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Stride by stride the thought increased that he might rest awhile, but he voiced it down with argument, with inward entreat, because of the distances that bound him, and the unreasoning stealth of time. But the image of ease stirred in him like a beast in its shell, for his tiredness felt lifelong –no! Longer! And though the future might suddenly come, it got no nearer. Besides, might a man not rest for just a while without incurring blame? Over the next gate he came to he saw a field, lushgreen with all the wealth of summers gone, and found –as he knew he would– a sunmade bed in the lee of a sheltering hedge. There he lay down and closed his eyes. First, time went; letting grace bloom in its stead. Deep as an ocean of patient growth, the earth he laid on bore him up and it seemed foolish not to give it all his weight. Breeze quested quietly through the drowsing rampart of the hedge, touching all the leaves and the small, brave twigs, as lovers some pure remembrance seek. His (own) heart, then, seemed to bunch up with a grievous yearning, but the hot sun whelmed his eyelids with royal a red languor, soaking into his limbs till he was molten with it. In that transmuting fusion, sensation flowered into spaciousness, a shadow fled, and life loomed right over him. As he lay, trying to distinguish from all around each of the many small voices busily engaged in the warm repair of peace, one that he knew flew right to the centre and performed there a weightless dance which pierced him with an ecstasy almost too sharp to bear. How it raptured with its wings, thrumming and zithering on the threshold of release.
And now he knows not whether he be asleep or afree.
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Marblewhite wind rolls out the plains of the leafgold earth, and there is much good humour at one who lies
sotted in the City gate. He stares upward, foxed by the strange devildesign of cantilevered stairways –branching
from one another at angles of dizzying span– and the incognate number of dwellings that seem to just hang in
the air. He traces with fuzzy sense a terraced maze of steps and plazas, jewelled here and there by the vivid
flare of suntouched foliage, bursting from hidden courts. Up, and further up, the City towers, a mountain of
inwardness carefully carved. It is dense and teeming at its lower layers, but domed at the top with a lattice of
soft airs, through which the great slow light of Above gives down the cool of glory. How the Drunken One can see all this from where he lies, no-one knows; but he feels the wind seeping through the City walls like a diagram of forgotten civilisations, and knows like a faith the immense circulation of multitude purpose that surges upward from the unknown subfound, connecting and connecting. But feckless wastrel, he! to lie at stretch in the stony gutter when La Diva Noire bustles with glossy breast to her balcony's edge in song. Perhaps, though, he, poor Lame-in-the-brain, hears best who hears for the first time how her liquid trills stayn the air with their purity before sinking in a prismatic rain of minors –only to soar once more, the singer's voice this time slurring wildly into a mad chorale whose every chord flies feathering to a charged, capacit silence. Because the Drunkard hears with his liver, lurching from shock to visceral shock, it is some time before the meaning of the song enters his inner ear. Is it true, then? That Love is in this place? And is this really where the Marriage is? Old Besoggled sees then the nuptial room, up on the highest level of all. He feels how tenuous its tempera walls, more cloud than substance. He sees the brilliant haze of its windows and has an inkling of their view across a different realm. He sees –O Sacre Coeur!– the Bride herself, lending a tender lissomeness to light with the rise and fall of her gentle breast and tresses' rich tumble; even espies her innocent, concentrated sigh of longing; longing and wonder for the Groom-gone-out (who goes everywhere by sun, arriving neither by door nor mounting from low access, who is huge-hearted), wonder and–— Something is happening! The Old Soak sees the Bride lift her head with a start. He feels the edge of energy as a new wind reaches through that exalted room, stirring the trodden rush, at-standing aware in every corner like the wake of sleeping bells. The Groom is returning! Her eyes close as her heart widens to this coming joy. He is approaching. She rises to her feet, shy and faltering, and is above the world. He is–— Whack! What? There is whack! on the cobbled hard, storming toward his lowered ear. It is the march of someone terrible, pounding at each step his staff upon the ground, a tower of outrage. Chap hoists his ragged head and sees Grandmayor Wholmann staring down with coals of anger burning in his eyes.
Seeing that the low one does not move, Fierceburgher Wholmann lifts high his staff and swings it smartly down.
The hard round roughwood bars into the man's shoulder, cracking at bones. He scrambles up, but not before the staff once more jars his back to a barrel of pain.
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You, again!
This Meister cries. |
The man, his back aching where some toe of a root had dug into it, sat hurriedly up, expecting watchers.
There were none. The landscape rolled away for ever; ever-rolling into far neglected countries, lying flat on the
lap of the indifferent earth. Oh, there were probably other creatures nearby, toiling mutely with the crudities of
their conditions, but none to speak, none to speak. He was alone. Slowed and gummed with his sleep, with head still lodden and with now a thirst, the man left the field, climbing wearily over the gate again and onto the road. Which went emptily on, breeding its backward and forward, but no gain. Shaking his clothes, tugging and re-settling them to try to rid them of the tired muss his sleep had made, the man started walking as had walked before. He became aware that it was much later than his body told him it should be. He had only dozed, he was sure; and while it had been past noon when he stopped to rest, the sunlight had still been falling strongly all about its business. Now it was far, far ahead, low and distant, giving its light to some other land. |
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© B R Mitchell 
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