Above the
Jungle
We landed by starlight. It was like awakening;
I felt that it was not the sky but the country of nightmare I was
leaving behind. Like a falling leaf, the immense creature settled
in narrowing circles through regions of progressively warmer air
until I could smell the odor of the Jungle Garden: the mingling of
green life and rotting wood with the perfume of wide, waxen,
unnamed blossoms.
A ziggurat lifted its dark head above
the trees—yet carried the trees with it, for they sprouted from its
crumbling walls like fungi from a dead tree. We settled on it
weightlessly, and at once there came torches and excited voices. I
was still faint from the thin and icy air I had been breathing only
moments before.
Human hands replaced the claws that had
grasped me for so long. We wound down ledges and stairways of
broken stone until at last I stood before a fire and saw across it
the handsome, unsmiling face of Vodalus and the heart-shaped one of
his consort, Thea, our half sister.
“Who is this?” Vodalus
asked.
I tried to lift my arms, but they were
held. “Liege,” I said, “you must know me.”
From behind me, the voice I had heard
in the air answered, “This is the man of the price, the killer of
my brother. For him, I—and Hethor, who serves me—have served
you.”
“Then why do you bring him to me?”
Vodalus asked. “He is yours. Did you think that when I had seen
him, I would repent of our agreement?”
Perhaps I was stronger than I felt
myself to be. Perhaps I only caught the man on my right
off-balance; however it was, I succeeded in twisting about, jerking
him into the fire, where his feet sent the red brands
flying.
Agia stood behind me, naked to the
waist, and Hethor behind her, showing all his rotten teeth as he
cupped her breasts. I fought to escape. She slapped me with an open
hand—there was a pull at my cheek, tearing pain, then the warm rush
of blood.
Since then, I have learned that the weapon is
called a lucivee, and that Agia had it
because Vodalus had forbidden any but his own bodyguard to carry
arms in his presence. It is no more than a small bar with rings for
the thumb and fourth finger, and four or five curved blades that
can be concealed in the palm; but few have survived its
blow.
I was one of those few, and rose after
two days to find myself shut in a bare room. Perhaps in each life
one room must become better known than any other: for prisoners, it
is always a cell. I, who had worked outside so many, thrusting in
trays of food to the disfigured and demented, now knew again a cell
of my own. What the ziggurat had once been, I never guessed.
Perhaps a prison indeed; perhaps a temple, or the atelier of some
forgotten art. My cell was about twice the size of the one I had
occupied beneath the tower of the torturers, six paces wide and ten
long. A door of ancient, gleaming alloy stood against the wall,
useless to Vodalus’s jailers because they could not lock it; a new
one, roughly made of the ironlike timbers of some jungle tree,
closed the doorway. A window I believe had never been meant for
one, a circular opening hardly bigger than my arm, pierced the
discolored wall high up and gave light to the cell.
Three days more passed before I was
strong enough to jump and, gripping its lower edge with one hand,
pull myself up to look out. When that day came, I saw a rolling
green country dotted with butterflies—a place so foreign to what I
had expected that I felt I might be mad and lost my hold upon the
window in my astonishment. It was, as I eventually realized, the
country of treetops, where ten-chain hardwoods spread a lawn of
leaves, seldom seen save by the birds.
An old man with a knowledgeable, evil
face had bandaged my cheek and changed the dressings on my leg.
Later he brought a lad of about thirteen whose bloodstream he
linked with mine until the boy’s lips turned the hue of lead. I
asked the old leech where he came from, and he, apparently thinking
me a native of these parts, said, “From the big city in the south,
in the valley of the river that drains the cold lands. It is a
longer river than yours, is the Gyoll, though its flood is not so
fierce.”
“You have great skill,” I said. “I’ve
never heard of a physician who did as much. I feel well already,
and wish you would stop before this boy dies.”
The old man pinched his cheek. “He’ll
recover quickly—in time to warm my bed tonight. At his age they
always do. Nay, it’s not what you think. I only sleep beside him
because the night-breath of the young acts as a restorative to
those of my years. Youth, you see, is a disease, and we may hope to
catch a mild case. How stands your wound?”
There was nothing—not even an
admission, which might have been rooted in some perverse desire to
maintain an appearance of potency—that could have convinced me so
completely as his denial. I told him the truth, that my right cheek
was numb save for a vague burning as irritating as an itch, and
wondered which of his duties the miserable boy minded
most.
The old man stripped away my bandages
and gave my wounds a second coating of the foul-smelling brown
salve he had used previously. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he told me.
“Although I don’t think you’ll need Mamas here again. You’re coming
along nicely. Her exultancy” (with a jerk of the
head to show this was an ironical reference to Agia’s stature)
“will be most pleased.”
I said, in what I sought to make an
offhand way, that I hoped all his patients were doing as
well.
“You mean the delator who was brought
in with you? He’s as well as can be expected.” He turned aside as
he spoke, so that I would not see his frightened
expression.
On the chance that I might gain
influence with him that would enable me to aid the Autarch, I
praised his understanding of his craft extravagantly and ended by
saying that I failed to comprehend why a physician of his ability
consorted with these wicked people.
He looked at me narrowly, and his face
grew serious. “For knowledge. There is nowhere a man in my
profession can learn as I learn here.”
“You mean the eating of the dead? I
have shared in that too, though they may not have told you
so.”
“No, no. Learned men—particularly those
of my profession—practice that everywhere, and usually with better
effect, since we are more selective of our subjects and confine
ourselves to the most retentive tissues. The knowledge I seek
cannot be learned in that way, since none of the recently dead
possessed it, and perhaps no one has ever possessed
it.”
He was leaning against the wall now,
and seemed to be speaking as much to some invisible presence as to
me. “The past’s sterile science led to nothing but the exhaustion
of the planet and the destruction of its races. It was founded in
the mere desire to exploit the gross energies and material
substances of the universe, without regard to their attractions,
antipathies, and eventual destinies. Look!” He thrust his hand into
the beam of sunshine that was then issuing from my high, circular
window. “Here is light. You will say that it is not a living
entity, but you miss the point that it is more, not less. Without
occupying space, it fills the universe. It nourishes everything,
yet itself feeds upon destruction. We claim to control it, but does
it not perhaps cultivate us as a source of food? May it not be that
all wood grows so that it can be set ablaze, and that men and women
are born to kindle fires? Is it not possible that our claim to
master light is as absurd as wheat’s claiming to master us because
we prepare the soil for it and attend its intercourse with
Urth?”
“All that is well said,” I told him.
“But nothing to the point. Why do you serve Vodalus?”
“Such knowledge is not gained without
experiment.” He smiled as he spoke, and touched the shoulder of the
boy, and I had a vision of children in flames. I hope that I was
wrong.
That had been two days before I pulled myself
up to the window. The old leech did not come again; whether he had
fallen from favor, or been dispatched to another place, or had
merely decided no further attentions were necessary, I had no way
of knowing.
Agia came once, and standing between
two of Vodalus’s armed women
spat in my face as she described the torments she and Hethor had
contrived for me when I was strong enough to endure them. When she
finished, I told her quite truthfully that I had spent most of my
life assisting at operations more terrible, and advised her to
obtain trained assistance, at which she went away.
Thereafter for the better part of
several days I was left alone. Each time I woke, I felt myself
almost a different person, for in that solitude the isolation of my
thoughts in the dark intervals of sleep was nearly sufficient to
deprive me of my sense of personality. Yet all these Severians and
Theclas sought freedom.
The retreat into memory was easy; we
made it often, reliving those idyllic days when Dorcas and I had
journeyed toward Thrax, the games played in the hedge-walled maze
behind my father’s villa and in the Old Yard, the long walk down
the Adamnian Steps that Agia and I had taken before I knew her for
my enemy.
But often too, I left memory and forced
myself to think, sometimes limping up and down, sometimes only
waiting for insects to enter the window so that I might for my
amusement pluck them from the air. I planned escape, though until
my circumstances altered there seemed no possibility of it; I
pondered passages from the brown book and sought to match them to
my own experiences in order to produce, insofar as possible, some
general theory of human action that would be of benefit to me
should I ever free myself.
For if the leech, who was an elderly
man, could still pursue knowledge despite the certainty of imminent
death, could not I whose death appeared more imminent still, take
some comfort in the surety that it was less certain?
Thus I sifted the actions of the
magicians, and of the man who had accosted me outside the jacal of
the sick girl, and of many other men and women I had known, seeking
for a key that would unlock all hearts.
I found none that could be expressed in
few words: “Men and women do as they do
because of thus and so … .” None of the ragged bits of metal
fit—the desire for power, the lust of love, the need for
reassurance, or the taste for seasoning life with romance. But I
did find one principle, which I came to call that of Primitivity,
that I believe is widely applicable, and which, if it does not
initiate action, at least seems to influence the forms that action
takes. I might state it this way: Because the
prehistoric cultures endured for so many chiliads, they have shaped
our heritage in such a way as to cause us to behave as if their
conditions obtained today.
For example, the technology that once
might have permitted Baldanders to observe all the actions of the
hetman of the lakeside village has been dust now for thousands of
years; but during the eons of its existence, it laid upon him a
spell, as it were, by which it remained effective though no longer
extant.
In the same way, we all have in us the
ghosts of long-vanished things, of fallen cities and marvelous
machines. The story I once read to Jonas when we were imprisoned
(with how much less anxiety and how much more
companionship) showed that clearly, and I read it over again in the
ziggurat. The author, having need for some sea-born fiend like
Erebus or Abaia, in a mythical setting, gave it a head like a
ship—which was the whole of its visible body, the remainder being
underwater—so that it was removed from protoplasmic reality and
became the machine that the rhythms of his mind
demanded.
While I amused myself with these
speculations, I became increasingly aware of the impermanent nature
of Vodalus’s occupation of the ancient building. Though the leech
came no more, as I have said, and Agia never visited me again, I
frequently heard the sound of running feet in the corridor outside
my door and occasionally a few shouted words.
Whenever such sounds came, I put my
unbandaged ear to the planks; and in fact I often anticipated them,
sitting that way for long periods in the hope of overhearing some
snatch of conversation that would tell me something of Vodalus’s
plans. I could not help but think then, as I listened in vain, of
the hundreds in our oubliette who must have listened to me when I
carried their food to Drotte, and how they must have strained to
overhear the fragments of conversation that drifted from Thecla’s
cell into the corridor, and thus into their own cells, when I
visited her.
And what of the dead? I own that I
thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked
below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions
of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the
dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful
children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women
and the most learned men—all are dead. Their bodies repose in
caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere
under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the
bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we
speak, or for what word?