I have never been greatly sensitive to beauty, but the beauty of the sky and the mountainside were such that it seemed they colored all my musings, so that I felt I nearly grasped ungraspable things. When Master Malrubius had appeared to me after our first performance of Dr. Talos’s play — something I could not then understand and still could not understand, though I grew more confident that it had occurred, and not less — he had spoken to me of the circularity of governance, though I had no concern with governance. Now it struck me that the will itself was governed, and if not by reason, then by things below or above it. Yet it was very difficult to say on what side of reason these things lay. Instinct, surely, lay below it; but might it not be above it as well? When the alzabo rushed at the zoanthrops, its instinct commanded it to preserve its prey from others; when Becan did so, his instinct, I believe, was to preserve his wife and child. Both performed the same act, and they actually performed it in the same body. Did the higher and the lower instinct join hands at the back of reason? Or is there but one instinct standing behind all reason, so that reason sees a hand to either side?
But is instinct truly that “attachment to the person of the monarch” which Master Malrubius implied was at once the highest and the lowest form of governance? For clearly, instinct itself cannot have arisen out of nothing — the hawks that soared over our heads built their nests, doubtless, by instinct; yet there must have been a time in which nests were not built, and the first hawk to build one cannot have inherited its instinct to build from its parents, since they did not possess it. Nor could such an instinct have developed slowly, a thousand generations of hawks fetching one stick before some hawk fetched two; because neither one stick nor two could be of the slightest use to the nesting hawks. Perhaps that which came before instinct was the highest as well as the lowest principle of the governance of the will. Perhaps not. The wheeling birds traced their hieroglyphics in the air, but they were not for me to-read.
As we approached the saddle that joined the mountain to that other even loftier one I have described, we seemed to move across the face of all Urth, tracing a line from pole to equator; indeed the surface over which we crawled like ants might have been the globe itself turned inside out. Far behind us and far ahead of us loomed the broad, gleaming fields of snow. Below them lay stony slopes like the shore of the icebound southern sea. Below these were high meadows of coarse grass, now dotted with wildflowers; I remembered well those over which I had passed the day before, and beneath the blue haze that wreathed the mountain ahead I could discern their band upon the chest, like a green fourragere; beneath it the pines shone so darkly as to appear black.
The saddle to which we descended was quite different, an expanse of montane forest where glossy-leaved hardwoods lifted sickly heads three hundred cubits toward the dying sun. Among them their dead brothers remained upright, supported by the living and wrapped in winding sheets of lianas. Near the little stream where we halted for the night the vegetation had already lost most of its mountain delicacy and was acquiring something of the lushness of the lowlands; and now that we were sufficiently near the saddle for him to have a clear view of it, and his attention was no longer monopolized by the need to walk and climb, the boy pointed and asked if we were going down there.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “It will be dark soon, and I would like to get through that jungle in a day.”
His eyes widened at the word jungle. “Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t really know. From what I heard in Thrax, the insects shouldn’t be nearly as bad as they are in lower places, and we’re not likely to be troubled by blood bats there — a friend of mine was bitten by a blood bat once, and it’s not very pleasant. But that’s where the big apes are, and there will be hunting cats and so on.”
“And wolfs.”
“And wolves, of course. Only there are wolves high up too. As high as your house was, and much higher.”
The moment I mentioned his old home I regretted it, for something of the joy in living that had been returning to his face went out of it with the word. For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then he said, “When those men—”
“Zoanthrops.”
He nodded. “When the zoanthrops came and hurt Mama, did you come to help as quick as you could?”
“Yes,” I said. “I came as quickly as I could make myself come.” It was true, at least in some sense, but nevertheless it was painful to say.
“Good,” he said. I had spread a blanket for him, and he lay down on it now. I folded it over him. “The stars got brighter, didn’t they? They get brighter when the sun goes away.”
I lay beside him looking up. “It doesn’t go away, really. Urth just swings her face away, so that we think it does. If you don’t look at me, I don’t go away, even though you don’t see me.”
“If the sun is still there, why do the stars shine harder?”
His voice told me he was pleased with his own cleverness in argument, and I was pleased with it too; I suddenly understood why Master Palaemon had enjoyed talking with me when! was a child. I said, “A candle flame is almost invisible in bright sunshine, and the stars, which are really suns themselves, seem to fade in the same way. Pictures painted in the ancient days, when our sun was brighter, appear to show that the stars could not be seen at all until twilight. The old legends — I have a brown book in my sabretache that tells many of them — are full of magic beings who vanish slowly and reappear in the same way. No doubt those stories are based on the look of the stars then.”
He pointed. “There’s the hydra.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Do you know any others?”
He showed me the cross and the great bull, and I pointed out my amphisbaena, and several others.
“And there’s the wolf, over by the unicorn. There’s a little wolf too, but I can’t find him.”
We discovered it together, near the horizon.
“They’re like us, aren’t they? The big wolf and the little wolf. We’re big Severian and little Severian.”
I agreed that was so, and he stared up at the stars for a long time, chewing the piece of dried meat I had given him. Then he said, “Where is the book with stories in it?”
I showed it to him.
“We had a book too, and sometimes Mama would read to Severa and me.”
“She was your sister, wasn’t she?”
He nodded. “We were twins. Big Severian, did you ever have a sister?”
“I don’t know. My family is all dead. They’ve been dead since I was a baby. What kind of story would you like?”
He asked to see the book, and I gave it to him. After he had turned a few pages he returned it to me. “It’s not like ours.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“See if you can find a story with a boy in it who has a big friend, and a twin. There should be wolfs in it.”
I did the best I could, reading rapidly to outrace the fading light.
XIX
The Tale of the Boy Called Frog
Part I
Early Summer and Her Son
ON A MOUNTAINTOP beyond the shores of Urth there once lived a lovely woman named Early Summer. She was the queen of that land, but her king was a strong, unforgiving man, and because she was jealous of him he was jealous of her in turn, and killed any man he believed to be her lover.
One day Early Summer was walking in her garden when she saw a most beautiful blossom of a kind wholly new to her. It was redder than any rose and more sweetly perfumed, but its strong stalk was thornless and smooth as ivory. She plucked it and carried it to a secluded spot, and as she reclined there contemplating it, it grew to seem to her no blossom at all but such a lover as she had longed for, powerful and yet as tender as a kiss. Certain of the juices of the plant entered her and she conceived. She told the king, however, that the child was his, and since she was well guarded, he believed her.