The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XXXIX — The Claw of the Conciliator Again

THE TWO-HEADED man lounging upon the divan beyond the crimson curtain raised his cup to acknowledge my bow. “I see you know to whom you come.” It was the head on the left that spoke.

“You’re Typhon,” I said. “The monarch — the sole ruler, or so you think — of this ill-starred world, and of others as well. But it wasn’t to you I bowed, but to my benefactor, Piaton.”

With a mighty arm that was not his, Typhon brought the cup to his lips. His stare across its golden rim was the poisoned regard of the yellowbeard. “You have known Piaton in the past?”

I shook my head. “I’ll know him in the future.”

Typhon drank and set his cup upon a small table. “What is said of you is true, then. You maintain that you are a prophet.”

“I hadn’t thought of myself in that way. But yes, if you like. I know that you’ll die on that couch. Does that interest you? That body will lie among the straps you no longer need to restrain Piaton and the implements you no longer need to force him to eat. The mountain winds will dry his stolen body until it is like the leaves that now die too young, and whole ages of the world will stride across it before my coming reawakens you to life.”

Typhon laughed, just as I had heard him laugh when I bared Terminus Est. “You’re a poor prophet, I fear; but I find that a poor prophet is more amusing than a true one. If you had merely told me that I would lie — should my death ever occur, which I’ve begun to doubt — among the funeral breads in the skull cavity of this monument, you would only have told me what any child could. I prefer your fantasies, and it may be that I can make use of you. You’re reported to have performed amazing cures. Have you true power?”

“That’s for you to say.”

He sat up, the muscular torso that was not his swaying. “I am accustomed to having my questions answered. A call from me, and a hundred men of my own division would be here to cast you” — he paused and smiled to himself — “from my sleeve. Would you enjoy it? That’s how we treat workmen who won’t work. Answer me, Conciliator! Can you fly?”

“I can’t say, having never tried.”

“You may have an opportunity soon. I will ask twice.” He laughed again. “It suits my present condition, after all. But not thrice. Do you have power? Prove it, or die.”

I allowed my shoulders to rise a finger’s width, and fall again. My hands were still numb from the gyves; I rubbed my wrists as I spoke. “Would you allow that I have power if I could kill a certain man who had injured me just by striking this table before us?”

The unfortunate Piaton stared at me, and Typhon smiled. “Yes, that would be a satisfactory demonstration.”

“Upon your word?”

The smile grew broader. “If you like,” he said. “Prove it!”’

I drew the dirk and drove it into the tabletop.

I doubt that there were provisions for the confinement of prisoners on the mountain; and as I considered those made for me, it occurred to me that my cell in the vessel that would soon be our Matachin Tower must have been a makeshift as well, and a shift made not very long ago. If Typhon had merely wished to confine me, he might easily have done it by emptying one of the solidly built sheds and locking me inside. It was clear he wished to do more — to terrify and suborn me, and thus win me to his cause.

My prison was a spur of rock not yet cut from the robe of the giant figure that already bore his face. A little shelter of stones and canvas was set up for me on that windswept spot, and to it were brought meat and a rare wine that must have been stored for Typhon himself. As I watched, a timber nearly as thick as the Alcyone’s mizzenmast, though not so high, was set into the rock where the spur left the mountain, and a smilodon chained to its base. The chiliarch hung from the top of this timber on a hook passed between his hands, which were manacled as my own had been.

For as long as the light lasted I watched them, though I soon realized that a battle raged at the foot of the mountain. The smilodon appeared to have been starved. From time to time it sprang up and sought to grasp the chiliarch’s legs. Always he lifted them so it fell a cubit short; and its great claws, though they grooved the wood like chisels, would not support it. In that one afternoon I had as much vengeance as I wish ever to have. When night came I carried food to the smilodon.

Once on my journey to Thrax with Dorcas and Jolenta, I had freed a beast bound much as the chiliarch was now; it had not attacked me, perhaps because I bore the gem called the Claw of the Conciliator, perhaps only because it had been too weak to do so. Now this smilodon ate from my hands and licked them with its broad, rough tongue. I touched its curving tusks, like the ivory of the mammoths; and I scratched its ears as I would have Triskele’s, saying, “We have borne swords. We know, do we not?”

I do not believe the beasts can comprehend more than the simplest and most familiar phrases, yet I felt the massive head nod.

The chain was fastened to a collar with two buckles as wide as my hand. I loosed it and set the poor creature free, but it remained at my side.

The chiliarch was not so readily released. I was able to climb the timber easily enough, locking my knees around it as I once had locked them around the pines in the necropolis as a boy. By then the horizon had dropped far below my star, and I could easily have lifted him free from his hook and flung him into the gulf below; but I dared not drop him for fear he would fall into it, or that the smilodon would attack him. Although the light was too faint for me to see it, its eyes gleamed as it stared up at us.

In the end I looped his hands about my neck and clambered down as well as I could, nearly slipping and half choking, but reaching the safety of the rock at last. When I carried him to the shelter, the smilodon followed and lay at our feet.

By morning, when seven guardsmen arrived with food, water, and wine for me and torches lashed to poles with which to drive back the smilodon, their chiliarch was fully conscious and had eaten and drunk. The consternation on the soldiers’ faces when they saw that he and the smilodon were gone entertained us; but it was nothing compared to their expressions when they discovered both in my shelter.

“Come ahead,” I told them. “The beast won’t harm you, and your chiliarch will discipline you only if you have been false to your duty, I feel sure.”

They advanced, though hesitantly, eyeing me with almost as much fear as the smilodon.

I said, “You saw what your monarch did to your chiliarch because he permitted me to retain a weapon. What will he do to you when he learns you’ve permitted your chiliarch to escape?”

The vingtner answered, “We’ll all die, sieur. There’ll be a couple more stakes, and three or four of us hung from each.” The smilodon snarled as he spoke, and all seven stepped back.

The chiliarch nodded. “He’s right. I’d order it myself, if I retained my office.”

I said, “Sometimes a man is broken by losing such an office.”

“Nothing’s ever broken me,” he replied. “This won’t, either.”

I think that was the first time I looked at him as a human being. His face was hard and cold, but full of intelligence and resolution. “You’re right,” I told him. “Sometimes indeed — but not this time. You must flee and take these men with you. I put them under your orders.”

He nodded again. “Can you release my hands, Conciliator?”

The vingtner said, “I can, sieur.” He stepped forward with the key, and the smilodon voiced no protest. When the manacles fell to the rock upon which we sat, the chiliarch picked them up and tossed them over the edge.

“Keep your hands clasped behind you,” I told him. “Cover them with your cape. Have these men march you to the flier. Everyone will think you’re being taken elsewhere for further punishment. You’ll know where you can land with safety better than I.”

“We’ll join the rebels. They should be glad to get us.” He rose and saluted, and I rose too and returned his salute, having been habituated to it during my time as Autarch.

The vingtner asked, “Conciliator, can’t you free Urth from Typhon?”

“I could, but I won’t unless I must. It’s easy — very easy — to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place.”

“Rule us yourself!”

I shook my head. “If I say I have a mission of greater importance, you’ll think I’m joking. Yet it’s the truth.”

They nodded, clearly without comprehension.

“I’ll tell you this. This morning I’ve been studying this mountain and the speed with which the work here is going forward. From those things, I know Typhon has only a short time to live. He’ll die on the red couch where he lies now; and without his word, no one will dare to draw aside the curtain. One after another will creep away. The machines that dig like men will return for fresh instructions, but they won’t receive them, and in time the curtain itself will fall to dust.”

They were staring at me openmouthed. I said, “There will never be another ruler like Typhon — a monarch over many worlds. But the lesser ones who will follow him, of whom the best and greatest will be named Ymar, will imitate him until every peak you see around us wears a crown. That’s all I’ll tell you now, and all I can tell you. You must go.”

The chiliarch said, “We’ll stay here and die with you, Conciliator, if you desire it.”

“I don’t,” I told them. “And I won’t die.” I tried to reveal the workings of Time to them, though I do not understand them myself. “Everyone who has lived is still alive, somewhen. But you are in great danger. Go!”

The guardsmen backed away. Their chiliarch said, “Won’t you give us some token, Conciliator, some proof that we once encountered you? I know my hands are profaned with your blood, and so are Gaudentius’s; but these men never harmed you.”

The word he had used suggested the token he received. I took off the thong and the little sack of manskin Dorcas had sewn for the Claw, which now held the thorn I had plucked from my arm beside unresting Ocean, the thorn upon which my fingers had closed aboard Tzadkiel’s ship. “This has been drenched in my blood,” I told them.

With one hand on the smilodon’s head, I watched them walk the promontory that held my shelter, their shadows still long in the morning light. When they reached the mass of rock that was fast becoming Typhon’s sleeve, the chiliarch concealed his wrists under his cape as I had suggested. The vingtner drew his pistol, and two soldiers aimed their weapons at the chiliarch’s back.

Thus disposed, prisoner and guard, they descended the stair on the farther side and were lost to me in the bustling roadways of that place I had not yet named the Accursed Town . I had sent them away lightly enough; but now that they were gone, I knew once more what it was to lose a friend — for the chiliarch too had become my friend — and my heart, though it may be (as some have said) as hard as metal, felt ready to crack at last.

“And now I must lose you too,” I told the smilodon. “In fact, I should have sent you away while it was still dark.”

It made a deep rumbling that must have been its purr, surely a sound seldom heard by man and woman. That thunderous purr was echoed faintly from the sky.

Far across the lap of the colossal statue, a flier lifted into the air, rising slowly at first (as those vessels always do when they rely upon the repulsion of Urth alone), then streaking away. I recalled the flier I had seen when I had parted from Vodalus, after the occurrence I placed at the very beginning of the manuscript I cast into the ever-changing universes. And I resolved then that if ever leisure should come to me again, I would pen a new account, beginning as I have with the casting away of the old.

Whence comes this unslakable thirst to leave behind me a wandering trail of ink, I cannot say; but once I referred to a certain incident in the life of Ymar. Now I have spoken with Ymar himself, yet that incident remains as inexplicable as the desire. I would prefer that similar incidents in my own life not suffer a similar obscurity.

The thunder that had been so distant sounded again, nearer now, the voice of a column of night-black cloud that outreached even the arm of Typhon’s colossal figure. The Praetorians had laid down the food and drink they had brought at some distance from my little shelter. (Such service is the price of undying loyalty; those who profess it seldom labor quite so diligently as a common servant whose loyalty is to his task.) I went out, the smilodon with me, to carry it back to whatever protection we could give it. The wind had already begun her storm song, and a few raindrops splattered the rock before us, as big as plums and icy cold.

“This is as good a chance as you’ll ever have,” I told the smilodon. “They’re running for shelter already. Go now!”

It leaped away as though it had been awaiting my consent, clearing ten cubits at every bound. In a moment it had vanished over the edge of the arm. In a moment more it reappeared, a tawny streak darkening to rain-wet brown from which workers and soldiers fled like coneys. I was glad to see that, for all the weapons of beasts, no matter how terrible they seem, are merely toys compared to the weapons of men.

Whether it returned safely to its hunting grounds, I am unable to say, though I trust it did. As for myself, I sat under my shelter for a time listening to the storm and munching bread and fruit, until at last the wild wind snatched the canvas from over my head.

I rose; when I looked through the curtains of the downpour, I saw a party of soldiers cresting the arm.

Astonishingly I also saw places without rain or soldiers. I do not mean that these newly seen places now spread themselves where the abyss had stretched. Its aching emptiness remained, rock dropping a league at least like a cataract, with the dark green of the high jungle far below — the jungle that would hold the village of sorcerers through which the boy Severian and I would pass.

Rather it seemed to me that the familiar directions of up and down, forward and back, left and right, had opened like a blossom, revealing petals unguessed, new Sefiroth whose existence had been hidden from me until now.

One of the soldiers fired. The bolt struck the rock at my feet, splitting it like a chisel. Then I knew they had been sent to kill me, I suppose because one of the men who had gone with the chiliarch had rebelled against his fate and reported what had transpired, though too late to prevent the departure of the rest.

Another leveled his weapon. To escape it, I stepped from the rain-swept rock into a new place.