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.”
“I do believe you,” I told him.
“Maxellindis’s uncle died. There was a tap he used to go to, way down south in the delta in a place called Liti. You’ve probably never heard of it. Maxellindis and me came to get him one night, and he was sitting there with his bottle and glass, with one arm on the table and his head down on his arm; but when I tried to shake his shoulder he fell out of the chair, and he was cold already.”
“’Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.’”
“What’s that?” Eata asked.
“Just an old story,” I said. “Never mind, go on.”
“After that, just her and me worked the boat. The two of us could do it about as well as the three of us had before. We never really got married. When we both wanted to we never had the money, somehow. And when we had the money, there was always some kind of quarrel. After a couple of years everybody thought we were married anyway.” He blew his nose, flinging the mucus over the side.
“Go on,” I said again.
“We did some smuggling, and one night we got stopped by a cutter. Eight or ten leagues south of Citadel Hill, that was. Maxellindis jumped — I heard the splash — and I would have too, but one of the taxmen threw a achico at my feet and tripped me up. You know what they are, I suppose.”
I nodded. “Was I Autarch still? You might have appealed to me.”
“No. I thought about it, but I was sure you’d send me back to the guild.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I told him, “but would that have been worse than what the law did to you?”
“It would have been for the rest of my life. That’s what I kept thinking about. Anyway, they took me upriver with our boat in tow. I was held till the assize, and then the judge ordered me flogged and made me sign on a carrack. They kept me in irons till we were out of sight of the coast, and they worked me like a slave, but I got to see the Xanthic Lands and I went over the side there and stayed for two years. It’s not such a bad place if you’ve got some money.”