by Gene Wolfe
“It was stolen,” muttered the old woman who sat the throne. “We never saw it.”
“But I did,” the ragged woman with the staff said. “I saw it in the hands of an angel, when I was just a girl and very ill. Tonight as I was coming here I saw it again, in the sky. So did your soldiers, although they are afraid to tell you. So did this giant who has come as I have to warn you and has been savaged for it. So would you see it, Autarch, if you would quit this tomb.”
“There have been such portents before. They have portended nothing. It would take more than the sight of a bearded star to change our mind.”
I thought of stepping onto the stage then to end the play, if I could; and yet I remained where I was, wondering for whose entertainment such plays are staged. For it was a play, and in fact a play I had seen before, though never from the audience. It was Dr. Tabs’s play, with the old woman on the throne in a role the doctor had taken for himself, and the woman with the staff in one of the roles that had been mine.
I have just written that I chose not to step forth, and it is true. But in the very act of making my decision, I must have moved a trifle. The little bells laughed again, and the larger bell from whose tongue they depended struck once, though ever so softly.
“Bells!” the old woman exclaimed again. “You, sister, you witch or whatever you call yourself. Go out! There’s a guard at our door. Tell their lochage we wish to know why the bells ring.”
“I will not leave this place at your command,” the woman said. “I have answered your question already.”
The giant looked up at that, parting his lank hair with blood-smeared hands. “If bells ring, they’re ringing because a New Sun is coming,” he rumbled in a voice almost too deep to be understood. “I do not hear them, but I do not need to hear them.” Though I doubted my eyes, it was Baldanders himself.
“Are you saying we are mad?”
“My hearing is not acute. Once I studied sound, and the more one learns of that, the less one hears it. Then too, my tympanic membranes have grown too wide and thick. But I have heard the currents that scour the black trenches and the crash of the waves upon your shore.”
“Silence!” the old woman commanded.
“You can’t order the waves to be silent, madame,” Baldanders told her. “They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.”
One of the Praetorians struck the side of his head with the butt of his fusil; it was like the blow of a mallet.
Baldanders seemed unaffected. “The armies of Erebus follow the waves,” he said, “and all the defeats they suffered at your husband’s hands will be avenged.”
From those words I knew the identity of the Autarch, and the shock of seeing Baldanders once more was as nothing to that. I must have started, because the small bells rang loudly, and a larger one spoke twice.
“Listen!” Valeria exclaimed in her cracked voice.
The chiliarch looked stricken. “I heard them, Autarch.” Baldanders rumbled, “I can explain them. Will you hear also what I say?”
“And I,” the woman with the staff told Valeria. “They ring for the New Sun, as the giant has already announced to you.”
Valeria muttered, “Speak, giant.”
“What I am about to say is not important. But I will say it in order that you will listen to what is important afterward. Our universe is neither the highest nor the lowest. Let matter become overdense here, and it bursts into the higher. We see nothing of that because everything runs from us. Then we talk of a black hole. When matter grows overdense in the universe below us, it explodes into ours. We see a burst of motion and energy, and we speak of a white fountain. What this prophetess calls the New Sun is such a fountain.”
Valeria murmured, “We have a fountain in our garden that foretells, and I heard someone call it the White Fountain many years ago. But what has any of this to do with the bells?”
“Be patient,” the giant told her. “You learn in a breath what I learned in a lifetime.”
The woman with the staff said, “That’s well. Only breaths remain to us. A thousand or so, it may be.”
The giant glared at her before he spoke again to Valeria. “Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things. Our sun has such a black hole as I described to you at its core. To fill it, a white fountain has been drawn across the void for millennia. It spins as it flies, and in its motion emits waves of gravitation.”
Valeria exclaimed, “What! Waves of dignity? You’re mad, just as this chiliarch has told us.”
The giant ignored her interruption. “These waves are too slight to render us giddy. Yet Ocean feels them and breeds new tides and fresh currents. I heard them, as I have already told you. They brought me here.”
The chiliarch snarled, “And if the Autarch orders it, we’ll toss you back.”
“Bells feel them in the same way. Like Ocean, their mass is delicately poised. Thus they ring, just as this woman says, pealing tbe coming of the New Sun.”
I was about to step out, but I saw that Baldanders was not yet finished.
“If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy”
I could not see her head from my vantage point, but Valeria must have nodded.
“The legend of the mountains of fire is more than a legend. In ages when men were only higher beasts, there were indeed such mountains. Their spew of fire was rock rendered incandescent by energy, as water is ice made fluid. A world below this, charged with too much energy, flared into our own — as with universes, so with worlds. In those ages, the young Urth was little more than a falling drop of that watery rock; men and women lived upon its floating scum and thought themselves secure.”
I heard Valeria sigh. “When we were ourselves young, we nodded over such prosy stuff for endless days, having nothing better to do. But when our Autarch came for us and we woke to life, we found no agnation in all that we had studied.”
“It has arrived at last, madame. The force that made your bells sound has warmed the cold heart of Urth once more. Now they toll the death of continents.”
“Is that the news you have come to tell us, giant? If the continents die, who will live?”
“Those on ships, possibly. Those whose ships are in the air or in the void, certainly. Those who live under the sea already, as I have now for fifty years. But it matters nothing. What—”
Baldanders’s solemn voice was interrupted by the banging of a door some distance down the Hypogeum Amaranthine and the tatoo of running feet. A junior officer sprinted up to the chiliarch, saluting while Baldanders and the woman with the staff turned to stare.
“Sieur…” The man faced his commander but could not keep his frightened eyes from wandering toward Valeria.
“What is it?”
“Sieur, another giant—”
“Another giant?” Valeria must have leaned forward at that. I saw a flash of gems and a wisp of gray hair beneath it.
“A woman, Autarch! A naked woman!”
Although I could not see her face, I knew Valeria must be addressing Baldanders when she asked, “And what can you tell us about this? Is it your wife, perhaps?”
He shook his head; and I, recalling the crimson chamber in his castle, speculated upon his living arrangements in thalassic caverns I could scarcely conceive.
“The lochage is bringing the giant woman for questioning,” the young officer said.
His chiliarch added, “Do you wish to behold her, Autarch? If not, I can conduct the interrogation.”
“We are tired. We will retire now. In the morning, tell us what you have learned.”
“Sh-she s-says,” the young officer stammered, “that certain cacogens have landed a man and a woman from one of their ships.”
For a moment, I imagined it was to Burgundofara and myself that this referred; but Abaia and his undines were not likely to be in error by whole ages.
“And what else?” Valeria demanded.
“Nothing else, Autarch. Nothing!”
“It is in your eyes. If it is not soon upon your tongue, it will be buried with you.”
“It’s only a groundless rumor, Autarch. None of our men have reported anything.”
“Out with it!”
The young officer looked stricken. “They say Severian the Lame has been seen again, Autarch. In the gardens, Autarch.”
It was then or never. I lifted the arras and stepped from under it, as all the little bells laughed and above them a great bell pealed three times.
Chapter XLIII — The Evening Tide
“YOU ARE no more surprised to see me than I am to see you,” I told them. And for three, at least, it was true.
Baldanders (whom I had never expected to see again when he had dived into the lake, and yet whom I had seen again looking just as I recalled him, when he fought for me before Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice) was grown too large for me to think him human ever again, his face heavier still and more misshapen, his skin as white as that of the water woman who had once saved me from drowning.
The girl whose brother had begged for a coin outside their jacal had become a woman of sixty or more, and the gray of age overlay the leanness and brownness of long roads. Earlier she had propped herself with her staff in a way that showed it was more than her badge of office; now she stood with shining eyes, as straight as a young willow.
Of Valeria I will not write — save to say that I should have known her instantly anywhere. Her eyes had not aged. They were still the bright eyes of the girl who had come to me wrapped in furs across the Atrium of Time; and Time had no power over them.
The chiliarch saluted and knelt to me as the castellan of the Citadel once had, and after a pause that grew embarrassingly long, his men and the young officer knelt too. I motioned for them to stand, and to give Valeria time to recover herself (for I feared for a moment that she might faint or worse), I asked the chiliarch whether he had been a junior officer when I sat the Phoenix Throne.
“No, Autarch. I was only a boy.”
“Yet clearly you recall me.”
“It’s my duty to know the House Absolute, Autarch. There are pictures and busts of you in some parts of it.”
“They…”
The voice was so weak I scarcely heard it. I turned to make sure it was indeed Valeria who spoke.
“They don’t really look as you did. They look the way I thought—”
I waited, wondering.
She waved a hand. It was a weak old woman’s gesture. “As I thought you might when you came back to me, back to our family tower in the Old Citadel. They look the way you do now.” She laughed, and began to sob.
Following hers, the giant’s words sounded like the rumbling of cart wheels. “You look as you always have,” he said. “I do not remember many faces, Severian; but I remember yours.”
“You’re saying that we have a quarrel to settle. I would rather leave it unsettled and give you my hand.”
Baldanders rose to take it, and I saw that he had grown to fully twice my height.
The chiliarch inquired, “Autarch, has he the freedom of the House Absolute now?”
“He does. He is indeed a creature of evil; but so are you, and so am I.”
Baldanders rumbled, “I will do no evil to you, Severian. I never have. When I flung away your jewel, I did so because you believed in it. That did harm, or so I believed.”
“And good, but that is all behind us. Let’s forget those things if we can.”
The prophetess said, “He has done harm too by saying here that you would bring destruction. I have told them the truth — that you would bring a rebirth, but they would not credit me.”
I told her, “He has told the truth, as well as you. If the new is to be born, the old must be swept aside. One who plants wheat kills grass. You are both prophets, although of different kinds; and each of you has prophesied as the Increate instructed you.”
Then the great doors of lapis lazuli and silver at the most distant end of the Hypogeum Amaranthine — doors used in my reign only for solemn processions and the ceremonial presentations of extern ambassadors — were flung wide; and this time it was not a lone officer who burst into the hypogeum but two score troopers, each brandishing a fusil or a blazing spear. Their backs were turned even toward the Phoenix Throne.
For a moment they occupied my attention so completely that I forgot how many years had passed since Valeria had last seen me — for me the time had not been years, but fewer perhaps than a hundred days all told. And so from the side of my mouth in the old way I had often used when we stood together at some lengthy ritual, the stealthy way of talking that I had learned as a boy whispering behind Master Malrubius’s back, I murmured, “This will be something worth seeing.”
Hearing her gasp, I glanced at her and saw her tear-stained cheeks and all the damage time had wrought. We love most when we understand that the object of our love has nothing else; and I do not think I have ever loved Valeria more than I did then.
I put my hand upon her shoulder, and though that was not a time or place for intimate scenes, I have been glad since that I did, for there was time for nothing more. The giantess crawled through the doorway, her hand first, like some five-legged beast, then her arm. It was larger than the trunks of many trees that are counted as old, and as white as sea foam; but disfigured by a crusted burn that cracked and bled even as it appeared.
I heard the prophetess mumble some prayer that ended with mention of the Conciliator and the New Sun. It is strange to hear yourself prayed to; and stranger still to realize that the supplicant has forgotten you are present.
A gasp then, and not just from Valeria but from us all, I believe, save Baldanders. The undine’s face appeared with her other hand, and although they did not in reality fill all that wide door, so large were they, and the mass of brilliant green hair, that they appeared to. I have sometimes heard it said in hyperbole that eyes are as big as platters. Of her eyes it was so; they wept tears of blood, and more blood trickled from her nostrils.
I knew she must have followed Gyoll from the sea, and from Gyoll traced its tributary, which wandered through the gardens where Jolenta and I had once floated upon it. I called to her, “How were you caught and driven from your element?”
Perhaps because she was a woman, her voice was not so deep as I anticipated, though it was deeper even than Baldander’s. Yet there was a lilt to it, as though she who struggled to pass the doorway even as she spoke and was so clearly dying had yet some vast joy that owed nothing to her own life or the sun’s. She said, “Because I would save you…”
With those words her mouth filled with blood; she spat it out, and it seemed some drain had opened from an abattoir.
I asked, “From the storms and fires that the New Sun will bring? We thank you, but we have been warned already. Are you not a creature of Abaia’s?”
“Even so.” She had dragged herself through the doorway to the waist. Now her flesh seemed so heavy it must be torn from her bones by its own weight; her breasts hung like the haycocks a child sees, who stands upon his head. I understood that it would never be possible to return her to her water — that she would die here in the Hypogeum Amaranthine, and a hundred men would be needed to dismember her corpse, and a hundred more to bury it.
The chiliarch demanded, “Then why shouldn’t we kill you? You’re an enemy of our Commonwealth.”
“Because I came to warn you.” She had allowed her head to sink to the terrazzo, where it lay at so unnatural an angle that her neck might have been broken; yet she still spoke.
“I can give you a more forcible reason, chiliarch,” I said. “Because I forbid it. She saved me once when I was a boy, and I remember her face as I remember everything. I would save her now if I could.” Looking at her face, a face of supernal beauty made hideous by its own weight, I asked, “Do you remember that?”
“No. It hasn’t yet occurred. It w
ill, because you spoke.”
“What’s your name? I’ve never known it.”
“Juturna. I want to save you…not earlier. Save all of you.”
Valeria hissed, “When has Abaia sought our good?”
“Always. He might have destroyed you…”
For the space of six breaths she could not continue, but I motioned Valeria and the rest to silence.
“Ask your husband. In a day, or a few days. He’s tried to tame you instead. Catch Catodon…cast out his conation. What good? Abaia would make of us a great people.”
I was reminded then of what Famulimus had asked me when I met her first: “Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?” And I felt myself upon the marches of a nobler world, where I should know what it might be. Master Malrubius had led me from the jungles of the north to Ocean speaking of hammer and anvil, and it seemed to me also that I sensed an anvil here. He had been an aquastor, like those who had fought for me in Yesod, created from my mind; thus he had believed, as I had, that the undine had saved me because I would be a torturer and an Autarch. It might be that neither he nor the undine were wholly wrong.
While I hesitated, lost among such thoughts, Valeria, the prophetess, and the chiliarch had whispered among themselves; but soon the undine spoke again. “Your day fades. A New Sun…and you are shadows.”
“Yes!” The prophetess seemed ready to leap for joy. “We are the shadows cast by his coming. What more can we be?”
“Another comes,” I said, for I thought I heard the patter of hurrying feet. Even the undine lifted her head to listen.
The sound, whatever it was, grew louder and louder still. A strange wind whistled down that long chamber, fluttering its antique hangings so that they strewed the floor with dust and pearls. Roaring like the thunder it flung back the double doors that had been propped open by the undine’s waist, and it carried that perfume — wild and saline, as fetid and fecund as a woman’s groin, that once met can never be forgotten; so that at that instant I would not have been surprised to hear the crash of surf or the mewing of gulls.
