The Urth of the New Sun (33 page)

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 pointillé 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.

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.

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.