The Sword of the Lictor

XXV Typhon and Piaton

WHEN I HEARD the footsteps, I had risen and drawn my sword, and I waited in a shadow for what seemed a watch at least, though it was no doubt much less. Twice more I heard them, quick and soft, yet somehow suggestive of a large man — a powerful man hurrying, almost running, light-footed and athletic.

Here the stars were in all their glory; as bright as they must be seen by the sailors whose ports they are, when they go aloft to spread the golden gauze that would wrap a continent. I could see the motionless guardsmen almost as if by day, and the buildings around me, bathed in the many-colored lights of ten thousand suns. We think with horror of the frozen plains of Dis, the outermost companion of our sun — but of how many suns are we the outermost companion? To the people of Dis (if such exist) it is all one long, starry night.

Several times, standing there under the stars, I nearly slept; and at the borders of sleep I worried about the boy, thinking that I had probably awakened him when I rose and wondering where I should find food for him when the sun could be seen again. After such thoughts, the memory of his death would come to my mind as night had come to the mountain, a wave of blackness and despair. I knew then how Dorcas had felt when Jolenta died. There had been no sexual play between the boy and me, as I believe there had at some time been between Dorcas and Jolenta; but then it had never been their fleshly love that had aroused my jealousy. The depth of my feeling for the boy had been as great as Dorcas’s for Jolenta, surely (and surely greater far than Jolenta’s for Dorcas). If Dorcas had known of it, she would have been as jealous as I had sometimes been, I thought, if only she had loved me as I had loved her.

At last, when I heard the footsteps no longer, I concealed myself as well as I could and lay down and slept. I half expected I would not wake from that sleep, or that I would wake with a knife at my throat, but no such thing happened. Dreaming of water, I slept well past the dawn and woke alone, cold and stiff in every limb.

I cared nothing then for the secret of the footsteps, or the guardsmen, or the ring, or for anything else in that accursed place. My only wish was to leave it, and as quickly as possible; and I was delighted — though I could not have explained why — when I found that I would not have to repass the circular building on my way to the northwestern side of the mountain.

There have been many times when I have felt I have gone mad, for I have had many great adventures, and the greatest adventures are those that act most strongly upon our minds. So it was then. A man, larger than I and far broader of shoulder, stepped from between the feet of a cataphract, and it was as though one of the monstrous constellations of the night sky had fallen to Urth and clothed itself in the flesh of humankind. For the man had two heads, like an ogre in some forgotten tale in The Wonders of Urth and Sky.

Instinctively, I put my hand on the sword hilt at my shoulder. One of the heads laughed; I think it was the only laughter I was ever to hear at the baring of that great blade.

“Why are you alarmed?” he called. “I see you are as well equipped as I am. What is your friend’s name?”

Even in my surprise, I admired his boldness. “She is Terminus Est,” I said, and I turned the sword so he could see the writing on the steel.

“ ‘This is the place of parting.’ Very good. Very good indeed, and particularly good that it should be read here and now, because this time will truly be a line between old and new such as the world has not seen. My own friend’s name is Piaton, which I fear means nothing much. He is an inferior servant to that you have, though perhaps a better steed.”

Hearing its name, the other head opened wide its eyes, which had been half closed, and rolled them. Its mouth moved as though to speak, but no sound emerged. I thought it a species of idiot.

“But now you may put up your weapon. As you see, I am unarmed, though already beheaded, and in any case, I mean you no hurt.”

He raised his hands as he spoke, and turned to one side and then the other, so that I might see that he was entirely naked, something that was already clear enough.

I asked, “Are you perhaps the son of the dead man I saw in the round building back there?”

I had sheathed Terminus Est as I spoke, and he took a step nearer, saying, “Not at all. I am the man himself.”

Dorcas rose in my thoughts as if through the brown waters of the Lake of Birds, and I felt again her dead hand clutch mine. Before I knew that I was speaking, I blurted, “I restored you to life?”

“Say rather that your coming awakened me. You thought me dead when I was only dry. I drank, and as you see, I live again. To drink is to live, to be bathed in water is to have a new birth.”

“If what you tell me is true, it is wonderful. But I am too much in need of water myself to think much about it now. You say that you have drunk, and the way you say it implies at least that you’re friendly toward me. Prove it, please. I haven’t eaten or drunk for a long time.”

The head that spoke smiled. “You have the most marvelous way of falling in with whatever I plan — there is an appropriateness about you, even to your clothing, that I find delightful. I was just about to suggest that we go where there is food and drink in plenty. Follow me.”

At that time, I think I would have followed anyone who promised me water anywhere. Since then I have tried to convince myself that I went out of curiosity, or because I hoped to learn the secret of the great cataphracts; but when I recall those moments and search my mind as it was then, I find nothing other than despair and thirst. The waterfall above Casdoe’s house wove its silver columns before my eyes, and I remembered the Vatic Fountain of the House Absolute, and the rush of water from the cliff top in Thrax when I opened the sluice gate to flood the Vincula.

The two-headed man walked before me as if he were confident I would follow him, and equally confident that I would not attack him. When we rounded a corner, I realized for the first time that I had not been, as I had thought, on one of the radiating streets that led to the circular building. It stood before us now. A door — though it was not the one through which little Severian and I had passed — was open as before, and we entered.

“Here,” the head that spoke said. “Get in.”

The thing toward which he gestured was like a boat, and padded everywhere within as the nenuphar boat in the Autarch’s garden had been; yet it floated not on water but in air. When I touched the gunwale, the boat rocked and bobbed beneath my hand, though the motion was almost too small to be seen. I said, “This must be a flyer. I’ve never seen one so close before.”

“If a flyer were a swallow, this would be — I don’t know — a sparrow, perhaps. Or a mole, or the toy bird that children strike with paddles to make it fly back and forth between them. Courtesy, I fear, demands that you enter first. I assure you there is no danger.”

Still, I hung back. There seemed something so mysterious about that vessel that for the moment I could not bring myself to set foot in it. I said, “I come from Nessus and from the eastern bank of Gyoll, and we were taught there that the place of honor in any craft is to be the last to enter and the first to leave.”

“Precisely,” the head that spoke replied, and before I realized what was happening, the two-headed man seized me about the waist and tossed me into the boat as I might have tossed the boy. It dipped and rolled under the impact of my body, and a moment later yawed violently as the two-headed man sprang in beside me. “You didn’t think, I hope, that you were to take precedence over me?”

He whispered something and the vessel began to move. It glided forward slowly at first, but it was picking up speed.

“True courtesy,” he continued, “earns the name. It is courtesy that is truthful. When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck. He offers it because he knows his ruler can take it if he wishes. Common people like that say — or rather, they used to say, in older and better times — that I have no love of truth. But the truth is that it is precisely truth that I love, an open acknowledgment of fact.”

All this time we were lying at full length, with hardly the width of a hand between us. The idiotic head the other had called Piaton goggled at me and moved its lips as he spoke, making a confused mumbling.

I tried to sit up. The two-headed man caught me with an arm of iron and pulled me down again, saying, “It’s dangerous. These things were built to lie in. You wouldn’t want to lose your head, would you? It’s nearly as bad, believe me, as getting an extra one.”

The boat nosed down and plunged into the dark. For a moment I thought we were going to die, but the sensation became one of exhilarating speed, the kind of feeling I had known as a boy when we used to slide on evergreen boughs among the mausoleums in winter. When I had become somewhat accustomed to it, I asked, “Were you born as you are? Or was Piaton actually thrust upon you in some way?” Already, I think, I had begun to realize that my life would depend on finding out as much as I could about this strange being.

The head that spoke laughed. “My name is Typhon. You might as well call me by it. Have you heard of me? Once I ruled this planet, and many more.”

I was certain he lied, so I said, “Rumors of your might echo still… Typhon.”

He laughed again. “You were on the point of calling me Imperator or something of the sort, weren’t you? You shall yet. No, I was not born as I am, or born at all, as you meant it. Nor was Piaton grafted to me. I was grafted to him. What do you think of that?”

The boat moved so rapidly now that the air was whistling above our heads, but the descent seemed less steep than it had been. As I spoke, it became nearly level. “Did you wish it?”

“I commanded it.”

“Then I think it very strange. Why should you desire to have such a thing done?”

“That I might have life, of course.” It was too dark now for me to see either face, though Typhon’s was less than a cubit from my own. “All life acts to preserve its life — that is what we call the Law of Existence. Our bodies, you see, die long before we do. In fact, it would be fair to say that we only die because they do. My physicians, of whom I naturally had the best of many worlds, told me it might be possible for me to take a new body, their first thought being to enclose my brain in the skull previously occupied by another. You see the flaw in that?”

Wondering if he were serious, I said, “No, I’m afraid I do not.”

“The face — the face! The face would be lost, and it is the face that men are accustomed to obey!” His hand gripped my arm in the dark. “I told them it wouldn’t do. Then one came who suggested that the entire head might be substituted. It would even be easier, he said, because the complex neural connections controlling speech and vision would be left intact. I promised him a palatinate if he should succeed.”

“It would appear to me—” I began.

Typhon laughed once more. “That it would be better if the original head were removed first. Yes, I always thought so myself. But the technique of making the neural connections was difficult, and he found that the best way — all this was with experimental subjects I provided for him — was to transfer only the voluntary functions by surgery. When that was done, the involuntary ones transferred themselves, eventually. Then the original head could be removed. It would leave a scar, of course, but a shirt would cover it.”

“But something went wrong?” I had already moved as far from him as I could in the narrow boat.

“Mostly it was a matter of time.” The terrible vigor of his voice, which had been unrelenting, now seemed to wane. “Piaton was one of my slaves — not the largest, but the strongest of all. We tested them. It never occurred to me that someone with his strength might be strong, too, in holding to the action of the heart…”

“I see,” I said, though in truth I saw nothing.

“It was a period of great confusion as well. My astronomers had told me that this sun’s activity would decay slowly. Far too slowly, in fact, for the change to be noticeable in a human lifetime. They were wrong. The heat of the world declined by nearly two parts in a thousand over a few years, then stabilized. Crops failed, and there were famines and riots. I should have left then.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“I felt a firm hand was needed. There can only be one firm hand, whether it is the ruler’s or someone else’s…

“Then too, a wonder-worker had arisen, as such people do. He wasn’t really a troublemaker, though some of my ministers said he was. I had withdrawn here until my treatment should be complete, and since diseases and deformities seemed to flee from him, I ordered him brought to me.”

“The Conciliator,” I said, and a moment later could have opened my own wrist for it.

“Yes, that was one of his names. Do you know where he is now?”

“He has been dead for many chiliads.”

“And yet he remains, I think?”

That remark startled me so that I looked down at the sack suspended from my neck to see if azure light were not escaping from it.

At that moment, the vessel in which we rode lifted its prow and began to ascend. The moaning of the air about us became the roaring of a whirlwind.