The Urth of the New Sun

Chapter XLIII — The Evening Tide

“YOU ARE no more surprised to see me than I am to see you,” I told them. And for three, at least, it was true.

Baldanders (whom I had never expected to see again when he had dived into the lake, and yet whom I had seen again looking just as I recalled him, when he fought for me before Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice) was grown too large for me to think him human ever again, his face heavier still and more misshapen, his skin as white as that of the water woman who had once saved me from drowning.

The girl whose brother had begged for a coin outside their jacal had become a woman of sixty or more, and the gray of age overlay the leanness and brownness of long roads. Earlier she had propped herself with her staff in a way that showed it was more than her badge of office; now she stood with shining eyes, as straight as a young willow.

Of Valeria I will not write — save to say that I should have known her instantly anywhere. Her eyes had not aged. They were still the bright eyes of the girl who had come to me wrapped in furs across the Atrium of Time; and Time had no power over them.

The chiliarch saluted and knelt to me as the castellan of the Citadel once had, and after a pause that grew embarrassingly long, his men and the young officer knelt too. I motioned for them to stand, and to give Valeria time to recover herself (for I feared for a moment that she might faint or worse), I asked the chiliarch whether he had been a junior officer when I sat the Phoenix Throne.

“No, Autarch. I was only a boy.”

“Yet clearly you recall me.”

“It’s my duty to know the House Absolute, Autarch. There are pictures and busts of you in some parts of it.”

“They…”

The voice was so weak I scarcely heard it. I turned to make sure it was indeed Valeria who spoke.

“They don’t really look as you did. They look the way I thought—”

I waited, wondering.

She waved a hand. It was a weak old woman’s gesture. “As I thought you might when you came back to me, back to our family tower in the Old Citadel. They look the way you do now.” She laughed, and began to sob.

Following hers, the giant’s words sounded like the rumbling of cart wheels. “You look as you always have,” he said. “I do not remember many faces, Severian; but I remember yours.”

“You’re saying that we have a quarrel to settle. I would rather leave it unsettled and give you my hand.”

Baldanders rose to take it, and I saw that he had grown to fully twice my height.

The chiliarch inquired, “Autarch, has he the freedom of the House Absolute now?”

“He does. He is indeed a creature of evil; but so are you, and so am I.”

Baldanders rumbled, “I will do no evil to you, Severian. I never have. When I flung away your jewel, I did so because you believed in it. That did harm, or so I believed.”

“And good, but that is all behind us. Let’s forget those things if we can.”

The prophetess said, “He has done harm too by saying here that you would bring destruction. I have told them the truth — that you would bring a rebirth, but they would not credit me.”

I told her, “He has told the truth, as well as you. If the new is to be born, the old must be swept aside. One who plants wheat kills grass. You are both prophets, although of different kinds; and each of you has prophesied as the Increate instructed you.”

Then the great doors of lapis lazuli and silver at the most distant end of the Hypogeum Amaranthine — doors used in my reign only for solemn processions and the ceremonial presentations of extern ambassadors — were flung wide; and this time it was not a lone officer who burst into the hypogeum but two score troopers, each brandishing a fusil or a blazing spear. Their backs were turned even toward the Phoenix Throne.

For a moment they occupied my attention so completely that I forgot how many years had passed since Valeria had last seen me — for me the time had not been years, but fewer perhaps than a hundred days all told. And so from the side of my mouth in the old way I had often used when we stood together at some lengthy ritual, the stealthy way of talking that I had learned as a boy whispering behind Master Malrubius’s back, I murmured, “This will be something worth seeing.”

Hearing her gasp, I glanced at her and saw her tear-stained cheeks and all the damage time had wrought. We love most when we understand that the object of our love has nothing else; and I do not think I have ever loved Valeria more than I did then.

I put my hand upon her shoulder, and though that was not a time or place for intimate scenes, I have been glad since that I did, for there was time for nothing more. The giantess crawled through the doorway, her hand first, like some five-legged beast, then her arm. It was larger than the trunks of many trees that are counted as old, and as white as sea foam; but disfigured by a crusted burn that cracked and bled even as it appeared.

I heard the prophetess mumble some prayer that ended with mention of the Conciliator and the New Sun. It is strange to hear yourself prayed to; and stranger still to realize that the supplicant has forgotten you are present.

A gasp then, and not just from Valeria but from us all, I believe, save Baldanders. The undine’s face appeared with her other hand, and although they did not in reality fill all that wide door, so large were they, and the mass of brilliant green hair, that they appeared to. I have sometimes heard it said in hyperbole that eyes are as big as platters. Of her eyes it was so; they wept tears of blood, and more blood trickled from her nostrils.

I knew she must have followed Gyoll from the sea, and from Gyoll traced its tributary, which wandered through the gardens where Jolenta and I had once floated upon it. I called to her, “How were you caught and driven from your element?”

Perhaps because she was a woman, her voice was not so deep as I anticipated, though it was deeper even than Baldander’s. Yet there was a lilt to it, as though she who struggled to pass the doorway even as she spoke and was so clearly dying had yet some vast joy that owed nothing to her own life or the sun’s. She said, “Because I would save you…”

With those words her mouth filled with blood; she spat it out, and it seemed some drain had opened from an abattoir.

I asked, “From the storms and fires that the New Sun will bring? We thank you, but we have been warned already. Are you not a creature of Abaia’s?”

“Even so.” She had dragged herself through the doorway to the waist. Now her flesh seemed so heavy it must be torn from her bones by its own weight; her breasts hung like the haycocks a child sees, who stands upon his head. I understood that it would never be possible to return her to her water — that she would die here in the Hypogeum Amaranthine, and a hundred men would be needed to dismember her corpse, and a hundred more to bury it.

The chiliarch demanded, “Then why shouldn’t we kill you? You’re an enemy of our Commonwealth.”

“Because I came to warn you.” She had allowed her head to sink to the terrazzo, where it lay at so unnatural an angle that her neck might have been broken; yet she still spoke.

“I can give you a more forcible reason, chiliarch,” I said. “Because I forbid it. She saved me once when I was a boy, and I remember her face as I remember everything. I would save her now if I could.” Looking at her face, a face of supernal beauty made hideous by its own weight, I asked, “Do you remember that?”

“No. It hasn’t yet occurred. It will, because you spoke.”

“What’s your name? I’ve never known it.”

“Juturna. I want to save you…not earlier. Save all of you.”

Valeria hissed, “When has Abaia sought our good?”

“Always. He might have destroyed you…”

For the space of six breaths she could not continue, but I motioned Valeria and the rest to silence.

“Ask your husband. In a day, or a few days. He’s tried to tame you instead. Catch Catodon…cast out his conation. What good? Abaia would make of us a great people.”

I was reminded then of what Famulimus had asked me when I met her first: “Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?” And I felt myself upon the marches of a nobler world, where I should know what it might be. Master Malrubius had led me from the jungles of the north to Ocean speaking of hammer and anvil, and it seemed to me also that I sensed an anvil here. He had been an aquastor, like those who had fought for me in Yesod, created from my mind; thus he had believed, as I had, that the undine had saved me because I would be a torturer and an Autarch. It might be that neither he nor the undine were wholly wrong.

While I hesitated, lost among such thoughts, Valeria, the prophetess, and the chiliarch had whispered among themselves; but soon the undine spoke again. “Your day fades. A New Sun…and you are shadows.”

“Yes!” The prophetess seemed ready to leap for joy. “We are the shadows cast by his coming. What more can we be?”

“Another comes,” I said, for I thought I heard the patter of hurrying feet. Even the undine lifted her head to listen.

The sound, whatever it was, grew louder and louder still. A strange wind whistled down that long chamber, fluttering its antique hangings so that they strewed the floor with dust and pearls. Roaring like the thunder it flung back the double doors that had been propped open by the undine’s waist, and it carried that perfume — wild and saline, as fetid and fecund as a woman’s groin, that once met can never be forgotten; so that at that instant I would not have been surprised to hear the crash of surf or the mewing of gulls.

“It’s the sea!” I called to the others. Then, as I tried to adjust my mind with what must surely have occurred, “Nessus must be under water.”

Valeria gasped, “Nessus drowned two days ago.”

As she spoke, I snatched her up; her frail body seemed lighter than a child’s.

The waves came then, the uncountable white-maned destriers of Ocean, foaming across the undine’s shoulders so that for a breath I saw her as though I saw two worlds together, at once a woman and a rock. She lifted her heavy head higher at their coming and cried out in triumph and despair. It was the wail a storm gives as it sweeps over the sea, and a cry I hope never to hear again.

The Praetorians were clattering up the steps of the dais to escape the water, the young officer who had seemed so frightened and feeble before taking Jader’s sister (a prophetess no longer, for she had no more to prophesy) by the hand and drawing her up with him.

“I will not drown,” Baldanders rumbled. “And the rest do not matter. Save yourself if you can.”

I nodded without thinking and with my free arm jerked aside the arras. The Praetorians crowded forward, so that the bells that had pealed three times for me jangled madly and broke their cracked, dry straps, falling clangorously.

Not whispering but shouting, for the word would never be of use again, I commanded the sealed door through which I had come. It flew open, and through it came the assassin, mute still, half-unknowing, numbed by the memory of the ashen plains of death. I called to him to halt, but he had caught sight of the crown and Valeria’s poor, ravaged face beneath it.

He must have been a swordsman of renown; no master-at-arms could have struck more quickly. I saw the flash of the poisoned blade, then felt the fiery pain of its thrust through my wife’s poor, raddled body into my own, where it reopened the wound that Agilus’s avern leaf had made so many years before.