by Gene Wolfe
We waited before her house for a long while. Fresh torches arrived, and fuel and live embers carried from the houses nearby gave us several small fires. Despite them, my legs became stiff from the cold that seeped from the earth.
Our only hope appeared to lie in outlasting these people, in drawing taut their nerves. But when I studied their faces, faces that might have been so many wooden masks smeared with ocher clay, I felt that they would outwear the year, far less a short summer’s night.
If only I could speak their tongue fluently, I thought, I might be able to wake fear enough in them, or at least explain what I had actually meant. The words — words not, alas, in their tongue but in my own — reechoed through my mind, so that I fell to speculating about them. Did I myself know what those words meant? Those or any others? Surely not.
Desperate, and driven by the same unquenchable impulse to sterile self-expression that has led me to write and revise the history I sent to molder and drown in Master Ultan’s library and soon after flung into the void, I began to gesticulate, to tell my story once again, as well as I could, this time without the use of words. My own arms cradled the infant I had been, thrashed helplessly in Gyoll until the undine saved me. No one moved to stop me, and after some time I stood up so that I might use my legs as well as my arms, walking pantomime down the empty, cluttered corridors of the House Absolute, and galloping for the destrier that had died beneath me at the Third Battle of Orithyia.
It seemed I heard music; and some later time I heard it indeed, for many of the men who had come when they heard the speeches of the hetman and the shaman were humming, beating a solemn cadence upon the ground with the butts of stone-tipped spears and antler-headed adzes; one played a nose flute. Its piping notes swarmed about me like bees.
In time I saw that some of the men were looking toward the sky and nudging one another. Thinking they detected the first gray radiance of dawn, I looked too; but I saw rising only the cross and the unicorn, the stars of summer. Then the shaman and the hetman prostrated themselves before me. At that instant, by the most marvelous good fortune, Urth looked upon the sun. My shadow fell across them.
Chapter L — Darkness in the House of Day
THE TALL woman and I moved into the Shaman’s house and took the best room. I was no longer permitted to work. The injured and the ill were brought to me for healing; some I cured as I had cured Declan, or as we of the guild had been taught to prolong the lives of our clients. Others died in my arms. Perhaps I could have revivified the dead as well, as I had recalled poor Zama ; I never attempted to do so.
Twice we were attacked by nomads. The hetman fell in the first battle, I rallied his warriors, and we turned the nomads back. A new hetman was chosen, but he seemed to regard himself — and to be regarded by his own people — as little more than my subordinate. In the second battle, it was I who led the war party while he took the nomads from the rear with a small force of picked bowmen. Together we herded and slaughtered them like sheep, and we were not molested again.
Soon the people began work on a new structure much larger than anything they had built before. Although its walls were very thick and its arches strong, I feared that they might not support so great a weight as a roof of mud and straw would impose; I taught the women to fire clay tiles just as they fired their pots, and to lay them to make a roof. When the building was completed, I recognized the roof upon which Jolenta would die, and I knew I would be buried beneath it.
Though you may think it incredible, before that time I had seldom thought of the undine or the directions she had indicated to me, preferring to revisit in memory the Urth of the Old Sun, as it was in the days of my childhood or under my autarchy. Now I explored fresher memories, for much as I feared them, I found I feared death more.
When I had sat upon a spur of rock thrust from the slope of Mount Typhon and watched Typhon’s soldiers coming for me, I had seen the meadow that is beyond Briah as clearly as I now saw our fields of maize. But then I had been the New Sun, with all the power of my star to draw upon, though it was so far away. Now I was the New Sun no more, and the Old Sun still had long to rule. Once or twice when I was nearly asleep, it seemed to me that the Corridors of Time slanted from some corner of our room. Always, when I tried to flee down any, I woke; and there was only stone, and the roof poles above.
Once I descended again to the ravine and retraced my steps to the east from which I had come. At last I stumbled over the pitiful little wall I had reared at the coughing of the cat, but though I went farther still, I returned to the stone town the day after I had left it.
At last, when I had lost all count of years, it came to me that if I could not rediscover the entrance to the Corridors of Time — and I could not — I must find Juturna; and that to find her I must first find the sea.
At dawn the next day, I wrapped some meal cakes and dried meat in a cloth and left the stone town, walking westward. My legs had grown stiff; and when after seven or eight watches of steady walking I fell and twisted my knee, I felt I had almost become again that Severian who had boarded the ship of Tzadkiel. Like him, I did not turn again, but continued as I had set my face. I had become used to the heat of the Old Sun long before, and it was the waning of the year.
The young hetman and a party of men from the stone town overtook me while Urth looked upon the Old Sun from her left. After a time, they seized my arms and tried to force me to go back; I refused, telling them I was bound for Ocean and hoped never to return.
I sat up, but I saw nothing. For a moment, I felt sure I had gone blind.
Ossipago appeared, shining with blue radiance. He said, “We are here, Severian.”
Knowing him for a mechanism, the servant and yet the master of Barbatus and Famulimus, I answered, “With light — the god from the machine. That was what Master Malrubius said when he came.”
Barbatus’s pleasant baritone flouted the gloom. “You’re conscious. What do you remember?”
“Everything,” I said. “I’ve always remembered everything.” Dissolution was in the air, the fetor of rotting flesh.
Famulimus sang, “For that were you chosen, Severian. You and you alone from many princes. You alone to save your race from lethe.”
“And then to abandon it,” I said.
No one answered.
“I have thought about that,” I told them. “I would have tried to return sooner, if I had known how.”
Ossipago’s voice was so deep that one felt rather than heard it. “Do you understand why you could not?”
I nodded, feeling foolish. “Because I’d used the power of the New Sun to retrace time until the New Sun itself no longer existed. Once I believed you three were gods, and then that the Hierarchs were still greater gods. So the autochthons believed me a god, and feared I would plunge into the western sea leaving them in night with winter always. But only the Increate is God, kindling reality and blowing it out. All the rest of us, even Tzadkiel, can only wield the forces he’s created.” I have never been clever at thinking of analogies, and now I groped for one. “I was like an army retreating so far that it’s cut off from its base.” I could not bite back the next words. “An army defeated.”
“In war no force may fail, Severian, until its trumpets blow ‘Surrender.’ Till then, though it may die, it does not know defeat.”
Barbatus remarked, “And who can say that this was not for the best? We’re all tools in his hands.”
I told him, “I understand something more — something I had not really understood until this moment: why Master Malrubius spoke to me of loyalty to the Divine Entity, of loyalty to the person of the monarch. He meant that we must trust, that we must not refuse our destinies. You sent him, of course.”
“The words were his, just the same — by now you should know that, too. Like the Hierogrammates, we summon personalities of the past from remembrance; and like the Hierogrammates, we do not falsify them.”
“But there are so many things I don’t know. When we met o
n Tzadkiel’s ship, you hadn’t known me before, and from that I knew it to be our final meeting. Yet you are here, all three.”
Sweetly Famulimus sang, “Thus surprised are we, Severian, to find you here where men have scarce begun. Though we have traced the time line down so far, whole ages of the world have passed since we’ve seen you.”
“And yet you knew I would be here?”
Stepping from the shadows, Barbatus said, “Because you told us so. Have you forgotten we were your councilors? You told us how the man Hildegrin was destroyed, so we’ve watched this place for you.”
“And I. I died too. The autochthons — my people—”
I broke off, but no one else spoke. And at last I said, “Ossipago, bring your light, please, to where Barbatus stood.”
The mechanism turned his sensors toward Barbatus, but did not move.
Famulimus sang softly, “Barbatus, you must guide him now, I fear. But truly our Severian should know. How can we ask that he should bear all loads, while yet by us not treated as a man?”
Barbatus nodded, and Ossipago moved nearer the place where Barbatus had been standing when I woke. I saw there what I had feared to see, the corpse of the man the autochthons had called Head of Day. Golden bands wreathed his arms, bracelets studded with orange jacinths and flashing green emeralds.
“Tell me how you did this,” I demanded.
Barbatus stroked his beard and did not reply.
“You know who schooled you by the restless sea, and fought for you when Urth lay in the scales,” Famulimus crooned.
I stared at her. Her face was as lovely and as inhuman as ever — not without expression, but bearing an expression that had little or nothing to do with mankind and its concerns.
“Am I an eidolon? A ghost?” I looked at my hands, hoping to be reassured by their solidity. They were shaking; to quiet them I had to jam them against my thighs.
Barbatus said, “What you call eidolons are not ghosts, but beings maintained in existence by some external source of energy. What you call matter is all, in actuality, merely bound energy. The only difference is that some is held in material form by its own energy.”
At that moment I wanted to cry more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. “Actuality? You think there’s really any actuality?” The release of tears would have been nirvana; harsh training yet held, and no tears came. For an instant I wondered wildly whether eidolons could weep at all.
“You speak of what is real, Severian; thus do you hold to what is real still. A moment since we spoke of him who makes. Among your folk the simple call him God, and you, the lettered, name him Increate. What were you ever but his eidolon?”
“Who maintains me in existence now? Ossipago? You may rest, Ossipago.”
Ossipago rumbled, “I don’t respond to commands from you, Severian. You learned that long ago.”
“I suppose that even if I were to kill myself, Ossipago could still call me back to existence.”
Barbatus shook his head, though not as a human being would have. “There would be no point — you could take your life again. If you truly want to die, go ahead. There are funeral offerings here, including a great many stone knives. Ossipago will bring you one.”
I felt as real as I ever have; and when I searched among my memories, I found Valena there still, and Thecla and old Autarch, and the boy Severian (who had been Severian only). “No,” I said. “We will live.”
“I thought so.” Barbatus smiled. “We’ve known you half our lives now, Severian, and you’re a weed that grows best when stepped upon.”
Ossipago seemed to clear his throat. “If you wish to speak more, I will take us to a better time. I have a link to the pile on our craft.”
Famulimus shook her noble head, and Barbatus looked at me.
“I’d rather we conferred here,” I told them. “Barbatus, when we were on the ship, I fell down a shaft. One doesn’t fall swiftly there, I know; but I fell a long way, I think nearly to the center. I was badly hurt, and Tzadkiel cared for me.” I paused, trying to remember all the details I could.
“Proceed,” Barbatus urged me. “We don’t know what you’re going to tell us.”
“I found a dead man there, with a scarred cheek like mine. His leg had been injured years before, just like mine. He was hidden between two machines.”
“Yet meant for you to find, Severian?” Famulimus asked.
“Perhaps. I knew Zak had done it. And Zak was Tzadkiel, or part of Tzadkiel; but I didn’t understand that then.”
“Yet you do now. It is the time for speech.”
I did not know what else to say and finished weakly, “The dead man’s face was bruised, but it looked very much like mine. I told myself that I couldn’t have died there, that I wouldn’t die there, because I felt sure I’d be laid in the mausoleum in our necropolis. I’ve told you about that.”
Ossipago rumbled, “Many times.”
“The funeral bronze is so like me, so much like the way I look now. Then there was Apu-Punchau. When he appeared…the Cumaean, she was a Hierodule, like you. Father Inire told me.”
Famulimus and Barbatus nodded.
“When Apu-Punchau appeared, he was me. I knew it, but I didn’t understand.”
“Neither did we,” Barbatus said, “when you told us about it. I think I may now.”
“Then tell me!”
He gestured toward the corpse. “There is Apu-Punchau.”
“Of course, I knew that long ago. They called me by that name, and I saw this place built. It was to be a temple, the Temple of Day , the Old Sun. But I’m Severian, and Apu-Punchau the Head of Day, too. How could my body rise from death? How could I die here at all? The Cumaean said it wasn’t his tomb, but his house.” I seemed to see her before me as I spoke, the old woman hiding the wise snake.
“She told you too that she knew not that age,” Famulimus sang.
I nodded.
“How could the warm sun die that rose each day? And how could you then die, that were that sun? Your people left you here with many a chant. And sealed your door, that you might live forever.”
Barbatus said, “We know that eventually you’ll bring the New Sun, Severian. We’ve passed through the time, as through many others, to that meeting with you in the giant’s castle — which we thought would be our last. But do you know when the New Sun was made? The sun you brought to this system to heal its old one?”
“When I was landed on Urth it was the age of Typhon, when the first great mountain was carved. But before that I was on Tzadkiel’s ship.”
“Which sometimes sails more swiftly than the winds that drive it,” Barbatus grunted. “So you know nothing.”
Famulimus sang, “If you would have our counsel now, tell all. We cannot be good guides if we walk blind.”
And so, beginning with the murder of my steward, I recounted everything that had happened to me from that time until the last moment I could recall before I woke in the House of Apu-Punchau. I have never been apt in winnowing needed details from the rest (as you, the reader of this, know too well), in part because it seems to me that all details are needed. Still less so was I then, when I could labor with my tongue and not my pen; I told them a great many things that I have not put into this record.
While I spoke, a sunbeam found its way through some chink; so I knew that I had returned to life in the night, and that a new day had begun.
And I was talking still when the potters’ wheels began their whir, and we heard the chatter of women trooping to the river that would fail their town when the sun cooled.
At last I said, “So much for me, and now for you. Can you unravel the mystery of Apu-Punchau for me now that you’ve heard all this?”
Barbatus nodded. “I believe we can. You know already that when a ship sails swiftly between the stars, minutes and days on board may be years or centuries on Urth.”
“It must be so,” I admitted, “when time was first measured by the coming and going of the light.”
“Therefore your star, the White Fountain, was born some while, and doubtless a long while, before the reign of Typhon. I’d guess that the time is not far distant now.”
Famulimus appeared to smile, and perhaps it was in fact a smile. “Indeed it must be so, Barbatus, when by the star’s own power he came here. Flying his time, he runs till he must halt; then halts he here because he cannot run.”
If Barbatus was discomposed by this interruption, nothing indicated it. “It may be that your power will return when the light of your star is first seen on Urth. If that is so, when that time comes Apu-Punchau may waken, provided he chooses to leave the place where he has found himself.”
“Wake to death in life?” I asked. “How horrible!”
Famulimus disagreed. “Say wonderful, Severian, instead. To life from death to aid the folk that loved him.”
I considered that for a time while all three stood waiting patiently. At last I said, “’Perhaps death is only horrible to us because it’s a dividing of the terror of life from the wonder of it. We see only the terror, which is left behind.”
Ossipago rumbled, “So we hope, Severian, as much as you.”
“But if Apu-Punchau is myself, what was the body I found on Tzadkiel’s ship?”
Nearly whispering, Famulimus sang, “The man whom you saw dead your mother bore. Or so it seems to me from what’s been said. Now I would weep for her if I had tears, though not — perhaps — for you still living here. What we did here for you, Severian, the mighty Tzadkiel accomplished there, remembrance taking from your dead mind to build your mind and you anew.”
“Do you mean that when I stood before Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice, I was an eidolon Tzadkiel himself had made?”
Ossipago muttered, “Made’s too strong a term, if I have as much, access to your tongue as I like to think. Made tangible, possibly.”
