by Gene Wolfe
The officer said, “We’ll lock him up for you, if you wish.”
“But if you don’t, you’ll have to have his irons now.”
He shrugged. “I’ve signed for them.”
“Take them, then.” She turned to her serving boy. “He may try to escape us, Reechy. If he does, give me your lantern and retake him”
The officer murmured, “Don’t,” as he freed my hands, then stepped away and made me a quick salute. The man with the sword grinned and swung back the narrow sally port door, the officer and his torchbearers filed out, and the door shut with a crash. I felt I had lost my only friend.
“That way, a Hundred and Two,” the woman said, and pointed toward the doorway through which she had come.
I had been looking about, at first with the hope of escape, then with a numb astonishment I cannot possibly describe. Words burst from me; I could no more have held them back than I could have silenced my heart. “That’s our Matachin Tower ! That one’s the Witches’ Keep — but it’s straight now! And there’s the Bear Tower !”
“You’re called a holy man,” she said. “I see you’re wholly deranged.” As she spoke, she held out her hands so I could see she was not armed, and gave me a twisted smile that would have been enough warning if the officer had not warned me already. It was plain the ragged boy had no weapon and posed no threat; she, I imagined, had a pistol or something worse under her rich uniform.
Most do not know it, but it is difficult to learn to strike another human being with all one’s force; some ancient instinct makes even the most brutal soften the blow. Among the torturers I had been taught not to do so. I struck her, the heel of my hand against her chin, as hard as I have ever struck anyone in my life, and she crumpled like a doll. I kicked the lantern, which went out as it flew from the boy’s hand.
The guard at the sally port raised his sword, but only to bar the way. I whirled and made off toward the Broken Court .
The pain that struck me at that moment was like the pain of the Revolutionary, the only pain I have ever felt that could be compared with it. I was being torn apart, and the separation of each limb was prolonged and prolonged until being quartered with the sword would have been nothing to it. The ground seemed to leap and reel under me, even when that hideous flash of pain was gone and I lay in the dark. All the great guns of the Battle of Orithyia were thundering together.
Then I had returned to the World of Yesod. Its pure air filled my lungs, and the music of its breezes soothed my ears. I sat up and found that it was only Urth as she seemed to one who had suffered Abaddon. As I rose I thought of all the aid I had sent this ruined body; yet my arms and legs were stiff and cold, and pain lingered in every joint.
I had lain upon a cot in a room that seemed oddly familiar. The door, which I felt sure had been of solid metal when I had last seen it, was a lattice of bars; it looked out into a narrow hall whose twistings I had known from childhood. I turned back to study the odd shape of the room.
It was the bedchamber Roche had occupied as a journeyman, and it was to this very room that I had come to don lay clothing on the evening of our excursion to the House Azure. I stared at it in astonishment. Roche’s bed, a trifle wider, had stood just where my cot was now. The position of the port (I recalled how surprised I had been to find Roche had a port, and that I myself had later been given a room without one) and the angles of the bulkheads were unmistakable.
I went to the port. It was open, admitting the breeze that had awakened me. No bars crossed it; but of course no one could have climbed down the smooth walls of the tower, and only a very small man could have squeezed his shoulders through the port. I thrust out my head.
Below me lay the Old Yard just as I recalled it, basking in the late summer sunshine; its cracked flagstones looked a trifle newer, perhaps, but otherwise they were the same. The Witches’ Keep now leaned awry, precisely as it had always leaned in the recesses of my memory. The wall lay in ruins, exactly as in my day, its unsmeltable metal slabs half in the Old Yard and half in the necropolis. A lone journeyman (so I already thought him) lounged at the Corpse Door, and though he wore a strange uniform and clasped a sword, as Brother Porter had not, he stood at the spot where Brother Porter used to stand.
Soon a boy, just such a ragged apprentice as I myself had been, crossed the Old Yard on some errand. I waved and shouted to him, and when he looked up I recognized him and called his name: “Reechy! Reechy!”
He waved in return and went on about his business, clearly afraid to be seen speaking to a client of his guild. His guild, I write, but I was sure by then that it had been mine too.
Long shadows told me it was still early morning; they were confirmed a few moments later by the slamming of doors and the footsteps of the journeyman bringing my atole. My door lacked the slot it ought to have had, so that he was forced to stand aside holding his stack of trays while another journeyman with a vouge, looking almost like a soldier, unlocked for him.
“You seem well enough,” he said as he put my tray on the floor inside the doorway.
I told him that at times I had felt better.
He edged closer. “You killed her.”
“The woman called Madame Prefect?”
He nodded, as did the other journeyman. “Broke her neck.”
“If you’ll take me to her,” I told them, “I may be able to restore her.”
They exchanged a glance and went away, slamming the barred door behind them.
So she was dead, and from the looks I had seen she had been hated. Once Cyriaca had asked me whether my offer to free her was not a final torment. (The latticed summerhouse floated from the depths of memory to stand, complete with twining vines and green moonlight, in my morning-bright cell.)
I had told her that no client would believe us; but I had believed Madame Prefect — believed at least that I could escape from her, though I had known she did not. And all the while some weapon had been trained upon me from the Matachin Tower, perhaps from this very port, though more likely from the gun room near the top.
My reverie was interrupted by the arrival of still another journeyman, this time accompanied by a physician. My door was thrown open once again; the physician stepped inside, and the journeyman locked it behind him and stood back, ready to fire through the bars.
The physician sat on my cot and opened a leather case. “How do you feel?”
“Hungry.” I tossed aside my bowl and spoon. “They brought me this, but it’s mostly water.”
“Meat is for the monarch’s defenders, not for subversives. You were hit by the convulsor?”
“If you tell me so. I know nothing about it.”
“You were not, in my opinion. Stand up.”
I stood, then moved my arms and legs as he ordered, let my head roll back and to each side, and so forth.
“You weren’t hit. You’re wearing an officer’s cape. Were you an officer?”
“If you like. I was a general, at least by courtesy. Not recently.”
“And you don’t tell the truth. That’s a junior officer’s, for your information. These idiots think they hit you. I hear the man who fired at you swears it.”
“Then question him.”
“To listen to him denying what I know already? I’m not such a fool. Shall I explain what happened?”
I told him I wished someone would.
“Very well. The earthquake came as you fled from Madame Prefect Prisca, at the instant this idiot on the gun deck fired. He missed as anyone would; but you fell and struck your head, and he thought he’d hit you. I’ve seen a good many of these supposedly wonderful happenings. They’re always quite simple, once you realize that the witnesses are confusing cause and effect.”
I nodded. “There was an earthquake?”
“Certainly, and a big one — we’re fortunate to have got off as lightly as we did. Haven’t you looked outside yet? You must be able to see the wall from here.” He stepped over to the port and looked out himself, then pointed (
as people do) as if I had. “A big section fell next to the zoetic transport there. Lucky the ship didn’t fall too. You don’t think you knocked that down yourself, do you?”
I told him I had never had any notion of why it had fallen.
“This coast is quake prone, as the old records indicate clearly enough — praise to our monarch, by the way, for having them brought here — but there hasn’t been one since the river changed its course, so most of these fools think there’ll never be another.” He chuckled. “Though after last night a few have changed their minds, I imagine.”
He was already on his way out as he spoke. The journeyman banged my door closed and locked it again.
I thought of Dr. Tabs’s play, in which the ground shakes and Jahi says: “The end of Urth, you fool. Go ahead and spear her. It’s the end for you anyway.”
How little I had talked with him upon the World of Yesod.
Chapter XXXVII — The Book of the New Sun
AS IN MY time, we prisoners were fed twice a day and our water carafes replenished at the evening meal. The apprentice carried my tray, gave me a wink, and returned when the journeyman was no longer about, with cheese and a loaf of fresh bread.
The evening meal had been as scanty as the morning one; I began to eat what he had brought me, while I thanked him for it.
He squatted in front of my cell door. “May I talk to you?”
I said I did not govern his acts, and he was likely to know the rules of the place better than I.
He flushed, his dark cheeks growing darker still. “I mean, will you talk with me?”
“If it won’t get you a beating.”
“I don’t think there’ll be any trouble, at least not now. But we ought to keep our voices down. Some of the others are probably spies.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Because you killed her, of course. The whole place is turned upside down. Everybody’s glad she’s dead, but there’s sure to be an investigation and no telling who’ll be sent to take her place.” He paused, seeming to think deeply about what he would say next. “The guards say you said you might be able to bring her back.”
“And you don’t want me to.”
He waved that away. “Could you have? Really?”
“I don’t know — I’d have to try. I’m surprised they told you.”
“I wait around and listen to them talk, shine boots or run errands for money.”
“I have none to give you. Mine was taken from me by the soldiers who arrested me.”
“I wasn’t after any.” He stood up and dug in one of the pockets of his ragged trousers. “Here, you better take these.”
He held them out; they were worn brass tokens of a design unfamiliar to me.
“Sometimes you can get people to bring you extra food or whatever.”
“You brought me more food, and I gave you nothing.”
“Take them,” he said. “I want to give them to you. You might need them.” When I would not extend my hand, he tossed them through the bars and disappeared down the corridor.
I picked up his coins and dropped them into one of my own pockets, as puzzled as I have ever been in my life.
Outside, afternoon had become chill evening with the port still open. I pushed the heavy lens shut and dogged it down. Its broad, smooth flanges, of a shape I had never considered, had clearly been intended to hold the void at bay.
As I finished my bread and cheese, I thought of our passage back to Urth on the tender and my exultation aboard Tzadkiel’s ship. How marvelous it would be to send this old Matachin Tower hurtling among the stars! And yet there was something sinister about it, as about all things perverted from a noble purpose to a shameful one. I had grown to manhood here feeling nothing of that.
The bread and cheese gone, I wrapped myself in the cape the officer had given me, shut out the light with one arm, and tried to sleep.
Morning brought more visitors. Burgundofara and Hadelin arrived, escorted by a tall journeyman who saluted them with his weapon and left them outside my door. My surprise was no doubt written on my face.
“Money can do wonders,” Hadelin said; his twisted mouth showed how painful the amount had been, and I wondered whether Burgundofara had concealed the wages she had brought from the ship, or if he considered that money his own now.
Burgundofara told me, “I needed to see you one last time, and Hadelin arranged it for me.” She wanted to say more, but the words caught in her throat.
Hadelin said, “She wants you to forgive her.”
“For leaving me for him, Burgundofara? There’s nothing to forgive; I had no right to you.”
“For pointing you out when the soldiers came. You saw me. I know you saw me.”
“Yes,” I said, remembering.
“I didn’t think — I was afraid—”
“Afraid of me.”
She nodded.
Hadelin said, “They’d have got you just the same. Somebody else would have pointed you out.”
I asked him, “You?”
He shook his head and stepped back from the bars.
When I had been Autarch, supplicants had often knelt before me; now Burgundofara knelt, and it seemed hideously inappropriate. “I had to talk to you, Severian. One last time. That was why I followed the soldiers to the wharf that night. Won’t you forgive me? I wouldn’t have done it, but I was so afraid.”
I asked whether she remembered Gunnie.
“Oh, yes, and the ship. Except that it seems like a dream now.”
“She was you, and I owe her a great deal. For her sake — your sake — I forgive you. Now and at every other time. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” she said; and instantly she was happy, as if a light had been kindled in her. “Severian, we’re going down the river to Liti. Hadelin goes there often, and we’ll buy a house where I’ll live when I’m not with him on Alcyone. We want to have children. When they come, can I tell them about you?”
Although I believed at the time that it was only because I could see Hadelin’s face as well as hers, a strange thing took place as she spoke: I grew conscious of her future, as I might have been of the future of some blossom that Valeria had plucked in the gardens.
I told her, “It may be, Burgundofara, that you will have children as you wish; if you do, you may tell them anything you like about me. It may also be that in a time to come you’ll want to find me again. If you look, you may. Or you may not. But if you look, remember you aren’t looking because I’ve told you to, or because I’ve promised you’ll find me.”
When they had gone, I thought for a moment about her and about Gunnie, who had once been Burgundofara. We say that a man is as brave as an atrox, or that a woman is as lovely as a red roe, as Burgundofara was. But we lack any such term for loyalty, because nothing we know is truly loyal — or rather, because true loyalty is found only in the individual and not in the type. A son may be loyal to his father or a dog to its master, but most are not. As Thecla I had been false to my Autarch, as Severian to my guild. Gunnie had been loyal to me and to Urth, not to her comrades; and perhaps we are unable to advance some paragon of loyalty to an apothegm only because loyalty (in the final analysis) is choice.
Yet how strange that Gunnie should sail the empty seas of time to become Burgundofara again. A poet would sing that she searched for love, I suppose; but it seemed to me she searched for the illusion that love is more than it is, though I would like to believe that it was for some higher love which has no name.
Another visitor soon came — but was no visitor at all, since I could not see his face. A whisper that seemed to originate in the empty corridor asked, “Are you the theurgist?”
“If you say it,” I answered. “But who are you, and where are you?”
“Canog, the student. I’m in the cell next to you. I heard the boy talking to you, and the woman and the captain just now.
I asked, “How long have you been here, Canog?” hoping he might advise me upon cert
ain matters.
“Nearly three months. I’m under sentence of death, but I don’t think it’ll be carried out. Usually they’re not, after such a long time. Probably the old phrontiserion has interceded for her erring child, eh? At least, I hope so.”
I had heard much such talk in my own day; it was strange to find it unchanged. I said, “You must know the ways of the place by now.”
“Oh, it’s just as the boy told you, meaning not so bad if you’ve a little money. I got them to give me paper and ink, so now I write letters for the guards. Then too, a friend brought a few of my books; I’ll be a famous scholar if they keep me here long enough.”
Having always asked the question when I toured the dungeons and oubliettes of the Commonwealth, I asked why he was imprisoned.
He was silent for a time. I had opened the port again, but even with a breath of wind coming through it I was conscious of the reek from the slop jar under my cot as well as the general stench of the place. The cawing of rooks rode upon the breeze; through my barred door came the endless tramping of boots upon metal.
At last he said, “We don’t pry into those matters here.”
“I’m sorry I’ve offended you, but you asked such a question of me. You asked if I was the theurgist, and it’s as a theurgist that I’ve been imprisoned.”
Another long pause.
“I killed a fool of a shopkeeper. He’d been asleep behind his counter, I knocked over a brass candlestick, and up he came roaring, with the pillow sword in his hand. What else could I do? A man has a right to save his own life, doesn’t he?”
“Not under every circumstance,” I said. I had not known the thought was in me until I had expressed it.
* * *
That evening the boy brought my food, and with it Herena, Declan, the mate, and the cook I had seen briefly in the inn of Saltus.
“I got them inside, sieur,” the boy said. He tossed back his wild black hair with a gesture fit for any courtier. “The guard owes me a few favors.”
Herena was weeping, and I pushed my arm between the bars to stroke her shoulder. “You’re all in danger,” I told them. “You may be arrested because of me. You mustn’t stay here long.”
