Ouen's face still held a waiter's deference, but his eyes were puzzled. “I never knew her, sieur. Cas they called her, but she died when I was young. In childbirth, my father said.”
“But you know what she looked like.”
He nodded. “My father had a locket with her likeness. Once when I was twenty or so I came to see him and found out he'd pledged it. I'd come into a bit of money then helping a certain optimate with his affairsâcarrying messages to the ladies and standing watch outside doors and so on, and I went to the pawnbroker's and paid the pledge and took it. I still wear it, sieur. In a place like ours, where there's so many in 'n out all the time, it's best to keep your valuables about you.”
He reached into his shirt and drew out a locket of cloisonne enamel. The pictures inside were of Dorcas in full face and profile, a Dorcas hardly younger than the Dorcas I had known.
“You say you became a potboy at ten, Ouen. But you can read and write.”
“A bit, sieur.” He looked embarrassed. “I've asked people, various times, what writing said. I don't forget much.”
“You wrote something when the torturer was here this spring,” I told him. “Do you recall what you wrote?”
Frightened, he shook his head. “Only a note to warn the girl.”
“I do. It was, âThe woman with you has been here before. Do not trust her. Trudo says the man is a torturer. You are my mother come again.'”
Ouen tucked his locket under his shirt. “It was only that she was so much like her, sieur. When I was a younger man, I used to think that someday I'd find such a woman. I told myself, you know, that I was a better man than my father, and he had, after all. But I never did, and now I'm not so sure I'm a better man.”
“At that time, you did not know what a torturer's habit looked like,” I said. “But your friend Trudo, the ostler, knew. He knew a good deal more about torturers than you, and that was why he ran away.”
“Yes, sieur. When he heard the torturer was asking for him, he did.”
“But you saw the innocence of the girl and wanted to warn her against the torturer and the other woman. You were right about both of them, perhaps.”
“If you say it, sieur.”
“Do you know, Ouen, you look a bit like her.”
The fat innkeeper had been listening more or less openly. Now he chuckled. “He looks more like you!”
I am afraid I turned to stare at him.
“No offense intended, sieur, but it's true. He's a bit older, but when you were talking I saw both your faces from the side, and there isn't a patch of difference.”
I studied Ouen again. His hair and eyes were not dark like mine, but with that coloring aside, his face might almost have been my own.
“You said you never found a woman like Dorcasâlike that one in your locket. Still you found a woman, I think.”
His eyes would not meet mine. “Several, sieur.”
“And fathered a child.”
“No, sieur!” He was startled. “Never, sieur!”
“How interesting. Were you ever in difficulties with the law?”
“Several times, sieur.”
“It is well to keep your voice low, but it need not be so low as that. And look at me when you speak to me. A woman you lovedâor perhaps only one who loved youâa dark womanâwas taken once?”
“Once, sieur,” he said. “Yes, sieur. Catherine was her name. It's an old-fashioned name, they tell me.” He paused and shrugged. “There was trouble, as you say, sieur. She'd run off from some order of monials. The law got her, and I never saw her again.”
He did not want to come, but we brought him with us when we returned to the lugger.
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When I had come upriver by night on the
Samru,
the line between the living and the dead city had been like that between the dark curve of the world and the celestial dome with its stars. Now, when there was so much more light, it had vanished. Half-ruinous structures lined the banks, but whether they were the homes of the most wretched of our citizens or mere deserted shells I could not determine until I saw a string on which three rags flapped.
“In the guild we have the ideal of poverty,” I said to Drotte as we leaned on the gunnel. “But those people do not need the ideal; they have achieved it.”
“I should think they'd need it most of all,” he answered.
He was wrong. The Increate was there, a thing beyond the Hierodules and those they serve; even on the river, I could feel his presence as one feels that of the master of a great house, though he may be in an obscure room on another floor. When we went ashore, it seemed to me that if I were to step through any doorway there, I might surprise some shining figure; and that the commander of all such figures was everywhere invisible only because he was too large to be seen.
We found a man's sandal, worn but not old, lying in one of the grassgrown streets. I said, “I'm told there are looters wandering this place. That is one reason I asked you to come. If there were no one but myself involved, I would do it alone.”
Roche nodded and drew his sword, but Drotte said, “There's no one here. You've become a great deal wiser than we are, Severian, but still, I think you've grown a little too accustomed to things that terrify ordinary people.”
I asked what he meant.
“You knew what the boatman was talking about. I could see that in your face. You were afraid too, or at least concerned. But not frightened like he was in his boat last night, or like Roche or Ouen there or I would have been if we'd been close to the river and knew what was going on. The looters you're talking about were around last night, and they must keep a watch out for revenue boats. They won't be anywhere near water today, or for several days to come.”
Eata touched my arm. “Do you think that girlâMaxellindisâis she in danger, back there on the boat?”
“She's not in as much danger as you are from her,” I said. He did not know what I meant, but I did. His Maxellindis was not Thecla; his story could not be the same as my own. But I had seen the revolving corridors of Time behind the gamin face with the laughing brown eyes. Love is a long labor for torturers; and even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed it or not. I was sorry for him, and more sorry for Maxellindis the sailor girl.
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Ouen and I went into the house, leaving Roche, Drotte, and Eata to keep watch from some distance away. As we stood at the door, I could hear the soft sound of Dorcas's steps inside.
“We will not tell you who you are,” I said to Ouen. “And we cannot tell you what you may become. But we are your Autarch, and we tell you what you must do.”
I had no words for him, but I discovered I did not need them. He knelt at once, as the castellan had.
“We brought the torturers with us so that you might know what was in store for you if you disobeyed us. But we do not wish you to disobey, and now, having met you, we doubt they were needed. There is a woman in this house. In a moment you will go in. You must tell her your story, as you told it to us, and you must remain with her and protect her, even if she tries to send you away.”
“I will do my best, Autarch,” Ouen said.
“When you can, you must persuade her to leave this city of death. Until then, we give you this.” I took out the pistol and handed it to him. “It is worth a cartload of chrisos, but as long as you are here, it is far better for you to have than chrisos. When you and the woman are safe, we will buy it back from you, if you wish.” I showed him how to operate the pistol and left him.
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I was alone then, and I do not doubt that there are some who, reading this too-brief account of a summer more than normally turbulent, will say that I have usually been so. Jonas, my only real friend, was in his own eyes merely a machine; Dorcas, whom I yet love, is in her own eyes merely a kind of ghost.
I do not feel it is so. We chooseâor choose notâto be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain cave is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his “forest books,” and the windsâthe messengers of the Increateâare his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.
Agia, whom I might have loved, has chosen instead to become a female Vodalus, taking all that lives most fully in humanity as her opponent. I, who might have loved Agia, who loved Dorcas deeply but perhaps not deeply enough, was now alone because I had become a part of her past, which she loved better than she had ever (except, I think, at first) loved me.
Resurrection
Almost nothing remains to be told. Dawn has come, the red sun like a bloody eye. The wind blows cold through the window. In a few moments, a footman will carry in a steaming tray; with him, no doubt, will be old, twisted Father Inire, eager to confer during the last few moments that remain ; old Father Inire, alive so long beyond the span of his short-lived kind; old Father Inire, who will not, I fear, long survive the red sun. How upset he will be to find I have been sitting up writing all night here in the clerestory.
Soon I must don robes of argent, the color that is more pure than white. Never mind.
There will be long, slow days on the ship. I will read. I still have so much to learn. I will sleep, dozing in my berth, listening to the centuries wash against the hull. This manuscript I shall send to Master Ultan; but while I am on the ship, when I cannot sleep and have tired of reading, I shall write it out againâI who forget nothingâevery word, just as I have written it here. I shall call it
The Book of the New Sun,
for that book, lost now for so many ages, is said to have predicted his coming. And when it is finished again, I shall seal that second copy in a coffer of lead and set it adrift on the seas of space and time.
Have I told you all I promised? I am aware that at various places in my narrative I have pledged that this or that should be made clear in the knitting up of the story. I remember them all, I am sure, but then I remember so much else. Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will write again.
Two things are clear to me. The first is that I am not the first Severian. Those who walk the corridors of Time saw him gain the Phoenix Throne, and thus it was that the Autarch, having been told of me, smiled in the House Azure, and the undine thrust me up when it seemed I must drown. (Yet surely the first Severian did not; something had already begun to reshape my life.) Let me guess now, though it is only a guess, at the story of that first Severian.
He too was reared by the torturers, I think. He too was sent forth to Thrax. He too fled Thrax, and though he did not carry the Claw of the Conciliator, he must have been drawn to the fighting in the northâno
doubt he hoped to escape the archon by hiding himself among the army. How he encountered the Autarch there I cannot say; but encounter him he did, and so, even as I, he (who in the final sense was and is myself) became Autarch in turn and sailed beyond the candles of night. Then those who walk the corridors walked back to the time when he was young, and my own storyâas I have given it here in so many pagesâbegan.
The second thing is this. He was not returned to his own time but became himself a walker of the corridors. I know now the identity of the man called the Head of Day, and why Hildegrin, who was too near, perished when we met, and why the witches fled. I know too in whose mausoleum I tarried as a child, that little building of stone with its rose, its fountain, and its flying ship all graven. I have disturbed my own tomb, and now I go to lie in it.
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When Drotte, Roche, Eata, and I returned to the Citadel, I received urgent messages from Father Inire and from the House Absolute, and yet I lingered. I asked the castellan for a map. After much searching he produced one, large and old, cracked in many places. It showed the curtain wall whole, but the names of the towers were not the names I knewâor that the castellan knew, for that matterâand there were towers on that map that are not in the Citadel, and towers in the Citadel that were not on that map.
I ordered a flier then, and for half a day soared among the towers. No doubt I saw the place I sought many times, but if so I did not recognize it.
At last, with a bright and unfailing lamp, I went down into our oubliette once more, down flight after flight of steps until I had reached the lowest level. What is it, I wonder, that has given so great a power to preserve the past to underground places? One of the bowls in which I had carried soup to Triskele was there still. (Triskele, who had stirred back to life beneath my hand two years before I bore the Claw.) I followed Triskele's footprints once more, as I had when still an apprentice, to the forgotten opening, and from there my own into the dark maze of tunnels.
Now in the steady light of my lamp I saw where I had lost the track, running straight on when Triskele had turned aside. I was tempted then to follow him instead of myself, so that I might see where he had emerged, and in that way perhaps discover who it was who had befriended him and to whom he used to return after greeting me, sometimes, in the byways of the Citadel. Possibly when I come back to Urth I shall do so, if indeed I do come back.
But once again, I did not turn aside. I followed the boy-man I had been, down a straight corridor floored with mud and pierced at rare intervals with forbidding vents and doors. The Severian I pursued wore ill-fitting shoes with run-down heels and worn soles; when I turned and flashed my light behind me, I observed that though the Severian who pursued him had excellent boots, his steps were of unequal length and the toe of one foot dragged at each. I thought, One Severian had good boots, the other good legs. And I laughed to myself, wondering who should come here in after-years, and whether he would guess that the same feet left both tracks.
To what use these tunnels were once put, I cannot say. Several times I saw stairs that had once descended farther still, but always they led to dark, calm water. I found a skeleton, its bones scattered by the running feet of Severian, but it was only a skeleton, and told me nothing. In places there was writing on the walls, writing in faded orange or sturdy black; but it was in a character I could not read, as unintelligible as the scrawlings of the rats in Master Ultan's library. A few of the rooms into which I looked held walls in which there had once ticked a thousand or more clocks of various kinds, and though all were dead now, their chimes silenced and their hands corroded at hours that would never come again, I thought them good omens for one who sought the Atrium of Time.
And at last I found it. The little spot of sunshine was just as I had remembered it. No doubt I acted foolishly, but I extinguished my lamp and stood for a moment in the dark, looking at it. All was silence, and its bright, uneven square seemed at least as mysterious as it had before.
I had feared I would have difficulty in squeezing through its narrow crevice, but if the present Severian was somewhat larger of bone, he was also leaner, so that when I had worked my shoulders through the rest followed easily enough.
The snow I recalled was gone, but a chill had come into the air to say that it would soon return. A few dead leaves, which must have been carried in some updraft very high indeed, had come to rest here among the dying roses. The tilted dials still cast their crazy shadows, useless as the dead clocks beneath them, though not so unmoving. The carven animals stared at them, unwinking still.
I crossed to the door and tapped on it. The timorous old woman who had served us appeared, and I, stepping into that musty room in which I had warmed myself before, told her to bring Valeria to me. She hurried away, but before she was out of sight, something had wakened in the time-worn walls, its disembodied voices, hundred-tongued, demanding that Valeria report to some antiquely titled personage who I realized with a start must be myself.
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Here my pen shall halt, reader, though I do not. I have carried you from gate to gateâfrom the locked and fog-shrouded gate of the necropolis of Nessus to that cloud-racked gate we call the sky, the gate that shall lead me, as I hope, beyond the nearer stars.
My pen halts, though I do not. Reader, you will walk no more with me. It is time we both take up our lives.
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To this account, I, Severian the Lame, Autarch, do set my hand in what shall be called the last year of the old sun.
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