by Wolfe, Gene
At once, as though a wall had collapsed to let light into a tomb, many of the memories of the House Absolute, mine by absorption now from the life of Thecla, coalesced. I understood something that had been implicit in the doctor’s play and in many of the stories Thecla had told me as well, though she had never mentioned it directly: The whole of this great palace lay underground—or rather, its roofs and walls were heaped with soil planted and landscaped, so that we had been walking all this time over the seat of the Autarch’s power, which I had thought still some distance away.
We did not go down into that grotto, which no doubt opened onto chambers quite unsuited to the detention of prisoners, or into any of the next score or so we passed. At last, however, we came upon one far more grim, though no less beautiful. The stair by which we entered it had been carved to resemble a natural formation of dark rock, irregular and sometimes treacherous. Water dripped from above, and ferns and dark ivy grew in the upper parts of this artificial cavern, where a little sunlight still found its way. In the lower regions, a thousand steps down, the walls were studded with blind fungi; some of these were luminous; some strewed the air with strange, musty odors; some suggested fantastic phallic fetishes.
In the center of this dark garden, supported by scaffolding and green with verdigris, hung a set of gongs. It appeared to me that they were intended to be rung by the wind; yet it seemed impossible that any wind should ever reach them.
So I thought, at least, until one of the praetorians opened a heavy door of bronze and worm-scarred wood in one of the dark stone walls. Then a draft of cold, dry air blew through that doorway and set the gongs to swaying and clashing, so well tuned that their chiming seemed the purposeful composition of some musician, whose thoughts were now in exile here.
In looking up at the gongs (which the praetorians did not prevent me from doing) I saw the statues, forty at least, who had followed us all the way across the gardens. They now rimmed the pit, motionless at last, and looked down on us like a frieze of cenotaphs.
I had expected to be the only occupant of a small cell, I suppose because I unconsciously transferred the practices of our own oubliette to this unknown place. Nothing more different from the actual arrangement could have been imagined. The entrance opened on no corridor of narrow doors, but to a spacious and carpeted one with a second entrance opposite. Hastarii with flaming spears stood as sentries before this second set of doors. At a word from one of the praetorians, they swung them open; beyond lay a vast, shadowy, bare room with a very low ceiling. Several dozen persons, men and women and a few children, were scattered in diverse parts of it—most singly, but some in couples or groups. Families occupied alcoves, and in some places screens of rags had been erected to provide privacy.
Into this we were thrust. Or rather I was thrust and the unfortunate Jonas was thrown. I tried to catch him as he fell, and I at least prevented his head from striking the floor; as I did so, I heard the doors slam shut behind me.
XV
Fool’s Fire
I was ringed by faces. Two women took Jonas from me, and promising to care for him carried him away. The rest began to ply me with questions. What was my name? What clothes were those I wore? Where had I come from? Did I know such a one, or such a one, or such a one? Had I ever been to this town or that? Was I of the House Absolute? Of Nessus? From the east bank of Gyoll or the west? What quarter? Did the Autarch still live? What of Father Inire? Who was archon in the city? How went the war? Had I news of so-and-so, a commander? Of so-and-so, a trooper? Of so-and-so, a chiliarch? Could I sing, recite, play an instrument?
As may be imagined, in such a welter of inquiries I was able to answer almost none. When the first flurry was spent, an old, gray-bearded man and a woman who seemed almost equally old silenced the others and drove them away. Their method, which would surely have succeeded nowhere but here, was to clap each by the shoulder, point to the most remote part of the room, and say distinctly, “Plenty of time.” Gradually the others fell silent and walked to what seemed the limits of hearing, until at last the low room was as still as it had been when the doors opened.
“I am Lomer,” the old man said. He cleared his throat noisily. “This is Nicarete.”
I told him my name, and Jonas’s.
The old woman must have heard the concern in my voice. “He will be safe, rest assured. Those girls will treat him as well as they can, in the hope that he’ll soon be able to talk to them.” She laughed, and something in the way she threw back her well shaped head told me she had once been beautiful.
I began to question them in my turn, but the old man interrupted me. “Come with us,” he said, “to our corner. We will be able to sit at ease there, and I can offer you a cup of water.”
As soon as he pronounced the word, I realized that I was terribly thirsty. He led us behind the rag screen nearest the doors and poured water for me from an earthenware jug into a delicate porcelain cup. There were cushions there, and a little table not more than a span high.
“Question for question,” he said. “That’s the old rule. We have told you our names and you have told us yours, and so we begin again. Why were you taken?”
I explained that I did not know, unless it were merely for violating the grounds.
Lomer nodded. His skin was of that pale color peculiar to those who never see the sun; with his straggling beard and uneven teeth, he would have been repulsive in any other setting; but he belonged here as much as the half-obliterated tiles of the floor did. “I am here by the malice of the Chatelaine Leocadia. I was seneschal to her rival the Chatelaine Nympha, and when she brought me here to the House Absolute with her in order that we might review the accounts of the estate while she attended the rites of the philomath Phocas, the Chatelaine Leocadia entrapped me by the aid of Sancha, who—”
The old woman, Nicarete, interrupted him. “Look!” she exclaimed. “He knows her.”
And so I did. A chamber of pink and ivory had risen in my mind, a room of which two walls were clear glass exquisitely framed. Fires burned there on marble hearths, dimmed by the sunbeams streaming through the glass but filling the room with a dry heat and the odor of sandalwood. An old woman wrapped in many shawls sat in a chair that was like a throne; a decanter of cut crystal and several brown phials stood on an inlaid table at her side. “An elderly woman with a hooked nose,” I said. “The Dowager of Fors.”
“You do know her then.” Lomer’s head nodded slowly, as though it were answering the question put by its own mouth. “You are the first in many years.”
“Let us say that I remember her.”
“Yes.” The old man nodded. “They say she is dead now. But in my day she was a fine, healthy young woman. The Chatelaine Leocadia persuaded her to it, then caused us to be discovered, as Sancha knew she would. She was but fourteen, and no crime was charged to her. We had done nothing in any case; she had only begun to undress me.”
I said, “You must have been quite a young man yourself.”
He did not answer, so Nicarete replied for him. “He was twenty-eight.”
“And you,” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“I am a volunteer.”
I looked at her in some surprise.
“Someone must make amends for the evil of Urth, or the New Sun will never come. And someone must call attention to this place and the others like it. I am of an armiger family that may yet remember me, and so the guards must be careful of me, and of all the others while I remain here.”
“Do you mean that you can leave, and will not?”
“No,” she said, and shook her head. Her hair was white, but she wore it flowing about her shoulders as young women do. “I will leave, but only on my own terms, which are that all those who have been here so long that they have forgotten their crimes be set free as well.”
I remembered the kitchen knife I had stolen for Thecla, and the ribbon of crimson that had crept from under the door of her cell in our oubliette, and I said, “Is it true that p
risoners really forget their crimes here?”
Lomer looked up at that. “Unfair! Question for question—that’s the rule, the old rule. We still keep the old rules here. We’re the last of the old crop, Nicarete and me, but while we last, the old rules still stand. Question for question. Have you friends who may strive for your release?”
Dorcas would, surely, if she knew where I was. Dr. Talos was as unpredictable as the figures seen in clouds, and for that very reason might seek to have me freed, though he had no real motive for doing so. Most importantly, perhaps, I was Vodalus’s messenger, and Vodalus had at least one agent in the House Absolute—him to whom I was supposed to deliver his message. I had tried to cast away the steel twice while Jonas and I were riding north, but had found that I could not; the alzabo, it seemed, had laid yet another spell upon my mind. Now I was glad of that.
“Have you friends? Relations? If you have, you may be able to do something for the rest of us.”
“Friends, possibly,” I said. “They may try to help me if they ever learn what has happened to me. Is it likely they may succeed?”
In that way we talked for a long time; if I were to write it all here, there would be no end to this history. In that room, there is nothing to do but talk and play a few simple games, and the prisoners do those things until all the savor has gone out of them, and they are left like gristle a starving man has chewed all day. In many respects, these prisoners are better off than the clients beneath our own tower; by day they have no fear of pain, and none is alone. But because most of them have been there so long, and few of our clients had been long confirmed, ours were, for the most part, filled with hope, while those in the House Absolute are despairing.
After what must have been ten watches or more, the glowing lamps in the ceiling began to fade, and I told Lomer and Nicarete I could remain awake no longer. They led me to a spot far from the door, where it was very dark, and explained that it would be mine until one of the other prisoners died and I succeeded to a better position.
As they left, I heard Nicarete say, “Will they come tonight?” Lomer made some reply, but I could not say what that reply was, and I was too fatigued to ask. My feet told me there was a thin pallet on the floor; I sat down and had begun to stretch myself full length when my hand touched a living body.
Jonas’s voice said, “You needn’t jerk back. It’s only me.”
“Why didn’t you say something? I saw you walking about, but I couldn’t break away from the two old people. Why didn’t you come over?”
“I didn’t say anything because I was thinking. And I didn’t come over because I couldn’t break away from the women who had me, at first. Afterward, those people couldn’t break away from me. Severian, I must escape from here.”
“Everyone wants to, I suppose,” I told him. “Certainly I do.”
“But I must.” His thin, hard hand—his left hand of flesh—gripped mine. “If I don’t, I will kill myself or lose my reason. I’ve been your friend, haven’t I?” His voice dropped to the faintest of whispers. “Will the talisman you carry … the blue gem … set us free? I know the praetorians didn’t find it; I watched while they searched you.”
“I don’t want to take it out,” I said. “It gleams so in the dark.”
“I’ll turn one of these mats on its side and hold it to shield us.”
I waited until I could feel the pallet in position, then drew out the Claw. Its light was so faint I might have shaded it with my hand.
“Is it dying?” Jonas asked.
“No, it’s often like this. But when it is active—when it transmuted the water in our carafe and when it awed the man-apes—it shines brightly. If it can procure our escape at all, I don’t believe it will do so now.”
“We must take it to the door. It might spring the lock.” His voice was shaking.
“Later, when the others are all asleep. I’ll free them if we can get free ourselves; but if the door doesn’t open—and I don’t think it will—I don’t want them to know I have the Claw. Now tell me why you must escape at once.”
“While you were talking to the old people I was being questioned by a whole family,” Jonas began. “There were several old women, a man of about fifty, another about thirty, three other women, and a flock of children. They had carried me to their own little niche in the wall, you see, and the other prisoners couldn’t come there unless they were invited, which they weren’t. I expected that they’d ask me about friends on the outside. or politics, or the fighting in the mountains. Instead I seemed to be only a kind of amusement for them. They wanted to hear about the river, and where I had been, and how many people dressed the way I did. And the food outside—there were a great many questions about food, some of them quite ludicrous. Had I ever seen butchering? And did the animals plead for their lives? And was it true that the ones who make sugar carried poison swords and would fight to defend it? …
“They had never seen bees, and seemed to think they were about the size of rabbits.”
“After a time I began to ask questions of my own and found that none of them, not even the oldest woman, had ever been free. Men and women are put into this room alike, it seems, and in the course of nature they produce children. And though some are taken away, most remain here throughout their lives. They have no possessions and no hope of release. Actually, they don’t know what freedom is, and although the older man and one girl told me seriously that they would like to go outside, I don’t think they meant to stay. The old women are seventh-generation prisoners, so they said—but one let it slip that her mother had been a seventh-generation prisoner as well.
“They are remarkable people in some respects. Externally they have been shaped completely by this place where they have spent all their lives. Yet beneath that are …” Jonas paused, and I could feel the silence pressing in all about us. “Family memories, I suppose you could call them. Traditions from the outside world that have been handed down to them, generation to generation, from the original prisoners from whom they are descended. They don’t know what some of the words mean any longer, but they cling to the traditions, to the stories, because those are all they have; the stories and their names.”
He fell silent. I had thrust the tiny spark of the Claw back into my boot, and we were in perfect darkness. His labored breathing was like the pumping of the bellows at a forge.
“I asked them the name of the first prisoner, the most remote from whom they counted their descent. It was Kimleesoong … Have you heard that name?”
I told him I had not.
“Or anything like it? Suppose it were three words.”
“No, nothing like that,” I said. “Most of the people I have known have had one-word names like you, unless a part of the name was a title, or a nickname of some sort that had been attached to it because there were too many Bolcans or Altos or whatever.”
“You told me once that you thought I had an unusual name. Kim Lee Soong would have been a very common kind of name when I was … a boy. A common name in places now sunk beneath the sea. Have you ever heard of my ship, Severian? She was the Fortunate Cloud.”
“A gambling ship? No, but—”
My eye was caught by a gleam of greenish light so faint that even in that darkness it was scarcely visible. At once there came a murmur of voices echoing and reechoing throughout the wide, low, crooked room. I heard Jonas scrambling to his feet. I did the same, but I was no sooner up than I was blinded by a flash of blue fire. The pain was as severe as I have ever felt; it seemed as though my face were being torn away. I would have fallen if it had not been for the wall.
Somewhere farther off the blue fire flashed again, and a woman cried out.
Jonas was cursing—at last, the tone of his voice told me he was cursing, though the words came in tongues unknown to me. I heard his boots on the floor. There was another flash, and I recognized the lightning-like sparks I had seen the day Master Gurloes, Roche, and I administered the revolutionary to Thecla. No doubt Jonas
screamed as I had, but by that time there was such bedlam I could not distinguish his voice.
The greenish light grew stronger, and while I watched, still more than half paralyzed with pain and wracked by as much fear as I can recall ever having experienced, it gathered itself into a monstrous face that glared at me with saucer eyes, then quickly faded to mere dark.
All this was more terrifying than my pen could ever convey, though I were to slave over this part of my account forever. It was the fear of blindness as well as of pain, but we were all, for all that mattered, already blind. There was no light, and we could make none. There was not one of us who could light a candle or so much as strike fire to tinder. All around that cavernous room, voices screamed, wept, and prayed. Over the wild din I heard the clear laughter of a young woman; then it was gone.
XVI
Jonas
I hungered then for light as a starving man for meat, and at last I risked the Claw. Perhaps I should say that it risked me; it seemed I had no control of the hand that slid into my boot top and grasped it.
At once the pain faded, and there came a rush of azure light. The hubbub redoubled as the other wretched inhabitants of the place, seeing that radiance, feared some new terror was to be thrust among them. I pushed the gem down into my boot once more, and when its light was no longer visible began to grope for Jonas.
