by Gene Wolfe
Although Pega had first seen me less than a watch before, she hugged me like a stuffed toy.
Odilo bowed as though we were being presented to each other in the Hypogeum Amaranthine. “Sieur, I feared that you had lost your life among these raging seas!” Odilo bowed again. “Sieur, it is exceeding pleasant as well as quite astonishing, sieur, if I may say so, sieur, to see you once again, sieur!”
Pega was more straightforward. “All of us thought you were dead, Severian!”
I asked him where the other woman was, then caught sight of her as a bucketful of water flew over the side and back into the flood. Like a sensible woman, she was bailing; and like a woman of sense, bailing downwind.
“She’s here, sieur. We are all here, all here now, sieur. I myself was the first to reach this craft.” Odilo inflated his chest with pardonable pride. “I was able to assist the females a bit, sieur. But no one had seen you at all, sieur, not since we cast our lots with the waves, if I may phrase it thus, sieur. We are most happy, sieur, indeed we are quite delighted—” He recollected himself. “Not that a young officer of your physique and undoubted prowess could be in much danger, sieur, where such humble persons as we had come safely through, sieur. Though but narrowly, sieur. Very narrowly, sieur. And yet the young women were concerned for you, sieur, for which I hope and trust you’ll forgive them.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” I told him. “I thank all of you for your help.”
The old sailor whose boat it was made some complex gesture (half-concealed by his thick coat) that I was unable to follow, then spit to windward.
“Our rescuer,” Odilo continued, beaming, “is—”
“Don’t matter,” the sailor snapped. “You get down there and trim that mains’l. Jib’s fouled, too. You stamp now and stutter, or she’ll capsize.”
It had been ten years and more since I had sailed on the Samru, but I had learned then how a fore-and-aft rig operates, and I do not forget. I had trimmed the gaff mainsail before Odilo and Pega had fathomed the mysteries of its simple rigging, and with a little help from the stay I freed the jib and payed out the sheet.
For the remainder of the day we lived in fear of the storm, flying before the strong winds that preceded it, always escaping but never completely sure we had. By night the danger seemed to have lessened, and we hove to. The sailor gave each of us a cup of water, a round of hard bread, and a scrap of smoked meat. I had known I was hungry, but I discovered that I was ravenous, as was everyone else.
“We’ve got to keep both eyes open for something to eat,” he directed Odilo and the women solemnly. “Sometimes, when there’s a wreck, you can find biscuit boxes or barrels of water. This’s about the biggest wreck there ever was, I suppose.” He paused, squinting at his vessel and the surrounding flood, still lit by the lingering incandescence of Urth’s new sun. “There’s islands — or there was — but we might not find them, and we’ve not got food enough nor water neither to reach the Xanthic Lands.”
“I have observed,” Odilo said, “that in the course of life events attain some nadir from which they are afterward elevated. The destruction of the House Absolute, the death of our beloved Autarch — if she has not, by the mercy of the Increate, somewhere survived—”
“She has,” I told him. “Believe me.” When he stared at me with his eyes filled with hope, I could only add weakly, “I feel it.”
“I trust so, sieur. Your feelings do you credit. But as I was saying, circumstances then reached their worst for us all.” He looked about, and even Thais and the old sailor nodded.
“And yet we lived. I discovered a floating table and thus was able to proffer my assistance to these poor women. Together we discovered still more furniture and constructed our raft, on which we were soon joined by our exalted guest; and at last you, Captain, rescued us, for which we are extremely grateful. That I should call a tendency. Our circumstances will incline toward the better for some time to come, I believe.”
Pega touched his arm. “You must have lost your wife, and your family too, Odilo. It’s admirable of you not to mention them, but we know how you must feel.”
He shook his head. “I never married. I’m glad of it now, though I’ve often regretted it. To be the steward of an entire hypogeum, and particularly, as I was in my youth, to be steward of my Hypogeum Apotropaic in the time of Father Inire, requires the most unremitting effort; one has hardly a watch in which to sleep. Previous to my own father’s lamented demise, there was a certain young person, the confidential servitrix of a chatelaine, if I may say so, to whom I hoped — but the chatelaine retired to her estates. For a time, the young person and I corresponded.”
He sighed. “Doubtless she found another, for a woman will always find another if she wishes. I hope and trust that he was worthy of her.”
I would have spoken then to relieve the tension if I could; but torn between amusement and sympathy as I was, I could think of nothing innocuous to say. Odilo’s inflated manner rendered him ridiculous, and yet I was conscious it was a manner that had evolved over many years, through the reigns of many Autarchs, as a means of preserving such people as Odilo had lately been from dismissal and death; and I was conscious too that I myself had been one of those Autarchs.
Pega had begun to talk to him in a low tone that was nearly a whisper, and although I could hear her voice above the slap of the waves against our side, I could not tell what was said. Nor was I sure I wished to hear it.
The old sailor had been rummaging under the little poopdeck that covered the last couple of ells of the stern. “Haven’t but four blankets,” he announced.
Odilo interrupted Pega to say, “Then I must do without. My clothing is dry now, and I should not be uncomfortable.”
The sailor tossed a blanket to each of the women, and one to me, keeping the last for himself.
I put mine in Odilo’s lap. “I’m not going to sleep for a while; I have some things to think about. Why don’t you use it until I’m ready for it? When I get sleepy, I’ll try to take it without waking you.”
Thais began, “I—” and though I was not meant to, I saw Pega elbow her so sharply she had to catch her breath.
Odilo hesitated; I could hardly make out his drawn face in the fading light, but I knew he must be very tired. At last he said, “That is most kind, sieur. Thank you, sieur.”
I had finished my bread and smoked meat long before. Not wishing to give him time to repent his decision, I went to the bow and stared out over the water. The waves still retained a twilight gleam from the sun, and I knew that their light was mine. I understood at that moment how the Increate must feel about his creation, and I knew the sorrow he knows because the things he creates pass away. I think it may be a law binding even him — that is to say, a logical necessity — that nothing can be eternal in the future that is not rooted in eternity in the past, as he himself is. And as I contemplated him in his joys and sorrows, it came to me that I was much like him, though so much smaller; thus an herb, perhaps, might think concerning a great cedar, or one of these innumerable drops of water about Ocean.
Night fell, and all the stars came out, so much the brighter for having hidden like frightened children under the gaze of the New Sun. I searched them — not for my own star, which I knew I would never see again, but for the End of the Universe. I did not find it, not upon that night nor any night since; yet surely it is there, lost among the myriad constellations.
Virescent radiance peeped across my shoulder like a ghost, and I, remembering the colored and many-faceted lanterns at the stern of the Samru, imagined we had hoisted a similar light; I turned to look, and it was the bright face of Lune, from which the eastern horizon had fallen like a veil. No man since the first had seen it as brilliant as I did that night. How strange to think that it was the same poor, faint thing I had seen only the night before beside the cenotaph! I knew then that our old world of Urth had perished, even as Dr. Tabs had foretold, and that our boat floated not there, but upon the wat
ers of the Urth of the New Sun, which is called Ushas.
Chapter XLVI — The Runaway
FOR A LONG while I stood there in the bow, sifting the sentinels of the night as Ushas’s swift motion revealed them. Our ancient Commonwealth had drowned; but the starlight that touched my eyes was more ancient still, had been old when the first woman nursed the first child. I wondered if the stars would weep, when Ushas herself was old, to learn of the death of our Commonwealth.
Certainly I, who had once been such a star, wept then.
From this I was taken by a touch at my elbow. It was the old sailor, the captain of our boat; he who had seemed so aloof before now stood with his shoulder next to mine, staring across the floodwaters as I did. It struck me that I had never learned his name.
I was about to ask it when he said, “Think I don’t know you?”
“Possibly you do,” I told him. “But if so, you have the advantage of me.”
“The cacogens, they can call up a man’s thought and show it to him. I know that.”
“You think I’m an eidolon. I’ve met them, but I’m not one of them; I’m a man like you.”
He might not have heard me. “All day I been watching you. I been lying awake watching you ever since we laid down. They say they can’t cry, but it’s not true, and I saw you crying and remembered what they said and how it’s wrong. Then I thought, how bad can they be? But it’s bad luck to have them on a ship, bad luck to think too much.”
“I’m sure that’s true. But those who think too much cannot help it.”
He nodded. “That’s so, I suppose.”
The tongues of men are older than our drowned land; and it seems strange that in so great a time no words have been found for the pauses in speech, which have each their own quality, as well as a certain length. Our silence endured while a hundred waves slapped the hull, and it held the rocking of the boat, the sigh of the night wind in the rigging, and pensive expectation.
“I wanted to say there’s nothing you can do to her that’ll hurt me. Sink her or run her aground, I don’t care.”
I told him I supposed I might do both, but that I would not do them intentionally.
“You never did me much harm when you were real,” the sailor said after another long pause. “I wouldn’t have met Maxellindis if it hadn’t been for you — maybe that was bad. Maybe it wasn’t. We’d some good years together, Maxellindis and me.”
I examined him from a corner of my eye as he stared blindly over the restless waves. His nose had been broken, perhaps more than once. In my mind I straightened it again and filled in his lined cheeks.
“There was that time you pounded me. Remember, Severian? They’d just made you the captain. When it came my turn I did the same to Timon.”
“Eata!” Before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed him and picked him up just as I used to when we had been apprentices together. “Eata, you little snot-nose, I thought I’d never see you again!” I spoke so loudly that Odilo moaned and stirred in his sleep.
Eata looked startled. His hand went toward the knife at his belt, then drew away.
I put him down. “When I reformed the guild you were gone. They said you’d run away.”
“I did.” He tried to swallow, or perhaps only to catch his breath. “It’s good to hear you, Severian, even if you’re just a bad dream. What did you call them?”
“Eidolons.”
“A eidolon. If the cacogens are going to show me somebody out of my head, I might have had worse company”
“Eata, do you remember the time we were locked out of the necropolis?”
He nodded. “And Drotte made me try to squeeze through the bars, but I couldn’t do it. Then when the volunteers opened it, I ran off and left you and him and Roche to the crows. None of you seemed much afraid of Master Gurloes, but I was, back then.”
“We were too, but we didn’t want to show it in front of you.”
“I suppose.” He was grinning; I could see his teeth flash in the green moonlight, and the black smudge where one had been knocked out. “That’s what boys are like, like the skipper said when he showed his daughter.”
Wildly and momentarily it occurred to me that if Eata had not run, it might have been he who saved Vodalus, he who did and saw all the things that I had seen and done. It may be that in some other sphere it happened so. Pushing away the thought, I asked, “But what have you been doing all this time? Tell me.”
“Not much to tell. When I was captain of apprentices it was easy enough to slip away and see Maxellindis whenever her uncle’s boat was docked somewhere around the Algedonic Quarter. I had talked to the sailors and learned to sail a bit myself; and so when it came feast time, I couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t put on fuligin.”
I said, “I did it only because I couldn’t imagine living in any place except the Matachin Tower .”
Eata nodded. “But I could, see? I’d thought all that year about living on the boat and helping Maxellindis and her uncle. He was getting stiff, and they needed somebody spry and stronger than her. I didn’t wait for the masters to call me in to choose. I just ran off.”
“And after that?”
“Forgot the torturers as fast as I could and as much as I could. Only lately I’ve started trying to remember what it was like, living in the Matachin Tower when I was young. You won’t believe this, Severian, but for years I couldn’t look at Citadel Hill when we went up or down that reach. I used to keep my eyes turned away.”
“I do believe you,” I told him.
“Maxellindis’s uncle died. There was a tap he used to go to, way down south in the delta in a place called Liti. You’ve probably never heard of it. Maxellindis and me came to get him one night, and he was sitting there with his bottle and glass, with one arm on the table and his head down on his arm; but when I tried to shake his shoulder he fell out of the chair, and he was cold already.”
“’Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.’”
“What’s that?” Eata asked.
“Just an old story,” I said. “Never mind, go on.”
“After that, just her and me worked the boat. The two of us could do it about as well as the three of us had before. We never really got married. When we both wanted to we never had the money, somehow. And when we had the money, there was always some kind of quarrel. After a couple of years everybody thought we were married anyway.” He blew his nose, flinging the mucus over the side.
“Go on,” I said again.
“We did some smuggling, and one night we got stopped by a cutter. Eight or ten leagues south of Citadel Hill, that was. Maxellindis jumped — I heard the splash — and I would have too, but one of the taxmen threw a achico at my feet and tripped me up. You know what they are, I suppose.”
I nodded. “Was I Autarch still? You might have appealed to me.”
“No. I thought about it, but I was sure you’d send me back to the guild.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I told him, “but would that have been worse than what the law did to you?”
“It would have been for the rest of my life. That’s what I kept thinking about. Anyway, they took me upriver with our boat in tow. I was held till the assize, and then the judge ordered me flogged and made me sign on a carrack. They kept me in irons till we were out of sight of the coast, and they worked me like a slave, but I got to see the Xanthic Lands and I went over the side there and stayed for two years. It’s not such a bad place if you’ve got some money.”
I said, “But you came back.”
“There was a riot and this girl that I’d been living with got killed in it. They have them there every couple years over the price of food in the market. The soldiers break heads, and I guess they broke hers. There was a caravel anchored off Blue Flower Island right then, and I went to see the captain and he gave me a berth. A man can be a terrible fool when he’s young, and I thought maybe Maxellindis had got us
another boat. But when I came back she wasn’t on the river. I’ve never seen her again. She died, I guess, the night the cutter got its grapple on us.”
He paused chin in hand. “Maxellindis was almost as good a swimmer as I ever was. You remember I could swim almost as well as you and Drotte, but maybe a nixie pulled her down. That used to happen, sometimes, specially on the lower reaches.”
I said, “I know,” remembering Juturna’s huge face as I had glimpsed it as a boy, when I had almost drowned in Gyoll.
“Not much more to tell I’d brought back a bit of money in a silk cestus I’d had a man make for me over there, and I got a little more when the caravel paid off. I bought this boat here on shares and here I am. But I can still speak a little of the Xanthic tongue, and more will come to my mouth when I hear it in another one. Or it would if we had more water and a little more food.”
I told him “There are many isles in that sea. I saw them on a chart in the Hypotherm Classis once.”
He nodded “I guess a couple hundred, and a lot more that don’t show on any chart I’ve seen. You’d think a ship couldn’t miss them all but it can. Unless you’re pretty lucky, you can pass right between them without ever knowing they’re there. A lot depends on when it’s night and when it’s day, and a lot more on how high up your lookout stands — if he’s in the maintop of a carrack or the bow of my little boat.”
I shrugged. “We can only hope.”
“That’s like the frog said when he seen the stork. But his mouth was dry, and he couldn’t quite get the word out.”
Eata paused for a moment, studying me instead of the waves. “Severian, do you know what’s happened to you? Even if you’re just a dream from the cacogens?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not a phantom. Or if I am, it’s Tzadkiel the Hierogrammate you should blame for me.”