“You are not the Chatelaine Thecla,” I said. “What am I doing here with you?” There was surely more in my voice than I had intended. She turned to face me, the thin cloth of her gown sliding away from her breasts. I saw fear flicker across her face as though directed by a mirror; she must have been in this situation before, and it must have turned out badly for her. “I am Thecla,” she said. “If you want me to be.”
I raised my hand and she added quickly, “There are people here to protect me.
All I have to do is scream. You may hit me once, but you won’t hit me twice.”
“No,” I told her.
“Yes there are. Three men.”
“There is no one. This whole floor is empty and cold—don’t you think I’ve noticed how quiet it is? Roche and his girl stayed below, and perhaps got a better room there because he paid. The woman we saw at the top of the stair was leaving and wanted to speak to you first. Look.” I took her by the waist and lifted her into the air. “Scream. No one will come.” She was silent. I dropped her on the bed, and after a moment sat down beside her. “You are angry because I’m not Thecla. But I would have been Thecla for you. I will be still.” She slipped the strange coat from my shoulders and let it fall. “You’re very strong.”
“No I’m not.” I knew that some of the boys who were afraid of me were already stronger than I.
“Very strong. Aren’t you strong enough to master reality, even for a little while?”
“What do you mean?”
“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?”
“You are not the Chatelaine Thecla,” I told her. “But don’t you see, neither is she. The Chatelaine Thecla, whom I doubt you’ve ever laid eyes on. No, I see I’m wrong. Have you been to the House Absolute?”
Her hands, small and warm, were on my own right hand, pressing. I shook my head.
“Sometimes clients say they have. I always find pleasure in hearing them.”
“Have they been? Really?”
She shrugged. “I was saying that the Chatelaine Thecla is not the Chatelaine Thecla. Not the Chatelaine Thecla of your mind, which is the only Chatelaine Thecla you care about. Neither am I. What, then, is the difference between us?”
“None, I suppose.”
While I was undressing I said, “Nevertheless, we all seek to discover what is real. Why is it? Perhaps we are drawn to the theocenter. That’s what the hierophants say, that only that is true.”
She kissed my thighs, knowing she had won. “Are you really ready to find it? You must be clothed in favor, remember. Otherwise you will be given over to the torturers. You wouldn’t like that.”
“No,” I said, and took her head between my hands.
10. THE LAST YEAR
I think it was Master Gurloes’s intention that I should be brought to that house often, so I would not become too much attracted to Thecla. In actuality I permitted Roche to pocket the money and never went there again. The pain had been too pleasurable, the pleasure too painful; so that I feared that in time my mind would no longer be the thing I knew.
Then too, before Roche and I had left the house, the white-haired man (catching my eye) had drawn from the bosom of his robe what I had at first thought was an icon but soon saw to be a golden vial in the shape of a phallus. He had smiled, and because there had been nothing but friendship in his smile it had frightened me.
Some days passed before I could rid my thoughts of Thecla of certain impressions belonging to the false Thecla who had initiated me into the anacreontic diversions and fruitions of men and women. Possibly this had an effect opposite to that Master Gurloes intended, but I do not think so. I believe I was never less inclined to love the unfortunate woman than when I carried in my memory the recent impressions of having enjoyed her freely; it was as I saw it more and more clearly for the untruth it was that I felt myself drawn to redress the fact, and drawn through her (though I was hardly conscious of it at the time) to the world of ancient knowledge and privilege she represented. The books I had carried to her became my university, she my oracle. I am not an educated man—from Master Palaemon I learned little more than to read, write, and cipher, with a few facts concerning the physical world and the requisites of our mystery. If educated men have sometimes thought me, if not their equal, at least one whose company did not shame them, that is owing solely to Thecla: the Thecla I remember, the Thecla who lives in me, and the four books. What we read together and what we said of it to one another, I shall not tell; to recount the least of it would wear out this brief night. All that winter while snow whitened the Old Yard, I came up from the oubliette as if from sleep, and started to see the tracks my feet left behind me and my shadow on the snow. Thecla was sad that winter, yet she delighted in talking to me of the secrets of the past, of the conjectures formed of higher spheres, and of the arms and histories of heroes millennia dead.
Spring came, and with it the purple-striped and white-dotted lilies of the necropolis. I carried them to her, and she said my beard had shot up like them, and I should be bluer of cheek than the run of common men, and the next day begged my pardon for it, saying I was that already. With the warm weather and (I think) the blossoms I brought, her spirits lifted. When we traced the insignia of old houses, she talked of friends of her own station and the marriages they had made, good and bad, and how such and such a one had exchanged her future for a ruined stronghold because she had seen it in a dream; and how another, who had played at dolls with her when they were children, was the mistress now of so many thousands of leagues. “And there must be a new Autarch and perhaps an Autarchia sometime, you know, Severian. Things can go on as they have for a long while. But not forever.”
“I know little of the court, Chatelaine.”
“The less you know, the happier you will be.” She paused, white teeth nibbling her delicately curved lower lip. “When my mother was in labor, she had the servants carry her to the Vatic Fountain, whose virtue is to reveal what is to come. It prophesied I should sit a throne. Thea has always envied me that. Still, the Autarch…”
“Yes?”
“It would be better if I didn’t say too much. The Autarch is not like other people. No matter how I may talk sometimes, on all of Urth there is no one like him.”
“I know that.”
“Then that is enough for you. Look here,” she held up the brown book. “Here it says, ‘It was the thought of Thalelaeus the Great that the democracy’—that means the People—‘desired to be ruled by some power superior to itself, and of Yrierix the Sage that the commonality would never permit one differing from themselves to hold high office. Notwithstanding this, each is called The Perfect Master.’ “ I did not see what she meant, and said nothing.
“No one really knows what the Autarch will do. That’s what it all comes down to. Or Father Inire either. When I first came to court I was told, as a great secret, that it was Father Inire who really determined the policy of the Commonwealth. When I had been there two years, a man very highly placed—I can’t even tell you his name—said it was the Autarch who ruled, though to those in the House Absolute it might seem that it was Father Inire. And last year a woman whose judgment I trust more than any man’s confided that it really made no difference, because they were both as unfathomable as the pelagic deeps, and if one decided things while the moon waxed and the other when the wind was in the east, no one could tell the difference anyway. I thought that was wise counsel until I realized she was only repeating something I had said to her myself half a year before.” Thecla fell silent, reclining on the narrow bed, her dark hair spread on the pillow.