by Gene Wolfe
Burgundofara appeared while we were talking, saying that she had felt the same urge as I, though I think in her case it was in fact no more than a desire to look about and see the ship again before she left all such ships forever. She sprang up a mast, which so distracted the officer that I thought he might actually do her some harm. Had he not been a Hierodule, I would have laid hands on him; and as it was, I was forced to stand between them when a party of sailors had brought her down.
We argued with him until our air grew foul, mostly for the sport of it on my part (and hers too, I think), then went below docilely enough, found the galley, and ate like two children, laughing and recounting our adventures.
The captain — not another masked Hierodule, but a man who appeared to be an ordinary human being — visited us in our cabin a watch or so afterward. I told him I had talked to no one in authority since Tzadkiel had left me, and that I hoped to get instructions from him.
He shook his head. “I’ve none to give you. I feel sure Tzadkiel will have arranged for you to know all you need to.”
Burgundofara interjected, “He’s got to bring the New Sun!” adding when I glanced at her, “Gunnie told me.”
“Can you?” the captain asked.
I tried to explain that I did not know, that I could feel the White Fountain as if it were a part of me, and that I had been trying to bring it closer; but that it did not seem to move.
“What is it?” he asked. Then, seeing my expression, “No, I really don’t know. I was told nothing except that I was to take you and this woman to Urth and land you safely north of the ice.”
“It’s a star, I think, or something like one.”
“Then it’s too massive to move the way we do. When you’re on Urth, you’ll no longer be moving in the uranic sense. Perhaps then it will come for you.”
Burgundofara asked, “Won’t it take a long time for a star to get to Urth?”
He nodded. “Centuries at least. But I really understand nothing about it — a great deal less than your friend here must. If it’s part of him, he must feel it, as he tells us he does.”
“I do. I feel its distance.” As I spoke, I seemed to be standing again before the windows of Master Ash, looking out at the endless plains of ice; possibly in some sense I had never left them. I said, “Could it be that the New Sun will come only after our race is gone? Would Tzadkiel play such a trick on us?”
“No. Tzadkiel doesn’t play tricks, though she may seem to. Tricks are for solipsists, who think everything will pass away.” He stood. “You wanted to ask me questions. I don’t blame you, but I’ve no answers. Would you like to go on deck and watch us land? It’s the only real gift I can give you.”
Burgundofara looked bewildered and asked, “So soon?” I confess I felt so myself.
“Yes, pretty soon now. I’ve got a few supplies for you, mostly food. Will you want weapons besides your knives? I can give them to you, if you need them.”
I asked, “Do you advise it?”
“I don’t advise anything. You know what you have to do. I don’t.”
“Then I’ll take none,” I said. “Burgundofara may decide for herself.”
“No,” she said. “Neither will I.”
“Then come,” the captain told us, and this time it was a command and not an invitation. We put on the necklaces and followed him out onto the deck.
Our ship skimmed high above the clouds, which appeared to boil beneath us, yet I felt that we had arrived. Urth flashed from blue to black, then blue again. The rail was ice cold in my hands, and I searched for Urth’s ice caps; but we were too near, already too close for them to be visible. There was only the azure of her seas, glimpsed through the rents in her surging clouds, and occasionally a flash of land, brown or green.
“It is a lovely world,” I said. “Not as lovely as Yesod, perhaps, but beautiful nonetheless.”
The captain shrugged. “We could make it as good as Yesod if we wanted to.”
“We will,” I told him. I had not known I believed that until I said it. “We will when enough of us have left it and come back.”
The clouds grew calmer, as though some mage had whispered a spell or a woman had bared her breast to them. Our sails were furled already; the watch swarmed aloft, making certain all our hamper was secure and as well braced as it could be.
As they leaped down again, the first thin winds of Urth struck us, impalpable, but bringing back (like the single motion of a coryphaeus’s hand) the whole world of sound. The masts shrilled like rebecs while every strand of rigging sang.
A moment more, and the ship herself yawed, pitched, and went down at the stern until the sunlit clouds of Urth rose behind her quarterdeck and Burgundofara and I were left clinging to the railposts.
The captain, standing at ease with one hand on a halyard, grinned at us and shouted, “Why, I thought the girl was a sailor, anyway. Lift him up there, darling, or we’ll send you to help the cook.”
I would have aided Burgundofara if I could, and she tried to assist me as the captain had directed her; thus by clinging to each other we managed to stay erect on the deck (now steeper than many stairs, though it seemed as smooth as a dancing floor) and even to take a few cautious steps toward him.
“You’ve got to ship on a little ‘un before you’re a sailor,” he told us. “It’s a pity I’ve got to land you now. I might make proper seamen of you.”
I managed to say that our arrival on Yesod had not been so violent.
He turned serious. “You didn’t have much potential to lose there, you see. You’d used it up reaching the higher plane. We’ve come in without a rag to brake us, like we were falling into the star. Stay away from the railing for a bit. The wind there will broil the skin right off your arm.”
“Wouldn’t our necklaces preserve us from it?”
“They’ve got a good field; without them you’d fry like a crackling. But they can only put out so much, like any other device, and that wind…well, it’s too thin to breathe, but. if the keel weren’t taking the brunt, we’d be blown away.”
For a time the apostis glowed like a forge; gradually it dimmed and went out, and our ship resumed a more conventional position, though the wind still screamed in the rigging and the clouds scudded under us like flecks of foam in a mill race.
The captain climbed to his quarterdeck, and I went with him to ask whether we might not remove our necklaces. He shook his head and pointed at the rigging, which was now rimmed with ice, saying we could not stay on deck long without them and asking if I had not noticed my air freshening.
I admitted I had, but explained that I had thought myself deceived.
“There’s some mixing,” he told me. “When there’s no air, the amulet draws back any that gets to the edge of the field. But it can’t tell the difference between air it brought up from below and wind that’s penetrated its pressure zone.”
How the tender could have a wake above the clouds, I do not understand; but it left one, long and white, stretched across the sky behind us. I merely report what I saw.
Burgundofara said, “I wish I’d been on deck when we left Urth. Even when we got to the big ship, they made us stay below until we had some training.”
“You’d only have been in the way,” the captain told her. “We set all sail as soon as we’re free of the atmosphere, so that’s a busy time. Was it this vessel?”
“I think so.”
“And now you’re coming back somebody important, mentioned by name in Tzadkiel’s orders. Congratulations!”
Burgundofara shook her head, and I noticed that enough wind was penetrating now to make her dark ringlets dance. “I don’t even know how she came to know it.”
I said, “One usually doesn’t, with her,” reflecting that just as I was many in a single body, Tzadkiel was many bodies in a single person.
The captain pointed over the taffrail, where the sea of cloud seemed almost to wash the planking of the tender’s hull. “We’re about to go down in
to that. When we get under it, you can take off your amulets without freezing.”
For a time we were trapped in mist. In a brown book I took from Thecla’s cell, I have read that a region of mist separates the living from the dead, and that the forms we call ghosts are nothing more than the remnants of this barrier of mist clinging to their faces and their garments.
Whether that is true, I cannot say; but certainly Urth is separated from the void by such a region, and that seems strange to me. Possibly the four realms are but two, and we entered the void and left it at last just as specters visit the country of the living.
Chapter XXVIII — The Village Beside the Stream
I RECALL thinking, as I leaned over the railing and watched dots of red and gold turn to woodlots, and brown smudges to fields of tangled stalks, how strange we should have looked had there been anyone to watch us, a trim pinnace — just such a vessel as might have lain alongside some wharf in Nessus — floating silently down out of the sky. I felt sure there was no one. It was earliest morning, when even small trees cast long shadows and scarlet foxes trot denward through the dew like flecks of fire.
“Where are we?” I asked the captain. “Which way does the city lie?”
“North by northeast,” he said, pointing.
The supplies he was giving us were in long sarcins of about the bigness of a demicannon’s barrel lashed to the base of the bonaventure. He showed us how to carry them, the strap over the left shoulder and fastened at the hip. He shook our hands, and seemed, so far as I could judge to wish us well sincerely.
A silver pont slid from the seam where the deck met the tender’s side. Burgundofara and I went down it and stood once more upon the soil of Urth.
We turned — as I believe no one could have helped turning — and watched the tender rise, righting herself as soon as her keel was free of the soil, bobbing in a gentle swell none but she could feel and lifting like a kite. We had come to Urth through clouds, as I have said; but the tender found an opening in them (I cannot but think it was so we might watch her) and rose through it, higher and higher, until hull and masts were no more than a pinprick of golden light. At length we saw her blossom to a shining speck, like the steel that falls from a file; then we knew that her crew had freed her sails, all of silver metal and each bigger than many an isle, and sheeted them home, and that we would not see her again. I looked away so that Burgundofara would not notice the tears in my eyes. When I looked back to tell her we should be going, I found that she had been weeping too.
Nessus lay north by northeast, so the captain had said; with the horizon still so near the sun, it was not hard to keep our course. We crossed frost-killed fields for half a league or more, entered a little wood, and soon reached a stream with a path meandering along its bank.
Burgundofara had not spoken until then, and neither had I; but when we saw the water, she went to it and scooped up as much as her hands would hold. When she had drunk it, she said, “Now I know we’ve really come home. I’ve heard that for landsmen it’s eating bread and salt.”
I told her that was so, though I had nearly forgotten it.
“For us it’s drinking the water of a place. There’s usually bread and salt enough on the boats, but water goes bad or leaks away. When we come to a new landing we drink its water, if it’s good water. If it isn’t, we put our curse on it. Do you think this runs to Gyoll?”
“I’m sure it must, or to some larger stream that does. Do you want to return to your village?”
She nodded. “Will you come with me, Severian?”
I remembered Dorcas, and how she had begged me to come with her down Gyoll to find an old man and a house fallen to ruin. “I will if I can,” I told her. “I don’t think I’ll be able to stay.”
“Then maybe I’ll leave when you do, but I’d like to see Liti again first. I’ll kiss my father and all my relations when I get there, and probably stab them when I go. Just the same, I have to see it again.”
“I understand.”
“I hoped you would. Gunnie said you were that kind of man — that you understood a lot of things.”
I had been examining the path as she spoke. Now I motioned her to silence, and we stood listening for perhaps a hundred breaths. A fresh wind stirred the treetops; birds called here and there, though most had already flown north. The stream chuckled to itself.
“What is it?” Burgundofara whispered at last.
“Someone’s run ahead of us. See his tracks? A boy, I think. He may have circled to watch us, or fetched others.”
“A lot of people must use this path.”
I crouched beside the footprint to explain to her. “He was here this morning, when we came. See how dark a mark he made? He’d come across the fields just as we did, and his feet were wet with dew. It will dry soon. His foot’s small for a man’s, but he runs with long strides — a boy that’s nearly a man.”
“You’re deep. Gunnie said you were. I wouldn’t have seen that.”
“You know a thousand times more about ships than I do, though I’ve spent some time on both kinds. I was a mounted scout for a while. This is the sort of thing we did.”
“Maybe we should go the other way.”
I shook my head. “These are the people I’ve come to save. I won’t save them by running from them.”
As we walked on, Burgundofara said, “We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You mean anything they know of. Everyone has done something wrong, and I a hundred such things — or rather, ten thousand.”
Because the wood was so hushed and I had not smelled smoke, I had supposed that the place to which the boy had run was a league away at least. The path turned sharply, and a silent village of a dozen huts stood before us.
“Can’t we just walk through?” Burgundofara asked. “They must be asleep.”
“They’re awake,” I told her. “They’re watching us through their doorways, standing to the rear so we won’t see them.”
“You’ve got good eyes.”
“No. But I know something of villagers, and the boy got here before us. If we walk through, we may get pitchforks in our backs.”
I looked from hut to hut and raised my voice: “People of this village! We’re harmless travelers. We have no money. We ask only the use of your path.”
There seemed a slight stirring in the silence. I walked forward and motioned for Burgundofara to follow.
A man of fifty stepped from one of the doorways; his brown beard was streaked with gray, and he carried a flail.
“You’re the hetman of this village,” I said. “We thank you for your hospitality. As I told you, we come in peace.”
He stared at me, reminding me of a certain mason I had once encountered. “Herena says you came from a ship that fell from the sky”
“What does it matter where we came from? We’re peaceful travelers. We ask nothing more than that you let us pass.”
“It matters to me. Herena is my daughter. If she lies, I must know of it.”
I told Burgundofara, “You see, I don’t know everything.” She smiled, though I could see she was frightened.
“Hetman, if you would trust a stranger’s word and not your daughter’s, you’re a fool.” By then the girl had edged near enough the door for me to see her eyes. “Come out, Herena,” I said. “We won’t hurt you.”
She stepped forward, a tall girl of fifteen with long brown hair and a withered arm no larger than an infant’s.
“Why were you spying on us, Herena?”
She spoke, but I could not hear her.
“She wasn’t spying,” her father said. “She was gathering nuts. She’s a good girl.”
Sometimes, though only rarely, a man looks at something he has seen a score of times and sees it in a new way. When I, sulky Thecla, used to set up my easel beside some cataract, my teacher always told me to see it new; I never understood what he meant and soon convinced myself he meant nothing. Now I saw Herena’s withered arm not as a permanent defo
rmity (as I had always seen such things before), but as an error to be righted with a few strokes of the brush.
Burgundofara ventured, “It must be hard…” Realizing she might give offense, she concluded, “Going out so early.”
I said, “I’ll correct your daughter’s arm, if you wish it.”
The hetman opened his lips to speak, then shut them again. Nothing in his face seemed to have changed, but there was fear there.
“Do you wish it?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
His eyes, and the unseen stares of all the other villagers, oppressed me. I said, “She must come with me. We won’t go far, and it won’t take long.”
He nodded slowly. “Herena, you must go with the sieur.” (I suddenly realized how rich the clothes I had taken from the stateroom must have looked to these people.) “Be a good girl, and remember that your mother and I will always…” He turned away.
She walked before me, back along the path until the village was out of sight. The place where her withered arm joined her shoulder was concealed under her tattered smock. I told her to take it off; she did so, drawlng it over her head.
I was conscious of the crimson-and-gold leaves, the pink-tinged brown of her skin, as I might have been of the jeweled colors of some microcosm at which I peered through an aperture. Birdsong and water-music were as remote and as sweet as the tinkling of an orchestrion in a courtyard far below.
I touched Herena’s shoulder, and reality itself was clay to be smoothed and stretched. With a pass or two I molded her a new arm, the mirror image of the other. A tear that struck my fingers as I worked felt hot enough to scald them; the girl trembled.
“I’m finished,” I said. “Put on your smock.” I was in the microcosm again, and again it seemed the world to me.
She turned to face me. She was smiling, though her cheeks were streaked with tears. “I love you, my lord,” she said, and at once knelt and kissed the toe of my boot.