. . . What was her name? Chestnut blossoms . . . A white rose . . .
I sniffed then. The odor was all but gone from the remains of the rose at my collar. Surprising that any of it had survived this far. It heartened me. I pushed ahead, curving gently to my right. From the corner of my eye, I saw the advancing wall of the storm, slick as glass, obliterating everything it passed. The roar of its thunder was deafening now.
Right, left . . .
The advance of the armies of the night . . . Would my Pattern hold against it? I wished that I might hurry, but if anything I was moving with increasing slowness as I went on. I felt a curious sense of bilocation, almost as if I were within the Jewel tracing the Pattern there myself while I moved out here, regarding it and mimicking its progress. Left . . . Turn . . . Right . . . The storm was indeed advancing. Soon it would reach old Hugi’s bones. I smelled the moisture and the ozone and wondered about the strange dark bird who had said he’d been waiting for me since the beginning of Time. Waiting to argue with me or to be eaten by me in this place without history? Whatever, considering the exaggeration usual in moralists, it was fitting that, having failed to leave me with my heart all laden with rue over my spiritual condition, he be consumed to the accompaniment of theatrical thunder. . . . There was distant thunder, near thunder and more thunder now. As I turned in that direction once more, the lightning flashes were nearly blinding. I clutched my chain and took another step. . . .
The storm pushed right up to the edge of my Pattern, and then it parted. It began to creep around me. Not a drop fell upon me or the Pattern. But slowly, gradually, we came to be totally engulfed within it.
It seemed as if I were in a bubble at the bottom of a stormy sea. Walls of water encircled me and dark shapes darted by. It seemed as if the entire universe were pressing in to crush me. I concentrated on the red world of the Jewel. Left . . .
The chestnut blossoms . . . A cup of hot chocolate at a sidewalk cafe . . . A band concert in the Tuileries Gardens, the sounds climbing through the sunbright air . . . Berlin in the twenties, the Pacific in the thirties-there had been pleasures there, but of a different order. It may not be the true past, but images of the past that rush to comfort or torment us later, man or nation. No matter. Across the Pont Neuf and down the Rue Rivoli, buses and fiacres . . . Painters at their easels in the Luxembourg Gardens . . . If all were to fall well, I might seek a shadow like this again one day . . . It ranked with my Avalon. I had forgotten . . . The details . . . The touches that make for life . . . The smell of the chestnuts . . .
Walking . . . I completed another circuit. The wind screamed and the storm roared on, but I was untouched. So long as I did not permit it to distract me, so long as I kept moving and maintained my focus on the Jewel. . . . I had to hold up, had to keep taking these slow, careful steps, never to stop, slower and slower but constantly moving. . . . Faces . . . It seemed that rows of faces regarded me from beyond the Pattern’s edge. . . . Large, like the Head, but twisted-grinning. Jeering, mocking me, waiting for me to stop or step wrongly. . . . Waiting for the whole thing to come apart around me. . . . There was lightning behind their eyes and in their months, their laughter was the thunder. . . . Shadows crawled among them. . . . Now they spoke to me, with words like a gale from off a dark ocean. . . . I would fail, they told me, fail and be swept away, this fragment of a Pattern dashed to pieces behind me and consumed. . . . They cursed me, they spat and vomited toward me, though none of it reached. . . . Perhaps they were not really there. . . . Perhaps my mind had been broken by the strain. . . . Then what good were my efforts? A new Pattern to be shaped by a madman? I wavered, and they took up the chorus, “Mad! Mad! Mad!” in the voices of the elements.