Before
Vodalus
On the morning of the sixth day, two women
came for me. I had slept very little the night before. One of the
blood bats common in those northern jungles had entered my room by
the window, and though I had succeeded in driving it out and
staunching the blood, it had returned again and again, attracted, I
suppose, by the odor of my wounds. Even now I cannot see the vague
green darkness that is diffused moonlight without imagining I see
the bat crawling there like a big spider, then springing into the
air.
The women were as surprised to find me
awake as I was to see them; it was just dawn. They made me stand,
and one bound my hands while the other held her dirk to my throat.
She asked how my cheek was healing, however, and added that she had
been told I was a handsome fellow when I was brought
in.
“I was almost as near to death then as
I am now,” I said to her. The truth was that though the concussion
I had suffered when the flier crashed had healed, my leg, as well
as my face, was still giving me considerable pain.
The women brought me to Vodalus; not,
as I had more or less expected, somewhere in the ziggurat or on the
ledge where he had sat in state with Thea, but in a clearing
embraced on three sides by slow green water. It was a moment or
two—I had to stand waiting while some other business was
conducted—before I realized that the course of this river was
fundamentally to the north and east, and that I had never seen
northeastward-flowing water before; all streams, in my previous
experience, ran south or southwest to join southwestern-flowing
Gyoll.
At last Vodalus inclined his head
toward me, and I was brought forward. When he saw that I could
scarcely stand, he ordered my guards to seat me at his feet, then
waved them back out of hearing distance. “Your entrance is somewhat
less impressive than that you made in the forest beyond Nessus,” he
said.
I agreed. “But, Liege, I come now, as I
did then, as your servant. Just as I was the first time you met me,
when I saved your neck from the ax. If I appear before you in
bloody rags and with bound hands, it is because you treat your
servants so.”
“Certainly I would agree that securing
your wrists seems a trifle excessive in your condition.” He smiled
faintly. “Is it painful?”
“No. The feeling is gone.”
“Still, the cords aren’t needed.”
Vodalus stood and drew a slender blade, and leaning over me,
flicked my bonds with the point.
I flexed my shoulders and the last
strands parted. A thousand needles seemed to pierce my
hands.
When he had taken his seat again,
Vodalus asked if I were not going to thank him.
“You never thanked me, Liege. You gave
me a coin instead. I think I have one here somewhere.” I fumbled in
my sabretache for the money I had been paid by
Guasacht.
“You may keep your coin. I’m going to
ask you for much more than that. Are you ready to tell me who you
are?”
“I’ve always been ready to do that,
Liege. I’m Severian, formerly a journeyman of the guild of
torturers.”
“But are you nothing else besides a
former journeyman of that guild?”
“No.”
Vodalus sighed and smiled, then leaned
back in his chair and sighed again. “My servant Hildegrin always
insisted you were important. When I asked him why, he had any
number of speculations, none of which I found convincing. I thought
he was trying to get silver from me for a little easy spying. Yet
he was right.”
“I have only been important once to
you, Liege.”
“Each time we meet, you remind me that
you saved my life once. Did you know that Hildegrin once saved
yours? It was he who shouted ‘Run!’ to your opponent when you
dueled in the city. You had fallen, and he might have stabbed
you.”
“Is Agia here?” I asked. “She’ll try to
kill you if she hears that.”
“No one can hear you but myself. You
may tell her later, if you like. She will never believe
you.”
“You can’t be sure of
that.”
He smiled more broadly. “Very well,
I’ll turn you over to her. You can then test your theory against
mine.”
“As you wish.”
He brushed my acquiescence aside with
an elegant motion of one hand. “You think you can stalemate me with
your willingness to die. Actually you’re offering me an easy exit
from a dilemma. Your Agia came to me with a very valuable
thaumaturgist in her train, and asked as the price of his service
and her own only that you, Severian of the Order of the Seekers for
Truth and Penitence, should be put into her hands. Now you say you
are that Severian the Torturer and no one else, and it is with
great embarrassment that I resist her demands.”
“And whom do you wish me to be?” I
asked.
“I have, or I should say I had, a most
excellent servant in the House Absolute. You know him, of course,
since it was to him that you gave my
message.” Vodalus paused and smiled again. “A week or so ago we
received one from him. It was not, to be sure, openly addressed to
me, but I had seen to it not long before that he was aware of our
location, and we were not far from him. Do you know what he
said?”
I shook my head.
“That’s odd, because you must have been
with him at the time. He said he was in a wrecked flier—and that
the Autarch was in the flier with him. He would have been an idiot
to have sent such a message in the ordinary course of things,
because he gave his location—and he was behind our lines, as he
must have known.”
“You are a part of the Ascian army,
then?”
“We serve them in certain scouting
capacities, yes. I see you are troubled by the knowledge that Agia
and the thaumaturgist killed a few of their soldiers to take you.
You need not be. Their masters value them even less than I do, and
it was not a time for negotiation.”
“But they did not capture the Autarch.”
I am not a good liar, but I was too exhausted, I think, for Vodalus
to read my face easily.
He leaned forward, and for a moment his
eyes glowed as though candles burned in their depths. “He was
there, then. How wonderful. You have seen him. You have ridden in
the royal flier with him.”
I nodded once more.
“You see, ridiculous though it sounds,
I feared you were he. One never knows. An Autarch dies and another
takes his place, and the new Autarch may be there for half a
century or a fortnight. There were three of you then? No
more?”
“No.”
“What did the Autarch look like? Let me
have every detail.”
I did as he asked, describing Dr. Talos
as he had appeared in the part.
“Did he escape both the thaumaturgist’s
creatures and the Ascians? Or do the Ascians have him? Perhaps the
woman and her paramour are holding him for
themselves.”
“I told you the Ascians did not take
him.”
Vodalus smiled again, but beneath his
glowing eyes his twisted mouth suggested only pain. “You see,” he
repeated, “for a time I thought you might be the one. We have my
servant, but he has suffered a head injury and is never conscious
for more than a few moments. He will die very shortly, I’m afraid.
But he has always told me the truth, and Agia says that you were
the only one with him.”
“You think that I am the Autarch?
No.”
“Yet you are changed from the man I met
before.”
“You yourself gave me the alzabo, and
the life of the Chatelaine Thecla. I loved her. Did you think that
to thus ingest her essence would leave me unaffected? She is with
me always, so that I am two, in this single body. Yet I am not the
Autarch, who in one body is a thousand.”
Vodalus answered nothing, but half
closed his eyes as though he were afraid I would see their fire.
There was no sound but the lapping of the river
water and the much-muted voices of the little knot of armed men and
women, who talked among themselves a hundred paces off and glanced
from time to time at us. A macaw shrieked, fluttering from one tree
to another.
“I would still serve you,” I told
Vodalus, “if you would permit it.” I was not certain it was a lie
until the words had left my lips, and then I was bewildered in
mind, seeking to understand how those words, which would have been
true in the past for Thecla and for Severian too, were now false
for me.
“‘The Autarch, who in one body is a
thousand,’” Vodalus quoted me. “That is correct, but how few of us
know it.”