Sword & Citadel (43 page)

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Authors: Gene Wolfe

BOOK: Sword & Citadel
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“I have duties to perform. In the upper level, where you slept.”
“I am afraid they must go unperformed.”
He was silent as we went out the door and onto the rocky hilltop. Then he said, “I will go with you, if I can. I have often wished to walk out of this door and never halt.”
I told him that if he would swear upon his honor, I would untie him at once.
He shook his head. “You might think that I betrayed you.”
I did not know what he meant.
“Perhaps somewhere there is the woman I have called Vine. But your world is your world. I can exist there only if the probability of my existence is high.”
I said, “I existed in your house, didn't I?”
“Yes, but that was because your probability was complete. You are a part of the past from which my house and I have come. The question is whether I am the future to which you go.”
I remembered the green man in Saltus, who had been solid enough. “Will you vanish like a soap bubble then?” I asked. “Or blow away like smoke?”
“I do not know,” he said. “I do not know what will happen to me. Or where I will go when it does. I may cease to exist in any time. That was why I never left of my own will.”
I took him by one arm, I suppose because I thought I could keep him with me in that way, and we walked on. I followed the route Mannea had drawn for me, and the Last House rose behind us as solidly as any other. My mind was busy with all the things he had told me and showed me, so that for a while, the space of twenty or thirty paces, perhaps, I did not look around at him. At last his remark about the tapestry suggested Valeria to me. The room where we had eaten cakes had been hung with them, and what he had said about tracing threads suggested the maze of tunnels through which I had run before encountering her. I started to tell him of it, but he was gone. My hand grasped empty air. For a moment I seemed to see the Last House afloat like a ship upon its ocean of ice. Then it merged into the dark hilltop on which it had stood; the ice was no more than what I had once taken it to be—a bank of cloud.
Foila's Request
For another hundred paces or more, Master Ash was not entirely gone. I felt his presence, and sometimes even caught sight of him, walking beside me and half a step behind, when I did not try to look directly at him. How I saw him, how he could in some sense be present while in another absent, I do not know. Our eyes receive a rain of photons without mass or charge from swarming particles like a billion, billion suns—so Master Palaemon, who was nearly blind, had taught me. From the pattering of those photons we believe we see a man. Sometimes the man we believe we see may be as illusory as Master Ash, or more so.
His wisdom I felt with me too. It had been a melancholy wisdom, but a real one. I found myself wishing he had been able to accompany me, though I realized it would have meant the coming of the ice was certain. “I'm lonely, Master Ash,” I said, not daring to look back. “How lonely I didn't realize until now. You were lonely also, I think. Who was the woman you called Vine?”
Perhaps I only imagined his voice.
“The first woman.”
“Meschiane? Yes, I know her, and she is very lovely. My Meschiane was Dorcas, and I am lonely for her, but for all the others too. When Thecla became a part of me, I thought I would never be lonely again. But now she is so much a part that we're only one person, and I can be lonely for others. For Dorcas, for Pia the island girl, for little Severian and Drotte and Roche. If Eata were here, I could hug him.
“Most of all, I'd like to see Valeria. Jolenta was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, but there was something in Valeria's face that tore my heart out. I was only a boy, I suppose, though I didn't think so then. I crawled up out of the dark and found myself in a place they called the Atrium of Time. Towers—the towers of Valeria's family—rose on all sides of it. In the center was an obelisk covered with sundials, and though I remember its shadow on the snow, it couldn't have had sunlight there for more than two or three watches of each day; the towers must shade it most of the time. Your understanding is deeper than mine, Master Ash—can you tell me why they might have built it so?”
A wind that played among the rocks seized my cloak so that it billowed
from my shoulders. I secured it again and pulled up my hood. “I was following a dog. I called him Triskele, and I said, even to myself, that he was mine, though I had no right to keep a dog. It was a winter day when I found him. We'd been doing laundry—washing the clients' bedclothes—and the drain plugged with rags and lint. I'd been shirking my work, and Drotte told me to go outside and ram a clothes prop up it. The wind was terribly cold. That was your ice coming, I suppose, though I didn't know it at the time—the winters getting a little worse each year. And of course when I got the drain open, a gush of filthy water would come out and wet my hands.
“I was angry because I was the oldest, except for Drotte and Roche, and I thought the younger apprentices ought to have to do the work. I was poking at the clog with my stick when I saw him across the Old Yard. The keepers in the Bear Tower had held a private fight, I suppose, the night before, and the dead beasts were lying outside their door waiting for the nacker. There was an arsinoither and a smilodon, and several dire wolves. The dog was lying on top. I suppose he had been the last to die, and from his wounds one of the dire wolves had killed him. Of course, he wasn't really dead, but he looked dead.
“I went over to see him—it was an excuse to stop what I was doing for a moment and blow on my fingers. He was as stiff and cold as … well, as anything I've ever seen. I killed a bull once with my sword, and when it was lying dead in its own blood it still looked quite a bit more living than Triskele did then. Anyway, I reached out and stroked his head. It was as big as a bear's, and they had cut off his ears, so that only two little points were left. When I touched him he opened his eyes. I dashed back across the Yard and rammed the stick up so hard it broke through at once, because I was afraid Drotte would send Roche down to see what I was doing.
“When I think back on it, it was as if I had the Claw already, more than a year before I got it. I can't describe how he looked when he rolled his eye up to see me. He touched my heart. I never revived an animal when I had the Claw, but then I never tried. When I was among them, I was usually wishing I could kill one, because I wanted something to eat. Now I'm no longer sure that killing animals to eat is something we are meant to do. I noticed that you had no meat in your supplies—only bread and cheese, and wine and dried fruit. Do your people, on whatever world it is where people live in your time, feel so too?”
I paused, hoping for an answer, but none came. All the mountaintops had dropped below the sun now; I was no longer certain whether some thin presence of Master Ash followed me or only my shadow.
I said, “When I had the Claw I found that it would not revive those dead by human acts, though it seemed to heal the man-ape whose hand I had struck off. Dorcas thought it was because I had done it myself. I can't say—I never thought the Claw knew who held it, but perhaps it did.”
A voice—not Master Ash's but a voice I had never heard before—called out, “A fine new year to you!”
I looked up and and saw, perhaps forty paces off, just such an uhlan as
Hethor's notules had killed on the green road to the House Absolute. Not knowing what else to do, I waved and shouted, “Is it New Year's Day, then?”
He touched spurs to his destrier and came galloping up. “Mid summer today, the beginning of the new year. A glorious one for our Autarch.”
I tried to recall some of the phrases Jolenta had been so fond of. “Whose heart is the shrine of his subjects.”
“Well said! I'm Ibar, of the Seventy-eighth Xenagie, patrolling the road until evening, worse luck.”
“Surely it's lawful to use the road here.”
“Entirely. Provided, of course, that you are prepared to identify yourself.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” I had almost forgotten the safe-conduct Mannea had written for me. Now I took it out and handed it to him.
When I had been stopped on my way to the Last House, I had by no means been sure that the soldiers who had questioned me could read. Each had stared wisely at the parchment, but it might well have been that they took in no more than the sigil of the order and Mannea's regular and vigorous, though slightly eccentric, penmanship. The uhlan unquestionably could. I could see his eyes traveling the lines of script, and even guess, I think, when they paused momentarily at “honorable interment.”
He refolded the parchment carefully but retained it. “So you are a servant of the Pelerines.”
“I have that honor, yes.”
“You were praying, then. I thought you were talking to yourself when I saw you. I don't hold with any religious nonsense. We have the standard of the xenagie near at hand and the Autarch at a distance, and that's all I need of reverence and mystery; but I have heard that they were good women.”
I nodded. “I believe—perhaps somewhat more than you. But they are indeed.”
“And you were sent on a task for them. How many days ago?”
“Three.”
“Are you returning to the lazaret at Media Pars now?”
I nodded again. “I hope to reach it before nightfall.”
He shook his head. “You won't. Take it easy, that's my advice to you.” He held out the parchment.
I took it and returned it to my sabretache. “I was traveling with a companion, but we were separated. I wonder if you've seen him.” I described Master Ash.
The uhlan shook his head. “I'll keep an eye out for him and tell him which way you went if I see him. Now—will you answer a question for me? It's not official, so you can tell me it's none of my affair if you want.”
“I will if I can.”
“What will you do when you leave the Pelerines?”
I was somewhat taken aback. “Why, I hadn't planned to leave at all. Someday, perhaps.”
“Well, keep the light cavalry in mind. You look like a man of your hands, and we can always use one. You'll live half as long as you would in the infantry, and have twice as much fun.”
He urged his mount forward, and I was left to ponder what he had said. I did not doubt that he had been serious in telling me to sleep on the road; but that very seriousness made me hurry forward all the faster. I have been blessed with long legs, so that when I need to I can walk as fast as most men can trot. I used them then, dropping all thoughts of Master Ash and my own troubled past. Perhaps some thin presence of Master Ash still accompanied me; perhaps it does so yet. But if it did, I was and remain unaware of it.
Urth had not yet turned her face from the sun when I came to that narrow road the dead soldier and I had taken only a little over a week before. There was blood in its dust still, much more than I had seen there previously. I had feared from what the uhlan had said that the Pelerines had been accused of some misdeed; now I felt sure that it was only that a great influx of wounded had been brought to the lazaret, and he had decided I deserved a night's rest before being set to work on them. That thought was a vast relief to me. A superabundance of the injured would give me an opportunity to show my skills and render it that much more likely that Mannea would accept me when I offered to sell myself to the order, if only I could contrive some tale to account for my failure at the Last House.
When I turned the final bend in the road, however, what I saw was entirely different.
Where the lazaret had stood, the ground seemed to have been plowed by a host of madmen, plowed and dug—its bottom already a small lake of shallow water. Shattered trees rimmed the circle.
Until darkness came, I walked back and forth across it. I was looking for some sign of my friends, and also for some trace of the altar that had held the Claw. I found a human hand, a man's hand, blown off at the wrist. It might have been Melito's, or Hallvard's, or the Ascian's, or Winnoc's. I could not tell.
I slept beside the road that night. When morning came I began my inquiries, and before evening I had located the survivors, some half dozen leagues from the original site. I went from cot to cot, but many were unconscious and so bandaged about the head that I could not have known them. It is possible that Ava, Mannea, and the Pelerine who had carried a stool to my bedside were among them, though I did not discover them there.
The only woman I recognized was Foila, and that only because she recognized me, calling “Severian!” as I walked among the wounded and dying. I went to her and tried to question her, but she was very weak and could tell me little. The attack had come without warning and shattered the lazaret like a thunderbolt; her memories were all of the aftermath, of hearing the screams that for a long time had brought no rescuers, and at last being dragged forth by soldiers who knew little of medicine. I kissed her as well as I could, and promised to come and see her again—a promise, I think, that
both of us knew I would not be able to keep. She said, “Do you recall the time when all of us told stories? I thought of that.”
I said I knew she had.
“I mean while they were carrying us here. Melito and Hallvard and the rest are dead, I think. You will be the only one who remembers, Severian.”
I told her I would remember always.
“I want you to tell other people. On winter days, or a night when there is nothing else to do. Do you remember the stories?”
“‘My land is the land of far horizons, of the wide sky.'”
“Yes,” she said, and seemed to sleep.
My second promise I have kept, first copying all the stories onto the blank pages at the close of the brown book, then giving them here, just as I heard them in the long, warm noons.

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