by Gene Wolfe
“You’re one of my own people, then. You boarded the ship when I did.”
He nodded.
“And Gunnie boarded with you?”
“No, Gunnie’s an old hand. She’s not your enemy, Autarch, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
To my amazement, Zak looked at me and nodded. I said, “I know more of that than you do, Purn.”
As if he had not heard me, he said, “I’d been hoping she’d kiss me. You don’t even know the way they do it here.”
“She kissed me,” I told him, “when we met.”
“I saw it, and I saw you didn’t know what she meant. On this ship, every new hand’s supposed to have an old one for a lover, to teach him ship’s ways. The kiss is the sign.”
“Women have been known to kiss and kill.”
“Not Gunnie,” Purn insisted. “Or anyhow, I don’t think so.
“But you’d have killed me for that? For her love?”
“I signed to kill you, Autarch. Everybody knew where you were going, and that you meant to bring back the New Sun if you could, turn Urth upside down and kill everybody.”
So stunned was I, not just by what he said but by his very evident sincerity, that I took a step backward. He was up in a trice. Zak lunged for him. But though Zak’s long blade gashed his arm, it did not go deep; he was off like a hare.
He would have had Zak after him like a hound if I had not called him back. “I’ll kill him if he tries to kill me again,” I said. “And you may do the same. But I won’t hunt him down for doing what he believes is right. We’re both trying to save Urth, it seems.”
Zak stared at me for a moment, then lifted his shoulders. “Now I want to know about you. You worry me a great deal more than Purn. You can speak.”
He nodded vigorously. “Zak talk!”
“And you understand what I say.”
He nodded again, though more dubiously.
“Then tell me the truth. Wasn’t it you I helped Gunnie and Purn and the others capture?”
Zak stared, then shook his head and looked to one side in a fashion that showed very plainly he did not wish to continue the conversation.
“It was I, actually, who caught you; and I didn’t kill you. I think perhaps you feel grateful for that. When Purn tried to kill me — Zak! Come back!”
He had bolted, as I should have guessed he would, and with my crippled leg I had no hope of overtaking him. By some freak of the ship, he remained visible for a long time, appearing from one direction only to vanish in another, the soft slapping of his bare feet still audible even when Zak himself was out of sight. I was vividly reminded of a dream in which I had seen the orphan boy with the same name as my own, wearing the clothes I had worn as an apprentice, fleeing down corridors of glass; and it seemed to me that just as little Severian the orphan had in some sense been playing my part in that dream, so Zak’s face had taken on something of the long proportions of my own.
Yet this was no dream. I was wide awake and not drugged, merely lost somewhere in the innumerable windings of the ship. What sort of creature was Zak? Not an evil one, I thought; but then how many of the millions of species on Urth can be called evil in any real sense? The alzabo, certainly, and the blood bats and scorpions, perhaps; the snake called “yellow beard” and other poisonous snakes, and a few more. A dozen or two all told out of millions. I remembered Zak as he had been when I had seen him first in the hold: fallow-hued, with a shaggy coat that was not of hair or feathers; four-limbed and tailless, and surely headless as well. When I had seen him next in his cage, he had been covered with hair and had possessed a blunt-featured head; I had supposed my original impression mistaken without ever calling it clearly to mind.
On Urth there are lizards that take on the coloration of the things about them — green if they are among leaves, gray among stones, and so on. They do this not in order to capture their prey, as one might think, but to escape the eyes of birds. Might it not be, I thought, that on some other world there had come into being an animal that assumed the shape of others? Its original shape (if it could be said to possess one) might have been even stranger than the four-legged, nearly spherical thing I had first seen in the hold. Predators do not prey on their own kind, as a rule. What greater assurance of safety could the prey have than the appearance of a predator?
Human beings must have presented it with some severe problems: intelligence, speech, and even the distinction between hair on the head and clothing on the body. Quite possibly, the shaggy, ribbonlike covering had been a first attempt at clothing, made when Zak had believed it to be an organic part of his pursuers. He had soon learned differently; and if he had not been released by the mutists with the rest, we would eventually have discovered a naked man in his enclosure. Now he was a man for practical purposes, and at large. But it was no wonder he had run from me — to escape a member of the imitated species who probed his masquerade must have been one of his deepest instincts.
Pondering all this, I had been walking down the passage in which Zak had left me. It soon split into three, and I halted there for a moment, uncertain which to follow. There seemed to be no reason to prefer one to another, and I chose the left at random.
I had not gone far before I noticed I was having difficulty in walking. My first thought was that I was ill, my second that I had been drugged. Yet I felt no worse than I had upon leaving the cranny where Gunnie had hidden me. I was not dizzy, and did not sense that I might fall; nor did I experience any difficulty in maintaining my balance.
And yet I had begun to fall even as these thoughts crossed my mind. It was not that I had failed to recognize that I had lost my equilibrium, but simply that I was unable to take a step quickly enough to catch my weight, although I fell very slowly indeed. My legs seemed bound by some incomprehensible force, and when I tried to stretch my arms before me, they were bound too; I could not lift them from my sides.
Thus I hung in the air, unsupported and subject to the very slight attraction of the holds of the ship, but not falling. Or rather, falling so slowly that it seemed I should never come to rest on the dingy brown walkway of the passage. Somewhere in a more distant part of the ship, a bell tolled.
All this persisted without change for a long time, or at least for a time that seemed very long to me.
At last I heard footsteps. They were behind me; I could not turn my head to see. Fingers reached for the long dagger. I could not move it, but I clenched my fist on the grip and resisted. There was a jolt, and rushing blackness.
It seemed to me that I had fallen from my warm bed of rags. I groped for it, but found only a cold floor. The floor was not uncomfortable — I lay too lightly for that. Almost, I floated. Yet it was chill, so chill I might have floated in one of the shallow pools that form sometimes upon the ice of Gyoll, when there is a brief season of warmth, sometimes even in midwinter.
I wished to lie upon my rags. If I failed to find them again, Gunnie would not find me. I groped for them, but they were not there.
Seeking them, I stretched my mind. I cannot explain how; it seemed to take no effort at all to fill the whole ship with my mind. I knew the holds around which we crept as rats in a house creep through the walls encompassing its rooms, and they were mighty caverns crammed with strange goods. The mine of the man-apes had held silver bars, and gold; but every hold of the ship (and there were many more than seven) was mightier by far, and the least of their treasures were of distant stars.
I knew the ship, its strange mechanisms and those stranger still that were not in truth mechanisms, or living creatures, or anything for which we have words. In it were many human beings and many more that were not human — all sleeping, loving, working, fighting. I knew them all, but there were some I recognized and many I did not.
I knew the masts, taller by a hundred times than the thickness through the hull; the great sails spread like seas, objects huge in two dimensions that scarcely existed in the third. Once a picture of the ship had frightened me. Now I knew her
through some sense better than sight, and I surrounded her as she surrounded me. I found my bed of rags, yet I could not reach it.
Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for, or perhaps it is only the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know. However that may be, I felt my consciousness falling in upon itself as the matter does in the heart of a star, as a building does when stone comes to stone again as they were deep in Urth in the beginning, as an urn does that is broken. Ragged figures leaned above me, many of them human.
The largest of all was the raggedest of all, and that seemed strange to me until I realized that he might be unable to obtain clothing to fit him, and so continued to wear what he had worn aboard, having it patched and patched again.
He seized me and pulled me erect, aided by some others, though he in no way required their help. It was the height of folly to struggle with him — they were ten at least, and all armed. And yet I did so, striking and being struck in a brawl I could not win. Since I had cast my manuscript into the void, it seemed that I have been chivied from place to place, never my own master for more than a few moments at a time. Now I was ready to strike at whoever sought to govern me, and if it were my fate that governed me, I would strike at that too.
But it was useless. I hurt the leader, I believe, about as much as the frantic warfare of a boy often would have hurt me. He pinned my arms behind me, and another tied them there with wire and prodded me to walk. So driven, I staggered along, and at last was pushed into a narrow room where there stood the Autarch Severian, by his courtiers surnamed the Great, royally attired in his yellow robe and gem-rich cape, the bacculus of power in his hand.
Chapter XIII — The Battles
IT WAS only an image, yet so real an image that for an instant I was ready to believe it was a second self who stood there. As I watched, he wheeled, waved with preposterous grandeur toward a vacant corner of the room, and took two strides. With the third he vanished; but he had no sooner done so than he reappeared at the spot where he had first been. For a long breath he remained there, then he turned, waved once more, and strode forward.
The barrel-chested leader croaked an order in a tongue I did not understand, and someone loosed the wire that bound my hands.
Again my semblance stepped forward. Having relieved myself of something of the contempt I felt for him, I was able to note his dragging foot and the arrogant angle at which he poised his head. The leader spoke again, and a little man with dirty gray hair like Hethor’s told me, “He desires you to do likewise. If you do not, we will kill you.”
I scarcely heard him. I recalled the finery and gestures now, and without the least desire to return in memory to that time, I was captured by it as by the devouring wings in the air shaft. The pinnace (which I had not then known was merely the tender of this great ship) reared before me, its pont extended like a cobweb of silver. My Praetorians, shoulder to shoulder for more than a league, formed an avenue at once dazzling and nearly invisible.
“Get him!”
Ragged men and women swirled around me. For an instant I supposed I was to be killed because I would not walk and raise my arm; I tried to call to them to wait, but there was no time for that or anything.
Someone seized my collar and jerked me backward, choking. It was an error; when I reeled against him, I was too near for him to use his mace, and I drove my thumbs into his eyes.
Violet light stabbed at the frenzied crowd; half a dozen died. A dozen more with half-ruined faces and missing limbs screamed. The air was full of the sweet smoke of burning flesh. I wrested his mace from the man I had blinded and laid about me. It was foolish — yet the jibers, who bolted from the room as rats fly a ferret, fared worse than I; I saw them reaped like grain.
More wisely, the barrel-chested leader had thrown himself to the floor at the first shot, an ell or so from my feet. Now he sprang for me. The mace head was a gear wheel; it struck him where the shoulder joins the neck, with every ounce of strength I possessed behind it.
I might as effectively have clubbed an arsinoither. Still conscious and still strong, he struck me as that animal strikes a dire-wolf. The mace flew from my hands, and his weight crushed the breath from my body.
There was a blinding flash. I saw his seven-fingered hands upraised, but there was between them only the stump of a neck that smoldered as stumps do where a forest has burned. He charged again — not at me but at the wall, crashed into it, and charged once more, wildly, blindly.
A second shot nearly cleaved him in two.
I tried to rise and found my hands slippery with his blood. An arm, immensely strong, circled my waist and lifted me. A familiar voice asked, “Can you stand?”
It was Sidero, and quite suddenly he seemed an old friend. “I think so,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You fought them.”
“Not successfully.” I recalled my days of generalship. “Not well.”
“But you fought.”
“If you like,” I said. Sailors boiled around us now, some flourishing fusils, some bloody knives.
“Will you fight them again? Wait!” He moved his own fusil in a gesture meant to silence me. “I kept the knife and the pistol. Take them now.” He was still wearing my belt, with my weapons on it. Clamping the fusil under what remained of his right arm, he released the buckle and handed the whole to me.
“Thank you,” I repeated. I did not know what else to say; and I wondered whether he had indeed struck me unconscious, as I had supposed.
The metal vizard that was his face provided no clues to his feelings, his harsh voice hardly more. “Rest now. Eat, and we will talk later. We must fight again later.” He turned to face the milling hands. “Rest! Eat!”
I felt like doing both. I had no intention of fighting for Sidero, but the thought of a meal shared with comrades who would guard me while I slept was irresistible. It would be easy (so I supposed) to slip off afterward.
The hands had carried rations, and we soon turned up more, the stores of the jibers whom we had killed. In a short time, we were sitting down to a fragrant dinner of lentils boiled with pork and accompanied by fiery herbs, bread, and wine.
Perhaps there were beds or hammocks nearby, as well as the food and the stove, but I for one was too exhausted to look for them. Though my right arm still pained me, I knew it could not do so severely enough to keep me awake; my aching head had been soothed by the wine I had drunk. I was about to stretch myself where I sat — though I wished that Sidero had preserved my cloak too — when a strongly built sailor squatted beside me.
“Remember me, Severian?”
“I should,” I said, “since you know my name.” The fact was that I did not, though there was something familiar in his face.
“You used to call me Zak.”
I stared. The light was dim, but even after allowance had been made for that, I could hardly believe him the Zak I had known. At last I said, “Without mentioning a matter neither of us wishes to discuss, I cannot help but remark that you appear to have changed a great deal.”
“It’s the clothes — I took them from a dead man. I’ve shaved my face too. And Gunnie has scissors. She cut off some of my hair.”
“Gunnie’s here?”
Zak indicated the direction with a motion of his head. “You want to talk to her. She’d like to talk too, I think.”
“No,” I said. “Tell her I’ll talk with her in the morning.” I tried to think of something more to say, but all I could manage was, “Tell her what she did for me more than repaid any harm.”
Zak nodded and moved away.
Mention of Gunnie had reminded me of Idas’s chrisos. I opened the pocket of the sheath and glanced inside to establish that they were still there, then lay down and slept.
When I woke — I hesitate to call it morning because there was no true morning — most of the hands were already up and eating such food as remained after the feast of the night b
efore. Sidero had been joined by two slender automatons, such creatures as I believe Jonas must once have been. The three stood some distance apart from the rest of us, talking in tones too low for me to overhear.
I could not be sure if these volitional mechanisms were nearer the captain and the upper officers than Sidero, and as I was debating whether to approach them and identify myself, they left us, disappearing at once in the maze of passages. As if he had read my thoughts, Sidero walked over to me.
“We can talk now,” he said.
I nodded and explained that I had been about to tell him and the others who I was.
“It would do no good. I called when first we met. You are not what you say. The Autarch is secure.”
I began to expostulate with him, but he held up his hand to silence me. “Let us not quarrel now. I know what I was told. Let me explain before we argue again. I hurt you. It is my right and duty to correct and chastise. Then I had joy of it.”
I asked him if he referred to his striking me when I lay unconscious, and he nodded. “I must not.” He seemed about to speak further, but did not. After a moment he said, “I cannot explain.”
“We know what moral considerations are,” I told him.
“Not as we. You believe you do. We know, and yet often make mistakes. We may sacrifice men to save our own existence. We may transmit and originate instructions to men. We may correct and chastise. But we may not become as you are. That is what I did. I must repay.”
I told him he had already, that he had repaid me in full when he saved me from the jibers.
“No. You fought and I fought. This is my payment. We go to a greater fight, perhaps the last. The jibers stole before. Now they rise to kill, to take the ship. The captain tolerated jibers for too long.”
I sensed how hard it was for him to speak critically of his captain, and how much he wished to turn away.
“I excuse you,” he said. “That is my payment to you.”
I asked, “You mean I don’t have to join you and your seamen in the battle unless I want to?”