Страница 56 из 66
We were always proud to bear her, and never found reason to complain of her.”
He sighed, and the breath seemed to catch in his throat, “She is gone. It is the blade that is the sword, not the sword furniture. The guild will preserve these somewhere, with your cloak and sabretache, because they have belonged to you. When you and I have been dead for centuries, old men like me will point them out to the apprentices. It’s a pity we haven’t the blade too. I used her for many years before you came to the guild, and never thought she would be destroyed fighting some diabolical weapon.” He put down the opal pommel and frowned at me. “What’s troubling you? I’ve seen men wince less when their eyes were torn out.”
“There are many kinds of diabolical weapons, as you call them, that steel ca
“Perhaps that may be,” Master Palaemon acknowledged.
“We have been thinking with the autarchs who have gone before us—our guild brothers, as it were, in a new guild. Master Malrubius said that only our predecessor has dared the test in modern times.
When we touch the minds of the others, we often find that they have refused it because they felt our enemies, who have retained so much more of the ancient sciences, would gain a greater advantage. Is it not possible they were right?”
Master Palaemon thought a long time before he answered. “I ca
I shrugged. “That is true in any aggregate. Master. But as you say, it is possibly more true among them. And what you call their rigidity is terrible—a deadness that surpasses belief. Individually they seem men and women, but together they are like a machine of wood and stone.”
Master Palaemon rose and went to the port and looked out upon the thronging towers. “We are too rigid here,” he said, “Too rigid in our guild, too rigid in the Citadel. It tells me a great deal that you, who were educated here, saw them as you did; they must be inflexible indeed. I think it may be that despite their science, which may amount to less than you suppose, the people of the Commonwealth will be better able to turn new circumstances to their benefit.”
“We are not flexible or inflexible,” I said. “Except for an unusually good memory, we are only an ordinary man.”
“No, no!” faster Palaemon struck his table, and again the lenses flashed. “You are an extraordinary man in an ordinary time. When you were a little apprentice, I beat you once or twice—you will recall that, I know. But even when I beat you, I knew you would become an extraordinary personage, the greatest master our guild would ever have. And you will be a master. Even if you destroy our guild, we will elect you!”
“We have already told you we mean to reform the guild, not destroy it. We’re not even sure we’re competent to do that. You respect us because we’ve moved to the highest place. But we reached it by chance, and know it. Our predecessor reached it by chance too, and the minds he brought to us, which we touch only faintly even now, are not, with one or two exceptions, those of genius. Most are only common men and women, sailors and artisans, farmwives and wantons. Most of the rest are eccentric second-rate scholars of the sort Thecla used to laugh at.”
“You have not just moved into the highest place,” Master Palaemon said, “you have become it. You are the state.”
“We are not. The state is everyone else—you, the castellan, those officers outside. We are the people, the Commonwealth.” I had not known it myself until I spoke.
I picked up the brown book. “We are going to keep this. It was one of the good things, like your sword. The writing of books shall be encouraged again. There are no pockets in these clothes; but perhaps it will do good if we are seen to carry it when we leave.”
“Carry it where?” Master Palaemon cocked his head like an old raven.
“To the House Absolute. We’ve been out of touch, or the Autarch has, if you wish to put it so, for over a month. We have to find out what’s happening at the front, and perhaps dispatch reinforcements.” I thought of Lomer and Nicarete and the other prisoners in the antechamber. “We have other tasks there too,” I said. Master Palaemon stroked his chin. “Before you go. Severian—Autarch—would you like to tour the cells, for old times sake? I doubt those fellows out there know of the door that opens to the western stair.”
It is the least-used staircase in the tower, and perhaps the oldest. Certainly it is the one least altered from its original condition. The steps are narrow and steep, and wind down around a central column black with corrosion. The door to the room where I, as Thecla, had been subjected to the device called the Revolutionary stood half open, so that though we did not go inside, I nevertheless saw its ancient mechanisms; frightful, yet less hideous to me than the gleaming but far older things in Baldanders’s castle.
Entering the oubliette meant returning to something I had, from the time I left for Thrax, assumed gone forever. Yet the metal corridors with their long rows of doors were unchanged, and when I peered through the tiny windows that pierced those doors I saw familiar faces, the faces of men and women I had fed and guarded as a journeyman.
“You are pale. Autarch,” Master Palaemon said. “I feel your hand tremble.” (I was supporting him a little with one hand on his arm.)
“You know that our memories never fade,” I said. “For us the Chatelaine Thecla still sits in one of these cells, and the Journeyman Severian in another.”
“I had forgotten. Yes, it must be terrible for you. I was going to take you to the Chatelaine’s old one, but perhaps you would rather not see it.”
I insisted that we visit it; but when we arrived, there was a new client inside, and the door was locked. I had Master Palaemon call the brother on duty to let us in, then stood for a moment looking at the cramped bed and the tiny table. At last I noticed the client, who sat upon the single chair, with wide eyes and an indescribable expression blended of hope and wonder. I asked him if he knew me.
“No,exultant.”
“We are no exultant. We are your Autarch. Why are you here?”
He rose, then fell to his knees. “1 am i
“All right,” I said. “We believe you. But we want you to tell us what you were accused of, and how you came to be convicted.”
Shrilly, he began to pour forth one of the most complex and confused accounts I have ever heard.
His sister-in-law had conspired with her mother against him. They said he had stuck his wife, that he had neglected his ill wife, that he had stolen certain moneys from her that she had been entrusted with by her father, for purposes about which they disagreed. In explaining all this (and much more) he boasted of his own cleverness while decrying the frauds, tricks, and lies of the others that had sent-him to the oubliette.
He said that the gold in question had never existed, and also that his motherin-law had used a part of it to bribe the judge. He said he had not known his wife was ill, and that he had procured the best physician he could afford for her.