The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XL — The Brook Beyond Briah

I STOOD in flower-spangled grass, sweet-smelling and softer than any other I have known; overhead the sky was azure, racked with clouds that hid the sun and barred the upper air with indigo and gold. Faintly, very faintly, I could still hear the roar of the storm that swept across Mount Typhon . Once there came a flash — or rather the shadow of a flash, if such a thing can be imagined — as if lightning had struck the rock, or one of the Praetorians had fired again.

When I had taken two steps, these things were no longer to be discerned; yet it seemed not so much that they were gone as that I had lost the ability (or perhaps only the will) to detect them, as when grown we no longer see things that interested us as children. Surely, I thought, this cannot be what the green man called the Corridors of Time. There are no corridors here, but only hills and waving grass and a sweet wind.

As I went farther, it seemed to me that everything I saw was familiar, that I walked in a place where I had been before, though I could not recall what it was. Not our necropolis with its mausoleums and cypresses. Not the unfenced fields where I had once walked with Dorcas and so come upon Dr. Tabs’s stage — those fields had cowered beneath the Wall of Nessus, and there were no walls here. Not the gardens of the House Absolute, full of rhododendrons, grottos, and fountains. Closest, I thought, to the pampas in spring, but for the color of the sky.

Then I heard the song of rushing water, and a moment later I saw its silver gleam. I ran to it, remembering as I ran how once I had been lame, and how I had drunk from a certain stream in Orithyia, then seen the pug marks of a smilodon; I smiled to myself between draughts to think that they would not frighten me now.

When I lifted my head, it was not a smilodon I saw, but a minute woman with brightly colored wings who was wading upon the water-washed stones some distance upstream as though to cool her legs. “Tzadkiel!” I shouted. Then I fell mute with confusion, having recalled the place at last.

She waved and smiled; and, most astonishingly, leaped from the water and flew, her gay wings rippling like dyed faille.

I knelt.

Still smiling, she dropped to the bank beside me. “I don’t think you’ve seen me do that before.”

“Once I saw you — a vision of you — hanging with wide wings in the vacancy between the stars.”

“Yes, I can fly there because there’s no attraction. Here I must be quite small. Do you know what a gravity field is?”

She waved an arm no longer than my hand at the meadow, and I said, “I see this one, mighty Hierogrammate.”

She laughed at that, a music like the tintinnabulation of tiny bells. “But it seems we have met?”

“Mighty Hierogrammate, I am the least of your slaves.”

“You must be uncomfortable there on your knees, and you’ve met another self of mine since I parted from her. Sit down and tell me about it.”

And so I did. And it was pleasant indeed to sit upon that bank, occasionally refreshing my laboring tongue with the cold, clean water of the brook, and recount to Tzadkiel how I had seen her first between the pages of Father Inire’s book, and how I had helped to capture her aboard her own ship, and how she had been male and called herself Zak, and how she had cared for me when I was injured. But you, who are my reader, know all these things (if indeed you exist), because I have written them here, omitting nothing, or at least very little.

When I spoke to Tzadkiel beside the brook, I strove to be as brief as I could; but she would not allow it, urging me down this byway and that one until I had told her of the small angel (of whom I had read in my brown book) who had met Gabriel, and of my childhoods in the Citadel, at my father’s villa, and in the village called Famulorum near the House Absolute.

And at last, when I had paused for breath for perhaps the thousandth time, Tzadkiel said, “No wonder I accepted you; in all those words there was not one lie.”

“I’ve told lies when I thought there was need of them, and even when there was none.”

She smiled and made no answer.

I said, “And I’d lie to you now, mighty Hierogrammate, if I thought my lies would save Urth.”

“You’ve saved her already; you began aboard my ship and you completed your task in our sphere, upon and within the world you call Yesod too. It must have appeared to Agilus and Typhon, and to many of the others who struggled against you, that the fight was an unequal one. If they had been wise, they would have known the fight was over already, some where and some time; but if they had been wise, they would have known you for our servant and not fought against you at all.”

“Then I cannot fail?”

“No, you have not failed. You could have on the ship and later; but you couldn’t die before the test, nor can you now, until your task is accomplished. If it weren’t so, the beating would have killed you, and the weapon in the tower, and much else. But your task will be accomplished soon. Your power is from your star, as you know. When it enters your old sun and brings the birth of the new…”

I said, “I’ve boasted too often of not fearing death to tremble at the thought today.”

She nodded. “That’s well. Briah’s no enduring house.”

“But this place is Briah, or part of it. It’s a passage in your ship, the one you showed me when you led me to my stateroom.”

“If that is so, you were near Yesod when you were with me on our ship. This is the Brook Madregot, and it runs from Yesod to Briah.”

“Between the universes?” I asked. “How can that be?”

“How could it not be? Energy gropes for some lower state, always; which is merely to say that the Increate tosses all the universes between his hands.”

“But it’s a stream,” I protested. “Like the streams of Urth.”

Tzadkiel nodded. “Those too are of energy seeking a lower state, and what is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.”

I thought about that for a time, and at last I said, “And how would I see you, Tzadkiel?”

She had been sitting upon the bank beside me; now she lay down in the grass, her chin in her hands and her bright wings rising above her back like fans with painted eyes. “You called these fields of gravity, and so they are, among other things. Do you know the fields of Urth, Severian?”

“I’ve never followed the plow, but I know them as well as a city man can.”

“Just so. And what is found at the edges of your fields?”

“Fences of split wood or hedges, to keep out cattle. In the mountains, walls of dry-laid stones to discourage deer.”

“And nothing else?”

“I can think of nothing,” I said. “Though perhaps I saw our fields with the wrong instrument.”

“The instruments you have are the right instruments for you, because you’ve been shaped by them. That’s another law. Nothing else?”

I recalled the hedgerows, and a sparrow’s nest I had once seen in one. “Weeds and wild things.”

“Here too. I myself am such a wild thing, Severian. You may think I’ve been stationed here to help you. I only wish it were so, and because I do I’ll help you if I can; but I’m a part of myself that was banished long ago, long before the first time you met me. Perhaps someday the giantess you call Tzadkiel — although that’s my name too — will want me to be a part of her again. Until then I will remain here, between the attractions of Yesod and Briah.

“To answer what you asked, if you had some other instrument, you might see me as she does; then you could tell me why I’ve been exiled. But until you can see such things, I know no more than you. Do you wish, now, to return to your world of Urth?”

“I do,” I replied. “But not to the time I left. As I told you, when I got back to Urth I thought it must freeze before the New Sun came; no matter how fast I drew my star to me, it was so distant that whole ages of the world would pass before it reached us. Then I realized I was in no age I knew, and I thought I’d have to wait in weariness. Now I see—”

“Your whole face brightens when you talk of it,” the small Tzadkiel interrupted me. “I understand how they knew you for a miracle. You will bring the New Sun before you sleep.”

“If I can, yes.”

“And you want my help.” She paused to stare at me with as serious a face as ever I was to see her wear. “I’ve many times been called a liar, Severian, but I would help you if I could.”

“Yet you cannot?”

“I can tell you this: Madregot flows from the glory of Yesod” — she pointed upstream — “to the destruction of Briah, down that way.” She pointed again. “Follow the water, and you’ll be at a time nearer the coming of your star.”

“If I’m not there to guide — but I’m the star too. Or at least I was. I can’t…it’s as if that part of myself is numb.”

“You’re not in Briah now, remember? You’ll know your New Sun again when you return there — if he still exists.”

“He must!” I said. “He — I — will need me, need my eyes and ears to tell him what passes on Urth.”

“Then it would be best,” the small Tzadkiel remarked, “not to go too far downstream. A few steps, perhaps.”

“When I came here, I wasn’t in sight of it. I may not have walked straight toward it.”

Her little shoulders moved up and down, carrying her tiny, perfect breasts with them. “Then there’s no telling, is there? So this is as good a place as any.”

I stood, recalling the brook as I had first seen it. “It went straight across my path,” I told her. “No, I think I’ll take a few steps with the water, as you suggested.”

She rose too, leaping into the air. “No one can say just how far a step will take him.”

“Once I heard a fable about a cock,” I said. “The man who told it said it was only a foolish tale for children, but there was some wisdom in it, I think. Seven, it said, was a fortunate number. Eight carried the little cock too far.” I took seven strides.

“Do you see anything?” the small Tzadkiel asked.

“Only you, the brook, and the grass.”

“Then you must walk away from it. Don’t jump across it, though, or you’ll end in another place. Go slowly.”

I turned my back to the water and took a step.

“What do you see now? Look down the stems of the grass to the roots.”

“Darkness.”

“Then take another step.”

“Fire — a sea of sparks.”

“Another!” She fluttered beside me like a painted kite.

“Only stems, as of common grass.”

“Good! A half step now.”

I edged forward cautiously. During the whole time we had talked in that meadow, we had been in shadow; now it seemed some blacker cloud obscured the face of the sun, so that a band of darkness stood before me, no wider than my outspread arms, yet deep.

“What now?”

“Twilight before me,” I said. And then, though I sensed rather than saw it, “A shadowy door. Must I go through?”

“That’s for you to decide.”

I leaned closer, and it seemed to me that the meadow was strangely tilted, just as I had seen it from my shelter on the mountain. Though it was only three steps behind me, the music of the Madregot sounded far away.

Dim letters floated in the darkness; it was a moment before I realized they were reversed and that the largest spelled my name.

I stepped into the shadow, and the meadow vanished; I was lost in night. My groping hands felt stone. I pushed at it, and it moved — reluctantly at first, then smoothly, yet with the resistance of great weight.

As though at my ear, I heard the crystal chiming of the small Tzadkiel’s laughter.