The Rite of Spring: The Student

The Rite of Spring: Fragment 9

The Student
in which Taynuic asks a question of the Ear, but the Ear only listens

The priest pulled a long hair from her head, and held it out between her two hands so that it glistened in the gloom.

"Look", she said, "here is a hair. How many dimensions has it?"

Well, I knew about that. My father has taught me my numbering, for he has some hopes to have me become a surveyor, if he can ever raise enough money to buy me my rule from the Hand. I said

"One - as nearly as anything in the world has." The priest nodded, and smiled sweetly.

"How much of it can you see?" "Why, all of it, apart from the bits that are between your fingers", I replied.

"So", she said, and picked up a piece of paper from the desk. She held it up between us.

"How many dimensions has this?"

"Two", I said, a little impatiently. I could not see what this had to do with the number of Cults there were.

"And what is written on my side of it?"

"I don't know", I said, trying hard to be polite. "I can't see your side of it."

"So", said the priest again, lifting a small box, "how many dimensions has this?"

"Three."

"And how many sides of it can you see?"

"Why, three also. Please, what has this to do with my question?"

"I cannot answer questions", said the priest.

"The Ear does not answer. The Ear listens. Listen, and the God will answer you."

She spoke calmly, and softly, and I grew more and more perplexed.

"Please, how can I listen to the God? She is in the High Place, and I am here." The priest just smiled, and answered with another question.

"How great is the God?"

Well, I knew the answer to that, because it is doctrine that the God is infinitly great.

"And is the High Place infinitely great?"

Of course not, but, but... the priest waited. At last she said "is the world infinitely great?", and waited again. Then, when I shook my head, she said

"where is the God?", and the answer that came to me was 'everywhere'.

"So", she said.

"How many dimensions has the God?"

"Why, three", I said, puzzled. The question seemed extraordinary.

"Why three?"

she asked. In frustration, I said

"nothing in the world has more than three!"

"But is the God bound by the limits of the world?"

By now I was so puzzled I could find no answer. The priest waited a while, not pressuring me, and then asked a different question.

"How many dimensions might something have if it were infinitely great?"

"That question doesn't make sense", I said crossly. "The House of the Eye is very much bigger than a grain of sand, but both have only three dimensions."

The priest nodded.

"That's true of course, but is the God no more different from the House of the Eye than the House of the Eye is from a grain of sand? Is the God just like a thing-in-the-world but much bigger?"

This was too hard. I couldn't answer it. I said, sulkily,

"are you trying to say that the God might have more than three dimensions?"

"Let us suppose the God has more than three dimensions. How many dimensions might the God have?"

Again the question was too hard. I started to get up, excusing myself, feeling foolish. But the priest said

"before you go, will you describe this box to me?"

She was pointing to the box she had shown me before. It was a plain wooden box, about half a span cubed, such as people keep blotting sand in. I described it.

"So,"

she lifted the box and put it under the desk, bringing out another.

"Describe this one for me."

"Why", I said, "it is about the same size as the other, but this one is decorated with a beautifully carved and lacquered dragon on the lid, and has hinges of gold."

The priest smiled.

"That is true", she said, and turned over the box, so that I saw that it was the same box as before.

"When you see the God from the House of the Eye, you see a God of pure reason. How many sides has the box?"

she asked. And with that, she got up, and left me. I wandered back out into the Place of Justice, already darkening in the shadow of the Front Gate. I walked along the steps until I came to a place where I could look across the river, up, up, to the High Place where the God dwells. The fragile, geometric shapes of the Thousand Steps. The soaring towers of the Gatehouse. The dark shadow of the gate, huge, seeming no bigger than the nail on my little finger. There, up there, higher than the kites fly, higher than the vultures, lives the God Incarnate. So high, but not far, not as far as the Upriver Gate is from the Delta Gate. But the God is infinite...

The priest of the Ear had been a shock. A comfortable looking woman who might have been someone's mother, so quiet, so calm. I had never got the chance to ask her my other questions. It didn't seem to matter. I realised that she would not have answered them either. But something I had learned in that interview troubled me far more than any answer she could have given me. For my father has always told me - and indeed it is doctrine, the Priest of the Eye had confirmed it to me - that women are creatures of pure emotion, without that capacity for reason. Yet this priest could reason better than either of them, or so it seemed to me. I had never known my father tell me an untruth before... and if you cannot trust the doctrine, what is there left to trust?

I trudged, bewildered, back across the square, through the crowded streets and alleys, up the flights of twisting stairs, and along the slatted boardwalk to my father's room. His study is a booth on the ground floor of the block, but we cannot afford the rent of a ground floor dwelling room, so we live four floors up. I ate the lentil porrage that was all we had to eat that night in silence. Finally I found the courage to ask my father about what I had learned.

He was angry.

"I have told you many times not to speak with the priests of the lesser Houses, for they will seek to trick and ensnare you. You have disobeyed me, and see, that is precisely what they have done. You may depend on it that this supposed priest was either a man dressed to appear to be a woman, or else there was a man hidden close by, signalling to her what she must say. Or more likely, from what you say, she merely plied you with fine sounding words, and you being nothing but an ignorant child mistook this for reason. If this is what you will get up to when you run errands, you can stay in my study and copy out next year's almanac for me. Oh, yes, and you can come up with me to the roofs these nights and help me with my records, for there are some important measurements I must make."

I was horrified. I had been sure my father would have shown me how to answer the woman's questions, but he had not tried, merely evading the issue, as he had told me those without reason would do. Also, I did not believe any of his suggestions about how the woman had been able to speak so well, and I did not think he did either. I felt - betrayed, I suppose, and very rebellious, and I copied the almanac in the days that followed with an ill grace. But one interesting thing did happen in that period which I should not have known if I had not angered my father.

The second night of my punishment was the night of the full moon, and we were up on the roof of the tenement with the sighting level. He was measuring the moon as it came to the top of its arc. Every few moments he would call out a number, and I would note it down. At first, each successive number was greater than the last; then, two or three together would be the same before the number would go up again; and at last, there was a long succession of numbers all the same, and finally one that was lower.

My father straightened up, complaining about his stiffness, and asked me for the almanac. He ruffled pages, found the place, and stared at it. Then he came over to where I was and unshuttered the lamp a little to see better. He picked up the flag board, and his fingers stuttered and flickered for a few moments, knocking the little wooden pegs this way and that. He laid the flagboard down by the lamp, and, kneeling, put the almanac beside it. Very deliberately, his fingers rattled up the pegs, adding some number into his calculation. At last he sighed. He ran his finger down the wire, knocking all the pegs back to zero. He straightened; he combed his fingers through his beard, in the way that he does when he does not know how to pay the rent.

Finally, he straightened up again and called across the alley to where Ballasallt stood on another rooftop was at the same task.

"Ball'sallt", he called,

"I make it three points low this time. How do you read it?" This surprised me greatly, for although Ballasallt is a friend of my father's, I had never heard them compare their readings before. After all, it is by the quality of his readings that an astrologer succeeds or fails, and so they guard them carefully. But the call came back across the alley

"as you do!"

My father grunted, and combed his beard again.

I asked him what was wrong.

"The Light of the Darkness is too low in her path", he said. This was how he always spoke of the moon.

"Why does that matter so much?"

I asked.

"You know that it is ever changing and untrustworthy, my son. But it is more untrustworthy than you will know, for it occasionally strays right out of its ordained path, and when this happens it may blind the Eye of the God, causing darkness to rule in the daytime. It is for this that all women make a sacrifice of blood each month - that the Eye of the God may be blinded, and darkness and disorder come into the world. It was on such a day that Kiar led the Yachorach across the Dawn Pass, and from that came the downfall of the Great House, and the power of the debased Houses. Now, each season that has passed for many seasons the Light of Darkness has been further from its path, and if the God does not force it back soon, it will blind the Eye before the year comes round again. And I fear what may happen then."

"Why?"

I asked, "what do you read?" My father shook his head, combing his beard again.

"I cannot read it, my son. It is too deep for me."

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