Текст книги "[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch"
Автор книги: Gene Wolfe
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In accordance with the principle of circularity, most of the accretions gathered in the progression through the first six were now dispensed with. There was no music, and the rich vestments of Assurance were replaced by starched robes whose sculptural folds gave all of us something of the air of icons. It is no longer possible for us to carry out the ceremony, as once we did, wrapped in the shining belt of the galaxy; but to achieve the effect as nearly as possible, Urth’s attractive field was excluded from the basilica. It was a novel sensation for me, and though I was unafraid, I was reminds again of that night I spent among the mountains when I felt myself on the point of falling off the world—something I will undergo in sober earnest tomorrow. At times the ceiling seemed a floor, or (what was to me far mote disturbing) a wall became the ceiling, so that one looked upward through its open windows to see a mountainside of grass that lifted itself forever into the sky. Startling as it was, this vision was no less true than that we commonly see.
Each of us became a sun; the circling, ivory skulls were our planets. I said we had dispensed with music, yet that was not entirely true, for as they swung about us there came a faint, sweet humming and whistling, caused by the flow of air through their eye sockets and teeth; those in nearly circular orbits maintained an almost steady note, varying only slightly as they rotated on their axes; the songs of those in elliptical orbits waxed and waned, rising as they approached me, sinking to a moan as they receded.
How foolish we are to see in those hollow eyes and marble calottes only death. How many friends are among them! The brown, book, which I carried so far, the only one of the possessions I took from the Matachin Tower that still remains with me, was sewn and printed and composed by men and women with those bony faces; and we, engulfed by their voices, now on behalf of those who are the past, offered ourselves and the present to the fulgurant light of the New Sun.
Yet at that moment, surrounded by the most meaningful and magnificent symbolism, I could not but think how different the actuality had been when we had left the ziggurat on the day after my interview with Vodalus and had marched (I under the guard of six women, who were sometimes forced to carry me) for what must have been a week or more through pestilential jungle. I did not know—and still do not knowwhether we were fleeing the armies of the Commonwealth or Ascians who had been Vodalus’s allies. Perhaps we were merely seeking to rejoin the major part of the insurgent force. My guards complained of the moisture that dripped from the trees to eat at their weapons and armour like acid, and of suffocating heat; I felt nothing of either. I remember looking down once at my thigh and noticing with surprise that the flesh had fallen away so that the muscles there stood out like cords and I could see the sliding parts of my knee as one sees the wheels and shafts of a mill.
The old leech was with us, and now visited me two or three times each day. At first he tried to keep dry bandages on my face when he saw the effort was futile, he removed them all and contented himself with plastering the wounds there with salve. After that, some of my women guards refused to look at me, and if they had reason to speak to me did so with downcast eyes. Others seemed to take pride in their ability to confront my torn face, standing straddle-legged (a pose they appeared to consider warlike) and resting their left hands upon the hilts of their weapons with studied casualness.
I talked with them as often as I could. Not because I desired them—the illness that had come with my wounds had taken all such desire from me—but because in the midst of the straggling column I was lonely in a way I had never been when I was alone in the war-torn north or even when I had been locked in my ancient, mould-streaked cell in the ziggurat, and because in some absurd corner of my mind I still hoped to escape. I questioned them about every subject of which they might conceivably have knowledge, and I was endlessly amazed to find how few were the points on which our minds coincided.
Not one of the six had joined Vodalus because of an appreciation of the difference between the restoration of progress he sought to represent and the stagnation of the Commonwealth. Three had merely followed some man into the ranks; two had come in the hope of gaining revenge for some personal injustice/and one because she had been fleeing from a detested stepfather. All but the last now wished they had not joined. None knew with any precision where we had been or had the slightest idea where we were going.
For guides our column had three savages: a pair of young men who might have been brothers or even twins, and a much older one, twisted, I thought, by deformities as well as age, who perpetually wore a grotesque mask. Though the first two were younger and the third much older, all three of them recalled to me the naked man I had once seen in the Jungle Garden. They were as naked as he and had the same dark, metallic-looking skin and straight hair. The younger two carried cerbotanas longer than their outstretched arms and dart bags hand-knotted of wild cotton and dyed a burnt umber, doubtless with the juice of some plant. The old man had a staff as crooked as himself, topped with the dried head of a monkey.
A covered palanquin whose place in the column was considerably more advanced than my own bore the Autarch, whom my leech gave me to understand was still alive; and one night when my guards were chattering among themselves and I sat crouched over our little fire, I saw the old guide (his bent figure and the impression of an immense head conferred by his mask were unmistakable) approach this palanquin and slip beneath it. Some time passed before he scuttled away. This old man was said to be an uturuncu, a shaman capable of assuming the form of a tiger.
Within a few days of our leaving the ziggurat, without encountering anything that might be called a road or even a path, we struck a trail of corpses. They were Ascians, and they had been stripped of their clothing and equipment, so that their starved bodies seemed to have dropped from the air to the places where they lay. To me, they appeared to be about a week dead; but no doubt decay had been accelerated by the dampness and heat, and the actual time was much less. The cause of death was seldom apparent.
Until then we had seen few animals larger than the grotesque beetles that buzzed about our fires by night. Such birds as called from the treetops remained largely invisible, and if the blood-bats visited us, their inky wings were lost in the smothering dark. Now we moved, as it seemed, through an army of beasts drawn to the corpse trail as flies are to a dead sumpter. Hardly a watch passed without our hearing the sound of bones crushed by great jaws, and by night green and scarlet eyes, some of them two spans apart, shone outside our little circles of firelight. Though it was preposterous to suppose these carrion-gorged predators would molest us, my guards doubled their sentries; those who slept did so in their corslets, with curtelaxes in their hands.
With each new day the bodies were fresher, until at last not all were dead. A madwoman with cropped hair and staring eyes stumbled into the column just ahead of our party, shouted words no one could understand, and fled among the trees. We heard cries for help, screams, and ravings, but Vodalus permitted no one to turn aside, and on the afternoon of that day we plunged—much in the same sense we might earlier have been said to have plunged into the jungle—into the Ascian horde.
Our column consisted of the women and supplies, Vodalus himself and his household, and a few of his aides with their retinues. In all it surely amounted to no more than a fifth of his force; but if every insurgent he could have called to his banner had been there, and every fighter become a hundred, they would still have been among that multitude as a cupful of water in Gyoll.
Those we encountered first were infantry. I recalled that the Autarch had told me their weapons were kept from them until the time of battle; but if it were so, their officers must have thought that time to be at hand, or nearly. I saw thousands armed with the ransieur, so that at length I came to believe that all their infantry was equipped in that way; then, as night was falling, we overtook thousands more carrying demilunes.
Because we marched faster than they, we moved more deeply into their force; but we camped sooner than they (if they camped at all) and all that night, until at last I fell asleep, I heard their hoarse cries and the shuffling of their feet. In the morning we were again among their dead and dying, and it was a watch or more before we overtook the stumbling ranks.
These Ascian soldiers had a rigidity, a will-less attachment to order, that I have never seen elsewhere, and that appeared to me to have no roots in either spirit or discipline as I understand them.
They seemed to obey because they could not conceive of any other course of action. Our soldiers nearly always carry several arms—at the very least an energy weapon and a long knife (among the schiavoni I was exceptional in not possessing such a knife in addition to my falchion). But I never saw an Ascian with more than one, and most of their officers bore no weapon at all, as if they regarded actual fighting with contempt.
XXIX. Autarch of the Commonwealth
BY THE MIDDLE of the day, we had again passed all those whom we had passed the afternoon before and came upon the baggage train. I think all of us were amazed to discover that the enormous force we had seen was no more than the rear guard of an army inconceivably greater.
The Ascians used uintathers and platybelodons as beasts of burden. Mixed with them were machines with six legs, machines apparently built to serve that purpose. So far as I could see, the drivers made no distinction between these devices and the animals; if a beast lay down and could not be made to rise again, or a machine fell and did not right itself, its load was distributed among those nearest to hand, and it was abandoned. There appeared to be no effort to slaughter the beasts for their meat or to repair or take parts from the machines.
Late in the afternoon some great excitement passed down our column, though neither I nor my guards could discover what it—was. Vodalus himself and several of his lieutenants came hurrying by, and afterward there was much coming and going between the end of the column and its head. When dark came we did not camp, but continued to tramp through the night with the Ascians. Torches were passed back to us, and since I had no weapons to carry and was somewhat stronger than I had been, I carried them, feeling almost as though I commanded the six swords who surrounded me.
About midnight, as nearly as I could judge, we halted. My guards found sticks for a fire, which we kindled from a torch. Just as we were about to lie down, I saw a messenger rouse the palanquin bearers ahead of us and send them blundering forward in the dark. They were no sooner gone than he loped back to us and held a quick, whispered conversation with the sergeant of my guards. At once my hands were bound (as they had not been since Vodalus had cut them free) and we were hurrying after the palanquin. We passed the head of the column, marked by the Chatelaine Thea’s little pavilion, without pausing, and were soon wandering among the myriad Ascian soldiers of the main body.
Their headquarters was a dome of metal. I suppose it must have folded or collapsed in some way as a tent does, but it appeared as permanent and solid as any building, black externally but glowing with a sourceless, pale light within when the side opened to admit us. Vodalus was there. Stiff and deferential; beside him the palanquin stood with its curtains opened to show the immobile body of the Autarch. At the centre of the dome, three women sat around a low table. Neither then nor later did they look at Vodalus, or the Autarch in his palanquin, or at me when I was brought forward, save for an occasional glance. There were stacks of papers before them, but they did not look at those at all—only at one another. In appearance they were much like the other Ascians I had seen, save that their eyes were saner and they were less starved looking.
“Here he is,” Vodalus said. “Now you see them both before you.”
One of the Ascians spoke to the other two in their own tongue. Both nodded and the one who had spoken said, “Only he who acts against the populace need hide his face.”
There was a lengthy pause, then Vodalus hissed at me,
“Answer her?”
“Answer what? There has been no question.”
The Ascian said, “Who is the friend of the populace? He who aids the populace. Who is the enemy of the populace?”
Speaking very rapidly, Vodalus asked, “To the best of your knowledge are you, or is this unconscious man here, the leader of the peoples of the southern half of this hemisphere?”
“No,” I said. It was an easy lie, since from what I had seen, the Autarch was the leader of very few in the Commonwealth. To Vodalus I added under my breath, “What kind foolishness is this? Do they believe I would tell them if I were the Autarch?”
“All we say is being transmitted to the north.”
One of the Ascians who had not spoken previously spoke now. Once she gestured in our direction.
When she was finished, all three sat deathly still. I had the impression that they heard some voice inaudible to me, and that they did not dare move while it spoke; but that may have been mere imagination on my part. Vodalus fidgeted, I shifted my position to put a little less weight on my injured leg, and the Autarch’s narrow chest heaved to the unsteady rhythm of his breathing, but the three of them remained as immobile as figures in a painting.
At last the one who had spoken first said, “All persons belong to the populace.” At that the others seemed to relax.
“This man is ill,” Vodalus said, looking toward the Autarch,” and he has been a useful servant to me, though I suppose his usefulness is now ended. The other I have promised to one of my followers.”
“The merit of sacrifice falls on him who without thought to his own convenience offers what he has toward the service of the populace.” The Ascian woman’s tone made it clear that no further argument was possible.
Vodalus looked toward me and shrugged, then turned on his heel and strode out of the dome.
Almost at once a file of Ascian officers entered carrying lashes.
We were imprisoned in an Ascian tent perhaps twice the size of my cell in the ziggurat. There was a fire there but no bedding, and the officers who had carried in the Autarch had merely dropped him on the ground beside it. After working my hands free, I tried to make him comfortable, turning him over on his back as he had been in the palanquin and arranging his arms at his sides.
About us the army lay quiet, or at least as quiet as an Ascian army ever is. From time to time someone far off cried out—in sleep, it seemed—but for the most part there was no sound but the slow pacing of the sentries outside. I cannot express the horror that the thought of going north to Ascia evoked in me then. To see only the Ascians’ wild, starved faces and to encounter myself, no doubt for the remainder of my life, whatever it was that had driven them mad, seemed to me a more horrible fate than any the clients in the Matachin Tower were ever forced to endure. I tried to lift the skirt of the tent, thinking that the sentries could do nothing worse than take my life; but the edges were welded to the ground by some means I did not understand. All four walls were of a slick, tough substance I could not tear, and Miles’s razor had been taken from me by my six female guards. I was about to rush out the door when the Autarch’s well-remembered voice whispered, “Wait.” I dropped to my knees beside him, suddenly afraid we would be overheard.
“I thought you were—sleeping.”
“I suppose I have been in a coma most of the time. But when I was not, I feigned, so Vodalus would not question me. Are you going to escape?”
“Not without you, Sieur. Not now. I had given you up for dead.”
“You were not far wrong ... certainly not by so much as a day. Yes, I think that is best, you must escape. Father Inire is with the insurgents. He was to bring you what is necessary, then help you get away. But we are no longer there ... are we? He may not be able to aid you. Open my robe. What you first require is thrust into my waistband.”
I did as he asked; the flesh my fingers brushed was as cold as a corpse’s. Near his left hip I saw a hilt of silvery metal no thicker than a woman’s finger. I drew the weapon forth; the mace was not half a span in length, but thick and strong, and of that deadly sharpness I had not felt since Baldanders’s mace had shattered Terminus Est
“You must not go yet,” the Autarch whispered.
“I will not leave you while you live,” I said. “Do you doubt me?”
“We will both live, and both go. You know the abomination.” His hand closed on mine. “The eating of the dead, to devour their dead lives. But there is another way you do not know, and another drug.
You must take it, and swallow the living cells of my forebrain.”
I must have drawn away, for his hand gripped my own harder.
“When you lie with a woman, you thrust your life into hers so that perhaps there will be new life.
When you do as I have commanded you, my life and the lives of all those who live in me will be continued in you. The cells will enter your own nervous system and multiply there. The drug is in the vial I wear at my neck, and that blade will split the bones of my skull like pine. I have had occasion to use it, and I promise it Do you recall how you swore to serve me when I shut the book? Use the knife now, and go as quickly as you can.”
I nodded and promised I would.
“The drug will be stronger than any you have known, and though all but mine will be faint, there will be hundreds of personalities.... We are many lives.”
“I understand,” I said.
“The Ascians march at dawn. Can there be more than a single watch remaining of the night?”
“I hope that you will live it out, Sieur, and many more. That you’ll recover.”
“You must kill me now, before Urth turns to face the sun. Then I will live in you ... never die, I live by mere volition now. I am relinquishing my life as I speak.”
To my utter surprise, my eyes were streaming with tears. “I’ve hated you since I was a boy, Sieur.
I’ve done you no harm, but I would have harmed you if I could, and now I’m sorry.”
His voice had faded until it was softer than the chirping of a cricket. “You were right to hate me, Severian. I stand ... as you will stand ...for so much that is wrong.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why?” I was on my knees beside him.
“Because all else is worse. Until the New Sun comes, we have but a choice of evils. All have been tried, and all have failed. Goods in common, the rule of the people ... everything. You wish for progress?
The Ascians have it. They are deafened by it, crazed by the death of Nature till they are ready to accept Erebus and the rest as gods. We hold human kind stationary ... in barbarism. The Autarch protects the people from the exultants, and the exultants... shelter them from the Autarch. The religious comfort them.
We have closed the roads to paralyse the social order....”
His eyes fell shut. I put my hand upon his chest to feel the faint stirring of his heart.
“Until the New Sun ...”
This was what I had sought to escape, not Agia or Vodalus or the Ascians. As gently as I could, I lifted the chain from his neck, unstoppered the vial and swallowed the drug. Then with that short, stiff blade I did what had to be done.
When it was over, I covered him from head to toe with his own saffron robe and hung the empty vial about my own neck. The effect of the drug was as violent as he had warned me it would be. You that read this, who have never, perhaps, possessed more than a single consciousness, cannot know what it is to have two or three, much less hundreds. They lived in me and were joyful, each in his own way, to find they had new life. The dead Autarch, whose face I had seen in scarlet ruin a few moments before, now lived again. My eye and hands were his, I knew the work of the hives of the bee of the House Absolute and the sacredness of them, who steer by the sun and fetch gold of Urth’s fertility. I knew his course to the Phoenix Throne, and to the stars, and back. His mind was mine and filled mine with lore whose existence I had never suspected and with the knowledge other minds had brought to his. The phenomenal world seemed dim and vague as a picture sketched in sand over which an errant wind veered and moaned. I could not have concentrated on it if I had wished to, and I had no such wish.
The black fabric of our prison tent faded to a pale dovegrey, and the angles of its top whirled like the prisms of kaleidoscope. I had fallen without being aware of it and lay near the body of my predecessor, where my attempts to rise resulted in nothing more than the beating of my hands upon the ground.
How long I lay there I do not know. I had wiped the knife now, still, my knife—and concealed it as he had. I could vividly picture a self of dozens of superposed images slitting the wall and slipping out into the night. Severian, Thecla, myriad others all escaping. So real was the thought that I often believed I had done it; but always, when I ought to have been running between the trees, avoiding the exhausted sleepers of the army of the Ascians, I found myself instead in the familiar tent, with the draped body not far from my own.
Hands clasped mine. I supposed that the officers had returned with their lashes, and tried to see and to rise so I would not be struck. But a hundred random memories intruded themselves like the pictures the owner holds up to us in rapid succession in a cheap gallery: a footrace, the towering pipes of an organ, a diagram with labelled angles, a woman riding in a cart.
Someone said, “Are you all right? What’s happened to you?” I felt the spittle dribbling from my lips, but no words came.
XXX. The Corridors of Time
SOMETHING STRUCK MY FACE a tingling blow.
“What’s happened? He’s dead. Are you drugged?”
“Yes. Drugged.” Someone else was speaking, and after a moment I knew who it was: Severian, the young torturer.
But who was I?
“Get up. We’ve got to get out.”
“Sentry.”
“Sentries,” the voice corrected us. “There were three of them. We killed them.”
I was walking down a stair white as salt, down to nenuphars and stagnant water. Beside me walked a suntanned girl with long and slanting eyes. Over her shoulder peered the sculptured face of one of the eponyms. The carver had worked in jade; the effect was that of a face of grass.
“Is he dying?”
“He sees us now. See his eyes.”
I knew where I was. Soon the pitchman would thrust his head through the doorway of the tent to tell me to be gone. “Above ground,” I said. “You told me I would see her above ground. But that was easy.
She is here.”
“We must go.” The green man took my left arm and Agia my right, and they led me out.
We walked a long way, just as I had envisioned myself running; stepping sometimes over sleeping Ascians.
“They keep little guard,” Agia whispered. “Vodalus told me their leaders are so well obeyed they can scarcely conceive of treacherous attack, In the war, our soldiers surprise them often.”
I did not understand and repeated, “ Our soldiers ...” like a child.
“Hethor and I will no longer fight for them. How could we, after we have seen them? My business is with you.”
I was beginning to find myself again, the minds that made up my mind all falling into place. I had been told once that autarch meant “self-ruler,” and I glimpsed the reason that title had come into being. I said,
“You wanted to kill me. Now you are freeing me. You could have stabbed me.” I saw a crooked dagger from Thrax quivering in Casdoe’s shutter.
“I could have killed you more readily than that. Hethor’s mirrors have given me a worm, no longer than your hand, that glows with white fire. I have only to fling it, and it kills and crawls back to me—one by one I slew the sentries so. But this green man would not permit it, and I would not wish it. Vodalus promised me your agony spread over weeks, and I will not have less.”
“You’re taking me back to him?”
She shook her head, and in the faint, grey dawn light that had crept through the leaves I saw her brown curls bounce on her shoulders as they had when I had watched her raise the gratings outside the rag shop. “Vodalus is dead. With the worm at my command, do you think I would let him cheat me and live? They would have taken you away. Now I will let you go free—because I have some inkling of where you will go—and in the end you will come into my hands again, as you did when our pteriopes took you from the evzones.”
“You are rescuing me because you hate me then,” I said, and she nodded. Vodalus, I suppose, had hated that part of me that had been the Autarch in the same way.
Or rather, he had hated his conception of the Autarch, for he had been loyal, in so far as he was capable of it, to the real Autarch, whom he supposed his servant. When I had been a boy in the kitchens of the House Absolute, there was a cook who so despised the armigers and exultants for whom he prepared food that, in order that he should never have to bear the indignity of their reproaches, he did everything with a feverish perfection. He was eventually made chief of the cooks of that wing. I thought of him, and while I did, Agia’s touch on my arm, which had become almost imperceptible as we hastened along, vanished altogether. When I looked for her, she was gone; I was alone with the green man.
“How did you come to be here?” I asked him. “You nearly lost your life in these times, and I know you cannot thrive under our sun.”
He smiled. Though his lips were green, his teeth were white; they gleamed in the faint light. “We are your children, and we are not less honest than you, though we do not kill to eat. You gave me half your stone, the stone that gnawed the iron and set me free. What did you think I would do when the chain no longer bound me?”
“I supposed you would return to your own day,” I said. The spell of the drug had faded sufficiently for me to fear our talk would wake the Ascian soldiers. Yet I could see noneonly the dark, towering boles of the jungle hardwoods.
“We requite our benefactors. I have been running up and down the corridors of Time, seeking for a moment in which you also were imprisoned, that I might free you.”
When I heard that, I did not know what to say. At last I told him, “You cannot imagine how strange I feel now, knowing that someone has been searching my future, looking for an opportunity to do me good. But now, now that we are quits, surely you understand that I did not help you because I believed you could help me.”
“You did—you desired my help in finding the woman who just left us, the woman whom since that occasion you have found several times. However, you ought to know that I was not alone: There are others questing there—1 shall send two of them to you. And you and I are not yet at a balance, for although I found you captive here, the woman found you also and would have freed you without my help.
So I shall see you again.”
As he said these words, he let go of my arm and stepped in that direction I had never seen until I watched the ship vanish into it from the top of Baldanders’s castle and could only see, it seemed, when there was something there. Immediately he turned and began to run, and despite the dimness of the dawn sky I could see his running figure for a long time, illuminated by intermittent but regular flashes. At last he faded to a point of darkness; but then, just when I expected that point to disappear utterly, it began to grow, so that I had the impression of something huge rushing toward me down that strangely angled tunnel.
It was not the ship I had seen but another and much smaller one. Still, it was so large that when it moved at last entirely info our field of consciousness, its gunwales touched several of the thick trunks at once. The hull dilated, and a pont, much shorter than the steps that had descended from the Autarch’s flier, slid out to touch the ground.
Down it came Master Malrubius and my dog, Triskele. At that moment I regained a command of my personality that I had not truly possessed since I had drunk alzabo with Vodalus and eaten Thecla’s flesh.
It was not that Thecla was gone (and indeed I could not wish her gone, though I knew that in many respects she had been a cruel and foolish woman) or that my predecessor and the hundred minds that had been enveloped in his had vanished. The old, simple structure of my single personality was no more; but the new, complex structure no longer dazzled and bewildered me. It was a maze, but I was the owner and even the builder of that maze, with the print of my thumb on every passageway. Malrubius touched me, and then taking my wondering hand in his laid it gently against his own cool cheek.
“You are real, then,” I said.
“No. We are almost what you think us—powers from above the stage. Only not quite deities. You are an actor, I believe.”
I shook my head. “Don’t you know me. Master? You taught me when I was a boy, and I have become a journeyman of the guild.”
“Yet you are an actor too. You have as much right to think of yourself in that way as the other. You had been performing when we spoke to you in the field near the Wall, and the next time we saw you, at the House Absolute, you were acting again. It was a good play; I should have liked to see the end.”
“You were in our audience?”
Master Malrubius nodded. “As an actor, Severian, you surely know the phrase I hinted at a moment ago. It refers to some supernatural force, personified and brought onto the stage in the last act in order that the play may end well. None but poor playwrights do it, they say, but those who say so forget that it is better to have a power lowered on a rope, and a play that ends well, than to have nothing, and a play that ends badly. Here is our rope—many ropes, and a stout ship too. Will you come aboard?”
