Valeria murmured, “We have a fountain in our garden that foretells, and I heard someone call it the White Fountain many years ago. But what has any of this to do with the bells?”
“Be patient,” the giant told her. “You learn in a breath what I learned in a lifetime.”
The woman with the staff said, “That’s well. Only breaths remain to us. A thousand or so, it may be.”
The giant glared at her before he spoke again to Valeria. “Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things. Our sun has such a black hole as I described to you at its core. To fill it, a white fountain has been drawn across the void for millennia. It spins as it flies, and in its motion emits waves of gravitation.”
Valeria exclaimed, “What! Waves of dignity? You’re mad, just as this chiliarch has told us.”
The giant ignored her interruption. “These waves are too slight to render us giddy. Yet Ocean feels them and breeds new tides and fresh currents. I heard them, as I have already told you. They brought me here.”
The chiliarch snarled, “And if the Autarch orders it, we’ll toss you back.”
“Bells feel them in the same way. Like Ocean, their mass is delicately poised. Thus they ring, just as this woman says, pealing tbe coming of the New Sun.”
I was about to step out, but I saw that Baldanders was not yet finished.
“If you know anything of science, madame, you must know that water is but ice given energy”
I could not see her head from my vantage point, but Valeria must have nodded.
“The legend of the mountains of fire is more than a legend. In ages when men were only higher beasts, there were indeed such mountains. Their spew of fire was rock rendered incandescent by energy, as water is ice made fluid. A world below this, charged with too much energy, flared into our own — as with universes, so with worlds. In those ages, the young Urth was little more than a falling drop of that watery rock; men and women lived upon its floating scum and thought themselves secure.”
I heard Valeria sigh. “When we were ourselves young, we nodded over such prosy stuff for endless days, having nothing better to do. But when our Autarch came for us and we woke to life, we found no agnation in all that we had studied.”
“It has arrived at last, madame. The force that made your bells sound has warmed the cold heart of Urth once more. Now they toll the death of continents.”
“Is that the news you have come to tell us, giant? If the continents die, who will live?”
“Those on ships, possibly. Those whose ships are in the air or in the void, certainly. Those who live under the sea already, as I have now for fifty years. But it matters nothing. What—”
Baldanders’s solemn voice was interrupted by the banging of a door some distance down the Hypogeum Amaranthine and the tatoo of running feet. A junior officer sprinted up to the chiliarch, saluting while Baldanders and the woman with the staff turned to stare.
“Sieur…” The man faced his commander but could not keep his frightened eyes from wandering toward Valeria.
“What is it?”
“Sieur, another giant—”
“Another giant?” Valeria must have leaned forward at that. I saw a flash of gems and a wisp of gray hair beneath it.
“A woman, Autarch! A naked woman!”
Although I could not see her face, I knew Valeria must be addressing Baldanders when she asked, “And what can you tell us about this? Is it your wife, perhaps?”
He shook his head; and I, recalling the crimson chamber in his castle, speculated upon his living arrangements in thalassic caverns I could scarcely conceive.
“The lochage is bringing the giant woman for questioning,” the young officer said.
His chiliarch added, “Do you wish to behold her, Autarch? If not, I can conduct the interrogation.”
“We are tired. We will retire now. In the morning, tell us what you have learned.”
“Sh-she s-says,” the young officer stammered, “that certain cacogens have landed a man and a woman from one of their ships.”
For a moment, I imagined it was to Burgundofara and myself that this referred; but Abaia and his undines were not likely to be in error by whole ages.
“And what else?” Valeria demanded.
“Nothing else, Autarch. Nothing!”
“It is in your eyes. If it is not soon upon your tongue, it will be buried with you.”
“It’s only a groundless rumor, Autarch. None of our men have reported anything.”
“Out with it!”
The young officer looked stricken. “They say Severian the Lame has been seen again, Autarch. In the gardens, Autarch.”
It was then or never. I lifted the arras and stepped from under it, as all the little bells laughed and above them a great bell pealed three times.
Chapter XLIII — The Evening Tide
“YOU ARE no more surprised to see me than I am to see you,” I told them. And for three, at least, it was true.
Baldanders (whom I had never expected to see again when he had dived into the lake, and yet whom I had seen again looking just as I recalled him, when he fought for me before Tzadkiel’s Seat of Justice) was grown too large for me to think him human ever again, his face heavier still and more misshapen, his skin as white as that of the water woman who had once saved me from drowning.
The girl whose brother had begged for a coin outside their jacal had become a woman of sixty or more, and the gray of age overlay the leanness and brownness of long roads. Earlier she had propped herself with her staff in a way that showed it was more than her badge of office; now she stood with shining eyes, as straight as a young willow.
Of Valeria I will not write — save to say that I should have known her instantly anywhere. Her eyes had not aged. They were still the bright eyes of the girl who had come to me wrapped in furs across the Atrium of Time; and Time had no power over them.
The chiliarch saluted and knelt to me as the castellan of the Citadel once had, and after a pause that grew embarrassingly long, his men and the young officer knelt too. I motioned for them to stand, and to give Valeria time to recover herself (for I feared for a moment that she might faint or worse), I asked the chiliarch whether he had been a junior officer when I sat the Phoenix Throne.
“No, Autarch. I was only a boy.”
“Yet clearly you recall me.”
“It’s my duty to know the House Absolute, Autarch. There are pictures and busts of you in some parts of it.”
“They…”
The voice was so weak I scarcely heard it. I turned to make sure it was indeed Valeria who spoke.
“They don’t really look as you did. They look the way I thought—”
I waited, wondering.
She waved a hand. It was a weak old woman’s gesture. “As I thought you might when you came back to me, back to our family tower in the Old Citadel. They look the way you do now.” She laughed, and began to sob.
Following hers, the giant’s words sounded like the rumbling of cart wheels. “You look as you always have,” he said. “I do not remember many faces, Severian; but I remember yours.”
“You’re saying that we have a quarrel to settle. I would rather leave it unsettled and give you my hand.”
Baldanders rose to take it, and I saw that he had grown to fully twice my height.
The chiliarch inquired, “Autarch, has he the freedom of the House Absolute now?”