The Urth of the New Sun (38 page)

I breached then, shooting free of the waves by two cubits, and saw, still some way off, a ragged raft to which two women clung, and on which a man stood shading his eyes with his hand while he scanned the tossing surface.

A dozen strokes carried me to them. The raft had been built of whatever floating stuff they could find, and bound together in any way that would serve. Its core was a large table such as an exultant might have spread for an intimate supper in his suite; and the table's eight sturdy legs, now pawing the air by pairs, seemed parodies of masts.

When I had clambered onto the back of a cabinet (somewhat cumbered by the well-meant help I got), I saw that the survivors comprised a fat, bald man and the two women, both fairly young, one short and blessed with the merry, round face of a cheerful doll, the other tall, dark, and hollow-cheeked.

"You see," the fat man said, "not all's lost. There'll be more, mark my word." The dark woman muttered, "And no water."

"We'll get something, never fear. Meantime, none to share amongst four's but a bit worse than none to share amongst three, provided it's doled out fairly." I said, "This must be fresh water all around us."

The fat man shook his head. "I fear it's the sea, sieur. High tides because of the Day Star, sieur, and they've swallowed up the countryside at present. Gyoll's mixed in with them, to be sure, so the water's not quite so salt as they say old Ocean is, sieur."

"Don't I know you? You seem familiar."

He bowed as skillfully as any legate, all the while keeping a hand braced on one of the table legs. "Odilo, sieur. Master steward, sieur, and charged by our benign Autarch, whose smiles are the hopes of her humble servants, sieur, with the regulation of the whole of the Hypogeum Apotropaic in its entirety, sieur. Doubtless you saw me there, sieur, upon some visit you made to our House Absolute, though I did not have occasion to wait upon you there, sieur, I'm sure, as I would have recollected such an honor to the very day of my demise, sieur."

The dark woman said, "Which may be this."

I hesitated. I did not want to feign to be the exultant Odilo plainly took me for; but to announce myself the Autarch Severian would be awkward even if I were believed. The doll-faced woman rescued me. "I'm Pega, and I was the armagette Pelagia's soubrette."

Odilo frowned. "Hardly well mannered for you to introduce yourself in such a way, Pega. You were her ancilla."

And then to me. "She was a good servant, sieur, I have no question. A trifle giddy, perhaps."

The doll-faced woman looked chastened, though I suspected the expression was entirely assumed. "I did madame's hair and took care of her things, but she really kept me to tell her all the latest jokes and gossip, and to train Picopicaro. That was what she said, and she always called me her soubrette." A fat tear rolled down her cheek, gleaming in the sun; but whether it was for her dead mistress or the dead bird, I could not be sure.

"And this, ah, female will not introduce herself to Pega and me. That is, beyond her name, which is—"

"Thais."

"I am enriched by this introduction," I said. By then I had remembered that I held honorary commissions in half a dozen legions and epitagms, all of which I could employ as incognitos without a lie. "Hipparch Severian, of the Black Tarentines." Pega's mouth shaped a tiny circle. "Ooh! I must've seen you in the procession!" She turned to the woman who had called herself Thais. "His men wore lacquered
cuir-bouilli
with white plumes, and you never saw such destriers!"

Odilo murmured, "You went with your mistress, I take it?"

Pega made some response, but I gave it no heed. A corpse bobbing a chain from the raft had caught my eye, and I thought how absurd it was that I should squat on a dead man's furniture and dissemble to servants with Valeria rotting underwater. How she would have mocked me! At a pause in the talk, I asked Odilo whether his father had not been steward before him in the same place.

He beamed with pleasure. "He was indeed, sieur, and gave the most complete satisfaction all his life. That was in the great days of Father Inire, sieur, when, if I may say so, sieur, our Hypogeum Apotropaic was famous all across the Commonwealth. May I ask why you inquire, sieur?"

"I merely wondered. It's more or less the usual thing, I believe."

"It is, sieur. The son's given an opportunity to show his mettle if he can; and if he does, he retains the office. You may not believe it, sieur, but my father once encountered your namesake before he had become Autarch. Do you know of his life and deeds, sieur?"

"Not as much as I'd like to, Odilo."

"Graciously spoken, sieur. Most graciously spoken indeed." The fat steward nodded and beamed at the two women to make sure they appreciated the exquisite courtesy of my reply.

Pega was studying the sky. "It's going to rain, I believe. Maybe we won't die of thirst after all."

Thais said, "Another storm. We'll drown instead."

I told them I hoped not, and began to examine my emotional state before I remembered it could no longer be the power of my star that had summoned the clouds gathering in the east.

Odilo was not to be deprived of his anecdote. "It was late one night, sieur, and my father was making his final rounds when he saw someone attired in the fuligin habiliments of a carnifex, though without the customary sword of execution. As was to be expected, his first thought was that the man was arrayed for a masque, of which there are always several in one part or another of the House Absolute on any given night. Yet he knew none was to take place in our Hypogeum Apotropaic, neither Father Inire nor the then Autarch having much fondness for those diversions."

I smiled, recalling the House Azure. The dark woman shot me a significant glance and ostentatiously covered her lips with her hand, but I had no desire to cut Odilo's recital short; now that I would no longer wander through the Corridors of Time, all that concerned the past or the future seemed infinitely precious to me.

"His next thought—which had better been his first, sieur, as he often owned to my mother and me as we sat by the fireside—was that this carnifex had set out upon some sinister mission, supposing himself apt to pass unobserved. It was vital, sieur, as my father understood at once, to learn if his errand served Father Inire or some other. My father therefore approached him as boldly as if he'd a cohort of hastarii at his back and asked his business straight out."

Thais murmured, "If he had been set upon some evil errand, he would have owned it, no doubt."

Odilo said, "My dear lady, I don't know whom you may be, as you have refrained from informing us even when our exalted guest obligingly made us privy to his own patrician identity. But you obviously know nothing of artifice, nor of the intrigues carried out daily—and nightly!—among the myriad hallways of our House Absolute. My father was well aware that no agent entrusted with an irrevealable commission would disclose it, however abrupt the demand. He hazarded that some involuntary gesture or fleeting expression might betray treachery, were such intended."

"Wasn't that Severian masked?" I asked. "You said he was dressed as a torturer."

"I'm quite certain he wasn't, sieur, as my father described him often—a most savage countenance, sieur, severely scarred on one cheek."

"I know!" Pega broke in. "I've seen his portrait and his bust. They're in the Hypogeum Abscititious, where the Autarch put them when she married again. He looked like he'd cut your throat whistling."

I felt that someone had cut my own.

"Quite apropos!" Odilo approved. "My father said much the same, though he never put it so succinctly that I can recall."

Pega was examining me. "He never had children, did he?"

Odilo smiled. "One would have heard of
that
, I imagine."

"Legitimate children. But he could have covered any woman in the House Absolute, just by cocking an eyebrow. Exultants, all of them."

Odilo told her to hold her tongue and said, "I do hope you will forgive Pega, sieur. After all, it's rather a compliment."

"To be told I look like a cutthroat? Yes, it's the kind I'm always getting." I spoke without reflection and continued in the same way, seeking at once to turn the talk to Valeria's remarriage and to conceal the grief I felt. "But wouldn't the cutthroat have to be my grandfather? Severian the Great would be eighty or more if he were alive, surely. Whom should I ask about him, Pega? My mother or my father? And don't you think there must have been something about him after all, for him to command so many fine chatelaines when he'd been a torturer in his youth, even if the Autarch took a new husband?" To fill the silence that followed my little speech, Odilo said, "That guild is abolished, sieur, I believe."

"Of course you do. That's what people always believe." The whole of the east was black already, and the motion of our improvised raft had grown perceptibly more lively. Pega whispered, "I didn't mean to offend, Hipparch. It's just that..." Whatever it was, was lost in the breaking of a wave.

"No," I told her. "You're right. He was a hard man from all I know of him; and a cruel one too, at least by reputation, though perhaps he wouldn't have owned to that. Quite possibly Valeria wed him for his throne, though I believe she's sometimes said otherwise. Her second husband made her happy, at least."

Odilo chortled. "Well put, sieur. A distinct hit. You must take care, Pega, when you cross swords with a soldier."

Thais stood, grasping a table leg with one hand and pointing with the other. "
Look!
"

The Boat

IT WAS a sail, lifted at times so high that we could glimpse the dark hull under it—at others nearly lost, dipping and spinning down the trenches of the flood. We shouted till we were hoarse, all of us, and capered and waved our arms, and at last I lifted Pega onto my shoulder, balancing as precariously as I had in the tossing howdah of Vodalus's baluchither.

The wind spilled from the gaff-rigged sail. Pega groaned. "They're sinking!"

"No," I told her, "they're coming about."

The little jib emptied and flapped in its turn, then filled again. I cannot say just how many breaths or how many beatings of my heart passed before we saw the sharp jibboom stabbing the sky like a flagstaff set on a green hill. Time has seldom gone more slowly for me, and I feel they might have numbered several thousands.

A moment more, and the boat lay within long bowshot of us, with a rope trailing in the water. I plunged in, not sure that the others would follow me, but feeling I would be better able to help them on board than on the raft.

At once it seemed I had plunged into another world, more outlandish than the Brook Madregot. The unresting waves and clouded sky vanished as if they had never existed. I sensed a mighty current, yet I could not have said by what means I knew of it; for although the drowned pastures of my drowned nation slipped under me and its trees gestured to me with supplicating limbs, the water itself seemed at rest. It was as if I watched the slow rolling of Urth across the void.

At length I saw a cottage with its walls and stone chimney still standing; its open door appeared to beckon me. I felt a sudden terror and swam upward toward the light as desperately as when I had been drowning in Gyoll.

My head broke the surface; water streamed from my nostrils. For a moment it seemed that both raft and boat were gone, but a wave lifted the boat so that I glimpsed its weather-stained sail. I knew I had been underwater a long time, even though it had not seemed so. I swam as fast as I could, but I was careful to keep my face in air as much as possible, and I closed my eyes when it was not.

Odilo stood in the stern with a hand on the tiller; when he saw me, he waved and shouted some encouragement I could not hear. In a moment or two, Pega's round face appeared above the gunnel, then another face, one I did not know, brown and wrinkled. A wave picked me up as a cat does her kittens, and I dove headfirst down its farther side and found the floating rope in the trough. Odilo abandoned the tiller (which was held with a loop of cordage in any case, as I saw when I got on board) and joined in hauling me in. The little boat had only a couple of cubits of freeboard, and it was not difficult to brace my foot on the rudder and vault over the stern.

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."