The Urth of the New Sun botns-5

by Gene Wolfe

  The mate said, “Let them come for me with their sweet-arsed soldier boys. They’ll find no virgin.”

  Declan nodded and cleared his throat, and I realized with some astonishment that he was their leader. “Sieur,” he began in his deep, slow voice, “it’s you who are in danger. They kill people in this place as we do pigs at home.”

  “Worse,” the boy put in.

  “We mean to speak to the magistrate on your behalf, sieur. We waited there this afternoon, but we weren’t admitted. Poor people wait for days, they say, before they get to speak with him; but we’ll wait as long as we have to. Meantime, we mean to do what we can in other ways.”

  Alcyone’s cook looked at him with a significance I did not understand.

  Herena said, “But now we want you to tell all of us about the New Sun’s coming. I’ve heard more than the others, and I’ve tried to tell them what you told me, but that was only a little. Will you tell us everything now?”

  “I don’t know whether I can explain so you’ll understand it,” I said. “I don’t know that I understand it myself.”

  “Please,” the cook said. It was the only word I was ever to hear from her.

  “Very well, then. You know what’s happened to the Old Sun: it is dying. I don’t mean that it’s about to go out like a lamp at midnight. That would take a very long time. The wick — if you can think of it so — has been trimmed by only the width of a hair, and the corn has rotted in the fields. You don’t know it, but the ice in the south is already gathering new strength. To the ice of ten chiliads will be added the ice of the winter now almost upon us, and the two will embrace like brothers and begin their march upon these northern lands. Great Erebus, who has established his kingdom there, will soon be driven before them, with all his fierce, pale warriors. He will unite his strength with Abaia’s, whose kingdom is in the warm waters. With others, less in might but equal in cunning, they will offer allegiance to the rulers of the lands beyond Urth’s waist, which you call Ascia; and once united with them will devour them utterly.”

  But everything that I said to them is much too long to be written here, each word a word. I told them all I knew of the history of the Old Sun’s dying, and what that would do to Urth, and I promised them that at last someone would bring a New Sun.

  Then Herena asked, “Aren’t you the New Sun yourself, sieur? The woman who was with you when you came to our village said you were.”

  I told her I would not speak of that, fearing that if they knew it — yet saw me imprisoned — they would despair.

  Declan wished to know how Urth would fare when the New Sun came; and I, understanding little more than he did himself, drew upon Dr. Tabs’s play, never thinking that in a time yet to come Dr. Tabs’s play would be drawn from my words.

  When they had gone at last, I realized I had not so much as touched the food the boy had brought me. I was very hungry, but when I reached for the bowl, my fingers brushed something else — a long and narrow bundle of rags so placed that it lay in shadow.

  The voice of my neighbor floated through the bars. “That was a fine tale. I took notes as fast as I could, and it should make a capital little book whenever I’m released.”

  I was unwinding the rags and scarcely heard him. It was a knife — the long dirk the mate had worn aboard the Alcyone.

  Chapter XXXVIII — To the Tomb of the Monarch

  FOR THE remainder of the evening, I gazed at the knife. Not in fact, of course; I had rewrapped it in its rags and hidden it under the mattress of my cot. But as I lay upon that mattress staring up at the metal ceiling that was so like the one I had known in the apprentices’ dormitory as a child, I felt the knife below my knees.

  Later it revolved before my closed eyes, luminant in the darkness and distinct from hilt of bone to needle point. When I slept at last, I found it among my dreams as well.

  Perhaps for that reason, I slept badly. Again and again I woke and blinked at the cell light glowing above my head, rose and stretched, and crossed to the port to search for the white star that was another self. At those times I would gladly have surrendered my imprisoned body to death, if I could have done it with honor, and fled, streaming through the midnight sky to unite my being. In those moments I knew my power, that could draw whole worlds to me and incremate them as an artist burns his earths for pigments. In the brown book, now lost, that I carried and read so long that at last I had committed to memory its whole contents (though they had once seemed inexhaustible) there is this passage: “Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; the sun and the moon and eleven stars made obeisance to me.” Its words show plainly how much wiser the peoples of ages long past were than we are now; not for nothing is that book titled The Book of the Wonders of Urth and Sky.

  I too dreamed a dream. I dreamed that I called the power of my star down upon myself, and rising, crossed (Thecla as well as Severian) to our barred door, and grasping its bars, bent them until we could easily have passed between them. But when we bent them it seemed we parted a curtain, and beyond it beheld a second curtain and Tzadkiel, neither larger than ourselves nor smaller, with the dirk afire.

  When the new day like a flood of tarnished gold poured at last through the open port and I waited for my bowl and spoon, I examined those bars; and though most were as they ought to have been, those at the center were not quite so straight as the rest.

  The boy carried in my food, saying, “Even if I only heard you once, I learned a lot from you, Severian. I’ll be sorry to see you go.”

  I asked whether I was to be executed.

  As he set down my tray, he glanced over his shoulder at the journeyman guard leaning against the wall. “No, it’s not that. They’re just going to take you somewhere else. A flier’s coming for you today, with Praetorians.”

  “A flier?”

  “Because it can fly over the rebel army, I suppose. Have you ever ridden in one? I’ve only watched them taking off and landing. It must be terrific.”

  “It is. The first time I flew in one, we were shot down. I’ve ridden in them often since, and even learned to operate them myself; but the truth is that I’ve always been terrified.”

  The boy nodded. “I would be too, but I’d like to try it.” Awkwardly, he offered his hand. “Good luck, Severian , wherever they take you.”

  I clasped it; it was dirty but dry, and seemed very small. “Reechy,” I said. “That’s not your real name, is it?”

  He grinned. “No. It means I stink.”

  “Not to my nose.”

  “It’s not cold yet,” he explained, “so I can go swimming. In the winter I don’t have much chance to wash, and they work me pretty hard.”

  “Yes, I remember. But your real name is…

  “Ymar.” He withdrew his hand. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because when I touched you, I saw the flash of gems about your head. Ymar, I think I’m beginning to spread out. To spread through time — or rather, to be aware that I am spread through time, since all of us are. How strange that you and I should meet like this.”

  I hesitated for a moment, my voice bewildered among so many swirling thoughts. “Or perhaps it isn’t really strange at all. Something governs our destinies, surely. Something higher even than the Hierogrammates.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ymar, someday you will become the ruler. You’ll be the monarch, although I don’t think you’ll call yourself that. Try to rule for Urth, and not just in Urth’s name as so many have. Rule justly, or at least as justly as circumstances permit.”

  He said, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I told him. “Even though I know no more than that you will rule, and someday sit disguised beneath a plane tree. But those things I do know”

  When he and the journeyman were gone, I thrust the knife into the top of my boot and covered it with my trouser leg. As I did, and afterward while I sat waiting on my cot, I speculated upon our conversation.

 
Was it not possible Ymar had reached the Phoenix Throne only because some epopt — myself — had prophesied he would? So far as I am aware, history holds no record of it; and perhaps I have created my own truth. Or perhaps Ymar, now feeling he rides his destiny, will fail to make the cardinal effort that would have won him a signal victory.

  Who can say? Does not Tzadkiel’s curtain of uncertainty veil the future even from those who have emerged from its mists? The present, when we leave it before us, becomes the future once more. I had left it, I knew, and waited deep in a past that was in my own day scarcely more than myth.

  Watch followed weary watch, as ants creep through autumn to winter. When at last I had concluded beyond question that Ymar’s information had been mistaken, that the Praetorians would come not that day but the next — or not at all — I glanced out the port hoping to amuse myself with the errands of those few persons who chanced to cross the Old Yard.

  A flier rode at anchor there, as sleek as a silver dart. I had no sooner seen it than I heard the measured tread of marching men — broken as they mounted the stair, resumed when they reached the level at which I waited. I rushed to the door.

  A bustling journeyman led the way. A bemedaled chiliarch sauntered after him; thrust well into his sword belt, his thumbs proclaimed him not a subordinate, but one infinitely superior. Behind them, in a single file maintained with the disciplined precision of hand-colored troops commanded by a child (though they were less visible than smoke), tramped a squad of guardsmen in the charge of a vingtner.

  As I watched, the journeyman waved in the direction of my cell with his keys, the chiliarch nodded tolerantly and strolled nearer to inspect me, the vingtner bellowed some order, and the boots of the squad halted with a crash, succeeded at once by a second bellow and a second crash, as the ten phantom guardsmen grounded their weapons.

  The flier differed scarcely at all from the one in which I had once inspected the armies of the Third Battle of Orithyia; and indeed it may have been the same device, such machines being maintained by generation after generation. The vingtner ordered me to lie on the floor. I obeyed, but asked the chiliarch (a hatchet-faced man of forty or so) whether I might not look over the side as we flew. This permission was refused, he doubtless fearing I was a spy — as in some sense I was; I had to content myself with imagining Ymar’s farewell wave.

  The eleven guardsmen who lined the seat astern, fading like so many ghosts into its pointille upholstery, owed their near invisibility to the catoptric armor of my own Praetorians; and I soon realized they were my own Praetorians in fact, their armor, and what was more important, their traditions having been handed down from this unimaginably early day to my own. My guards had become my guards: my jailers.

  Because our flier hurtled through the sky and I sometimes glimpsed streaking clouds, I expected our journey to be short; but a watch at least elapsed, and perhaps another, before I felt the flier drop and saw the landing line cast. Dismal walls of living rock rose upon our left, reeled, and were lost to sight.

  When our pilot retracted the dome, the wind that lashed my face was so chill that I supposed we had flown south to the ice-fields. I stepped out — and looked up to see instead a towering ruin of snow and blasted stone. All around us ragged, faceless peaks loomed through pent clouds. We were among mountains, but mountains that had not yet put on the carven likenesses of men and women — such unshaped mountains, then, as are to be seen in the oldest pictures. I would have stood staring at them until dusk, but a cuff on the ear knocked me sprawling.

  I rose consumed with impotent rage; I had suffered such abuse after I had been taken at Saltus and had succeeded in making that officer my friend. Now I felt I had accomplished nothing, that the cycle had begun again, that it was fated to persist, and perhaps to continue to my death. I resolved it would not. Before the day was over, the knife thrust into the top of my boot would end a life.

  Meanwhile my own streamed from my clangorous ear, hot as though from the kettle where it drenched my chilled flesh.

  I was driven into a stream far greater, of vast, hurrying wains burdened with yet more shattered rock, wains that rolled forward without oxen or slaves to draw them, no matter how steep the gradient, launching dense clouds of dust and smoke into the shining air and bellowing like bulls when we crossed their path. Far up the mountain, a giant in armor dug stone with his iron hands, looking smaller than a mouse.

  The hurrying wains gave way to hurrying men as we went among plain and even ugly sheds whose open doorways revealed curious tools and machines. I asked the chiliarch I intended to kill where he had brought me. He motioned to the vingtner, and I got another blow from the vingtner’s gauntlet.

  In a round structure larger than the rest, I was driven down aisles lined with cabinets and seats until we reached a circular curtain, like the wall of an indoor tent or pavilion, at its center. I had recognized the building by then.

  “You are to wait here,” the chiliarch instructed me. “The monarch will speak to you. When you leave, you will—”

  A voice from the other side of the curtain, thick with wine and yet familiar still, called, “Loose him.”

  “Obedience and obeisance!” The chiliarch jerked erect, and he and his guardsmen saluted. For a moment all of us stood like so many images.

  When that voice was not heard again, the vingtner freed my hands. The chiliarch whispered, “When you leave this place you will say nothing of what you may have heard or seen. Otherwise you will die.”

  “You are mistaken,” I told him. “It is you that will die.” There was sudden fear in his eyes. I had been reasonably sure he would not dare signal the vingtner to strike me there, under the unseen gaze of his monarch. Nor was I wrong; for the space of a heartbeat we stared at each other, slayer and slain by both accounts.

  The vingtner barked a command, and his squad turned their backs to the curtain. When the chiliarch had assured himself that none of the guardsmen would be able to see what lay beyond the curtain when it parted, he told me, “Go through.”

  I nodded and advanced to it; it was of crimson triple silk, luxurious to the touch. As I pushed it aside, I saw the faces I had expected. Seeing them, I bowed to their owner.

  Chapter XXXIX — The Claw of the Conciliator Again

  THE TWO-HEADED man lounging upon the divan beyond the crimson curtain raised his cup to acknowledge my bow. “I see you know to whom you come.” It was the head on the left that spoke.

  “You’re Typhon,” I said. “The monarch — the sole ruler, or so you think — of this ill-starred world, and of others as well. But it wasn’t to you I bowed, but to my benefactor, Piaton.”

  With a mighty arm that was not his, Typhon brought the cup to his lips. His stare across its golden rim was the poisoned regard of the yellowbeard. “You have known Piaton in the past?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll know him in the future.”

  Typhon drank and set his cup upon a small table. “What is said of you is true, then. You maintain that you are a prophet.”

  “I hadn’t thought of myself in that way. But yes, if you like. I know that you’ll die on that couch. Does that interest you? That body will lie among the straps you no longer need to restrain Piaton and the implements you no longer need to force him to eat. The mountain winds will dry his stolen body until it is like the leaves that now die too young, and whole ages of the world will stride across it before my coming reawakens you to life.”

  Typhon laughed, just as I had heard him laugh when I bared Terminus Est. “You’re a poor prophet, I fear; but I find that a poor prophet is more amusing than a true one. If you had merely told me that I would lie — should my death ever occur, which I’ve begun to doubt — among the funeral breads in the skull cavity of this monument, you would only have told me what any child could. I prefer your fantasies, and it may be that I can make use of you. You’re reported to have performed amazing cures. Have you true power?”

  “That’s for you to say.”

 
He sat up, the muscular torso that was not his swaying. “I am accustomed to having my questions answered. A call from me, and a hundred men of my own division would be here to cast you” — he paused and smiled to himself — “from my sleeve. Would you enjoy it? That’s how we treat workmen who won’t work. Answer me, Conciliator! Can you fly?”

  “I can’t say, having never tried.”

  “You may have an opportunity soon. I will ask twice.” He laughed again. “It suits my present condition, after all. But not thrice. Do you have power? Prove it, or die.”

  I allowed my shoulders to rise a finger’s width, and fall again. My hands were still numb from the gyves; I rubbed my wrists as I spoke. “Would you allow that I have power if I could kill a certain man who had injured me just by striking this table before us?”

  The unfortunate Piaton stared at me, and Typhon smiled. “Yes, that would be a satisfactory demonstration.”

  “Upon your word?”

  The smile grew broader. “If you like,” he said. “Prove it!”’

  I drew the dirk and drove it into the tabletop.

  I doubt that there were provisions for the confinement of prisoners on the mountain; and as I considered those made for me, it occurred to me that my cell in the vessel that would soon be our Matachin Tower must have been a makeshift as well, and a shift made not very long ago. If Typhon had merely wished to confine me, he might easily have done it by emptying one of the solidly built sheds and locking me inside. It was clear he wished to do more — to terrify and suborn me, and thus win me to his cause.

  My prison was a spur of rock not yet cut from the robe of the giant figure that already bore his face. A little shelter of stones and canvas was set up for me on that windswept spot, and to it were brought meat and a rare wine that must have been stored for Typhon himself. As I watched, a timber nearly as thick as the Alcyone’s mizzenmast, though not so high, was set into the rock where the spur left the mountain, and a smilodon chained to its base. The chiliarch hung from the top of this timber on a hook passed between his hands, which were manacled as my own had been.