by Gene Wolfe
“Did you love her so much?”
“Yes, my lady, and hate her too. I’m Thecla and the man who loved Thecla.”
“Then I will tell you nothing about her — what could I tell you? Perhaps she will tell you herself after the Presentation.”
“If I succeed, you mean.”
“Would your Thecla punish you if you failed?” Apheta asked, and a great joy entered my heart. “But eat, then we must go. I told you last night that our days are short here, and you have already slept away the first part of this one.”
I swallowed the cake and drained the cup. “What of Urth,” I said, “if I fail?”
She stood. “Tzadkiel is just. He would not make Urth worse than she is, no worse than she would have been had you not come.”
“That is the future of ice,” I said. “But if I succeed, the New Sun will come.” As though the cup had been drugged, I seemed to stand infinitely far from myself, to watch myself as a man watches a mote, to hear my own voice as a hawk hears the squeaking of a meadow mouse.
Apheta had pushed aside the curtain. I followed her out into the stoa. Through its open arch shone the fresh sea of Yesod , a sapphire flecked with white. “Yes,” she said. “And your Urth will be destroyed.”
“My lady—”
“Enough. Come with me.”
“Purn was right, then. He wanted to kill me, and I should have let him.” The avenue we took was steeper than that we had descended the night before, going straight up the hillside toward the Hall of Justice, which loomed above us like a cloud.
“It was not you who prevented him,” Apheta said.
“Earlier, in the ship, my lady. It was he, then, last night in the dark. Someone stopped him then, or I should have died. I couldn’t free myself.”
“Tzadkiel,” she said.
Though my legs were longer than hers, I had to hurry to keep up with her. “You said he wasn’t there, my lady.”
“No. I said he did not sit in his Seat of Justice that day. Autarch, look about you.” She halted, and I with her. “Is this not a fair town?”
“The fairest I’ve ever seen, my lady. Surely a hundred times more fair than any on Urth.”
“Remember it; you may not see it again. Your world might be as fair as this, if all of you wished it so.”
We climbed until we stood at the entrance to the Hall of Justice. I had imagined pushing throngs, such as we had at our public trials, but the hilltop was wrapped in morning silence.
Apheta turned again and pointed toward the sea. “Look,” she said again. “Can you see the isles?”
I did. They were scattered — endlessly as it seemed — across the water, just as I had beheld them from the ship.
“Do you know what a galaxy is, Autarch? A whorl of stars, uncountable, remote from all others?”
I nodded.
“This isle on which we stand judges the worlds of your galaxy. Each isle you see judges another. I hope knowing that will aid you, because it is all the aid I can give you. If you do not see me again, remember that I shall see you, nonetheless.”
Chapter XXI — Tzadkiel
ON THE previous day, the sailors had been seated in the front of the Examination Chamber. The first thing I noticed when I entered it again was that they were not there. Those who had those places were wrapped in a darkness that seemed to emanate from them, and the sailors were by the door and toward the sides of the room.
Looking past the dark figures and down the long aisle that led to Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice, I saw Zak. He was seated upon that throne. Over the walls of white stone on each side of it, there spread what seemed tapestries of the finest tissue, worked in a pattern of eyes in gorgeous colors. It was not until they moved that I realized they were his wings.
Apheta had left me at the foot of the steps, and from that time I had been unguarded; as I stood staring at Zak, two sailors appeared to take my arms and lead me to him.
They left me, and I stood before him with head bowed. No speech of the old Autarch’s came unbidden to my mind this time; there was only confusion. At last I stammered, “Zak, I’ve come to plead for Urth.”
“I know,” he said. “Welcome.” His voice was deep and clear, like the blowing of a golden horn far away, so that I recalled a certain foolish tale of Gabriel, who wore the war horn of Heaven across his back, suspended on the rainbow. It suggested Thecla’s book, in which I had read it; and that, in turn, the great volume of pavonine leather the old Autarch had shown me when I had asked him the way to the garden, when he, having been told of me, supposed that I had arrived to replace him and would go to plead for Urth at once.
I knew then that I had seen Tzadkiel before I helped Sidero and the rest catch him as Zak, and that the male form I saw was no more true (though no less) than the winged woman whose glance had stunned me then, and that neither was more true, or less, than the animal shape that had saved me when Purn had tried to kill me outside his cage.
And I said, “Sieur — Zak — Tzadkiel, mighty Hierogrammate — I don’t understand.”
“Do you mean that you do not understand me? And why should you? I do not understand myself, Severian, or you. Yet I am as I am, your own race having made us so before the apocatastasis. Were you not told that they had shaped us in their image?”
I tried to speak, but I could not. At last I nodded.
“The form you have now was their first, the shape they bore when they were newly sprung from the beasts. All races change, shaped by time. Are you aware of it?”
I recalled the man-apes of the mine, and said, “Not always for the better.”
“Indeed. But the Hieros grasped their own shaping, and that we might follow them, ours as well.”
“Sieur—”
“Ask. Your final trial comes soon, and it cannot be just. Whatever reparation we can make, we will make. Now or after.”
My heart froze at those words; behind me all those who sat upon the benches whispered, so that I heard their voices like the soughing of leaves in a forest, though I did not know who they were.
When I could speak again, I said, “Sieur, it is a foolish question. But once I heard two tales of shape-changers, and in one an angel — and I think that you, sieur, are such an angel — tore open his breast and gave the power he had to change his shape to a barnyard goose. And the goose used it at once, becoming a swift salt goose forever. Last night, the lady Apheta said I might not go lame always. Sieur, was he — was Melito — instructed to tell me that story?”
A little smile played at the corners of Tzadkiel’s lips, recalling the way Zak used to grin at me. “Who can say? Not by me. You must understand that when a truth is known, as that has been known by so many for so many aeons, it spreads abroad and changes its own shape, taking many forms. But if you are asking that I give my ability to you, I cannot. If we could bestow it at will, we would give it to our children. You have met them, and they are imprisoned still in the form you wear now. Have you another question before we proceed?”
“Yes, sieur. A thousand. But if I am permitted only one, why did you come aboard the ship as you did?”
“Because I wished to know you. When you were a boy on your own world, did you never bend the knee to the Conciliator?”
“On Holy Katharine’s Day, sieur.”
“And did you believe in him? Did you believe with all your being?”
“No, sieur.” I felt I was about to be punished for my unbelief, and to this day I cannot say whether I was or not.
“Suppose you had. Did you never know of one of your own age who did?”
“The acolytes, sieur. Or at least, so it was said among us, who were the torturers’ apprentices.”
“Would they not have wished to walk with him, if they could? Stand beside him when he was in danger? Care for him, perhaps, when he was ill? I have been such an acolyte, in a creation now vanished. In that too there was a Conciliator and a New Sun, though we did not use those names.
“But now we must talk of som
ething else, and quickly. I have many duties, some more demanding than this. Let me say plainly that we have tricked you, Severian. You have come to stand our examination, and thus we have talked of it to you, and even told you this building is our Hall of Justice. None of it is so.”
I could only stare at him.
“Or if you wish it put in another way, you have already passed our testing, which was an examination of the future you will create. You are the New Sun. You will be returned to your Urth, and the White Fountain will go with you. The death agonies of the world you know will be offered to the Increate. And they will be indescribable — continents will founder, as has been said. Much that is beautiful will perish, and with it most of your race; but your home will be reborn.”
Although I can, as I do, write the words he used, I cannot convey his tone or even hint at the conviction it carried. His thoughts seemed to thunder forth, raising pictures in the mind more real than any reality, so that while I imagined I saw the continents perish, I heard the crashing of great buildings and smelled Urth’s bitter sea wind.
An angry murmur rose behind me.
“Sieur,” I said, “I can remember the examination of my predecessor.” I felt as I had when I was the youngest of our apprentices.
Tzadkiel nodded. “It was necessary that you recall it; it was for that reason he was examined.”
“And unmanned?” The old Autarch trembled in me, and I felt my own hands shake.
“Yes. Otherwise a child would have stood between you and the throne, and your Urth would have perished forever. The alternative was the death of the child. Would that have been better?”
I could not speak, but his dark eyes seemed to bore into every heart that beat in mine, and at last I shook my head.
“Now I must go. My son will see that you are returned to Briah and Urth, which will be destroyed at your order.”
His gaze left me, and I followed it to the aisle behind me, where I saw the man who had brought us from the ship. The sailors were rising and drawing their knives, yet I scarcely noticed them. The center places that had been theirs the day before held others now, figures no longer shadowed. Sweat sprang from my forehead as blood had when I had first seen Tzadkiel, and I turned to cry out to him.
He was gone.
Lame leg or not I ran, hobbling as swiftly as I could around the Seat of Justice in search of the stair by which I had been led away the night before. I think it only fair to myself to say that I fled not so much from the sailors as from the faces of the others I had seen in the Chamber.
However that may be, the stair was gone too; I found only a smooth floor of stone slabs there, one of which was, no doubt, raised by some concealed mechanism.
Now another such mechanism acted. Swiftly and smoothly, Tzadkiel’s throne sank, as a whale that has surfaced to bask in the sun sinks back into the ice-choked Southern Sea. At one moment the great stone seat stood between me and the larger part of the Chamber, as solid as a wall; at the next the floor was closing over its back, and a fantastic battle spread before me.
The Hierarch whom Tzadkiel had called his son lay sprawled in the aisle. Over him surged the sailors, their knives flashing and many bloodied. Against them stood a score or so who seemed at first as weak as children — and indeed I saw at least one child among them — but held their ground like heroes and, when they had only their hands to fight with, fought weaponless. Because their backs were toward me, I told myself I did not know them; but I knew it for a lie.
With a roar that echoed from the walls, the alzabo burst from this encircled band. The sailors fell back, and in an instant it was crushing a man in its jaws. I saw Agia with her poisoned sword, and Agilus too, swinging a crimsoned avern like a mace, and Baldanders, unarmed until he seized a sailor and smashed another to the floor with her.
And Dorcas, Morwenna, Cyriaca, and Casdoe. Thecla, already down, the blood that trickled from her throat stanched by a ragged apprentice. Guasacht and Erblon slashed with their spathae as though they fought from the saddle. Dana wielded a slender saber in either hand. Somehow chained again, Pia throttled a sailor with her chain.
I dashed past Merryn and found myself between Gunnie and Dr. Tabs, whose flickering blade felled a man at my feet. A raging sailor charged me, and I — I swear it — welcomed him for his weapon, seizing his wrist, breaking his arm, and wrenching his knife away all in a single motion. I had no time to wonder at the ease of it before I saw that Gunnie had stabbed him in the neck.
It seemed that I had no sooner joined the battle than it was over. A few sailors fled from the Chamber; twenty or thirty bodies lay upon the floor or over the benches. Most of the women were dead, though I saw one of the women-cats licking blood from her stubby fingers. Old Winnoc leaned wearily on one of the scimitars used by the Pelerines’ slaves. Dr. Tabs cut a dead man’s robe to wipe the blade of his cane sword, and I saw that the dead man was Master Ash.
“Who are they?” Gunnie asked.
I shook my head, feeling I scarcely knew myself. Dr. Tabs seized her hand and brushed its fingers with his lips. “Allow me. I am Tabs, physician, playwright, and impresario. I’m—”
I no longer listened. Triskele had bounded up to me with blood-smeared flews, hindquarters quivering with joy. Master Malrubius, resplendent in the fur-trimmed cloak of the guild, followed him. When I saw Master Malrubius I knew, and he, seeing me, knew I did.
At once he — with Triskele, Dr. Tabs, the dead Master Ash, Dorcas, and the rest — fell to silver shards of nothingness, just as he had that night on the beach after he had rescued me from the dying jungle of the north. Gunnie and I were left alone with the bodies of the sailors.
Not all were corpses. One stirred and groaned. We tried to bind the wound in his chest (it was from the doctor’s narrow blade, I think) with rags ripped from the dead, though blood bubbled from his mouth. After a time the Hierarchs came with medicine and proper bandages, and took him away.
The lady Apheta had come with them, but she remained with us.
“You said that I would not see you again,” I reminded her.
“I said that you might not,” she corrected me. “Had things fallen out otherwise here, you would not have.”
In the stillness of that chamber of death, her voice was scarcely a whisper.
Chapter XXII — Descent
“THERE MUST be many questions you want to ask,” Apheta whispered. “Let us go out into the portico, and I will answer them all.”
I shook my head, for I heard the water-music of rain through the open doorway.
Gunnie touched my arm. “Is somebody spying on us?”
“No,” Apheta told her. “But let us go out. It should be pleasant there, and we have only a short time now, we three.”
“I can understand you well enough,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Perhaps some others among these many dead will begin to moan. That would make a fit voice for you.”
She nodded. “It would indeed.” I had seated myself where Tzadkiel had crouched on the first day; she sat down beside me, no doubt so that I might hear her better.
In a moment Gunnie sat too and sheathed her dagger, having cleaned the blade on her thigh. “I’m sorry,” Gunnie said.
“Sorry for what? Because you fought for me? I don’t blame you.”
“Sorry the others didn’t, that the magic people had to defend you against us. Against all of us but me. Who were they? Did you whistle them up?”
“No,” I said. Apheta, “Yes.”
“They were people I’d known, that’s all. Some were women I’d loved. Many are dead — Thecla, Agilus, Casdoe… Perhaps they’re all dead now, all ghosts, though I didn’t know it.”
“They are unborn. Surely you know that time runs backward when the ship sails swiftly. I told you myself. They are unborn, as you are.”
She spoke to Gunnie. “I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have
mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death.”
I said, “I can’t stop you from explaining all this, but do it elsewhere. Or let me go where I need not hear it.”
Apheta asked, “It gave you no joy?”
“To see them all again, tricked into defending me? No. Why should it?”
“Because they were not tricked, no more than Master Malrubius was on any of the occasions when you saw him after his death. We found them among your memories and let them judge. Everyone in this Chamber, save yourself, saw the same things. Has it not struck you as odd that I can scarcely speak here?”
I turned to stare at her, feeling I had been away and come back to hear her talk when it was of some other matter.
“Our rooms are always filled with the sound of water and the sighing of the wind. This was built for you and your kind.”
Gunnie said, “Before you came in, he — Zak — showed us that Urth had two futures. It could die and be born new. Or it could go on living for a long time before it died forever.”
“I’ve known that since I was a boy.”
She nodded to herself, and for a moment I seemed to see the child she had been instead of the woman she had become. “But we haven’t. We hadn’t.” Her gaze left my face, and I saw her looking from corpse to corpse. “In religion, but sailors never pay much attention to that.”
For want of something better to say, I said, “I suppose not.”
“My mother did, and it was like she was crazy, someplace in a corner of her mind. You know what I mean? And I think that was all it was.”
I turned to Apheta and began, “What I want to know—”
But Gunnie caught me by the shoulder, her hand large and strong for a woman’s, and drew me back to her. “We thought it wouldn’t be for a long while yet, a long while after we were dead.”
Apheta whispered, “When you sign aboard that ship, you sail from the Beginning to the End. All sailors know that.”