“But it’s a stream,” I protested. “Like the streams of Urth.”
Tzadkiel nodded. “Those too are of energy seeking a lower state, and what is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.”
I thought about that for a time, and at last I said, “And how would I see you, Tzadkiel?”
She had been sitting upon the bank beside me; now she lay down in the grass, her chin in her hands and her bright wings rising above her back like fans with painted eyes. “You called these fields of gravity, and so they are, among other things. Do you know the fields of Urth, Severian?”
“I’ve never followed the plow, but I know them as well as a city man can.”
“Just so. And what is found at the edges of your fields?”
“Fences of split wood or hedges, to keep out cattle. In the mountains, walls of dry-laid stones to discourage deer.”
“And nothing else?”
“I can think of nothing,” I said. “Though perhaps I saw our fields with the wrong instrument.”
“The instruments you have are the right instruments for you, because you’ve been shaped by them. That’s another law. Nothing else?”
I recalled the hedgerows, and a sparrow’s nest I had once seen in one. “Weeds and wild things.”
“Here too. I myself am such a wild thing, Severian. You may think I’ve been stationed here to help you. I only wish it were so, and because I do I’ll help you if I can; but I’m a part of myself that was banished long ago, long before the first time you met me. Perhaps someday the giantess you call Tzadkiel — although that’s my name too — will want me to be a part of her again. Until then I will remain here, between the attractions of Yesod and Briah.
“To answer what you asked, if you had some other instrument, you might see me as she does; then you could tell me why I’ve been exiled. But until you can see such things, I know no more than you. Do you wish, now, to return to your world of Urth?”
“I do,” I replied. “But not to the time I left. As I told you, when I got back to Urth I thought it must freeze before the New Sun came; no matter how fast I drew my star to me, it was so distant that whole ages of the world would pass before it reached us. Then I realized I was in no age I knew, and I thought I’d have to wait in weariness. Now I see—”
“Your whole face brightens when you talk of it,” the small Tzadkiel interrupted me. “I understand how they knew you for a miracle. You will bring the New Sun before you sleep.”
“If I can, yes.”
“And you want my help.” She paused to stare at me with as serious a face as ever I was to see her wear. “I’ve many times been called a liar, Severian, but I would help you if I could.”
“Yet you cannot?”
“I can tell you this: Madregot flows from the glory of Yesod” — she pointed upstream — “to the destruction of Briah, down that way.” She pointed again. “Follow the water, and you’ll be at a time nearer the coming of your star.”
“If I’m not there to guide — but I’m the star too. Or at least I was. I can’t…it’s as if that part of myself is numb.”
“You’re not in Briah now, remember? You’ll know your New Sun again when you return there — if he still exists.”
“He must!” I said. “He — I — will need me, need my eyes and ears to tell him what passes on Urth.”
“Then it would be best,” the small Tzadkiel remarked, “not to go too far downstream. A few steps, perhaps.”
“When I came here, I wasn’t in sight of it. I may not have walked straight toward it.”
Her little shoulders moved up and down, carrying her tiny, perfect breasts with them. “Then there’s no telling, is there? So this is as good a place as any.”
I stood, recalling the brook as I had first seen it. “It went straight across my path,” I told her. “No, I think I’ll take a few steps with the water, as you suggested.”
She rose too, leaping into the air. “No one can say just how far a step will take him.”
“Once I heard a fable about a cock,” I said. “The man who told it said it was only a foolish tale for children, but there was some wisdom in it, I think. Seven, it said, was a fortunate number. Eight carried the little cock too far.” I took seven strides.
“Do you see anything?” the small Tzadkiel asked.
“Only you, the brook, and the grass.”
“Then you must walk away from it. Don’t jump across it, though, or you’ll end in another place. Go slowly.”
I turned my back to the water and took a step.
“What do you see now? Look down the stems of the grass to the roots.”
“Darkness.”
“Then take another step.”
“Fire — a sea of sparks.”
“Another!” She fluttered beside me like a painted kite.
“Only stems, as of common grass.”
“Good! A half step now.”
I edged forward cautiously. During the whole time we had talked in that meadow, we had been in shadow; now it seemed some blacker cloud obscured the face of the sun, so that a band of darkness stood before me, no wider than my outspread arms, yet deep.
“What now?”
“Twilight before me,” I said. And then, though I sensed rather than saw it, “A shadowy door. Must I go through?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
I leaned closer, and it seemed to me that the meadow was strangely tilted, just as I had seen it from my shelter on the mountain. Though it was only three steps behind me, the music of the Madregot sounded far away.
Dim letters floated in the darkness; it was a moment before I realized they were reversed and that the largest spelled my name.
I stepped into the shadow, and the meadow vanished; I was lost in night. My groping hands felt stone. I pushed at it, and it moved — reluctantly at first, then smoothly, yet with the resistance of great weight.
As though at my ear, I heard the crystal chiming of the small Tzadkiel’s laughter.
Chapter XLI — Severian from His Cenotaph
A COCK crowed; and as the stone swung back, I saw the starry sky and the single bright star (blue now with its velocity) that was myself. I was whole once more. And near! Fair Skuld, rising with the dawn, was not so brilliant and did not show so broad a disk.
For a long time — or at least, for a time that seemed long to me — I studied my other self, still far beyond the circle of Dis. Once or twice I heard the murmur of voices, but I did not trouble to see whose they were; and when at last I looked around me, I was alone.
Or nearly so. An antlered buck watched me from the crest of a little hill to my right, his eyes faintly gleaming, his body lost in the deeper dark beneath the trees that crowned the hill. On my left, a statue stared with sightless eyes. A last cricket chirped, but the grass was jeweled with frost.
As I had in the meadow about Madregot, I had the feeling of being in a familiar place without being able to identify it. I was standing upon stone, and the door I had pushed back was of stone also. Three narrow steps led to a clipped lawn. I went down them, and the door swung silently behind me, changing its nature, or so it seemed, as it moved; so that when it had shut it appeared no door at all.
I stood in the slightest of dells, a thousand paces or more from lip to lip, set among gentle hills. There were doors in these, some no wider than those of private rooms, some greater than the stone doorway in the obelisk behind me. The doors and the flagged paths that led from them told me I stood upon the grounds of the House Absolute. The long shadow of the obelisk was not born of the plenilune moon, but of the first crescent of the sun, and that shadow pointed to me like an arrow. I was in the west — in a watch or less the horizon would rise to conceal me.