by Gene Wolfe
For as long as the light lasted I watched them, though I soon realized that a battle raged at the foot of the mountain. The smilodon appeared to have been starved. From time to time it sprang up and sought to grasp the chiliarch’s legs. Always he lifted them so it fell a cubit short; and its great claws, though they grooved the wood like chisels, would not support it. In that one afternoon I had as much vengeance as I wish ever to have. When night came I carried food to the smilodon.
Once on my journey to Thrax with Dorcas and Jolenta, I had freed a beast bound much as the chiliarch was now; it had not attacked me, perhaps because I bore the gem called the Claw of the Conciliator, perhaps only because it had been too weak to do so. Now this smilodon ate from my hands and licked them with its broad, rough tongue. I touched its curving tusks, like the ivory of the mammoths; and I scratched its ears as I would have Triskele’s, saying, “We have borne swords. We know, do we not?”
I do not believe the beasts can comprehend more than the simplest and most familiar phrases, yet I felt the massive head nod.
The chain was fastened to a collar with two buckles as wide as my hand. I loosed it and set the poor creature free, but it remained at my side.
The chiliarch was not so readily released. I was able to climb the timber easily enough, locking my knees around it as I once had locked them around the pines in the necropolis as a boy. By then the horizon had dropped far below my star, and I could easily have lifted him free from his hook and flung him into the gulf below; but I dared not drop him for fear he would fall into it, or that the smilodon would attack him. Although the light was too faint for me to see it, its eyes gleamed as it stared up at us.
In the end I looped his hands about my neck and clambered down as well as I could, nearly slipping and half choking, but reaching the safety of the rock at last. When I carried him to the shelter, the smilodon followed and lay at our feet.
By morning, when seven guardsmen arrived with food, water, and wine for me and torches lashed to poles with which to drive back the smilodon, their chiliarch was fully conscious and had eaten and drunk. The consternation on the soldiers’ faces when they saw that he and the smilodon were gone entertained us; but it was nothing compared to their expressions when they discovered both in my shelter.
“Come ahead,” I told them. “The beast won’t harm you, and your chiliarch will discipline you only if you have been false to your duty, I feel sure.”
They advanced, though hesitantly, eyeing me with almost as much fear as the smilodon.
I said, “You saw what your monarch did to your chiliarch because he permitted me to retain a weapon. What will he do to you when he learns you’ve permitted your chiliarch to escape?”
The vingtner answered, “We’ll all die, sieur. There’ll be a couple more stakes, and three or four of us hung from each.” The smilodon snarled as he spoke, and all seven stepped back.
The chiliarch nodded. “He’s right. I’d order it myself, if I retained my office.”
I said, “Sometimes a man is broken by losing such an office.”
“Nothing’s ever broken me,” he replied. “This won’t, either.”
I think that was the first time I looked at him as a human being. His face was hard and cold, but full of intelligence and resolution. “You’re right,” I told him. “Sometimes indeed — but not this time. You must flee and take these men with you. I put them under your orders.”
He nodded again. “Can you release my hands, Conciliator?”
The vingtner said, “I can, sieur.” He stepped forward with the key, and the smilodon voiced no protest. When the manacles fell to the rock upon which we sat, the chiliarch picked them up and tossed them over the edge.
“Keep your hands clasped behind you,” I told him. “Cover them with your cape. Have these men march you to the flier. Everyone will think you’re being taken elsewhere for further punishment. You’ll know where you can land with safety better than I.”
“We’ll join the rebels. They should be glad to get us.” He rose and saluted, and I rose too and returned his salute, having been habituated to it during my time as Autarch.
The vingtner asked, “Conciliator, can’t you free Urth from Typhon?”
“I could, but I won’t unless I must. It’s easy — very easy — to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place.”
“Rule us yourself!”
I shook my head. “If I say I have a mission of greater importance, you’ll think I’m joking. Yet it’s the truth.”
They nodded, clearly without comprehension.
“I’ll tell you this. This morning I’ve been studying this mountain and the speed with which the work here is going forward. From those things, I know Typhon has only a short time to live. He’ll die on the red couch where he lies now; and without his word, no one will dare to draw aside the curtain. One after another will creep away. The machines that dig like men will return for fresh instructions, but they won’t receive them, and in time the curtain itself will fall to dust.”
They were staring at me openmouthed. I said, “There will never be another ruler like Typhon — a monarch over many worlds. But the lesser ones who will follow him, of whom the best and greatest will be named Ymar, will imitate him until every peak you see around us wears a crown. That’s all I’ll tell you now, and all I can tell you. You must go.”
The chiliarch said, “We’ll stay here and die with you, Conciliator, if you desire it.”
“I don’t,” I told them. “And I won’t die.” I tried to reveal the workings of Time to them, though I do not understand them myself. “Everyone who has lived is still alive, somewhen. But you are in great danger. Go!”
The guardsmen backed away. Their chiliarch said, “Won’t you give us some token, Conciliator, some proof that we once encountered you? I know my hands are profaned with your blood, and so are Gaudentius’s; but these men never harmed you.”
The word he had used suggested the token he received. I took off the thong and the little sack of manskin Dorcas had sewn for the Claw, which now held the thorn I had plucked from my arm beside unresting Ocean, the thorn upon which my fingers had closed aboard Tzadkiel’s ship. “This has been drenched in my blood,” I told them.
With one hand on the smilodon’s head, I watched them walk the promontory that held my shelter, their shadows still long in the morning light. When they reached the mass of rock that was fast becoming Typhon’s sleeve, the chiliarch concealed his wrists under his cape as I had suggested. The vingtner drew his pistol, and two soldiers aimed their weapons at the chiliarch’s back.
Thus disposed, prisoner and guard, they descended the stair on the farther side and were lost to me in the bustling roadways of that place I had not yet named the Accursed Town . I had sent them away lightly enough; but now that they were gone, I knew once more what it was to lose a friend — for the chiliarch too had become my friend — and my heart, though it may be (as some have said) as hard as metal, felt ready to crack at last.
“And now I must lose you too,” I told the smilodon. “In fact, I should have sent you away while it was still dark.”
It made a deep rumbling that must have been its purr, surely a sound seldom heard by man and woman. That thunderous purr was echoed faintly from the sky.
Far across the lap of the colossal statue, a flier lifted into the air, rising slowly at first (as those vessels always do when they rely upon the repulsion of Urth alone), then streaking away. I recalled the flier I had seen when I had parted from Vodalus, after the occurrence I placed at the very beginning of the manuscript I cast into the ever-changing universes. And I resolved then that if ever leisure should come to me again, I would pen a new account, beginning as I have with the casting away of the old.
Whence comes this unslakable thirst to leave behind me a wandering trail of ink, I cannot say; but once I referred to a certain incident in the life of Ymar. Now I have spoken with Ymar himself, yet that incident remai
ns as inexplicable as the desire. I would prefer that similar incidents in my own life not suffer a similar obscurity.
The thunder that had been so distant sounded again, nearer now, the voice of a column of night-black cloud that outreached even the arm of Typhon’s colossal figure. The Praetorians had laid down the food and drink they had brought at some distance from my little shelter. (Such service is the price of undying loyalty; those who profess it seldom labor quite so diligently as a common servant whose loyalty is to his task.) I went out, the smilodon with me, to carry it back to whatever protection we could give it. The wind had already begun her storm song, and a few raindrops splattered the rock before us, as big as plums and icy cold.
“This is as good a chance as you’ll ever have,” I told the smilodon. “They’re running for shelter already. Go now!”
It leaped away as though it had been awaiting my consent, clearing ten cubits at every bound. In a moment it had vanished over the edge of the arm. In a moment more it reappeared, a tawny streak darkening to rain-wet brown from which workers and soldiers fled like coneys. I was glad to see that, for all the weapons of beasts, no matter how terrible they seem, are merely toys compared to the weapons of men.
Whether it returned safely to its hunting grounds, I am unable to say, though I trust it did. As for myself, I sat under my shelter for a time listening to the storm and munching bread and fruit, until at last the wild wind snatched the canvas from over my head.
I rose; when I looked through the curtains of the downpour, I saw a party of soldiers cresting the arm.
Astonishingly I also saw places without rain or soldiers. I do not mean that these newly seen places now spread themselves where the abyss had stretched. Its aching emptiness remained, rock dropping a league at least like a cataract, with the dark green of the high jungle far below — the jungle that would hold the village of sorcerers through which the boy Severian and I would pass.
Rather it seemed to me that the familiar directions of up and down, forward and back, left and right, had opened like a blossom, revealing petals unguessed, new Sefiroth whose existence had been hidden from me until now.
One of the soldiers fired. The bolt struck the rock at my feet, splitting it like a chisel. Then I knew they had been sent to kill me, I suppose because one of the men who had gone with the chiliarch had rebelled against his fate and reported what had transpired, though too late to prevent the departure of the rest.
Another leveled his weapon. To escape it, I stepped from the rain-swept rock into a new place.
Chapter XL — The Brook Beyond Briah
I STOOD in flower-spangled grass, sweet-smelling and softer than any other I have known; overhead the sky was azure, racked with clouds that hid the sun and barred the upper air with indigo and gold. Faintly, very faintly, I could still hear the roar of the storm that swept across Mount Typhon . Once there came a flash — or rather the shadow of a flash, if such a thing can be imagined — as if lightning had struck the rock, or one of the Praetorians had fired again.
When I had taken two steps, these things were no longer to be discerned; yet it seemed not so much that they were gone as that I had lost the ability (or perhaps only the will) to detect them, as when grown we no longer see things that interested us as children. Surely, I thought, this cannot be what the green man called the Corridors of Time. There are no corridors here, but only hills and waving grass and a sweet wind.
As I went farther, it seemed to me that everything I saw was familiar, that I walked in a place where I had been before, though I could not recall what it was. Not our necropolis with its mausoleums and cypresses. Not the unfenced fields where I had once walked with Dorcas and so come upon Dr. Tabs’s stage — those fields had cowered beneath the Wall of Nessus, and there were no walls here. Not the gardens of the House Absolute, full of rhododendrons, grottos, and fountains. Closest, I thought, to the pampas in spring, but for the color of the sky.
Then I heard the song of rushing water, and a moment later I saw its silver gleam. I ran to it, remembering as I ran how once I had been lame, and how I had drunk from a certain stream in Orithyia, then seen the pug marks of a smilodon; I smiled to myself between draughts to think that they would not frighten me now.
When I lifted my head, it was not a smilodon I saw, but a minute woman with brightly colored wings who was wading upon the water-washed stones some distance upstream as though to cool her legs. “Tzadkiel!” I shouted. Then I fell mute with confusion, having recalled the place at last.
She waved and smiled; and, most astonishingly, leaped from the water and flew, her gay wings rippling like dyed faille.
I knelt.
Still smiling, she dropped to the bank beside me. “I don’t think you’ve seen me do that before.”
“Once I saw you — a vision of you — hanging with wide wings in the vacancy between the stars.”
“Yes, I can fly there because there’s no attraction. Here I must be quite small. Do you know what a gravity field is?”
She waved an arm no longer than my hand at the meadow, and I said, “I see this one, mighty Hierogrammate.”
She laughed at that, a music like the tintinnabulation of tiny bells. “But it seems we have met?”
“Mighty Hierogrammate, I am the least of your slaves.”
“You must be uncomfortable there on your knees, and you’ve met another self of mine since I parted from her. Sit down and tell me about it.”
And so I did. And it was pleasant indeed to sit upon that bank, occasionally refreshing my laboring tongue with the cold, clean water of the brook, and recount to Tzadkiel how I had seen her first between the pages of Father Inire’s book, and how I had helped to capture her aboard her own ship, and how she had been male and called herself Zak, and how she had cared for me when I was injured. But you, who are my reader, know all these things (if indeed you exist), because I have written them here, omitting nothing, or at least very little.
When I spoke to Tzadkiel beside the brook, I strove to be as brief as I could; but she would not allow it, urging me down this byway and that one until I had told her of the small angel (of whom I had read in my brown book) who had met Gabriel, and of my childhoods in the Citadel, at my father’s villa, and in the village called Famulorum near the House Absolute.
And at last, when I had paused for breath for perhaps the thousandth time, Tzadkiel said, “No wonder I accepted you; in all those words there was not one lie.”
“I’ve told lies when I thought there was need of them, and even when there was none.”
She smiled and made no answer.
I said, “And I’d lie to you now, mighty Hierogrammate, if I thought my lies would save Urth.”
“You’ve saved her already; you began aboard my ship and you completed your task in our sphere, upon and within the world you call Yesod too. It must have appeared to Agilus and Typhon, and to many of the others who struggled against you, that the fight was an unequal one. If they had been wise, they would have known the fight was over already, some where and some time; but if they had been wise, they would have known you for our servant and not fought against you at all.”
“Then I cannot fail?”
“No, you have not failed. You could have on the ship and later; but you couldn’t die before the test, nor can you now, until your task is accomplished. If it weren’t so, the beating would have killed you, and the weapon in the tower, and much else. But your task will be accomplished soon. Your power is from your star, as you know. When it enters your old sun and brings the birth of the new…”
I said, “I’ve boasted too often of not fearing death to tremble at the thought today.”
She nodded. “That’s well. Briah’s no enduring house.”
“But this place is Briah, or part of it. It’s a passage in your ship, the one you showed me when you led me to my stateroom.”
“If that is so, you were near Yesod when you were with me on our ship. This is the Brook Madregot, and it runs from Yesod
to Briah.”
“Between the universes?” I asked. “How can that be?”
“How could it not be? Energy gropes for some lower state, always; which is merely to say that the Increate tosses all the universes between his hands.”
“But it’s a stream,” I protested. “Like the streams of Urth.”
Tzadkiel nodded. “Those too are of energy seeking a lower state, and what is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.”
I thought about that for a time, and at last I said, “And how would I see you, Tzadkiel?”
She had been sitting upon the bank beside me; now she lay down in the grass, her chin in her hands and her bright wings rising above her back like fans with painted eyes. “You called these fields of gravity, and so they are, among other things. Do you know the fields of Urth, Severian?”
“I’ve never followed the plow, but I know them as well as a city man can.”
“Just so. And what is found at the edges of your fields?”
“Fences of split wood or hedges, to keep out cattle. In the mountains, walls of dry-laid stones to discourage deer.”
“And nothing else?”
“I can think of nothing,” I said. “Though perhaps I saw our fields with the wrong instrument.”
“The instruments you have are the right instruments for you, because you’ve been shaped by them. That’s another law. Nothing else?”
I recalled the hedgerows, and a sparrow’s nest I had once seen in one. “Weeds and wild things.”
“Here too. I myself am such a wild thing, Severian. You may think I’ve been stationed here to help you. I only wish it were so, and because I do I’ll help you if I can; but I’m a part of myself that was banished long ago, long before the first time you met me. Perhaps someday the giantess you call Tzadkiel — although that’s my name too — will want me to be a part of her again. Until then I will remain here, between the attractions of Yesod and Briah.