The Urth of the New Sun botns-5

by Gene Wolfe

  “To answer what you asked, if you had some other instrument, you might see me as she does; then you could tell me why I’ve been exiled. But until you can see such things, I know no more than you. Do you wish, now, to return to your world of Urth?”

  “I do,” I replied. “But not to the time I left. As I told you, when I got back to Urth I thought it must freeze before the New Sun came; no matter how fast I drew my star to me, it was so distant that whole ages of the world would pass before it reached us. Then I realized I was in no age I knew, and I thought I’d have to wait in weariness. Now I see—”

  “Your whole face brightens when you talk of it,” the small Tzadkiel interrupted me. “I understand how they knew you for a miracle. You will bring the New Sun before you sleep.”

  “If I can, yes.”

  “And you want my help.” She paused to stare at me with as serious a face as ever I was to see her wear. “I’ve many times been called a liar, Severian, but I would help you if I could.”

  “Yet you cannot?”

  “I can tell you this: Madregot flows from the glory of Yesod” — she pointed upstream — “to the destruction of Briah, down that way.” She pointed again. “Follow the water, and you’ll be at a time nearer the coming of your star.”

  “If I’m not there to guide — but I’m the star too. Or at least I was. I can’t…it’s as if that part of myself is numb.”

  “You’re not in Briah now, remember? You’ll know your New Sun again when you return there — if he still exists.”

  “He must!” I said. “He — I — will need me, need my eyes and ears to tell him what passes on Urth.”

  “Then it would be best,” the small Tzadkiel remarked, “not to go too far downstream. A few steps, perhaps.”

  “When I came here, I wasn’t in sight of it. I may not have walked straight toward it.”

  Her little shoulders moved up and down, carrying her tiny, perfect breasts with them. “Then there’s no telling, is there? So this is as good a place as any.”

  I stood, recalling the brook as I had first seen it. “It went straight across my path,” I told her. “No, I think I’ll take a few steps with the water, as you suggested.”

  She rose too, leaping into the air. “No one can say just how far a step will take him.”

  “Once I heard a fable about a cock,” I said. “The man who told it said it was only a foolish tale for children, but there was some wisdom in it, I think. Seven, it said, was a fortunate number. Eight carried the little cock too far.” I took seven strides.

  “Do you see anything?” the small Tzadkiel asked.

  “Only you, the brook, and the grass.”

  “Then you must walk away from it. Don’t jump across it, though, or you’ll end in another place. Go slowly.”

  I turned my back to the water and took a step.

  “What do you see now? Look down the stems of the grass to the roots.”

  “Darkness.”

  “Then take another step.”

  “Fire — a sea of sparks.”

  “Another!” She fluttered beside me like a painted kite.

  “Only stems, as of common grass.”

  “Good! A half step now.”

  I edged forward cautiously. During the whole time we had talked in that meadow, we had been in shadow; now it seemed some blacker cloud obscured the face of the sun, so that a band of darkness stood before me, no wider than my outspread arms, yet deep.

  “What now?”

  “Twilight before me,” I said. And then, though I sensed rather than saw it, “A shadowy door. Must I go through?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  I leaned closer, and it seemed to me that the meadow was strangely tilted, just as I had seen it from my shelter on the mountain. Though it was only three steps behind me, the music of the Madregot sounded far away.

  Dim letters floated in the darkness; it was a moment before I realized they were reversed and that the largest spelled my name.

  I stepped into the shadow, and the meadow vanished; I was lost in night. My groping hands felt stone. I pushed at it, and it moved — reluctantly at first, then smoothly, yet with the resistance of great weight.

  As though at my ear, I heard the crystal chiming of the small Tzadkiel’s laughter.

  Chapter XLI — Severian from His Cenotaph

  A COCK crowed; and as the stone swung back, I saw the starry sky and the single bright star (blue now with its velocity) that was myself. I was whole once more. And near! Fair Skuld, rising with the dawn, was not so brilliant and did not show so broad a disk.

  For a long time — or at least, for a time that seemed long to me — I studied my other self, still far beyond the circle of Dis. Once or twice I heard the murmur of voices, but I did not trouble to see whose they were; and when at last I looked around me, I was alone.

  Or nearly so. An antlered buck watched me from the crest of a little hill to my right, his eyes faintly gleaming, his body lost in the deeper dark beneath the trees that crowned the hill. On my left, a statue stared with sightless eyes. A last cricket chirped, but the grass was jeweled with frost.

  As I had in the meadow about Madregot, I had the feeling of being in a familiar place without being able to identify it. I was standing upon stone, and the door I had pushed back was of stone also. Three narrow steps led to a clipped lawn. I went down them, and the door swung silently behind me, changing its nature, or so it seemed, as it moved; so that when it had shut it appeared no door at all.

  I stood in the slightest of dells, a thousand paces or more from lip to lip, set among gentle hills. There were doors in these, some no wider than those of private rooms, some greater than the stone doorway in the obelisk behind me. The doors and the flagged paths that led from them told me I stood upon the grounds of the House Absolute. The long shadow of the obelisk was not born of the plenilune moon, but of the first crescent of the sun, and that shadow pointed to me like an arrow. I was in the west — in a watch or less the horizon would rise to conceal me.

  For a moment I regretted that I had given the Claw to the chiliarch; I wanted to read the inscription on the stone door. Then I remembered how I had examined Declan in the darkness of his hut, and I stepped nearer it and used my eyes.

  To the Honor of

  SEVERIAN THE GREAT

  Autarch of Our Commonwealth

  by Right the First Man of Urth

  Memorabilus

  It was a lofty shaft of blue chalcedony, and something of a shock. I was thought dead, so much was clear; and this pleasant vale had been appointed my proxy resting place. I would have preferred the necropolis beside the Citadel — the place where I must indeed repose at last, or at least be thought to — or the stone town, to which the first remark would apply with greater force.

  That led me to wonder just where on the grounds I was, as well as to speculate on whether Father Inire or some other had been the erector of my monument. I shut my eyes, allowing my memory to rove at will, and to my astonishment found the little stage that Dorcas, Baldanders, and I had cobbled together for Dr. Tabs. Here was the very spot, and my absurd memorial stood where at another time I had feigned to think the giant Nod a statue. Recalling the moment, I glanced at the one I had seen upon stepping back into Briah, and found it was, just as I had supposed, one of those harmless half-living creatures. It was moving slowly toward me now, its lips curved in an archaic smile.

  For a breath I admired the play of my own light on its pale limbs, but it seemed to me it had been only two watches or three since daylight had come to the slopes of Mount Typhon , and the vitality I felt now put me in no mood to contemplate statues or seek rest in one of the secluded arbors scattered throughout the gardens. A hidden archway not far from where the buck had stood gave access to the Secret House. I ran to it, murmured the word that mastered it, and went in.

  How strange and yet how good it was to thread those narrow passages once more! Their suffocating constriction and padded, ladde
rlike steps summoned up a thousand memories of gambades and trysts: coursing the white wolves, scourging the prisoners of the antechamber, reencountering Oringa.

  Had it been true, as Father Inire had originally intended, that these tortuous passageways and cramped chambers were known only to himself and the reigning Autarch, they would have been fully as dull as any dungeon and, if anything, less pleasant. But the Autarchs had revealed them to their paramours, and those paramours to their own gallants, so that they soon held at least a round dozen intrigues on any fine spring evening, and perhaps at times a hundred. The provincial administrator who brought to the House Absolute certain dreams of adventure or romance seldom realized that they stole past on slippered feet within an ell of his sleeping head. Entertaining myself with such reflections as these, I had walked perhaps half a league (halting from time to time to spy out both public halls and private apartments through the oillets the place provided) when I stumbled over the body of an assassin.

  He lay, as he had surely lain for a year at least, upon his back; the sere flesh of his face had begun to fall away from his skull, so that he grinned as though at discovering death was but a jest in the end. His outstretched hand had lost its grip upon the venom-daubed batardeau lying across its palm. As I bent to inspect it and him, I wondered whether he had contrived to nick himself; far stranger things have taken place within the Secret House. More probably, I decided, he had fallen victim to some defense of his intended victim’s — waylaid, perhaps, when his mission was betrayed, or felled by some wound before he could reach safety. For a moment I considered taking his batardeau to replace the knife I had lost so many chiliads ago, but the thought of wielding a poisoned blade was repugnant.

  A fly buzzed about my face.

  I waved it away, then watched in amazement as it burrowed into the dry flesh, followed by a score of others.

  I stepped back; before I could turn away, all the hideous stages of putrefaction presented themselves in order reversed, like urchins at an almshouse who thrust the youngest of their company to the front: the wrinkled flesh swelled and seethed with maggots, retreated to the lividity of death, and finally resumed the coloration and almost the appearance of life; the flaccid hand closed on the corroded steel hilt of the batardeau until it gripped it like a vise.

  Recalling Zama , I was ready to run when the dead man sat up — or to wrest his weapon from him and kill him with it. Perhaps these impulses canceled each other; in the event I did neither, merely stood aside to watch him.

  He rose slowly and stared at me with empty eyes. I said, “You had better put that away before you hurt someone.” Such weapons are usually sheathed with the sword, but there was a scabbard for his at his belt, and he did as I suggested.

  “You are confused,” I told him. “It would be wise for you to stay here until you come to yourself. Don’t follow me.”

  He made no reply, nor did I expect any. I slipped by him and walked away as quickly as I could. When I had gone fifty strides or so, I heard his faltering steps; I began to run, making as little noise as possible and dodging down this turning and that.

  How far it was, I cannot say. My star was still ascendant, and it seemed to me I might have dashed around the whole circuit of Urth without tiring. I ran by many strange doors without opening any, knowing that all would lead from the Secret House to the House Absolute by one means or another. At last I came to an aperture closed by no door; a strong draft from it carried the sound of a woman’s weeping, and I halted and stepped through.

  I found myself in a loggia, with arches on three sides. The woman’s sobs seemed to come from my left; I went to one of the arches and peered out. It overlooked that wide and windy gallery we called the Path of Air — the loggia was one of those constructions that appear merely ornamental though they serve the needs of the Secret House.

  Shadows on the marble floor far below me showed that the woman was ringed by half a dozen scarcely visible Praetorians, one of whom supported her by the elbow. At first I could not see her eyes, which were bent toward the floor and lost in her raven-dark hair.

  Then (I cannot tell by what chance) she glanced up at me. Hers was a lovely face of that complexion called olive and as smoothly oval as an olive, too, with something in it that tore my heart; and though it was strange to me, I had the sensation of return once again. I felt that in some lost life I had stood just where I was standing then; and that in that life I had seen her beneath me in just that way.

  She and the shadows of the Praetonans were soon almost out of sight. I shifted from one arch to the next to keep them in view; and she stared back at me, until she was looking over the shoulder of her pale gown when I last glimpsed her.

  She was as lovely and as unknown at that final glimpse as at the first. Her beauty was reason enough for any man to stare at her, but why did she stare at me? If I had understood her expression at all, it had been one of mingled hope and fear, and perhaps she too had some sense of a drama being played upon a second occasion.

  A hundred times I reviewed my scrapes and escapes in this Secret House, whether as Thecla alone, or as Severian and Thecla united, or as the old Autarch. I could not find the moment — yet it existed; and I began, as I walked on, to search those veiled lives that lie behind the last, memories that I have scarcely mentioned in this narrative, that dim as they grow stranger and stretch backward, perhaps, to Ymar, and behind Ymar to the Age of Myth.

  Yet overwhelming all these shadowy lives — and incomparably more vivid, as a mountain may be seen to the very expression in its eyes when the forest about its base has sunk into a green haze — hurtled the white star that was myself. I was there also; and I saw before me, seemingly still very distant (though I knew it was much nearer than it appeared) the crimson sun that was to be, after so many centuries, simultaneously my destruction and my apotheosis. To its left and right, brave Skuld and sullen Verthandi seemed inconsequential moons. The night-dark dot of Urth crept across its face, nearly lost among its mottlings; and in the dying moments of that night I wandered, bewildered and wondering, underground.

  Chapter XLII — Ding, Dong, Ding!

  WHEN I HAD entered the secret house, I had scarcely known where I was bound. Or rather, I had scarcely been conscious of it; unconsciously, I had been directing my steps toward the Hypogeum Amaranthine, as I at length realized. I intended to learn who it was who sat the Phoenix Throne, and to reclaim it if I could. When the New Sun arrived, our Commonwealth would require a ruler who understood what had taken place; so I thought.

  A certain door of the Secret House opened behind the velvet arras that hung behind the throne. I had sealed it with my word in the initial year of my reign; and I had hung the narrow space between the arras and the wall with bells, so that no one could walk there without making some sound that would be overheard by the occupant of the throne.

  Now the door opened smoothly and silently at my command. I stepped out and closed it after me. The little bells, suspended upon silk threads, tinkled softly; above them larger bells, from whose tongues the threads hung, whispered with brazen voices and let fall a shower of dust.

  I stood motionless, listening. At last the bells ceased their jingling, though not before I had heard the laughter of the small Tzadkiel in it.

  “What is that ringing?” It was an old woman who spoke, her tones thin and cracked.

  Another spoke in a man’s deep voice. I could not make out his words.

  “Bells!” the old woman exclaimed. “We heard bells. Are you grown so deaf, chiliarch, that you didn’t hear them too?”

  Now I wished indeed for the batardeau, with which I might have slit the arras and so peered out; as the deep voice spoke again, it struck me that others who had stood where I stood must have had the same thought, and sharp knives to boot. I searched the arras with my fingertips.

  “They rang, we tell you. Send someone to inquire.”

  Perhaps there were many such rents, for I found one in a breath, made by some watcher only a tri
fle, below my own height. Applying my eye to it, I saw that I stood three strides to the right of the throne. Only the hand of the occupant was visible to me where it lay upon the arm, as thin as that of an anatomy, a hand webbed with blue veins and spangled with gems.

  Before the throne, head bent, crouched a form so vast that for a moment I thought it was that Tzadkiel who had commanded the ship. Its disordered hair was caked with blood.

  Behind it stood a cluster of shadowy guardsmen, and beside it a helmetless officer whose insignia and virtually invisible armor marked him as the chiliarch of the Praetorians, though he was not, of course, the chiliarch who had held the post during my reign, nor the one whom I had carried down from the upright timber in an epoch now unimaginably distant.

  Before the throne and thus almost out of my field of view, a ragged woman leaned upon a carven staff. She spoke just as I realized that she was there, saying, “They ring to welcome the New Sun, Autarch. The whole of Urth prepares for his coming.”

  “In our childhood,” the old woman on the throne muttered, “we had little to do but read history. Thus we know that there have been a thousand prophets such as you, my poor sister — no, say a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand crazed paupers who fancied themselves great rhetors and sought to make themselves great rulers as well.”

  “Autarch,” answered the ragged woman, “won’t you hear me? You speak of thousands and hundreds of thousands. A thousand times at least I have heard objections such as you bring, but you have not yet heard what I will say.”

  “Go on,” the woman on the throne told her. “You may speak as long as you amuse us.”

  “I haven’t come to amuse you, but to tell you that the New Sun has come often before, seen perhaps by only a single person, or a few. You must recall the Claw of the Conciliator, for it vanished in our time.”