[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch
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As he stood at his little table, one. felt that he was conscious of someone standing behind him. He looked straight to the front, never turning his head and hardly moving a shoulder, and he Spoke as much for that unknown listener as for us.
“I have done my best to teach you boys the rudiments of learning. They are the seeds of trees that should grow and blossom in your minds. Severian, look to your Q. It should be round and full like the face of a happy boy, but one of its cheeks is as fallen-in as your own. You have all, all you boys, seen how the spinal cord, lifting itself toward its culmination, expands and at last blossoms in the myriad pathways of the brain. And this one, one cheek round, the other seared and shrivelled.”
His trembling hand reached for the slate pencil, but it escaped his fingers and rolled over the edge of the table to clatter on the floor. He did not stoop to pick it up, fearful, I think, that in. stooping he might glimpse the invisible presence.
“I have spent much of my life, boys, in trying to implant those seeds in the apprentices of our guild. I have had a few successes, but not many. There was a boy, but he—”
He went to the port and spat, and because I was sitting near it I saw the twisted shapes formed by the seeping blood and knew that the reason I could not see the dark figure (for death is of the colour that is darker than fuligin) that accompanied him was that it stood within him.
Just as I had discovered that death in a new form, in the shape of war, could frighten me when it could no longer do so in its old ones, so I learned now that the weakness of my body could afflict me with the terror and despair my old teacher must have felt. Consciousness came and went.
Consciousness went and came like the errant winds of spring, and I, who so often have had difficulty in falling asleep among the besieging shades of memory, now fought to stay awake as a child struggles to lift a faltering kite by the string. At times I was oblivious to everything except my injured body. The wound in my leg, which I had hardly felt when I received it, and whose pain I had so effortlessly locked away when Daria had bandaged it, throbbed with an intensity that formed the background to all my thoughts, like the rumbling of the Drum Tower at the solstice. I turned from side to side, thinking always that I lay upon that leg.
I had hearing without sight and occasionally sight without hearing. I rolled my cheek from the matted hair of Mamillian and laid it on a pillow woven of the minute, downy feathers of hummingbirds.
Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, fuming his head to watch me from one brown eye.
XXIV. The Flier
SUNLIGHT IN MY FACE.
I tried to sit up, and in fact succeeded in getting one elbow beneath me. All about me shimmered an orb of colour—purple and cyan, ruby and azure, with the orpiment of the sun piercing these enchanted tints like a sword to fall upon my eyes. Then it was blotted out, and its extinction revealed what its splendour had obscured: I lay in a domed pavilion of variegated silk, with an open door.
The rider of the mammoth was walking toward me. He was robed in saffron, as I had always seen him, and carried an ebony rod too light to be a weapon. “You have recovered,” he said.
“I’d try and say yes, but I’m afraid the effort of speaking might kill me.”
He smiled at that, though the smile was no more than a twitching of the mouth. “As you should know better than almost anyone, the sufferings we endure in this life make possible all the happy crimes and pleasant abominations we shall commit in the next... aren’t you eager to collect?”
I shook my head and laid it on the pillow again. The softness smelled faintly of musk.
“That is just as well, because it will be some time before you do.”
“Is that what your physician says?”
“I am my own, and I’ve been treating you myself. Shock was the principal problem.... It sounds like a disorder for old women, as you are no doubt thinking at this moment. But it kills a great many men with wounds. If all of mine who die of it would only live, I would readily consent to the death of those who take a thrust in the heart.”
“While you were being your own physician—and minewere you telling the truth?”
He smiled more broadly at that. “I always do. In my position, I have to talk too much to keep a skein of lies in order; of course, you must realize that the truth ... the little, ordinary truths that farm wives talk of, not the ultimate and universal Truth, which I’m no more capable of uttering than you ... that truth is more deceptive.”
“Before I lost consciousness, I heard you say you are the Autarch.”
He threw himself down beside me like a child, his body making a distinct sound as it struck the piled carpets. “I did. I am. Are you impressed?”
“I would be more impressed,” I said, “if I did not recall you so vividly from our meeting in the House Azure.” (That porch, covered with snow, heaped with snow that deadened our footsteps, stood in the silken pavilion like a spectre. When the Autarch’s blue eyes met mine, I felt that Roche stood beside me in the snow, both of us dressed in unfamiliar and none-too-well-fitting clothes. Inside, a woman who was not Thecla was transforming herself into Thecla as I was later to make myself Meschia, the first man.
Who can say to what degree an actor assumes the spirit of the person he portrays? When I played the Familiar, it was nothing, because it was so close to what I was—or had at least believed myself to be—in life; but as Meschia I had sometimes had thoughts that could never have occurred to me otherwise, thoughts alien equally to Severian and to Thecla, thoughts of the beginnings of things and the morning of the world.)
“I never told you, you will recall, that I was only the Autarch.”
“When I met you in the House Absolute, you appeared to be a minor official of the court. I admit you never told me that, and in fact I knew then who you were. But it was you, wasn’t it, who gave the money to Dr. Talos?”
“I would have told you that without a blush. It is completely true. In fact, I am several of the minor officials of my court.... Why shouldn’t I be? I have the authority to appoint such officials, and I can just as well appoint myself. An order from the Autarch is often too heavy an instrument, you see. You would never have tried to slit a nose with that big headsman’s sword you carried. There is a time for a decree from the Autarch, and a time for a letter from the third bursar, and I am both and more besides.”