The
Corpse
I had never discovered what uses the other
buildings had served. No more did I understand this one, which was
circular and covered by a dome. Its walls were metal—not the darkly
lustrous metal of our Citadel towers, but some bright alloy like
polished silver.
This gleaming building stood atop a
stepped pedestal, and I wondered to see it there when the great
images of the cataphracts in their antique armor stood plainly in
the streets. There were five doorways about its circumference (for
we walked around it before venturing inside), and all of them stood
open. By examining them and the floor before them, I tried to judge
whether they had stood so for so many years; there was little dust
at this elevation, and in the end I could not be certain. When we
had completed our inspection, I told the boy to let me go first,
and stepped inside.
Nothing happened. Even when the boy
followed me, the doors did not close, no enemy rushed at us, no
energy colored the air, and the floor remained firm beneath our
feet. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that we had somehow entered a
trap: that outside on the mountain we had been free, however hungry
and thirsty we were, and that here we were free no longer. I think
I would have turned and run if he had not been with me. As it was,
I did not want to appear superstitious or afraid, and I felt an
obligation to try to find food and water.
There were many devices in that
building to which I can give no name. They were not furniture, nor
boxes, nor machines as I understand the term. Most were oddly
angled; I saw some that appeared to have niches in which to sit,
though the sitter would have been cramped, and would have faced
some part of the device instead of his companions. Others contained
alcoves where someone might once, perhaps, have
rested.
These devices stood beside aisles, wide
aisles that ran toward the center of the structure as straight as
the spokes of a wheel. Looking down the one we had entered, I could
see, dimly, some red object, and upon it, much smaller, something
brown. At first, I did not pay great attention to either, but when
I had satisfied myself that the devices I have described were of no
value and no danger to us, I led the boy toward them.
The red object was a sort of couch, a very
elaborate one, with straps so that a prisoner might be confined
upon it. Around it were mechanisms that seemed intended to provide
for nourishment and elimination. It stood upon a small dais, and on
it lay what had once been the body of a man with two heads. The
thin, dry air of the mountain had desiccated that body long
ago-like the mysterious buildings, it might have been a year old or
a thousand. He had been a man taller than I, perhaps even an
exultant, and powerfully muscled. Now I might, I thought, tear one
of his arms from its socket with a gesture. He wore no loincloth,
or any other garment, and though we are accustomed to sudden
changes in the size of the organs of procreation, it was strange to
see them so shriveled here. Some hair remained upon the heads, and
it appeared to me that the hair of the right had been black; that
of the head on the left was yellowish. The eyes of both were
closed, and the mouths open, showing a few teeth. I noticed that
the straps that might have bound this creature to the couch were
not buckled.
At the time, however, I was far more
concerned with the mechanism that had once fed him. I told myself
that ancient machines were often astoundingly durable, and though
it had long been abandoned, it had enjoyed the most favorable
conditions for its preservation; and I twisted every dial I could
find, and shifted each lever, in an attempt to make it produce some
nutriment. The boy watched me, and when I had been moving things
here and there for some time asked if we were going to
starve.
“No,” I told him. “We can go a great
deal longer without food than you would think. Getting something to
drink is a great deal more urgent, but if we can’t find anything
here, there is sure to be snow further up the
mountain.”
“How did he die?” For some reason I had
never brought myself to touch the corpse; now the boy ran his plump
fingers along one withered arm.
“Men die. The wonder is that such a
monster lived. Such things usually perish at birth.”
“Do you think the others left him here
when they went away?” He asked.
“Left him here alive, you mean? I
suppose they could have. There would have been no place for him,
perhaps, in the lands below. Or perhaps he did not want to go.
Maybe they confined him here on this couch when he misbehaved.
Possibly he was subject to madness, or fits of violent rage. If any
of those things are true, he must have spent his last days
wandering over the mountain, returning here to eat and drink, and
dying when the food and water he depended on were
exhausted.”
“Then there isn’t any water in there,”
the boy said practically.
“That’s true. Still, we don’t know it
happened like that. He may have died for some other reason before
his supplies ran out. Then too, the kind of thing we’ve been saying
would seem to assume that he was a sort of pet or mascot for the
people who carved the mountain. This is a very elaborate place in
which to keep a pet. Just the same, I don’t think I’m ever going to
be able to reactivate this machine.”
“I think we ought to go down,” the boy
announced as we were leaving the circular building.
I turned to look behind us, thinking
how foolish all my fears had been. Its doors remained open; nothing
had moved, nothing had changed. If it had ever been a trap, it
seemed certain it was a trap that had rusted open centuries
before.
“So do I,” I said. “But the day is
nearly over—see how long our shadows are now. I don’t want to be
overtaken by the night when we’re climbing down the other side, so
I’m going to find out whether I can reach the ring we saw this
morning. Perhaps we’ll find water as well as gold. Tonight we’ll
sleep in that round building out of the wind, and tomorrow we’ll
start down the north side by the first light.”
He nodded to show that he understood,
and accompanied me willingly enough as I set off to look for a path
to the ring. It had been on the southern arm, so that we were in
some sense returning to the side we had first climbed, though we
had approached the cluster of sculptured cataphracts and buildings
from the southeast. I had feared that the ascent to the arm would
be a difficult climb; instead, just where the vast height of the
chest and upper arm rose before us, I found what I had been wishing
for much earlier: a narrow stair. There were many hundreds of
steps, so it was a weary climb still, and I carried the boy up much
of it.
The arm itself was smooth stone, yet so
wide there seemed to be little danger that the boy would fall off
as long as we kept to the center. I made him hold my hand and
strode along quite eagerly, my cloak snapping in the
wind.
To our left lay the ascent we had begun
the day before; beyond it was the saddle between the mountains,
green under its blanket of jungle. Beyond even that, hazy now with
distance, rose the mountain where Becan and Casdoe had built their
home. As I walked, I tried to distinguish their cabin, or at least
the area in which it stood, and at last I found what seemed to me
the cliff face I had descended to reach it, a tiny fleck of color
on the side of that less lofty mountain, with the glint of the
falling water in its center like an iridescent mote.
When I had seen it, I halted and turned
to look up at the peak on whose slope we walked. I could see the
face now and its mitre of ice, and below it the left shoulder,
where a thousand cavalrymen might have been exercised by their
chiliarch.
Ahead of me, the boy was pointing and
shouting something I could not understand, pointing down toward the
buildings and the standing figures of the metal guardsmen. It was a
moment before I realized what he meant—their faces were turned
three-quarters toward us, as they had been turned three-quarters
toward us that morning. Their heads had moved. For the first time,
I followed the direction of their eyes—and found that they were
looking at the sun.
I nodded to the boy and called, “I
see!”
We were on the wrist, with the little
plain of the hand spread before us,
broader and safer even than the arm. As I strode over it, the boy
ran ahead of me. The ring was on the second finger, a finger larger
than a log cut from the greatest tree. Little Severian ran out upon
it, balancing himself without difficulty on the crest, and I saw
him throw out his hands to touch the ring.
There was a flash of light—bright, yet
not blindingly so in the afternoon sunshine; because it was tinted
with violet, it seemed almost a darkness.
It left him blackened and consumed. For
a moment, I think, he still lived; his head jerked back and his
arms were flung wide. There was a puff of smoke, carried away at
once by the wind. The body fell, its limbs contracting as the legs
of a dead insect do, and rolled until it had tumbled out of sight
in the crevice between the second and third fingers.
I, who had seen so many brandings and
abacinations, and had even used the iron myself (among the billion
things I recall perfectly is the flesh of Morwenna’s cheeks
blistering), could scarcely force myself to go and look at
him.
There were bones there, in that narrow
place between the fingers, but they were old bones that broke
beneath my feet when I leaped down like the bones strewn upon the
paths in our necropolis, and I did not trouble to examine them. I
took out the Claw. When I had cursed myself for not using it when
Thecla’s body was brought forth at Vodalus’s banquet, Jonas had
told me not to be a fool, that whatever powers the Claw might
possess could not possibly have restored life to that roasted
flesh.
And I could not help but think that if
it acted now and restored little Severian to me, for all my joy I
would take him to some safe place and slash my own throat with
Terminus Est. Because if the Claw would do
that, it would have called Thecla back too, if only it had been
used; and Thecla was a part of myself, now forever
dead.
For a moment it seemed that there was a
glimmering, a bright shadow or aura; then the boy’s corpse crumbled
to black ash that stirred in the unquiet air.
I stood, and put the Claw away, and
began to walk back, vaguely wondering how much trouble I would have
in leaving that narrow place and regaining the back of the hand.
(In the end, I had to stand Terminus Est on
the tip of her own blade and put one foot on a quillion to get up,
then crawl back, head down, until I could grasp her pommel and pull
her up after me.) There was no confusion of memory, but for a time
a confusion of mind, in which the boy was merged in that other boy,
Jader, who had lived with his dying sister in the jacal upon the
cliff in Thrax. The one, who had come to mean so much to me, I
could not save; the other, who had meant little, I had cured. In
some way, it seemed to me they were the same boy. No doubt that was
merely some protective reaction of my mind, a shelter it sought
from the storm of madness; but it seemed to me somehow that so long
as Jader lived, the boy his mother had named Severian could not
truly perish.
I had meant to halt upon the hand and
look back; I could not—the truth is that I feared I would go to the
edge and throw myself over. I did not actually stop until I had
nearly regained the narrow stair that led down so
many hundreds of steps to the broad lap of the mountain. Then I
seated myself and once more found that fleck of color that was the
cliff below which Casdoe’s home had stood. I remembered the barking
of the brown dog as I had come through the forest toward it. He had
been a coward, that dog, when the alzabo came, but he had died with
his teeth in the defiled flesh of a zoanthrop, while I, a coward
too, had hung back. I remembered Casdoe’s tired, lovely face, the
boy peeping from behind her skirt, the way the old man had sat
cross-legged with his back to the fire, talking of Fechin. They
were all dead now, Severa and Becan, whom I had never seen; the old
man, the dog, Casdoe, now little Severian, even Fechin, all dead,
all lost in the mists that obscure our days. Time itself is a
thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron
palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll,
on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as
rain.
I knew then, on the arm of that giant
figure, the ambition to conquer time, an ambition beside which the
desire of the distant suns is only the lust of some petty,
feathered chieftain to subjugate some other tribe.
There I sat until the sun was nearly
hidden by the rising of the mountains in the west. It should have
been easier to descend the stair than it had been to climb it, but
I was very thirsty now, and the jolt of each step hurt my knees.
The light was nearly gone, and the wind like ice. One blanket had
been burned with the boy; I unfolded the other and wrapped my chest
and shoulders in it under my cloak.
When I was perhaps halfway down, I
paused to rest. Only a thin crescent of reddish brown remained of
the day. That narrowed, then vanished; and as it did, each of the
great metal cataphracts below me raised a hand in salute. So quiet
they were, and so steady, that I could almost have believed them
sculptured with lifted arms, as I saw them.
For a time the wonder of it washed all
my sorrow from me, and I could only marvel. I remained where I was,
staring at them, not daring to move. Night rushed across the
mountains; in the last, dim twilight I watched the mighty arms come
down.
Still dazed, I reentered the silent
cluster of buildings that stood in the figure’s lap. If I had seen
one miracle fail, I had witnessed another; and even a seemingly
purposeless miracle is an inexhaustible source of hope, because it
proves to us that since we do not understand everything, our
defeats—so much more numerous than our few and empty victories—may
be equally specious.
By some idiotic error, I contrived to
lose my way when I tried to return to the circular building where I
had told the boy we would spend the night, and I was too fatigued
to search for it. Instead I found a sheltered spot well away from
the nearest metal guardsman, where I rubbed my aching legs and
wrapped myself against the cold as well as I could. Although I must
have fallen asleep almost at once, I was soon awakened by the sound
of soft footsteps.