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All the time I had spent in journeying from Thrax to Lake Diuturna, and from the lake to the war, and all the time I had spent as a prisoner of Vodalus, and in sailing up Gyoll, she had spent in returning here to her place, where she had lived forty years ago or more though it had now fallen into decay.
As I had myself, an ancient buzzing with antiquity as a corpse with flies. Not that the minds of Thecla and the old Autarch, or the hundred contained in his, had made me old. It was not their memories but my own that aged me, as I thought of Dorcas shivering beside me on the brown track of floating sedge, both of us cold and dripping, drinking together from Hildegrin’s flask like two infants, which in fact we had been.
I paid no heed to where I walked after that. I went straight down a long street alive with silence, and when it ended at last. I turned at random. After a time I reached Gyoll, and looking downstream saw the Samru riding at anchor at the meeting place. A basilosaur swimming up from the open sea would not have astounded me more.
In a few moments I was mobbed by smiling sailors. The captain wrung my hand, saying, “I was afraid we’d come too late. In my mind’s eye I could see you struggling for your life in sight of the river, and us still half a league off.”
The mate, a man so abysmally stupid that he thought the captain a leader, clapped me on the back and shouted, “He’d have given ‘em a good fight!”
XXXIII. The Citadel of the Autarch
THOUGH EVERY LEAGUE that separated me from Dorcas tore my heart, it was tetter than I can tell you. to be back on the Samru again after seeing the empty, silent south.
Her decks were of the impure but lovely white of new-cut wood, scrubbed daily with a great mat called a bear—a sort of scouring pad woven from old cordage and weighed with the gross bodies of our two cooks, whom the crew had to drag over the last span of planking before breakfast. The crevices between the planks were sealed with pitch, so that the decks seemed terraces paved in a bold, fantastic design.
She was high in the bow, with a stem that curled back upon her, Eyes, each with a pupil as big as a plate and a skyblue iris of the brightest obtainable paint, stared out across the green waters to help find her way; her left eye wept the anchor.
Forward of her stem, held there by a triangular wooden brace itself carved, pierced, gilded, and painted, was her figurehead, the bird of immortality. Its head was a woman’s, the face long and aristocratic, the eyes tiny and black, its expressionlessness a magnificent commentary on the sombre tranquillity of those who will never know death. Painted wooden feathers grew from its wooden scalp to clothe its shoulders and cup its hemispherical breasts; its arms were wings lifted up and back, their tips reaching higher than the termination of the stem and their gold and crimson primary feathers partially obscuring the triangular brace. I would have thought it a creature wholly fabulous—as no doubt the sailors did—had I not seen the Autarch’s anpiels.
A long bowsprit passed to starboard of the stem, between the wings of the samru. The foremast, only slightly longer than this bowsprit, rose from the forecastle. It was raked forward to give the foresail room, as though it had been pulled out of true by the forestay and the labouring jib. The mainmast stood as straight as the pine it had once been, but the mizzenmast was raked back, so the mastheads of the three masts were considerably more separated than their bases, Each mast held a slanting yard made by lashing together two tapering spars that had once been entire saplings, and each of these yards carried a single, triangular, rust-coloured sail.
The hull itself was painted white below the water and black above it, save for the figurehead and eyes I have already mentioned, and the quarterdeck rail, where scarlet had been used to symbolize both the captain’s high state and his sanguinary background. This quarterdeck actually occupied no more than a sixth of the Samru’s length, but the wheel and the bi
I was standing by these lanterns the next evening, listening to the thudding of the drum, the soft splashing of the sweepblades, and the rowers’ chant, when I saw the first lights along the riverbank. Here was the dying edge of the city, the home of the poorest of the poorest of the poor—which onlymeant that the living edge of the city was here, that death’s dominion ended here. Human beings were preparing to sleep here, perhaps still sharing the meal that marked the day’s end. I saw a thousand kindnesses in each of those lights, and heard a thousand fireside stories. In some sense I was home again; and the same song that had urged me forth in the spring now bore me back:
Row, brothers, row!
The current is against us.
Row, brothers, row!
Yet God is for us.
Row, brothers, row!
The wind is against us.
Row, brothers, row!
Yet God is for us.
I could not help but wonder who was setting out that night.
Every long story, if it be told truly, will be found to contain all the elements that have contributed to the human drama since the first rude ship reached the strand of Lune: not only noble deeds and tender emotion, but grotesquerie, bathos, and so on. I have striven to set down the unembellished truth here, without the least worry that you, my reader, would find some parts improbable and others insipid; and if the mountain war was the scene of high deeds (belonging more to others than to me), and my imprisonment by Vodalus and the Ascians a time of horror, and my passage on the Samru an interlude of tranquillity, then we are come to the interval of comedy.
We approached that part of the city where the Citadel stands—which is southern but not the southernmost—under sail and by day. I watched the sun-gilt eastern bank with great care, and had the captain land me on those slimy steps where I had once swum and fought. I hoped to pass through the necropolis gate and so enter the Citadel through the breach in the curtain wall that was near the Matachin Tower; but the gate was closed and locked, and no convenient party of volunteers arrived to admit me.
Thus I was forced instead to walk many chains along the margin of the necropolis, and several more along the curtain wall to the barbican.
There I encountered a numerous guard who carried me before their officer, who, when I told him I was a torturer, supposed me to be one of those wretches that, most often at the onset of winter, seek to gain admission to the guild. He decided (very properly, had he been correct) to have me whipped; and to prevent it I was forced to break the thumbs of two of his men, and then demand while I held him in the way called the kitten and ball that he take me to his superior, the castellan.
I admit I was somewhat awed at the thought of this official, whom I had seldom so much as seen in all the years I had been an apprentice in the fortress he commanded. I found him an old soldier, silver-haired and as lame as I. The officer stammered out his accusations while I stood by: I had assaulted and insulted (not true) his person, maimed two of his men, and so on. When he had finished, the castellan looked from me to him and back again, dismissed him, and offered me a seat.
“You are unarmed,” he said. His voice was hoarse but soft, as though he had strained it shouting commands.
I admitted that I was.
“But you have seen fighting, and you have been in the jungle north of the mountains, where no battle has been since they turned our flank by crossing the Uroboros.”