In the Bartizan of
the Vincula
“You have company, Lictor,” the sentry told
me, and when I only nodded to acknowledge the information, he
added, “It might be best for you to change first, Lictor.” I did
not need then to ask who my guest was; only the presence of the
archon would have drawn that tone from him.
It was not difficult to reach my
private quarters without passing through the study where I
conducted the business of the Vincula and kept its accounts. I
spent the time it took to divest myself of my borrowed jelab and
put on my fuligin cloak in speculating as to why the archon, who
had never come to me before, and whom, for that matter, I had
seldom even seen outside his court, should find it necessary to
visit the Vincula—so far as I could see, without an
entourage.
The speculation was welcome because it
kept certain other thoughts at a distance. There was a large
silvered glass in our bedroom, a much more effective mirror than
the small plates of polished metal to which I was accustomed; and
on it, as I saw for the first time when I stood before it to
examine my appearance, Dorcas had scrawled in soap four lines from
a song she had once sung for me:
Horns of Urth, you fling notes to
the sky,
Green and good, green and good.
Sing at my step; a sweeter glade have I.
Lift, oh, lift me to the fallen wood!
Green and good, green and good.
Sing at my step; a sweeter glade have I.
Lift, oh, lift me to the fallen wood!
There were several large chairs in the
study, and I had anticipated finding the archon in one of them
(though it had also crossed my mind that he might be availing
himself of the opportunity to go through my papers—something he had
every right to do if he chose). He was standing at the embrasure
instead, looking out over his city much as I myself had looked out
at it from the ramparts of Acies Castle earlier that afternoon. His
hands were clasped behind him, and as I watched I saw them move as
if each
possessed a life of its own, engendered by his thoughts. It was
some time before he turned and caught sight of me.
“You are here, Master Torturer. I did
not hear you come in.”
“I am only a journeyman,
Archon.”
He smiled and seated himself on the
sill, his back to the drop. His face was coarse, with a hook nose
and large eyes rimmed with dark flesh, but it was not a masculine
face; it might almost have been the face of an ugly woman. “Charged
by me with the responsibility for this place, you remain a mere
journeyman?”
“I can be elevated only by the masters
of our guild, Archon.”
“But you are the best of their
journeymen, judging from the letter you carried, from their
choosing you to send here, and from the work you’ve done since you
arrived. Anyway, no one here would know the difference if you chose
to put on airs. How many masters are there?”
“I would know, Archon. Only two, unless
someone has been elevated since I’ve been gone.”
“I’ll write them and ask them to
elevate you in absentia.”
“I thank you, Archon.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and turned to
stare out the embrasure as though the situation embarrassed him.
“You should have word of it, I suppose, in a month.”
“They will not elevate me, Archon. But
it will make Master Palaemon happy to hear you think so well of
me.”
He swung around again to look at me.
“We need not be so formal, surely. My name is Abdiesus, and there
is no reason you should not use it when we’re alone. You’re
Severian, I believe?”
I nodded.
He turned away again. “This is a very
low opening. I was examining it before you came in, and the wall
hardly reaches above my knees. It would be easy, I’m afraid, for
someone to fall out of it.”
“Only for someone as tall as yourself,
Abdiesus.”
“In the past, were not executions
performed, occasionally, by casting the victim from a high window
or from the edge of a precipice?”
“Yes, both those methods have been
employed.”
“Not by you, I suppose.” Once more he
faced me.
“Not within living memory, so far as I
know, Abdiesus. I have performed decollations—both with the block
and with the chair—but that is all.”
“But you would have no objection to the
use of other means? If you were instructed to employ
them?”
“I am here to carry out the archon’s
sentences.”
“There are times, Severian, when public
executions serve the public good. There are others when they would
only do harm by inciting public unrest.”
“That is understood, Abdiesus,” I said.
As sometimes I have seen in the eyes of a boy the worry of the man
he will be, I could see the future guilt that
had already come (perhaps without his being aware of it) to settle
on the archon’s face.
“There will be a few guests at the
palace tonight. I hope that you will be among them,
Severian.”
I bowed. “Among the divisions of
administration, Abdiesus, it has long been customary to exclude
one—my own—from the society of the others.”
“And you feel that is unjust, which is
wholly natural. Tonight, if you wish to think of it in that way, we
will be making some restitution.”
“We of the guild have never complained
of injustice. Indeed, we have gloried in our unique isolation.
Tonight, however, the others may feel they have reason to protest
to you.”
A smile twitched at his mouth. “I’m not
concerned about that. Here, this will get you onto the grounds.” He
extended his hand, holding delicately, as though he feared it would
flutter from his fingers, one of those disks of stiff paper, no
bigger than a chrisos and lettered in gold leaf with ornate
characters, of which I had often heard Thecla speak (she stirred in
my mind at the touch of it), but which I had never before
seen.
“Thank you, Archon. Tonight, you said?
I will try to find suitable clothing.”
“Come dressed as you are. It’s to be a
ridotto—your habit will be your costume.” He stood and stretched
himself with the air, I thought, of one who nears the completion of
a long and disagreeable task. “A moment ago we spoke of some of the
less elaborate ways that you might perform your function. It might
be well for you to bring whatever equipment you will require
tonight.”
I understood. I would need nothing
beyond my hands, and told him so; then, feeling I had already been
remiss in my duties as his host, I invited him to take what
refreshment we had.
“No,” he said. “If you knew how much I
am forced to eat and drink for courtesy’s sake, you’d know how much
I relish the company of someone whose hospitable offers I can
refuse. I don’t suppose your fraternity has ever considered using
food as a torment, instead of starvation?”
“It is called planteration,
Archon.”
“You must tell me about it sometime. I
can see your guild is far ahead of my imagination—no doubt by a
dozen centuries. After hunting, yours must be the oldest science of
them all. But I cannot stay longer. We will see you at
evening?”
“It is nearly evening now,
Archon.”
“At the end of the next watch
then.”
He went out; it was not until the door
closed behind him that I detected the faint odor of the musk that
had perfumed his robe.
I looked at the little circle of paper
I held, turning it over in my hand. Pictured on the back were a
falsity of masks, in which I recognized one of the horrors—a face
that was no more than a mouth ringed with fangs—I had seen in the
Autarch’s garden when the cacogens tore away their disguises, and a
man-ape’s face from the abandoned mine near Saltus.
I was tired from my long walk as well
as from the work (almost a full day’s, for I had risen early) that
had preceded it; and so before going out again I undressed and
washed myself, ate some fruit and cold meat, and sipped a glass of
the spicy northern tea. When a problem troubles me deeply, it
remains in my mind even when I am unaware of it. So it was with me
then; though I was not conscious of them, the thought of Dorcas
lying in her narrow, slant-ceilinged room in the inn and the memory
of the dying girl on her straw bound my eyes and stopped my ears.
It was because of them, I think, that I did not hear my sergeant,
and did not know, until he entered, that I had been taking up
kindling from its box beside the fireplace and breaking the sticks
with my hands. He asked if I were going out again, and since he was
responsible for the operation of the Vincula in my absence I told
him I was, and that I could not say when I would return. Then I
thanked him for the loan of his jelab, which I said I would not
need again.
“You are welcome to it anytime, Lictor.
But that was not what concerned me. I wanted to suggest that you
take a couple of our clavigers when you go down to the
city.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But it is well
policed, and I will be in no danger.”
He cleared his throat. “It’s a matter
of the prestige of the Vincula, Lictor. As our commander, you
should have an escort.”
I could see he was lying, but I could
also see that he was lying for what he believed to be my good, and
so I said, “I will consider it, assuming you have two presentable
men you can spare.”
He brightened at once.
“However,” I continued, “I don’t want
them to carry weapons. I’m going to the palace, and it would be
insulting to our master the archon if I were to arrive with an
armed guard.”
At that he began to stammer, and I
turned on him as though I were furious, throwing down the
splintered wood so that it crashed against the floor. “Out with it!
You think I am threatened. What is it?”
“Nothing, Lictor. Nothing that concerns
you, particularly. It is just …”
“Just what?” Knowing he was going to
speak now, I went to the sideboard and poured us two cups of
rosolio.
“There have been several murders in the
city, Lictor. Three last night, two the night before. Thank you,
Lictor. To your health.”
“To yours. But murders are nothing
unusual, are they? The eclectics are forever stabbing one
another.”
“These men were burned to death,
Lictor. I really don’t know much about it—no one seems to. Possibly
you know more yourself.” The sergeant’s face was as expressionless
as a carving of coarse, brown stone; but I saw him look quickly at
the cold fireplace as he spoke, and I knew he attributed my
breaking of the sticks (the sticks that had been so hard and dry in
my hands but that I had not felt there until long after he entered,
just as Abdiesus had not, perhaps, realized he was contemplating
his own death until long after I had come to watch him) to
something, some dark secret,
the archon had imparted to me, when in fact it was nothing more
than the memory of Dorcas and her despair, and of the beggar girl,
whom I confused with her. He said, “I have two good fellows waiting
outside, Lictor. They’re ready to go whenever you are, and they
will wait for you until you’re ready to come back.”
I told him that was very good, and he
turned away at once so I would not guess he knew, or believed he
knew, more than he had reported to me; but his stiff shoulders and
corded neck, and the quick steps he took toward the door, conveyed
more information than his stony eyes ever could.
My escorts were beefy men chosen for their
strength. Flourishing their big, iron claves, they accompanied me
as I shouldered Terminus Est down the
winding streets, walking to either side when the way was wide
enough, before and behind me when it was not. At the edge of the
Acis I dismissed them, making them the more eager to leave me by
telling them they had my permission to spend the remainder of the
evening as they saw fit, and hired a narrow little caique (with a
gaily painted canopy I had no need of now that the day’s last watch
was over) to carry me upriver to the palace.
It was the first time I had actually
ridden on the Acis. As I sat in the stern, between the
steersman-owner and his four oarsmen, with the clear, icy river
rushing by so near that I could have trailed both hands in it if I
wished, it seemed impossible that this frail wooden shell, which
from the embrasure of our bartizan must have appeared no more than
a dancing insect, could hope to gain a span against the current.
Then the steersman spoke and we were off—hugging the bank to be
sure, but seeming almost to skip over the river like a thrown
stone, so rapid and perfectly timed were the strokes of our eight
oars and so light and narrow and smooth were we, traveling more in
the air above the water than in the water itself. A pentagonal
lantern set with panes of amethyst glass hung from the sternpost;
just at the moment when I, in my ignorance, thought we were at the
point of being caught amidships by the current, capsized, and swept
sinking down to the Capulus, the steersman let the tiller hang by
its lashings while he lit the wick.
He was right, of course, and I wrong.
As the little door of the lantern shut upon the butter-yellow flame
within and the violet beams leaped forth, an eddy caught us, spun
us about, whirled us upstream a hundred strides or more while the
rowers shipped their oars, and left us in a miniature bay as quiet
as a millpond and half-filled with gaudy pleasure boats. Water
stairs, very similar to the steps from which I had swum in Gyoll as
a boy though much cleaner, marched out of the depths of the river
and up to the brilliant torches and elaborate gates of the palace
grounds.
I had often seen this palace from the
Vincula, and thus I knew that it was not the subterranean structure
modeled on the House Absolute that I might otherwise have expected.
No more was it any such grim fortress as our Citadel—apparently the
archon and his predecessors had considered the strongpoints of
Acies Castle and the Capulus, doubly linked as they were by the
walls and forts strung along the crests of the cliffs, sufficient
security for
the safety of the city. Here the ramparts were mere box hedges
intended to exclude the gaze of the curious and perhaps to give a
check to casual thieves. Buildings with gilded domes were scattered
over a pleasance that seemed intimate and colorful; from my
embrasure they had looked much like peridots broken from their
string and dropped upon a figured carpet.
There were sentries at the filigree
gates, dismounted troopers in steel corselets and helmets, with
blazing lances and long-bladed cavalry spathae; but they had the
air of minor and amateur actors, good-natured, hard-bitten men
enjoying a respite from running fights and wind-swept patrols. The
pair to whom I showed my circle of painted paper no more than
glanced at it before waving me inside.