[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch
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I heard his voice as one might hear the squeaking of mice: “Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counter clockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted mirror sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that goes racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvetlid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds.
She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind; We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain, for the universe is leaving us behind....”
There was a bell on the table beside the carafe. Merryn rang it as though to overpower Hethor’s voice, and wfien Master Malrubius had moistened his lips with the tumbler, she took it from the Cumaean, flung what remained of its water on the-floor, and inverted it over the neck of the carafe.
Hethor was silenced, but the water spread over the floor, bubbling as though fed by a hidden spring. It was icy cold. I thought vaguely that my governess would be angry because my shoes were wet.
A maid was coming in answer to the ring—Thecla’s maid, whose flayed leg I had inspected the day after I had saved Vodalus. She was younger, as young as she must have been when Thecia was actually a girl, but her leg had been flayed already and ran with blood. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I am so sorry, Hunna. I didn’t do it—it was Master Gurloes, and some journeymen”
Master Malrubius sat up in bed, and for the first time I observed that his bed was in actuality a woman’s hand, with fingers longer than my arm and nails like talons. “You’re well!” he said, as though I were the one who had been dying. “Or nearly well, at least.” The fingers of the hand began to close upon him, but he leaped from the bed and into water that was now knee high to stand beside me.
A dog—my old dog Triskele—had apparently been hiding beneath the bed, or perhaps only lying on the farther side of it, out of sight. Now he came to us, splashing the water with his single forepaw as he drove his broad chest through it and barking joyously. Master Malrubius took my right hand and the Cumaean my left; together they led me to one of the great eyes of the mountain.
I saw the view I had seen when Typhon had led me there: The world rolled out like a carpet and visible in its entirety. This time it was more magnificent by far. The sun was behind us; its beams seemed to have multiplied their strength, Shadows were alchemised to gold, and every green thing grew darker and stronger as I looked. I could see the grain ripening in the fields and even the myriad fish of the sea doubling and redoubling with the increase of the tiny surface plants that sustained them. Water from the room behind us poured from the eye and, catching the light, fell in a rainbow.
Then I woke.
While I slept, someone had wrapped me in sheets packed with snow. (I learned later that it was brought down from the mountaintops by sure-footed sumpters.) Shivering, I longed to return to my dream, though I was already half-aware of the immense distance that separated us. The bitter taste of medicine was in my mouth, the stretched canvas felt as hard, as a floor beneath me, and scarlet-clad Pelerines with lamps moved to and fro, tending men and women who groaned in the dark.
V. The Lazaret
I DO NOT BELIEVE I really slept again that night, though I may have dozed. When dawn came, the snow had melted. Two Pelerines took the sheets away, gave me a towel with which to dry myself, and brought dry bedding. I wanted to give the daw to them then—my possessions were in the bag under my cot—but the moment seemed inappropriate. I lay down instead, and now that it was daylight, slept.
I woke again about noon. The lazaret was as quiet as it ever became; somewhere far off two men were talking and another cried out, but their voices only emphasized the stillness. I sat up and looked around, hoping to see the soldier. On my right lay a man whose close-cropped scalp made me think at first that he was one of the slaves of the Pelerines. I called to him, but when he turned his head to look at me, I saw I had been mistaken.
His eyes were emptier than any human eyes I had ever seen, and they seemed to watch spirits invisible to me. “Glory to the Group of Seventeen,” he said.
“Good morning. Do you know anything about the way this place is run?”
A shadow appeared to cross his face, and I sensed that my question had somehow made him suspicious. He answered, “All endeavours are conducted well or ill precisely in so far as they conform to Correct Thought.”
“Another man was brought in at the same time I was. I’d. like to talk to him. He’s a friend of mine, more or less.”
“Those who do the will of the populace are friends, though we have never spoken to them. Those who do not do the will of the populace are enemies, though we learned together as children.”
The man on my left called, “You won’t get anything out of him. He’s a prisoner.”
I turned to look at him. His face, though wasted nearly to a skull, retained something of humour. His stiff, black hair looked as though it had not seen a comb for months. “He talks like that all the time.
Never any other way. Hey, you! We’re going to beat you!”
The other answered, “For the Armies of the Populace, defeat is the springboard of victory, and victory the ladder to further victory.”
“He makes a lot more sense than most of them, though,” the man on my left told me. “You say he’s a prisoner. What did he do?”
“Do? Why, he didn’t die.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. Was he selected for some kind of suicide mission?”
The patient beyond the man on my left sat up—a young woman with a thin but lovely face. “They all are,” she said. “At least, they can’t go home until the war is won, and they know, really, that it will never be won.”