The Pelagic Argosy
Sights Land
When I regained consciousness, it was the pain
in my leg that I felt first. It was pinned beneath the body of the
piebald, and I struggled to free it almost before I knew who I was
or how I found myself where I did. My hands and face, the very
ground on which I lay, were crusted with blood.
And it was quiet—so quiet. I listened
for the thudding of hoofs, the drum roll that makes Urth herself
its drum. It was not there. The shouts of the cherkajis were no
more, nor the shrill, mad cries that had come from the checkerboard
of Ascian infantry. I tried to turn to push against the saddle, but
I could not do so.
Somewhere far off, no doubt on one of
the ridges that rimmed the valley, a dire wolf raised its maw to
Lune. That inhuman howling, which Thecla had heard once or twice
before when the court went to hunt near Silva, made me realize that
the dimness of my sight was not due to the smoke of the grass fires
that had burned earlier that day, or, as I had half feared, to some
head injury. The land was twilit, though whether by dusk or dawn I
could not say.
I rested and perhaps I slept, then
roused again at the sound of footsteps. It was darker than I
remembered. The footsteps were slow, soft, and heavy. Not the sound
of cavalry on the move, nor yet the measured tread of marching
infantry—a walk heavier than Baldanders’s and more slow. I opened
my mouth to cry for help, then closed it again, thinking I might
call upon myself something more terrible than that I had once waked
in the mine of the man-apes. I lunged away from the dead piebald
until it seemed I would wrench my leg from its socket. Another dire
wolf, as frightful as the first and much closer, howled to the
green isle overhead.
As a boy, I was often told I lacked
imagination. If it were ever true, Thecla must have brought it to
our nexus, for I could see the dire wolves in my mind, black and
silent shapes, each as large as an onyger, pouring down into the
valley; and I could hear them cracking the ribs of the dead. I
called, and called again, before I knew what it was I
did.
It seemed to me that the heavy
footsteps paused. Certainly they moved toward me, whether they had
been coming toward me before or not. I heard a rustling in the
grass, and a little phenocod, striped like a melon, bounded out,
terrified by something I still could not see. It shied at the sight
of me and in a moment was gone.
I have said that Erblon’s graisle was
silenced. Another blew now, a deeper, longer, wilder note than I
had ever heard. The outline of a bent orphicleide showed against
the dusky sky. When its music was ended it fell, and in a moment
more I saw the head of the player blotting out the brightening moon
at three times the height of a mounted trooper’s helmet—a domed
head shaggy with hair.
The orphicleide sounded once more, deep
as a waterfall, and this time I saw it rise, and the white, curling
tusks that guarded it on each side, and I knew I lay in the path of
the very symbol of dominion, the beast called Mammoth.
Guasacht had said I held some mastery
over animals, even without the Claw. I strove to use it now,
whispering I know not what, concentrating my thought until it
seemed my temples would burst. The mammoth’s trunk came questing
toward me, its tip nearly a cubit across. Lightly as a child’s hand
it touched my face, flooding me with moist, hot breath sweet with
hay. The corpse of the piebald was lifted away; I tried to stand
but somehow fell. The mammoth caught me up, winding its trunk about
my waist, and lifted me higher than its own head.
The first thing I saw was the muzzle of
a trilhoen with a dark, bulging lens the size of a dinner plate. It
was fitted with a seat for the operator, but no one sat there. The
gunner had come down and stood upon the mammoth’s neck as a sailor
might upon the deck of a ship, with one hand on the barrel for
balance. For a moment a light shone in my face, blinding
me.
“It’s you. Miracles converge on us.”
The voice was not truly either a man’s or a woman’s; it might
almost have been a boy’s. I was laid at the speaker’s feet, and he
said, “You’re hurt. Can you stand on that leg?”
I managed to say I did not think I
could.
“This is a poor place to lie, but a
good one to fall from. There’s a gondola farther back, but I’m
afraid Mamillian can’t reach it with his trunk. You’ll have to sit
up here, with your back against the swivel.”
I felt his hands, small, soft, and
moist, beneath my arms. Perhaps it was their touch that told me who
he was: The androgyne I had met in the snowcovered House Azure, and
later in that artfully foreshortened room that posed as a painting
hanging in a corridor of the House Absolute.
The
Autarch.
In Thecla’s memories I saw him robed in
jewels. Although he had said he recognized me, I could not believe
in my dazed state that it was so, and I gave him the code phrase he
had once given me, saying, “The pelagic argosy sights
land.”
“It does. It does indeed. Yet if you
fall overboard now, I’m afraid
Mamillian’s not quite quick enough to catch you … despite his
undoubted wisdom. Give him as much help as you can. I’m not as
strong as I look.”
I got some part of the trilhoen’s mount
in one hand and was able to pull myself around on the
musty-smelling mat that was the mammoth’s hide. “To speak the
truth,” I said, “you’ve never looked strong to me.”
“You have the professional eye and
ought to know, but I’m not even as strong as that. You, on the
other hand, have always seemed to me a construction of horn and
boiled leather. And you must be, or you’d be dead by now. What
happened to your leg?”
“Burned, I think.”
“We’ll have to get you something for
it.” He raised his voice slightly. “Home! Back
home, Mamillian!”
“May I ask what you’re doing
here?”
“Having a look at the field of battle.
You fought here today, I take it.”
I nodded, though I felt my head would
tumble from my shoulders.
“I didn’t … or rather, I did, but not
personally. I ordered certain bodies of light auxiliaries into
action, with a legion of peltasts in support. I suppose you must
have been one of the auxiliaries. Were any of your friends
killed?”
“I only had one. She was all right the
last time I saw her.”
His teeth flashed in the moonlight.
“You maintain your interest in women. Was it the Dorcas you told me
of?”
“No. It doesn’t matter.” I did not
quite know how to phrase what I was about to say. (It is the worst
of bad manners to state openly that one has penetrated an
incognito.) At last I managed, “I can see you hold high rank in our
Commonwealth. If it won’t get me pushed from the back of this
animal, can you tell me what someone who commands legions was doing
conducting that place in the Algedonic Quarter?”
While I spoke, the night had grown
rapidly darker, the stars winking out one after another like the
tapers in a hall when the ball is over and footmen walk among them
with snuffers like mitres of gold dangling from spidery rods. At a
great distance I heard the androgyne say, “You know who we are. We
are the thing itself, the self-ruler, the Autarch. We know more. We
know who you are.”
Master Malrubius was, as I realize now, a very
sick man before he died. At the time I did not know it, because the
thought of sickness was foreign to me. At least half our
apprentices, and perhaps more than half, died before they were
raised to journeyman; but it never occurred to me that our tower
might be an unhealthy place, or that the lower reaches of Gyoll,
where we so often swam, were little purer than a cesspool.
Apprentices had always died, and when we living apprentices dug
their graves we turned up small pelvises and skulls, which we, the
succeeding generation, reburied again and again until they were so
much injured by the spade that their chalky particles were lost in
the tarlike soil. I, however, never suffered more than a sore
throat and a running nose, forms of sickness that serve only to
deceive
healthy people into the belief that they know in what disease
consists. Master Malrubius suffered real illness, which is to see
death in shadows.
As he stood at his little table, one
felt that he was conscious of someone standing behind him. He
looked straight to the front, never turning his head and hardly
moving a shoulder, and he spoke as much for that unknown listener
as for us.
“I have done my best to teach you boys
the rudiments of learning. They are the seeds of trees that should
grow and blossom in your minds. Severian, look to your Q. It should be round and full like the face of a happy
boy, but one of its cheeks is as fallen-in as your own. You have
all, all you boys, seen how the spinal cord, lifting itself toward
its culmination, expands and at last blossoms in the myriad
pathways of the brain. And this one, one cheek round, the other
seared and shriveled.”
His trembling hand reached for the
slate pencil, but it escaped his fingers and rolled over the edge
of the table to clatter on the floor. He did not stoop to pick it
up, fearful, I think, that in stooping he might glimpse the
invisible presence.
“I have spent much of my life, boys, in
trying to implant those seeds in the apprentices of our guild. I
have had a few successes, but not many. There was a boy, but
he-—”
He went to the port and spat, and
because I was sitting near it I saw the twisted shapes formed by
the seeping blood and knew that the reason I could not see the dark
figure (for death is of the color that is darker than fuligin) that
accompanied him was that it stood within him.
Just as I had discovered that death in
a new form, in the shape of war, could frighten me when it could no
longer do so in its old ones, so I learned now that the weakness of
my body could afflict me with the terror and despair my old teacher
must have felt. Consciousness came and went.
Consciousness went and came like the errant
winds of spring, and I, who so often have had difficulty in falling
asleep among the besieging shades of memory, now fought to stay
awake as a child struggles to lift a faltering kite by the string.
At times I was oblivious to everything except my injured body. The
wound in my leg, which I had hardly felt when I received it, and
whose pain I had so effortlessly locked away when Daria had
bandaged it, throbbed with an intensity that formed the background
to all my thoughts, like the rumbling of the Drum Tower at the
solstice. I turned from side to side, thinking always that I lay
upon that leg.
I had hearing without sight and occasionally
sight without hearing. I rolled my cheek from the matted hair of
Mamillian and laid it on a pillow woven of the minute, downy
feathers of hummingbirds.
Once I saw torches with dancing flames of
scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns
and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to
life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him
that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his
benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I
thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my
father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it
fell under the Swan. He listened intently, turning his head to
watch me from one brown eye.