door had solidly clicked shut, she opened an inner one that led through into a room, down the centre of which ran a long, low bench. Cupboards lined the facing walls, four of which Tom opened wide, taking out a white garment from each.

  “Put these on over your clothes,” he instructed, and Craith soon realised why they wore such close fitting gear, as he struggled to get into what turned out to be a one-piece suit. Alice helped them, gathering loose hair into hairnets and lifting and tying the hoods of their suits into place. Finally, she handed out finely woven gloves which they all had to don. This whole process fascinated Craith, but before he could ask its purpose, Alice stood before them and cleared her throat.

  “Before we tie our facemasks on,” she announced, “I’ll tell you a bit about the building we’re now standing in.”

  She paused, clearly gathering her thoughts. “This is the Index Building, the starting point for all possible paths to the answer—or answers—to whatever question is being asked of the Wisdom of Solem.”

  “Eh?” Craith said. “The what?”

  “Follow me, Craith, and all will be made clear,” she said as she fastened facemasks across their mouths, and together they traipsed after her to another door at the end of the room.

  As soon as Craith stepped through, he jolted to a halt and stared, too stunned to describe to Janeen what he saw, too stunned even to close his mouth.

  Directly before him ran a narrow open-meshed walkway, stretching away into the distance. On both sides, rising from an unutterable depth, a long procession of great shelving monoliths reached up to the high roof above, each packed solid with identical spines. Gantries and ladders laced their heights, white-suited figures here and there slipping great tomes in and out or carrying them back and forth.

  “Craith?” Janeen said at his silence. “Tell me what you see,” and he tried, only croaking at first.

  E
ven when he found his voice, he couldn’t pull the right words from his mind to describe it all, never mind its impact. It took Alice’s close familiarity to furnish some sense of what Craith was both seeing and feeling, and Janeen’s blindness to keep her tongue free to ask, “But what’s it all for?”

  Alice led them a little way down the walkway, to where the stacks of facing shelves were spaced further apart. The walkway between held a long table upon which a man currently consulted one of the tomes. Alice nodded to him.

  “Good morning, Desmond.” He looked up, returned the nod and stood. “Would you mind if we asked you what you’re doing? In way of instruction for our two new arrivals.”

  He seemed only slightly surprised and clearly pleased to be asked, as though all in the Fintweg at least knew of Janeen. He held up a sheet of paper, what Craith recognised as one of the eynputna’s forms.

  “This,” he said, as though delivering a lecture, “is one of a number of requests for guidance on how to handle this Spring’s unusually high rivers. It’s from Gaelgheden, a place on the outer bank of a bend in the river, so more prone to erosion than most. It also has gravel banks that lead up to—”

  “I’m sure the detail’s fascinating, Desmond, but if I may move you on to what you’re doing here, at this precise moment?”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Well, I’m looking up all the references for all the elements in the problem, to find a common correlation, one that will give me one, or more likely a number of locations from which to start my search in the WOS Body—that’s the Wisdom of Solem. ‘W’, ‘O’, ‘S’, you see?” he directed at Craith and Janeen. “An abbreviation.”

  “Eh?” Craith managed at last.

  “It’s like the index of a book?”

  “Not many books where I come from. Do you mean it’s like knowing which cards ‘ave been played, so you can work out what’s left in t’pack?”

  “Eh?”

  “The thing is,” Tom said from behind Craith, “the answer to the folk of Gaelgheden’s problem lies somewhere in the Wisdom of Solem, and Desmond here’s looking for a starting point for finding it. But it’s likely to be a long path of discovery, following innumerable cross-references, footnotes, even marginalia—”

  “Margin-what?”

  “Notes that other Waurdfilgs have added over the uncountable millennia.”

  “Desmond’s one of our many Waurdfilgs,” Alice added. “They chase the pathways through the Wisdom until they find the perfect answer.”

  “So,” Craith said, knotting his brow, “if this is the…the ‘Index Building’, then where’s the Wisdom itself?”

  “It’s crammed into another thirty-two other such buildings, all as large as this one, Craith.”

  “Thirty…thirty two? No wonder the eynputna reckoned the Fintweg was ‘wise beyond wisdom’.”

  Janeen grabbed his arm. “Craith!” she levelled at him. “When I asked you, you said you didn’t know anything about the Fintweg,” and the accusation in her voice made him glad of Tom’s interruption.

  “Ah, well, not quite ‘beyond wisdom’, which is why we’re somewhat keen for you to meet with the Hartsghul, Janeen. You see, we’ve had an annoying problem of our own these past few thousand years, one we’ve never quite got to the bottom of. It’s something we suspect may be important in its own right, but about which the WOS has pitifully little to say. Something we reckon you’re uniquely placed to help us with, my dear, if you are what we suspect you are.”

  47 Of Long Forgotten Miracles

  Janeen made no comment, although she remained clearly interested in what Alice and Tom continued to reveal about the Wisdom of Solem, how it ensured the whole world would never change. Craith eventually felt more at ease and so resumed his commentary for Janeen’s benefit, but it meant he couldn’t quite keep his mind wholly on what was being said.

  At last, once they’d struggled out of their protective clothing, Alice led them from the Index Building and outside. It left Craith only with an impression of how important was the world’s blanket of forest. “The lungs of our world” stuck in his mind, and “The great leveller of the Earth’s climate”, whatever that meant.

  As she led them further down the avenue, Alice pointed out the long line of buildings on each side that housed the Wisdom of Solem. When they came to the last two, though, Craith noted, “But there’s an even number! You’ve only mentioned thirty three. What’s the extra one for?”

  “This,” she told him, as she turned them towards the entrance to one of the last two, “is the Perfect Building, where all the answers ever gleaned from the Wisdom of Solem are gathered together. All new ones are compared with what went before, so we can be sure we’ve arrived at perfection. Now, though, I need to collect something from it that’s nowhere near as perfect, something to take with us to your meeting with the Hartsghul.”

  She asked them to wait outside for a moment, then slipped in through the door, soon returning with a satchel slung over her shoulder.

  “They’ve advised me that the Hartsghul’s already been waiting a while for us. We’ll have to go straight there,” and Alice soon brought them to the end of the avenue, to where a line of close-growing trees ran in a curve away to either side. A stone-flagged pathway led directly on and into their deep shade.

  “This is the Leyel Grove,” she told Craith and Janeen. “A most ancient site from well before the Fintweg. It’s a popular place to come and think, or just to enjoy a pleasant walk.”

  They followed her along the path and soon came out from beneath the trees and into a large, bright, circular, tree bordered garden filled with flowerbeds. Early Summer blooms filled the eye with their intense and regimented colours. Paths of well-worn stone ran between, stooping figures here and there drawing blooms nearer their nose or ambling contentedly from one splash of colour to the next.

  At the very centre towered a huge, gnarled and unshapely tree, many of its trunk-like limbs resting on the ground. Its unkempt foliage varied greatly about its vast spread: some vigorous, others lacklustre in their frail thirst for light. As they passed between the press of flowers towards it, folk nodded, offering their good-mornings but nothing to delay them.

  So huge was the tree that Craith didn’t at first notice a small, round, yellow, domed building close in to the great girth of its irregular trunk. He only saw it when Alice brought them into the shade and his eyes had adjusted. She stopped before its simple doorway, where she turned to face them.

  This is Lepfyn, and from where this unchanging world was forged. She turned to rest her eyes reverently upon its unassuming stand.

  Through its entrance, Craith could see stone benching set against its curved inner wall. Concentric steps at its centre led down to a small ornamental pond, the orange glint of fish lazily floating close to the surface. Only when Alice smiled and invited them in did Craith notice the figure of a woman seated opposite the entrance, head tilted forward onto her gently rising and falling chest.

  Her wheezing breath was all that filled the otherwise dead silence, until Alice stepped in behind them and politely coughed.

  The woman’s head snapped back, eyes startled wide and glazed for a moment before narrowing to a stare.

  “Hartsghul,” Alice quietly and respectfully said. “If I may present Janeen Toynbow of Delph, and—”

  “Craith Waindrifa, her paramour, I’m reliably informed,” the woman said, and her voice reverberated around the walls as she stared yet closer still at the two newcomers.

  Craith only wondered what a “Paramour” was.

  “And Janeen’s eyes, we mustn’t forget that,” Alice pointed out.

  “Indeed, we must not,” the Hartsghul quietly agreed as she tilted her head back and peered closely at Craith. The creases of her heavily lined face spread out from her own eyes like a child’s depiction of the rays of the Sun. “And in deference to which, I suppose, he’d best be given leave to stay.”

  She snapped her gaze to Janeen but thrust an open hand t
owards Alice.

  The satchel soon passed from Alice’s shoulder and into the Hartsghul’s gnarled hand, her free one flicking a gesture of dismissal towards the entrance. Alice withdrew, joining Tom outside, and together they moved out of hearing.

  “Come, sit beside me, you two,” the Hartsghul said, and Craith helped Janeen to the seat beside her before sitting at his beloved demon’s side.

  He watched the Hartsghul stare out through the entrance, although he suspected she saw nothing of the great tree’s dappled shade, nor the now seated figures of Alice and Tom, quietly waiting. The old woman slowly licked her lips, briefly closed her eyes then turned to Janeen.

  “I take it you now understand the purpose of the Fintweg?” and Janeen nodded. “But what you won’t know is why it works so well.”

  “Because of the nature of its demons, of its Waurdfilgs,” Janeen carefully said, and the Hartsghul quietly laughed before a smile lit her face.

  “You are truly a demon, my dear; that is plain enough, and, I reckon, a rare one amongst a rare breed.” She gently took Janeen’s hand in her own.

  “Our uncommon ability to wonder is what makes us demons,” she said, “and why we’re so detrimental to the world at large. If it weren’t for the Wisdom of Solem, our small body of such folk would long ago have been driven to break free from here. But its wealth of knowledge has well satisfied our enquiring minds.”

  “And why you must harvest demons from The Green; to lock them away from the world, where they can be kept safe and satisfied as they serve the Fintweg.”

  “Yes, my dear. But you see, we have long known the Wisdom of Solem to be deficient, that it does not contain all knowledge. Not quite all. This it has revealed to us itself, for nothing is ever truly perfect.”

  “Not perfect?”

  “The Wisdom of Solem hints at something it cannot answer, and for keenly wondering minds like ours, well, that makes for a most disconcerting prospect; one that has worried at our curiosity for thousands of years. For you see, we have nothing within the Fintweg from which to gain answers but the Wisdom of Solem itself.”