The Incompleat Nifft (73 page)

I laid it all out on the rocks, and dove into the sea. We swam a furlong or two. I realized I had not until this very moment really emerged from the underworlds—that one never can until he has taken a plunge in the sea, snorted the brine. This alone can cleanse the last whiffs of subworld air from the nostrils! The morning sun touched our skins through the water's chilly velvet, and we were home again under the sky.

At length we swam back and re-dressed, and performed the simple, homely ceremony we had conceived. The pair of us stood ourselves side by side, facing out over the harbor deeps, our little
Bounty
's drowning place. Barnar, in his beautiful, surprising baritone, sang Passarolle's
Hymn to Having Had
:

How you gleamed! How you dazzled me,
shone in my arms
 

When I hugged you, and held you,
and had you for mine!
 

But all things that live must at length come
to harm,
 

If it's only the harm of their ceasing to shine.
 

You blazed when we loved!
You were both flame and wick.
 

How meltingly glowed you your body away!
 

And all our sweet nearness, we lived it up quick!
 

Now, somewhere, the still-fleeing light of our days
 

Wings shining along with the lie we still love,
 

Though long have our hands and our hearts
ceased to move.
 

We cast out the wreaths, and watched them till they grew sodden, and sank. Only at that moment, I think, did my soul finally and fully let go of my lost fortune. It seemed to me that a transparent empire of phantom wonders flickered in the sky above me, and melted away forever—castles and splendors, steeples and towers of Exploit standing tall on history's horizons . . . all of it a thousand fathoms down now. Dark.

And in that moment the wreaths went down, something heavy seemed to sink out of my heart as well. How much less I had now than before! But I seemed to know myself again.

"A good fortyweight each of specie in our moneybelts," said Barnar. "Our weapons, our gear . . . And tenweight each of the Unguent of Flight . . ."

How good it was that our eyes could meet again, Barnar and I, and we could laugh!

"Well, old Ox-back," I suggested, "let's fly on down to the Minuskulons."

"What a splendid idea!"

We anointed our hands and our feet with the Unguent of Flight, and we climbed into the air.

Back down in the subworld, when we had followed the New Queen's ravening army for some days, but had not yet grown greatly laden with our plunder, Barnar and I found ourselves almost directly under the polestar and murky sun of that region: the red-weeping Eye of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine.

And the whim took us to fly up near that monstrous orb and see what could be seen within it.

The demon's pupil yawned above us, a sawtoothed wheel of black. Its simple hugeness made us hang in terror, halted still some quarter mile below it, and from even this remove its dark sentience sucked with a whirlpool's force at us, irresistibly pulling our buoyancy up into itself.

And we saw that red shadows thronged that abyss at every depth, they bloomed and melted, making those deeps as populous as a night sky is with stars. And I believe—though it stirs the hairs along my nape even to think it now—I believe the Demon noted us, and knew us for humankind. Knew us for possessors of the sun he craved, the sun he had destroyed himself to reach, his blazing Grail of exploit.

And I will always think that I saw more, that I saw the sun 'Omphalodon dreamed of, saw it there in the gulf of his gaze: a furious contorted coal of ruby light, poisonously hot and murky, but burning colossally, a titan in its sea of blood-red worlds. I directly beheld 'Omphalodon's dream, and I pitied him. This blood-hued, scalding pustule of a sun, its rage all heat and little light—thus high was all the demon's imagining could achieve, origined as he was so deep in hell.

Now Barnar and I, from the south lip of half-ruined Dolmen Harbor, took to the air, and climbed straight up toward the sun itself. Its inexhaustible gold bathed us in the ultimate, the only wealth—sweet Light! Where is the joy of anything else without it?

Now in this cloudless windy noon, this scoured blue sky, we flew. And despite all the leagues we had swum the vaulted skies of the subworld, we flew now for the first time, except, perhaps for those first moments of wild discovery flying up the wall of 'Omphalodon's buried flesh.

We felt snug and free as fish in the wind's liquidity; we soared, grabbing handfuls of the atmosphere. Dolmen's blackened crown, still leaking smoke from smouldering carcasses, dropped away beneath us.

We spurned them, and climbed higher, and the island dwindled to let us see others of the Angalheims, strung out to the south, a great flotilla of islands cruising in to dock at Kairnheim's shore, the green scrub on their flanks all polished and glossy like new armor scoured by the wind's whetstone. Here and there other, more peaceful flower fields showed, shards of rainbow in the uplands.

We gaped astonished on the earth, on one another. We had life, and flight, and some time left under the sun of this wide mad wealth, this World of Light.

"We're rich!" I howled.

"Away!" Barnar bellowed, and we pulled up into a sharp climb toward the zenith.