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

Автор книги: Gene Wolfe

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“You look the type. Besides, you carried me bottom up, and men who do that always want to hit it.”

“I never knew that. It’s an interesting thought.”

“I have a lot of them—that kind.” Quickly and gracefully she seated herself beside me and put a hand on my knee.

“Listen, it was the initiation, that’s all. We take turns, and it was my turn and I was supposed to hit you. Now it’s over.”

“I understand.”

“Then you won’t hurt me? That’s wonderful. We can have a good time here, really. Whatever you want and as much as you want, and we won’t go back until it’s time to eat”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt you.”

Her face, which had been wreathed with forced smiles, fell, and she looked at the ground. I suggested that she might run away.

“That would only make it more fun for you, and you’d hurt me more before we were through.” Her hand crept up my thigh as she spoke. “You’re nice looking, you know. And so tall.” She made a sitting bow, pressing her face into my lap to give me a tingling kiss, then straightening up at once. “It could be nice. Really it could.”

“Or you could kill yourself. Have you a knife?”

For an instant, her mouth formed a perfect little circle.

“You’re crazy, aren’t you? I should have known.” She leaped to her feet.

I caught her by one ankle and sent her sprawling to the soft forest floor. Her shift was rotten with wear—a pull and it fell away. “You said you wouldn’t run.”

She looked over her shoulder at me with large eyes. I said, “You have no power over me, neither you nor they. I am not afraid of pain, or of death. There is only one living woman I desire, and no man but myself.”

XX. Patrol

WE HELD A PERIMETER no more than a couple of hundred paces across. For the most part, our enemies had only knives and axes—the axes and their tagged clothes recalled the volunteers I had helped Vodalus against in our necropolis—but there were hundreds of them already, and more coming.

The bacele had saddled up and left camp before dawn. The shadows were still long, somewhere along the shifting front, when a scout showed Guasacht the deep ruts of a coach travelling north. For three watches we tracked it.

The Ascian raiders who had captured it fought well, turning south to surprise us, then west, then north again like a writhing serpent; but always leaving a trail of dead, caught between our fire and that of the guards inside, who shot them through the loopholes. It was only toward the end, when the Ascians could no longer flee, that we grew aware of other hunters.

By noon, the little valley was surrounded. The gleaming steel coach with its dead and dying prisoners stood miredto the axles. Our Ascian prisoners squatted in front of it, guarded by our wounded. The Ascian officer spoke our tongue, and a watch earlier Guasacht had ordered him to free the coach and shot several Ascians when he had failed; thirty or more remained, nearly naked, listless and empty-eyed.

Their weapons were piled some distance off, near our tethered mounts.

Now Guasacht was making the rounds, and I saw him pause at the stump that sheltered the trooper next to me. One of the enemy put her head from behind a clump of brush some way up the slope. My contus struck her with a bolt of flame; she leaped by reflex, then curled up as spiders do when someone tosses them among the coals of a campfire. She had been white-faced beneath her red bandana, and I suddenly understood that she had been made to look—that there were those behind that brush who had disliked her, or at least not valued her, and who had forced her to look out. I fired again, slashing the green growth with the bolt and bringing a puff of acrid smoke that drifted toward me like her ghost

“Don’t waste those charges,” Guasacht said at my elbow. More from habit, I think, than from fear, he had thrown himself flat beside me.

I asked if the charges would be exhausted before night if I fired six times a watch.

He shrugged, then shook his head.

“That’s how fast I’ve been shooting this thing, as well as I can fudge by the sun. And when night comes ...”

I looked at him, and he could only shrug again. “When night comes,” I continued, “we won’t be able to see them until they’re only a few steps away. We’ll fire more or less at random and kill a few score, then draw swords and stand back to back, and they’ll kill us.”

He said, “Help will arrive before then,” and when he saw I did not believe him, he spat. “I wish I’d never looked at the damned thing’s track. I wish I’d never heard of it.”

It was my turn to shrug. “Give it back to the Ascians, and well break out.”

“It’s coin, I tell you! Gold to pay our troops. It’s too heavy to be anything else.”

“The armour must weigh a good deal.”

“Not that much. I’ve seen these coaches before, and it’s gold from Nessus or the House Absolute.

But those things inside—who’s ever seen such creatures?”

“I have.”

Guasacht stared at me.

“When I went out through the Piteous Gate in the Wall of Nessus. They are man-beasts, contrived by the same lost arts that made our destriers faster than the road engines of old,” I tried to recall what else Jonas had told me of them, and finished rather weakly by saying, “The Autarch employs them in duties too laborious for men, or for which men cannot be trusted.”

“I suppose that might be right enough. They can’t very well steal the money. Where would they go?

Listen, I’ve had my eye on you.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve felt it”

“I’ve had my eye on you, I say. Particularly since you made that piebald of yours go for the man that trained him. Up here in Orithyia we see a lot of strong men and a lot of brave ones—mostly when we step over their bodies. We see a lot of smart ones too, and nineteen out of twenty are too smart to be of use to anybody, including themselves. What’s valuable are men, and sometimes women, who’ve got a kind of power, the power that makes other people want to do what they say. I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve got it. You’ve got it too.”

“It hasn’t been overwhelmingly apparent in my life before this.”

“Sometimes it takes the war to bring it out. That’s one of the benefits of the war, and since it hasn’t got many we ought to appreciate the ones it does. Severian, I want you to go down to the coach and treat with these man-animals. You say you know something about them. Get them to come out and help us fight. We’re both on the same side, after all.” I nodded. “And if I can get them to open the doors, we can divide the money among us. Some of us, at least, may escape.”

Guasacht shook his head in disgust. “What did I tell you just a moment ago about being too smart? If you were really smart, you wouldn’t have ignored it. No, you tell them that even if there’s only three or four of them, every fighter counts. Besides, there’s at least a chance the sight of them will frighten these damn freebooters away.. Let me have your contus, and I’ll hold your position for you until you come back.”

I handed over the long weapon, “Who are these people, anyway?”

“These? Camp followers. Sutlers and whores—men as well as women. Deserters. Every so often the Autarch or one of his generals has them rounded up and put to work, but they slip away before long.

Slipping away’s their specialty. They ought to be wiped out.”

“I have your authority to treat with our prisoners in the coach? You’ll back me up?”

“They’re not prisoners—well, yes, I suppose they are. You tell them what I said and make the best deal you can. I’ll back you.”

I looked at him for a moment, trying to decide whether he meant it. Like so many middle-aged men, he carried the old man he would become in his face, soured and obscene, already muttering the objections and complaints that would be his in the final skirmish.

“You’ve got my word. Go on.”

“All right.” I rose. The armoured coach resembled the carriages that had been used to bring important clients to our tower in the Citadel. Its windows were narrow and barred, its rear wheels as high as a man. The smooth steel sides suggested those lost arts I had mentioned to Guasacht, and I knew the man-beasts inside had better weapons than ours. I extended my hands to show I was unarmed and walked as steadily as I could toward them until a face showed at one window grill.

When one hears of such creatures, one imagines something stable, midway between beast and human; but when one actually sees them—as I now saw this man-beast, and as I had seen the man-apes in the mine near Saltus—they are not like that at a11. The best comparison I can make is to the flickering of a silver birch tossed by the wind. At one moment it seems a common tree, at the next, when the undersides of the leaves appear, a supernatural creation. So it is with the man-beasts. At first I thought a mastiff peered at me through the bars; then it seemed rather a man, nobly ugly, tawnyfaced and amber-eyed. I raised my hands to the grill to give him my scent, thinking of Triskele.

“What do you want?” His voice was harsh but not unpleasant.

“I want to save your lives,” I said. It was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it as soon as the words had left my mouth.

“We want to save our honour.”

I nodded. “Honour is the higher life.”

“If you can tell us how to save our honour, speak. We will listen. But we will never surrender our trust.”

“You have already surrendered it,” I said.

The wind died, and the mastiff was back in an instant, flashing teeth arid blazing eyes.

“It was not’ to safeguard gold from the Ascians that you were put into this coach, but to safeguard it from those of our own Commonwealth who would steal it if they could. The Ascians are beaten—look at them. We are the Autarch’s loyal humans. Those you were set to guard against will overwhelm us soon.”

“They must kill me and my fellows before they can get the gold.”

It was gold, then. I said, “They will do so. Come out and help us fight, while there is still a chance of victory.”

He hesitated, and I was no longer sure that I had been entirely wrong to speak first of saving his life.

“No,” he said. “We cannot. What you say may be reason, I do not know. Our law is not the law of reason. Our law is honour and obedience. We stay.”

“But you know that we are not your enemies?”

“Anyone seeking what we guard is our enemy.”

“We re guarding it too. If these camp followers and deserters came within range of your weapons, would you fire on them?”

“Yes, of course.”

I walked over to the spiritless cluster of Ascians and asked to speak with their commander. The man who stood was only slightly taller than the rest; the intelligence in his face was the kind one sometimes sees in cunning madmen. I told him Guasacht had sent me to treat in his stead because I had often spoken with Ascian prisoners and knew their ways. This was, as I intended, overheard by his three wounded guards, who could see Guasacht manning my position on the perimeter.

“Greetings in the name of the Group of Seventeen,” the Ascian said.

“In the name of the Group of Seventeen.” The Ascian looked startled but nodded.

“We are surrounded by the disloyal subjects of our Autarch, who are thus the enemies of both the Autarch and the Group of Seventeen. Our own commander, Guasacht, has devised a plan that will leave us all alive and free.”

“The servants of the Group of Seventeen must not be expended without purpose.”

“Precisely. Here is the plan. We will harness some of our destriers to the steel coach—as many as necessary to pull it free. You and your people must work to free it too. When it’s free, well return your weapons and help you fight your way out of this cordon. Your soldiers and ours will go north, and you can keep the coach and the money inside to take to your superiors, just as you hoped when you captured it.”

“The light of Correct Thought penetrates every darkness.”

“No, we haven’t gone over to the Group of Seventeen. You have to help us in return. In the first place, help get the coach out of the mud. In the second, help us fight our way out. In the third, provide us with an escort that will get us through your army and back to our own lines.”

The Ascian officer glanced toward the gleaming coach. “No failure is permanent failure. But inevitable success may require new plans and greater strength.”

“Then you approve of my new plan?” I had not been aware that I was perspiring, but now the sweat ran stinging into my eyes. I wiped my forehead with the edge of my cloak, just as Master Gurloes used to.

The Ascian officer nodded. “Study of Correct Thought eventually reveals the path of success.”

“Yes,” I said. “All right, I’ve studied it. Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts.”

When I returned to the coach, the same man-beast I had seen before came to the window again, not quite so hostile this time. I said, “The Ascians have agreed to try to push this thing out once more. We’re going to have to unload it.”

“That is impossible.”

“If we don’t, the gold will be lost with the sun. I’m not asking you to give it up—just take it out and mount guard over it. You’ll have your weapons, and if any human bearing arms comes close to you, you can kill him. I’ll be with you, unarmed. You can kill me too.”

It took a great deal more talking, but eventually they did it. I got the wounded who had been watching the Ascians to lay down their conti and harness eight of our destriers to the coach, and got the Ascians positioned to pull on the harness and heave at the wheels. Then the door in the side of the steel coach swung open and the man-beasts carried out small metal chests, two working while the one I had spoken to stood guard. They were taller than I had expected and had fusils, with pistols in their belts to supplement them—the first pistols I had seen since I had watched the Hierodules use them to turn Baldsnders’s charges in the gardens of the House Absolute.

When all the chests were out and the three man-beasts were standing around them with their weapons at the ready, I shouted. The wounded troopers lashed every destrier in the new team, the Ascians heaved until their eyes started from their straining faces ... and just when we all thought it would not, the steel coach lifted itself from the mud and lumbered half a chain before the wounded could bring it to a halt. Guasacht nearly got us both killed by running down from the perimeter waving my contus, but the man-beasts had just sense enough to see that he was merely excited and not dangerous.

He got a great deal more excited when he saw the manbeasts carry their gold inside again, and when he heard what I had promised the Ascians. I reminded him that he had given me leave to act in his name.

“When I act,” he sputtered, “it’s with the idea of winning.”

I confessed I lacked his military experience, but told him I had found that in some situations winning consisted of disentangling oneself.

“Just the same, I had hoped you would work out something better.”

Rising inexorably while we remained unaware of their motion, the mountain peaks to the west were already clawing for the lower edge of the sun; I pointed to it.

Suddenly, Guasacht smiled. “After all, these are the same Ascians we took it from before.”

He called the Ascian officer over and told him our mounted troopers would lead the attack, and that his soldiers could follow the steel coach on foot. The Ascian agreed, but when his soldiers had rearmed themselves, he insisted on placing half a dozen on top of the coach and leading the attack himself with the rest. Guasacht agreed with an apparent bad grace that seemed to me entirely assumed. We put an armed trooper astride each of the eight-destriers of the new team, and I saw Guasacht conversing earnestly with their cornet.

I had promised the Ascian we would break through the cordon of deserters to the north, but the ground in that direction proved to be unsuited to the steel coach, and in the end a route north by northwest was agreed upon. The Ascian infantry advanced at a pace not much short of a full run, firing as they came. The coach followed. The narrow, enduring bolts of the troopers’ conti stabbed at the ragged mob who tried to close about it, and the Ascian arquebuses on its roof sent gouts of violet energy crashing among them. The man-beasts fired their fusils from the barred windows, slaughtering half a dozen with a single blast.

The remainder of our troops (I among them) followed the coach, having maintained our perimeter until it was gone. To save precious charges, many put their conti through the saddle rings, drew their swords, and rode down the straggling remnant the Ascians and the coach had left behind.

Then the enemy was past, and the ground clearer. At once the troopers whose mounts pulled the coach dapped spurs to them, and Guasacht, Erblon, and several others who were riding just behind it swept the Ascians from its top in a cloud of crimson flame and reeking smoke. Those on foot scattered, then turned to fire.

It was a fight I did not feel I could take part in. I reined up, and so saw—I believe, before any of the others—the first of the anpiels who dropped, like the angel in Melito’s fable, from the sun-dyed clouds.

They were fair to look upon, naked and having the slender bodies of young women; but their rainbow wings spread wider than any teratornis’s, and each anpiel held a pistol in either hand. Late that night, when we were back in camp and the wounded had been cared for, I asked Guasacht if he would do as he had again.

He thought for a moment. “I hadn’t any way of knowing those flying girls would come. Looking at it from this end, it’s natural enough—there must have been enough in that coach to pay half the army, and they wouldn’t hesitate to send elite troops looking for it. But before it happened, would you have guessed it?”

I shook my head.

“Listen, Severian, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. But you did what you could, and you’re the best leech I ever saw. Anyway, it came out all right in the end, didn’t it? You saw how friendly their seraph was. What did she see, after all? Plucky lads trying to save the coach from the Ascians. We’ll get a commendation, I should think. Maybe a reward.”

I said, “You could have killed the man-beasts, and the Ascians too, when the gold was out of the coach. You didn’t because I would have died with them. I think you deserve a commendation. From me, at least.”

He rubbed his drawn face with both hands. “Well, I’m just as happy. It would have been the end of the Eighteenth; in another watch we’d have been killing each other for the money.”

XXI. Deployment

BEFORE THE BATTLE there were other patrols and days of idleness. Often enough we saw no Ascians, or saw only their dead. We were supposed to arrest deserters and drive from our area such peddlers and vagabonds as fatten on an army; but if they seemed to us such people as had surrounded the steel coach, we killed them, not executing them in any formal style but cutting them down from the saddle.

The moon waxed again nearly to the full, hanging like a green apple in the sky. Experienced troopers told me the worst fights always came at or near the full of the moon, which is said to breed madness. I suppose this is actually because its refulgence permits generals to bring up reinforcements by night.

On the day of the battle, the graisle’s bray summoned us from our blankets at dawn. We formed a ragged double column in the mist, with Guasacht at our head and Erblon following him with our flag. I had supposed that the women would stay behind—as most had when we had gone on patrolbut more than half drew conti and came with us. Those who had helmets, I noticed, thrust their hair up into the bowl, and many wore corslets that flattened and concealed their breasts. I mentioned it to Mesrop, who rode opposite me.

“There might be trouble about the pay,’ he said. “Somebody with sharp eyes will be counting us, and the contracts usually call for men.”

“Guasacht said there’d be more money today,’ I reminded him.

He cleared his throat and spat, the white phlegm vanishing into the clammy air as though Urth herself had swallowed it.

“They won’t pay until it’s over. They never do.”

Guasacht shouted and waved an arm; Erblon gestured with our flag, and we were off, the hoofbeats sounding like the thudding of a hundred muffled drums. I said, “I suppose that way they don’t have to pay for those who are killed.”

“They pay triple-once because he fought, once for blood money, and once for discharge money.”

“Or she fought, I suppose.” Mesrop spat again.

We rode for some time, then halted at a spot that seemed no different from any other. As the column fell silent, I heard a humming or murmuring in the hills all around us. A scattered army, dispersed no doubt for sanitary reasons and to deprive the Ascian enemy of a concentrated target, was assembling now just as particles of dust in the stone town had come together in the bodies of its resuscitated dancers.

Not unnoticed. Even as birds of prey had once followed us before we reached that town, now five-armed shapes that spun like wheels pursued us above the scattered clouds that dimmed and melted in the level red light of dawn. At first, when they were highest, they seemed merely grey; but as we watched they dropped toward us, and I saw they were of a hue for which I can find no name but that stands to achroma as gold to yellow, or silver to white. The air groaned with their turning.

Another that we had not seen came leaping across our path, hardly higher than the treetops. Each spoke was the length of a tower, pierced with casements and ports. Though it lay flat upon the air, it seemed to stride along. Its wind whistled down upon us as if to blow away the trees. My piebald screamed and bolted, and so did many other destriers, often falling in that strange wind.

In the space of a heartbeat it was over. The leaves that had swirled about us like snow fell to earth.

Guasacht shouted and Erblon sounded the graisle and brandished our flag. I got the piebald under control and cantered from one destrier to another, taking them by the nostrils until their riders could manage them again.

I rescued Daria, who I had not known was in the column, in this way. She looked very pretty and boyish dressed as a trooper, with a contus, and a slender sabre at either side of her saddle horn. I could not help thinking when I saw her of how other women I had known would appear in the same situation: Thea a theatrical warrior maid, beautiful and dramatic but essentially the figure of a figurehead; Thecla—how part of myself—a vengeful mimalone brandishing poisoned weapons; Agia astride a slender-legged sorrel, wearing a cuirass moulded to her figure, while her hair, plaited with bowstrings, flew wild in the wind; Jolenta a floriate queen in armour spikey with thorns, her big breasts and fleshy thighs absurd at any gait faster than a walk, smiling dreamily at each halt and attempting to recline in the saddle; Dorcas a naiad riding, lifted momentarily like a fountain flashing with sunshine; Valeria, perhaps, an aristocratic Daria.

I had supposed, when I saw our people scatter, that it would be impossible to reassemble the column; but within a few moments of the time the pentadactyl air-strider had passed over us, we were together again. We galloped for a league or more—mostly, I suspect, to dissipate some of the nervous energy of our destriers—then halted by a brook and gave them just as much water as would wet their mouths without making them sluggish. When I had fought the piebald back from the bank, I rode to a clearing from which I could watch the sky. Soon Guasacht trotted over and asked me jocularly, “You looking for another one?”

I nodded and told him 1 had never seen such craft before.

“You wouldn’t have, unless you’ve been close to the front. They’d never come back if they tried to go down south.”

“Soldiers like us wouldn’t stop them.”

He grew suddenly serious, his tiny eyes mere slits in the sun-browned flesh. “No. But plucky lads can stop their raiding parties. The guns and air-galleys can’t do that.”

The piebald stirred and stamped with impatience. I said, “I come from a part of the city you’ve probably never heard of, the Citadel. There are guns there that look out over the whole quarter, but I’ve never known them to be fired except ceremonially.” Still staring at the sky, I thought of the wheeling pentadactyls over Nessus, and a thousand blasts, issuing not just from the Barbican and the Great Keep, but from all the towers; and I wondered with what weapons the pentadactyls would reply.

“Come along,” Guasacht said. “I know it’s a temptation to keep a lookout for them, but it doesn’t do any good.”

I followed him back to the brook, where Erblon was lining up the column. “They didn’t even fire at us. They must surely have guns in those fliers.”

“We’re pretty small fish.” I could see that Guasacht wanted me to rejoin the column, though he hesitated to order me to do so directly.

For my part, I could feel fear grip me like a spectre, strongest about my legs, but lifting cold tentacles into my bowels, touching my heart. I wanted to be silent, but I could not stop talking. “When we go onto the field of battle—” (I think I imagined this field like the shaven lawn of the Sanguinary Field, where I had fought Agilus.)

Guasacht laughed. “When we go into the fight, our gunners would be delighted to see them out after us.” Before I understood what he was about to do, he struck the piebald with the flat of his blade and sent me cantering off.

Fear is like those diseases that disfigure the face with running sores. One becomes almost more afraid of their being seen than of their source, and comes to feel not only disgraced but defiled. When the piebald began to slow, I dug my heels into him and fell into line at the very end of the column.

Only a short time before I had been on the point of replacing Erblon; now I was demoted, hot by Guasacht but by myself, to the lowest position. And yet when I had helped reassemble the scattered troopers, the thing I feared had already passed; so that the entire drama of my elevation had been played out after it had ended in debasement. It was as though one were to see a young man idling in a public garden stabbed—then watch him, all unknowing, strike up an acquaintance with the voluptuous wife of his murderer, and at last, having ascertained, as he thought, that her husband was in another part of the city, clasp her to him until she cried out from the pain of the dagger’s hilt protruding from his chest.

When the column lurched forward, Daria detached herself from it and waited until she could fall in beside me. “You’re afraid,” she said. It was not a question but a statement, and not a reproach but almost a password, like the ridiculous phrases I had learned at Vodalus’s banquet.

“Yes. You’re about to remind me of the boast I made to you in the forest. I can only say that I did not know it to be an empty one when I made it. A certain wise man once tried to teach me that even after a client has mastered one excruciation, so that he can put it from his mind even while he screams and writhes, another quite different excruciation may be as effectual in breaking his will as in breaking a child’s. I learned to explain all this when he asked me but never until now to apply it, as I should, to my own life. But if I am the client here, who is the torturer?”

“We’re all more or less afraid,” she said. “That was whyyes, I saw it—Guasacht sent you away. It was to keep you from making his own feeling worse. If it were worse, he wouldn’t be able to lead. When the time comes, you’ll do what you have to, and that’s all any of them do.”

“Hadn’t we better go?” I asked. The end of the column was moving off in that surging way the tail of a long line always does.

“If we go now, a lot of them will know we’re at the rear because we’re afraid. If we wait just a little while longer, many of those who saw you talking with Guasacht will think he sent you back here to speed up stragglers, and that I came back to be with you.”

“All right,” I said.

Her hand, damp with sweat and as thin as Dorcas’s, came sliding into mine.

Until that moment, I had been certain she had fought before. Now I asked her, “Is this your first time too?”

“I can fight better than most of them,” she declared, “and I’m sick of being called a whore.”

Together, we trotted after the column.

XXII. Battle

I SAW THEM first as a scattering of coloured dots on the farther side of the wide valley, skirmishers who seemed to move and mix, as bubbles do that dance upon the surface of a mug of cider. We were trotting through a grove of shattered trees whose white and naked wood was like the living bone of a compound fracture. Our column was much larger now, perhaps the whole of the irregular contarii. It had been under fire, in a more or less dilatory way, for about half a watch. Some troopers had been wounded (one, near me, quite badly) and several killed. The wounded cared for themselves and tried to help each other—if there were medical attendants for us they were too far behind us for me to be conscious of them.

From time to time we passed corpses among the trees; usually these were in little clusters of two or three, sometimes they were merely solitary individuals. I saw one who had contrived in dying to hook the collar of his brigandine jacket to a splinter protruding from one of the broken trunks, and I was struck by the horror of his situation, his being dead and yet unable to rest, and then by the thought that such was the plight of all those thousands of trees, trees that had been killed but could not fall.

At about the same time I became aware of the enemy, I realized that there were troops of our own army to either side. To our right a mixture, as it were, of mounted men and infantry, the riders helmetless and naked to the waist, with red and blue blanket rolls slung across their bronzed chests. They were better mounted, I thought, than most of us. They carried lancegays not much longer than the height of a man, many of them holding them aslant their saddle-bows. Each had a small copper shield bound to the upper part of his left arm. I had no idea from what part of the Commonwealth these men might come; but for some reason, perhaps only because of their long hair and bare chests, I felt sure they were savages.