The Hetman’s
Boat
After that I was locked in the dark for what I
later found had been the night and the greater part of the
following morning. Yet though it was dark where I lay, it was not
at first dark to me, for my hallucinations needed no candle. I can
recall them still, as I can recall everything; but I will not bore
you, my ultimate reader, with the entire catalog of phantoms,
though it would be easy enough for me to describe them here. What
is not easy is the task of expressing my feelings concerning
them.
It would have been a great relief for
me to believe that they were all in some way contained in the drug
I had swallowed (which was, as I guessed then and learned later,
when I could question those who treated the wounded of the
Autarch’s army, nothing more than the mushrooms that had been
chopped into my salad) just as Thecla’s thoughts and Thecla’s
personality, comforting at times and troubling at others, had been
contained in the fragment of her flesh I had eaten at Vodalus’s
banquet. Yet I knew it could not be so, and that all the things I
saw, some amusing, some horrible and terrifying, some merely
grotesque, were the product of my own mind. Or of Thecla’s, which
was now a part of my own.
Or rather, as I first began to realize
there in the dark as I watched a parade of women from the
court—exultants immensely tall and imbued with the stiff grace of
costly porcelains, their complexions powdered with the dust of
pearls or diamonds and their eyes made large as Thecla’s had been
by the application of minute amounts of certain poisons in
childhood—products of the mind that now existed in the combination
of the minds that had been hers and mine.
Severian, the apprentice I had been,
the young man who had swum beneath the Bell Keep, who had once
nearly drowned in Gyoll, who had idled alone on summer days in the
ruined necropolis, who had handed the Chatelaine Thecla, in the
nadir of his despair, the stolen knife, was gone.
Not dead. Why had he thought that every
life must end in death, and never in anything else? Not dead, but
vanished as a single note vanishes, never to reappear, when it
becomes an indistinguishable and inseparable part of some
extemporized melody. That young Severian had hated death,
and by the mercy of the Increate, whose mercy indeed (as is wisely
said in many places) confounds and destroys us, he did not
die.
The women turned long necks to look
down at me. Their oval faces were perfect, symmetrical,
expressionless yet lewd; and I understood quite suddenly that they
were not—or at least no longer were—the courtiers of the House
Absolute, but had become the courtesans of the House
Azure.
For some while, as it seemed to me, the
parade of those seductive and inhuman women continued, and at each
beat of my heart (of which I was conscious at that time as I have
seldom been before or since, so that it seemed as if a drum
throbbed in my chest) they reversed their roles without changing
the least detail of their appearance. Just as I have sometimes
known in dreams that a certain figure was in fact someone whom it
did not in the least resemble, so I knew at one instant that these
women were the ornaments of the Autarchial presence, and at the
next that they were to be sold for the night for a handful of
orichalks.
During all this time, and all the much
longer periods that preceded and followed it, I was acutely
uncomfortable. The spiders’ webs, which I came gradually to
perceive were common fishing nets, had not been removed; but I had
been bound with ropes as well, so that one arm was tightly pinioned
by my side and the other bent until the fingers of my hand, which
soon grew numb, almost touched my face. At the height of the action
of the drug I had become incontinent, and now my trousers were
soaked with urine, cold and stinking. As my hallucinations grew
less violent and the intervals between them longer, the misery of
my circumstances afflicted me more, and I became fearful of what
would happen to me when I was eventually taken from the windowless
storeroom into which I had been cast. I supposed that the hetman
had learned from some estafette that I was not what I had pretended
to be, and no doubt also that I was fleeing the archon’s justice;
for I assumed that he would not otherwise have dared to treat me as
he had. Under these circumstances, I could only wonder whether he
would dispose of me himself (doubtless by noyade, in such a place),
deliver me to some petty ethnarch, or return me to Thrax. I
resolved to take my own life should the opportunity be afforded me,
but it seemed so improbable that I should be given the chance that
I was ready to kill myself in my despair.
At last the door opened. The light, though it
was only that of a dim room in that thick-walled house, seemed
blinding. Two men dragged me forth as they might have pulled out a
sack of meal. They were heavily bearded, and so I suppose it was
they who had appeared, when they burst in upon Pia and me, to have
the pelts of animals for faces. They set me upon my feet, but my
legs would not hold, and they were forced to untie me and to remove
the nets that had taken me when the net of Typhon had failed. When
I could stand again, they gave me a cup of water and a strip of
salt fish.
After a time the hetman came in.
Although he stood as importantly as he was no doubt accustomed to
stand when he directed the affairs of his village, he could not
keep his voice from quavering. Why he should still be
frightened of me I could not understand, but plainly he still was.
Since I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by the attempt,
I ordered him to release me.
“That I cannot do, Grand Master,” he
said. “I am acting under instructions.”
“May I ask who has dared tell you to
act in this fashion toward the representative of your
Autarch?”
He cleared his throat. “Instructions
from the castle. My messenger bird carried your sapphire there last
night, and another bird came this morning, with a sign that means
we are to bring you.”
At first I supposed he meant Acies
Castle, where one of the squadrons of dimarchi had its
headquarters, but after a moment I realized that here, two score
leagues at least from the fortifications of Thrax, it was most
unlikely that he would be so specific. I said, “What castle is
that? And do your instructions preclude my cleaning myself before I
present myself there? And having my clothing washed?”
“I suppose that might be done,” he said
uncertainly; then to one of his men: “How stands the
wind?”
The man addressed gave a half shrug
that meant nothing to me, though it seemed to convey information to
the hetman.
“All right,” he told me. “We can’t set
you free, but we’ll wash your clothes and give you something to
eat, if you wish it.” As he was leaving, he turned back with an
expression that was almost apologetic. “The castle is near, Grand
Master, the Autarch far. You understand. We have had great
difficulties in the past, but now there is peace.”
I would have argued with him, but he
gave me no chance. The door shut behind him.
Pia, now dressed in a ragged smock,
came in a short time later. I was forced to submit to the indignity
of being stripped and washed by her; but I was able to take
advantage of the process to whisper to her, and I asked her to see
that my sword was sent wherever I was—for I was hoping to escape,
if only by confessing to the master of the mysterious castle and
offering to join forces with him. Just as she had ignored me when I
had suggested that she might float the weight of her chain on a
stick of firewood, she gave no indication of having heard me now;
but a watch or so later, when, dressed once more, I was being
paraded to a boat for the edification of the village, she came
running after our little procession with Terminus
Est cradled in her arms. The hetman had apparently wanted to
retain such a fine weapon, and remonstrated with her; but I was
able to warn him as I was being dragged on board that when I
arrived at the castle I would inform whoever received me there of
the existence of my sword, and in the end he
surrendered.
The boat was a kind I had never seen
before. In form it might have been a xebec, sharp fore and aft,
wide amidships, with a long, overhanging stern and an even longer
prow. Yet the shallow hull was built of bundles of buoyant reeds
tied together in a sort of wickerwork. There could be no step for
a conventional mast in such a frail hull, and in its place stood a
triangular lash-up of poles. The narrow base of the triangle ran
from gunwale to gunwale; its long isosceles sides supported a block
used, just as the hetman and I clambered aboard, to hoist a
slanting yard that trailed a widely striped linen sail. The hetman
now held my sword, but just as the painter was cast off, Pia leaped
into the boat with her chain jangling.
The hetman was furious and struck her;
but it is not an easy matter to take in the sail of such a craft
and turn it about with sweeps, and in the end, though he sent her
weeping to the bow, he permitted her to stay. I ventured to ask him
why she had wanted to come, though I thought I knew.
“My wife is hard on her when I am not
at home,” he told me. “Beats her and makes her scrub all day. It’s
good for the child, naturally, and it makes her happy to see me
when I come back. But she would rather go with me, and I don’t
greatly blame her.”
“Nor do I,” I said, trying to turn my
face away from his sour breath. “Besides, she will get to see the
castle, which I suppose she has never seen before.”
“She’s seen the walls a hundred times.
She comes of the landless lake people, and they are blown about by
the wind and so see everything.”
If they were blown by the wind, so were
we. Air as pure as spirit filled the striped sail, made even that
broad hull heel over, and sent us scudding across the water until
the village vanished below the rim of the horizon—though the white
peaks of the mountains were still visible, rising as it seemed from
the lake itself.