The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXXVII — The Book of the New Sun

AS IN MY time, we prisoners were fed twice a day and our water carafes replenished at the evening meal. The apprentice carried my tray, gave me a wink, and returned when the journeyman was no longer about, with cheese and a loaf of fresh bread.

The evening meal had been as scanty as the morning one; I began to eat what he had brought me, while I thanked him for it.

He squatted in front of my cell door. “May I talk to you?”

I said I did not govern his acts, and he was likely to know the rules of the place better than I.

He flushed, his dark cheeks growing darker still. “I mean, will you talk with me?”

“If it won’t get you a beating.”

“I don’t think there’ll be any trouble, at least not now. But we ought to keep our voices down. Some of the others are probably spies.”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“Because you killed her, of course. The whole place is turned upside down. Everybody’s glad she’s dead, but there’s sure to be an investigation and no telling who’ll be sent to take her place.” He paused, seeming to think deeply about what he would say next. “The guards say you said you might be able to bring her back.”

“And you don’t want me to.”

He waved that away. “Could you have? Really?”

“I don’t know — I’d have to try. I’m surprised they told you.”

“I wait around and listen to them talk, shine boots or run errands for money.”

“I have none to give you. Mine was taken from me by the soldiers who arrested me.”

“I wasn’t after any.” He stood up and dug in one of the pockets of his ragged trousers. “Here, you better take these.”

He held them out; they were worn brass tokens of a design unfamiliar to me.

“Sometimes you can get people to bring you extra food or whatever.”

“You brought me more food, and I gave you nothing.”

“Take them,” he said. “I want to give them to you. You might need them.” When I would not extend my hand, he tossed them through the bars and disappeared down the corridor.

I picked up his coins and dropped them into one of my own pockets, as puzzled as I have ever been in my life.

Outside, afternoon had become chill evening with the port still open. I pushed the heavy lens shut and dogged it down. Its broad, smooth flanges, of a shape I had never considered, had clearly been intended to hold the void at bay.

As I finished my bread and cheese, I thought of our passage back to Urth on the tender and my exultation aboard Tzadkiel’s ship. How marvelous it would be to send this old Matachin Tower hurtling among the stars! And yet there was something sinister about it, as about all things perverted from a noble purpose to a shameful one. I had grown to manhood here feeling nothing of that.

The bread and cheese gone, I wrapped myself in the cape the officer had given me, shut out the light with one arm, and tried to sleep.

Morning brought more visitors. Burgundofara and Hadelin arrived, escorted by a tall journeyman who saluted them with his weapon and left them outside my door. My surprise was no doubt written on my face.

“Money can do wonders,” Hadelin said; his twisted mouth showed how painful the amount had been, and I wondered whether Burgundofara had concealed the wages she had brought from the ship, or if he considered that money his own now.

Burgundofara told me, “I needed to see you one last time, and Hadelin arranged it for me.” She wanted to say more, but the words caught in her throat.

Hadelin said, “She wants you to forgive her.”

“For leaving me for him, Burgundofara? There’s nothing to forgive; I had no right to you.”

“For pointing you out when the soldiers came. You saw me. I know you saw me.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering.

“I didn’t think — I was afraid—”

“Afraid of me.”

She nodded.

Hadelin said, “They’d have got you just the same. Somebody else would have pointed you out.”

I asked him, “You?”

He shook his head and stepped back from the bars.

When I had been Autarch, supplicants had often knelt before me; now Burgundofara knelt, and it seemed hideously inappropriate. “I had to talk to you, Severian. One last time. That was why I followed the soldiers to the wharf that night. Won’t you forgive me? I wouldn’t have done it, but I was so afraid.”

I asked whether she remembered Gunnie.

“Oh, yes, and the ship. Except that it seems like a dream now.”

“She was you, and I owe her a great deal. For her sake — your sake — I forgive you. Now and at every other time. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” she said; and instantly she was happy, as if a light had been kindled in her. “Severian, we’re going down the river to Liti. Hadelin goes there often, and we’ll buy a house where I’ll live when I’m not with him on Alcyone. We want to have children. When they come, can I tell them about you?”

Although I believed at the time that it was only because I could see Hadelin’s face as well as hers, a strange thing took place as she spoke: I grew conscious of her future, as I might have been of the future of some blossom that Valeria had plucked in the gardens.

I told her, “It may be, Burgundofara, that you will have children as you wish; if you do, you may tell them anything you like about me. It may also be that in a time to come you’ll want to find me again. If you look, you may. Or you may not. But if you look, remember you aren’t looking because I’ve told you to, or because I’ve promised you’ll find me.”

When they had gone, I thought for a moment about her and about Gunnie, who had once been Burgundofara. We say that a man is as brave as an atrox, or that a woman is as lovely as a red roe, as Burgundofara was. But we lack any such term for loyalty, because nothing we know is truly loyal — or rather, because true loyalty is found only in the individual and not in the type. A son may be loyal to his father or a dog to its master, but most are not. As Thecla I had been false to my Autarch, as Severian to my guild. Gunnie had been loyal to me and to Urth, not to her comrades; and perhaps we are unable to advance some paragon of loyalty to an apothegm only because loyalty (in the final analysis) is choice.

Yet how strange that Gunnie should sail the empty seas of time to become Burgundofara again. A poet would sing that she searched for love, I suppose; but it seemed to me she searched for the illusion that love is more than it is, though I would like to believe that it was for some higher love which has no name.

Another visitor soon came — but was no visitor at all, since I could not see his face. A whisper that seemed to originate in the empty corridor asked, “Are you the theurgist?”

“If you say it,” I answered. “But who are you, and where are you?”

“Canog, the student. I’m in the cell next to you. I heard the boy talking to you, and the woman and the captain just now.

I asked, “How long have you been here, Canog?” hoping he might advise me upon certain matters.

“Nearly three months. I’m under sentence of death, but I don’t think it’ll be carried out. Usually they’re not, after such a long time. Probably the old phrontiserion has interceded for her erring child, eh? At least, I hope so.”

I had heard much such talk in my own day; it was strange to find it unchanged. I said, “You must know the ways of the place by now.”

“Oh, it’s just as the boy told you, meaning not so bad if you’ve a little money. I got them to give me paper and ink, so now I write letters for the guards. Then too, a friend brought a few of my books; I’ll be a famous scholar if they keep me here long enough.”

Having always asked the question when I toured the dungeons and oubliettes of the Commonwealth, I asked why he was imprisoned.

He was silent for a time. I had opened the port again, but even with a breath of wind coming through it I was conscious of the reek from the slop jar under my cot as well as the general stench of the place. The cawing of rooks rode upon the breeze; through my barred door came the endless tramping of boots upon metal.

At last he said, “We don’t pry into those matters here.”

“I’m sorry I’ve offended you, but you asked such a question of me. You asked if I was the theurgist, and it’s as a theurgist that I’ve been imprisoned.”

Another long pause.

“I killed a fool of a shopkeeper. He’d been asleep behind his counter, I knocked over a brass candlestick, and up he came roaring, with the pillow sword in his hand. What else could I do? A man has a right to save his own life, doesn’t he?”

“Not under every circumstance,” I said. I had not known the thought was in me until I had expressed it.

That evening the boy brought my food, and with it Herena, Declan, the mate, and the cook I had seen briefly in the inn of Saltus.

“I got them inside, sieur,” the boy said. He tossed back his wild black hair with a gesture fit for any courtier. “The guard owes me a few favors.”

Herena was weeping, and I pushed my arm between the bars to stroke her shoulder. “You’re all in danger,” I told them. “You may be arrested because of me. You mustn’t stay here long.”

The mate said, “Let them come for me with their sweet-arsed soldier boys. They’ll find no virgin.”

Declan nodded and cleared his throat, and I realized with some astonishment that he was their leader. “Sieur,” he began in his deep, slow voice, “it’s you who are in danger. They kill people in this place as we do pigs at home.”

“Worse,” the boy put in.

“We mean to speak to the magistrate on your behalf, sieur. We waited there this afternoon, but we weren’t admitted. Poor people wait for days, they say, before they get to speak with him; but we’ll wait as long as we have to. Meantime, we mean to do what we can in other ways.”

Alcyone’s cook looked at him with a significance I did not understand.

Herena said, “But now we want you to tell all of us about the New Sun’s coming. I’ve heard more than the others, and I’ve tried to tell them what you told me, but that was only a little. Will you tell us everything now?”

“I don’t know whether I can explain so you’ll understand it,” I said. “I don’t know that I understand it myself.”

“Please,” the cook said. It was the only word I was ever to hear from her.

“Very well, then. You know what’s happened to the Old Sun: it is dying. I don’t mean that it’s about to go out like a lamp at midnight. That would take a very long time. The wick — if you can think of it so — has been trimmed by only the width of a hair, and the corn has rotted in the fields. You don’t know it, but the ice in the south is already gathering new strength. To the ice of ten chiliads will be added the ice of the winter now almost upon us, and the two will embrace like brothers and begin their march upon these northern lands. Great Erebus, who has established his kingdom there, will soon be driven before them, with all his fierce, pale warriors. He will unite his strength with Abaia’s, whose kingdom is in the warm waters. With others, less in might but equal in cunning, they will offer allegiance to the rulers of the lands beyond Urth’s waist, which you call Ascia; and once united with them will devour them utterly.”

But everything that I said to them is much too long to be written here, each word a word. I told them all I knew of the history of the Old Sun’s dying, and what that would do to Urth, and I promised them that at last someone would bring a New Sun.

Then Herena asked, “Aren’t you the New Sun yourself, sieur? The woman who was with you when you came to our village said you were.”

I told her I would not speak of that, fearing that if they knew it — yet saw me imprisoned — they would despair.

Declan wished to know how Urth would fare when the New Sun came; and I, understanding little more than he did himself, drew upon Dr. Tabs’s play, never thinking that in a time yet to come Dr. Tabs’s play would be drawn from my words.

When they had gone at last, I realized I had not so much as touched the food the boy had brought me. I was very hungry, but when I reached for the bowl, my fingers brushed something else — a long and narrow bundle of rags so placed that it lay in shadow.

The voice of my neighbor floated through the bars. “That was a fine tale. I took notes as fast as I could, and it should make a capital little book whenever I’m released.”

I was unwinding the rags and scarcely heard him. It was a knife — the long dirk the mate had worn aboard the Alcyone.