The theme of this story is one I returned to later, with considerably better equipment. It has a good sentence in it, though: “He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”
In darkness a man stood alone, naked, holding a smoking torch. The reddish glow lit air and ground for only a few feet; beyond that was the darkness, the immeasurable. From moment to moment there was a rush of wind, a half-glimpsed glitter of eyes, a vast muttering: “Hold it higher!” The man obeyed, though the torch shook in his shaking hands. He raised it clear above his head, while the darkness rushed and jabbered around him, closing in. The wind blew colder, the red flame guttered. His rigid arms began to quiver, then to jerk a little; his face was oily with sweat; he barely heard the soft, huge jabbering, “Hold it up, up, hold it up. . . .” The current of time had stopped; only the whispering grew and grew till it was a howling, and still, horribly, nothing touched him, nothing came within the circle of light. “Now walk!” the great voice howled. “Walk forward!”
The torch above his head, he stepped forward on the ground he could not see. It was not there. With a scream for help, he fell, darkness and thunder about him, the torch he would not let go flaming backward into his eyes.
Time . . . time, and light, and pain, they had all started again. He was crouching in some kind of ditch, on all fours in the mud. His face stung and his eyes, in this bright light, were full of fog. He looked up from his mud-blotched nakedness to a blurred, radiant figure standing above him. Light fell in glory on white hair, the long folds of a white cloak. The eyes gazed at Ganil, the voice spoke to him: “You lie in the Grave. You lie in the Grave of Knowledge. So lie your forefathers forever beneath the ashes of the fires of Hell.” The voice swelled out: “O fallen Man, arise!” Ganil managed to get to his feet. The white figure was pointing: “That is the Light of Human Reason. It guided you to the grave. Drop it.” Ganil realized he was still holding a mud-sodden black stick, the torch; he let it fall. “Now rise,” the white figure cried in a slow exaltation, “rise from darkness and walk in the Light of Common Day!” Hands reached to Ganil, helping and hauling him up. Men knelt offering him basins and sponges, others towelled him, rubbed him down till he stood clean and warm, a grey cloak round his shoulders, amid the chatting and laughter, coming and going, in the bright spacious hall. A bald man clapped his shoulder. “Come on, time for the Oath.”
“Did I-did I do all right?”
“Fine! Only you held up that damn fool torch so long. Thought you’d keep us growling around in the dark all day. Come on.” They led him over black pavement and under the very lofty, white-beamed ceiling, to a curtain that dropped, pure white, in a few straight folds, thirty feet from roof to floor. “Curtain of Mystery,” somebody said to Ganil in a matter-of-fact tone. Laughing and talking had died away; they stood all round him, silent. In silence the white curtain parted. Ganil stared foggily at what was revealed: a high altar, a long table, and an old man in white.
“Postulant, will you swear our Oath with us?”
Somebody nudged Ganil, whispering, “I will.” “I will,” Ganil stuttered.
“Swear then, Masters of the Rite!” The old man raised up a shape of silver: an X-cross, supported by an iron shaft. “Under the Cross of the Common Day I swear never to reveal the rites and mysteries of my Lodge—”
“Under the Cross . . . I swear . . . the rites . . .” muttered all the men around Ganil, and propelled by another nudge he muttered with them.
“To live well, to work well, to think well—” As Ganil finished repeating this a voice whispered in his ear, “Don’t swear.”
“To avoid all heresies, to betray all necromancers to the Courts of College, and to obey the High Masters of my Lodge from now forth till my death—” Mutter, mutter. Some seemed to be repeating the long passage, some not; Ganil, confused, muttered a word or two and then stood silent. “And I swear never to teach the Mysteries of Machinery to any gentile. I swear this beneath the Sun.” A grating rumble almost drowned their voices. Slowly, crankily, a section of the roof was swinging back to reveal the yellow-grey, cloud-covered sky of summer. “Behold the Light of Common Day!” the old man in white cried out, triumphant, and Ganil stared up at it. The machinery apparently stuck before the skylight was fully open; there was a loud clanking of gears, then silence. The old man came forward, kissed Ganil on both cheeks, and said, “Welcome, Master Ganil, to the Inner Rite of the Mystery of the Machine.” The initiation was over. Ganil was a Master of his Lodge.
“Mean burn you got there,” the bald fellow said as they all walked back down the hall. Ganil put up his hand and found that his left cheek and temple were raw and sore. “Lucky it missed your eye.”
“Just missed being blinded by the light of Reason, eh?” said a soft voice. Glancing round Ganil saw a fair man, with brown hair and blue eyes, actually blue, like those of an albino cat or a blind horse. He looked away from the deformity at once, but the fair man went on in his soft voice, the voice that had whispered “Don’t swear” during the taking of the Oath, “I’m Mede Fairman. I’ll be your Co-Master in Lee’s shop. Feel like getting a beer when we’re out of here?”
The dank beer-dreggy warmth of the tavern was a queer change from all the terror and ceremony of the day. Ganil felt dizzy. Mede Fairman drank off half a tankard, wiped foam pleasurably off his mouth, and inquired, “What d’you think of the initiation?”
“It was—it was—”
“Humbling?”
“Yes,” Ganil agreed. “Really humbling.”
“Humiliating, even,” the blue-eyed man suggested.
“Yes. A—a great mystery.” Perplexed, Ganil stared down into his beer. Mede smiled and said in his soft voice, “I know. Drink up, now. I think you ought to have an Apothecary look at that burn.” Ganil obediently followed him out into the evening, into the narrow streets thronged with pedestrians, horse-carts, ox-carts, chuffing motor-carts. In the Merchantsplace the booths of the artisans were being closed for the night, and down High Street the great doors of the Shops and Lodges were already barred. Here and there the overhung, elbowing houses were parted by the blank yellow façade of a temple, marked with one plain circle of polished brass. In the dull, brief summer twilight under the unmoving clouds the black-haired, bronze-skinned people of the Common Day crowded and idled and pushed and talked and cursed and laughed, and Ganil, dizzy from fatigue and pain and strong beer, kept close beside Mede as if, for all his own new Masterhood, this blue-eyed stranger were his only guide.
“XVI plus IXX,” Ganil said impatiently, “what the devil, boy, can’t you add?” The apprentice flushed red. “Isn’t it XXXVI, then, Master Ganil?” he asked feebly. For answer Ganil jammed one of the rods the boy had been machining into its place in the steam engine that was being repaired; it was too long by an inch.
“It’s because my rule of thumb’s so long, sir,” the boy said, displaying his knobby hands. The distance between first and second thumb-joint was in fact unusually long. “So it is,” Ganil said. His dark face darkened. “Very interesting. But it doesn’t matter how long your inch is so long as you use it consistently. And what matters, you blockhead, is that XVI and IXX don’t make XXXVI, never have, never can, never will till the world ends—you incompetent gentile!”
“Yes, sir. It’s so hard to remember, sir.”
“It’s intended to be hard to remember, Wanno Prentice,” said a deep voice: Lee the Shopmaster, a fat deep-chested man with bright black eyes. “Come over here a minute, Ganil.” Leading him to a quieter corner of the great workshop, Lee went on cheerfully, “You’re a bit impatient, Master Ganil.”
“Wanno should know his addition-tables.”
“Even Masters forget an addition now and then, you know.” Lee patted Ganil’s shoulder in a fatherly way. “Why, you sounded for a moment there as if you expected him to compute it!” He laughed aloud, a fine bass laugh through which his eyes gleamed merrily and with infinite shrewdness. “Take it easy, that’s all
. . . . I understand you’re coming for dinner next Altarday Eve?”
“I took the liberty—”
“Fine, fine! More power to you. Wish she’d take on a good steady fellow like you. But I give you fair warning. My daughter’s a willful hussy.” Again the Master laughed, and Ganil grinned, a little ruefully. The Shopmaster’s daughter Lani had not only most of the young men of the Shop, but also her father, twisted right round her little finger. A clever, quicksilver girl, she had at first rather scared Ganil. It took him a while to notice that she spoke, to him only, with a certain shyness, a hint almost of pleading. He had finally got up courage to ask a dinner invitation from her mother, the recognized first step of a courtship. He stood now where Lee had left him, thinking of Lani’s smile.
“Ganil, have you ever seen the Sun?”
It was a low voice, dry and easy. He turned, meeting his friend’s blue eyes.
“The Sun? Yes, of course I have.”
“When was the last time?”
“Let’s see, I was twenty-six; four years ago. Weren’t you here in Edun then? It came out in late afternoon, and that night there were stars. I counted eighty-one, I remember, before the sky closed.”
“I was up north in Keling then in my first Mastership.” Mede leaned against the wooden guard rail of the model heavy steam engine as he spoke. His light eyes looked away from the busy shop, out the windows at the fine, steady rain of late autumn. “Heard you telling off young Wanno just now . . . ‘What matters is that XVI and IXX don’t make XXXVI. . . .’ ‘When I was twenty-six, four years ago . . . I counted eighty-one stars. . . .’ A little more and you’d be computing, Ganil.”
Ganil frowned, unconsciously rubbing the whitish scar on his temple. “Well, hell, Medel even gentiles know IV from XXXI”
Mede smiled faintly. He had his Comparing Stick in his hand, and lowering it he drew on the dusty floor a round shape. “What’s that?” he asked.
“The Sun.”
“Right. It’s also a . . . a figure. A number. The figure for Nothing.”
“The figure for Nothing?”
“Yes. You could use it in the subtraction-tables, for instance. I from II leaves I, right? But what does II from II leave?” A pause. He tapped the circle with his stick. “That.”
“Yes, of course.” Ganil stared down at the circle, the sacred image of the Sun, the Hidden Light, the Face of God. “Is that priest-knowledge?”
“No.” Mede drew an X-cross over the circle. “That is.”
“Then what—whose knowledge is the—the figure for Nothing?”
“No one’s. Anyone’s. It’s not a mystery.” Ganil frowned in surprise at this statement. They spoke in low voices, standing close as if discussing a measurement on Mede’s Comparing Stick. “Why did you count the stars, Ganil?”
“I . . . I wanted to know. I’ve always liked counting, numbers, the tables. That’s why I’m a Mechanic.”
“Yes. You’re thirty, aren’t you, you’ve been a Master for four months now. Did you ever think, Ganil, that to be a Master means you have learned everything your trade can teach? From now on until your death you’ll learn nothing more. There is no more.”
“But the Shopmasters—”
“Shopmasters learn some secret signals and passwords,” Mede said in his soft, dry voice, “and of course they have power. But they know no more than you. . . . You thought perhaps they were allowed to compute, didn’t you? They aren’t.”
Ganil was silent.
“And yet there are things to be learned, Ganil.”
“Where?”
“Outside.”
There was a long pause.
“I can’t listen to this, Mede. Don’t speak of it again. I won’t betray you.” Ganil turned and walked away, his face harsh with anger. With all his will he turned that confused and struggling anger against Mede, a man as deformed of mind as of body, an evil counsellor, a lost friend.
It had been a pleasant evening: Lee jovial, his fat wife motherly, and Lani shy and radiant. Ganil’s youthful gravity made her tease him, but even in her teasing was that pleading, yielding note; another moment, it seemed, and all her verve would turn to tenderness. Passing a dish at table once her hand had for an instant touched his. He still knew exactly where, there, the side of his right hand near the wrist, one soft touch. He moaned luxuriously as he lay in bed in his room over the Shop in the utter blackness of the city night. O Lani, soft touch of a hand, of lips—O Lord, Lord! Courtship was a long business, eight months at least, going from step to step as one must with a Master’s daughter. Ganil had to get his mind off this unendurable sweetness. Think of nothing, he told himself firmly, go to sleep. Think of nothing. . . . And he thought of nothing. The circle. The round empty circle. What was I times 0? The same as II times 0. What if you put I beside 0, what would that figure be, 10?
Mede Fairman sat up in bed, brown hair lank over groggy blue eyes, and tried to focus on the person crashing around his room. The first dirty-yellow light of dawn showed at the window. “This is Altarday,” he growled, “go away, I’m sleepy.” The vague figure resolved into Ganil, the crashing into a whisper. “Mede!” Ganil kept whispering, “look!” He stuck a slate under Mede’s nose. “Look, look what you can do with that figure for Nothing—”
“Oh, that,” said Mede. He pushed Ganil and the slate away, went and dunked his head in the basin of icy water on his clothes-chest, and kept it there a while. He returned dripping to sit on the bed. “Let’s see.”
“See, you can use any number for a base, I used XII because it’s handy. XII becomes 1-0, see, and XIII is I-I, then when you get up to XXIV—”
“Sh.”
Mede studied the slate. Finally he said, “Will you remember this?” and at Ganil’s nod, wiped the neat crowded figures off the slate with a rub of his sleeve. “I hadn’t realized that one could use any base. . . . But look, use the base X, I’ll tell you why in a minute, and here’s a device that makes it easier. Now X will be 10, and XI will be II, but for XII, write this,” and he wrote on the slate, 12.
Ganil stared at the figure. At last he said in a peculiar struggling voice, “Isn’t that one of the black numbers?”
“Yes, it is. All you’ve done, Ganil, is to come at the black numbers by the back door.”
Ganil sat beside him, silent.
“What’s CXX times MCC?” Mede inquired.
“The tables don’t go that high.”
“Watch.” Mede wrote on the slate:
and then as Ganil watched,
Another long pause. “Three Nothings . . . XII times itself . . . Give me the slate,” Ganil muttered. Then after a silence broken only by the patter of rain and the squeak of chalk on slate, “What’s the black number for VIII?”
By twilight of that cold Altarday they had gone as far as Mede could take Ganil. Indeed Ganil had gone farther than Mede could follow him. “You must meet Yin,” the fair man said. “He can teach you what you need. Yin works with angles, triangles, measurements. He can measure the distance between any two points, points you can’t reach, using his triangles. He is a great Learner. Numbers are the heart of this knowledge, the language of it.”
“And my own language.”
“Yes, it is. Not mine. I don’t love numbers for themselves. I want to use them. To explain things . . . For instance, if you throw a ball, what makes the ball move?”
“Your throwing it.” Ganil grinned. White as a sheet—much whiter than Mede’s sheets—his head ringing with sixteen straight hours of mathematics minus meals or sleep, he had lost all fear, all humility. His smile was that of a king come home from exile.
“Fine,” said Mede. “Why does it keep on moving?”
“Because . . . because the air holds it up?”
“Then why does it ever fall? Why does it follow a curve? What kind of curve is it? Do you see how I need your numbers?” It was Mede who now looked like a king, an angry king with an empire too immense to control. “And they talk about Mysteries,
” he snorted, “in their little shuttered shops! —Here, come on, let’s get some dinner and go see Yin.”
Built right up against the city wall, the tall old house peered from leaded windows at the two young Masters down in the street. Sulfurous late-autumn twilight hung over the steep slate roofs shining with rain. “Yin was a Machine-Master like us,” Mede told Ganil as they waited at the iron-barred door, “retired now, you’ll see why. Men from all the Lodges come here, apothecaries, weavers, masons. Even some artisans. One butcher. He cuts up dead cats.” Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists. Now the door swung open, and a servant took them upstairs to a room where logs glowed on a great hearth, and a man rose from a high-backed oaken chair to greet them.
Ganil thought at once of the Overmaster of his Lodge, the figure that had cried down to him in his grave, “Arise.” Yin too was old and tall, and wore the white cloak of the High Masters. But he stooped, and his face was creased and weary as an old hound’s. He held out his left hand to greet them. His right arm ended in a long healed, shiny stump at the wrist.
“This is Ganil,” Mede was saying. “He invented the duodecimal system last night. Get him working on the mathematics of curves for me, Master Yin.”
Yin laughed, an old man’s short, soft laugh. “Welcome, Ganil. From now on, come here when you please. We’re all necromancers here, we practice the black arts. Or try to . . . Come freely, day or night. And go freely. If we’re betrayed, so be it. We must trust one another. Mystery belongs to no man; we’re not keeping a secret, but practicing an art. Does that make sense to you?”
Ganil nodded. Words never came easily to him, only numbers. And he found himself very moved, which embarrassed him. This was no solemn symbolic Initiation and Oath, but only an old man talking quietly.
The Wind's Twelve Quarters Page 5