The Seven Last Days: Volume IV: A Mirror Filled With Light

Seven Novels of the Last Days

Volume Four

A Mirror Filled With Light

by James David Audlin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by James David Audlin

Cover photo by Marijke Taffein

Cover design by the author

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This novel is based on several dreams that came to me in the 1970s. The novel was written 28 May 1974 – 1 September 1980.

A portion of this novel was published in an earlier draft in Venture, XXVII, 1, Spring 1977, copyright © 1977 by David May.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coïncidental.

IN MEMORIAM

David May

Il miglior fabbro

Beloved friend, you were by my side

bursting with inspiration and encouragement

as this novel was being written,

and I hope you are still somehow enjoying it in Heaven.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the King James Version, or are translated, paraphrased, or parodied by the author. All materials quoted in translation are translated by the author. The following sources are referenced by chapter and paragraph numbers.

Shrove Tuesday, 8: paraphrase from The Hazards of Space Exploration, by James David Audlin. Copyright © 1990 by James David Audlin. Used with permission of the author.

First Sunday in Lent, 107, and Monday of I Lent, 27-32: based on stories from the Fioretti and The Life of St. Clare.

Monday of I Lent, 19 and 21: a passage from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.

Tuesday of I Lent, 47: lines from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, copyright © 1950 by the Macmillan Company.

Tuesday of I Lent, 47: lines from pity this busy monster,manunkind, by e. e. cummings. Copyright © 1944 by e. e. cummings.

Tuesday of I Lent, 48: parody of a passage from Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Tuesday of I Lent, 135: the sonnet, Or che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace, by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch).

Palm Sunday, 23: lines from The Hurt, by David May. Copyright © 1975 by James Audlin and David May. Used with permission of the author.

Palm Sunday, 60: a fragment by Alkaios. Greek excerpt, slightly emended by James David Audlin, is from Greek Lyric, Volume I, translated and edited by D. A. Campbell. Copyright © 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Palm Sunday, 63, 76, 77, 116; Tuesday of Holy Week, 70, 88; Maundy Thursday, 163; fragments by Sappho. Greek excerpts are from Greek Lyric, Volume I, translated and edited by D. A. Campbell. Copyright © 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Palm Sunday, 78: line from Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Tyger, by William Blake.

Monday of Holy Week, 103: parody of a text from The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 edition, page 81.

Monday of Holy Week, 185: the Shahadah.

Monday of Holy Week, 185: a passage from the Tao-te Ching, by Lao-tse, Chapter 1.

Maundy Thursday, 16: lines from Jerusalem, IV, 96, 26-27, by William Blake.

Maundy Thursday, 34: lines and paraphrase of lines from Les Fleurs du Mal, Au Lecteur, by Charles Baudelaire.

Maundy Thursday, 146: lines from Faust, I, 1339-1345, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Maundy Thursday, 180: lines from The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, III, v, 1, 12, and 11, by William Shakespeare.

Good Friday, 107: Paraphrase of a verse from the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, 5:18.

Besides the above directly quoted sources, the author acknowledges a debt of kindred thinking to many authors, especially Robert Graves, C. G. Jung, and John Michell. Thanks must also be given to those who critically read the manuscript at various stages of its completion, especially Roger Hazelton, David May, Randolph Emerson, Allan Munroe, and my father and brother, both named David John Audlin.

Table of Contents

Shrove Tuesday

Ash Wednesday

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Friday after Ash Wednesday

Saturday after Ash Wednesday

First Sunday in Lent

Monday of I Lent

Tuesday of I Lent

Wednesday of I Lent

Thursday of I Lent

Friday of I Lent

Saturday of I Lent

Second Sunday in Lent

Monday of II Lent

Tuesday of II Lent and Several Days Following

Friday of III Lent

Saturday of III Lent

Fourth Sunday in Lent and the Two Weeks Following

Palm Sunday

Monday of Holy Week

Tuesday of Holy Week

Wednesday of Holy Week

Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Holy Saturday

Easter Day

A MIRROR FILLED WITH LIGHT

Shrove Tuesday

Ah, the light. It is warm, golden sunlight, and it feels very good, very deep and vital. He smiles as he looks up at the sun. It seems so close and large, with streams of warm light flowing down like the hair of a beautiful woman. He breathes in the soft air, moving farther and farther away from the ruin, slowly, wonderingly, almost as if this were the first time he had left it. The air is charged with warm electricity. His arms are out, palms upward, and his head and heart arch back beneath the sky that spans his world. The sunlight pools in his palms; without even moving he can feel the glistening of the light trickle between his fingers, tickling the hairs on the backs of his hands. He raises his arms upward, and the light pours down them. He catches the sunlight in his hands, he raises it to his face and smells the smell of it, he cups it in his hands arid tastes it, warm and salty, he splashes it across his brow and cheeks, and feels its strange power. He laughs. Ah, the light. He closes his eyes and sees red, and gold, and blue. He opens them and sees hazy yellow and green. He smiles to see the syllables of light, and, like a strangely overgrown child, he dances, and all the while fine strands of the light spin gold through the air.

There are flowers, not many, but a welcome sight. A patch of cowslips here, a lone Indian paintbrush there, even a tiny group of mushrooms, bright red with yellow spots. He rubs his hands together, rubs the thin, tight, spiderwebby feeling of dusty winter out of them. He feels a shuddering thrill of happiness. Although from his chest there comes only the unvarying metallic hummm of his artificial heart, his petalon, some imaginary heart in him is throbbing wildly with joy, expanding his arteries, rushing a freshening wind through his lungs, shaking off the dull deadness of winter.

Summer, summer at last. When he’d been a boy, it had meant baseball, swimming, ice cream. Now it means life, simply a life, to live in freedom, but it is the same gladness he had known years ago. Oh, the impossible blue of this sky. After a long moment he turns and looks back at the ruin. It crouches low and sodden before him on broken knees. Although it is surrounded by the pools of the sun, no light touches its grey masses. Perhaps it really is bright and shimmering in the glowing haze, but still it seems only bent inward, into its own shadows. Although it is what it is, a ruin, it seems to have only the essence of ruin, the mere esse of existence. Huge, very plain squarehewn rocks, now fallen from the instable human order they had once been forced to adjoin to, retain still a stubborn, fierce singleness of identity in the face of change. Shreds of wooden boards, rusted iron pipes, and sharp white sparks of glass have scratched jaggedly out of this unmoving, unfathomable tumble of menhirs. He looks at the ruin with an unblinking stare and a partly open mouth. It slowly gazes back at him with its heavy lidded eyes.

He lives in the ruin. He has lived in the ruin for a very long time now, and the ruin has loved and nurtured him, bent and tortured him. He saw it fall into ashes after standing for centuries as a country chapel, a relic from more faithful times. It saw him first go hungry and then learn to forage when the Soldiers ceased to come. By now they understand each other very well. Thus it is that both, he and the ruin, know what the coming of summer means. Not that time has any meaning for him, for when one is alone it cannot, but the sunlight nevertheless means a change. Indeed, the stone ruin, though sunken in a speckled black sea of his own past, remains yet the focus of his life and being. If he were to bother to try, he would remember times and events both before and after the ruin, but he rarely bothers. He might remember the cave in the garden, so like this ruin. He might remember the jail and the crucifix’s eyes. He might remember Sister Clare and her loving silences. He might remember the screaming of the war. He might even remember the beautiful Sappho, just now walking away from him, that he will marry her, that Kid and Limpid, and that – but no, it is not time now for dreaming, for imagining stories ... But somewhere at the center of it all, at the focus of his life, the eye of the hurricane, is this ruin. In this place there is no time, but around it, like a swirling wind, roar the seas of too much time. Here, in the center of his circular life, is the ruin, his shelter and his prison.

No one has come to him in a long while, such a long while that he has come to a dead, vague stillness. There is no caring, no worry, no ripples on the water. There is only stillness, and life blows through him as if he were a rock. There is the fact of his seeking out his own meat and plants, and, faintly behind that, the fainter of two superimposed images, the fact of a bowl of cold stew brought by the still, harsh Soldiers. He may be scarred by the burning atraumac rains that fall, with the craters of exploding neutrons burned deep in his flesh, but he is still alive, and if anything matters, that is it. Basic life needs no memory, and no concept of an unyielding time. Even the dragonflies have that much. Ah, the sunlight. He lies down in the long, sweet grass, and shuts his eyes.

(Sunlight, sunlight that pools on his temples and eyelids, great seas that glint with their rushing tides, rustling with the winds that whither across their ancient backs, alizarian spaces and fallows, dipping between the waves, upturnings, downturnings, and all the while the winds of light that curve in the arabesques of geomagnetic lines of force, until they take a new home, alighting softly, and the seas shudder and lie still again.)

The sun was a geyser of light. It sloped and slid, lost its balance, and started slipping down the sky. He rose so slowly he didn’t quite realize his eyes were already open. Through the flecks of long grasses he could see distant mountains and clouds. As sleep slowly drained its way out of him he looked at them, their strange contrast in depth to the grasses, and let the focus of his eyes shift slowly from near to far, seeing first mountains through blurred green, then grass with a faint grey-pink cast, feeling the distance between with almost physical force. The sun was low in the sky. He felt its fading warmth, autumn-colored, dancing faintly on his back. He got up slowly and breathed the watery blue evening air deep into his ashen lungs.

The evening was like a sea, an expanse of washing, cooling air, spread deeply around him in eddies and swirls, in deep banks, and eventual stratospheric waves breaking far overhead. The clouds, sinking into a deep orange and glowing violet, were like islands far above him, that looked, not down toward him, but upward to the stars, to the hidden suns and galaxies, to the intense fountains of light hidden, it was once said, in the footprint of the night. He was deep underwater, deep, and very deep under cool evening waters, very still, and very deep, in a white, cold sea of pale beauty.

He got up and slowly walked down toward the pond that bordered on the highway, through the dirt- and stone-choked gullies below the grasslands the ruin was in. There was a small path that went down from the ruin to the highway, but he rarely bothered to take it because it circled so wide just to avoid the broken ground. He crossed the wide band of highway, flat, smooth, still warm from the setting sun. It was a straight and empty road, cutting its way jaggedly through immense shapes of hills that rimmed the horizon.

There were not many plants in the sand past the highway. The long scrawny necks of a thrust of dieflowers stuck upward out of their portion of the sand, still and brittle in the pale evening light. Their blooms had long since withered, the last rain having been weeks before, in the last summer. But soon after the next rain, which would probably not be long now, they would be back, and he would have to be careful not to come too near them. The gritty sand was also dotted with a few meager hunches of oilbushes, with their unpleasant greasy leaves that looked like huge hairy dark green tongues. He urinated in one hunch, as had always been his habit, the plants being relegated to this service because of their appearance alone.

Thirst touched him softly as an empty need in his stomach. He went through the strip of sand to the quiet white shore of the pond. Pale trees struck crooked lines through it against the narrowing sky. He lowered himself down onto the rock where he always crouched, and dipped his hand in. Cold bitter water clenched his fingers, and he raised some up, where it tore into his mouth, leaving behind a cold numb feeling. Then he washed his face. He would perhaps have expected the water to wrench back from his moving hand, except for the fact that this water was still water: very still water that never moved toward or away, in or out. When he lifted some, it was as if he were not lifting it, that it only seemed to keep on touching his rising hands. For after the cold lashes had fallen from his hands, the pond was silent, and as still and frosted as it had always been. A pond, dead with the deadness of dry bones, looked up at the evening sky with its one huge unblinking dead eye. To his mind there came briefly a visual thought of the plane, a Locust LT-4 that had gone down in the hills to the southeast, and the two bodies he had visited daily, with the eyes that had stared at him until the acid rains finally burned their corpses into the empty earth.

He began walking back, past the sand-cloaked oilbushes, toward the ruin. Walking kept his mind quiet and untroubled; mental peace, he had found is very important to one who is always alone. His sandalled feet fell softly on the hard, torn pavement of the highway, where transports and landships still sometimes thrashed their intents onward toward a distant enemy. The road to them, he knew, was a thin, fast ribbon to grab and hold on to, deep in the lairs of their armored vehicles, screaming by thoughtless of the land traversed. But to him it was a very wide field of sunburnt tar, dry and cracking from the hot days and cold nights, with crooked lines of plants gnawing at its joints. The black treadmarks of the landships meant nothing to him: whether the rumbling behemoths had the Beastmark or the Sign of the Children, they were all the same. He stepped off the other side of the highway into rough gravel.

This gravel felt important and delicate to him in comparison to the road. Gravel partook of the earth, and had been there before the road, and was now somehow overcoming the road again: the cracks were just the first sign of entropy. The road seemed always to be screaming a thin sound of passing, even though it was not often now that something went by. The war was in another quarter of the earth for a time, and this land could afford to rest and know silence. The gravel was quiet, and so too was the grass around the ruin.

The ruin was now sheathed in darkness; the sun was falling behind the hills. It was a cold monument he came back to, not a home, but a familiar place where he could stay if he liked. He did not enter immediately, but slowly wandered about gathering plants to eat. For a few moments he wished he had bothered to catch a fish from the pond, but it didn’t really matter to him. Nor did it concern him that it was already too dark to read in his Bible. The thoughts left quickly.

The roots of the plants he had pulled up trailed behind him. This was a dry land, and plants had learned to dig deeply in order to find moisture. But the dryness also meant that they came up easily from the sandy loam. He was doing well, he thought. There were some wallworts, a clump of henflake, and some radishes. The evening was beginning to be rather cold. When he returned to the ruin, he went inside and took out his winter cloak and put it on. A little later he would have to start a fire, but for now he was still warm enough.

He chewed the wallworts solemnly while looking at the pinpointed sky. Darkness was trembling softly all around him, and he watched it as he would a strange new animal. The evening smelled of cold and damp, and the night felt thick and heavy on him, coagulating into white pocking lumps on his exposed skin. His flat bony teeth shredded the rest of the wallwort leaves. He threw the bare stalk into the darkness and started on the henflake. Dry pulp slid around his tongue, loose and thick. Henflake was altogether uninteresting as food, but it contributed to keeping him alive. After the Doctors and the Soldiers had stopped coming, after his hospital or prison (depending on which of those you asked) had fallen to its heavy grey knees, he had had to learn to supply his own food. It had been a slow process discovering which plants and animals were edible; sometimes he had become sick, but he always managed to stay alive. Even those things he had learned to trust still sometimes revolted in the tender recesses of his stomach, but at least he was still alive. It was strange that it was usually the uninteresting foods that were safe to eat. But the radishes he ate more slowly; they had a taste worthy of notice.

He lay back after finishing, and heard the distant hiss of a Locust LT-4. Looking up, he saw a flaring spot of brilliant white scrape a splintered path across the sky. Two followed it, then three more, forming a moving pattern across the sky, unreal in its perfection. That there were men in the aëroplanes he assumed, but it was still hard to comprehend the possibility of human life in those distant streaks. They were other, wholly other. In seconds they were gone over the northern horizon, leaving behind for faint moments the ruddy glow of their skytrails. Against the phosphorescence of these he could see the faint beginnings of a tenebrous roiling in the evening sky. There would be rains tomorrow, atraumac rains, and the dieflowers would bloom.

He went into his sleeping area in the ruin, a shelf of rock protected by an overhang. In another corner he had constructed a small fireplace with broken rock and metal. He made a small fire with his flint, and lay down on the rock shelf. For hours he sank and breathed low in dark, musklike waters.

Ash Wednesday

The morning stole upon him dark and suddenly, riding swiftly over the plains like a gaunt and terrible horse. He could see a crack of sky beyond the overhang, and in it heavy rusty clouds turned in huge cylindrical shapes, sometimes breaking to show a scorched strip of the sickly yellow stratosphere above them. There would indeed be rains, and he would have to hide deeper in the ruin. The air was vibrating with a strange urgency. It would not be long now.

He gathered as many edible plants as he could carry and went back inside the ruin, taking them in to another part of the pile that was difficult to get to, but much more protected from the sky as well as on all four sides. It necessitated crawling through a short tunnel under a pile of fallen masonry, and so he usually didn’t go to the trouble of going into this one last untumbled room in the ruin. He went back out again and got his few belongings – a few clothes, utensils, and his Bible. In the room again, he turned to look out the small window. This window, oddly enough, still had most of its glass; small bits of colored glass held by lead strips. It had once been a picture, he thought, of one of the Apostles, perhaps even Saint John the Evangelist, but the number of missing pieces in the center of the window made it impossible to identify. Through this space in the glass he could see the sky roll overhead, a million earthen cylinders, each larger than the whole world.

Soon the rains would begin to fall, he knew, since the sky was turning silver and black with an immense sinking fog. A wind began to tear madly from the north, dragging its black nails across the land with a dark night of force. The ruin rumbled and sang a dark note from the changes in air pressure, and the pale brown leaves on the floor swirled in a rising spiral.

Lightning began to burn, searing furious holes in the sky. The wind knocked searching bolts of electric fire in all directions. They flared past the ruin, taking something of the form of mad comets. The leaves still swirled darkly where they were. He felt in some way rather blurred, as if he were not really all alone. The earth trembled slowly. A lightning bolt had hit somewhere, and the shock was the shock of a woman who has lost her child. Immediately thereupon the rains started screaming down, hot as tears. The sun was crying, the stars were crying, the sky was crying; hot tears touched the earth and instantly froze. He went up to the window, as close as he dared, to see better. There were some plants out there: some buzzam and a lot of milkweed and burdock. The rain touched the plants, stroked them hard as it scored the earth. They bent low to the ground, bending like weeping women. The rain burned and froze them, and slowly they turned a black deeper than the empty spaces in the night sky, and they burned with a cold blue-white flame for a few moments before disintegrating. The whole world was gathering around herself a dark faint ionospheric luminescence. The grass was burning. The pond and highway were glowing madly. The sky was burning fiercest of all and draining in little pieces down the edge of the horizon, raining on all the meadows and fields of the world, falling like the petals of spring, like the spells of fallen wizards, like the faces of dying children slept in the nightmare of their past; they, the rains, fell and shook coldly upon a world that had closed her eyes.

A drop of rain struck him on the wrist and he shouted in pain, scrambling back from the window. His shout was only silence among the screams of the storming sky. He looked at his wrist, at a blue spark that glowed fiercely into his skin. And he was not alone. Somehow, he was not alone. He was splitting, turning, falling apart into two equal halves. He was turning into his own opposite. Deep inside him something was moving and growing, becoming alive and aware, like a chrysalis, and wanting out, out.

He did not see the wind shift its pattern to wrest the globes of rain from their flight and fling them now to the west. He could not have seen how they struck the ruin on the side the window looked out of, and how they arranged themselves in intricate heaving sweating patterns on the glowing frozen flanks of the tomb he was in. He did not see the second gust of black wind, nor the rain on it. The drops struck him furiously, their desire to get at him unbridled in their madness, and the lashes of cold flames fell full on the face of his destiny. He looked up suddenly and thought he saw, standing in the field, a tall figure wreathed in blinding light. Another gust of wind, another lashing by the rain. He coughed, bewildered, groped through the window, and ran heavily out into the night.

* * *

JOHN: What are you looking for?

LUCIFER: Bring me light. I must have light.

(Globes of lightning wreath the figure.)

JOHN: Who are you?

LUCIFER: No matter who I am. Bring me light. I must have light.

JOHN: I am the Son of Thunder.

LUCIFER: You are darkness. I am light.

JOHN: I must live.

LUCIFER (Spoken gently as to a child.): I have come to kill you.

JOHN: I must live.

LUCIFER: And I must have light.

JOHN: Then why kill me?

LUCIFER: You must die so I may have light.

JOHN: Why must I die for you? I will die only for the Lord; I will only drink of his cup and no other. . .

LUCIFER: You must die to yourself; only then can you die for the Lord.

JOHN: And you?

LUCIFER: I am you. I must have light to live. You must die.

JOHN: I must live, I cannot die!

LUCIFER: You must die to live. Believe me, it is necessary.

(Whirlwinds of rain around the glowing figures, one bright white, one burning black.)

JOHN: But I must live!

LUCIFER: Go to Aholibah, and there die.

JOHN: But I must live! ...

(So the voices go on, until the storm drowns them out.)

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

The vague pale white of morning slipped down from the eastern hills and moved across the land. He woke sharply to this light, although still caught in the webs of sleep. The sound of the pond was a rustle like autumn grasses; the wind threaded through it, raising small needle waves that slowly crossed and recrossed each other. The pond was a studied combination of stillness and movement, and the clouds in the distant sky, transparent white, moved too in slow procession. He lay in the trembling sand at the pond’s edge, and saw an empty stillness filled partially by the white necrotic trees that reached crookedly from the pale water and the empty hills about a mile away. Over this vision was pasted the weariness of the sun, as a broken egg lying in the shards of its splintered clouds. As the distant source of a breath of cold rays, it glowed wanly, lying between his feet and between two hills that lay to the east. He was standing on the sun, he fantasized. He was standing on the sun, and it was going out. The sun stared slowly back at him from between his feet. He looked at it, and, he thought, he could see deep beneath the corona, to the point where he could imagine the blackness of the sun, a growing cancerous rot spreading outward some day to crack its surface into a million jagged red ruts.

Suddenly he did not want to look at the sun any more, and turned over onto his stomach, looking west. There was less drama in this direction: just the hunches of oilbushes, and the dieflowers he would have to get past to return to the ruin. Their blooms were large and sunny, smiling like the faces of children. They were very beautiful plants. Right now they weren’t calling to him. They knew he was going past them soon, and they were waiting, and looking very beautiful.

He looked down at his hands, leaning on his elbows to do so. From the tips of his fingers the last aging tendrils of blue fire were evaporating into the morning air. He could feel a slight agony in his fingers as they left, twisting up like the most rarefied gas, thin, veiled, dissipating into the air.

And in a moment it was gone; his hands were dark and solid, again those dirty tired hands he knew as his. They were stiff. He stretched them slowly in long, groping movements. His whole body was tired from lying as it had. But he got up and flung his arms about to loosen the joints. When he felt better he began the walk back toward the ruin.

He heard singing in his head, and knew the dieflowers had noticed him coming. Their beautiful heads were turned toward him, and they were smiling and laughing at him silently in his mind. Their petals rustled, and drops of the morning dew sparkled on them like diamonds. They wanted him to come near, but he didn’t. He could hear them singing to them from the back of his mind, and they looked very beautiful. After he had walked past them they kept singing for a while, but pretty soon they stopped. The withdrawal from his mind left him feeling empty, but free, as if with the feeling of a wind blowing across an empty plain.

He reached the edge of the highway and stopped. There was something different, something vitally changed. Whatever had changed was not obvious; it was hiding behind sameness the same way an owl hides her bitterness behind a stony face. The road was empty, blank as a strand of spiderweb, and the hills it spanned were as silent as always. Grasses here and there shifted intermittently with small, breathing rustles as the fingers of the wind stroked gently across them. When they moved he could see behind them the spiky heads of the buzzam.

He crossed the highway. His senses were awake; he smelled the dry, dusty air heated by the baking macadam, he felt the patches of pasty tar that dotted the customary roughness. He smelled the heavy ugly oil that the landships’ undersides dripped with, and his feet threaded through the deep parallel lines their treads knifed into the road.

When he had gone up the trail he sat in the grass outside the ruin. Today it was not as sunny and warm as it had been two days ago. Where before the storm the sunlight had rolled over him in waves, today heavy clouds were lining up in the sky, as if to attack and fight off the sun. One or two shapes in the sky were enough to lead him to imagining whole ranks and files of grim whiteclad men on grey and white horses standing together against the sun. The sun itself looked tired and weak, facing these warriors with little pride or courage. The clouds moved closer together, the men with grained, lined faces urged their muttering, cold-breathed steeds closer together until they stood with their panting, dirt stained flanks right up against each other. The sun was retreating; its light was getting fainter and farther away. It was already sinking through the sky toward the horizon. Today would not be a long day – not more than an hour or so.

The sun was gone. There was a chill in the air, and goosebumps went in waves up and down his tired arms. The thick white clouds stayed still, thinking. Then he saw small flakes like dust circling down from above, looking dark against the white of the clouds, tossing like lost children in the wind. He knew snow meant that most of the newly grown plants would die, and he hadn’t put any away, not expecting any more snow. The animals would still be around – at least some of them, rabbits, for instance – but they were rather difficult to catch in the winter. Water was little problem, but it might become one later. If it were cold enough, the pond might freeze.

He walked between the upright stones and into the ruin. The day was darkening, and again he would not be able to read in his Bible. It was his only possession of importance besides his clothes, his cup, the metal shards he used for tools and utensils, his flint, and the like. He lit a fire with some stored wood, and then took out his Bible anyway, holding it in his hands, feeling the rough binding worn smooth exactly where his hands were, the wrinkled pages beaten to a smooth limpness, and the flyleaf, torn loose ages ago. The smell of old paper drifted to him in the warmth of the fire, as he turned the pages. He had had this Bible for a very long time; he only vaguely remembered it as new (this memory, actually, more a memory of earlier rememberings), when it had replaced another, older Bible, all but completely adrift in the waters of his memory.

But he did not need to be able to see to read this Bible of his; he had read it for so long now that every page was bright in his mind. He could turn them by with his eyes shut: an endless procession of pages, silent words whispering deeply like distant bells at every turn. A spectrum of color the whole of the Bible in a moment – as if it were possible to read it in an instant, all the intricacies of light and dark strands in it, the beauties and uglinesses, life and death, in one piece of time. The