The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXXVI — The Citadel Again

IT WAS MY hope to see the old sun rise before I was locked away. That was not to be. For a long time, or at least for what felt like a long time, we climbed a gentle hill. More than once our torches set fire to raddled leaves overhead that ignited a few others, releasing the pungent smoke that is the very breath of autumn before they smoldered out. More leaves strewed the path we trod, but they were sodden with rain.

At last we came to a brooding wall so lofty that the light of our torches failed to reveal its summit, so that for a moment I took it for the Wall of Nessus. A man in half armor leaned on the shaft of his vouge before the dark and narrow archway of a sally port in the wall. When he caught sight of us, he did not straighten his stance, or show any other sign of respect for the officer; but when we had traced the path almost to his feet, he pounded the iron door with the steel-shod butt of his weapon.

The door was opened from within. As we passed through the thickness of the wall — which was great, but not nearly so great as that of the Wall of Nessus — I stopped so suddenly that the officer behind me collided with me. The guard within was armed with a long, double-edged sword, whose squared tip he permitted to rest upon the paving stones.

“Where am I?” I asked the officer. “What is this place?”

“Where I told you I would bring you,” he answered. “There is the hulk.”

I looked and saw a mighty tower, all of gleaming metal. The guard drawled, “He’s afraid of my blade. She has a good edge, fellow — you’ll never feel it.”

The officer snapped, “You will address this prisoner as sieur.”

“While you’re here, sieur, perhaps.”

What the officer might have said or done to him then, I do not know; while they spoke a woman had come out of the tower, followed by a serving boy with a lantern. The officer saluted this woman, who by the richness of her uniform was of superior rank, in the most negligent fashion and said, “You find sleep difficult, I see.”

“Not at all. Your message said you would come, and I know you for a man of your word. I prefer to inspect our new clients personally. Turn about, fellow, and let me see you.”

I did as she bid.

“A fine specimen, and you haven’t marked him at all. He didn’t resist?”

The officer said, “We present you with a tabula rasa.”

When he added nothing further, one of the soldiers with torches whispered, “He fought like a devil, Madame Prefect.” The officer shot him a glance that indicated he would pay for the remark.

“With such a docile client,” the woman continued, “I’ll hardly need you and your men to get him to a cell, I suppose?”

The officer said, “We’ll lock him up for you, if you wish.”

“But if you don’t, you’ll have to have his irons now.”

He shrugged. “I’ve signed for them.”

“Take them, then.” She turned to her serving boy. “He may try to escape us, Reechy. If he does, give me your lantern and retake him”

The officer murmured, “Don’t,” as he freed my hands, then stepped away and made me a quick salute. The man with the sword grinned and swung back the narrow sally port door, the officer and his torchbearers filed out, and the door shut with a crash. I felt I had lost my only friend.

“That way, a Hundred and Two,” the woman said, and pointed toward the doorway through which she had come.

I had been looking about, at first with the hope of escape, then with a numb astonishment I cannot possibly describe. Words burst from me; I could no more have held them back than I could have silenced my heart. “That’s our Matachin Tower ! That one’s the Witches’ Keep — but it’s straight now! And there’s the Bear Tower !”

“You’re called a holy man,” she said. “I see you’re wholly deranged.” As she spoke, she held out her hands so I could see she was not armed, and gave me a twisted smile that would have been enough warning if the officer had not warned me already. It was plain the ragged boy had no weapon and posed no threat; she, I imagined, had a pistol or something worse under her rich uniform.

Most do not know it, but it is difficult to learn to strike another human being with all one’s force; some ancient instinct makes even the most brutal soften the blow. Among the torturers I had been taught not to do so. I struck her, the heel of my hand against her chin, as hard as I have ever struck anyone in my life, and she crumpled like a doll. I kicked the lantern, which went out as it flew from the boy’s hand.

The guard at the sally port raised his sword, but only to bar the way. I whirled and made off toward the Broken Court .

The pain that struck me at that moment was like the pain of the Revolutionary, the only pain I have ever felt that could be compared with it. I was being torn apart, and the separation of each limb was prolonged and prolonged until being quartered with the sword would have been nothing to it. The ground seemed to leap and reel under me, even when that hideous flash of pain was gone and I lay in the dark. All the great guns of the Battle of Orithyia were thundering together.

Then I had returned to the World of Yesod. Its pure air filled my lungs, and the music of its breezes soothed my ears. I sat up and found that it was only Urth as she seemed to one who had suffered Abaddon. As I rose I thought of all the aid I had sent this ruined body; yet my arms and legs were stiff and cold, and pain lingered in every joint.

I had lain upon a cot in a room that seemed oddly familiar. The door, which I felt sure had been of solid metal when I had last seen it, was a lattice of bars; it looked out into a narrow hall whose twistings I had known from childhood. I turned back to study the odd shape of the room.

It was the bedchamber Roche had occupied as a journeyman, and it was to this very room that I had come to don lay clothing on the evening of our excursion to the House Azure. I stared at it in astonishment. Roche’s bed, a trifle wider, had stood just where my cot was now. The position of the port (I recalled how surprised I had been to find Roche had a port, and that I myself had later been given a room without one) and the angles of the bulkheads were unmistakable.

I went to the port. It was open, admitting the breeze that had awakened me. No bars crossed it; but of course no one could have climbed down the smooth walls of the tower, and only a very small man could have squeezed his shoulders through the port. I thrust out my head.

Below me lay the Old Yard just as I recalled it, basking in the late summer sunshine; its cracked flagstones looked a trifle newer, perhaps, but otherwise they were the same. The Witches’ Keep now leaned awry, precisely as it had always leaned in the recesses of my memory. The wall lay in ruins, exactly as in my day, its unsmeltable metal slabs half in the Old Yard and half in the necropolis. A lone journeyman (so I already thought him) lounged at the Corpse Door, and though he wore a strange uniform and clasped a sword, as Brother Porter had not, he stood at the spot where Brother Porter used to stand.

Soon a boy, just such a ragged apprentice as I myself had been, crossed the Old Yard on some errand. I waved and shouted to him, and when he looked up I recognized him and called his name: “Reechy! Reechy!”

He waved in return and went on about his business, clearly afraid to be seen speaking to a client of his guild. His guild, I write, but I was sure by then that it had been mine too.

Long shadows told me it was still early morning; they were confirmed a few moments later by the slamming of doors and the footsteps of the journeyman bringing my atole. My door lacked the slot it ought to have had, so that he was forced to stand aside holding his stack of trays while another journeyman with a vouge, looking almost like a soldier, unlocked for him.

“You seem well enough,” he said as he put my tray on the floor inside the doorway.

I told him that at times I had felt better.

He edged closer. “You killed her.”

“The woman called Madame Prefect?”

He nodded, as did the other journeyman. “Broke her neck.”

“If you’ll take me to her,” I told them, “I may be able to restore her.”

They exchanged a glance and went away, slamming the barred door behind them.

So she was dead, and from the looks I had seen she had been hated. Once Cyriaca had asked me whether my offer to free her was not a final torment. (The latticed summerhouse floated from the depths of memory to stand, complete with twining vines and green moonlight, in my morning-bright cell.)

I had told her that no client would believe us; but I had believed Madame Prefect — believed at least that I could escape from her, though I had known she did not. And all the while some weapon had been trained upon me from the Matachin Tower, perhaps from this very port, though more likely from the gun room near the top.

My reverie was interrupted by the arrival of still another journeyman, this time accompanied by a physician. My door was thrown open once again; the physician stepped inside, and the journeyman locked it behind him and stood back, ready to fire through the bars.

The physician sat on my cot and opened a leather case. “How do you feel?”

“Hungry.” I tossed aside my bowl and spoon. “They brought me this, but it’s mostly water.”

“Meat is for the monarch’s defenders, not for subversives. You were hit by the convulsor?”

“If you tell me so. I know nothing about it.”

“You were not, in my opinion. Stand up.”

I stood, then moved my arms and legs as he ordered, let my head roll back and to each side, and so forth.

“You weren’t hit. You’re wearing an officer’s cape. Were you an officer?”

“If you like. I was a general, at least by courtesy. Not recently.”

“And you don’t tell the truth. That’s a junior officer’s, for your information. These idiots think they hit you. I hear the man who fired at you swears it.”

“Then question him.”

“To listen to him denying what I know already? I’m not such a fool. Shall I explain what happened?”

I told him I wished someone would.

“Very well. The earthquake came as you fled from Madame Prefect Prisca, at the instant this idiot on the gun deck fired. He missed as anyone would; but you fell and struck your head, and he thought he’d hit you. I’ve seen a good many of these supposedly wonderful happenings. They’re always quite simple, once you realize that the witnesses are confusing cause and effect.”

I nodded. “There was an earthquake?”

“Certainly, and a big one — we’re fortunate to have got off as lightly as we did. Haven’t you looked outside yet? You must be able to see the wall from here.” He stepped over to the port and looked out himself, then pointed (as people do) as if I had. “A big section fell next to the zoetic transport there. Lucky the ship didn’t fall too. You don’t think you knocked that down yourself, do you?”

I told him I had never had any notion of why it had fallen.

“This coast is quake prone, as the old records indicate clearly enough — praise to our monarch, by the way, for having them brought here — but there hasn’t been one since the river changed its course, so most of these fools think there’ll never be another.” He chuckled. “Though after last night a few have changed their minds, I imagine.”

He was already on his way out as he spoke. The journeyman banged my door closed and locked it again.

I thought of Dr. Tabs’s play, in which the ground shakes and Jahi says: “The end of Urth, you fool. Go ahead and spear her. It’s the end for you anyway.”

How little I had talked with him upon the World of Yesod.