grown enormously, and soon it would be impossible for them to dispose of Eigenblick tidily, if dispose of him they must; not much longer and it would be impossible to dispose of him at all. They raised Hawksquill’s fees, and spoke in veiled terms of perhaps seeking other sources of advice. Hawksquill ignored all this. So far from malingering, she now spent nearly every waking and many sleeping hours in pursuit of whoever or whatever it was that claimed to be Russell Eigenblick, haunting her own memory mansions like an unlaid ghost, and following flying scraps of evidence farther than she had ever gone before, pulling up at times before powers she would rather not have started into wakefulness, and finding herself in places that she had not before known she knew existed.
Where she found herself just now was at the top of a stair.
Whether she mounted or descended these stairs she wouldn’t afterwards be able to determine; but they were long. At the end of them was a chamber. The broad studded door stood flung open. A great stone, by its track in the dust, had not long ago been rolled away from barring shut the door. Dimly within she could see a long feast- table, spilled cups and scattered chairs iced with ancient dust; from the chamber came an odor as of a messy bedroom just opened. But there was no one within.
She made to pass the broken door to investigate, but noticed then seated on the stone a figure in white, small, pretty, head bound in a golden fillet, paring its nails with a small knife. Not knowing what language to speak to this person, Hawksquill raised her brows and pointed within.
“He is not here,” the person said. “He is risen.”
Hawksquill considered a question or two, but understood before she asked that this personage would not answer them, that he (or she) was an embodiment only of that one remark: He is not here, he is risen. She turned away (the stair and the door and the message and the messenger fading from her attention like a shape momentarily perceived in changeful clouds) and set off further, bethinking herself where she might go for answers to many new questions, or questions to fit the many new answers she was quickly garnering.
Daughter of Time
“The difference,” Hawksquill had long ago written in one of the tall marbled folios filled with her left-handed script which stood or lay on the long lamplit study table far behind her now, “the difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space.
“To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at. When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in space; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante’s sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Heraclitus could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time’s body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form—the qualities of Space. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory.”
Knowing this to be so, it could not matter to Hawksquill that on her travels her gray-bunned head and nerveless limbs did not probably change place, remained (she supposed) in the plush chair in the middle of the Cosmo-Opticon at the top of her house which stood in a hexagram of lower City streets. The winged horse she had summoned to bear her away was not a winged horse but that Great Square of stars pictured above her, and “away” was not where she was borne; but the greatest skill (perhaps the only skill) of the true mage is to apprehend these distinctions without making them, and to translate time into space without an error. It’s all, said the old alchemists quite truthfully, so simple.
“Away!” said the voice of her Memory when the hand of her Memory was on the reins again and her seat was sure, and away they went, vast wings beating through Time. They traversed oceans of it while Hawksquill thought; and then her steed plunged, at her command, unhesitatingly, without a blink, which took the breath of her Memory away, into either the southern sky below the world or into the limpid-dark austral waters, in any case making for there where all past ages lie, Ogygia the Fair.
Her Steed’s silver-shod feet touched that shore, and his great head sank; his strong wings, billowing like draperies, now emptied of the air of time, sank too with a whisper and trailed along the eternal grass, which he cropped for strength. Hawksquill dismounted, patted her steed’s enormous neck, whispered that she would return, and started off, following the footprints, each longer than herself, pressed on these shores at the end of the Golden Age and petrified long since. The air was windless, yet the gigantic forest under whose eaves she entered soughed with a breath of its own, or perhaps with His breath, expelled and drawn with the long regularity of immemorial sleep.
She came no closer than the entrance of the vale he filled. “Father,” she said, and her voice startled the silence; aged eagles with heavy wings rose up and settled sleepily again. “Father,” she said again, and the vale stirred. The great gray boulders were his knees, the long gray ivy his hair, the precipice-gripping rnassy roots his fingers; the eye he opened to her was milky-gray, a dim-glowing stone, the Saturn of her Cosmo-Opticon. He yawned: the inhalation turned the leaves of trees like storm-wind and stirred her hair, and when he exhaled his breath was the cold black breath of a bottomless cave.
“Daughter,” he said, in a voice like earth’s.
“I’m sorry to disturb your sleep, Father,” she said, “but I have a question only you can answer.”
“Ask it then.”
“Does a new world now begin? I see no reason why it should, and yet it seems it does.”
Everyone knows that when his sons overthrew their ancient Father, and cast him here, the endless Age of Gold ended, and Time was invented with all its labors. Less well known is how the young, unruly Gods, frightened or ashamed at what they had done, gave the ruling of this new entity into the hands of their Father. He was asleep in Ogygia then and didn’t care, so ever since it has been here in this isle, where the five rivers have their common wellspring, that all the used years accumulate like fallen leaves; and when the Ancientest One, troubled by a dream of overthrow or change, shifts his massy limbs and smacks his lips, scratching at the rock-ribbed muscles of his hams, a new age issues, the measures alter which he gives to the dance of the universe, the sun is born in a new sign.
Thus the airy scheming Gods contrived to put the blame for the calamity on their old Father. In time, Kronos, king of the happy Timeless Age, became old busybody Chronos with his sickle and hourglass, father of chronicles and chronometers. Only his true sons and daughters know better—and some adopted ones, Ariel Hawksquill among them.
“Does a new age now begin?” she asked again. “It’s beforehand if it does.”
“A New Age,” said Father Time in a voice that could create one. “No. Not for years and years.” He brushed away a few of these that had gathered in withered piles on his shoulders.
“Then,” Hawksquill said, “who is Russell Eigenblick, if he isn’t King of a new age?”
“Russell Eigenblick?”
“The man with the red beard. The Lecturer. The Geography.”
He lay back again, his rocky couch groaning beneath him. “No King of a new age,” he said. “An upstart. An invader.”
“Invader?”
“He is their champion. That’s why they waked him.” His milky-gray eye was drifting closed. “Asleep for a thousand years, lucky man. And now awakened for the conflict.”
“Conflict? Champion?”
