The Province of Forms

East of the Shattered Mosaic the road came to a border, marked by a low stone wall with a gate in it and a small gatehouse. On the other side the land changed so abruptly that Inquirer stopped and stared.

It wasn’t one country at all. It was a great many, packed close together like the squares of a quilt. Straight ahead lay a long green valley full of villages and winding lanes, with smoke going up from cottage chimneys. To the left, over a river, rose bare brown hills topped with stone buildings that looked like courthouses. To the right was a garden, an enormous wild one full of flowers and fountains and birdsong, where the trees seemed to sway in time to music, and beyond it an orchard of short, gnarled trees bent with fruit. Further off were mountains with fire on their peaks. And right at the edge of sight, far to the east, were other mountains stranger than any he had ever seen. They seemed to change shape while he looked at them, and they were full of odd lights, and their tops were lost in cloud.

Carved over the gate were the words: The Province Of Forms. God, Who At Sundry Times And In Divers Manners Spake.

The gatekeeper was a tall, graceful woman in a long gown that changed color as she moved. In one light it was the plain brown of a working dress, in another green and embroidered like a festival robe, in another the stern black of a judge’s gown, and sometimes it was shot through with fire. She smiled at the two of them.

“Welcome to my Province. I’m Dame Kinds. Some call me Genre, but that’s a foreign word and I prefer the old one. I keep this border. You’ve come from the Mosaic, I see, so you’ve learned to read a thing in its place. Now you have to learn that the places aren’t all alike.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Inquirer.

“You will. Tell me: if a friend writes to you, I’m so hungry I could eat a horse, do you send him a horse?”

Inquirer laughed. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a… a way of talking. He doesn’t mean it as a fact.”

“And if you read in a lawbook, A man shall pay a fine of ten silver pieces, is that a way of talking?”

“No. That’s a law. It means just what it says.”

“And if you read in a poem, My love is like a red, red rose, do you think your sweetheart has thorns and petals?”

“No.”

“There. You know my whole lesson already. You know it in your own language and your own life without even thinking about it. Every kind of writing has its own rules, a letter or a law or a poem or a story or a proverb or a vision, and you read each one by its rules without noticing you’re doing it. The trouble is that when men open the Book they forget all that and read the whole thing as if it were one kind of thing. A newspaper, usually. Or a puzzle. Or a code.”

She swept her arm out over the patchwork country beyond the gate.

“The Book is many kinds of writing. God spoke in divers manners: in stories and laws and songs, in proverbs and oracles, in gospels and letters and visions. Each district of my Province is one of those kinds, and to read the Book rightly you have to learn to walk in each one the way its own people walk. You won’t learn it all in one trip through. But you’ll learn enough to know when you’ve crossed a border.”

She opened the gate.

“One more thing. There are two men in my Province who’ll try to stop you learning. One reads every kind as if it were the same kind. The other reads stories as if they were commands. And there’s a lady who reads everything as a hidden picture. Mind all three.”

The road went first through the long green valley, and Dame Kinds walked with them as far as the first village.

It was a pleasant country. Every village had a storyteller sitting on a bench by the well, telling a tale to anybody who stopped. In one, an old man was telling about a shepherd boy who killed a giant with a stone from a sling. In another a woman was telling about a widow who wouldn’t leave her mother-in-law. In a third a young man was telling about a king who saw a woman bathing from his roof, and what came of it.

“This is the Valley of Stories,” said Dame Kinds. “Narrative, the scholars call it. Nearly half the Book is told this way: Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ruth, Esther, the Gospels, Acts. They’re true stories. They happened. But they’re told. The teller chooses what goes in and what’s left out, and he arranges it. He lets you watch a man make his choices and then lets you watch what comes of them, and he very seldom stops to tell you straight out what to think.”

They stopped at the well where the young man was telling about David and Bathsheba, and Inquirer heard the whole terrible thing through: the adultery, the murder of Uriah, the cover-up, Nathan’s story about the poor man’s one ewe lamb, and David’s cry, I have sinned against the Lord.

“Does the storyteller ever say David did wrong?”

Inquirer thought about it. “Only once. Right at the end. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. The rest of the time he just… tells it, and lets you watch.”

“Yes. That’s how stories teach, by showing. You learn what God is like by watching what He does, and you learn what sin is by watching it unroll, one step after another, from a lazy afternoon on a roof to a dead soldier and a dead child. The story teaches, but it teaches the way stories do. Now, here’s where you need to be careful.” Her voice went grave. “A story records a great many things it doesn’t approve. David took another man’s wife. The Book tells you so. Does it tell you to do it?”

“No, of course not.”

“Of course not. That’s easy to say, because it’s so plainly wicked. But plenty of things in the stories aren’t so plainly wicked, and men have taken them for commands. Come on, I’ll show you what I mean. It isn’t far.”

At the bottom of the Valley of Stories was a big open field covered in sheepskins.

There were hundreds of them pegged out on the grass in rows, and next to each fleece a man or woman knelt or sat or lay, staring at it with a fixed, anxious look. Some had obviously been there a very long time. Their hair was matted and their clothes in rags, and a few were as thin as rakes. In the middle of the field, on a little platform, stood a burly, confident man in a shepherd’s smock with a fleece slung over each shoulder.

“Mr. Fleece-Setter,” said Dame Kinds.

“Brothers and sisters!” he was shouting. “Keep watching! Keep waiting! The Lord will show you His will! Remember Gideon! He laid out a fleece and said, If the dew be on the fleece only, and it be dry upon all the earth beside, then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by mine hand. And the Lord answered him! So put out your fleece and ask your question and wait for the sign! Should I marry this man? Should I take this job? Should I move to that town? Put out your fleece! The Lord will answer!”

Inquirer looked at the ragged people kneeling by their fleeces. A young woman near him was crying quietly.

“How long have you been here?” he asked her.

“Three months. I asked whether I should accept a proposal of marriage. I said, if the fleece is wet in the morning and the ground’s dry, then yes. But it’s never been wet when the ground was dry. Not once. Or else it’s been wet and the ground’s been wet too, and I don’t know what that means. He says wait. My young man’s given up and gone. But I still don’t know whether I ought to have married him, so I’m still waiting.”

Inquirer felt his temper rising. He turned to Dame Kinds. “But Gideon did it! It’s in the Book!”

“It’s in the Book. So read the story. Not the tile. The story.”

He opened the Book, and Plain-Sense looked over his shoulder, and they read the sixth chapter of Judges together from the start.

They read that the Lord had already appeared to Gideon and told him straight out, Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel… have not I sent thee? They read that Gideon had already asked for one sign and been given it, fire out of the rock. They read that the Spirit of the Lord had already come on him. Only then, when he knew perfectly well what God wanted of him, did Gideon put out his fleece. And then he put it out a second time, because he still didn’t believe, and said, Let not thine anger be hot against me.

“He wasn’t asking God what to do,” said Plain-Sense slowly. “God had already told him. He was asking for proof because he was scared. The fleece isn’t a method for finding out God’s will. It’s a picture of a frightened man who wouldn’t trust what God had already said. And God was patient with him, which is the wonder of it. But the story doesn’t say do this. It says look how patient God was, even with this.”

Mr. Fleece-Setter had heard them. He came striding down off his platform, red in the face.

“Are you saying Gideon was wrong? He’s in the Hall of Faith! Hebrews eleven!”

“He is in the Hall of Faith,” said Dame Kinds, quite calmly. “So is Samson. So is Jephthah. So is Rahab the harlot. So is David. They’re in there for their faith, Mr. Fleece-Setter, not for every single thing they did. You’ve taken something the Book records and turned it into something the Book commands. You’ve made a description into a prescription, and now these poor souls are starving in your field waiting for God to answer a question He answered long ago in His Word: walk in wisdom, obey what’s written, and trust Him for the rest.”

The young woman had stopped crying. She was looking from Dame Kinds to Mr. Fleece-Setter and back.

“Then I don’t have to wait for the fleece?”

“You never did, child,” said Dame Kinds, gently. “Get up. Go and find your young man, if he’s still to be found, and talk it over with him and with your elders like a sensible Christian. The Lord guides His people by His Word and by wisdom and by His providence. He doesn’t guide them by wet wool.”

The young woman got to her feet, shaky from kneeling so long. She looked down at the fleece for a moment, then rolled it up, tucked it under her arm, and walked out of the field. Two or three others who had been watching her got up slowly and went after her.

Mr. Fleece-Setter shouted after them, but Inquirer noticed his voice had lost some of its boom.

They were nearly out of the field when they heard a dreadful cry from behind the hedge at the far end.

They ran. Beyond the hedge was a cottage, and in its doorway stood a man with a knife in his hand and a look of agony on his face. In the yard in front of him was a girl of twelve or so, white with fright.

“Stand back!” the man shouted when he saw them. “I’ve made a vow! I’ve got to keep it! The Book says so!”

“What vow?” said Dame Kinds sharply.

“I swore,” and his voice cracked, “I swore that if the Lord gave me the win in my lawsuit, I’d offer up whatever came out of my door first to meet me. Like Jephthah! And I won! And she came running out to tell me… she came first…”

Inquirer didn’t stop to think. He walked straight up to the man and took the knife out of his hand, and the man let him. He sank down on his doorstep with his face in his hands, and the girl ran to Dame Kinds and hung on to her.

“Listen to me,” said Dame Kinds, very low and very fierce. “Jephthah’s is one of the darkest stories in the whole Book. It isn’t there to be copied. It’s there to show you how far Israel had fallen in those days, when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Jephthah made a rash vow out of ignorance and pride, and then he kept it, God help him, in the teeth of the Law. The Law forbids that very thing in so many words: There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire. The Book records it with horror. It doesn’t praise it with one single word. What you learn from that story isn’t keep every vow. It’s don’t make rash vows, and see how dark it gets when men forget the Law.”

The man was sobbing. “Then what do I do? I swore.”

“A vow to do evil is no vow. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay, yes. But no man’s bound by an oath to break God’s own commandment. Go to your elders. Confess your rash oath before the Lord. Give a thank-offering out of your purse if you want to, and hold on to your daughter, and thank God somebody happened by.”

They left him with his arms round his daughter, both of them crying. Inquirer was still holding the knife, and found his hands were shaking. He threw it into the hedge.

“How many people do this? Read a story and copy it?”

“Not many go that far. But a great many do it in smaller ways. The Book records that the first church in Jerusalem sold their land and held everything in common, so some men say every Christian must. It records that the apostles drew lots to choose a man to replace Judas, so some say we ought to pick our pastors by lot. It records that Paul shaved his head for a vow, and that the disciples met in an upper room. Every time, you have to ask: Is the Book telling me what happened here, or telling me what to do? A story can do both, but you have to learn to tell which. And the rest of the Book helps you. When the teaching parts of the Book say do this, you do it. When it’s only a story showing it, you go carefully.”

They crossed a stream out of the Valley of Stories and into the great wild garden. This was the Garden of Songs.

Inquirer had never seen anything like it. The flowers were enormous and every color imaginable, the fountains leaped and sang, and the trees moved as if to music. When they walked underneath, the leaves rustled together in a sound exactly like clapping. A brook ran along by the path and seemed to be laughing. The green rounded hills behind the garden, in a certain light, looked very much as though they were skipping.

Plain-Sense had gone quiet and looked uncomfortable.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve never liked this part. It’s the poetry. The Psalms and the Prophets and Job and the Song of Songs. I read it and I always want to ask, but what does it mean? The trees clap their hands. Trees haven’t got hands. The hills skip like lambs. Hills don’t skip.” He frowned. “I’m good at plain things. I’m no good at this.”

Dame Kinds laughed, kindly. “I know, my dear. That’s why Master Context warned you. You read things for what they are. That’s your gift. But what is a poem? It isn’t a newspaper with the lines chopped short. It’s a way of saying true things that can’t be said as well any other way. When the Psalmist says the trees clap their hands, he’s telling you something perfectly true: all creation rejoices when God comes to set things right. He’s just saying it the way a poet says things, so you feel it in your bones and don’t only know it in your head. Read it flat and you get nonsense, or a lie. Read it as a poem and you get the truth with all the joy left in it.”

“How do I tell what’s a poem?”

“Listen.” They had come to a fountain with two jets of water side by side, going up and coming down together, and she pointed at it. “Hebrew poetry doesn’t rhyme the way yours does. It rhymes thoughts. One line says a thing, and the next line says it again a bit differently, or says the opposite, or carries it a step further. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Two jets, side by side. That’s the music of it. They call it parallelism. When you hear that rhythm, you’re in the Garden.”

She took them on through the garden past fountain after fountain, and at each one she read out the lines on the basin and showed them how the second line answered the first. Plain-Sense listened with his brows pulled together, and bit by bit his face began to change.

At the last fountain, the tallest and brightest of them, she read: As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

Plain-Sense didn’t say anything for a bit. Then: “That’s not a measurement.”

“No.”

“Because east and west never meet. You can go east forever and never get to where west starts. So he’s saying our sins are taken away infinitely far. For good.” He stopped. His voice had changed. “That’s truer than a measurement would be.”

Dame Kinds put her hand on his arm. “Now you’re reading poetry. And you’re still reading plainly. The plain sense of a poem is the poem’s sense. It isn’t the flat sense.”

At the far edge of the garden, by the gate into the orchard, they came on a dry, precise little man in grey spectacles with a tape-measure in one hand and a notebook in the other. He was measuring a tree.

“No hands,” he was muttering, and writing it down. “No hands whatsoever. Isaiah fifty-five, twelve: false.” He moved to the next tree. “No hands. False.”

“That’s Mr. Flat-Reader,” said Dame Kinds. “He comes every year to check the Garden.”

Mr. Flat-Reader peered at them through his grey lenses. “Pilgrims? Been in the Garden? Then you’ve seen it. Nonsense, the lot of it. Trees with hands. Hills skipping. The sun running a race like a bridegroom. Either it’s literally true, in which case I’ll find the hands, or it’s false, in which case the Book’s full of errors. I’ve been measuring thirty years and haven’t found one hand yet.”

“And the Proverbs?” said Dame Kinds. “You’ve been in the orchard too, I think.”

His eyes lit up. “Ah, the Proverbs. Now those are more like it. Plain statements! Guarantees! Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. A promise. A law of nature. If a child goes wrong, that proves the parents failed. I’ve written to a great many parents to tell them so.”

Inquirer looked at Dame Kinds. “Is that right?”

“No. Come into the orchard and I’ll show you. You’re welcome to come too, Mr. Flat-Reader.”

He didn’t come. He went back to measuring trees.

The orchard was quiet and sunny, the trees old and short and loaded with fruit. Each tree bore one kind of fruit, and on a little wooden tag hanging from a branch there was a proverb.

“This is the Orchard of Wisdom. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and some of the Psalms. A proverb isn’t a promise and it isn’t a law. It’s a saying about how the world generally goes, under God. Wisdom boiled down. A soft answer turneth away wrath. Does it? Usually. Not always. Sometimes a soft answer gets you hit anyway. But it’s the wise way, and it mostly works, and it’s how God made the world to run. Train up a child is like that. It’s the way of wisdom, and children brought up that way usually do keep to it. But it isn’t a contract. Look here.”

She took them to two trees growing side by side. The tag on the first said: Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. The tag on the second: Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

Inquirer stared at them. “They contradict each other.”

“They’re planted side by side on purpose. Proverbs aren’t laws. They’re wisdom. Sometimes you have to answer a fool and sometimes you mustn’t, and wisdom is knowing which is which. Mr. Flat-Reader can’t stand that. He wants a rule for everything. But the Orchard teaches you to be wise, not just to follow rules. And there’s another book in this orchard, Job, that was written for exactly this, to show that the general rule doesn’t always hold in a single life. Job’s friends were flat readers of proverbs. You’re suffering, so you must have sinned. And God told them they were wrong.”

They met the lady in the evening, on the road past the orchard where it started climbing toward the fiery mountains.

She was sitting in a beautiful carriage at the roadside, painted with gold and vines, and she was very elegant and very lovely, in a gown of dark blue silk embroidered with tiny symbols: stars, keys, doves, fish, ladders. She had large dreamy eyes and a jeweled lorgnette.

“Travelers!” she called, very sweetly. “How delightful. Do come and sit with me a moment. I’m Madam Allegory. You’ve been reading the stories with that stern woman, I see. How dull she makes them. Let me show you their secret. Let me show you what they really mean.”

She held up a little painted card showing a man lying wounded by a road, another man binding up his wounds, and an inn in the background.

“The Good Samaritan. Everyone thinks it’s a story about being kind to your neighbor. How ordinary. No, no. The wounded man is Adam. Jerusalem is the heavenly city he fell from. Jericho is this mortal world. The robbers are the devil and his angels. The priest and the Levite are the Law and the Prophets, who couldn’t save him. The Samaritan is Christ. The oil and wine are the sacraments, the inn is the Church, the two pence are the two Testaments. And the innkeeper,” she gave a radiant smile, “is the Apostle Paul! Isn’t it beautiful? A great teacher of the Church read it so, long ago.”

Inquirer had to admit it was beautiful. It was like the glass cathedral back home: everything glittered.

But Plain-Sense said, “Why did the Lord tell that story?”

Madam Allegory blinked at him over her lorgnette. “Why?”

“Yes. Who was He talking to? What had they asked Him?”

Inquirer remembered. He’d read it in the old Book, before the Snatchers got it. “A lawyer asked Him, And who is my neighbor?, because he wanted to justify himself. And the Lord told the story, and at the end He asked, Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And the lawyer said, He that shewed mercy on him. And the Lord said, Go, and do thou likewise.”

“Then that’s what it means,” said Plain-Sense. “The Lord told us. He was showing a man who wanted to put a fence round his duty that his neighbor is anybody in need, even an enemy, and that a despised Samaritan understood the Law better than the priest did. It’s a sharp, uncomfortable story. Your version’s lovely, madam, and it’s full of true doctrine. Christ does save fallen Adam. But that’s not what this story is saying. You’ve hung true things on it that it wasn’t built to carry, and while you were at it you’ve dropped the thing it was built to carry. Which is the sting at the end: go and do likewise.”

Madam Allegory’s lovely face went cold. “How very literal of you.”

“Not literal,” said Dame Kinds, who had come up behind them. “Faithful. My dear,” she said to Madam Allegory, and not unkindly, “you’re a real form of writing, and an honorable one. The Lord used allegory Himself now and then. Paul did once, and told his readers he was doing it. Men have written whole books as allegories, good ones. When an author writes an allegory, it must be read as one. But you take stories that weren’t written that way and turn them into allegories regardless. That isn’t reading. That’s painting over.”

Madam Allegory lifted her lorgnette and examined the two pilgrims through it, and Inquirer had the uncomfortable feeling she was looking for symbols in them.

“And what are you, I wonder?” she murmured. “Two pilgrims on a road, meeting a lady in a carriage. What a lovely allegory that would make.”

She tapped the side of the carriage with her lorgnette, and it rolled off into the dusk.

Inquirer stood looking after it with an odd expression.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Only, she’s right, isn’t she? We are in one.” He gave an uneasy laugh. “Whoever’s telling this.”

Dame Kinds smiled. “Then the Author meant it that way. Which is the whole difference.”

She walked them to the edge of her Province, where the road climbed between two great ranges. On the left stood the fiery mountains, the Heights of Prophecy, smoking at the top, with voices crying out of them. On the right, far off, were the strange shifting peaks of the Apocalypse Mountains, all lights and beasts and thrones up in the clouds.

“You won’t cross those today. You’ll see them from the road, and you’ll come back to them many times in your life. When you do, remember what you learned in my Province. The prophets speak in poetry more often than not, and their visions come in pictures. The great book of the Revelation is written in symbols that its first readers knew from the prophets and from their own world. A beast is an empire. A horn is a power. A number is a pattern. Read them the way they were written, as symbols with true meaning, not as a coded timetable and not as nothing at all. And never build on the strange corners of those mountains what the plain lands of the Book don’t teach. Many a pilgrim has gone up into the Apocalypse Mountains with a chart and a calendar and come down with nothing.”

“And the Gospels? And the letters?”

“The Gospels are stories, but a special kind. They’re told to proclaim Christ, and each evangelist arranges his telling to suit his own purpose. Read them story by story and then book by book, and ask why each one tells it his way. The letters are just what they say: letters, to churches and men with real troubles. They’re the plainest teaching in the Book, which is why the stories and songs so often have to be read in their light. Their arguments are long, as Master Context showed you. Follow the argument.”

She gave each of them a small leather wallet. Inside was a set of cards like a pack. Each card named a kind of writing and listed its rules on one side, and on the other had a question to ask before you read.

“Ask the question every time you open the Book. What kind of writing is this? Before you ask what it means, ask what it is. A man who takes a poem for a law, or a story for a command, or a vision for a newspaper, will go wrong however carefully he reads every word.”

Then she turned back to her Province, her gown changing as she went, brown and green and black and fire and at last a deep dusky blue that faded into the evening.

The two pilgrims stood at the border looking east. The road went on between the mountains toward a town on a plain a long way off, and they could see its lights coming on in the dusk. There were a great many of them, more than in any town they had passed, and on the wind came the faint sound of bells and music and a great many voices shouting.

“What’s that?”

Plain-Sense looked at it for some time, and his face went grave.

“That’s the Exchange. The Exchange of Novelties. I’ve heard about it. It’s the biggest market on the whole road.”

“What do they sell?”

“Meanings,” said Plain-Sense.