The Urth of the New Sun (36 page)

She and the shadows of the Praetonans were soon almost out of sight. I shifted from one arch to the next to keep them in view; and she stared back at me, until she was looking over the shoulder of her pale gown when I last glimpsed her.

She was as lovely and as unknown at that final glimpse as at the first. Her beauty was reason enough for any man to stare at her, but why did she stare at me? If I had understood her expression at all, it had been one of mingled hope and fear, and perhaps she too had some sense of a drama being played upon a second occasion. A hundred times I reviewed my scrapes and escapes in this Secret House, whether as Thecla alone, or as Severian and Thecla united, or as the old Autarch. I could not find the moment—yet it existed; and I began, as I walked on, to search those veiled lives that lie behind the last, memories that I have scarcely mentioned in this narrative, that dim as they grow stranger and stretch backward, perhaps, to Ymar, and behind Ymar to the Age of Myth.

Yet overwhelming all these shadowy lives—and incomparably more vivid, as a mountain may be seen to the very expression in its eyes when the forest about its base has sunk into a green haze—hurtled the white star that was myself. I was there also; and I saw before me, seemingly still very distant (though I knew it was much nearer than it appeared) the crimson sun that was to be, after so many centuries, simultaneously my destruction and my apotheosis. To its left and right, brave Skuld and sullen Verthandi seemed inconsequential moons. The night-dark dot of Urth crept across its face, nearly lost among its mottlings; and in the dying moments of that night I wandered, bewildered and wondering, underground.

Ding, Dong, Ding!

WHEN I HAD entered the secret house, I had scarcely known where I was bound. Or rather, I had scarcely been conscious of it; unconsciously, I had been directing my steps toward the Hypogeum Amaranthine, as I at length realized. I intended to learn who it was who sat the Phoenix Throne, and to reclaim it if I could. When the New Sun arrived, our Commonwealth would require a ruler who understood what had taken place; so I thought. A certain door of the Secret House opened behind the velvet arras that hung behind the throne. I had sealed it with my word in the initial year of my reign; and I had hung the narrow space between the arras and the wall with bells, so that no one could walk there without making some sound that would be overheard by the occupant of the throne. Now the door opened smoothly and silently at my command. I stepped out and closed it after me. The little bells, suspended upon silk threads, tinkled softly; above them larger bells, from whose tongues the threads hung, whispered with brazen voices and let fall a shower of dust.

I stood motionless, listening. At last the bells ceased their jingling, though not before I had heard the laughter of the small Tzadkiel in it.

"What is that ringing?" It was an old woman who spoke, her tones thin and cracked. Another spoke in a man's deep voice. I could not make out his words.

"Bells!" the old woman exclaimed. "We heard bells. Are you grown so deaf, chiliarch, that you didn't hear them too?"

Now I wished indeed for the batardeau, with which I might have slit the arras and so peered out; as the deep voice spoke again, it struck me that others who had stood where I stood must have had the same thought, and sharp knives to boot. I searched the arras with my fingertips.

"They rang, we tell you. Send someone to inquire."

Perhaps there were many such rents, for I found one in a breath, made by some watcher only a trifle, below my own height. Applying my eye to it, I saw that I stood three strides to the right of the throne. Only the hand of the occupant was visible to me where it lay upon the arm, as thin as that of an anatomy, a hand webbed with blue veins and spangled with gems.

Before the throne, head bent, crouched a form so vast that for a moment I thought it was that Tzadkiel who had commanded the ship. Its disordered hair was caked with blood. Behind it stood a cluster of shadowy guardsmen, and beside it a helmetless officer whose insignia and virtually invisible armor marked him as the chiliarch of the Praetorians, though he was not, of course, the chiliarch who had held the post during my reign, nor the one whom I had carried down from the upright timber in an epoch now unimaginably distant.

Before the throne and thus almost out of my field of view, a ragged woman leaned upon a carven staff. She spoke just as I realized that she was there, saying, "They ring to welcome the New Sun, Autarch. The whole of Urth prepares for his coming."

"In our childhood," the old woman on the throne muttered, "we had little to do but read history. Thus we know that there have been a thousand prophets such as you, my poor sister—no, say a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand crazed paupers who fancied themselves great rhetors and sought to make themselves great rulers as well."

"Autarch," answered the ragged woman, "won't you hear me? You speak of thousands and hundreds of thousands. A thousand times at least I have heard objections such as you bring, but you have not yet heard what I will say."

"Go on," the woman on the throne told her. "You may speak as long as you amuse us."

"I haven't come to amuse you, but to tell you that the New Sun has come often before, seen perhaps by only a single person, or a few. You must recall the Claw of the Conciliator, for it vanished in our time."

"It was stolen," muttered the old woman who sat the throne. "We never saw it."

"But I did," the ragged woman with the staff said. "I saw it in the hands of an angel, when I was just a girl and very ill. Tonight as I was coming here I saw it again, in the sky. So did your soldiers, although they are afraid to tell you. So did this giant who has come as I have to warn you and has been savaged for it. So would you see it, Autarch, if you would quit this tomb."

"There have been such portents before. They have portended nothing. It would take more than the sight of a bearded star to change our mind."

I thought of stepping onto the stage then to end the play, if I could; and yet I remained where I was, wondering for whose entertainment such plays are staged. For it was a play, and in fact a play I had seen before, though never from the audience. It was Dr. Tabs's play, with the old woman on the throne in a role the doctor had taken for himself, and the woman with the staff in one of the roles that had been mine.

I have just written that I chose not to step forth, and it is true. But in the very act of making my decision, I must have moved a trifle. The little bells laughed again, and the larger bell from whose tongue they depended struck once, though ever so softly.

"Bells!" the old woman exclaimed again. "You, sister, you witch or whatever you call yourself. Go out! There's a guard at our door. Tell their lochage we wish to know why the bells ring."

"I will not leave this place at your command," the woman said. "I have answered your question already."

The giant looked up at that, parting his lank hair with blood-smeared hands. "If bells ring, they're ringing because a New Sun is coming," he rumbled in a voice almost too deep to be understood. "I do not hear them, but I do not need to hear them." Though I doubted my eyes, it was Baldanders himself.

"Are you saying we are mad?"

"My hearing is not acute. Once I studied sound, and the more one learns of that, the less one hears it. Then too, my tympanic membranes have grown too wide and thick. But I have heard the currents that scour the black trenches and the crash of the waves upon your shore."

"Silence!" the old woman commanded.

"You can't order the waves to be silent, madame," Baldanders told her. "They are coming, and they are bitter with salt."

One of the Praetorians struck the side of his head with the butt of his fusil; it was like the blow of a mallet.

Baldanders seemed unaffected. "The armies of Erebus follow the waves," he said, "and all the defeats they suffered at your husband's hands will be avenged." From those words I knew the identity of the Autarch, and the shock of seeing Baldanders once more was as nothing to that. I must have started, because the small bells rang loudly, and a larger one spoke twice.

"Listen!" Valeria exclaimed in her cracked voice.

The chiliarch looked stricken. "I heard them, Autarch." Baldanders rumbled, "I can explain them. Will you hear also what I say?"

"And I," the woman with the staff told Valeria. "They ring for the New Sun, as the giant has already announced to you."

Valeria muttered, "Speak, giant."

"What I am about to say is not important. But I will say it in order that you will listen to what is important afterward. Our universe is neither the highest nor the lowest. Let matter become overdense here, and it bursts into the higher. We see nothing of that because everything runs from us. Then we talk of a black hole. When matter grows overdense in the universe below us, it explodes into ours. We see a burst of motion and energy, and we speak of a white fountain. What this prophetess calls the New Sun is such a fountain." Valeria murmured, "We have a fountain in our garden that foretells, and I heard someone call it the White Fountain many years ago. But what has any of this to do with the bells?"

"Be patient," the giant told her. "You learn in a breath what I learned in a lifetime." The woman with the staff said, "That's well. Only breaths remain to us. A thousand or so, it may be."

The giant glared at her before he spoke again to Valeria. "Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things. Our sun has such a black hole as I described to you at its core. To fill it, a white fountain has been drawn across the void for millennia. It spins as it flies, and in its motion emits waves of gravitation."

Valeria exclaimed, "What! Waves of dignity? You're mad, just as this chiliarch has told us."

The giant ignored her interruption. "These waves are too slight to render us giddy. Yet Ocean feels them and breeds new tides and fresh currents. I heard them, as I have already told you. They brought me here."

The chiliarch snarled, "And if the Autarch orders it, we'll toss you back."

"Bells feel them in the same way. Like Ocean, their mass is delicately poised. Thus they ring, just as this woman says, pealing tbe coming of the New Sun." I was about to step out, but I saw that Baldanders was not yet finished.

"If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy"

I could not see her head from my vantage point, but Valeria must have nodded.

"The legend of the mountains of fire is more than a legend. In ages when men were only higher beasts, there were indeed such mountains. Their spew of fire was rock rendered incandescent by energy, as water is ice made fluid. A world below this, charged with too much energy, flared into our own—as with universes, so with worlds. In those ages, the young Urth was little more than a falling drop of that watery rock; men and women lived upon its floating scum and thought themselves secure."

I heard Valeria sigh. "When we were ourselves young, we nodded over such prosy stuff for endless days, having nothing better to do. But when our Autarch came for us and we woke to life, we found no agnation in all that we had studied."

"It has arrived at last, madame. The force that made your bells sound has warmed the cold heart of Urth once more. Now they toll the death of continents."

"Is that the news you have come to tell us, giant? If the continents die, who will live?"

"Those on ships, possibly. Those whose ships are in the air or in the void, certainly. Those who live under the sea already, as I have now for fifty years. But it matters nothing. What—"

Baldanders's solemn voice was interrupted by the banging of a door some distance down the Hypogeum Amaranthine and the tatoo of running feet. A junior officer sprinted up to the chiliarch, saluting while Baldanders and the woman with the staff turned to stare.

"Sieur..." The man faced his commander but could not keep his frightened eyes from wandering toward Valeria.

"What is it?"

"Sieur, another giant—"

"Another giant?" Valeria must have leaned forward at that. I saw a flash of gems and a wisp of gray hair beneath it.

"A woman, Autarch! A naked woman!"

Although I could not see her face, I knew Valeria must be addressing Baldanders when she asked, "And what can you tell us about this? Is it your wife, perhaps?" He shook his head; and I, recalling the crimson chamber in his castle, speculated upon his living arrangements in thalassic caverns I could scarcely conceive.

"The lochage is bringing the giant woman for questioning," the young officer said. His chiliarch added, "Do you wish to behold her, Autarch? If not, I can conduct the interrogation."

"We are tired. We will retire now. In the morning, tell us what you have learned."

"Sh-she s-says," the young officer stammered, "that certain cacogens have landed a man and a woman from one of their ships."

For a moment, I imagined it was to Burgundofara and myself that this referred; but Abaia and his undines were not likely to be in error by whole ages.

"And what else?" Valeria demanded.

"Nothing else, Autarch. Nothing!"

"It is in your eyes. If it is not soon upon your tongue, it will be buried with you."

"It's only a groundless rumor, Autarch. None of our men have reported anything."

"Out with it!"

The young officer looked stricken. "They say Severian the Lame has been seen again, Autarch. In the gardens, Autarch."

It was then or never. I lifted the arras and stepped from under it, as all the little bells laughed and above them a great bell pealed three times.

The Evening Tide

"YOU ARE no more surprised to see me than I am to see you," I told them. And for three, at least, it was true.

Baldanders (whom I had never expected to see again when he had dived into the lake, and yet whom I had seen again looking just as I recalled him, when he fought for me before Tzadkiel's Seat of Justice) was grown too large for me to think him human ever again, his face heavier still and more misshapen, his skin as white as that of the water woman who had once saved me from drowning.