Severian and
Severian
I drank as much water as I could, and told the
boy that he must do so as well, that there were many dry places in
the mountains, and that we might not drink again until next
morning. He had asked if we would not go home now; and though I had
planned until then to retrace our route back to the house that had
been Casdoe’s and Becan’s, I said we would not, because I knew it
would be too terrible for him to see that roof again, and the field
and the little garden, and then to leave them for a second time. At
his age he might even suppose that his father and his mother, his
sister and his grandfather were somehow still inside.
Yet we could not descend much
farther—we were already well below the level at which travel was
dangerous for me. The arm of the archon of Thrax stretched a
hundred leagues and more, and now there was every chance that Agia
would put his dimarchi on my trail.
To the northeast stood the highest peak
I had yet seen. Not only its head but its shoulders too bore a
shroud of snow, which descended nearly to its waist. I could not
say, and perhaps no one now could, what proud face it was that
stared westward over so many lesser summits; but surely he had
ruled in the earliest of the greatest days of humanity, and had
commanded energies that could shape granite as a carver’s knife
does wood. Looking at his image, it seemed to me that even the
hard-bitten dimarchi, who knew the wild uplands so well, might
stand in awe of him. And so we made for him, or rather for the high
pass that linked the folded drapery of his robe to the mountain
where Becan had once established a home. For the time being, the
climbs were not severe, and we spent far more effort in walking
than in climbing.
The boy Severian held my hand often
when there was no need of my support. I am no great judge of the
ages of children, but he seemed to me to be about of that growth
when, if he had been one of our apprentices, he would first have
entered Master Palaemon’s schoolroom—that is to say, he was old
enough to walk well, and to talk sufficiently to understand and to
make himself understood.
For a watch or more he said nothing
beyond what I have already related. Then, as we were descending an
open, grassy slope bordered by pines, a
place much like that in which his mother had died, he asked,
“Severian, who were those men?”
I knew whom he meant. “They were not
men, although they were once men and still resemble men. They were
zoanthrops, a word that indicates those beasts that are of human
shape. Do you understand what I am saying?”
The little boy nodded solemnly, then
asked, “Why don’t they wear clothes?”
“Because they are no longer human
beings, as I told you. A dog is born a dog and a bird is born a
bird, but to become a human being is an achievement—you have to
think about it. You have been thinking about it for the past three
or four years at least, little Severian, even though you may never
have thought about the thinking.”
“A dog just looks for things to eat,”
the boy said.
“Exactly. But that raises the question
of whether a person should be forced to do such thinking, and some
people decided a long time ago that he should not. We may force a
dog, sometimes, to act like a man—to walk on his hind legs and wear
a collar and so forth. But we shouldn’t and couldn’t force a man to
act like a man. Did you ever want to fall asleep? When you weren’t
sleepy or even tired?”
He nodded.
“That was because you wanted to put
down the burden of being a boy, at least for a time. Sometimes I
drink too much wine, and that is because for a while I would like
to stop being a man. Sometimes people take their own lives for that
reason. Did you know that?”
“Or they do things that might hurt
them,” he said. The way he said it told me of arguments overheard;
Becan had very probably been that kind of man, or he would not have
taken his family to so remote and dangerous a place.
“Yes,” I told him. “That can be the
same thing. And sometimes certain men, and even women, come to hate
the burden of thought, but without loving death. They see the
animals and wish to become as they are, answering only to instinct,
and not thinking. Do you know what makes you think, little
Severian?”
“My head,” the boy said promptly, and
grasped it with his hands.
“Animals have heads too—even very
stupid animals like crayfish and oxen and ticks. What makes you
think is only a small part of your head, inside, just above your
eyes.” I touched his forehead. “Now if for some reason you wanted
one of your hands taken off, there are men you can go to who are
skilled in doing that. Suppose, for example, your hand had suffered
some hurt from which it would never be well. They could take it
away in such a fashion that there would be little chance of any
harm coming to the rest of you.”
The boy nodded.
“Very well. Those same men can take
away that little part of your head that makes you think. They
cannot put it back, you understand. And even if
they could, you couldn’t ask them to do it, once that part was
gone. But sometimes people pay these men to take that part away.
They want to stop thinking forever, and often they say they wish to
turn their backs on all that humanity has done. Then it is no
longer just to treat them as human beings—they have become animals,
though animals who are still of human shape. You asked why they did
not wear clothes. They no longer understand clothes, and so they
would not put them on, even if they were very cold, although they
might lie down on them or even roll themselves up in
them.”
“Are you like that, a little bit?” the
boy asked, and pointed to my bare chest.
The thought he was suggesting had never
occurred to me before, and for a moment I was taken aback. “It’s
the rule of my guild,” I said. “I haven’t had any part of my head
taken away, if that’s what you’re asking, and I used to wear a
shirt … But, yes, I suppose I am a little like that, because I
never thought of it, even when I was very cold.”
His expression told me I had confirmed
his suspicions. “Is that why you’re running away?”
“No, that’s not why I’m running away.
If anything, I suppose you could say it is the other side of it.
Perhaps that part of my head has grown too large. But you’re right
about the zoanthrops, that is why they are in the mountains. When a
man becomes an animal, he becomes a dangerous animal, and animals
like that cannot be tolerated in more settled places, where there
are farms and many people. So they are driven to these mountains,
or brought here by their old friends, or by someone they paid to do
it before they discarded the power of human thought. They can still
think a little, of course, as all animals can. Enough to find food
in the wild, though many die each winter. Enough to throw stones as
monkeys throw nuts, and use their clubs, and even to hunt for
mates, for there are females among them as I said. Their sons and
daughters seldom live long, however, and I suppose that is for the
best, because they are born just as you were—and I was—with the
burden of thought.”
That burden lay heavily on me when we
had finished speaking; so heavily indeed that for the first time I
truly understood that it could be as great a curse to others as
memory has sometimes been to me.
I have never been greatly sensitive to
beauty, but the beauty of the sky and the mountainside were such
that it seemed they colored all my musings, so that I felt I nearly
grasped ungraspable things. When Master Malrubius had appeared to
me after our first performance of Dr. Talos’s play—something I
could not then understand and still could not understand, though I
grew more confident that it had occurred, and not less—he had
spoken to me of the circularity of governance, though I had no
concern with governance. Now it struck me that the will itself was
governed, and if not by reason, then by things below or above it.
Yet it was very difficult to say on what side of reason these
things lay. Instinct, surely, lay below it; but might it not be
above it as well? When the alzabo rushed at the zoanthrops, its
instinct commanded it to preserve its prey from others; when Becan
did so, his instinct, I believe, was to preserve his wife and
child. Both performed the same act, and they actually performed it
in the same body. Did the higher and the lower instinct join hands
at the back of reason? Or is there but one instinct standing behind
all reason, so that reason sees a hand to either side?
But is instinct truly that “attachment
to the person of the monarch” which Master Malrubius implied was at
once the highest and the lowest form of governance? For clearly,
instinct itself cannot have arisen out of nothing-the hawks that
soared over our heads built their nests, doubtless, by instinct;
yet there must have been a time in which nests were not built, and
the first hawk to build one cannot have inherited its instinct to
build from its parents, since they did not possess it. Nor could
such an instinct have developed slowly, a thousand generations of
hawks fetching one stick before some hawk fetched two; because
neither one stick nor two could be of the slightest use to the
nesting hawks. Perhaps that which came before instinct was the
highest as well as the lowest principle of the governance of the
will. Perhaps not. The wheeling birds traced their hieroglyphics in
the air, but they were not for me to read.
As we approached the saddle that joined the
mountain to that other even loftier one I have described, we seemed
to move across the face of all Urth, tracing a line from pole to
equator; indeed the surface over which we crawled like ants might
have been the globe itself turned inside out. Far behind us and far
ahead of us loomed the broad, gleaming fields of snow. Below them
lay stony slopes like the shore of the ice-bound southern sea.
Below these were high meadows of coarse grass, now dotted with
wildflowers ; I remembered well those over which I had passed the
day before, and beneath the blue haze that wreathed the mountain
ahead I could discern their band upon the chest, like a green
fourragere; beneath it the pines shone so darkly as to appear
black.
The saddle to which we descended was
quite different, an expanse of montane forest where glossy-leaved
hardwoods lifted sickly heads three hundred cubits toward the dying
sun. Among them their dead brothers remained upright, supported by
the living and wrapped in winding sheets of lianas. Near the little
stream where we halted for the night the vegetation had already
lost most of its mountain delicacy and was acquiring something of
the lushness of the lowlands; and now that we were sufficiently
near the saddle for him to have a clear view of it, and his
attention was no longer monopolized by the need to walk and climb,
the boy pointed and asked if we were going down there.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “It will be dark
soon, and I would like to get through that jungle in a
day.”
His eyes widened at the word
jungle. “Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t really know. From what I heard
in Thrax, the insects shouldn’t be nearly as bad as they are in
lower places, and we’re not likely to be troubled by blood bats
there—a friend of mine was bitten by a blood bat
once, and it’s not very pleasant. But that’s where the big apes
are, and there will be hunting cats and so on.”
“And wolfs.”
“And wolves, of course. Only there are
wolves high up too. As high as your house was, and much
higher.”
The moment I mentioned his old home I
regretted it, for something of the joy in living that had been
returning to his face went out of it with the word. For a moment he
seemed lost in thought. Then he said, “When those
men—”
“Zoanthrops.”
He nodded. “When the zoanthrops came
and hurt Mama, did you come to help as quick as you
could?”
“Yes,” I said. “I came as quickly as I
could make myself come.” It was true, at least in some sense, but
nevertheless it was painful to say.
“Good,” he said. I had spread a blanket
for him, and he lay down on it now. I folded it over him. “The
stars got brighter, didn’t they? They get brighter when the sun
goes away.”
I lay beside him looking up. “It
doesn’t go away, really. Urth just swings her face away, so that we
think it does. If you don’t look at me, I don’t go away, even
though you don’t see me.”
“If the sun is still there, why do the
stars shine harder?”
His voice told me he was pleased with
his own cleverness in argument, and I was pleased with it too; I
suddenly understood why Master Palaemon had enjoyed talking with me
when I was a child. I said, “A candle flame is almost invisible in
bright sunshine, and the stars, which are really suns themselves,
seem to fade in the same way. Pictures painted in the ancient days,
when our sun was brighter, appear to show that the stars could not
be seen at all until twilight. The old legends—I have a brown book
in my sabretache that tells many of them—are full of magic beings
who vanish slowly and reappear in the same way. No doubt those
stories are based on the look of the stars then.”
He pointed. “There’s the
hydra.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Do you
know any others?”
He showed me the cross and the great
bull, and I pointed out my amphisbaena, and several
others.
“And there’s the wolf, over by the
unicorn. There’s a little wolf too, but I can’t find
him.”
We discovered it together, near the
horizon.
“They’re like us, aren’t they? The big
wolf and the little wolf. We’re big Severian and little
Severian.”
I agreed that was so, and he stared up
at the stars for a long time, chewing the piece of dried meat I had
given him. Then he said, “Where is the book with stories in
it?”
I showed it to him.
“We had a book too, and sometimes Mama
would read to Severa and me.”
“She was your sister, wasn’t
she?”
He nodded. “We were twins. Big
Severian, did you ever have a sister?”
“I don’t know. My family is all dead.
They’ve been dead since I was a baby. What kind of story would you
like?”
He asked to see the book, and I gave it
to him. After he had turned a few pages he returned it to me. “It’s
not like ours.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“See if you can find a story with a boy
in it who has a big friend, and a twin. There should be wolfs in
it.”
I did the best I could, reading rapidly
to outrace the fading light.