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Consciousness went and came like the errant winds of spring, and I, who so often have had difficulty in falling asleep among the besieging shades of memory, now fought to stay awake as a child struggles to lift a faltering kite by the string. At times I was oblivious to everything except my injured body. The wound in my leg, which I had hardly felt when I received it, and whose pain I had so effortlessly locked away when Daria had bandaged it, throbbed with an intensity that formed the background to all my thoughts, like the rumbling of the Drum Tower at the solstice. I turned from side to side, thinking always that I lay upon that leg.
I had hearing without sight and occasionally sight without hearing. I rolled my cheek from the matted hair of Mamillian and laid it on a pillow woven of the minute, downy feathers of hummingbirds.
Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, fuming his head to watch me from one brown eye.
XXIV. The Flier
SUNLIGHT IN MY FACE.
I tried to sit up, and in fact succeeded in getting one elbow beneath me. All about me shimmered an orb of colour—purple and cyan, ruby and azure, with the orpiment of the sun piercing these enchanted tints like a sword to fall upon my eyes. Then it was blotted out, and its extinction revealed what its splendour had obscured: I lay in a domed pavilion of variegated silk, with an open door.
The rider of the mammoth was walking toward me. He was robed in saffron, as I had always seen him, and carried an ebony rod too light to be a weapon. “You have recovered,” he said.
“I’d try and say yes, but I’m afraid the effort of speaking might kill me.”
He smiled at that, though the smile was no more than a twitching of the mouth. “As you should know better than almost anyone, the sufferings we endure in this life make possible all the happy crimes and pleasant abominations we shall commit in the next... aren’t you eager to collect?”
I shook my head and laid it on the pillow again. The softness smelled faintly of musk.
“That is just as well, because it will be some time before you do.”
“Is that what your physician says?”
“I am my own, and I’ve been treating you myself. Shock was the principal problem.... It sounds like a disorder for old women, as you are no doubt thinking at this moment. But it kills a great many men with wounds. If all of mine who die of it would only live, I would readily consent to the death of those who take a thrust in the heart.”
“While you were being your own physician—and minewere you telling the truth?”
He smiled more broadly at that. “I always do. In my position, I have to talk too much to keep a skein of lies in order; of course, you must realize that the truth ... the little, ordinary truths that farm wives talk of, not the ultimate and universal Truth, which I’m no more capable of uttering than you ... that truth is more deceptive.”
“Before I lost consciousness, I heard you say you are the Autarch.”
He threw himself down beside me like a child, his body making a distinct sound as it struck the piled carpets. “I did. I am. Are you impressed?”
“I would be more impressed,” I said, “if I did not recall you so vividly from our meeting in the House Azure.” (That porch, covered with snow, heaped with snow that deadened our footsteps, stood in the silken pavilion like a spectre. When the Autarch’s blue eyes met mine, I felt that Roche stood beside me in the snow, both of us dressed in unfamiliar and none-too-well-fitting clothes. Inside, a woman who was not Thecla was transforming herself into Thecla as I was later to make myself Meschia, the first man.
Who can say to what degree an actor assumes the spirit of the person he portrays? When I played the Familiar, it was nothing, because it was so close to what I was—or had at least believed myself to be—in life; but as Meschia I had sometimes had thoughts that could never have occurred to me otherwise, thoughts alien equally to Severian and to Thecla, thoughts of the begi
“I never told you, you will recall, that I was only the Autarch.”
“When I met you in the House Absolute, you appeared to be a minor official of the court. I admit you never told me that, and in fact I knew then who you were. But it was you, wasn’t it, who gave the money to Dr. Talos?”
“I would have told you that without a blush. It is completely true. In fact, I am several of the minor officials of my court.... Why shouldn’t I be? I have the authority to appoint such officials, and I can just as well appoint myself. An order from the Autarch is often too heavy an instrument, you see. You would never have tried to slit a nose with that big headsman’s sword you carried. There is a time for a decree from the Autarch, and a time for a letter from the third bursar, and I am both and more besides.”
“And in that house in the Algedonic Quarter—”
“I am also a criminal... just as you are.”
There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity. I, who had always thought myself, though not truly intelligent, at least prudent and quick to learn simple things, who had always counted myself the practical and foreseeing one when I had travelled with Jonas or Dorcas, had never until that instant co
“All of us are—all of us must be who must enforce the law. Do you think your guild brothers would have been so severe with you—and my agent reports that many of them wished to kill you—if they had themselves been guilty of something of the same kind? You were a danger to them unless you were terribly punished because they might otherwise someday be tempted. A judge or a jailer who has no crime of his own is a monster/alternately purloining the forgiveness that belongs to the Increate alone and practicing a deathly rigor that belongs to no one and nothing.
“So I became a criminal. The violent crimes offended my love of humanity, and I lack the quickness of hand and thought required of a thief. After blundering about for some time... that would be in about the year you were born, I suppose ... I found my true profession. It takes care of certain emotional needs I ca
“That’s what we call them too,” I said. “Clients.” had been listening as much to the tone of his voice as to his words. He was happy, as I thought he had not been on either of the other occasions on which I had encountered him, and to hear him was like hearing a thrush speak. He almost seemed to know it himself, lifting his face and extending his throat, the Rs in arrange and romance trilled into the sunlight.