The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XLV — The Boat

IT WAS a sail, lifted at times so high that we could glimpse the dark hull under it — at others nearly lost, dipping and spinning down the trenches of the flood. We shouted till we were hoarse, all of us, and capered and waved our arms, and at last I lifted Pega onto my shoulder, balancing as precariously as I had in the tossing howdah of Vodalus’s baluchither.

The wind spilled from the gaff-rigged sail. Pega groaned. “They’re sinking!”

“No,” I told her, “they’re coming about.”

The little jib emptied and flapped in its turn, then filled again. I cannot say just how many breaths or how many beatings of my heart passed before we saw the sharp jibboom stabbing the sky like a flagstaff set on a green hill. Time has seldom gone more slowly for me, and I feel they might have numbered several thousands.

A moment more, and the boat lay within long bowshot of us, with a rope trailing in the water. I plunged in, not sure that the others would follow me, but feeling I would be better able to help them on board than on the raft.

At once it seemed I had plunged into another world, more outlandish than the Brook Madregot. The unresting waves and clouded sky vanished as if they had never existed. I sensed a mighty current, yet I could not have said by what means I knew of it; for although the drowned pastures of my drowned nation slipped under me and its trees gestured to me with supplicating limbs, the water itself seemed at rest. It was as if I watched the slow rolling of Urth across the void.

At length I saw a cottage with its walls and stone chimney still standing; its open door appeared to beckon me. I felt a sudden terror and swam upward toward the light as desperately as when I had been drowning in Gyoll.

My head broke the surface; water streamed from my nostrils. For a moment it seemed that both raft and boat were gone, but a wave lifted the boat so that I glimpsed its weather-stained sail. I knew I had been underwater a long time, even though it had not seemed so. I swam as fast as I could, but I was careful to keep my face in air as much as possible, and I closed my eyes when it was not.

Odilo stood in the stern with a hand on the tiller; when he saw me, he waved and shouted some encouragement I could not hear. In a moment or two, Pega’s round face appeared above the gunnel, then another face, one I did not know, brown and wrinkled.

A wave picked me up as a cat does her kittens, and I dove headfirst down its farther side and found the floating rope in the trough. Odilo abandoned the tiller (which was held with a loop of cordage in any case, as I saw when I got on board) and joined in hauling me in. The little boat had only a couple of cubits of freeboard, and it was not difficult to brace my foot on the rudder and vault over the stern.

Although Pega had first seen me less than a watch before, she hugged me like a stuffed toy.

Odilo bowed as though we were being presented to each other in the Hypogeum Amaranthine. “Sieur, I feared that you had lost your life among these raging seas!” Odilo bowed again. “Sieur, it is exceeding pleasant as well as quite astonishing, sieur, if I may say so, sieur, to see you once again, sieur!”

Pega was more straightforward. “All of us thought you were dead, Severian!”

I asked him where the other woman was, then caught sight of her as a bucketful of water flew over the side and back into the flood. Like a sensible woman, she was bailing; and like a woman of sense, bailing downwind.

“She’s here, sieur. We are all here, all here now, sieur. I myself was the first to reach this craft.” Odilo inflated his chest with pardonable pride. “I was able to assist the females a bit, sieur. But no one had seen you at all, sieur, not since we cast our lots with the waves, if I may phrase it thus, sieur. We are most happy, sieur, indeed we are quite delighted—” He recollected himself. “Not that a young officer of your physique and undoubted prowess could be in much danger, sieur, where such humble persons as we had come safely through, sieur. Though but narrowly, sieur. Very narrowly, sieur. And yet the young women were concerned for you, sieur, for which I hope and trust you’ll forgive them.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” I told him. “I thank all of you for your help.”

The old sailor whose boat it was made some complex gesture (half-concealed by his thick coat) that I was unable to follow, then spit to windward.

“Our rescuer,” Odilo continued, beaming, “is—”

“Don’t matter,” the sailor snapped. “You get down there and trim that mains’l. Jib’s fouled, too. You stamp now and stutter, or she’ll capsize.”

It had been ten years and more since I had sailed on the Samru, but I had learned then how a fore-and-aft rig operates, and I do not forget. I had trimmed the gaff mainsail before Odilo and Pega had fathomed the mysteries of its simple rigging, and with a little help from the stay I freed the jib and payed out the sheet.

For the remainder of the day we lived in fear of the storm, flying before the strong winds that preceded it, always escaping but never completely sure we had. By night the danger seemed to have lessened, and we hove to. The sailor gave each of us a cup of water, a round of hard bread, and a scrap of smoked meat. I had known I was hungry, but I discovered that I was ravenous, as was everyone else.

“We’ve got to keep both eyes open for something to eat,” he directed Odilo and the women solemnly. “Sometimes, when there’s a wreck, you can find biscuit boxes or barrels of water. This’s about the biggest wreck there ever was, I suppose.” He paused, squinting at his vessel and the surrounding flood, still lit by the lingering incandescence of Urth’s new sun. “There’s islands — or there was — but we might not find them, and we’ve not got food enough nor water neither to reach the Xanthic Lands.”

“I have observed,” Odilo said, “that in the course of life events attain some nadir from which they are afterward elevated. The destruction of the House Absolute, the death of our beloved Autarch — if she has not, by the mercy of the Increate, somewhere survived—”

“She has,” I told him. “Believe me.” When he stared at me with his eyes filled with hope, I could only add weakly, “I feel it.”

“I trust so, sieur. Your feelings do you credit. But as I was saying, circumstances then reached their worst for us all.” He looked about, and even Thais and the old sailor nodded.

“And yet we lived. I discovered a floating table and thus was able to proffer my assistance to these poor women. Together we discovered still more furniture and constructed our raft, on which we were soon joined by our exalted guest; and at last you, Captain, rescued us, for which we are extremely grateful. That I should call a tendency. Our circumstances will incline toward the better for some time to come, I believe.”

Pega touched his arm. “You must have lost your wife, and your family too, Odilo. It’s admirable of you not to mention them, but we know how you must feel.”

He shook his head. “I never married. I’m glad of it now, though I’ve often regretted it. To be the steward of an entire hypogeum, and particularly, as I was in my youth, to be steward of my Hypogeum Apotropaic in the time of Father Inire, requires the most unremitting effort; one has hardly a watch in which to sleep. Previous to my own father’s lamented demise, there was a certain young person, the confidential servitrix of a chatelaine, if I may say so, to whom I hoped — but the chatelaine retired to her estates. For a time, the young person and I corresponded.”

He sighed. “Doubtless she found another, for a woman will always find another if she wishes. I hope and trust that he was worthy of her.”

I would have spoken then to relieve the tension if I could; but torn between amusement and sympathy as I was, I could think of nothing innocuous to say. Odilo’s inflated manner rendered him ridiculous, and yet I was conscious it was a manner that had evolved over many years, through the reigns of many Autarchs, as a means of preserving such people as Odilo had lately been from dismissal and death; and I was conscious too that I myself had been one of those Autarchs.

Pega had begun to talk to him in a low tone that was nearly a whisper, and although I could hear her voice above the slap of the waves against our side, I could not tell what was said. Nor was I sure I wished to hear it.

The old sailor had been rummaging under the little poopdeck that covered the last couple of ells of the stern. “Haven’t but four blankets,” he announced.

Odilo interrupted Pega to say, “Then I must do without. My clothing is dry now, and I should not be uncomfortable.”

The sailor tossed a blanket to each of the women, and one to me, keeping the last for himself.

I put mine in Odilo’s lap. “I’m not going to sleep for a while; I have some things to think about. Why don’t you use it until I’m ready for it? When I get sleepy, I’ll try to take it without waking you.”

Thais began, “I—” and though I was not meant to, I saw Pega elbow her so sharply she had to catch her breath.

Odilo hesitated; I could hardly make out his drawn face in the fading light, but I knew he must be very tired. At last he said, “That is most kind, sieur. Thank you, sieur.”

I had finished my bread and smoked meat long before. Not wishing to give him time to repent his decision, I went to the bow and stared out over the water. The waves still retained a twilight gleam from the sun, and I knew that their light was mine. I understood at that moment how the Increate must feel about his creation, and I knew the sorrow he knows because the things he creates pass away. I think it may be a law binding even him — that is to say, a logical necessity — that nothing can be eternal in the future that is not rooted in eternity in the past, as he himself is. And as I contemplated him in his joys and sorrows, it came to me that I was much like him, though so much smaller; thus an herb, perhaps, might think concerning a great cedar, or one of these innumerable drops of water about Ocean.

Night fell, and all the stars came out, so much the brighter for having hidden like frightened children under the gaze of the New Sun. I searched them — not for my own star, which I knew I would never see again, but for the End of the Universe. I did not find it, not upon that night nor any night since; yet surely it is there, lost among the myriad constellations.

Virescent radiance peeped across my shoulder like a ghost, and I, remembering the colored and many-faceted lanterns at the stern of the Samru, imagined we had hoisted a similar light; I turned to look, and it was the bright face of Lune, from which the eastern horizon had fallen like a veil. No man since the first had seen it as brilliant as I did that night. How strange to think that it was the same poor, faint thing I had seen only the night before beside the cenotaph! I knew then that our old world of Urth had perished, even as Dr. Tabs had foretold, and that our boat floated not there, but upon the waters of the Urth of the New Sun, which is called Ushas.