Aged thirteen, I played solo tennis against a brick wall. It was the wall between our garden and that of Mrs. Sayers. The ground on our side was so rough that I could hardly return my shots, so I practised smash serves. Sometimes the ball would go too high, strike the line of blue-gray coping tiles along the wall’s top, fly skyward, and drop on the far side. I would then, with or without the permission of Mrs. Sayers, slink around into her garden. It was a neglected orchard; nettles abounded among the trees, and searching for my ball I beat a path with my racket. I was a Roman soldier, pioneering a Roman road into an untamed frontier.
______ 2
There was a party of roadbuilders, building a road into a wilderness.
The roadbuilders lived at their roadhead camp, and each day they worked, driving their road forward.
Children didn’t take part in the stooping work, and played all day, except that one of them, a boy, was the roadguider.
______ 3
Early morning. He went out onto the moist grass, threw a colored stone, and walked after it into a woodland, using a stick to beat nettles and brambles aside. The baleful plants grew tall and tried to fall back on him; he slashed them aside the more savagely. His path curved among the trees. Its shape pleased him. The path curved, was out of sight of the camp, and now out of sound. He became scared and turned back. That was enough for the day. The road followed his path.
In the evenings the roadbuilders sat around their fire to eat and talk.
Days later, the boy had to push ahead again. He came to something reddish, half buried in undergrowth. It was an old wall. The wall was decayed and low, and he climbed over it. He found his way among a few other ruined structures. In one of them a girl was hiding. The girl was not killed but taken into the camp, and she became the boy’s companion.
______ 4
The girl could at first make only Frantagont noises, but after a while she learned to speak. She learned that she was called Yacherd, because she had been found among stones like a lizard.
During the evening meal, she asked where the road came from. One of the men replied that it came from the empire. “The empire sent us out, and we continue our task.”
The road, passing from open country, had followed the boy’s stone into the forest. At camping-places the roadbuilders cut clearings so that they could see the stars. One day, sun showed between trees on the left, and the road emerged along the curved side of a valley. Carpets of treetops tended upward toward distant horizons. The boy, now a bit older, saw the way to go, slanting up a slope so as to cross the next stream and take the next slope. He still threw his colored stone ahead, but he designed where to throw it.
The country went on up. There were mountains ahead. The road kept finding subtle ways to thread the terrain. And the roadbuilders kept finding stone of the right kind.
______ 5
At loose intervals, messengers arrived along the road. They brought rather meaningless messages, at which the roadbuilders nodded and smiled, and sometimes they brought supplies of the foods and medicines that the roadbuilders had not been growing in their moving garden.
These messengers were strange in some ways and wore clothes on their feet, but the girl found them somewhat more friendly than the roadbuilders, and asked them questions, such as how far it was back to the empire. They said they had traveled for three or four days, and complained that the road was in some places not as smooth as expected.
The boy, who was now older, enjoyed his duty of designing-ahead, for which he was respected and envied. He didn’t need to do it every day, but he went out and meditated on the future landscape before satisfying himself with the next reach. He saw slanting lines up the slopes, exquisitely finding levels or at least reducing steepnesses. He crafted it so that the builders seldom had to cut the land deeper than a spit. He didn’t have to join in the work, most of the time.
The part that he trod was the part the roadbuilders would build next. The parts beyond – he envisaged them but he set no foot on them yet. To do so could be dangerous.
So, when the slabs had been laid to a certain point and work had broken off, and the next part had not been firmly designed, no foot had yet been set beyond this point, the nose of the road. The road was exploring.
The country ahead was higher, an audience of forests, with some peaks at the back.
The roadguider kept the road aiming ahead as straight as was reasonably possible. But once, as the country steepened and grew more tangled, he was amazed to find himself emerging on a ledge and looking back down on his companions, laboring on a coil of the road not far below.
The road at last, after solving forests and gullies, had to tackle a mountain pass. The roadguider could be seen up ahead, on the gravelly screes, thinking about the safe route. Then, slowly, the road came up.
There came the day when the roadguider started out from only just below the pass’s summit, which was a cleft between rocks. He came running back.
He could hardly speak for amazement, indeed he had hardly seen what he had seen. It was like a sheet of an orangeish color, fading to the sky. By the time the roadbuilders built their way up to the pass and were ready to see beyond it for themselves, they understood that they would simply see more land, a new territory, fading to remoteness.
Some of them sighed. But the task of building downward was easier in some ways.
______ 6
The seasons passed and the road began to find itself among forests again, and then fields. These were pieces of ground with sharp borders, and with grass growing on them or other plants in rows. And houses. The road had come again among its frustrators.
These Frantagon appeared and made their noises at the roadbuilders, and then attacked them. The roadbuilders ignored them, killed only a few. Then the Frantagon appeared in a large number and the roadbuilders had to scatter. This had happened before. –Kunour, the roadguider, was not chief among the heroes but had many adventures, once hiding in a Frantagont woman’s house. Special squads came up from the empire, the roadbuilders themselves knew how to creep with their weapons in the woods, and those Frantagon that survived were dispersed over the horizons. Nothing could stop the Road.
______ 7
There were brooks to be crossed; there were streams larger than a pace-long slab could span, but the builders knew how to combine them. There were rivers, in which the slabs had to be stacked and corbelled. In summers when they built through hot lowlands, they worked by night and made love and music in the days. At the joint of these times they held their only festival, for the Change of Seasons.
When this roadguider had owned the road’s growth for many seasons, he experienced another surprise. He followed his colored stone to the top of a low grassy pass. He could have noticed immediately what was ahead, and did, but for a moment his attention was delayed by his search for his stone among the grasses. He had located it but not quite picked it up when he stopped and gazed at what was ahead. It was water, stretching to the horizon.
At first he thought he could descry distant plains and rivers, but they were fields of the sea. He had seen lakes, but infinite water never. The road had to slope down to this coast and deflect along it. Something might be wrong, but stone slabs of the right kind were still being found. They occur in nature, in or near the road’s route, luckily.
Then the road found itself at the end of the land. Water was not only to the left, but in front, though other land could be seen across it. The road had to turn again. Then there was more water, though, again, land could be seen on the other side of it. They were on a ness, of squarish shape, hemmed by water.
Someone suggested that this was a pleasant fertile place and perhaps they should cease to be roadbuilders and settle here. But the road had to go on. What seemed certain was that the roadguider had been wrong. He argued that no one had his feeling for the design and that the pace slabs were still being found. But he was replaced.
In disgust he decided to leave the roadhead and travel back to the empire.
______ 8
He and his companion had two children. Shastin was so strong that she could lift a pace stone with one hand. Arinka was a usually solemn little boy, though when he laughed he really laughed. Though so different, they were fond of each other, and sometimes her brother was the only person that the mighty girl would obey. Yet, when he chose to go with his father, she stayed with her mother, disdaining to leave the work of the road.
Father and small son set off on their footwheels, taking food in their wheeled baskets. In a day they could travel lengths that had taken seasons to build. But Kunour now, like the messengers, had reason to notice places that the roadbuilders had not ground as smoothly as they should.
He recognized the countries of the various Frantagon who had been destroyed, the mountain pass, the woodlands. They camped one night beside the bit of old reddish wall, where he had found his Lizard girl.
Only just beyond this, to his surprise, was the first fort of the <I>roppeoc<$>, the empire. The place where he had been born was now inside the empire. The empire had been growing, as he knew, sending a feeler along the road, but still it was a surprise.
They came to a village, and found hospitality and friends. Kunour had learned some friendliness from his mate, and his child Arinka, though shy, was liked by people at once. The village was only a new frontier village, but they rested in it, doing their best to sleep in houses, and learned a lot. People remarked kindly about the old forms of the language that Kunour used, though children teased Arinka, imitating his words.
People seemed to have much to talk about. (At the roadhead there had been little to talk about but the road and the hills.) The latest news was that the capital had moved. The empire, yes, had been growing in the direction found for it by the road.
Kunour wanted to go on to the middle. They set off again. The country inhabited by people spread on either side, and there were not only paths but lanes and other roads leading off to villages, but the roads, lanes, and paths were all tributaries to the cardinal road.
______ 9
The road led them through a province that was a block of upland dissected by five rivers; a province where there were fifty words for green and an art of making rugs out of shades of green; a province composed of long lakes between mountains, so that people hardly traveled on roads. They came to a town, and then to the capital.
It was a splendid city. When it became the capital, it had been amplified with temples and fountains. The road was embraced by it in the form of a fine avenue, crowned with gates and arcades.
Yet Kunour was restless about staying here, because it was only recently the capital and did not feel like the center of things. The stem of the road was yet to come. So he moved on, to the former capital. In this older city, with its feeling of long composure, he was happy to settle.
Having become a shoe-wearing building-dweller, he was glad to talk about the frontier road, on which he was expert compared with anyone here. He explained that he had been roadguider and had resigned. He answered road-related questions, though some people didn’t appear interested enough to ask the questions they might have.
The road itself passed through the city, having come from an earlier capital, yet he was not sure of its route. He had to have entered by it, but the city had many streets, at angles to each other, and the line of the road was dislocated and there were a few streets that might have been members of the road or not. There were streets that were greater than the road in their own ways, tall and wide and busy, though one knew that they did not have the soul of the road.
All this was surprising, because the road, surely, had started off straight – it used to be said at the roadhead about some questionably severe curve that the hills forced, “Just look at what happened to our born-straight road!” But perhaps the straight beginning had been in some plain farther back.
Arinka said that they might take a walk out the other side and see whether there was a road with the pace-long slabs, and there was.
Arinka asked whether they should go on, and find the other end of the road.
“You mean”, said his father, “the place where the road began? There is no such place – the road simply started from the frontier, of the time.” He pictured the road as starting from the tip of some ordinary road.
The road here, though still honored, had become surprisingly minor. Not much business flowed along it. People here had vehicles of various kinds more powerful than footwheels. There were various kinds of public transport, but it seemed that on streets that were part of the road itself you still had to use footwheels or your feet.
Kunour had no wish to travel further. There were a few hills ahead, nothing like the mountains he had once built through, but he had reached an age at which hills had grown steeper and longer.
If his father would not, Arinka, when he was old enough, resolved to go on by himself and find the road’s past.
______ 10
The provinces continued, differing from each other in their own ways, all with many people, some with more forests or fields or factories than others. They spoke dialects that diverged from each other and from the correct language of the empire. Some of them seemed hardly to know that they were parts of the empire. They could almost have been Frantagont.
Roads were of diverging natures from that of the road. They had hedges; or walls; turned corners.
The road had increasing portions that were not well maintained. Stretches had been sidelined by other roads. Arinka was sometimes uncertain that he was still on the road, but he was able to observe, with a little digging, that this road and this road only included the pace slabs. It might have been repaired with other materials, but the slabs could be found as usual, or even more than usual and perhaps thicker than usual – some to the pace length and cubit width and more of them reduced by imperfections, as was usual. He had abandoned his footwheels some time back, had to jettison the wheels from his kit too and carry it on his back.
He came to an even older capital, and broke his journey in other towns, sometimes long enough that it might have seemed he had been diverted into a settled profession, such as carpenter or singer, but this was only for a while. He was tempted to relent this journeying and go back to his father, or all the way to his mother and his sister – he was as if at the end of an ever longer string, dropping down a well of distance; but he went on. There was another town that claimed to have been once the capital, and then another sea.
______ 11
This might have been the end of the road, but it was not. A town lay beside the sea and the road ran past it, between town and beach. People here, as everywhere, felt themselves not to be at an end of the world but at its center.
As usual Arinka easily found friends. There was a table beside the road at which they sat in conversation. He explained that he was seeking the source of the road, and one of them said: “Here you are beside the sea! Ends are found here, sources are to be found in the mountains.”
“You are mocking his road”, said another; “it isn’t a river. If it flows, it flows upward, its tip is still creeping upward into some mountain, and he is rowing downward against it to find the spring it started from. A spring that is likely to be, or have been, a city. –But it isn’t a river and I’m not sure it’s a road. What he tells us about it opens up in my mind a world less weary. Here, we are at the dead center. One side of the circle around us is this gulf of the sea, the other is the hinterland, but we know it only too well. We know where all the roads lead to, inland. I wasn’t born here, I came at the age of twenty, and I remember that at first it was exciting, I went rambling out in a different direction each weekend, but there isn’t an infinity of directions and I came to know them all. Beyond that ridge there is a valley, but it’s a dull one. Once, I did go walking up a stream to find its source. It turned out to be not hidden high among forests or rocks but just part-way up a bare corry, surrounded by sheep. If there was ever really a place, presumably at the foot of a mountain, beyond which nothing was known, it would be a shrine.”
To Arinka the unknown was the road in the direction he was going, and he departed again along it.
He might have gone on, following the traces of the road that were becoming fainter, hoping to find its beginning and even the reason for its beginning, but, in a small old town called Tiq, he fell in love.
______ 12
What happened was that the people of Tiq liked him as much as he liked Tiq. He had, as did any roadbuilder, skills in how to use wildplants, deliver babies, massage, weld, and play on box-drums, and some military skills. The townspeople ensured that he would stay by introducing him to Etke.
It was she who called him, in the manner of her dialect, Arinka. (I forgot to mention that his name when young was Ringal. The mouths of the people of Tiq made it into something slightly different, and this reminded them of a figure from far back in their history whose name was Arinka. He had been a king – Arinka I – not only back in the time when there were kings but at the beginning of that time. It amused them to picture that hoary Arinka reincarnated in their fresh roadbuilder friend.)
They made him their mayor. At last he knew that he would stop moving, and never go back to his origin, nor onward to the road’s origin.
______ 13
Tiq, he realized, had once been yet another capital, though the local historians did not put it just that way; they had a structure of dynasties that filled the past. When Tiq was its capital, the empire must have been smaller.
He had by now learned not only to speak large parts of this and other dialects, but to write, and he began to add to the local history. There was much in and around Tiq to become infinitely interested in. There were anecdotes, religions, paintings made on the quoins and beams of buildings or on table tops or bookshelves; there were peacock farms. Different kinds of people wore clothes with different distributions of bright colors. Some of the people were fat. With his friends’ encouragement, he continued to wear his land-colored roadbuilder rags; they were appreciated as the mark of yet another kind of person. He tried to go back to bare feet, but his feet had become soft.
There was love within the genders too, and those who admired a limb, caressed it. People had not heard of the road. They had him give a lecture about it, and placed an inscription on a corner where it might have passed. One of them asked him: “Could it be said that the Road is male and the Frantagont female?” The question had to be explained to him – the road penetrating the country ahead – and he laughed as he thought of his mighty sister Shastin, and had to answer that the idea had not occurred to him. As he said this he noticed why no such idea had occurred to him: “idea” was one of the words of his new vocabulary. New to him were analogy, poetry. Tiq did not consist of streets. Children played different games in each court or rooftop. He looked at these children and wondered, Can there be young in an old race? There had been no old at the roadhead.
The dialect of Tiq was luxuriant with devices that had not been in the correct language of the empire, and there were other languages round about, of which he learned and recorded much. One language had vowels that mutated diagonally across the mouth; another could express a kind of humour that no other language could.
Etke did not yet have a child; if she did, the child would be infinite. Because of her, Arinka could no longer think of moving on. He could no longer think of moving on, if only because he now had possessions, papers. Far too much to carry in his pack. The <I>kond<$>, the roadbuilders, might sometime find the road’s end, but he would never find its beginning.
He found himself worrying about the boundary around knowledge. Was there anything outside, was there anything that was not worth knowing? He wished he could compact all knowledge into a cubic crystal that would have the property of <I>rim<$>: absolute permanence. Then it could be sealed safely in some abyss under Tiq.
People were content to spend their lives in Tiq, though they went on picnics into the country, and longer excursions to other small towns, and canoed on rivers. There was a wedge of direction where some mountains loomed that were said to be impassable.
Tiq did not so much stand on the land as sprout from its wrinkles; half of its rooms were caves in the rock. It was ringed by an ancient wall. When you looked out of some windows you looked into tree-tops, because two small forests ran through the city. They were in glens, crossed at their narrow points by bridges or joined houses; only birds and small animals lived in them. The streams in them joined at a pool that lay half in and half outside what had been a northeastern gate. The wall was no longer complete, but it was complex, ornamental, made mostly of a kind of limestone that radiated the evening sun. Being now useless, this wall was a sculpture. Arinka made drawings of it – he had learned to draw, too, and he made drawings of Etke, sometimes inside the wall of her clothes, more often not. His drawings became part of the many documents of Tiq that needed to be preserved. Tiq was a treasure-house. It was fairly rich, too, though not powerful – there were no armies around here since the provinces had ceased fighting with each other.
______ 14
However, news came of villages that had been destroyed by an approaching band of nomads. Refugees came into Tiq, and they said there had come thundering down on them a wild people – in the imagination of these refugees their assailants had half-flown through the air in long leaps, led by a dire warrior who, in their imagination, was clad in clanging steel and was kous – irresistible.
Whatever the truth about these barbarians, to whom nobody could get near, it was true that farms and villages were burning. Inside Tiq, Arinka began to imagine its unthinkable destruction.
By a word let slip, he suspected that people had always feared the peace would end, and that this could have been why they inveigled him to stay with them.
Even before it had been suggested to him, he began to think that he himself should go out and find these people – if humans they were – and persuade them to like him, spare him, and understand the preciousness of Tiq and of civilized life.
Before the first light of dawn, he disentangled himself from Etke by infinitesimal stages so as not to wake her; stood, and put on the entertaining clothes that she sometimes made him wear. Their room was in the wall; he had begun by carrying her up the spiral stair to it from the banqueting hall inside the city. Their window looked out on a lake, in which he could see a star and a meteor reflected. He let himself out through a small gate. He expected that the exercise of walking through the cool twilight would allow his mind to determine what he would do, but as he topped the bank on the other side of the pool a figure sprang from behind a bush and flung a stone at his eye.
The stone missed and the invader was only a boy. Arinka seized him gently and said (the unplanned words were startled out of him): “Take me to your leader.”
He had not expected that he would have any language in common with the invaders, but the child understood him and replied:
“Shastin?”