The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XVI — The Epitome

NO LONGER so unlearned as I had been, I leaped off the platform and, after a long, slow fall rather pleasant than otherwise, met the procession halfway.

The prisoner did not so much as glance up. Though I could not see his face well, I saw enough to make me certain I had not seen it before. He was of the height of an exultant at least, and I would judge half a head taller than most. His chest and shoulders were magnificently developed, as were his arms, from what I could see of them. As he trudged along, great muscles in his thighs slipped like anacondas beneath skin translucently pale. His golden hair held no trace of gray; and from it and the slenderness of his waist, I judged him no more than twenty-five, and perhaps younger.

The three who followed this extraordinary prisoner could not have appeared more commonplace. All were of average height and seemed to have reached middle age. The man wore tunic and hose under his cloak; the two women had loose gowns that ended just below the knee. None were armed.

As they approached, I stepped well to one side; but only the sailors paid any attention to me. Several (though there were none I recognized) motioned for me to join them, their faces those of revelers who in their excess of joy summon every bystander to their celebration.

I hurried over, and before I knew it Purn had seized me by the hand. I felt a thrill of fear — he was near enough to have stabbed me twice over — but his expression held only welcome. He shouted something I could not quite hear, and slapped my back. In a moment, Gunnie had pushed him to one side and kissed me as soundly as at our first meeting.

“You wormy guiser,” she said, and kissed me again, not so roughly this time, but longer.

It was no use trying to question them in that uproar; and in truth if they were willing to make peace, I (with no friend on board except Sidero) was more than glad they should.

Our procession wound out a doorway and down a long, swooping passage that led to a part of the ship like nothing I had seen before. Its walls were insubstantial, not because they were in any way dreamlike, but because they somehow suggested that they were thinner than tissue and might be burst in an instant, so that I was reminded of the trumpery booths and pavilions of the fair at Saltus, where I had killed Morwenna and met the green man. And for a moment or two I stood amid the hubbub, trying to understand why it should be so.

One of the cloaked women mounted a seat and clapped her hands for quiet. Because the sailors’ high spirits had not been fueled with wine, she was soon obeyed, and my riddle answered: through the thin walls I could hear, however faintly, the rush of the icy air of Yesod. No doubt I had heard it before without being conscious of it.

“Dear friends,” the woman began. “We thank you for your welcome and your help, and for all the many kindnesses all of you have shown us on board your vessel.”

Various sailors spoke or shouted replies, some merely good-natured, others glowing with that rustic politeness which makes the manners of courtiers seem so cheap.

“Many of you are yourselves from Urth, I know. Perhaps it would be well to determine how many. May I see a show of hands? Raise one hand, please, if you were born upon the world called Urth.”

Nearly everyone present raised his hand.

“You know that we have condemned the peoples of Urth, and why. They now feel they have earned our forgiveness, and the chance to resume the places they held of old—”

Most of the sailors booed and jeered, including Purn, but not (as I noted) Gunnie.

“And they have dispatched their Epitome to claim it for them. That he lost heart and concealed himself from us should not be counted against him or them. Rather we consider that the sense of his world’s guilt so manifested should be reckoned in their favor. As you see, we are about to take him to Yesod for his assize. Even as he will represent Urth in the dock, so must others represent it on the gradins. None of you need come, but we have your captain’s permission to take from among you those who wish to come. They will be returned to this ship before it sails again. Those who do not should leave us now.”

A few hands slipped from the back of the crowd.

The woman said, “We ask also that all those not born upon Urth leave us.”

A few more departed. Many of those who remained appeared hardly human to me.

“All the rest of you will come with us?”

There was a chorus of assent.

I called, “Wait!” and sought to push my way to the front, where I would be heard. “If—”

Three things happened at once: Gunnie clapped her hand over my mouth; Purn pinned my arms behind me; and what I had believed only some strange chamber of our ship fell from under me.

It fell sidelong, tumbling the crowd of sailors and us into a single struggling mass, and its fall was not in the least like the leaps I had made in the rigging. The hunger of a world drew us at once; and though I do not think it was as great as that of Urth, after so many days in the weak pull of the holds it seemed great indeed.

A monstrous wind shouted outside the bulkheads, and in the wink of an eye the bulkheads themselves vanished. Something, we could not tell what, kept out that wind. Something kept us from tumbling out of the little flier like so many beetles swept from a bench — yet we were in the midst of the sky of Yesod, with only the narrow floor beneath our feet.

That floor tilted and leaped like a destrier in the wildest charge of the most desperate battle ever fought. No teratornis ever slipped down a mountain of air so swiftly as we, and at its bottom we shot upward like a skyrocket, spinning like a shaft in flight.

A moment later, and we were skimming the mastheads of the ship like a swallow, then like a swallow indeed we dove among them and darted between mast and mast, between cable and spar.

Because so many sailors had fallen or half fallen, I could see the faces of the three from Yesod who had led us into the flier, and I was able for the first time to see the full face of their prisoner too. Theirs were calm and amused; his ennobled by the most resolute courage. I knew my own reflected my fear, and felt much as I had when the Ascian pentadactyls had whirled over Guasacht’s schiavoni. I felt something more as well, of which I shall write in a moment.

Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run. And it was just so with me. Ashamed to reveal my terror to Purn and Gunnie, I forced my features into an expression that no doubt resembled real resolution about as much as his death mask resembles the smiling countenance of an old friend. I lifted Gunnie then, muttering some nonsense to the effect that I hoped she had not been hurt. She answered, “It was the poor boy I fell on who caught it,” and I realized she was ashamed just as I was and, just as I was, determined to stand firm though her bowels had turned to milk.

As we spoke, the flier rose above the masts again, leveled its flight, and spread its wings, so that we felt we stood upon the back of some great bird.

The woman who had addressed us before said, “Now you have an adventure to recount to your shipmates when you return to your ship. There is no cause for alarm. There will be no more tricks, and you cannot fall from this craft.”

Gunnie whispered, “I knew what you were going to tell her, but can’t you see they’ve found the real one?”

“I am what you call the real one,” I said, “and I don’t know what’s happening. Have I told you — no, I haven’t. I carry the memories of my predecessors, and indeed you may say I am the predecessors themselves as well as myself. The old Autarch who gave me his throne went to Yesod too. Went as I’m going — or rather, as I thought I was going.”

Gunnie shook her head; I could see she pitied me. “You think you remember all that?”

“I do remember it. I can recall each step of his journey; I feel the pain of the knife that unmanned him. It wasn’t like this at all; he was taken from the ship with the proper respect. He endured long testing on Yesod, and at last was judged to have failed, as he judged himself to have failed.” I looked to where the woman and her companions stood, hoping I had attracted their attention.

Purn was beside us again. “Then you still claim you’re really the Autarch?”

“I was,” I told him. “And yes, I will bring the New Sun if I can. Will you still stab me for that?”

“Not here,” he said. “Probably not at all. I’m a simple man, see? I believed you. Only when they caught the real one, I knew you’d been yarning me up. Or maybe your wits are mixed. I’ve never killed anybody, and I wouldn’t want to kill a man for yarning. Killing a Port o’ Lune man’s worse — sure bad luck.” He spoke to Gunnie as though I were not there. “You think he really believes it?”

“I’m positive he does,” she said. After a moment she added, “It might even be the truth. Listen to me, Severian, because I’ve been on board a long time. This is my second voyage to Yesod, so I guess I was in the crew when they took your old Autarch, though I never saw him and didn’t get to come down till later. You know this ship moves in and out of Time like a darning needle, don’t you? Don’t you know that by now?”

I said, “Yes, I’m coming to understand so.”

“Then let me ask you. Isn’t it possible we’ve been carrying two Autarchs? You and one of your successors? Suppose you were to go back to Urth. You’d have to choose a successor sooner or later. Mightn’t he be the one? Or the one he chose? And if he is, what’s the use of your going through with it, and losing some things you don’t want to lose when it’s over?”

“You mean that what I do can make no difference to the future.”

“Not when the future’s already up at the front of this tender.”

We had talked as though the other sailors were not present, but it is never wholly safe to do that — one does it only with the sufferance of the ignored. One of the sailors to whom I had paid no heed grasped me by the shoulder and pulled me half a step toward him so that I could see better through the hyaline sides of our flier.

“Look!” he said. “Look at that, will you!” But for a beat of my heart I looked at him instead, suddenly aware that he who had been nothing to me was everything to himself, and I only a supernumerary to him, a lay figure permitting him, by sharing his joy, to double it.

Then I looked, because it would have seemed a species of betrayal not to; and I saw that we were turning, slowing, in a wide, wide, circle, above an isle set in an endless sea of blue, translucent water. The isle was clearly a single hilltop that rose above the waves, and it was dressed in the green of gardens and the white of marble, and it wore a fringe of little boats.

There was nothing to be seen so impressive as the Wall of Nessus, or even the Great Keep. Yet in its way, the isle was more impressive, because everything about it was beautiful, without exception, and there was a joy there that towered higher than the Wall, as high as a thunderhead.

It came to me then, seeing that isle and the stupid and brutal faces of the men and women all about me, that there was something more I did not see. A memory rose, sent by one of those dim figures who stand, for me, behind the old Autarch, those predecessors whom I cannot see clearly and often cannot see at all. It was the figure of a lovely virgin, clothed in silks of many hues and dewed with pearls. She sang in the avenues of Nessus and lingered by its fountains until night. No one dared to molest her, for though her protector was invisible, his shadow fell all around her, rendering her inviolate.