Guasacht
The next two days I spent in wandering. I will
not say much of them here, for there is little to say. I might, I
suppose, have enlisted in several units, but I was far from sure I
wanted to enlist. I would have liked to return to the Last House,
but I was too proud to cast myself on Master Ash’s charity,
assuming that Master Ash was again to be found there. I told myself
I would gladly have returned to the post of Lictor of Thrax, yet if
that had been possible, I am not certain I would have done so. I
slept like an animal in wooded places and took what food I could,
which was little.
On the third day I discovered a rusty
falchion, dropped, as it appeared, in some campaign of the year
before. I got out my little flask of oil and my broken whetstone
(both of which I had retained, together with her hilt, when I had
cast the wreck of Terminus Est into the
water) and spent a happy watch in cleaning and sharpening it. When
that was done, I trudged on, and soon struck a road.
With the protection of Mannea’s
safe-conduct effectively removed, I was more chary of showing
myself than I had been on my way from Master Ash’s. But it seemed
probable that the dead soldier the Claw had raised, who now called
himself Miles though I knew some part of him to be Jonas, had by
now joined some unit. If so, he would be on a road or in camp near
one, if he was not actually in battle; and I wished to speak to
him. Like Dorcas, he had paused a time in the country of the dead.
She had dwelt there longer, but I hoped that if I could question
him before too much time had erased his memories of it, I might
learn something that would—if not permit me to regain her—at least
help reconcile me to her loss.
For I found I loved her now as I never
had when we tramped crosscountry to Thrax. Then my thoughts had
been too much of Thecla; I had always been reaching inside myself
to find her. Now it seemed, if only because she had been a part of
me so long, that I had grasped her indeed, in an embrace more final
than any coupling—or rather, that as the male’s seed penetrates the
female body to produce (if it be the will of Apeiron) a new human
being, so she, entering my mouth, by my will had combined with the
Severian that was to establish a new man: I who still call myself
Severian but am conscious, as it were, of my double
root.
Whether I could have learned what I
sought from Miles-Jonas, I do not know. I have never found him,
though I have persevered in the search from that day to this. By
midafternoon I had entered a realm of broken trees, and from time
to time I passed corpses in more or less advanced stages of decay.
At first I tried to pillage them as I had the body of Miles-Jonas,
but others had been there before me, and indeed the fennecs had
come in the night with their sharp little teeth to loot the
flesh.
Somewhat later, as my energies were
beginning to flag, I paused at the smoldering remains of an empty
supply wagon. The draft animals, which had not, it appeared, been
dead long, lay in the road, with their driver pitched on his face
between them; and it occurred to me that I might do worse than to
cut as much meat as I wanted from their flanks and carry it to some
isolated spot where I could kindle a fire. I had fleshed the point
of the falchion in the haunch of one of these animals when I heard
the drumming of hoofs, and supposing them to belong to the destrier
of an estafette, moved to the edge of the road to let him
pass.
It was instead a short, thick-bodied,
energetic-looking man on a tall, ill-used mount. He reined up at
the sight of me, but something in his expression told me there was
no need for fight or flight. (If there had been, it would have been
fight. His destrier would have done him
little good among the stumps and fallen logs, and despite his
haubergeon and brass-ringed buff cap, I thought I could best
him.)
“Who are you?” he called. And when I
told him, “Severian of Nessus, eh? You’re civilized then, or
half-civilized, but you don’t look like you’ve been eating too
well.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “Better than
I’ve been accustomed to, recently.” I did not want him to think me
weak.
“But you could use some more—that’s not
Ascian blood on your sword. You’re a schiavoni? An
irregular?”
“My life has been pretty irregular of
late, certainly.”
“But you’re attached to no formation?”
With startling dexterity he vaulted from his saddle, threw the
reins to the ground, and came striding over. He was slightly
bowlegged and had one of those faces that appear to have been
molded in clay and flattened from the top and bottom before firing,
so that the forehead and chin are shallow but broad, the eyes
slits, the mouth wide. Still I liked him at once for his verve, and
because he took so little trouble to hide his
dishonesty.
I said, “I’m attached to nothing and no
one—memories excepted.”
“Ahh!” He sighed, and for an instant
rolled his eyes upward. “I know—I know. We have all had our
difficulties, every one of us. What was it, a woman or the
law?”
I had not previously viewed my troubles
in that light, but after thinking for a moment I admitted it had
been a bit of both.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place
and you’ve met the right man. How’d you like a good meal tonight, a
whole crowd of new friends, and a handful of orichalks tomorrow?
Sound good? Good!”
He returned to his mount, and his hand
darted out as quickly as a fencer’s blade to grasp her bridle
before she could shy away. When he had the reins again, he leaped
into the saddle as readily as he had left it. “Now you get up
behind me,” he called. “It’s not far, and she’ll carry two easily
enough.”
I did as he told me, though with
considerably more difficulty since I had no stirrup to assist me.
The instant I was seated, the destrier struck like a bushmaster at
my leg; but her master, who had clearly been anticipating the
maneuver, clubbed her so hard with the brass pommel of his poniard
that she stumbled and nearly fell.
“Pay no mind,” he said. The shortness
of his neck did not permit him to look over his shoulder, so he
spoke out of the left side of his mouth to make it clear he was
addressing me. “She’s a fine animal and a plucky fighter, and she
just wants to make sure you understand her value. A sort of
initiation, you know. You know what an initiation is?”
I told him I thought myself familiar
with the term.
“Anything that’s worth belonging to has
one, you’ll find—I’ve found that out myself. I’ve never seen one
that a plucky lad couldn’t handle and laugh about
afterwards.”
With that cryptic encouragement he set
his enormous spurs to the sides of his fine animal as if he meant
to eviscerate her on the spot, and we went flying down the road,
trailed by a cloud of dust.
Since the time I had ridden Vodalus’s
charger out of Saltus, I had supposed in my innocence that all
mounts might be divided into two sorts: the highbred and swift, and
the cold-blooded and slow. The better, I thought, ran with the
graceful ease, almost, of a coursing cat; the worse moved so
tardily that it hardly mattered how they did it. It used to be a
maxim of one of Thecla’s tutors that all two-valued systems are
false, and I discovered on that ride a new respect for him. My
benefactor’s mount belonged to that third class (which I have since
discovered is fairly extensive) comprising those animals that
outrace the birds but seem to run with legs of iron upon a road of
stone. Men have numberless advantages over women and for that
reason are rightly charged to protect them, yet there is one great
one women may boast over men: No woman has ever had her organs of
generation crushed between her own pelvis and the bony spine of one
of these galloping brutes. That happened to me twenty or thirty
times before we reined up, and when I slid over the crupper at last
and leaped aside to dodge a kick, I was in no very good
mood.
We had halted in one of those little,
lost fields one sometimes finds among the hills, an area more or
less level and a hundred strides or so across. A tent the size of a
cottage had been erected in the center, with a faded flag of black
and green flapping before it. Several score hobbled mounts grazed
at will over the field, and an equal number of ragged men, with a
sprinkling of unkempt women, lounged about cleaning armor,
sleeping, and gambling.
“Look here!” my benefactor shouted,
dismounting to stand beside me.
“Here’s a new recruit!” To me he announced, “Severian of Nessus,
you’re standing in the presence of the Eighteenth Bacele of the
Irregular Contarii, every one of us a fighter of dauntless courage
whenever there’s a speck of money to be made.”
The ragged men and women were standing
and drifting toward us, many of them frankly grinning. A tall and
very thin man led the way.
“Comrades, I give you Severian of
Nessus!
“Severian,” my benefactor continued,
“I’m your condottiere. Call me Guasacht. This fishing pole here,
taller even than you are, is my second, Erblon. The rest will
introduce themselves, I’m sure.
“Erblon, I want to talk to you.
There’ll be patrols tomorrow.” He took the tall man by the arm and
led him into the tent, leaving me with the crowd of troopers who
had by now surrounded me.
One of the largest, an ursine man
almost my height and at least twice my weight, gestured toward the
falchion. “Don’t you have a scabbard for that? Let’s see
it.”
I surrendered it without argument;
whatever might happen next, I felt certain it would not be an
occasion for killing.
“So, you’re a rider, are
you?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve ridden a bit, but I
don’t consider myself an expert.”
“But you know how to manage
them?”
“I know men and women
better.”
Everyone laughed at that, and the big
man said, “Well, that’s just fine, because you probably won’t do
much riding, but a good understanding of women—and destriers—will
be a help to you.”
As he spoke, I heard the sound of
hoofs. Two men were leading up a piebald, muscular and wild-eyed.
His reins had been divided and lengthened, permitting the men to
stand at either side of his head, about three paces away. A trollop
with fox-colored hair and a laughing face sat the saddle with ease,
and in lieu of the reins held a riding whip in each hand. The
troopers and their women cheered and clapped, and at the sound the
piebald reared like a whirlwind and pawed the air, showing the
three horny growths on each forefoot that we call hoofs for what
they were—talons adapted almost as well to combat as to gripping
turf. Their feints outsped my eyes.
The big man slapped me on the back.
“He’s not the best I ever had, but he’s good enough, and I trained
him myself. Mesrop and Lactan there are going to pass you those
reins, and all you have to do is get up on him. If you can do it
without knocking Daria off, you can have her until we run you
down.” He raised his voice: “All right, let him
go!”
I had expected the two men to give me
the reins. Instead they threw them at my face, and in snatching for
them I missed them both. Someone goaded the piebald from behind,
and the big man gave a peculiar, piercing whistle. The piebald had
been taught to fight, like the destriers in the Bear Tower, and
though his long teeth had not been augmented with metal, they had
been left as nature made them and stood out from his mouth like
knives.
I dodged a flashing forefoot and tried
to grasp his halter; a blow from one of the whips caught me full
across the face, and the piebald’s rush knocked me
sprawling.
The troopers must have held him back or
I would have been trampled. Perhaps they also helped me to my
feet—I cannot be sure. My throat was full of dust, and blood from
my forehead trickled into my eyes.
I went for him again, circling to the
right to keep clear of his hoofs, but he turned more quickly than
I, and the girl called Daria snapped both lashes before my face to
throw me off. More from anger than any plan I seized one. The thong
of the whipstock was around her wrist; when I jerked the lash she
came with it, falling into my arms. She bit my ear, but I got her
by the back of the neck, spun her around, dug fingers into one firm
buttock and lifted her. Kicking the air, her legs seemed to startle
the piebald. I backed him through the crowd until one of his
tormentors goaded him toward me, then stepped on his
reins.
After that, it was easy. I dropped the
girl, caught his halter, twisted his head, and kicked his forefeet
from under him as we were taught to do with unruly clients. With a
high-pitched, animal scream he came crashing down. I was in the
saddle before he could get his legs beneath him, and from there I
lashed his flanks with the long reins and sent him bolting through
the crowd, then turned him and charged them again.
All my life I had heard of the
excitement of this kind of fighting, though I had never experienced
it. Now I found everything more than true. The troopers and their
women were yelling and running, and a few flourished swords. They
might have threatened a thunderstorm with more effect—I rode over
half a dozen at a sweep. The girl’s red hair flew like a banner as
she fled, but no human legs could have outdistanced that steed. We
flashed past her, and I caught her by that flaming banner and threw
her over the arcione before me.
A twisting trail led to a dark ravine, and
that ravine to another. Deer scattered ahead of us; in three bounds
we overtook a buck in velvet and shouldered him out of the way.
While I had been Lictor of Thrax, I had heard that the eclectics
often raced game and leaped from their mounts to stab it. I
believed those stories now—I could have cut the buck’s throat with
a butcher knife.
We left him behind, crested a new hill
and dashed down into a silent, wooded valley. When the piebald had
run himself out, I let him find his own path among the trees, which
were the largest I had seen since leaving Saltus; and when he
stopped to crop the sparse, tender grass that grew between their
roots, I halted and threw the reins on the ground as I had seen
Guasacht do, then dismounted and helped the red-haired girl
off.
“Thanks,” she said. And then, “You did
it. I didn’t think you could.”
“Or you wouldn’t have agreed to this? I
had supposed they made you.”
“I wouldn’t have given you that cut
with the whip. You’ll want to repay me now, won’t you? With the
reins, I suppose.”
“What makes you think that?” I was
tired and sat down. Yellow flowers, each blossom no bigger than a
drop of water, grew in the grass; I picked a few and found they
smelled of calambac.
“You look the type. Besides, you
carried me bottom up, and men who do that always want to hit
it.”
“I never knew that. It’s an interesting
thought.”
“I have a lot of them—that kind.”
Quickly and gracefully she seated herself beside me and put a hand
on my knee. “Listen, it was the initiation, that’s all. We take
turns, and it was my turn and I was supposed to hit you. Now it’s
over.”
“I understand.”
“Then you won’t hurt me? That’s
wonderful. We can have a good time here, really. Whatever you want
and as much as you want, and we won’t go back until it’s time to
eat.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt
you.”
Her face, which had been wreathed with
forced smiles, fell, and she looked at the ground. I suggested that
she might run away.
“That would only make it more fun for
you, and you’d hurt me more before we were through.” Her hand crept
up my thigh as she spoke. “You’re nice looking, you know. And so
tall.” She made a sitting bow, pressing her face into my lap to
give me a tingling kiss, then straightening up at once. “It could
be nice. Really it could.”
“Or you could kill yourself. Have you a
knife?”
For an instant, her mouth formed a
perfect little circle. “You’re crazy, aren’t you? I should have
known.” She leaped to her feet.
I caught her by one ankle and sent her
sprawling to the soft forest floor. Her shift was rotten with
wear—a pull and it fell away. “You said you wouldn’t
run.”
She looked over her shoulder at me with
large eyes.
I said, “You have no power over me,
neither you nor they. I am not afraid of pain, or of death. There
is only one living woman I desire, and no man but
myself.”