Роджер Мур - The Reign of Istar

Come, Astralas, ride into prophecy:
I am the breath of a God,
the wind was saying,
the source of dreams
and the webwork of reason .
Astralas, open your arms:
I shall pass through
your fingers as brindled light,
as a vision from
the brows of a weary king .
Hasten to Istar,
domed and templed,
where sunlight refracts
on bronze and silver,
on crystal and burnished iron .
Ten visions there you
shall read and interpret,
in that comfortable city
where truth without pain
governs the span of the hand,
glitters like moonlight
over immovable waters .
But you, Astralas,
impressed for your terrible voyage,
cannot make truce with
the wind and the water
in the breath of your veins,
because they are
with you forever .

The trees wept blood
at my departure,
staining the whiteness
of birches and butternut,
glittering dark on the maple and oak,
blood that was falling
like leaves in a thousand countries,
greater than augury,
sprung from prophetic wounds,
as I sailed through the mouth
of ancient Thon-Thalas
like a prayer into endless ocean.
In the mazed and elaborate swirl
of omens, of long prophecies,
comes a time when you stand
in the presence of oracles,
but what they foretell
is mirrors and smoke.

When I reached the Courrain
I was standing on deck,
despair having moved
to the country of faith,
and slowly the coast took a shape
and a name, as the forest
dwindled to Silvanost,
green on water on green.

At long last, to portside
lay the watch fires of Balifor,
the manhandling country of kender,
of hoopak and flute
and rifled treasuries.
The smoke from the coastline
mingled with clouds from the mountains
in the high air resolving
to nebulous hammer and harp,
to veiled constellations,
as the shores of Balifor
sighed with departures of gods.

North and west along the coast,
cradled by pine-scented wind,
by infusion of hemlock,
the long plains climbed into
mountainous green,
and everywhere forest and ocean,
ocean and forest twined
with the westernmost haze
of the damaged horizons,
until the traveler’s fancy
supposes Silvanost rising again
in dreams of retrieval,
but instead it is priest-ridden Istar,
sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense,
the long smoke rising
destroyed in its own celebrations.
There in the branching seas,
in warm waters harmful and northern,
the wind took me westward
skirting a desolate land.

Now the sea is a level
and heartless country,
boiling with unsteady fires:
The salt air smothers
the coastal lights,
but the mast, the shipped oars,
ignite with the corposant,
and all through the water
a green incandescence,
and often at night
the coastline is dark,
obscured by the luminous reef
by the Phoenix of Habbakuk,
low in the canceling west,
and the wind and the water
are borrowed and inward as light.

And on those same nights,
on the face of the waters,
unexplainable darkness
embarks from the starboard to port
like a dream beneath memory
as though from the ocean
a new land is rising, proclaimed
by the distant and alien
calls of the whales.
The compass needle
flutters and falls
into vertiginous waters,
and waking to sunlight
fractured on spindrift,
the impervious jade
of the ocean below you,
you dismiss the night, you turn it away,
which is why this song
returns to you quietly
at full noon, when the assembled sea
is changing past thought and remembrance
above the eternal currents.

And now the northerlies
rising fierce, equatorial,
the madman’s wind,
the mistrals of prophecy,
guiding me into the bay.
Karthay tumbled by to the portside,
the city of harbors where the sorcerer’s tower
waits out the erosion of mountains,
as the northerlies lifted
my boat from the waters’ embrace.
Into the Bay of Istar we rushed
like an unforeseen comet,
like a dire thing approaching
the webbed and festering streets,
the harbor’s edge
where the wind sailed over me,
calming the vessel
at the feet of the mountainous piers:
where the wind sailed over me,
catching the web of the kingdom
as it blew where it wished,
and none could tell
where it came or went,
and it dove through the alleys,
vaulted the towers,
and lay waste the house
of the last Kingpriest.

The augurers took it
as one immutable sign,
to add to the bloodtears
of alder and vallenwood,
to the pillared eruptions
of campfire and forge,
to the flight of the gods
and the gods returning.
And the sound of my coming
was a warning sign.

Ten visions, O Istar, lie sleeping
in the great crystal dome
of your Kingpriest’s Temple,
where the walls recede from the plumb line,
where foundations devolve
through corundum through quartz,
through limestone through clay,
to the half-fallen dreams of foundation.

Ten visions lie sleeping
and my song has awakened them all.
For my words are the leveling wind,
are the blood of the trees
and the fire on the shores,
the gods walk in my song,
where ten visions waken in the hands of my singing:
I offer them, glittering, shattered,
and the gods break in my hands.

Istar, your army in Balifor
is a gauntlet, clenched
on a quicksilver heirloom.

Your priests in Qualinost
are dazzlements of glass
fractured on red velvet.

Your light hand in Hylo
steals breath from the cradle:
Ice on the glove.

In Silvanost, the white thighs of the women
wade through the muddied waters
of Thon-Thalas.

Your sword arm in Solamnia
entangles in filaments,
in the spider’s alley.

Your children in Thoradin
dream away ancestries
of green earth and sun.

The shards of remembered Ergoth
collect to a broken vessel
from dispersion they call
the planet’s twelve corners.

One name on the lips of Thorbardin
the rows of teeth
unmarked gravestones.

Your fingers in Sancrist
fumble the intricate hilt
of a borrowed sword.

But, Istar, the last song
is yours, the song at the center of songs:
A bleached bone on the altar.

And last generation of Istar,
pure generation,
born of bright stones
drawn from the crown
of a mountebank’s hat,
whose goodness is ordinance,
precise, mathematical,
stripped of the elements
in the hearts fire
and the earth of the body,
in the water of blood
and the air’s circumference:
You have passed through your temple
unharmed until now,
but now all of Istar
is strung on our words
on your own conceiving
as you pass from night
to awareness of night
to know that hatred
is the calm of philosophers
that its price is forever
that it draws you through meteors
through winter’s transfixion
through the blasted rose
through the shark’s water
through the black compression of oceans
through rock
through magma
to yourself to an abscess of nothing
that you will recognize as nothing
that you will know is coming again and again
under the same rules.