Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,191

left the flowers by the side of the stream and went away to the Palace and thought the matter over at length.

The following day he returned with more flowers and a renewed ardor. But it ended in the same way and he took wing and flew great distances over the Land to ponder certain additional points that Spring had made. But the next day he returned for a third time and said to her, “Be it so then.” And he went into her and was surrounded by her as a rock in a river is enfolded in its waters, smooth and yet strong, and their auras merged as when two rivers come together deep in a forest and flow as one to exhaust themselves much later into the ocean.

After that Spring went weeks without manifesting herself in any particular form. Egdod went to the Fastness to ponder what had happened between them. There, far from the distractions posed not only by Spring but by the curious behavior of the souls in Town, he worked with Thingor on the making of new contrivances, each more complex than the last. The feathers of Warm Wings had put the Pantheon in mind of flying creatures covered with the same, larger than bees, that would make nests for themselves in the branches of trees. The construction of their wings must needs be different from those of the bees and so long effort went into its devising.

The Chasm gaped below the Knot as ever, and the workshops and watchtowers of the Fastness overlooked it. The other souls who came to visit the place looked on it as a defect. Pluto in particular was of the view that it was an error in need of fixing and had ideas as to how this rift in the Land’s fabric might be stitched up. But Egdod forbade it, and reminded him that he himself had first emerged from that same pit.

“What else might then crawl up out of it, I wonder?” was Pluto’s answer.

“Anything whatsoever,” Egdod said, “and that is the promise and the danger of it. For the chaos that you see down there is the source of all you see and all you are.” But in his private thoughts Egdod weighed the words of Pluto and of the others. During idle moments he would perch on the edge of the wall he had thrown up around the Fastness, gazing down into the chaos below and testing himself by seeing what new forms he could draw forth from it. Motes of color he saw in the static, such as he had painstakingly shaped into leaves in the very beginning, and these he sought to form into new shapes that might clothe the flying creatures he was building with Thingor. And in the roar of noise that came up from the pit he sometimes heard strains that had about them some character of melody or rhythm. Those he pursued in the windings of his mind, and lost them more often than not. But when they did not elude him he was able to draw them forth out of the noise and to discover music in them. He was not creating the music but rescuing it by stripping away the harsh and formless noise in which it had somehow become ensnared. Rich strains of music began to fill the Fastness. All who visited the place remarked on its beauty, and it gave new vigor to Thingor, who seemed to possess some art of transmuting sounds into new objects of beauty and ingenuity that had not before been seen in the Land.

Nor was he the only one at work making new wonders in the Fastness. The blankets and the garment-stuff of Knotweave had put the Pantheon in mind of making smaller and finer fabrics on which marks could be inscribed using loose feathers from wings dipped in black potions concocted from the fruits and barks of certain trees. The ingenuity of Knotweave thus came together with Warm Wings’s feathers and Freewander’s knowledge of trees and flowers to create paper and ink. Longregard and Freewander roamed about drawing maps of the Land and pictures of mountains and trees. Speaksall and Greyhame for their parts devised a system of writing and put it to use setting down accounts of what had happened in the Land, as best as it could be remembered. They taught these arts to certain souls of Town, foremost among them a woman who came to be known as