No sooner had Man tied Tarnung about his shoulders and picked up Maser than the god vanished from his sight, and he found he rested in a grove of trees with scarlet flowers.
The time of the gods is not as the time of men and women. Who can say how long Man wandered across Land on Zed? He wandered in the high, hot lands where men have few laws and many slaves.
There he fought many fights until he knew all the manner of fighting of the people of the high, hot lands and grew shamed of killing those men with Maser, and took for himself the crooked sword of those lands, putting Maser by. Then he drew to him a hundred wild men, bandits, and slaves who had slain their masters and fled, and murderers of many kinds. And he armed them after the manner of the high, hot lands, and mounted them on the yellow camels of those lands, that oftimes crush men with their necks, and led them in many wars. His face was like the faces of other men, and his sword like their swords; he stood no taller than they, and his shoulders were no broader; yet because he was very cunning and sometimes vanished from the camp, his followers venerated him.
At last he grew rich, and built a citadel in the fastness of the mountains. It stood upon a cliff and was rimmed with mighty walls. A thousand spears and a thousand spells guarded it. Within were white domes and white towers, a hundred fountains, and gardens that leaped up the mountain in roses and ran down it like children in the laughter of many waters. There Man sat at his ease and exchanged tales with his captains of their many wars. There he listened to the feet of his dancers as the pattering of rain, and meditated on their round limbs and smiling faces. And at last he grew tired of these things and, wrapping himself in Tarnung, vanished and was seen in that citadel no more.
Then he wandered in the steaming lands, where the trees grew taller than his towers and the men are shy and kill from the shadows with little poisoned arrows no longer than their forearms. There for a long while he wore the cloak Tarnung always, for no sword avails against such an arrow in the neck. The weight of the sword he had fetched from the high, hot lands oppressed him there, and the breath of the steaming lands rusted its blade, and so he cast it, one day, into a slow river where the black crocodiles swam and the river horses with amber eyes floated like logs or bellowed like thunder. But the magical sword Maser he kept.
And in the steaming lands he learned the ways of the great trees, of which each is an island, with its own dwellers thereon, and he learned the ways of the beasts of Zed, whose cleverness is so much less than the cleverness of men, and whose wisdom is so much more. There he tamed a panther with eyes like three emeralds, so that it followed him like a dog and killed for him like a hawk, and when he came upon a village of the men of the steaming lands he leaped from a high branch onto the head of their idol and smote the hut of their chief with the sword Maser and vanished from their sight. And when he returned after a year to that village, he saw that the old idol was destroyed and a new idol set up, with lightning in its hand and a panther at its feet.
Then he entered that village and blessed all the people and made the lap of that idol his throne. He rode an elephant with a bloodred tusk and two trunks; his war canoes walked up and down the river on a hundred legs; the heads of his drums were beaten with the white bones of chiefs; his wives were kept from the sun so their pale beauty would lure him to his hut by night and their fresh skins give him rest even in the steaming lands, and they were gorged with oil and meal until he lay upon them as upon pillows of silk. And so he would have remained had not the god Isid Iooo IoooE come to him in a dream of the night and commanded him to bestir himself, wandering and observing in the cold lands.
There he walked down a thousand muddy roads and kissed cool lips in a hundred rainy gardens. The people of the cold lands keep no slaves and have many laws, and their justice is the wonder of strangers, and so he found the bread of the cold lands hard and scant, and for a long time he cleaned boots for it, and for a long time dug ditches to drain their fields.
And each day the ship of Isid Iooo IoooE circled Zed, and when it had made several hundred such circles, Zed circled its lonely sun, and circled again, and yet again, so that Man’s beard grew white, and the cunning that had won battles in the high, hot lands and burned the idol in the steaming lands was replaced with something better and less useful.
One day he plunged the blade of his shovel into the earth and turned his back to it. In a spinney he drew out Maser (which he had not drawn for so long that he feared its magic was no more than a dream he had had when young) and cut a sapling. With that for a staff he took to the roads again, and when its leaves withered—which they did but slowly in that wet, cold country—he cut another and another, so that he taught always beneath a green tree.
In the marketplace he told of honor, and how it is a higher law than any law.
At the crossroads he talked of freedom, the freedom of the wind and clouds, the freedom that loves all things and is without guilt.
Beside city gates he told stories of the forgotten cities that were and of the forgotten cities that might be, if only men would forget them.
Often the people of the cold lands sought to imprison him according to their laws, but he vanished from their sight. Often they mocked him, but he smiled at their mockery, which knew no law. Many among the youth of the cold lands heard him, and many feigned to follow his teachings, and a few did follow them and lived strange lives.
Then a night came when the first flakes of snow were falling, and on that night the god Isid Iooo IoooE drew him up as the puppeteer lifts his doll. A few friends were in the lee of a wood with him, and it seemed to them that there came a sudden flurry of snow spangled with colors and Man was gone.
But it seemed to him, as he stood once more in the presence of the god Isid Iooo IoooE, that he had waked from a long dream; his hands had their strength again, his beard was black, and his eyes had regained their clarity, though not their cunning.
“Now tell me,” Isid Iooo IoooE commanded him, “all that you have seen and done,” and when Man had told him, he asked, “Which of these three peoples loved you the best, and why did you love them?”
Man thought for a time, drawing the cloak Tarnung about his shoulders, for it seemed to him cold in the belly of the ship of Isid Iooo IoooE. “The people of the high, hot lands are unjust,” he said. “Yet I came to love them, for there is no falsity in them. They feast their friends and flay their foes and, trusting no one, never weep that they are betrayed.
“The people of the cold lands are just, and yet I came to love them also, though that was much harder.
“The people of the steaming lands are innocent of justice and injustice alike. They follow their hearts, and while I dwelt among them I followed mine and loved them best of all.”
“You yet have much to learn, Man,” said the god Isid Iooo IoooE. “For the people of the cold lands are much the nearest to me. Do you not understand that in time the steaming lands, and all of the Land of Zed, must fall to one of its great peoples or the other?”
