“Nearly three months. I’m under sentence of death, but I don’t think it’ll be carried out. Usually they’re not, after such a long time. Probably the old phrontiserion has interceded for her erring child, eh? At least, I hope so.”
I had heard much such talk in my own day; it was strange to find it unchanged. I said, “You must know the ways of the place by now.”
“Oh, it’s just as the boy told you, meaning not so bad if you’ve a little money. I got them to give me paper and ink, so now I write letters for the guards. Then too, a friend brought a few of my books; I’ll be a famous scholar if they keep me here long enough.”
Having always asked the question when I toured the dungeons and oubliettes of the Commonwealth, I asked why he was imprisoned.
He was silent for a time. I had opened the port again, but even with a breath of wind coming through it I was conscious of the reek from the slop jar under my cot as well as the general stench of the place. The cawing of rooks rode upon the breeze; through my barred door came the endless tramping of boots upon metal.
At last he said, “We don’t pry into those matters here.”
“I’m sorry I’ve offended you, but you asked such a question of me. You asked if I was the theurgist, and it’s as a theurgist that I’ve been imprisoned.”
Another long pause.
“I killed a fool of a shopkeeper. He’d been asleep behind his counter, I knocked over a brass candlestick, and up he came roaring, with the pillow sword in his hand. What else could I do? A man has a right to save his own life, doesn’t he?”
“Not under every circumstance,” I said. I had not known the thought was in me until I had expressed it.
That evening the boy brought my food, and with it Herena, Declan, the mate, and the cook I had seen briefly in the inn of Saltus.
“I got them inside, sieur,” the boy said. He tossed back his wild black hair with a gesture fit for any courtier. “The guard owes me a few favors.”
Herena was weeping, and I pushed my arm between the bars to stroke her shoulder. “You’re all in danger,” I told them. “You may be arrested because of me. You mustn’t stay here long.”
The mate said, “Let them come for me with their sweet-arsed soldier boys. They’ll find no virgin.”
Declan nodded and cleared his throat, and I realized with some astonishment that he was their leader. “Sieur,” he began in his deep, slow voice, “it’s you who are in danger. They kill people in this place as we do pigs at home.”
“Worse,” the boy put in.
“We mean to speak to the magistrate on your behalf, sieur. We waited there this afternoon, but we weren’t admitted. Poor people wait for days, they say, before they get to speak with him; but we’ll wait as long as we have to. Meantime, we mean to do what we can in other ways.”
Alcyone’s cook looked at him with a significance I did not understand.
Herena said, “But now we want you to tell all of us about the New Sun’s coming. I’ve heard more than the others, and I’ve tried to tell them what you told me, but that was only a little. Will you tell us everything now?”
“I don’t know whether I can explain so you’ll understand it,” I said. “I don’t know that I understand it myself.”
“Please,” the cook said. It was the only word I was ever to hear from her.
“Very well, then. You know what’s happened to the Old Sun: it is dying. I don’t mean that it’s about to go out like a lamp at midnight. That would take a very long time. The wick — if you can think of it so — has been trimmed by only the width of a hair, and the corn has rotted in the fields. You don’t know it, but the ice in the south is already gathering new strength. To the ice of ten chiliads will be added the ice of the winter now almost upon us, and the two will embrace like brothers and begin their march upon these northern lands. Great Erebus, who has established his kingdom there, will soon be driven before them, with all his fierce, pale warriors. He will unite his strength with Abaia’s, whose kingdom is in the warm waters. With others, less in might but equal in cunning, they will offer allegiance to the rulers of the lands beyond Urth’s waist, which you call Ascia; and once united with them will devour them utterly.”
But everything that I said to them is much too long to be written here, each word a word. I told them all I knew of the history of the Old Sun’s dying, and what that would do to Urth, and I promised them that at last someone would bring a New Sun.
Then Herena asked, “Aren’t you the New Sun yourself, sieur? The woman who was with you when you came to our village said you were.”
I told her I would not speak of that, fearing that if they knew it — yet saw me imprisoned — they would despair.
Declan wished to know how Urth would fare when the New Sun came; and I, understanding little more than he did himself, drew upon Dr. Tabs’s play, never thinking that in a time yet to come Dr. Tabs’s play would be drawn from my words.
When they had gone at last, I realized I had not so much as touched the food the boy had brought me. I was very hungry, but when I reached for the bowl, my fingers brushed something else — a long and narrow bundle of rags so placed that it lay in shadow.
The voice of my neighbor floated through the bars. “That was a fine tale. I took notes as fast as I could, and it should make a capital little book whenever I’m released.”
I was unwinding the rags and scarcely heard him. It was a knife — the long dirk the mate had worn aboard the Alcyone.
Chapter XXXVIII — To the Tomb of the Monarch
FOR THE remainder of the evening, I gazed at the knife. Not in fact, of course; I had rewrapped it in its rags and hidden it under the mattress of my cot. But as I lay upon that mattress staring up at the metal ceiling that was so like the one I had known in the apprentices’ dormitory as a child, I felt the knife below my knees.
Later it revolved before my closed eyes, luminant in the darkness and distinct from hilt of bone to needle point. When I slept at last, I found it among my dreams as well.
Perhaps for that reason, I slept badly. Again and again I woke and blinked at the cell light glowing above my head, rose and stretched, and crossed to the port to search for the white star that was another self. At those times I would gladly have surrendered my imprisoned body to death, if I could have done it with honor, and fled, streaming through the midnight sky to unite my being. In those moments I knew my power, that could draw whole worlds to me and incremate them as an artist burns his earths for pigments. In the brown book, now lost, that I carried and read so long that at last I had committed to memory its whole contents (though they had once seemed inexhaustible) there is this passage: “Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; the sun and the moon and eleven stars made obeisance to me.” Its words show plainly how much wiser the peoples of ages long past were than we are now; not for nothing is that book titled The Book of the Wonders of Urth and Sky.
I too dreamed a dream. I dreamed that I called the power of my star down upon myself, and rising, crossed (Thecla as well as Severian) to our barred door, and grasping its bars, bent them until we could easily have passed between them. But when we bent them it seemed we parted a curtain, and beyond it beheld a second curtain and Tzadkiel, neither larger than ourselves nor smaller, with the dirk afire.
When the new day like a flood of tarnished gold poured at last through the open port and I waited for my bowl and spoon, I examined those bars; and though most were as they ought to have been, those at the center were not quite so straight as the rest.