To the Castle
The remaining islands were separated now, and though the boats moved among them and sails were bent to every limb, I could not but feel that we were stationary under the streaming clouds, our motion only the last delusion of a drowning land.
Many of the floating islands I had seen earlier that day had been left behind as refuges for women and children. Half a dozen remained, and I stood upon the highest point of Llibio's, the largest of the six. Besides the old man and me; it carried seven fighters. The other islands bore four or five apiece. In addition to the islands we had about thirty boats, each crewed by two or three.
I did not deceive myself into thinking that our hundred men, with their knives and fish spears, constituted a formidable force; a handful of Abdiesus's dimarchi would have scattered them like chaff. But they were my followers, and to lead men into battle is a feeling like no other.
Not a glimmer showed upon the waters of the lake, save for the green, reflected light that fell from the myriad leaves of the Forest of Lune, fifty thousand leagues away. Those waters made me think of steel, polished and oiled. The faint wind brought no white foam, though it moved them in long swells like hills of metal.
After a time a cloud obscured the moon, and I wondered briefly whether the lake people would lose their bearings in the dark. It might have been broad noon, however, from the way they handled their vessels, and though boats and islands were often close together, I never in all that voyage saw two that were in the slightest danger of fouling each other.
To be conveyed as I was, by starlight and in darkness, in the midst of my own archipelago, with no sound but the whisper of the wind and the dipping of paddles that rose and fell as regularly as the ticking of a clock, with no motion that could be felt beyond the gentle swelling of the waves, might have been calming and even soporific, for I was tired, though I had slept a little before we set out; but the chill of the night air and the thought of what we were going to do kept me awake.
Neither Llibio nor any of the other islanders had been able to give me more than the vaguest information about the interior of the castle we were
to storm. There was a principal building and a wall. Whether or not the principal building was a true keepâthat is, a fortified tower high enough to look down upon the wallâI had no idea. Nor did I know whether there were other buildings in addition to the principal one (a barbican, for example), or whether the wall was strengthened with towers or turrets, or how many defenders it might have. The castle had been built in the space of two or three years with native labor; so it could not be as formidable as, say, Acies Castle; but a place a quarter of its strength would be impregnable to us.
I was acutely conscious of how little fitted I was to lead such an expedition. I had never so much as seen a battle, much less taken part in one. My knowledge of military architecture came from my upbringing in the Citadel and some casual sightseeing among the fortifications of Thrax, and what I knewâor thought I knewâof tactics had been gleaned from equally casual reading. I remembered how I had played in the necropolis as a boy, fighting mock skirmishes with wooden swords, and the thought made me almost physically ill. Not because I feared much for my own life, but because I knew that an error of mine might result in the deaths of most of these innocent and ignorant men, who looked to me for leadership.
Briefly the moon shone again, crossed by the black silhouettes of a flight of storks. I could see the shoreline as a band of denser night on the horizon. A new mass of cloud cut off the light, and a drop of water struck my face. It made me feel suddenly cheerful without knowing whyâno doubt the reason was that I unconsciously recalled the rain outside on the night when I stood off the alzabo. Perhaps I was thinking too of the icy waters that spewed from the mouth of the mine of the man-apes.
Yet leaving aside all these chance associations, the rain might be a blessing indeed. We had no bows, and if it wet our opponents' bowstrings, so much the better. Certainly it would be impossible to use the bullets of power the hetman's archer had fired. Besides, rain would favor an attack by stealth, and I had long ago decided that it was only by stealth that our attack could hope to succeed.
I was deep in plans when the cloud broke again, and I saw that we were on a course parallel to the shore, which rose in cliffs to our right. Ahead, a peninsula of rock higher still jutted into the lake, and I walked to the point of the island to ask the man stationed there if the castle was situated on it. He shook his head and said, “We will go about.”
So we did. The clews of all the sails were loosed, and retied on new limbs. Leeboards weighted with stones were lowered into the water on one side of the island while three men strained at the tiller bar to bring the rudder around. I was struck by the thought that Llibio must have ordered our present landfall, wisely enough, to escape the notice of any lookouts who might keep watch over the waters of the lake. If that were the case, we would still be in danger of being seen when we no longer had the peninsula between the castle and our little fleet. It also occurred to me that since the builder of the castle had not chosen to put it on the high spur of rock we
were skirting now, which looked very nearly invulnerable, it was perhaps because he had found a place yet more secure.
Then we rounded the point and sighted our destination no more than four chains down the coastâan outthrust of rock higher still and more abrupt, with a wall at its summit and a keep that seemed to have the impossible shape of an immense toadstool.
I could not believe my eyes. From the great, tapering central column, which I had no doubt was a round tower of native stone, spread a lensshaped structure of metal ten times its diameter and apparently as solid as the tower itself.
All about our island, the men in the boats and on the other islands were whispering to one another and pointing. It seemed that this incredible sight was as novel to them as to me.
The misty light of the moon, the younger sister's kiss upon the face of her dying elder, shone on the upper surface of that huge disk. Beneath it, in its thick shadow, gleamed sparks of orange light. They moved, gliding up or down, though their movement was so slow that I had watched them for some time before I was conscious of it. Eventually, one rose until it appeared to be immediately under the disk and vanished, and just before we came to shore, two more appeared in the same spot.
A tiny beach lay in the shadow of the cliff. Llibio's island ran aground before we reached it, however; I had to jump into the water once more, this time holding
Terminus Est
above my head. Fortunately there was no surf, and though rain still threatened, it had not yet come. I helped some of the lake men drag their boats onto the shingle while others moored islands to boulders with sinew hawsers.
After my trip through the mountains, the narrow, treacherous path would have been easy if I had not had to climb it in the dark. As it was, I would rather have made the descent past the buried city to Casdoe's house, though that had been five times farther.
When we reached the top we were still some distance from the wall, which was screened from us by a grove of straggling firs. I gathered the islanders about me and askedâa rhetorical questionâif they knew from where the sky ship above the castle had come. And when they assured me they did not, I explained that I did (and so I did, Dorcas having warned me of them, though I had never seen such a thing before), and that because of its presence here it would be better if I were to reconnoiter the situation before we proceeded with the assault.
No one spoke, but I could sense their feeling of helplessness. They had believed they had found a hero to lead them, and now they were going to lose him before the battle was joined.
“I am going inside if I can,” I told them. “I will come back to you if that is possible, and I will leave such doors as I may open for you.”
Llibio asked, “But suppose you cannot come back. How shall we know when the moment to draw our knives has come?”
“I will make some signal,” I said, and strained my wits to think what
signal I might make if I were pent in that black tower. “They must have fires on such a night as this. I'll show a brand at a window, and drop it if I can so that you'll see the streak of fire. If I make no signal and cannot return to you, you may assume they have taken me prisonerâattack when the first light touches the mountains.”
Â
A short time later I stood at the gate of the castle, banging a great iron knocker shaped (so far as I could determine with my fingers) like the head of a man against a plate of the same metal set in oak.
There was no response. After I had waited for the space of a score of breaths, I knocked again. I could hear the echoes waked inside, an empty reverberation like the throbbing of a heart, but there was no sound of voices. The hideous faces I had glimpsed in the Autarch's garden filled my mind and I waited in dread for the noise of a shot, though I knew that if the Hierodules chose to shoot meâand all energy weapons came ultimately from themâI would probably never hear it. The air was so still it seemed the atmosphere waited with me. Thunder rolled to the east.
At last there were footsteps, so quick and light I could have thought them the steps of a child. A vaguely familiar voice called, “Who's there? What do you want?”
And I answered, “Master Severian of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and PenitenceâI come as the arm of the Autarch, whose justice is the bread of his subjects.”
“Do you indeed!” exclaimed Dr. Talos, and threw open the gate.
For a moment I could only stare at him.
“Tell me, what does the Autarch want with us? The last time I saw you, you were on your way to the City of Crooked Knives. Did you ever get there?”
“The Autarch wanted to know why your vassals laid hold of one of his servants,” I said. “That is to say, myself. This puts a slightly different light on the matter.”
“It does! It does! From our point of view too, you understand. I didn't know you were the mysterious visitor at Murene. And I'm sure poor old Baldanders didn't either. Come in and we'll talk about it.”
I stepped through the gateway in the wall, and the doctor pushed the heavy gate closed behind me and fitted an iron bar into place.
I said, “There really isn't much to talk about, but we might begin with a valuable gem that was taken from me by force, and as I have been informed, sent to you.”
Even while I spoke, however, my attention was drawn from the words I pronounced to the vast bulk of the ship of the Hierodules, which was directly overhead now that I was past the wall. Staring up at it gave me the same feeling of dislocation I have sometimes had on looking down through the double curve of a magnifying glass; the convex underside of that ship had the look of something alien not only to the world of human beings, but to all the visible world.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Talos said. “Baldanders has your trinket, I believe. Or rather, he had it and has stuck it away somewhere. I'm sure he'll give it back to you.”
From inside the round tower that appeared (though it could not possibly have done so) to support the ship, there came faintly a lonely and terrible sound that might have been the howling of a wolf. I had heard nothing like it since I had left our own Matachin Tower; but I knew what it was, and I said to Dr. Talos, “You have prisoners here.”
He nodded. “Yes. I'm afraid I've been too busy to feed the poor creatures today, what with everything.” He waved vaguely toward the ship overhead. “You don't object to meeting cacogens, I hope, Severian? If you want to go in and ask Baldanders for your jewel, I'm afraid you'll have to. He's in there talking to them.”
I said I had no objection, though I am afraid I shuddered inwardly as I said it.
The doctor smiled, showing above his red beard the line of sharp, bright teeth I recalled so well. “That's wonderful. You were always a wonderfully unprejudiced person. If I may say so, I suppose your training has taught you to take every being as he comes.”
Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus
As is common in such pele towers, there was no entrance at ground level. A straight stair, narrow, steep, and without railings, led to an equally narrow door some ten cubits above the pavement of the courtyard. This door stood open already, and I was delighted to see that Dr. Talos did not close it after us. We went through a short corridor that was, no doubt, no more than the thickness of the tower wall and emerged into a room that appeared (like all the rooms I saw within that tower) to occupy the whole of the area available at its level. It was filled with machines that seemed to be at least as ancient as those we had in the Matachin Tower at home, but whose uses were beyond my conjecture. At one side of this room another narrow stair ascended to the floor above, and at the opposite side a dark stairwell gave access to whatever place it was in which the howling prisoner was confined, for I heard his voice floating from its black mouth.
“He has gone mad,” I said, and inclined my head toward the sound.
Dr. Talos nodded. “Most of them are. At least, most of those I've examined. I administer decoctions of hellebore, but I can't say they seem to do much good.”
“We had clients like that in the third level of our oubliette, because we were forced to retain them by the legalities; they had been turned over to us, you see, and no one in authority would authorize their release.”
The doctor was leading me toward the ascending stair. “I sympathize with your predicament.”
“In time they died,” I continued doggedly. “Either by the aftereffects of their excruciations or from other causes. No real purpose was served by confining them.”
“I suppose not. Watch out for that gadget with the hook. It's trying to catch hold of your cloak.”
“Then why do you keep him? You aren't a legal repository in the sense we were, surely.”
“For parts, I suppose. That's what Baldanders has most of this rubbish
for.” With one foot on the first step, Dr. Talos turned to look back at me. “You remember to be on your good behavior now. They don't like to be called cacogens, you know. Address them as whatever it is they say their names are this time, and don't refer to slime. In fact, don't talk of anything unpleasant. Poor Baldanders has worked so hard to patch things up with them after he lost his head at the House Absolute. He'll be crushed if you spoil everything just before they leave.”
I promised to be as diplomatic as I could.
Because the ship was poised above the tower, I had supposed that Baldanders and its commanders would be in the uppermost room. I was wrong. I heard the murmur of voices as we ascended to the next floor, then the deep tones of the giant, sounding, as they so often had when I was traveling with him, like the collapse of some ruinous wall far off.
This room held machines too. But these, though they might have been as old as those below, gave the impression of being in working order; and moreover, of standing in some logical though impenetrable relation to one another, like the devices in Typhon's hall. Baldanders and his guests were at the farther end of the chamber, where his head, three times the size of any ordinary man's, reared above the clutter of metal and crystal like that of a tyrannosaur over the topmost leaves of a forest. As I walked toward them, I saw what remained of a young woman who might have been a sister of Pia's lying beneath a shimmering bell jar. Her abdomen had been opened with a sharp blade and certain of her viscera removed and positioned around her body. It appeared to be in the early stages of decay, though her lips moved. Her eyes opened as I passed her, then closed again.
“Company!” Dr. Talos called. “You won't guess who.”
The giant's head swung slowly around, but he regarded me, I thought, with as little comprehension as he had when Dr. Talos had awakened him that first morning in Nessus.
“Baldanders you know,” the doctor continued to me, “but I must introduce you to our guests.”
Three men, or what appeared to be men, rose graciously. One, if he had been truly a human being, would have been short and stout. The other two were a good head taller than I, as tall as exultants. The masks all three wore gave them the faces of refined men of middle age, thoughtful and poised; but I was aware that the eyes that looked out through the slits in the masks of the two taller figures were larger than human eyes, and that the shorter figure had no eyes at all, so that only darkness was visible there. All three were robed in white.
“Your Worships! Here's a great friend of ours, Master Severian of the torturers. Master Severian, let me present the honorable Hierodules Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus. It's the labor of these noble personages to inculcate wisdom in the human raceâhere represented by Baldanders, and now, yourself.”
The being Dr. Talos had introduced as Famulimus spoke. His voice might have been wholly human save that it was more resonant and more
musical than any truly human voice I have ever heard, so that I felt I might have been listening to the speech of some stringed instrument called to life. “Welcome,” it sang. “There is no greater joy for us, than greeting you, Severian. You bow to us in courtesy, but we to you will bend our knees.” And he did briefly kneel, as did both the others.
Nothing he could possibly have said or done could have astounded me more, and I was too much taken by surprise to offer any reply.
The other tall cacogen, Barbatus, spoke as a courtier might to fill the silence of an otherwise embarrassing gap in the conversation. His voice was deeper than Famulimus's, and seemed to have something soldierly in it. “You are welcome hereâvery welcome, as my dear friend has said, and all of us have tried to indicate. But your own friends must remain outside as long as we are here. You know that, of course. I mention it only as a matter of form.”
The third cacogen, in a tone so deep that one felt rather than heard it, muttered, “It doesn't matter,” and as though he feared I might see the empty eye slits of his mask, turned and made a show of staring out the narrow window behind him.
“Perhaps it doesn't, then,” Barbatus said. “Ossipago knows best, after all.”
“You have friends here then?” Dr. Talos whispered. It was a peculiarity of his that he seldom spoke to a group as most people do, but either addressed a single individual in it almost as though he and the other were alone, or else orated as if to an assembly of thousands.
“Some of the islanders gave me an escort,” I said, trying to put the best face I could on things. “You must know of them. They live on the floating masses of reeds in the lake.”
“They are rising against you!” Dr. Talos told the giant. “I warned you this would happen.” He rushed to the window through which the being called Ossipago seemed to look, shouldering him to one side, and stared out into the night. Then, turning toward the cacogen, he knelt, seized his hand, and kissed it. This hand was quite plainly a glove of some flexible material painted to resemble flesh, with something in it that was not a hand.
“You will help us, Worship, will you not? You have fantassins aboard your ship, surely. Once line the walls with horrors, and we will be safe for a century.”
In his slow voice, Baldanders said, “Severian will be the victor. Else why did they kneel to him? Though he may die, and we may not. You know their ways, Doctor. The looting may disseminate knowledge.”
Dr. Talos turned upon him furiously. “Did it before? I ask you!”
“Who can say, Doctor?”
“You know it did not. They are the same ignorant, superstitious brutes they have always been!” He whirled again. “Noble Hierodules, answer me. You must know, if anyone does.”
Famulimus gestured, and I was never more aware of the truth behind his mask than I was at that moment, for no human arm could have made the
motion his did, and it was a meaningless motion, conveying neither agreement nor disagreement, neither irritation nor consolation.
“I will not speak of all the things you know,” he said. “That those you fear have learned to overcome you. It may be true that they are simple still; still, something carried home may make them wise.”
He was addressing the doctor, but I could contain myself no longer and said, “May I ask what you're talking about, sieur?”
“I speak of you, of all of you, Severian. It cannot harm you now, that I should speak.”
Barbatus interjected, “Only if you don't do it too freely.”
“There is a mark they use upon some world, where sometimes our worn ship finds rest at last. It is a snake with heads at either end. One hand is deadâthe other gnaws at it.”
Without turning from the window, Ossipago said, “That is this world, I think.”
“No doubt Camoena could reveal its home. But then, it doesn't matter if you know it. You will understand me the more clearly. The living head stands for destruction. The head that does not live, for building. The former feeds upon the latter; and feeding, nourishes its food. A boy might think that if the first should die, the dead, constructive thing would triumph, making his twin now like himself. The truth is both would soon decay.”
Barbatus said, “As so often, my good friend is less than clear. Are you following him?”
“I am not!” Dr. Talos announced angrily. He turned away as if in disgust and hurried down the stair.
“That does not matter,” Barbatus told me, “since his master does.”
He paused as though waiting for Baldanders to contradict him, then continued, still addressing me. “Our desire, you see, is to advance your race, not to indoctrinate it.”
“Advance the shore people?” I asked.
All this time, the waters of the lake were murmuring their night-grief through the window. Ossipago's voice seemed to blend with it as he said, “All of you ⦔
“It is true then! What so many sages have suspected. We are being guided. You watch over us, and in the ages of our history, which must seem no more than days to you, you have raised us from savagery.” In my enthusiasm, I drew out the brown book, still somewhat damp from the wetting I had given it earlier in the day, despite its wrappings of oiled silk. “Here, let me show you what this says: âMan, who is not wise, is yet the object of wisdom. If wisdom finds him a fit object, is it wise in him to make light of his folly?' Something like that.”
“You are mistaken,” Barbatus told me. “Ages are aeons to us. My friend and I have dealt with your race for less than your own lifetime.”
Baldanders said, “These things live only a score of years, like dogs.” His tone told me more than is written here, for each word fell like a stone dropped down some deep cistern.
I said, “That cannot be.”
“You are the work for which we live,” Famulimus explained. “That man you call Baldanders lives to learn. We see that he hoards up past loreâhard facts like seeds to give him power. In time he'll die by hands that do not store, but die with some slight gain for all of you. Think of a tree that splits a rock. It gathers water, the sun's life-bringing heat ⦠and all the stuff of life for its own use. In time it dies and rots to dress the earth, that its own roots have made from stone. Its shadow gone, fresh seeds spring up; in time a forest flourishes where it stood.”
Dr. Talos emerged again from the stairwell, clapping slowly and derisively.
I asked, “You have left them these machines, then?” I was acutely conscious, as I spoke, of the eviscerated woman mumbling beneath her glass somewhere behind me, a thing that once would not have bothered the torturer Severian in the least.
Barbatus said, “No. Those he found, or constructed for himself. Famulimus said that he wished to learn, and that we saw to it that he did, not that we taught him. We teach no one anything, and only trade such devices as are too complex for your people to duplicate.”
Dr. Talos said, “These monsters, these horrors, do nothing for us. You've seen themâyou know what they are. When my poor patient ran wild through them in the theater of the House Absolute, they nearly killed him with their pistols.”
The giant shifted in his great chair. “You need not feign sympathy, Doctor. It suits you badly. Playing the fool while they looked on ⦔ His immense shoulders rose and fell. “I shouldn't have let it overcome me. They've agreed now to forget.”
Barbatus said, “We could have killed your creator easily that night, as you know. We burned him only enough to turn aside his charges.”
I recalled then what the giant had told me when we parted in the forest beyond the Autarch's gardensâthat he was the doctor's master. Now, before I had time to consider what I was doing, I seized the doctor's hand. Its skin seemed as warm and living as my own, though curiously dry. After a moment he jerked away.
“What are you?” I demanded, and when he did not answer, I turned to the beings who called themselves Famulimus and Barbatus. “Once, sieurs, I knew a man who was only partly human flesh ⦔
They looked toward the giant instead of replying, and though I knew their faces were only masks, I felt the force of their demand.