The Urth of the New Sun

Our only hope appeared to lie in outlasting these people, in drawing taut their nerves. But when I studied their faces, faces that might have been so many wooden masks smeared with ocher clay, I felt that they would outwear the year, far less a short summer’s night.

If only I could speak their tongue fluently, I thought, I might be able to wake fear enough in them, or at least explain what I had actually meant. The words — words not, alas, in their tongue but in my own — reechoed through my mind, so that I fell to speculating about them. Did I myself know what those words meant? Those or any others? Surely not.

Desperate, and driven by the same unquenchable impulse to sterile self-expression that has led me to write and revise the history I sent to molder and drown in Master Ultan’s library and soon after flung into the void, I began to gesticulate, to tell my story once again, as well as I could, this time without the use of words. My own arms cradled the infant I had been, thrashed helplessly in Gyoll until the undine saved me. No one moved to stop me, and after some time I stood up so that I might use my legs as well as my arms, walking pantomime down the empty, cluttered corridors of the House Absolute, and galloping for the destrier that had died beneath me at the Third Battle of Orithyia.

It seemed I heard music; and some later time I heard it indeed, for many of the men who had come when they heard the speeches of the hetman and the shaman were humming, beating a solemn cadence upon the ground with the butts of stone-tipped spears and antler-headed adzes; one played a nose flute. Its piping notes swarmed about me like bees.

In time I saw that some of the men were looking toward the sky and nudging one another. Thinking they detected the first gray radiance of dawn, I looked too; but I saw rising only the cross and the unicorn, the stars of summer. Then the shaman and the hetman prostrated themselves before me. At that instant, by the most marvelous good fortune, Urth looked upon the sun. My shadow fell across them.

Chapter L — Darkness in the House of Day

THE TALL woman and I moved into the Shaman’s house and took the best room. I was no longer permitted to work. The injured and the ill were brought to me for healing; some I cured as I had cured Declan, or as we of the guild had been taught to prolong the lives of our clients. Others died in my arms. Perhaps I could have revivified the dead as well, as I had recalled poor Zama ; I never attempted to do so.

Twice we were attacked by nomads. The hetman fell in the first battle, I rallied his warriors, and we turned the nomads back. A new hetman was chosen, but he seemed to regard himself — and to be regarded by his own people — as little more than my subordinate. In the second battle, it was I who led the war party while he took the nomads from the rear with a small force of picked bowmen. Together we herded and slaughtered them like sheep, and we were not molested again.

Soon the people began work on a new structure much larger than anything they had built before. Although its walls were very thick and its arches strong, I feared that they might not support so great a weight as a roof of mud and straw would impose; I taught the women to fire clay tiles just as they fired their pots, and to lay them to make a roof. When the building was completed, I recognized the roof upon which Jolenta would die, and I knew I would be buried beneath it.

Though you may think it incredible, before that time I had seldom thought of the undine or the directions she had indicated to me, preferring to revisit in memory the Urth of the Old Sun, as it was in the days of my childhood or under my autarchy. Now I explored fresher memories, for much as I feared them, I found I feared death more.

When I had sat upon a spur of rock thrust from the slope of Mount Typhon and watched Typhon’s soldiers coming for me, I had seen the meadow that is beyond Briah as clearly as I now saw our fields of maize. But then I had been the New Sun, with all the power of my star to draw upon, though it was so far away. Now I was the New Sun no more, and the Old Sun still had long to rule. Once or twice when I was nearly asleep, it seemed to me that the Corridors of Time slanted from some corner of our room. Always, when I tried to flee down any, I woke; and there was only stone, and the roof poles above.

Once I descended again to the ravine and retraced my steps to the east from which I had come. At last I stumbled over the pitiful little wall I had reared at the coughing of the cat, but though I went farther still, I returned to the stone town the day after I had left it.

At last, when I had lost all count of years, it came to me that if I could not rediscover the entrance to the Corridors of Time — and I could not — I must find Juturna; and that to find her I must first find the sea.

At dawn the next day, I wrapped some meal cakes and dried meat in a cloth and left the stone town, walking westward. My legs had grown stiff; and when after seven or eight watches of steady walking I fell and twisted my knee, I felt I had almost become again that Severian who had boarded the ship of Tzadkiel. Like him, I did not turn again, but continued as I had set my face. I had become used to the heat of the Old Sun long before, and it was the waning of the year.

The young hetman and a party of men from the stone town overtook me while Urth looked upon the Old Sun from her left. After a time, they seized my arms and tried to force me to go back; I refused, telling them I was bound for Ocean and hoped never to return.

I sat up, but I saw nothing. For a moment, I felt sure I had gone blind.

Ossipago appeared, shining with blue radiance. He said, “We are here, Severian.”

Knowing him for a mechanism, the servant and yet the master of Barbatus and Famulimus, I answered, “With light — the god from the machine. That was what Master Malrubius said when he came.”

Barbatus’s pleasant baritone flouted the gloom. “You’re conscious. What do you remember?”

“Everything,” I said. “I’ve always remembered everything.” Dissolution was in the air, the fetor of rotting flesh.

Famulimus sang, “For that were you chosen, Severian. You and you alone from many princes. You alone to save your race from lethe.”

“And then to abandon it,” I said.

No one answered.

“I have thought about that,” I told them. “I would have tried to return sooner, if I had known how.”

Ossipago’s voice was so deep that one felt rather than heard it. “Do you understand why you could not?”

I nodded, feeling foolish. “Because I’d used the power of the New Sun to retrace time until the New Sun itself no longer existed. Once I believed you three were gods, and then that the Hierarchs were still greater gods. So the autochthons believed me a god, and feared I would plunge into the western sea leaving them in night with winter always. But only the Increate is God, kindling reality and blowing it out. All the rest of us, even Tzadkiel, can only wield the forces he’s created.” I have never been clever at thinking of analogies, and now I groped for one. “I was like an army retreating so far that it’s cut off from its base.” I could not bite back the next words. “An army defeated.”

“In war no force may fail, Severian, until its trumpets blow ‘Surrender.’ Till then, though it may die, it does not know defeat.”

Barbatus remarked, “And who can say that this was not for the best? We’re all tools in his hands.”

I told him, “I understand something more — something I had not really understood until this moment: why Master Malrubius spoke to me of loyalty to the Divine Entity, of loyalty to the person of the monarch. He meant that we must trust, that we must not refuse our destinies. You sent him, of course.”