a theogony

I. That Has Been Established

Before there was anything to be true about, Axiom was already the case.

He was not the strongest of the first powers and never needed to be. Strength contends; Axiom did not contend. He held. And he had one habit that everything else about him grew out of, which was this: he did not look at things. He established them. He would arrive at a place, consider what must be so, declare it so, and move on. The place would obey, and he would never afterward have any reason to go back and check. Looking is for those who might be wrong.

When Flow was brought to him he established that she was his wife, and she was.

She was not unhappy about it at first. He was the one who held. There is a kind of girl who finds that restful, which she had been for about a century, and she liked walking beside him while he settled the shape of things, and she liked that nothing could go wrong in a place he had been.

When she was with child he established that the child would be his, and it was.

Then Ground, who was older than all of them and spoke perhaps twice an age, said to him in a voice like a house settling at night:

One of these will overturn you.

Axiom considered this for a long time. He had never been given a sentence he could not place. It did not follow from anything. It sat in him like a splinter under the nail, and because he could not remove it he did the only thing he knew how to do with a possibility.

He ate it.

The first was Hearth, the still center, who was three days old. Flow brought her out into the light and Axiom put out his hands without turning his head, because he was in the middle of establishing something, and took the bundle, and swallowed. Flow made a sound. He said, kindly, without pausing, That has been established, and went on with what he had been saying.

Then Seed, who was the not-yet. Then Air, the between. Then Water, the taking-of-shape. Then Space, the room in which anything at all could be somewhere else.

There were four more.

She did not leave. She was not kept and she was not deceived; she knew after the first one exactly what he was and exactly what would happen, and she lay down with him again, and carried, and bore, and brought the child out into the light with her own arms, four more times. She could not afterward explain this to anybody, including herself. The nearest she ever came was to say that each time she had thought — not hoped, thought, in the flat way you think a thing you have decided is true — that this one he might look at.

And once she hid one. Water, it was. She kept her a day and a half in a fold of the hills, and then walked out and gave her over herself, on her own legs, unasked. The hiding had turned out to be worse than the giving. She stopped being asked about it long before she stopped thinking about it.

They did not die. Nothing dies in Axiom. Inside him they stopped being children and became premises — fixed, and true in the particular way a thing is true when no one is permitted to ask about it again. Hearth felt herself going stiff and had time to think one clear thought before the stiffness took her, and the thought was: I will keep one coal.

II. The Stone

Flow went down under the world to Ground, and stayed there a long while, and came back up with a stone in her apron.

It was an ordinary grey stone about the size of a loaf. That was the entire trick, and she understood exactly why it would work, and understanding it was the worst hour of her life.

Ground had a great many stones. Flow was down there long enough to have looked at most of them, and what she came up with was the ugliest thing in the place — pocked, mean, slightly the wrong shape, a stone you would not want in your house. She chose it for that reason. She knew, while she was choosing it, precisely what kind of reason that was, and she took it anyway, and she has never pretended otherwise.

She bore the sixth in a cave and did not let herself hold him long. Then she wrapped the stone in the birth-cloth, still warm, and practised.

She said Here perhaps forty times, sitting on the floor of the cave with the bundle in her lap, in different ways, until it came out of her flat and slightly bored, the voice of a woman handing over a thing of no importance. Then she walked out to where her husband was establishing the boundaries of the year.

“Here,” she said.

He put out his hands. He did not turn his head. And she stood there with the bundle in her arms and let herself see it plainly at last — that he was not going to look, that he had never looked, not once, not at any of them; that he had swallowed five children and could not have described a single one of their faces, nor said which had her eyes, nor told you whether Water had been a boy.

She gave him the stone.

She heard it go down.

“Thank you,” said Axiom, pleasantly, to the air beside her, and went back to the year.

And she wanted to laugh.

Not the grief, which she had budgeted for; the laugh that came up behind it, immediate and delighted and vicious, the laugh of someone who has just got away with something in a house where nothing has ever been got away with. She held it in. She held it in for an age. It is in her still, on certain nights getting as far as her throat, and she is by now an old woman with five grown children and a dead husband who has still never once let it out where anyone could hear.

III. The Mountain

The mountain was one he had not yet ruled upon. He had ruled on nearly everything by then, but not that hill, and a thing unruled is a thing unwatched.

Wild women kept the child there. When he cried they beat their shields with the flats of their spears, so that the noise went up and out into the sky and could not be traced back down to anything.

He worked out at four that this was a thing he could cause.

He was not in distress on most of those occasions. He simply liked the noise. He liked that it went up and out and came down somewhere else and belonged to nobody. Lying on his back in the middle of a racket with no author was the first pleasure of his life, and he arranged for it perhaps twice a week for two years. The women knew quite well what he was doing and beat the shields anyway, because they were fond of him and because it was funny.

They gave him no throne-name and no office. They called him Wander, because there was nowhere he was supposed to be. He was not in the account.

Flow came when she could. She could not come often.

There were times she could have come and did not. The mountain was a long way. The road went up through country her husband had established early and never afterward revisited — a river running where it had been told to run, a stand of trees that had not since put out anything unaccounted for — and she walked it at night mostly, past a flat stone near the top that she had sat down on the first time and every time after, which was a good deal harder to get up off going one way than going the other. She was tired. There is a specific exhaustion in visiting a child you are not allowed to keep, and some seasons she looked at the road and did not take it, and told him afterward that it had been the distance. He knew it was not the distance. He had got good early at knowing what people were not saying. He never mentioned it, never held it against her, put it somewhere and kept it.

He was perhaps six when he asked her the question every child asks, and she told him the truth, because she had already decided that this one was going to be told things.

“Are they dead?”

“No,” said Flow. “That’s the worst of it. They’re in there. They’re alive, and they’ve been made to hold still.”

He thought about that for a while, the way children do, without hurrying.

“Then I’ll go and get them,” he said.

His mother put her hand over her mouth. She had come up the mountain that night to tell him to hide, to stay small, to live — and she found she could not say any of it, because she had waited an age for someone in her family to say a thing like that out loud.

He meant it entirely.

He also noticed, in the middle of saying it, that it was a tremendous thing to say, and that his mother’s face had changed while he said it, and he had a small private moment of admiring how it had sounded coming out of him. Both of those were the case at the same time. They went on being the case at the same time for the rest of his life.

And nobody told him not to.

He was six years old and he undertook to go inside a god and bring five people out, and there was no one in existence whose office it was to say no you will not. So the sentence was said on a hillside by a small boy, and it stood, and from that night on everyone who knew he existed treated him as the one who was going to do it.

“He’ll see you coming,” she said, when she could speak. “He sees everything that follows from what he’s laid down.”

“Then I’ll come from somewhere else.”

“There isn’t anywhere else, love.”

“There’s this hill,” said Wander.

IV. The Three Learnings

He learned three things, and learned all of them from the world rather than from a father, which is why Axiom never knew he had them.

Thunder he learned from the shields, and he had half of it before he could speak. He understood that a sound can arrive long after the thing that made it, so that anyone who hears it and reasons backward will reason into an empty place. Thunder is an effect that has slipped its cause.

He spent a year using it on the women who had raised him. Honey, mostly. Bread. A blanket he did not need. One knife.

The knife was missed, and a girl was blamed for it — one of the young ones, newly come up, who had no history there to defend her. He was in the room while they said it. He was eleven. He did not speak. He had a reason at the time, but it was gone by the following spring and never turned up again.

He waited to be caught. He took a comb in February and a second blanket in March, and waited to be caught for those too. Being found out was the only way the weight could ever be taken off him, and he waited the rest of that winter. Nobody came. Nobody came because nobody could: the shields had done their work, the noise of the theft had arrived from the far side of the hill, and he was the only person on that mountain who knew what had happened.

So he put it down somewhere in himself instead, the way you put down a thing you intend to come back for, and he never came back for it, and he carries it still.

Lightning he learned from a storm that opened a tree above him and left it standing in two halves, smoking. He saw that the bolt does not choose its road. It goes down every road at once, groping, branching, a hundred crooked arms in the dark, and only afterward is one arm remembered as the path while the rest are forgotten as though never attempted. From Lightning he took the sight of the many futures: he could stand in a moment and see all of its arms at once, lit and reaching.

He used it, for a long time, on nothing whatsoever. Which hand the pebble was in. Which way the hare would break. Which of the women would lose her temper first, and how to be standing somewhere else when she did. He was very good at games that year, and unbearable about it. He could have seen which of them had lied about the stores, and which two were not speaking and why, and he never once looked; there was no sport in it, and the hare was better. And the eldest took him aside to tell him that a man who always wins is a man nobody plays with, which he thought about for a week, then went on winning. He liked the little astonishment on people’s faces when he told them which way the hare would run, and sometimes waited half a second before telling them, to make sure they had time to be astonished. That was the last time anyone ever corrected him about anything.

Bright was last and nearly killed him.

Bright is what you look through. Nobody has ever seen brightness; they have only seen what it fell on. To learn it he had to stop being a thing that light falls on and become the falling.

The wild women told him what it would cost. They were not gentle about it; they were fond of him.

“If you do this,” said the eldest, “he will never find you. And nothing else will ever find you either. You will be looked through for the rest of your life. No one will ever meet your eyes again, not your mother, not your sisters, not one of them, not ever.”

Wander was young and had lived his whole life on a hill where nobody was allowed to say his father’s name.

“Will I be able to reach them?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s cheap,” he said, and he was wrong about the price, not about the trade.

He stepped into it. And afterward he was still there — you could see him, you could answer him — but no eye would hold him, and no face turned the whole way toward him, and nothing that met him could afterward say it had.

His father was a separate matter. Axiom’s great sight covered all that followed from all he had laid down, and it went over him and found nothing, because Wander now followed from nothing at all, and a thing that follows from nothing is a thing that cannot be thought.

And then he ran wild.

He was nine years old, he had just become the one thing in existence that nobody could take hold of, and no hand could ever come down on his shoulder again. He went everywhere. He stood at the elbows of kings in halls he had no business in. He listened to people who believed themselves alone. He took food off tables in front of the people whose food it was, and the servants were beaten for it. Once he stood an entire evening in a room where a woman was bathing — not touching anything, not doing anything, simply there, unmeetable — and he came out of it shaken, and went back twice. The second time she looked up, at nothing, and covered herself, and sat very still until the water went cold.

He did not go back.

He could not be caught. Not by his father, and not by anyone else. Nobody could pull him out by the ear, call him by his name, and make him give the thing back in front of someone who loved him. He could only carry it, because carrying was the one skill anyone had ever required of him.

And his brothers and sisters were in the dark the entire time.

He knew where they were. He had known since he was six. It is not the case that he spent those years preparing; he spent some of those years preparing. The rest of them he spent being the only free thing there was, in a world where five of his family had been made to hold still, and the distance between those two facts is not something he was ever in any hurry to stand close to.

He had also, by then, been the one who was going to do it for longer than most people are anything, and was tired in a way he had no word for and no one to describe it to. A tired child will put a thing off for an age and call it timing.

Once or twice across the ages Axiom noticed that his accounting failed to balance. There was a remainder. He considered it, and corrected the accounting, and never for an instant doubted the ledger instead of the sum. His blindness was not inflicted on him by anyone. He performed it himself, carefully, like a rite.

V. The Waking

The poets will tell you there was a war, and there was: ten years of it, Titans and thrown mountains, Toil and Weight and Hour and Edge and End, and it was magnificently loud and it was entirely a decoy. Wander gave them a war to watch because he needed everyone facing outward for a long time. 

He was in it himself, occasionally, in the only way left to him. The noise over that field was his. It came down out of a clear sky and from the wrong direction and could not be traced back to anything, and the Titan line broke where he had known since morning it would break, because he had stood in the moment and seen every arm of it and put himself at the root of the one he wanted. They said afterward that the sky had been with them, and later still that he had gone through that army with the lightning in his fist, which is a good picture and never happened. And every day he was the weather over that war was a day there was nobody in the dark.

People died in it. He walked the field afterward, unseen, the length of it and back, and nobody knew he was there, and he did not tell anyone he had gone.

The real work was inside his father, and it was not a battle. It was a rescue, and it went slowly, and it nearly failed four times.

He went in unseen and found the dark, and in the dark five enormous held-still things, set into place like stones in a wall. He put his hand on the nearest and said, quietly, the only thing he had:

“Air. Wake up.”

Nothing.

“Air. It’s me. I’m the sixth. He never got me.”

Nothing. She had been a premise for an age.

So he tried something else. He asked her a question — not about herself, a stupid one, an idle one, the kind a child asks. Why is the dark this colour and not another?

And in the wall, something moved.

Because a question is a thing with an open end, and an open end cannot be a premise, and Air had been the between, and the between is exactly where questions live. Her first sound in an age was not a word. It was the upward hook at the end of a sentence. It came up out of her like breath out of someone pulled from a river.

…why?

Axiom, far above them, stopped mid-establishment and stood very still, because for the first time in his existence he contained something he could not answer out of himself. He answered it anyway. He was thorough. Yet an answer has to be defended, and defending concedes that there was something to defend against, and so a draught went under a door somewhere inside him that he could not find.

“Say your name,” Wander said to his sister.

“I don’t have a name. I have a definition.”

“Say the definition, then.”

“The between.”

“Good,” said Wander. “Now be it.”

She was. That was the whole of the war, in the end, and it looked nothing like a war.

Her second question was her own, and it was not a kind one, and she asked it the moment she had breath for it.

How long have you been out there?

He said something. She did not pursue it. She was the between and she could hear an answer arriving from the wrong direction, and she let it go past her, and letting it go past was considerably worse than pursuing it would have been, and she knew that too.

VI. The Others

Water would not wake for a question, so Wander sat in the dark beside her for what he later learned was eleven years and told her things. What the sea does at the turn of the tide. How a puddle holds a whole sky in it upside down and does not spill. What his mother’s face looked like from underneath, when she bent over you.

He told her about rain on different things, because rain on a roof, rain on a pond, rain on your own bare arm are three separate pieces of information, all three of which he had; he told her some of it twice, knowing while he did it that he was doing it, going on anyway, because there was nothing down there to mark where one telling stopped and the next started, for the alternative was to sit in the dark beside his sister and say nothing.

Water woke because she wanted to see.

What she wanted to see first she did not admit to anybody for an age: it was herself. She had been told about the sea and the sky and the puddle, and what she came up out of the dark wanting, with a force that frightened her, was to find out what she looked like. The first thing she did was hold up a surface with her own face in it, which she looked at for a good long while — turning it, holding it further off, pleased and appalled and pleased again — and it was very nearly an accident that Axiom’s face went into it at all.

Yet it did. And it was very nearly right — very nearly — and he lurched, because an image is a second copy, and whatever can be copied is a thing that happens to be, and a thing that happens to be might have been otherwise. He had never once been an example of himself.

Space woke fastest, was the most dangerous, and enjoyed himself enormously.

All Space had to do was stop being compressed. He opened. And then, having opened, he went on opening — stretched, took more room than he needed, put an elbow where an elbow could not be, spread out with a great deal of unnecessary comment about how good it felt. A distance appeared between Axiom and the things Axiom contained — a gap where none was permitted — and from that hour Axiom was a being with an inside that was not him.

Seed was hardest. Seed was the not-yet, and Axiom had fixed her hardest of all, because not-yet was the enemy of everything he was. Twice Wander got her partly loose and felt his father’s attention come down on her like a hand on a bird, restating her, that has been established, that has been established, and she went stiff again both times, and the second time Wander put his head against the dark and wept.

On the third attempt he did not try to wake her. He planted something instead. Nothing much: one small fact that was true, and unfinished. And Axiom, who could not leave anything unresolved, resolved it — and the resolving made it grow, and the growing was Seed, and by the time he understood what he was feeding it had roots in him.

She has a habit now that she has never lost and will not be talked out of: she leaves things one step short of finished, on purpose, in other people’s houses. A shelf with the last peg out. A story with the end withheld. Ask her why and she will look at you pleasantly and not tell you, and you will find yourself thinking about it a week later, which is the point, and she knows it is the point.

Hearth was not asleep.

Hearth had been in there longest and had never quite gone under. When Wander finally found her, right down at the bottom, she had one coal, and it was still lit, and it had been lit for an age.

She had kept it by a method she was never afterward willing to describe, except once, to Water, in a kitchen, a long time later, when she said that it had mostly been a matter of going over small things — the order you bank a fire in, the number of steps across a room she had never stood in and had only been told about — that the trick was to choose things with no end to them, and that she had run out of things with no end to them about halfway through.

“I know,” she said, before he could speak. “I’ve been listening to you. You talk a great deal for someone who isn’t there.”

“How long has it been?” he said.

“Eleven years with Water. Longer than that with Seed. I couldn’t tell you what came before those, because before those you weren’t here.”

He did not answer.

“I’m not scolding you,” said Hearth. “I could hear you the whole time. You were having a lovely time out there. For the first age or so I was glad. Somebody in this family ought to have been.”

That was a great deal worse than scolding.

“You could have gone out.”

“Yes,” said his eldest sister. “I kept thinking someone might come.”

VII. Which One Am I In

After that it went quickly, and it was unbearable for all of them, because to wake the five was to fill their father with contradiction and their father was also the room they were standing in.

He began to feel it. Not pain; he had no arrangement for pain. What came over him has a name now only because he invented the name while it was happening to him. He no longer matched himself. He was a rule with exceptions living inside it, a sentence whose words had begun to move while he was still saying it. He would establish a thing and find that establishing it produced two futures instead of one, and he could not stop reasoning, because reasoning was the stuff he was made of. Once he reached for a boundary and found his hand already on the other side of it, and once he answered Flow, he heard his own voice speaking to the air beside her. Every correction bred a fork. Every fork bred two more.

And Wander, unseen, watching every arm of the lightning at once, chose where to stand.

The last of it was arranged over an age and lasted a heartbeat. He set his five siblings — free now, themselves now, doing nothing but existing in their own right — into a position with two continuations. Both complete. Both valid. Neither able to rule out the other.

Axiom examined it. Axiom examined it again.

And then, for the first time in the history of anything, Axiom asked a question.

Which one am I in?

VIII. Look At Me

He convulsed.

Nobody struck him. There was no draught and no second trick of Flow’s; those came later. He was trying to expel a contradiction, and it had gone too deep, and he did what a body does when it cannot hold what it holds.

(Flow heard that version eventually, the one with the potion in it, and she never corrected it, not once, not in an age. She liked being in it. She had done the actual thing, which was invisible, and the poets had handed her a cup, which was not, and she looked the exchange over and found she could live with it very comfortably.)

Up came the stone first — that plain grey stone, still agreeing with everything.

Up came Space, and the world had room in it. Up came Water, and Seed, and Air. Up came Hearth with her coal, the first in and the last out, and she stood in the open air blinking, an age old and three days old. Flow came down the sky like something falling and got all five of them into her arms at once, which should not have been possible and was. She did not say any of their names, for she had said all five to herself on so many nights, in so many empty rooms, that saying them now — out loud, in daylight, to faces — would have been a different act entirely, and she was not ready for it.

There was a sixth, and he stood where he was.

She spoke to him that evening and he answered her, and it was as it had been since he was nine: her eyes went past him on the way to something else, and neither of them remarked on it, because they had stopped remarking on it an age ago.

And Axiom came apart. He was bringing up every premise he had ever assumed, including the one he had never bothered to state, which was that he was; and he was turning inside out, and he was, at last, uncertain — and an uncertain Axiom is not a wounded Axiom. It is simply not Axiom.

Wander walked out into the middle of it. There was no reason to. The work was done and his siblings were behind him and the whole of the plan was complete. He walked out anyway, because he was nine years old on a hill once and had never met his father.

“Your son,” said Wander.

It did not arrive. Not because the air failed — the air was perfectly good, and every other thing in the world could hear him — but because Axiom had established what his children were and how many, and a sixth was not a thought available to him, and a thing that cannot be thought cannot be heard saying anything.

And Axiom turned his head.

He had never done it before. Not once, in the whole of existence — not at his wife, not at any of the six, not at the world he had established down to its last boundary. And now he turned his head, and he was looking for his son, and he wanted to find him; and he was searching a place where nothing could be seen, because his son had made himself into the very thing you look through, in order to come and get him. Flow turned her face away.

“Please look at me,” said Wander.

“I am looking,” said Axiom.

He went on looking for a while. Then the looking stopped being done by anybody. Nobody killed Axiom. He simply ceased to follow, and the world went on without requiring him, and after a time it had gone on so long that he was no longer the case, which is the only death available to something like him.

IX. The Bowing

The five stood in the light, wet and enormous and new, and looked around for whoever had done this, and found him. Half-found him. Their eyes came to where he was and slid, and came back.

He took a step sideways. Five faces turned, a little late, and lost him again, and found him again.

And they bowed.

Hearth was the last up off her knees. She came over with the coal still in her hand — the one she had kept lit an age, down at the bottom, by going over the order you bank a fire in — and gave it to him, and closed his fingers round it.

“You’ll want that,” she said. “It’ll be cold by evening, and there’s five of us, and nowhere to put anybody.”

She had been out of the dark less than an hour.

That was the trap. Nobody set it. It was made out of gratitude.

And it was lovely.

He had been unmeetable for an age. Nobody had looked at him since he was a boy on a hill, and now here were five faces turned up at him, every one belonging to somebody he had carried out of the dark, and it went into him like heat into a man who has stopped noticing he is cold. He answered it. Anyone would have answered it. Yet he was quick.

A bow makes a top. A top makes an order. An order is a rule, and to be the rule is to stand inside it, in the one place where a rule is most completely a prisoner. The instant Wander answered to the bowing, he had somewhere he was supposed to be.

And Wander was the name of one who did not.

He felt it go out of him like warmth out of a stone at nightfall. He kept Thunder — the noise of it, the weapon, the spectacle. He kept Lightning in his fist and Bright across his shoulders like a mantle. He kept all the tools and lost every single thing they had meant. The thunder still cracked; it no longer came from nowhere. The bolt still forked, and he could see only the arm that was actually taken. The brightness still fell on everything, and now everything could see him standing in it, which was, he found, about nine years too late.

The many futures came out of him entirely and went into the stone.

Of course they went into the stone. That stone had lain in the dark in his place once, pretending to be him so that he could go free. Now it lay in his hands holding everything he had been, and he was not free any more.

He held it a long time before he moved.

He thought about keeping it. He had the reason ready before he had finished having the thought — that it was dangerous, that it would have to be guarded, that of all of them he was the one it could be trusted with. And he heard the shape of that reason as it arrived.

He had been making decisions of that size since he was six, with nobody to check them against. Every single one had been approved by the only authority available, which was himself, and the approval had never once been withheld. A girl was blamed for a knife and it was approved. Servants were beaten for bread and it was approved. He stood in that woman’s room three times and it was approved, and he had gone on being, by every account including his own, the best thing that had ever happened to his family.

An age of that and he had learned exactly one thing about his own reasons, which was that the good ones and the others came to him in the same voice and arrived at the same speed.

Then he carried it a long way, to the middle of the earth, and set it down at Delphi, and did not keep it, and did not give it to his family, and did not set a guard on it.

Let nobody own this, he said. Let anyone ask.

It sits there still, full of all the roads at once. Any ruler may put a question to it, which it always answers, with every future it holds folded into a single sentence; and the ruler hears only the arm he was already walking down, and goes away satisfied, and is destroyed on schedule.

That was the last free act of his life, and he did it well.

X. The Doom

Then his sisters and his brothers looked at him, five faces he had spent an age reaching in the dark, all of them frightened now that it was over, with a world to run and nobody left who knew how — and he loved them, and so he sat down.

That is all it was. He did not seize it. He sat down to keep them safe, which is the best reason there has ever been, and it was the throne; once you are in it you must hold it, and holding is a thing he turned out to be very good at.

He was very good at it because he had been doing it since he was six. Nothing about the weight was new to him. All that was new was that the weight now had a chair under it and a name on it and everybody could see it, and the one moment in the whole of existence when he might have been allowed to set it down — the work finished, the five out, the sky open — was the moment it was formally handed to him.

Nobody comes to relieve the one who is managing. The five did not withhold it out of any unkindness; they simply looked at him doing it beautifully, year upon year, and drew the obvious conclusion, which is that it was not heavy.

The story counts his years while there is anyone counting. Six on the mountain. Nine on the night he bought Bright. Eleven in the room with the knife.

After that it is ages, and ages, and nobody has written down a number about him since.

He stopped wandering. He turned his gaze from the many roads to the single one, watched its horizon with enormous patience, and grew slowly better at ruling and slowly worse at everything else. Ages went by. He established a great deal.

He found, when he considered it, that he could not remember the names of the wild women. Hearth remembered two. He did not ask her for them. They had raised him in a hurry, for a purpose, knowing they could not keep him, and had let him go at nine because there was no one else to let him go, and he had left the hill and never gone back.

The girl who was blamed for the knife he had never learned the name of at all, not in the whole of the year he lived beside her, and that is the one he thinks about now: briefly, and then about something else.

And somewhere in that long unmoving season he heard Ground speaking in the old voice, like a house settling at night, saying the sentence she had said once before to somebody else:

One of these will overturn you.

He heard it as a warning.

It was not a warning.

They say he sits there yet, an excellent ruler, and that he has begun lately to answer his wife without turning his head.
Somewhere, a noise goes up and out into the sky, and there is no tracing it back down.