Noman

by William Nicholson

  He smiled at Seeker and turned his face towards the seashore.

  "Wait for me, brother."

  He too then made his slow way to the waiting boat. There the two brothers helped each other to climb in. There they lay down in each other's arms, in their final rest.

  Seeker joined his outstretched hands together and streamed his lir towards them. The boat creaked on the shingle, then shuddered and slipped into the water. The wind caught its sail and filled it and drove it out into the open sea.

  27 Something Good and Strong

  SEEKER ENTERED THE LONG HALL WITH ITS CRACKED mirrors and sat in the empty armchair, as he had done before. In the mirror before him he saw only himself, alone. He watched and he waited and time passed.

  He saw the beams of sunlight falling through the long windows swing slowly by, picking out the knots and cracks in the old floorboards. He saw the cobwebs caught in the passing sunlight glow and then fade into the shadows again. He saw his hand on the arm of the chair, and the veins on the back of his hand.

  Then at last he heard footsteps approaching, fast and light. Someone entering the house. The one he was waiting for hesitated in the entrance hall and then came on into the long room.

  It was Echo Kittle.

  She walked between the mirrors to where he sat, her slender form reflected in the broken glass. She came to a stop before him and met his gaze with those wide gray eyes.

  "You know what I want," said Echo.

  "Yes," he said. "I know."

  "Just one last kindness."

  She dropped down onto her knees before him.

  "It's me who asks you, not the other one. But do it quickly, before she comes back. I can't bear to live like this. Set me free."

  "I will," he said. "But not like this."

  "She came from you. I kissed you as you slept. I'm well paid for my stolen kiss, don't you think?"

  A spasm passed through her as she spoke. It began as a sad smile but then, for a moment, contorted her lovely face into something harder and older.

  "I said I was bad inside. Do you remember? Now it's true."

  "It's not you that's bad," said Seeker. "It's the one that's inside you."

  "We're joined now," said Echo. "She'll never leave me." Tears filled her eyes. "She's told me so. She likes being me."

  Her face contorted again, and her voice changed.

  "You can't kill me, Seeker."

  Now he was hearing the harsh mocking tones he had heard in the Haven, when the savanter had said to him, "You have strength, boy, but no love."

  "If you kill me you kill the pretty one. And you don't want that."

  Then Echo's true expression and voice returned.

  "Do it, Seeker," she said. "Kill us both. Don't leave me like this. End the badness in me."

  Seeker gazed at her, so lovely and so afraid. He had a promise to keep. He reached out his hands to take her hands.

  "Stand up," he said. "Look at me in the mirror."

  Echo did as he asked, turning to his reflection in the broken glass.

  "I'm speaking to the other one in you now."

  There in the mirror where Echo had stood, in Echo's clothes, weeping Echo's tears, was a shrivelled old woman.

  "What do you want with me?" said the savanter.

  "What do you want with her?" said Seeker.

  "Her youth. Her beauty."

  "For what?"

  The old woman gave a dry little laugh.

  "'For what?' he asks. Do you know what it is to grow old? Do you know what it is to see your own death approaching? I want to live, Seeker. I want to be forever young."

  "And then?" said Seeker.

  "Then? Then?" The old woman's voice became high and shrill. "There is no then. There's only life!"

  "What of your mission?"

  "Our mission is life! Noman charged us to seek truth without limits. We are to grow in knowledge forever. We are to challenge the stupid faith of the Noble Warriors."

  "What you say is true. All warriors need a worthy enemy. Our swords grow rusty. You are the necessary enemy."

  "Ah! You understand at last."

  "But now you want to live forever. That was no part of Noman's plan."

  "Knowledge has its own life. We have gained so much knowledge. Must it now die with us?"

  Seeker considered this in silence for a few moments.

  "Tell me your name," he said at last.

  "Names come and go. Today I am Echo."

  "No, tell me. When you set out on your journey, when everything was still new. You had a name then."

  He spoke with an unexpected gentleness. The savanter too softened her tone.

  "When everything was still new ... Yes, I remember it. Enjoy it, boy. It doesn't last. Is this a trick to weaken me?"

  "No. I too seek the truth."

  "I had a name then." She gave her dry laugh. "I was called Hope. We live long enough to see our names mock us."

  "Have you no more hope?"

  "My dear boy. You have seen what hope I have. I live on through others."

  I too live on through others, Seeker thought, and others through me. The power of the Noble Warriors comes from the Community, living and dead, reaching back into the past.

  Leave even one alive and it will all begin again.

  If the seeds he planted so long ago show that they can renew themselves without him, the farmer will know that he has planted living corn.

  "You don't need to fear that I'll kill you," he said.

  "Oh, you won't do that," said the savanter. "You'd never kill the pretty one."

  "Nor would I kill you. You still have work to do. The savanters, like the Noble Warriors, must be renewed."

  "Oh, clever, clever." But the old lady no longer sounded bitter. She sounded interested.

  "I won't kill you," he went on, "but your separate existence must come to an end. You must give your life to Echo. She will live on for you. The lord of wisdom will not die. She will be called Echo."

  "And why should I do this thing?"

  "You have no choice. If you live divided within her, the torment will tear her apart. You know what I say is true. You knew it when you entered her. The old must die for the new to be born."

  Now the old lady began to weep her own tears.

  "Manny promised us we'd be forever young."

  "Manlir is dead. You are the last."

  "The things we learned!"

  "You're the memory of the savanters, Hope. You're the link in the undying chain. Through you the wisdom passes to the next generation."

  "The next generation ... How I've hated them."

  "But no more. You don't hate Echo. You love her."

  "Why should that be?"

  "Because you feel the pulse of her life like a child in your womb. This is your eternal life. There is no other."

  The savanter wept as she looked at Seeker from the broken mirror.

  "You ask me to let myself die, after all these years."

  "You know you want it."

  "If only Manny were here. He'd tell me what to do."

  "He'd tell you to go further than you've ever gone before. He'd tell you to go all the way. There are no limits to your pursuit of wisdom."

  "Oh, clever, clever."

  "Choose the surprise."

  The old lady's withered cheeks cracked into a smile.

  "You're good," she said.

  "And I'm right. And you know it. It's gone on long enough."

  "Choose the surprise." She chuckled to herself. "Well, well. The girl's in for a surprise of her own."

  "Do you need my help?"

  "Certainly not." The savanter drew herself up in proud dignity. "I am capable of making my own exit."

  With that she raised her bony hands to her withered face and covered it up. She stood like this for a few moments, as if hiding herself from fear or shame. Then she lowered her hands. There was Echo's young and lovely face staring out of the glass at Seeker.

  He turned to her
to look at Echo directly. She was blinking, unsure what had happened to her.

  "How do you feel now?"

  "I don't know. Strange. Has she gone?"

  "Yes. She's gone."

  "But it's not the same. I'm not the same."

  "You'll never be the same again. You carry her life within you. Her long past, her memories, her deep knowledge."

  "Why? What for?"

  "Do you remember how you told me once you'd do something good and strong?"

  "Yes."

  "This is how it begins."

  Echo looked frightened.

  "Why me?"

  "Because for you there's always more to want. You chose this when you leaned too far out of the tree to touch the first Caspians. You chose this when you followed me out of the Glimmen. You've chosen it with every decision you've ever made."

  "So I have."

  "Look in the mirror," said Seeker. "What do you see?"

  Echo looked. There was her familiar face that others said was beautiful. There, her gray eyes. And in those eyes a new awakening.

  There has to be more.

  She began to breathe more rapidly, and a shiver ran through her body. She felt she was waking, but not from sleep: this was a waking from childhood; a coming out of a small dark room in which she had understood nothing to a new world of immense and brilliant space. Only the beginning, only the first step. But the adventure lay before her now, the seeking and the finding, the slow mighty building of the edifice of knowledge. She saw then how for all the rest of her life she would grow and multiply and embrace all things.

  "You're to be a lord of wisdom, Echo. For you there'll be no limits."

  She was stroking the little finger of her left hand. She blushed a little as she saw and remembered. But it felt different now. The badness in her remained, but no longer as a source of shame. She had cared too much for herself, and still did, but not because she was wicked. It was only a rawness in her, and a kind of restlessness that she knew she would never lose. She needed it, this worm of dissatisfaction that gnawed at her core, because this new world had so much to offer, and she did not mean to come to rest.

  "Oh, Seeker!" she said, her eyes glowing. "I feel—I don't know what I feel!"

  There were no words to express it, this overwhelming sensation of having crested a hilltop to find before her, like a giant landscape in the sun, her life to come, exciting, powerful, and mysterious.

  "Go home," he said to her. "Say good-bye to your family and friends. Take nothing but the clothes you wear. And set out and find your life."

  "And you?"

  "I mean to do the same."

  "Will I see you again?"

  "I can't tell."

  She took his hand in hers and held it.

  "I wanted you to love me, Seeker. I wanted you like I wanted Kell: to have for myself. But I can't have you, can I? People can't have people."

  "You wanted me to love you," he said. "But you never loved me."

  He spoke without accusation in his voice. As she heard it, she knew it was true.

  "No, I didn't. How strange."

  "You don't love anyone."

  "Is that bad?"

  "Not everyone is a lover. Not everyone has to be completed by someone else."

  "I'll just go on being me."

  She had always known it, all her life.

  I'm an explorer. I go alone.

  "We're only just at the beginning," she said. "We're still young. I wonder when we'll meet again, and how we'll have changed. Imagine being old, and remembering today, and how I held your hand and said to you—"

  She stopped, smiling at the absurdity of what she was saying.

  "Said what?"

  "I haven't said it yet. I was remembering it before the memory had happened."

  She let go of his hand.

  "You're the finest person I've ever known."

  She turned and walked away down the long room between the mirrors to the open door.

  28 Rain Falls on the Garden

  MORNING STAR CAME AFTER A WHILE TO THE SEA OF grass. In one place to the side of the road the grass had been trampled into a narrow track. She turned off the road and followed the track, the waving grasses brushing her shoulders on either side as she went. The track led her to a small white clapboard house with a pale blue door.

  The sun was high in the sky and burning hot. The interior of the house, glimpsed through the grass-fringed windows, was cool and empty and white. She knocked on the faded blue panels of the door. No one answered. She tried the handle and the door opened. She went into the house, seeking its shade.

  "Anyone here?"

  No need to call loud, it was a small house. The occupants would hear her come in even if she hadn't called. But no one appeared from the side rooms. She was alone.

  The plain white-walled room pleased her. There was a blue cornflower in a glass on the table, which she took as a sign of welcome. She explored the house, and the more she saw, the better she liked it. It seemed to her that small though it was, there was just the right amount of room for everything. A main room for cooking and eating and talking. A bedroom just big enough for its bed. A washroom with a long brick-lined trench for washing clothes and dishes and people.

  Outside a back door that opened from the washroom there was a small yard, a rectangle of bare earth cleared of the tall grass. Here there grew a single bay tree, shading with its broad waxy leaves a stack of stove wood and a well with a timber lid. Beside the well lay a tin dipper on a cord. She lifted the lid and dropped the dipper and heard it slap into water not far below. The water was sweet and cool on her dry lips.

  She sat in the main room, with her cup of water in her hands and her bare brown feet stretched out before her, and let her eyes close. For the first time since the disintegration of the Joyous she felt something like a quietness of the spirit. These had been bitter days for Morning Star. One by one the pillars that had held up her world had broken and fallen away. The Nom was destroyed. Her passion for the Wildman had passed like a dream. She had lost her colors. The Joy Boy was dead. Seeker was gone. And most heartbreaking of all, she had watched a great gathering of people acclaim the coming of a god she had herself invented.

  It was hard after so much loss to be so alone. But at least here in this plain house she could rest. She would go on her way again later. She would find Seeker later. For now, she let her head grow heavy and her breaths come slow, and the heat of noon passed overhead without touching her.

  She woke and opened her eyes and there was Seeker, sitting in the chair by the stove. For a moment it seemed so natural that he should be by her side that she smiled and said, "There you are."

  It was as if he had gone out earlier and had returned, as if this was where he belonged. Then, waking more fully, she let her smile turn to a laugh, and laughed at herself.

  "I don't know what's happening to me," she said. "Where did you come from? What are you doing here?"

  "I live here," he said, smiling back.

  He looked so like the old Seeker, with his friendly face and his worried eyes, that all her recent fears of him slipped away.

  "I came in for the shade," she said. "There's a well. There's sweet water there."

  "I know."

  "I don't believe you live here. You never said anything about it."

  "See that cupboard." He pointed to the cupboard on the wall by the stove. "Look inside. There's a tin of oatcakes there. And a half-eaten jar of honey. Look in the bedroom. Hanging on the back of the door there's a belt with a bone buckle."

  "So you've had a look around."

  "Why should I make up things like that?"

  "I don't know why. I don't know anything about you any more. You've gone somewhere so far away I can't follow you there."

  "But you can read my colors."

  "No. I lost my colors."

  "You lost your colors! How did you do that?"

  She gave a small shrug.

  "It was too much. I couldn'
t go on living like that." She remembered then how the world had looked just before she fell. "There was a waterfall. It was very beautiful."

  "A waterfall?"

  He was looking at her with such an odd expression. She wondered why she had said that about the waterfall. It can't have meant anything to him.

  "So you're telling me this is your house?"

  "It's Jango's house," he said.

  "Who's Jango?"

  "A sort of a friend. He's old. He lives here with his wife."

  "Is she old, too?"

  "Yes. I'd say they're about the same age. They're very close."

  Seeker looked at her in that new odd way of his and spoke the words Jango had spoken to him.

  "My dearest friend, my life's companion, my comfort in old age, and my one and only love."

  "The old man said that about his wife?"

  "Yes."

  "I suppose they'll come back soon. I hope they won't mind finding us here, sitting in their chairs."

  "No, they won't mind."

  Morning Star looked round the simple room.

  "Don't you envy them?" she said.

  "Not exactly," said Seeker.

  "Oh, I do. To have one person to love, and to know they love you."

  "One person above all others."

  "Yes, I know. It's not the Nomana way. But all that's over now."

  She looked away from his intent and curious gaze, feeling a wave of sadness pass through her.

  "Do you say that because the Nom's been destroyed?" he said.

  "That, and everything."

  She didn't want to explain more, ashamed of what she had done in Radiance.

  "Do you remember, Star?" he said. "Do you remember how you felt when you first came to Anacrea? When you wanted to join the Noble Warriors?"

  "Of course I remember."

  "Do you remember hiding by a wall in the night, and crying, and me finding you?"

  "You were crying, too."

  "You had a little bundle in your hand."

  "I have it still."

  She reached into her pocket and took out the plait of wool her father had given her when she had left to go to Anacrea.