“Thanks, but seeing as how beholden and honorific I is, what say you share part of your cloak with me, so I ain’t dangling in the wind, making ladies faint and making bulls feel all dinky-donked? I am a kindly man and don’t care to make the critters jealous.”

The man dipped his drinking horn once more into the surface substance, and stood, and gestured for Montrose to kneel. Montrose did and was bemused, but not startled, when the man poured the liquid in the horn over Montrose’s head.

The substance dripped over his neck and shoulders, growing pleasantly warm as it did so, and the fluid rippled and curled and formed itself into hair-thin strands almost too fine to see. Montrose stood, looking down, beheld a white garment being instantly woven into place on his frame, seamless, a twin to the other man’s own, draped neatly from shoulder to waist, to fall to a purple hem just below his knobby knees. He thought he looked ridiculous in it.

But at least the sleeves were folded in such a way to form deep pockets just below his wrists, and he could put the diamond seed in one.

“Such is the wedding garb for me,” said the man in his hypnotic, chanting baritone. “Our records showed you might have wished for something from your period, but I will not deny what you request, and share my own.”

Montrose tried to adjust the garb, to throw over both shoulders, and it perversely kept rearranging itself into handsome folds and classical drapes.

“What’s the big idea of pouring me into another body? Why did you pox with my alarm clock and snuff my lesser selves?”

“For sheer joy’s sake. We decided to surprise you! It was thought not fitting that you should come a pauper to your bride, so we shouldered the expense of recombining your mind while you slept.”

“Some surprise. What the plague is with leaving me to find my way all by my lonesome?” he grunted while trying to rip the fabric, hoping this would kill it and make it lie still. “Right unneighborly.”

“As for leaving you alone, I do not understand your word. To us, solitariness is precious, and, to you, ’twill make your union joyous all the more. You waited but seventy-five degrees of the planetary rotation while I approached, and, of course the additional delay was gained because you walked froward, not toward. To intrude myself in greater haste was feared to be unseemly. I was told that the men of old, being mortal, practiced no patience. I hoped it untrue of you, whose vigil has outlasted all things known to history.”

Menelaus had some of the fabric in his teeth and was still unable to rip the garment, get it to lie still, nor to wrestle it into submission. A long tail of the material was successfully slapping him in the face. “Much as I poxing appreciate the gesture—you know—my duds don’t need to look ’zactly like yours. I ain’t got the knees for wearing no skirt, see.”

The man of gold touched Menelaus lightly on the shoulder, and the garment altered itself, becoming a long tunic, and the cloak was now something more like a poncho, but rich with emerald embroidery. The design showed a triple-headed serpent chasing sparrows, writhing into Celtic knots and arabesques. The hood fell off, remolded itself, grew thicker, and became a broad-brimmed hat more like what Menelaus was used to.

“But now the land must garb him in a floral, festive coat to match your own!” So saying, the gold man began walking and, as he did so, cracks spread from his feet in spiderwebs across the level plain with shocking suddenness.

Montrose followed, his mind full of questions, but that feeling of buoyant joy which woke him was still in the back of his mind, so he held his peace and decided to watch whatever show his host put on.

As the man of gold walked, he broke the ground in each direction. Behind him, in his footsteps, like a green fire following a trickle of gasoline, grass blades erupted from the cracks in the ground. With soundless explosion, the glassy surface to either side of him sent up shafts of brown, which turned green and opened up their branches, turning into trees. Dewdrops flew from the buds and new leaves, and the trunks elongated, breathing out mists, even as Montrose watched.

The air grew cool with water vapor. At the beginning of their walk, the two men were in an ice-colored landscape of diamond broken by countless small saplings and scattered shrubs. As they walked, through saplings shoulder-high, Montrose could hear at first the trickle, and, later, the lapping rush of a stream off to their left, invisible behind the trees now towering overhead. Their course was parallel to this unseen stream. By the end of the walk, the trees had formed a natural cathedral, green and hushed and solemn, and underfoot was soil and grass as thick and refreshing to the bare feet as splashing in a pool.

Flowers of every color were springing up, but white was the dominant hue, with white rose, tuberose, peony, baby’s breath overwhelming the other blooms, and dendrobium and hydrangea, amaryllis, and apple-of-my-eye.

He was not surprised by this rapid, elfin growth. Ever since the day he had seen the white-haired and wrinkled Hermeticists throw off their old age like a wet cloak thrown aside, he expected to see such rapid cellular changes eventually on a wider scale.

Nonetheless, watching the green spread across the barren glass with the speed of a prairie fire in a high wind, and trunks shoot up like brown and silent rockets, with fruits and flowers like quiet fireworks bursting, and bestow the tall and solemn beauty of deep forestlands and sunny glades in so short of time, was magic.

He noted the species of trees were not merely from Earth, with no alien life-forms present, but from his quarter of Earth, from North America. And they were not simply the pines and evergreens of his cold youth, but the leafy trees, oak and ash and elm, of his happier teenaged years, when he was a horse soldier, campaigning in the thick woods of Mojave and the overgrown green swamps of Death Valley.

The two men came suddenly to the brink of the cliff Montrose had seen hours before from afar. Stepping out from between stately birch trees was like stepping from a high temple rich with shadows through a doorway guarded by brown pillars. The brightness of the sun in the cloudless white sky was like a blow to the face.

At their foot was a gulf of air overlooking a flat plain of glassy diamond. To their right, cherry trees and apples were spilling small white and pink petals into the depth of air.

To their left, the stream which thick woods had for so long kept hidden now leaped shoutingly into view, and, with a noise like cymbals, flashing in the sun, brilliant, threw itself from the cliff in a long, smooth parabola to dash against the cliff, a thin and threadlike waterfall, robed in its own windblown mists and spray. A second threadlike stream could be seen falling from the brink five hundred yards beyond that, and a third at a thousand yards, and so on, evenly spaced to left and right across the inlets and headlands of the irregular cliff side.

The man flourished aloft the drinking horn he had previously offered Montrose and, with a bow of his head, cast it from the cliff. Slowly, the tiny thing toppled, growing invisible with distance.

Montrose said, “What was that for?”

The other replied, “To honor and receive your bride, I am opening the floodgates of the buried waters of the Earth.”

No sooner than he said it but there was a loud, sharp explosion of noise. Montrose clutched his ears, shocked. The glassy plain so far beneath them was heaving. Vast cubes and boulders and sheets of the diamond substance were rising and falling, and smaller stones were hurling themselves in the air. It was if all the earthquakes of the world, all the landslips and eruptions, had been gathered into one spot and set free. Up from the vents and canyons and fissures, volumes of fluid broke forth, columns of spray rearing hundreds of yards in the air like giant sea serpents on a rampage. Fountains and volcanoes of cold fluid surged to the surface, and maelstroms whirled whole lakes and mighty rivers upward and upward.