The Mercy of
Agia
At first I thought there could be nothing
stranger than to see the army stretch across the surface of Urth
until it lay like a garland before us, coruscant with weapons and
armor, many-hued; the winged anpiels soaring above it nearly as
high as we, circling and rising on the dawn wind.
Then I beheld something stranger still.
It was the army of the Ascians, an army of watery whites and
grayish blacks, rigid as ours was fluid, deployed toward the
northern horizon. I went forward to stare at it.
“I could show them to you more
closely,” the Autarch said. “Still, you would see only human
faces.”
I realized he was testing me, though I
did not know how. “Let me see them,” I said.
When I had ridden with the schiavoni
and watched our troops go into action, I had been struck by their
look of weakness in the mass, the cavalry all ebb and flow like a
wave that crashes with great force—then drains away as mere water,
too weak to bear the weight of a mouse, pale stuff a child might
scoop up in his hands. Even the peltasts, with their serried ranks
and crystal shields, had seemed hardly more formidable than toys on
a tabletop. Now I saw how strong the rigid formations of our enemy
appeared, rectangles that held machines as big as fortresses and a
hundred thousand soldiers shoulder to shoulder.
But on a screen in the center of the
control panel I looked under the visors of their helmets, and all
that rigidity, all that strength, melted into a kind of horror.
There were old people and children in the infantry files, and some
who seemed idiots. Nearly all had the mad, famished faces I had
observed the day before, and I recalled the man who had broken from
his square and thrown his spear into the air as he died. I turned
away.
The Autarch laughed. His laughter held
no joy now; it was a flat sound, like the snapping of a flag in a
high wind. “Did you see one kill himself?”
“No,” I said.
“You were fortunate. I often do, when I
look at them. They are not permitted arms until they are ready to
engage us, and so many take advantage of the opportunity. The
spearmen drive the butts of their weapons into soft ground,
usually, then blast off their own heads. Once I saw two
swordsmen—a man and a woman—who had made a compact. They stabbed
each other in the belly, and I watched them counting first, moving
their left hands … one … two … three, and dead.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
He shot me a look I could not
interpret. “What did you say?”
“I asked who they are, Sieur. I know
they’re our enemies, that they live to the north in the hot
countries, and that they’re said to be enslaved by Erebus. But who
are they?”
“Up until now I doubt you knew you did
not know. Did you?”
My throat felt parched, though I could
not have told why. I said, “I suppose not. I’d never seen one until
I came into the lazaret of the Pelerines. In the south, the war
seems very remote.”
He nodded. “We have driven them half as
far to the north as they once drove us south, we autarchs. Who they
are you will discover in due time … . What matters is that you wish
to know.” He paused. “Both could be ours. Both armies, not just the
one to the south … . Would you advise me to take both?” As he
spoke, he manipulated some control and the flier canted forward,
its stem pointing at the sky and its bow to the green earth, as
though he meant to pour us out upon the disputed
ground.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I
told him.
“Half what you said of them was
incorrect. They do not come from the hot countries of the north,
but from the continent that lies across the equator. But you were
right when you called them the slaves of Erebus. They think
themselves the allies of those who wait in the deep. In truth,
Erebus and his allies would give them to me if I would give our
south to them. Give you and all the rest.”
I had to grip the back of the seat to
keep from falling toward him. “Why are you telling me
this?”
The flier righted itself like a child’s
boat in a puddle, bobbing.
“Because it will soon be necessary for
you to know that others have felt what you will feel,”
I could not frame a question I dared to
ask. At last I ventured, “You said you’d tell me here why you
killed Thecla.”
“Does she not live in
Severian?”
A windowless wall in my mind fell to
ruins. I shouted: “I died!” Not realizing
what I had said until the words were past my lips.
The Autarch took a pistol from beneath
the control panel, letting it lie across his thighs as he turned to
face me.
“You won’t need that, Sieur,” I said.
“I’m too weak.”
“You have remarkable powers of recovery
… . I have seen them already. Yes, the Chatelaine Thecla is gone,
save as she endures in you, and though the two of you are always
together, you are both lonely. Do you still seek for Dorcas? You
told me of her, you remember, when we met in the Secret
House.”
“Why did you kill Thecla?”
“I did not. Your error lies in thinking
I am at the bottom of everything.
No one is … . Not I, or Erebus, or any other. As to the Chatelaine,
you are she. Were you arrested openly?”
The memory came more vividly than I
would have thought possible. I walked down a corridor whose walls
were lined with sad masks of silver and entered one of the
abandoned rooms, high-ceilinged and musty with ancient hangings.
The courier I was to meet had not yet come. Because I knew the
dusty divans would soil my gown, I took a chair, a spindly thing of
gilt and ivory. The tapestry spilled from the wall behind me; I
recalled looking up and seeing Destiny crowned in chains and
Discontent with her staff and glass, all worked in colored wool,
descending upon me.
The Autarch said, “You were taken by
certain officers, who had learned that you were conveying
information to your half sister’s lover. Taken secretly, because
your family has so much influence in the north, and conveyed to an
almost forgotten prison. By the time I learned what had occurred,
you were dead. Should I have punished those officers for acting in
my absence? They are patriots, and you were a
traitor.”
“I, Severian, am a traitor too,” I
said, and I told him, then for the first time in detail, how I had
once saved Vodalus, and of the banquet I had later shared with
him.
When I had concluded, he nodded to
himself. “Much of the loyalty you felt for Vodalus comes, surely,
from the Chatelaine. Some she imparted to you while she was yet
living, more after her death. Naive though you have been, I am
certain you are not so naive as to think it a coincidence that it
was she whose flesh was served to you by the
corpse-eaters.”
I protested, “Even if he had known of
my connection with her, there was no time to bring her body from
Nessus.”
The Autarch smiled. “Have you forgotten
that you told me a moment ago that when you had saved him, he fled
in such a craft as this? From that forest, hardly a dozen leagues
outside the City Wall, he could have flown to the center of Nessus,
unearthed a corpse preserved by the chill soil of early spring, and
returned in less than a watch. Actually, he need not have known so
much or moved so swiftly. While you were imprisoned by your guild,
he may have learned that the Chatelaine Thecla, who had been loyal
to him even to death, was no more. By serving her flesh to his
followers, he would strengthen them in his cause. He would require
no additional motive to take her body, and no doubt he reinterred
her in hoarded snow in some cellar, or in one of the abandoned
mines with which that region abounds. You arrived, and wishing to
bind you to him, he ordered her brought out.”
Something passed too swiftly to be
seen—an instant later the flier rocked with the violence of its
motion. Sparks maneuvered on the screen.
Before the Autarch could take the
controls again, we were scudding backward. There was a detonation
so loud it seemed to paralyze me, and the reverberating sky opened
in a blossom of yellow fire. I have seen a sparrow, struck by a
stone from Eata’s sling, reel in the air just as we did, and fall,
like us, fluttering to one side.
I woke to darkness, pungent smoke, and the
smell of fresh earth. For a moment or a watch I forgot my rescue
and believed I lay on the field where Daria and I, with Guasacht,
Erblon, and the rest, had fought the Ascians.
Someone lay near me—I heard the sigh of
his breath, and the creakings and scrapings that betray
movement—but at first I paid no heed to them, and later I came to
believe that these sounds were made by foraging animals, and grew
afraid; later still, I recalled what had happened and knew they
were surely made by the Autarch, who must have survived the crash
with me, and I called to him.
“So you still live, then.” His voice
was very weak. “I feared you would die … though I should have known
better. I could not revive you, and your pulse was but
faint.”
“I have forgotten! Do you rememberr
when we flew over the armies? For a time I forgot it! I know now
what it is to forget.”
There was pale laughter in his voice.
“Which you will now remember always.”
“I hope so, but it fades even as we
speak. It vanishes like mist, which must itself be a forgetting.
What was that weapon that brought us down?”
“I do not know. But listen. These are
the most important words of my life. Listen. You have served
Vodalus, and his dream of renewed empire. You still wish, do you
not, that humankind should go again to the stars?”
I recalled something Vodalus had told
me in the wood and said, “Men of Urth, sailing between the stars,
leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the
sun.”
“They were so once … and brought all
the old wars of Urth with them, and in the young suns kindled new
ones. Even they,” (I could not see him, yet I knew by his tone that
he had indicated the Ascians) “understand it must not be so again.
They wish the race to become a single individual … the same,
duplicated to the end of number. We wish each to carry all the race
and its longings within himself. Have you noticed the phial I wear
at my neck?”
“Yes, often.”
“It contains a pharmacon like alzabo,
already mixed and held in suspension. I am cold already below the
waist. I will die soon. Before I die … you must use
it.”
“I cannot see you,” I said. “And I can
scarcely move.”
“Nevertheless, you will find a way. You
remember everything, and so you must recall the night you came to
my House Azure. That night someone else came to me. I was a servant
once, in the House Absolute … . That is why they hate me. As they
will hate you, for what you once were. Paeon, who trained me, who
was honey-steward fifty years gone by. I knew what he was in truth,
for I had met him before. He told me you were the one … the next. I
did not think it would be quite so soon … .”
His voice fell away, and I began to
grope for him, pulling myself along. My hand found his, and he
whispered, “Use the knife. We are behind the
Ascian line, but I have called upon Vodalus to rescue you … . I
hear the hoofs of his destriers.”
The words were so faint I could hardly
hear, though my ear was within a span of his mouth. “Rest,” I said.
Knowing that Vodalus hated him and sought to destroy him, I thought
him delirious.
“I am his spy. That is another of my
offices. He draws the traitors … . I learn who they are and what
they do, what they think. That is one of his. Now I have told him
the Autarch is trapped in this flier and given him our location. He
has served me … as my bodyguard … before this.”
Now even I could hear the sound of feet
on the ground outside. I reached up, searching for some means by
which to signal; my hand touched fur, and I knew the flier had
overturned, leaving us like hidden toads beneath it.
There was a snap and the scream of
tearing metal. Moonlight, seeming bright as day but green as willow
leaves, came flooding through a rent in the hull that gaped as I
watched. I saw the Autarch, his thin white hair darkened with dried
blood.
And above him silhouettes, green shades
looking down upon us. Their faces were invisible; but I knew those
gleaming eyes and narrow heads belonged to no followers of Vodalus.
Frantically, I searched for the Autarch’s pistol. My hands were
seized. I was drawn up, and as I emerged I could not help thinking
of the dead woman I had seen pulled from her grave in the
necropolis, for the flier had fallen on soft ground and half buried
itself. Where the Ascian bolt had struck it, its side was torn
away, leaving a tangle of ruined wiring. The metal was twisted and
burned.
I did not have much time to look at it.
My captors turned me around and around as one after another took my
face in his hands. My cloak was fingered as though they had never
seen cloth. With their large eyes and hollow cheeks, these evzones
seemed to me much like the infantry we had fought against, but
though there were women among them, there were no old people and no
children. They wore silvery caps and shirts in place of armor, and
carried strangely shaped jezails, so long barreled that when their
butt plates rested on the ground their muzzles were higher than
their owners’ heads. As I saw the Autarch lifted from the flier, I
said, “Your message was intercepted, Sieur, I think.”
“Nevertheless, it arrived.” He was too
weak to point, but I followed the direction of his eyes, and after
a moment I saw flying shapes against the moon.
It almost seemed they slid down the
beams to us, they came so quickly and so straight. Their heads were
like the skulls of women, round and white, capped with miters of
bone and stretched at the jaws into curved bills lined with pointed
teeth. They were winged, the pinions so great they seemed to have
no bodies at all. Twenty cubits at least these pinions stretched
from tip to tip; when they beat they made no sound, but far below I
felt the rush of air.
(Once I had imagined such creatures
threshing the forests of Urth and beating flat her cities. Had my
thought helped bring these?)
It seemed a long time before the Ascian
evzones saw them. Then two or three fired at once, and the
converging bolts caught one at their intersection and blew it to
rags, then another and another. For an instant the light was
blotted out, and something cold and flaccid struck my face,
knocking me down.
When I could see again, half a dozen of
the Ascians were gone, and the rest were firing into the air at
targets almost imperceptible to me. Something whitish fell from
them. I thought it would explode and put my head down, but instead
the hull of the wrecked flier rang like a cymbal. A body—a human
body broken like a doll’s—had struck it, but there was no
blood.
One of the evzones jammed his weapon in
my back and pushed me forward. Two more were supporting the Autarch
much as the woman-cats had supported me. I discovered that I had
lost all sense of direction. Though the moon still shone, masses of
cloud veiled most of the stars. I looked in vain for the cross and
for those three stars that are, for reasons no one understands,
called The Eight and hang forever over the
southern ice. Several of the evzones were still firing when there
came blazing among us some arrow or spear that burst in a mass of
blinding white sparks.
“That will do it,” the Autarch
whispered.
I was rubbing my eyes as I stumbled
along, but I managed to ask what he meant.
“Can you see? No more can they. Our
friends above … Vodalus’s, I think … did not know our captors were
so well armed. Now there will be no more good shooting, and as soon
as that cloud drifts across the disc of Lune …”
I felt cold, as though a chill mountain
wind had cut the tepid air around us. A few moments before I had
been in despair to find myself among these gaunt soldiers. Now I
would have given anything for some guarantee that I would remain
among them.
The Autarch was to my left, hanging
limp between two evzones who had slung their long-barreled jezails
aslant their backs. As I watched, his head lolled to one side, and
I knew he was unconscious or dead. “Legion” the woman-cats had
called him, and it did not take great intellect to combine that
name with what he had told me in the wrecked flier. Just as Thecla
and Severian had joined in me, many personalities were surely
united in him. Ever since the night I had first seen him, when
Roche had brought me to the House Azure (whose odd name I was now,
perhaps, beginning to grasp), I had sensed the complexity of his
thought, as we sense, even in a bad light, the complexity of a
mosaic, the myriad, infinitesimal chips that combine to produce the
illuminated face and staring eyes of the New Sun.
He had said I was destined to succeed
him, but for how long a reign? Preposterous as it was in a
prisoner, and in a man so injured and so weak that a watch of rest
on the coarse grass would have seemed like paradise, I
was consumed with ambition. He had said I must eat his flesh and
swallow the drug while he still lived; and, loving him, I would
have torn my own from the grasp of my captors, if I had possessed
the strength, to claim that luxury and pomp and power. I was
Severian and Thecla united now, and perhaps the torturers’ ragged
apprentice had, without fully knowing it, longed for those things
more than the young exultant held captive at court. I knew then
what poor Cyriaca had felt in the gardens of the archon; yet if she
had felt fully what I felt at that moment, it would have burst her
heart.
An instant later I was unwilling. Some
part of me treasured the privacy that not even Dorcas had entered.
Deep inside the convolutions of my mind, in the embrace of the
molecules, Thecla and I were twined together. For others—a dozen or
a thousand, perhaps, if in absorbing the personality of the Autarch
I was also to absorb those he had incorporated into himself—to come
where we lay would be for the crowds of the bazaar to enter a
bower. I clasped my heart’s companion to me, and felt myself
clasped. I felt myself clasped, and clasped my heart’s companion to
me.
The moon dimmed as a dark lantern does
when one presses the lever that makes its plates iris closed until
there remains no more than a point of light, then nothing. The
Ascian evzones fired their jezails in a lattice of lilac and
heliotrope, beams that diverged high in the atmosphere and at last
pricked the clouds like colored pins; but without effect. There was
a wind, hot and sudden, and what I can only call a flash of black.
Then the Autarch was gone, and something huge rushed toward me. I
threw myself down.
Perhaps I struck the ground, but I do
not remember it. In an instant, it seemed, I was swooping through
the air, turning, climbing surely, the world below no more than a
darker night. An emaciated hand, hard as stone and three times
human size, clutched me about the waist.
We ducked, turned, lurched, slipped
sidewise down a slope of air, then, catching a rising wind, climbed
till the cold stung and stiffened my skin. When I craned my neck to
look upward, I could see the white, inhuman jaws of the creature
that bore me. It was the nightmare I had known months earlier when
I had shared Baldanders’s bed, though in my dream I had ridden the
thing’s back. Why that difference between dream and truth should
be, I cannot say. I cried out (I do not know what) and above me the
thing opened its scimitar beak to hiss.
From above, too, I heard a woman’s
voice call, “Now I have repaid you for the mine—you are still
alive.”