Perelandra (29 page)

‘We know these things now,’ said the King, seeing Ransom’s hesitation. ‘All this, all that happened in your world, Maleldil has put into our mind. We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep. You are more ignorant of evil in Thulcandra now than in the days before your Lord and Lady began to do it. But Maleldil has brought us out of the one ignorance, and we have not entered the other. It was by the Evil One himself that he brought us out of the first. Little did that dark mind know the errand on which he really came to Perelandra!’

‘Forgive me, my Father, if I speak foolishly,’ said Ransom. ‘I see how evil has been made known to the Queen, but not how it was made known to you.’

Then unexpectedly the King laughed. His body was very big and his laugh was like an earthquake in it, loud
and deep and long, till in the end Ransom laughed too, though he had not seen the joke, and the Queen laughed as well. And the birds began clapping their wings and the beasts wagging their tails, and the light seemed brighter and the pulse of the whole assembly quickened, and new modes of joy that had nothing to do with mirth as we understand it passed into them all, as it were from the very air, or as if there were dancing in Deep Heaven. Some say there always is.

‘I know what he is thinking,’ said the King, looking upon the Queen. ‘He is thinking that you suffered and strove and I have a world for my reward.’ Then he turned to Ransom and continued. ‘You are right,’ he said, ‘I know now what they say in your world about justice. And perhaps they say well, for in that world things always fall below justice. But Maleldil always goes above it. All is gift. I am Oyarsa not by His gift alone but by our foster mother’s, not by hers alone but by yours, not by yours alone but my wife’s – nay, in some sort, by gift of the very beasts and birds. Through many hands, enriched with many different kinds of love and labour, the gift comes to me. It is the Law. The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own.’

‘That is not the whole of what happened, Piebald,’ said the Queen. ‘The King has not told you all. Maleldil drove him far away into a green sea where forests grow up from the bottom through the waves …’

‘Its name is Lur,’ said the King.

‘Its name is Lur,’ repeated the
eldila
. And Ransom realised that the King had uttered not an observation but an enactment.

‘And there in Lur (it is far hence),’ said the Queen, ‘strange things befell him.’

‘Is it good to ask about these things?’ said Ransom.

‘There were many things,’ said Tor the King. ‘For many hours I learned the properties of shapes by drawing lines in the turf of a little island on which I rode. For many hours I learned new things about Maleldil and about His Father and the Third One. We knew little of this while we were young. But after that He showed me in a darkness what was happening to the Queen. And I knew it was possible for her to be undone. And then I saw what had happened in your world, and how your Mother fell and how your Father went with her, doing her no good thereby and bringing the darkness upon all their children. And then it was before me like a thing coming towards my hand … what I should do in like case. There I learned of evil and good, of anguish and joy.’

Ransom had expected the King to relate his decision, but when the King’s voice died away into thoughtful silence he had not the assurance to question him.

‘Yes …’ said the King, musing. ‘Though a man were to be torn in two halves … though half of him turned into earth…. The living half must still follow Maleldil. For if it also lay down and became earth, what hope would there be for the whole? But while one half lived, through it He might send life back into the other.’ Here he paused for a long time, and then spoke again somewhat quickly. ‘He gave me no assurance. No fixed land. Always one must throw oneself into the wave.’ Then he cleared his brow and turned to the
eldil
and spoke in a new voice.

‘Certainly, oh foster mother,’ he said. ‘We have much need of counsel for already we feel that growing up
within our bodies which our young wisdom can hardly overtake. They will not always be bodies bound to the low worlds. Hear the second word that I speak as Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri. While this World goes about Arbol ten thousand times, we shall judge and hearten our people from this throne. Its name is Tai Harendrimar, The Hill of Life.’

‘Its name is Tai Harendrimar,’ said the
eldila.

‘On the Fixed Land which once was forbidden,’ said Tor the King, ‘we will make a great place to the splendour of Maleldil. Our sons shall bend the pillars of rock into arches –’

‘What are arches?’ said Tinidril the Queen.

‘Arches,’ said Tor the King, ‘are when pillars of stone throw out branches like trees and knit their branches together and bear up a great dome as of leafage, but the leaves shall be shaped stones. And there our sons will make images.’

‘What are images?’ said Tinidril.

‘Splendour of Deep Heaven!’ cried the King with a great laugh. ‘It seems there are too many new words in the air. I had thought these things were coming out of your mind into mine, and lo! you have not thought them at all. Yet I think Maleldil passed them to me through you, none the less. I will show you images, I will show you houses. It may be that in this matter our natures are reversed and it is you who beget and I who bear. But let us speak of plainer matters. We will fill this world with our children. We will know this world to the centre. We will make the nobler of the beasts so wise that they will become
hnau
and speak: their lives shall awake to a new life in us as we awake in Maleldil. When the time is ripe
for it and the ten thousand circlings are nearly at an end, we will tear the sky curtain and Deep Heaven shall become familiar to the eyes of our sons as the trees and the waves to ours.’

‘And what after this, Tor-Oyarsa?’ said Malacandra.

‘Then it is Maleldil’s purpose to make use free of Deep Heaven. Our bodies will be changed, but not all changed. We shall be as the
eldila
, but not all as the
eldila
. And so will all our sons and daughters be changed in the time of their ripeness, until the number is made up which Maleldil read in His Father’s mind before times flowed.’

‘And that,’ said Ransom, ‘will be the end?’

Tor the King stared at him.

‘The end?’ he said. ‘Who spoke of an end?’

‘The end of your world, I mean,’ said Ransom.

‘Splendour of Heaven!’ said Tor. ‘Your thoughts are unlike ours. About that time we shall be not far from the beginning of all things. But there will be one matter to settle before the beginning rightly begins.’

‘What is that?’ asked Ransom.

‘Your own world,’ said Tor, ‘Thulcandra. The siege of your world shall be raised, the black spot cleared away, before the real beginning. In those days Maleldil will go to war – in us, and in many who once were
hnau
on your world, and in many from far off and in many
eldila
, and, last of all, in Himself unveiled, He will go down to Thulcandra. Some of us will go before. It is in my mind, Malacandra, that thou and I will be among those. We shall fall upon your moon, wherein there is a secret evil, and which is as the shield of the Dark Lord of Thulcandra – scarred with many a blow. We shall break her. Her light shall be put out. Her fragments shall fall
into your world and the seas and the smoke shall arise so that the dwellers in Thulcandra will no longer see the light of Arbol. And as Maleldil Himself draws near, the evil things in your world shall show themselves stripped of disguise so that plagues and horrors shall cover your lands and seas. But in the end all shall be cleansed, and even the memory of your Black Oyarsa blotted out, and your world shall be fair and sweet and reunited to the field of Arbol and its true name shall be heard again. But can it be, Friend, that no rumour of all this is heard in Thulcandra? Do your people think that their Dark Lord will hold his prey for ever?’

‘Most of them,’ said Ransom, ‘have ceased to think of such things at all. Some of us still have the knowledge: but I did not at once see what you were talking of, because what you call the beginning we are accustomed to call the Last Things.’

‘I do not call it the beginning,’ said Tor the King. ‘It is but the wiping out of a false start in order that the world may
then
begin. As when a man lies down to sleep, if he finds a twisted root under his shoulder he will change his place and after that his real sleep begins. Or as a man setting foot on an island, may make a false step. He steadies himself and after that his journey begins. You would not call that steadying of himself a last thing?’

‘And is the whole story of my race no more than this?’ said Ransom.

‘I see no more than beginnings in the history of the Low Worlds,’ said Tor the King. ‘And in yours a failure to begin. You talk of evenings before the day had dawned. I set forth even now on ten thousand years of preparation – I, the first of my race, my race the first of
races, to begin. I tell you that when the last of my children has ripened and ripeness has spread from them to all the Low Worlds, it will be whispered that the morning is at hand.’

‘I am full of doubts and ignorance,’ said Ransom. ‘In our world those who know Maleldil at all believe that His coming down to us and being a man is the central happening of all that happens. If you take that from me, Father, whither will you lead me? Surely not to the enemy’s talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe with no centre at all, but millions of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds for ever, and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness. Or do you make your world the centre? But I am troubled. What of the people of Malacandra? Would they also think that their world was the centre? I do not even see how your world can rightly be called yours. You were made yesterday and it is from old. The most of it is water where you cannot live. And what of the things beneath its crust? And of the great spaces with no world at all? Is the enemy easily answered when He says that all is without plan or meaning? As soon as we think we see one it melts away into nothing, or into some other plan that we never dreamed of, and what was the centre becomes the rim, till we doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was ever more than a trick of our own eyes, cheated with hope, or tired with too much looking. To what is all driving? What is the morning you speak of? What is it the beginning of?’

‘The beginning of the Great Game, of the Great Dance, said Tor. ‘I know little of it as yet. Let the
eldila
speak.’

The voice that spoke next seemed to be that of Mars, but Ransom was not certain. And who spoke after that, he does not know at all. For in the conversation that followed – if it can be called a conversation – though he believes that he himself was sometimes the speaker, he never knew which words were his or another’s, or even whether a man or an
eldil
was talking. The speeches followed one another – if, indeed, they did not all take place at the same time – like the parts of a music into which all five of them had entered as instruments or like a wind blowing through five trees that stand together on a hilltop.

‘We would not talk of it like that,’ said the first voice. ‘The Great Dance does not wait to be perfect until the peoples of the Low Worlds are gathered into it. We speak not of when it will begin. It has begun from before always. There was no time when we did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance which we dance is at the centre and for the dance all things were made. Blessed be He!’

Another said, ‘Never did He make two things the same; never did He utter one word twice. After earths, not better earths but beasts; after beasts, not better beasts but spirits. After a falling, not recovery but a new creation. Out of the new creation, not a third but the mode of change itself is changed for ever. Blessed be He!’

And another said, ‘It is loaded with Justice as a tree bows down with fruit. All is righteousness and there is no equality. Not as when stones lie side by side, but as when stones support and are supported in an arch, such is His order; rule and obedience, begetting and bearing, heat glancing down, life growing up. Blessed be He!’

One said, ‘They who add years to years in lumpish aggregation, or miles to miles and galaxies to galaxies, shall not come near His greatness. The day of the fields of Arbol will fade and the days of Deep Heaven itself are numbered. Not thus is He great. He dwells (all of Him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him. Blessed be He!’

‘The edge of each nature borders on that whereof it contains no shadow or similitude. Of many points one line; of many lines one shape; of many shapes one solid body; of many senses and thoughts one person; of three persons, Himself. As in the circle to the sphere, so are the ancient worlds that needed no redemption to that world wherein He was born and died. As is a point to a line, so is that world to the far-off fruits of its redeeming. Blessed be He!’

‘Yet the circle is not less round than the sphere, and the sphere is the home and fatherland of circles. Infinite multitudes of circles lie enclosed in every sphere, and if they spoke they would say, For us were spheres created. Let no mouth open to gainsay them. Blessed be He!’

‘The peoples of the ancient worlds who never sinned, for whom He never came down, are the peoples for whose sake the Low Worlds were made. For though the healing what was wounded and the straightening what was bent is a new dimension of glory, yet the straight was not made that it might be bent nor the whole that it might be wounded. The ancient peoples are at the centre. Blessed be He!’

‘All which is not itself the Great Dance was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen
World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the Dust and made it glorious for ever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the world where this was enacted is the centre of worlds. Blessed be He!’