[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch
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She turned to me. “You have a great many shallow cuts too, and some them are infected. Rock shards?”
I managed to say, “I’m not the one who is ill. I brought my friend here.”
“You are both ill, and I suspect you brought each other. I doubt that either of you would have reached us without the other. Was it rock shards? Some weapon of the enemy’s?”
“Rock shards, yes. A weapon of a friend’s.”
“That is the worst thing, I am told—to be fired upon by your own side. But the fever is the chief concern.” She hesitated, looking from the soldier to me and back. “I’d like to put you both in bed now, but you’ll have to go to the bath first,”
She clapped her hands to summon a burly man with a shaven head. He took our arms and began to lead us away, then stopped and picked me lip, carrying me as I had once carried little Severian. In a few moments we were naked and sitting in a pool of water heated by Stones. The burly man splashed more water over us, then made us get out one at a time so he could crop our hair with a pair of shears. After that we were left to soak awhile.
“You can speak now,” I said to the soldier.
I saw him nod in the lamplight
“Why didn’t you, then, when we were coming here?”
He hesitated, and his shoulders moved a trifle. “I was thinking of many things, and you didn’t talk yourself. You seemed so tired. Once I asked if we shouldn’t stop, but you didn’t answer.”
I said, “It seemed to me otherwise, but perhaps we are both correct. Do you recall what happened to you before you met me?”
Again there was a pause. “I don’t even remember meeting you. We were walking down a dark path, and you were beside me.”
“And before that?”
“I don’t know. Music, perhaps, and walking a long way. In sunshine at first but later through the dark.”
“That walking was while you were with me,” I said. “Don’t you recall anything else?”
“Flying through the dark. Yes, I was with you, and we came to a place where the sun hung just above our heads.
There was a light before us, but when I stepped into it, it became a kind of darkness.”
I nodded. “You weren’t wholly rational, you see. On a warm day it can seem that the sun’s just overhead, and when it is down behind the mountains it seems the light becomes darkness. Do you recall your name?”
At that he thought for several moments, and at last smiled ruefully. “I lost it somewhere along the way. That’s what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat.”
The burly man with the shaven head had come back without either of us noticing. He helped me out of the pool and gave me a towel with which to dry myself, a robe to wear, and a canvas sack containing my possessions, which now smelled strongly of the smoke of fumigation. A day earlier it would have tormented me nearly to frenzy to have the Claw out of my possession for an instant. That night I had hardly realized it was gone until it was returned to me, and I did not verify that it had indeed been returned until I lay on one of the cots under a veil of netting. The Claw shone in my hand then softly as the moon; and it was shaped as the moon sometimes is. I smiled to think that its flooding light of pale green is the reflection of the sun.
On the first night I slept in Saltus, I had awakened thinking I was in the apprentices dormitory in our tower. Now I had the same experience in reverse: I slept and found in sleep that the shadowy lazaret with its silent figures and moving lamps had been no more than a hallucination of the day.
I sat up and looked around. I felt well—better, in fact, than I had ever felt before; but I was warm. I seemed to glow from within. Roche was sleeping on his side, his red hair tousled and his mouth slightly open, his face relaxed and boyish without the energy of his mind behind it. Through the port I could see snow drifts in the Old Court, new-fallen snow that showed no tracks of men or their animals; but it occurred to me that in the necropolis there would be hundreds of footprints already as the small creatures who found shelter there, the pets and the playmates of the dead, came out to search for food and to disport themselves in the new landscape Nature had bestowed on them. I dressed quickly and silently, holding my finger to my own lips when one of the other apprentices stirred, and hurried down the steep stair that wound through the centre of the tower.
It seemed longer than usual, and I found I had difficulty in going from step to step. We are always aware of the hindrance of gravity when we climb stairs, but we take for ranted the assistance it gives us when we descend. Now that assistance had been withdrawn, or nearly so. I had to force each foot down, but do it in a way that prevented it from sending me shooting up when it struck the step, as it would have if I had stamped. In that uncanny way we know things in dreams, I understood that all the towers of the Citadel had risen at last and were on their voyage beyond the circle of Dis. I felt happy in the knowledge, bat I still desired to go into the necropolis and track the coatis and foxes, I was hurrying down as fast as I could when I heard a groan. The stairway no longer descended as it should but led into a cabin, just as the stairs in Baldanders’s castle had stretched down the walls of its chambers.
This was Master Malrubius’s sickroom. Masters are entitled to spacious quarters; still, this was larger by far than the actual cabin had been. There were two ports just as I remembered, but they were enormous—the eyes of Mount Typhon. Master Malrubius’s bed was very large, yet it seemed lost in the immensity of the room. Two figures bent over him. Though their clothing was dark, it struck me that it was not the fuligin of the guild. I went to them, and when I was so near I could hear the sick man’s laboured breathing, they straightened up and turned to look at me. They were the Cumaean and her acolyte Merryn, the witches we had met atop the tomb in the ruined stone town.
“Ah, sister, you have come at last,” Merryn said. As she spoke, I realized that I was not, as I bad thought, the apprentice Severian. I was Thecia as she had been when she was his height, which is to say at about the age of thirteen Of fourteen. I felt an intense embarrassment—not because of my girl’s body or because I was wearing masculine clothes (which indeed I rather enjoyed) but because I had been unaware of it previously. I also felt that Merryn’s words had been an act of magic—that both Severian and I had been present before, and that she had by some means driven him into the background. The Cumaean kissed me on the forehead, and when the kiss was over wiped blood from her lips. Although she did not speak, I knew this was a signal that I had in some sense become the soldier too.
“When we sleep,” Merryn told me, “we move from temporality to eternity.”
“When we wake,” the Cumaean whispered, “we lose the facility to See beyond the present moment.”
“She never wakes,” Merryn boasted. Master Malrubius stirred and groaned, and the Cumaean took a carafe of water from the table by his bed and poured a little into a tumbler. When she set down the carafe again, something living stirred in it. I, for some reason, thought it the undine; I drew back, but it was Hethor, no higher than my hand, his grey, stubbled face pressed against the glass.