Текст книги "[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch"

Автор книги: Gene Wolfe

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“I have done my best to teach you boys the rudiments of learning. They are the seeds of trees that should grow and blossom in your minds. Severian, look to your Q. It should be round and full like the face of a happy boy, but one of its cheeks is as fallen-in as your own. You have all, all you boys, seen how the spinal cord, lifting itself toward its culmination, expands and at last blossoms in the myriad pathways of the brain. And this one, one cheek round, the other seared and shrivelled.”

His trembling hand reached for the slate pencil, but it escaped his fingers and rolled over the edge of the table to clatter on the floor. He did not stoop to pick it up, fearful, I think, that in. stooping he might glimpse the invisible presence.

“I have spent much of my life, boys, in trying to implant those seeds in the apprentices of our guild. I have had a few successes, but not many. There was a boy, but he—”

He went to the port and spat, and because I was sitting near it I saw the twisted shapes formed by the seeping blood and knew that the reason I could not see the dark figure (for death is of the colour that is darker than fuligin) that accompanied him was that it stood within him.

Just as I had discovered that death in a new form, in the shape of war, could frighten me when it could no longer do so in its old ones, so I learned now that the weakness of my body could afflict me with the terror and despair my old teacher must have felt. Consciousness came and went.

Consciousness went and came like the errant winds of spring, and I, who so often have had difficulty in falling asleep among the besieging shades of memory, now fought to stay awake as a child struggles to lift a faltering kite by the string. At times I was oblivious to everything except my injured body. The wound in my leg, which I had hardly felt when I received it, and whose pain I had so effortlessly locked away when Daria had bandaged it, throbbed with an intensity that formed the background to all my thoughts, like the rumbling of the Drum Tower at the solstice. I turned from side to side, thinking always that I lay upon that leg.

I had hearing without sight and occasionally sight without hearing. I rolled my cheek from the matted hair of Mamillian and laid it on a pillow woven of the minute, downy feathers of hummingbirds.

Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, fuming his head to watch me from one brown eye.

XXIV. The Flier

SUNLIGHT IN MY FACE.

I tried to sit up, and in fact succeeded in getting one elbow beneath me. All about me shimmered an orb of colour—purple and cyan, ruby and azure, with the orpiment of the sun piercing these enchanted tints like a sword to fall upon my eyes. Then it was blotted out, and its extinction revealed what its splendour had obscured: I lay in a domed pavilion of variegated silk, with an open door.

The rider of the mammoth was walking toward me. He was robed in saffron, as I had always seen him, and carried an ebony rod too light to be a weapon. “You have recovered,” he said.

“I’d try and say yes, but I’m afraid the effort of speaking might kill me.”

He smiled at that, though the smile was no more than a twitching of the mouth. “As you should know better than almost anyone, the sufferings we endure in this life make possible all the happy crimes and pleasant abominations we shall commit in the next... aren’t you eager to collect?”

I shook my head and laid it on the pillow again. The softness smelled faintly of musk.

“That is just as well, because it will be some time before you do.”

“Is that what your physician says?”

“I am my own, and I’ve been treating you myself. Shock was the principal problem.... It sounds like a disorder for old women, as you are no doubt thinking at this moment. But it kills a great many men with wounds. If all of mine who die of it would only live, I would readily consent to the death of those who take a thrust in the heart.”

“While you were being your own physician—and minewere you telling the truth?”

He smiled more broadly at that. “I always do. In my position, I have to talk too much to keep a skein of lies in order; of course, you must realize that the truth ... the little, ordinary truths that farm wives talk of, not the ultimate and universal Truth, which I’m no more capable of uttering than you ... that truth is more deceptive.”

“Before I lost consciousness, I heard you say you are the Autarch.”

He threw himself down beside me like a child, his body making a distinct sound as it struck the piled carpets. “I did. I am. Are you impressed?”

“I would be more impressed,” I said, “if I did not recall you so vividly from our meeting in the House Azure.” (That porch, covered with snow, heaped with snow that deadened our footsteps, stood in the silken pavilion like a spectre. When the Autarch’s blue eyes met mine, I felt that Roche stood beside me in the snow, both of us dressed in unfamiliar and none-too-well-fitting clothes. Inside, a woman who was not Thecla was transforming herself into Thecla as I was later to make myself Meschia, the first man.

Who can say to what degree an actor assumes the spirit of the person he portrays? When I played the Familiar, it was nothing, because it was so close to what I was—or had at least believed myself to be—in life; but as Meschia I had sometimes had thoughts that could never have occurred to me otherwise, thoughts alien equally to Severian and to Thecla, thoughts of the beginnings of things and the morning of the world.)

“I never told you, you will recall, that I was only the Autarch.”

“When I met you in the House Absolute, you appeared to be a minor official of the court. I admit you never told me that, and in fact I knew then who you were. But it was you, wasn’t it, who gave the money to Dr. Talos?”

“I would have told you that without a blush. It is completely true. In fact, I am several of the minor officials of my court.... Why shouldn’t I be? I have the authority to appoint such officials, and I can just as well appoint myself. An order from the Autarch is often too heavy an instrument, you see. You would never have tried to slit a nose with that big headsman’s sword you carried. There is a time for a decree from the Autarch, and a time for a letter from the third bursar, and I am both and more besides.”

“And in that house in the Algedonic Quarter—”

“I am also a criminal... just as you are.”

There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity. I, who had always thought myself, though not truly intelligent, at least prudent and quick to learn simple things, who had always counted myself the practical and foreseeing one when I had travelled with Jonas or Dorcas, had never until that instant connected the Autarch’s position at the very apex of the structure of legality with his certain knowledge that I had penetrated the House Absolute as an emissary of Vodalus. At that moment, I would have leaped up and fled from the pavilion if I could, but my legs were like water.

“All of us are—all of us must be who must enforce the law. Do you think your guild brothers would have been so severe with you—and my agent reports that many of them wished to kill you—if they had themselves been guilty of something of the same kind? You were a danger to them unless you were terribly punished because they might otherwise someday be tempted. A judge or a jailer who has no crime of his own is a monster/alternately purloining the forgiveness that belongs to the Increate alone and practicing a deathly rigor that belongs to no one and nothing.

“So I became a criminal. The violent crimes offended my love of humanity, and I lack the quickness of hand and thought required of a thief. After blundering about for some time... that would be in about the year you were born, I suppose ... I found my true profession. It takes care of certain emotional needs I cannot now satisfy otherwise ... and I have, I really do have, a knowledge of human nature. I know just when to offer a bribe and how much to give, and, the most important thing, when not to. I know how to keep the girls who work for me happy enough with their careers to continue, and discontented enough with their fates.... They’re khaibits, of course, grown from the body cells of exultant women so an exchange of blood will prolong the exultants’ youth. I know how to make my clients feel that the encounters I arrange are unique experiences instead of something midway between dewy-eyed romance and solitary vice. You felt that you had a unique experience, didn’t you?”

“That’s what we call them too,” I said. “Clients.” had been listening as much to the tone of his voice as to his words. He was happy, as I thought he had not been on either of the other occasions on which I had encountered him, and to hear him was like hearing a thrush speak. He almost seemed to know it himself, lifting his face and extending his throat, the Rs in arrange and romance trilled into the sunlight.

“It is useful too. It keeps me in touch with the underside of the population, so I know whether or not taxes are really being collected and whether they’re thought fair, which elements are rising in society and which are going down.”

I sensed that he was referring to me, though I had no idea what he meant. “Those women from the court,” I said.

“Why didn’t you get the real ones to help you? One of them was pretending to be Thecla when Thecla was locked under our tower.”

He looked at me as though I had said something particularly stupid, as no doubt I had. “Because I can’t trust them, of course. A thing like that has to remain a secret.... Think of the opportunities for assassination. Do you believe that because all those gilded personages from ancient families bow so low in my presence, and smile, and whisper discreet jokes and lewd little invitations, they feel some loyalty to me? You will learn differently, you may be sure. There are few at my court I can trust, and none among the exultants.”

“You say I’ll learn differently. Does that mean you don’t intend to have me executed?” I could feel the pulse in my neck and see the scariet gout of blood.

“Because you know my secret now? No. We have other uses for you, as I told you when we talked in the room behind the picture.”

“Because I was sworn to Vodalus.”

At that his amusement mastered him. He threw back his head and laughed, a plump and happy child who had just discovered the secret of some clever toy. When the laughter subsided at last into a merry gulping, he clapped his hands. Soft though they looked, the sound was remarkably loud.

Two creatures with the bodies of women and the heads of cats entered. Their eyes were a span apart and as large as plums; they strode on their toes as dancers sometimes do, but more gracefully than any dancers I have ever seen, with something m their motions that told me it was their normal gait. I have said they had the bodies of women, but that was not quite true, for I saw the tips of claws sheathed in the short, soft fingers that dressed me. In wonder, I took the hand of one and pressed it as I have Sometimes pressed the paw of a friendly cat, and saw the claws barred. My eyes brimmed with tears at the sight of them, because they were shaped like that claw that is the Claw, that once lay concealed in the gem that I, in my ignorance, called the Claw of the Conciliator. The Autarch saw I was Weeping, and told the woman-cats they were hurting me and must put me down. I felt like an infant who has just learned he will never see his mother again.

“We do not harm him. Legion,” one protested in such a voice as I had never heard before.

“Put him down, I said!”

“They have not so much as grazed my skin, Sieur,” I told him.

With the woman-cats’ support I was able to walk. It was morning, when all shadows flee the first sight of the sun; the tight that had wakened me had been the earliest of the new day. Its freshness filled my lungs now, and the coarse grass over which we walked darkened my scuffed old boots with its dew; a breeze faint as the dim stars stirred my hair.

The Autarch’s pavilion stood on the summit of a hill. All around lay the main bivouac of his army—tents of black and grey, and others like dead leaves; huts of turf and pits that led to shelters underground, from which streams of soldiers issued now like silver ants.

“We must be careful, you see,” he said. “Though we are some distance behind the lines here, if this place were plainer it would invite attack from above.”

“I used to wonder why your House Absolute lay beneath its own gardens, Sieur.”

“The need has long passed now, but there was a time when they laid waste to Nessus.”

Below us and all around us, the silver lips of trumpets sounded.

“Was it only the night?” I asked. “Or have I slept a whole day away?”

“No. Only the night. I gave you medicines to ease your pain and keep infection from your wound. I would not have roused you this morning, but I saw you were awake when I came in ... and there is no more time.”

I was not certain what he meant by that. Before I could ask, I caught sight of six nearly naked men hauling at a rope. My first impression was that they were bringing down some huge balloon, but it was a flier, and the sight of its black bill brought vivid memories of the Autarches court.

“I was expecting—what was its name? Mamillian.”

“No pets today. Mamillian is an excellent comrade, silent and wise and able to fight with a mind independent of my own, but when all is said and done, I ride him for pleasure. We will thieve a string from the Ascians’ bow and use a mechanism today. They steal many from us.”

“Is it true that it consumes their power to land? I think one of your aeronauts once told me that.”

“When you were the Chatelaine Thecla, you mean. Thecla purely.”

“Yes, of course. Would it be impolitic. Autarch, to ask why you had me killed? And how you know me now?”

“I know you because I see your face in the face of my young friend and hear your voice in his. Your nurses know you too. Look at them.”

I did, and saw the woman-cats’ faces twisted in snarls of fear and amazement.

“As to why you died, I will speak of that—to him—on board the flier ... have we time. Now, go back. You find it easy to manifest yourself because he is weak and ill, but I must have him now, not you.

If you will not go, there are means.”

“Sieur-”

“Yes, Severian? Are you afraid? Have you entered such a contrivance before?”

“No,” I said. “But I am not afraid.”

“Do you recall your question about their power? It is true, in a sense. Their lift is supplied by the antimaterial equivalent of iron, held in a penning trap by magnetic fields. Since the anti-iron has a reversed magnetic structure, it is repelled by promagnetism. The builders of this flier have surrounded it with magnets, so that when it drifts from its position at the centre it enters a stronger field and is forced back.

On an antimaterial world, that iron would weigh as much as a boulder, but here on Urth it counters the weight of the promatter used in the construction of the flier. Do you follow me?”

“I believe so, Sieur.”

“The trouble is that it is beyond our technology to seal the chamber hermetically. Some atmosphere—a few moleculesis always creeping in through porosities in the welds, or by penetrating the insulation of the magnetic wires. Each such molecule neutralizes its equivalent in anti-iron and produces heat» and each time one does so, the flier loses an infinitesimal amount of lift. The only solution anyone has found is to keep fliers as high as possible, where there is effectively no air pressure.”

The flier was nosing down now, near enough for me to appreciate the beautiful sleekness of its lines.

It had precisely the shape of a cherry leaf.

“I didn’t understand all of that,” I said. “But I would think the ropes would have to be immensely long to allow the fliers to float high enough to do any good, and that if the Ascian pentadactyls came over by night they would cut them and let the fliers drift away.”

The woman-cats smiled at that with tiny, secretive twitchings of their lips.

“The rope is only for landing. Without it, our flier would require sufficient distance for its forward speed to drive it down. Now, knowing we’re below, it drops its cable just as a man in a pond might extend his hand to someone who would pull him out. It has a mind of its own, you see. Not like Mamillian’s—a mind we have made for it, but enough of a mind to permit it to stay out of difficulties and come down when it receives our signal.”

The lower half of the flier was of opaque black metal, the upper half a dome so clear as to be nearly invisible—the same substance, I suppose, as the roof of the Botanic Gardens. A gun like the one the mammoth had carried thrust out from the stem, and another twice as large protruded from the bow.

The Autarch lifted one hand to his mouth and seemed to whisper into his palm. An aperture appeared in the dome (it was as if a hole had opened in a soap bubble) and a flight of silver steps, as thin and insubstantial looking as the web ladder of a spider, descended to us. The bare-chested men had left off pulling. “Do you think you can climb those?” the Autarch asked.

“If I can use my hands,” I said.

He went before me, and I crawled up ignominiously after him, dragging my wounded leg. The seats, long benches that followed the curve of the hull on either side, were upholstered in fur; but even this fur felt colder than any ice. Behind me, the aperture narrowed and vanished.

“We will have surface pressure in here no matter how high we go. You don’t have to worry about suffocating.”

“I am afraid I am too ignorant to feel the fear, Sieur.”

“Would you like to see your old bacele? They’re far to the right, but I’ll try to locate them for you.”

The Autarch had seated himself at the controls. Almost the only machinery I had seen before had been Typhon’s and Baldanders’s, and that which Master Gurloes controlled in the Matachin Tower. It was of the machines, not of suffocation, that I was afraid; but I fought the fear down.

“When you rescued me last night, you indicated that you had not known I was in your army.”

“I made inquiries while you slept.”

“And it was you who ordered us forward?”

“In a sense ... I issued the order that resulted in your movement, though I had nothing to do with your bacele directly. Do you resent what I did? When you joined, did you think you would never have to fight?”

We were soaring upward, calling, as I had once feared to do, into the sky. But I remembered the smoke and the brassy shout of the graisle, the troopers blown to red paste by the whistling bolts, and all my terror fumed to rage. “I knew nothing of war. How much do you know? Have you ever really been in a battle?”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, his blue eyes flashing. “I’ve been in a thousand. You are two as people are usually counted. How many do you think I am?”

It was a long while before I answered him.

XXV. The Mercy of Agia

AT FIRST I THOUGHT there could be nothing stranger than to see the army stretch across the surface of Urth until it lay like a garland before us, coruscant with weapons and armour, many-hued; the winged anpiels soaring above it nearly as high as we, circling and rising on the dawn wind.

Then I beheld something stranger still. It was the army of the Ascians, an army of watery whites and greyish blacks, rigid as ours was fluid, deployed toward the northern horizon. I went forward to stare at it.

“I could show them to you more closely,” the Autarch said. “Still, you would see only human faces.”

I realized he was testing me, though I did not know how. “Let me see them,” I said.

When I had ridden with the schiavoni and watched our troops go into action, I had been struck by their look of weakness in the mass, the cavalry all ebb and flow like a wave that crashes with great force—then drains away as mere water, too weak to bear the weight of a mouse, pale stuff a child might scoop up in his hands. Even the peltasts, with their serried ranks and crystal shields, had seemed hardly more formidable than toys on a tabletop. Now I saw how strong the rigid formations of our enemy appeared, rectangles that held machines as big as fortresses and a hundred thousand soldiers shoulder to shoulder.

But on a screen in the centre of the control panel I looked under the visors of their helmets, and all that rigidity, all that strength, melted into a kind of horror. There were old people and children in the infantry files, and some who seemed idiots. Nearly all had the mad, famished faces I had observed the day before, and I recalled the man who had broken from his square and thrown his spear into the air as he died. I turned away.

The Autarch laughed. His laughter held no joy now; it was a flat sound, like the snapping of a flag in a high wind. “Did you see one kill himself?”

“No,” I said.

“You were fortunate. I often do, when I look at them. They are not permitted arms until they are ready to engage us, and so many take advantage of the opportunity. The spearmen drive the butts of their weapons into soft ground, usually, then blast off their own heads. Once I saw two swordsmen—a man and a woman—who had made a compact. They stabbed each other in the belly, and I watched them counting first, moving their left hands ...one ... two ... three, and dead.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

He shot me a look I could not interpret. “What did you say?”

“I asked who they are, Sieur. I know they’re our enemies, that they live to the north in the hot countries, and that they’re said to be enslaved by Erebus. But who are they?”

“Up until now I doubt you knew you did not know. Did you?”

My throat felt parched, though I could not have told why. I said, “I suppose not. I’d never seen one until I came into the lazaret of the Pelerines. In the south, the war seems very remote.”

He nodded. “We have driven them half as far to the north As they once drove us south, we autarchs.

Who they are you will discover in due time.... What matters is that you wish to know.” paused. “Both could be ours. Both armies, not just the one to the south.... Would you advise me to take both?” As he spoke, he manipulated some control and the flier canted forward, its stern pointing at the sky and its bow to the green earth, as though he meant to pour us out upon the disputed ground.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I told him.

“Half what you said of them was incorrect. They do not come from the hot countries of the north, but from the continent that lies across the equator. But you were right when you called them the slaves of Erebus. They think themselves the allies of those who wait in the deep. In truth, Erebus and his allies would give them to me if I would give our south to them. Give you and all the rest.”

I had to grip the back of the seat to keep from falling toward him. “Why are you telling me this?”

The flier righted itself like a child’s boat in a puddle, bobbing.

“Because it will soon be necessary for you to know that others have felt what you will feel.”

I could not frame a question I dared to ask. At last I ventured, “You said you’d tell me here why you killed Thecla.”

“Does she not live in Severian?”

A windowless wall in my mind fell to ruins. I shouted: “I died!” Not realizing what I had said until the words were past my lips.

The Autarch took a pistol from beneath the control panel, letting it lie across his thighs as he fumed to face me.

“You won’t need that, Sieur,” I said. “I’m too weak.”

“You have remarkable powers of recovery.... I have seen them already. Yes, the Chatelaine Thecla is gone, save as she endures in you, and though the two of you are always together, you are both lonely.

Do you still seek for Dorcas? You told me of her, you remember, when we met in the Secret House.”

“Why did you kill Thecla?”

“I did not. Your error lies in thinking I-am at the bottom of everything. No one is.... Not I, or Erebus, or any other. As to the Chatelaine, you are she. Were you arrested openly?”‘

The memory came more vividly than I would have thought possible. I walked down a corridor whose walls were lined with sad masks of silver and entered one of the abandoned rooms, high-ceilinged and musty with ancient hanging. The courier I was to meet had not yet come. Because I knew the dusty divans would soil my gown, I took a chair, a spindly thing of gilt and ivory. The tapestry spilled from the wall behind me; I recalled looking up and seeing Destiny crowned in chains and Discontent with her staff and glass, all worked in coloured wool, descending upon me.

The Autarch said, “You were taken by certain officers, who had learned that you were conveying information to your half sister’s lover. Taken secretly, because your family has so much influence in the north, and conveyed to an almost forgotten prison. By the time I learned what had occurred, you were dead. Should I have punished those officers for acting in my absence? They are patriots, and you were a traitor.”

“I, Severian, am a traitor too.” I said, and I told him, then for the first time in detail, how I had once saved Vodalus, and of the banquet I had later shared with him.

When I had concluded, he nodded to himself. “Much of the loyalty you felt for Vodalus comes, surely, from the Chatelaine. Some she imparted to you while she was yet living, more after her death.

Naive though you have been, I am certain you are not so naive as to think it a coincidence that it was she whose flesh was served to you by the corpse-eaters.”

I protested, “Even if he had known of my connection with her, there was no time to bring her body from Nessus.”

The Autarch smiled. “Have you forgotten that you told me a moment ago that when, you had saved him, he fled in such a craft as this? From that forest, hardly a dozen leagues outside the City Wall, he could have flown to the centre of Nessus, unearthed a corpse preserved by the chill soil of early spring, and returned in less than a watch. Actually, he need not have known so much or moved so swiftly. While you were imprisoned by your guild, he may have learned that the Chatelaine Thecla, who had been loyal to him even to death, was no more. By serving her flesh to his followers, he would strengthen them in his cause. He would require no additional motive to take her body, and no doubt he reinterred her in hoarded snow in some cellar, or in one of the abandoned mines with which that region abounds. You arrived, and wishing to bind you to him, he ordered her brought out”

Something passed too swiftly to be seen—an instant later The fier rocked with the violence of its motion. Sparks maneuvered on the screen.

Before the Autarch could take the controls again, we were scudding backward. There was a detonation so loud it seemed to paralyse me, and the reverberating sky opened in a blossom of yellow fire. I have seen a sparrow, struck by a stone from Eata’s sling, reel in the air just as we did, and fall, like us, fluttering to one side.

I woke to darkness, pungent smoke, and the smell of fresh earth. For a moment or a watch I forgot my rescue and believed I lay on the field where Daria and I, with Guasacht, Erblon, and the rest, had fought the Ascians.

Someone lay near me—I heard the sigh of his breath, and the creakings and scrapings that betray movement—but at first I paid no heed to them, and later I came to believe that these sounds were made by foraging animals, and grew afraid; later still, I recalled what had happened and knew they were surely made by the Autarch, who must have survived the crash with me, and I called to him.

“So you still live, then.” His voice was very weak. “I feared you would die ... though I should have known better. I could not revive you, and your pulse was but faint.”

“I have forgotten! Do you remember when we flew over the armies? For a time I forgot it! I know now what it is to forget.”

There was pale laughter in his voice. “Which you will now remember always.”

“I hope so, but it fades even as we speak. It vanishes like mist, which must itself be a forgetting.

What was that weapon that brought us down?”

“I do not know. But listen. These are the most important words of my life. Listen. You have served Vodalus, and his dream of renewed empire. You still wish, do you not, that humankind should go again to the stars?”

I recalled something Vodalus had told me in the wood and said, “Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.”

“They were so once ....and brought all the old wars of Urth with them, and in the young suns kindled new ones. Even they,” (I could not see him, yet I knew by his tone that he had indicated the Ascians)

“understand it must not be so again. They wish the race to become a single individual ... the same, duplicated to the end of number. We wish each to carry all the race and its longings within himself. Have you noticed the phial I wear at my neck?”

“Yes, often.”

“It contains a pharmacon like alzabo, already mixed and held in suspension. I am cold already below the waist. I will die soon. Before I die ... you must use it.”

“I cannot see you,” I said. “And I can scarcely move.”

“Nevertheless, you will find a way. You remember everything, and so you must recall the night you came to my House Azure. That night someone else came to me. I was a servant once, in the House Absolute.... That is why they hate me. As they will hate you, for what you once were. Paeon, who trained me, who was honey-steward fifty years gone by. I knew what he was in truth, for I had met him before. He told me you were the one .. , the next. I did not think it would be quite so soon....”