When next he walks around to the poet’s cell (expecting, as usual, that Taliesin will not remember who he is), he is careful to avoid the sticky smear of honey . . . only to find it has been cut in half along with the gravy stain. Both end now along a perfect curve. They simply stop. No line nor gap is visible. The floor looks as if someone has taken a wet rag and wiped half of the spill away.
He is still pondering this development when many hours later the next meal is served. He gets up from his own cell and retrieves the two patens, turns and discovers that the stains have returned in full—gravy and honey exactly as he left them after the last meal. The floor has been replaced and then returned. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He wonders how many ways that can be possible. Floor and ceiling, are they interchangeable? Does the ceiling descend, replacing the floor, or the floor rise, to be replaced by another beneath it? One or the other? The cells remain the same, as borne out by the half of the stain that has not changed. No wonder the food will not arrive if either of them is in the center. They would be crushed or else whisked away to a different level of this prison. Critically, it means that another level to the prison exists!
He broods on this for days, or what he thinks of as days. At one point he doesn’t put his empty paten out in the center, recalling that Taliesin had done the same once. He dips a finger in the cold remains of the food and draws a thin stripe across the threshold of his own cell on the floor while the smears at Taliesin’s door are absent.
Soon he’s established that only two floors are involved. The stains vanish and reappear with each plunge into darkness.
This knowledge feels powerful, exciting, a step of some kind toward escape; but the feeling doesn’t last long. How can he remain conscious while the exchange of floors occurs? The darkness, the music—no matter how he tries, he cannot overcome them. On one occasion he waits on hands and knees to spring out the instant the lights dim.
When they do, he leaps.
He wakes up lying in the center, his chin throbbing, and this time there is no food. The stains also bear out that the floors have not been switched. He vaguely remembers hearing the musical note sound, but he was airborne.
When he explains what he attempted to Taliesin, the poet chides him. “Now we won’t be served anything for at least a day.”
Yet, barely an hour later, he’s asking where their meals are, having no memory of the previous exchange.
Distracted both by thirst and by the imponderable escape while Taliesin drifts from topic to topic, Thomas remains in his cell. To him the poet’s babbling is just noise, and most of the time he forgets halfway through what he’s even speaking about. First it’s Nicnevin, then the flitting little homunculi, which he refers to as manikins, then it’s the elves having crossed by some means from one world to another and their attainment of a state of athanasia. It’s a waterfall of words.
Then, in a lull, he suddenly says, “I must remember if I have not, to tell you so overjoyed was I when I heard you say your name.”
Thomas blinks back into the conversation. He remembers how the poet covered his mouth with his hand, as if excited by the news. He stands, stretching, and walks out of his cell, stands before the poet’s. “I do, now you tell me. Overjoyed at my name?”
“Quite some time ago True Thomas appeared in a prophetic dream. It was he who was to share this prison with me, he who would defy them.”
“You saw me. In a vision.”
But Taliesin has drifted into an argument with his unseen companion: “Yes, yes, it was someone else’s vision and not mine, very well, does that make the claim any less valid? I will not this circumstance downplay, no.” He huffs. “All of you have told me. There, will that do?”
Bemused, Thomas inserts himself into the conversation again. “You and your . . . companion beheld this True Thomas?”
“Him. And a few prior to him, not I. ’Tis his brother he refers to. You see, as a voice, like the others, he was a mere wisp at the beginning and will—”
“Onchu?”
Taliesin balks. “Why, yes, that is his name.” Then to the invisible one: “He does know your name, just as ti predicted he would. Final proof, yes, yes, I accept it is he.”
For a long minute Thomas just stares down at him. Then he says, “You’re speaking with my brother?”
“Cannot ti see him?”
Thomas grits his teeth at this cruel jape. “There is no one there at all to see. You told me you spoke to Urien of the poem.”
“And sometimes I do. If you can’t see Onchu, then ti lack the vision. Nothing to be done about that. I’ve powers none.” A blind man is telling him he lacks vision. It’s too absurd, but the suggestion that the poet is conversing with Onchu while Thomas never has inflames and stings. Taliesin offers, “They come to me, you understand, for a brief time only. He’ll be gone soon.”
“Who comes to you?”
“Why, the teind.”
Thomas draws a breath. “But the teind are all dead. They’re thrown into Hel. I had to watch.” Sìleas drops once more into the bottomless pit, disintegrating in slow motion right before his eyes. With all his will he wants to suppress the awful memory.
“Oh, they’ll not return to this world, ti has sentenced that most direct and true. Their fall lasts an aeon, but there is a space in that infinity when their voice grows and grows until I can hear them and they me, and then, slowly, as they have arrived so they fade away. He is fading, I fear. Someone else will follow, for there is always another. The elves do not miss paying their tithe. But he and they assured me you were coming.”
The old poet waits—he would say eagerly—for his reaction, but nothing about this constitutes a joyous reunion, nor any reunion at all. Would that Alpin’s ghost was here right now to interrogate Taliesin’s phantom. The notion gives him an idea, and finally he says to the empty space, “Onchu, if you’re truly there, tell him something only we would know.”
Taliesin’s wrinkled brow furrows. “He says, there were two thousand nine hundred sixty-eight leaves on the black alder tree.”
Thomas gasps at that, then laughs aloud. He sinks down onto the floor. It’s a long time before he speaks again. His eyes grow wet. “What . . . what is it like, brother—Hel?”
Then Taliesin’s aspect changes. He winces as if the response itself hurts, and his features pull as if his face is trying to recast itself. His milky eyes roll back in his head. “Agony,” he says, and the voice has lost the Welsh lilt entirely. “Every scrap that were me coming apart, but ever the while distant. My suffering was spread across a black sky, agony shared with all the others who fall ahead of me. One by one, they’ve gone, and I’m now from meself parting, nearly gone, as well. Taliesin is a candle flame in the depthless pit of Hel, oh so dim now.”
It is his brother. The cadence, the flow, the words belong to Onchu. “How did you know I would come here?”
“Hel. Hel folds time, past and future all together, your and my time together, and even long after that, Tommy. I ken ye when you first peered in, when the girl, Sìleas, was flung after me. I thought they would tumble you as well, but you retreated. Saw you brought low but not so low as the devils think, heh? Ye’ll rise again, brother, hey-o, to count your catkins on the river bank. I swear I will be there to hear the tally when you do.”
Thomas wipes at his cheeks, snuffles.
Taliesin sags. When he raises his head again, he says, “Nay, he’s drifted off.”
“Gone?”
“Oh, probably not forever, though it’s difficult to be certain. I’ve spoke with hundreds. And one day they’re simply not there anymore.”
“But I have so much more to say to him. I want—I need for him to know . . .” He breaks off, shakes his head, runs his gray sleeve across his nose.
Taliesin asks, “When does the food come?”
“Don’t know. Soon, I hope.” He means it. He’s just as ravenous at this point as the poet. “I wish I’d asked him how I escape. If Onchu can see the future, then he would know, wouldn’t he?”
