Fever
I cannot say how far we walked, or how far
worn the night was before we reached our destination. I know that I
began to stumble some time after we turned aside from the main
road, and that it became a sort of disease to me; just as some sick
men cannot stop coughing and others cannot keep their hands from
shaking, so I tripped, and a few steps farther on tripped again,
and then again. Unless I thought of nothing else, the toe of my
left boot caught at my right heel, and I could not concentrate my
mind—my thoughts ran off with every step I took.
Fireflies glimmered in the trees to
either side of the path, and for a long time I supposed that the
lights ahead of us were only more such insects and did not hurry my
pace. Then, very suddenly as it seemed to me, we were beneath some
shadowy roof where men and women with yellow lamps moved up and
down between long rows of shrouded cots. A woman in clothes I
supposed were black took charge of us and led us to another place
where there were chairs of leather and horn, and a fire burned in a
brazier. There I saw that her gown was scarlet, and she wore a
scarlet hood, and for a moment I thought that she was
Cyriaca.
“Your friend is very ill, isn’t he?”
she said. “Do you know what is the matter with him?”
And the soldier shook his head and
answered, “No. I’m not even sure who he is.”
I was too stunned to speak. She took my
hand, then released it and took the soldier’s. “He has a fever. So
do you. Now that the heat of summer is come, we see more disease
each day. You should have boiled your water and kept yourselves as
clean of lice as you could.”
She turned to me. “You have a great
many shallow cuts too, and some of them are infected. Rock
shards?”
I managed to say, “I’m not the one who
is ill. I brought my friend here.”
“You are both ill, and I suspect you
brought each other. I doubt that either of you would have reached
us without the other. Was it rock shards? Some weapon of the
enemy’s?”
“Rock shards, yes. A weapon of a
friend’s.”
“That is the worst thing, I am told—to
be fired upon by your own side.
But the fever is the chief concern.” She hesitated, looking from
the soldier to me and back. “I’d like to put you both in bed now,
but you’ll have to go to the bath first.”
She clapped her hands to summon a burly
man with a shaven head. He took our arms and began to lead us away,
then stopped and picked me up, carrying me as I had once carried
little Severian. In a few moments we were naked and sitting in a
pool of water heated by stones. The burly man splashed more water
over us, then made us get out one at a time so he could crop our
hair with a pair of shears. After that we were left to soak
awhile.
“You can speak now,” I said to the
soldier.
I saw him nod in the
lamplight.
“Why didn’t you, then, when we were
coming here?”
He hesitated, and his shoulders moved a
trifle. “I was thinking of many things, and you didn’t talk
yourself. You seemed so tired. Once I asked if we shouldn’t stop,
but you didn’t answer.”
I said, “It seemed to me otherwise, but
perhaps we are both correct. Do you recall what happened to you
before you met me?”
Again there was a pause. “I don’t even
remember meeting you. We were walking down a dark path, and you
were beside me.”
“And before that?”
“I don’t know. Music, perhaps, and
walking a long way. In sunshine at first but later through the
dark.”
“That walking was while you were with
me,” I said. “Don’t you recall anything else?”
“Flying through the dark. Yes, I was
with you, and we came to a place where the sun hung just above our
heads. There was a light before us, but when I stepped into it, it
became a kind of darkness.”
I nodded. “You weren’t wholly rational,
you see. On a warm day it can seem that the sun’s just overhead,
and when it is down behind the mountains it seems the light becomes
darkness. Do you recall your name?”
At that he thought for several moments,
and at last smiled ruefully. “I lost it somewhere along the way.
That’s what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the
goat.”
The burly man with the shaven head had
come back without either of us noticing. He helped me out of the
pool and gave me a towel with which to dry myself, a robe to wear,
and a canvas sack containing my possessions, which now smelled
strongly of the smoke of fumigation. A day earlier it would have
tormented me nearly to frenzy to have the Claw out of my possession
for an instant. That night I had hardly realized it was gone until
it was returned to me, and I did not verify that it had indeed been
returned until I lay on one of the cots under a veil of netting.
The Claw shone in my hand then, softly as the moon; and it was
shaped as the moon sometimes is. I smiled to think that its
flooding light of pale green is the reflection of the
sun.
On the first night I slept in Saltus, I had
awakened thinking I was in the apprentices’ dormitory in our tower.
Now I had the same experience in reverse: I slept and found in
sleep that the shadowy lazaret with its silent figures and moving
lamps had been no more than a hallucination of the
day.
I sat up and looked around. I felt
well—better, in fact, than I had ever felt before; but I was warm.
I seemed to glow from within. Roche was sleeping on his side, his
red hair tousled and his mouth slightly open, his face relaxed and
boyish without the energy of his mind behind it. Through the port I
could see snow drifts in the Old Court, new-fallen snow that showed
no tracks of men or their animals; but it occurred to me that in
the necropolis there would be hundreds of footprints already as the
small creatures who found shelter there, the pets and the playmates
of the dead, came out to search for food and to disport themselves
in the new landscape Nature had bestowed on them. I dressed quickly
and silently, holding my finger to my own lips when one of the
other apprentices stirred, and hurried down the steep stair that
wound through the center of the tower.
It seemed longer than usual, and I
found I had difficulty in going from step to step. We are always
aware of the hindrance of gravity when we climb stairs, but we take
for granted the assistance it gives us when we descend. Now that
assistance had been withdrawn, or nearly so. I had to force each
foot down, but do it in a way that prevented it from sending me
shooting up when it struck the step, as it would have if I had
stamped. In that uncanny way we know things in dreams, I understood
that all the towers of the Citadel had risen at last and were on
their voyage beyond the circle of Dis. I felt happy in the
knowledge, but I still desired to go into the necropolis and track
the coatis and foxes. I was hurrying down as fast as I could when I
heard a groan. The stairway no longer descended as it should but
led into a cabin, just as the stairs in Baldanders’s castle had
stretched down the walls of its chambers.
This was Master Malrubius’s sickroom.
Masters are entitled to spacious quarters; still, this was larger
by far than the actual cabin had been. There were two ports just as
I remembered, but they were enormous—the eyes of Mount Typhon.
Master Malrubius’s bed was very large, yet it seemed lost in the
immensity of the room. Two figures bent over him. Though their
clothing was dark, it struck me that it was not the fuligin of the
guild. I went to them, and when I was so near I could hear the sick
man’s labored breathing, they straightened up and turned to look at
me. They were the Cumaean and her acolyte Merryn, the witches we
had met atop the tomb in the ruined stone town.
“Ah, sister, you have come at last,”
Merryn said.
As she spoke, I realized that I was
not, as I had thought, the apprentice Severian. I was Thecla as she
had been when she was his height, which is to say at about the age
of thirteen or fourteen. I felt an intense embarrassment—not
because of my girl’s body or because I was wearing masculine
clothes (which indeed I rather enjoyed) but because I had been
unaware of
it previously. I also felt that Merryn’s words had been an act of
magic—that both Severian and I had been present before, and that
she had by some means driven him into the background. The Cumaean
kissed me on the forehead, and when the kiss was over wiped blood
from her lips. Although she did not speak, I knew this was a signal
that I had in some sense become the soldier too.
“When we sleep,” Merryn told me, “we
move from temporality to eternity.”
“When we wake,” the Cumaean whispered,
“we lose the facility to see beyond the present
moment.”
“She never wakes,” Merryn
boasted.
Master Malrubius stirred and groaned,
and the Cumaean took a carafe of water from the table by his bed
and poured a little into a tumbler. When she set down the carafe
again, something living stirred in it. I, for some reason, thought
it the undine; I drew back, but it was Hethor, no higher than my
hand, his gray, stubbled face pressed against the
glass.
I heard his voice as one might hear the
squeaking of mice: “Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms,
by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise,
ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our
silver sails, our demon-haunted mirror sails, our hundredleague
masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the
threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet
with the winds of Time that goes racing by. The bone in her teeth!
The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where
old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the
unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my
soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of
Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against
the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the
star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is
her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the
captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail!
She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past
we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail,
Captain, for the universe is leaving us behind …”
There was a bell on the table beside
the carafe. Merryn rang it as though to overpower Hethor’s voice,
and when Master Malrubius had moistened his lips with the tumbler,
she took it from the Cumaean, flung what remained of its water on
the floor, and inverted it over the neck of the carafe. Hethor was
silenced, but the water spread over the floor, bubbling as though
fed by a hidden spring. It was icy cold. I thought vaguely that my
governess would be angry because my shoes were wet.
A maid was coming in answer to the
ring—Thecla’s maid, whose flayed leg I had inspected the day after
I had saved Vodalus. She was younger, as young as she must have
been when Thecla was actually a girl, but her leg had been flayed
already and ran with blood. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I am so
sorry, Hunna. I didn’t do it—it was Master Gurloes, and some
journeymen.”
Master Malrubius sat up in bed, and for
the first time I observed that his bed was in actuality a woman’s
hand, with fingers longer than my arm and nails like talons.
“You’re well!” he said, as though I were the one who had been
dying. “Or nearly well, at least.” The fingers of the hand began to
close upon him, but he leaped from the bed and into water that was
now knee high to stand beside me.
A dog—my old dog Triskele—had
apparently been hiding beneath the bed, or perhaps only lying on
the farther side of it, out of sight. Now he came to us, splashing
the water with his single forepaw as he drove his broad chest
through it and barking joyously. Master Malrubius took my right
hand and the Cumaean my left; together they led me to one of the
great eyes of the mountain.
I saw the view I had seen when Typhon
had led me there: The world rolled out like a carpet and visible in
its entirety. This time it was more magnificent by far. The sun was
behind us; its beams seemed to have multiplied their strength.
Shadows were alchemized to gold, and every green thing grew darker
and stronger as I looked. I could see the grain ripening in the
fields and even the myriad fish of the sea doubling and redoubling
with the increase of the tiny surface plants that sustained them.
Water from the room behind us poured from the eye and, catching the
light, fell in a rainbow.
Then I woke.
While I slept, someone had wrapped me
in sheets packed with snow. (I learned later that it was brought
down from the mountaintops by surefooted sumpters.) Shivering, I
longed to return to my dream, though I was already half-aware of
the immense distance that separated us. The bitter taste of
medicine was in my mouth, the stretched canvas felt as hard as a
floor beneath me, and scarlet-clad Pelerines with lamps moved to
and fro, tending men and women who groaned in the
dark.