The Heralds’ Gate and the Road Home

I come now to the part of the account I know best, because I was there. I’ve kept the wall of the City of the Word longer than I can easily reckon, and I saw these four pilgrims come up the last mile of the King’s Highway. I remember it very clearly. It was evening, with the sun behind them, and their four long shadows went ahead of them up the road toward the gate.

But between the road and the gate there’s a river, and every pilgrim has to cross it. I’ll tell what Inquirer told me about that crossing, and then what I saw for myself.

The river runs right round the City, close under the walls, like a moat. It isn’t wide, not next to the Babel or the Distance; a strong man could throw a stone over it. But it’s fast and clear and very deep, and there’s no bridge over it and no boat on it.

When the four of them came to the bank they stood looking at it a long while. The gate was just across the water, the Heralds’ Gate, which I have the honor to keep: plain and high, white stone, with its doors standing open. On the far bank, on the steps below it, people were waiting, and Inquirer could see them. There was a tall man in a black gown with a single worn Book under his arm, and an old woman in a grey shawl, and a girl of fourteen with a taper and a jar of oil. And there was a Figure he couldn’t look at straight, because His face was full of light.

“How do we get across?” said Pliable.

Inquirer looked up and down the bank. There were no stepping stones. But on a stone post at the water’s edge these words were carved:

So Shall My Word Be That Goeth Forth Out Of My Mouth: It Shall Not Return Unto Me Void.

And under that, smaller:

Preach The Word.

“It’s the River of Voice,” said Plain-Sense slowly. “Mother told me about it once when I was small. She said you cross it by speaking. Every step you take, you’ve got to say what the Book says, faithfully. And if you say it true, the water holds you up.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then you sink.”

Analogy went first. He was the oldest, and he said he’d waited long enough.

He stood at the water’s edge with his great Book of cross-references under one arm and his stick in the other hand, opened the Book at the first chapter of Hebrews, and began to read aloud. Then he started saying, plainly, what it meant. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. He said that God had spoken before, in many ways, and truly; that now He had spoken last and fullest in His Son, the brightness of His glory; and that therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to what we’ve heard, in case we drift away from it.

And while he was speaking he stepped out onto the water.

It held him. It didn’t turn to stone or ice; it stayed water, clear and quick. But it held him up the way a floor holds a man, step after step, as long as he kept talking. He didn’t hurry, and he didn’t show off. Once or twice he stopped and turned back a page and said, “No, I put that badly, let me say it better,” and the water sagged a little under his feet, and then held again once he’d put it right. He crossed the whole river like that, his stick tapping on the water as if it were a pavement, and on the far bank the old woman in the grey shawl reached down and helped him up the steps.

Pliable went next. He was white in the face.

“I’ll sink. I know I will. I’ll start glossing. I always do.”

“Then don’t,” said Inquirer. “Say what it says. Just that. You can do it. You’ve walked the whole road.”

Pliable opened his battered Book at the Twenty-third Psalm, which he said was the only passage he was sure of, and began.

He did well at first. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He talked about the shepherd who leads his sheep through the green places and the dark valley alike, and he stepped out onto the water and it held. But halfway over, something happened to him that I’ve seen happen to a great many preachers. He looked up and saw the people on the far bank listening, and the old gift came up in him, the knack of making things gleam, and he began to embellish. He said something very beautiful about the still waters being a picture of the soul’s inner calm amid the stresses of modern life. It was really rather lovely. It wasn’t what David meant.

The water opened under him like a trapdoor.

He went down with a cry, and for one dreadful moment there was nothing on the surface but his battered Book floating, and a few bubbles.

Then his head came up, gasping. He was grabbing at nothing, and the current had him and was taking him downstream toward the bend and whatever was round it.

Inquirer told me he didn’t think. He opened his own Book, the one the copyists had given him, and read out the first thing he saw. It wasn’t anything about drowning or rescue. The Book had fallen open in Nehemiah: So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

“Gave the sense!” he shouted. “Pliable! Gave the sense! Not more than the sense! Say what David meant! Just what he meant!”

And Pliable, choking and spluttering in the fast water, heard him, and with what breath he had left he shouted out the plain sense of the Psalm. That the Lord is a shepherd to His people. That He leads them and feeds them and keeps them through every danger. That at the end He brings them into His house for ever.

The river lifted him. It stood him on his feet on the surface, dripping and shaking, a few yards from where he’d gone under. He stood there a long moment. Then he fished his Book up off the water, finished the Psalm, plainly, and walked the rest of the way over. On the far bank the girl with the taper took his hand and led him up the steps. She was laughing and he was crying.

Plain-Sense crossed the way he did everything, steadily and without any fuss. He took the third chapter of Romans, read it whole, and explained it plainly, and the river carried him over like a road. He didn’t look at the far bank at all until he got there. When he did, his mother was standing on it. Faithful-Rendering had come up from her ferry to meet him. I hadn’t known she was there until I saw him run up the steps.

That left Inquirer alone on the near bank.

He told me he stood there a long time. Not because he was afraid of sinking, though he was. It was because now that he was here, at the last river, with the gate just across the water, he couldn’t think what to say.

He’d learned so much. The tongues and the history, the forms and the shapes and the grammar, the words and the story and the whole counsel, the Fathers and the bridge. Every passage in the Book seemed to stand open to him now, like a door into a house full of rooms. Which should he pick?

And under that, further down, was something else, the old fear, the polisher’s fear: that when he opened his mouth it would be his own face that came out.

He took the little grey pebble out of his pocket and looked at it. It was very smooth by now from all the turning.

Then he put it back and opened the rough bundle of strips Master Context had tied up for him in the Shattered Mosaic, all that was left of the black-boarded Book from the cellar, the one he’d scraped in his workshop that first night. It fell open at the second chapter of Ephesians, which he and the old mason had put back together by firelight.

And he knew what to say.

He read it aloud first. And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins. Then he started to say what it meant, and as he spoke he stepped out onto the water.

I won’t try to set down everything he said. I was on the steps below the gate and I heard it. It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t polished. He didn’t make it gleam. He said what Paul had said to the Ephesians, as plainly as he could manage: that they’d been dead in sin, following the course of this world, by nature children of wrath, even as others. And then he came to the hinge, the two words the whole passage turns on, and he said them slowly. But God. He said that God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love, had made them alive together with Christ when they were dead. That by grace they were saved through faith, and that not of themselves; it was the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. And that they were His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.

And then, because he couldn’t help it, and because it was true, he said one thing more. He said that he’d been dead himself. That he’d lived forty years in a city of mirrors polishing the Book until it showed nothing but his own face, and hadn’t known the Book was speaking, or Whose voice it was. But God. God had sent an old woman with a basket, and a herald, and a lantern. God had taken him up a stair on his knees and ground his lenses at the foot of a Cross and walked him the whole length of the road. God had done all of it, Inquirer said. Not of works. Lest any man should boast.

The river held him the whole way.

When he came up the steps on the far side, the old woman in the grey shawl was waiting for him. It was Supplication. She took his face between her two hands the way a mother does and looked at him.

“I told you I’d be at the end,” she said, “same as the beginning.”

I was at the gate when he got to it, and I asked him his name, as I ask every pilgrim, and he told me. Then I asked the name of the place he’d come from, and he told me that too, and I wrote it in the Register.

Then I asked him the question I ask every pilgrim, the one written over the gate itself in old letters: What Saith The Scripture?

And he laughed. He told me afterwards it was the very question he’d cried out in his workshop that first night, with the scraped Book on the bench in front of him. What does this Book say? He’d cried it then as a question with no answer. Now here he was being asked it at the gate, and he found he could answer. Not fully, never fully. But truly.

“It says God has spoken. In a great many ways, and last of all in His Son. It says what its writers meant it to say, in their languages and their times, and that’s what God says too. It tells one story, from the first promise to the last, and all of it leads to Him. And it says it plainly enough for a farmer’s wife to stand on, and deeply enough that I’ll be learning it till I die.”

I wrote that in the Register as well. Then I opened the gate and let him in.

I won’t try to describe the City. Every pilgrim who comes in sees it differently, and every one of them tells me afterwards that all the descriptions he’d heard were wrong. I’ll only put down what Inquirer said to me about it, on the first of the seven nights he sat with me on the wall.

He said the strangest thing about the City was that everyone in it was listening.

Not to him, and not to each other, though they talked a great deal. They were listening to the Word. In every street and house and square the Book was being read aloud and people were listening to it, and not the way the people of Mine-Own-Meaning listened to themselves in their parlous. They listened the way you listen to a voice you love and want to hear more than any other. And when they’d heard, they did what they’d heard. He saw a man in the market give back money he’d taken unfairly, because he’d just heard Zacchaeus read. He saw two women who’d quarreled kneel down together in the street, because they’d just heard Philippians. He saw children learning their letters out of the Psalms.

And there wasn’t a mirror anywhere. Not one. He told me he looked for them out of old habit, in every window and every fountain. The windows showed only what was on the other side of them, and the fountains showed only the sky.

On his second day in the City the Herald Sola-Scriptura took him to the Hall of the Heralds.

It was a long, high, plain building in the middle of the City, full of heralds, men and women from every country in the world and every age, in every kind of dress, each carrying a Book. At the far end of the Hall, on a raised place, there was a throne, and on the throne sat the One Inquirer had seen on the steps below the gate and hadn’t been able to look at.

Here in the Hall he could look. He told me the light was no less. But his eyes were different now, after the River, and he could bear it.

I won’t write what he told me about that Face. Some things don’t belong in the Register. I’ll only say that the One on the throne held a Book in His hands, and it was the same Book. The Book Inquirer had scraped in his workshop, carried up the Stair, read in the Lighthouse, compared in the long room, carried across the Babel. The Book of every stage of the road. And it was the Book the One on the throne had Himself spoken.

“In the beginning was the Word,” said Sola-Scriptura quietly beside him, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That’s Whose Book it is. He is what it says. Every road through the Book comes out here, at Him.”

The One on the throne spoke to Inquirer. I don’t know all of what He said. Inquirer only told me the last of it, and I put that down here because it belongs to the account.

He said: Go home.

Inquirer had expected a great many things in the City. He hadn’t expected that.

“Home? To Mine-Own-Meaning?”

“Go home to thy friends,” said the One on the throne, “and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee. You came out of the Hall of Mirrors with a scraped Book and an unlit lantern. Go back with the Book open and the lantern lit. Speak in the square, in front of the glass cathedral. Tell them what the Book says. Not what it means to you. What it says. Some will listen. Most won’t. Speak anyway. My word will not return to Me void.”

And He gave Inquirer a herald’s staff, a plain one of almond wood, very like the staff old Promise had carried on the Covenant Highway.

“And the road?” said Inquirer. “Do I walk the whole of it again, going back?”

It was the Herald Sola-Scriptura who answered, with a smile, the first full smile Inquirer had ever seen on that grave face.

“Do you remember what Supplication told you, at the top of the Stair? That you’d be back in her room every morning, in a manner of speaking, long after you’d forgotten the stair?”

“I remember. I didn’t understand it.”

“Do you understand it now?”

Inquirer was quiet a long time. Then he said, “Yes.”

And he did. Every time he opened the Book from now on, for the rest of his life, he’d walk the whole road again. He’d kneel on the Stair and open his shutters to the Illuminator’s light. He’d ask what the copies said and carry the words across the Babel. He’d dig in the Diggings and keep his feet out of the Clocktower. He’d read the Mosaic whole, and know its kind, and see its shape. He’d read its grammar, and its words with Mrs. Usage’s key. He’d find the author’s mark, and its place on the Highway, and its neighbors in the Concordance Country. He’d take it to the Citadel and to the Fathers. He’d carry it across the Bridge, through the Cross. And then he’d cross the River of Voice and say what it said. Every passage, every morning. Sometimes in an hour and sometimes in a week, but never in years. It wasn’t a road you finish. It was a way of reading.

“That’s the secret,” said Sola-Scriptura. “The City isn’t the end of reading. It’s where you learn to read for the rest of your life.”

That was when he came up onto the wall and sat with me for seven nights and told me all of it. I’ve set it down here as faithfully as I can. He made me promise to tell it the way it happened and not the way I’d have liked it to happen, and I’ve tried. Where I’ve failed, I’ve failed in the places where I most wished he hadn’t had to go through what he went through. The Exchange, especially. But he said those were the places that mattered most, so I’ve left them in.

On the seventh night he got up and took his herald’s staff and his iron lantern and his two Books, and his pack with the Charter and the clay lamp and the little brass key in it. And the grey pebble, which he took out of his pocket one last time to show me.

“It’s very smooth now,” he said.

“Will you need it in the City,” I asked him, “now that you’ve come?”

“I’m not staying in the City. Not yet. And I’ll need it every day I live. My lenses aren’t clear. They’re only clearer. They’ll go dark again the first morning I forget the Stair.” He put the pebble back in his pocket. “I’ll be grinding them till the day I see Him face to face. Then I won’t need lenses at all.”

Then he went down off the wall and out through the Heralds’ Gate and across the River of Voice, talking as he went, and the water held him. And he set off west along the King’s Highway, toward home.

Plain-Sense went with him as far as the Bridgewright’s bridge and then on to his mother’s ferry, to learn to row. Analogy stayed in the City. He said he’d found a shop near the Hall of the Heralds that needed a bookbinder, and he meant to spend the rest of his days putting honest cross-references into the margins of new heralds’ Books. Pliable went west with Inquirer all the way. He said he had a Ledge to visit, and a great many people on it he owed letters to.

That’s the end of what Inquirer told me. But I keep the Register of Arrivals, and pilgrims come in at my gate from every country in the world, and in the years since, some of them have come from the province of Autonomy. Some even from the city of Mine-Own-Meaning.

They tell me things.

They tell me there’s a man who stands in the great square of that city in front of the glass cathedral with a plain Book open in his hands, reading it aloud and telling people what it says. They tell me that for a long time hardly anybody listened. The Worshipful Company of Polishers had him up before their court again. Lord What-It-Means-To-Me got very old and very sad and asked him to stop, and he wouldn’t.

They tell me his wife, Comfortable-Notion, listened from the edge of the crowd for a long time before she came any closer. And that one day she went home and took a kitchen knife to the silvering of her parlor Book.

They tell me his younger daughter was the first person in the city to read a whole chapter in the Greek. She learned it from her father at the kitchen table, out of a blue-bound lexicon.

They tell me that a young man who used to be a trader in an Exchange far away came to the city and opened a school, where he teaches the children their Hebrew letters, right to left, and raps their knuckles, gently, when they make a daleth look like a resh.

And they tell me that every morning, before he goes out to the square, the man with the plain Book kneels on the floor of his old workshop in the Street of Reflections, where he used to polish, with the Book open in front of an iron lantern. And he says, not cleverly, the same words he said at the top of the Kneeling Stair. And the lantern lights.

The last pilgrim from Mine-Own-Meaning came in at my gate only a month ago. She was a girl of fifteen with a black-boarded Book in a basket, the silver scraped off its pages. When I asked her where she’d got it, she said an old woman had left it at her door. And when I asked her the question written over the gate, What saith the Scripture?, she said she didn’t know yet. But she meant to find out.

I wrote her name in the Register. Then I opened the gate.

And you who’ve read this account: you’ve got a Book too. It may be polished till it shows your face, or scraped, or brand new. It doesn’t matter where you start. There’s a Stair at the start of the road, and an old woman at the top of it who keeps a door with no handle on the outside.

Knock.

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

Here ends The Pilgrim’s Process.