The Sword of the
Lictor
“We are leaving,” Casdoe told me. “But I will
make breakfast for us before we go. You will not have to eat it
with us if you do not wish to do so.”
I nodded and waited outside until she
brought out a wooden bowl of plain porridge and a wooden spoon;
then I took them to the spring and ate. It was screened by rushes,
and I did not come out; it was, I suppose, a violation of the oath
I had given the alzabo, but I waited there, watching the
house.
After a time Casdoe, her father, and
little Severian emerged. She carried a pack and her husband’s
staff, and the old man and the boy had each their little sack. The
dog, which must have crawled beneath the floor when the alzabo came
(I cannot say I blame him, but Triskele would not have done that)
was frisking about their heels. I saw Casdoe look around for me.
When she failed to find me, she put down a bundle on the
doorstep.
I watched them walk along the edge of
their little field, which had been plowed and sown only a month or
so before, and now would be reaped by birds. Neither Casdoe nor her
father glanced behind them; but the boy, Severian, stopped and
turned before going over the first ridge, to see once more the only
home he had ever known. Its stone walls stood as stoutly as ever,
and the smoke of the breakfast fire still curled from its chimney.
His mother must have called to him then, because he hurried after
her and so disappeared from view.
I left the shelter of the rushes and
went to the door. The bundle on the step held two blankets of soft
guanaco and dried meat wrapped in a clean rug. I put the meat into
my sabretache and refolded the blankets so I could wear them across
my shoulder.
The rain had left the air fresh and
clean, and it was good to know that I would soon leave the stone
cabin and its smells of smoke and food behind me. I looked around
inside, seeing the black stain of the alzabo’s blood and the broken
chair. Casdoe had moved the table back to its old place, and the
Claw, that had gleamed so feebly there, had left no mark upon its
surface. There was nothing left that seemed worth the carrying; I
went out and shut the door.
Then I set off after Casdoe and her
party. I did not forgive her for having
failed to give me light when I fought the alzabo—she might easily
have done so by lowering her lamp from the loft. Yet I could not
greatly blame her for having sided with Agia, a woman alone among
the staring faces and icy crowns of the mountains; and the child
and the old man, neither of whom could be said to have much guilt
in the matter, were at least as vulnerable as she.
The path was soft, so much so that I
could track them in the most literal sense, seeing Casdoe’s small
footprints, the boy’s even smaller ones beside them taking two
strides to her one, and the old man’s, with the toes turned out. I
walked slowly in order not to overtake them, and though I knew my
own danger increased with each step I took, I dared to hope that
the archon’s patrols, in questioning them, would warn me. Casdoe
could not betray me, since whatever honest information she might
tender the dimarchi would lead them astray; and if the alzabo were
about, I hoped to hear or smell it before it attacked—I had not
sworn, after all, to leave its prey undefended, but only not to
hunt it, or to remain in the house.
The path must have been no more than a
game trail enlarged by Becan; it soon vanished. The scenery here
was less stark than it had been above the timberline. South-facing
slopes were often covered with small ferns and mosses, and conifers
grew from the cliffs. Falling water was seldom out of earshot. In
me Thecla recalled coming to a place much like this to paint,
accompanied by her teacher and two gruff bodyguards. I began to
feel that I would soon come across the easel, palette, and untidy
brush case, abandoned beside some cascade when the sun no longer
lingered in the spray.
Of course I did not, and for several
watches there was no sign of humanity at all. Mingled with the
footprints of Casdoe’s party were the tracks of deer, and twice the
pug marks of one of the tawny cats that prey on them. These had
been made, surely, just at dawn, when the rain had
stopped.
Then I saw a line of impressions left
by a naked foot larger than the old man’s. Each was as large, in
fact, as my own booted print, and its maker’s stride had been, if
anything, longer. The tracks crossed at right angles to those I
followed, but one imprint fell over one of the boy’s, showing that
their maker had passed between us.
I hurried forward.
I assumed that the footprints were
those of an autochthon, though even then I wondered at his long
stride—those savages of the mountains are normally rather small. If
it was indeed an autochthon, he was unlikely to do Casdoe and the
others any real harm, though he might pillage the goods she
carried. From all I had heard of them, the autochthons were clever
hunters, but not warlike.
The impressions of bare feet resumed.
Two or three more individuals, at least, had joined the
first.
Deserters from the army would be
another matter; about a quarter of our prisoners in the Vincula had
been such men and their women, and many of them had committed the
most atrocious crimes. Deserters would be well
armed, but I would have expected them to be well shod too,
certainly not barefoot.
A steep climb rose ahead of me. I could
see the gouges made by Casdoe’s staff, and the branches broken
where she and the old man had used them to pull themselves up—some
broken, possibly, by their pursuers as well. I reflected that the
old man must be exhausted by now, that it was surprising that his
daughter could still urge him on; perhaps he, perhaps all of them,
knew by now that they were pursued. As I neared the crest I heard
the dog bark, and then (at the same time it seemed almost an echo
of the night before) a wild, wordless yell.
Yet it was not the horrible, half-human
cry of the alzabo. It was a sound I had heard often before,
sometimes, faintly, even while I lay in the cot next to Roche’s,
and often when I had carried their meals and the clients’ to the
journeymen on duty in our oubliette. It was precisely the shout of
one of the clients on the third level, one of those who could no
longer speak coherently and for that reason were never, for
practical purposes, brought again to the examination
room.
They were zoanthrops, such as I had
seen feigned at Abdiesus’s ridotto. When I reached the top I could
see them, as well as Casdoe with her father and son. One cannot
call them men; but they seemed men at that distance, nine naked men
who circled the three, bounding and crouching. I hurried forward
until I saw one strike with his club, and the old man
fall.
Then I hesitated, and it was not
Thecla’s fear that stopped me but my own.
I had fought the man-apes of the mine
bravely, perhaps, but I had to fight them. I had stood against the
alzabo to stalemate, but there had been nowhere to run but the
darkness outside, where it would surely have killed
me.
Now there was a choice, and I hung
back.
Living where she had, Casdoe must have
known of them, though possibly she had never encountered them
before. While the boy clung to her skirt she slashed with the staff
as though it were a sabre. Her voice carried to me over the yells
of the zoanthrops, shrill, unintelligible, and seemingly remote. I
felt the horror one always feels when a woman is attacked, but
beside it or perhaps beneath it lay the thought that she who would
not fight beside me must now fight alone.
It could not last, of course. Such
creatures are either frightened away at once or not frightened away
at all. I saw one snatch the staff from her hand, and I drew
Terminus Est and began to run down the long
slope toward her. The naked figure had thrown her to the ground and
was (as I supposed) preparing to rape her.
Then something huge plunged out of the
trees to my left. It was so large and moved so swiftly that I at
first thought it a red destrier, riderless and saddleless. Only
when I saw the flash of its teeth and heard the scream of a
zoanthrop did I realize it was the alzabo.
The others were upon it at once. Rising
and falling, the heads of their ironwood bludgeons seemed for a
moment grotesquely like the heads of feeding hens when corn has
been scattered on the ground for them. Then a zoanthrop was thrown
into the air, and he, who had been naked before, now appeared to be
wrapped in a cloak of scarlet.
By the time I joined the fight, the
alzabo was down, and for a moment I could give no attention to it.
Terminus Est sang in orbit about my head.
One naked figure fell, then another. A stone the size of a fist
whizzed past my ear, so close that I could hear the sound; if it
had struck, I would have died a moment afterward.
But these were not the man-apes of the
mine, so numerous they could not, in the end, be overcome. I cut
one from shoulder to waist, feeling each rib part in turn and
rattle across my blade, slashed at another, split a
skull.
Then there was only silence and the
whimpering of the boy. Seven zoanthrops lay upon the mountain
grass, four killed by Terminus Est, I think,
and three by the alzabo. Casdoe’s body was in its jaws, her head
and shoulders already devoured. The old man who had known Fechin
lay crumpled like a doll; that famous artist would have made
something wonderful of his death, showing it from a perspective no
one else could have found, and embodying the dignity and futility
of all human life in the misshapen head. But Fechin was not here.
The dog lay beside the old man, its jaws bloodied.
I looked about for the boy. To my
horror, he was huddled against the alzabo’s back. No doubt the
thing had called to him in his father’s voice, and he had come. Now
its hindquarters trembled spasmodically and its eyes were closed.
As I took him by the arm, its tongue, wider and thicker than a
bull’s, emerged as though to lick his hand; then its shoulders
shuddered so violently that I started back. The tongue was never
wholly returned to its mouth, but lay flaccid on the
grass.
I drew the boy away and said, “It is
over now, little Severian. Are you all right?”
He nodded and began to cry, and for a
long time I held him and walked up and down.
For a moment I considered using the Claw,
though it had failed me in Casdoe’s house as it had failed me at
times before. Yet if it had succeeded, who could say what the
result might have been? I had no wish to give the zoanthrops or the
alzabo new life, and what life might be granted Casdoe’s headless
corpse? As for the old man, he had been sitting at the doors of
death already; now he had died, and swiftly. Would he have thanked
me for summoning him back, to die again in a year or two? The gem
flashed in the sunlight, but its flashing was mere sunshine and not
the light of the Conciliator, the gegenschein of the New Sun, and I
put it away again. The boy watched me with wide eyes.
Terminus Est had
been bloodied to her guard and beyond. I sat upon a fallen tree and
cleaned her with the rotting wood while I debated what to do, then
whetted and oiled her blade. I cared nothing for the zoanthrops or
the alzabo, but to leave Casdoe’s body, and the old man’s, to be
dismembered by beasts seemed a vile thing.
Prudence warned against it as well.
What if another alzabo should come, and when it had glutted itself
upon Casdoe’s flesh set off after the boy? I considered carrying
them both back to the cabin. It was a considerable distance,
however; I could not carry the two together, and it seemed sure
that whichever I left behind would be violated by the time I
returned for it. Drawn by the sight of so much blood, the
carrion-eating teratornises were already circling overhead, each
borne on wings as wide as the main yard of a caravel.
For a time I probed the ground, seeking
some place soft enough that I might dig it with Casdoe’s staff; in
the end, I carried both bodies to a stretch of rocky ground near a
watercourse, and there built a cairn over them. Under it they would
lie, I hoped, for nearly a year, until the melting of the snows, at
about the time of the feast of Holy Katharine, should sweep the
bones of daughter and father away.
Little Severian, who had only watched
at first, had himself carried small stones before the cairn was
complete. When we were washing ourselves of grit and sweat in the
stream, he asked, “Are you my uncle?”
I told him, “I’m your father—for now,
at least. When someone’s father dies, he must have a new one, if
he’s as young as you are. I’m the man.”
He nodded, lost in thought; and quite
suddenly I recalled how I had dreamed, only two nights before, of a
world in which all the people knew themselves bound by ties of
blood, being all descended from the same pair of colonists. I, who
did not know my own mother’s name, or my father’s, might very well
be related to this child whose name was my own, or for that matter
to anyone I met. The world of which I had dreamed had been, for me,
the bed on which I had lain. I wish I could describe how serious we
were there by the laughing stream, how solemn and clean he looked
with his wet face and the droplets sparkling in the lashes of his
wide eyes.