The boy carried in my food, saying, “Even if I only heard you once, I learned a lot from you, Severian. I’ll be sorry to see you go.”
I asked whether I was to be executed.
As he set down my tray, he glanced over his shoulder at the journeyman guard leaning against the wall. “No, it’s not that. They’re just going to take you somewhere else. A flier’s coming for you today, with Praetorians.”
“A flier?”
“Because it can fly over the rebel army, I suppose. Have you ever ridden in one? I’ve only watched them taking off and landing. It must be terrific.”
“It is. The first time I flew in one, we were shot down. I’ve ridden in them often since, and even learned to operate them myself; but the truth is that I’ve always been terrified.”
The boy nodded. “I would be too, but I’d like to try it.” Awkwardly, he offered his hand. “Good luck, Severian , wherever they take you.”
I clasped it; it was dirty but dry, and seemed very small. “Reechy,” I said. “That’s not your real name, is it?”
He grinned. “No. It means I stink.”
“Not to my nose.”
“It’s not cold yet,” he explained, “so I can go swimming. In the winter I don’t have much chance to wash, and they work me pretty hard.”
“Yes, I remember. But your real name is…
“Ymar.” He withdrew his hand. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because when I touched you, I saw the flash of gems about your head. Ymar, I think I’m beginning to spread out. To spread through time — or rather, to be aware that I am spread through time, since all of us are. How strange that you and I should meet like this.”
I hesitated for a moment, my voice bewildered among so many swirling thoughts. “Or perhaps it isn’t really strange at all. Something governs our destinies, surely. Something higher even than the Hierogrammates.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ymar, someday you will become the ruler. You’ll be the monarch, although I don’t think you’ll call yourself that. Try to rule for Urth, and not just in Urth’s name as so many have. Rule justly, or at least as justly as circumstances permit.”
He said, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”
“No,” I told him. “Even though I know no more than that you will rule, and someday sit disguised beneath a plane tree. But those things I do know”
When he and the journeyman were gone, I thrust the knife into the top of my boot and covered it with my trouser leg. As I did, and afterward while I sat waiting on my cot, I speculated upon our conversation.
Was it not possible Ymar had reached the Phoenix Throne only because some epopt — myself — had prophesied he would? So far as I am aware, history holds no record of it; and perhaps I have created my own truth. Or perhaps Ymar, now feeling he rides his destiny, will fail to make the cardinal effort that would have won him a signal victory.
Who can say? Does not Tzadkiel’s curtain of uncertainty veil the future even from those who have emerged from its mists? The present, when we leave it before us, becomes the future once more. I had left it, I knew, and waited deep in a past that was in my own day scarcely more than myth.
Watch followed weary watch, as ants creep through autumn to winter. When at last I had concluded beyond question that Ymar’s information had been mistaken, that the Praetorians would come not that day but the next — or not at all — I glanced out the port hoping to amuse myself with the errands of those few persons who chanced to cross the Old Yard.
A flier rode at anchor there, as sleek as a silver dart. I had no sooner seen it than I heard the measured tread of marching men — broken as they mounted the stair, resumed when they reached the level at which I waited. I rushed to the door.
A bustling journeyman led the way. A bemedaled chiliarch sauntered after him; thrust well into his sword belt, his thumbs proclaimed him not a subordinate, but one infinitely superior. Behind them, in a single file maintained with the disciplined precision of hand-colored troops commanded by a child (though they were less visible than smoke), tramped a squad of guardsmen in the charge of a vingtner.
As I watched, the journeyman waved in the direction of my cell with his keys, the chiliarch nodded tolerantly and strolled nearer to inspect me, the vingtner bellowed some order, and the boots of the squad halted with a crash, succeeded at once by a second bellow and a second crash, as the ten phantom guardsmen grounded their weapons.
The flier differed scarcely at all from the one in which I had once inspected the armies of the Third Battle of Orithyia; and indeed it may have been the same device, such machines being maintained by generation after generation. The vingtner ordered me to lie on the floor. I obeyed, but asked the chiliarch (a hatchet-faced man of forty or so) whether I might not look over the side as we flew. This permission was refused, he doubtless fearing I was a spy — as in some sense I was; I had to content myself with imagining Ymar’s farewell wave.
The eleven guardsmen who lined the seat astern, fading like so many ghosts into its pointille upholstery, owed their near invisibility to the catoptric armor of my own Praetorians; and I soon realized they were my own Praetorians in fact, their armor, and what was more important, their traditions having been handed down from this unimaginably early day to my own. My guards had become my guards: my jailers.
Because our flier hurtled through the sky and I sometimes glimpsed streaking clouds, I expected our journey to be short; but a watch at least elapsed, and perhaps another, before I felt the flier drop and saw the landing line cast. Dismal walls of living rock rose upon our left, reeled, and were lost to sight.
When our pilot retracted the dome, the wind that lashed my face was so chill that I supposed we had flown south to the ice-fields. I stepped out — and looked up to see instead a towering ruin of snow and blasted stone. All around us ragged, faceless peaks loomed through pent clouds. We were among mountains, but mountains that had not yet put on the carven likenesses of men and women — such unshaped mountains, then, as are to be seen in the oldest pictures. I would have stood staring at them until dusk, but a cuff on the ear knocked me sprawling.
I rose consumed with impotent rage; I had suffered such abuse after I had been taken at Saltus and had succeeded in making that officer my friend. Now I felt I had accomplished nothing, that the cycle had begun again, that it was fated to persist, and perhaps to continue to my death. I resolved it would not. Before the day was over, the knife thrust into the top of my boot would end a life.
Meanwhile my own streamed from my clangorous ear, hot as though from the kettle where it drenched my chilled flesh.
I was driven into a stream far greater, of vast, hurrying wains burdened with yet more shattered rock, wains that rolled forward without oxen or slaves to draw them, no matter how steep the gradient, launching dense clouds of dust and smoke into the shining air and bellowing like bulls when we crossed their path. Far up the mountain, a giant in armor dug stone with his iron hands, looking smaller than a mouse.
The hurrying wains gave way to hurrying men as we went among plain and even ugly sheds whose open doorways revealed curious tools and machines. I asked the chiliarch I intended to kill where he had brought me. He motioned to the vingtner, and I got another blow from the vingtner’s gauntlet.
In a round structure larger than the rest, I was driven down aisles lined with cabinets and seats until we reached a circular curtain, like the wall of an indoor tent or pavilion, at its center. I had recognized the building by then.
“You are to wait here,” the chiliarch instructed me. “The monarch will speak to you. When you leave, you will—”
A voice from the other side of the curtain, thick with wine and yet familiar still, called, “Loose him.”