by Gene Wolfe
I leaped for joy then, and leaping left the deck and the others far below, and spun myself a dozen times as a gambler spins a coin. But I returned to the deck sobered, for as I spun I had beheld a star brighter than all the rest.
Chapter XXIV — The Captain
WE WERE soon taken below. To tell the truth, I was happy enough to go. It is difficult to explain — so much so that I am tempted to omit it altogether. Yet I think it would be easy if only you were as young as once you were.
An infant in its crib does not at first know that there is a distinction between its body and the wood that surrounds it or the rags upon which it lies. Or rather, its body seems as alien as all the rest. It discovers a foot and marvels to find so odd a thing a part of itself.
So with me. I had seen the star; and seeing it — immensely remote though it was — had known it a region of myself, absurd as the baby’s foot, mysterious as his genius is to one who has only just discovered it. I do not mean that my consciousness, or any consciousness, rested in the star; at that time, at least, it did not. Yet I was aware of existence at two points, like a man who stands waist deep in the sea, so that wave and wind are alike to him in that both are something less than the whole, the totality of his environment.
Thus I walked with Gunnie and the sailors cheerfully enough and held my head high. But I did not speak, or remember to take off my necklace until I observed that Gunnie and the sailors had removed theirs.
What a sad shock I felt then! The air of Yesod, to which I had in a day become accustomed, left me; and an atmosphere like — and yet unlike and inferior to — the atmosphere of Urth rushed to fill my lungs. The first fire must have been kindled in an age now inconceivably remote. At that instant, I felt as some ancient must toward the end of his lifetime, when none save the eldest recalled the pure winds of bygone mornings. I looked at Gunnie and saw that she was looking at me. Each knew what the other felt, though we did not speak of it, then or subsequently.
How far we threaded the ship’s mazed passages I cannot say. I was too wrapped in my own thoughts to count my strides; and it seemed to me that though time as it existed on that ship was not other than time as it existed upon Urth, yet time upon Yesod had been otherwise, stretched to the frontier of Forever yet over in a wink. Musing on that and the star, and a hundred further wonders, I plodded forward, knowing nothing of where I had been until I noticed that most of the sailors had gone, replaced by Hierodules masked as men. I had been so far lost amid chimeric speculations that for a while I supposed that those whom I had thought sailors had always been masked Hierodules, and had been recognized as such by Gunnie from the beginning; but when I cast back my mind to the moment we first stood upon the deck again, I found it was not so, though so charming a thought. In our mean universe of Briah, extravagance is but a weak recommendation of truth. The sailors had merely slipped away unnoticed by me, and the Hierodules — taller and far more formally arrayed — had taken their places.
I had only begun to study them when we halted before great doors of a shape recalling those through which Gunnie and I had passed with Apheta a watch before on Yesod. These, however, did not require my shoulder, but swung slowly and ponderously open of themselves, revealing a long vista of marmoreal arches — each at least a hundred cubits high — down which played such light as was never seen upon any world that circled a star, light silver, gold, and berylline by turns, flashing as though the air itself held splintered treasures.
Gunnie and the remaining hands recoiled in fear at all this and had to be driven through the doorway by the Hierodules with orders and even with blows; but I stepped inside readily enough, believing that from my years on the Phoenix Throne I recognized the pomps and wonders with which we sovereigns cow poor, ignorant people.
The doors shut behind us with a crash. I drew Gunnie to me, telling her as well as I could that there was nothing to fear, or at least that I thought there was nothing or little, and that if some danger arose, I would do anything I could to protect her. Overhearing me, the sailor who had shot the line to us (one of the few who remained with us) remarked, “Most that come here don’t come back. This is the skipper’s quarters.”
He himself did not seem much frightened, and I told him so.
“I run with the tide. A man has to recollect that most is sent here for punishment. Once or twice she’s commended a man here, instead of in front of his mates. They’ve come back, I believe. Not having nothing he wants hid does more to make a man brave than burnt wine, you’ll find. That way he can run with the tide.”
I said, “You have a good philosophy.”
“It’s the only one I know, which makes it easy to stick with.”
“I’m Severian.” I put out my hand.
“Grimkeld.”
I have big hands, but the hand that clasped mine was bigger, and as hard as wood. For a moment we matched strength.
While we walked the tramping of our feet had grown to a solemn music, joined by instruments that were not trumpets nor ophicleides nor any others known to me. As our hands parted the strange music reached a crescendo, the golden voices of unseen throats calling all about us, one to another.
In an instant everyone fell silent. The winged figure of a giantess appeared, as sudden as the shadow of a bird but towering like the green pines of the necropolis.
All the Hierodules bowed at once, and a moment later so did Gunnie and I. The sailors who had come with us made their obeisance as well, pulling off their caps, bending their heads and knuckling their foreheads, or bowing less gracefully but even more abjectly.
If Grimkeld’s philosophy had protected him from fear, my memory had protected me. Tzadkiel, I felt certain, had been the captain of this ship when I had sailed upon her previously. Tzadkiel, I felt certain, was her captain now; and on Yesod I had learned not to fear him. But at that instant I looked in Tzadkiel’s eyes and saw the eyes that spangled her wings, and knew myself for a fool.
“There is a great one among you,” she said, and her voice was like the playing of a hundred citharae, or the purr of the smilodon, the cat that slew our bulls as wolves kill sheep. “Let him step forward.”
It was as difficult as anything I have done in all my lives, but I strode to the front as she had asked. She took me up as a woman lifts a puppy, holding me cupped between her hands. Her breath was the wind of Yesod, which I had thought never to feel again.
“Whence does so much power come?” It was but a whisper, yet it seemed to me that such a whisper must shake the whole fabric of the ship.
“From you, Tzadkiel,” I said. “I have been your slave in another time.”
“Tell me.”
I tried to do so, and found, I do not know how, that each word of mine now carried the meaning of ten thousand, so that when I said Urth, the continents came with it, and the sea and all the islands, and the indigo sky wrapped in the glory of the old sun reigning amid his ring of stars. After a hundred such words, she knew more of our history than I had known I knew; and I had reached the moment when Father Inire and I had embraced, and I had mounted the pont to the ship of the Hierodules, which was to take me to this ship, the ship of the Hierogrammate, the ship of Tzadkiel, though I did not know it. A hundred words more, and all that had befallen me on the ship and in Yesod stood shining in the air between us.
“You have undergone trials,” she said. “If you wish, I can give you that which will make you forget them all. Though only by instinct, you will still bring a young sun to your world.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to forget, Tzadkiel. I’ve boasted too often that I forget nothing, and forgetting — which I have known once or twice — seems to me a kind of death.”
“Say instead that death is a remembering. But even death can be kind, as you learned upon the lake. Would you rather I set you down?”
“I am your slave, as I’ve said. Your will is mine.”
“And if it were my will to drop you?”
“Then your slave would seek to
live still, so that Urth might live too.”
She smiled and opened her hands. “You have forgotten already what a slight thing it is to fall here”
I had indeed, and felt a momentary terror; but to have fallen from a bed on Urth would have been a more serious matter. I settled to the floor of Tzadkiel’s quarters as lightly as thistledown.
Even so, it was a moment or two before I collected my thoughts sufficiently to note that the others were gone and I stood alone. Tzadkiel, who must have seen my look, whispered, “I have sent them away. The man who rescued you will be rewarded, as will the woman who fought for you when the rest would have slain you. But it is not likely you will see either again.”
She moved her right hand toward me until the tips of its fingers rested on the floor before me. “It is expedient,” she said, “that my crew think me large, and not guess how often I move among them. But you know too much about me to be deceived in that way, and you deserve too much to be deceived in any. It would be more convenient for us now if we were of similar size.”
I scarcely heard the last word. Something so astounding was taking place that all my attention was seized by it. The uppermost knuckle of her index finger was shaping itself into a face, and it was the face of Tzadkiel. The nail divided and redivided, then the whole of the first and second joints too, so that the lowest knuckle became her knees. The finger stepped away from the hand and put out arms and hands of its own, and eye-spangled wings; and the giantess behind it vanished like a flame blown out.
“I will take you to your stateroom,” Tzadkiel said. She was not so tall as I.
I would have knelt, but she lifted me up.
“Come. You are fatigued — more than you know, and no wonder. There is a good bed for you there. Food will be brought to you whenever you wish it.”
I managed to say, “But if you are seen…”
“We will not be seen. There are passages here that are used only by me.”
Even as she spoke, a pilaster swung away from the wall. She led me through the opening it revealed and down a shadowy corridor. I remembered then that Apheta had told me her people could see in such darkness; but Tzadkiel did not pulse with light as Apheta had, and I was not so foolish as to suppose we would share the bed she had mentioned. After what seemed a long walk, dawn came — low hills dropping below the old sun — and it seemed we were not in a corridor at all. A fresh wind stirred the grass. As the sky grew lighter, I saw a dark box set in the ground before us. “That is your stateroom,” Tzadkiel told me. “Be careful. We must step down into it.”
We did so, onto something soft. Then we stepped down again, and at last onto a floor. Light flooded the room, which was much larger than my old stateroom and oddly shaped. The morning meadow from which we had come was no more than a picture on the wall behind us, the steps the back and seat of a long settee. I went to the picture and tried to thrust my hand into it, but met solid resistance.
“We have such things in the House Absolute,” I said. “I see whence Father Inire took his model, though ours are not so well contrived.”
“Mount that seat confidently, and you may go through,” Tzadkiel told me. “It is the pressure of a foot upon the back that dissolves the illusion. Now I must go, and you must rest.”
“Wait,” I said. “I won’t be able to sleep unless you tell me…”
“Yes?”
“I have no words. You were a finger of Tzadkiel’s. And now you are Tzadkiel.”
“You know our power to change shape; your younger self encountered me in the future, as you told me only a few moments ago. The cells of our bodies shift, like those of certain sea creatures on your Urth, which can be pressed through a screen yet reunite. What then prevents me from shaping a miniature and constricting the connection until it parts? I am such an atomy; when we reunite, my greater self will know all I have learned.”
“Your great self held me in her hands, then vanished like any dream.”
“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”
Chapter XXV — Passion and the Passageway
EXHAUSTION operates strangely upon the mind. Left alone in my stateroom, I could only think that my door was unguarded now. Throughout my time as Autarch, there had always been sentries at my door, usually Praetorians. I wandered through several rooms searching for it merely to verify that there were none now; but when I opened it at last, half-human brutes in grotesque helmets sprang to attention.
I closed it again, wondering whether they were meant to keep others out, or myself inside; and I wasted a few moments more searching for some means of extinguishing the light. I was too spent, however, to keep that up for long. Dropping my clothing to the floor, I stretched myself across the wide bed. As my thoughts drifted toward that misty state we call dreaming, the light dimmed and went out.
I seemed to hear footsteps, and for what seemed a long time I struggled to sit up. Sleep pressed me to my mattress, holding me as securely as any drug. At last, the walker sat beside me and brushed back the hair from my forehead. Breathing her perfume, I drew her to me.
Curls brushed my cheek as our lips met.
When I woke, I knew I had been with Thecla. Though she had not spoken and I had not seen her face, there was no question in my mind. Odd, impossible, wonderful, I called it to myself, yet it was so. No one in this universe or any other could have deceived me so long through so much intimacy. But it was not, surely not, impossible at all. Tzadkiel’s children, the mere infants she brooded upon her world in Yesod, had brought Thecla back with the rest to fight the sailors. Surely it was not impossible for Tzadkiel herself to bring her again.
I leaped up, then turned to see if there were not some trace — a hair or a crushed blossom left upon the pillow. I would (as I told myself) have treasured such a token always. The unfamiliar pelt with which I had covered myself was smoothly spread. No impression of a second body showed next to the one left by my own.
Somewhere in those laborious writings I assembled in the clerestory of the House Absolute and even more laboriously will repeat aboard this ship at an unknown date in the future that has become my past, I have said that I have seldom felt myself alone, though I must have seemed so to the reader. In fairness to you, then, should you ever come across these writings as well, allow me to say that I did feel alone then, that I knew myself alone, though I was, as my predecessor had trained his equerries to call him, Legion.
I was that predecessor, and alone, and his predecessors; each as solitary as every ruler must be until better times — or rather, better men and women — shall come to Urth. I was Thecla too, Thecla thinking of a mother and half sister never to be seen again, and of the young torturer who had wept for her when she no longer had tears left for herself. Most of all was I Severian, and horribly lonely, as the last man on some derelict ship knows loneliness when he dreams of friends and wakes to find himself as solitary as ever, and goes on deck, perhaps, to stare at the peopled stars and the tattered sails that will never bear him to any of them.
That fear gripped me, even while I sought to laugh it away. I was alone in the great suite Tzadkiel had called my stateroom. I could hear no one; and it seemed possible, as all the delirious things we dream seem possible in the moment of waking, that there was no one to hear, that Tzadkiel, for her own unfathomable reasons, had emptied the ship while I slept.
I bathed in the balneary, and scraped the disturbingly unscarred face that watched me from the glass, all the while listening for a voice or a footfall. My clothes were torn, and so dirty I hesitated to put them on again. The closets held clothing of many colors and many kinds, and particularly, so it seemed to me, of those kinds that can be readily adapted to masculine or feminine wear, and to any frame, all of them of the richest materials. I selected a pair of loose, dark trousers bound at the waist with a russet sash, a tunic with an open neck and large pockets, and a cloa
k of the true fuligin of that guild of which I am still officially a master, lined with particolored brocade. So arrayed I stepped at last from my door and was saluted as before by my monstrous ostiaries.
I had not been abandoned, and indeed by the time I had dressed myself the fear of it had largely left me; yet as I walked the grand and empty gangway beyond my suite, my mind dwelt upon the thought; and from the dreamed Thecla who had delighted and deserted me, it passed to Dorcas and Agia, to Valeria, and at last to Gunnie, whom I had been glad enough to take as my lover when she could be of service to me and I had no other, and from whom I had allowed myself to be separated without a word of protest when Tzadkiel told me she had sent the sailors away.
Throughout my life, I have been far too ready to abandon women who have had a claim on my loyalty — Thecla, of course, until it was too late to do more than ease her death; and after Thecla, Dorcas, Pia, and Dana, and at last Valeria. On this vast ship, I seemed about to cast aside another, and I resolved not to do so. I would seek out Gunnie, wherever she might be, and bring her to stay with me in my stateroom until we reached Urth and she could return, if she wished, to her fishing village and her own people.
So determined I strode along, and my newly mended leg permitted me to walk at least as rapidly as when I had set off up the Water Way that runs with Gyoll; but my thoughts were not wholly of Gunnie. I was conscious of the need to take note of my surroundings and the direction in which I walked, for nothing would have been easier than to lose myself aboard this vast ship, as I had done more than once on the voyage to Yesod. I was conscious too of something else, a bright point of light that seemed infinitely far, yet immediate.
