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?”
“He does. He is indeed a creature of evil; but so are you, and so am I.”
Baldanders rumbled, “I will do no evil to you, Severian. I never have. When I flung away your jewel, I did so because you believed in it. That did harm, or so I believed.”
“And good, but that is all behind us. Let’s forget those things if we can.”
The prophetess said, “He has done harm too by saying here that you would bring destruction. I have told them the truth — that you would bring a rebirth, but they would not credit me.”
I told her, “He has told the truth, as well as you. If the new is to be born, the old must be swept aside. One who plants wheat kills grass. You are both prophets, although of different kinds; and each of you has prophesied as the Increate instructed you.”
Then the great doors of lapis lazuli and silver at the most distant end of the Hypogeum Amaranthine — doors used in my reign only for solemn processions and the ceremonial presentations of extern ambassadors — were flung wide; and this time it was not a lone officer who burst into the hypogeum but two score troopers, each brandishing a fusil or a blazing spear. Their backs were turned even toward the Phoenix Throne.
For a moment they occupied my attention so completely that I forgot how many years had passed since Valeria had last seen me — for me the time had not been years, but fewer perhaps than a hundred days all told. And so from the side of my mouth in the old way I had often used when we stood together at some lengthy ritual, the stealthy way of talking that I had learned as a boy whispering behind Master Malrubius’s back, I murmured, “This will be something worth seeing.”
Hearing her gasp, I glanced at her and saw her tear-stained cheeks and all the damage time had wrought. We love most when we understand that the object of our love has nothing else; and I do not think I have ever loved Valeria more than I did then.
I put my hand upon her shoulder, and though that was not a time or place for intimate scenes, I have been glad since that I did, for there was time for nothing more. The giantess crawled through the doorway, her hand first, like some five-legged beast, then her arm. It was larger than the trunks of many trees that are counted as old, and as white as sea foam; but disfigured by a crusted burn that cracked and bled even as it appeared.