The Cursed
Town
At about noon of the next day we found water
again, the only water the two of us were to taste upon that
mountain. Only a few strips of the dried meat Casdoe had left for
me remained. I shared them out, and we drank from the stream, which
was no more than a trickle the size of a man’s thumb. That seemed
strange, because I had seen so much snow on the head and shoulders
of the mountain; I was to discover later that the slopes below the
snow, where snow might have melted with the coming of summer, were
blown clear by the wind. Higher, the white drifts might accumulate
for centuries.
Our blankets were damp with dew, and we
spread them there on stones to dry. Even without the sun, the dry
gusts of mountain air dried them in a watch or so. I knew that we
would be spending the coming night high up the slopes, much as I
had spent the first night after leaving Thrax. Somehow, the
knowledge was powerless to depress my spirits. It was not so much
that we were leaving the dangers we had found in the saddle of
jungle, as that we were leaving behind a certain sordidness there.
I felt that I had been befouled, and that the cold atmosphere of
the mountain would cleanse me. For a time that feeling remained
with me almost unexamined; then, as we began to climb in earnest, I
realized that what disturbed me was the memory of the lies I had
told the magicians, pretending, as they did, to command great
powers and be privy to vast secrets. Those lies had been wholly
justifiable—they had helped to save my life and little Severian’s.
Nevertheless, I felt myself somewhat less of a man because I had
resorted to them. Master Gurloes, whom I had come to hate before I
left the guild, had lied frequently; and now I was not sure whether
I had hated him because he lied, or hated lying because he did
it.
And yet Master Gurloes had possessed as
good an excuse as I did, and perhaps a better one. He had lied to
preserve the guild and advance its fortunes, giving various
officials and officers exaggerated accounts of our work, and when
necessary concealing our mistakes. In doing that, he, the de facto
head of the guild, had been advancing his own position, to be sure;
yet he had also been advancing mine, and that of Drotte, Roche,
Eata, and all the other apprentices and journeymen who would
eventually inherit it. If he had been the simple, brutal man he
wished everyone to believe he was, I
could have been certain now that his dishonesty had been for his
benefit alone. I knew that he was not; perhaps for years he had
seen himself as I now saw myself.
And yet I could not be certain I had
acted to save little Severian. When he had run and I had
surrendered my sword, it might have been more to his advantage if I
had fought—I myself was the one whose immediate advantage had been
served by my docile capitulation, since if I had fought I might
have been killed. Later, when I had escaped, I had surely returned
as much for Terminus Est as for the boy; I
had returned for her in the mine of the man-apes, when he had not
been with me; and without her, I would have become a mere
vagabond.
A watch after I entertained these
thoughts, I was scaling a rock face with both the sword and the boy
on my back, and with no more certainty concerning how much I cared
for either than I had before. Fortunately I was fairly fresh, it
was not a difficult climb as such things go, and at the top we
struck an ancient highway.
Although I have walked in many strange
places, I have walked in none that gave me so great a sensation of
anomaly. To our left, no more than twenty paces off, I could see
the termination of this broad road, where some rockslide had
carried its lower end away. Before us it stretched as perfect as on
the day it was completed, a ribbon of seamless black stone winding
up toward that immense figure whose face was lost above the
clouds.
The boy gripped my hand when I put him
down. “My mother said we couldn’t use the roads, because of the
soldiers.”
“Your mother was right,” I told him.
“But she was going to go down, where the soldiers are. No doubt
there were soldiers on this road once, but they died a long time
before the biggest tree in the jungle down there was a seed.” He
was cold, and I gave him one of the blankets and showed him how to
wrap it about him and hold it closed to make a cloak. If anyone had
seen us then, we would have appeared a small, gray figure followed
by a disproportionate shadow.
We entered a mist, and I thought it strange to
find one that high up. It was only after we had climbed above it
and could look down upon its sunlit top that I realized it had been
one of the clouds that had seemed so remote when I had looked up at
them from the saddle.
And yet that saddle of jungle, so far
below us now, was itself no doubt thousands of cubits above Nessus
and the lower reaches of Gyoll. I thought then how far I must have
come, that jungles could exist at such altitudes—nearly to the
waist of the world, where it was always summer, and only height
produced any difference in the climate. If I were to journey to the
west, out of these mountains, then from what I had learned from
Master Palaemon, I would find myself in a jungle so pestilential as
to make the one we had left seem a paradise, a coastal jungle of
steaming heat and swarming insects; and yet there too I would see
the evidences of death, for though that jungle received as much of
the sun’s strength as any spot on Urth, still it was
less than it had received in times past, and just as the ice crept
forward in the south and the vegetation of the temperate zone fled
from it, so the trees and other plants of the tropics died to give
the newcomers space.
While I looked down at the cloud, the
boy had been walking ahead. Now he looked back at me with shining
eyes and called, “Who made this road?”
“No doubt the workers who carved the
mountain. They must have had great energies at their command and
machines more powerful than any we know about. Still, they would
have had to carry the rubble away in some fashion. A thousand carts
and wains must have rolled here once.” And yet I wondered, because
the iron wheels of such vehicles score even the hard cobbles of
Thrax and Nessus, and this road was as smooth as a processional
way. Surely, I thought, only the sun and wind have passed
here.
“Big Severian, look! Do you see the
hand?”
The boy was pointing toward a spur of
the mountain high above us. I craned my neck, but for a moment I
saw nothing but what I had seen before: a long promontory of
inhospitable gray rock. Then the sunlight flashed on something near
the end. It seemed, unmistakably, the gleam of gold; when I had
seen that, I saw also that the gold was a ring, and under it I saw
the thumb lying frozen in stone along the rock, a thumb perhaps a
hundred paces long, with the fingers above it hills.
We had no money, and I knew how
valuable money might be when we were forced, as eventually we must
be, to reenter the inhabited lands. If I was still searched for,
gold might persuade the searchers to look elsewhere. Gold might
also buy little Severian an apprenticeship in some worthy guild,
for it was clear he could not continue to travel with me. It seemed
most probable that the great ring was only gold leaf over stone;
even so, so vast a quantity of gold leaf, if it could be peeled
away and rolled up, must amount to a considerable total. And though
I made an effort not to, I found myself wondering if mere gold leaf
could have endured so many centuries. Would it not have loosened
and fallen away long ago? If the ring were of solid gold, it would
be worth a fortune; but all the fortunes of Urth could not have
bought this mighty image, and he who had ordered its construction
must have possessed wealth incalculable. Even if the ring were not
solid through to the finger beneath, there might be some
substantial thickness of metal.
As I considered all this, I toiled
upward, my long legs soon outstripping the boy’s short ones. At
times the road climbed so steeply I could hardly believe vehicles
burdened with stone had ever traversed it. Twice we crossed
fissures, one so wide that I was forced to throw the boy across it
before leaping over it myself. I was hoping to find water before we
halted; I found none, and when night fell we had no better shelter
than a crevice of stone where we wrapped ourselves in the blankets
and my cape and slept as well as we could.
In the morning we were both thirsty. Although
the rainy season would not come until autumn, I told the boy I
thought it might rain today, and we
started forward again in good spirits. Then too, he showed me how
carrying a small stone in the mouth helps to quench thirst. It is a
mountain trick, one I had not known. The wind was colder now than
it had been before, and I began to feel the thinness of the air.
Occasionally the road twisted to some point where we received a few
moments of sunshine.
In doing so, it wound farther and
farther from the ring, until at last we found ourselves in full
shadow, out of sight of the ring altogether and somewhere near the
knees of the seated figure. There was a last steep climb, so abrupt
that I would have been grateful for steps. And then, ahead of us
where they seemed to float in the clear air, a cluster of slender
spires. The boy called out “Thrax!” so happily that I knew his
mother must have told him tales of it, and told him too, when she
and the old man took him from the house where he had been born,
that she would bring him there.
“No,” I said. “It is not Thrax. This
looks more like my own Citadel—our Matachin Tower, and the witches’
tower, and the Bear Tower and the Bell Tower.”
He looked at me,
wide-eyed.
“No, it isn’t that either, of course.
Only I have been to Thrax, and Thrax is a city of stone. Those
towers are of metal, as ours were.”
“They have eyes,” little Severian
said.
So they did. At first I thought my
imagination was deceiving me, particularly since not all the towers
possessed them. At last I came to realize that some faced away from
us, and that the towers had not only eyes but shoulders and arms as
well; that they were, in fact, the metallic figures of cataphracts,
warriors armored from head to toe. “It isn’t a real city,” I told
the boy. “What we have found are the guardsmen of the Autarch,
waiting in his lap to destroy those who would harm
him.”
“Will they hurt us?”
“It’s a frightening thought, isn’t it?
They could crush you and me beneath their feet like mice. I’m sure
they won’t, however. They’re only statues, spiritual guards left
here as memorials to his powers.”
“There are big houses too,” the boy
said.
He was right. The buildings were no
more than waist-high to the towering metal figures, so that we had
overlooked them at first. That again reminded me of the Citadel,
where structures never meant to brave the stars are mingled with
the towers. Perhaps it was merely the thin air, but I had a sudden
vision of these metal men rising slowly, then ever more swiftly,
lifting hands toward the sky as they dove into it as we used to
dive down to the dark waters of the cistern by
torchlight.
Although my boots must have grated on
the wind-swept rock, I find I have no memory of such a sound.
Perhaps it was lost in the immensity of the mountaintop, so that we
approached the standing figures as silently as if we walked over
moss. Our shadows, which had spread behind us and to our left when
they had first appeared, were contracted into pools about our feet;
and I noticed that I could see the eyes of every figure. I told
myself that I had overlooked some at first, yet they glittered in
the sun.
At last we threaded a path among them,
and among the buildings that surrounded them. I had expected these
buildings to be ruinous, like those in the forgotten city of
Apu-Punchau. They were closed, secretive, and silent; but they
might have been constructed only a few years before. No roofs had
fallen in; no vines had dislodged the square gray stones of their
walls. They were windowless, and their architecture did not suggest
temples, fortresses, tombs, or any other type of structure with
which I was familiar. They were utterly without ornament and
without grace; yet their workmanship was excellent, and their
differing forms seemed to indicate differences in function. The
shining figures stood among them as if they had been halted in
their places by some sudden, freezing wind, not as monuments
stand.
I selected a building and told the boy
we would break into it, and that if we were fortunate we might find
water there, and perhaps even preserved food. It proved a foolish
boast. The doors were as solid as the walls, the roof as strong as
the foundation. Even if I had possessed an ax, I do not think I
could have smashed my way in, and I dared not hew with Terminus Est. Poking and prying for some weakness, we
wasted several watches. The second and third buildings we attempted
proved no easier than the first.
“There’s a round house over there,” the
boy said at last. “I’ll go and look at it for you.”
Because I felt sure there was nothing
in this deserted place that could harm him, I told him to go
ahead.
Soon he was back. “The door’s
open!”