Castle of Days (1992) SSC

by Gene Wolfe

  Since I mentioned my job in “Helioscope,” perhaps I should end this essay by explaining just what it is I do. I am what is called a technical journalist. Specifically, I am a senior editor on the staff of Plant Engineering magazine. I write articles about bearings and electric drills and hydraulic pumps and so forth; and I buy articles other people have written about such topics and edit them and, in the famous phrase, “see them through the press.” I take my own photos—black-and-white and color—conduct my own interviews, do my own research, and travel all over the United States. (But mostly to Cleveland and Detroit, it seems, and for some reason, Philadelphia.) I have a nice, big, private office with a carpeted floor and a walnut desk, not to mention my typewriter and a ceiling-high bookcase. I share a secretary with two other senior editors, but have no actual subordinates to worry about. It could be a lot worse.

  At present Plant Engineering has an editorial staff of 25 persons, headed by Leo Spector, who is The Editor and my boss. The 25 include the managing editor (that means the editor’s right-hand man), nine senior editors, half a dozen or so junior editors with various titles (copy editor, production editor, proofreader, bulletins editor, and so on) and three artists. Together we put out a magazine that averages about 200 pages every two weeks.

  Hands and Feet

  If you take down The Shadow of the Torturer, open the cover, and begin to read, before you ever come to the text proper you will strike four lines of verse:

  A thousand ages in thy sight

  Are like an evening gone;

  Short as the watch that ends the night

  Before the rising sun.

  All four of the volumes are prefaced by similar epigraphs. Since the publication of Shadow, I have learned somewhat to my dismay that some readers assume that I wrote these introductory verses myself. I didn’t. They are, as our forefathers would have said, by divers hands; I would like to talk a little about whose hands those were, and about some other scraps of verse that are to be found in the texts themselves.

  It was that first quotation, met by accident, that persuaded me to use epigraphs; it embodied so many of the things I was trying to put into Shadow—great spans of time, travel through time by which ages are passed like the numbered doors along a hallway, sun symbolism. Best of all, watch used as a unit of duration. I had already decided that the “watch” would be the hour of Urth. (It is actually a little longer than an hour: one twentieth of an Urth day.) Those lines are the work of Isaac Watts (1674-1748), and are a part of a poem he called “Psalm XC.” If, like me, you are apt to bellow out that fine old carol “Joy to the World” at about the time that eggnog makes its appearance in the dairy case of the supermarket, then you are already somewhat familiar with Watts, whether or not you recognized his name. He also wrote:

  ‘Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain “You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again.”

  If that couplet has a familiar ring, it may be because it recalls the song of that eminent versifier the Mock Turtle:

  ‘Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare “You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”

  But that is a Carroll of another kind.

  Before I leave Watts, I can’t resist one last quote:

  But, children, you should never let

  Such angry passions rise,

  Your little hands were never made

  To tear each other’s eyes.

  If Master Palaemon wrote poetry—and for all I know, he may—he might have written that.

  The Claw of the Conciliator opens with a quotation from Gertrude von Le Fort, about whom I know next to nothing except that she wrote the lines I borrowed:

  But strength still goes out from your thorns, and from your abysses the sound of music.

  Your Shadows lie on my heart like roses and your nights are like strong wine.

  which I think very beautiful. You’ll already have noted the rose symbolism. The poem’s feeling of space complements the feeling of time in the first quotation. The mentions of shadows and nights link Claw to the first volume, The Shadow of the Torturer; and of course shadows and night may be said to evoke the sun by emphasizing its absence, though they do not symbolize it.

  The third volume, The Sword of the Lictor, has for its epigraph a quotation from Osip Mandelstam:

  Into the distance disappear the mounds of human heads.

  I dwindle—go unnoticed now.

  But in affectionate books, in children’s games, I will rise from the dead to say: the sun!

  Mandelstam was last seen in December 1938, rooting through a garbage heap near Vladivostok. He had ventured some remarks critical of the Soviet Government, which drolly illustrated his error by sending him to Siberia to be starved and beaten to death. What more can I say but that Sword is one of those “affectionate books” and The Castle of the Otter another?

  The fourth and last volume, The Citadel of the Autarch, will begin with the following lines from “The Dawn Wind”:

  At two o’clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.

  And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

  “The Dawn Wind” is by Rudyard Kipling. I just pulled his collected verse off my shelf to check the quotation and make certain I had the title right, and I see, written in my mother’s script inside the front cover: Gene R. Wolfe Xmas 1945 1619 Vassar Houston 6, Tex. K3-1929. I was 14 at Christmas in 1945, so I’ve been reading Kipling for a long time. Actually, I’m sure I began much earlier, with the Just So Stories. (For years I wondered where Kipling had acquired that strange first name. Just in case you’ve wondered too, his father proposed to his mother on the shore of Lake Rudyard.) Kipling belongs to that extensive class of Victorian writers, of which G. K. Chesterton is the archetype, who were once wildly popular and are now regarded with sublime contempt by critics who have never read them. He is the only one of our four poets—as far as I know—who wrote sf. “With the Night Mail” is his best-known story in the genre, but by no means his only one. About four months ago, at a party at Betty Hull’s, Fred Pohl told me he was editing a collection of Kipling’s sf. I believe it will be the first such collection ever published; and it should be well worth reading. I was able to tell Fred about a Kipling book he had never heard of, and I find I’m unable to resist the temptation to tell you about it too. Its title is Thy Servant a Dog, and the narrator is a Scotty. It has been called the worst book ever perpetrated by a major writer, but I’ve always found it fun. Here’s a sample:

  Now we live at Place in Country, next to Park, and plenty good smells. We are all here. Please look! I count paws. There is me, and Own God—Master. There is Slippers, and Slippers’s Own God—Missus. That is all my paws. There is Adar. There is Cookey. There is James-with-Kennel-that-Moves. There is Harry-with-Spade. That is all Slippers’s paws. I cannot count more; but there is Maids, an Odd-man, and Postey, and Telegrams, and Pleasmbutcher and People. And there is Kitchen Cat which runs up Wall. Bad! Bad! Bad!

  Besides the epigraphs, there are scraps of verse here and there, most of which I wrote myself. Severian hides his chrisos with a spell:

  Where I put you, there you lie,

  Never let a stranger spy,

  Like glass grow to any eye,

  Not of me.

  Here be safe, never leave it,

  Should a hand come, deceive it,

  Let strange eyes not believe it,

  Till I see.

  The round, yellow coin symbolizes the sun, of course. Later the imprisoned Thecla recites:

  Here Rose the Graced, not Rose the Chaste, reposes. The scent that rises is no scent of roses.

  Those lines were originally applied to the Fayre Rosamund (Rosamund means rose of the world), the mistress of Henry II of England. Henry built a maze to hide her, but one day Queen Eleanor came with her knights and
surprised Rosamund while she was embroidering. (The king was often heard to say she had great talent.) She fled into the maze; but she dropped her needlework as she ran, and the ball of thread remained in the pocket of her gown. The queen’s knights followed the thread and killed her. She died in 1175. If you’re able to locate a nursery specializing in rare and unusual roses, you may be able to buy Rosa Mundi (Rosa gallica versicolor). It was named for her, quite possibly while she was still alive, making her the first person in history for whom a rose has been named. Grow it in your yard—and it will grow like a weed almost anywhere, given sunlight and water—and you’ll have a relic of the Middle Ages every bit as authentic as the White Tower and a good deal more romantic. The blossoms are light red (it is this red, not pink, that is properly called rose) striped with pale blush. The plant blooms only for about three weeks in June, but during those three weeks it is almost covered with flowers.

  Claw proper starts with a chapter titled “The Village of Saltus.” Severian wakes in an inn in this village (its name indicates a narrow wooded valley) and goes outside to watch some soldiers who have been landed there march up the village street. The men are slingers and members of “an elite corps of the erentarii”—crack light infantry, in other words. They sing as they march:

  When I was a lad, my mother said,

  “You dry your tears and go to bed;

  I know my son will travel far,

  Born beneath a shooting star.”

  In after years, my father said,

  As he pulled my hair and knocked my head,

  “They mustn’t whimper at a scar,

  Who’re born beneath a shooting star.”

  A mage I met, and the mage he said,

  “I see for you a future red,

  Fire and riot, raid and war,

  O born beneath a shooting star.”

  A shepherd I met, and the shepherd said,

  “We sheep must go where we are led,

  To Dawn-Gate where the angels are,

  Following the shooting star.”

  Of all the material in the four volumes of The Book of the New Sun, I think this little song gave me the most trouble. It had to be something soldiers could march a quick-step to. It also had to be something these soldiers would march to. (Their slings projected pyrotechnic missiles, the “shooting stars” of their song.) It also had to illuminate—darkly—Severian’s past and future.

  I suspect that I am a good deal more interested in my little bits of verse than you are; so we’ll skip over a few, deal with something rather less commonplace, then close off this essay.

  In The Sword of the Lictor, toward the end, you will find a Hierodule named Famulimus. Famulimus talks somewhat differently from my other characters. Read what he has to say, and if nothing strikes you as odd, read it again, aloud.

  “Though you did not now pass our test, I meant no less than what I said to you. How often we have taken counsel, Liege. How often we have done each other’s will. You know the water women, I believe. Are Ossipago, brave Barbutus, I, to be so much less sapient than they?”

  If this alien actually sounds a little alien, even with a vocabulary of contemporary English, it is because he speaks in metrical “feet,” each foot consisting of two syllables. In other words, Famulimus is speaking blank verse.

  The whole subject of poetry in sf deserves a book, but it will never get one. If you are interested in it, you should join the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

  Words Weird and Wonderful

  Ever since The Shadow of the Torturer was published, people who like it have been asking, “Which words are real, and which are made-up?” And people who don’t ask, “Why did you use so many funny words?”

  The answers are that all the words are real, and I used odd words to convey the flavor of an odd place at an odd time. Some fans seem to be able to tolerate any amount of gibberish, so long as it is gibberish; but let a hard-working writer venture some perfectly legitimate word like epopt, and—but I’d better stop before my tears get my typewriter all rusty.

  Anyway, what I’d like to do now is go through Shadow and explain some of the unusual words. Unless you are a very unusual person (but then, you are) I’ll explain some you know perfectly well—you can skip those paragraphs—and leave out some you’d like to know more about. But I don’t know what either of us can do about the latter, and I’ll try to be reasonable, prudent, and downright sapient.

  CHAPTER I

  BARBICAN A defensive outwork protecting an entrance to a fortified place. “And try to get through the barbican without a safeconduct?” Drotte objects when Eata suggests they circle the necropolis. Guards would be stationed in the barbican, of course.

  GALLIPOTS An old slang word for those assistants or apprentices who pounded drugs, rolled pills, collected herbs, and so forth for an apothecary.

  SIMPLES Single ingredients that would later be compounded into medicines. These are most often herbs of various kinds.

  MYSTES Initiates in a mystery cult. Actually, the word mystes is probably older than the word mystery, which seems to have been derived from it. A mystery cult was one which made the person who reached the heart of it a mystes. Today we know that it was all what the Wizard of Oz would call humbug, that there is nothing but mumbo-jumbo at the heart of cults. In fact, we are so smart today that we know that without even knowing what the secrets were. Democritus (b. 460 B.C.) said, “By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space,” but the idea that he may have known about time travel or anything like that is pure hooey. Democritus was called The Laughing Philosopher.

  BADELAIRE A short, heavy, curved, single-edged sword with S-shaped quillons. Wilkinson’s Swords and Daggers shows a beautiful one in Plate 32. He says it’s a “very fine falchion-like sword.” Well, yes, it’s much more like a falchion than a can-opener; but it’s a badelaire.

  DHOLES The wild “red dogs” of India. They hunt in large packs and would do more damage to domestic livestock if the Indians had more of it for them to eat. The entire matter of “wild dogs” is badly confused. The domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is no more than a tamed wolf (C. lupus). Domestic dogs will mate readily with their wild relatives, by the way, and the crossings produce fertile offspring. The wild dog of Australia, the dingo, (C. dingo, what else?) is just our oldest friend, the domestic dog, with his hat turned up on one side. But animals like the dhole (Cuon dukhunensis) and the cape hunting dog (Lycaon tricolor venaticus) are much further from the domestic dog than the wolf is. To confuse everything still more, the word dhole means wolf.

  AMSCHASPAND Very roughly, a Zoroastrian archangel. There are six, and they attend upon Ahura Mazda, the good god.

  ARCTOTHER A large bear, now extinct. So many extinct animals reappear in The Shadow of the Torturer, and the subject is so complex, that I propose to treat them only briefly in this essay. Arctothers would make great rugs.

  CHAPTER II

  MATACHIN TOWER In a Spanish tradition, matachins are masked sword dancers. Some authorities say the tradition is derived from the Moors. Well, maybe. To the other inhabitants of the Citadel, the Seekers for Truth and Penitence are most visible on the feast of Holy Katharine, when the journeymen, wearing their masks, dance with their beheading swords.

  AUTARCH Literally, self-ruler. A ruler subject to no restraints, internal or external.

  EXULTANTS High-born people. Used ironically in The Book of the New Sun because the exultants are taller than the commonality.

  CACOGENS Literally, those filthy born. More broadly: degenerate. In The Book of the New Sun, an ethnic slur directed against those born off-world.

  URTH The eldest of the Norns, who represents the Past. She is also called Urdur. The name of the planet where the action takes place.

  WILDGRAVE The chief of a band of foresters.

  BURGESS The representative of a borough in a legislative body.

  NENUPHARS A kind of water-lily having
a wide, blue flower.

  KHAN A large building where travelers can stable their mounts and spread their bedding in unfurnished rooms.

  CHAPTER III

  OUBLIETTE Literally, a place of forgetting. A dungeon entered from above.

  MINIM A sixtieth of a drachma.

  TINCTURE A medicinal substance dissolved in alcohol.

  MASTIFFS One of the oldest and largest breeds of dogs. Think of a St. Bernard with a coat like a Great Dane’s.

  DIATRYMAE “Killer ostriches.” Now extinct.

  DIMARCHI Literally, those who fight in two ways. Soldiers trained to act as infantry or cavalry as the occasion demands. Dragoons.

  EIDOLON An apparition, a phantom.

  CHAPTER IV

  TRISKELE A design characterized by three radiating legs. (The name of Severian’s three-legged dog.) THYLACODON A primitive opossum, now extinct.

  FULIGIN Literally, soot-colored. A complete black, without gloss.

  BARYLAMBDAS Large, primitive, plant-eating animals, now extinct.

  GLYPTODONS Large animals related to armadillos, now extinct.

  SMILODON A kind of saber-toothed tiger.

  GLAIVE A polearm with a head like the blade of a wide sword.

  CHAPTER V

  SABRETACHES Flat cases originally intended for maps and documents, worn on the sword belt.