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

Автор книги: Gene Wolfe

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“We both will,” I said.

He turned to look at me before he started down the stair. “I told you I could not go with you. You have discovered for yourself how well hidden this house is. For all who do not walk the path correctly, even the lowest story stands in the future.”

I caught both his arms behind him in a double lock and used my-free hand to search him for weapons. There were none, and though he was strong, he was not as strong as I had feared he might be.

“You plan to carry me to Mannea. Is that correct?”

“Yes, Master, and well have a great deal less trouble if you will go willingly. Tell me where I can find some rope—I don’t want to have to use the belt of your robe.”

“There is none,” he told me.

I bound his hands with his cincture, as I had first planned. “When we are some distance from here,” I said, “I will loose you if you will give me your word to behave well.”

“I made you welcome in my house. What harm have I done you?”

“Quite a bit, but that doesn’t matter. I like you. Master Ash, and I respect you. I hope that you won’t hold what I am doing to you against me any more than I hold what you have done to me against you. But the Pelerines sent me to fetch you, and I find I am a certain sort of man, if you understand what I mean.

Now don’t go down the steps too fast. If you you won’t be able to catch yourself.”

I led him to the room to which he had first taken me and got some of the hard bread and a package of dried fruit. “I don’t think of myself as one anymore,” I continued, “but I was brought up as—” It was at my lips to say torturer, but I realized (then, I think, for the first time) that it was not quite the correct term for what the guild did and used the official one instead, “—as a Seeker for Truth and Penitence. We do what we have said we will do.”

“I have duties to perform. In the upper level, where you slept.”

“I am afraid they must go unperformed.” He was silent as we went out the door and onto the rocky hilltop. Then he said, “I will go with you, if I can. I have often wished to walk out of this door and never halt.” I told him that if he would swear upon his honour, I would untie him at once. He shook his head.

“You might think that I betrayed you.” I did not know what he meant.

“Perhaps somewhere there is the woman I have called Vine. But your world is your world. I can exist there only if the probability of my existence is high.”

I said, “I existed in your house, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but that was because your probability was complete. You are a part of the past from which my house and I have come. The question is whether I am the future to which you go.”

I remembered the green man in Saltus, who had been solid , enough. “Will you vanish like a soap bubble then?” I asked. “Or blow away like smoke?”

“I do not know,” he said. “I do not know what will happen to me. Or where I will go when it does. I may cease to exist in any time. That was why I never left of my own will.”

I took him by one arm, I suppose because I thought I could keep him with me in that way, and we walked on. I followed the route Mannea had drawn for me/and the Last House rose behind us as solidly as any other. My mind was busy with all the things he had told me and showed me, so that for a while, the space of twenty or thirty paces, perhaps, I did not look around at him. At last his remark about the tapestry suggested Valeria to me. The room where we had eaten cakes had been hung with them, and what he had said about tracing threads suggested the maze of tunnels through which I had run before encountering her. I started to tell him of it, but he was gone. My hand grasped empty air. For a moment I seemed to see the Last House afloat like a ship upon its ocean of ice. Then it merged into the dark hilltop on which it had stood; the ice was no more than what I had once taken it to be—a bank of cloud.

XVIII. Foila’s Request

FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED paces or more. Master Ash was not entirely gone. I felt his presence, and sometimes even caught sight of him, walking beside me and half a step behind, when I did not try to look directly at him. How I saw him, how he could in some sense be present while in another absent, I do not know. Our eyes receive a rain of photons without mass or charge from swarming particles like a billion, billion suns—so Master Palaemon, who was nearly blind, had taught me. From the pattering of those photons we believe we see a man. Sometimes the man we believe we see may be as illusory as Master Ash, or more so.

His wisdom I felt with me too. It had been a melancholy wisdom, but a real one. I found myself wishing he had been able to accompany me, though I realized it would have meant the coming of the ice was certain. “I’m lonely. Master Ash,” I said, not daring to look back. “How lonely I didn’t realize until now. You were lonely also, I think. Who was the woman you called Vine?”

Perhaps I only imagined his voice. “The first woman.”

“Meschiane? Yes, I know her, and she is very lovely. My Meschiane was Dorcas, and I am lonely for her, but for all the Others too. When Thecla became a part of me, I thought I would never be lonely again. But now she is so much a part that we’re only one person, and I can be lonely for others. For Dorcas, for Pia the island girl, for little Severian and Drotte and Roche. If Eata were here, I could hug him.

“Most of all, I’d like to see Valeria. Jolenta was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but there was something in Valeria’s face that tore my heart out. I was only a boy, I suppose, though I didn’t think so then. I crawled up out of the dark and found myself in a place they called the Atrium of Time.

Towers—the towers of Valeria’s family—rose on all sides of it. In the centre was an obelisk covered with sundials, and though I remember its shadow on the snow, it couldn’t have had sunlight there for more than two or three watches of each day; the towers must shade it most of the time. Your understanding is deeper than mine. Master Ash—can you tell me why they might have built it so?”

A wind that played among the rocks seized my cloak so that it billowed from my shoulders. I secured it again and pulled up my hood. “I was following a dog. I called him Triskele, and I said, even to myself, that he was mine, though I no right to keep a dog. It was a winter day when I found him. We’d been doing laundry—washing the clients’ bedclothes—and the drain plugged with rags and lint. I’d been shirking my work, and Drotte told me to go outside and ram a clothes prop up it. The wind was terribly cold. That was your ice coming, I suppose, though I didn’t know it at the time—the winters getting a little worse each year. And of course when I got the drain open, a gush of filthy water would come out and wet my hands.

“I was angry because I was the oldest, except for Drotte and Roche, and I thought the younger apprentices ought to have to do the work. I was poking at the clog with my stick when I saw him across the Old Yard. The keepers in the Bear Tower had held a private fight, I suppose, the night before, and the dead beasts were lying outside their door waiting for the nacker. There was an arsinoither and a smilodon, and several dire wolves. The dog was lying on top. I suppose he had been the last to die, and from his wounds one of the dire wolves had killed him. Of course, he wasn’t really dead, but he looked dead.

“I went over to see him—it was an excuse to stop what I was doing for a moment and blow on my fingers. He was as and cold as ... well, as anything I’ve ever seen. I killed a bull once with my sword, and when it was lying dead in its own blood it still looked quite a bit more living than Triskele did then.

Anyway, I reached out and stroked his head. It was as big as a bear’s, and they had cut off his ears, so that only two little points were left. When I touched him he opened his eyes. I dashed back across the Yard and rammed the stick up so hard it broke through at once, because I was afraid Drotte would send Roche down to see what I was doing.

“When I think back on it, it was as if I had the Claw already, more than a year before I got it. I can’t describe how he looked when he rolled his eye up to see me. He touched my heart. I never revived an animal when I had the Claw, but then I never tried. When I was among them, I was usually wishing I could kill one, because I wanted something to eat. Now I’m no longer sure that killing animals to eat is something we are meant to do. I noticed that you had no meat in your supplies—only bread and cheese, and wine and dried fruit. Do your people, on whatever world it is where people live in your time, feel so too?”

I paused, hoping for an answer, but none came. All the mountaintops had dropped below the sun now; I was no longer certain whether some thin presence of Master Ash followed me or only my shadow.

I said, “When I had the Claw I found that it would not revive those dead by human acts, though it seemed to heal the man-ape whose hand I had struck off. Dorcas thought it was because I had done it myself. I can’t say—I never thought the Claw knew who held it, but perhaps it did.”

A voice—not Master Ash’s but a voice I had never heard before—called out, “A fine new year to you!’’

I looked up and saw, perhaps forty paces off, just such an uhlan as Hethor’s notules had killed on the green road to the House Absolute. Not knowing what else to do, I waved and shouted, “Is it New Year’s Day, then?”

He touched spurs to his destrier and came galloping up. “Mid summer today, the beginning of the new year. A glorious one for our Autarch.”

I tried to recall some of the phrases Jolenta had been so fond of. “Whose heart is the shrine of his subjects.”

“Well said! I’m Ibar, of the Seventy-eighth Xenagie, patrolling the road until evening, worse luck.”

“Surely it’s lawful to use the road here.”

“Entirely. Provided, of course, that you are prepared to identify yourself.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” I had almost forgotten the safeconduct Mannea had written for me. Now I took it out and handed it to him.

When I had been stopped on my way to the Last House, I had by no means, been sure that the soldiers who had questioned me could read. Each had stared wisely at the parchment, but it might well have been that they took in no more than the sigil of the order and Mannea’s regular and vigorous, though slightly eccentric, penmanship. Tine uhlan unquestionably could. I could see his eyes travelling the lines of script, and even guess, I think, when they paused momentarily at “honourable interment.”

He refolded the parchment carefully but retained it. “So you are a servant of the Pelerines.”

“I have that honour, yes.”

“You were praying, then. I thought you were talking to yourself when I saw you. I don’t hold with any religious nonsense. We have the standard of the xenagie near at hand and the Autarch at a distance, and that’s all I need of reverence and mystery; but I have heard that they were good women.”

I nodded. “I believe—perhaps somewhat more than you. But they are indeed.” And you were sent on a task for them. How many days ago?”

“Three.”

“Are you returning to the lazaret at Media Pars now?”

I nodded again. “I hope to reach it before nightfall.”

He shook-his head. “You won’t. Take it easy, that’s my advice to you.” He held out the parchment.

I took it and returned it to my sabretache. “I was travelling with a companion, but we were separated. I wonder if you’ve seen him,” I described Master Ash.

The uhlan shook his head. “I’ll keep an eye out for him and tell him which way you went if I see him.

Now—will you answer a question for me? It’s not official, so you can tell me it’s none of my affair if you want.”

“I will if I can.”

“What will you do when you leave the Pelerines?”

I was somewhat taken aback. “Why, I hadn’t planned to leave at all. Someday, perhaps.”

“Well, keep the light cavalry in mind. You look like a man of your hands, and we can always use one. You’ll live half as long as you would in the infantry, and have twice as much fun.”

He urged his mount forward, and I was left to ponder what he had said. I did not doubt that he had been serious in telling me to sleep on the road; but that very seriousness made me hurry forward all the faster. I have been blessed with long legs, so that when I need to I can walk as fast as most men can trot.

I used them then, dropping all thoughts of Master Ash and my own troubled past. Perhaps some thin presence of Master Ash still accompanied me; perhaps does so yet. But if it did, I was and remain unaware of it.

Urth had not yet turned her face from the sun when I came to that narrow road the dead soldier and I had taken only a little over a week before. There was blood in its dust still, much more than I had seen there previously. I had feared from what the uhlan had said that the Pelerines had been accused of some misdeed; now I felt sure that it was only that a great influx of wounded had been brought to the lazaret, and he had decided I deserved a night’s rest before being set to work on them. That thought was a vast relief to me. A superabundance of the injured would give me an opportunity to show my skills and render it that much more likely that Mannea would accept me when I offered to sell myself to the order, if only I could contrive some tale to account for my failure at the Last House.

When I turned the final bend in the road, however, what I saw was entirely different. Where the lazaret had stood, the ground seemed to have been plowed by a host of madmen, plowed and dug—its bottom already a small lake of shallow water. Shattered trees rimmed the circle. Until darkness came, I walked back and forth across it. I was looking for some sign of my friends, and also for some trace of the altar that had held the Claw. I found a human hand, a man’s hand, blown off at the wrist. It might have been Melito’s, or Hallvard’s, or the Ascian’s, or Winnoc’s. I could not tell.

I slept beside the road that night. When morning came I began my inquiries, and before evening I had located the survivors, some half dozen leagues from the original site. I went from cot to cot, but many were unconscious and so bandaged about the head that I could not have known them. It is possible that Ava, Mannea, and the Pelerine who had carried a stool to my bedside were among them, though I did not discover them there.

The only woman I recognized was Foila, and that only because she recognized me, calling

“Severian!” as I walked among the wounded and dying. I went to her and tried to question her, but she was very weak and could tell me little. The attack had come without warning and shattered the like a thunderbolt; her memories were all of the aftermath of hearing the screams that for a long time had brought no rescuers, and at last being dragged forth by soldiers who knew little of medicine. I kissed her as well as I could, and promised to come and see her again—a promise, I think, that both of us knew I would not be able to keep. She said, “Do you recall the time when all of us told stories? I thought of that.”

I said I knew she had.

“I mean while they were carrying us here. Melito and Hallvard and the rest are dead, I think. You will be the only one who remembers, Severian.” I told her I would remember always. “I want you to tell other people. On winter days, or a night when there is nothing else to do. Do you remember the stories?”

“‘My land is the land of far horizons, of the wide sky.’ “

“Yes,’ she said, and seemed to sleep. My second promise I have kept, first copying all the stories onto the blank pages at the close of the brown book, then giving them here, just as I heard them in the long, warm noons.

XIX. Guasacht

THE NEXT TWO DAYS I spent in wandering. I will not say much of them here, for there is little to say. I might, I suppose, have enlisted in several units, but I was far from sure I wanted to enlist. I would have liked to return to the Last House, but I was too proud to cast myself on Master Ash’s charity, assuming that Master Ash was again to be found there. I told myself I would gladly have returned to the post of Uctor of Thrax, yet if that had been possible, I am not certain I would have done so. I slept like an animal in wooded {daces and took what food I could, which was little.

On the third day I discovered a rusty falchion, dropped, as it appeared, in some campaign of the year before. I got out my little flask of oil and my broken whetstone (both of which I had retained, together with her hilt, when I had cast the wreck of Terminus Est into the water) and spent a happy watch in cleaning and sharpening it. When that was done, I trudged on, and soon struck a road.

With the protection of Mannea’s safe-conduct effectively removed, I was more chary of showing myself than I had been on my way from Master Ash’s. But it seemed probable that the dead soldier the Claw had raised, who now called Miles though I knew some part of him to be Jonas, had by now joined some unit. If so, he would, be on a road or in camp near one, if he was not actually in battle; and I wished to speak to him. Like Dorcas, he had paused a time in country of the dead. She had dwelt there longer, but I hoped that if I could question him before too much time had erased his memories of it, I might learn something that would—if not permit me to regain her—at least help reconcile me to her loss.

For I found I loved her now as I never had when we tramped cross-country to Thrax. Then my thoughts had been too much of Thecla; I had always been reaching inside myself to find her. Now it seemed, if only because she had been a part of me so long, that I had grasped her indeed, in an embrace more final than any coupling—or rather, that as the male’s seed penetrates the female body to produce (if it be the will of Apeiron) a new human being, so she, entering my mouth, by my will had combined with the Severian that was to establish a new man: I who still call myself Severian but am conscious, as it were, of my double root.

Whether I could have learned what I sought from Miles—Jonas, I do not know. I have never found him, though I have persevered in the search from that day to this. By midafternoon I had entered a realm of broken trees, and from time to time I passed corpses in more or less advanced stages of decay. At first I tried to pillage them as I had the body of Miles—Jonas, but others had been there before me, and indeed the fennecs had come in the night with their sharp little teeth to loot the flesh.

Somewhat later, as my energies were beginning to flag, I paused at the smouldering remains of an empty supply wagon. The draft animals, which had not, it appeared, been dead long, lay in the road, with their driver pitched on his face between them; and it occurred to me that I might do worse than to cut as much meat as I wanted from their flanks and carry it to some isolated spot where I could kindle a fire. I had fleshed the point of the falchion in the haunch of one of these animals when I heard the drumming of hoofs, and supposing them to belong to the destrier of an estafette, moved to the edge of the road to let him pass.

It was instead a short, thick-bodied, energetic-looking man on a tall, ill-used mount. He reined up at the sight of me, but something in his expression told me there was no need for fight or flight. (If there had been, it would have been fight. His destrier would have done him little good among the stumps and fallen logs, and despite his haubergeon and brassringed buff cap, I thought I could best him.)

“Who are you?” he called. And when I told him, “Severian of Nessus, eh? You’re civilized then, or half-civilized, but you don’t look like you’ve been eating too well.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “Better than I’ve been accustomed to, recently.” I did not want him to think me weak.

“But you could use some more—that’s not Ascian blood on your sword. You’re a schiavoni? An irregular?”

“My life has been pretty irregular of late, certainly.”

“But you’re attached to no formation?” With startling dexterity he vaulted from his saddle, threw the reins to the ground, and came striding over. He was slightly bowlegged and had one of those faces that appear to have been moulded in clay and flattened from the top and bottom before firing, so that the forehead and chin are shallow but broad, the eyes slits, the mouth wide. Still I liked him at once for his verve, and because he took so little trouble to hide his dishonesty.

I said, “I’m attached to nothing and no one—memories excepted.” .

“Ahh!” He sighed, and for an instant rolled his eyes upward. “I know—I know. We have all had our difficulties, every one of us. What was it, a woman or the law?”

I had not previously viewed my troubles in that light, but after thinking for a moment I admitted it had been a bit of both.

“Well, you’ve come to the right place and you’ve met the man. How’d you likw a good meal tonight, a whole crowd of new friends, and a handful of orichalks tomorrow? Sound good? Good!”

He returned to his mount, and his hand darted out as quickly as a fencer’s blade to grasp her bridle before she could shy away. When he had the reins again, he leaped into his saddle as readily as he had left it. “Now you get up behind me,” he called. “It’s not far, and she’ll carry two easily enough.”

I did as he told me, though with considerably more difficulty since I had no stirrup to assist me. The instant I was seated, the destrier struck like a bushmaster at my leg; but her master, who had clearly been anticipating the maneuver, dubbed her so hard with the brass pommel of his poniard that she stumbled and nearly fell.

“Pay no mind,” he said. The shortness of his neck did not permit him to look over his shoulder, so he spoke out of the left side of his mouth to make it clear he was addressing me. “She’s a fine animal and a plucky fighter, and she just wants to make sure you understand her value. A sort of initiation, you know.

You know what an initiation is?”

I told him I thought myself familiar with the term. “Anything that’s worth belonging to has one, you’ll find—I’ve found that out myself. I’ve never seen one that a plucky lad couldn’t handle and laugh about afterwards.”

With that cryptic encouragement he set his enormous spurs to the sides of his fine animal as if he meant to eviscerate her on the spot, and we went flying down the road, —trailed by a cloud of dust.

Since the time I had ridden Vodalus’s charger out of Saltus, I had supposed in my innocence that all mounts might be divided into two sorts: the highbred and swift, and the cold-blooded and slow. The better, I thought, ran with the graceful ease, almost, of a coursing cat; the worse moved so tardily that it hardly mattered how they did it. It used to be a maxim of one of Thecla’s tutors that all two-valued systems are false, and I discovered on that ride a new respect for him. My benefactor’s mount belonged to that third class (which I have since discovered is fairly extensive) comprising those animals that you outrace the birds but seem to run with legs of iron upon a road of stone. Men have numberless advantages over women and for that reason are rightly charged to protect them, yet there is one great one women may boast; over men: No woman has ever had her organs of generation crushed between her own pelvis and the bony spine of one of these galloping brutes. That happened to me twenty or thirty times before we reined up, and when I slid over the crupper at last and leaped aside to dodge a kick, I was in no very good mood.

We had halted in one of those little, lost fields one sometimes finds among the hills, an area more or less level and a hundred strides or so across. A tent the size of a cottage had been erected in the centre, with a faded flag of black and green flapping before it. Several score hobbled mounts grazed at will over the field, and an equal number of ragged men, with a sprinkling of unkempt women, lounged about cleaning armour, sleeping, and gambling.

“Look here!” my benefactor shouted, dismounting to stand beside me. “Here’s a new recruit!” To me he announced, “Severian of Nessus, you’re standing in the presence of the Eighteenth Bacele of the Irregular Contarii, every one of us a fighter of dauntless courage whenever there’s speck of money to be made.”

The ragged men and women were standing and drifting toward us, many of them frankly grinning. A tall and very thin man led the way.

“Comrades, I give you Severian of Nessus!

“Severian,” my benefactor continued, “I’m your condottiere. Call me Guasacht This fishing pole here, taller even than you are, is my second, Erblon. The rest will introduce themselves, I’m sure.

“Erblon, I want to talk to you. There’ll be patrols tomorrow.” He took the tall man by the arm and led him into tent leaving me with the crowd of troopers who had by now surrounded me.

One of the largest, an ursine man almost my height an least—twice my weight, gestured toward the falchion. “Don’t you have a scabbard for that? Let’s see it.”

I surrendered it without argument; whatever might happen next, I felt certain it would not be an occasion for kill

“So, you’re a rider, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve ridden a bit, but I don’t consider myself an expert.”

“But you know how to manage them?”

“I know men and women better.”

Everyone laughed at that, and the big man said, “ Well, that’s just fine, because you probably won’t do much riding, but a good understanding of women—and destriers—will be a help to you.”

As he spoke, I heard the sound of hoofs. Two men were leading up a piebald, muscular and wild-eyed. His reins had been divided and lengthened, permitting the men to stand at either side of his head, about three paces away. A trollop with fox-colored hair and a laughing face sat the saddle with ease, and in lieu of the reins held a riding Whip in each hand. The troopers and their women cheered and clapped, and at the sound the piebald reared like a whirlwind and pawed the air, showing the three horny growths on each forefoot that we call hoofs for what they were—talons adapted almost as well to combat as to gripping turf. Their feints outsped my eyes.

The big man slapped me on the back. “He’s not the best I ever had, but he’s good enough, and I trained him myself.

Mesrop and Lactan there are going to pass you those reins, and all you have to do is get up on him.

If you can do it without knocking Daria off, you can have her until we run you down.” He raised his voice: “All right, let him go!”

I had expected the two men to give me the reins. Instead they threw them at my face, and in snatching for them I missed them both. Someone goaded the piebald from behind, and the big man gave a peculiar, piercing whistle. The piebald had been taught to fight, like the destriers in the Bear Tower, and though his long teeth had not been augmented with metal, they had been left as nature made them and stood out from his mouth like knives.

I dodged a flashing forefoot and tried to grasp his halter; a blow from one of the whips caught me full across the face, and the piebald’s rush knocked me sprawling.

The troopers must have held him back or I would have been trampled. Perhaps they also helped me to my feet—I cannot be sure. My throat was full of dust, and blood from my forehead trickled into my eyes.

I went for him again, circling to the right to keep clear of his hoofs, but he turned more quickly than I, and the girl called Daria snapped both lashes before my face to throw me off. More from anger than any plan I seized one. The thong of the whipstock was around her wrist; when I jerked the lash she came with it, falling into my arms. She bit my ear, but I got her by the back of the neck, spun her around, dug fingers into one firm buttock and lifted her. Kicking the air, her legs seemed to startle the piebald. I backed him through the crowd until one of his tormentors goaded, him toward me, then stepped on his reins.

After that, it was easy. I dropped the girl, caught his halter, twisted his head, and kicked his forefeet from under him as we were taught to do with unruly clients. With a highpitched, animal scream he came crashing down. I was in the saddle before he could get his legs beneath him, and from there I lashed his flanks with the long reins and sent him bolting through the crowd, then turned him and charged them again.

All my life I had heard of the excitement of this kind of fighting, though I had never experienced it.

Now I found everything more than true. The troopers and their women were yelling and running, and a few flourished, swords. They might have threatened a thunderstorm with more effect—I rode over half a dozen at a sweep. The girl’s red hair flew like banner as she fled, but no human legs could have outdistanced that steed. We flashed past her, and I caught her by that flaming banner and threw her over the arcione before me.

A twisting trail led to a dark ravine, and that ravine to another. Deer scattered ahead of us; in three bounds we overtook a buck in velvet and shouldered him out of the way. While I had been Lictor of Thrax, I had-heard that the eclectics often raced game and leaped from their mounts to stab it. I believed those stories now—I could have cut the buck’s throat with a butcher knife.

We left him behind, crested a new hill and dashed down into a silent, wooded valley. When the piebald had run himself out, I let him find his own path among the trees, which were the largest I had seen since leaving Saltus; and when he stopped to crop the sparse, tender grass that grew between their roots, I halted and threw the reins on the ground as I had seen Guasacht do, then dismounted and helped the redhaired girl off.

“Thanks,” she said. And then, “You did it. I didn’t think you could.”

“Or you wouldn’t have agreed to this? I had supposed they made you.”

“I wouldn’t have given you that cut with the whip. You’ll want to repay me now, won’t you? With the reins, I suppose.”

“What makes you think that?” I was tired and sat down. Yellow flowers, each blossom no bigger than a drop of water, grew in the grass; I picked a few and found they smelled of calambac.