The Circle of the
Sorcerers
By the first light of morning we entered the
mountain jungle as one enters a house. Behind us the sunlight
played on grass and bushes and stones; we passed through a curtain
of tangled vines so thick I had to cut it with my sword and saw
before us only shadow and the towering boles of the trees. No
insect buzzed within, and no bird chirped. No wind stirred. At
first the bare soil we trod was almost as stony as the mountain
slopes, but before we had walked a league it grew smoother, and at
last we came to a short stair that had surely been carved with the
spade. “Look,” said the boy, and he pointed to something red and
strangely shaped that lay upon the uppermost step.
I stopped to look at it. It was a
cock’s head; needles of some dark metal had been run through its
eyes, and it held a strip of cast snakeskin in its
bill.
“What is it?” The boy’s eyes were
wide.
“A charm, I think.”
“Left here by a witch? What does it
mean?”
I tried to recall what little I knew of
the false art. As a child, Thecla had been in the care of a
nursemaid who tied and untied knots to speed childbirth and claimed
to see the face of Thecla’s future husband (was it mine, I wonder?)
at midnight, reflected in a platter that had held bridal
cake.
“The cock,” I told the boy, “is the
herald of day, and in a magical sense his crow at dawn can be said
to bring the sun. He has been blinded, perhaps, so that he will not
know when dawn appears. A snake’s casting of his skin means
cleansing or rejuvenation. The blinded cock holds onto the old
skin.”
“But what does it mean?” the boy asked
again.
I said I did not know; but in my heart
I felt sure it was a charm against the coming of the New Sun, and
it somehow pained me to find that renewal, for which I had hoped so
fervently when I was a boy myself, but in which I hardly believed,
should be opposed by anyone. At the same time, I was conscious that
I bore the Claw. Enemies of the New Sun would surely destroy the
Claw, should it fall into their hands.
Before we had gone another hundred
paces, there were strips of red cloth suspended from the trees;
some of these were plain, but others had been
written over in black in a character I did not understand—or as
seemed more likely, with symbols and ideographs of the sort those
who pretend to more knowledge than they possess use in imitation of
the writing of the astronomers.
“We had better go back,” I said. “Or go
around.”
I had no sooner spoken than I heard a
rustling behind me. For a moment I truly thought the figures that
stepped onto the path were devils, huge-eyed and striped with
black, white, and scarlet; then I saw that they were only naked men
with painted bodies. Their hands were fitted with steel talons,
which they held up to show me. I drew Terminus
Est.
“We will not hinder you,” one said.
“Go. Leave us, if you wish.” It seemed to me that beneath the paint
he had the pale skin and fair hair of the south.
“You would be well advised not to. With
this long blade I could kill you both before you touched
me.”
“Go, then,” the blond man told me. “If
you have no objection to leaving the child with us.”
At that I looked around for little
Severian. He had somehow vanished from my side.
“If you wish him returned to you,
however, you will surrender your sword to me and come with us.”
Showing no sign of fear, the painted man walked up to me and
extended his hands. The steel talons emerged from between his
fingers, being fastened to a narrow bar of iron he held in his
palm. “I will not ask again,” he said.
I sheathed the blade, then took off the
baldric that held the sheath and handed the whole to
him.
He closed his eyes. Their lids had been
painted with dark dots rimmed with white, like the markings of
certain caterpillars that would have the birds think them snakes.
“This has drunk much blood.”
“Yes,” I said.
His eyes opened again, and he regarded
me with an unblinking stare. His painted face—like that of the
other, who stood just behind him—was as expressionless as a mask.
“A newly forged sword would have little power here, but this might
do harm.”
“I trust it will be returned to me when
my son and I leave. What have you done with him?”
There was no reply. The two walked
around me, one to either side, and went down the path in the
direction the boy and I had been going. After a moment I followed
them.
I might call the place to which they led me a
village, but it was not a village in the ordinary sense, not such a
village as Saltus, or even a place like the clusters of autochthon
huts that are sometimes called villages. Here the trees were
greater, and farther separated, than I had ever seen forest trees
before, and the canopy of their leaves formed an impenetrable roof
several hundred cubits overhead. So great indeed were these trees
that they seemed
to have been growing for whole ages; a stair led to a door in the
trunk of one, which had been pierced for windows. There was a house
of several stories built upon the branches of another, and a thing
like a great oriole’s nest swung from the limbs of a third. Open
hatches showed that the ground at our feet was mined.
I was taken to one of these hatches and
told to descend a crude ladder that led into darkness. For a moment
(I do not know why) I feared that it might go very far, into such
deep caverns as lay beneath the man-apes’ nighted treasure house.
It was not so. After descending what was surely not more than four
times my height and clambering through what then seemed to be
ruined matting, I found myself in a subterranean room.
The hatch had been shut over my head,
leaving everything dark. Groping, I explored the place and found it
to be about three paces by four. The floor and walls were of earth,
and the ceiling of unpeeled logs; there were no furnishings
whatsoever.
We had been taken at about mid morning.
In seven watches more, it would be dark. Before that time it might
be that I would find myself led into the presence of someone in
authority. If so, I would do what I could to persuade him that the
child and I were harmless and should be let go in peace. If not,
then I would climb the ladder again and see if I could not break
out of the hatch. I sat down to wait.
I am certain I did not sleep; but I
used the facility I have for calling forth past time, and so, at
least in spirit, left that dark place. For a time I watched the
animals in the necropolis beyond the Citadel wall, as I had as a
boy. I saw the geese shape arrowheads against the sky, and the
comings and goings of fox and rabbit. They raced across the grass
for me once more, and in time left their tracks in snow. Triskele
lay dead, as it seemed, on the refuse behind the Bear Tower; I went
to him, saw him shudder and lift his head to lick my hand. I sat
with Thecla in her narrow cell, where we read aloud to each other
and stopped to argue what we had read. “The world runs down like a
clock,” she said. “The Increate is dead, and who will recreate him?
Who could?”
“Surely clocks are supposed to stop
when their owners die.”
“That’s superstition.” She took the
book from my hands so she could hold them in her own, which were
long-fingered and very cold. “When the owner is on his deathbed, no
one pours in fresh water. He dies, and his nurses look at the dial
to note the time. Later they find it stopped, and the time is the
same.”
I told her, “You’re saying that it
stops before the owner; so if the universe is running down now,
that does not mean that the Increate is deadonly that he never
existed.”
“But he is ill. Look around you. See
this place, and the towers above you. Do you know, Severian, that
you never have?”
“He could still tell someone else to
fill the mechanism again,” I suggested, and then, realizing what I
had said, blushed.
Thecla laughed. “I haven’t seen you do
that since I took off my gown for
you the first time. I laid your hands on my breasts, and you went
red as a berry. Do you remember? Tell somebody to fill it? Where is
the young atheist now?”
I put my hand upon her thigh.
“Confused, as he was then, by the presence of
divinity.”
“You don’t believe in me then? I think
you’re right. I must be what you young torturers dream of—a
beautiful prisoner, as yet unmutilated, who calls on you to slake
her lust.”
Trying to be gallant I said, “Such
dreams as you lie beyond my power.”
“Surely not, since I am in your power
now.”
Something was in the cell with us. I
looked at the barred door and Thecla’s lamp with its silver
reflector, then into all the corners. The cell grew darker, and
Thecla and even I myself vanished with the light, but the thing
that had intruded upon my memory of us did not.
“Who are you,” I asked, “and what do
you wish with us?”
“You know well who we are, and we know
who you are.” The voice was cool and, I think, perhaps the most
authoritative I have ever heard. The Autarch himself did not speak
so.
“Who am I, then?”
“Severian of Nessus, the lictor of
Thrax.”
“I am Severian of Nessus,” I said. “But
I am no longer lictor of Thrax.”
“So you would have us
believe.”
There was silence again, and after a
time I understood that my interrogator would not question me, but
rather would force me, if I desired my freedom, to explain myself
to him. I wanted greatly to seize him—he could not have been more
than a few cubits away—but I knew that in all likelihood he was
armed with the steel talons the guards on the path had shown me. I
wanted also, as I had for some time, to draw the Claw from its
leathern sack, though nothing could have been more foolish. I said,
“The archon of Thrax wished me to kill a certain woman. I freed her
instead, and had to flee the city.”
“By magic passing the posts of the
soldiers.”
I had always believed all
self-proclaimed wonder-workers to be frauds; now something in my
interrogator’s voice suggested that even as they attempted to
deceive others, so they might deceive themselves. There was mockery
in it, but it was mockery of me, not of magic. “Perhaps,” I said.
“What do you know of my powers?”
“That they are insufficient to free you
from this place.”
“I have not attempted to free myself,
and yet I have already been free.”
That disturbed him. “You were not free.
You merely brought the woman here in spirit!”
I let my breath out, trying to keep the
sigh inaudible. In the antechamber of the House Absolute, a little
girl had once mistaken me for a tall woman, when Thecla had for a
time displaced my own personality. Now, it seemed, the remembered
Thecla must have spoken through my mouth. I said,
“Surely I am a necromancer then, who can command the spirits of the
dead. For that woman is dead.”
“You told us you freed
her.”
“Another woman, who only slightly
resembled that one. What have you done to my son?”
“He does not call you his
father.”
“He suffers fancies,” I
said.
There was no reply. After a time I rose
and ran my hands once more over the walls of my underground prison;
they were of plain earth, as before. I had seen no light and heard
no sound, but it seemed to me that it would have been possible to
cover the hatch with some portable structure to exclude the day,
and if the hatch were skillfully constructed, it might be lifted
silently. I mounted the first rung of the ladder; it creaked
beneath my weight.
I climbed a step up, and another, and
it creaked at each. I tried to rise to the fourth rung, and felt my
scalp and shoulders prodded as though with the points of daggers. A
trickle of blood from my right ear wet my neck.
I retreated to the third rung and
groped overhead. The thing that had seemed like a torn mat when I
entered the underground chamber proved to be a score or more of
sharp bamboo splittings, anchored somehow in the shaft with their
points directed down. I had descended with ease because my body had
forced them to one side; now they prevented me from ascending much
as the barbs on a fish spear prevent the fish from getting away. I
took hold of one and tried to break it, but though I might have
done so with both hands, it was impossible with one. Given light
and time I might have worked my way through them; light perhaps I
might have had, but I did not dare to take the risk. I jumped to
the floor again.
Another circuit of the room told me no
more than I had known before, yet it seemed beyond credence that my
questioner had climbed the ladder without making a sound, though he
might perhaps possess some special knowledge that would permit him
to pass through the bamboo. I went about the floor on my hands and
knees, and learned no more than before.
I attempted to move the ladder, but it
was fixed in position; so beginning at the corner nearest the
shaft, I jumped and touched the wall at a point as high as I could
reach, then moved half a step to one side and jumped again. When I
had arrived at a place that must have been more or less opposite
the spot where I had been sitting, I found it: a rectangular hole
perhaps a cubit high and two across, with its lower edge slightly
higher than my head. My interrogator might have climbed from it
silently, perhaps with the aid of a rope, and returned the same
way; but it seemed more likely that he had merely thrust his head
and shoulders through, so that his voice had sounded as if he were
truly in the room with me. I gripped the edge of the hole as well
as I could, jumped, and pulled myself up.