The sailor tossed a blanket to each of the women, and one to me, keeping the last for himself.
I put mine in Odilo’s lap. “I’m not going to sleep for a while; I have some things to think about. Why don’t you use it until I’m ready for it? When I get sleepy, I’ll try to take it without waking you.”
Thais began, “I—” and though I was not meant to, I saw Pega elbow her so sharply she had to catch her breath.
Odilo hesitated; I could hardly make out his drawn face in the fading light, but I knew he must be very tired. At last he said, “That is most kind, sieur. Thank you, sieur.”
I had finished my bread and smoked meat long before. Not wishing to give him time to repent his decision, I went to the bow and stared out over the water. The waves still retained a twilight gleam from the sun, and I knew that their light was mine. I understood at that moment how the Increate must feel about his creation, and I knew the sorrow he knows because the things he creates pass away. I think it may be a law binding even him — that is to say, a logical necessity — that nothing can be eternal in the future that is not rooted in eternity in the past, as he himself is. And as I contemplated him in his joys and sorrows, it came to me that I was much like him, though so much smaller; thus an herb, perhaps, might think concerning a great cedar, or one of these innumerable drops of water about Ocean.
Night fell, and all the stars came out, so much the brighter for having hidden like frightened children under the gaze of the New Sun. I searched them — not for my own star, which I knew I would never see again, but for the End of the Universe. I did not find it, not upon that night nor any night since; yet surely it is there, lost among the myriad constellations.
Virescent radiance peeped across my shoulder like a ghost, and I, remembering the colored and many-faceted lanterns at the stern of the Samru, imagined we had hoisted a similar light; I turned to look, and it was the bright face of Lune, from which the eastern horizon had fallen like a veil. No man since the first had seen it as brilliant as I did that night. How strange to think that it was the same poor, faint thing I had seen only the night before beside the cenotaph! I knew then that our old world of Urth had perished, even as Dr. Tabs had foretold, and that our boat floated not there, but upon the waters of the Urth of the New Sun, which is called Ushas.
Chapter XLVI — The Runaway
FOR A LONG while I stood there in the bow, sifting the sentinels of the night as Ushas’s swift motion revealed them. Our ancient Commonwealth had drowned; but the starlight that touched my eyes was more ancient still, had been old when the first woman nursed the first child. I wondered if the stars would weep, when Ushas herself was old, to learn of the death of our Commonwealth.
Certainly I, who had once been such a star, wept then.
From this I was taken by a touch at my elbow. It was the old sailor, the captain of our boat; he who had seemed so aloof before now stood with his shoulder next to mine, staring across the floodwaters as I did. It struck me that I had never learned his name.
I was about to ask it when he said, “Think I don’t know you?”
“Possibly you do,” I told him. “But if so, you have the advantage of me.”
“The cacogens, they can call up a man’s thought and show it to him. I know that.”
“You think I’m an eidolon. I’ve met them, but I’m not one of them; I’m a man like you.”
He might not have heard me. “All day I been watching you. I been lying awake watching you ever since we laid down. They say they can’t cry, but it’s not true, and I saw you crying and remembered what they said and how it’s wrong. Then I thought, how bad can they be? But it’s bad luck to have them on a ship, bad luck to think too much.”
“I’m sure that’s true. But those who think too much cannot help it.”
He nodded. “That’s so, I suppose.”
The tongues of men are older than our drowned land; and it seems strange that in so great a time no words have been found for the pauses in speech, which have each their own quality, as well as a certain length. Our silence endured while a hundred waves slapped the hull, and it held the rocking of the boat, the sigh of the night wind in the rigging, and pensive expectation.
“I wanted to say there’s nothing you can do to her that’ll hurt me. Sink her or run her aground, I don’t care.”
I told him I supposed I might do both, but that I would not do them intentionally.
“You never did me much harm when you were real,” the sailor said after another long pause. “I wouldn’t have met Maxellindis if it hadn’t been for you — maybe that was bad. Maybe it wasn’t. We’d some good years together, Maxellindis and me.”
I examined him from a corner of my eye as he stared blindly over the restless waves. His nose had been broken, perhaps more than once. In my mind I straightened it again and filled in his lined cheeks.
“There was that time you pounded me. Remember, Severian? They’d just made you the captain. When it came my turn I did the same to Timon.”
“Eata!” Before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed him and picked him up just as I used to when we had been apprentices together. “Eata, you little snot-nose, I thought I’d never see you again!” I spoke so loudly that Odilo moaned and stirred in his sleep.
Eata looked startled. His hand went toward the knife at his belt, then drew away.
I put him down. “When I reformed the guild you were gone. They said you’d run away.”
“I did.” He tried to swallow, or perhaps only to catch his breath. “It’s good to hear you, Severian, even if you’re just a bad dream. What did you call them?”
“Eidolons.”
“A eidolon. If the cacogens are going to show me somebody out of my head, I might have had worse company”
“Eata, do you remember the time we were locked out of the necropolis?”
He nodded. “And Drotte made me try to squeeze through the bars, but I couldn’t do it. Then when the volunteers opened it, I ran off and left you and him and Roche to the crows. None of you seemed much afraid of Master Gurloes, but I was, back then.”
“We were too, but we didn’t want to show it in front of you.”
“I suppose.” He was grinning; I could see his teeth flash in the green moonlight, and the black smudge where one had been knocked out. “That’s what boys are like, like the skipper said when he showed his daughter.”
Wildly and momentarily it occurred to me that if Eata had not run, it might have been he who saved Vodalus, he who did and saw all the things that I had seen and done. It may be that in some other sphere it happened so. Pushing away the thought, I asked, “But what have you been doing all this time? Tell me.”
“Not much to tell. When I was captain of apprentices it was easy enough to slip away and see Maxellindis whenever her uncle’s boat was docked somewhere around the Algedonic Quarter. I had talked to the sailors and learned to sail a bit myself; and so when it came feast time, I couldn’t go through with it, couldn’t put on fuligin.”
I said, “I did it only because I couldn’t imagine living in any place except the Matachin Tower .”
Eata nodded. “But I could, see? I’d thought all that year about living on the boat and helping Maxellindis and her uncle. He was getting stiff, and they needed somebody spry and stronger than her. I didn’t wait for the masters to call me in to choose. I just ran off.”
“And after that?”
“Forgot the torturers as fast as I could and as much as I could. Only lately I’ve started trying to remember what it was like, living in the Matachin Tower when I was young. You won’t believe this, Severian, but for years I couldn’t look at Citadel Hill when we went up or down that reach. I used to keep my eyes turned away.”