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“But so near that the life of a man will nearly reach it?” He twitched his shoulders and smiled beneath his beard. “Let us say it is a thing of degree. You will not see this. Nor will your children, nor theirs. But the process has already begun. It began long before you were born.”
I knew nothing of the south, but I found myself thinking of the island people of Hallvard’s story, the precious little sheltered places with a growing season, the hunting of the seals. Those islands would not hold men and their families much longer. The boats would scrape over their stony beaches for the last time. “My wife, my children, my children, my wife.”
“At this time, many of your people are already gone,” Master Ash continued. “Those you ‘call the cacogens have mercifully carried them to fairer worlds. Many more will leave before the final victory of the ice. I am myself, you see, defended from those refugees.”
I asked if everyone would escape.
He shook his head. “No, not everyone. Some would not go, some could not be found. No home could be found for others.”
For some time I sat looking out at the beleaguered valley and trying to order my thoughts. At last I said, “I have always found that men of religion tell comforting things that are not true, while men of science recount hideous truths. The Chatelaine Ma
“The distinction you mention no longer holds. Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something, It is the same something. You are yourself what you call a man of science, so I talk of science to you. If Ma
I have so many memories that I often become lost among them. Now as I looked at the pines, waving in a wind I could not feel, I seemed to hear the beating of a drum. “I met another man who said he was from the future once,” I said. “He was green—nearly as green as those trees—and he told me that his time was a time of brighter Sun.”
Master Ash nodded. “No doubt he spoke truly.”
“But you tell me that what I see now is but a few lifetimes away, that it is part of a process already begun, and that this will be the last glaciation. Either you are a false prophet or he was.”
“I am not a prophet,” answered Master Ash, “nor was he. No one can know the future. We are speaking of the past.”
I was angry again. “You told me this was only a few lifetimes away.”
“I did. But you, and this scene, are past events for me.”
“I am not a thing of the past! I belong to the present.”
“From your own viewpoint you are correct. But you forget I ca
This is my house. It is through my windows that you have looked. My house strikes its roots into the past. Without that I should go mad here. As it is, I read these old centuries like books. I hear the voices of the long dead, yours among them. You think that time is a single thread. It is a weaving, a tapestry that extends forever in all directions. I follow a thread backward. You will trace a colour forward, what colour I ca
Not knowing what to say, I could only mutter that I had conceived of time as a river.
“Yes—you came from Nessus, did you not? And that was a city built about a river. But it was once a city by the sea, and you would do better to think of time as a sea. The waves ebb and flow, and currents run beneath them.”
“I would like to go downstairs, “I said. “To return to my own time.”
Master Ash said, “I understand.”
“I wonder if you do. Your time, if I have heard you rightly, is that of this house’s highest story, and you have a bed there, and other necessary things. Yet when you are not overwhelmed by your labours you sleep here, according to what you have told me. Yet you say this is nearer my time than your own.”
He stood up. “I meant that I too flee the ice. Shall we go? You will want food before you begin the long trip back to Ma
“We both will,” I said.
He turned to look at me before he started down the stair. “I told you I could not go with you. You have discovered for yourself how well hidden this house is. For all who do not walk the path correctly, even the lowest story stands in the future.”
I caught both his arms behind him in a double lock and used my-free hand to search him for weapons. There were none, and though he was strong, he was not as strong as I had feared he might be.
“You plan to carry me to Ma
“Yes, Master, and well have a great deal less trouble if you will go willingly. Tell me where I can find some rope—I don’t want to have to use the belt of your robe.”
“There is none,” he told me.
I bound his hands with his cincture, as I had first pla
“I made you welcome in my house. What harm have I done you?”
“Quite a bit, but that doesn’t matter. I like you. Master Ash, and I respect you. I hope that you won’t hold what I am doing to you against me any more than I hold what you have done to me against you. But the Pelerines sent me to fetch you, and I find I am a certain sort of man, if you understand what I mean.
Now don’t go down the steps too fast. If you you won’t be able to catch yourself.”
I led him to the room to which he had first taken me and got some of the hard bread and a package of dried fruit. “I don’t think of myself as one anymore,” I continued, “but I was brought up as—” It was at my lips to say torturer, but I realized (then, I think, for the first time) that it was not quite the correct term for what the guild did and used the official one instead, “—as a Seeker for Truth and Penitence. We do what we have said we will do.”
“I have duties to perform. In the upper level, where you slept.”
“I am afraid they must go unperformed.” He was silent as we went out the door and onto the rocky hilltop. Then he said, “I will go with you, if I can. I have often wished to walk out of this door and never halt.” I told him that if he would swear upon his honour, I would untie him at once. He shook his head.
“You might think that I betrayed you.” I did not know what he meant.
“Perhaps somewhere there is the woman I have called Vine. But your world is your world. I can exist there only if the probability of my existence is high.”
I said, “I existed in your house, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but that was because your probability was complete. You are a part of the past from which my house and I have come. The question is whether I am the future to which you go.”
I remembered the green man in Saltus, who had been solid , enough. “Will you vanish like a soap bubble then?” I asked. “Or blow away like smoke?”
“I do not know,” he said. “I do not know what will happen to me. Or where I will go when it does. I may cease to exist in any time. That was why I never left of my own will.”
I took him by one arm, I suppose because I thought I could keep him with me in that way, and we walked on. I followed the route Ma