Across the River Again
Before dawn, Roche was at my door, with Drotte and Eata. Drotte was the oldest of us, yet his face and flashing eyes made him seem younger than Roche. He was still the very picture of wiry strength, but I could not help but notice that I was now taller than he by the width of two fingers. I must surely have been so already when I left the Citadel, though I had not been conscious of it. Eata was still the smallest, and not yet even a journeyman—so I had only been away one summer, after all. He seemed a bit dazed when he greeted me, and I suppose he was having trouble believing I was now Autarch, particularly since he had not seen me again until now, when I was once more dressed in the habit of the guild.
I had told Roche that the three of them were to be armed; he and Drotte carried swords similar in form (though vastly inferior in workmanship) to Terminus Est, and Eata a clava I recalled having seen displayed at our Masking Day festivities. Before I had seen the fighting in the north, I would have thought them well-enough equipped; now all three, not only Eata, seemed like boys burdened with sticks and pinecones, ready to play at war.
For the last time we went out through the rent in the wall and threaded the paths of bone that wound among the cypresses and tombs. The death roses I had hesitated to pick for Thecla still showed a few autumnal blooms, and I found myself thinking of Morwenna, the only woman whose life I have ever taken, and of her enemy, Eusebia.
When we had passed the gate of the necropolis and entered the squalid city streets, my companions seemed to become almost lighthearted. I think they must have been subconsciously afraid they would be seen by Master Gurloes and punished in some way for having obeyed the Autarch.
“I hope you’re not planning on going for a swim,” Drotte said. “These choppers would sink us.”
Roche chuckled. “Eata can float with his.”
“We’re going far to the north. We’ll need a boat, but I think we’ll be able to hire one if we walk along the embankment.”
“If anybody will rent to us. And if we’re not arrested. You know, Autarch—”
“Severian,” I reminded him. “For as long as I wear these clothes.”
“—Severian, we’re only supposed to carry these things to the block, and it will take a lot of talking to make the peltasts think three of us are necessary. Will they know who you are? I don’t—”
This time it was Eata who interrupted him, pointing toward the river. “Look, there’s a boat!”
Roche bellowed, all three waved, and I held up one of the chrisos I had borrowed from the castellan, turning it so it would flash in the sunlight that was then just beginning to show over the towers behind us. The man at the tiller waved his cap, and what appeared to be a slender lad sprang forward to put the dipping lugsails on the other tack.
She was two-masted, rather narrow of beam and low of freeboard—an ideal craft, no doubt, for running untaxed merchandise past the patrol cutters that had suddenly become mine. The grizzled old moonraker of a steersman looked capable of much worse, and the slender “lad” was a girl with laughing eyes and a facility for looking from them sidelong.
“Well, this ‘pears to be a day,” the steersman said when he saw our habits. “I thought you was in mournin’, I did, till I got up close. Eyes? I never heard of ’um, no more than a crow in court.”
“We are,” I told him as I got on board. It gave me a ridiculous pleasure to find I had not lost the sea legs I had acquired on the Samru, and to watch Drotte and Roche grab for the sheets when the lugger rocked beneath their weight.
“Mind if I’ve a look at that yellow boy? Just to see if he’s good. I’ll send him right home.”
I tossed him the coin, which he rubbed and bit and at last surrendered with a respectful look.
“We may need your boat all day.”
“For the yellow boy, you can have her all night too. We’ll both be glad of the company, like the undertaker remarked to the ghost. There was things in the river up till first light, which I suppose might have something to do with you optimates being out on the water this mornin’?”
“Cast off,” I said. “You can tell me, if you will, what these strange things were while we are under way.”
Although he had broached the subject himself, the steersman seemed reluctant to go into much detail—perhaps only because he had difficulty in finding words to express what he had felt and to describe what he had seen and heard. There was a light west wind, so that with the lugger’s battenstiffened sails drawn taut we were able to run upstream handily. The brown girl had little to do but sit in the bow and trade glances with Eata. (It is possible she thought him, in his dirty gray shirt and trousers, only a paid attendant of ours.) The steersman, who called himself her uncle, kept a steady pressure on the tiller as he talked, to keep the lugger from flying off the wind.
“I’ll tell you what I saw myself, like the carpenter did when he had the shutter up. We was eight or nine leagues north of where you hailed us.
Clams was our cargo, you see, and there’s no stoppin’ with them, not when there’s a chance of a warm afternoon. We goes down to the lower river and buys them off the diggers, do you see, then runs them up the channel quick so’s they can be et before they goes bad. If they goes off you lose all, but you make double or better if you can sell them good.
“I’ve spent more nights on the river in my life than anywhere else—it’s my bedroom, you might say, and this boat’s my cradle, though I don’t usually get to sleep until mornin’. But last night—sometimes I felt like I wasn’t on old Gyoll at all, but on some other river, one that run up into the sky, or under the ground.
“I doubt you noticed unless you was out late, but it was a still night with just little breaths of wind that would blow for about as long as it takes a man to swear, then die down, then blow again. There was mist too, thick as cotton. It hung over the water the way mists always does, with about so much clear space as you could roll a keg through between it and the river. Most of the time we couldn’t see the lights on either shore, just the mist. I used to have a horn I blowed for those that couldn’t see our lights, but it went over the side last year, and being copper it sunk. So I shouted last night, whenever I felt like there was another boat or anything close by us.
“About a watch after the mist came I let Maxellindis go to sleep. Both sails was set, and when each puff of air come we would go up river a bit, and then I’d set out the anchor again. You maybe don’t know it, optimates, but the rule of the river is that them that’s goin’ up keeps to the sides and them that’s goin’ down takes the middle. We was goin’ up and ought to have been over to the east bank, but with the mist I couldn’t tell.
“Then I heard sweeps. I looked in the mist, but I couldn’t see lights, and I hollered so they’d sheer off. I leaned over the gunnel and put my ear close to the water so’s to hear better. A mist soaks up noises, but the best hearin’ you can ever have is when you gets your head under one, because the noise runs right along the water. Anyway, I did that, and she was a big one. You can’t count how many sweeps there is with a good crew pullin’, because they all go in and come up together, but when a big vessel goes fast you can hear water breakin’ under her bow, and this was a big one. I got up on top of the deckhouse tryin’ to see her, but there still wasn’t any lights, though I knew she had to be close.
“Just when I was climbin’ down I caught the sight of her—a galleass, four-masted and four-banked, no lights, comin’ right up the channel, as near as I could judge. Pray for them that’s comin’ down, thinks I to myself, like the ox said when he fell out of the riggin’.
“Of course I only saw her for a minute before she was gone in the mist again, but I heard her a long while after. Seein’ her like that made me feel so queer I yelled every once in a while even if no other craft was by. We had made another half league, I suppose, or maybe a little less, when I heard somebody yell back. Only it wasn’t like answerin’ my hail, but like somebody’ d laid a rope end to him. I called again, and he called back regular,
and it was a man I know named Trason what has his own boat just like I do. ‘Is it you?’ he called, and I said it was and asked if he was all right. ‘Tie up!’ he says.
“I told him I couldn’t. I had clams, and even if the night was cool, I wanted to sell soon as I could. ‘Tie up,’ Trason calls again, ‘Tie up and go ashore.’ So I call back, ‘Why don’t you?’ Just then he come in sight, and there was more on his boat than I would’ve thought it would hold—pandours, I’d have said, but every pandour ever I saw had a face brown as mine or nearly, and these was white as the mist. They had scorpions and voulges—I could see the heads of them stickin’ up over the crests of their helmets.”
I interrupted him to ask if the soldiers he had seen were starved looking and if they had large eyes.
He shook his head, one corner of his mouth twisting up. “They was big men, bigger than you or me or anybody in this boat, a head taller than Trason. Anyway, they were gone in a moment, just like the galleass. That was the only other craft I saw till the mist lifted. But …”
I said, “But you saw something else. Or heard something.”
He nodded. “I thought maybe you and your people here was out because of them. Yes, I saw and I heard things. There was things in this river I never saw before. Maxellindis, when she woke up and I told her about it, said it was the manatees. They’re pale in moonlight and look human enough if you don’t come too close. But I’ve seen ‘em since I was a boy and never been fooled once. And there was women’s voices, not loud but big. And something else. I couldn’t understand what any of ’em was sayin’, but I could hear the tone of it. You know how it is when you’re listenin’ to people over the water? They would say so-and-so-and-so. Then the deeper voice—I can’t call it a man’s because I don’t think it was one—the deeper voice’d say go-and-do-that-and-this-and-that, I heard the women’s voices three times and the other voice twice. You won’t believe it, optimates, but sometimes it sounded like the voices was coming up out of the river.”
With that he fell silent, looking out over the nenuphars. We were well above that part of Gyoll opposite the Citadel, but they were still packed more densely than wildflowers in any meadow this side of paradise.
The Citadel itself was visible now as a whole, and for all its vastness seemed a glittering flock fluttering upon the hill, its thousand metal towers ready to leap into the air at a word. Below them the necropolis spread an embroidery of mingled white and green. I know it is fashionable to speak in tones of faint disgust of the “unhealthy” growth of the lawns and trees in such places, but I have never observed that there is actually anything unhealthy about it. Green things die that men may live, and men die that green things may live, even that ignorant and innocent man I killed with his own ax there long ago. All our foliage is faded, so it is said, and no doubt it is so; and when the New Sun comes, his bride, the New Urth, will give glory to him with leaves like emeralds. But in the present day, the day of the old sun and old Urth, I have never seen any other green so deep as the great pines’ in
the necropolis when the wind swells their branches. They draw their strength from the departed generations of mankind, and the masts of argosies, that are built up of many trees, are not so high as they.
The Sanguinary Field stands far from the river. We four drew strange looks as we journeyed there, but no one halted us. The Inn of Lost Loves, which had ever seemed to me the least permanent of the houses of men, still stood as it had on the afternoon when I had come there with Agia and Dorcas. The fat innkeeper very nearly fainted when he saw us; I made him fetch Ouen, the waiter.
I had never really looked at him on that afternoon when he had carried in a tray for Dorcas, Agia, and me. I did so now. He was a balding man about as tall as Drotte, thin and somehow pinched looking; his eyes were deep blue, and there was a delicacy to the molding of his eyes and mouth that I recognized at once.
“Do you know who we are?” I asked him.
Slowly, he shook his head.
“Have you never had a torturer to serve?”
“Once this spring, sieur,” he said. “And I know these two men in black are torturers. But you’re no torturer, sieur, though you’re dressed like one.”
I let that pass. “You have never seen me?”
“No, sieur.”
“Very well, perhaps you have not.” (How strange it was to realize that I had changed so much.) “Ouen, since you do not know me, it might be well if I knew you. Tell me where you were born and who your parents were, and how you came to be employed at this inn.”
“My father was a shopkeeper, sieur. We lived in Oldgate, on the west bank. When I was ten or so, I think, he sent me to an inn to be a potboy, and I’ve worked in one or another since.”
“Your father was a shopkeeper. What of your mother?”
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 affairs—carrying 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, ‘The 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 Dorcas—like 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 loved—or perhaps only one who loved you—a dark woman—was 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.
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 girl—Maxellindis—is 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.
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.
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 choose—or choose not—to 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 winds—the messengers of the Increate—are 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.