To water itself, enraptured and lost
As the whole world vanishes.
And always the river spoke like this, always the dark current lulling the heart and the mind into that undertow where the homelands shift behind you and fade, and you think they have vanished in the necessity of rivers, in the battlements of forest, so that if you return to recover your path you are lost in the maze of leaf and inevitable current, of fore and aft, of the homelands always receding.
So spoke the river, and darkly I hearkened, suspended in darkness, in the heart's surrender.
A boat for the passage
I began to fashion, hides stripped in the lime pits sealed with tallow and stitched by the tendon of flax as the awl and the needle passed through and over the supple and skeletal wood:
The sails bellied forth in carnivorous winds, and in dark, in surrender, the ship moved rudderless, launched on insensible currents, borne to the South where the Courrain covers the edge of the world.
And borne to the South
I lay on the deck, and the boat was a cradle, a bride's bed, a gray catafalque carried into the night, it was strong wine and medicine, sleep past remembrance and past restoration, and as I lay down in the veinwork of halyards
I decided to rise up no longer.
And the date of my death was my embarkation.
III
Something there is in the rudderless sailing, abandoning hope as the husk of desire, architectures of boat and body coalesce with the water and the disburdening wind.
In the south, the sails filled with words and the boat took wing above the denial of waters.
Softly the wind spoke under the pulse of the sails:
Come, Astralas, ride into prophecy:
I am the breath of a God,
the wind was saying, the source of dreams and the webwork of reason.
Astralas, open your arms:
I shall pass through your fingers as brindled light,
as a vision from the brows of a weary king.
Hasten to Istar, domed and templed,
where sunlight refracts on bronze and silver,
on crystal and burnished iron.
Ten visions there you shall read and interpret,
in that comfortable city where truth without pain governs the span of the hand,
glitters like moonlight over immovable waters.
But you, Astralas,
impressed for your terrible voyage,
cannot make truce with the wind and the water in the breath of your veins,
because they are with you forever.
The trees wept blood at my departure, staining the whiteness of birches and butternut, glittering dark on the maple and oak, blood that was falling like leaves in a thousand countries, greater than augury, sprung from prophetic wounds, as I sailed through the mouth of ancient Thon-Thalas like a prayer into endless ocean.
In the mazed and elaborate swirl of omens, of long prophecies, comes a time when you stand in the presence of oracles, but what they foretell is mirrors and smoke.
When I reached the Courrain
I was standing on deck, despair having moved to the country of faith, and slowly the coast took a shape and a name, as the forest dwindled to Silvanost, green on water on green.
At long last, to portside lay the watch fires of Balifor, the manhandling country of kender, of hoopak and flute and rifled treasuries.
The smoke from the coastline mingled with clouds from the mountains in the high air resolving to nebulous hammer and harp, to veiled constellations, as the shores of Balifor sighed with departures of gods.
North and west along the coast, cradled by pine-scented wind, by infusion of hemlock, the long plains climbed into mountainous green, and everywhere forest and ocean, ocean and forest twined with the westernmost haze of the damaged horizons, until the traveler's fancy supposes Silvanost rising again in dreams of retrieval, but instead it is priest-ridden Istar, sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense, the long smoke rising destroyed in its own celebrations.
There in the branching seas, in warm waters harmful and northern, the wind took me westward skirting a desolate land.
IV
Now the sea is a level and heartless country, boiling with unsteady fires:
The salt air smothers the coastal lights, but the mast, the shipped oars, ignite with the corposant, and all through the water a green incandescence, and often at night the coastline is dark, obscured by the luminous reef by the Phoenix of Habbakuk, low in the canceling west, and the wind and the water are borrowed and inward as light.
And on those same nights, on the face of the waters, unexplainable darkness embarks from the starboard to port like a dream beneath memory as though from the ocean a new land is rising, proclaimed by the distant and alien calls of the whales.
The compass needle flutters and falls into vertiginous waters, and waking to sunlight fractured on spindrift, the impervious jade of the ocean below you, you dismiss the night, you turn it away, which is why this song returns to you quietly at full noon, when the assembled sea is changing past thought and remembrance above the eternal currents.
And now the northerlies rising fierce, equatorial, the madman's wind, the mistrals of prophecy, guiding me into the bay.
Karthay tumbled by to the portside, the city of harbors where the sorcerer's tower waits out the erosion of mountains, as the northerlies lifted my boat from the waters' embrace.
Into the Bay of Istar we rushed like an unforeseen comet, like a dire thing approaching the webbed and festering streets, the harbor's edge where the wind sailed over me, calming the vessel at the feet of the mountainous piers: where the wind sailed over me, catching the web of the kingdom as it blew where it wished, and none could tell where it came or went, and it dove through the alleys, vaulted the towers, and lay waste the house of the last Kingpriest.
The augurers took it as one immutable sign, to add to the bloodtears of alder and vallenwood, to the pillared eruptions of campfire and forge, to the flight of the gods and the gods returning.
And the sound of my coming was a warning sign.
Ten visions, O Istar, lie sleeping in the great crystal dome of your Kingpriest's Temple, where the walls recede from the plumb line, where foundations devolve through corundum through quartz, through limestone through clay, to the half-fallen dreams of foundation.
Ten visions lie sleeping and my song has awakened them all.
For my words are the leveling wind, are the blood of the trees and the fire on the shores, the gods walk in my
