Master of the House
of Chains
“It was in my hair, Severian,” Dorcas said.
“So I stood under the waterfall in the hot stone room—I don’t know
if the men’s side is arranged in the same way. And every time I
stepped out, I could hear them talking about me. They called you
the black butcher, and other things I don’t want to tell you
about.”
“That’s natural enough,” I said. “You
were probably the first stranger to enter the place in a month, so
it’s only to be expected that they would chatter about you, and
that the few women who knew who you were would be proud of it and
perhaps tell some tales. As for me, I’m used to it, and you must
have heard such expressions on the way here many times; I know I
did.”
“Yes,” she admitted, and sat down on
the sill of the embrasure. In the city below, the lamps of the
swarming shops were beginning to fill the valley of the Acis with a
yellow radiance like the petals of a jonquil, but she did not seem
to see them.
“Now you understand why the regulations
of the guild forbid me from taking a wife—although I will break
them for you, as I have told you many times, whenever you want me
to.”
“You mean that it would be better for
me to live somewhere else, and only come to see you once or twice a
week, or wait till you came to see me.”
“That’s the way it’s usually done. And
eventually the women who talked about us today will realize that
sometime they, or their sons or husbands, may find themselves
beneath my hand.”
“But don’t you see, this is all beside
the point. The thing is …” Here Dorcas fell silent, and then, when
neither of us had spoken for some time, she rose and began to pace
the room, one arm clasping the other. It was something I had never
seen her do before, and I found it disturbing.
“What is the point, then?” I
asked.
“That it wasn’t true then. That it is
now.”
“I practiced the Art whenever there was
work to be had. Hired myself
out to towns and country justices. Several times you watched me
from a window, though you never liked to stand in the crowd—for
which I hardly blame you.”
“I didn’t watch,” she
said.
“I recall seeing you.”
“I didn’t. Not when it was actually
going on. You were intent on what you were doing, and didn’t see me
when I went inside or covered my eyes. I used to watch, and wave to
you, when you first vaulted onto the scaffold. You were so proud
then, and stood just as straight as your sword, and looked so fine.
You were honest. I remember watching once when there was an
official of some sort up there with you, and the condemned man and
a hieromonach. And yours was the only honest face.”
“You couldn’t possibly have seen it. I
must surely have been wearing my mask.”
“Severian, I didn’t have to see it. I
know what you look like.”
“Don’t I look the same
now?”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “But I
have been down below. I’ve seen the people chained in the tunnels.
When we sleep tonight, you and I in our soft bed, we will be
sleeping on top of them. How many did you say there were when you
took me down?”
“About sixteen hundred. Do you honestly
believe those sixteen hundred would be free if I were no longer
present to guard them? They were here, remember, when we
came.”
Dorcas would not look at me. “It’s like
a mass grave,” she said. I could see her shoulders
shake.
“It should be,” I told her. “The archon
could release them, but who could resurrect those they’ve killed?
You’ve never lost anyone, have you?”
She did not reply.
“Ask the wives and the mothers and the
sisters of the men our prisoners have left rotting in the high
country whether Abdiesus should let them go.”
“Only myself,” Dorcas said, and blew
out the candle.
Thrax is a crooked dagger entering the heart
of the mountains. It lies in a narrow defile of the valley of the
Acis, and extends up it to Acies Castle. The harena, the pantheon,
and the other public buildings occupy all the level land between
the castle and the wall (called the Capulus) that closes the lower
end of the narrow section of the valley. The private buildings of
the city climb the cliffs to either side, and many are in large
measure dug into the rock itself, from which practice Thrax gains
one of its sobriquets—the City of Windowless Rooms.
Its prosperity it owes to its position
at the head of the navigable part of the river. At Thrax, all goods
shipped north on the Acis (many of which have traversed nine tenths
of the length of Gyoll before entering the mouth of the smaller
river, which may indeed be Gyoll’s true source) must be unloaded
and carried on the backs of animals if they are to travel farther.
Conversely, the hetmans of the mountain tribes and the landowners
of the region who wish to ship their wool and corn to the southern
towns bring them to take boat at Thrax, below the cataract that
roars through the arched spillway of Acies Castle.
As must always be the case when a
stronghold imposes the rule of law over a turbulent region, the
administration of justice was the chief concern of the archon of
the city. To impose his will on those without the walls who might
otherwise have opposed it, he could call upon seven squadrons of
dimarchi, each under its own commander. Court convened each month,
from the first appearance of the new moon to the full, beginning
with the second morning watch and continuing as long as necessary
to clear the day’s docket. As chief executor of the archon’s
sentences, I was required to attend these sessions, so that he
might be assured that the punishments he decreed should be made
neither softer nor more severe by those who might otherwise have
been charged with transmitting them to me; and to oversee the
operation of the Vincula, in which the prisoners were detained, in
all its details. It was a responsibility equivalent on a lesser
scale to that of Master Gurloes in our Citadel, and during the
first few weeks I spent in Thrax it weighed heavily upon
me.
It was a maxim of Master Gurloes’s that
no prison is ideally situated. Like most of the wise tags put
forward for the edification of young men, it was inarguable and
unhelpful. All escapes fall into three categories—that is, they are
achieved by stealth, by violence, or by the treachery of those set
as guards. A remote place does most to render escapes by stealth
difficult, and for that reason has been favored by the majority of
those who have thought long upon the subject.
Unfortunately, deserts, mountaintops,
and lone isles offer the most fertile fields for violent escape—if
they are besieged by the prisoners’ friends, it is difficult to
learn of the fact before it is too late, and next to impossible to
reinforce their garrisons; and similarly, if the prisoners rise in
rebellion, it is highly unlikely that troops can be rushed to the
spot before the issue is decided.
A facility in a well-populated and
well-defended district avoids these difficulties, but incurs even
more severe ones. In such places a prisoner needs, not a thousand
friends, but one or two; and these need not be fighting men—a
scrubwoman and a street vendor will do, if they possess
intelligence and resolution. Furthermore, once the prisoner has
escaped the walls, he mingles immediately with the faceless mob, so
that his reapprehension is not a matter for huntsmen and dogs but
for agents and informers.
In our own case, a detached prison in a
remote location would have been out of the question. Even if it had
been provided with a sufficient number of troops, in addition to
its clavigers, to fend off the attacks of the autochthons,
zoanthrops, and cultellarii who roamed the countryside, not to
mention the armed retinues of the petty exultants (who could never
be relied upon), it would still have been impossible to provision
without the services
of an army to escort the supply trains. The Vincula of Thrax is
therefore located by necessity within the city—specifically, about
halfway up the cliffside on the west bank, and a half league or so
from the Capulus.
It is of ancient design, and always
appeared to me to have been intended as a prison from the
beginning, though there is a legend to the effect that it was
originally a tomb, and was only a few hundred years ago enlarged
and converted to its new purpose. To an observer on the more
commodious east bank, it appears to be a rectangular bartizan
jutting from the rock, a bartizan four stories high at the side he
sees, whose flat, merloned roof terminates against the cliff. This
visible portion of the structure—which many visitors to the city
must take for the whole of it—is in fact the smallest and least
important part. At the time I was lictor, it held no more than our
administrative offices, a barracks for the clavigers, and my own
living quarters.
The prisoners were lodged in a slanted
shaft bored into the rock. The arrangement used was neither one of
individual cells such as we had for our clients in the oubliette at
home, nor the common room I had encountered while I was myself
confined in the House Absolute. Instead, the prisoners were chained
along the walls of the shaft, each with a stout iron collar about
his neck, in such a way as to leave a path down the center wide
enough that two clavigers could walk it abreast without danger that
their keys might be snatched away.
This shaft was about five hundred paces
long, and had over a thousand positions for prisoners. Its water
supply came from a cistern sunk into the stone at the top of the
cliff, and sanitary wastes were disposed of by flushing the shaft
whenever this cistern threatened to overflow. A sewer drilled at
the lower end of the shaft conveyed the wastewater to a conduit at
the cliff base that ran through the wall of the Capulus to empty
into the Acis below the city.
The rectangular bartizan clinging to
the cliff, and the shaft itself, must originally have constituted
the whole of the Vincula. It had subsequently been complicated by a
confusion of branching galleries and parallel shafts resulting from
past attempts to free prisoners by tunneling from one or another of
the private residences in the cliff face, and from countermines
excavated to frustrate such attempts—all now pressed into service
to provide additional accommodations.
The existence of these unplanned or
poorly planned additions rendered my task much more difficult than
it would otherwise have been, and one of my first acts was to begin
a program of closing unwanted and unnecessary passages by filling
them with a mixture of river stones, sand, water, burned lime, and
gravel, and to start widening and uniting those passages that
remained in such a way as to eventually achieve a rational
structure. Necessary though it was, this work could be carried
forward only very slowly, since no more than a few hundred
prisoners could be freed to work at a time, and they were for the
most part in poor condition.
For the first few weeks after Dorcas
and I arrived in the city, my duties
left me time for nothing else. She explored it for us both, and I
charged her strictly to inquire about the Pelerines for me. On the
long journey from Nessus the knowledge that I carried the Claw of
the Conciliator had been a heavy burden. Now, when I was no longer
traveling and could no longer attempt to trace the Pelerines along
the way or even reassure myself that I was walking in a direction
that might eventually bring me in contact with them, it became an
almost unbearable weight. While we were traveling I had slept under
the stars with the gem in the top of my boot, and with it concealed
in the toe on those few occasions when we were able to stop beneath
a roof. Now I found that I could not sleep at all unless I had it
with me, so I could assure myself, whenever I woke in the night,
that I retained possession of it. Dorcas sewed a little sack of
doeskin for me to hold it, and I wore it about my neck day and
night. A dozen times during those first weeks I dreamed I saw the
gem aflame, hanging in the air above me like its own burning
cathedral, and woke to find it blazing so brightly that a faint
radiance showed through the thin leather. And once or twice each
night I awakened to discover that I was lying on my back with the
sack on my chest seemingly grown so heavy (though I could lift it
with my hand without effort) that it was crushing out my
life.
Dorcas did everything in her power to
comfort and assist me; yet I could see she was conscious of the
abrupt change in our relationship and disturbed by it even more
than I. Such changes are always, in my experience, unpleasant—if
only because they imply the likelihood of further change. While we
had been journeying together (and we had been traveling with
greater or lesser expedition from the moment in the Garden of
Endless Sleep when Dorcas helped me clamber, half-drowned, onto the
floating walkway of sedge) it had been as equals and companions,
each of us walking every league we covered on our own feet or
riding our own mount. If I had supplied a measure of physical
protection to Dorcas, she had equally supplied a certain moral
shelter to me, in that few could pretend for long to despise her
innocent beauty, or profess horror at my office when in looking at
me they could not help but see her as well. She had been my
counselor in perplexity and my comrade in a hundred desert
places.
When we at last entered Thrax and I
presented Master Palaemon’s letter to the archon, all that was by
necessity ended. In my fuligin habit I no longer had to fear the
crowd—rather, they feared me as the highest official of the most
dreaded arm of the state. Dorcas lived now, not as an equal but as
the paramour the Cumaean had once called her, in the quarters in
the Vincula set aside for me. Her counsel had become useless or
nearly so because the difficulties that oppressed me were the legal
and administrative ones I had been trained for years to wrestle
with and about which she knew nothing; and moreover because I
seldom had the time or the energy to explain them to her so that we
might discuss them.
Thus, while I stood for watch after
watch in the archon’s court, Dorcas fell into the habit of
wandering the city, and we, who had been incessantly together
throughout the latter part of the spring, came now in summer to
see each other hardly at all, sharing a meal in the evening and
climbing exhausted into a bed where we seldom did more than fall
asleep in each other’s arms.
At last the full moon shone. With what
joy I beheld it from the roof of the bartizan, green as an emerald
in its mantle of forest and round as the lip of a cup! I was not
yet free, since all the details of excruciations and administration
that had been accumulating during my attendance on the archon
remained to be dealt with; but I was now at least free to devote my
full attention to them, which seemed then nearly as good a thing as
freedom itself. I had invited Dorcas to go with me on the next day,
when I made an inspection of the subterranean parts of the
Vincula.
It was an error. She grew ill in the
foul air, surrounded by the misery of the prisoners. That night, as
I have already recounted, she told me she had gone to the public
baths (a rare thing for her, whose fear of water was so great that
she washed herself bit by bit with a sponge dipped in a bowl no
deeper than a dish of soup) to free her hair and skin from the odor
of the shaft, and that she had heard the bath attendants pointing
her out to the other patrons.