The Last
House
Mannea had given me a rough map showing the
location of the anchorite’s retreat, emphasizing that if I failed
to follow the course indicated on it precisely, I would almost
certainly be unable to locate it.
In what direction that house lay from
the lazaret I cannot say. The distances shown on the map were in
proportion to their difficulty, and turnings were adjusted to suit
the dimensions of the paper. I began by walking east, but soon
found that the route I followed had turned north, then west through
a narrow canyon threaded by a rushing stream, and at last
south.
On the earliest leg of my journey, I
saw a great many soldiers—once a double column lining both sides of
the road while mules carried back the wounded down the center.
Twice I was stopped, but each time the display of my safe-conduct
permitted me to proceed. It was written on cream-colored parchment,
the finest I had then seen, and bore the narthex sigil of the order
stamped in gold. It read:
To Those Who Serve—
The letter you read shall identify
our servant Severian of Nessus, a young man dark of hair and eye,
pale of face, thin, and well above the middle height. As you honor
the memory we guard, and yourselves may wish in time for succor and
if need be an honorable interment, we beg you not hinder this
Severian as he prosecutes the business we have entrusted to him,
but rather provide him such aid as he may require and you can
supply.
For the Order of the
Journeying Monials of the Conciliator, called Pelerines, I am
The Chatelaine Mannea
Instructress and
Directress
Once I had entered the narrow canyon,
however, all the armies of the world seemed to vanish. I saw no
more soldiers, and the rushing water drowned the distant thundering
of the Autarch’s sacars and culverins—if indeed they could have
been heard in that place at all.
The anchorite’s house had been
described to me and the description augmented by a sketch on the
map I carried; moreover, I had been told that two days would be
required for me to reach it. I was considerably surprised,
therefore, when, at sunset, I looked up and saw it perched atop the
cliff looming over me.
There was no mistaking it. Mannea’s
sketch had captured perfectly that high, peaked gable with its air
of lightness and strength. Already a lamp shone in one small
window.
In the mountains I had climbed many
cliffs; some had been much higher than this one, and some—at least
in appearance—more sheer. I had by no means been looking forward to
camping among the rocks, and as soon as I saw the anchorite’s
house, I decided I would sleep in it that night.
The first third of the climb was easy.
I scaled the rock face like a cat and was more than halfway up the
whole of it before the fading of the light.
I have always had good night vision; I
told myself the moon would soon be out and continued. In that I was
wrong. The old moon had died while I lay in the lazaret, and the
new would not be born for several days. The stars shed some light,
though they were crossed and recrossed by bands of hurrying clouds;
but it was a deceptive light that seemed worse than none, save when
I did not have it. I found myself recalling then how Agia had
waited with her assassins for me to emerge from the underground
realm of the man-apes. The skin of my back crawled as though in
anticipation of the arbalests’ blazing bolts.
Soon a worse difficulty overtook me: I
lost my sense of balance. I do not mean that I was entirely at the
mercy of vertigo. I knew, in a general way, that down was in the direction of my feet and up in the direction of the stars; but I could be no more
precise than that, and because I could not, I could judge only
poorly how far I might lean out to search for each new
handhold.
Just when this feeling was at its
worst, the hurrying clouds closed their ranks, and I was left in
total darkness. Sometimes it seemed to me that the cliff face had
assumed a more gentle slope, so that I might almost have stood
erect and walked up it. Sometimes I felt that it was beetling out—I
must cling to the underside or fall. Often I felt certain I had not
been climbing at all, but edging long distances to the left or
right. Once I found myself almost head downward.
At last I reached a ledge, and there I
determined to stay until the light came again. I wrapped myself in
my cloak, lay down, and shifted my body to bring my back firmly
against the rock. No resistance met it. I shifted once more and
still felt nothing. I grew afraid that my sense of direction had
deserted me even as my sense of balance had, and that I had somehow
turned myself about and was edging toward the drop. After feeling
the rock to either side, I rolled on my back and extended my
arms.
At that moment there came a flash of
sulfurous light that dyed the belly of every cloud. Not far off,
some great bombard had loosed its cargo of death, and in that
hectic illumination I saw that I had gained the top of the
cliff, and that the house I had seen there was nowhere to be found.
I lay upon an empty expanse of rock and felt the first drops of the
coming rain patter against my face.
Next morning, cold and miserable, I ate some
of the food I had carried from the lazaret and made my way down the
farther side of the high hill of which the cliff had formed a part.
The slope there was easier, and it was my intention to double about
the shoulder of the hill until I again reached the narrow valley
indicated on my map.
I could not do so. It was not that my
way was blocked, but rather that when, after long walking, I
arrived at what should have been the location I sought, I found an
entirely different place, a shallower valley and a broader stream.
After several watches wasted searching there, I discovered the spot
from which (as it seemed to me) I had seen the anchorite’s house
perched upon the cliff top. Needless to say, it was not there now,
nor was the cliff so high nor so steep as I recalled
it.
It was there that I took out the map
again, and studying it noticed that Mannea had written, in a hand
so fine that I could scarcely believe it had been done with the pen
I had seen her use, the words THE LAST HOUSE
beneath the image of the anchorite’s dwelling. For some reason
those words and the picture of the house itself atop its rock
recalled to me the house Agia and I had seen in the Jungle Garden,
where husband and wife had sat listening to the naked man called
Isangoma. Agia, who had been wise in the ways of all the Botanic
Gardens, had told me there that if I turned on the path and
attempted to go back to the hut I should not find it. Reflecting
upon that incident, I discovered that I did not now believe her,
but that I had believed her at the time. It might be, of course,
that my loss of credulity was only a reaction to her treachery, of
which I had by now had a sufficient sample. Or it might merely be
that I was far more ingenuous then, when I was less than a day gone
from the Citadel and the nurturing of the guild. But it was also
possible—so it seemed to me now—that I had believed then because I
had just seen the thing for myself, and that the sight of it, and
the knowledge of those people, had carried its own
conviction.
Father Inire was alleged to have built
the Botanic Gardens. Might it not be that some part of the
knowledge he commanded was shared by the anchorite? Father Inire,
too, had built the secret room in the House Absolute that had
appeared to be a painting. I had discovered it by accident but only
because I had followed the instructions of the old picture cleaner,
who had meant that I should. Now I was no longer following the
instructions of Mannea.
I retraced my way around the shoulder
of the hill and up the easy slope. The steep cliff I recalled
dropped before me, and at its base rushed a narrow stream whose
song filled all the strait valley. The position of the sun
indicated that I had at most two watches of light remaining, but by
that light the cliff was far easier to descend than it had been to
climb by night. In less than a watch I was down, standing in the
narrow valley I had left the evening
before. I could see no lamp at any window, but the Last House stood
where it had been, founded upon stone over which my boots had
walked that day. I shook my head, turned away from it, and used the
dying light to read the map Mannea had drawn for me.
Before I go further, I wish to make it clear
that I am by no means certain there was anything preternatural in
all that I have described. I saw the Last House thus twice, but on
both occasions under similar lighting, the first time being by late
twilight and the second by early twilight. It is surely possible
that what I saw was no more than a creation of rocks and shadows,
the illuminated window a star.
As to the vanishing of the narrow
valley when I tried to come upon it from the other direction, there
is no geographical feature more prone to disappear from sight than
such a narrow declivity. The slightest unevenness in the ground
conceals it. To protect themselves from marauders, some of the
autochthonous peoples of the pampas go so far as to build their
villages in that form, first digging a pit whose bottom can be
reached by a ramp, then excavating houses and stables from the
sides of it. As soon as the grass has covered the cast-out earth,
which occurs very rapidly after the winter rains, one may ride to
within half a chain of such a place without realizing it
exists.
But though I may have been such a fool,
I do not believe I was. Master Palaemon used to say that the
supernatural exists in order that we may not be humiliated at being
frightened by the night wind; but I prefer to believe that there
was some element truly uncanny surrounding that house. I believe it
now more firmly than I did then.
However it may be, I followed the map I
had been given from that time forward, and before the night was
more than two watches old, found myself climbing a path that led to
the door of the Last House, which stood at the edge of just such a
cliff as I remembered. As Mannea had said, the trip had taken just
two days.